by Dan Abnett
“You don’t really want to do that though, do you?”
“What?”
“You didn’t like getting kidnapped any more than we did,” Abby said, and she grinned. “But now that you know what’s here, you want to stay and see it, don’t you?”
Cutter laughed and shook his head.
“It’s the creatures they’re talking about, and the numbers. That herd was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. Of course I want to see more.”
“I know what you mean,” she replied. “But as much as I want to get in there and study all of those wonderful creatures, there may be something else we need to deal with.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I was wondering what that was,” Abby said. She pointed up at the sky just above the treeline. “I’ve been watching it for a while.”
Cutter looked up. There was a shimmer in the night sky, a ghostly flicker of something.
“Is that the northern lights?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Does that happen here?”
Cutter shrugged.
“I don’t even know where here is,” he said. “I mean, not exactly. Siberia, boom. It’s a big place. But if that isn’t the aurora borealis, then I have a feeling I know what it is...”
They went back inside the longhouse.
“I’d like to see a map,” Cutter said.
When Medyevin had translated the request, Umarov seemed uncertain.
“You’ve got to show me a map sooner or later,” Cutter pointed out with exaggerated patience. “I’m going to need one tomorrow when we start hunting for this anomaly. So you might as well do it now.”
Umarov shrugged his shoulders. He rummaged through some papers on the bench beside him and produced a large-scale military survey map. He handed it to Cutter, who unfolded it.
“So this is the region?” he asked. “Wow, this is wilderness. There’s a whole lot of nothing out here.”
“It is a particularly remote and empty quarter of the Krasnoyarsk Krai,” Medyevin agreed.
“Okay, this is the river that runs outside the camp. That’s got to be at least a thousand kilometres long all by itself, and it’s part of a much bigger river system.” Cutter laughed to himself, tracing his finger across the map. “We’re going to have to get used to a completely differ-ent notion of scale,” he said. “This is a huge country. We —”
He fell silent.
“Is that the name of this river?” he asked Medyevin.
“Yes, it is,” Medyevin replied.
“The river right outside?” Cutter pressed.
Medyevin nodded, puzzled.
“What is it?” Abby asked. “What’s the matter?”
“That’s got to be more than a coincidence,” Cutter murmured, staring at the map.
“What has?” Connor asked.
“This place, that river,” Cutter said, looking at them both. “It’s Tunguska.”
SEVENTEEN
Cutter and Umarov helped Connor to load the makeshift ADD into the back of a 4×4.
“Careful, careful,” Connor said. “It’s a bit delicate.”
The heavy field radio had been stripped out and extensively altered, and several additional components had been wired into it. The result looked like a science project gone enthusiastically wrong. Once it was bedded down in the back of the 4×4, Connor flipped down the set’s front cover and threw the power toggles.
The set hummed as it came up to power. Indicators lit up. It emitted a soft, crackling hiss that stopped when Connor plugged in and put on a pair of headphones. He picked up a wand made of bare wire with a handle of duct tape and played out the long flex that connected the wand to the side of the radio set. Then he stood up in the back of the 4×4 and began to sweep the wand around like a conductor with a baton.
It was early morning, and the mist was still heavy and cold, so thick they could barely see across the yard of the advance camp. A group had assembled in the dawn gloom to watch Connor’s first test. The scientists Suvova, Bulov, Medyevin and Yushenko stood with Abby, all huddled down in winter coats. Yushenko had brought a digital video camera, and was keeping a record of the proceedings.
A grim-faced Koshkin and Umarov had been joined by the general’s adjutant Zvegin and a trio of soldiers.
Abby had grabbed a cup of coffee from the mess tent. She was cold and tired. The bunk and bedroll she’d been given had been damp and uncomfortable, and she’d found it very difficult to sleep. She kept think-ing about what Cutter had told her the night before. He’d seemed particularly fascinated that the place was called Tunguska. According to him, there’d been a natural disaster here in the early part of the twentieth century. A meteor or a comet had hit the remote region, devastating the forests. The incident was still shrouded in mystery.
