Time slowed as he arced through the air, then sped back up again when he thumped onto the edge of the sub's deck. The stupidity of what he'd done suddenly sank in. His fingers slipped and he began sliding off the deck and into the ice cold water. His feet kicked against the side of the submarine as he fought to find a foothold. Then his fingers caught the edge of a metal plate and with one last, desperate effort, he hauled himself onto the submarine. Water bubbled and hissed around him.
Cold water sloshed up Glitch's shins as he waded toward the conning tower. He heard the crackle of gunfire and risked a glance over his shoulder. Anderson had managed to get ahold of a rifle, and she was firing at the two dinosaurs and forcing them back.
Glitch was still five feet away from the conning tower, but the water was well above his knees. He was running out of time. He unhooked the metal box from his belt, turned it back on, and knelt down. He fumbled with the carabiner until he felt it lock onto the deck. The white light flashed brightly beneath the water.
The submarine was almost past the end of the dock. Glitch took a deep breath and threw himself into the water. The cold drove the air from his lungs, and panic gripped him. He began to swim, but his clothes dragged him down. Each stroke seemed to cut his energy in half. He sank lower and lower in the water. By the time his fingertips touched concrete, he was barely managing to keep his head above water.
Glitch dragged his shivering body up onto the dock. He struggled to his knees, coughing out the ocean he'd tried to breathe in during those final few strokes. When his lungs were finally working again, he turned back to the water and watched as the submarine drifted out of the hangar, taking its deadly payload with it.
"Come on," said Glitch quietly. He crossed his fingers.
A dark shape appeared, rising up through the water—the megalodon. Its head broke the surface, and huge jaws crammed with massive, triangular teeth opened wide.
The megalodon slammed into the side of the submarine. The impact rocked the sub sideways. Sounds of groaning, tearing metal echoed across the hangar. The megalodon thrashed and twisted. The sub's bulkhead buckled and then collapsed under the onslaught. Something popped and crackled, and smoke began leaking from a tear in the sub's hull. Then the submarine disappeared, the megalodon still worrying at its prey.
"Glitch!" shouted Anderson.
She'd brought down one of the Sarcosaurs, but now she was holding the apparently empty rifle by the barrel and swinging it to fend off the affections of the remaining dinosaur. Glitch wasn't sure how he was going to help her, not when there was a third dinosaur advancing toward him. Glitch frowned. A third dinosaur?
The Sarcosaurus let out an ear-splitting cry and paced toward Glitch. He backed away. Dr. Zheng was frantically pulling at bits of machinery and dragging tarpaulins aside as she tried to find a weapon.
"Get out of here, Doc," shouted Glitch, "while you still can."
Zheng waved an impatient hand at him and continued her search.
The dinosaur let out another screech. Glitch could hear the rhythmic pounding of the ocean behind him. Whump, whump, whump. The sound was heavy, deep, and it shook him to his core.
Glitch was pushed forward as a blast of icy air washed over him. Droplets of water splattered across his back and the thumping ocean became the roar of a helicopter's rotors.
He dropped to the ground as the Bell Huey swept into view. The side door was open, a sniper crouching inside. She raised a rifle to her shoulder and fired. The Sarcosaurus let out a screech as a red dart hit its flank. It took a few steps back before its legs buckled and it fell to the ground. It twitched and flopped a couple of times before falling still.
The helicopter had already shifted position, and the sniper was firing again. Less than thirty seconds later the dinosaur near Anderson was lying on the ground too.
Glitch gave the helicopter a thumbs-up. As he turned to leave, Glitch glimpsed a dark shadow sweeping beneath the surface of the ocean. Moments later, the megalodon leapt from the water toward the helicopter.
Chapter Eight
Saviors from the Skies
The helicopter leaned back, its engine screaming as the pilot pulled the nose upward. The shark hit the front of the chopper. The impact spun the front of the aircraft, and Glitch could see the pilot inside, fighting for control. The megalodon's jaws slid across metal, and as it closed its mouth, gravity reclaimed it and the shark fell. It belly-flopped back into the water, sending plumes of spray into the air. The helicopter swayed for a moment, then leveled out and climbed away. As it rose, sunlight glinted off four long gouges in its nose.
