by David Drake
She nodded and aimed.
“Fire!”
The three gunners volleyed raggedly. The thick tree trunks acted as baffles, blurring the sharpness of the reports. The gunfire had the same feeling of muffled desecration as farts echoing in a cathedral. The red-flashed titanosaur began striding forward. Adrienne Salmes worked her bolt and fired again. A wounded animal gave a warning call, so loud and low-pitched that the humans’ bowels trembled. Mrs. Salmes fired again. The titanosaur was a flickering picture in a magic lantern formed by open patches between six-foot tree boles. The huntress began to run after her disappearing prey.
Vickers grabbed her shoulder, halting her with an ease that belied his slender build. She turned on him in fury. “I won’t let a wounded animal go!” she screamed.
“It won’t go far,” Vickers said. He released her. “We’ll follow as soon as it’s safe.” He gestured, taking in the bellowing, mountainous forms padding in all directions among the even larger trees. “They’ll circle in a moment. Then it’ll be safe for things our size to move,” he said.
Russet motion ceased, though the tidal bellowing of over a dozen sauropods continued. Mears was still firing in the near distance. Brewer had lowered his rifle and was rubbing his shoulder with his left hand. “Let’s get everybody together,” the guide suggested, “and go finish off some trophies.”
Brewer’s expression was awed as they approached. “It really did fall,” he said. “It was so big, I couldn’t believe . . . But I shot it where you said and it just ran into the tree.” He waved. “And I kept shooting and it fell.”
The haunches of the titanosaur were twice the height of a man, even with the beast belly-down in the loam. McPherson pointed at the great scars in the earth beneath the sauropod’s tail. “It kept trying to move,” he said in amazement. “Even though there was a tree in the way. It was kicking away, trying to get a purchase, and I thought the tree was going to go over. But it did. The dinosaur. And I have a tape of all of it!”
Mears, closest to the bellowing giants, was just as enthusiastic. “Like a shooting gallery!” he said. “But the tin ducks’re the size of houses. God Almighty! I only brought one box of ammo with me. I shot off every last slug! God Almighty!”
The titanosaurs had quieted somewhat, but they were still making an odd series of sounds. The noises ranged from bird calls as before to something like the venting of high-pressure steam. Vickers nodded and began walking toward the sounds. He had caught Adrienne Salmes’ scowl of distaste at the contractor’s recital. If the guide agreed, it was still not his business to say so.
The herd was larger than Vickers had estimated. Forty of the sauropods were in a circle facing outwards around a forest giant, which was so much bigger than its neighbors that it had cleared a considerable area. Several of the beasts were rearing up. They flailed the air with clawed forefeet and emitted the penetrating steam-jet hiss that seemed so incongruous from a living being. Mears raised his rifle with a convulsed look on his face before he remembered that he had no ammunition left.
McPherson was already rolling tape. “Have you reloaded?” the guide asked, looking from Salmes to Brewer. The blonde woman nodded curtly while the meat packer fumbled in the side pocket of his coveralls.
“I don’t see the one I hit,” Adrienne Salmes said. Her face was tight.
“Don’t worry,” the guide said quietly. “It’s down, it couldn’t have made it this far the way you hit it. It’s the ones that weren’t heart-shot that we’re dealing with now.”
“That’s not my responsibility,” she snapped.
“It’s no duty you owe to me,” Vickers agreed, “or to anything human.”
Brewer snicked his bolt home. Vickers’ laser touched the center of the chest of a roaring titanosaur. Orange pulmonary blood splashed its tiny head like a shroud. “On the word, Mr. Brewer,” he said, “if you would.”
Adrienne said, “All right.” She did not look at Vickers.
Across the circle, eighty yards away, a large male was trying to lick its belly. Its long neck strained, but it was not flexible enough to reach the wound. The laser pointer touched below the left eye. “There?” the guide asked.
Adrienne nodded and braced herself, legs splayed. Her arms, sling, and upper body made a web of interlocking triangles.
The guide swung his own weapon onto the third of the wounded animals. “All right,” he said.
