Day of the Predator tr-2

by Alex Scarrow

  Maddy nodded. ‘Can we filter that any further?’

  › Affirmative. 219 were single-incursion events. Of the remaining eight density signatures that demonstrated a repeated incursion, only one demonstrated a regularly timed signature.

  Sal bit her lip with excitement. ‘That’s it! Surely? That’s got to be it!’

  › Affirmative, Sal. There is a high probability that this is the correct time-stamp.

  ‘YES!’ said Maddy, spinning round in her chair, her hand raised for a high-five. Sal obliged with a hearty slap and a shriek of excitement.

  Cartwright smiled. ‘I presume that means you’ve found your friend?’

  ‘Yes… see?’ Maddy grinned proudly. ‘I told you we could do it!’

  ‘So then… what happens now?’

  She spun back to face the monitors in front of her. ‘Bob? We’re good to begin charging up to open a portal?’

  › Information: we have a 24-hour time period identified in which to open a window.

  ‘Hmm.’ Maddy pulled absently on her top lip. ‘Twenty-four hours. But when exactly do we open it?’

  Cartwright looked vexed and impatient.

  ‘We have to be sure they’re there, right?’ said Sal on Maddy’s behalf. ‘You know? Before we commit to opening a portal. If we spend the stored charge and they’re not there, we’ve gone and wasted it.’

  Maddy nodded. ‘We’ll only have enough stored energy to open one, maybe two windows. How do we make sure they’re actually right there and ready and waiting to come through, though?’

  ‘Hang on!’ cut in Cartwright. ‘You just said “they”. Are you telling me there’s more than just your friend stuck back there?’

  Sal nodded. ‘Yes, Liam… and some others… children that were caught up in an accident.’

  ‘Good God,’ the old man whispered. ‘Accident? This was an accident? What the heck have you people been up to?’

  ‘It was a training incident,’ cut in Sal, ‘that’s all. It went wrong. These things happen from time to time.’

  › Information: it will be possible to open a series of pinhole windows and obtain a small-resolution image of the target location.

  ‘Right.’ Maddy nodded. ‘Right… then we could see exactly when — during the day — there’s somebody standing around. Yes… yes, good idea, Bob. Let’s proceed with that.’

  › Affirmative.

  Cartwright sighed. ‘So what’s happening now?’ Clearly impatient to see the displacement machine actually finally running.

  Maddy turned to look over her shoulder. ‘We’re taking some images of the portal location to make sure that when we open the window they’re ready and waiting to come through.’

  ‘Why don’t you just open your portal and see for yourself?’

  ‘Sal just explained that. We could be wasting a full power-up, and we can’t risk doing that.’ Maddy shrugged. ‘Anyway, wouldn’t you want to check first? This is the Cretaceous era, right? That means dinosaurs. I’d want to know the coast is clear of T-rexes first. Don’t you?’

  The old man glanced at Forby and the man shook his head quickly. ‘Taking a few photos first sounds like a pretty good move to me, sir.’

  Cartwright laughed nervously. ‘Uh, I guess you’re right. OK… we’ll do it your way. Just get a move on before those hunters down the beach find a railway arch in the middle of their jungle.’

  CHAPTER 68

  65 million years BC, jungle

  The three girls had revived the smouldering fire; the dried brittle moss that seemed to carpet every boulder and rock made perfect kindling and already a thick column of smoke was drifting up into the evening sky.

  Liam felt a little happier now. Fire had seemed to keep those creatures at bay during the last few nights that they’d been out on their errand. They seemed to have a healthy respect for it — actually, to be more precise, a morbid fear of it.

  He looked up across the twilit clearing. It had got dark very quickly. He wondered how the others were doing with Keisha. Surely they must have found her by now? If those pack hunters really had felled that tree and made their way across, then he was surprised they’d allowed her to live.

  He was considering that point when he heard two sounds at the same time: one a far-off scream, shrill and terrifying that rattled around the clearing like a gunshot, and the other the sound of approaching trainers slapping the hard ground. He exchanged a hurried glance with the girls, and with Becks as she stopped fiddling with their damaged windmill and snapped erect like a spooked meerkat.

