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She hissed in frustration more than from pain and got her feet back under her. Bullets ricocheted off the ring wall, just missing her head and forcing her back down. Pinned after all.

She tried to crawl along the ring’s curve, but men were closing in on all sides.

Nowhere to go.

She glanced up past the halogen lamps’ glare, to the faint image of the stars above.

Almost nowhere.

“Don’t shoot!” she shouted, hoping the Russians would understand more English than she did Russian. She raised her hands up, but stayed down in a crouch, getting her bare feet beneath her, ignoring the sting of cold metal. “Don’t shoot!”

“Vstavat’,” a man said behind her.

She turned her eyebrows up and stuck out a quivering lip before looking over her shoulder at the man. “W-where am I?” she sobbed, looking frail and lost.

The man’s AK-47 turned slightly. If she attacked, he might be able to bring it to bear, but she had no intention of attacking. Just as the man opened his mouth to issue some sort of order, and before his comrades arrived, Maigo heaved herself up. She left the ground behind and sailed up into the darkness above the halogen lamps.

The men below turned their weapons up and fired at the night sky, but had nothing to aim at. Bullets buzzed around her, but none struck home as she arced over the ancient site and descended toward its core.

She landed without a sound, employing the techniques taught to her by the naturally lithe Lilly, whose fate was still unknown. She’d thrown her clear of the explosion, and probably the base, but had Lilly been injured? Maigo doubted it. Like all good cats, Lilly always landed on her feet and could handle drops that seemed impossible to master, even for the stronger Maigo.

As soundless as Maigo was, her body still glowed like a beacon in the harsh light.

“Tam!” someone shouted. She turned and saw a man on the far side of the rings lift his AK-47 toward her. She saw the perfectly round barrel and knew it was aimed at her head. Right between the eyes.

The soldier pulled the trigger, but his shot cut through the empty sky instead of her head. He’d been jerked back and thrown out of the light. A shadow pounced on him and then slid through the darkness, bounding with ridiculous agility and a complete lack of fear. “Go, girl, go!” Lilly’s shout was followed by the scream of a man caught off guard, and then an “oof!”

Lilly was providing a counteroffensive.

Maigo leapt for the center of the structure and was pursued by bullets. Before she was struck, a second weapon joined in, this one targeting the lamps. With a spray of sparks, the halogens burst in rapid succession, plunging the site into darkness.

Maigo fell atop the center of the structure, a broad slab of cold metal. She squeaked to a stop as her skin rubbed against the surface. Before she could stand, a loud clunk reverberated beneath her.
Physical contact,
Maigo thought, recalling Brice’s words.
It’s the only way inside.
The clunk was followed by nine more, and then the floor fell away, taking her down with it.

Maigo coughed as the floor came to an abrupt halt. Had she been...human, the impact would have broken bones. She glanced up and saw the circular entrance a hundred feet up.
More than broken bones
, she thought.
Another security measure to keep out the unworthy?

A wave of nausea roared through her body and kept her pinned for a moment. She saw red eyes in her mind again, but they came and went without any additional fanfare.
Preapproved
, she thought, and the sound of gunfire, now far overhead, encouraged her back to her feet.

Find what’s down here
, she thought, formulating a plan.
Get back to the surface. Find Lilly. Retreat to the X-35. And get the hell out of Mother Russia.

But when she stood up and looked around, that plan didn’t seem quite as simple. She stood on a round platform, twenty feet across, surrounded by black. The ceiling above her was a smooth, stone dome. The Atlanteans had carved out the inside of Big Diomede, creating an enormous space. But how big was it?

“Hello,” Maigo shouted, and her voice echoed loud and far, sliding down around her for what must have been hundreds of feet.

Maigo stepped up to the side and looked down. She had better-than-human night vision—not as good as Lilly’s, but even Lilly might have had trouble in this soup. She could see just twenty feet down, where a staircase descended, wrapping around what she could now see was a tall spire. The stairs were six feet wide and two feet tall. Not designed for people.

How tall is this thing?