Glitch let out a slow breath and then began jogging toward the exit where Anderson and Zheng were waiting for him.
A second helicopter had landed on the plain outside the hangar. Four soldiers were stationed around it with heavy rifles, but there were no signs of any more dinosaurs.
A tall, thin-faced man in a dark suit greeted them as they climbed into the helicopter. "Good afternoon, Captain Anderson."
Anderson nodded to him. "Mr. Winston. Glad you could make it."
Glitch barely had time to buckle his seat belt before the helicopter was climbing upward. It banked right, and Glitch could see the dinosaurs scattered across the island, heedless of the drama that had just played out so close to them. Then the helicopter leveled off again, and they were sweeping low across the ocean.
Glitch frowned at the thin-faced man. "How did you get here so quickly?" he shouted.
"Let's just say we were in the area."
"You knew about the dinosaurs."
The thin-faced man didn't respond.
"What will happen to them now?"
"Don't worry. We have our best people on the way."
Glitch looked at Anderson and raised his eyebrows. She gave him a wry smile.
Someone wrapped a blanket around Glitch's shoulders. He suddenly remembered his phone and patted his pockets. It was gone, probably lost when he took his swim. Which meant the proof of what they’d found was gone too.
He sighed and stared out of the window, watching the island recede into the distance and promising himself this was the last time he'd get mixed up with Anderson and Dr. Zheng. Definitely the last time.
A Word from Philip Harris
When I was growing up, one of the highlights of the summer and Christmas school holidays was the BBC’s children’s programming. Every morning they’d air a Tarzan movie and episodes of the old black-and-white fiction serials from the 1930s—Zorro, The Lone Ranger, and Buck Rogers. I enjoyed them all, but my favorite was Flash Gordon starring Larry “Buster” Crabbe.
I’d eagerly sit down each morning to see how Flash, Dale, and Doc managed to get out of whatever mess they’d gotten themselves into the day before. I don’t know how many times I watched each series (I remember them being shown every year for most of my childhood, although I doubt that’s actually true), but they stuck with me, and I’ve always had a soft spot in my geeky heart for those serials (helped by the 1980 movie, of course).
A couple of years ago, that love of Flash Gordon inspired me to write Glitch Mitchell and the Unseen Planet, the story of a teenage nerd who gets pulled through an interstellar gateway to an alien planet. I kept the same episodic format, ending each chapter with a cliffhanger and ratcheting up the intensity until Glitch is... well, that would be a spoiler.
When I heard about Samuel Peralta’s Jurassic Chronicles anthology, the idea of plunging Glitch, Doctor Zheng and Captain Anderson into dinosaur-filled peril was impossible to resist. It’s an idea straight out of old school pulp fiction, and films like The Land That Time Forgot, and At the Earth’s Core were regular features of my childhood, just like Flash Gordon.
It was also a chance to write something a little light-hearted. Most of my stories are dark and gritty, so it’s fun to let rip with some good old fashioned over the top action every now and again. I hope you enjoyed reading the story as much as I did writing it.
You can find more abo
ut Glitch Mitchell and the Unseen Planet, and my other books, at my website - http://www.solitarymindset.com
The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur
by Stant Litore
1
SEE ME. See what I can do. I walk naked out beneath the cameras with my sister athletes beside me, and the heat of these pounding sands would scorch my feet, but the nanites are already at work, toughening my soles, inuring them. For seven years they have shaped me, week to week and night to night—for speed, strength, sex appeal. For this moment.
My sisters sing a hymn to Hymen, god of marriage, but I only move my lips. I feel safe in my silence. It gives me time to prepare, to look up at all your faces. Your seats look like soap bubbles to me—bubbles high above my head, bubbles containing little circular platforms with people on them. Small hovercycles zip past with cameras, projecting our faces and bodies onto screens revolving slowly in the air near your bubbles, so that you can see us and those we are here to honor. The sands curve up to the left and right, along the curvature of this steel cylinder we’re inside, and there is more sand yet high above your bubbles: we are spinning in space, though we don’t feel the motion; the spin is what imprisons my feet to the sand. But gravity is not imprisonment, it is illusion. In a few moments, I will dance and leap in the air, competing with my sisters, and no chain will bind me—not gravity or any other. You will see what I can do.
