by Chuck Dixon
“I don’t like that sky.” Dwayne nodded at the bank of black clouds dropping down to the peaks.
“It’ll be a relief from the bugs,” Chaz said.
Boats sniffed the air. “No thunder. We should be okay in the trees.”
“Bat and me will take point. That suit you?” Lee said to Bat Jaffe.
“Sure. I want to see what got those big deer hustling like that.” She slung her rifle across her midriff. The pair started off toward the taller trees at the far end of the clearing while the rest adjusted gear for the long afternoon hump.
“I’ll stay on drag,” Boats said.
“Leg bothering you, sailor?” Dwayne said.
“I can hack. I won’t slow us down.”
“Let me know if it gets any worse,” Dwayne said even though he knew the former SEAL could be marching on bloody stumps and never let him know. He’d keep an eye on Boats.
They both smelled blood before they came up on the kill. The caribou was an enormous doe lying on its side.
Black flies swirled over it in a dense swarm. A rear leg was broken. White bone gleamed from torn flesh. The guts had been ripped from the abdomen in a wide swath that dampened the forest for twenty feet behind the animal. Its shattered rib cage was spread wide like a grisly pair of wings.
Bat crouched away from the carcass. She waved a hand before her face to part the fog of flies. They were well up the forested slope. The trees were old growth redwoods with boles thirty feet in diameter at the base. The forest floor was a spongy loam of fallen needles and fungus growths. Shelves of fungi climbed up the bark of the trees. Under the stink of blood and tripe was the musky smell of old rot always present in rain forests this thick.
“Look at the size of this female,” she said. “How big are the bucks? We can’t stay here. Whatever killed this will be back.”
“Uh huh. I only want to wait for Jimbo to catch up,” Lee said. He held his rifle raised while scanning the gloom all around. The dark sky above turned the forest to a world of shadows. The patter of rain was reaching them where it dropped through the branches high above.
Jimbo trotted up, with Byrus behind.
“This is a cat kill,” Jimbo said. “Big cat. Snapped the ’bou’s leg, bringing him down. That took weight and force.” The rain was coming down steadily now, dissipating the worst of the insects. Byrus stood by, his ever-present smile gone now as he watched the woods around them with a head cocked to listen. His fists gripped the shaft of his spear well past mid-length. With the length of the razor-sharp blade, the Macedonian had a good five feet of stabbing reach.
“How do you know it’s a cat?” Lee said.
“Bite marks on the head. The skull is crushed. Whatever did this, took the caribou’s whole head in its mouth to use as a grip while it clawed out its guts. That’s how cats kill.”
“Is it still here?” Bat said.
“Oh yeah. It’s making up its mind about us,” the Pima said.
“Best guess?” Lee said.
“Upwind. Above us. The sign is all one cat. My theory is they hunt solo like our tigers or leopards. If they move in prides, we are seriously fucked.”
“We’re talking a sabretooth, right? Like in the Ice Age movies?” Bat turned her head on a swivel to look up the hill.
“Never saw them,” Jimbo said.
“Cartoons. They’re cute,” Bat said, his eyes on the gloom between the trees.
“We need to move, and we need to stick together doing it. We need to move downhill and join the other guys.” Jimbo backed down the slope, rifle raised to port, eyes trained over the front sights.
9
Stalking Horse
Dwayne halted with Chaz behind him. They could see the others turned back and moving downslope toward them at a run. he rain was pounding now, creating a susurrating din that made the world close in around them. Both Rangers raised rifles. Something was up. It all felt wrong in a sudden moment of change.
Movement to the left. Something was rushing between the trees, and Dwayne swung his rifle to cover it. A tawny shape burst from the shadows between the thick boles. It was streaked with white and black stripes from its thick neck along its barrel chest and heavily-muscled haunches. Impossible large yellow teeth and black-rimmed eyes. The creature ran full-out toward the Rangers. A high scream plunged to a thunderous roar as the cat raced over the ground in leaps and bounds.
