by David Drake
“I’ll go,” said Adrienne Vickers from the doorway.
“You’ve been listening?” Stern demanded.
The woman spun her cigar out into the darkness, then exhaled in jets from both nostrils before she squeezed into the trailer. She was in no hurry to speak. Though the nicotine had stripped her visual purple so that she could not see by the instrument lights, she knew that she was the focus of the eyes of the four men. “I don’t listen at doors,” Adrienne said at last, “though everybody in camp’s heard Mr. Warren’s little outburst, I’m sure.”
“Adrienne,” Vickers said, “this isn’t a game.”
“Look, dammit,” the tall blonde said. She leaned forward and gestured, her fingernails glinting. “There’s only one tyrannosaur we can promise, that’s really promise. The one Henry and I captured alive. I don’t have to listen to you talk to know that.”
“You didn’t say anything tonight,” her husband commented.
“Neither did you!” Adrienne responded sharply, though not in a loud voice. “And we didn’t have to, did we? We both knew what had to be done. Anyway”—she drew a breath—“anyway, I’m the one who needs to nurse the baby back. He’ll be sedated, but we don’t dare have him knocked on his ass, not if he needs to be upright for Cardway the same morning.”
“Well then,” the Prime Minister said briskly. “We are agreed?” Stern nodded. Warren shrugged.
“Does it ever bother you,” Adrienne Vickers asked, “that a—certifiable madman like Cardway has the sort of power you’re encouraging him to use? I mean, it’s your world. I’ve found I could do all right without it . . . though I suppose I’d have to get used to a crossbow and smoke banana leaves or something.”
“Banana leaves would be an improvement, I’m sure, Madame,” the Prime Minister said, bowing courteously.
“And we joke about it,” the woman continued wonderingly. “Well, it’s your world. For however long. Henry, I’m for bed.”
“We’ve said our say,” the guide remarked, reaching past his wife to the door catch. “We’ll see in the morning. We’ll all see in the morning.”
Either the sun slanting across their backs was hotter than it had been the day before, or the anger in the box of the half-track made it seem that way. The shadow of the dust they raised stretched ahead of the vehicle, bulking across the scrub like chaos made manifest. Secretary Cardway rode grimly at the front bulkhead, to the right of the cal-fifty. The gunner, wedged tightly between the Secretary and Vickers on the other side, looked nervous. He was the same soldier who had manned the gun the day before. What he had seen then had convinced him that both of the men beside him were dangerously insane.
In the distance, flecks spun against the white sky like flakes of cardboard hurled from a giant bonfire. Cardway’s face softened minusculy from the stony anger he had maintained since getting up in the morning. Vickers saw the interest and said over the intercom, “Pterosaurs again, sir. For the carrion. What we have to hope is that the bigger carnivores will be there too.”
The Secretary of State looked across at Vickers while the soldier between them cringed away. “You goddamn better hope so,” the politician said. His voice in Vickers’ ears was out of synch with his moving lips, because the sound was being picked up by Cardway’s throat mike.
In the back of the box, the Prime Minister frowned. Warren, beside him, appeared to take no notice. The Englishman had been morose all morning. When he looked at Vickers, it was with a degree of animation; but the spirit animating his eyes was one of dull anger. Warren had not been pleased to be subordinated to Vickers. It was now evident to him that his employers considered Adrienne also a far more valuable member of the operation than the junior guide was . . . and that made one more factor for Vickers to consider.
Craig and a holographer rode in the middle of the box. The PR staffer at least could be trusted not to actively endanger anyone else.
As they neared the scene of the previous day’s slaughter, the circling flecks resolved into pterosaurs descending. There were never fewer than a dozen in sight at a time, even though the lowest continually disappeared at the bottom of the falling helixes. Newcomers, by now from many kilometers distance, replenished the pattern from above. Their fragile wing membranes enabled the great creatures to lift from the ground in air so still that pollen scarcely drifted. The converse of that delicacy was the fact that severe braking forces like those habitually employed by the feathered scavengers of later ages would have shredded pterosaur wings at the first application. Silent and awesomely large, the creatures spiraled down with the gentle beauty of thistledown.
