Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (8 page)

“Sure, Henry,” she said savagely. “Every year the air and water are poisoned a little bit worse, every year the land is stripped a little barer, every year there’s tens of millions more people to speed up the decline. And everything’s fine. Just the way you’re fine when you fall out of a window—until you hit the ground!”

Tracking was even less difficult than Vickers had expected. The tyrannosaur’s strides were as regular as a heartbeat, each of ten feet or so through the undergrowth. They were a little closer on uphills, and they strung into long gouges on downslopes: the beast’s heels dug in, and sometimes there was the mark of a dewclaw.

The floater swept beneath a branch from which hung scores of football-shaped nests woven from plant fibers. Nesting birds with slim, curved beaks cried raucously at the humans’ sudden appearance.

A wasp stung Vickers on the forehead. Another settled on his right wrist. He slapped the second one and was stung on the back of the neck. Wasps shared the tree with the birds; they swarmed to defend it, though fortunately they didn’t pursue the human intruders far.

Louise swung the floater around a tree. Orange flowers sprang directly from the trunk. A stray sunbeam touched a bloom and lighted it into a torch flame.

The angry splotch of a wasp sting glowed on Louise’s right cheekbone. “They’re evil, Henry,” she said.

He glanced at her. “The ghosts, you mean?” he said.

“They’re not ghosts, they’re aliens,” Louise said. “Alien to us, at least. Maybe you’re right about them, them being from another time.”

Vickers shrugged. “I don’t know where they’re from,” he repeated. “If they’re real—”

In his gut, he didn’t believe the slender, scaled figures existed. Intellectually he knew that the evidence suggested the—ghosts, whatever—had to be real, but the emotional core of Vickers’ mind refused to accept that.

“—then they’re sure not human. Doesn’t make them evil, though.”

“The Punan camp,” Louise said grimly. The vine-covered branch of a fallen tree
whanged
the side of the floater. She had mistaken the obstruction for the whippy weakness of a sapling. They were traveling recklessly fast.

“They needed food for the tyrannosaurus,” Vickers said. His voice was wooden in its lack of affect. “They’re not human, so pigs and men are all the same. It’s only evil if men do it to other men.”

There had been other villages like that one, half a world and half a lifetime away. Vickers hadn’t forgotten those villages either.

“It’s all
right
with you, Henry?” Louise shouted. “It’s all right? What’s the matter with you?”

“I said they weren’t evil, Louise,” Vickers replied softly. “It’s not all right, no. But there’s only three of them and—”

His face changed. His mind was so completely in the past that he forgot to keep his expression neutral.

“—I’ve got a hundred rounds. That should be plenty.”

The terrain was rising. Louise twitched the floater abruptly upward. She had almost plowed into the ground while transfixed by a glimpse into the soul of a man she thought she knew.

They flew on. By this time, they could anticipate the twists to one side or the other when major obstructions diverted the dinosaur’s course. The track swung back, as surely as a pendulum.

“Do you suppose they’re taking it to their ship?” Louise murmured. “Or machine. I don’t even know what the Israelis’ apparatus looks like.”

Vickers shook his head. The question didn’t touch his area of present focus, so he barely heard the words.

They were getting close. A smell that at first Vickers couldn’t identify made the hair on the back of his neck lift. A combination of snake smell and carrion . . . Although the tyrannosaur appeared to be an active hunter rather than a scavenger, flesh caught between its teeth would rot. There were no tick birds here in the forest to clean the beast’s jaws like those of crocodiles on a mudbank.

Vickers began to hear a rasping quiver whenever the floater topped a ridge. At first he thought it was the sound of a distant storm, but it was too constant for that. “Louise?” he said. “Do you hear that noise?”

She looked at him. “Yes,” she said, “but I don’t know what it is. It isn’t the tyrannosaur.”

The tyrannosaur had brushed a tree, pulling aside the shrouding vines. The bark beneath was rough. Scales the size of Vickers’ thumbnail glittered against it. Most were dark, but one was a bright yellowish green.

“We’re getting very low on power,” Louise said.

The charge indicator was in the red zone. Vickers grimaced. “We’re nearly up with him,” he said. “Hold on for as long as you can.”

