"Kaiju" is what the fleet called the creatures that came up out of Tra Sakinig after the gorilla control unit under the ziggurat was shut down on 9/13/3200. The Cay-Opu were only the little things, the worker bees. The Franklin Bio-industrial team had been genetically engineering super-beasts from the planet's own creatures, and the same machine that drove the Cay-Opu to dig had kept the beasts asleep, imprisoned by their creator, "the foolish human who thought she could contain it". In the laboratory under the ziggurat there were jars of preserved animals, one local bird four times its normal size, and an abstract found aboard the Cradle described a fifteenfold gigantism. Tim Treebreaker said they had been asleep for as long as he could remember.

The moment the machine went down a roar centuries old shook the caverns, and the party escaped in a dump truck with cargo-van-sized monitor lizards and bus-sized, diesel-breathing dragons after them, onto a surface where hundreds of flying beasts filled the sky and a creature the size of a starship clawed free of its prison. Within days they had spread across the whole planet. The ones the fleet met include:

• Dragons, fire-breathing fliers that hunt in flocks;
• Blink-cats, tank-sized cats that teleport in short hops;
• Scaled panthers, green-eyed hunters of the canopy;
• Giant monitor lizards, as big as a cargo van;
• Cyberillas, cybernetic gorillas up to about ten metres tall;
• a kaiju-class Cryptling that besieged Tralin Outpost;
• the giant dolphin and other swimming kaiju in the seas;
• the Great Beast, the size of a starship, and a flier the size of a cruiser seen over another continent.

They fell on the Cay-Opu villages first. The fleet's forum on the crisis resolved to investigate the creatures and try to fix or recreate the dormancy device, to protect and evacuate the humans and Speghti, to refit the Cradle for human habitation and to open dialogue with the Cay-Opu. Tralin and the other outposts were besieged, a Mandate weapons cache was cleared out ahead of one of them, and the fleet's evacuation of Tra Sakinig was ordered in fortnight 17.

Epilogue (provisional)

Because of the kaiju, the people on the Cradle are never resettled on Tra Sakinig. The swimming kaiju kill a great many Speghti and destroy at least one city-sized fortress, but the organo-mechs first tested at Fort Trulia, and the Speghti skill at pacifying sea creatures, turn some of them into defenders of the oceans.