*
“Yes, Mr. President,” Batter had answered once a secure line had been established, and the young lieutenant sitting next to him had given him the thumbs up that the line was safe and open.
“Batter, how well can you hear me?” the President asked, aware that Batter was in the air.
“You are coming through five by five Sir.”
“Listen, I have two new situations I need for you to assess for me.”
“Yes sir.”
“The first is this: we may not have as much time to prepare the ARC units as we previously discussed this morning. It appears that there is another smaller asteroid actually in front of the one we first spotted. According to Pan-STARRS, there is ‘a shadow’ asteroid in front of the Diabolus, and the computers just picked up on it. Apparently, the trajectory is almost exactly the same as Diabolus, but this one is way out in front of it. It’s not as big, but big enough. The astronomers are still trying to work out the exact time line and potential impact damage, but suffice it to say that this new asteroid is going to get here much sooner. They are calling this one Depraedor.”
Batter’s mind was going.
“Batter, are you still with me?”
“Oh, ah, yes, Sir. I got it.”
“Obviously, I need to know exactly what you can get ready and what the time line is for all of the ARC units.”
“How much time, Sir?” Batter asked, wondering what could be worse than a twenty-eight day notice.
The President paused. “72 hours.”
Batter looked at the airman who was assisting him with the call. The young officer had turned away from him and seemed busy with other tasks associated with the operation of the helicopter. There were two pilots up front, but all Batter could see was the back of their helmets. For some reason, he vaguely wondered about their families and how many children they might have.
“Batter, are you there?”
“Yes, Sir. I will get on it, and I’ll have a report for you right after I touch down. We had a little snag with Utah yesterday that I am trying to address. Nevada, of course, is always ready, but I will reconfirm that when I get there. I’ll check on the status of Colorado and Kansas as well.”
There were a total of four ARC units that had been developed. Of them, Utah was the least complete. The original criteria for the three additional units had been that they all needed to have proximity to the Area 51 rail line, away from any major historical seismic activity, and spread out enough to give each of them a chance of survivability should one or more others suffer a close or direct hit from a nuclear attack or—now it seemed—from a massive asteroid impact event.
“I’m counting on you, Batter. We are preparing to move personnel soon. I need to know how many, and where.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Now,” the President continued, “I have one other thing. You know about the K-T samples that were taken from the Utah site last week?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, apparently the find was astonishing in many respects. In short, the scientists believe they may have finally identified the missing link in their cryogen research. As you know, this had been an integral component of the entire ARC project even before we were faced with this shortened timeline. In any case, if true, they are telling me it might now be possible to complete a cryogenic unit that could actually work long range. I need you to meet with the researchers when you arrive and let me know what you think.”
For years, there had been wild speculation about how long it might be necessary to remain underground after an asteroid hit, particularly if it happened to have the magnitude of something like the K-T. The scientists had speculated that it might be as much as a few centuries before it was safe to venture out on to the surface, far beyond the time that food and supplies would reasonably last in the ARC units. Were cryogenics actually possible, there might be a way to preserve at least some semblance of the human race into a time when it once again became possible to inhabit the planet.
Batter was only somewhat familiar with cryogenics. He knew of several private companies that claimed they had perfected it, but they were really just a bunch of cowboys milking the Indians as far as he was concerned, and they certainly seemed to be a whole lot better at freezing things than they were at thawing them out. The government research in cryo, on the other hand, which had initially been pursued for use with astronauts in space travel, was much further along in development. In fact, the scientists at 51 had recently revived a primate that had been frozen for just over a year with minimal cell damage. According to Pete Wilson, everything they needed to produce viable cryo units had been completely vetted with the exception of a fully tested cryo-protectant. With some misgivings, Batter had approved the construction and installation of several cryo-beds at each of the ARCs, on Pete’s assurance that they were “just one molecule away” from perfection.
“May I ask sir, what leads them to believe this?” Batter asked.
“Well, apparently when they thawed out that one dinosaur specimen they managed to save—are you ready for this, Batter—its heart started beating!”
Chapter 16
Arzat Awake
“Shit! She’s gaining consciousness! Let’s have everyone out of the room except the anesthesiologists please,” Pete Wilson said as calmly as he could, his heart racing.
Pete had been lucky. Despite the terrible and unfortunate accident in the desert, he had not been killed and his team had been miraculously able to save one of the twelve specimen they had originally taken out of the Utah site. The prize they had been left with was the only remaining evidence of what everyone had thought at the time to be a perfectly preserved, never seen before, specimen of a sentient pre-K-T dinosaur. But “perfectly preserved” were hardly the words to describe what was now happening in the lab.