“It struck this area,” Cutter said, “which was so far from anywhere, very few people realised what had happened. But the blast was heard thousands of miles away, and it changed the world’s weather for a year or more. If it had hit a population centre, a city, it would have been a very different story.”
“It’s just a coincidence, isn’t it?” she’d asked him. “I mean, it can’t have anything to do with the anomalies, can it?”
“I’m not sure we can rule out anything any more,” he had replied.
As she stood with the scientific group, watching Connor get ready, she saw Vols hurrying to join them, buttoning his tunic. She had to smile. He was there to protect her again, like a loyal guard dog.
“Getting anything?” Cutter called up to Connor.
Connor played the wand around a bit more, and then began to point it in a rather more specific direction.
“I’m getting something!” he announced in an overloud voice.
Cutter tapped his ears.
Connor pulled the headphones off.
“Sorry. I said, I think I’m getting something. Hang on, I’ll put it on the speaker.”
He flipped a switch. The background noise crackled out of the set again, but when Connor aimed the wand in a particular direction, the noise began to wail and sing with distortion.
“There’s your anomaly,” Cutter said to Koshkin.
“That proves nothing,” Bulov said, and he stalked off back to his bunk.
“Shall we check it out?” Connor asked.
“No time like the present.” Cutter looked at Koshkin. “Let’s take it out for a little field test,” he suggested, and he held out his hand.
“What?” Koshkin asked, eyeing the hand suspiciously.
“Give me the keys. I’m driving. You can follow me.”
The Russian narrowed his eyes.
“Oh, come on,” Cutter said. “I’m going to escape by driving across Siberia in a jeep?”
Reluctantly, Koshkin handed over the keys.
Cutter and Abby climbed aboard with Connor, and Cutter let Vols take the other seat. Koshkin, Suvova and Zvegin climbed into a second 4×4 driven by Umarov, and Yushenko and Medyevin boarded a third that was manned by another pair of soldiers. Yushenko was still clutching his video camera. There was a rattle of starter motors, and the three vehicles switched on their headlamps and rolled forward in convoy.
Standing up in the rear if the leading 4×4 with the wand in his hand and the headphones back on, Connor held onto the roll bar and peered at the dashboard compass.
“Roughly north,” he said.
They led the convoy out through the camp. Near the river, in the chilly dawn, they saw Natacha Antila leading a squad of troopers in early morning calisthenics.
“That’s just trying way too hard,” Abby said. She looked up at Connor and laughed as he threw medic Antila a joke-serious salute from the back of the 4×4 as they drove past.
The doctor did not acknowledge him.
They followed the trail away from the camp and into the woods. Wherever the mist cleared in patches, Cutter put his foot down and raced ahead of Umarov. Looking back, he saw Koshkin berating the other F
SB specialist for not driving fast enough. That caused him to grin, and when Vols followed his gaze, even he seemed to find it amusing.
The woods were wild and dense, but Cutter saw evidence of both motorised and foot patrols from the advance camp. Markov’s garrison had established a significant perimeter around the site. There was a radiating series of guard posts and observation nests. Bleary-eyed soldiers watched the trio of 4×4s as they dashed past through the mist.
After half an hour, Umarov sounded his horn, signalling for Cutter to pull over. They halted in a glade of immense spruce trees where the backlit mist was coiling like luminous yellow smoke. Koshkin dismounted and ran forward to Cutter’s vehicle.
“What’s the matter?” Cutter asked.
“We stay put here for five minutes,” Koshkin told him.
“Why?”
“I just got a radio call from obs post eighteen, which is about a kilometre west of here. Something came through the perimeter about ten minutes ago. Whatever it was, it was big. Post eighteen is going to send a sweep team in to find it, but we’re going to sit here engines off for a moment.”