  ‘Help!’ He heard Edward’s voice through the gathering gloom, and then a moment later picked out of that gloom the dancing outline of his pale T-shirt.

  ‘Edward! What’s up?’

  The boy joined him, gasping and looking anxiously back over his shoulder. ‘They’re h-here! THEY’RE HERE!’

  Liam followed his gaze and saw nothing across the clearing, just the dark outline of the apron of jungle. ‘Where are the others?’

  The boy ignored his question, his eyes wide with terror. ‘Th-they’re h-here, they’re h-here!’

  Liam grasped his arm firmly. ‘EDWARD! What about the others?’

  The boy looked at him. ‘Dead,’ he replied. ‘All dead.’

  ‘Oh God, look!’ gasped Laura.

  She was pointing across the clearing. Where a mere second ago he’d seen only jungle, now he saw a line of the creatures approaching them cautiously, spreading out like beaters for a hunting party. He quickly estimated thirty, maybe forty, of them; all sizes.

  The whole pack… Jay-zus!

  In the middle of the line, he thought he recognized one of them in particular. The one he’d seen in the jungle, barking orders to the others, their leader.

  ‘Liam,’ said Becks, stepping back from the windmill to join him and the others near the smoking fire, now beginning to take hold and crackle and spark. ‘Do you see the middle one?’

  He knew what she was referring to. The one in the middle, the pack leader, was holding one of their spears in its claws. He nodded.

  ‘Like my adaptive AI,’ she continued, ‘the species has observed our behaviour and learned from it.’

  He swallowed nervously. ‘Back to the palisade… we need to go now!’

  ‘Negative, I must stay.’

  ‘What?’ He looked at her.

  ‘This location has been probed in the last twenty-four hours.’ She nodded towards their broken windmill. ‘There are decaying particles in the vicinity of the interference device. They may scan again at any moment.’

  She was right, of course. Utterly barking mad, but quite right.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he uttered, watching the approaching hominids closing the gap slowly. ‘You four,’ he said to the others, ‘get inside the wall and wait there!’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Edward.

  He really had no idea just then… some notion of holding out beside the campfire, back to back with Becks until… until… what?

  Until they’ve finally worn her down, and jump her. Then turn on me.

  But, there was a slight chance, wasn’t there? A slight chance Maddy and Sal were going to sweep this place again at any moment. And, if they did, this might be their last chance to flag the signal, to tell them they were right here. The alternative, hiding inside their flimsy palisade until these creatures finally managed to gnaw their way through the twine, pull aside a couple of the logs from the wall and get in… He shuddered.

  ‘There’s a return window coming,’ he said. ‘It’s coming soon! Becks and me need to be out here waiting for it. You four will be safer inside. I’ll call for you when it opens. Now just go!’

  ‘I want to stay,’ said Edward, picking up one of their hatchets from a pile of cut wood beside the fire. The other three nodded. ‘We’ll f-fight them t-together,’ whispered Laura, her teeth chattering noisily.

  Jasmine looked across at the palisade, twenty yards away beyond the flickering pool of light fr
om the fire. ‘They’ll find a way in anyway.’

  Liam looked at the creatures, now almost entirely encircling them, maintaining their cautious distance. ‘All right. Perhaps you’re right,’ he uttered. ‘Becks, how’re we gonna do this?’

  ‘Recommendation: I need to be in the vicinity of the interference device in order to detect any precursor particles arriving.’

  Liam nodded. ‘Yes… yes. R-right. We should hold the ground over there.’ He reached down towards the fire and pulled out a branch. The end of it flickered with flames. ‘Everyone grab a torch. They don’t like fire!’

  The others followed suit. Then moved together in a tight huddle, away from the reassuring glow of the campfire towards their contraption, a dozen yards beyond the growing pall of amber firelight.

  The creatures followed them, silently padding across the soft ground, watching them, and ever so subtly closing the distance around them.

  ‘YOU BACK OFF!’ screamed Laura at them, waving her flaming stick.