There was something angelic in the descent of the pterosaurs with their dazzlingly white upper surfaces. Then the half-track rumbled through the last of the masking brush. The ground on which the winged scavengers were landing was a living hell of previous arrivals.
Thirty meters in front of them, a dryptosaur glared up from the carcass of the duckbill it had finished disemboweling. The carnivore was probably one of the pair that had escaped the day before, a smallish male with scar tissue ridging the left side of its head including the eye socket. Not a choice trophy, but closer than Vickers cared to see a carnivore to one of his clients. “Go ahead, sir,” he said, aiming at the top of the beast’s sternum himself.
“It’s smaller than the other one,” Cardway muttered correctly. He sighted and fired anyway.
The dryptosaur was facing them astraddle of the herbivore’s neck. Its head and body were raised higher than they would normally have been. Like a dog on a morsel, the carnivore was trying to look as threatening as possible to drive away its competition. The half-track was probably equated in the beast’s limited mind with an unusually large ceratopsian—not a creature that a dryptosaur or even a tyrannosaur of several times the bulk would normally have charged. Still, the beast lived by killing, and a wound could be expected to bring a response. The guide tensed.
And promptly felt a fool when the Mannlicher blasted and the dryptosaur crumpled like a wet sheet. Cardway had placed his bullet perfectly, shattering the carnosaur’s spine after wrecking the complex of blood vessels above the heart. The beast flopped over on its back, the hind legs kicking upward convulsively. A drop of blood slung from a talon spattered coldly on Vickers’ wrist, but the danger was over. “Perfect!” the guide said with honest enthusiasm. “Now—”
Secretary Cardway cut off the instructions with another thunderous shot. Beside himself, Vickers started to curse. Then he stepped back. There was no point cursing an avalanche or a waterspout. The Secretary was as ungovernable as those forces of Nature when he once began firing. The muzzle of the .458 jumped three more times, each thrust preceded by a momentary spurt of orange as the last of the powder charge burned outside the barrel. The reports lessened in apparent intensity, though only because they were literally deafening to the listeners. After the fifth shot, the ringing that persisted was loud enough to challenge the myriad squalling of the scavengers remaining on the scattered corpses. There were no herbivores in sight where there had been hundreds the preceding day. Possibly that was a reaction to the carnage itself, the slaughter and the stink of blood. More likely, the plant-eaters would avoid the area only so long as the sharp-toothed throng were bolting the carrion like locusts on Spring wheat.
“Pull up a hundred meters or so to the right,” Vickers ordered the driver. “Dead slow.” The guide squinted though the Sun was behind him as he surveyed the crop of vermin. Usually the presence of the pair of dryptosaurs—the second was slashing at a pentaceratops which had died on the far bank of the stream—would mean that nothing bigger had found the kill. A tyrannosaur would drive away the one-ton dryptosaurs, though it was likely to ignore anything smaller. Here, however, the volume of flesh was so great that Vickers hoped against hope that the clanking of their treads would lift the dragonlike head of the greatest of the carnosaurs into sight from where it rested behind a fallen triceratops or the like.
Nothing of the so
rt happened. Even the lesser meat-eaters, which were present, ignored the vehicle. That was just as well. There were at least a score of dromaeosaurs visible, half-ton predators with the habits and vicious temperament of hyenas. The slaughter had drawn several packs together, some of them surely out of their range. When the food had been bolted down to the last scraps, the bush would be the scene of fighting which nothing human could equal in savagery. For the nonce, all were fully occupied with stuffing down gobbets of meat. Their mouths expanded like snakes’ to accept larger pieces than rigid jaw hinges would have permitted. The number and proximity of the carnivores still made Vickers nervous, even with the heavy machine gun to back him up in an emergency.
Smaller than the toothed dromaeosaurs but still potentially lethal to a man were the ornithominids, beaked omnivores in appearance much like the ostriches for which some were named. Their normal diet was of seeds and insects. But as when the lemmings swarm in Norway, the reindeer feed on them, here a similar abundance of flesh had summoned the swift runners from far across the plains to feast. They pecked and squabbled, darting in to seize a strip of meat and dragging it back to a distance of a few meters. They bolted their food, defending it with glaring eyes and legs whose kick could rip sheet metal.
