Day of the Dragonstar

by David Bischoff

  “Whatever you say. Just make sure my son stays healthy. If anything happens to him, you can bet I’ll turn myself in and blow the whistle on you.”

  “We keep our bargains. I must go now. The supply vans will be loaded. Just remember that my people will want one of our agents on board that second mission. I don’t think I should have to remind you what the consequences would be if you do not comply.”

  “You will kill my son . . . go ahead and say it. You’ve said it so many times before, why be gentle at this point of the game?”

  “Very well. We will kill your son. Satisfied?”

  The IASA official looked away. “We’d better break this up now.”

  “We will meet again at the next shipment?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “No. Goodbye.”

  The Quartermaster departed quickly and quietly, leaving the troubled TWC agent to ponder what must now be done. It would not be difficult to place a Third World operative on board the Goddard. There were several men and women in Deep-Space Operations who qualified for the assignments, and who would be beyond suspicion since they had never been asked by their government to engage in any covert activities. TWC Intelligence, seeing the growing need for an extensive espionage network almost twenty years before, had been placing operatives within the IASA with regularity. Some of these operatives had never been utilized, but they were always available if needed.

  Somewhere beyond the orbit of Mars, Artifact One spun in toward the sun. The IASA official considered the implications of what he had been asked to do, and wondered if the life of his son was worth the trade.

  Sleep would not come easily tonight, he knew.

  * * *

  It was business as usual for Marcus Abdul Jashad. His orders had taken him to Paris, the famed City of Light, and he regretted that he would be having such a short stay in what—even he was forced to admit—remained one of the most beautiful and fascinating cities on the planet. Yes, his stay would be unfortunately brief, but such was the nature of his business.

  He sat by the chair at the window of the Hotel Internationale, a soaring glass tower which overlooked the promenade to Versailles, the age-old site of meetings, treaties, and summit conferences. Later that morning, delegates from the European Economic Alliance would be conferring with the leaders of the Third World Confederation in a mini-summit enclave. The white men of Europe would be sitting down with the darkly-complected ministers of the TWC to discuss issues of the day, said Le Monde. Issues of the day! thought Jashad. How quaint a phrase!

  These Europeans were so smug, now that they were no longer under the thumb of the petroleum cartel, of the TWC. Our day in the sun has been too swift, sweet but fleeting, thought Jashad. And now the old men of his alliance were knuckling under to the fierce economic pressure being brought to bear by the rich, influential nations of the West and the East. There was an ugly attitude brewing in the camps hostile to the TWC that now it was growing time to pay the piper. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the Arab and African states had called the tune, and the whole world had danced. But now, the oil was practically gone, and what was left was not wanted. Their base of power obliterated, the TWC was filling on hard times, and was beginning to kowtow to the whims of the other nations of the world.

  It was an unthinkable position to Jashad, and the hatred for the white man and his technology burned deep in him. He sucked deeply on an Egyptian cigarette, exhaled, and then broke into a coughing spasm. A large clot of phlegm became dislodged in his chest, rocketing up his throat. Jashad caught it on the end of his tongue and wiped it away with the tip of his index finger.. He stared at the dark, sticky mass for a moment, considering that he should again try to quit smoking, and then flicked it away contemptuously. It struck the filigreed wallpaper of the suite and clung to it like a living thing. Jashad smiled at his minor gesture of defiance, and look another deep drag from his cigarette.

  Checking his watch, he saw that it was almost time. He moved to the bed, where his suitcase lay open. First, he removed a case of what appeared to be Cuban cigars, each wrapped in a thin aluminum tube. He opened the case and began opening the cigar tubes, shaking out of each a false top which contained a cut-off panatella tip. Then he began to screw together eight of the tubes, fitting their micromachined threads into one another until he had the barrel and chamber of a weapon. From his camera bag, he removed the handgrip from his Nikon system and fitted it to the barrel. A trigger-assembly was concealed as part of a bartender’s kit, and a high-powered scope masqueraded as a telephoto lens. Even the shrewdest customs agent would never see a weapon among such ordinary objects. Jashad’s ammunition was always supplied by local agents—inevitably more than enough for his assignment—and he especially enjoyed the kind presently provided. It was a caliber hollowpoint explosive shell which left no doubt of any impact outcome. Even a shot to an extremity such as the arm or leg caused such massive shock to the body that the victim’s heart and nervous system was instantly jellied. It was a shell which the American CIA listed as “very high on the ‘lethality index.’”

