With each lunge and landing, the landscape around her crumbled. Alarms sounded. Explosions filled the air. People screamed, their voices lost in the quaking rumble of each step forward. A mile high cloud of dust and ash trailed in her wake, cast up by her tail, which thrashed a zigzag of destruction, whipping back and forth.
But as she closed in on her enemy, she also felt the presence of her former self growing stronger. She was coming. But still an afterthought.
Nemesis looked to the horizon.
Beyond the manicured neighborhoods and emptied downtowns, she saw smoke. She smelled it, too, mixed with blood. Her stomach churned. She hadn’t eaten since waking. The little people scattered about wouldn’t sate her hunger, but her enemy would.
Nemesis roared, her voice booming, the sound waves streaking out ahead of her, leveling everything in her path before she crushed what remained underfoot and swept it all away with her swishing tail.
A high-pitched wail replied from the distance, but it didn’t sound afraid.
It sounded defiant and angry.
The enemy hadn’t stopped running because it was distracted by food, it had stopped to fight.
Nemesis bellowed again, and still three miles away, she began lurching, her chest heaving, her throat constricting and flexing. As she lunged up and came down on her massive arms, she expelled a bright orange glob, which slurped free and shot out with a pop. The projectile soared toward the horizon, pursued by Nemesis, and announced her approach by unleashing the fires of hell and harsh judgment on the violator and everything else around it.
The shockwave from the explosion washed back over Nemesis, stumbling her. Her hands fell back as her torso ground through the city, but her legs never stopped pumping, and she quickly got her arms under her again, charging into the wave of heat generated by the explosion.
A wall of smoke blocked her view of what lay ahead, but she charged onward, parting the black cloud with her mass, the swell of air around her kicking the ash skyward.
Then she saw the enemy, blackened, but unharmed. It stood boldly on four thick legs, its four talon-tipped arms open wide to embrace her, a city at its back. The creature was easily her size now, perhaps larger, but Nemesis never slowed. Instead, she roared once more, shoved off the ground and dove into the waiting arms of her enemy, sending them both catapulting into the city beyond.
40
Katsu Endo sat at the X-35’s controls, but he was only pretending to fly. Once he’d input the flight path into the system, including preferred altitudes, speeds and airspace, he could sit back and let the vehicle’s onboard radar system automatically avoid any obstacles it came across. Endo couldn’t fly a plane, or a helicopter, but to operate the X-35, you didn’t really need to know how to pilot. While you could pilot manually, all you needed was basic competency with a touch-screen operating system. And when you did need to manually pilot, the designers had made the controls as simple as a video game, no doubt understanding that future pilots would be most comfortable with a flight stick and simple foot controls. And with the repulse engines, it was possible.
So instead of piloting, he was listening.
And planning.
Hudson didn’t trust him entirely; that was no secret. But he didn’t loathe Endo as much as he pretended to, and despite his frequent threats of legal action, Hudson had yet to attempt subduing Endo, despite ample opportunity.
It’s because, Endo knew, the solution to the Kaiju problem is far more complicated than black and white. Both men occupied gray territory and had done questionable things to protect entire cities, and the ones they loved. And, by the sounds of it, Hudson wasn’t done.
If Endo understood correctly, Nemesis was looking for a partner. The monster had been born half-human after all. It made sense that, now lacking Maigo, Nemesis would want her back, to share life. Nemesis Prime had been a lone beast, destined to smite in solitude, but Nemesis was different. She required a partner to be whole. At least, that was the way Endo understood it.
Lilly had spoken of a spot on the back of Nemesis’s neck, an opening, where black tendrils had reached for her. Endo could only assume, as Hudson and Maigo clearly were, that entering that space would then link Maigo and Nemesis once more.
It was a bold plan. Even for Hudson. While the man could be...thorny, Endo had come to respect the man’s creative solutions to problems, and his willingness to enter the gray areas of morality. But could he handle what Cole had revealed to them? Could the man sacrifice Maigo, and then, lacking her strength, work against an invasion?
Endo didn’t think so. What Hudson was about to do would break him.