Adrienne’s Schultz and Larsen cracked; the light went out of the gut-shot sauropod’s eye. Undirected, the rest of the great living machine began slowly to collapse where it stood. Brewer was firing, oblivious of his bruised shoulder in the excitement. Vickers put three rounds into the base of his own target’s throat. Its head and neck were weaving too randomly to trust a shot at them.
Either the muzzle blasts or the sight of three more of their number sagging to the ground routed the herd. Their necks swung around like compass needles to iron. With near simultaneity, all the surviving titanosaurs drifted away from the guns. Their tails were held high off the ground.
Adrienne Salmes lowered her rifle.
“God Almighty, let me use that!” Mears begged, reaching out for the weapon. “I’ll pay you—”
“Touch me and I’ll shove this up your bum, you bloody butcher!” the blonde woman snarled.
The contractor’s fist balled. He caught himself, however, even before he realized that the muzzle of the .358 had tilted in line with his throat.
“The river isn’t that far away,” said Vickers, pointing in the direction the sauropods had run. “We’ll follow in the pony—it’s a sight worth seeing. And taping,” he added.
The undergrowth slowed the hunters after they recrossed the ridgeline, but the titanosaurs were still clearly evident. Their heads and even hips rocked above the lower vegetation that sloped toward the river. The herd, despite its size and numbers, had done surprisingly little damage to its rush to the water. The pony repeatedly had to swing aside from three-inch saplings which had sprung back when the last of the titanosaurs had passed.
But the beasts themselves were slowed by the very mechanics of their size. Their twelve-foot strides were ponderously slow even under the goad of panic. The tensile strength of the sauropods’ thigh bones simply was not equal to the acceleration of the beasts’ mass to more than what would be a fast walk in a man. The hunters reached a rocky spur over the mudflats fringing the water just as the leading titanosaurs splashed into the stream 150 yards away. The far bank of the river was lost in haze. The sauropods continued to advance without reference to the change in medium. Where a moment before they had been belly-deep in reeds, now they were belly-deep in brown water that was calm except for the wake of their passage. When the water grew deeper, the procession sank slowly. The beasts farthest away, in mid-stream over a quarter-mile out, were floating necks and tails while the forefeet propelled them by kicking down into the bottom muck.
“Don’t they hide underwater and snorkel through their necks?” Brewer asked. Then he yipped in surprise as his hand touched the barrel of his Weatherby. The metal was hot enough to burn from strings of rapid fire and the Cretaceous sunlight.
Vickers nodded. He had heard the question often before. “Submarines breathe through tubes because the tubes are steel and the water pressure doesn’t crush them,” he explained. “Sauropods don’t have armored gullets, and their lungs aren’t diesel engines inside a steel pressure hull. Physics again. Besides, they float—the only way they could sink would be to grab a rock.”
As Vickers spoke, the last titanosaur in the line sank.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” the guide blurted.
The sauropod surfaced again a moment later. It blew water from its lungs as it gave the distress cry that had followed the shooting earlier.
The mild current of the river had bent the line of titanosaurs into a slight curve. The leaders were already disappearing into the haze. None of the other beasts even bothered to look back to see the cause of the bellowing.
No doubt they already knew.
The stricken titanosaur sank again. It rolled partly onto its left side as it went under the surface this time. It was still bellowing, wreathing its head in a golden spray as it disappeared.
“I think,” said Adrienne Salmes dryly, “that this time the rock grabbed the dinosaur.”
Vickers grunted in reply. He was focusing his binoculars on the struggle.
Instead of rising vertically, the sauropod rolled completely over sideways. Clinging to the herbivore’s left foreleg as it broke surface was something black and huge and as foul as a tumor. The linked beasts submerged again in an explosion of spray. Vickers lowered the binoculars, shivering. They were not common, even less commonly seen. Great and terrible as they were, they were also widely hated. For them to sun themselves on mudbanks as their descendants did would have been to court death by the horns and claws of land animals equally large. But in their own element, in the still, murky waters, they were lords without peer.
“Christ Almighty,” Mears said, “was that a whale?”
