Kahurangi grinned at this.
“So what’s the plan here?” I said. I nodded to Aparna. “You’re telling us Bella is going to die if we don’t get her back over here, and take a chunk of Canada with her when she goes.” I looked over to Niamh. “You’re giving us a timeline of less than a day before it happens.” I pointed to Kahurangi. “And you’re telling us that the only way we get her back is to use the same perimeter that took her over to the other side to begin with.”
Kahurangi blinked at this. “I didn’t say that.”
“You sure implied it,” I said. “I’m guessing the thing isn’t on now, but that Bella’s reactor is keeping the barrier thin. But even as thin as it is now, it’s not enough. If she’s going to get back, it needs to be turned on again.”
“Sure,” Niamh said. “So, that’s one problem. Then there are all the rest of them.”
“Like the fact we can’t get over there to start with,” Aparna said.
“And that if we do get over, there’s going to be a welcoming committee,” Kahurangi added.
“You mean the people who stole Bella in the first place and killed some of us to get her,” I said.
“Yes, those.”
“Even if we could get over, MacDonald and Danso aren’t going to say yes,” Aparna noted.
I nodded at this. After our last meeting, the two of them agreed to send an urgent message to Honda Base informing them of the events at Tanaka and asking to make reassembling the gateway a priority. Even if Honda agreed to it, it would be days before anything would happen through that. In the meantime, MacDonald and Danso had placed Bella’s site off limits, excepting the personnel on the Shobijin, who would leave the site when the new aerostat had been repositioned.
“We’ve lost more people today than we have since the sixties,” MacDonald had said. “These people were trained to kill and had no compunctions about doing so. We can’t risk a chance they come through again with our people there.”
MacDonald and Danso were right, of course. Even if anyone on our side could go over, these killers would be waiting for them when they did. It would be foolish and possibly suicidal to attempt it.
Except that if some of us didn’t, Bella would die, and take a fair chunk of Labrador with her when she did. A mostly unpopulated chunk, to be sure.
Unless she moved.
“Can Bella fly over there?” I asked Aparna.
“Not well,” Aparna said after a minute.
“So, that’s a yes.”
“She doesn’t want to fly right now,” Kahurangi said. “She’s got eggs.”
“She doesn’t want to fly, but she will if she’s threatened or if she feels like she’s in danger, right?” I asked. “Like, for example, feeling like she’s slowly suffocating and burning up because the parasites that keep air moving through her are dying off from the cold and lack of oxygen.”
“There’s not much on the other side she could get to, is there?” Aparna asked.
“Tanaka Base is more or less in the same place as Happy Valley–Goose Bay in Labrador. That’s about ten thousand people,” I said. “Plus there’s a Canadian military base there. And they’re both right by a river and an ocean inlet.”
Aparna nodded. “And Bella will be looking for water.”
“Looking?” Niamh said. “She’s right up against some now.”
“Not necessarily on the other side,” I said. “And if she’s hurting in her current location, she’ll be looking for somewhere else to be. Like the only patch of light within a hundred kilometers, right next to a huge body of water.”
“It’s not going to look great for a Canadian military base to be attacked by a kaiju,” Kahurangi admitted.
“Which then explodes,” Niamh said. “Taking ten thousand Canadians with it.”
“Is it likely she moves?” I asked Aparna.
“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ve literally never had any of this happen before. But Kahurangi is right. She’s not going to move. Not unless she absolutely feels like she has to. So, if she moves, there’s probably not a lot of time before she goes up.”
“And what happens if we get her back? Does she still go up?”
“If she’s back, then her parasites stop dying, and they’re able to move more air through her no matter what,” Aparna said. “If we get her over in time, she’ll live. She won’t be happy for a while. But she’ll live. I think.”