Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire - The Official Movie Novelization

by Greg Keyes

Genres: Superheroes; Media Tie-In; Science Fiction Fantasy; Science Fiction

Synopsis

The official novelization of the blockbuster Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the latest film in the Monsterverse franchise, starring Dan Stevens, Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry.

A follow-up to the explosive showdown of Godzilla vs. Kong. This time the almighty Kong and the fearsome Godzilla face a colossal undiscovered threat hidden within our world, challenging their very existence – and our own. The latest epic will delve further into the histories of these Titans, their origins and the mysteries of Skull Island and beyond, while uncovering the mythic battle that helped forge these extraordinary beings and tied them to humankind forever.

Writer Greg Keyes returns to the Monsterverse to transport readers ever deeper into the world of Monsters. This book explores the events of the film while adding to the history and lore of the Titans, portraying existing scenes from a fresh perspective and expanding upon the film. A must-read for any Godzilla and Kong fan.

 

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Release date: April 16, 2024

Publisher: Titan Books

Print pages: 308

Sample

PROLOGUE

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

—“Fire and Ice”, Robert Frost

2016
The ice sheet
Greenland interior

When the coring drill shut down, Dr. Magezi Maartens heard something strange. At first she thought it was just audio persistence in her ears from the drill, but the sound was quite unlike that of the core sampler. Definitely a machine noise, though. She turned around slowly, searching. Whatever was making the sound, there was nowhere for it to hide.

It was a fine summer day in Greenland. The sky was a turquoise dome, the sun a blindingly bright jewel in the south that looked like it should be hot but wasn’t. Downstream, on the coast, the temperature was above freezing. Jakobshavn Glacier was calving icebergs into the fjord, and in some places it was warm enough to go in shirtsleeves, so long as you didn’t step into the shade for very long. Up here on the thickest part of the ice sheet it was a balmy negative ten degrees Celsius. Nothing met Magezi’s gaze but ice, sky, the core sampler, the handful of grad students she’d brought up here with her, and the cluster of prefab huts that made up their camp. Greenland had plenty of wildlife—birds, arctic foxes, polar bears, musk oxen—but those were all on the coastal fringes. Here there was nothing to eat—or drink, for that matter. All the water here had been frozen for hundreds of thousands of years. Central Greenland was a desert, far more lifeless than the arid, hot deserts of her native South Africa.

She’d tracked the sound now to an aircraft of some sort, flying toward them, undoubtedly headed someplace further east.

Except that it wasn’t. As she watched, it slowed and then began to descend. It was shaped like a plane but was behaving like a helicopter. She had never quite seen anything like it.

Her students were looking up now too, distracted from their tasks.

“Hold on,” one of them—Max—said. “What’s that?”

“You’ve got me,” Magezi said. “Wealthy tourists, maybe?” But she didn’t think so. She squinted through the glare off the ice as the vessel settled. It had an emblem of some sort painted on its hull. It looked like a stylized hourglass on its side. It wasn’t Swedish military, or American, or any other nationality she recognized, for that matter. But it did look… military. And expensive.

“You guys stay back here,” she said. “I’ll go check it out.”

She trudged across the frozen surface toward the aircraft, some hundred meters away.

Well before she got there, four figures emerged. She couldn’t tell much about them: like her, they were bundled up in arctic gear. But when she got close enough, one of them pulled down the

scarf across his face.

“Doctor Maartens?”

“Yes,” she said. This man knew her name. That was a surprise. What was this? All of her permits were in order, she was sure. He was an older fellow, fifties, maybe early sixties. He spoke English with what she judged to be a Japanese accent. Close up, she guessed the other three might be women.

“My name is Ishirō Serizawa,” he said. He nodded at his companions. “This is Doctor Graham, Doctor Russell and Doctor Andrews. We were hoping to have a word with you.”

“I guess you must have been to come all the way out here,” she said. “Am I in trouble?”

“No, not at all,” he said. “This concerns your research. If you want to step inside, I can offer you some hot coffee, or tea, and we can talk more comfortably.”

That sounded sketchy. Few things had been drilled into her during childhood more persistently than to not get into a vehicle with people she didn’t know. Then again, she was a long way from help, and she was able to make out that there were at least two more people in the plane. If these people meant her harm, there wasn’t much she could do about it.

“That sounds wonderful,” she lied. “Perhaps my crew could be invited in?”

“I’m sorry, Doctor,” Serizawa said. “We need to speak to you in private. But we can have coffee brought to your crew.”

She sighed. “I don’t know who you people are,” she said.

“We work for an organization called Monarch,” he replied. “You may have heard of us.”

