Read Dinosaurs & A Dirigible Online
Authors: David Drake
Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (9 page)
Vickers hadn’t missed. His bullet had stabbed in and out of the Javan’s upper chest, severing one of the pulmonary arteries on its passage. There was a hole in the windshield of the truck behind the man, and a mist of blood coated the glass.
Despite that, the bullet had no shock effect because the fellow had been pumped with adrenaline when it hit him. The armor-piercing projectile hadn’t struck a major bone or the spinal column, and the volume of oxygenated blood already in the brain was sufficient to sustain consciousness for a full minute. The Javan carried through the action he had started, unaware that he was already dead on his feet.
The batteries in the base of the floater ruptured in a yellowish haze. Louise dropped the capture gun and grabbed the control yoke vainly with both hands. The floater dropped with a sickening lurch.
The solar array spilled air. It tilted like an ownerless umbrella cartwheeling down the street. Louise tried to cling to the guardrail. The floater flipped upside down and plunged to the ground. Knapsacks flung their contents across the stripped dirt.
The Garand steadied in Vickers’ hands. This time the front post was on the driver’s forehead. The bullet, striking three inches below the point of aim, blew out the back of the man’s skull in a spray of blood and fresh, cream-colored brains.
Nikisastro saw Vickers for the first time. He opened his mouth to shout, but he must have known that would be useless. He ran toward the cover of the trees.
That too was useless. A running enemy was still an easy target at two hundred yards.
Henry Vickers was no longer a civilian: the jungle had won its struggle for his mind. Mercy was as alien to him as it was to the rifle in his expert hands.
The tyrannosaur burst from the forest wall, its jaws gaping toward Nikisastro. Vickers squeezed, aiming again for the man’s head because failure had taught him not to trust the effect of AP rounds on a human torso.
The Javan’s skull blew apart. The bullet acted as a piston that converted soft nerve tissue into hydraulic working fluid. Nikisastro’s limbs flew wide in a spastic convulsion.
Vickers raised his sights to the tyrannosaur. He visualized the point that would take his steel projectile through the reptile’s brain as their fellows had penetrated human targets.
A rosy curtain swelled to hide the dinosaur.
Three slender figures . . .
Vickers’ trigger finger continued to take up slack.
Vickers was no longer in Borneo or in any part of the world he had known.
A wind as hot as that from a furnace door shocked him. There was no Sun, only a sky that filtered light to a sullen red.
His eyes blurred, stung by astringents in the air. The breeze bit his exposed skin. Dust blowing from the surrounding wasteland was the only visible motion. His lungs burned, and he knew that when he breathed he would die.
Vickers turned. His mouth was clamped shut and his eyes brimmed with cleansing tears. There was nothing alive in the hundred-foot radius his vision could penetrate through the acid atmosphere, but a colossal statue had fallen facedown onto the ground behind him. The metal from which the figure was cast had suffered only pitting and tarnish, but the stone base was crumbled to gravel.
The statue was of a humanoid figure, unclothed and sexless. Its three-fingered left hand had been raised in greeting. When the statue fell, the arm broke at the elbow; it lay beside the rest of the body.
The statue’s triangular face had a supernal stillness, divorced from every human emotion. Drifts of dust piled in the lee of the metal figure, but the wind had scoured patches of ground clean as well. The surface beneath was artificial. It must have been mirror-smooth until ages of acid grit had worked on it.
The atmosphere crushed down on Vickers like the roof of a collapsing tunnel, suffused with glowing death
—
He stood in the logging road again. His skin burned, and his eyes streamed with tears. Tawny dust clung to the coat of oil protecting the Garand’s bolt and receiver. Vickers sucked in a deep breath and blew it out again, clearing his nose and lips of the poisonous reek which had immersed them.
The three alien figures hung between Vickers and the tyrannosaur. The light that bathed them was the sky of the dead world from which Henry Vickers had just returned.
Vickers lowered his rifle. He blinked furiously to clear his eyes, though he could see well enough through his tears to shoot had he wanted to.
The tyrannosaur was staggering drunkenly from the dose of anesthetic that Louise had fired into its throat. The hypodermic dart must have entered a major blood vessel to work so quickly.
Vickers walked toward the crashed floater at a deliberate pace. He was afraid that if he tried to move faster, he would fall and perhaps be unable to rise. He didn’t see any members of the logging crew, though the engines of abandoned equipment still thumped at idle.
Fifty yards from Vickers, the tyrannosaur dipped its great head to Nikisastro’s corpse. The beast’s three-clawed forelimbs were too short to grip prey so small; they scrabbled in the air as the jaws worked the victim down unaided.