  The creatures hissed, warbled and mewed at that, one of the smaller ones attempting a copy of her shaking voice.

  ‘… Yoo… bak… offfff…’

  Becks turned to Liam. ‘This location has just been scanned again. There are several hundred new particles.’

  Liam felt a surge of hope. ‘Oh, c’mon! Why don’t they just get on with it and open a bleedin’ window?’

  Becks cocked her head. She had no answer.

  All of a sudden, the creature holding the spear barked in a croaky voice and, as one, the creatures surged forward towards them.

  ‘Oh my God! Oh my God! screamed Laura.

  ‘Recommendation: use your spears to — ’

  CHAPTER 69

  2001, New York

  The best part of an hour passed in silence with Maddy, Sal and Cartwright gathered around the monitors watching a progress bar slowly inch across one of the screens, and an empty directory slowly fill with low-resolution JPG files.

  Forby meanwhile stood beside the doorway, cranked up a couple of feet, gazing at the jungle world outside. ‘They’re still hunting those beach pigs or whatever those things are,’ he called out softly.

  ‘Good,’ replied Cartwright absently. ‘How much longer?’

  Maddy shrugged. ‘You can see the progress bar yourself, can’t you? It’s nearly there.’

  The old man made a face. ‘If it’s anything like the Windows I got at home, nearly there can mean another five minutes or another five hours.’

  ‘This is an operating system from sometime in the 2050s,’ said Maddy. ‘It sure ain’t gonna be Windows.’

  The progress bar suddenly lurched forward to a hundred per cent and Bob’s dialogue box appeared.

  › Process complete.

  ‘Bob, can you do some sort of slideshow?’

  › Affirmative. Images are taken one every five minutes.

  A monitor to the left of them flickered to life, revealing a small pixelated image of green and blue.

  Maddy squinted at the image. ‘What is that?’

  ‘Jungle,’ said Sal. ‘That’s what it is. Jungle and some sky.’

  Forby joined them around the desk. ‘Yeah… that’s a jungle, I think.’

  A second image appeared, almost identical to the first, a couple of pixel blocks had changed tone slightly. ‘Is this as clear as the images get?’ asked Cartwright.

  › Affirmative. The pinhole and image data size has been kept to a minimum to conserve on energy consumption.

  ‘All we need is to see enough pixels change to indicate something moving around the area, right?’ said Sal.

  › Correct, Sal.

  ‘Can you play through these slides a little faster, please, Bob?’

  › Affirmative, Maddy. Increasing display rate times ten.

  The next slide came up, just the same as the last, and another, an undecipherable flicker show of green and blue pixels. They watched in silence until approximately midway through the complexion of the image suddenly changed with a mass of dark pixels.

  ‘Whoa! Stop!’ said Maddy. She studied the shape on-screen. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That looks like a person,’ said Forby. ‘See? That’s a shoulder and an arm.’

  Sal cocked her head and frowned. ‘It doesn’t look right.’

  ‘What time in their day is this image, Bob?’

  › 14:35.

  ‘Half past two in the afternoon,’ said Sal.

  ‘Give us the next image, Bob.’

  Another dark image appeared on-screen, the blue pixels of sky and green of jungle almost entirely gone.

  ‘Somebody standing right in the middle of the portal location… for about five minutes,’ mumbled Maddy to herself. She looked at Sal. ‘That’s got to be the support unit? She’s sensed a tachyon particle and she’s hanging around for another?’

  Sal shook her head. ‘Maybe… but the shape of the body looks all kind of funny to me.’

  ‘Oh, come on, it’s a one hundred by one hundred pixel image — everything’s going to look all funny.’

  She shook her head again. ‘I’m not sure. It could be anything… it could be some animal.’

  ‘Bob, next image.’

  Another image flickered up and this time the dark mass of pixels was gone, leaving the image the same even mix of blue and green squares.

  Maddy grabbed a pen from the desk and scribbled the time of 14:35 on a scrap of paper. ‘Well, OK, we know someone was hanging around then. We’ve got one possible window. Let’s get on with the slideshow and see what else we get.’

