Most of the containers on the upper levels of the stack were empty now, which was fine by her.
She simply went along the ones on the ground floor of the pile, keyed in her override code that unlocked the outer door and the inner boxes and left the door ajar. Her beasties would come out eventually, and she hoped she’d have time to get out of the way before they did.
By the time she finished the bottom row, she calculated that there would be a little over 120 Compsognathus on the container deck by the time they all emerged, which should be quite fun.
She hurried back to her room; being on this deck would soon be unhealthy.
***
Flavia pulled her t-shirt back on and gave Johan a peck on the cheek. “That wasn’t bad.”
“Yeah, I could tell it was just okay by the way I had to put my hand over your mouth to muffle the screams so the entire ship wouldn’t hear us,” he replied.
“I wish you had a cabin to yourself,” she said. The diamond pattern on the deck metal was probably permanently imprinted on her back.
He looked around. “Why? This place is kind of cool.”
She shuddered. The stacks of containers around them looked like socialist worker housing, brutalist and rectangular, but infinitely more likely to topple. Except in the throes of ecstasy, she spent most of her time wondering if a big swell wouldn’t knock the entire pile down on them. She grinned evilly in the knowledge that if they ever got a decent place to have sex in, he wouldn’t be able to stop her screaming with just a hand.
But even though she couldn’t relax completely, it was still better than sitting in her cabin watching Marion play one game after another of solitaire on her computer, and get shushed every time she wanted to start a conversation.
They started towards the back of the ship—she never bothered to learn the nautical name, even though some of the other analysts kept on about prows and bows and poops. “I should probably see what Hans is up to,” Johan said. “He knows about us, but he’ll be pissed if I leave him alone his entire shift.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Guarding some drifters we picked up. Boss says they’re refugees of some sort, and we need to hold them until we can turn them over to the Indians.”
Flavia grunted. His whole world seemed to be some macho fantasy about strutting around keeping order. Now that he had actual people to keep contained, he would be unbearable. Hell, she was surprised he’d even bothered to meet her that night. What was sex compared to prisoners?
Their footsteps echoed in the thin canyons between the piles of containers. The deck was mostly covered in the oblong boxes, but they were stacked together in approximately cubical formations five containers wide and five high with spaces between them enforced by metal grids high above. He was right… it did sound like her screams would have carried all the way back to the cabin area if he’d let her.
Suddenly, Johan stopped. “What was that?” he said.
She swatted his chest. “Don’t start with that. You know as well as I do that the only thing we have to guard against on this ship is rats. And if it’s rats, you won’t be able to keep me from screaming no matter what you try.”
He laughed and they began walking again. This time, she heard the noise, some kind of rustling up ahead. She’d been kidding about the rats, but it definitely sounded like there were some up ahead. She let him walk in front of her. Rats didn’t actually frighten her, but why be with a big, hulking oaf if you couldn’t use him to scare away rodents?
They approached an intersection between two piles of containers. Something flashed through the gap and she hugged him close.
“That’s too big to be a rat,” she said.
“What is?”
“Didn’t you see it?”
“There’s nothing there.” He walked forward, laughing. She didn’t want to approach whatever she’d seen, but she wanted him to leave her behind in the dark even less. The motion-sensor-activated lights were few and far between, placed every twenty meters or so. She cast long shadows.
They reached the intersection. They had to turn right to reach the stairs that led up to the main deck.
“Oh, shit!” Johan cried.
“What?”
He never answered her, and she never found out for herself. Her next impression was that the hallways were suddenly filled with a rancid odor and teeth. Millions and millions of teeth.
But that wasn’t her last thought, or even the next-to-last. Her next-to-last last thought was that whoever was screaming now was certainly being heard upstairs. It was the scream of pain unimaginable.
Flavia’s very last thought was the realization that the scream was hers.
***
This time, Cora saw them coming and fired first. A dinosaur fell to her first shot, the neck exploding and severing the head, which rolled off into the shadows of the containers.
“Lucky,” Eddie laughed. He stood beside her with his strange square blade in the air and a look of eager anticipation on his features. “I thought that one was mine for sure.”
“You’ll get your chance,” she replied grimly.
The tactical situation wasn’t as bad as it had been on the island. The straight canyons between the container groupings were an infinitely superior place to fight a swarm of carnivores than the jungle. Not only was the lighting much better, but the terrain was straight and flat, offering no cover except for corners. It was like fighting in a city, except you didn’t have to worry about snipers on the buildings.
The thought caused her to look up nervously. What if the dinosaurs had somehow gotten up there and were even now waiting to jump on them from above?
Cora shook her head. They had enough problems without adding terminal paranoia to the list.
“Fall back a bit. Let’s find a spot we can defend,” she shouted. “We’re too exposed.”
