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“So when you say you found it…”
“I’m saying the Coast Guard found him, actually. Me coming in and picking him up was more happenstance than anything else.”
Tendo fixed a withering glare on Newt, who was assiduously looking anywhere and everywhere but at him.
“Happenstance.”
“Yup.”
“Newt….”
“Yeah?”
Tendo grabbed him by the shoulder. Newt tried fruitlessly to twist away, staring at the floor in undeniable guilt. The container on the dock behind them made a distinct kind of noise; half-gurgle, half-growl; Tendo let go of Newt at once, wary of upsetting the creature inside.
“Can it see me?”
“He can’t, no. He’s in there pretty securely.”
“Why,” Tendo said flatly. “Why did you do this. Why did you bring this here. If Hermann doesn’t kill you, you know the Marshall’s gonna.”
“I couldn’t just leave him!” Newt protested, backing up against the shipping container defensively. “He’s har-”
“If you even try to say a kaiju is harmless I’m gonna throw you in there with it and lock the door behind you. It’s a kaiju.”
“Just barely!”
“What the hell does that even mean?”
“Look,” Newt said. He took Tendo’s arm and dragged him to the front of the container, pointing; the container had been rigged and refitted as a makeshift animal cage, and the kaiju was sitting quietly inside looking out at the water. It looked down at Tendo curiously. The creature had a face like a mastiff – if mastiffs had tusks and corkscrewing horns. It gave its gurgling growl again, ropes of foamy saliva hanging from its jowls. It was, in Tendo’s humble opinion, the very essence of ugly – but Newt was looking at it with clear, open adoration.
“No.”
“But-”
“No. I’m in charge of regulating shipment receiving, and I say, no. It can go right back where it came from.”
“They’ll euthanize him!”
“And?” Tendo asked incredulously. “Look, I know there’s weird little bits and pieces of these sons of bitches still washing up everywhere, but just ‘cause they found one that’s still kicking doesn’t automatically mean it’s okay to-”
Newt hung onto Tendo’s collar, leaning against him and pulling at him pleadingly.
“The ocean-sweeper class are bottomfeeders,” he said. “This guy is harmless! Seriously, the most he’s supposed to do is eat refuse and debris!”
“What, so he’s a sea-goat?”
“Kind of!” Newt looked at the kaiju enthusiastically, pointing at its close-sitting splintery teeth; Tendo squinted at them and noticed they weren’t really teeth at all, but more akin to baleen.
“Good god.”
“Harmless. Told you. Harmless.”
“Why would they make something like this?” Tendo asked. Newt’s enthusiasm tamped down a bit and he cleared his throat.
“To…um. Mmmaybe…clean out native…wildlife,” he said haltingly. “Clean slate for Precursor animals…or just empty out the ocean for…I dunno. I dunno, but it doesn’t matter, okay? We caught him before he could damage any local ecosystems and he’s not going to be doing anything else that could be harmful. He’s a big cow-goat thing. Harmless.”
“Say that as many times as you want, it isn’t gonna make it true,” Tendo muttered. He pushed Newt off, shaking his head. “Alright. Alright. I can probably pass this by the Marshall as a research specimen or something. God help you when he gets out of control.”
“He won’t! I promise!”
“Yeah, yeah. Walk him every day and give him a bath once a week, all that new puppy crap.”
Tendo studied the container and the creature still staring down at him, sighing.
“Marshall’s gonna have my head for this.”
“You named it?”
Newt cringed at Gottlieb’s tone, unable to help admiring the perfect balance of scorn and disbelief he’d managed to convey in three simple words. He nodded quickly.
“I can’t just keep calling him Specimen Fourteen. Crumpet’s….cuter.”
Gottlieb ground his teeth, eyes squeezing shut as though trying through sheer force of will to make the kaiju sitting beside Newt evaporate into thin air. He opened his eyes after a moment and saw the creature was still there and not a figment of his imagination, no matter how much he hoped for the contrary.
“I can’t believe this,” he said. “I can’t believe you’ve done this.”
“Everyone’s saying that,” Newt mumbled, looking over at the kaiju. “Crumpet’s-”
“Don’t. Don’t you dare actually name it something that puerile. Naming it means you’re going to get attached to it.”
