by Jake Bible
“Yep,” Amanda replied.
“So what you’re really asking is how do we get him to stay behind at the FOB,” Cash said. “Because as soon as we’re out of sight, he’ll order some poor schmuck to get him an ATV so he can follow us.”
“Us…” Amanda said.
“Yes, us,” Cash said then realized exactly what she was getting at. “What? Have you lost your mind? You’ll want me in the field! Who is going to handle Elvis? You’ll need me for that at the very least!”
“We both know Elvis gets stubborn around you, brother,” Amanda said. “No offense, but the two of you have always gotten on each other’s nerves when you spend too much time together. Don’t get me wrong, lots of love between you and that dino, but it’s brotherly love. And brothers eventually start fighting.”
“So, I’m secondary to the dino?” Cash asked.
“You were the one that pointed out how needed he is,” Amanda said. “Sorry, brother, but you may have been too convincing. It makes more sense to have me lead the chase, so no operators become confused at the chain of command, and you stay behind at FOB to keep your father in line and also to coordinate whatever we may need coordinated when shit gets real.”
“Odds of comms working once you’re outside the bubble are slim to none, Mandy,” Cash said. “So, what you’re saying is I get to stay behind with my thumb up my butt and play babysitter.”
“He’s your father, not mine,” Amanda said. “Anyway, your new girlfriend will be there too.” Amanda’s eyes went wide. “Oh, maybe she’ll be too much of a distraction for you. I should bring her with and leave the camera guy only.”
“You think you’re funny,” Cash snapped. “You are actually finding this funny.”
“Hilarious,” Amanda said. She chuckled a little, but it was weak. “Seriously, brother, am I wrong? You tell me if my assessment of the personal dynamics forced on my ass in this mission is incorrect. Tell me that and I’ll defer to your never-ending wisdom.”
“You’ve never deferred to a damn thing in your life,” Cash said. He rested the back of his head against the headrest of his jump seat and closed his eyes. “You are not wrong. Everything you’ve said is right. I hate you for it all, but I’m not going to fight you.”
“Good,” Amanda said. “Because we both know I’d kick your fucking ass.”
“Guys?” Mike’s voice cut in. “Sorry to break up your moment.”
“Have you been listening?” cash asked.
“Of course, don’t be stupid, dude,” Mike said. “I can hear everything over comms if I want.”
“What’s up, Mike?” Amanda asked.
“Two minutes until you are in position,” Mike said. “Let your people know to get ready.”
“All personnel, prepare for the turn,” Amanda called over general comms.
“Good,” Mike said. “Just so you know, the transport drones are going to move faster than they ever have before. We have a tenth of a second window to get you up out of the bubble on Flipside. Then we have to time your return inside the bubble so you don’t get sliced up.”
“We have seventeen seconds between micro-turns, yeah?” Cash asked.
“It sounds like plenty of time, but the problem is momentum,” Mike said. “Well, actually the problem is braking. That will take time. The transport drones will need space to slow down and then space to return.”
“Okay, so?” Amanda said.
“We brake the transports outside the bubble in Flipside and wait until after the next micro-turn,” Cash said. “That gives us a full seventeen seconds to descend. We’ll be in position by then.”
“Except, you’ll be outside the bubble,” Mike said. “What happens to tech when it is outside the bubble too long?”
“It can glitch,” Cash said.
“And then we fall,” Amanda said.
“And we won’t know when you fall into,” Mike said. “The micro-turns are cycling through different times. We’ve figured out the cycle, but if you miss the right window, then you’ll be up in the air for at least an hour until the next window comes back around.”
“And you’re waiting to tell us now?” Amanda snapped.
“Sucks to get ambushed while strapped into your jump seat, huh?” Cash said.
“Bite me, brother,” Amanda said. “Okay, Mike, so what do we do?”
“You hang onto your asses, dudes,” Mike said. “The acceleration is going to hurt and put a ton of strain on the drones’ props. Then they’ll be under even more strain as they brake and drop.”
