Lester folded his hands behind his head.
“Let me get this straight — you allowed a creature from the future to escape into the past? Now, isn’t that precisely what we’ve been trying to avoid for the last, oh I don’t know, forever?”
“It couldn’t be helped,” Cutter said. No, I’m sorry Lester, I screwed up. No, I promise you, Lester, it won’t happen again.
“So what, pray tell, are we looking at here? Worst case scenario, lay it out straight.”
“Worst case,” Cutter said, leaning forward, “we’ve irrevocably changed the course of evolution. Altered the ages of man beyond recognition, wiped out great minds and all of their great creations, changed the immune systems of man and animal, and maybe created a god.”
“What?” Lester opened his eyes then, and rocked forward in his chair. “Please tell me you are joking. Very funny, Cutter, I have to say. Much better than making up a name and pretending one of our team members has disappeared.”
“It’s no joke,” Cutter said. His eyes were cold.
“Please explain, then, in words of two syllables or less, if possible.”
“It’s really very simple,” Cutter said. “The future predator bore an uncanny resemblance to the mythical figure of Pacha Kamaq, the god the Incas called Earth Shaker.”
Lester leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk in front of him, and put his head in his hands. For a moment he didn’t say a word. He simply sat there. Then he looked up.
“What part of creating a god seemed like a good idea, Cutter?”
“It wasn’t exactly part of the plan, Lester.”
Still no sorry. Lester inhaled slowly, that single breath the only sound in the room. He shook his head.
“We lost two good men out there in what was clearly reckless endangerment. And now this? Carelessly allowing an unknown creature to escape into the Plio-Pleistocene. ‘Not part of the plan’ is, frankly, not good enough. What do you have to say for yourself, Professor?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, man. Look at what we’ve learned here,” Cutter protested. “We can’t simply close our eyes to this stuff. Everything’s changed, in just a matter of days. Everything we thought we knew, we don’t know anymore. Anomalies are opening overseas, Lester. They could open at any time, in any place. Places that are out of range of our detection devices. We’re the only ones —”
Lester cut him off.
“Yes, thank you. We are the only ones. I seem to have heard that before. Jenny, what do you have to say for yourself? You’ve been aw-fully quiet.”
She looked at the faces around the room, at Abby and Connor, Stephen and Cutter. They weren’t the same people with whom she had travelled to Peru. The experience had changed them all. She couldn’t exactly claim that it had brought them closer, and neither had it driven them apart, but they had lived through things together.
Abby had held a man in her arms while he died. That wasn’t something she would ever forget. Cutter had been forced to burn a man who had become a friend. Even though by doing so he had saved all of their lives, there was no way something like that couldn’t affect him.
She had been dragged screaming out of a broken window into the mist, and locked up in a cage like an animal waiting for the slaughter. Connor, Stephen, all of them, had walked through the valley of death in the shadow of the Thylacosmilus. Something like that changed you. It took the excitement of their job and mutated it into something horrible and deadly.
How many more people would have to die because of the anomalies and the corruption they had come across?
She didn’t believe for a minute that the dying was done. It would go on as long as anomalies opened rifts in time and space, and let the creatures through. And one day it would be one of them dying, not just soldiers who had been seconded to the team. They all knew it. Peru had proved that much beyond a shadow of a doubt.
That was why she was quiet. It was why they all were.
“Cutter’s right.”
“Now there’s a surprise,” Lester said acerbically. “Do tell me, I’d love to hear how. That’s what I live for, after all. Tell me more of the brilliance of the good Professor, do. I shall save it as yet another entry for my memoires.”
“Now we know that the phenomenon isn’t limited to the British Isles, that opens up a whole new can of worms. Judging from the kind of corrupt officials we encountered, wanting us dead and buried and dumped in an open grave in deepest darkest Peru, it throws open the potential for a whole slew of political disasters.”
“My little ray of sunshine.” Just the thought of the diplomatic nightmares that were unfolding in front of him, and the fact that he’d be reliant upon Cutter and the others to try and avert them, did not exactly set his heart a-flutter. “I think I need a couple of aspirin, I’ve got a migraine coming on. Out you go. Leave.” He dismissed them.
The door sighed shut as it closed behind Jenny, Cutter, and the rest of the team.
It could easily have been the sound of Lester’s heart.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Nothing can survive in a vacuum, and as the song goes, no one can exist all alone. This book couldn’t have happened without a few good men and women, so, my thanks go out to Dan Abnett, he knows why, to Cath Trechman, and yep, she knows why too (though for everyone else’s benefit, it is all about patience and insight. Every good book needs an even better editor)... to Adrian Hodges and Tim Haines (come on, everyone can work out why they’re getting the hearty slap on the back —they created the show, without them dinos wouldn’t be roaming the earth, and what fun would that be?)... to Marie for coffee and cuddles and coping with the sleepless nights having a writer in her life entails... to Roddy Frame for music to write by, and to each and every person who has beavered away behind the scenes making this book possible: particularly the designer Martin Stiff, proofreaders, sales reps and marketing and publicity, all the guys you never think about when you sit down to write the first word, and forget when you crack open the spine and read the first page — so to the unsung majority who do what they do, my heartfelt thanks. But most of all, to you, for picking this book up off the shelf. Without you it’s all rather pointless after all.
This book was brought to you by the letter S.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
PRIMEVAL
THE LOST ISLAND
PAUL KEARNEY
A trawler is torn to pieces by an enormous sea monster off the Irish coast. Meanwhile, Connor’s anomaly detector goes off the charts: half a dozen rifts in time have appeared, all on one deserted — yet politically contentious — island...
While Lester struggles to hold on to his career as the story edges ever closer to the front page, Cutter and the team battle through a deadly storm to reach the island, only to find themselves fighting to survive amidst the terrifying creatures roaming the harsh landscape...
www.titanbooks.com
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
PRIMEVAL
EEXTINCTION EVENT
DAN ABNETT
When an Entelodon goes on the rampage down Oxford Street, causing untold damage and loss of life, Cutter decides a new approach to tackling the anomalies is needed. However, his investigations expose him and the team to a violent encounter with a mysterious Russian scientist and a situation more catastrophic and frightening than they’ve ever faced before...
When Cutter, Abby and Connor disappear without a trace, Lester and Jenny must use every trick in the book to try to track them down...
www.titanbooks.com
yscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share
Shadow of the Jaguar Page 27