The apparition disappears behind a small island of brush. Corey’s senses are afire; every step seems to uncover new threats and the wailing call of the damned echoes over the hard rock around him. The wails rise into the long soft howl of the night hunters. ‘Ah, now you’re into my territory. Sing your heart out to the moon. Feel your cries ride the pale beams of the night’s mistress, climbing the stair of its rays up to these alien stars.’
Soft memories of stories long forgotten flow into his mind as he pushes on under his burden. A low rumble rises in his throat. He feels the urge to call as he often did when alone in his youth. A youth spent travelling the trail of old under the rays of the pale hunter’s moon, as did his ancestors. He can feel his strength grow as the cool air blows across his skin. The power of the night race pushes him onward filling his soul with the bliss of freedom and the sweet thrill of the chase. The joy of it wells up inside him and bursts forth into the night.
‘God Almighty what the heck are your doing Corey. You scared the peanuts out of me! I never, ever heard anyone howl like that! Just shut the hell up and get down over here!’
‘Anton, where the heck did you go! Oh, thank goodness, I’ve about reached the end of my rope.’
‘Well it didn’t sound like it. Set her down over here. Our friend stopped at the edge of the trees when he felt the first pulses of the ‘sentinels. We should be ok for a little while.’
‘Cheeze, where did you learn to howl like that? I thought those stories of your ancestors that you were spinning were all made up. I mean, I almost wet my pants when you started in. I guess you heard that black demon too. Heck, I wonder what he thought of it.’
‘Ah, I’m bushed and I don’t know what you are talking about Anton. I could hear that Black Ghost right on my tail. I think I could have plugged him but I didn’t know where you were.’
‘Well I’m glad you held off. Here’s some salve although her blood does seem to be starting to coagulate. She’ll be ok. The question is, what do we do now?’
‘I think we just sit tight and wait. This is a good spot, we’re protected by these rocks and …’
‘No Corey, it ends here tonight if I have to go out there and strangle that SOB with my bare hands. There’s no ending it any other way now that we killed his companion.’
‘What, are you sure we got him?’
‘Yeah, I went over while you were bringing Molly back up and put a slug into him point blank. He was down on the edge of the cliff where he fell after you winged him. Looked like he wouldn’t of gotten too far anyway. He was pretty chewed up by that Albertosaurus. Good shooting, by the way. I’ve never seen you move so quickly or with such deadly accuracy. You sure you don’t want to be working for Blackwave instead of spending your time tinkering in the lab?’
‘I may not be working for anyone after we get back and have to stand there in front of Mark. This trip wasn’t exactly sanctioned you recall.’
‘Oh stop your fretting. What’s he gonna do about it ….’
‘Shhh! The ‘sentinel alarm. Something small, just man-sized but he’s coming this way.’
Except for the brilliance of the stars peaking through the canopy above them, they couldn’t see anything under the shade of the trees. Even the light enhancement of their battle helmets fought against the dark shadows. Out of necessity and because of the rapid flight, they now sat within the rocks without the prepared advantage of a cleared perimeter and established kill zones.
The jungle around them remains strangely quiet. All around them sits an eerie absence of the normal calls and song of the evening life. The silence continues to inundate them with imagined warnings of nearby danger. It is a menacing silence that allows the soft snap of a twig to carry through the trees like the crack of a rifle. An electric chill runs down Corey’s spine at the sound but his self control manages to move his body slowly to meet the threat. A rustle in the leaves and the rapid, furtive stepping flows with the small cries of vengeance unsatisfied. A sudden burst of leaves and branches pushed aside without fear of detection and the scrub palms off near the edge of their perimeter shake with the intruder’s dark passage.
‘What the hell is it Anton? Shouldn’t we have a StrobeSentinel ID?’ Corey’s thoughts flew silently across his Hive Tab contact.
‘There must be a gap in the field there. Never mind, just focus on it.’
The dark figure ran off silently. Then, another scramble through the brush rose ahead of them. ‘Watch it, he’s coming back!’