That did ring a bell. “The Godzilla chasers?” They had been in the news, lately. A supposedly multinational, government-funded organization that had come to the fore after the startling realization that giant monsters lay sleeping in the earth.

Serizawa smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Godzilla chasers.”

That was alarming. What could they want with her? Unless…

“Wait,” she said. “Do you think something’s buried out here? One of your monsters?”

“No,” Serizawa said. “As I said, this is about your research.”

“I’m a paleontologist,” she said. “I look for very tiny fossils, not gargantuan ones.”

“I’ve read your papers,” the person Serizawa had identified as Graham said. Her accent was soft, something British. “You’re really

very brilliant. Please, come have a coffee, and have a look at something. You could really be very helpful.”

Magezi glanced back at her students.

“And you’ll bring them some?”

“Of course.”

*   *   *

The inside of the craft was full of instruments and screens, but there was an area in the back that could only be described as a small meeting room—complete with table and video displays. The coffee was good: far better than the dehydrated stuff they had brought with them to the glacier. A guy in a vaguely military outfit put on a parka with the hourglass insignia on it and took insulated cups out to her people.

She sipped and smiled nervously at her four hosts. Serizawa seemed to be the leader. Graham and Serizawa seemed… close. Not romantically. More like colleagues who had known each other for a long time. Russell was a little intense. Andrews, the youngest, didn’t say much. She looked a little out of her element, like maybe she was wondering why she was even here.

“So, what’s this about?” Magezi asked.

“You have a theory that Greenland froze very quickly at the beginning of the last glaciation,” Russell said.

She nodded. “Seems like you guys are familiar with my paper. I’ve been taking ice cores, trying to establish a chronology for some fossils I’ve been collecting. When I got down to the old surface, I found a layer of ice that was… different from the rest. Laid down very quickly. Like instantaneously.”

“Because of the size of the ice crystals,” Russell said.

“You have read my paper,” she said. “Yes, the quicker water freezes, the smaller the crystals. That’s why you want your frozen shrimp to be flash-frozen, not just iced in a freezer. Bigger crystals turn the shrimp to pulp by exploding their cell membranes from the inside.”

“And when did this happen?” Serizawa said.

“Greenland iced over between two point five and three million years ago,” she said. “But that was just the beginning, you know. The seed of the Ice Age. Ice Ages come in pulses. Things get cold, ice forms at the poles. Ice reflects sunlight—which means it pushes radiation that might become heat back into space. It gets colder, more ice forms. The last big pulse was a little over a hundred thousand years ago. But this event two and a half million years ago—I think

this is what started the pulses of glaciation. But since there’s been a more recent thaw, there isn’t much left of that first layer.”

“What might that event have been, do you think?” Serizawa asked. “What explains the instantaneous freezing?”

“What’s this about?” she asked. “Does this have something to do with Godzilla? Or those things he was fighting?”

Serizawa smiled. “Everything is connected,” he said. “Just not always in the way we may think.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “Do you have any ideas on what could have caused it?”

She shook her head. “Sometimes weather patterns just collapse. But even a polar vortex wouldn’t have frozen things this quickly. It’s like everything was hosed down with liquid nitrogen or something. I have no explanation. But I’m looking for one.”

“Was there anything else peculiar about the ice?” he pressed. “Something you didn’t put in your paper?”

She took another sip of coffee. “Look,” she said. “That paper got me pegged as a fringe scientist by half of my community. They say I’m trying to bring back catastrophism as an explanation for geological data. You know—‘Noah’s Flood,’ ‘Maarten’s Icebox.’”

“And yet you keep testing,” Russell said. “You took a crew to Siberia, didn’t you? Tested four more sites. And the Canadian shield. You didn’t publish those results.”

“Yet,” she said. “Not yet.”

“Are your claims corroborated?”

She shrugged. “Yes. Same thin layer of weird ice in each location.”

“Just how weird was it?” Russell pursued. “Not just tiny crystals.”

She looked at each of them, trying to see any sign they were mocking her. But they seemed deadly serious.

“No,” she said. “There was something else. In all of the samples. A sort of pattern in the ice. Frozen compression waves, like some kind of… sound. Like the ice froze so quickly it recorded a sound signature. But there’s also… ah… trace signs of a radiation burst. As if a… I don’t know. A bomb went off. Not like a nuclear bomb, radiating energy that becomes heat. Like… the opposite of that. A radiation that slows atoms down. Makes them stop in their tracks. Not just something cold, but the… the essence of cold.”

Russell looked at Serizawa. “I see it now,” she said. “How did I miss it? It’s a bioacoustic signature.”