The least of the scavengers were feathered, though only a few of them were true birds in the sense that they or their ancestors could fly. Many of their descendants would, however. Warm-blooded creatures like dinosaurs needed either bulk or insulation to prevent their high metabolisms from outstripping any possible food source. The smallest of the dinosaurs crawling over the bloating carcasses were no bigger than chickens. Like chickens, they could not have survived without the dead air space provided within their layers of feathers—the feathers being modified scales, as was the fur of mammals and the pterosaurs. Some few had made the insulation do double duty, adding wing beats to the powerful thrust of their hind legs when they wished to climb a carcass or escape to a nearby bush with a chosen morsel. The high skies were still the province of the great pterosaurs now descending, however, their delicacy more efficient until the storms of the coming age swept them into oblivion.
There were no mammals visible save the occupants of the half-track. The night would bring them out again from the holes to which they had been driven tens of millions of years before by the ancestors of the dinosaurs. So long as Earth hosted the dinosaurs, the mammals would grub for insects in the dark and would fall prey to the least of the swift-striding creatures with whom they in no sense competed.
The vehicle halted as Vickers had ordered. Craig, the bodyguard, said, “You did this as an insult, didn’t you?” His voice was high, on the edge of control.
The guide turned in surprise. He had become accustomed to thinking of the bodyguard as a tool rather than a human being, an object with a programmed set of responses to stimuli . . . rather like his own Uzi submachine gun. It was disconcerting to hear Craig volunteering statements that had no bearing on his duties. It was more than disconcerting that the statements made no sense. Vickers wondered if the strain had in fact pushed the younger American off the deep end, ready to spray all those around him with bullets too small to be useful except on men.
Perhaps Secretary Cardway had the same thought. “Craig, what the hell do you mean?” he demanded with something less than his normal assurance. Greenbaum edged backward, trying to get behind the bodyguard without being obtrusive about it. Adrienne and Stern had been left in camp with the “vehicle that wasn’t running right” according to the story the Americans had been told. They would have been comforting companions at this juncture. Thomas Warren merely watched with a glimmer of a smile.
“He’s trying to shame you with this filth, sir,” Craig said. He gestured with his left hand at the landscape, the slaughtered dinosaurs lying like hillocks completely covered by the mass of creatures feeding on them. “This, this—disgusting . . . he’ll make you out to be a butcher to the world, sir. He’s just brought you here to discredit you!”
Vickers was very still. There was an instant’s fear within him that perhaps Craig had seen within him a truth that the guide had hidden even from himself. There was nothing unnatural about the scavengers, any more than the sight of maggots festering in a dead rabbit is unnatural. But it was true that this circus of carrion and corruption would affect many voters with the repugnance with which the machine gunning had affected the guide himself.
But Secretary Cardway blinked incredulously. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “I had to bring you but I don’t have to listen to crap. Keep your mouth shut if you still want a job when we get back.” He turned to Vickers, utterly ignoring the bodyguard whose insight he was unable to credit. “And we’re going back right now,” he said. “I’ve wasted enough time.” Rotating his head to fix the Prime Minister, he added, “If this is your idea of fun, Greenbaum, you must love campaigning. Heat, dust, rubber food, and idiots.”
The responder on Vickers’ wrist looked like a watch. It now gave a tiny chime and tickled his skin with just enough current to get his attention. The guide glanced down, certain that God must answer prayers in the Cretaceous. The device was tuned to the radio beacon Stern and Adrienne carried to tag the tyrannosaur. The responder’s face had lighted dull orange, meaning that the beast had popped back into the Cretaceous within two—or three, at the outside—kilometers of the responder. That was almost too close, since it would take some minutes to unload the tyrannosaur and ride the intrusion vehicle back Topside. But Vickers could easily kill time en route until Adrienne radioed with the coded message that gave him the all-clear.
“Well, this is a washout, it seems,” Vickers said, beaming at the others, “but there’s a spot I noticed just a—a few minutes from here where I’ll give you my word there’s a tyrannosaur.”