‘What is he doing? That’s no way …’
A dark figure suddenly appeared in the low brush. It ran low, passing from cover to cover. Never directly at them, it wove from side-to-side. A burst of speed and it hopped over a scrub palmetto crashing through the undergrowth with a total disregard for noise. It suddenly stopped and turned back toward them, weaving in and out of the brush. A sharp cry bordering on a scream and it leapt through the air.
Two snaps filled the air, flashing the leaves and grass around them with the violence of a yellow strobe of pure plasma energy. The figure was thrown across and into a tree.
‘Wait a second Anton! Look at it, it’s one of those damned Ricardoestesia!’
‘Move! Grab Molly and I’ll cover you! We have to move to the other side. Hurry!’
Corey shoulders his rifle and picked up the still unconscious girl with one arm. Molly moaned in pain. Corey ignored her protests and shifted position over behind Anton.
Anton’s call carried silently across Corey’s Hive Tab, ‘It knows where we are now. See what it did, it drove that poor thing directly into us and we were dumb enough to show it exactly where we were hiding. Watch out, we won’t know what will be coming …’
The sobbing wail echoed through the leaves. It seems to surround them in its cry, searching and beseeching them to come to its aid. Then a small stringent smell assaults their nostrils. It grows slowly, saturating the still air of the jungle as the moans echo and rend their hearts with pity and somehow, a primal fear.
The moans turn into a low thrumming. Their heads throb with the blast of each barely heard call. Molly begins to moan and whimper at their feet. Anton turns to look at her and suddenly feels it on his leg.
The pull is sudden and savage. Anton’s rifle slides along a branch and flies from his grip. The savage hold on his leg pulls it from under him. His head glances off a rock, slamming into the ground. A massive weight stomps down on his chest and his world fills with a yellow flash that rips savagely through his head.
Hands reach down and pull him roughly back to the shelter of the rock. His leg armor is still stiff from the attack and a splitting headache begins to form in the back of his skull. Suddenly he feels his rifle thrust back into his hands.
The night air fills with a screech of frustration and anger. Anton struggles up to a crouch position when something slams into him with a feral cry, ‘You damn lizard I’m gonna wring your …’
Anton turns; the enhanced view of his helmet shows Corey’s head struggling above him. His eyes are filled with anger and his face red in the wrath of a berserker. Anton pushes him up and reaches out. He can feel steel hard muscles covered with a slick film of feathers. A foot strikes forward, glancing off his helmet. It misses Corey and twists Anton around.
Anton is surprised to find his combat knife in his hand. He strikes out, feeling the hard resistance of skin break before its point. His hand wrenches from the jolt as it deflects from bone and sinks deeper into the victim. A sense of satisfaction fills him as his ears ring from the cries and screams around him. He suddenly realizes that the screams are his and it pushes him on. Anton pushes the blade deeper into the body and twists his wrist in the killing thrust that mangles internal organs sensitive to life. Gathering his leg under him, he pushes on the bodies on top of him and swings his other hand onto the handle of the blade. With a two-handed thrust he pulls the blade along the bone, cutting through the sensitive muscle and tissue. Blood and body fluids burst from the open wound a
nd a scream fills his world.
They twist and fall into the brush. Something hard lands on the small of his back as they roll across and into the sharp branches of a stump. He can feel the savage thrusts and jerks of its death throes beneath him and his hands clamp tighter on the handle of his blade. It won’t move, embedded deep in the bone so he twists and with a snap it breaks free. Anton yanks the knife and the body twists out from beneath him.
Anton struggles to rise. His legs brace themselves under him as he searches the shadows for the best place to attack. The mass before him jerks and then shivers and swings over. Then he sees Corey. His legs are wrapped around its back and his arms locked in a death grip under its jaws. The arm of the beast is twisted between its side and Corey. As he watches, Corey grunts and twists his arm deeper into its throat and the spine of the Black Ghost snaps, the sound ringing through the air like the crack of a bullet. A violent jerk, then another spasm and then peace.
Anton falls back against a tree, his chest heaving. His head is throbbing with pain and the muscles of his arms are beginning to knot up with the sudden release of tension. Slowly he slides to the ground. The black demon shakes again but he notices the spasms are from Corey bearing down on the body with even greater savagery.
