“So I’ll stick to my dead assumption then. In the unlikely event that they’re not, we won’t be doing them much good if we die trying to find them. At my compound, I have equipment and supplies for a proper rescue mission. If they’re not dead, which they most certainly are.”
We reached the crash site of my saucer. My hope, albeit slim, was that the craft would be salvageable or at least give us access to better equipment. But the pterodactyls swarmed over the wreckage, tearing it to pieces with their claws, beaks, and eye beams. There was no way to get to it without meeting the same fate.
“Didn’t you know about those things?” asked Zala.
“They’re not normally so aggressive, although the fauna mutates at such an advanced rate that there’s no way to stay on top of it. But in this case, I think they were triggered.” I pointed to a device, a small missile lodged in the side of the saucer. “That must be what shorted the force field. It’s probably equipped with some kind of signal generator that gets the pterodactyls frenzied. Clever. The sensor interference makes the small device almost undetectable, and once the field is down, the reptiles do the rest.”
“Don’t tell me you made that too.”
“I’d experimented with frequency sensitivity in the wildlife but hadn’t done anything with the research. Someone must’ve carried it forward to practical application.”
“Is there nothing you’ve touched that can’t be made into a weapon?”
“Everything is a weapon,” I replied. “It’s just a matter of being creative enough.”
Zala took aim with her rifle. “I’ll destroy the device. The creatures should leave, and we might be able to salvage something of worth from the saucer.”
“That could backfire on us. We don’t know how the pterodactyls will react.”
“No, but we do know that trekking through the forest with what we have is probably inadequate for our survival.”
She made sense, but in a situation like this, it paid to weigh the variables. While I was pondering, she fired her rifle from the hip. The shot was dead on. The missile blew to bits. The pterodactyls responded with shrieks and a few lasers blasted in random directions. One came dangerously close to slicing off Zala’s head. Another reflected off Snarg’s thick armor. The ricochet killed a reptile. The pterodactyls took to the sky in a chorus of caws and screeches.
“Looks like you were right”—Zala snapped her fingers—“there was nothing to worry about.”
Something fell from the sky, landing just a few feet away from us. The metallic polyhedral embedded itself in the soil. We remained still, waiting for more to fall.
“Another weapon?” asked Zala. “A bomb perhaps?”
Snarg extended the spikes along her back. She only did that when especially tense. My exo detected an ultrasonic whine signal.
“Destroy it,” I said.
Zala fired several bolts into the device. They only blackened its shell without damage. The frequency remained, and Snarg clawed the ground and twitched.
The island rumbled. The roar of charging nodosaurids was much too close and getting closer. The canopy made direction impossible to figure, but we had only a few seconds before they would be upon us.
I grabbed Zala, activated my rocketpack. We flew upward just as the two-headed nodosaurids came crashing through the jungle, knocking down trees and crushing everything in their way. We hung suspended while underneath my ship was pulverized by the rampaging herd. The creatures’ extra heads didn’t make them smarter, only more likely to panic. And several hundred tons of panicked, armor-plated dinosaurs were enough to finish my saucer off. The nodos smashed it with their tails and butted it back and forth like a giant Frisbee.
It was several minutes before the device that had triggered their rage stopped emitting. Whether some stubborn nodo stepped on it or someone just cut the signal, the dinosaurs calmed. The herd milled about in the clearing and wreckage they’d created.
I’d hovered close to the canopy to avoid detection by any zealous pterodactyls, but it was only a matter of time before they spotted something smaller than them to blast from the sky. I landed, set Zala down. The nodos brayed, gave us some room but otherwise ignored us.
“Oh, Emperor.” Zala nodded toward Snarg, trampled into the ground. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
Snarg raised her head and spit out some dirt. She crawled out of the hole and coiled up at my side.
“By the Seventh,” said Zala. “What does it take to kill that thing?”
“More than a few enraged nodosaurids.” I bent down and picked out a piece of scrap I couldn’t identify. Just junk now.
“We should get moving,” I said.
We’d both seen the plume of smoke where the Venusians had crashed. They’d come down closer to the compound, but it was still faster to continue on our own. Zala didn’t like it, but she had to admit it made more sense than trying to search a teeming wilderness.
The journey was slow, but it was better to keep moving on the island. Standing still usually meant death. If not from the assassins after me then from the irradiated monsters that called this place home. Moving wasn’t really safer, but it felt more active, gave us the illusion of having some control over our fate. I’d never been very good at inaction. I liked to initiate. If we were going to stumble across something large and hungry, I’d prefer we were the ones doing the stumbling rather than being stumbled upon. Either way, we were likely to perish on the island, but I still found the former more satisfying than the latter.
Zala questioned me. I didn’t mind. In point of fact, I rather liked being questioned. It was refreshing, a nice change of pace.
“Your compound’s security has been compromised,” she said.
“True.”
“Someone is trying to kill you.”
“Also true.”
“And yet you continue to act exactly how they want you to.”
“I don’t see any alternative. We’re unlikely to survive the night if we don’t try. Unless my operative finds us first. In the meantime, it’s better to keep moving.”
