Chương 18: Chapter 16.5 - No royalties for half kills (part 2)

We came out into something that shouldn't have existed. A military base folded into a valley, invisible from above. Camouflage netting stretched tree to tree, bunkers were hidden in hillocks, and the whole installation looked like the forest had grown a tumor and taught it to wage war. The smell reached me before anything else did. Pine and diesel sat on top, and underneath them ran bleach, the aggressive clinical kind that is made to clean blood. The bus stopped.

We hauled our bags out into filtered sunlight, and the quiet hit my ears harder than any noise would have. A base this size should have been producing a constant grind of engines and voices and equipment. This one had birdsong and a generator humming somewhere behind the treeline. My work phone buzzed while I was getting the case down the steps. V:'How does the base look?' I set the case in the gravel and typed one-handed.

'No idea. We arrived ninety seconds ago.'

'I see. I had assumed a senior agent of the interventions department would have formed a complete picture of the installation before the doors opened.'

'I'll have it by dinner.'

'I shall hold you to that. Do try to refrain from setting this one on fire. For now.' I was putting the phone away when it buzzed again.

'Also, congratulations on the endorsement. The cleanup division spent eleven hours removing your face from four hundred and twelve uploads, and I am told the blur in the remainder is your own doing, as consumer cameras cannot resolve you at combat speed. The billboard, regrettably, is too amusing to just remove.' A man was waiting for us at the edge of the pad. Silver hair, somewhere in his fifties, and he carried himself with the posture they teach at academies and nowhere else.

Commander's insignia sat on his collar, and his boots had been polished into mirrors. He smiled while we walked up, and the smile stopped somewhere short of his eyes.

"Welcome to Forward Operating Base Wharton," he said.

"I'm Commander Richard Ashworth. I run this installation." The commander himself greeting eight rookies personally. Somewhere in this valley there was an entire chain of command that had been skipped, and I wanted to know why.

"Sir." Liam stepped forward.

"Our squad is reporting for duty." Ashworth's gaze went down the line, paused on Francesca, and arrived at me. It stayed there.

"Peter O'Connor," he said. Not a question.

"Yes, sir."

"I've read your file. Fascinating background, given it doesn't explain your combat capabilities at all." Knowing my home organization, everything they found about me was AI-generated after an intern got the task to create a fake online footprint for me. I vaguely remembered them sending it to me to approve it. I never opened the email. So, I only shrugged.

"It's magic… sir." By the cold, flat expression, he was not amused. But Manuel and Nadia snorted somewhere behind me, so that worked for me. Commander Ashworth moved on down the line.

"Liam van Hellsing. You're the squad leader?" Liam nodded, visibly uncomfortable about how my conversation went.

"Your father's achievements are exemplary. I'll expect the same standard." Ashworth turned and started walking.

"Come. I'll show you your quarters." The base ran bigger than it looked from the pad, and emptier than it had any business being. We passed a mess hall with seating for a hundred, and about ten tables showed any sign of use. The recreation room had a television that wasn't plugged into anything anymore. Corridors built for platoons carried the sound of eight people and gave it back doubled.

"We're at twenty percent capacity," Ashworth said without slowing.

"With six squads, two of which are in medical recovery. That includes yours."

"What happened to the rest?" Nadia asked. His pace didn't change.

"Attrition." So, they got eaten, or stomped to slush, or torn into pieces small enough to hose off a street. I didn't ask the follow-up, and neither did anybody else. Our barracks sat at the end of a long corridor. Bunk beds, lockers, a small common area, and nothing that anyone had bothered to make comfortable. Ashworth deposited us there and took Liam with him for the deployment briefing. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. The door closed.

We stood around for a moment.

"Did anybody else find him creepy?" Manuel said.

"Or is that just me?"

"Not just you," Kara muttered.

"He gives me hives," Nadia said.

"Something's off about him." I claimed the top bunk in the left corner nearest the door, and Torres started sorting out the rest, because old habits die hard. Francesca ended up underneath me, which was either coincidence or Torres deciding that mages should be stored together. I slid the case under the bunk and locked it to the frame. Liam came back an hour later looking a year older.

"Let's gather up for a briefing." We came off the bunks and made a loose circle. He propped a tablet on the table and brought up a countdown.

"This is the base's prediction clock. Sensor arrays in the Atlantic feed it. Right now it's showing thirteen."

"Thirteen what?" Manuel asked.

"Hours until the next attack." The room went quiet.

"The interval used to be a week," Liam said.

"Now it's rarely more than four days. And command's confidence in the clock dropped through the floor on Thursday, because a medium class kaiju came up a river inland and nothing predicted it. That's why they wanted bodies here early." He tapped the screen and a map came up, Atlantic City and the coastline around it, dotted red.

"The city's been a primary target since the first attacks fifteen months ago. They come out of the sea and hit the coast."

"Same as New York," Nadia said.

"You don't get used to it. People think you do." He zoomed out. Red markers ran the length of the east coast.