Slowly he begins to laugh. It’s a weak laugh from a body too tired to move, ‘Corey! Ease off boy. You got him, ease off. It’s over.’
Corey slowly relaxes as Anton’s words sink in. He releases his grip and his hand flashes back to his belt. A pale, deadly glint of moonlight reflects from the black anodized blade of his Ka-Bar combat knife as it flicks out and forward. Savagely Corey’s hand rips back across the raptor’s neck, severing tissue and arteries but the pulsing thrust of blood from a beating heart is not there. The engineer collapses, falling across the dead beast.
The throbbing in Anton’s head slowly begins to recede. He stands, his shaking hand moving unconsciously to the familiar pain in the small of his back as he watches Corey lift his head.
Corey rolls off the beast and looks over toward Molly. Blood is slowly dripping from his wrist that was trapped in the mouth of the beast. Anton notices it wasn’t from a bite but rather a skin-rip from the sudden hardening of the ArmorAll shirt. Then Corey turns over toward Anton. ‘Molly seems ok but I’m too tired to crawl over. Anyway, she’s lying there just as we left her.’
He looks back up into the dark jungle around them and then he turns back to Anton, ‘It’s over. Now maybe we can get back to normal. I don’t want to do this anymore.’
References
1. O'Connor PM, Claessens LPAM (2005) Basic avian pulmonary design and flow-through ventilation in non-avian theropod dinosaurs. Nature 436:253-256. (Dinosaur lungs and breathing)
2. Landis, G.P., and Snee, L.W., 1991, 40Ar/39Ar Systematics and argon diffusion in Amber; implications for ancient earth atmospheres: in Kump, L.R., Kasting, J.F., Robinson, J.M., Atmospheric oxygen variation through geologic time. Global and Planetary Change. v. 5, p.63-67. (Oxygen Content)
3. Lehman, T.M. & Coulson, A.B. 2002. A juvenile specimen of the sauropod Alamosaurus sanjuanensis from the Upper Cretaceous of Big Bend National Park, Texas. Journal of Palaeontology. 76(1): 156-172
4. Coombs, W. P. 1975. Sauropod habits and habitats. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 17, 1-33. (trunked sauropod initial paper)
5. Witmer, L. M. 2001. Nostril position in dinosaurs and other vertebrates and its significance for nasal function. Science 293, 850-853.
6. Xing Xua1, Xiaoting Zhengb and Hailu Youc, A new feather type in a nonavian theropod and the early evolution of feathers , PNAS January 20, 2009 vol. 106 no. 3 832-834 (Sauropod feathers)
7. W. L. Makous, "Fourier models and the loci of adaptation," J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 14, 2323-2345 (1997)
8. Norell, Mark A.; Makovicky, Peter J. (1999). "Important features of the dromaeosaurid skeleton II: information from newly collected specimens of Velociraptor mongoliensis". American Museum Novitates 3282: 1–45. http://hdl.handle.net/2246/3025
Dinosaur Lungs
The bones of the dinosaur are perforated and hollow. The hollows contain air-filled membranes that are connected to the lungs and trachea. In almost all dinosaurs, there is a set of anterior air sacs, and another set of posterior sacs, with the lungs located between them. This makes their bones, like those of a bird, much less dense and considerably lighter than those of a human.
Just like in modern birds, instead of inflating their lungs directly, dinosaurs inflated the air sacs first, and then the sacs are compressed like a bellows to drive air through the lungs. There is a complex, continuous cycle of respiration but it pays off in efficiency. One set of sacs inflates by inhalation, then the air is expelled from the sacs through the lungs and to the other set where it is then expelled to the trachea or throat. It actually takes two breaths to move an intake of air through the complex of sacs and lungs.
This means the blood fills with oxygen with every inhale or exhale. The design is very much like a supercharger on an engine but now applied to the blood flow allowing dinosaurs to move like birds with extreme rapidity and to achieve their massive size. The higher oxygen content of the atmosphere of the timeframe, close to 10% greater than present, also helped them grow to massive proportions.
