Extinction Event

by Dan Abnett

  A shot of the overcast sky.

  A shot of the smoke rising.

  A wide-angle shot of the trees. Then Koshkin, talking to Suvova. Then Abby and Cutter, from a much greater distance.

  The camera work wasn’t great. The autofocus slid in and out as the image moved around. There were snatches of voices on the soundtrack, pieces of conversation from Cutter, Suvova and Koshkin that the built-in mic had picked up. Most of it was filled with the rustle of Yushenko’s waterproofs and the sound of his own breathing, magnified.

  Every little while, Cutter heard Yushenko’s voice, captioning the record in Russian.

  “What’s he saying?” he asked Suvova, who was standing next to him, peering nervously at the screen.

  “He’s saying... ‘this is the impact site’. Now he says, ‘observe the aspect of the fallen trees’.” Suvova paused. “Now he just said, ‘this is film of the edge of the impact area’.”

  Cutter kept watching. The view on the flip-out screen, still wobbly, moved away from the main group, who by that time were just figures in the middle distance. The viewfinder tracked across the trees at the limit of the crater burn: tree trunks, still standing, scorched and burned, tangles of slumped foliage, charred and coated with ashes.

  The camera moved steadily to the left, then suddenly began to pan back the way it had come. On the soundtrack, Yushenko could be heard saying something.

  “What was that?” Cutter asked.

  Suvova shrugged.

  “I don’t know what he said. It was too fast.”

  In an instant the view on the screen scrambled. There was a burst of unintelligible sound that overwhelmed the mic for an instant, a flash of sky, jumbled motion, a jarring impact. Then there was just a resolutely steady view, looking sidelong across the ground in close-up, flecks of dirt and ash on the lens.

  Nothing more.

  “What did you see?” Abby asked.

  “Nothing,” Cutter replied. “Something hit him, and he dropped the camera.”

  “No, you’re not looking properly,” Bulov insisted. “You’re not seeing. He didn’t see it either, not right away. That’s why he went back.”

  Cutter peered at him for a moment, then pressed rewind. The screen images raced backwards. The camera’s POV leapt up out of the dirt and started to track backwards along the treeline.

  “There,” Bulov said, leaning in past Cutter’s shoulder. “There.”

  Cutter ran and re-ran the brief sequence at half-speed, and then at an almost dead crawl. The viewfinder tracked again across the trees at the limit of the burn: tree trunks, still standing, scorched and burned...

  Except they weren’t all tree trunks.

  Cutter tried to freeze the image, but it was so blurry and quick. What appeared to be two larch trees, close together, scorched and half-peeled to a pale, patchy lime-and-grey pattern, weren’t trees.

  They were legs.

  They were the rear-jointed legs of something large, something bipedal, something so big its head and body were out of the frame above Yushenko’s head. They were the legs of a Carnosaur, a hyperpredator, standing just outside the ring of destruction.

  Silent, still, waiting.

  He could just make out the edge of one of the feet, what appeared to be three toes, like a chicken’s foot, yet massively, insanely enlarged.

  “Can I see it?” Abby asked.

  “There’s not much to see,” Cutter said.

  “Let me see,” she insisted. “I’d rather see it. Imagining what you’re looking at is worse.”

  He pressed freeze-frame and handed the camcorder over to her.

  She looked at the image. Then she looked up, and her eyes were wide.

  “So that’s Baba Yaga, is it?”

  When the storm broke, it took them completely by surprise. Past midnight, the rain had eased to almost nothing, and the wind had stilled. In the spaces between the tops of the tall trees around the camp, it was possible to see patches of stars in an ice-cold, crystal-clear Siberian night sky.

  A titanic peal of thunder woke them. Lightning flashed so brightly every other second, it looked as though the campsite and the ATVs had been lit by strobing searchlights. There was no delay between flash and boom. The storm had appeared right over them.

  There was panic and confusion, most of it born out of the fact that they had been shocked awake. A strong wind drove through the forest, shaking the trees and swirling up leaf litter, but there was no rain.

  “Are you all right?” Cutter shouted at Abby.