This is a private dinodrome, chartered for races in honor of the wedding of the Duchess Amy Mardonia and the Third Lord Leo Archibald II. Tonight’s is the last of the games; the celestial couple have already wedded and departed for the Bower; it is their guests who have remained behind that I and the animals will entertain. It is said that if one of the great creatures gives its death scream at the same moment as the consummation, the marriage is to be a lucky one. Of course, these matters are timed with precision, as all ceremonies are. A radio jock stands ready to transmit the games, play by play, to the Bower station, and the couple will time their sex so that the Duchess’s virginity is not taken until the first death in the arena.
Everything in the universe yearns toward perfection of form and placement; this, my trainers have taught me. All things that are by their nature anarchic, wild, hectic, must be confined within tight steel walls and the tight strictures of ritual; only in this way can the human species be made beautiful and complete. Sex is by its nature an anarchic thing. So is laughter. So is aggression. The animals that will run with me in this arena in a few brief moments—they are the ultimate anarchic impulse, the ultimate sign of the containment of uncontrollable urges and the subjugation of the wild and organic to a specific aesthetic vision.
My own body is another such sign. As I wait here, perfectly poised, with my hook and its long coil of rope ready in my hand, I can feel my breasts shifting slightly as the nanites enlarge and lift them for your view. My skin feels oily and slick, not because I have applied any ointment to myself, but because the microscopic machines inside me are preparing my skin for your cameras. Inked into my body is my tattoo, my sigil, and I permit myself a small and secret smile: because that sigil is my own, the only part of me that is not yours. The sigil is the shape of three timberwolves, one leaping from my thigh across my belly, the other two darting across my breasts. There were never timberwolves in China where I was born. But I watched a vid of them when I was nine. Wolves running in the snow: beautiful, vanished creatures. None of them alone. They moved together. They ran together, hunted together.
Died together.
I watched that vid again and again, watched the untamed perfection of their hunting, the way they turned as one, the bursts of snow from their footfalls like spray from water, their panting breath freezing in the air.
To you, my sigil speaks loudly of my ferocity, proclaims me exotic and half-feral, sexy and wild. My sigil, my nakedness, my position on these sands—all of this divides me from you, isolates me, makes me a thing to be desired, a perfectly trained and sculpted animal, and not a person. You want to watch me. You want to cheer as I move. You want to bed me. I am your Timberwolf.
But to me, my sigil is my secret, forbidden prayer.
My longing for a pack.
2
The lovers are naked now, their bodies lit with candlelight – actual beeswax candles, from actual bees! Imagine the sheer wealth of that! They are projected over our heads on those virtual screens, larger than titans, the Third Lord grimly pleased, the Duchess looking uncertain, though flushed from aphrodisiacs. They are dancing alone beside his bed, a dance more precisely scripted than the one about to happen here below. Some of you are watching them, I know—with prurient interest, or with worshipful awe. But I will soon have you watching me.
The other athletes seek to draw your attention, too; they strut and poise on the sand. There are only three others for this event. It is no Patriot Day run, though you number tens of thousands, I know, and more may be watching from other stations and other habitats. Coldly, standing completely still, I refuse to look over my shoulder at any of the others. I want you to notice my disdain. I want my lack of movement to draw your gaze. I will be the woman of ice that the men among you wish to thaw, and the woman of grace and beauty that the women among you yearn to be. I have considered this performance with great care.
Anyway, I have seen the others many times in training on the conservatory world, and in the small arenas of our training cylinder above Europa’s frozen sea. I have no need to look at them; I know what they are like. Hyena is leaping and spinning in the air, unworried about wasting energy because her nanites will keep her going, and I can hear her throw her head back and yip each time she lands, like the animal whose sigil she’s taken. Orca’s dance is more alluring. Hummingbird is kneeling with her hands pressed together and her head bowed, swaying slightly; the delicate and non-functional wings grown to her back are whirring rapidly in the air, a blur of color behind her shoulders. She wants to suggest to you something of the virgin bride, as though her performance today will uniquely honor the young Duchess.
