I don’t try to push her. This girl who was one part of a city-destroying Kaiju, and has the strength of who knows how many men, is shaking under my arms. So I just rub her back and turn my attention to understanding what I’m seeing.
The tank nearest us contains what looks like a very pale, very blond human man. But I’m pretty sure he’s not human. The first tell is that he’s a good ten feet tall, but not in the lanky way abnormally tall humans look. He’s built like a professional wrestler—the Hulk Hogan variety, not Andre the Giant, who’d look small next to this guy. And then there is the symbol on the man’s chest. It’s not a tattoo, it’s like an indentation, like it was carved out of him, but with perfect edges. There are three circles, one inside the other, centered on the man’s broad chest. A single line protruding down from the center circle extends downward through the next two. I have no idea what it means, but I commit it to memory.
The next tank contains something that is very much not human, and completely unrecognizable to me. In some regards, it’s humanoid, with a head, two arms and two legs...but that’s where the comparison ends. Its face is fugly, covered with boney horns that look like they punched out of the skin. Its mouth, frozen open in death, is full of large white teeth. It has three red eyes on either side of its long domed head, which ends at a mane of hair, flowing out behind it in the water. Its body is powerful, like a cross between the blond giant and a hairless, gray lion. Its hands and feet are tipped with long, deadly looking claws. Its long, powerful tail is tipped with a tuft of hair, like a painter’s brush. While its body isn’t as big as the alien Viking fellow, it looks like it could make short work of him.
And that brings us to the third tank, where the creature Maigo and I both recognize from Nemesis Prime’s memories is contained. It’s not the whole creature. Just its head. At its full height, the creature would probably be a good fifty feet tall. It’s not Kaiju big, but these are the things that captured Nemesis Prime, tortured her and turned her into something she might not have been without them. It reminds me of the way people train elephants for the circus; the smaller, but smarter life form, plucking the larger, more malleable-minded giant from its habitat and training it, often through violence, to perform a duty. I look at its two, basketball-sized, black eyes, and even in death, I see a ruthless intelligence. The bald head was covered in gleaming white skin, stretched down to where its mouth was hidden by a mass of tentacles that remind me of spiky star fish limbs.
“What...are they?” Collins asks.
Endo steps up to the center glass tank containing the gray creature. “I don’t know the details, but they’re not of this Earth. Like Nemesis Prime. Our Nemesis is different. Thanks to Maigo, she is, at least partly, of this Earth. But I think these creature have something to do with Nemesis.”
He doesn’t know, I think, and for some reason, I decide to tell him. “The big one on the right...trained Nemesis Prime and brought her to Earth. Or, at least, his species did.”
Endo looks uncommonly surprised. “You’ve seen them before?”
“In Nemesis’s memories.” I rub Maigo’s back. “We both did. Saw them and felt what they did to her, how they made her the goddess of vengeance.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Endo asks.
“You’re not exactly a team player,” Collins says on my behalf.
Endo frowns, perhaps reconsidering his life choices, but probably just pouting about not being the all-knowing Nemesis fanboy.
“I’m okay,” Maigo says as her shivers stop. She holds onto my arms, and we stand together. She turns toward the contained monsters. “Why are they here?”
Maigo steps out of my arms, her strength and resolve that of a Kaiju, returned in full. She heads for the big, tentacle-faced floating head. She stares the thing down, and I wonder for a moment, if she faced this thing, at its full height, would she be strong enough to take it down? She might be, but I hope to never find out.
With a sudden roar, Maigo draws her fist back, ready to punch the glass. A voice stops her.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Zach Cole says, standing behind us, having entered the room without making a sound.
Maigo glares back at him. “Why not?”
He shrugs. “It’d make a mess. And you could destroy a one of a kind specimen.”
“Just another one of your sick collections?” I ask, slowly lowering my hand to my sidearm.
Cole boldly steps up beside Maigo, his hands clasped behind his back. I’m not sure what’s more surprising, that he seems unafraid of Maigo or that the ample bellied man in a suit can reach his hands that far back. “This collection might help the human race survive long enough to have a future.”
“Explain,” Endo demands.