Even Greenbaum and Warren looked askance at the senior guide. Vickers’ enthusiasm had carried him momentarily out of the present setting. The incongruity of his triumphant tone did not strike him until he saw everyone else in the vehicle gaping as if he had lost his mind. “Ah,” he continued, in a more reserved fashion, “I’ll sit beside the driver there and guide him. Mr. Secretary, if you’ll stand ready but not shoot until Mr. Warren or I say, say to shoot, that is, we’ll put you in the best place.”
As the guide clambered down to exchange places with the holographer, he surreptitiously set his responder on search mode and swept it in an arc. The lighted face glowed green until the guide’s arm pointed within one degree of the beacon. There it flashed red, giving Vickers the bearing. Setting the little device back on ranging, he said to the driver, “We’re headed northeast, friend.” He gestured. “Take it easy. One of these trails to water should lead us back the way we want. When it branches, I’ll give you directions.”
The soldier frowned in puzzlement, but Stern had made it clear that morning that Vickers was to be obeyed no matter what he ordered. The vehicle shuddered into gear, then swung wide so that the driver could steer it into what looked like a suitable gap in the brush.
This time, no one had suggested salvaging the dead dryptosaur. Vickers wondered silently whether even bagging a tyrannosaur would affect Secretary Cardway as Greenbaum and Stern hoped it would. Very possibly it would not—which was probably to the world’s benefit.
Branches flapped toward Vickers’ face and sprang away as the half-track crawled through brush that was growing denser. Occasionally a cluster of stumps would appear where some ceratopsian had sheared off a thicket near the ground and spent the next ten minutes stuffing it all down his gullet. More often, an alcove had been stripped of leaves and bark by some hadrosaur’s enormous battery of teeth. The naked white branch cores splayed skeletally toward the beaten trail, then were gone and past and replaced by similar signs.
Twice at a forking, Vickers checked his responder and pointed the driver on. Above and behind him, Secretary Cardway’s expression showed an increasing impatience for something to happen. The guide in turn was concerned that he
had not yet received clearance from Adrienne. He was planning a delay—taking the next wrong turning should be enough—when Nature accomplished the desired end herself. Brush crashed to the right of the trail and a huge ceratopsian head loomed over the half-track.
“Hold it!” Vickers cried. The driver’s foot, poised between brake pedal and accelerator, slammed down on the former. The juddering halt sprayed dust forward, but their speed was low enough to avoid injuries. It was a triceratops, snorting a dozen feet in the air. Its beak was open, displaying rows of knife-edged shearing teeth behind it. “My God, Mr. Secretary!” Vickers cried as he swung his door open, “I think we’ve got a pair mating! I don’t think any clients ever had a look at this before!”
“Nail the blighter right through the throat!” said Thomas Warren in the box above.
Vickers, shocked and furious, spun around. “Wait, for Chrissake!” he shouted. Cardway had already leveled the Mannlicher and it was doubtful that he even heard. The guide leaped, trying to get out of the cone of shock when the big rifle fired. He was partly successful. The muzzle blast sledged him but did not knock him down with a nose bleed as would have resulted from slightly closer proximity. Leaves trembled in an arc to either side of the gun. The triceratops lurched upright with both its broad front paws lashing at the sky.
Vickers snapped off two shots at the dinosaur forty feet away. From his angle, all he could see beyond the brush was the creature’s weaving skull—but a shot anywhere else would be useless at this point anyway. Then a hawthorn thicket splintered toward the half-track to pass the female, charging with her head down and her black-tipped horns aimed at the cab.
If the two ceratopsians had stayed coupled, they would have been harmless even to spectators approaching close enough to touch them. Violently dismounted by her mate, the female’s certain reaction was to run in the direction she was facing. While that was not a charge, technically, the effect was the same on anything that happened to be in the path of the ten-ton missile. It was really the first time the heavy machine gun could have been useful. It was not useful, of course, because the range was too short and the gunner was unprepared for a target appearing twenty feet below the rearing head he had trained on. Vickers, leaning over the hood of the half-track, fired.