Both Cash and Amanda got what Mike was saying at the same time.
“Oh, hell no!”
“Have you lost your fucking mind?”
“It’s the only way,” Mike said, sounding one hundred percent apologetic. “We have to drop you back inside the bubble. Gravity is going to be faster than reversing the props for descent.”
“You motherfucker…” Amanda muttered.
“Tressa know about this?” Cash asked, thinking back to the out-of-character hug and kiss on the cheek. “Yep. She knew about this.”
“Again, guys, I’m so sorry,” Mike said. “But this is our only shot.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Amanda said. “We’ll kill you when we get back.”
“Ha. Funny,” Mike said. “You were joking, right, dude?”
“Was I?” Amanda said.
“You were, you were,” Mike replied. “Thirty seconds until we do this. Hold on.”
“Heads between knees and KYAG, people!” Amanda shouted over general comms.
“What is KYAG?” Barbara’s voice asked over the comms.
“Kiss your ass goodbye,” Cash said just as the transport drone holding the crawler dropped.
***
To say there was pain would have been an understatement. Cash felt like every bone in his body had been turned to dust. His head screamed, it was hard to breathe, and his eyes stung from smoke and blood.
But he was alive.
Carefully, he undid the straps to his jump seat and fell forward onto his hands and knees. At least the transport crash landed upright. He was grateful for that. His knees screaming at him in agony wasn’t, but he sucked that up, shoved it aside, and focused.
“You okay?” Amanda asked as she took Cash by the arm and helped him to his feet.
She wiped blood from his face and gave him a hard look.
“I probably look worse than I feel, if how you look is any indication,” Cash said. He glanced around the cargo hold. As far as he could see, everyone was moving and alive. “The other transports?”
“Comms are down,” Amanda said and aimed her head at the crawler’s rear hatch. “Haven’t had a chance to do a visual yet.”
“Let’s do that,” Cash said as he moved down the line of seats, checking on operators, until he reached the seat his father was still sitting in. “You good, old man?”
“That could have been better,” Thompson replied as he undid his straps and stood up on shaky legs. “But I’m breathing, so no complaints.”
“Good,” Cash said and moved on.
Amanda was barking orders and operators were gearing up as Cash slammed his palm against the hatch controls. Instead of falling slowly, the hydraulics on the hatch hissed and coughed then the ramp fell with a heavy clunk all at once.
Cash stared at a scene out of a nightmare. Then he grabbed a stun thumper from the crawler’s wall.
“Fuck,” he said. “Wrong time.”
“What was that?” Thompson asked as he limped up next to his son. “Oh…”
Flipside FOB was in ruins. It was the demolished version like they’d already seen in one of the pics Mike had shown them.
“What happened?” Amanda asked.
“Something went wrong,” Cash said. “Mike’s calculations were off.”
There was shouting and hollering from across the base and Cash focused past the broken buildings and still-smoldering ruins.
“Other transports,” Cash said.
“Come on!”
Strapping the stun thumper to his back, Cash raced out of the crawler and took a second to glance above him at the transport drone that held the vehicle. Two of its props were completely gone and one was hanging by wires. The fourth was still intact, but useless without at least a second working one to balance it out.
Pushing the question of how they would get back to their time and place out of his mind, Cash ran. He dodged sparking wires that hung from struts that stuck up into the air like ribs. He jumped over puddles of what he hoped was motor oil. He dashed around piles of debris, ignoring the human body parts that stuck out from between pieces of broken equipment.
Cash pushed on until he was close enough to see a transport drone and the four speed rollers it still gripped under its main body. All four of the speed rollers were intact, none of them looking to be damaged in any way. That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that the transport drone had landed on two separate piles of debris and the speed rollers were at least twenty yards up off the ground. They could probably handle the fall, if the clamps let go, but there was no guarantee. And each speed roller held half a dozen operators.
