A Matter of Honor

            The submarine Atragon was the flagship of the G-Force fleet: the most powerful, versatile, and advanced machine they possessed, and Doug Gordon was her captain. It struck him as a little ironic that a ship that had been designed as a weapon against the Americans in World War II should now be piloted by an American. Gordon had served on the Atragon from the very earliest days of G-Force. He had been part of the first troop transfer from the US Navy when the organization was first formed. Well he remembered how little that arrangement had been to Captain Jinguji’s liking. The proud old warrior had been nothing short of brutal to the young gaijin when he first began his service. But even then, Gordon wasn’t the kind of man to let anyone else push him around. He had submitted to the Captain’s abuse with stoic pride, pushing back whenever he could, and doing his duties with all the drive and perfection of a man with something to prove.

            In the end, he had been the only American sailor left on the Atragon. The others had all quite and transferred to less abusive commands. Gordon had never quit anything in his life, and he’d be damned if he was going to start now. His dogged perseverance and strict devotion to his duty had, at last, earned Jinguji’s grudging respect, though he had still made it clear that Gordon was the sole exception to his hatred for Americans up until the day he died.

            The Atragon itself, meanwhile, had gone through more fights, suffered more damage, and been rebuilt more often than any other ship in the fleet (at least, of the ships that remained in the fleet). Gordon had helped in more overhauls than he could count, and now knew her at least as well as he knew his own body.

            Today, she was on patrol a hundred meters deep and fifty miles off the Australian coast. A navy cruiser had picked up some odd radio signals in this area, and the Atragon had been sent to investigate. It might be nothing, or it might be a Mu remnant planning an attack on Sydney, or a dozen other possibilities. You needed a flexible mind to survive in G-Force.

            So far, after ten hours slow cruising along the coastline, they hadn’t found anything. Gordon was just about ready to call it in as a false alarm when one of the panels lit up.

            “Captain, sonar contact.”

            Gordon leaned forward, adjusting the screen in front of him to show a view of the sonar screen.

            “What is it?”

            “Identified as Anguirus, sir,” said a female officer.

            That was surprising. Anguirus was usually a fairly sedentary creature; staying on islands or coastal waters until something disturbed him. It was rare to find him out at sea like this.

            “Bearing?”

            “West by Northwest,” answered the sonar man. “He…he’ll be passing right over us in a minute.”

            Gordon switched to the top camera, giving him an enhanced view of the ocean directly overhead. The camera’s special sensors made the water as clear as air, allowing him to see every solid object passing overhead about as clearly as if he were viewing it on a very cloudy day.

            After a few tense seconds, the massive, bulky shape of the kaiju glided into view overhead, leaving a white trail of foam in his wake. Like Godzilla, Anguirus was basically just a huge dinosaur. In his case, he resembled the armored ankylosaurs, except that his horned, crocodile-like head proclaimed him to be a meat-eater. A thick, jointed shell covered in spines protected his back, and his armored tail – which was half-again as long as his body – was lined with enormous spikes that folded flat when not in use, but sprang up as tall as telephone poles when he needed them. The tail ended in a heavy club ornamented with two curved spikes.

            The giant silhouette passed swiftly by, his long tail beating the water behind him.

            “Where are you going?” Gordon muttered to the monster overhead.

            “Uh, sir?” said the sonar man.

            “What?”

            “If he maintains this course, he’ll be heading right for Brisbane.”

            There was a heavy silence in the cabin.

            “He won’t,” said Gordon confidently. “He’s not the type.”

            Still, this was an odd coincidence: a strange signal, and in the same waters a major kaiju swimming purposefully toward land. They needed to know more.

            “Surface and follow him,” Gordon ordered.

            The Atragon rose smoothly, breaking the surface about three hundred yards behind the kaiju’s tail. Anguirus paused, glanced over his shoulder at them, and then continued his journey westward. The Atragon steamed after him.

            The First Mate, Lieutenant Ikehata Hyodo, cleared his throat.

            “Sir,” he said. “If he’s on his way to Brisbane…”

            “He’s not,” said Gordon simply.

