“Too bad we can’t just kill it.”
“Now, now. Remember the code. Get under cover and sit tight.”
Keeva had to wake LaForest, who was bone-weary from hours of wading in marshes and climbing pseudo-trees. When he understood what they were going after, he came swiftly alert.
In a few minutes they were nearing the canyon, and could see the other shuttle, sleek and fan-shaped like a stingray, with Tishi and Gomez inside. The raptor circled above, wings motionless for long spells, then it flapped languidly, swiveling its great crested head. Its hunger made Keeva throb. The wheeling flight left a burning afterimage in her mind. Whatever it was, it clearly ruled these skies.
“Some kind of dinosaur,” LaForest murmured, glassing the beast. “Early in the transition to birds. No sign of feathers. Wings covered by membrane. Scaly legs.”
“I’ll try to get close enough for a dart,” said Keeva. “You figure the dose.”
While they spoke, the hunter pumped its wings and climbed rapidly.
Focusing the scanner through the cockpit window, LaForest said, “Don’t lose it. I’d love to get some DNA. But I need at least a clear scan.”
“Okay. Here goes.” Keeva donned the guide-helmet, so she could steer with her eyes. The predator’s hunger drowned out all other sensations. Finger poised on the throttle, she warned, “Hold on.”
The shuttle rose swiftly to pursue the soaring hulk. Its long tapering wings stroked the air. Suddenly it banked, and plunged toward the canyon. Keeva watched it steadily, and the shuttle rode the beam of her sight, diving with giddy speed. The raptor leveled out a few meters above the canyon floor and raced between the sandy walls. Then it swerved up a side canyon, the great wings nearly raking stone, and with a sickening tilt the shuttle hurtled after, down ever narrower gulches. Keeva was scarcely breathing. The hunt possessed her. Suddenly a bluff loomed ahead, the raptor swooped up and over, Keeva jerked her gaze after it, and the shuttle, lurching, barely cleared the stone rim. In the few seconds it took the craft to right itself, the raptor escaped.
Keeva spun the shuttle, searching the sky. She wanted to chase down that beast, pounce on it, tear it apart, her training forgotten in a rush of adrenalin.
Beside her in the cockpit, LaForest wheezed, “Enough.”
She was shaking. “It can’t have gone far.”
“No, please, let it go. I got a good scan.”
She forced her eyes away from the arid landscape, toward her partner. His face was drained, skin drawn tight.
“I never saw you so fierce before,” he said. “It was like blood lust.”
She released a long breath, pulled off the guide-helmet, shook her hair loose. “I never felt a bio-field like that before. It was monstrous, ancient, like some primordial enemy.”
The scanner identified the creature as Quetzalcoatlus alleni, a pterosaur from the Cretaceous, with a wingspan up to twelve meters, best known from fossils discovered in the 2020s.
The raptor’s aura still haunted Keeva as she roamed among the mist cages feeding and watering birds. The air was thick with trilling. The flood of sensations made her dizzy. That familiar overtone, part of a melody she could not quite remember, played above the roar.
Tishi and Gomez were hunched over microscopes, examining plants. LaForest was analyzing scans of Q. alleni. The skeletal view glimmered on the screen when Minsk and Wodo trooped into the lab with their day’s catch of birds and data.
Keeva groaned. “Where are we going to put more birds?”
“Hang them from the ceiling,” answered Wodo cheerfully. Gesturing at the screen, he said, “We saw four of your raptors flying down the coast.”
“Keeva and I saw two on our way back to the ship,” LaForest said.
“I wonder how many of those brutes there are,” said Minsk.
“I’m waiting for an answer to that,” LaForest replied. He had fed to the drones orbiting Aton-17 information on the pterosaur’s wingspan, flight pattern, and infrared print, enough metrics to distinguish it from other avifauna. Now he keyed in a request for a global census. A schematic of the planet flashed onto the screen, and black dots began appearing, each one marking the position of a giant raptor. Eventually, skeins of dots encircled the globe, sweeping along coasts and mountain ranges, all converging on a volcanic island near the equator.
