THE AGE OF MONSTERS BEGINS.

Sat.u.r.day, December 9, 2000, 10:01 P.M.

Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Energia-Buran launch site.

On the Kazakhstan steppes east of the Aral Sea.

Floodlights and precisely directed spotlights illuminated the crowning achievement of the newly revived Russian s.p.a.ce program - the multipurpose carrier vehicle-shuttle complex Energia-Buran. An influx of foreign money from j.a.pan, Europe, and the United States had made this leap in Russian s.p.a.ce technology possible.

When the Mir was destroyed, it looked as if Russian s.p.a.ce exploration had died with it. But renewed interest in building an international s.p.a.ce station - and the knowledge that dangers such as King Ghidorah might lurk in s.p.a.ce - fueled the development of the Russian shuttle program as an adjunct to America's program.

The brightly lit ground complex designed for the launch of the Energia-Buran featured a huge a.s.sembly hangar, cryogenic propellant depots, and the uniquely designed launchpad itself. Off in the distance, the concrete landing runway for the Buran s.p.a.ce shuttle's return to Earth - a field that had never yet been used - waited for the Buran's maiden voyage. A new age was about to begin with the launch of Russia's version of the U.S. s.p.a.ce shuttle in just a few days' time.

Already, technicians had a.s.sembled the various stages of the Energia rocket booster in the weatherproof hangar. The huge railway trains designed for the task had moved the completed booster and shuttle to the main launch complex. Now the Energia-Buran stood proudly on the launchpad, its nose pointed at the stars shimmering in the desert sky.

Work had been interrupted earlier, when the scientists and technicians first noticed lights and activity at the Proton launch site on the other side of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. As far as anyone knew, no Proton rocket was scheduled to be launched - yet within hours after the flurry of activity began, the men working on the Energia-Buran were stunned into silence when a rocket indeed lifted off from that distant pad, lighting up the Russian night with its fiery exhaust.

Now, more than an hour later, the excitement of the mysterious, unscheduled launch had died in the face of the daunting work that still needed to be done before the Energia-Buran could fly into history.

As men in cold-weather gear scrambled around the base of the Energia booster rocket, high-pressure pipes were hooked up to the boosters themselves. Other technicians in white coats scrambled around on the catwalks of the delicate-looking two-story launch tower. Two elevators constantly moved up and down inside, carrying men and material to their workstations.

Underneath the rocket, inside the five-story concrete hexagon that served as the launching pad, scientists and ground crew members were performing vital system checks on the high-pressure hydraulic pipes and gas ducts.

There were over 400 rooms inside this pad. The rooms were filled with instruments and equipment that still needed to be installed in the booster before the launch could commence.

In the distance, lights burned in the huge, 787-foot-long, 175-foot-high vehicle a.s.sembly hangar. There, railcars were loaded with explosive fuel, destined to be pumped into the Buran shuttle's engine tanks. The shuttle, which was already attached to the hull of the Energia three-stage booster, gleamed white in the spotlights.

The booster rockets themselves had already been fueled before being railed out to the launch pad. It was a hazardous practice, but part of the Russian s.p.a.ce program since its inception.

The Russian shuttle looked remarkably like its NASA counterpart. In fact, only an educated observer could tell them apart. The Buran was white, covered by heat-resistant tiles; it had swept-back wings and a drooping nose that was painted in antiglare black.

Around the Energia-Buran pad was a forest of service facilities, diverters, and the floodlights - which could be pointed at a specific area of the shuttle or booster for work at night.

There were also tall lightning-protection masts to draw nature's fury away from the sensitive rocket during the many storms that blow across the steppes.

As midnight pa.s.sed, work continued - until the unexpected sound of the cosmodrome's early-warning system began to wail. The alarm system was a relic of the Cold War days, a precaution against an American sneak attack.

The men halted their work and exchanged uneasy glances. One of the project directors cursed aloud and flipped open his cellular phone.

"This has to be a mistake," he muttered angrily.