“Yes,” Serizawa

said. “But more than that.” He looked back at Magezi. “You haven’t published about that.”

“Like I said, I’ve already lost a lot of funding.”

Serizawa nodded and tapped a device in his palm. On the screen in front of her, two pictures popped up. An extremely magnified ice sample, and an electron microscope image of presumably the same sample.

“Does this look familiar?” Serizawa asked.

“That’s it,” she said. “That’s my data. How did you get it?”

“We didn’t,” Graham said. “This didn’t come from Greenland, or Siberia, or the Canadian Shield.”

“But it’s the same,” Magezi said. “Right down to the compression waves. Although now that I’ve been looking at it, the resolution is better than mine. You’ve got better equipment.” She looked up. “Where the hell is this from?”

“We can’t tell you that,” Serizawa said. “For now. It’s a site we’re curating. Trying to learn more about.”

“That’s it? You’re just going to walk in here, tease me with this, and walk out? Where is this from? It could go a long way toward vindicating me.”

“Is that why you do this?” Graham asked. “Do you want vindication?”

She had thought she did. But the instant the question was asked, she knew the real answer.

“No,” Magezi said. “What I really want? Is to know. To know what all this means.”

“That,” Serizawa said, “is up to you. I can hire you on a contract basis. I can get you funding. And we can show you this data in context. But you can’t publish it for an audience outside of Monarch. At least not right now.”

Magezi ran her gaze over them. “Is this for real?” she asked.

“It is very real,” Serizawa said.

“You,” Magezi said, lifting her finger to indicate Andrews, who hadn’t said anything during the entire conversation. “What do you do?”

“Me?” Andrews said. She seemed a bit startled. “I’m, well, I’m an anthropologist. And a linguist.”

“That’s interesting. What does that have to do with ice core samples and rapid glaciation?”

“I…” She glanced at Serizawa, clearly unsure if she was supposed to be talking at all. He nodded at her.

“Well,” she said, “I guess there’s a feeling that some of my research into belief systems might have a part to play here.”

“Belief systems? You mean like religion, folklore, mythology?”

“Yes,” Andrews said.

“That has to do with this? Rapid glaciation that happened before our

ancestors were even human?”

“Well, but our sample is much more recent,” Andrews said. “It—” She cut herself off.

“More recent? How much more recent? Recent enough for humans to have witnessed it happening?” Magezi sat back, thinking. “So within the last hundred thousand years or so.”

“I probably shouldn’t have said that,” Andrews sighed.

“No, it’s fine,” Serizawa said. “You talked about pulses, Doctor Maartens.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yeah, of course. There are probably multiple layers of this stuff. I was only looking at the earliest possible horizon, the ice right at the old surface level. But maybe the onset of every glaciation expansion in the last three million years has a layer like this.” She looked up sharply at Andrews. “What myths? What legends?”

“I think I’m here more to listen than to talk,” Andrews said.

“You guys aren’t going to tell me anything unless I join your little club, are you?” she said.

“You said you wanted to know,” Serizawa said. “This is how you find out.”

“Is there a dental plan?” she asked.

“An excellent one,” he said, without a trace of a smile.

She glanced outside at her grad students, standing around their little collection of tents. She had funding for another week, and after that, there was nothing in the pipeline. Then it was back to the classroom. And she liked teaching well enough, but she had never fooled herself that it was ever anything more than a way to get funding for her fieldwork. That was all about to go away, though, wasn’t it?

And these guys? They knew that.

“Why me?” she asked. “You already have my data. It’s clear that you have plenty of money and equipment. Any decent paleontologist could do what you’re asking. So why me? Because I’m desperate?”

“No,” Serizawa. “We had this ice profile before your paper was published. We had noticed the fine granularity of the ice crystals. Not one of our scientists noticed the compression wave patterns. Nor did we suspect that there was a greater, worldwide pattern. You saw that. That’s why we want you.”

She finished her coffee and sat silently for a moment.

“That’s very

flattering,” she said. “It explains why you want me. But what I want is a reason to work for you. And not money. I can get funding. It won’t be easy, but I can get it.”

Serizawa kept his poker face, but she didn’t miss the flicker of eye contact between him and Graham.

Then Serizawa went to his device again.

“You didn’t see this,” Graham whispered.

A new image came on the monitor. More ice, not magnified this time. Just a regular image, like a part of a glacier. Something in it… She noticed the scale. It was huge.

“Shit!” she swore. “What the hell is that?”

Serizawa smiled, put his device down. The screen went black. They all watched her. No one said a thing.

