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

nothing compared to rocketing along through a superstorm, aiming for a freaking hole in the ground…

He closed his eyes. Come on, Dave.

“Little light precipitation,” Dave’s cheerful voice came over the intercom. If you will look off to our port side—that’s to the left, folks—you’ll be able to see—well, nothing. But if you keep your eyes straight ahead, I think I can promise you—there we go.”

The jungle suddenly appeared, the tallest trees jutting into the clouds, the planes so low to the treetops Nathan found himself involuntarily pushing imaginary brakes on the floor. They were going so fast…

In an instant, the cave mouth was there, a gaping wound in the world.

“In we go!” Dave shouted. “Unto the breach.”

There’s gonna be T-shirts with that on it, Nathan thought. This is going to change everything.

The jets turned on floodlights as they whipped down the tunnel. It was harrowing, but somehow not as bad as the storm. This was more like watching a roller-coaster ride, maybe with a Wild West silver-mine theme. There wasn’t anything to see here that was too far out of the ordinary. Everything weird was much further down the tunnel. Monarch had sent drones in, of course, and the data they had provided had added significantly to his calculations, but there was a point beyond which the signals weren’t strong enough to maintain the sort of contact that made remote piloting possible. That was especially true when they hit the Vortex itself, where gravity appeared to do funny things with time, so outside signals were out of synch with the drones’ experience of reality. Human pilots were necessary.

“Looking good, control,” Dave said. “Outside temperature elevated, but nothing crazy. This looks like a cakewalk.”

“You’re coming up on the Vortex,” Nathan said. “Once you enter, you’ll have to switch to your G-pulse signal for us to stay in touch.”

“Acknowledged, control.”

Nathan watched the feed from the forward cameras. The tunnel tilted down now, not vertical but not that far from it. Up ahead, weird colors scintillated, cutting off visibility of anything beyond.

“Switching to G-pulse,” Dave said. “Going in, brother. See you on the other side.”

The screen went black as the transition happened. Then it flared back on, a chaos of rapidly shifting pixels. He knew the data was now coming in discrete bundles every few seconds, but the receiver should be buffering it, piecing it together, synchronizing the disparate flows of time.

“Dave?” he said. “Do you read me?”

“Copy,” Dave said. “Trippy. Really trippy … could probably sell tickets…” his voice stretched out into a long squeal, then a groan, lowering in pitch until it was inaudible. As if the signal was red-shifting, moving away from him at incredible speed. How fast were they going? No telemetry was coming through.

“Shit,” he muttered under his breath. “Shit.”

This was not supposed to happen. He’d missed something. Yes, he had expected acceleration, but not nearly to this order of magnitude. He had told the reporters it would be like going into a jetstream; this seemed more like a railgun.

“Dave,” he said. “If you can hear me, abort. Abort now. Put on every brake you have and come back.”

He listened desperately for an answer, but none came.

No, no, no, no…

It should still be all right. When they came out the other end of this, they should have space to slow down, right? If it was like he thought, there should be dozens of miles of open space in front of them, hundreds maybe. A world-sized cavern.

It was going to be all right. It was…

Abruptly everything was back—telemetry, sound, the forward cameras. He had a glimpse of open space, a curved horizon, a storm or something, in the distance, coming closer with incredible speed.

“Wow,” Dave said. “That was intense. But we’re—”

Then everything went black. Nothing.

“Dave!” he shouted. “Dave!” He switched frequencies, tried again. Nothing from any of the planes. It was as if they had simply ceased to exist.

Trying not to panic, he pulled up the last image, the last set of data. The picture showed nothing but what might be a thunderhead with lightning shining from its core. Mountains in the distance, upside down. He scrolled through the other readings until he got to the readout of speed, velocity—deceleration. He went back over it again, desperate to believe it was wrong. That he had read it wrong.

“Dave,” he said. “Oh, God, Dave.”

THREE

They believe, in all this country, that there is a kind of gorilla—known to the initiated by certain signs, but chiefly by being of extraordinary size… Such gorillas, the natives believe can never be caught or killed; and also, they have much more shrewdness and sense than the common animal. In fact, in these “possessed” beasts it would seem that the intelligence of man is united with the strength and ferocity of the beast.

From Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial

Africa, Paul B. Du Chaillu, 1861

Skull Island Eleven Months Ago

White light scorched across the dark heavens, leaving a jagged streak of red behind Jia’s eyelids as she blinked them shut against the pouring rain. An instant later, she felt the shiver the light made in the earth and air. The water sucked at her ankles, climbing higher toward her calves. She clung to Sister-Mother’s hand, felt the calluses there, the strength that kept her going, the grip that forced down her terror. Everything was wrong, and she knew it. She did not know the wind speech of her people, and they rarely used it anyway. But she knew it by their expressions, by the way they held their hands, the set of their shoulders, tilt of their hips when they paused, struggling through the jungle.

She knew that they expected to leave the world soon, to join the bundles of their generations in the What-Always-Is.

The blue-white light came again and again, incandescent serpents coiling in the sky and striking down toward the earth. She could smell the breath of the rainsnakes—like copper, like blood and yet not quite like either. And she could smell salt in