Dragonstar Destiny

by David Bischoff

  “No, actually I rather fancied a jog around the park first!” Barkham said sarcastically.

  “Hey, there’s no reason for anger,” Mikaela said, hopping off the couch and pacing. “I mean, we’re still alive and we’re absolutely unharmed. Just shaken up a bit. Doubtless we’ll find out what’s going on soon enough. Let’s take Thesaurus’s example. He’s taking all this very well. And no wonder ... he’s run into aliens before. Haven’t you, Thesaurus?”

  “I live and I continue to learn,” said Thesaurus. “I am open to the new and the wonderful. I am grateful for every new experience before I must expire. And, I confess,” said the lizard-man, “I am very eager indeed to speak to the Makers of my home.”

  “You see! We should all take it this philosophically!” said Mikaela. “We are privileged!”

  “Privileged?” Barkham said. “To get bashed on the head and dragged into an alien spaceship? Yeah, maybe I’m in a bad mood and maybe I should get a little more positive ... But I refuse to agree that I’m privileged!”

  Takamura got off the couch and stretched. He then began exercising out the tightness in his muscles. “I suspect that we can argue all we like, and we shall still remain in the same situation. We may as well be stoical about it. That is, while we examine the walls for any possible exit!” He grinned.

  Dr. Jakes had to laugh. “And why not? First thing rats do when they get put in a new cage is to try to find a way out.”

  It was a short search, and they found nothing, but Mishima felt better that they had at least examined their environment thoroughly.

  He settled back on the huge couch in a comfortable position. “So much for that. I wonder if we’re going to be fed and watered.”

  No sooner had he spoken than a portion of the central couch slid back and a small table elevated. On the table were five bowls of brownish gruel and five cups of clear water.

  “Ask and ye shall receive,” said Mikaela, crawling over to the table. She examined one of the bowls and stuck a finger in it, tasting it.

  “Tastes like oatmeal, but less flavor,” she said, making a face.

  “Next time I’ll be more specific,” said Mishima.

  Mikaela volunteered to be the first to eat and drink. She did so, with no ill effects. Mishima found the food to be as tasteless as Mikaela had indicated. But it was surprisingly filling and doubtlessly nutritious. Even Thesaurus had no trouble getting it down.

  “Looks like our needs were specifically analyzed and met,” said Dr. Jakes.

  “Which means we’re being more than watched,” Mikaela said. “God alone knows what kind of devices they’ve got tuned in on us!”

  “Not a pleasant thought at all,” said Barkham, though the food seemed to have cheered him up a little. “I would think, though, that if they’re going to be offering us our food, there should at least be some kind of sanitary facilities!”

  No sooner had he spoken than a door in the side of the room opened. They all blinked.

  Dr. Jakes, who was closest, examined what lay beyond the new door. He came back with a bemused look on his face. “It’s a toilet. A toilet and a sink, and towels!”

  “How thoughtful,” said Mikaela. “They’ve even provided us with a modicum of privacy!”

  Mishima sprang up from the couch, addressing the walls. “Thank you!” he said. “Thank you very much. We truly appreciate your hospitality!”

  The others looked at him as though he were crazy.

  “Well, clearly they can understand what we’re saying,” said Mishima.

  “All right,” said Barkham. “Why don’t you ask them where the hell we are!”

  Mishima turned and addressed the walls again. “Is there any way that you’d be willing to communicate with us? We’d like to know where we are now, and what you intend on doing with us.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  And then the whole wall by the couch came alive with colors. The change was so abrupt that Mishima recoiled with shock.

  He noticed that the others had responded in just the same way, as though a sudden wave of fire had washed through the metal side of the room attempting to engulf them. But the three-dimensional quality of the colors retreated into flat images, utilizing light and shadow to illustrate depth.

  There was a sun, burning in the night ...