“He is a HE, and we’re already getting along together great,” Newt said hotly, defensiveness overriding the guilt of making Gottlieb so upset. “I’ve been telling everyone for days now, he’s harmless.”
They looked over at the kaiju. Crumpet was laying down with his head pillowed on his front legs, blinking dolefully at them and drooling; the saliva had a faint glowing sheen to it that spread over the concrete floor, forming slick puddles. Gottlieb’s expression was twisted with reflexive disgust and he fixed that look on Newt, gesturing at the kaiju.
“Harmless or not, he’s at least seven hundred pounds, he reeks, and…”
“Nobody complains about Max like this.”
“Max isn’t eight feet tall!” Gottlieb snapped. “Max doesn’t go through over a hundred pounds of fish a day!”
“I’m switching him over to kibble! He’s got a digestive system like a goat, he can handle pretty much anything and get nutritional value out of it!” Newt said, cringing back as Gottlieb continued to glare at him. “What d’you want me to do, let him starve?”
“You know full well what I want to happen, but seeing as we’re lacking in Jaegers at the moment Rangers Mori and Becket will be having a particularly hard time realizing that hope,” Gottlieb retorted. Newt stared at him in shock, backing up and spreading his arms out to shield the unmoving lump of a kaiju.
“You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t actually let them.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because he’s friendly!”
Gottlieb stared at Newt as though he was a lunatic, then over at Crumpet. The kaiju snuffled wetly, pawing at his wrinkled muzzle to relieve an itch. Gottlieb’s anger cooled into quiet incredulity as he watched the kaiju; the creature followed Newt everywhere and hadn’t done much in the way of rampant destruction aside from bumping into things accidentally. His claws were short and blunt, the tusks barely more than nubs, and his biting strength had been reported as somewhere between weak to uncomfortable pressure.
“So what exactly are we going to be doing with Crumpet,” Gottlieb said, feeling ridiculous just saying the name out loud. Newt brightened slightly, patting the kaiju‘s wrinkled muzzle.
“Well, for starters there’s a bunch of other little specialized kaiju floating around out there,” he said. “We were so focused on the big ones we missed the smaller critters that sneaked through so often. Like the jellyfish ones that’re all over towards the Bering Sea now?”
“The ones capable of sinking ships, yes.”
“They’re environmental clean-up crews,” Newt said, enthusiasm growing. “Crumpet’s part of the bottom feeder class, the ones that eat up pretty much anything they can get. If the Coast Guard hadn’t found him when they did he’d probably be halfway through cleaning out that entire ecosystem, right? And the more they eat, the bigger they grow.”
“That can’t be sustainable for more than a few months at best,” Gottlieb said. Crumpet snuffled wetly and sneezed, sending glowing spray all over the floor. “They would starve to death.”
“Exactly,” Newt said. “Eat, grow, die, decompose, and enrich the area with Precursor-specific fertilization.”
“That’s deplorable.”
“Oh, yeah it is. But it’d work.”
“Not very effectively,” Gottlieb said, though he sounded doubtful of his own opinion. “So now that his diet is restricted…?”
“No more growing. He’s big, yeah, but…nothing like category one big, y’know? Not even half category.”
“There’s no such thing as a half category kaiju.”
“Otachi’s nightmare-embryo kind of was.”
“Don’t remind me of that thing,” Gottlieb muttered, shuddering. “Just thinking about it still turns my stomach.”
Newt leaned against Crumpet, patting the kaiju on the head; he blinked up at Newt and yawned widely, showing off rows of baleen and his fat blue tongue curling. The squeaking yawn was completely out of proportion with the creature’s size and girth, and Gottlieb found the sound almost endearing. He shook it of quickly, trying to fix a stern expression back in place.
“Can you guarantee he’s not going to turn rabid and attempt to gum us to death?” he asked. Newt nodded cheerfully.
“Look at this mug,” he said, kneeling down beside Crumpet’s head and taking the creature’s face in his hands, squishing the kaiju’s cheeks. Crumpet gurgled, blinking benignly up at Gottlieb. “Is this the face of a stone-cold killer?”