“There are thousands,” Tishi breathed.
LaForest scratched his beard. “Why the devil are they congregating?”
Keeva imagined that fearsome gathering. “We stirred them up, and they’re swarming like bees when you disturb a hive.”
Fingering the spot on the globe where the flight trajectories came together, LaForest said, “Let’s move the ship there and see what they’re up to.”
No one objected. If the crew members had craved safety, they would never have joined Project VIVA, never left the Enclosure. The jump was quickly made, and the ship materialized on a lava field near the center of the island. Dozens of raptors spiraled overhead, casting great patches of shadow. More glided over the horizon, gathering from all points of the compass. By nightfall, several hundred smoky shapes whirled in that vortex.
Next day, while the others ventured out cautiously in their shuttles to continue surveying, LaForest and Keeva stayed aboard ship to observe Q. alleni. He inscribed their data onto a warp chip for transfer back to Earth, and she kept watch through the domed roof. All day the sky darkened as flight upon flight of predators arrived. She had expected to be overwhelmed by their hunger. But instead she sensed a different craving. For what?
“Why send back data before we have any idea what they mean?” she asked LaForest. “What’s Control going to think when they read that the dominant bio forms on Aton-17 are extinct Terran birds?”
“They’ll probably think I want to see birds so badly that I’m conjuring them out of thin air,” he admitted.
“Could you delay the report long enough for me to test a hunch?”
He turned abruptly toward her, bumping one of the suspended cages, which set off a chorus of alarm calls. “What’s your hunch?” he cried above the din.
She waited for quiet, then said, “You know that terrible hunger I was picking up? It isn’t coming through anymore.”
“So they’ve gorged themselves.”
“Exactly, as birds do before they set off on migration. And they’re milling around, like a vast dynamo, charging up for some move.”
He gazed at the funnel of birds. “What sort of move?”
“I can’t tell from inside the ship. Too much shielding.”
Although he objected, she slipped out through the hatch. Immediately, the full force of the raptors’ energy surged through her. Tears sprang to her eyes.
In a moment the hatch swung open behind her and LaForest’s bushy head emerged. “This is crazy. Come back in here.”
Barely able to speak, she growled, “I’m all right.”
“At least carry a stunner.”
“They’re not interested in me.”
“Keeva, please—”
“Go back inside. You’re disturbing the field.”
After a pause the hatch clicked and she was alone. Standing amid the rubble of cooled lava, with thousands of pterosaurs circling above, Keeva felt as if she were in the eye of a cyclone. She glanced at the ship. It looked frail, like an exposed egg. How presumptuous, she thought, for Earth to fling these bubbles into space.
The hatch opened and LaForest called out, “They’re all here. The drones show every single one on the planet has arrived.”
“Quiet, or I’ll lose them.”
Again he withdrew. She pressed a palm against each temple, intent on the vortex of raptors circling above, building power. Their yearning swept everything else from her mind. As night fell the ominous forms merged with the darkness, their craving sharpened, and suddenly she recognized the shape of their desire.
She screamed.
An instant later the sky was empty.
Even wi
th eyes shut, Keeva realized from the serenade of birds that she was in the lab. When her eyes blinked open, she discovered five anxious faces peering down at her where she lay on a bench.
“We thought they’d snatched you away,” said LaForest with a tense smile.
“No danger of that,” Keeva murmured. “They were too intent on traveling.”
“Traveling where?” LaForest asked sharply.
“To Earth.” Keeva sat up with a groan. The others drew back, as if fearing she might flail about. “Just before they took off, what they were longing for came into focus—the image of Earth—and their desire swept over me. It was more than I could bear. That’s why I screamed.”
Above her, the others exchanged worried looks.
“Lie back down,” said LaForest, who was gripping her shoulder lightly. “Give your head a chance to clear.”
“It is clear. Everything finally makes sense.” His gentle pressure forced her down onto the pillow. She did not really mind. There would be time to explain. She was exhausted, yet the energy of that blue cyclone whirled in her still.
“No animal can fly sixty-four light-years through a vacuum, not even with a twelve-meter wingspan,” LaForest said patiently.
