Green Steel

Part One: The Temple of the Head

Unnamed Island, South Pacific, Spring 2014

It had taken Jamie a while to earn the trust of the local people. At first, of course, they thought he was from one of the big conglomerates, come to ruin their island. When they found he had no communication devices, just a lot of notebooks, they thought he was a journalist or a writer here to study them. That made them more open with him, at first. Then, of course, they realised that he was more interested in living the life than documenting it. Not that it made him one of them – they thought he was a little crazy – but they liked him well enough. Old Keemu, the priest, seemed to be the only one to fully grasp that there was no way Jamie could live the life he wanted to live, in harmony with nature, back in the States.

Quite why he had been asked to join this particular pilgrimage, however, Jamie was unsure. Keemu had told him that once every ten years, all the adult males of the tribe were obliged to make a trip into the rugged and uninhabited interior of the island. Their goal was some kind of ancient temple.

"You should come take a look." Keemu had said in his fluent English. "Maybe you can tell us something about the place."

Why the old man thought this should be so, Jamie had no idea, but he was curious. The trip started out like a holiday. The men talked as they walked, they told the kind of jokes and sang the kind of songs that men of almost any race tell and sing once out of earshot of their womenfolk. Jamie, who was already fairly adept in the local dialect, had his vocabulary expanded in directions he had not expected. But as they got deeper in, the mood changed. The chatter faded and the men became, not solemn or afraid, but somehow uncomfortable.

They came to a long, narrow valley and climbed a gentle slope. The valley opened out into a dale, and there they saw their destination. Jamie let out a low whistle. Whatever this was, it had not been built by any Polynesian people. The style was completely wrong.

"The Temple of the Head, we call it." Keemu told him.

Jamie shook his head. The 'temple' looked almost like a statue buried in the ground to its neck. But what a statue! The head – all that was visible – looked to be about 25 feet high, meaning that if there was a statue underneath, the whole thing would be 200 feet tall!

The face, if it was a face, was masklike, having only eyes and a mouth. Instead of ears, there seemed to be some kind of headphones, connected across the top of the head with tubes. A crude stone stairway led up to the gaping mouth.

Keemu and the other men stood back, letting Jamie approach. He went up the steps and paused.

"Don't go in on your own!" One of the men called. "We'll need lights."

Jamie nodded, then touched the wall at one side of the mouth. It was discoloured with age and exposure to the elements, but there was no moss, no vegetation of any kind climbing on it, smooth and cold to the touch.

Keemu was beside him. "Well?" The old man asked. "What do you think?"

"It's metal." Jamie said. "Or stone coated in metal. Weird."

Keemu shook his head. "None of our people could or would have built this." He stated. "Do you know of anyone who could?"

Jamie shrugged. "The face looks a little like some Viking and Saxon war-masks I saw in England. But this is nothing like anything they could build back then. The Greeks, the Romans, even the Chinese couldn't have made this!

"Is it as old as it looks?"

"Nobody knows." Keemu told him. "The Old People, who lived here before we came, told our ancestors that it had always been here. We've lived on this island for maybe three hundred years, and the Old People even longer."

Jamie gave a laugh. "There are people back in my country who'd talk about Atlanteans and Lemurians, or the Lizard-men of Valusia." He said. "I'd say aliens, but only because we know they exist now. Less than ten years ago, I wouldn't have said that!"

"Spacemen, huh?" Keemu replied. "I'd kinda figured that, myself. But let's get inside. When you've seen the rest, I'll tell you more."

The rest of the men had made crude torches, and it was by the flickering orange light of these that they made their way into the mouth. This was a large room, with several metal doors leading off it. All tightly closed and with no visible means of opening them. In the centre was a large chair, with several obviously high-tech but very inert devices clustered around it. Seated in the chair was a human skeleton, still articulated,, with a metal band around the skull that connected to the machinery.

Jamie couldn't understand how the bones held together, they should have fallen apart. Then he saw something gleam in the torchlight. Looking closer, he saw a fine web of metal filaments that covered the skeleton, keeping it intact.

"Our people came here three hundred years ago," Keemu said. "because the volcano in the middle of our old home was erupting, and we couldn't stay there. We'd fished off this island for years, and we knew the Old People. They were dying. they'd stopped having children and a lot of them were wasting away.