  Jashad grinned as he thought of the typically Western governmentese while loading the clip into his weapon. They were such fools! Did they really think that the younger factions of the TWC would let the old men roll over and play dead? There comes a time when all things must admit their age and decrepitness, a time to move over for the young jackals . . . or be devoured by them.

  Again, he returned to the window, where he had cut a small hole in the thermal glass, large enough to admit the barrel of his weapon. He sat down in a chair and watched the promenade where already the French gendarmes were lining the streets and barricades, where the motorcycle patrols were forming an advance guard for the limousine column now advancing upon the old palace. Through his scope, it was as though the steps to Versailles were twenty paces distant, and Jashad smiled at the absurd simplicity of this assignment. In all the years of paranoia and high technology, nothing had been effectively done to prevent the efficiency of one man with a gun.

  Calmly he watched for the approach of the silver, turn-of-the-century Rolls Royce of Ada Kadan Mrundi, the Economic Minister of the TWC, and the elder statesman of the Confederation. When Mrundi had been a young man, he had been a fiercely respected leader of Third World objectives, a hero to young boys who called him by his tribal name—“The Simba”—the great lion. But now, the Arab leaders had become disenchanted with their African ally and feared that he would lead them all down a primrose path to economic strangulation at the hands of the white men. The Jiha had decided that Mrundi must be eliminated publicly so that the whole world would know that the TWC was not ready to roll over and play dead.

  And who else but Marcus Jashad would be the one selected for this monumental task, this important message to the world? Was he not the premier specialist in such matters in perhaps the whole world? To some, he was an international hero, to others, an international criminal. He smiled at the thought. It did not matter what the world thought of him. He knew his job and he knew it well. One of the best, yes . . .

  And then, out of the morning mist, came the procession of armored limousines. Through his scope, he watched for the silver Rolls, catching it glinting off the sun’s rays, following it carefully to the front of the palace. Checking his clip and the firing chamber, he drew in a breath and held it, watching the magnified figures of security personnel caper about the opening doors to the vehicles. And then Mrundi was visible in gaily colored tribal robes, surrounded by the press of his bodyguards so that only his shining bald head was visible in their midst.

  There would only be seconds before he was carried into the mirrored halls of the palace. Only seconds for the job to be done, but that was all Jashad required. He squeezed the trigger twice, and the weapon recoiled silently as the shells raced to their mark. Jashad grinned as he watched his work through the scope. Mrundi’s shining bald head
suddenly exploded like a piece of over-ripened fruit and his party of bodyguards were sprayed with a fine pink mist, expressions of shock upon their faces.

  Withdrawing the weapon from the tiny hole in the glass, Jashad dropped it to the floor, where it fell silently onto the carpet. He changed his clothes deliberately, wishing that he had a woman at his disposal. He always felt a need for a violent sexual release after an assignment such as this one, and on some lucky occasions he had been able to punish a young one with his excess energies. The younger the better, he thought with a smile, as he put on dark glasses and left the suite.

  By the time he reached the lobby, there was already a subtle hum of confusion and a tinge of fear in the throngs which were moving out into the street. Calmly, he joined them, assuming their mask of apprehension and morbidity, and moved as close as the gendarmes’ barriers would allow. He watched the follow-up until the ambulances and the police vans made it impossible, and then he simply disappeared into the crowd.

  * * *

  That evening he was in a small fishing village on the coast of Portugal where he would be meeting his contact—a small yacht which would take him across the Mediterranean to Alexandria. At last he would have his rest and his reward—they had promised him three ten-year-olds this time. It would be a pleasant cruise indeed.

