Kaiju Agonistes

Ninety Minutes Earlier in December, 1954

Let’s make a list. Title it “Top Twenty Ways to Seriously Annoy an Awakened Watchseed.”

The bottom nineteen items are irrelevant. Just leave ’em blank. At the top of the list, write: “Tickle it with an atomic bomb.”

The drop is lucky, a pickle straight into the barrel. The parachute-slowed Mark 7 is fused to airburst at fifty feet, with a yield of twenty-two kilotons. This is a compromise setting, meant to allow deployment whether the Mid-Pacific Entity is submerged, surfaced, or stomping around on an island. Half a dozen observation aircraft are monitoring at a presumably safe distance, gulping data from this unprecedented combination of atomic field test and public-relations bonanza (assuming things shake out; if the monster swims out of the mushroom cloud unharmed, a lot of film canisters are going straight into a vault at Pearl Harbor).

The water column above Messenger eats most of the thermal and hard radiation pointed in that direction. Several hundred feet of water vaporize, leaving a goodly amount to be compressed by the blast wave, which follows merrily in the wake of the X-rays and gamma rays, turning the immediate area into a hell of hydrostatic shock. As a fresh white plume of radioactive steam and condensation rises somewhere southeast of Eniewetok Atoll (Merry Christmas, Marshall Islanders, and, not for the first time, surprise!), Messenger sinks in a slow flat spin, oozing clouds of blood.

Self-repairing, stuffed full of modular biofactories, Messenger has nonetheless underprepared for direct violence of this magnitude. The sudden overpressure cracks its carapace and fills its joints and hollows with thousands of seeping fissures. This is a setback.

Yet only that. Messenger is still in the game, already calculating food requirements for repairs and improvements, visualizing a larger, tougher battle configuration to help these primates grasp the points it needs to make. Remember those gradually escalating stages of violence, those generous intervals of time for reflection? Oh, that’s done.

Overhead the handshakes and promotions are already starting. Messenger flutters back down into the cold blackness, making a list and checking it twice.