  It was a hazy reddish star, an occasional solar flare licking out into the darkness toward its planets. This full image of a sun dissolved into a representational view of the same star, much smaller now and surrounded by planets ... and by something else. Another slow dissolve took the view from this system to an all-too-familiar object, drifting against a starscape:

  The Dragonstar.

  “It’s showing us the star system we’re in,” said Mikaela, the first to recover use of her tongue. “It’s saying, ‘This is where you are’!”

  “Obviously,” said Barkham. “But what good does that do for us?”

  “Shhh,” said Dr. Jakes. “I’m concentrating.”

  The image of the Dragonstar faded away, to be replaced by the image of a huge grey planet—a planet without the usual features of continents and seas or clouds. Its entirety consisted of the geometric panorama of buildings of incredible heights, and fields of metal. Crystal sparkled in the sun on the day side, and on the night, strange colored lights burned.

  “The central planet of the First Race,” Barkham muttered, disobeying his own request. But no one seemed to mind—they were too busy staring at this incredible sight with awe.

  As they watched, the images began to change faster, flashing down onto the surface of the metal planet and then within.

  The viewers gasped. It was all too much to take in. Alien image piled upon alien image, and it felt to Mishima Takamura that his brain was overloading with the implications all these sights presented.

  There were views of cities with unimaginably odd denizens roaming the streets. There were glimpses into alien biomes with the most fantastic of plants. And there was the sequence in which the wall showed corridor after corridor descending deep into the heart of this world, walls undulating with flashing lights and alien circuitry. And all through these wandered a most unlikely bestiary of aliens. Tall aliens and small aliens. Aliens with a multitude of limbs and aliens with none. Aliens with myriad eyes and aliens flowing through byways like wobbling piles of protoplasm.

  “I don’t understand,” said Dr. Jakes.

  “What’s wrong?” Takamura demanded, unable to tear his eyes away from these views which affected him almost as strongly as mystical visions of the divine might.

  “I see what Jakes is getting at,” said Mikaela. “Where are the descendants of the dinosaurs?”

  “Huh?” said Barkham, and Thesaurus’s reptilian eyes tore away from the wall screen to stare at Lindstrom.

  “So far we don’t see anything much like Thesaurus out there,” said Mikaela. “We had assumed that the seeders would have created life after their own images.”

  “Surely that doesn’t mean anything,” said Takamura. “There seems to be such a variety of alien life. There could be reasons for that we can’t possibly understand right now.”

  “Perhaps if we simply watch,” said Dr. Jakes, “the images themselves will explain.”

  “That’s apparently what we’re supposed to do,” said Takamura.

  The images continued, showing a dizzying number of views of alien vistas until Takamura had to close his eyes for a time to relieve his brain. When he opened them again, however, the wall had faded once more to black.

  Then a galaxy appeared in the center of the screen.

  The Milky Way.

  Then their home galaxy faded away and another galaxy, non-spiral, took its place.

  Another faded in and out.

  And another.

  “It would appear that we’re being shown
the range of this civilization’s spread. Which would explain the number of aliens down on this planet ... This must be the central hub,” said Dr. Jakes.

  “Yes,” said Takamura. “The capital ...”

  “And they’ve brought us here. They’ve brought the Dragonstar back,” said Mikaela Lindstrom. “And they’re taking the time to actually show us where we are and who they are ...”

  “I don’t know,” said Barkham. “It doesn’t follow their modus operandi. I mean, they knock us out—”

  “But they didn’t kill us,” said Takamura. “They dealt with us as possibly dangerous creatures. Without doing harm to us, they neutralized any possibility of a threat to them.”

  The wall went dark again.

  Takamura wondered what was next. They all stared at the wall, waiting in suspense for the next step of the communication process.

  Then the wall faded, and an image of a creature’s head loomed. Its eyes were liquid sparkles of intelligence. It seemed to be staring straight into Takamura’s soul.

  It opened its mouth to speak, and Takamura shivered with the importance of this moment ... the first verbal communication between the Creators and representatives of their children.

