“I’m not getting any answers now!” Sanders said. “You have me monologuing, I’m guessing, to stay alive longer. Yes, I know about monologuing. I’ve watched The Incredibles.”
“The trans-dimensional portal,” Niamh promoted. “Monologue on that, please.”
“Clearly we had it before now.”
“Since when?”
“Since the 1960s, if you must know.” Sanders turned to me. “Remember that bit of drama back at Tanaka Base? Where your administrator tried to lecture me about my family’s involvement in the old version of Tanaka being obliterated? She was more right than she knew. That kaiju didn’t just happen to be near the base. We lured it in.”
“So you’ve killed KPS people before,” I said.
“We didn’t know the kaiju had a malformed reactor,” Sanders said. “We can’t be blamed for that.”
“No, just for putting the kaiju in a place where it could kill dozens of people.”
“If you like,” Sanders said, conceding the point because he didn’t seem to care about it very much. “We were trying to get it into an earlier version of the portal, which was powered like this one is, with our company’s RTGs.” Sanders jerked a thumb back at the generator container. “That one’s a prototype polonium-210 RTG. Outputs a ridiculous amount of energy really quickly. Perfect for this use case. Fuel doesn’t last very long, though.”
“You’ve tried this before?” Aparna said.
“It didn’t work,” Sanders said. “We could make a tear in the dimensional wall, but it wasn’t significant enough to bring anything through. We needed more residual thinning, and we could never get it. Until now. That first kaiju going nuclear and thinning the barrier, and then Bella sitting at the edge of the crater and having her reactor keep it thin?” Sanders made a chef’s kiss action with his hands. “Perfect. My family’s been waiting for actual generations for this moment.” He motioned around. “We’ve had this prepped to go for years. We update the components from time to time, obviously. But we’ve been ready.”
“Yeah, all right, but why?” Kahurangi asked. “What good does bringing a kaiju over do you? You can’t control them. You can’t harness their energy. They can’t survive here more than a few days. What’s the point?”
Sanders smiled at this. “Dr. Lautagata, I would think of all people you would understand.”
“I don’t.”
“Then let me help. Which is your pack?” Kahurangi pointed out his pack. Sanders rummaged through it and fished out a spray bottle. “What is this?”
“Kaiju pheromones.”
“Which you use to keep the parasites off you.”
“Mostly.”
Sanders waved at all four of us. “Which is why the four of you currently smell like fermented gym shorts.”
“Yes.”
“So you are less interested in the kaiju than what you can get out of the kaiju,” Sanders said. He sniffed the spray bottle nozzle, made a grimacing face at it, set it down on the ground, and continued to rummage through Kahurangi’s pack. “For you, the kaiju isn’t the kaiju. It’s a bunch of compounds and smells and pheromones that you can fiddle with to give you what you want.” He pulled what looked like a remote control out of the pack, puzzled at it, set it down. “I’m the same way. Just not about smells and pheromones.”
“You want the reactor,” Aparna said, suddenly.
Sanders smiled at her. “Dr. Chowdhury, clearly the smartest of the four of you. Yes. My family’s been in nuclear and nuclear-derived power generation since just after the end of World War II. Imagine the competitive advantage we could have if instead of building viable nuclear reactors, we could just grow them. Safe. Effective. Organic. Wind and solar are only going to get us so far, you know. I don’t care about the kaiju one way or another. I just want to know how their bodies make their reactors.”
He looked over to me. “Although you should have figured that out by now. You caught me trying to smuggle out kaiju genetic information.”
“I didn’t know this was plan B,” I said.
“I’m glad you didn’t figure it out,” Sanders said. “But that does bring up the question of how you figured out how we were here at all. When my people went in, the first thing they did was take out the aerostat.”
“And the helicopter,” I added.