“You got me,” she said. “I’m in.” ONE

For most of human civilization, we believed that we were Earth’s most dominant species. We believed that life could only exist on the surface of the planet. Well, after a certain point you have to wonder—what else were we wrong about?

Today’s new frontier is not outer space. It’s right beneath our feet. We have mapped less than five percent of Hollow Earth, but our ecosystems are linked in ways that we never could have imagined. We are not two separate worlds. We’re one. The answers to some of life’s fundamental questions are waiting for us down there. But only if Hollow Earth is protected.

—TED Talk, Dr. Ilene Andrews

2027
Godzilla’s lair
The South Pacific

He sleeps, but he feels the world on his skin and in his bones, in the rivulets and rivers of his nerves. He tastes the atmosphere and the water, the iron, the salt, the life, the death. He feels the pulse of the planet’s magnetic field, the sleet of solar radiation it turns away from the delicate life beneath.

The surface and shallows of a world are dangerous. The life-giving sun could become scorching death. The very winds could carry poison around the globe. Masses of metal and ice might be hurled down at speeds lethal to the thin film of the biosphere, disrupting it for millions of years. Longer.

But all was relatively well, now. His sleep has been peaceful, for a time. Because the others were in their places, also resting. The ones above, the ones below. His territory is unchallenged, and it is thriving. But lately, things have begun to change.

Now something stirs on his skin. Something amiss, a distant call, the pulse of energy where it should not be. This happened before, not long ago. He stopped it, and there had been no greater threat. So he had returned to rest. But now this had to be dealt with.

And now he knows another has felt it, too.

He feels the pricks of her six legs as she begins to walk. He rouses to the next level of wakefulness. Maybe she is just moving from one resting spot to another. Maybe she will settle back down. She understands her place. She will not challenge him again.

And yet she continues to move, striding across the ocean floor. She feeds at the hot places where the rocks grind together, where sustenance seeps up from beneath. She is not only healed from their last fight, she is growing stronger. But she is not moving toward his resting place. She does not seek to challenge him yet.

But she will. The threat he feels—to her it is sustenance. She will feed and grow stronger. He is not pleased. He made an example of her once, but he let her live. He saw her purpose in his territory. But she has not learned. She will not learn.

And so he uncurls himself. He leaves his resting place and begins to swim in the deep waters with long, powerful sweeps of his tail. He stretches his senses. He experiences the rise and swell of tides, the crawling ice at either pole of the world, the subterranean vibrations of the other place, beneath the waters, 

the stone. He feels the other, whom he did battle with. Whom he fought with against something far worse. That one is where he should be.

The others, too, are still obedient to his command, still in their places.

And yet, there is something else besides the source she now seeks, the faintest tickle of something wrong. The sound of something coming in the distance, perhaps not very far away.

But this is in front of him. This must be done first.

2027
Hollow Earth Access Point
Monarch Base
Barbados

Monarch director Hampton switched the monitor to the television, found the channel, made herself a cup of tea, and settled down to watch. She got through the nonsense at the start of the show, mostly by ignoring it. Then they started rolling clips of Titans.

A moment later, Dr. Andrews appeared on-screen. Much as she really did dislike doing these appearances, she was quite adept at it. She made a good impression. Today she had on a black suit and white shirt. Simple. Professional without being stuffy. And as always, she sounded credible. And she had a new haircut, short. It looked good.

The interviewer, a youngish fellow also in a black suit, had a pleasant enough demeanor. He started easy, as they had discussed.

“My guest today is Doctor Ilene Andrews, a Monarch scientist and director in charge of the Kong Research Division. She’s the foremost expert on Kong and Titans in general. Welcome to the show, Doctor Andrews.”

“Thanks so much for having me on today,” she said.

“For those of us who have been sleeping under a rock for the past few years, would you mind bringing us up to speed on Kong? We all know he’s a Titan, we all know he had a bit of a tussle with Godzilla a while back, but what else can you tell us about the big guy?”

“Sure,” she said. “Well, our exploratory team discovered Kong living on an isolated island in the South Pacific—”

“Skull Island,” the host put in.

“Yes,” she said. “We discovered that he was the protector of a group of people called the Iwi. His kind and their kind had been living in harmony for generations. When they were menaced by the monsters of the island, Kong stepped in. We

decided it was best not to try and fix what wasn’t broken. We set up an observation post and tried to intrude as little as possible.”

“You said Kong’s kind? There was more than one?”

“He had a family. There are skeletons of other Great Apes on the island. But when we got there, Kong was the only one. The last of his species.”

“And then there was another tragedy.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “The Island was surrounded by a constant storm that protected it from the outside. ...