"The Old People told us we could have the island, as long as we took care of the last of them, and made sure the giant didn't wake up. They said that they used to worship the giant and try to wake it up. Once a year, they would all go to the Temple, and choose one of the youngest and strongest men to sit in the throne and put the crown on. The legend was that if the warrior was good enough, the giant would awake and make him into a God. But the young men who tried all died.

"Then one day, a strange ship, like nothing they'd ever seen before, put in to the island, and a group of men with white skins and strange clothes and weapons came ashore. They didn't stay long, but they left one man behind. When the Old People approached him, he attacked them and killed six of their warriors with his metal sword before they knocked him out.

"Well, since he was such a mighty warrior, they thought he might be able to wake the giant. So they took him to the Temple and put him on the throne. He wasn't like the others, he didn't die straight away. His eyes opened, and he said something in a strange language. They figured it was a curse, because a terrible light shone in the Temple for a minute. Then the white man died.

"But after that, the Old People could never make children any more. Worse, a lot of them started to waste away and die early. That's how we found them. Ever since then, every ten years, the men of the tribe come here to make sure that skeleton is still in place. When he does fall out of the throne, it means the giant is going to expect more young men to be put in it, and when that happens, we will leave the island."

There was no ceremony as such. The men cleared the room of ten years' worth of wind-blown detritus. Keemu placed a smooth white stone from the shore on a small pile of similar stones between the skeletons' feet. Then they set up camp in the dale outside.

It had been a long day, but sleep would not come for Jamie. He lay staring up at the stars, brooding. There was something maddeningly familiar about the great metal face, and he racked his brains trying to recall it. His mind, as it often did when he couldn't sleep, went back home, to the small, remote Kansas farm where he and his widowed mother had lived. Simple lives, in tune with the rhythm of the seasons, sowing and harvesting enough to feed themselves and a little extra to sell, for cash they would use to buy the few things they didn't make themselves and couldn't do without. Gasoline for the ancient truck, for instance, or new tools. They had no tractor, but kept a pair of horses to pull the plough. Their only electricity was from an old battery, charged up by a cranky windmill, that served both for the truck and an antique radio.

It was on that radio they had listened to the sporadic news reports, six years ago now, about the aliens who had invaded Earth. The Daleks, it seemed, had no interest in remote farms, so Jamie and his mother had been sorry for the city folk who died, but were unaffected themselves.

But that same year, Jamies' Ma had passed away, leaving him adrift and purposeless at the age of twenty. Inexperienced about the world, and having barely attended, much less finished, High School, he had come back from his mornings' work, a month after the funeral, to find a shiny SUV parked in front of the ramshackle house. The sharp-suited lawyer from a farming conglomerate had overwhelmed him with words, and before he realised it, Jamie had sold his home.

The resentment he felt, once realisation had sunk in, was not wholly justified. The lawyer had, in his way, been a fair man, and the price paid to Jamie had been at the top of what the land was worth. But even with ample funds, Jamie had been unable to adjust to a life of artificial rhythms. The city suffocated him, and everywhere he went, he found people who lived by clock and calendar, rather than sun and season. He also resented the cost of living elsewhere, and the constant pressure to buy more than needed, and to work for wages, rather than live off his own labour. So he had travelled, in search of a place where people still lived simply and naturally, and the search had brought him here.

But it was during his travels that he had seen images like the face on the Temple, and now he remembered. Another race of aliens, who had tried to conquer Earth and failed. The name he had heard was Cybermen.

Just thinking of that word seemed to open a window in his mind. An idea seemed to form out of nowhere. An idea that would help all mankind. But it needed something to achieve it. Something he could only find within the Temple.

Everyone else was asleep, so he slipped back up to the mouth and peered in. As he did so, faint light began to glow from panels in the ceiling. Fascinated, he moved further in. A soft, pervasive hum filled the air. Jamie halted a moment, putting a hand to his head. Then he straightened up and moved forward, face blank, limbs stiff. The skeleton in the chair flared with blue light, and vanished. Jamie sat down, and without apparent volition, placed the metal band on his head. For a few seconds, his body went rigid, his face distorted in pain. Then he relaxed, and opened his eyes, revealing nothing but fathomless black.

New Command Core installed. System diagnostic in progress.

Reactor resuming full operation.

Major systems functional.

Some damage to peripheral systems. Repair drones dispatched.

Require mission parameters. Uploading from Command Core.

Parameter one: Destroy advanced technology.

