“It’s still my theory,” she said. “But to paraphrase Thomas Wolfe—who was, by the way, paraphrasing Ella Winter—sometimes you can’t go home again.”
Nathan nodded, not so much because he was agreeing with her, but because it felt like the conversation had run its course. Everyone had regrets, and everyone had fears for the future. He had let that petrify him on the ship. He couldn’t afford that kind of indecision anymore. Hindsight was easy. Looking forward was hard.
He watched the frozen terrain of Antarctica go by beneath him.
“We’re getting close,” he said.
Ilene nodded, but didn’t say anything. Jia’s young face was creased with concern.
The moment of truth was coming. He had been thinking of Kong as a walking compass needle, a guide with no agenda of his own. That was why it had been easy to watch him anesthetized, loaded onto a ship, strapped down, made helpless against his foe. But now Nathan knew better. Jia and Ilene had always known better, had been trying to tell him all along. Finally he had to face the fact that the Titan not only had agency but was accustomed to exercising it. Used to being in charge of his own fate. And while Nathan could drag the proverbial horse halfway around the world, he could not make him drink. A captive Kong couldn’t lead them anywhere; it was entirely possible at this point that a freed Kong wouldn’t either. In this moment it all hinged on the Titan—and the tiny girl who had bonded with him.
They approached a vast, snow-covered canyon, far too symmetrical to have been made by nature. The immense, squared-off trench ended in a gigantic metal valve that was opening as they arrived. The canyon walls were covered in catwalks and entrances to interior space, like a city had been built into the vertical walls. The new, improved, slightly relocated Monarch Outpost 32.
The helicopter Nathan and the others were in settled on a helipad dug down into one end of the canyon, which formed a semi-protected hangar, as the other choppers landed Kong into the snow below. He was still sedated, of course. If he had awakened in flight, Nathan shuddered to think what would have happened.
“Where are the HEAVs?” he asked Simmons.
“Downstairs,” she said. “Warming up.”
He nodded, feeling the heaviness of the moment. Despite his pretensions to the contrary, deep down Nathan knew they were about to truly venture into the unknown. Walter Simmons and his daughter insisted these new vehicles could make the trip, survive the gravity inversion that had killed Dave and his team. And while Nathan believed he understood the physics of how the HEAVs operated, he was a geologist, not an engineer. And whatever trials the Apex scientists had put these things through, they had not yet encountered the only test that actually mattered. The Vortex itself.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Ilene said.
He followed her gaze to the enormous circular opening that had been bored in the ice-covered cliff and braced with a metal frame. He knew that the hole was usually closed by a dilating door, but that had already been withdrawn into the surrounding mechanism, leaving the way to Hollow Earth wide open. He nodded.
“I’ve only seen it in pictures,” he replied. “Back when we were trying to decide on an entry. It’s bigger than I thought. And they’ve … uh, done a lot with it.”
“This is where they found Monster Zero,” she said.
“Near here,” he said. “In fact, I didn’t even know about Ghidorah back in the day. That was above my security classification. I thought Outpost 32 was all about that.” He nodded at the opening below them.
“It seems like more than coincidence,” she said. “That Ghidorah should be frozen in the ice so near an entrance to Hollow Earth.”
Nathan nodded. “Lots of theories there,” he said. “Was Ghidorah going into the Vortex, or had it just come out of it? Or neither? The ice all around here is more than thirty million years old. The ice around Ghidorah was younger, based on the samples they took when they found it. And the structure of the ice is different; it clearly melted quickly and re-froze quickly. How did that happen? There isn’t enough evidence to land on a good explanation.”
Ilene was staring down, off to their left, at the entrance to the rift.
“It’s bigger than the one on Skull Island,” she said. “Why didn’t you use this one before?”
“Bigger means less stable,” he said. “Wait until you see it inside. The opening is comparatively small. You’ve seen those little burrows sand crabs dig in the beach? Just an inch or less in diameter? Those are pretty stable. Now imagine trying to dig a burrow ten feet in diameter in the same sand.”
“It wouldn’t hold,” she said.
“Right. The structural integrity of the sand doesn’t scale up. And it’s more than just that; I speculated that a larger opening also increases the intensity of the membrane. The acceleration will be even greater than in the Skull Island Vortex. Back then, math said nothing we could build would make it through. I thought at Skull Island we had a shot, but even there I miscalculated. But the HEAVs change everything.”
“You hope,” she said.
“That’s right,” he replied. “Look, it might be best if you and Jia—”
“If Kong goes, we go,” she said.
And there, of course, was the billion-dollar question. Would Kong go?
He noticed Jia signing something to Ilene.
“What?” he asked.
“Kong’s waking up,” she replied.
The cables snapped explosively from the net, and the helicopters turned and started to fly away.
Nathan looked down and saw the ape’s gargantuan eyelids fluttering open. Kong watched the helicopters leave, probably wondering what the hell was going on. Then he spotted them, looking down on him from their balcony.
Nathan realized he was holding his breath. If Kong bolted now, it was all over. They might be able to capture him again, but that would further lower their chance of obtaining his cooperation. If they couldn’t, it was debatable whether