  But when the dinghy pulled up to the shoreline, Jashad could see that something was wrong. He was an expert at reading the faces of men, and he could see that the Jiha captain who greeted him carried an unexpected message.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked as he climbed aboard.

  “You know that there’s been a change of plans?” The captain’s expression was of mild confusion and surprise.

  “Not really,” said Jashad. “You tell me.”

  “Something important has come up. A change of plans, and you will be needed immediately.”

  Jashad felt a rush of outrage shoot through. “Is this how they repay me for such a cleanly executed job! When?! And where?!”

  The boat slipped into the oily black waters towards not a yacht, but the sleek, low-profile lines of a military gun-boat. The Jiha captain shook his head. “I’m sorry, Marcus. But we need you now. You are going to the moon.”

  THE STEAMY HEAT of the Jurassic forest hung about Ian Coopersmith. He half-reclined in the broad, firm fronds of a towering, prehistoric fern, where he and Rebecca Thalberg had spent the night in a kind of half-sleep punctuated by the night-cries of predators and prey. It was the morning of their seventh “day” on board Artifact One, and Ian was gradually learning necessities for survival in the harsh, uncompromising environment of Earth’s long-ago past.

  Thirty-two kilometers above his head, running the length of the gigantic cylinder-ship, stretched a burning rod of heat and light. Coopersmith had assumed that it was some kind of gigantic fusion reactor—a p-p reaction—perhaps being fed by induction of interstellar hydrogen. Possibly the power source was something more exotic, like the new power kernels—Kerr-Newman black holes with McAndrew shields—or maybe the theoretical quark modulator made fact. Coopersmith could not be certain, but any civilization that could build a ship as magnificent as Artifact One could not be limited from developing any kind of technological miracle. The illuminator, as Ian had come to refer to it, operated on a roughly twelve-hour cycle—simulating a never-ending sequence of artificial days and nights. The temperature varied by less than ten degrees Centigrade by Ian’s estimate between the days and the nights, but it was enough of a difference to produce temperature gradients along the length of the cylinder and produce cyclic forms of “weather.”

  Although Coopersmith had been a tactical engineer for most of his professional career, he had a modicum of survival experience in the outdoors, thanks to vacations spent camping in the American Northwest. Though he was not expert, he possessed enough knowledge to have, thus far, kept him and Thalberg alive. Water could be found, in stream-fed lakes, underground “springs” —which in reality must have been vast storage tanks and recycling systems—and, if need be, swamps or rainpools. Food was found in a large variety of greens and fruit-clusters that they observed the herbivorous dinosaurs eating. Early on in their wanderings, Ian decided that they would eat no fruits or seeds that they did not see the lizards consume themselves. So far, at least, they had not poisoned themselves. On the second day, he discovered a mineral deposit of flint, which he used to chip at the steel edge of his belt-buckle, and from that point on, he and Rebecca had fire if they needed it. She had kept reminding him that they would require protein in their diets to maintain their stamina and strength, and the fire would help make left-over carrion from a felled herbivore more palatable.

  They had their first taste of Iguanodon on the fourth day, and to their surprise, it was not the taste-horror that had been imagined.

  During their week in the jungle lowlands, Ian had been able to make some elementary observations about the behavior of the dinosaurs, which had helped them survive. If seemed as though the daily routine of life among beasts was a neverending cycle of feeding, sleeping, copulating, and eliminating. The fleshy herbivorous creatures such as the Diplodocus, Iguanodon, Brachiosaurus, and Trachodon remained near the swamps, rivers, and lakes, and seemed to do most of their feeding and copulating during the day-cycles. In their numerous encounters thus far with the herbivorous dinosaurs, Ian had noted that the large creatures were quite skittish and almost afraid of the humans—when they noticed them at all. It seemed that the plant-eaters possessed such low levels of intelligence that they usually failed to detect Ian and Rebecca even when they blundered into their midst. They seemed to depend more on their sense of smell and hearing than on sight, and were only dangerous if you remained in their path as they clumsily waddled along.