“A crocodile,” the guide replied, staring at the roiling water. “Enough like what you’d find in the Nile or the Congo that you couldn’t tell the difference by a picture. Except for the size.” He paused, then continued, “The science staff will be glad to hear about this. They always wondered if they preyed on the big sauropods, too. It seems that they preyed on any goddamn thing in the water.”
“I’d swear it was bigger than the tyrannosaurus you showed us,” Adrienne Salmes observed, lowering her own binoculars.
Vickers shrugged. “As long, at least. Probably heavier. I looked at a skull, a fossil in London . . . I don’t know how I’d get one back as a trophy . . . It was six feet long, which was impressive; and three feet wide, which was incredible, a carnivore with jaws three feet wide. Tyrannosaurs don’t compare, no. Maybe whales do, Mr. Mears, but nothing else I know of.”
There were no longer any titanosaurs visible. The herd had curved off downstream, past the intrusion vehicle and the hunting camp. They were lost against the haze and the distant shoreline by now. The water still stirred where the last of them had gone down, but by now the struggles must have been the thrashings of the sauropod’s autonomic nervous system. The teeth of the crocodile were six inches long; but they were meant only to hold, not to kill. The water killed, drowning a thirty-ton sauropod as implacably as it would any lesser creature anchored to the bottom by the crocodile’s weight.
“We’d best take our trophies,” Vickers said at last. No one in the world knew his fear of drowning, no one but himself. “The smell’ll bring a pack of gorgosaurs soon, maybe even a tyrannosaur. I don’t want that now, not with us on the ground.”
The guide rubbed his forehead with the back of his left hand, setting his bush hat back in place carefully. “The ponies convert to boats,” he said, patting the aluminum side. “The tread blocks can be rotated so they work like little paddle wheels.” He paused as he swung the tiller bar into a tight circle. “I guess you see why we don’t use them for boats in the Cretaceous,” he added at last. “And why we didn’t keep our camp down on the intrusion vehicle.”
Vickers was even quieter than his wont for the rest of the morning.
The shooting platform had returned before the ponies did, the second of them dripping with blood from the titanosaur heads. Two heads had Mears’ tags on them, though the contractor had finished none of the beasts he had wounded. The best head among those he had sprayed would have been the one the guide had directed Adrienne Salmes to kill—with a bullet through the skull that destroyed all trophy value.
There were no game laws in the Cretaceous, but the line between hunters and butchers was the same as in every other age.
The McPhersons greeted each other with mutual enthusiasm. Their conversation was technical and as unintelligible to non-photographers as the conversation of any other specialists. Jonathan Salmes was sitting on a camp stool, surly but alert. He did not greet the returning party, but he watched the unloading of the trophies with undisguised interest. The right side of his face was puffy.
“We’ve found a tyrannosaur,” Dieter called as he and the pilots joined Vickers. That was good news, but there was obvious tension among the other members of the staff. Brady carried a spray gun loaded with antiseptic sealer. A thorough coating would prevent decay for almost a month, ample time to get the heads to proper taxidermists.
When Dieter was sure that all the clients were out of earshot, he said in a low voice, “Don has something to tell you, Henry.”
“Eh?” prompted Vickers. He set one of the sauropod heads on the spraying frame instead of looking at the pilot.
“I had to clobber Salmes,” Washman said, lifting out the red-flashed trophy. “He was off his head—I’m not sure he even remembers. There was a mixed herd of duckbills came down the trail. He came haring out of his tent with that gun of his. He didn’t shoot, though, he started chasing them down the trail.” The pilot straightened and shrugged. Steve Brady began pumping the spray gun. The pungent mist drifted downwind beyond the gaping heads. “I grabbed him. I mean, who knows what might be following a duckbill? When he swung that rifle at me, I had to knock him out for his own good. Like a drowning man.” Washman shrugged again. “His gun wasn’t even loaded, you know?”
“Don, run the ponies down to the water and mop them out, will you?” Vickers said. The pilot jumped onto the leading vehicle and spun them off down the trail. The two guides walked a little to the side, their rifles slung, while Brady finished sealing the trophies. “It’s going to have to be reported, you know,” Vickers said. “Whether Salmes does or not.”
