Deathbeast
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Dorik came hobbling up then, still buttoning his pants. Ethab didn’t even look at him; he said, “Dorik, go back to camp.”
Dorik stood there, still in the act of zipping up his fly, a stunned look on his face—as if he’d run into a door. But Ethab ignored him now; Dorik no longer existed.
“Nusa, flank me.” Ethab pointed. “Loevil, go with. Read screens for her.” They moved out then, leaving Dorik standing still holding his zipper. He opened his mouth to call after them, closed it, turned toward Loevil and Nusa, closed his mouth again—his chin trembled as he looked hungrily after. “I want to go too—” he said, but nobody heard him. He hefted his rifle in futile readiness, shifting his weight back .and forth from one foot to the other. The night laughed around him.
A rocky bluff overlooked the gully. Ethab and Megan came up to the crest in darkness. Their goggle-plates turned the night into purple day. Fifty meters distant, Nusa and Loevil also crested the slope. They began sweeping the area with their spotlights, then double- checked through their goggles. There were insect sounds in the night, but the deathbeast was nowhere to be seen or heard. The gully was empty.
Ethab studied the red and purple trough in his goggles. “All right... where is he?”
Loevil’s voice came filtered through his earpieces. “He’s dropped off the screen. Wait a minute, I’ll go to a wider scan—” There was a pause, then a puzzled, “Come on, machine!” A shorter pause. “Nothing.”
Ethab tossed him a withering look, unseen in the darkness, hidden by the goggle-plate over his face—
—but just the same, Loevil apologized. “Interference, I guess.”
“Terrific.” He turned back to the gully, thoughtfully.
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Beside him, Megan was worriedly studying her own scanner. Why didn’t it beep?
Ethab thought of something and touched his communicator again. “Kalen—?”
Kalen was guiding Tril carefully across the sandy floor of the plain. She moved in a daze, her eyes glassy. Kalen had Eese’s gaudy rifle on his back and was cradling his own in readiness. He was also carrying something in a plastic body bag. “Yo—” he responded. “I’m bringing Tril in to camp.” She still held her rifle in her hands, clicking and unclicking its safety latch in a steady nervous beat.
“Keep your eyes open,” came Ethab’s voice. “The thing is moving.”
At this, Tril made a small whimpery sound, a gasp of subdued horror—not so much in fear as resignation. It ended in a tiny, dying wail of breath.
Kalen pumped his goggles up to maximum augmentation and made a quick, efficient pirouette to scan the horizon in a 360-degree arc. Still looking, he said, “It’s nowhere on my horizon.”
“Right,” said Ethab. “Out.”
Ethab and Megan began closing ranks with Nusa and Loevil. All of them were concerned. There was something big out there in the night and they couldn’t find it.
Megan shook her head. “I think we’ve lost him....
Ethab said slowly, “You don’t just lose nine tons of dinosaur.”
She shrugged. The facts spoke for themselves.
Ethab added, “They don’t usually leave the scene of a kill right away.”
“They do when they’ve finished eating,” said Loevil. “Especially if they’re still hungry. Eese was just a snack—” Liking the metaphor, he embroidered it facetiously. “—an appetizer, an hors d’oeuvre, a munchie—”
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Both Ethab and Megan tamed to face him. Even through their goggles, he could see their expressions and shut up.
Ethab said, “All right—we’ll go down that way—” He pointed down the gully. “—then head back around through there—” He moved boldly out; the others followed with less certainty. Their spotlights pointed like fingers as they moved down the slope.
Five
A MOMENT FOR DORIK
They were circling a rocky hill: Ethab, Nusa, Megan, Loevil. Periodically, one or the other of them would lower his or her filter to check the surrounding landscape. The goggle-plates made everything brighter, but also a little fuzzier—the devices looked at radiated heat as well as using electronic image amplification. Logic circuits combined the two images into one—the amplification of moonlight and starlight provided a sense of landscape, but the colors of the objects in an image were a function of their heat radiation levels. The view through the goggles was not an easy one to look at; the colors tended to be harsh and there was a persistent fuzziness around the edges of objects that would not go away.
