“Because it means we have an escape,” I said. “If we are on a planet, I don’t think there is a possible way for us to get home. If we are on a spaceship, it means that someone has to be driving this thing, and the cockpit is probably up there somewhere.” I pointed up to the beautiful blue sky.
“You are a dreamer, and you always have a positive attitude,” Trel said as she looked up at the sky again. “It is something I love about you, Victor.”
“Thanks,” I said with a shrug. “I just want to take care of you, and everyone else. I’d like us to get out of here if we can.”
“Yeah,” Trel said with a frown, and she turned her black eyes back to the river.
“What is wrong?” I asked.
“Hmmm,” she said as she let out a long breath. “I have been thinking of my home.”
“And?” I asked when she didn’t say anything for a half a minute.
“Do you think about going home?” she asked.
“No,” I admitted. “I just want you all to be able to go home.”
“What if we do not wish to?” she asked, and her words caught me by surprise.
“I thought you wanted to--”
“I do,” she interrupted me. “Kind of. Blah. It is complicated. Let me explain. On my world, of course, I am Duchess. My family is the most respected, and my bloodline is cherished. I lived a life of luxury. Everyone did as I asked or wanted, and the only trial I had to endure was picking a male from the hundreds of thousands that wished to inseminate me. Now, this was no easy task, mind you, but I did not have to worry about food, or shelter, or friends, or anything. I had a hundred attendees to meet my every demand, and I experienced luxury that I could not begin to describe to you.”
“Yeah,” I chuckled. “You’ve told us all about it.”
“I am bragging, but you understand my troubles. I have gone from that to looking for the correct type of mud on the bank of a river so I can make a container to filter our water or carry our shit.”
“It’s a pretty big step backwards.” I laughed, and she smiled wide enough for me to see her fangs pop out from behind her full lips.
“But I love it,” she said as she shook her head. “I never really did anything on my world. I say it was hard choosing a mate, and it was, but choosing incorrectly meant very little. All of my suitors were just as capable as any other of the men of my species were. I spent months splitting hairs over the best one. Then, as soon as he filled my womb with his seed, I just killed him.”
“Yeah…” my voice trailed off as I tried to push down the weird feelings of jealousy. I didn’t like the idea of Trel having children with two other men, but I also realized that those poor dudes were dead now. She had killed them, but she hadn’t wanted to kill me.
“Here I am not worshiped for my title. I am worshiped because I am your primary wife and leader of our group. Everyone adores me because I care for them like my little broodlings. I feel as if I am needed here. I enjoy building our fort and solving our survival problems. I feel as if I have value here beyond my offspring, and I love being with you, Victor.”
I opened my mouth to question her definitions of “worship” and “adoration,” but I realized that Trel’s ego was so large, she actually might not have realized that she sometimes grated on the other women when she belittled them.
“Are you saying you don’t want to go home?” I asked.
“Well, hmmm.” She tapped her lips with her finger and thought for a few moments. “I suppose if everyone else went to their world, I would just bring you to mine and we could live out the rest of our lives in luxury, but I would not want to leave my friends behind, or you. You would need to come with me.”
“I’m surprised to hear you say this,” I said.
“Why? I have told you that I love you many times.”
“No, I was more talking about the other women. I didn’t think you had such strong feelings for them.”
“Pfft,” she raspberried. “Of course I care for them. They are my husband’s wives and my best friends. I had no friends at home. Just my servants and my sisters.”
“Your sisters weren’t your friends?” I asked.
“They were, but they were also jealous of my prestige.” Trel shrugged.
“They weren’t duchesses?” I asked.
“Oh no,” she said as she shook her head. “They were not fertile, so they could not be duchesses. Only one female per brood is capable of creating more offspring.”
“Ahh,” I said. I didn’t know much about insects, but I remembered hearing that some species only had a single queen who could produce offspring.
“My point is that I am fine on this world, with you, and our friends, and my brood.” Her hand went to her bare stomach, and she patted her sleek muscles there gently.
“Are you pregnant?” I asked.
“I do not know yet,” she said. “You seem very eager to know.”
“You said it takes a few days?” I asked. “But when you, ahhh, with the other two males, you--”
“Yes,” she said. “It was possible that their seeds would not have fertilized my eggs, but I killed them anyway. Ugh. They were annoying.”
I nodded to her and then turned around on Tom’s back to look at the terrain again. We were now in the foothills on the western side of the valley, and while the tree cover was still somewhat dense, I saw that up ahead it would turn into an open field of grass as it ran up the gentle slopes. The river we had been following was now deep inside of a gorge, and I realized we were going to have to move away from it so that we could find a good path for getting up and over the slopes and into the next valley.
“I think Sheela was on the north side of the valley,” I said as we reached the end of the juniper tree line. “The slopes on the north are bare, but there was more foliage on the bottom parts.”
“You are worried about being visible when we cross over the hills?” Trel asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “If anyone is watching this valley, they will see us riding on this slope.”
