“I admire your optimism,” I said.
“Yeah, I admire it, and I also think they will murder the shit out of us the first chance they get,” Niamh said. “So, no, let’s just go for the generator.”
Kahurangi nodded. “I’m with Niamh, here.”
“All right,” Aparna said. “It was worth saying.”
We made our way around in the woods, moving counterclockwise against Bella’s bulk. As we did so, the human encampment made itself known in a stand of lights, and a collection of shipping containers that had been repurposed for whatever activities the crew down there was doing. At least a dozen people were out in the open, collecting material from the natal jelly and from Bella herself. More milled among the containers. One container wasn’t a container at all, but a small trailer. I suspected whoever was running the operation would be in there.
Kahurangi pointed. “I think the generator’s in there.”
I followed his hand to a storage container set a bit away from the rest. The doors of the container were closed, and a thick cable snaked out of it, leading several meters to a large box out in the open, which itself connected to the first of the barrels of the perimeter.
No other cables came out of the container; whatever was powering the rest of the encampment was somewhere else. It all pointed to this being, indeed, the generator we were looking for.
“Anyone see guards or others near there?” I asked. I didn’t see any, but it didn’t hurt to have confirmation from others. No one saw anything; the nearest person moving about was tens of meters from it and moving away.
Still moving in the tree line, we picked our way around until we were directly behind the generator container, with Bella towering up in front of us.
“We ready?” I asked.
“Should we all go?” Aparna said.
Niamh looked at her. “Do you want to stay behind?”
“Not really.”
“We all go,” I said. “One.”
Bella shifted, monstrously, lifted her head, and screamed.
“Two,” I whispered, entirely lost.
A beam shot from her again, nearly straight up, followed by a reverberating crack. The beam abruptly cut short some tens of meters above her head as it punched through to Kaiju Earth, tearing a hole in the sky.
Around us, the world started to glow. The portal effect, so pronounced on the other side, was hardly noticeable here, except for when Bella released so much nuclear energy at once. Bella herself was drenched in fog as the moist, warm air of Kaiju Earth whipped through the far larger dimensional holes near her and collided with the freezing, dense air of this one.
She looked in the moment like every kaiju you’d ever seen in a movie. Large. Angry. Terrifying.
Primal.
Bella stopped screaming and the beam of light stopped. The world stopped glowing and all the holes went away. I had the presence of mind to glance at my smartwatch, to record the interval between Bella’s eruptions.
“Three,” I said, looking at the time.
Everyone else ran.
That’s not what I meant, I thought, and then ran to catch up.
The door to the generator container was slightly ajar, and lights glowed from within. We entered, and I closed the door as quietly as possible once we were all inside.
Inside was strip lighting along the top of the container walls. A long, modern-looking object was inside, with an instrument panel reading out data and a laptop attached to it via a USB-C cable.
“This is the generator?” Aparna asked.
“I think so,” I said, looking at the instrument panel, which was showing the amount of electrical output and other indicators.
“It doesn’t look like a generator. It looks like an overgrown iPhone.”
“It doesn’t smell like a generator either,” Niamh said.
“You’re right,” Kahurangi agreed. “I’ve been around diesels when I’ve done fieldwork. This isn’t one of those. You can hear around it, for one.”
“It’s outputting power,” I said. “At least that’s what the panel says.”
“Does the panel say anything about discharging the capacitors?” Niamh asked.
“No.” I looked up at the laptop. “But this might.” The laptop had up a window that featured an image of the capacitors, chained together. There were several dozen of them; moving the computer cursor over each of the icons noted how close to capacity their charge was. They were all at 95 percent or above.
In the bottom right of the window was a large red button with the words Discharge Capacitors on it.