The terrain climbed. When the floater crested the ridge, the sound hit them redoubled. Superimposed on the rumble of diesel engines was the high scream of a chainsaw. They were nearing the logging operation.

Louise’s face set. Neither she nor Vickers spoke.

A hump in the ground ahead might once have been a fallen tree. Insects and microbes had reduced it to a mauve pile, covered now by broad-leafed ferns. The tyrannosaur had ripped through the obstruction without swerving. Torn fronds quivered at the edges of where the punky wood had fallen in to fill the gap.

Louise pulled back on her control yoke. The floater lifted a foot, then staggered and dropped like a man falling down stairs.

“We’ve got to get into the sun—” she shouted as the floater crashed through ferns in an explosion of brown spores “—light!”

They came out the other side of the fern thicket. Louise fought her controls. The floater balanced but would not rise. The charge indicator pulsed red, and a warning buzzer sounded.

“We don’t—” Louise said, and the tyrannosaur thirty feet away cocked its head toward them. Its belly scales were cream-colored, while its back was slate gray with vertical green stripes. The beast disappeared through a screen of elephant ear plants.

Vickers stepped off of the floater without thinking at the conscious level. He’d gotten the Garand only halfway to his shoulder before the sudden target vanished. He ran after the tyrannosaur, holding the butt of the heavy weapon in the crook of his right arm so that he had a hand free to grab supports.

Surface roots, hard and slippery, spread a net across the ground. Vickers stumbled. He caught himself on one of a trio of arrow-straight stems springing from a common base. Spines or an insect stabbed his palm, but the pain didn’t register for the moment. He continued to jog along the dinosaur’s track.

Behind him, Louise spiked skyward in the lightened floater. Vickers hoped it wouldn’t lose power before she could deploy the solar array, but that was out of his hands.

The ground climbed. The slope was no more than one in five, but Vickers’ legs were weak for lack of use in the past several days. He didn’t let himself think of failing. He would catch and finish his quarry if he had to crawl on his belly to do so.

The noise of snorting engines hit Vickers like the first rush of a storm. He shouldered through a stand of saplings. Sword-shaped leaves sprouted directly from their trunks. Sunlight dazzled him.

He was at the edge of a wide logging road. Diesel exhaust mingled with the sharp smells of turned earth and freshly cut vegetation. To his left, a four-wheeled grapple skidder with a ’dozer blade in front and a hydraulic grab on the other end rolled thunderously down the middle of the road at a walking pace. The grab held the butt end of the hundred-and-fifty-foot tree the tractor was dragging toward the aerostat tethered at the edge of the forest a quarter of a mile away.

The tyrannosaur was a hundred yards down the road to the right, among half a dozen Indonesian sawyers. Most of the men were running. A pair of bare legs protruded from the beast’s jaws. The tyrannosaur’s skull flexed like that of a snake swallowing. Peristaltic motion of the throat muscles dragged the victim the rest of the way down.

Vickers clicked his safety lever forward. He dropped into a sitting position for steadier aim. That was a mistake. After Vickers’ days in the rain forest, the logging road looked like bare wasteland, but the trash of branches and bulldozed saplings formed a muzzle-high screen between Vickers and his target.

He staggered to his feet again. He was breathing hard from his run, and his skin was slick with sweat.

A sawyer turned with his chainsaw raised. The cutting bar was nearly as long as the man wielding it was tall. White exhaust spurted as the Indonesian revved the saw’s two-stroke engine. The hooked teeth glinted in the sunlight that filled the clearing.

The tyrannosaur paused. Vickers aimed, breathed deeply, and began to let his breath out slowly as his finger took up the trigger’s slack. The muzzle had been describing a three-inch circle in the air. Now it steadied.

The torque and weight of the big saw pulled the bar down despite the Indonesian’s desperate efforts to keep it between him and the tyrannosaur. The beast’s huge head darted forward like that of a robin taking a worm. Vickers slacked his trigger instinctively lest he hit the man instead of the tyrannosaur.

The sawyer screamed and tried to fling the saw like an awkward medicine ball. The tyrannosaur’s jaws clopped shut in a spray of blood, severing the man’s torso at diaphragm level.