They moved along the endless, ruler-straight canyon for a few yards until they reached an intersection with one path that dead-ended at a wall. Every instinct screamed to avoid it, and Cora hesitated at the crossroad. She didn’t like having her back to a wall, even if it made perfect sense from the tactical perspective of being able to hold out forever. It tasted too much of a desperate last stand.
Harold paid the price for her indecision. He was in the left arm of the crossroad and saw a group of dinosaurs heading their way. He fired at the leader, downing it, but the pack kept coming.
“Watch out!” he shouted.
Following Cora’s lead, everyone else packed into the corridor she’d selected… everyone but Harold. He stood his ground, trying to take down more of the creatures to cover their retreat. Sheer numbers pulled him to the ground.
Then the dinosaurs did something she hadn’t seen from them before: they dragged the screaming Harold down the corridor and out of sight faster than a person could run, moving with unexpected coordination.
Cora wanted to run after him, but Sked restrained her even as he used his other hand to grab Crazy Eddie. The dude was stronger than he looked, even though he looked plenty strong. “Nothing you can do. There’s too many of them.”
She turned on him and snarled. “So what do we do? Just sit here and let them pick us off one by one until there’s nothing left but chewed-up bones?”
“We can hold here. They can only come at us from one direction.”
“They just did that and still got Harold.”
“But now we have a better proportion of guns to targets,” Akane said. She was holding up Harold’s pistol, which he’d dropped when they dragged him away.
“What good is that? Did you see how many there were? We’ll be out of bullets in the middle of the next charge. We might as well go down swinging.”
“Too late.” Those words, surprisingly, came from Ania, who’d been silent the whole way. She pointed straight ahead, and then to each side. Bright points of eyes, reflective in the dark like the eyes of cats, shone back at them from all three directions. The ones in the jungle hadn’
t done that, either. Or they’d been too busy running to notice.
“Back!” Cora shouted, all thoughts of attack suppressed.
“Shouldn’t we try to hold the entrance to this one?”
“No. We’ll use the canyon as a killing field.”
She was just thankful that they’d been forewarned this time. Just before the little bastards appeared, screams had sounded somewhere in the distance, terrified sounds that ended as abruptly as they began.
Cora didn’t know about the rest of them, but she immediately put two and two together and guessed their sharp-teethed pursuers were somehow on the ship.
Or maybe that was the wrong way to think about it. Logic said that the little reptiles had been on the ship all along, and the ones on the island had arrived there from here. These were the people who’d built the things.
They retreated to the back of the corridor. It was the perfect place to defend against an enemy without ranged weapons: long and narrow. Every bullet would hit a minimum of one target, probably more.
“Make them count, boys,” Cora said.
The team cocked their guns and awaited the charge. Eddie held his watermelon chopper at the ready. She tensed as the seconds—probably the last seconds of their lives—ticked into minutes.
Gunfire erupted, but not from them. It was automatic weapons fire, unmistakable staccato bursts. Somewhere, a man screamed.
The dinosaurs blocking the exit to their tunnel disappeared to be followed moments later by a group of black-clad humans firing machine guns. They sprinted across the intersection without looking their way.
Sked sprinted to the crossroad and popped his head out. He turned back towards them. “Time to go,” he said.
“We’re not going to find a more defensible position than this one,” Cora replied.
“But we might find one where we can actually survive. Do what you want, I’m getting out of this death trap while the soldiers are distracted.”
Cora cursed but rounded up the rest of the group and followed. Sked led them straight towards one of the stairwells on the side of the cargo deck.
They sprinted up and ran along a corridor until they came to a door that led into a room full of boxes and shelves.
“Kitchen stores,” the cook said.
“It’ll do for now,” Sked replied.
The group filed in and the hacker faced Cora. “Akane and I are going to go have a look around. This boat is full of bad guys, so it’s best that you stay here.”
“Why should you go out there?”
“Because this is the kind of thing we do for a living. We know how to move around industrial areas—and ships, I suppose—without being seen.”
“We’ve already been seen. Someone sicced the dinosaurs on us.”
Sked considered that. “Yeah. But I want to know why the dinosaurs are fighting security. I have a suspicion that the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing. Maybe we can work with that. Either way, we’ll find a safe place to hunker down while we figure out what to do next.”
They disappeared out the door into the pre-dawn glow. She hoped they knew what they were doing.
Because if they didn’t, she sure as hell wasn’t going to be able to hide this lot.
Chapter 19
Dieter was enraged. Sabrina could tell by the way his eyes flashed, something she’d always thought was a figure of speech. She studied him with the eye of a veteran biologist. Maybe ‘flashing’ wasn’t the right word, but they certainly bulged and caught the light differently, wide open as they were. Also, a very unattractive vein protruded on the upper left corner of his forehead.
“That’s enough, Dieter,” she said. “You really shouldn’t shout English insults with that accent. You sound like a Nazi in a bad movie.”
He stopped mid-word, mouth hanging open, unable to believe she’d actually said what she’d said.
Sabrina had to stop herself from sniggering. He was like a cartoon character.