Louise crawled from beneath the flimsy wreckage of the floater. She had a pressure cut on her forehead, but the solar panels and the pole supporting them had cushioned the shock of the crash.
“Tom’s in the back of the pickup,” she called.
Vickers knelt to help her. “Were you hit?” he demanded. “I—it was my fault, I didn’t put him down and there’s no
excuse.”
“No, no,” she said. She pulled her right leg free of the crumpled guardrail. Her limbs flexed normally. The only blood Vickers could see was on her forehead. “I’m fine, but untie Tom!”
The tyrannosaur’s legs splayed. The beast skidded prone on the sharp keel of its breastbone. Because of the birdlike delicacy of the creature’s movements, the way the ground shook at the impact of the five-ton body was a subconscious surprise to Vickers.
The tyrannosaur flopped onto its left side. Its tail thrashed stiffly, thumping the russet soil twice before subsiding into random muscle twitches. The hormone-collecting bottle gleamed at the base of the great skull.
Glancing over his shoulder to be sure that Louise really was all right—she was getting to her feet—Vickers stepped to the back of the pickup. His eyes had cleared, but his stomach lurched violently in reaction to events of the past hour.
Vickers deliberately looked at the driver. The head shot had flung the man against the cab of the pickup, from which he had caromed forward onto his face. The bullet and the pressure wave it sent through the dead man’s brain had blown a fist-sized cavity from the back of his skull.
If you can do it, you can look at what you’ve done. If you don’t like what you see, you can stop doing that sort of thing in the future.
For twenty years, Henry Vickers had been able to avoid killing human beings. God willing, he could go at least another twenty years before he
chose
to do it again. It’s always a choice.
Tom O’Neill lay in the box of the white truck, trussed like a chicken with a piece of his own shirt stuffed in his mouth to gag him. A good thing Louise had seen O’Neill from the air; otherwise he might have lain in the truck till the Sun cooked him.
Vickers pulled the gag out before cutting the wrist and ankle ropes with his folding knife. Blood from the guards, already blackening as it dried, dappled O’Neill. The Javans had hurtled off the other side of the truck box.
“Vickers, they killed Louise!” O’Neill blurted between gasping breaths. “The bastards shot her,
shot
her!”
“Don’t squirm or I’ll cut you,” Vickers said. “Louise is all right. Maybe a bit shaken.”
“She’s . . .” O’Neill said on a rising note of question. “Oh, thank God.” Then he added, “Vickers? I saw them right here in broad daylight. They’re not ghosts or dreams, they’re
real.”
“I saw them too,” Vickers said. He cut the last cord. “They don’t mean any harm. I guess in their terms, what happened in the forest was just the cost of doing business. There isn’t always time for mercy.”
Nikisastro’s henchmen had pulled the nylon rope almost tourniquet tight. Though, from their standpoint, O’Neill was probably lucky they hadn’t shot him out of hand when he landed in the middle of the operation to harangue them.
Vickers looked around at the strip of road through what had been virgin forest. For the first time, he
saw
the devastation logging caused. Louise was walking cautiously toward the pickup.
“Maybe they are ghosts,” Vickers said softly. “Wherever it is they come from sure as hell isn’t worth having. I think they’re trying to keep other places from going the same way.”
O’Neill pulled himself into a sitting position, using his elbows because his hands wouldn’t grip properly. He clenched and opened his fists, working life back into his fingers. “Louise,” he said, “what do we do now?”
“Now,” Vickers interrupted, “we use a bulldozer and log chains to drag your tyrannosaurus into a cargo sling. Louise says you can fly anything, O’Neill. Can you fly that blimp over there?”
“The aerostat?” O’Neill said, following the direction of Vickers’ nod. He interlaced his fingers and bent them outward against the opposite hands. The rope marks stood out red and raw, but the blood supply hadn’t been cut off long enough to do nerve damage. “Yeah, I can do that. So we fly the tyrannosaur back to the compound?”
O’Neill stood up in the truck box. He swayed slightly but kept his balance.
“That’s right,” Vickers agreed. “Louise, let’s get going. I’ve driven a Cat, but it’ll take more than one set of hands with the log chain.”
“Are you sure they’re going to let us borrow their aerostat, Henry?” Louise asked as she fell into step alongside Vickers, headed toward the idling bulldozer.
“Oh, I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” Vickers said, his tone as thin as a knife edge. He stripped the partial magazine from his Garand and replaced it with a full one. He carried the weapon in his hands instead of reslinging it.