*
Pete had finally been able to breathe a sigh of relief when the helicopter they had called for after the accident had safely reached the base and the sarcophagus had been transferred into secure cold storage. He had given everyone on his team only eight hours to rest before they would begin to examine the specimen in detail. After he had seen the medics, Pete took a hot shower in his quarters and fell instantly asleep. Then, what seemed to be only a second later, he awoke to his alarm blaring and his head throbbing from the ten sutures it had taken to close the wound he had suffered in the wreck.
An hour later, he and his team started the slow process of thawing and exhuming the specimen. The top layer of the sarcophagus had been like cutting the stone that encased it, some kind of ambergris or near relative that was two to three inches thick. The second layer had been the big surprise. They had expected the entire block to be frozen solid, but the minute they had broken away a large enough section of the amber, they discovered some sort of goo about the consistency of jello. It was as if the creature had been purposefully packed in it the minute after death. Whatever the material was, its freezing point was well below 0 Celsius. Someone had thoughtfully called for a shop vacuum. Then, five hours and three fifty gallon trash bins later, they were looking at a complete dinosaur from the late Cretaceous.
Everyone’s heart rate had increased. Bones, skin, perhaps even internal organs. As Pete suspected, this was going to go down as one of the most significant finds ever in the world of paleontology. Scratch that. It was one of the most significant finds in all human history, period! Pete was confident that he and his associates would be writing enough material over the next few years to fill a library. The fact that the information would probably all be classified was only mildly disturbing. Those were the rules of the game when you worked for a top secret organization, and he had long ago surrendered to the idea. Pete was also enough of a realist to know that, had it not been for the governmental construction of the Utah ARC, it was very unlikely that anyone would have ever made such a discovery. After all, they had been working at minus 1,000 feet or so from the surface for god’s sake. Then, of course, there had been th
e accident. Now, none of that seemed to matter.
The specimen was removed from its ancient stone capsule and placed on a rolling table then transferred to a large and very well equipped autopsy room. Pictures were taken, and various measurements. The creature would have stood about 6 feet 8 inches and weighed 311 pounds. Some distant relative of the theropods was the immediate theory. It definitely had walked upright. They determined that it was probably an adolescent female. The creature had no apparent tail of any kind—another first—but the greatest mystery was that it appeared to be partially clad in some sort of reptile skin.
One of the younger doctors, a clown by the name of Phillips, had posed for a shot with a stethoscope. When he placed it on the chest of the creature, his face had immediately gone from jovial to serious. He had paused long enough to cause the team member who was taking the photographs to admonish him.
“Come on Phillips, very funny, quit messing around, and let me get some more shots without you in the damn picture!”
Phillips had ignored the remark. “Ah, Dr. Wilson, I think you better…,” he said as he carefully but quickly moved away from the dinosaur and thrust his scope out to Pete. “I know it’s impossible, and you must think I am kidding, but….”
Pete looked Phillips in the eye. There was something unnerving about the way he had looked back. “OK, Phillips,” Pete finally said, “I’ll bite just so you can have a good laugh. You probably all deserve it.” Pete took the scope over to the specimen, placed the instrument in his ears and then, as nonchalantly as he could, he placed the flat part on the dinosaur’s chest and listened. Nothing. Phillips gave an expectant look his way as if to encourage him, but Pete was just about to give up when he heard it—a heartbeat deep and distant—at nine second intervals. He caught five or six of them before his hands shook and he dropped the stethoscope from his ears. “That is impossible,” was all he could say.
The next minutes were a blur of activity. They rushed the dinosaur from the autopsy room to the largest operating room in the building and placed her on a table that was equipped with thick leather restraints. Pete immediately called in every doctor, veterinarian, and animal expert on base and basically ordered every test it was possible to do without cutting the creature open. They cinched the dinosaur down and started a heart monitor along with an EEG to report brain activity, and watched in awe as the brain functions increased steadily along with the heart rate.
Pete was concerned about the consequences of the creature regaining consciousness and the shock it might send her into when she suddenly realized her new circumstances. He had seen animals often go into shock when they had recovered from anesthesia in different surroundings. Reluctantly, he had ordered an IV and prepared to have anesthesiologists ready to sedate if necessary.
Pete was just as worried that any kind of drug might kill his specimen, especially any kind of anesthesia. How were they to know what kind of dosage or even if it would work? One of the other doctors had a lot of experience with gators, and another with primates, but his was only mildly comforting to Pete. Talk about famous, he had thought. How about being responsible for killing the one and only specimen of a living dinosaur ever known by overdosing it with tranquilizers?
He instructed everyone to leave the room except his two anesthesiologists, and ordered the doors secured. No telling what might happen. There was a glass gallery just above them, so the rest of the team could still see what was going on.