There was no running away. Dwayne dug a boot sole into the sandy soil and dropped the sights on the enormous animal racing to fill his entire field of vision. He sent a long burst of rounds directly at the pair of eyes now wide and staring; eyes filled only with malice and rage. The world slowed down as everything happened at once. He sensed rather than saw Chaz rooted close to his right also firing full auto. The heat from a muzzle flash swept over Dwayne’s face. Over the noise, he could hear Chaz shouting wordless sounds.
A tremendous weight struck Dwayne hard and fast. He felt sudden vertigo as his boots left the slope. A feral smell filled his nose and mouth. Dwayne could feel himself falling and falling and was gone in an instant riding a bright white flash of pain down into darkness.
He came to with voices all around. He tried to move and felt agony claw at his side. He sucked in a lungful of air, and the pain climbed up to his neck and down to his groin like a lance of fire.
“Slow down, bro. You broke some ribs.” Chaz’s voice. “I’m alive, right?” Dwayne’s voice was a dry croak. He opened his eyes to see the fluttering glare of a campfire.
“You’re alive. Got you taped up tight. Giving you the good stuff to cut the pain. You might want to take air in little sips for a while.” Chaz was adjusting an IV drip hanging from Byrus’ spear stuck in the ground. Dwayne was propped up on a pair of packs. Rain spattered on a ground sheet slung above him. The downpour was a steady drizzle now.
Bat was by the fire. A big blaze stacked with timbers.
Boats was dropping new logs on top, causing white embers to rise in the dark. They were back down on the sandy clearing where they’d had the last meal he could remember. The others were unseen. They’d be away from the glare on watch.
Dwayne wondered how long he’d been out. He tried to form the words to ask Chaz. The world went all fuzzy around the edges, and he was gone again on a delicious current of painkillers dripping down the IV tube to become a consuming torrent.
The cat was a sabretooth. A male. An adult from Jimmy Smalls’ educated guess based on the teeth. And the teeth were a wonder. Two big tusks yellowed to an amber color. One was blunted where the point broke off in some struggle a long while back. With Byrus’ help, Jimbo pulled them from the jaws of the carcass as a trophy. He presented them to a bleary Dwayne the following morning.
“These are yours, dude. You earned them,” the Pima said, placing one of the curved fangs in Dwayne’s hand.
“What did I do?”
“You did everything right. You stood your ground and unloaded. It’s your damned Viking luck that two rounds went into its heart. It was stone dead when it hit you.”
“I was aiming at its head.”
“Yeah. That was dumb. That cat’s skull bone is two inches thick. All you did was gouge its fur.”
“I’ll remember that next time,” Dwayne said with a weak smile.
“It’s my fault, Dwayne,” Jimbo said.
“What?”
“I was thinking like a soldier instead of an Indian. We shouldn’t have been walking point and drag; all spread out like that. We’re not walking a battlefield. We’re walking a hunting ground. We need to stay tight from here on.”
“We lost a day, right? Let me wire my shit up, and we’ll get back on the hump tomorrow.” Dwayne winced as he tried to lever himself to an upright sitting position.
“You’re not going anywhere but home, asshole.” Lee was standing over him.
“Fuck you,” Dwayne growled between clenched teeth, trying to get to a knee.
“Sure. You will fuck me. You’ll fuck us
all if you come along. We have a hard week-long march ahead of us at the outside. And a week back maybe with pursuit on our ass the whole way. We’re not taking you with us to turn that into a month-long clusterfuck while we nurse your broken ass along.”
“There’s truth in that.” Dwayne nodded, resting back with teeth gritted against the fire wrapped around his ribs.
“Fucking A. We’re moving east. You and the sailor head back to the beach,” Lee said.
“Boats? You’ll need him. I’m only a half-day from the raft.”
“And how are you gonna drag it to the surf ? You’re busted up. You keep playing, and you’ll wind up with a snapped rib in your lung,” Chaz said less harshly than Hammond.
