“No, he doesn’t,” Satie said. “These things weren’t built. They evolved. Evolution doesn’t overengineer. The kaiju nuclear bioreactors work well enough. Until they don’t.”
“And then they wipe out all life over a hundred square kilometers,” Kahurangi sneered.
“They don’t go up that big,” Satie said.
Kahurangi started to say something, but I held up a hand. “How big do they go up?”
“Your average kaiju will go off like a ten-or fifteen-kiloton bomb,” Satie said.
“I don’t have any sense of that,” I said.
Satie checked his instruments. “It means that if that kaiju went up right now, we’d be just beyond the light blast damage radius.” He glanced back briefly at Kahurangi. “Which means we’ll survive. This helicopter has shielded electronics and instrumentation so it’s resistant to being fried by an electromagnetic pulse. This is not the first time we’ve had a venting kaiju. Every minute we fly takes us farther away from it.”
“Unless it decides to chase us,” Kahurangi said.
Satie shook his head. “It’s not chasing anything anymore. It went to that place to die.”
“How do you know that?”
“When kaiju know they’re dying, they try to head to water. The ocean if they can get to one, but any large body of water will do. Don’t ask me why; I’m a pilot. But it’s definitely a thing. The KPS learned that the hard way.”
“What do you mean?” Kahurangi asked.
“This Tanaka Base isn’t the first Tanaka Base,” Satie said. “The first one was about forty klicks east, on a peninsula on the inlet there. This was in the sixties. Juvenile kaiju with a bad reactor came through, walked right up to the base and went off. Eighty people dead before they knew it.”
“Why’d it come into the base at all?” I asked.
“I’m not a kaiju, I don’t know why they do things. But now we keep bases away from large bodies of water, and”—he motioned with his head to Kahurangi—“Dr. Pham and now Dr. Lautagata here make the ‘stay away’ pheromones to mark our territory around the base.”
“And that works,” I said.
“It’s like everything about the kaiju,” Satie said. “It works until it doesn’t.”
The world in front of us got very bright, which meant the world behind had gotten even brighter. The kaiju had gone off.
“It’s about to get very bumpy,” Satie warned us. “Dr. Lautagata, if you want to throw up now, you go right ahead.”
* * *
“I did not throw up,” Kahurangi said, at dinner that night, as he recounted the day’s events to Aparna and Niamh. He and I had just gotten out of an hours-long meeting with Brynn MacDonald, her Blue Team counterpart, Jeneba Danso, Tom Stevens, and the leads of the biology and physics labs, going over everything from our helicopter ride. Martin Satie had been excused to tend to his helicopter. Apparently, he would be going out again soon.
“No, you just got enough radiation passing through your body to spontaneously turn into a tumor,” Niamh said.
“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work like that,” Kahurangi replied.
“That’s just what a person who has spontaneously turned into a tumor would say.”
Kahurangi turned to Aparna. “You’re the biologist here. Help me.”
“I’m not saying you are a sentient tumor,” Aparna said. “But I would have to run some tests to be sure.”
Kahurangi pointed at me. “Jamie was in the same helicopter! Where are the tumor accusations there?”
“I am definitely mostly tumor at this point,” I admitted.
“I thought we were friends,” Kahurangi said, narrowing his eyes at me.
“Tumors have no friends,” I replied. “In other news, I found out today that Kahurangi has a doctorate.”
“I mean, we all have doctorates.” Aparna pointed to herself. “Dr. Chowdhury.” She pointed to Niamh. “Dr. Healy.”
“Fun fact, Healy means ‘scientific’ in Gaelic,” Niamh said. “I am Dr. Scientific. You may bow to me now.”
“I think I won’t,” I said.
“Look at that, the tumor is jealous it only has a master’s.”
“I am not. Okay, maybe a little.”
“We still like you,” Aparna said.
“And by like, we mean ‘pity,’” Niamh added.