Megan moved closer to Nusa and touched her arm lightly. “Don’t look through your filters too much,” she said. “It’ll ruin your night vision.”
Nusa raised her plate and looked at Megan, a dark figure in the moonlight. “You’re telling me how to hunt?”
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Megan’s teeth flashed white against her darker skin. ‘Tm telling you how to survive. You can hunt any way you want.”
They trudged on in silence. They were well off the slope now, back onto the flatland, and circling the base of the hill clockwise. It loomed above them on their right, rocky and forbidding, as if it were only slumbering in the night It jutted unevenly, black against black. Above, the stars were crisp and frozen. They were a splash of brilliant light, a fountain’s glittering spray hung across the velvet pit of space. The moon was a barren beauty on the horizon, impossibly close and floating through the mist of stars like a goblet of bright wine; she was pockmarked in amber fascination— veiled and impassive, she would wait a hundred million years for the footsteps of her first suitors.
Below her sterile gaze, the only sound was the crunch of boots across a sandy meadow. Dry grass and leaves, twigs and gravel—the scrape of cleat on earth—the night was an echo chamber of intensified time. Each moment reverberated in upon itself, amplified in its own anticipation. Uncertainty trickled like drops of ice along flte hunters’ skin. Perspiration beaded cold, then evaporated in a breath of drying wind. The breeze kept tugging at their jackets, plucking at their vests and hair. It whistled in their eyes and murmured just beyond the limits of their ears—they couldn’t hear the words it whispered; it was an ally of the deathbeast in the night, not of man. It teased and taunted all around them....
Ethab paused to sniff the air and scan the horizon. Loevil came up beside him, reading his meters.
“You think we’re through for the night, Mr. Loevil?”
“No,” said Loevil. He pretended nonchalance, but he was faking. He would have preferred to have a safer trip,
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a nice dull hunt with tourists who would be content with daytime thrills, snapping photographs, and at the most, perhaps, eventually bagging a little something small enough to make the bringing of its head and hide back as a trophy a practical possibility. But no—he had to be so lucky as to be on this trip with a hunter who really knew what hunting was about, goddammitall.
“I agree with you,” said Ethab. “He’s nocturnal. He’ll be back—”
Nearby... something grunted. As if it were clearing its throat. But the sound was loud. Close. A rumble as of the Earth preparing for upheaval.
Loevil whirled—a reflex-action, instinctive—looking to his flank, surprised. The others too were turning— Nusa, Megan, Ethab—
The deathbeast, a gigantic hulking darkness, separated itself from the rocky horizon, moving massively into the open. Each enormous step was a thundering quake. They had been circling the hill after it, and now it had turned back to meet them all head on. Its eyes were fiery embers in the dark, as if lit from within—
—No, it was the reflected glare of someone’s spotlight. And then a rifle fired and its bolt split the night like lightning. The flash and whoop of it was like a crack of thunder in the prehistoric dark. Already the hunters and the guides were
spreading sideways, forming a skirmish line even as they were firing. Their spotlights cut across the moonlit blue tableau, painting the towering Tyrant King—Tyrannosaurus Rex!—in stark relief. Loevil was fascinated by its vast and huge authority. And then it began to rage—and Loevil knew it was the final power in this land—its voice was the strident cry of doom; an anger so fierce and unrelenting,
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like a wrathful god avenging crimes against its worshippers, that Loevil knew that there could be no mercy here—
The god-beast hesitated in the night, transfixed in the stabbing beams of the spotlights; they were bars of moving brilliance, illuminated by the dust they pierced. He snapped at them, not at their sources. He was confused by things he couldn’t sink his teeth into. He snapped and bit again. He roared—and the ground trembled. His tail rose high and lashing—crashed into and toppled a small tree—his body lowered for a charge, then raised again because there was no target. His head came jutting, turning, snapping; every time he roared, his breath came like a hot inferno, the open door of a blast furnace letting loose a jet of anger, ripe with blood and hunger, foulness and decay. He was poised, this mighty towering mountain of angered scaly flesh, ready to lurch forward—needing only targets to attack. He kept raising up and turning, looking, only to be blinded by the stabbing spotlights. The splatter of the blazer-bolts came sizzling hard across his back and sides. He roared and stepped aside, turning to attack the unseen thing that bit him—and was-hit again by light, and by the crackle of another beam—he lowered once again, raising his tail, leaning into his attack; readying to charge—but the beam came crackling now across his muzzle and he stepped back instead, recoiling, rising, roaring, thundering his pain and rage—frustrated he lashed out—but he couldn’t find a target in the dark—only those awful glaring circles of accusing brightness—
The deathbeast raged with savage power and the stillness of the night was shattered. Even at the camp they could hear the distant bellowing, and the horizon glowed with fire. Kalen came to his feet as if he were spring- loaded. Like Ethab, he came up with his weapon in his hand; he could have been stamped from the same mold.