“I want you and the sailor off this op,” Lee said. “That lame asshole and his bum leg were going to hold us up anyway. You cripples need to go to the showers and let us finish this.”
“Yeah. Fuck. Yeah. That’s the right call. Damn it,” Dwayne said and spat. He didn’t like giving in, leaving a fight. But this wasn’t about him. It was about the unit. Pride was a killer. He had to tamp that shit down.
The others split out the bulks of Boats’ and Dwayne’s ammo and food packs, leaving them enough for the march back to the beach and to hold a camp there until they could get the field open again. Jimbo had already set up a recorded repeat transmission for them once they were back in range of the manifestation field area and the Ocean Raj thirty miles out at sea and a hundred millennia away.
Chaz had last minute medical orders for Dwayne. “The painkillers should serve double duty as a cough suppressant. Take it easy walking back. Frequent stops. You don’t want those ribs slipping out of place. They’re green breaks. There’s no blood in your spit or piss. You’re good as long as you don’t do anything stupid.”
“Like let a giant pussycat fall on me?” Dwayne said with a grin. Even smiling hurt.
“Like that. Let Boats make the decisions, all right? You’re going to be goofy for a while.”
“How fucked is my life that I’m letting that nut call the shots?”
“That hurt, bro,” Boats said with a grin.
The two groups rucked up and made their farewells. The larger unit moved away toward the redwoods in a tight wedge formation. The two remaining went at a slower pace back toward the dunes. Boats dragged their packs on a travois rigged up from some sapling boles leaving twin gouges in the sand. Dwayne walked before him at an easy pace, rifle ready and eyes focused on the tops of the dunes marching ahead of them to the surf. The fangs of the sabretooth were tucked into a cargo pocket of his pants.
From the dark within the tree line, two yellow eyes watched the herd of strange creatures divide. Two had cut themselves away, moving on two legs.
The female tiger lay unmoving, filling her eyes with the vision of the pair of wounded animals moving back toward the water. She filled her nose with their strange scent; the oily smell of blood and sweat; a heady mix of spice and musk. A scent unknown to her but sharp enough even to cut through the smoky fug from the guttering embers of the fire she’d watched them build the night before.
The two were out of sight in the low pines below. The others were gone into the woods up the hill. She slipped low from the ferns at the forest edge, keeping the fronds of saw grass between her and the tree line. Past the fire, the scent of animals grew stronger. Salty with a sharp tang of something unknown to her memory. And something else, an odor as familiar to her as her own. The slightest tinge of the aroma of her mate slain the day before.
She rose to lope through the grass following the twin lines in the sand with the determined pace of a predator wary of a new breed of prey.
10
Reverse Engineering
Seas were at four feet under a rising wind and falling barometer. Enough to make the Ocean Raj pitch uncomfortably. Acting skipper Geteye got them underway in a roundabout course at ten knots, enough to make the ship’s stabilizers kick in and settle the decks to a comfortable roll.
Caroline Tauber awoke from her nap when she felt the rumble of the engines through the frame of her bunk. She called the bridge to ask why they were accelerating. Geteye assured her that they would remain on station. They were on a circular cruise to nowhere.
She was awake now and decided to stay that way. The nap was troubled with what she called work dreams. In her dream, she was working out problems on a whiteboard. The equation kept erasing itself somehow, and she raced to rewrite the symbols and numbers before they vanished again. But each time she was near to a conclusion, the board was wiped clean again by an invisible hand. It was a familiar anxiety dream for her. It usually meant she was close to some kind of breakthrough.
The main crew cabin had been transformed into a playroom for Stephen. Caroline found her son laughing at Quebat, who was in a faux argument in rapid Persian with a squirrel hand puppet. Parviz lay on a lounger, apparently engrossed in a SpongeBob cartoon on the television mounted to the bulkhead.
The pair made for perfect babysitters. Maintaining the reactor that was humming away below decks wasn’t much to occupy them. It could be done remotely from anywhere on board. The Iranians were bored out of their minds and eagerly volunteered to watch over Stephen whenever Caroline needed a break or to work. It was the perfect distraction for them, and the boy adored them both.
