Godzilla vs. Kong by Greg Keyes (e books free to read TXT) 📗

“You were in Brazil, with Behemoth, right?” Nathan said. “One of the few survivors.”

“Yes,” she said.

“But that was sabotage,” Nathan pointed out. “Not a fault in the technology.”

“Of course,” she replied. “But that goes to the trust issue. What can be turned on can be turned off. Even the best door only works if it is closed. But it wasn’t just containing them I’m talking about; it was the conceit that we could control them, kill them if we wanted. Meu Deus, the hubris. Understand, we found most of the Titans quiescent to begin with. We just built containments around the places they had already chosen to sleep. In several cases, the termination protocols were applied when they started to wake—and failed, anyway. Titans have an ability to sort of … ramp up when they need to. Exceed what we calculated about their resilience from their resting capacity.”

“And how is Kong different?” Nathan asked.

“He isn’t,” Araya replied. “But we’ve had a long time to study him, and since Ghidorah, we’ve learned a little humility. How do you think we got him into his enclosure in the first place?”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” Nathan said. “I guess I figured you built it around him.”

Araya shook her head. “Back in 1973, a lieutenant colonel named Packard tried to take Kong down with napalm. He almost succeeded. Of course, Kong was still relatively young then, about a third of the size he is now. What dropped him wasn’t the fire but the fact that the napalm sucked up all of the oxygen from the immediate atmosphere. Kong needs a lot of oxygen to function. His lungs are bigger in proportion to his size than ours are, but that doesn’t matter if there isn’t anything to put in them, right? But what Packard didn’t realize—if he even understood what happened—was that it also takes time for the oxygen reserve in Kong’s blood to completely deplete especially if he’s active and angry. Because there is also a lot of blood. You ever hyperventilate before diving underwater?”

“Yes,” he said. “My brother and I used to see who could stay under longer.”

“Right. You enrich your blood with oxygen before holding your breath. When Kong is active, his blood is always enriched.”

“I assume you didn’t napalm him to get him into the enclosure?”

“No. We sequenced his DNA, and we built models on how to subdue him with an odorless chemical that is both a gas and water-soluble. It bonds with his blood like oxygen does, but it isn’t oxygen. That’s combined with a general soporific to keep him down after his oxygen levels return to normal. We introduced it when he was already naturally asleep. The first three times we tried it, it failed anyway. No one was killed but … it was close. The fourth time we got the dosage right. Then we used choppers to move him into the biodome and sealed it up while he was still snoozing. So we’ve done this before. We’ve got this.”

“And it won’t hurt him, depriving him of oxygen?”

“There’s enough oxygen left that there’s no risk of brain damage,” she said. “Believe me, nobody here wants to hurt him.”

“That’s commendable.”

“Yes,” Ayara said. “Also, if we hurt him, there is a spectacularly good chance he will kill us all. The lieutenant colonel I told you about? Packard? Kong crushed him like a bug.”

*   *   *

Pacific Ocean

Ilene experienced the whole thing like a nightmare she couldn’t—or rather, was unwilling—to wake from. When they doused Kong with the gas, he woke, briefly, feebly pawing at his face before succumbing. Techs swarmed over Kong as if he were Gulliver, and they Lilliputians, building a harness around him for the helicopters to fasten to.

Then they opened the biodome with shaped charges, and the rain came in, pounding the last remaining fragment of the Skull Island ecosystem mercilessly, lashing it with lightning, tearing limbs from the trees. She cried, then; Skull Island was a place of great beauty and bloody horror, and it was like nowhere else in the world—and now it was gone, all of it. It sank into her how irrevocable her decision had been; there was no going back now—not for Kong, not for Jia—not for her. Skull Island was as lost to the world as the age of dinosaurs.

For the first time since she had known the girl, Jia wept, pulling into herself and refusing Ilene’s attempt to comfort her. If her heart had not already been broken, that would have done it.

The ship was a modified bulk cargo vessel equipped to handle close to 100,000 tons of Titan on its broad deck. The scaffolding had been stripped away and replaced by huge reels to spool on the chains needed to hold the Titan down.

There was nothing to see of the island as the ship pulled away; just the storm, reaching high into the heavens. But as the ship started moving, the giant storm dwindled with surprising speed, until there was nothing to see in any direction except ocean and ships.

Though the expedition’s route took them through the Southern Pacific and its inhabited islands, they didn’t pass within sight of any of them. This was by design, as they were trying not to draw attention. On the surface, given the size of the fleet accompanying them, that seemed ridiculous. But in practice, the South Pacific and the Antarctic Ocean they were bound for were so vast, four times as many ships wouldn’t draw attention unless someone knew where and when to look.

Jia came out of her shell after the first few days. She stayed on deck. When she wasn’t looking at the bound form of Kong, she stared out at what for her must have been impossibly distant horizons. Even before the storm came ashore, there had been near-constant tempests surrounding the island. In ten years, Ilene could only remember about four when the ocean horizon was visible, and then usually not for long. She had spent one