Driving up to Towra Point, she felt a certain tightness in her gut. She was going back to where it all had started for her. The streets were nicely cleaned, some of the damaged trees and the bridges had been fixed as much as possible. There weren't many cars out on the road, and the going was relatively easy. Absentmindedly, she slowed the small rental down to almost a halt when she passed the tree she had collided with two months ago. Of course, her car wasn't there anymore, but something inside her had somehow expected it to still be there and remind her of her own incompetence.
The stick-shift Chevrolet Corsa stalled and she just sat there, as she had after the accident, trapped inside the crashed vehicle. 'Damn you, Hansen!' she thought and wondered why he had come to mind. She remembered that this exact line had been the last thing she had said to him over the comm right before she had crashed. When she snapped out of it again, she didn't even know how she had stopped in the first place.
4 days didn't seem like enough time to collect and interpret all the data that had been gathered by the servers. Once again, time never seemed enough and she wondered if it ever would again. But in the end, it took only 36 hours, the rest was spent trying to convince the superiors of their findings - which seemed more like a sci-fi novel than reality.
Once again, Kylie was almost alone at the Towra Point post, once again working frantically in the almost abandoned facility. Only the occasional janitor or loading crew went about their duties but other than that, the huge hangar once bustling with people looked like a ghost town.
There was a constant video-commlink exchange with officers from military headquarters in San Francisco, Cabo San Lucas and Manila. It had felt better to work on her own in the beginning but she soon realized that it was a hell of a lot of data to process on all ends and she quickly found out that she would not get any sleep any time soon before coming up with results. Not she cared much - there was nobody waiting for her at home anyways. There was pressure - yes, most definitely, but not the immediate life or death pressure she had been under during the Kaiju attack and this time, she felt as if she could think more clearly.
Kylie had suggested to take a chronological approach right from the beginning in order to save time and so they began on August 10th, 2013, only hours before Trespasser had reaped the Californian coast and ended when Scissure was bombed down in Sydney on September 4th, 2014. Two common factors came together quite quickly while analyzing the recorded data. All four Kaiju had emerged from the Pacific Ocean before hitting the coastline and each was preceded by a major seaquake.
A warning system called "Kaiju Emergency Alert system" had been established early on in February, right after the second attack, but it was still only developing. It couldn't predict the third attack, let alone the fourth. There had been too many earthquakes - after all, the Pacific Rim was the most active zone in all the world.
Bayani, the officer from Manila suggested the monsters must be hiding somewhere in the deep volcanic trenches that covered the floor of Pacific Ocean, as they showed up whenever there was not only seismic but also volcanic activity from within the Pacific. This initial idea was as good as any start, even though there had been constant monitoring of plate tectonics and subductions even before the attacks had started, and none of the geo-marine survey systems data that Kylie now analyzed showed proof of entities that big simply floating around down there. They surely couldn't be living down there, the radars would have picked up on their size.
San Francisco had blown up a huge 3D map of the Pacific Ocean's floor on the massive shared screen, bringing forward all the tectonic ridges that had been shown volcanic activities lately. Usually, an earthquake - or in this case a seaquake - happened when the tectonic plates shifted. The hiding place - or whatever it actually was they were looking for - would be somewhere close to a convergence line.
And then it became clear. There were a couple of heavy ridges along the ocean floor, the deepest being the Tonga Kermadec Trench with two volcanic arcs in close proximity. It was the most linear, fastest converging and most seismically active subduction boundary on Earth, stretching out for more than 3000 km, at about 2500 km north north-east of New Zealand. It had even become its own micro oceanic plate.
It was right there that the Earth's core seemed to be more unstable than anywhere else in the world due to the terrains' fast convergence rate of 24 cm a year and the northern extension growing much faster than the southern counterpart. The trench contorted constantly, growing and convulsing into itself over and over again. It was also much younger than other ridges, having formed only about five million years ago, with what seemed strategically positioned volcanoes along its two arcs reaching as deep as 11.000 meters at Horizon Deep, its deepest point, making it the second deepest trench in the world after the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.