The grapple skidder blocked any further chance of a shot, though Vickers caught glimpses of the chaos across the road. Men screamed as they ran, but human voices were lost in the continuing roar of logging machinery. A bulldozer with a high land-clearing blade and a roof of heavy screen sat empty and idling. The space between its treads would have been excellent protection, but none of the panicked loggers thought to hide there.

Nikisastro’s pickup turned into the fresh-cut road and accelerated. Ruts sent the vehicle bounding high on its suspension. The two guards in back clung to the sides for dear life.

The tyrannosaur ignored the remaining sawyers. It strode off on a course converging with that of the grapple skidder. The beast’s movements were deceptively swift. Because of its size, what appeared to be a deliberate walking pace accelerated the tyrannosaur from a halt to about fifteen miles per hour in a single stride.

Vickers ran into the road to get around the log bouncing behind the skidder. The tree’s top had been roughly trimmed, but some branches remained. One of them broke, springing toward Vickers and making him duck.

The tyrannosaur’s head bobbed back and forth with each stride, like that of a bird hunting in short grass. The beast stepped close to the grapple skidder. The driver’s mouth opened in a silent scream. He jumped out the far side of his cab.

The tractor’s huge rear wheel ground over him and rolled up briefly red. The driverless equipment rumbled on until it left the cleared roadway. It climbed partway up the bole of a giant tree and stalled there.

A floater with its solar array spread swooped down on the tyrannosaur. Louise was piloting left-handed. She held the capture gun in her right, supporting the fore-end on the floater’s guardrail.

The beast turned at the motion and darted its huge head in the direction of the floater. The muzzle of the capture gun recoiled up and to the right as Louise fired. She slid the control yoke in the opposite direction, curving past the tyrannosaur’s gape. Slamming jaws shredded a corner of the solar array, but inertia carried the craft free.

Vickers gulped air to clear fatigue poisons from his blood. He didn’t dare shoot for fear of hitting a human being. There were men and pieces of abandoned logging equipment everywhere.

The white truck skidded to a halt two hundred yards from where Vickers stood. The driver and Nikisastro got out of the cab, the former waving a submachine gun. The two guards in back had been clinging with both hands to keep from being flung out of the truck box. They straightened and unslung their weapons.

A man wearing a yellow hard hat stepped from the forest behind where the grapple skidder had crashed. He obviously had no idea what had been going on. He was only twenty feet from the tyrannosaur when he and the beast saw each other.

The man turned and ran, losing his helmet to a low branch. The tyrannosaur followed with the shocking acceleration of a terrier jumping a rat. The long, rigid tail flicked side to side, parallel to the ground, balancing the huge body as the beast vanished into the forest.

Louise’s floater pogoed twenty feet in the air in the middle of the logging road. She was trying to load the capture gun one-handed without losing control of her little vehicle.

Nikisastro pointed to Louise and shouted. His three guards raised their submachine guns.

Vickers’ surroundings shrank to the dimensions of his sight picture. Everything else was a gray blur which had no present meaning. His breath steadied; his arms were as firm as a sandbag rest. The top of the front blade in the center of the rear circle, the sight’s protective horns flaring to either side. The driver’s throat above the post because the Garand was sighted for one hundred yards and Vickers had to allow for bullet drop at the doubled range.

He didn’t feel the sear’s crisp release.
A puff of white from the muzzle, the steel buttplate recoiling
hard
against his shoulder, and the empty brass sailing a high arc to the right dripping its own faint trail of smoke.

Vickers let the recoil help him turn, bringing the sights down on the first of the gunmen in the back of the pickup. His squeeze started as the front post steadied and continued through the fraction of a second after powder gases blew their miniature white curtain from the muzzle again.

Recoil, the third target with his submachine gun already shouldered. The second Javan toppling backward out of the truck box at the periphery of Vickers’ circle of vision.
Squeeze
and the submachine gun flying apart in a spray of sparks. The gun’s shredded magazine flung cartridges in all directions as the armor-piercing bullet wobbled on and through the gunman’s chest.

The muzzle blast of Vickers’ high-velocity cartridges was terrific, but he heard only the third
wham!
as he started to relax and the world softened again into color. The driver fired a long burst into Louise’s floater.