  “Yeah!” she yelled back. “But what is this?”

  There was a tingle in the air. Everything was charged. Cutter could smell ozone. The metal wires used to hold the shelters were live with static. He could see blue snakes of electricity twitching around the UHF aerial on top of the second ATV.

  There was an explosion. Sixty metres from the camp perimeter, lightning had struck a fir tree. The top third of the tree came ripping down in an incandescent shower of sparks.

  As fast and as violently as it had begun, the freak storm ceased. There was a breathless moment of total stillness, and then the rain began to sheet down with renewed fury as if the thunder had shaken loose the entire contents of the clouds.

  The rain was so heavy, it made Abby and Cutter laugh at each other. Soldiers scrambled around them, trying to secure shelter lines that had been freed by the wind.

  Then something else came out of the trees.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  There were several shouts of alarm. For a brief but terrifying moment, Abby thought that Baba Yaga had paid them a visit, but it wasn’t a Carnosaur. A massive quadruped loomed out of the rain and ploughed through the centre of the camp area.

  Soldiers scattered.

  The creature was eight or nine metres long, and must have weighed in excess of five tons. It had a small, wedge-shaped head fringed with pyramidal cheek horns, and a wide, thickset body with a domed back that was armour-plated with enormous scutes of bone.

  It was an Ankylosaurus.

  In the hard, local light of the camp, it appeared to be black and white. Its eyes were bovine and lugubrious, and its plant-cropping beak of a mouth kept opening to unleash braying, rattling barks of alarm.

  “Get clear of it!” Cutter shouted. Abby backed away. Floundering in the darkness, a couple of soldiers fell over in the rain-slick mud.

  Since Yushenko’s disappearance, Bulov had been carrying a powerful CO2 pistol that he’d taken from the ATV’s locker. Abby saw him struggling to load it with one of the darts he was carrying in a small shoulder bag. His fingers were slipping in the streaming rain.

  “Don’t shoot it!” Abby yelled, trying to steer Bulov clear of the creature. “Just get out of its way!” She wasn’t sure whether he had heard her or not.

  The Ankylosaurus lumbered straight through the camp area, dragging down the awnings of shelters and snapping guy-wires across its huge bulk. The stove went over, and sparking hot coals tumbled out of the metal fire basket the soldiers had set up. A line parted, and two suspend-ed lamps thumped into the mud. The Ankylosaurus brayed again. Abby could see its tail, long and powerful, held up off the ground, twitching. The macelike ball on the end was made out of fused osteoderms, and looked heavy and lethal.

  Trammelled for a moment by the trailing shelter lines, the creature became panicked. It brayed and struck out defensively. Its tail lashed like a whip, moving with an incredible speed that belied its size and weight. The tail muscles drove the bone-club into the side of the lead ATV, a significant section of the hull caved in, and the vehicle was almost knocked over.

  “Wow!” Abby yelled.

  “Stay away from the tail!” Cutter shouted at the Russians around them.

  “Oh, no kidding!” Suvova shouted back.

  Bulov finally got his CO2 pistol loaded. He aimed it at the mighty armoured dinosaur, and fired.

  “No!” Abby yelped.

  The dart spat out of the pistol and ricocheted off one of the
creature’s bone scutes. It rebounded with considerable force, and punched into the side of one of the ATVs about ten centimetres from Cutter’s face.

  Abby snatched the pistol out of the Russian scientist’s hands.

  “Give me that before you hurt someone!” she snapped.

  Tearing free, the Ankylosaurus barged on, flattening a shelter and bringing down several more cables before it cleared the edge of the camp area and vanished into the blackness and the heavy rain.

  “It’s as if that thing came out of nowhere!” Suvova exclaimed breathlessly.

  “Like the storm,” Abby said to Cutter. “And like the northern lights.” She pointed. “They’re back.”

  He looked up at the sky behind the trees.

  “Come on,” he said.

  They moved back through the forest, making their way by torchlight, heading towards the impact site. Koshkin and the soldiers followed them. Dozens of torch beams danced and swung in the driving rain.

  “What are we doing?” Bulov complained. “We should stay in the safety of the camp!”