“Hey!” someone shouted from the driver-side window of one of the speed rollers. “Any thoughts on how to get us down from here?”
Cash slowed to a walk and assessed the situation as Amanda and the others from his crawler caught up with him.
“They’re going to have to climb down,” Amanda said then raised her voice and shouted, “Any wounded?”
“Only some bruises,” the speed roller driver shouted.
“Good,” Amanda shouted back. “Rope it on out of there. We’ll deal with getting the speed rollers to the ground once all personnel is clear.”
“Got it,” the driver said then tucked back inside the cab of the speed roller.
“We still have power,” Cash said, turning to Amanda. “Geothermals are still online.”
“Yeah, I saw the wiring,” Amanda said. “I’ll send a team to go check out their status.”
“I’ll go find the other transports,” Cash said.
“Good,” Amanda said then moved off to coordinate with the operators ready to get off the speed rollers and to get a team over to the geothermal generators ASAP.
Cash took off running once more, but a little slower as one of his exo-braces sparked. He headed to where he knew the wall of the FOB was. He’d start there and work his way around, hoping all the transport drones were within the FOB’s perimeter wall. He’d gone about fifty yards before he came across something that made him pull up short.
Cash skidded to a stop and winced as his left exo-brace sparked again. He barely glanced down at it before whipping his head back up to stare at the item lying on a sheet of corrugated metal.
One of Elvis’s feeding bowls.
“Elvis!” Cash shouted as he moved off and started searching the FOB again. “Elvis!”
He paused as he thought he heard a bellow from off to his left. Cash listened hard, but it didn’t repeat.
“Elvis!” Cash shouted as he turned in the direction he thought he’d heard the dino call from. He jogged slowly that way until he heard the bellow once more. “Elvis!”
The buildings around Cash were in better shape than around the transports. It helped that they hadn’t had tons and tons of machinery land on them. But better shape was a relative term…
“Elvis!” Cash called again as he moved carefully around the corner of a barely standing building. He froze.
Cash found the source of the bellowing and it wasn’t Elvis.
About ten yards away was a very different dinosaur lying on its side. It lifted its massive head and the creature’s nostrils widened. Then its eyes locked onto Cash.
If Cash had been any closer, he would have been knocked out of his boots by the bellow the creature let loose with before its head fell back to the ground and its eyes slid shut.
Cash waited, but the Tyrannosaurus rex stayed still. It was breathing, Cash could see its ribcage moving up and down, but it was too wounded to get up. The creature groaned and there was no mistaking the immense amount of pain expressed in that sound. Cash pulled the stun thumper from his back and put the butt to his shoulder. If he got close enough, and shot a shockround directly through the creature’s eye, then he’d be able to fry its brain and put it out of its misery.
But that meant getting close enough, which Cash was not exactly keen about.
The T-rex groaned again and blood seeped from its wide nostrils.
“Dammit,” Cash muttered, taking slow, careful steps in the huge dinosaur’s direction. “Don’t you dare eat me, you fucker. I’m going to do the right thing here, so don’t kill me for it, okay?”
The T-rex didn’t respond. Cash hadn’t expected it to. Elvis was an anomaly. He’d been raised with humans and understood their speech the same way any dog or cat or horse would. The T-rex only heard food making noise, not a human making speech.
“No kill, no kill, no kill,” Cash mumbled under his breath as he got closer and closer.
He was halfway there when he heard the bellow he’d actually been searching for. Cash felt like an idiot for mistaking the T-rex’s call for Elvis. He was glad no one was around to witness his mistake. He may have given in to emotion a little and that wasn’t how an operator performed.
“Hold on, buddy,” Cash said. “Got to help a dino onto the next plane.”
Cash kept moving and was at the right distance. The T-rex shifted slightly, which gave Cash’s bladder a bit of a jump, but the eyes stayed closed and Cash waited a couple seconds before taking aim.