Parameter two: Destroy industrial economy.

Parameter three: Destroy cities.

Parameters compatible with base directives. Mission accepted.

Mission requirements.

Repairs underway.

Full crew and strike teams required.

Life-forms suitable for upgrading located nearby, Cybermats dispatched to harvest.

Upgrade facility operational and ready.

Scanning for more upgradable life-forms.

Nature of location and resources indicate slow build-up optimal.

Projected time until full mission capability one planetary orbit.

Cyberking now active.

Tokyo, Japan. Summer 2015

"Wow!" Tony Stark gasped. "Is that what..who..I think it is?"

Tony was not a man easily impressed – he had seen a great deal, and done even more. But the 160-foot figure that dominated the courtyard of the impressive building was even more significant than it's sheer size implied.

Shinsei Tanaka smiled proudly. "Indeed, Antony-san. That is Tetsujin Nijuhachi-go – Iron Man 28. Though I believe the Western press called him by another name."

"Gigantor." Tony said. "Is that a replica, Tanaka-san?"

"No, that is the actual mech." Tanaka replied. "Which is to say, it is his outer shell and skeleton. His active systems – reactor, rocket engines and hydraulic musculature, as well as the control unit, were all removed when he was decommissioned in 1966. But Kaneda Shotaro could never bring himself to fully dismantle the old fellow, and he was kept at his old base until last year. Shotaro-san had left Tetsujin and the base to the company when he died in 1982, and when we opened this fine new HQ last year, we decided to set him up here as a memorial to our founders."

"Don't," said the matronly red-haired woman standing nearby, "get any ideas, Arthur!"

The tall, thin, balding man standing next to Tony gave a sheepish grin. "No, dear." He said. "Of course not, dear."

"Ah, you are also an engineer, Arthur-san?" Tanaka asked.

Arthur Weasley shook his head. "Sadly not, Tanaka-san. Before I retired, I was an employee of the Health and Safety Executive in Britain, so I did deal with technology to a certain extent. But I've always been a bit of a tinkerer in my spare time."

"Ah!" Tanaka grinned. "Well, very many useful inventions have been made by 'tinkerers', Arthur-san! I take it that is why Antony-san brought you along today?"

"Yes, he thought I'd be interested." Arthur replied. "Though I'd never heard of the PDRC before. Tony tells me you're a Private Military Company?"

"Yes." Tanaka nodded. "I am aware that many people disapprove of such businesses, but we are not mercenaries in the understood or traditional sense of the word." He gestured for them to follow him and continued to talk as they went.

"The original organisation was called PBDC – Pacific Basin Defence Co-operative. It was, as the name implies, a co-operative of scientists, engineers and soldiers brought together by a concern about the increasing number of kaiju and daikaiju attacks taking place in the area."

"Yes, I've heard of those." Arthur put in. "Giant monsters that attack around the coastal areas. You've had a lot of problems in the past with them."

"Indeed." Tanaka acknowledged. "The PBDC was formed in 1954 – the year that Gojira first appeared. They felt that the military forces in the various nations were far more concerned with the Cold War than the monster attacks, and feared that eventually those authorities might be driven to a nuclear response."

"My father was one of the founders." Tony added. "Along with Dr Benton Quest. The PBDC looked at less conventional ways of stopping the kaiju."

Tanaka nodded. "They tried lasers, masers, sonics, electrical weapons and even toxic agents. The weapons were often effective, but seldom lethal, and the monsters always came back.

"But Dr Kanedas' wife was an expert in animal behaviour. She suggested to him that the monsters always returned because they could not see or understand what had beaten them. Humans to them were little more than ants, and could not exert any kind of territorial dominance that the beasts would recognise.

"From that came the idea of a giant robot, as big as the daikaiju and able to fight them physically. The result was Tetsujin. He had a crude, poorly-shielded nuclear reactor, leaky hydraulic muscles and a rocket pack with a range of less than thirty miles. He was controlled remotely by a clumsy, heavy unit that only Dr Kanedas' son, Shotaro, knew how to operate. But for ten years he was our only and best defence against the daikakiju. He did the job and he earned their respect!

"But eventually, he became obsolete, so we decommissioned him. By that time, we'd acquired and repurposed some of Bolivar Trasks' Sentinel robots. With what we learned from them, and from our experience with Tetsujin, we built two more mechs, Great Mazinger and Jet Jaguar.