“You or I might have done the same thing,” Dieter replied.
“I’m not denying that,” the senior guide snapped. “But it has to be reported.”
The two men stood in silence, looking out at a forest filled with sounds that were subtly wrong. At last Dieter said, “Salmes goes up in the platform with you and Don tomorrow, doesn’t he?”
Vickers agreed noncommittally.
“Maybe you ought to go with Steve instead,” Dieter suggested. He looked at Vickers. “Just for the day, you know.”
“Washman just flies us,” Vickers said with a shake of his head. “I’m the one that’s in contact with the client. And Don’s as good as pilots come.”
“That he is,” the other guide agreed, “that he is. But he is not a piece of furniture. You are treating him as a piece of furniture.”
Vickers clapped his companion on the shoulder. “Come on,” he said, “Salmes’ll be fine when he gets his tyrannosaur. What we ought to be worrying about is three more for the others. If Salmes goes home with a big boy and the rest have to settle for less—well, it says no guarantees in the contracts, but you know the kind of complaints the company gets. That’s the kind of problem we’re paid to deal with. If they wanted shrinks instead of guides, they’d have hired somebody else.”
Dieter laughed half-heartedly. “Let us see what we can arrange for lunch,” he said. “At the moment, I am more interested in sauropod steak than I am in the carnivores that we compete with.”
“Damn, the beacon cut out again!” Washman snarled. There was no need of an intercom system; the shooting platform operated with only an intake whine which was no impediment to normal speech. The silence was both a boon to coordination and a help in not alarming the prey. It did, however, mean that the client was necessarily aware of any technical glitches. When the client was Jonathan Salmes—“Goddamn, you’re not going to put me on that way!” the big man blazed. He had his color back and with it all his previous temper. Not that the bruise over his right cheekbone would have helped. “One of the others paid you to save the big one for them, didn’t they?” he demanded. “By God, I’ll bet it was my wife! And I’ll bet it wasn’t money either, the—”
“Take us up to a thousand feet,” Vickers said sharply. “We’ll locate the kill visually if the marker isn’t working. Eighty tons of sa
uropod shouldn’t be hard to spot.”
“Hang on, there it’s on again,” said the pilot. The shooting platform veered slightly as he corrected their course. Vickers and Salmes stood clutching the rail of the suspended lower deck which served as landing gear as well. Don Washman was seated above them at the controls, with the fuel tank balancing his mass behind. The air intake and exhaust extended far beyond the turbine itself to permit the baffling required for silent running. The shooting platform was as fragile as a dragonfly; and it was, in its way, just as efficient a predator.
By good luck, the tyrannosaur had made its kill on the edge of a large area of brush rather than high forest. The platform’s concentric-shaft rotors kept blade length short. Still, though it was possible to maneuver beneath the forest canopy, it was a dangerous and nerve-wracking business to do so. Washman circled the kill at 200 feet, high enough that he did not need to allow for trees beneath him. Though the primary airflow from the rotors was downward, the odor of tens of tons of meat dead in the sun still reached the men above. The guide tried to ignore it with his usual partial success. Salmes only wrinkled his nose and said, “Whew, what a pong.” Then, “Where is it? The tyrannosaurus?”
That the big killer was still nearby was obvious from the types of scavengers on the sauropod. Several varieties of the smaller coelurosaurs scrambled over the corpse like harbor rats on a drowned man. None of the species weighed more than a few hundred pounds. A considerable flock of pterosaurs joined and squabbled with the coelurosaurs, wings tented and toothless beaks stabbing out like shears. There were none of the large carnivores around the kill—and that implied that something was keeping them away.
“Want me to go down close to wake him up?” Washman asked.
The guide licked his lips. “I guess you’ll have to,” he said. There was always a chance that a pterodactyl would be sucked into the turbine when you hovered over a kill. The thought of dropping into a big carnosaur’s lap that way kept some guides awake at night. Vickers looked at his client and added, “Mr. Salmes, we’re just going to bring the tyrannosaur out of wherever it’s lying in up in the forest. After we get it into the open, we’ll maneuver to give you the best shot. All right?”