  “Greetings,” said a hissy alien voice, pronunciation totally off. “And fuck you all!”

  PHINEAS KEMP raged against the dark.

  Somewhere deep in his being, he struggled up and out of the enfolding unconsciousness, as though he were at the bottom of some terribly deep well, with only a glimmer of light above him. It would be so easy to just give up, drift back to the bottom, and lie there in the warm sludge. But something called at him, something terribly urgent, and Kemp swam upward toward the light.

  And broke through to the surface, gasping.

  The light was blinding.

  And he ached all over.

  The scene settled in all around him, black and white resolving into harsh color: he lay in the wrecked OTV. He tasted blood in his mouth, felt warm liquid trickling down his face. He craned his neck and saw Becky Thalberg lying behind him in the canted car, unconscious and breathing shallowly.

  He looked around and saw that Kate Ennis had either been thrown from the car or had managed to pull herself out of the wreck and was now kneeling in the dirt light meters from the OTV, groaning.

  Nearby, three dinosaurs milled.

  Triceratopses.

  The triceratopses that had wrecked them.

  They seemed a bit confused. Two were nibbling at clumps of vegetation growing from between some rocks. The other looked dazed. They were big things, with tough hides and a crown of three horns apiece upon their ugly heads. They were herbivorous, Kemp knew ... but they could be awfully mean if riled ... And with the things that had been happening lately to the dinosaurs, there was no telling how the beasts would react to humans walking among them.

  Kemp struggled to a sitting position. The top of the OTV had been smashed like an eggshell, but its ends still served as shelter from a possible attack by the triceratopses. It would be best to stay awhile inside.

  “Kate!’ he called. “Kate, are you okay?”

  Kate groaned and did not respond. She seemed totally out of it, in some different world. The only thing Kemp’s words seemed to do for her was to make her stand up, wobbly. She turned slightly and Kemp could see two rivulets of blood running down her forehead. She did not seem to see him. She opened her mouth and turned again.

  “Rick?” she said. “Rick?”

  Who was Rick? Kemp wondered. But then Kate started to walk away from the OTV, toward the triceratopses.

  “Kate!” cried Kemp. “No! Don’t! Come back!”

  “Rick?” cried Kate, clearly out of her head beneath the hot Illuminator. “Rick!”

  She was walking directly toward the dazed triceratops.

  And the triceratops grunted, its eyes focusing on the advancing woman.

  “Kate!” Kemp cried. “Get away from it! Get away!”

  The triceratops snorted. It pawed the ground. The other two looked up from their snacks.

  Kemp fumbled for his rifle.

  The dazed triceratops started running toward Kate Ennis, who did not seem to notice it at all.

  It lowered its horns as it picked up speed.

  “Kate!” cried Kemp helplessly. “Run! Get away!”

  The pounding of the creature’s feet upon the ground finally caused a little awareness to come into Kate Ennis’s eyes. She looked up and Kemp saw that she could see the triceratops advancing upon her at a rapid clip. She screamed, and she turned to run ...

  But she was too late.

  The horn of the triceratops caught her squarely in the back, skewering her through, emerging from between her breasts red with her blood. The scream was ripped from her mouth as the triceratops tossed her up five yards in the air.

  Her body hit the ground with a sickening thwap.

  The maddened dinosaur commenced to trample her until her body was an unrecognizable splatter of blood and flesh and bone upon the harsh ground.

  It sniffed the remains of the woman, then moved off to nibble on something edible. The others, after looking up in dull interest, returned to their own feeding.

  Kemp stared on with horror, holding the gun he had not had time to use, not able to believe the awful violence he had just witnessed, not able to accept his loss.

  Kate, he thought. Oh God, Kate!

  Emotion choked his chest, and he had to turn away to prevent burning tears from coursing down his cheek. He had cared for her, in a curious way, in a manner he had never cared for another woman ... She was so effervescent, so alive ... And now she was ... gone.

