I caught what he meant, and turned to MacDonald and Danso. “How long are we out of communication with the other side?” I asked.
“When Honda Base shuts down the gateway, it’s usually for a couple of weeks,” Danso said.
“Can that be made any shorter?”
“It’s not like flipping a switch,” she said. “They pull things apart for maintenance. They’ve already started doing that. Even if it was an emergency it would still take several days for them to put it all back together and into working order.”
“This kind of is an emergency,” Niamh said.
“We need more than what we have now to get them to speed things up,” Danso said.
Niamh was incredulous. “A fucking kaiju on the other side isn’t enough?”
Danso pointed to Aparna. “Dr. Chowdhury has told us we have blind spots. We need to be able to see into those blind spots first. This is a situation where we do not want to cry wolf.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Camp Century isn’t the only place where people come through to this side. There are other gateways on other continents.”
“Yes,” MacDonald said.
“We can’t get a message through by sending it to them?”
MacDonald shook her head. “Our aerostat networks aren’t that extensive. They cover a local area—local in this case meaning this chunk of North America. If we need to get a message to Europe or Asia or Australia, we usually send it through Camp Century, which relays it through the other side.”
“There has to be something else we could do.”
“We could use the Shobijin,” MacDonald said. “Send it to the KPS base in Europe. But it won’t be any faster in the long run, and we want to use the Shobijin here. No matter what, there is going to be a gap of at least a week before we could say or send anything to the other side.”
“By which time, if Bella is over there, they will have already figured that out,” Aparna said. She had a point. Eventually a kaiju was going to be hard to miss.
“We still need answers,” Danso said. “For ourselves, if not for anything else. We have to know what happened to our people. And we have to know, as best we can, what happened and why.”
“The instrument packages,” I said. “Are they operating?”
“Maybe,” Niamh said. “It depends. The old ones are running low on power and they’ve been dinged up by the local wildlife, but they still work. Unless they were powered down when the mission team switched them for the new ones. The new ones should work just fine, but they need to be powered on. Also the old ones might be lost if they were on Chopper One when—” Niamh stopped, because there was no easy way to say what would come next. They took a moment before continuing. “But either way, we can’t get at the data until the Shobijin gets there to receive their data and transmit it back to us. If they’re transmitting.”
I looked over to Satie. “How long until the Shobijin will be ready?”
“Several hours to prep at least,” he said.
I nodded and stood up. “Well, let’s go, then,” I said to him.
He grinned, again, the first for him that I had seen for the day. “That’s my line,” he said, standing up.
“What’s going on?” MacDonald asked.
“We need answers,” I replied, nodding to Danso. “And there are still a few hours of daylight left. So I’m going to go looking.”
“At the site,” MacDonald said.
“Yes.”
“Which you know is crawling with creatures who will be happy to eat you,” Kahurangi said.
“Yes,” I said. “Want to come?”
“Want? No. But I will,” he said. “Because you’ll need someone to watch your back. Just let me stop at the lab first. I’ve been working on some new pheromone formulas. I’ve got some things you might want to try out.”
“Are you going to try them out with me?”
“No, I should be the control subject.”
I blinked. “Really, dude?”
Kahurangi grinned again and shook his head, chuckling. “Sorry,” he said to me. “It’s been a bad day. I really needed that look on your face right now.”
CHAPTER
22
“This is the new stuff,” Kahurangi said to me as we approached the site. He leaned forward from the back of the passenger compartment of Chopper Two and handed me an applicator bottle of something that could have been suntan lotion.