A small predator jumped out of the jungle. Zala smashed it across the jaw with the butt of her rifle, and it retreated. She didn’t lose a step.
“What if this ally of yours is in league with our mystery puppet master?”
“I sincerely doubt it. Although it’s an interesting possibility.”
“Your definition of interesting continues to elude me.”
We stopped while Snarg sniffed the air. Her antennae twitched nervously.
“If he’s not a traitor, then he could be dead,” said Zala.
I chuckled. “If Dinosaur Island hasn’t killed him yet, then it is safe to say he is nigh unkillable.”
Snarg chirped a warning. Zala didn’t have to be told to ready her weapon.
An obsidian boulder flew from the underbrush and came crashing at our feet. Zala swept the jungle with her rifle.
“Put it down,” I said.
“But…”
“Put it down before they kill you where you stand.”
“What kills me?” she demanded.
“If you don’t put it down, you’ll never get a chance to find out.”
The next boulder flew inches from her head and shattered a thick tree trunk into splinters.
“There won’t be another warning,” I said.
Reluctantly, she lowered the rifle.
The jungle parted and twelve-foot-tall reptilian primates with sails running down their backs emerged into view. The creatures surrounded us.
“What are they?” she asked.
“At some point, they had been dimetrodons, but several generations of mutation have transformed them into hulking primates with a cunning higher animal intelligence. I call them primadons. Interestingly enough,” I added, “dimetrodons are often thought of as dinosaurs by your average Terran, though in fact they are more closely related to mammals than reptiles and fall under the category of pelycosau
rs.”
“I don’t find that very interesting,” she said.
“Not a fan of terrestrial paleontology, I take it.”
The alpha of the primadons, a great brute with a scarred body, pounded the earth with his fists and roared.
“What are they going to do with us?” whispered Zala.
“It remains to be seen, but they’re carnivorous, so they’re probably planning on eating you. They’ll probably just smash me to pieces and, if they notice, lick up the pulped remains.”
Her rifle hummed as she upped the damage setting.
“You’ll only end up annoying them.”
“A true warrior does not slide willingly down her opponent’s gullet.”
The alpha leaned forward and sniffed Snarg. She snipped his nose, and he jumped back with a fearsome howl. The primadons responded with their own dreadful cacophony, and no doubt every edible creature within a thousand yards was already running in the opposite direction.
“We’ll have to risk flying to escape.”
“I don’t like being carried from battle like some helpless child,” she replied with a snarl.
“Fine with me. I don’t need to take you with me.”
The dance of the primadons reached a fevered pitch. They punched and grappled with each other for the right to the first bite, and there wouldn’t be a better opportunity. I seized her and rocketed upward. But the alpha, alert predator that he was, had other plans. He threw something. I didn’t know what it was, but it was big and heavy and had enough force to cause me to spin around, smash through the trees, and come crashing to the ground.
I lost track of everything. My senses only cleared enough to see the hazy outline of the creature preparing to bash me into oblivion.
Then I heard the long, terrifying howl that filled every monster on the island with fear. A figure bounded from out of nowhere and put himself between the beast and me.
My squat and bulky rescuer stood barely five feet tall. His carapace was a rainbow of scarlet and blue. He had a knife sheathed at his side, but he didn’t pull it. It wasn’t necessary.
The savage raised his head and howled, beating his chest with his fists, a throbbing rhythm that warned of his arrival. The primadons retreated. All except the alpha, who bull-rushed his opponent. Faster than the eye could follow, the savage wrestled with the alpha, turning and twisting and with a fluid motion, slamming the great beast to the jungle floor. The alpha shrieked his surrender, but the savage didn’t let up until he heard the snap of bone.
He released the alpha, who growled at us one last time before loping mildly into the jungle along with the rest of the tribe.
The savage helped me to my feet.
“How goes it, Emperor?”
“Could be better,” I replied. “Glad you could make it.”
The savage didn’t smile. It wasn’t in his nature. He clasped me on the shoulder and nodded. “You’ll have to forgive my people. They are rarely gracious hosts.”
Zala stumbled into view.
“Good of you to join us,” I said. “May I introduce Kreegah the Merciless. My man on the inside.”
8
With Kreegah and Snarg escorting us through the jungle, the journey was much smoother. The diminutive but powerful Jupitorn spoke rarely. His trained senses focused on the environment, scanning for any threat.
“I would have been here sooner,” he said, “but I was closer to the other skyship.”
“Did you find my battleguard?” asked Zala.
“I found some people. They looked like you. Several were dead.”
“But not all?”
“No, there were still living among them. I told them to stay where they were until I could come back for them. They had weapons. If they wait for me, they should be fine.”
Kreegah tilted his head at Zala. He blinked his large blue eyes.
“Did I do something wrong?”
Zala shrugged. “No, but couldn’t you have brought them with you?”
“They were too slow. If I’d waited for them, you would be dead by now.”
He sniffed the air. He sprang through the canopy and disappeared. We waited for his return.