  A groan from Becky Thalberg behind him returned him to the present reality, and his concern for her and his own instinct for survival turned him enough away from his grief that he was able to function.

  “Becky,” he said, turning around and touching her. “Becky, you’re okay.”

  He saw her eyes flicker on. “What happened?”

  “We had an accident,” he said. “Kate ... Kate Ennis is dead.”

  That brought her around. “Dead?”

  “Don’t look. It’s not pleasant. The triceratops got her ... the one we swerved to avoid. We have to get out of here, Becky. Grab our supplies and get out. The base can’t be too far away, and we’ve got to reach it.”

  Becky didn’t say anything. She seemed too intent on keeping herself conscious. Methodically she extricated herself from the back of the OTV while Kemp gathered their supplies. Carefully they got out of the OTV—wrecked beyond hope of use, Kemp noted—and took refuge from the triceratops behind it.

  “Oh God,” Becky said finally, glimpsing the remains of Kate Ennis. “Phineas, this is just too much ... I ... I don’t think I can take it.”

  “Shhh,’ whispered Kemp. “Not so loud. We don’t want to attract the same attention from those creatures that they gave to Kate. Now listen—this is what we’ve got to do.”

  He pointed to the top of the large boulder, which was attached to a ridge leading around to the other side of an outcropping of rocks. “If we get up there, we’ll be able to sneak off without the big bastards noticing. Feel up to a quick run?”

  Becky seemed to be having difficulty breathing. “I don’t know, Phineas. Something’s wrong.”

  Kemp could see nothing physically wrong with her, and there seemed no sign of internal bleeding. From the way she was breathing, though, he could tell that her troubles were more psychological than physical. She was having what appeared to be a prime anxiety attack, and Kemp really couldn’t blame her. After all she’d been through before—stuck in the Great Mesozoic Outback again. But they couldn’t afford the time it would take for her to get better. They had to get away from these triceratopses.

  “Dammit, Becky,” he said. “You did just fine with Coopers
mith. Don’t I inspire you to survive?”

  “You asshole,” said Becky, her eyes flashing. “I can do just fine, thank you!”

  “There you go! That’s the spirit! Now climb those rocks and I’ll cover you!”

  She swallowed hard, still angry. But she glanced up at the boulder, squinting in the light from the sky, and she nodded her head.

  Kemp put a gun in her hand. “And when you get up there, you cover me, right?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  She ran.

  The triceratopses did not seem to notice at first.

  But when Becky almost lost her footing, she dislodged a shower of rocks which rolled down, causing noise that seemed to be of avalanche proportion. She kept moving up the edge, and she pulled herself to the top of the boulder.

  However, the triceratops that had killed Kate Ennis started with the slide of rocks, twisting its tank-like head around, tiny eyes red and dangerous.

  “Oh shit,” said Kemp, raising his rifle.

  The triceratops wasted no time as it saw the flash of movement behind the OTV, the splinter of light reflected from the metal of the rifle. It lowered its array of horns, snorted hard, and charged with a roar. Its tiny brain did not seem to be able to detach Kemp from the OTV. It headed for that first.

  Kemp fired off a round, succeeding only in gouging off a chip of the creature’s bony crown. The ’tops struck the OTV, its bloody center horn piercing the cracked top bubble. With a shake of its sinewy head, the OTV was steam-shoveled out of the beast’s way.

  The path was clear to Kemp.

  Kemp aimed more carefully this time, firing directly into the triceratops’s eye. It exploded, and the creature honked and screamed with pain.

  But after only a short pause, it kept on coming.

  Kemp turned and started to run up the way that Becky had run. Peripherally he noted that she had reached the top of the boulder and was peering down on the drama below.

  “Becky!” he screamed. “I said, cover me!”

  Becky seemed to be still stunned, but she recovered quickly enough, shooting down at the triceratops.