“I doubt anyone will be watching from a high enough spot to see past all the trees,” Trel said, “but your worries remind me of my plan to build up on that large redwood in the center of our camp. I need to climb up to the top, but if my guess is correct, we might be able to see across our entire valley.”
“That’s a great idea,” I said.
“I know,” she replied with her usual belly laugh. “I am a genius.”
“I think you are probably right about us being seen,” I said as I looked across the field. “If I were with Kacerie, I would worry about her bright pink hair, but if anyone saw us from a distance, they would probably just think it was a lone trike.”
I urged Tom forward, and he trotted up the slope toward the crest of the hills. I guessed that the slope was about eight hundred feet of elevation, and it took us a good ten minutes to wind up the edges so that the angle of ascent wasn’t too steep for the big trike. I made him pause right below the crest of the grassy hill so Trel and I could look over the edge and down into the next valley without a giant trike profile against the skyline.
“Damn,” I said as I saw the jungle spread out before us. “This just seems to confirm my earlier thoughts. Dinosaurland is pretty drunk.”
“Hmmm,” Trel said. “It does seem odd that we would have more jungle here, but we have jungle to our east and more jungle to our north. Perhaps our valley is just odd because it has redwoods and those juniper trees as you call them.”
“Could be,” I said as I glanced across the valley below us. It looked about four times the size of ours, and I could see the sliver of ocean peaking through the curves of the hills on the far west side of the dark green valley, “but yeah, everywhere else seems to be jungle. I don’t see any smoke or anything. Do you?”
“Nope,” Trel said. “There might not be any tribes over here.”
“Alright, let’s get going.”
I commanded Tom to crest the hilltop and then desce
nd the other side. The jungle was pretty dense halfway down, and I weaved the big trike around a spread of palm trees while I looked for some sort of game trail that I could take through the forest. Unfortunately, my path was taking me farther away from the river, and I grew a bit frustrated after about a mile of travel.
“Damn,” I said as I looked at the jungle. “I guess we could just plow through all the plants and trees there, but that seems like slow going.”
“Agreed,” Trel said. “There has to be some sort of path the creatures are taking to travel through this valley.”
“Probably all the way on the north side,” I said. “Then we’ll have to swing back south once we cross into the next valley so we can meet up with the river again.”
“We don’t have much of a--” Trel started to say, but then a roar came from the distant jungle to our left, and we both swung or heads over to look at the trees we were skirting while we traveled on the grassy foothills.
“That sounded like a carno,” I hissed.
“Yeah,” Trel agreed. “But that does mean there is probably a path somewhere through the jungle. Those dinosaurs are large.”
“Let’s hope it is just one, and it doesn’t find us. I don’t want to fight.” I continued to push Tom in the north direction, and then I saw a wide gap in the jungle. The gap actually looked like a road, since there were stones on the ground and it was about as wide as a four-lane freeway. However, closer inspection of the stones made me realize the road hadn’t really been planned by anything sentient. It looked like it was an old riverbed that had dried up long ago. Some grass was growing up between the various thick stones, but trees hadn’t been able to gain purchase.
“This has to lead through the valley,” I said as I slowed Tom.
“It is worth a try,” Trel said. “If we keep going north, it might cost us an extra hour.”
“Alright,” I said as I turned Tom west toward the gap, took a deep breath, and then commanded him to trot down the riverbed.
It only took me a half a minute to wonder if I’d made a bad decision.
The sides of the old riverbed-road had sloped up a bit, and the jungle began to rise high over our heads so that there was only a small strip of blue sky above us. There was still room to turn around, but Tom would have to make a three-point turn, and he would lose all of his speed.
Then we heard another roar.
It was to the south, toward the river we had been following earlier, but it was hard to tell exactly how far away the predator was. Tom didn’t seem to get nervous, but the big trike probably outweighed a carnotaurus by at least two times. He wouldn’t have problems dealing with one.
But we would have a problem with two or more.
“Let’s pick up the speed a bit, buddy,” I said as I urged him to change from a trot into a canter type movement. This pace was much faster, and a bit smoother of a ride, but I didn’t think he could keep up the pace for more than half an hour before getting tired. Wind started to sting my eyes, and I guessed we were going around thirty miles-per-hour. The speed had never seemed fast in my car, but it felt very fast while on the back of a massive dinosaur.
I heard another roar from the south, but it sounded farther away now, and I let out a slight sigh of relief.
Then I heard another roar to the north, and this one sounded much closer.
“Fuck,” I growled as I glanced back at the spears and axes tied behind the saddle. Trel saw where I was looking and she reached her hand back to pull one of the spears loose.
“Can Tom go faster?” Trel asked, and her face looked mildly concerned.
“Yeah,” I said, but before I could give him the command, I saw movement behind us, and I twisted my head around more. Trel’s long black hair was twisting in the wind behind us, and for half a moment, I thought that was the movement I had noticed, but then a pair of carnotaurus rounded the corner some three hundred yards behind us.
“Shit!” I shouted, and Trel turned around.
“They are smaller than the ones you fought the other day!” Trel shouted, and I saw that, while she was right, and these did look like adolescent carnos, they were still really fucking big.