“The other thing I want you to do . . .” he added, his voice human again, “is to dump the last hour of data from your floater’s link to the world media. There’s no way to cover up about the tyrannosaur now, so don’t even try. When everybody’s evening news is full of a dinosaur in the middle of Borneo, there’ll be so many Western reporters around here that your Javan friends won’t
dare
play games.”
Vickers set one foot on the bulldozer’s bogey coupler, paused, and swung himself up into the cab. He’d be fine so long as he didn’t overdraw on his slight remaining reserves of strength.
Behind him, Louise sucked in her breath with a sharp hiss. “Henry,” she said.
“Henry.”
He turned, the rifle’s butt rising smoothly toward his shoulder; then he relaxed. The three slender humanoids hung in ruddy light above the comatose tyrannosaur. Their slim-boned left arms lifted together.
“It’s all right, Louise,” Vickers said. “They’re just waving goodbye.”
CALIBRATION RUN
The sabertooth sprang from cover just as Vickers bent to pick up the partridge he had shot. Holgar Nilson had been dynamiting rock samples a hundred yards away. He shouted as he leveled his Mauser. The blond Nilson would have had an easy shot—except that Vickers’ own body blocked the Mauser’s line of fire.
The thud of the cat’s paws crossing to leap again warned Vickers an instant in advance of Nilson’s cry. The sandy-haired guide was holding his shotgun at the balance, not ready to fire—and not that birdshot would have affected the 500-pound killer.
The cat swung down its lower jaw, locking out of the way everything extraneous to stabbing with its six-inch upper canines, as it made its third and final leap. Its bared palate was white as bone.
Vickers flung himself backwards, trying desperately to raise the shotgun. The sabertooth’s hide was mottled brown on black, its belly cream. As it sprang, its forelegs splayed and the ten black claws shot out of the pads. Every tense muscle of the cat’s body quivered in the air. Its weight slammed Vickers’ torso against the stony ground while the blast of Nilson’s rifle rumbled about them.
The cat’s eyes were a hand’s breadth from Vickers’ face as they glazed and the life went out of them. A shudder arched the creature’s back, rocking the serrated fangs downward. Vickers screamed but the points were not piercing his chest, only compressing it, and the thrust itself was a dying reflex. Blood had been spurting from the cat’s throat where the Brenneke bullet had entered. Now the nostrils drooled blood as well and the cat’s muscles went limp.
Holgar Nilson ran to the linked bodies, cursing in Norwegian. Vickers could not breathe. The carcass sagged over him like a bag of rice, pinning him so tightly that he could not move his index finger enough to put the shotgun on safe. The weapon was pressing against his right leg. It would blow his foot off if it fired now. Nilson tugged at the sabertooth ineffectively, his panic little less than that of his partner trapped under the cat. The big Norwegian was waving his Mauser one-handed while his eyes scanned the brush in quick arcs. “There was another one,” he gasped, “the male. But it ran off when I fired.”
“Here, let me help,” said Linda Weil, dropping the first-aid kit to seize one of the sabertooth’s fangs. The curved inner edges of the teeth could shear flesh with all the cat’s brutal strength behind them, but they did not approximate real knife blades. In any case, the fangs were the only handholds available on the slack carcass. Weil was a short, broad-hipped woman. She twisted, using the thrust of her legs against the passive weight of the sabertooth. The great brown-and-black body slumped away fluidly; its haunches still covered Vickers’ calves. Nilson stopped groping blindly and looked down. He gripped a clawed foot and rotated the cat’s hindquarters away from his partner.
Vickers was sucking deep breaths. His face and tunic front were covered with blood. He put the shotgun on safe and cocked an arm behind him to help him rise.
“No, no,” said the dark-haired woman, touching the guide’s shoulder with a restraining hand. “Just wait—”
Vickers lurched upright into a sitting position. “I’m all right,” he wheezed. Then, “It was my fault. It was all my fault.”
“The buckle,” said Nilson. “Look at your pack buckle.” The Norwegian’s composure was returning. His left index finger touched one strap of the pack Vickers had been wearing to hold small specimens. The steel buckle was warped like foil against its padding where it had blocked the thrust of the sabertooth’s fang. The brushing contact of Nilson’s finger caused pain to stab Vickers.
“Damn,” muttered the older guide as Linda Weil helped him off with the empty pack and unbuttoned his tunic. The blood that sprayed Vickers was the cat’s, but he knew from the pain that he might well have a cracked rib of his own. The female paleontologist’s fingers were cool and expert. She had been chosen as an on-site investigator for the Time Intrusion Project as much for her three years of medical school as for her excellent series of digs in the Sinai with a University of Chicago team.
