“Look, Martin,” I said. “I don’t know why I need to remind you of this, but this is literally my first time doing this and I know nothing.”
“A five count is gonna work just fine,” Satie said. “We’ll cover the rest after. Ready?”
“For what?” I asked.
“This,” he said, and brought the copter down hard on top of Edward. Edward squished like a pudding with a hard crust on it. Satie hovered the copter a couple of meters above where he just poked Edward.
The area that Satie had just bounced off started to glow.
“One,” Satie said.
The glow suddenly focused itself into an intensely bright three-meter circle.
“Uhhhh, I think I found the eye,” I said.
“Two,” Satie said, and then jammed the copter back down into the heavily illuminated surface.
Edward roared.
“Three!” Satie said, and drove us straight up. I flipped the switch and started to count, watching the eye as I did so. It took until four before we started gaining altitude relative to it. Edward had been chasing us up the whole way.
“Off!” I yelled at Satie. He yanked us over and away from Edward, who narrowly missed swatting us with, well, whatever it was you wanted to call what he was swatting us with, since tentacle seemed too limited at the moment.
“Can you still see him?” Satie asked. Both I and Kahurangi said yes. “Watch his eyes!”
“What are we looking for?” Kahurangi said.
Edward stopped roaring. There were four wide disks of light we took for his eyes. We stared at them.
They suddenly contracted. The new sunlike pinpoints focused on us.
“Oh, shit,” Kahurangi said.
And then, equally suddenly, there were wings.
“Oh, shit,” Kahurangi repeated.
“There are fucking wings on this thing?” I yelled, incredulously.
“There sure are,” Satie said.
“There were no wings a minute ago!”
“They were there,” Satie said. “You were just looking for eyes.”
Edward heaved into the air.
“Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit,” Kahurangi said.
“We should go,” I said to Satie.
Satie wheeled the helicopter around and started to fly away from Edward.
“Okay, so, right now, there’s good news and some potentially not-great news,” Satie said. He reached over with his left hand and clicked a button, which turned on a monitor showing us the view from the rear camera. It was, at the moment, mostly filled with Edward. “That head bounce pissed him off, and he was probably going to kill us, but then he got a whiff of those pheromones and now he doesn’t want to kill us anymore.”
“Are you sure?” Kahurangi said.
“Eyes dilated, right?”
We nodded.
“That’s your sign.”
“If he doesn’t want to kill us now, why is he chasing us?”
“Because he wants to do something else to us instead.”
“We’re gonna get fucked by a kaiju?!?” Kahurangi yelled, processing the implication.
“That’s the good news.”
“How is this good news?”
“It’s good news because as long as he wants to mate with us, he doesn’t want to kill us,” Satie said. He dipped the helicopter down, flying it dangerously close to the canopy of trees below. Edward was momentarily confused but then trimmed to match. “Which means he’ll chase us but won’t attack us. We want him to chase us because we’re leading him to Bella.”
“And when he sees Bella, he’ll go for her instead of us,” I said.
“We’ll see. That’s the plan.”
“What’s the less-great news?”
“The pheromones wear off. Quickly. We have to keep dosing him until we get him to Bella.”
I considered this. “So we have to keep close enough to him to hit him with more pheromones.”
“Yes.”
“Because if we don’t, he’ll want to kill us, in which case we’re dead.”
“Yes.”
“But if we do, and we’re sloppy, then he’ll grab us and try to fuck the helicopter. In which case we’re dead.”
“Yes.”
“And you do this all the time.”
“Yes,” Satie said. “Sort of. This is as far as we’ve ever gotten.”
“Wow, he’s close,” Kahurangi said, pointing at the monitor.
“Dose him again,” Satie said to me. “Count of five.”