“You still think kaiju shouldn’t exist physically?” I asked. I noticed around us things skittering about. The screamers and the parasite pheromones were doing their work, creating a bow wave of creatures determined to avoid us. Most of them at this point were insects and small lizardy creatures, none of which would have presented much of a threat to us. I suspected most of the real creature action was taking place in the natal jelly, where larger creatures were eating kaiju eggs and then being eaten by parasites in turn. Nature red in tooth and claw, as Tennyson once said; alternately, the circle of life, as Mufasa said.
“I read the precis,” Aparna said. “The science checks out. It’s just that it’s so convoluted. The things that kaiju have to do to live is ridiculous.”
“You mean like organic nuclear reactors,” I prompted. I was having Aparna talk not just to have a conversation, but because I had an inkling that she was more on edge about this first away mission of hers than she was letting on. Having her talk would distract her from that.
“Yeah, but that’s just one thing. And it’s not the weirdest thing. The weirdest thing is they have fans.”
I opened my mouth.
“As in to cool themselves, not Comic-Con nerds, Jamie, I see you.”
I closed my mouth again, grinning.
“And the weirdest thing about that is that the fans aren’t part of them. They’re colonies of parasites—” And then Aparna was off and running about how the parasites drew air into the kaiju and cooled off its internals, including the reactor, and how this was just barely enough heat exchange, and how the constant intake of air meant there was always a breeze around a kaiju, and how this constant air exchange made the kaiju one of the most important pollinators on this planet, and so on and so forth, and Aparna didn’t even have time to be nervous as we walked.
Until we got to where we planned to plant the first instrument pack and found a stack of tree crabs scavenging a carcass just where we planned to plant the thing.
“Oh, shit,” Aparna said, pulling up.
“Keep walking,” I said. “We have our screamers on. We’re going to scare them off as we get closer.”
And we did, most of them. They went skittering away as we drew up on them. But five tree crabs remained, policing the carcass, antennae waving threateningly at us.
I had been here before. But unlike before, I had now spent time under Riddu Tagaq’s tutelage learning how to deal with the little fuckers.
Which was, you march right up to them, grab them mid-carapace where they have a blind spot, and then chuck them hard and far.
Which is what I did to the first one I came up to before it had time to react. I hurled it and it flew, chittering in alarm as it did. My crab fighting skills were impeccable.
Its fellows turned their antennae to follow its path into the air and back down again, and then turned their attention back to me.
“Who else wants some?” I asked.
In a movie, they would have all comically fled. In reality, I had to repeat the process of grabbing and chucking four more times. And then I had to pick up a rotted carcass and heave it some distance away, so that if the tree crabs came back, they would bother the corpse, not us. I came away from the whole experience smelling even worse than I had before, which was saying something.
I stood where we had planned to place the instrument package and made a ta-da motion. “Whenever you’re ready, Dr. Chowdhury,” I said. Aparna shook herself out of motionlessness and swiftly got to work, unzipping her bag, pulling out the stake and mallet, and getting to installing the package.
While she did that I scanned the area, canister launcher in hand. If there was anything larger than a tree crab, it was not making itself known. The one advantage of walking around in a nuclear explosion debris field, if one wanted to call it an advantage, was that there was very little verticality. Nothing would be coming at us from above. It was one less dimension to worry about.
“Done,” Aparna said, standing up. The instrument package stuck up a few inches from the ground; its cameras were now at about the same height as a prone human.
“Is it sending?” I asked.
Aparna nodded and pointed to a green light on the package. “Sending to the nearest aerostat and receiving, too. They’re probably already getting the signal back at Tanaka.”
I waved to the package and then looked at my smartwatch. “That took four minutes. Come on, let’s plant the other one and get to the chopper.”
“It’s going well so far,” Aparna said.