A square mark larger than the buckle’s edges was stamped in white above Vickers’ left nipple. “I don’t hear anything grating,” Weil said. “We’ll strap it. Maybe when we get back to Tel Aviv they’ll want to drain the hematoma.”
“It was waiting for me like I was a goddamn antelope,” Vickers said. He was a stocky man of thirty-five who usually looked as calm as a fireplug. Now he rubbed the back of his hand over the sockets of his pale eyes, smearing the splotches of tacky blood. “Holgar,” he said, “I wasn’t ready. I wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell except for you.”
“Holgar, we’ll want the skull and limbs of this macheirodont when you have a chance,” said Linda Weil, pointing toward the sabertooth as she stood. She looked back at Vickers before she continued, “And frankly, I think that if anyone’s error can be said to have led to this—problem, near disaster—it was mine. Both of you are used to animals that’ve had hundreds of thousands of years to learn to fear man. That’s not the case here. As you said, Henry, we’re just meat on the hoof so far as the bigger carnivores here are concerned.
I’m
the one who should have realized that.”
Vickers sighed and stood up carefully. He walked over to the spur-legged partridge, ten feet away where he had dropped it when the cat struck. Raising the heavy bird, he gestured with it to Weil. “It’s a francolin like the one we got in the snare two days ago,” he said. “I thought I’d roast it for dinner instead of keeping it for a specimen.”
The dark-haired paleontologist nodded back. “After I get you bandaged,” she agreed. “I think we could all do with a meal and a chance to relax.”
# # #
Hyenas had already begun to call in the sullen dusk. Time spent in the African bush gave the ugly, rhythmic laughter a homely sound to the pair of guides, but Linda Weil shuddered with distaste.
Holgar Nilson laughed. He patted the paleontologist on the thigh with a greasy hand. “They are only predators like ourselves,” he said. “Perhaps we should invite them to join us for dinner one night, yes? We have so much in common.”
Weil switched the francolin drumstick to her left hand and squeezed Nilson against her thigh with her right. “I don’t question their right to exist,” the woman said. “It’s just that I don’t like them.” She frowned, scientist again. “We could use a specimen, though. There’s a good enough series of hyena fossils known Topside that fresh examples ought to be more datable than most of what we’ve gathered.”
“You know,” said Vickers, speaking in a conscious effort to break out of the shell of depression that surrounded him, “I’ve never quite understood what use the specimens we bring back were going to be. For dating, that is. I mean, taking radiation levels from the igneous rocks should give them the time within a few thousand years. And if I understand the Zeiss—” he gestured with his thumb—“its photographs ought to be down to the minute when they’re compared to computer models of star and planet positions.”
The 200mm reflector bolted to the intrusion vehicle was lost in the darkness, as was the normal purr of the motor drive that rotated it by microns along the plane of the ecliptic. As Vickers gestured, the mechanism gave one of its rare clicks, signaling the end of an exposure as the telescope reset itself to lock on another portion of sky. The click might have been that of a grenade arming for the level of response it drew from Holgar Nilson, though the younger guide kept the edges of his anger sheathed in bluff camaraderie. “Come, come,” he said, “machines fail. Anyway, the sky could have been overcast for months, for years, for all they knew Topside. And for the rock dating to work, they must compare the samples we bring back with samples from the same rock a million years in the future. How are they to be sure of that, hey? When they only
think
so far we are inserted into the same place, with latitude and longitude changing as the continents move.”
Vickers nodded, realizing why his partner reacted so defensively. “Sure,” he said, “and the more cross-checks, the better. And I suppose the astronomical data is going to be easier to correlate if they’ve got a fair notion of where to start.”
“Besides,” said Linda Weil harshly, “I don’t think anyone quite realized how useless anything I came back with would be for the intended purpose. Oh, it’ll have use—we’ve enormously expanded human knowledge of Pliocene life-forms, but as you say, Henry, for dating—”
She paused, looking out over the twilit hills. They had been fortunate in that their intrusion vehicle, an angular block of plates and girders, had been inserted onto high ground. During daylight they had a good view over the brush and acacias, the short grass and the beasts that lived there. Now the shadows of the trees and outcrops had merged with the greater shadow of the horizon, and the landscape was melding into a velvet blur. “The whole problem,” Weil said toward the darkness, “is that we’ve got an embarrassment of riches. Before—when I was Topside—a femur was as much as you were likely to get to identify an animal, and a complete skull was a treasure. We decided what the prehistoric biomass looked like by reconstructing a few fragments here, a few fragments there . . .” She chuckled ruefully and looked back at her male companions. “And here we are, in the middle of thousands and thousands of animals, somewhere in the past I’ve been studying for years . . . and I’m nowhere near being able to accurately place the time into which we’ve been inserted, the way I’ve been hired to do—because I can’t swear that a single species is one that we ‘know’ from fossils. I feel as if I’ve spent my working life throwing darts at a map and convincing myself that I’ve travelled to the places the darts hit.”