“It’s likely to be more scared of three noisy trucks than we are of it,” Cutter said.
“Let’s just sit,” Koshkin insisted. “Please, turn off your engine.”
Cutter obeyed. The Russian walked back to his vehicle. Medyevin and Yushenko got out of their 4×4 and stretched their legs. Yushenko hoisted his camera again and took some idle footage of the scene. It was oppressively quiet without the sound of the engines. Cutter heard a few bird calls, and the occasional twig crack from the undergrowth.
He looked at Connor, who still had the headphones on and was making adjustments to the radio set dials.
“Okay?” Cutter asked.
Connor shook his head.
“I’m worried about it overheating!” he shouted.
Cutter tapped his ears.
Connor took off the cans.
“Sorry. I said, I’m worried about it overheating.”
“Shut it down for a bit. Give it a rest,” Cutter suggested.
“No, it’s all right for now.” Connor put the headphones back on. He began to fiddle obsessively with the controls.
Cutter looked at Abby, who smiled and shrugged.
A minute or two went by. Cutter sat back and waited. He heard what sounded like a hornbill, and something else that was either a bullfrog or some kind of thrush. Then he heard something else.
It was a deep, rumbling cry, part growl, part snort.
He sat up.
“Before you ask, yes, I did hear that,” Abby said.
The others had heard it, too. Cutter looked back and saw the occupants of the other 4×4s, alert and wary. Vols got out of the vehicle and stood ready with his AK.
They heard the guttural cry again, closer this time.
“Came from that way,” Cutter said, pointing out across the glade.
“Absolutely,” Abby agreed. They jumped down together and began to head off across the leaf litter, heads low. Vols gave a little gasp of alarm and hurried after them. Connor was so busy with his jury-rigged ADD he didn’t seem to notice that they had left the 4×4.
Cutter heard the cry a third time, and they adjusted their direction. Vols caught up with them.
“Please to be back,” he requested, keeping his voice low. Despite the matt-black assault weapon in his hands, he looked scared.
“It’s fine,” Abby said in a reassuring voice.
“Be back!” Vols insisted.
Something moved up ahead of them, stirring the undergrowth. It came into view out of the mist.
“Oh, look at that,” Cutter whispered.
It was a horned dinosaur.
EIGHTEEN
The Ceratopsian was about four metres long from its beaked snout to the tip of its raised and surprisingly thin tail. Its quadrupedal body was large, stable and low to the ground. Cutter estimated its weight at around three tons. It was a sub-adult, a calf. The horns on its nose and brows were not far off the huge size they would reach in maturity, and its large, crested skull was very distinctive.
“Triceratops?” Abby whispered at Cutter’s side.
“No, no,” he hissed back softly. “Torosaurus. Look at the size of the frill.”
With Vols hovering anxiously behind them, they took another step or two towards it.
The bass, lowing noise, a combination of growl and snort, was coming from the creature. It was welling up from deep inside its enormous torso, and then grumbling out of its throat.
The Torosaurus had emerged from the undergrowth and mist with its left side to Cutter and Abby, a profile view that allowed them to see the full projection of its awesome crest and the muted slate-and-ash stripes that ran horizontally along its flanks. Its head was tipped forward, beak down, eyes half closed. Discharge, like tree sap, had gathered around the eye they could see, and when it groaned, steam puffed from its nostrils.
“Look at the crest,” Cutter whispered.
The creature’s spectacular frill was pulsing with colour. Aposematic patterns of amber and black rippled through the surface scales of the bicorn crest, and two dramatic, encircled dots had appeared like giant staring eyes in the centre of each lobe of the frill.
“It can change colour,” Abby murmured in delight.
“The crest is full of blood vessels,” Cutter explained quietly. “The theory’s always been that they use their crests for display and signalling. I think this one’s in distress.”