*
Now the beast was actually regaining consciousness—65 million years after it should have died! It was utterly and completely impossible. “This is impossible, right?” Pete kept asking to no one in particular as he closely watched the monitors. No one bothered to answer until the beast began to move.
“Be careful Doc,” one of the anesthesiologists cautioned, obviously scared to death. One of the creature’s fingers twitched and Pete was standing very close to the table.
The Arzat was almost certain she must be in another world. There were strange sounds all around her and a multitude of very unfamiliar and unpleasant smells that she had never experienced before. And never in her life had she been surrounded with so much pure light. Before she even opened her eyes she could sense that it would be blinding to do so. She instinctively attempted to pull her hand up to cover her face, but her arm would not move.
Perhaps she was still dreaming, she thought. She had certainly felt like she had been dreaming for a very long time. Nothing had happened in the dreams that she could specifically recall-movement, travel, alien voices, and the ever present cold-but all of the images were vague. The only thing she could remember clearly was one of the female Arzats handing her something foul to drink. She felt as if she were stuck in a white cloud, the kind that emerged in the bright sunlight just before a storm.
She tried to move again, but her left arm, both her feet, and her legs were mysteriously pinned down. She started to panic. Gradually, she opened her eyes. At first she could see nothing, the brightness of her surroundings blurred everything. She blinked a few times and, as her pupils naturally dialed down to impossibly narrow slits, she was surprised to see a weird creature staring at her, so close to her face that she could have reached out and grabbed it were she not constrained. She hissed and snarled instinctively. The creature, whatever it was, seemed equally surprised and immediately took a couple of steps back. There were other similar creatures in the room as well, but she was not sure of their numbers. She could not really see them, but she could sense them. She was surrounded.
Where were her parents? Where was she? The Arzat tried desperately to move again. As her eyes became better focused, she attempted to see what was holding her, but she had difficulty lifting her head. It too was strapped down somehow. She strained to look down her body, and was further upset to see that there were all kinds of things attached to her skin, as if she were in a giant spider’s web. She was still weak, but the anger and fear that welled up inside her took over. She started to twist from side to side with the enormous force of all of her muscles, her eyes focused on the creature at her side. The animal’s own eyes widened, and she could see a strange white space around its pupils that was even more disturbing. It began crying out in some sort of incoherent high pitched babbling. She took no satisfaction at all from the fact that it seemed as frightened as she was. The only thing on her mind was breaking free.
“Doctor?” one of the anesthesiologists asked Pete in a very concerned tone. It was clear that he was anxious to get the order to sedate.
Pete didn’t immediately answer. He was too mesmerized by what was happening. The creature twisted and pulled with every bit of her strength and finally snapped the leather that had been holding her right arm and took a swipe at him.
“OK,” Pete said as calmly as possible, thinking that he had waited too long. He backed away from the table. “OK. Let’s see if we can slow her down some.” The dinosaur was just about to completely break out of the restraints, Pete could see that. In a second, he and the two other doctors were going to be stuck in a room with this thing that was not only gigantic but pissed. The three men watched as one of them carefully fed drugs into the IV.
The Arzat was still struggling to free her other hand when her body suddenly began feeling heavy. The sensation was very similar to the one she experienced when her mother and the other females had administered the drugs in the cave. She attempted in vain to get any part of her body to work but it was impossible, and she felt herself quickly drifting back to sleep.
Pete and the other doctors watched the heart and brain-activity monitors carefully to be sure that the anesthesia was not negatively impacting the creature before they could all breathe freely again. “What do you think John?” he finally asked the doctor that had put the dinosaur under.
“I gave her just about the same dose as I would have given a full grown gorilla. Might keep her down for an hour or so, but I wouldn’t know for sure Doc. I would guess shorter than longer,” the anesthesiolog
ist answered, still trying to recover from the scene he had just witnessed.
They all continued to look at the EKG and the other monitors. Pete had been terrified to drug the creature—afraid there might be some negative reaction. Any kind of anesthesia was always dangerous, and they still hadn’t done a full blood analysis. The doctors were shooting in the dark. Pete knew that he was going to need to act very quickly now. He didn’t dare risk another dose.
“Hey, Ron,” Pete asked the officer in charge of the area, “can you come in here please?” Ron was another old friend of Pete’s who had been working with him for many years. Ron had stationed himself just outside the operating room and had already given orders to clear everyone out of the entire section if necessary. He could see that this creature would rip the place apart if it ever got going, far worse than any angry full-grown gorilla. Unbeknownst to Pete, Ron had also stationed marksmen with high-powered rifles close by just in case.
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Is this room strong enough to contain this thing when she comes to?”
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