  Once more the images began to flicker on-screen one after another, a second apart, the blue pixels of the sky slowly changing hue from bright blue to a rose colour.

  ‘It’s evening,’ said Cartwright helpfully.

  The sequence continued, with the sky pixels slowly reddening in colour, and the jungle’s light green becoming a deeper darker green, until all of a sudden, in the middle of the image, they saw a single dot of bright orange.

  ‘Stop!’

  All four of them craned forward to get a better look.

  ‘That’s fire, isn’t it?’ said Forby. ‘A flame?’

  Sal nodded. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Someone starting a campfire maybe?’

  ‘Fire… right,’ uttered Cartwright, ‘and the only thing that can make a fire back then is going to be human.’

  Maddy tapped her chin thoughtfully. ‘Yup… so maybe this is a more reliable candidate than the other. What time is this image, Bob?’

  › 18:15.

  ‘Give me the next image.’

  The orange pixel became a dozen pixels, and half the screen was filled by a vertical block of black pixels. In the top left corner, they could just make out the sky, the pink evening becoming a deep purple with the onset of dusk.

  ‘Someone’s standing right there again!’

  ‘And that thing doesn’t look as weird as the earlier one,’ said Sal.

  Maddy looked at her. ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘Screw up your eyes a bit, Maddy… it sort of blurs the pixels slightly. You can make out shapes more easily.’

  ‘A campfire and someone standing right there,’ said Cartwright. ‘Looks like the best time so far.’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied absently. ‘What do you think, Bob?’

  › This image looks most probable.

  ‘Quickly run through the rest.’

  The slideshow flickered through the last sixty-eight images, one image per second. A juddering animation of time… the fire slowly dwindling, dying and vanishing, the sky darkening until the final few dozen images were simply a sequence of black pixels.

  › Sequence complete.

  ‘Looks like we have a winner,’ said Cartwright. ‘Can we now proceed?’ He looked up at Forby. ‘You know? Before those hunters come knocking on our door?’

  ‘OK… let’s begin powering up, Bob.’

  › Affirmative.

  Cartwright stood up straight, his ar
ms caressing a stiff back. ‘So

  … what happens next?’ He glanced at the large perspex tube. ‘They’re going to appear inside that?’

  She shook her head and pointed to a circle of chalk scrawled across the concrete floor. ‘There. You and Forby need to stand well clear of that.’

  Cartwright’s man stepped away from the table and faced the circle, unslinging his assualt rifle in readiness.

  Maddy turned to regard both men. ‘I’d be happier if Mr Forby could take his finger off the trigger.’

  Cartwright smiled. ‘Of course.’ He nodded at his man. ‘You can stand down, Forby. But… just stay alert, all right?’

  Forby nodded, slackening his grip and lowering the barrel of his gun.

  CHAPTER 70

  65 million years BC, jungle

  Liam lashed out with his hatchet, swinging the serrated metal blade in one hand and probing and prodding with his bamboo spear in the other. But the creatures dodged back with graceful agility, keeping their eyes on the weapons.

  The fire nearby had taken a firm hold of the branches that had been thrown on top of it. Occasional tongues of flame lashed up into the almost dark sky, and upward cascades of sparks danced like fireflies. The flickering light, the warmth from the campfire and the dancing flames on the ends of their torches were causing the hominids’ probing attack to falter.

  ‘GO AWAY!’ screamed Laura, prodding the flaming end of her branch towards the nearest of them.

  Becks, meanwhile, had managed to kill one of them and severely wound another. She could move forward with the same sudden speed as these things, catching them off balance. The wounded creature, now thrashing around on the ground, had lost a limb to one vicious roundhouse sweep of her hatchet. The creature she’d managed to grasp hold of moments ago had had its fragile spine snapped over her knee.

  For her efforts she’d received a deep gash down one thigh. Her left leg was red with her own blood, soaking the sock rolled over the edge of her combat boot almost black. The wound was already clotting, but Liam couldn’t help notice how much blood she’d lost in that one sudden crimson gush and worried whether her engineered body was capable of replacing that blood with the same efficiency as it could staunch a wound.