She considered leaping, but there were heights even she couldn’t safely land from. There was no choice but to take the stairs. She leapt down the twenty feet and then followed the stairs around. Her bare feet slapped over the smooth metal stairs, and she was forced to slow down as she nearly slipped over the railing-less side. With every revolution downward, the temperature increased. After thirty trips around, she was glad to be dressed for the beach.

How much further?
she wondered, and then she had her answer, as the stairs stopped and a walkway led out over the darkness. She crept onto the walkway, testing her weight on the ancient surface and wondering why there were no railings. The Atlanteans seemed to have had little regard for personal safety. Then again, all of this was designed by an alien species that resembled human beings, but stood ten feet tall.

When the floor didn’t even wiggle, she stepped out more confidently. She saw a round platform ahead. At its center was a metal sphere standing atop a cone. The top of the sphere rose above her head, out of reach. She stepped onto the platform, looking at the sphere. Aside from its highly reflective surface that bent Maigo’s face into something horrible, it was featureless.

She raised her hand toward its surface, ready to test Brice’s physical contact theory again, when a voice stopped her.

It came from above, echoing and distorted, but Maigo recognized it as Lilly. “Maigo! It’s coming!”

She sounded uncharacteristically worried. Almost like she was in pain. Had she been injured? And what was coming?

It’s
coming.

A laugh, closer and louder than Lilly’s voice ripped through the air. The sound of talons scrabbling against a hard surface filled the air like static.

It.

Leshiy, the Russian monster. But what was it?

She would soon find out, of that there was no doubt. The only way out of here was back out the way she had come, past Leshiy, and past the Russians. But she wasn’t worried. She was a monster, too. And while most of the time she hated that truth, there were occasions where she embraced it.

She stood on her tip-toes and placed her hand against the sphere.

She felt a tingle of energy and tried to pull her hand away, but found herself locked in place.

There was a loud thud behind her.

She tried to turn around, but her locked arm restricted her movement. She craned her head around and saw it. A large creature with gray skin, wild tufts of hair and black claws lay motionless at the far side of the walkway. Its back was toward her, but she could see rolls of muscle, bony protrusions along its back and a long, still tail, dangling over the side, into the abyss.

The thing had slipped and fallen.

Leshiy looked like a powerful foe, but clumsy footwork and tall heights don’t make good friends. She turned her back on the creature and tried to pull her hand free again. She stopped pulling when the sound of grinding gears and snapping locks roared out all around her. The floor vibrated. Loud clacks issued from far below, repeating every second and bringing orange light to the gloom. The glow rose up beneath her as ancient lights came to life.

And then something giggled.

She looked back over her shoulder. The Leshiy still lay motionless. But then, movement. The long tail dangling over the side twitched. The creature’s head lifted off the floor, revealing a purple stain. She saw a face turn toward her, partly human, partly something else. Its snout curled in a sneer, and it let out another laugh. Then the creature sprang into motion, righting itself onto all fours, its forelimbs splayed wide for balance. Its hind legs were curled and ready to pounce. The creature’s two human eyes were framed by four more solid red eyes, all squinted, all looking straight at her.

The human parts were easy to recognize, and after a moment of looking, Maigo recognized the rest of it, or at least some of it. GOD was creating chimeras again, as they had done on Island 731, but instead of merging various animal species into something more deadly, they had thrown alien DNA into the mix. In this case, Ferox DNA.

Leshiy hissed and took a step forward.

Orange light blazed around them as the sequence of igniting lamps reached their level with a clack. Leshiy skittered back in surprise. At first, Maigo thought it was strange that the clearly savage creature would react so strongly to light, but then, as it slowly craned its head upward, she realized it was reacting to what the light revealed.

Maigo’s hand sprang free from the orb. Then she twisted around and looked into a pair of massive, blazing red eyes.

14

I look down at the bulbous, white head and see eyes as black as night and the size of commuter buses staring back at me.

Not at us,
I think,
past us.
Of all the things in the sky right now, Helicopter Betty is the least dangerous.