Keeva was unwrapping herself from the blankets in which he had bundled her the night before. She felt restored, except for the aching sense of loss which the departure of the great hunters had left in her. “They didn’t fly,” she said.
“Then how did they go?”
“They warped.” She sat up with blankets snarled about her waist, hair frizzed. The mad empath in the morning, she thought.
LaForest eyed her warily. “We’re talking about pterosaurs, sweetheart, not ships.”
“I’m telling you they went through warp. I saw where they were going, I felt them slip through. I’ve passed through too many times myself to mistake the feeling. And every bird in here,” she said, gesturing at the twittering cages, “gives off some trace of warp passage. It’s in them, in their genes. That’s the overtone I’ve been trying to identify since we netted our swan. From at least as far back at Q. alleni, they’re descended from creatures that migrated through warp.”
Years of collaboration had taught him not to dismiss her intuitions, but his reason balked. “How could they have learned to warp?”
“How did they learn to fly?”
“But humans have understood the principles of space transfer for only a few decades.”
“So? Birds have had millions of years to figure it out. Think of all the methods they use to orient themselves in migration—sun, stars, magnetic field, landforms, wind. Who knows what else? We still can’t navigate as well as a homing pigeon.”
He shook his head. “Birds can’t warp. They just can’t.”
“Trust me. I felt them go.”
His bewilderment touched her. His mouth sagged open, as it had when he first spied the tundra swans blazing like white fire above the ocean. She knew he was turning over the idea, to see what it might yield.
“All right, for the sake of argument, let’s suppose they can go through warp.” He began pacing among the cages, the birds tracking him with their glossy eyes. “Let’s say the ancestors of all these birds traveled here from Earth. To avoid extinction back home, they all fled here.” Suddenly he stopped, snagged by a memory. “Maybe old Audubon wasn’t so demented after all.”
“Audubon?”
“There’s a passage somewhere in his Lunatic Journal, the one he wrote in his final years, when he was demented. Let me find it.” He punched in a query, and a page came up on the screen. “Here. Listen. ‘Extinction of species has ever mystified the naturalist. As for birds, perhaps those that vanish are merely slaughtered. Or perhaps cruel nature has extinguished them with ice or fire. Or perhaps, when sorely pressed by men or circumstance, birds undertake a grand migration, to the moon or farther planets.’”
“Maybe he wasn’t so demented,” Keeva said.
“Maybe not.” LaForest stood dead still among the birds. A parrot thrust its enameled bill through the mesh of its cage and took a nip at his shoulder. With mounting excitement, he said, “If Audubon’s guess was right, and some threats on Earth drove these birds here, could some disturbance here drive them back? Did Q. alleni flee because we challenged their dominion over Aton?”
Keeva hugged the blankets about her knees. She gazed at the captive birds, large and small, gaudy and plain, each one the exquisite outcome of millions of years of evolution. “Just think, if all these beauties went back home.”
He considered the idea, then said quickly, “No, the code won’t allow it. We can’t tamper with whole ecosystems.”
“Then we’ll have to leave, won’t we? Otherwise, we may trigger more migrations.” When he hesitated, she asked, “Are you going to say anything about it when you send that data?”
“I transferred the chip an hour ago,” he said. “Control sent a reply, but I haven’t had a chance to look at it.”
Curious what earthbound scientists would think about news of tundra swans, indigo buntings, and other extinct Terran birds, Keeva thumbed a button to display the message:
Very funny, LaForest. Were you sampling Aton-17’s mushrooms when you made that report? Now please send real data.
Speaking of birds, here’s a puzzler for you. Hong Kong reported an aerial attack this a.m. We sent a drone to check and it came back loaded with the body of a flying monster, which had crashed into the dome. Huge blue thing. The scans show it’s a pterosaur known from fossils dating to the Late Cretaceous.
LaForest reached out for Keeva’s hand, like a man surprised in sleep groping for a light. “So they really are going home.”
“Home,” she echoed. “I wonder what they’ll think of Earth.”
