She smiled to think of how easily an abortion-clinic protest could be dispersed if she just let a dinosaur out among the religious nuts.
It might solve one of her largest problems. The fact that political discourse was getting more and more polarized in the US as protests flared and people refused to compromise worked to her favor. In fact, she financed an important meme farm to heighten the childish behavior of random Americans on both sides of the divide.
Unfortunately, she had a problem. To really bring things to a flashpoint, one needed victims. Gun victims, for political reasons, were used differently from what she wanted. They were used to call attention to Second Amendment rights, and that wasn’t what she wanted. She needed chaos and confusion, not prepared sound bites. You couldn’t shoot protesters with automatic rifles or your intentions would immediately be lost in the subsequent shitshow.
But if these people were for real, then she would definitely have confusion. The Buddha had given her an email address.
Krista typed: Send me a quote for a T-Rex. My one condition is that they have to deliver it, in a van, to Portland, Oregon. I will need to keep the van, so include it in the price.
She imagined it wouldn’t be cheap. Getting something like that into the country would likely be a nightmare, unless they could find a way to grow the thing here.
Money was no object, however. She could afford whatever they wanted for something that perfect.
Krista looked out over her manicured lawn and sighed. There would be upheaval, of course. Good people would suffer. But it was the only way to tear down the corrupt capitalist society they lived in and create something better.
In the long run, people would understand. They’d thank her.
***
As he died, Luca shook his head. It was hard to concentrate in this body. The only reason he hadn’t gone completely insane already was that he had plenty of experience in transferring from one mind to another.
Of course, that bastard agent of his had promised to delete all the copies of his mind immediately when the transfer was finished. The man had obviously lied through his teeth.
Unsurprising. The business of transferring minds was illegal in every country that suspected it could be done, and would be made illegal everywhere else when governments decided it wasn’t just science fiction. It wasn’t a line of work that attracted honest people.
Except for Luca himself. His entire reputation was based on being the foremost straight shooter in the industry. Discreet and effective, he got client after client.
Of course, his actual service was a little less than exotic. He transferred into a client’s mind for a few months and got their bodies in shape. It was incredible how much people would pay to look like an Olympic athlete without any of the suffering and hard work normally involved in that kind of transformation.
It allowed Luca to live like a king.
Correction, it allowed the real Luca to live like a king. A copy that no one knew existed could apparently be used for whatever anyone wanted to do with it, including dumping it into the weirdly wired brain of a huge chickensaurus.
He wondered what the real Luca was doing. Probably spending his millions on a beach in the South of France.
He roared. In a human body, it would have been a scream of frustration. He couldn’t think right. Sometimes, such as when the woman spoke, he could barely make out her words, and while he was listening, everything else disappeared: he couldn’t think of anything else, certainly couldn’t remember who he’d been.
Worse, even when things were relaxed, he wasn’t quite himself. For example, he couldn’t recall, no matter how hard he tried, what job he’d been on when this copy had been made.
He remembered only snatches of faces. A woman. The name Romina floated around her. A vague sense of New York. That was it. Other stuff seemed to be missing, too, but he really couldn’t put his finger on it.
And when the woman ordered him—several copies of him, it seemed, but he couldn’t manage to count them, numbers were impossible in this head—to attack, he just blanked out and went. The body took over, and all he could remember from the charge were vague sensations. Grass. Sunlight. Food in the shape of a mammal.
Then he heard a sharp crack and felt pain, a pain that overwhelmed everything else. The pain of impending death.
Now he couldn’t move the body at all. One of his eyes still saw the grass as he lay on his side. The other was under his head.
Perhaps it was for the best. This mind they’d transferred him to was stifling. It took all his discipline just to keep from losing his grip completely.
It felt… it felt almost like being trapped inside a box just slightly larger than he was. The box allowed movement, but you could only move one thing at a time. So you could scratch your nose, but only if you wedged yourself into a position that allowed nothing else to move.
That was the way this brain felt.
At least now there were few calls to use it. He was too weak to move, so balancing the unusual shape of his body was no longer a problem. No one was yelling orders at him, and he didn’t have to charge at armed enemies. Hell, the sounds outside his immediate sphere were irrelevant to him; he was dying. The shooting went on while he ignored it.
That let him think more clearly than at any time since he’d been downloaded into this body.
As his blood drained onto the ground and the limited consciousness of this form allowed him a bit of thought, he realized that he was relieved.
The brain he was locked inside didn’t allow him to feel surprise at that, and even acceptance was a difficult concept.
Death was less complicated for him: one moment he was, the next he wasn’t.
***
Marianne stopped. “Did you hear that?”
“Gunfire,” Max replied. “From the village.”
“Why would they be shooting?”
“Because the whole place is infested with enormous monsters that enjoy eating human flesh? That’s always a good bet. But that means they’ll be retreating back this way. We should move.”
Max jogged in the direction of the helicopter, and Vasily ran up beside him. “Those aren’t all AK-47s,” he said.