“Are you guys okay?” she asked.
“We are fine, Caroline,” the squirrel answered in falsetto.
“You sure? Because I wanted to get some work in.”
“We were going to give the little one lunch then down for a nap,” Quebat said.
“Hummus and mashed carrots,” Parviz said, turning his eyes from the television.
“Sounds yummy. So, you’re good?”
“All is good. You work. We’ll watch Stephen,” Quebat said.
She kissed her son on the top of his head and made her way below decks to the lab area.
“This may get techie,” Morris Tauber cautioned.
“I’ll try and keep up,” Caroline said.
“I’ll break it down for you.”
The sarcasm in her reply had eluded her brother. It always did.
Morris tapped some keys and brought up a schematic crowded with call-outs. A window was open with a dense column of numbers and symbols scrolling down it.
“The papers that Samuel gifted you have opened my mind to some new possibilities. This is a manifestation frame I’ve been working on,” he said.
“It’s a cube,” she said.
He nodded. “A perfect cube.”
“So your improvement is changing the manifestation array from round to square.”
“No. No! It’s not a change to the tube. This is dedicated to digital transmission only. We use this to communicate with the guys instead of opening up the larger field. Less juice and a constant signal.”
“What are the dimensions?” She leaned in to study the image.
“A cubic meter. Even less. Totally contained.”
“And the operational window?”
“Perpetual. In theory. It doesn’t rely on the gigajoule push the main Tube does. It’s a soft opening allowing only two-way transmission of voice and data. We could keep it open for uninterrupted communication with anyone in the field.”
“And this can be done? What changes would need to be made on the other side?” Caroline’s excitement grew.
“Zero. We open it up and start transmitting.” Morris smiled, pleased to see his sister’s keen interest.
She gripped his shoulder and nodded, eyes on the animated schematic turning on the screen.
“This is great, Mo. A real breakthrough. What can I do to help?”
“Well, I haven’t made it upstairs in a while. I could use a sandwich.”
He rocked forward under a sudden slap to the back of his head.
“Engineers. Get your own goddamn sandwich,” Caroline said. She prodded him out of his chair to take his place at the keyboard.
11
&nbs
p; The Way Ahead
The drone settled back to the ground, almost at Jimbo’s feet. He shared the data he’d recorded with the team.
“This pass is the most direct route. See it there? The opening is four klicks east by south of here.” He traced the snaking pathway between peaks with his finger on the screen.
“We’ll have to pathfind it,” Lee said.
Jimbo nodded. “No GPS in The Then. The only satellite up there is the Moon.”
“Tree cover goes all the way to the peaks. Looks like Burma,” Lee said.
“Feels like Burma. Thicker air. Warmer and wetter. The canopy goes all the way to the top.”
“No relief from the bugs then.” Bat waved a hand to part a cloud of gnats.
“We can make another ten or fifteen. Thirty for the day.
Make camp on higher ground,” Lee said.
“And wring out our undies,” Chaz added.
The dense air and high humidity were taking a toll. Their CamelBaks were near empty, and they gobbled salt tabs like candy. The branches above dripped with fresh rainfall but nowhere near enough for a refill. Jimbo used his nose for water on the march up the slope but found only a few stagnant pools. At one pool, they startled a herd of animals that looked like short-haired alpacas with drooping proboscises. The odds were good they’d find a spring or stream further into the San Gabriels. If not, they’d have to stop and waste march time looking for potable water alongside trails.
“You ever think of a unit name? I mean, what do we call ourselves?” Bat said from a broad shelf of rock, waiting for the others to catch up.
“Like the ‘Time Rangers’ or some shit like that?” Chaz handed the drone case up to her.
“Yeah. A little esprit de corps. A patch or something,” she said.
“We just call ourselves ‘the guys,’” Chaz said. He levered up onto the ledge, helped along by a hand from Bat.