            Anguirus was not the type of kaiju who raided cities. He was a fierce fighter, and much more dangerous than he appeared, but he wasn’t aggressive toward man in the way that someone like Godzilla or Rodan could be. On the contrary, Anguirus had what Gordon could only describe as a code of honor: alone of almost all the kaiju mankind had yet encountered, Anguirus stoutly refused to engage military forces. At first it had been thought that he was simply more easily cowed than any other monster, but the events of the Black Hole War had disabused them of that notion. During that conflict he had nearly killed himself fighting Mechagodzilla, disabling the robot’s left arm even after having his jaw broken in three places. He had only ceased fighting when the robot knocked him unconscious by stomping repeatedly on his head.

Anguirus would fight an equal or superior opponent to the death, but he refused to engage any enemy he regarded as inferior. The idea of him wantonly attacking a city was ridiculous.

So why was he going that way?

Gordon really wished they had Miki with them; she’d be able to just ask the critter. But, of course, she was much too important to waste on a simple scouting mission, and no one had so much as suggested she come along. She was probably back in Tokyo, or who knows where: almost definitely too far off to be of any help to them now. If he tried to have her flown in, even if the brass agreed to it, she almost certainly wouldn’t get here before Anguirus himself showed them what he was up to.

Still, they needed to let them know what was going on. At this rate, they’d be in the city in just over an hour.

“Call it in,” said Gordon.

The five present members of the United Nations Godzilla Countermeasures Committee – UNGCC, better known as G-Force – received Captain Gordon’s report with alarm.

“Excuse me, Captain, do we have this right?” said Dr. Yoshida. “You are telling us that a major kaiju is less than an hour away from a city of two million people, and your recommendation is that we…do nothing?” 

“No,” said Gordon, not bothering with the ‘sir.’ “I recommended that, unless Ms. Saegusa can be brought in time, we continue to follow and observe him.”

“That sounds an awful lot like doing nothing, Captain,” said Admiral Stenz.

“Sir, knowing Anguirus’s nature, I’m positive he isn’t about to attack Brisbane for no reason.”

“Then what is your interpretation of his behavior?” asked General Aso.

“I don’t know for sure yet,” Gordon admitted. “My best guess would be that he senses some kind of threat or enemy in that direction.”

“We don’t have any reports of kaiju sightings in that area,” said Dr. Jinguji. “As a matter of fact, we haven’t had any sightings on the Australian coast since the Second Mu War, and that was five years ago! You don’t seriously think that Megalon is still alive, do you?”

“Probably not,” Gordon admitted. It was hard to recover from having your head blown up, even for a kaiju. “But it’s possible that some other creature, perhaps a gyaos, or something we’ve never seen before is waiting in that direction.”

“There haven’t been any gyaos sightings for years,” Professor Okubo sighed. “Last we heard from Ms. Kusanagi, she told us that Gamera is sleeping peacefully. Now he wouldn’t be doing that if there were gyaos flapping around, would he?”

“I didn’t say I thought it was a gyaos, you greasy old bastard! I just said that something has caught his attention.”

There was a murmur of indignation at Gordon’s outburst, but he didn’t care. It wasn’t the first time his bad temper had gotten the best of him. Hell, Okubo got off easy compared to some other superior officers he’d chewed out!

“Captain Gordon,” said Admiral Stenz. “Whatever your personal feelings or gut instincts may be, you’re first priority is to protect to lives of the people of Brisbane, is that clear?”

“Admiral…”

“Is. That. Clear?”

Gordon ground his teeth.

“Yes, sir.”

“Therefore, you are ordered to do anything and everything in your power to stop Anguirus from making landfall. Understood?”

Gordon nodded.

“Dismissed.”

The screen went blank. Gordon looked out the bridge window. Anguirus’s spike-covered shell filled his vision, but beyond that he saw the Australian coast just visible on the horizon.

The bridge was deathly silent.

“Captain?” asked Hyodo, nervously.

Gordon took a deep breath.

“Maintain course,” he said. “Keep following him.”

The order to do ‘anything and everything in his power’ to stop Anguirus could mean only one thing. There were very few weapons in existence, short of a hydrogen bomb, that posed any serious threat to a kaiju. The Atragon’s various missile systems might do some minor damage, and the big guns would probably not even pierce Anguirus’s hide. But they did possess one weapon powerful enough to disable or even kill almost any known kaiju in the world: the Absolute Zero Cannon. This weapon blasted all the energy right out of an object’s molecules, freezing it solid and, more often than not, causing it to shatter into pieces. It was an updated and vastly more powerful version of the freeze cannon that had been installed on the Atragon when it was first built and which it had used against Manda during the First Mu War. Manda had survived, but with permanent nerve damage that left him a sluggish, disoriented shell of his former self, and that was from a device barely a tenth as strong as the current version.