When the trumpets call, I simply bend to a crouch, one hand splayed in the hot sand before me, head lifted, ready for a sprint or a leap. I can hear the intake of your breath. Mine is the pose that draws you, because you have been talking for weeks about seeing the Timberwolf in action at last. The media has told you that I am faster than my sisters, that I am wilder, more savage, that I might be better. Now my stance promises you that you will see it.
On the screens above me, the Duchess Amy is enduring the fondling of her much older husband, but your gaze, and mine, is on the sands. I see the grit whirlpooling down some distance ahead of me, as the first of the trap doors is opened—I can’t hear it, not over your screams—but I can see the dark opening in the bottom of this artificial world of sand and heat. Then the first triceratops comes up in a rush like a whale breaching, and its loud call breaks the air. I leap forward into my run, and I am fast, faster than you knew, tearing across the sand toward the beast, my sister athletes hurrying behind me. Other beasts surge up behind the first, but I ignore them. My hook flashes through the air; cold metal catches the frill just behind the beast’s cheek. Even as it tosses its head I spring, using the bull’s movement and my own momentum to carry me to its back, landing with my legs spread wide, one hand thrust into the air in triumph. I rock on its back. The beast roars, turning in a circle, but wrenching the hook loose from its frill, I spin the metal scythe on its rope in tight circles. Then a quick lash, a cut across its flank sends my bull screeching forward across the sand. All your faces above me, all you in your bubbles, as I ride the rolling bull. One of my sisters leaps into the air to my left, and there are screeches behind me, and I know my competition is in pursuit. I will outrace them all.
We charge up the long slope of the dinodrome’s hull, the first of many laps vanishing beneath us. The tug of spin gravity beneath us is fierce, but the tug of your applause is fiercer; the roar of it! I could leap into the air on it and fly, only I have to st
ay connected to my bull. Glancing back, I see Orca and Hummingbird and Hyena, each of them mounted, Hyena yipping and laughing, Hummingbird dancing, spinning in circles, flipping and catching herself on her toes on her bull’s withers, her wings becoming streaks of light and color, like flame in the air. Orca intent. Intent on me, glaring forward; she is the closest behind me. The triceratops are in stampede, and there are more than four. Others race between us, and to distract your attention from Hyena’s shrieks of joy and Hummingbird’s acrobatics, I spring from my bull’s back to another’s as it nears. I spin the hook and slash, driving it fiercely on, needing whatever bull I ride to be first. Orca follows, leaping high—leaping over my head—to her next bull. Then the others.
We charge past the ribbons of light and the blare of trumpets that mark the start of the second lap. I and the others leap and spin in the air from one bull’s back to the next. The creatures surge and buck beneath us, maddened. Orca is the first to miss her leap, tumbling over the frill, but even as the triceratops tosses back its head and bellows its fury, she catches the animal’s horn with her hands and spins around it to power a fresh leap to its back. Seeing the opportunity, I loop the hook rope about my own beast’s horn and use it to tug my creature to the side, mid-charge, and it slams into Orca’s bull just as she lands, half unsettled, on its back. She glances at me in horror as she topples back over the triceratops’s hips and falls on her rump in the sand. Ignoring her, I loop the other end of the rope about her beast’s horn, tethering the two together, and I flip in the air, dancing back and forth between the two bulls, wrenching raucous cheers from your throats. I am showing off, and you are loving it—this is what you came to see. This is how the mating bed of the Duchess and her groom is to be honored. And despite myself, I am laughing, laughing without control or pause: great giggles bursting from me as I leap and spin. I feel hot and full of oxygen and alive. Watch me leap onto the edge—the very edge—of a triceratops’s frill and dance there, fast and nimble, my bare feet tapping lightly against the rounded rim of that huge shield the creature carries on its head. Watch me cartwheel down its snout to balance precariously by one hand on the horn over its nostrils, before leaping back to the long horns above its eyes, where I spin and flip and twirl to amaze your hearts. Watch! Watch what I can do.
The Jurassic Chronicles (Future Chronicles Book 15) Page 14