“I know,” Max replied in Russian to keep Marianne from understanding. “There’s something else going on, and I want no part of it. We should just grab a chopper and get the hell out of here.”
“Where are you going to take it?”
“Back to base. I’ll take my chances with the CO. He hates the witch woman more than most.”
“But not more than you.”
“I think she killed my brother.”
“What if the colonel won’t help?”
“Then we shoot our way out and run for it. The Kazakh border is a couple of hours away.”
“Why not take the chopper directly?”
“Because I want to at least try to get some justice for Yevgeny.”
Vasily said nothing more.
They went slower than Max would have liked; Marianne wasn’t particularly fast. They might have actually made better time if they’d carried her, but any net gain in speed would have been nullified by the inevitable argument.
It would be fine, though. He checked behind him near-obsessively, but there was no sign of Sun-Lee or of whoever was shooting at him. The helicopters, safely nested on the tarmac of the launch area, were less than half a click away. Even at Marianne’s speed, they’d be there in three minutes.
The earth shook beneath him and knocked Max to the ground while Vasily spilled beside him and Marianne behind.
He looked up to see the helicopters disappear as the cement collapsed into the earth below. The grinding shriek of torn metal reached them an instant later, audible over the rumbling of… could it possibly be an earthquake? Was his luck actually that bad?
The shaking stopped as suddenly as it had started.
They got up and ran to the tarmac. Max could see a huge hole in the center and, since they had no bette
r ideas, they kept running to the edge. Only a second before they reached the hole did Max’s sixth sense trigger his danger instinct.
“Wait! Move back,” he said in Russian. “The hole. It’s a square. There’s no way that was caused by an earthquake. Get the girl and move away. I’m going to have a look.”
“Why not run?”
“If it’s a way out of here, I want to know about it.”
“And if it’s not?”
“We’re probably dead anyway. Now move.”
The fact that Vasily did as he was told was testament to how well his men had been trained. No one could possibly pretend that the regulations of the Russian Army still held sway. The action they were undertaking was strictly against other Russians, and yet none of his men had wavered at any point.
He just wished he could have seen them in action against Russia’s true enemies.
But that was the life of a soldier, particularly a special forces soldier. You played the hand you were dealt, and this time, someone had decided to pull monsters from the bottom of the deck.
He’d act accordingly.
The hole was twenty meters square, and the interior was brightly lit by the late morning sun.
What he saw resembled a collapse in a parking garage. The tarmac had fallen to reveal a structure built up in several levels. He counted six stories to the rubble-strewn floor. There was an entire complex down there, dust-covered desks visible in the darkness of the floors. Two mangled helicopters lay in the rubble, small tongues of flame licking one of them.
But there was also something else down there, something spider-like and black, with the tail of a scorpion and way too many legs. It was climbing, skittering up the side, pulling itself up floor by floor.
Only when it reached a level three floors below his feet did Max stop to take a measure of scale.
It was enormous. Easily six or seven meters across the central body, the tail was even longer than that. Each leg was as thick as his torso… and there were eight of them. Pincers that looked like those of a lobster blown up a hundred times snapped around columns to gain a climbing grip. No, not like those of a lobster. Like those of a scorpion. They shone chitinously.
Max stepped back, and then again. He stared down at the approaching angel of death and couldn’t move.
“Max!” Vasily shouted to him. “Is everything all right?”
That woke him from his trance. He turned and called back. “No! Get the hell out of here.”
“What about you?”
“I’m right behind you.”
And he was. He sprinted in the direction of his two companions. “Which way?” Vasily asked.
“Cover! Any kind of cover!”
They ran downhill toward the trees. When Max reached them, he didn’t even ask, and simply picked up Marianne in his stride and threw her over his shoulder. She weighed next to nothing.
He felt her take a breath, and almost grinned. He knew he was about to get an earful for treating her with less than complete dignity, but she screamed instead.
“What the hell is that?”
“You tell me,” he panted in reply. “I’m looking this way, remember.”
“It’s like a seriously fucked up spider.”
“Oh, that. Yeah. That’s what we’re running from.”
“It’s coming this way.”
He didn’t reply. He already knew that.
“Oh God, it’s too fast. We’re never going to make it!”
Max looked back. They’d had a hundred-meter head start, but that was already down to fifty. They would never get anywhere near the trees in time. The thing moved like a train, thundering on eight chitinous legs.
They were most definitely dead.
But he still kept running. What else could he do? Maybe it would grab one of them and ignore the others long enough for them to reach safety. Ideally they should split up… but that wouldn’t help. There was only one clump of trees anywhere nearby, and that was the one they were making for.
The creature halved the distance again, in seconds. Max could almost feel it at his back, pincers ready to slice through him.
The ground shook now with its proximity. Every instinct screamed that he should turn to see, but he knew that would slow him down.