  The carnivores were another story altogether.

  Having seen how quickly and savagely the Gorgosaurus and the Allosaurus had devastated the exploration team, lan and Rebecca had a fearful but healthy respect for the meat-eating species. From long-distance observation, Ian had noted that the predators normally were less in evidence during the middle of the day-cycles, and it was not uncommon for them to be found lying in a clearing, dozing loudly at these times. The carnivorous dinosaurs did their principal feeding at night, relying on a super-keen sense of smell, remarkably sharp night vision, and incredible quickness. Ian reflected upon his early books of childhood on dinosaurs which often referred to them all as lumbering and slow. Nothing could be further from the truth in regard to the meat-eaters—they were swift without a doubt. It was difficult to sleep for the first few evenings because of the nocturnal feeding habits of the predators, and the darkness was constantly being shattered by their savage cries, and the bleating, sheep-like sounds of their victims being literally eaten alive.

  Because of the feeding patterns, Ian and Rebecca had taken to spending their nights in the highest trees, usually proto-redwoods, giant ferns, and the occasional large ginkgo. They could easily find something taller than the largest of the meat-eaters, which would be approximately ten meters. At least Ian had not seen anything larger than that, but he could not be sure that some truly monstrous Tyrannosaurus did not prowI only in the darkest of nights, and had yet to be seen by them. He did not wish to think about such things.

  It had been bad enough adjusting to the sounds of the night, especially when they would be anchored into the treetops, held in by “safety harnesses” which Ian had fashioned from vines, and some large beast would stagger into their particular tree, shaking them from their half-sleep with earthquake immediacy. There had also been one occasion when two bipedal carnivores (Ian had not the presence of mind, nor sufficient light, to identify them) had smelled them as they slept in the high limbs of a proto-redwood. The scent of such helpless, fear-struck morsels had driven the carnivores into a mindless frenzy, for they remained at the base of the tree for almost the entire night, endlessly attempting to scale the tall, thin tree. Lea
ping, ripping, and tearing, they continued until Rebecca was driven to the edge of hysteria. They had no choice but to hang in the darkness, hoping that the terrible claws would gain no purchase, that the knife-edge jaws would not come flying up out of the damp night. As the dawn had grown closer, the two predators gave up their attempts and searched for more accessible prey, but when Ian descended from the tree an hour after the daycycle had begun, he was shocked to see the deep gouges in its base, literally thousands of claw-slashes left as a monument to the savage intensity of the hunters.

  They had spent the first three days trying to retrace their panicked flight through jungle back to the entrance hatch where they had first come upon the beasts, but this had proved fruitless. They had entered the Jurassic forest at nightfall, and spent several maniac-hours running mindlessly through the darkness, climbing trees only to find them unsuitable, or searching for outcroppings of rock that might have a small fissure or cave. Ian and Rebecca had failed to identify and remember any significant landmarks that might have helped them recognize the approximate location of the small clearing by the swamp, and the smaller knoll where the hatch had opened. There was the additional problem of learning to plot one’s position on a landmass that had no celestial features other than the longitudinal shaft of energy going down the center of the ship. This was good for achieving a “north-south” orientation, but little else. With a landmass that curved away and up in both “east” and “west” directions, it was difficult to readily deduce one’s position.

  After three days of wandering hopelessly through the interior, Coopersmith had suggested that they not continue to search for the hatch. It was possible that it had been accidentally closed by the inadvertent actions of some dinosaur, or perhaps some automatic mechanism had sealed it after some predetermined amount of time. If it did remain open, it was doubtful that he and Rebecca could find it without risking a terrible death. From his observations, Ian had learned that the most dangerous places to be were near the marshes and lakeshores—for it was here that the herbivores huddled for food and drink, and that drew the predators. The hatch, as Ian reminded her, was perilously close to a natural feeding ground, and he would just as soon avoid it as not.