But the man could not raise anyone on his cell phone. Satellite communications were down - or his cell phone battery was dead. In the distance, some of the workers began to heed the air-raid warning and moved to their designated bomb shelters.

Dropping the cell phone into the pocket of his overalls, the project director crossed a concrete plain to a communications post. There, a hardwired phone was installed for just such an emergency.

The director lifted the phone and clicked the receiver. On the other side of Baikonur, at the Leninsk control facility, an excited voice answered.

"What is this nonsense?" the director spat. "We have mere days to prepare for the launch, and you have my men excited over nothing!"

But the voice on the other end of the line ignored the project director's words. "Get into the shelters," the voice cried excitedly. "We believe an attack is imminent."

Attack? the project director thought. Attack by whom?

The director slammed the phone onto its hook. He turned and saw technicians and scientists staring at him. They were waiting for instructions.

"Well, what are you waiting for!" the director cried. "Get to the shelters."

The men took off in a run. But it was already too late.

"Look!" a ground crewman cried, pointing at the dark horizon. Others paused and turned, staring into the darkness. Despite the blinding lights of the launchpad, a glowing streak was evident in the night sky.

The project director grunted. That glow resembled the one that often surrounded a s.p.a.ce vehicle as it reentered the atmosphere.

The director felt a touch of fear. He turned and pushed the scientist in front of him. "Get to the shelter, Dmitri," he commanded. But the scientist, along with several others, was too mesmerized by the vision dropping out of s.p.a.ce toward them.

Three minutes later, Gigan slammed into the middle of Baikonur Cosmodrome. The creature landed in a forest of rocket-fuel tanks and high-pressure pipes near Pad Number Two - the Proton site, which had launched so mysteriously earlier that night.

A mushroom cloud of fiery fuel blossomed over the s.p.a.ce center. The explosion was so brilliant that it lit the entire cosmodrome as if it were early afternoon.

The technicians at the Proton site, who had just launched the orbital missile that struck the creature, had fled to their underground shelters at the first sound of the air-raid alarm. Now torrents of burning liquid fuel gushed into the crowded shelters. Men and women died screaming.

In the midst of the firestorm, Gigan rose to its feet and howled into the night. Its single scarlet eye glowed in the creature's head. Above that eye, a tiny red dot flickered eerily.

The gigantic creature turned and moved toward the Proton a.s.sembly building nearby. As Gigan walked, its single-clawed foot knocked aside the heavy railcars that transported rockets to their launch pads.

Under Gigan's fearsome tread, the tracks curled and buckled, and concrete shattered. Underground pipes burst, and water spewed from the ground.

Gigan slammed into the Proton's a.s.sembly hangar, which was still brightly lit - powered by its own internal electric generators. The creature opened its beak, and a shrill machine sound suddenly shattered the night. The huge buzz saw built into the cyborg's chest began to whirl, until the individual blades were lost in a blur.

Then Gigan slammed, belly first, into the a.s.sembly building, the blades cutting into the walls of the hangar. The hollow building was twice the size of the sixty-five-meter-tall creature. But Gigan's terrible power was tremendous.

The hangar crumpled under the cyborg's a.s.sault. The roof came down on top of Gigan's head, but the creature was not even stunned. Shaking off debris and whole sections of steel framework, Gigan lurched into the center of the building. As the walls collapsed around the monster, high-pressure fuel lines began to blow up.

Gigan staggered through the exploding building, finally stumbling out the other side as blazing debris flew in all directions. The noise and explosions seemed to infuriate the monster even further.

One curved metallic forearm lashed out, knocking down a swaying launch tower. As the steel-frame structure slowly tilted and fell, an underground fuel tank detonated. It sent the tower flying into the sky like one of the rockets that once rose into s.p.a.ce from that very pad.

Kilometers away, a HIND military helicopter rose from the airfield on the far side of the town of Leninsk. The sprawling town was the home of thousands of scientists, cosmonauts, engineers, technicians, and their families. Inside the helicopter, the top directors of the Baikonur Cosmodrome and their immediate family members were being evacuated.