“Let’s go, Tom!” I shouted as I told him to change his canter into a sprint. The trike lowered his head a bit and followed my orders, and the wind began to whip painfully at my face.
The road we ran on had a slight northward twist, but I could see it begin to snake back to the left some two hundred yards up ahead. The turn wasn’t a ninety-degree angle, but it was still a bit sudden, so I steered Tom to the far right of the road and angled his approach into the turn as if I was playing a racing video game. The big trike obeyed me, and I had him lean hard to the left a few dozen yards before the turn came up.
Tom pushed hard into the turn, and his left shoulder came within a few inches of scraping against the walls at the apex of the turn. It had been perfectly executed, and I turned back around a few moments after I straightened him to look at the carnos. The pair of dinos obviously hadn’t spent over two-hundred hours playing Gran Turismo on their Playstations, and they skidded around the turn with too much speed. Their sides slammed into the wall, and they bounced off in a way that made them lose almost all their speed.
I turned back around and told Tom to push a bit harder. He let out a slightly annoyed sounding huff, but he still flexed his powerful legs and gave me a little more speed. There was a gentle turn to the right up ahead, and I waited until the last possible moment to slow him down and take the outside.
As soon as I hit the right turn at the apex, I saw that it was really an “S” curve, and I’d ended up taking the first angle a little too acutely, I adjusted Tom’s speed a bit and then punched him through the last segment so he could accelerate. I was positive the maneuvers had gained me a lot of distance on the two chasing carnos, but I wasn’t going to feel good until we’d completely dropped them.
I took three more turns as efficiently as possible, and a distant roar behind us made me think that they had given up the chase, but then I heard another set of roars up ahead, and two larger carnos plowed through the right side of the jungle.
“Ahhh, fuck,” I growled as soon as I saw them, but my stomach dropped even more when another pair emerged from the left side of the jungle even closer to us.
I had only moments to think about my next course of action, and the world seemed to slow to a standstill as my brain twisted through my possible options. The pair on the right was farther away, but they had both pushed through the jungle and were dropping into the river bed with clumsy movements. It would take them a few moments to recover and stand up, and then they would be a threat.
The pair on the left were closer to us, but they seemed more cautious. They had just poked the upper bodies out of the thick jungle, and I wondered how easy it would be for them to shake the tree vines free of their legs and get on the road.
There were also the other two behind us, and I realized that I really only had one course of action.
“Hold on!” I shouted at Trel. “I’m going to ram them!”
Trel didn’t say anything, but I felt her hands wrap around my stomach, and her hair whipped around my shoulders for a second.
Tom knew what I wanted, and the big trike let out a thunderous snort of air before he picked up his speed even more. We blew by the pair of carnos that had just stuck their heads out of the jungle, and their snapping jaws missed taking my arm off by about ten feet. They crashed into the road behind us, but we were moving too fast, and I felt my eyes tunnel vision on the pair who had first dropped onto the road. The one on the left had fallen on his side when he dropped down from the shoulder of the river bank, but the one on the right had regained his footing, and he turned toward the lumbering Tom with his teeth bared.
I aimed the trike’s horns right at that fucker and prayed we’d all live through the collision.
Tom raised his head at the last moment, and his top right horn slammed into the carno’s face. The thing
let out what I imagined was going to turn into a screech of agony, but the predator didn’t have much of an opportunity to get air out of his lungs. Tom had too much speed, and the carno’s face was ripped apart a moment before my trike plowed over him like a steamroller over a milk bottle.
The carno we passed on our left snapped at Trel and me, but I was ready for the movement and dodged to my right a fraction of a second before his teeth clamped closed. I could feel the warmth of the dino’s breath on my face, and I could briefly smell its stench, but then Tom was past him, and I felt my heart start beating again.
“You okay-- ahh!” I started to say to Trel, but the carno had already started moving, and I had to yank the beautiful woman to the side so that the predator didn’t bite her in half.
Trel spun around me while she used her spider-legs to maintain her balance. The carno made another lunge at us, but Trel had grabbed a spear from the sheath on the side of the saddles and jabbed the beast right in the nose with the point of her weapon when it tried to strike. The carno screeched as it pulled its head away from us, but the malevolent look in its eyes made me think that it was way more pissed off than it was hurt.
“Victor!” Trel shouted as I threw myself forward on Tom to avoid the carno’s teeth. The thing let out another hiss, and I guessed that Trel had poked it with her spear again.
I twisted around on Tom’s saddle and moved to reach for one of the spears, but the carno seemed to guess what I was doing, and he snapped his teeth right where I was trying to reach. I screamed another round of curses at him, and then tried to reach again, but he snapped once more, and probably would have taken my arm off if Trel hadn’t slammed her spear deep into his right eye.
The carno let out a screech and twisted its head violently to the side. The movement tore the spear from Trel’s grasp, but the carno also lost his balance, and he slammed his left shoulder into the wall before he kind of ping pong balled off the sides of the alley. He then tripped over a boulder that Tom had avoided and tumbled to the group like a rolled barrel.
But there were three more carnos right behind him.
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