“It could be,” Gottlieb said dryly. Newt snorted. “I can’t believe the Marshall hasn’t taken him away from you yet.”
“Marshall Hansen’s busy with…marshalling,” Newt said evasively. “What he doesn’t know yet won’t get me arrested for harboring extraterrestrials.”
“He doesn’t know yet? How on earth can he not know?”
“Might’ve slipped Tendo twenty bucks not to mention anything about it yet. Just need to work out the proper way to explain it,” Newt said. “I’ve got a whole list so far. I think the best way’s to say he’s an experimental prototype.”
“Prototype for what?”
“Dunno yet. That’s why he’s experimental. Weighing all the different possibilities, you know?”
Gottlieb made an irritated sound, rubbing at his eyes tiredly and half-hoping again that Crumpet would be gone when he opened them.
“You mentioned other breeds of specialized kaiju. He is clearly hound-like, for whatever ungodly reason. Maybe say he’s bred to sniff them out and hunt them.”
“That’s…actually not a bad idea at all,” Newt said, intrigued. “Dogs can be trained for that pretty easy, can’t they? Hounds after foxes, that kind of stuff.”
“It was merely a suggestion for the lie you intend on telling the Marshall, not-”
“No, no! That’s a good idea!” Newt looked alarmingly excited now and Gottlieb wished very badly he could recant, but it was already too late. “Prototype hunter, sniffs out problematic kaiju, guides in Corps crews to get rid of the issues – Hermann, that’s genius!”
“It’s improbable-”
“Pshht. Just gotta train him the right way, that’s all.” Newt patted Crumpet’s head again; the kaiju looked up at him and Gottlieb realized there was somewhat dimwitted affection in the kaiju’s regard for the much smaller, considerably overexcited and screechy human that kept poking and prodding at him. The creature’s stumpy tail was even wagging slightly.
“My god, this is absolutely ridiculous,” Gottlieb muttered. Newt laughed, waving a dismissive hand.
“Where’s your sense of adventure, dude? C’mooon. It’ll be fun.”
“I’m not helping you train him.”
“Please? Didn’t you have pets when you were younger?”
“Well, we had a dog when I was a child, but-”
“Great!”
“A beagle and a kaiju are two completely separate things!” Gottlieb said before Newt could interrupt him again. “We can’t expect this thing will even understand what we’re trying to train it for.”
“Why the hell did you guys have a beagle?”
“What?”
“Seriously. Beagle? Like…Snoopy?”
Gottlieb sighed irritably.
“Father and my brothers used to like to hunt. The dog was adept at retrieving whatever birds they managed to flush.”
“Oooh. So…you didn’t go with ‘em?”
“I’m not particularly fond of killing things for sport,” Gottlieb said shortly. He gestured at Crumpet. “You really want to train him to fetch flushed prey too?”
“Well…” Newt frowned deeply, considering. “No. No, I wouldn’t wanna do that. But…”
He brightened again and Gottlieb felt a distinct surge of apprehension at the optimistic expression.
“What.”
“Well, we have solid proof the non-citybusting kaiju aren’t exactly harmful,” he said. “So…instead of hunting…what if it was just…collection?”
“Collection. As in herding.”
“Yep.”
“You want to build a bloody menagerie of the things, don’t you.”
“Maybe.”
Gottlieb stared at Newt piercingly; this time Newt returned the look unflagging. Crumpet gave another squeaky yawn to cut the growing tension; a few moments of silence ticked by and Gottlieb’s resolve deflated. His head hung and he turned away, limping back to his side of the lab and sitting down at his desk.
“You are going to write the proposal for this harebrained project. I’ll…support it. But you are doing the work for it.”
Newt saluted Gottlieb with a grin, pushing himself up and heading to his own desk. Crumpet lumbered to his stumpy, elephantine feet and followed Newt faithfully, sitting down beside him and watching as Newt started to type.
“Admit it. You’re just as interested in the idea as me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Gottlieb said. “The end result’s an entire complex full of things like him.”
Crumpet growled softly, his tail thumping on the floor.