But the movement attracted Gigan's attention. Its dead red eye focused on the object in the distance, and the creature stood stock-still. Suddenly a red beam of energy sprang from the tiny dot in the middle of Gigan's forehead.

The light stabbed through the darkness, striking the helicopter as it attempted to escape. The chopper instantly blew apart in a yellow blast, raining debris onto the runway and igniting several aircraft parked on the tarmac. These fires quickly spread to the hangars and to several other helicopters idling for takeoff.

Now two sections of the Baikonur Cosmodrome were burning.

But not yet satisfied with the destruction it was meting out, Gigan turned to the brightly illuminated Energia-Buran launchpad a kilometer or more away. With surprising speed, the 25,000-ton creature lumbered across the steppes to the other launchpad.

With the creature's imminent approach, the shelters near the pad began to disgorge frightened technicians and scientists, who fled the monster's apocalyptic destruction.

Sunday, December 10, 2000, 11:00 A.M.

Parque Molinas, Miraflores.

Central Lima, Peru.

Her gigantic shadow falling across the buildings of central Lima, the airship Destiny Explorer was docked on a temporary mooring tower and an elevator tower erected in a small, tidy park in the heart of the crowded city of seven and a half million souls. Mycroft E. Endicott was as true as his word. The mast and elevator tower were waiting when the airship arrived in Lima.

This South American metropolis was one of the first European settlements in the New World, and was founded by the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro - who, in 1535, actually laid out the 117 blocks of the main town with his own hand on a blank sheet of parchment.

The city had since grown, and the latter half of the twentieth century saw the rise of the pueblos jovenes - literally "young towns" - the terrible shanty-towns where most of the unskilled rural laborers ended up living after they moved to the city to find work. These settlements had rampant crime, and they lacked electricity, running water, and sanitation facilities. Most of the waste from the shantytowns ended up in the Pacific Ocean.

As the airship circled the city the day before, Sh.e.l.ly Townsend got an aerial view of some of those slums. It wasn't pretty. She saw many unpleasant details, despite the clinging fog that hovered over this part of the country from April to December. The mist, called garua, blotted out the sun and blanketed the city, trapping car exhaust and other pollutants.

All in all, Sh.e.l.ly's first impression of Peru wasn't a good one. But she had to admit that the sound of the bells, which had been ringing all morning from dozens of churches and cathedrals, was quite beautiful.

After she thought about it for a while, Sh.e.l.ly wondered if shantytowns like the ones in Lima would be the future home of many of her own countrymen. Things just seemed to be getting worse everywhere in the world - including in the United States. At least the people of South America had their faith to sustain them. Sh.e.l.ly wasn't sure what she believed, now that a pit had opened up at the bottom of the world.

Is this Armageddon? Sh.e.l.ly wondered gloomily. And does the world die with a whimper, or a bang?

Sh.e.l.ly knew that her melancholy state of mind sprang from the knowledge that she would soon lose control of her beloved airship ... and get booted off, too.

Just like the INN reporters and those poor kids who won the contest.

Even now the teenagers were packing their bags, and the reporters - who traveled light - were sitting in the observation deck awaiting the ground transportation that would take them from the park to El Condado, a four-star hotel on the other side of the Rio Remac. INN, through the American emba.s.sy, was footing the bill.

Sh.e.l.ly refused to pack, however. She decided that her father and Captain Dolan would have to drag her kicking and screaming off this airship before she'd leave.

And they would need some of those Army Rangers stationed at the bottom of the elevator tower to do it, too!

That little drama would unfold when her father came back from a briefing in a government building across town. When Simon Townsend returned, he would do so with a U.S. Army colonel named Briteis. The colonel would lead the expedition to Antarctica, in command of two squads of Airborne Rangers.