“How do you get that?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Lost, maybe. It’s just a juvenile. It’s got separated from its herd. This is amazing, Abby. There was another theory that Torosaurus was simply an adult form of Triceratops. We’d never found a juvenile, you see, so the suggestion was that the huge crest was a sexual dimorphic feature of mature specimens. This sub-adult proves that theory wrong. Torosaurus are a completely separate Ceratopsid genus.”
“You really think it’s in distress?” Abby pressed.
Cutter nodded.
“What’s that smell?” Abby asked.
“I don’t know,” Cutter replied.
He was used to the fact that almost every creature they encountered had a distinctive odour, and most of them weren’t especially pleasant, but a particularly nasty smell hung in the cold morning air. It was warm and bovine, ripe and rotten. It smelled of dung and gas and raw meat.
He was reasonably certain it didn’t bode well.
The creature rasped and snorted again.
“I think it’s having respiratory difficulties,” Cutter said, stepping still closer. “And is it me, or is it limping a little?”
The Torosaurus took another few steps, its head still down.
“I think it is limping.” Abby edged towards the creature with Cutter. “It’s favouring its left foreleg.”
“Please to be back!” Vols hissed strenuously.
Someone shouted. Cutter looked over his shoulder, and saw Koshkin and Umarov moving forward with the two armed troopers. Koshkin was clutching an AK of his own. Suvova and the others were following them, though Connor was still working on the ADD in the lead 4×4, oblivious to it all.
Yushenko was filming eagerly.
Koshkin shouted again. Cutter signalled for him to stay back and shut up. At the sound of the Russian’s voice, however, the calf lifted its nose a little, exhaled with a rough, barking cough, and began to swing its head from side to side, threatening with its horns and coloured crest.
It started to turn towards them.
Abby edged to the left to look at its right flank.
“Oh God,” she breathed, and gestured to Cutter to move sidelong with her.
With Vols following, they circled to the right of the calf, where they were able to see its other profile for the first time. Part of its torso, a section just behind its right foreleg, was missing. A considerable chunk of meat had been removed, leaving a ghastly open wound that was so deep they could see
layers of yellow fat and the sugar-pink of several ribs. The wound was glistening red and crawling with shiny black flies.
The young Torosaurus was dying. It was bewildered by pain, shock and blood loss.
Something had taken a devastatingly large bite out of it.
“Oh the poor thing,” Abby murmured softly.
Cutter started to study their surroundings intently.
“Okay, now we’ve got another problem,” he said quietly. “That bite looks pretty fresh. Whatever did it could be close by. We may have walked right into the middle of a hunt. The predator’s driven the calf away from its family group so it can pick it off. It might be waiting for it to die from the injury. It might be watching us right now.”
Abby halted and slowly began to scan the trees, the undergrowth and the sheets of mist nearby.
“Okay,” she said stiffly, “that’s not a happy thought.”
“Let’s back off,” Cutter whispered. He looked at Vols. “Be back, eh? We go back?”
Vols nodded eagerly.
They began to back away. The calf uttered another painful, lowing groan.
This time it was answered. But the reply was a booming roar that started as a bestial bellow and ended as a shriek, like tortured metal. The sound echoed around the misty glade.
Six tons of adult Torosaurus, nearly nine metres long, entered the glade on the far side. It paced forward through the bracken and ground cover, chuffing and snorting like a steam engine. Its horns were huge, and it lowered them in a bowing display that made the vast frill of its crest rise up like the banner of a medieval warlord. The adult’s crest was streaked with red, black and yellow bands that trickled like slow moving water, and the eye-like dots on the lobes of its frill were almost white with fury.
Cutter reached out gently and touched Abby’s sleeve.
“Don’t make any sudden movements,” he whispered.
“Wasn’t going to,” she whispered back.
Koshkin and Umarov ran up with the soldiers. All of them were brandishing weapons. They faced the massive adult and began to shout at it to drive it off. Koshkin and one of the troopers rattled a few rounds of gunfire into the air. It bellowed back at them, swinging its titanic skull from side to side.