  “Where’s your sense of adventure?” Abby asked him.

  He glared at her.

  “Give me the pistol back.”

  “No,” she said flatly.

  “What are we doing, Nicky?” Suvova asked.

  “There’s something I need to take a look at,” Cutter replied. “It can’t wait until morning.”

  Despite the rain, the flicker of the sky lights was bright. Ghost colours formed and merged, dragging and slipping across the sky. They had an oddly luminous effect on the rain.

  “Moonbows!” Abby declared delightedly.

  Cutter nodded. Radiant arcs of silvered colour glowed in the downpour. Everything seemed unnaturally lit.

  They came out into the open, into the great burned circle. At night, in the rain, it smelled of cold air and damp cinders.

  The sky over the circle was rippling with light and colour, forming a patch of luminous, shivering distortion that was at least three or four kilometres wide. Beyond the circle, the swirling coloured lights extended down into the Siberian forests. Like will-o’-the-wisps, they were dancing and shining out between the distant trees. Sheet lightning grumbled and murmured in the distance, around the edges of the extraordinary show.

  “It’s huge,” Abby said, awestruck.

  “It is,” Cutter agreed. “It really, really is.”

  “Is this some kind of lightning?” Bulov asked.

  “No,” Cutter said. He looked at Koshkin. “Radio the advance camp. You can tell Connor we won’t need that detector after all.”

  “Why not?” Koshkin asked.

  “There’s your anomaly,” Cutter announced.

  THIRTY-SIX

  “I swear I’m talking to myself,” Lester sighed. “You are absolutely, definitely, unequivocally not going.”

  “Except, I am,” Jenny replied. “It’s not up for debate.”

  “I’m not debating,” Lester said. “Am I debating? Did I sound like I was debating? I’m in charge. I say things and they happen. I don’t call for a popular vote. You’re not going. I say so.”

  Jenny smiled and gave him a peck on the cheek.

  “It’s very sweet of you to be so worried about me. But I am going. Why else would I be dressed like this?”

  Lester looked her up and down. Jenny was wearing a set of khaki weatherproofs, gloves and a pair of expensive hiking boots.

  “Someone’s got to keep an eye on her,” Jenny said. “Someone with seniority. That’s you or me, James. Are you going to go?”

  “I wasn’t planning to, no.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  “Not even slightly.”

  “Then it’s going to be me,” Jenny concluded. “Either that, or you take a resignation letter from me, and I look for a job in media.”

  Lester shook his head.

  “This is a ridiculously hazardous thing you’re doing,” he said.

  “Well I’m not about to send Jake Hemple and his men into any situation I wouldn’t go into myself,” she said.

  “Really?” he replied. “I thought that was why we paid them.”

  “You have an almost adorably medieval view of employment law, James,” she said. “I’ll see you when we get back. Wish me luck.”

  “She can’t be trusted,” Lester said. “You realise that?”

  Jenny nodded.

  “Oh, I know.”

  The black Land Rovers with tinted windows were ready and waiting in the ARC’s underground loading dock. Garney and Redfern had just finished loading the last of the packs.

  “Ready?” Hemple asked Jenny as she walked up.

  “Absolutely.” She sounded as if she meant it.

  “Lester not coming to wave us off?” he added wryly.

  “I think he’s rather preoccupied with the stack of employee life assurance certificates he’s got to fill out.”

  “You haven’t got any ID on you, have you?” Hemple asked.

  “No.”

  “Good. We can’t carry any ID, just in case...”

  “I understand,” she replied.

  “I mean, the Russians... the diplomatic scandal would...”

  “It’s okay. I get it — I was there when we established that rule in the first place. Anyway, we’ve got to reach Russia first, remember?”

  Hemple grinned.

  “She tells me that’s the easy part.”

  A side door that led onto the dock opened, and Mason entered, escorting Helen Cutter. Mason, like Hemple and the other alpha team members, was wearing black battledress and field kit. The teams’ weapons had been loaded into Land Rover One in strong boxes.

  “A six-man team?” Jenny asked.