Pulses of blue-green color ripple through the Kaiju’s bulbous, bald head as the tentacles hanging where its mouth should be snap open in an obvious threat display. The shifting colors remind me of a cuttlefish. Unlike the tentacles of squid or octopus, these are not covered in round suckers, but long, sharp spikes. They remind me of pale, white, starfish limbs, and even more like the alien head GOD had floating in a giant tube beneath the sands of Area 51. Its name was Artuke. One of the Aeros.

But while the Kaiju below bears some resemblance to the Aeros, I think this is something different. Created by them, maybe, but not one of them. For starters, it’s too big. The thing is standing chest deep in water that descends three hundred feet. And that’s with a slight hunch. If it stood up straight, it would be taller than Nemesis. But it also lacks a certain intelligence. There’s no way to know how smart this thing is, but I get the impression that this thing is more primal rage than brains. I don’t see it flying around the galaxy subjecting planets. No, this isn’t the enemy, this is their weapon.

As the ten tentacles spread wide, a circular mouth is revealed. Layers of long, pointed teeth surround the mouth. Layer by layer, the teeth bloom into a kind of death flower, ready to stab and shove food into a mouth big enough to swallow Betty whole. If that wasn’t bad enough, a tongue of twitching red tendrils warbles just inside the maw.

The creature is one nasty sonuvabitch. But part of me knows that while this monster, and the alien species that spawned it, are the inspiration for Cthulhu, this isn’t the actual monster. Cthulhu was fiction. This...this is real, and deserves its own name.
Lovecraft
, I decide.

Lovecraft’s threat comes to an abrupt end as a hellfire missile screams in below us and detonates against the open tentacles. There’s a body-shaking roar, first from the explosion, and then from the Kaiju. When the ball of fire fades, I see Lovecraft staggering back, but there’s no obvious sign of injury. All tentacles are present and accounted for.

Then it’s hit again, this time from the back. The Kaiju spins around in the ocean, lashing out with its massive, ape-like arm. The creature’s swinging at something that’s already gone, but it manages to swipe a third missile from the sky before it explodes. And then, chaos erupts. Missiles cut through the air from every direction. Torpedoes slide through the water. Enough firepower to sink Atlantis a dozen times over converges on the creature.

And Lovecraft sees it all coming.

Knows what it means. I can see understanding in its black eyes. And then, defiance.

In the face of the U.S. military’s Earth-shattering power, the monster doesn’t cringe or raise its arms. It stands still, and waits.

Not a good sign.

“Fuck me sideways,” Woodstock mumbles. “Thing is either fearless or a tough sumbitch.”

“I think it’s both,” Collins says.

The fusillade of missiles, rockets and torpedoes strike in unison. The Kaiju is lost in the world’s most expensive fireworks display, costing untold millions of dollars. Helicopter Betty shakes as a pressure wave slides past like an incoming tide. Smoke billows around the monster, hiding its luminous form even better than the water could.

Far below, three Apache attack helicopters swing low and fly circles around the expanding cloud.

On Devine, the helicopters are displayed as War Party Zero. War Parties One–Three are deployed between us and Boston. I tap the icon and connect to the pilots directly. “War Party Zero, this is Hudson, do you have eyes on the target?” I nearly say, ‘Over,’ but since Devine works through an encrypted satellite network, there’s no need for the standard radio jargon.

“Negative, sir,” one of the pilots says. “Target is concealed.”

Maybe the thing is pulverized. There’s no way to know. But in a situation like this, better safe than sorry. At $14.6 million a pop, MOABs, officially known as GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bombs, are a pricey option, but in this case, I think the expense is justified. The 30,000-pound bunker busters are designed to punch through 200 feet of concrete before detonating. If it can punch through this thing’s skin, it should turn the rest of it into a smear.
Should
being the operative word. We
are
dealing with a creature from another planet, most likely created by an advanced civilization, for the express purpose of destroying and/or subjugating entire worlds.

“Get out of there,” I tell the pilots. “We’re going to—”