Alamosaurus
Alamosaurus is a genus of titanosaurian sauropod dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous Period from an area that is now North America. It was a large quadrupedal herbivore. Isolated vertebrae and limb bones indicate that it reached sizes comparable to Argentinosaurus and Puertasaurus, which would make it the largest dinosaur known from North America. Alamosaurus, like other sauropods, had a long neck and a long tail, extrapolations anticipate the creature could reach over 15 meters (50 feet) in length.
Skeletal elements of Alamosaurus are among the most common Late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils found in the United States Southwest and are now used to define the fauna of that time and place. In the south of Late Cretaceous North America, the transition from the Edmontonian to the Lancian is even more dramatic than it was in the north. Thomas M. Lehman describes it as "the abrupt reemergence of a fauna with a superficially 'Jurassic' aspect." These faunas are dominated by Alamosaurus and feature abundant Quetzalcoatlus a large flying pterosaurus, in Texas that reached wingspans of greater than fifty feet.
Sauropod Trunks
The trunked sauropod movement started around 1975 with Walter Coombs's paper. Fossil record evidence has never been found but why else would a land-based sauropod have nostrils on the top of its head? Many parallels and the concept itself originate from a comparison of dinosaur skulls and morphology to those of elephants. Many of the artist’s conceptions look very odd but then so would an elephant if we only knew their bodies from concepts drawn from their skeletons. Sauropod trunks, unlike feathers, are one of the most hotly contested concepts in the field right now. Finding fossils of this delicate, soft appendage is also difficult because they decay rapidly.
Velociraptors
The Velociraptor was a mid-sized dromaeosaurid, with adults measuring around eight feet long and standing only about as high as your thigh.[3] The skull was uniquely up-curved, concave on the upper surface and convex on the lower. The jaws were lined with many widely spaced teeth, each more strongly serrated on the back edge than the front, rather like that of a shark.
There is ample evidence for their being feathered but they were not the large, reptile-like animals shown in Jurassic Park. The Jurassic park animals are actually more closely modeled to the highly intelligent Troondon of our story… if they had feathers that is.
Epilog: Pale Beauty
“The stars are the jewels of the night,
and perchance surpass anything which day has to show.”
Henry David Thoreau
Yes, he could see it now. A single bright point of starlight blazed like a diamond on a dark velvet cloth draped across the blue sky in the east. Slightly to the south, the faint outline of our nearby satellite is cl
earer now. Its surface presents a hard image full of white rings with sharp, black contrasts and no shading or color. Somehow, the orb’s beauty lies in what it gives rather than what it is. This is what lends the magnificence to its creation.
The cliffs here on the south rim already bath in the dark folds of the coming night. A roar from the nearby waters falling to the valley far below play a soft dirge for the dying day, resonating up and down with the playful ministrations of the breeze. Long shafts of light dance their last among the swirling mists. They glisten sharply from dew-covered leaves on the vines lining the fall of the waters. The rays push through the mist, weaker in the evening glow but still able to amaze the eye with their mathematically perfect swirl of rainbow structures that play chaotically through the fine aerosol of the spray.
Bands of deep red emerge softly in the sky marking the final passage of the yellow orb that keeps and warmed the long day. Their glory emerges, growing in depth and strength with the slow passing of the source.
I know the moment is upon us as we stand here. The magnificence around us demands our soul’s awareness with such strength that even my young son turns his attention to the heavens. ‘Over there Gabriel! Keep your eyes up the valley, watch along the river far below where the sun is going down. Now watch!’
My voice rises in strength unconsciously as the words escape. Without thought, I push to insure he can hear my words over the rising song mounting from the jungle around us. Small hands grip my shoulders with a blessed promise of future strength. The beauty of it startles even his young attentions when it finally comes.
Its splendor comes with the soft violence of a moment’s silence. A golden flash of light, contained much as a wave crashing upon the shore, shears across the far peaks of the valley. A few moments fire each rocky pinnacle with yellow tones of grandeur contrasting the deep velvet blue of the skies beyond.
Hunter's Moon (Cretaceous Station Book 2) Page 42
