by David Drake
Nikisastro’s pickup turned into the fresh-cut road and accelerated. Ruts sent the vehicle bounding high on its suspension. The two guards in back clung to the sides for dear life.
The tyrannosaur ignored the remaining sawyers. It strode off on a course converging with that of the grapple skidder. The beast’s movements were deceptively swift. Because of its size, what appeared to be a deliberate walking pace accelerated the tyrannosaur from a halt to about fifteen miles per hour in a single stride.
Vickers ran into the road to get around the log bouncing behind the skidder. The tree’s top had been roughly trimmed, but some branches remained. One of them broke, springing toward Vickers and making him duck.
The tyrannosaur’s head bobbed back and forth with each stride, like that of a bird hunting in short grass. The beast stepped close to the grapple skidder. The driver’s mouth opened in a silent scream. He jumped out the far side of his cab.
The tractor’s huge rear wheel ground over him and rolled up briefly red. The driverless equipment rumbled on until it left the cleared roadway. It climbed partway up the bole of a giant tree and stalled there.
A floater with its solar array spread swooped down on the tyrannosaur. Louise was piloting left-handed. She held the capture gun in her right, supporting the fore-end on the floater’s guardrail.
The beast turned at the motion and darted its huge head in the direction of the floater. The muzzle of the capture gun recoiled up and to the right as Louise fired. She slid the control yoke in the opposite direction, curving past the tyrannosaur’s gape. Slamming jaws shredded a corner of the solar array, but inertia carried the craft free.
Vickers gulped air to clear fatigue poisons from his blood. He didn’t dare shoot for fear of hitting a human being. There were men and pieces of abandoned logging equipment everywhere.
The white truck skidded to a halt two hundred yards from where Vickers stood. The driver and Nikisastro got out of the cab, the former waving a submachine gun. The two guards in back had been clinging with both hands to keep from being flung out of the truck box. They straightened and unslung their weapons.
A man wearing a yellow hard hat stepped from the forest behind where the grapple skidder had crashed. He obviously had no idea what had been going on. He was only twenty feet from the tyrannosaur when he and the beast saw each other.
The man turned and ran, losing his helmet to a low branch. The tyrannosaur followed with the shocking acceleration of a terrier jumping a rat. The long, rigid tail flicked side to side, parallel to the ground, balancing the huge body as the beast vanished into the forest.
Louise’s floater pogoed twenty feet in the air in the middle of the logging road. She was trying to load the capture gun one-handed without losing control of her little vehicle.
Nikisastro pointed to Louise and shouted. His three guards raised their submachine guns.
Vickers’ surroundings shrank to the dimensions of his sight picture. Everything else was a gray blur which had no present meaning. His breath steadied; his arms were as firm as a sandbag rest. The top of the front blade in the center of the rear circle, the sight’s protective horns flaring to either side. The driver’s throat above the post because the Garand was sighted for one hundred yards and Vickers had to allow for bullet drop at the doubled range.
He didn’t feel the sear’s crisp release. A puff of white from the muzzle, the steel buttplate recoiling hard against his shoulder, and the empty brass sailing a high arc to the right dripping its own faint trail of smoke.
Vickers let the recoil help him turn, bringing the sights down on the first of the gunmen in the back of the pickup. His squeeze started as the front post steadied and continued through the fraction of a second after powder gases blew their miniature white curtain from the muzzle again.
Recoil, the third target with his submachine gun already shouldered. The second Javan toppling backward out of the truck box at the periphery of Vickers’ circle of vision. Squeeze and the submachine gun flying apart in a spray of sparks. The gun’s shredded magazine flung cartridges in all directions as the armor-piercing bullet wobbled on and through the gunman’s chest.
The muzzle blast of Vickers’ high-velocity cartridges was terrific, but he heard only the third wham! as he started to relax and the world softened again into color. The driver fired a long burst into Louise’s floater.
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 ha
d 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 it
s 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.