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Behind him, things crashed to the ground as Dorik scrambled for his rifle too. Kalen was already running for the rocky outcrop that sheltered the camp. He leapt easily up to the top of it and snapped his goggles into place. Dorik came stumbling after him, barking his shins and fumbling with his own filter-plate, trying to fit it across his eyes.
There, on the close horizon, caught like Gulliver struggling among the Lilliputians, was something large and violent, criss-crossed with sparkling fire and light— it was thrashing back and forth, like a mountain fighting off a storm of bright, electric-swarming, lightning- stinging wasps, turning, ever turning, twisting, biting at its tormentors, seeing only flashes and jerking at their deadly bites; it hissed and thundered back at them. It moved away and back—it raised its body high and lowered it again in threatened charge; it stamped its heavy feet and bellowed; it thrashed its tail side to side: a repertoire of challenge designed to outbluster any rival Tyrant into horrified retreat. Long live the Tyrant King, the King is One! He snapped at the neon beams of light that threatened him, not yet understanding that his real foes were something smaller, their bravado only magnified by the raging crimson heat they hurled in reckless glee.
Kalen and Dorik could smell the stench of burning flesh—even at this distance; the acrid ozone smell of blazer-bolts charred through the air; the sound of every flash was a high-pitched angry shriek.
The deathbeast, god of prehistoric fear, stood towering above the tiny human beings, nine tons of flesh and power, sixteen meters of terror; his skin glistened dark and oily in the stark light of their beams. He inhaled and his chest distended like a barrel, he exhaled and his breath rasped out like fire. His jaws were large enough
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to hold a good-sized horse; his teeth were knives and daggers, the serrated edge of death; they lined his jaws like nightmares. The deathbeast’s hide was armor—not plates or sheathes so much as interleaving scales, a mesh like mail crafted for a knight, yet fashioned for a dragon, a flexing skin of flesh and iron. The blazer-bolts charred into it like lightning, too bright to look at with the naked eye. Where each bolt struck, the skin and scales exploded, blood boiled, flesh erupted, heat pumped into the Tyrant King like a demon’s angry wrath. The beams crackled and struck, meat jerked and burned; the god-beast bellowed, turning in its agony— but it wouldn’t back away! It didn’t have the brains! The blazers weren’t strong enough to kill it, even with the super-chargers. The hunters couldn’t pump enough heat into the monster—they could hurt it, they could madden it with pain, they could char and score it, they could give it agony—but they couldn’t stop it, and if it decided to move, they couldn’t even slow it down!
But still the bolts kept coming! Blue-white flashing in the blackened air—the smoke outlined the stabbing beams—in the instant of a microsecond, they cycled into yellow, orange, crimson aftershocks, leaving ultraviolet hazes, deep and brooding, glowing, hanging in the light-scorched air. The haze sparkled with a myriad static flickerings, discharges of the smoke and dust. The monster bit and snapped and roared. The earth shook with every step. Images were burned into the hunters’ eyes. The huge tail flashed above, the thing staggered as if bit—the tail thundered down against the ground and lashed above again as the beast regained its balance. Its pain was coming from those lights... it would attack whatever lurked behind them—
Dorik was stumbling after Kalen, trying to keep up. They were running through the night, rushing toward
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the flashing, glittering battle—and one thought kept bouncing to the surface of his mind: This might be his chance to prove to Ethab that he could hold his own. He tripped across a rock and went sprawling on his face, but he was up and running before he even finished falling, even more determined now. His blood was surging through his veins as if it were on fire. This could be his chance!