“Are you out of your mind?” Dieter said.
“Of course not.”
“Then why is this ship overrun with dinosaurs?”
She noted the hesitation between the words ‘is’ and ‘this’. It was quite clear that Raztenberger had been about to say ‘my ship’. He always felt that the mission should have been his to command despite the fact that he brought absolutely no useful skills to the party. “Because our job is to get data about how well the dinosaurs work and footage that we can use to sell them. Showing them in action in a ship environment is a good step in that direction.” Sabrina almost had enough self-control to leave the answer at that, but fell at the last hurdle. She couldn’t stop herself from adding. “And also because you are a bumbling fool who hasn’t been able to do anything right since this trip started. If you’d contained our prisoners, I wouldn’t have had to hunt them down.”
He turned purple. Interesting. That couldn’t be good for his blood pressure. “The only people you’ve managed to hunt down so far are two of my guards and one of your own analysts, and now the things are running all over the ship. Dozens of them,” he said.
“That’s not true. The Compsognathus pack also got one of the people from the island. Would you like to see the video?”
“No, I don’t want to watch your stupid video. I haven’t got your snuff fetish.”
“It’s not a snuff fetish,” she replied. “I am a scientist, and these videos are the best data humanity has ever had regarding the hunting behavior of small carnivores from the Jurassic period.”
“Hell, there’s no real need for it. We can watch it firsthand as those little monsters hunt us down one by one. How stupid do you have to be to pull a stunt like that?” He shook his head. “I will be informing Jermaine about what has been happening here, I’m afraid. He will be most unhappy.”
“I’m sure you’re right, but there’s no need for you to trouble yourself. I sent him an email a few minutes ago. It went into your failures in excruciating detail.” She smirked. “And yes, he’s most unhappy.”
Dieter swallowed and exited her room with a final glare, presumably to run off and try to kiss some CEO butt.
She didn’t care. Unlike that jumped-up security guard, she had important things to do. Things like figure out where the nine survivors had gotten off to, and how to lead her pack to the exact area.
Unfortunately, the security cameras had chosen this exact moment to start acting up, and none of her creatures had caught sight of them over the past half hour.
She returned to what she’d been doing before Dieter so rudely interrupted her: thinking.
***
Sked grinned. “I’m good,” he said.
“You’re not that good. These people are total amateurs,” Akane replied.
“You gotta be good to fleece the amateurs.”
“Whatever.”
He’d thought getting to the bad guys’ control area would entail a struggle against high-end security protocols followed by a mad dash to beat surveillance camera coverage. Instead, it had been child’s play to completely ignore the hardened area of the network, that single high-security node, and work through the ship’s control computer, which appeared to be from sometime in the 1980s.
Whoever owned this ship wasn’t concerned about getting hacked, probably because there was very little worth hacking on that particular mainframe unless you wanted to attack the ship’s accounting software and take away their ability to know how much money they’d made and spent on the last thirty years of trips. He estimated the software was at least that old.
A traditional hacker would find nothing worth his time in the digital corridors, but for Sked’s purposes, the system was a godsend. He simply turned off the security cameras and then installed a patch that would immediately turn them off again if anyone bothered to restart them. After that, he simply matched the areas that had been rented out for passengers with a map.
“The biggest area that the customers are using is over here, a storage locker
about twice the size of the room they put us in. It was probably where the crew stored their supplies, which explains why Cora and the rest of them are stashed in a regular room full of boxes of macaroni. If they have a central control room, that’s where we’ll find it.”
“Which way?”
“Follow me, oh princess of digital mayhem.” He headed towards the ship’s stern.
“I swear, as soon as I get back to civilization, I’m going to plug myself into a computer and never come out again. I’ll never depend on you for technology again.”
“If we get out of this, do whatever you want. Meanwhile, I’m not letting you get anywhere near my devices. Last thing I want is to discover you installed something evil in there just when I’m trying to do something delicate.”
She snorted. “Delicate? You’re a blunt instrument, Sked. Skilled, but blunt.”
“Says the kettle to the pot.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. It’s up the stairs, first door on the right.”
They halted beside a door. This wasn’t one of those big bulkhead doors like their former prison, but a regular door with a handle. He could hear people talking on the other side: at least one male and one female voice.
He tested the handle; the door was unlocked. They shrugged, exchanged a glance, brought up their pistols and entered.
The long, dim room was full of computers and screens showing numbers and graphs. Four young people—three women and a man—sat in front of screens. Two of them appeared to be playing some online game, the other two, seated next to each other, were chatting over a couple of cups of coffee. No one looked up to see who’d entered.
Akane shrugged again, turned the lock on the door—a simple unit like the one you’d expect to see at a home bathroom door—and said, in a loud voice, “Hi there, graveyard shift. This is your pre-dawn pirate attack. Please step away from your computers and raise your hands like a well-behaved group of mass murderers.”
Lost Island Rampage Page 19