Godzilla vs. Kong by Greg Keyes (read people like a book .txt) 📕

Monarch had re-tasked several satellites overnight, along with tuning up the web of air and undersea sensors. The tale the data told this morning was unambiguous; there was no mistaking the twin bioacoustic and radiation profiles.

“Godzilla,” he murmured under his breath. Not what he had been hoping for.

“You see it?” Chloe asked.

“Yeah,” Mark said. “Have we had any movement?” Chloe was the intern on the night shift. She was young, but very good at her job. She had blond, curly hair that he suspected required a fair amount of effort to maintain. He usually missed her—she was almost always gone before he showed up in the morning—but Madison had left for school early, and he hadn’t seen any reason to stick around the house with her gone.

“Yes, he’s definitely cruising,” she said. “Kind of exciting. This is the first time I’ve actually seen a Titan on the move. I was in high school, back in the day.”

That made her, what, twenty-one? Twenty-two? Younger than he’d thought. A handful of years older than Madison.

“No worries,” Mark told her. “That doesn’t make me feel old at all. Let me have a look.” He bent over her shoulder to examine the interactive chart showing several projections of the globe.

Madison was right; Godzilla had been spotted near the Micronesian islands of Kiribati two days ago. Now, after a global search expanding out from there, Monarch had located him. They were tracking him using various forms of telemetry, one of which was based on the passive bioacoustic characteristics of the ORCA that Emma had used to communicate with the Titans to devastating effect. This version could only receive, not transmit, and along with satellite surveillance, was one of their best early warning strategies against not just Godzilla, but all of the Titans.

He studied the Titan’s meandering line. There was no way of knowing where Godzilla had first started this journey, but extrapolating from the remnants of his trail, it looked like he’d taken a swing by Fiji, passing Kiribati on his way to a certain storm-covered island east of there. After that, he came near the South American coast, then followed it down to the southernmost tip of the continent. From there he had begun moving toward Antarctica before taking an abrupt turn north.

“He’s patrolling again,” Mark said.

“You mean for other Titans?”

“Right,” he said. “Three years ago, right after the fight with Ghidorah, he did something we’ll call ‘the big cleanup.’ Some of the other Titans didn’t exactly stay in line. He went on a global walkabout and set them straight. He drove Scylla from Georgia. He ran Amhuluk out of the Amazon, and so forth. Not long after, they all ended up going dormant. We think Godzilla may have sent out some sort of silent signal, although we aren’t sure how.”

“He attacked humans, during that period, too, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, but those were some very bad actors who were taking advantage of the chaos at the time. A terrorist group. They had taken over an offshore oil rig and had captured a Titan, Na Kika, using a stolen containment net, apparently with some sort of plan to mine her parts for use in bioweapons. Intelligence thinks it might have been an offshoot of Jonah’s bunch, but I have my doubts about that. Monarch got wind of it and sent some jets to check it out. Then Godzilla showed up and wiped the floor with them. I think it fits in with the rest of his pattern during that time. It was like Godzilla was sorting things out, establishing himself as king, so to speak. And then he went silent. Disappeared. We haven’t heard a peep out of him for almost three years. Or any other Titan, for that matter—Kong excepted, I guess.”

“Looks like he checked on Kong,” Chloe said, nodding at the map.

“We have him at Fiji first,” he said. “That’s where Rodan ended up. He cruised by Skull Island for sure. But he has never bothered Kong there—we’re not a hundred percent sure why. And he checked on Quetzalcoatl, then Scylla. Then it looks like he was going to have a look at Methuselah, but he never got there. He went north instead.”

“You think he’s headed for the Amazon?” she said.

“Maybe,” he replied. But it felt a little off. Godzilla had left Behemoth in the Amazon basin, where it hadn’t been any trouble. It was hibernating like the rest of them, and the locals liked it a lot; some literally worshipped it. And why would Godzilla skip checking up on Methuselah when he was less than a hundred miles from it and head north instead?

Or maybe what felt “off” was the notion that he could predict what Godzilla was going to do. He had spent years of his life hating the Titan. His son Andrew had died in San Francisco during Godzilla’s fight with the MUTOs—Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms—and after that Mark had been a firm believer that the only good Titan was a dead one. It had taken a while for him to come around, to realize that Godzilla and humanity had a common enemy in Ghidorah. But how far did that go? With Ghidorah gone and the other Titans either submitting willingly to Godzilla’s rule or being beaten into submitting to it, what was his agenda now? Godzilla wasn’t just a big, dumb lizard. There was a brain in there, one Mark believed was pretty sophisticated. Emma had believed that the Titans existed as a check against the harm humans might do in the world; in releasing them, she had believed she would heal ecosystems devastated by pollution, deforestation, and climate change.

The thing was, Emma had been right. Not morally or ethically—dooming so many innocents was out of bounds, no matter how laudable the ultimate ends. But since the Titans had emerged, the rainforests were once more gaining ground, reefs were healing, climate change had ground to a halt and was even reversing. But now, humans