Godzilla himself was the only kaiju known to have taken a direct hit from the AZC and survive with no permanent damage. The Atragon was currently the sole ship to carry it (though Gordon had heard rumors that they would try to mount it on one of the new mechas they were building), and it had only fired the weapon four times in its entire history. The trouble was that the AZC destroyed itself with each firing, so that each time they used it, they had to take the ship apart and install a new one, which cost G-Force about twice its annual budget in one go.

The authorization to use this weapon on Anguirus if he made landfall staggered Gordon. It was a kill order. G-Force had just authorized him to kill what was widely regarded as one of the noblest and most trustworthy monsters in the world. It was like being authorized to drop a nuke on Mothra.

Actually, it was worse than that. Anguirus had saved his life – saved his entire crew – during the Second Mu War. The Atragon had been damaged by the sea-dragon Dagahra, but Anguirus had intervened by attacking both Dagahra and the shark-like Zigra at the same time to protect the downed ship.

It had been an all-but-suicidal move. Zigra had nearly taken his leg off by the time the Atragon was able to issue supporting fire (Zigra had been the third time they had fired the AZC). Once Zigra had been dispatched, Anguirus had been able to turn his full attention on Dagahra, and though the sea dragon was nearly twice his size, and though Anguirus had lost a lot of blood and was fighting on a broken leg he had still managed to tear part of Dagahra’s wing off, driving him into full retreat.

Gordon could see that the entire crew was thinking the same thing. They couldn’t kill Anguirus, whatever happened.

The trouble was, Anguirus was now within sight of the Australian coast.

Hyodo leaned in close.

“Captain,” he said. “We can’t risk two million lives out of gratitude.”

“It’s not gratitude,” Gordon answered. “It’s honor.”

“Take us into the air,” he ordered after a few minutes’ silence. “Block him. See what he does.”

The Atragon fired its high-powered jump-jets, lifting itself into the air. Putting on speed, it soared over Anguirus, then turned and lowered itself into the water, the enormous drill on its nose pointing at the kaiju.

Anguirus stopped and cocked his crocodile-like head to the side as he contemplated the Atragon, as though confused as to what the submarine thought it was doing. Then he opened his jaws – still crooked from being broken by Mechagodzilla – and gave a high-pitched bark of annoyance. With a flick of his tail, Anguirus lurched forward and dove under the Atragon. The submarine shuddered as the enormous beast swam mere feet beneath its hull, buffeted by his wake.

“Captain?” Hyodo asked as soon as the kaiju had passed.

Gordon grunted.

“That settles it,” he said.

“Settles what?”

“If Anguirus had gone rogue, he’d’ve just cut right through us,” Gordon said. “He’s not heading for Brisbane: he’s got something else on his mind.”

“But what?”

Gordon shrugged. Anguirus was barely half-a-mile from the coast of North Stradbroke Island.

Brisbane is cut off from the open ocean by two long islands: North Stradbroke Island and Moreton Island, both of them long, narrow, and sparsely populated. If Anguirus continued on his present course – as he showed every sign of doing – he would cross the northern end of North Stradbroke in maybe half-an-hour and then have nothing but open water between him and the city.

            The Atragon rose into the air again, continuing to follow the monster from overhead as he approached the shore.

The screen flickered, and G-Force was back.

“Captain!” Admiral Stenz snapped. “Anguirus will be making landfall in minutes. You are ordered to stop him now.”

“He’ll be landing on the island; not the coast,” Gordon answered. The admiral gave a hollow laugh.

“I don’t believe it,” said Professor Okubo. “Captain Gordon, do you really intend to let a major kaiju just land in a city of two million people unopposed?”

“He saved our lives,” Gordon answered simply.

“So your lives are worth more than the lives of everyone in Brisbane? Possibly more?” Okubo snapped.

“It’s a matter of honor,” the captain replied. “Anguirus would understand that better than you.”

“Captain Gordon,” said Stenz, very slowly and clearly. “You are hereby ordered to deploy the Absolute Zero Cannon immediately.”