The Land Where Songtrees Grow
On all that forsaken planet, nothing moved but the searchers. Their boat glided through the swampy forest, slipping over mats of water plants, around hummocks smothered in ferns, beneath the arching roots of songtrees. Vines looped from branch to branch, gnarled lavender ropes like crude streamers left from a party. Far overhead the canopy of purple leaves formed a lacework roof, admitting needles of daylight. The glassy still water divided at the prow of the boat, gathered at the stern, and in a moment turned again to glass.
The rescue party had quickly found the desolate basecamp. Leaving their warpship in orbit around Memphis-12, they had flown down in the shuttle, following locator signals that kept beaming out from the orange dome of the camp like the wail of an abandoned child. Inside, the dome was a shambles, with tools and clothing scattered about, mud caked on the floor, papers and disks and bits of plants jumbled together, the air fetid with the smell of corrosion and rot. Careful examination of the mess revealed no clues to the scientists’ disappearance. They could not have gone far, for their boat, a bright red inflatable like the one the rescuers used, was tethered near the dome.
For three Memphis days, which were just over thirty E-hours long, the searchers had scoured the swamp, working outward from the dome in widening circles. Their boat skimmed the water, driven by an electric motor that purred quietly. Otherwise, the silence was broken only by their own voices and, for a spell each dawn and dusk, by the clamor of the trees. Now and again a crew member would cry out, having seen in the murk what looked like a grimacing face or lifted hand, but every alarm proved false. By their fourth day of threading the watery maze, they had grown sick of peering through the gloom for any sign of the missing exobiologists. Eyes ached, throats rasped from the steamy air.
Their fatigue was obvious to Kyle Benton, leader of the five-person team. But he was a stickler for schedules, and so he would keep them looking until songtide. They could rest for the hour or so while the trees howled and screeched, then the search would resume. In every direction the songtrees rose on scaffolds of roots, like muscular arms propped on splayed fingers. Benton could not shake the feeling that, behind his back, the trees kept shifting, their knobby roots asti
r in the muck. Everything was a purple tint, shading from violet through lavender and mauve to near-black. Returning to camp this evening would be a relief, if only to see the bright orange dome, its geometrical curves defying this vegetable disorder.
When the trees began the creaking and groaning that preceded songtide, Benton called a halt. Though the team had encountered nothing on Memphis-12 that could upset the boat—no wind, no current in the inky water, no beasts—he ordered that the craft be moored. It paid to follow routines; they kept a man steady in face of the unexpected. That was why he set one dial of his watch to Pacific Time, no matter where Project VIVA sent him on rescue missions. Obeying routine had kept him and his crews alive and sane through two decades of hunting for scientists who had run amok or gotten lost or died in dozens of ways on dozens of worlds.
“Okay,” Benton called, “we knock off for an hour.”
“May we swim, Captain?”
The question was from Megan Kerry, a cyber engineer fresh out of Chicago, with the reckless energy and curiosity of a first-timer. Her genius with electronics had persuaded Benton to take her on, in spite of that dangerous enthusiasm and her Irish good looks. She had pestered him about swimming since the first day.
“Why are you so eager to get into that filthy soup?” he asked.
“I want to hear how the music sounds in the water.”
“Music?” he scoffed. But she was so unjaded, so eager, that he relented. “All right. Go ahead and swim. But take detox.”
Kerry tucked a loop of sandy hair behind her ear. “We have to wear helmets?”
He wished the woman would either chop off her luxuriant hair or tie it back in a knot. “Yes, you have to wear helmets. I don’t want any skin exposed to that swill.”
She obediently swallowed the medicine and sealed her bubble helmet to the neck-ring on her yellow shimmersuit. Then she plunged over the side, her sleek body sinking into the lavender broth. A moment later she surfaced, glistening like a seal. The pleasure on her face unsettled Benton. He was reassured to see that Seth Cummings, the doctor, was also taking detox and donning a helmet. Ingrained caution had enabled Cummings to survive thirty missions. If he would entrust himself to those scummy waters with only a pill and a suit for protection, Benton could stop worrying.
Dancing in Dreamtime Page 23