"Then in the 1980s, it became clear that we could no longer support ourselves as a non-profit organisation. So the PBDC was disbanded and the PRDC – Pacific Rim Defence Corporation – was formed. We provide highly-trained troops armed with state-of-the-art weaponry -most of which is non-lethal – for security to governments and private companies across the region. We also train local armed and security forces.

"When we first started, we used the profits to do further research and development into mechs. We built three more – Raydeen, Dangard Ace and Combatra – for daikaiju defence and another one, Red Ronin, was commissioned for SHIELD.

"But then, of course, the daikaiju began to change their behaviour. They became less hostile. They helped defend the Earth against several alien threats, including the Daleks. Now they all live on Monster Island, where our people study them. We're making great strides in communicating with them, in fact."

"So now you're just a PMC?" Arthur asked.

"Not entirely." Tanaka said. "You see, Arthur-san, there are a great many islands in the Pacific ocean. Now many of them are little more than coral reefs around a lagoon, but a substantial number are large enough to support communities, and many do.

"Some of them are claimed by various governments – the Pitcairn Islands are still a colony of your country, for instance – but many are not, and do not wish to be. We use the profits from our paid work to finance assistance to these people. It could be support and relief after natural disasters, or protection from the pirate fleets that still hunt those waters. Also, sometimes, American, Japanese or Chinese commercial interests can be less than ethical in their dealings with such communities. Support from the PRDC can lend weight to local opinions.

"But sometimes, we find ourselves at a loss. For the last twelve months, some of these island communities have been, for want of a better word, disappearing!"

"What, just up and leaving?" Tony asked.

Tanaka shook his head. "No. That we could understand. No, what happens is that either a neighbouring island notices signs of conflict, or there is a distress call – usually garbled and cut off short. By the time help arrives, we find all the healthy adults and children gone, and the old and sick dead, killed out of hand."

"You've reported this?" Arthur asked.

"To who?" Tanaka replied. "Those islands don't belong to anyone. They don't produce anything valuable. Nobody cares. Except us."

Tony and Arthur exchanged a grim look. "We know people who'll care." Tony said. "People who can get things done. Give us the details!"

But Tanaka never had a chance. Suddenly, alarms began to blare inside the building, and sirens began to wail outside.

"What the heck...?" Tony exclaimed.

Tanaka had pulled out a tablet computer and was reading rapidly.

"A coastal installation is under attack about five kilometres away." He told them. "There's an oil refinery there, and a nuclear power station, as well as several factories. Reports indicate..." He looked up, pale faced. "They say it's Cybermen!

"UNIT has only a small presence in Japan, but they're en route, so are our people, but they're going to be badly outnumbered. Wait! They say there's a giant Cyberman there – 200 feet tall and heavily armed!"

"Can you get your own mechs on-site?" Tony asked.

Tanaka shook his head. "They're mothballed. We'd need twenty-four hours to get them battle-ready, and even then, we have no trained pilots – the original ones no longer work for us, and we'd have to locate them. It might take days. The SHIELD heli-carrier and UNITS' Valiant are both in the Atlantic, also hours away."

"Dammit!" Tony said. He pulled out his cellphone and speed-dialled a specific number. "Erik? Tony. You monitoring the situation here? How soon? Damn! It'll have to do. Meet you there."

"Wait!" Arthur Weasley had been talking into a pocket mirror, which Tanaka fortunately had been too busy with his tablet to notice. "Tell Mr Lensherr to get his people together and wait. Someone will be there to help in a few minutes. Then you'd better get into your working clothes, Tony!"

Tony knew Arthur better than to ask any questions. He'd already signalled with a device on his wrist, and now a red-and-gold UAV dropped out of the sky to hover nearby. A hatch at the rear of the drone opened and Tony, shedding his jacket as he ran, dived into it. The fuselage seemed to fold round him before dropping clear of the rest of the drone as Iron Man!

"Tanaka-san, show me where this attack is happening!." Arthur said, the authority in his voice unmistakable. "Right! Molly, get back to the hotel. Tony, shall we?"

"Be careful!" Molly ordered. Arthur just grinned at her, then he and Iron Man vanished with a boom.

Tanaka stared at the spot they had been in, then turned to Molly, who had already raised her wand. "Oblivius!" Tanaka blinked at her, then looked around.

"I think," Molly said firmly but kindly, "they need you inside, Tanaka-san."