Gordon glanced out the window. Anguirus had entered a shallow bay under rocky cliffs beneath the resort community of Point Lookout. He was wading now; no longer swimming. On the nearby beaches, vacationers were visible fleeing in panic before the monster.

“No.”

Admiral Stenz glared at him. Gordon glared right back.

“You are relieved of duty,” said Stenz through clenched teeth. “Lieutenant Hyodo, secure the Captain.”

Hyodo looked in horror from the admiral to the captain to the monster.

“I wouldn’t try it, Hyodo,” said Gordon. He didn’t really think Hyodo would; they were friends after all. But he thought it just as well to remind him that he, Gordon, was one of G-Force’s top hand-to-hand fighters.

“Captain, I swear…”

But before Stenz could finish, the screen flickered and died as a wave of energy surged over the ship. The Atragon rocked, but remained airborne as every screen, light, and instrument onboard flickered. Some went black.

“EMP!” one of the officers shouted.
            “Damage report!”

“Engines still firing.”

“Navigation, communications offline.”

“Energy weapons offline.”

“Forward guns report still functional, but the automatic loaders are down.”

“Son-of-a-bitch…” Gordon muttered, his eyes flicking out the window as the cliffs before them crumbled and something huge began to emerge.

Anguirus, however, didn’t wait for the creature to free itself. He rose onto his hind legs and shrieked a challenge. The creature answered with a low, almost metallic growl as long, thin legs tore through the rock. Anguirus lunged forward and seized the nearest of these in his jaws and pulled. The other monster snarled in surprise and pain, but Anguirus’s grip was like death and he kept tugging it ruthlessly.

As the monster struggled to free itself before its leg was torn off, the crew recognized enough to confirm their guess.

“It’s a MUTO!” Hyodo exclaimed.  

The MUTO – Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms – were parasitic, insect-like remnants from the Age of Kaiju. Like the other kaiju, they drew strength from radiation, but unlike most of the known monsters, they were not mutants but more or less the same as they had been all those hundreds of millions of years ago. Their lifecycle required them to seek out sources of radiation to serve as food for their growing eggs. Something like the nuclear plant outside of Brisbane would have done very nicely.

“That explains the signal we caught the other day,” he growled. “Dammit, I thought these bastards were extinct.”

The MUTO had managed to extract herself enough by now to make a lunge at the smaller monster, slashing at him with the scythe-like claw on her other leg. It caught him on the back of the neck, drawing blood from under his thick scales. He released his grip and stepped back, his teeth bared, his tail whipping back and forth.  

The female MUTO was enormous. Compared to her, Anguirus looked like a Labrador teasing a buffalo. She stood nearly three hundred feet tall. He barely made that on his hind legs. Her two front legs – which were the longest of her six and ended in razor-sharp scythes – were raised, ready to tear into the smaller kaiju if he dared attack.

He did dare.

Anguirus seemed to gather himself up like a spring and then launched straight at the MUTO. She slashed at him with her scythes, but he curled himself up in midair, forming an armored, spike-covered ball. The blows struck harmlessly against his shell, and he slammed into her like a boulder. The MUTO howled and staggered back, but stayed on her feet. Anguirus unrolled himself, landing on all fours beneath her, and then immediately thrust up with his nose-horn, aiming for her relatively unarmored belly. She screeched in pain, lurched backwards, and struck him hard across the face with the flat of her scythe, then stabbed downward with the other. It landed across the top of Anguirus’s muzzle, forcing his head down into the surf. Taking advantage of his brief immobility, the MUTO bent down and latched her jaws on the back of his neck, between the end of his shell and the five horns protecting the back of his head.

Anguirus snarled and twisted under her grip, slashing at her face with his front claws, but they only scrapped against her armor as she bit deeper. Blood welled out from beneath her jaws, but Anguirus’s struggles only became more violent. He jammed his horns back against her face to no effect. Then his long tail swung around, every spike standing on end, and he struck her on the top of the head with his club.

That got her attention.