“How did a Jupitorn end up here?” asked Zala.
“It’s difficult to know for sure,” I replied. “I’ve seen the ship that brought him here. A pleasurecraft. It must have had drive problems. Possibly the gravity well caught them unaware. Wrong place, wrong time. Whatever the reason, the craft crashed onto Dinosaur Island roughly forty years ago. All the passengers must have been killed upon impact or fallen victim to the jungle. Except for one hatchling, adopted by a primadon female and raised as her own. Even then, he would’ve died if not for his superior strength and adaptability.”
“I’ve never seen one with such a fully developed carapace.”
“My guess is that the island’s radiation triggered dormant genes while still in the egg.”
“And he lives here?”
Kreegah dropped behind us, landing with barely a rustle. Zala jumped. She did her best to hide it.
“Where else would I live?”
Before she could answer the question, he held up his hand.
“You should be quiet now.”
Something thumped through the underbrush. It had the throaty respiration of a full-grown stegosauroid, a dim-witted but easily startled beast, but when it shrieked, it sounded more like a siamotyrannus. We didn’t see it, and it passed without noticing us.
We made it to Kreegah’s home just as night was falling. It was never dark on the island, only an emerald twilight. The flora glimmered with faint light visible when the sun went down, and the radioactive sky shimmered.
He lived in a small mountain. In the dim green glow, it was difficult to spot the shape of a Jupitorn pleasurecraft covered in moss and vines. Kreegah rolled a moss-covered boulder from an old airlock.
He said, “Wait in here. If your friends are still alive, I’ll bring them back.”
After we were gone, he sealed the entrance.
“What if something happens to him?” asked Zala. “How are we supposed to get out of here?”
I ignored the question. Jupitorn craftsmanship meant the interior still had a few working lights. Kreegah had also taken to scattering luminescent grass on the floor. We moved down a corridor. There was a noticeable tilt in the floor, but nothing to slow us down. We reached the bridge, where the emergency lights cast a soft yellow glow that mixed with the green of the grass to cast sparkling emerald hues on the walls. Most of the consoles and terminals were broken. A few creeping vines and stubborn roots had pried cracks in the hull and a thin layer of dust covered everything. Bones of all shapes and sizes littered the floor, and judging by the way Zala winced, the place probably had quite an unpleasant odor. Sealed in my exo, I was spared that experience.
“He lives like an animal,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I replied. “I’d say he’s done very well for himself, all things considered.”
She sat in a chair, gently at first for fear of its snapping with decay. “He doesn’t belong here. You should take him home, Emperor.”
“I’ve offered. He’s not interested.”
“So we’re staying here for the night then?” she asked.
“You don’t want to be out in that jungle at night,” I said. “There are…things out there.”
“There were things out there earlier.”
“These are different things,” I replied. “Worse things.”
She passed the next hour checking and double-checking her weapons. When I suggested she take off her armor and make herself comfortable, she dismissed the notion. I amused myself studying a sample of grass.
“You can’t stop it, can you?” said Zala.
“Stop what?”
“Analyzing and studying and thinking. It’s a compulsion with you.”
I paused to note the energy yield of the sample. “You make it sound like a bad thing.”
�
��For you, it is. You’ve already probably managed to think of twelve ways to use that grass for some nefarious scheme.”
I laughed. “You flatter me, Zala. I’m not that good. It’s only six so far.” My exo beeped as it added more data. “Oh, seven.”
She pointed her rifle at me. “Wrath of my gods be damned, I should kill you right here.”
“And only five of these uses could be classified as nefarious,” I said. “The sixth and seventh are merely morally dubious.”
She lowered the weapon, placing it across her lap. Her eyes glinted, two pinpoints in the dark. Her scales caught the peculiar lights, and she almost glowed herself.
She continued to polish her gun until Kreegah returned. He had only three Venusians with him.
“Where are the rest?” she asked.
“Dead,” replied one of her soldiers. “Some were killed in the crash. The rest we lost when we ventured into the jungle to find you. We were able to fend off the creatures until night. Then something came out of nowhere and carried off several of the others.”
“I warned them,” said Kreegah.
“We were following protocol,” said the soldier.
“Protocol is for people without common sense,” I said softly to myself.
Zala glared. “We wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t led us into an ambush.”
“You’re free to abandon this misguided bodyguard mission anytime you want.”
There was a moment of silence. I couldn’t know what Zala was thinking, but I assumed it was something about honor or justice or some variation of them.
As for me, I wasn’t certain how I felt about the idea. I’d grown fond of Zala over the years. I didn’t have many friends, and while our relationship had always been tinged by a few past misunderstandings, there was something reassuring about having her around. In a chaotic equation, she was among the constants. It was nice to have something to rely on.
She gave her remaining battleguard permission to relax. They found places to sit and check their equipment. Like good soldiers. There was something comforting about that too. They were woefully underequipped for the threats of Dinosaur Island but were still determined to make the most of what they had. I enjoyed their optimism.
Emperor Mollusk Versus The Sinister Brain Page 7