“Do not pull that trigger,” a woman’s voice hissed from a few yards behind Cash.
Cash knew the voice. He backed away from the T-rex until he was at what he considered a safe distance to be at when retreating from a wounded and dying mega-predator. Then he spun about and lowered his stun thumper as he saw Olivia straighten up and come out from behind a pile of debris.
“What?” was all Cash could say. He blinked and shook his head then, “How?”
“I’ve been here for months,” Olivia said.
As she got closer, Cash believed her. The woman he saw was not the woman he’d left back at Topside BOP. This woman was leaner, harder, and had a look in her eye like she’d seen way worse shit than that day when she lost her friends, colleagues, and her wife.
“Talk to me,” Cash said.
“Tell your people not to fire their stun thumpers,” Olivia said and tapped at her ear. “Get on the fucking comms and tell them now!”
“What? Why?”
“Tell them!”
Cash tapped his ear and opened the general channel.
“Listen up, people,” he called. “Do not discharge your—”
There was a scream which was quickly followed by more. Then the sound of a high-pitched call, like a brief bleep from a fire detector.
“Shit,” Olivia snarled. “Come on. We have to get underground or they will tear us apart.”
“What will?” Cash asked, but Olivia was already running. “Hey! Where are you going?”
Cash took off after her, but then skidded to a stop when he rounded the corner of the building Olivia had sprinted past. He almost collided with her back, was about to snap at her for lack of warning, then closed his mouth as he saw what was facing them.
Three six-legged combat bots with dual .50 cal belt guns on top were standing right there. Standing in the ruins of Flipside FOB.
“Slowly,” Olivia whispered through gritted teeth. “Very slowly walk back to the T-rex. We’ll use him as a distraction.”
Cash did not argue. He backed up slowly with Olivia basically pressing her back against his front, trying to meld them into one. He understood. If the combots, as they were known in military circles, targeted them, they’d see one target. If they pursued, splitting up would confuse them just enough to maybe give Cash and Olivia a one-second lead and avoid being ripped apart by the .50
cal machine guns.
Cash lost sight of the combots and immediately turned to run. Olivia passed him easily, her body pushing hard as she sprinted back to the T-rex.
“Hey!” Olivia shouted, waving her arms over her head as she got close to the predator. “Wake up, Pissy!”
The T-rex roused itself enough to lift its head, but that was as far as it got.
Olivia swore loudly and sprinted past the downed creature. Cash was right behind, not caring that he was within swiping distance of the beast’s short front claws. Not that the creature had the energy to do any swiping. Cash finally got a view of the T-rex’s wounds. He almost slipped on the spilled intestines that were strewn out behind the dino.
Cash kept running, barely able to keep up with Olivia as she jumped piles of junk and ducked under broken I-beams and warped sheet metal. They ran what had to be half the distance of the FOB before Olivia stopped, shoved aside a melted hunk of plastic, and yanked hard on a cellar door.
Cash knew it was more than a cellar door, but that’s how his mind classified it in the time it took for Olivia to open the door, grab Cash by the arm and shove him down a set of stairs, and slam the door closed behind both of them. She threw four heavy bolts to secure the door then fell down onto her ass as she held her head in her hands.
“We tried to warn you,” Olivia said. “We tried everything. You must not have seen the signs in the new pics.”
“What pics? What signs?” Cash asked, suddenly plunged into complete darkness.
“Doesn’t matter,” Olivia said. “None of it matters now.”
Then she broke down into heavy sobs and Cash only stood there, stun thumper still gripped in his hands, with absolutely no clue as to what was happening or how to handle any of it.
Eight
Amanda shoved Thompson to the ground just as the .50 cals opened up on the group that she had been speaking to calmly only a second before as she handed out assignments. She barely avoided being shredded herself, but managed to dive out of the way, hot bullets streaking past her body. She felt the sting of a round across the back of her neck as she slid in the dirt and detritus of what was left of Flipside FOB.