At the very heart of the old city of Peru was the Plaza de las Armas. The plaza was the center of government in this capital city. The largest building on the plaza was a centuries-old cathedral. The second-largest structure was the Government Palace. Inside, in a briefing room provided for the Americans by Peruvian authorities, Simon Townsend fought the battle of his life.

For more than an hour, Townsend had listened to, and argued against, the U.S. Army's request to requisition his airship. Now, in order to convince Townsend of the urgency of the crisis confronting the entire planet, Colonel Briteis brought in a thin, gawky young scientist with a frizzy beard and a faraway stare.

Though unimpressed by the man's demeanor, Townsend listened in stunned silence and with mounting apprehension to the top-secret briefing given by the kaijuologist named Dr. Max Birchwood. Townsend had never imagined the unexplained and unexplainable events that had occurred on the south polar continent over the past several weeks.

As a slide projector cast pictures on a white screen at the front of the room, Dr. Birchwood laid out the situation to the man who had built the Destiny Explorer.

"The abyss at the pole is now almost one hundred miles in diameter," Dr. Birchwood said. "In this series of images, you can see how fast the hole grew."

Simon Townsend stared mutely. In each photo - taken only hours apart, as the numbers in the upper right-hand corner indicated - the hole continually expanded.

"These photos were taken by a high-alt.i.tude spy plane that took off from Australia several days ago. That plane was the last manned aircraft permitted to overfly the abyss -"

"Permitted?" Townsend asked. "What do you mean by 'permitted'?"

"Twelve hours after the first spy plane completed its mission, the Royal Air Force sent its own spy plane over the site. That aircraft vanished without a trace."

"It could have crashed," Townsend argued.

Dr. Birchwood shook his head. "The first plane might have crashed, except for the fact the next six aircraft sent over the Antarctic disappeared, too."

"You risked other pilots' lives like that?" Townsend asked incredulously.

Dr. Birchwood shook his head. "Only the first two planes had pilots - volunteers. The other four were remote-control drones. None of them made it back with their intelligence information intact."

"So you don't know what is going on right now, do you?" Townsend asked.

"Not true, Mr. Townsend," Dr. Birchwood stated. "Which brings us to your remarkable airship ..."

Dr. Birchwood nodded to the soldier at the projector, and more slides appeared on the screen.

"Yesterday, we sent a U.S. Navy remote-control blimp over the abyss. The ship took twelve hours to cross over the opening and circle back. But it made it, and it brought back new photographs of the pit and its surroundings."

Townsend studied the pictures. It appeared that the abyss had stabilized and was no longer growing, but no matter the angle from which the pictures were taken, the hole in the ice seemed to have no bottom.

The last photo had two dark blots on it, standing out in stark relief against the ancient ice. The objects seemed to be flying or hovering above the mouth of the abyss. The picture flashed by, and only one dark object could be seen in the next photo - the other one was gone.

"What were those things over the pit?" Townsend asked.

Dr. Birchwood smiled. "What, indeed?" he said cryptically.

But before the kaijuologist could say more, the army colonel spoke up. "Encouraged by the blimp's success, another unmanned aircraft was sent over the area," Colonel Briteis added. "It, too, was destroyed or crashed -"

"So we think that whatever intelligence may be driving events in Antarctica, it does not regard lighter-than-air craft as a threat for some unknown reason," Dr. Birchwood said, completing the colonel's thought.

Simon Townsend's eyes widened in comprehension. Then he shook his head in disbelief.

"So you are telling me that on the basis of this thin and rather dubious theory that whatever is in that pit likes airships, you are willing to risk my life, the lives of the U.S. soldiers who are going on this crazy expedition, and the Destiny Explorer itself?"

Dr. Birchwood paled as if the words stung him. Townsend knew he'd hit a nerve. But it was Colonel Briteis who answered the airship designer's question.

"As far as the soldiers are concerned, they are trained for this. If it means death, they will accept that," the colonel said icily.

Then he stood up and leaned over the table toward Simon Townsend. The colonel's voice dropped an octave.