  “Yeah, for the insertion,” Hemple said. “Mason, Redfern, Jenkins, Garney and Murdoch. Plus me, of course.”

  “Of course. Can’t have you missing out on the chance to shoot some monsters.”

  “They were fighting for places, you know.”

  “Who were?” she asked.

  “The boys. Alpha team, plus the reserves, plus beta team. They all wanted to make the cut. I had to limit it to the senior ten men, and then draw straws.”

  “That’s devotion to the cause,” Jenny said, smiling.

  “Everyone wants a chance to do this,” Hemple explained. “And everyone wants a chance to put this right. We’re protection duty. Cutter, Abby and Connor should never have been taken. It was our watch. We want to put things right.”

  Mason brought Helen over to them. Her hands were secured in a set of plastic cuffs.

  “Are these really necessary?” she asked.

  “From what I’ve heard about you,” Hemple said, “it’s the very least precaution we can take. I’ll cut them off you when we get in.”

  Helen shrugged. “It’s nice to know that my reputation has preceded me.”

  “So where are we going?” Jenny asked.

  “It’s a three-step journey,” Helen replied. “You’ll stay close to me and you will do exactly as I tell you, or you’ll end up in more trouble than you can imagine.” She looked at Jenny. “As it is, this is very dangerous. Are you sure you should be coming?”

  “Don’t you start,” Jenny cautioned. “Where are we going?” she asked again.

  “The west side of the Bairstow reservoir, just off the A163,” Helen replied.

  “And how do you know the anomaly will be open?” Jenny demanded.

  “The ADD picked it up,” Hemple interrupted, quickly. “Now, let’s go,” he added. “No time like the present.”

  “Indeed not,” Helen agreed, and she smiled in a way that made Jenny nervous.

  They gunned along a cycle track on the west side of the reservoir. It was mid-afternoon, breezy, sunny. Some people were walking dogs and flying kites in the park on the other side of the water.

  The cinder track was flanked by chain-link fencing where litter had collected. Away from the track was a wide patch of waste ground, thick with
brambles and reedy saplings.

  “Here,” Helen said.

  The ominous vehicles pulled up. There were two Land Rovers for the alpha team, and another two for the back-up detachment who were going to take watch.

  The men got out and began to unload. A member of the back-up walked along the cycle path and signalled to two cyclists to find another route.

  Still cuffed, Helen strode up into the waste ground with Jenny and Hemple. About a hundred metres from the cycle track, in a ditch where the undergrowth was particularly dense, they saw the unmistakable twinkle and flash of an anomaly.

  “As promised,” Helen said.

  “Where does it go?” Hemple asked.

  “The Permian,” she answered, “but we won’t be there long. Just long enough to make a connection.”

  They went back to the transports. The back-up team members had taped off the entire area and set up electric lamp stands ready for nightfall. Alpha team was ready. They ran a quick equipment check, and hoisted their packs onto their backs.

  “Shall we?” Jenny suggested. She was getting impatient, though she was sure that it was just a coping strategy for her nerves.

  Escorted by the members of the back-up, alpha team went back to the anomaly with Jenny and Helen. Hemple nodded to the back-up leader, raised his weapon and led the party, single file, into the anomaly.

  Jenny felt a faint tingle, nothing more. The metal clasps and buttons of her clothes and kit twitched at the pull of the anomaly as she went through.

  What she noticed next was the air. She went from warm breeze to raw, bright cold, several degrees cooler. She went from a fresh, suburban air to something that tasted very different. There was something in it, some trace element, and a hint of sulphur. There was also a pressure differential that made her ears pop.

  It was very bright. A hard-edged sun, still low in the sky and rising, blazed out of a gigantic pale blue sky. Alpha team spread out around her, weapons raised. Helen stood at Jenny’s side.

  “You’ve taken a step back 280 million years,” Helen said.

  “280...” Jenny murmured.

  “Give or take.” Helen raised her hands to shield her eyes. It was an awkward gesture with her wrists cuffed together. “We’d better move,” she said. “It’s not far, but this sun is pretty fierce. You won’t feel it because of the air temperature and the wind, but you’ll burn badly before you know it.”