It was also right there they could finally pinpoint the exact origin of the seaquakes on. All sensors were now focused on the Tonga Kermadec Trench, the computers rapidly relaying and replaying the information New Zealand's geo-marine survey systems had gathered on the specific days of attack. Every time a seaquake was provoked by the subduing of plate edges - according to the data from August 10th 2013 where Trespasser wrecked California, February 5th 2014 when Hundun hit Manila, June 1st 2014 with Kaiceph raging through Cabo San Lucas and finally September 2nd, marking the day of Scissure making landfall in Sydney - the convergence rate in the Tonga Kermadec Trench would increase exponentially and the three most central - and at the same time the deepest - volcanoes would suddenly activate in what seemed a gigantic connected chamber at over 10.000 meters depth - but with no visible magma transfer.
There was, however, a transfer of another sort of matter. It was a constant flow so small that sensors had never really picked up on it, especially in that region, having been mistaken for a leak in a magma chamber. But it definitely wasn't magma that streamed out at the bottom of Horizon Deep.
They all ran the data through their individual programs again and again, and every single time got the same results. The matter was alien. And it didn't come from the Earth's core. Whenever tectonic and volcanic activity appeared together, there seemed to form some sort of fissure that didn't hold anything until the Kaiju appeared through it. Bayani had the guts to say out loud what they were all thinking: "We are looking at a portal, a breech in dimensions." Cullen, the officer from San Francisco snorted but there was no defiance on his face, just pure despair. It sounded demented - deranged, insane - but it seemed to be the only possibility there was. The sensors couldn't reach into the fissure and it made them believe even more that they had discovered a path into another world - or from where they looked at it, a path from another world into theirs.
Humanity's wildest and at the same time most feared dreams apparently had come true. They had encountered alien life. Aliens had always been part of the vivid imagination of humans, usually portrayed as the enemy on a mission to destroy humanity and Earth in films and books but no one would have ever imagined them to actually be real, and much less to be a real threat. To find them at the bottom of the ocean. however, was actually something quite difficult to digest.
Science had invested so much in to space exploration, yet the much more urgent mysteries were right here, at the bottom of the planet. 95 percent of the ocean remained unexplored today, which was incredible given how much humans relied on it. The ocean affected everything, from food and travel to health and climate. While the ocean took up most of the planet, the vast majority of the underwater world remained a mystery to humans. Every year, scientists discovered thousands of incredible, and sometimes alien-like marine species, but there was still so much nobody had ever laid eyes on. But so far, exploring the ocean in the same way space was explored had been a challenge. The farthest reaches of the ocean seemed unreachable due to physical and technical hindering but shooting people in a rocket to the moon was not a fantasy at all. And, unlike the vivid images of other planets that have captured people´s imaginations, life deep below the surface usually appeared dark and unexciting.
Star Trek would have everyone believe that space was the final frontier, but though they knew little about outer space, there were still plenty of frontiers to explore here on their home planet. Now, it became clear that they were losing the race of discovery.
The results - reissued, revised and rectified by all four countries - seemed ridiculous and outrageous, but were irrefutable. The Kaiju did not originate from Earth, but them being from outer space or another dimension was not something the brain could deal with easily. The movies of old had shown huge monsters like Godzilla or King-Kong bringing about havoc - but in the end they had all been earthly creatures. This now was different, it was real, it most likely meant the end of the world as they knew it.
One factor however remained a mystery. How had the fissure formed in the first place? There was talk of conspiracy theories, and Kylie almost expected the US officer to be a Flat Earther. They bounced ideas off each other, some more ridiculous than others, but all ridiculous nonetheless. Cortez from Mexico finally brought up the aborted Apollo 13 mission in 1970, suggesting that the radioisotope thermoelectric generator had leaked nuclear fuel into Horizon Deep after having plunged right into the trench after the breakup of the rocket in the atmosphere, but atmospheric and oceanic monitoring had never indicated a release of any nuclear fuel.
In the end, Kylie thought, it didn't even matter. What mattered was the existence of alien life, dangerous alien life.