“Run, Vasily,” he shouted. Unburdened by Marianne, Vasily could run much faster than he’d been going. The man had actually been matching Max’s pace. It was the bravest thing Max had ever seen, but now it was just foolhardy. He needed to sprint so at least one of them would survive.
The thing was so close now, he could actually see its shadow, and his burning legs were strained to breaking point.
Suddenly, the monster disappeared. Max didn’t see it, he felt it. The wind no longer fluttering at his back, the sun no longer blocked. For some reason, it had fallen back. He was almost too scared to ask Marianne what was going on.
“It turned to the left. It’s running that way,” the woman reported.
“Why?” Max gasped. His lungs felt like they wanted to jump through his chest.
“I think it saw one of the dinosaurs, a big one. Over there.” He felt her pointing but didn’t turn to look. The trees were just a couple of hundred meters ahead. He’d look around once he reached them.
When he arrived, he fell to his knees, spilling Marianne into the dead leaves on the floor. He gasped for a minute before he could move again, all the while listening to Vasily and Marianne’s running commentary.
“It’s going for that little one,” Vasily reported in Russian.
“I think it’s trying to reach the big one. What did Ronnie call it? Oh yeah. The diplodocus,” Marianne said in English.
“Oh, it went for the big one in the end. The big one sees it. It’s turning to face it.”
Max staggered to his feet and leaned on a tree beside them. They should probably concentrate on moving further into the woods, but the scene presented by the two monsters was too compelling to look away from.
The shiny black thing, insect-like and menacing, had stepped up to the diplodocus, dwarfed by the enormous herbivorous dinosaur. Even at this distance, Max thought one strike of a reptilian leg would tear the black monster a new asshole, or at least severely dent the armor.
The diplodocus advanced with a roar that reached them several seconds later.
The black monster held its ground and, as soon as the dinosaur was in range, reached out with a pincer.
Blood spurted from the diplodocus’ chest, a great fountain.
Now wounded, the dinosaur went berserk. Rearing like a horse, it tried to come down on the spider-scorpion thing with both feet at once, but the insect monster was much too quick. It danced out of the way and snipped when it could.
The diplodocus kicked out with one leg. It missed again. It paid the price again.
The battle continued for several minutes, the prehistoric monster on the offensive, the one that looked like it had sprung from the screen during a 1950s science fiction film defending… but so effectively that it was the one dishing out the pain. A blundering attack from the dinosaur would be met with a surgical strike from the huge claw.
Soon, the blood loss, gallons and gallons of it, told on the diplodocus and it became sluggish. During one attempt to crush the other creature with its front legs, it stumbled and its long neck hit the ground.
That was all the smaller monster needed. It struck the center of the dinosaur’s neck with a pincer and squeezed.
The neck was too big to sever, but the pincers cut through enough of it that Max knew the fight was over. The dinosaur tried to get up, but the energy just wasn’t there.
The spider-monster seemed to know as well. It moved back a couple of steps and waited for the dinosaur to collapse completely.
Then it began to feed.
***
Tatiana’s vantage point, a little higher up than Sun-Lee’s, gave her a clear view of the hill leading up to the helicopters. She saw the aircraft disappear and witnessed the chas
e, the soldiers’—and Marianne’s—narrow escape from a monster that could have come from an insane person’s worst nightmare.
She had no idea how Marianne could have suddenly popped up again, but it was a measure of her respect for the other reporter’s resourcefulness that Tatiana was unsurprised.
She wanted to call out to Marianne, to tell her to climb up with them, but just didn’t dare. That thing might hear them, and if it did, they would die. She had no doubt about it. There could be no escape. The monster was death, immediate, painful death. No human power could save them once it knew they were there.
So she remained silent as the other group entered the woods, only whispering to Sun-Lee. “Did you see it?”
“No, what was it?”
“A monster.”
“One of the dinosaurs?”
“No, something else. Something awful, too awful to describe, like a huge bug.”
To her astonishment, Sun-Lee smiled. “Well, that was quick. It must have been truly itching to get out. I suppose one can’t blame it. It’s been locked up for five months.”
“You knew about that thing?”
He suddenly started as if realizing for the first time that he was talking to someone else. He stared into her eyes for a moment and then nodded. “Yes. I knew about it. It’s the culmination of the atrocities they are storing here.”
“They can build those things?”
“No. Not really. Not here, anyway. The monster you saw was produced by a Frenchman called Philippe. No one really knows his last name because he never uses it. He doesn’t use Philippe, either, but he’ll admit to it if someone knows who he is.”
“Is he working for the Russians, too?”
“Philippe? No... Philippe works for his own amusement. Or maybe he does it out of a belief that science should move forward unchecked by the morality of its day, that science is above ethics in the same way the weather is. He is an idealist, and the people he has most contempt for are those who try to stop him from researching anything he likes.” He paused for a moment. “And what he likes to research is the extreme bleeding edge of what we can create with today’s gene-editing tools. Moreover, he works with human genes, something that even the Russians would never attempt. He created the monster you saw.”
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