The beast was moving now—one step at a time—biting at the unseen forces that were hurling brilliant fire at him. The tiny demons, imps of bright technology, danced in gleeful circles around the monster’s legs, darting in and back and all around—the monster turned and turned and tried to follow them—
“He’s confused!” shouted Megan “—because we’re not running!”
“It’s the lights!” said Ethab, and fired again. Zeep-
whooop!
“We’re going to need the super-chargers,” said Nusa, not realizing in her own confusion that they were already plugged in.
“About fifty of them, Fd say,” Loevil snapped, scuttling sideways and letting off another shot without even taking the time to aim. The target was too big and too close—too close!—to miss. He lowered his goggle-plate against the glare.
The deathbeast thundered—the Tyrant had his target now—there were four of them, little things they were— and then he really did move! The ground cracked under his enormous weight—but he had direction now. A step and then another, and another, arching his body forward, raising his tail as he did so—his fearsome bulk was pushed off-balance by the action—his gigantic legs pumped forward, not so much propelling him as keeping him from falling on his face—and that was how he
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charged! He held his tail high, and his massive body low and forward, and as long as he could hold that posture, he would move, a giant hurtling boulder of pounding lizard flesh. His legs pumped just enough to keep his bulk aloft and moving—this was the Tyrant’s charge!
Something flashed red off to one side—it bit his eye; the god-beast staggered as another bit his haunch; the something creased his ragged jaw, abruptly burning. He stumbled, turning, off balance, then recovered quickly, turning to face this newer source of p
ain on his right— his tail flashed out in dismay, cropping saplings on one side—was his target some ethereal kind of ghost, flickering in and out of existence like a gulp of smoke?
Kalen fired again—his bolt passed near the death- beast’s ear, sizzling through the air like crimson terror. The nearness of it caused the awful head to jerk about. Dorik’s bolt seared bright across the creature’s skull, marking it with a line of blackened tissue, arrow-straight and instantly cauterized.
The deathbeast roared its pain and rage. Its frustration was a wall of sound that cracked and shattered landscapes. It found a new direction for the venting of its wrath—it came charging now at Kalen’s and Dorik’s stabbing beams. Its tail raised in warning, lashing back and forth, illuihinated by the lights, bright fingers of technology reaching back one hundred million years before their time./The creature’s eyes were crimson, its -mouth was black and roaring. Their weapons barked and sizzled at it, and it focused all its anger on those burning slashing beams, the sources of its pain, and it came charging down upon them—
Kalen scattered sideways, ducking behind a rock, dodging the pulping blow of the deathbeast’s heavy tail. It couldn’t see him in the dark; its eyes were blinded by the afterglares of all the bolts that had seared across its
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vision—but it smelled the scent of something alien and ugly. It snapped at little Kalen, missing him as he rolled over on his back and then away, but grabbing something fiery-metal—the beast jerked upward at the touch of Dorik’s probing fire, taming toward the burning of the beam—Dorik’s silly boldness. It dropped the fiery-metal something it had grabbed, Kalen’s blazer-rifle, which shattered when it hit the rocky ground. Its fuel cells exploded with a yellow roar. The deathbeast, startled, jerked backward and away, almost ready now to call the whole thing quits and go off roaming in the night again—but one more bolt from Dorik’s shrilling blazer came piercing it and once again its anger rose like flames—
Dorik kept on firing, a silly smile on his face; the mighty beast was taming now and leaving Kalen, coming on toward Dorik—this was the moment of achievement, his chance to prove himself a man! He fired upward at it, again and then again—