The MUTO released him, howling and backing away, but Anguirus didn’t even pause for breath. Still bleeding from the neck where she bit him, he charged after her retreating form, sprang up onto his hind legs, and seized the underside of her throat in his jaws. The MUTO snarled in fury, but Anguirus kicked his own feet out from under himself so that his full weight hung unsupported on her throat. The MUTO was strong, but not that strong. She toppled forward into the ocean, shrieking and flailing her many limbs. Anguirus seemed to flip her over, so that she landed on her back in the surf, and that’s when he appeared to notice the soft, swinging egg sack on her underside. Abandoning her throat, he turned, ducked his head, and drove his horn right into the bulbous mass of orange and red eggs.

The egg sack split open like a bursting balloon, spilling steaming hot, clear liquid and unfertilized ends all over him. Anguirus howled as the stinging fluids hit his eyes, but he didn’t stop. The MUTO screamed in agony as he ripped through this one soft part of her.

Too late, she reached out with her scythes, hooked Anguirus under his shoulders and pulled. The blades pierced his flesh and grated against his bones, severing muscles and sinew. He was yanked back like a fish on a hook and slammed against the crumbling cliffs.

The MUTO rose shakily to her feet, her underside still gushing fluids. Anguirus staggered up as well, bleeding from multiple wounds. He stood on his hind legs, his forelimbs hanging stiff and trembling before him as blood flowed from the wounds on his shoulders, dying the surf around him. Gordon thought wildly of Moses turning the Nile to blood.  

The MUTO charged, covering the ground between them in a single bound. But Anguirus had been ready for her. He ducked, turned, and swung his powerful, clubbed tail right into the knee on her middle-left leg. The crack was loud enough to be heard for miles down the coast. She screamed, her claws scrapping harmlessly against his shell as she staggered sideways. Anguirus gave her no respite, however, and swung his tail back again, this time hitting the rearmost leg, almost as hard, snapping that one as well.

She collapsed onto her left side, trying to hold herself up with her still-undamaged front pair of legs. Anguirus was on her in an instant. With whatever strength he had left in his arms, he seized the back of her head and forced it down, exposing the back of her neck and making a gap in her armor, through which the relatively soft flesh shown. Then, as she shrieked and struggled, he rammed his horn right into that gap and tore upwards, as if he were trying to dig through her neck. A massive chunk of flesh came away on his horn. Her clear bodily fluids sprayed into the air. Anguirus tossed his head to remove the bits of flesh, then bit into the ragged hole he had made in her neck, shaking his head back and forth to tear it even wider. He kept biting and worrying even after she had stopped moving.

Finally, Anguirus seemed satisfied that his opponent was dead. The MUTO’s head was hanging on only by a few narrow strips of flesh and her massive body was limp. Anguirus sniffed her once or twice, then threw back his head and gave a howl of triumph that probably was heard all the way to Sydney.

As one, the crew of the Atragon let out a long, steady breath. As if the ship too had been waiting, tensed, to see the outcome of the battle, its equipment flickered back on with the destruction of the source of the EMP.

“Captain Gordon,” said Stenz furiously. “Did you just hang up on me?”

The whole crew actually laughed.

“No sir,” said Gordon. “Not intentionally. I was just about to, but the MUTO got there first.”

“MUTO?” Yoshida asked.

“Yes, sir; we had a female MUTO hibernating in the cliffs just below Point Lookout.”

There was a very heavy silence from the people in Tokyo.

“And…Anguirus?” asked General Aso at last.

“Well, he’ll be needing a little R&R,” Gordon commented, looking out the window as the monster limped back to the open sea, leaving a trail of blood in his wake. “But he’ll be alright. He’s heading back East now.”

They didn’t need to ask whether the MUTO was dead or not. When Anguirus left the field, it was because the fight was over.

“Captain Gordon,” said Stenz. “You disobeyed a direct order…”

“Yeah? What about it?” asked Gordon gruffly. “If I hadn’t, you’d have a MUTO tearing her way through Brisbane right now.”

“Be that as it may,” Stenz answered. “You will nonetheless return to base and report for disciplinary action.”

He paused, then added,

“As soon as you have located and killed the male MUTO.”

Gordon nodded and saluted.

“We’ll take care of it,” he said. “Atragon out.”

The screen went blank. Gordon leaned back in his chair. Anguirus had reached the open sea and was now swimming away, off to find some place to rest and recover before his next fight.

Now, though, it was their turn.

“Lieutenant Hyodo,” Gordon ordered. “Start scanning for any signs of EMP activity. We’ve got us a MUTO to kill.”