“Well, you’ve travelled here, for certain,” said the blond man, “and
I
at least am glad of it.” He raised his hand to Weil’s shoulder and tried to guide the woman closer to him for a kiss.
“Holgar . . .” the woman objected in a low voice, leaning free of the big hand’s pressure.
“I’ll get a couple hyenas tomorrow,” Vickers said morosely. The fire he stared at glinted from his face where grease from the bird smeared him. “Unless I screw up again, at least. Christ, Holgar, maybe I’d have been better off if you were a second slower with your shot. Hunting’s about the one thing I’d decided I could handle. If I’m no good for that either, then I may as well be a cat’s dinner.” Unwatched, the shorter guide’s hands turned and turned again the section of francolin ribs from which he had gnawed only half the flesh.
Nilson looked disconcerted. He lowered his hand from the paleontologist’s back and resumed attacking his meal. Absently, Vickers wished that one of the three of them had had the skill to make gravy to go with the mashed potatoes, which were freeze-dried and reconstituted.
“Ah, Henry,” said Linda Weil, “I think that’s just shock talking. You aren’t incompetent because of one mistake—it’s the mistakes that make us human. The planning for this, this expedition, was mostly yours; and everything’s gone very well. Except that all I can really say about the time we’re at is that we’re a great deal farther back than the round million years they intended to send us.”
“You see, Henry,” Nilson said, “what you need is a wife.” The Norwegian gestured with the fork he had just cleared of its load of canned peas. “You have no calm center to your life. Wherever I go, I know that my Mary is there in Pretoria, my children are growing—Oskar, Olaf, and little Kristin . . . do you see? That is what you need.”
Vickers looked at the bigger man. Nilson had jarred him out of his depression as Linda Weil had been unable to do with her encouragement. The paleontologist’s complexion was dark, but it was no trick of the firelight that led Vickers to see a blush on her face. She looked down at her hands. “Maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong places,” Vickers said dryly. “Your wife is British, if I remember?”
Nilson nodded vigorously as he chewed another mouthful of peas.
“Both of mine were Americans,” the older guide said. “Maybe that’s where I went wrong.” He turned his face toward the night. His profile was as sharp and thin as a half-worn knife. “The sporting goods store I tried to manage was in Duluth,” he continued, “and the ranch was in Rhodesia. But I could hunt, that I could do. Well.” He looked at Weil again. In a normal voice he added, “Well, I still can. I’ll get you a hyena in the morning.”
“Actually,” said Weil, visibly glad of the change of subject, “what concerns me more is that something’s raiding our box traps. Several of those to the west had the lids sprung when I checked them this morning. The rest were empty. Probably
was
a hyena; I don’t think a mongoose would be strong enough. But apart from being interested in whatever’s doing it, I’d like to have the damage stopped.”
“We could lay a sensor from the intrusion alarm under one of the traps,” Holgar said. His enthusiasm rang a little false. It was a reaction to the embarrassment he finally had realized that his earlier comment had caused. “Sleep close with the shotgun.”
“I’ve got a three-bead night sight on the Garand,” Vickers said, the problem reflecting his mind away from the depression that had been smothering him. “I can sandbag the gun and the spotlight a hundred yards away. That ought to be far enough we won’t disturb whatever it is.” He frowned and turned to Linda Weil. “Thing is, I can’t make sure of something at night unless I give it a head shot or use soft points that’ll blow the body apart if it’s small. What’s your preference?”
The paleontologist waved the question away. “Save the skull if you can,” she said. “But—we’ve just seen how dangerous the predators here—now, that is—can be. Are you going to disconnect the warning system around us?”
“Just move one pick-up,” Nilson said with a laugh. His left fingertips caressed Weil’s cheek playfully. “Otherwise you might get a closer and sooner view of a hyena than you expected, no? And what a waste that would be.”
Vickers noticed that his hands were still trembling. Just as well the administrators Topside hadn’t permitted any liquor among the supplies, he thought. Though usually it wouldn’t have mattered to him one way or the other. “It’s all right,” he said aloud. “I probably won’t be sleeping much tonight anyway. Holgar, let’s rig something now while there’s still enough daylight to work with.”