“We weren’t expecting the helicopter,” Sanders admitted. “Or your staff. We thought getting the aerostat and then the instrument packs would be enough. Even with the downed helicopter, you still should have thought it was Bella attacking, not us. What happened?”
“You were sloppy,” Niamh said.
“Evidently, but how, is what I’m asking.”
“You remember Tom Stevens,” I said.
“The guy who said we went to Dartmouth together.”
“That’s the one. Your people murdered him.”
“That will be an awkward note in the alumni magazine, but continue.”
“Before that happened, he hid a camera,” I said. “We caught your people. We saw your perimeter.”
“Trans-dimensional portal,” Sanders corrected.
I ignored this. “And we knew it wasn’t an accident or the result of a kaiju attack. We know. Our people know. And as soon as the gateway at Honda Base comes back online, people on this side will know, too.”
Sanders looked up to one of the men who had weapons on us, the one who asked which one of us zapped Dave. “You said the site was clean.”
“I thought it was,” the man replied. Now that I knew, the voice matched what I remembered from Tom’s video.
“Well, obviously it wasn’t,” Sanders snapped. “This complicates things.”
“There’s nothing that ties this to you or your company,” the man said. “We don’t have any identifying clothes. The portal doesn’t have brand marks. They can’t know.”
“Except that you’ve done this before,” I said. “Your company, I mean. Eventually KPS will figure that out.”
“No, they won’t,” Sanders said, almost distractedly. “They were never told what we were doing. It was between us and the Department of Energy.”
“Then they will know,” I said.
Sanders smirked at me. “You know who’s in charge of the United States right now, right? Do you think they’ll care? Especially if I give them an excuse to declare martial law and scrub the election? Dude, I’ll get the Presidential Medal of Freedom for this shit.”
I ground my teeth. “I hate that you’re right about that,” I said.
“I know you do,” Sanders said, placatingly. “But I don’t think it will get that far. Evidence or not, we can make sure it doesn’t come back to us.” He turned back to Aparna. “We’ve spent the last several hours extracting genetic material from Bella’s eggs,” he said. “And we’ve taken some of the eggs themselves, to raise in a controlled environment. We’ll be able to look at the young kaiju as they develop.”
“But that’s not going to help you,” Aparna said.
“I know that,” Sanders said. “I know that because you told me how the parasites are needed to spur the development, and I know that because of our company’s own research. All the more reason to bring Bella over. We’ve been harvesting her parasites, too, both for their genetics and for individuals.”
“And they haven’t eaten any of you?” Niamh asked.
“A few have tried, but the cold and the thinner air makes them less active,” Sanders said. “They’ve mostly just been clinging to Bella for warmth.”
“Which makes your threat of feeding us to them less terrifying.”
“Well, we’ll deliver you to them directly, that’ll help.” Sanders checked his watch again. “And soon, because it’s only going to be a couple of hours before Bella goes up, by our estimation.”
“The Canadians have to know you’re here by now,” Kahurangi said.
“Of course they do; they gave us permits,” Sanders said. “They think we’re doing radio interferometry out here. We told them a week ago that tonight they might see some intense light coming from here as part of our work, so they’re expecting that.”
“And the massive fucking kaiju?” Niamh asked.
“We have permission to build structures as long as we don’t permanently alter the site. Bella is a structure, so far as they know.”
“No one’s going to buy that,” Aparna said.
“They might not if we were doing this in the middle of Montreal. But we’re sixty miles from the nearest town of any size, in Labrador, in the middle of a pandemic. We’re not even on any flight paths. I don’t think you understand how incredibly perfect this location is for this.”