"Roughly fifteen points of contact from Portland to Miami. Every coastal city of any size. That's why KSF is spread this thin. There are too many fronts." Luca frowned at the screen.

"Europe has six on the entire Atlantic coast. We thought that was a lot."

"Nobody knows why they're doing it, or why here." He swiped to aerial photographs. Craters, collapsed blocks, claw marks carved into streets wide enough to swallow a motorcycle.

"The beachfront is a permanent evacuation zone. Half the city is abandoned. What's left is mostly old-timers who refuse to go and come back whenever they get carried out. About a third of Atlantic City is a battlefield." Oh, I knew why they were doing it. Lillith had been overconfident when she summoned the kaiju goddess, and the goddess was teaching her a lesson in humility by focusing on her territory. This wasn't a detail I was going to share with anyone, though.

"And we're the cleanup crew," Francesca said, not bothering with the question mark.

"Exactly. When a kaiju makes landfall, the primary threat goes to the angels, the high-tier mages, or the heavy response." He glanced at me for half a second.

"We handle the swarm that comes in with it. Tiny and small tiers, mostly."

"Define the sizes," Torres said.

"The alert on Thursday said medium sized." Liam swiped again.

"Tiny is the size of a small car. Small is a house. Medium runs to about five stories. Anything above that is beyond our weapons and our pay grade, but large runs double the size of medium, extra large double that, and titanic is everything that would stand over forty floors tall. There is a titanic-tier kaiju leading the attacks here, colloquially called the Big Red."

"Really?" I raised an eyebrow.

"Big Red?"

"The internet poll named it Gorlothrok, the Crimson Bane. Commander Ashworth referred to it as Big Red." Francesca leaned forward.

"What's the survival rate for squads like ours?" Liam hesitated, which was most of an answer.

"There aren't squads like ours. Squads have zero mages, sometimes one. We have two." Sara's head came up.

"Then why do we have two?" Liam shrugged.

"Fate?"

"It's a coincidence," Francesca said, too fast and too flat. Everyone looked at her. Manuel snorted.

"Well, now it's definitely not." Luca shifted a half step in front of her.

"There's nothing to it."

"Now you're both lying," Nadia said.

"You told us last week you came to the States hunting a mage who messed with your memories. So, either that was a lie, or this is." For once in my life, I wasn't the villain in the room. It felt fantastic.

"The hunt is mine and it's true," Francesca said.

"And I did not know this squad had another mage until I met Peter at the ceremony. Both things can be true." That last part still sounded like a lie, but she'd set her jaw in a way that promised the conversation would cost more than it returned, so we let it go for now.

"Anyway," Torres said, in the calm voice he used to lower the temperature in a room.

"What do we actually know about the enemy? Base training is supposed to run half a year and we got a week, so I assume we're skipping the part where somebody explains what we're shooting at. I've got a friend at KSF who told me they come back. Somehow."

"They do." Liam set the tablet down.

"Kaiju bodies have cores. Tiny ones have a single core. Bigger ones can carry several. If you destroy one core but not all of them, the body dissolves within a few seconds and the kaiju returns on a later wave, adapted against whatever killed the core it lost." The room absorbed that. I'd known the first half since Thursday afternoon, when a core shattered under a Cadillac and the ugly grey bastard started coming apart with a second one still shining through the hole in its throat.

The second half was new, and it settled into my stomach like a swallowed stone.

"How long until one comes back?" I asked.

"Three to four days, matching the wave interval."

"And it comes back knowing what killed it, or just resistant to it?" Liam looked at me.

"Nobody knows. The reports only track that the resistance is there."

"How intelligent are they?"

"Differs wildly." I thought about a mouth full of six rows of teeth folding into something that was unmistakably a smirk while the body around it turned to smoke.

"Sure," I said.

"Get some rest," Liam said.

"Tomorrow will be a difficult day." He went to his bunk and started unpacking with aggressive precision, which ended the conversation more effectively than an order. The mood had curdled. People drifted off into their own heads. Torres tried some small talk with Manuel, got three words back, and let it go. I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling. Fifteen months of attacks. A city sawn into thirds.

A batch of fresh bodies fed into a grinder full of monsters that had already been sharpened against everyone who'd tried before us. It also explained why conventional weapons had stopped working. If a large kaiju carries two cores, one in the skull and one somewhere in its guts, a missile takes the skull and the thing dissolves and comes back three days later slightly harder to kill with missiles. Repeat until missiles do nothing, or until the army runs out of them. The waves were infinite. The ammunition wasn't.

And somewhere under the Atlantic, an eighty-foot grey fish with no eyes was growing a new answer for a man who throws cars. I opened my phone when no one was looking. Unread messages from Ophelia. I opened the first one,'Since none of my panties got the reaction I wanted, I ordered a hundred new sets. They will arrive tomorrow. Tonight, since I've got no panties now, I will need to consult my shoes with you.' I closed the phone and went to sleep.

That lasted me for twenty minutes, after which I spent most of the night texting with Ophelia. The alarm woke me at five in the morning. It rang through the entire base. Deployment time.