Bridgehead

by David Drake

  “As I understood Bayar…” said Eisley. He flicked his head sideways as an eye blinked back at him above half a bale of dun grass which was ratcheting into the broad jaws. The scale of things here was that of a parking lot, not a pasture. “As I understood Mustafa,” the diplomat resumed, “the recovery is automatic. We just have to stay alive till then. I presume.” And, Eisley thought, we have to hope that I did understand; that Mustafa was correctly informed; and that the fact the two of us are here at all doesn’t mean that something catastrophic had happened to the apparatus.

  Sue touched a miniature tree with a trunk like a pot. Its leaves were broad and patterned like those of a croton bush, though the veins were a deep cyan and the edges almost black. The ground was less steep, and the ribbon of dark vegetation had separated into discrete trees. They grew taller and were more densely sited farther toward the center of the valley. The water table seemed to be a crucial factor in the type of vegetation, suggesting that the brilliance and heat of the sun might not be simply subjective phenomena.

  “Well,” the tall woman said, “I didn’t really expect to have company here.” She was swinging her jacket loosely, now that they were beyond the area in which the dinosaurs grazed. From higher on the hill there were signs of paths beaten through the broad-leaved trees, probably by beasts seeking water. Sue hugged the man. “Anyway, I can’t think of anybody I’d rather be trapped in a time machine with.”

  “Halt.…” called a very distant, very loud voice.

  The two accidental transportees stared at one another in amazement. Back up the slope, one of the grazers lifted its head and snorted. That ordinary, bestial sound disposed of any possibility that what they had heard before was not a voice speaking English.

  Sue squinted and looked up the hillside. The valley’s echoing walls made it impossible to really determine the source of the sound. The trees where the couple now stood were short and spaced generally yards apart, so the foliage did not interfere with Schlicter’s view uphill. For the moment, it did not seem important to her that the trees provided camouflage though not concealment.

  “Halt,” the voice called again. This time it repeated itself with the antiphony of competing echoes, “halt-halt-halt,” the single syllable stepping over itself, out of synchronization and from several locations.

  Over the rise surged a dozen vehicles of two unfamiliar types. Ten of the vehicles were magenta-and-black egg shapes that reminded Eisley powerfully of the three-wheeled German bubble-cars of the 1950s. Though the high grass made certainty difficult, these did not appear to have any wheels at all. The two other vehicles were the size and general layout of flatbed trucks. They seemed to be circular rather than rectangular in ground plan, each with an identifiable cab sticking up in front.

  What was far more shocking than the vehicles was the cargo which the pair of open trucks carried. At first sight they resembled mechanical contrivances contorted with their antenna arrays, six to the back of each of the larger vehicles. But they moved nervously, independently, acting not like machines but rather like the one thing their limbs made it certain they were not: human beings.

  “Halt! Halt!” the trucks shouted. They were half a mile away, but their voices boomed with the distant authority of public address systems in sports arenas.

  Eisley and Schlicter tensed. One of the grazing dinosaurs whirled with unexpected speed toward a truck. A corona of spikes which the two humans had not noticed before sprang erect on the beast’s neck. It coughed a thunderous challenge toward the vehicle, a creature worth its notice.

  Beings on the back of both trucks bathed the dinosaur in beams of intense, rusty light. The sound of giant fingernails on slate filled the valley. Pieces of the beast scaled away like rind clipped from a hard cheese. Grass and brush flattened and did not spring up again. A face of rock, touched by a stray beam, popped and scattered pebbles of itself down the hill.

  The beast leaped onto its hind legs and flailed the air. Half a dozen beams converged. The vehicles’ own forward motion sawed the beams forward. Claws, toes, and then the huge flat skull itself fell away. The torso strode onward, spouting blood from the neck and the half of the forelimb still linked to the heart. Another dazzle of beams cut at the hind legs. The animal crashed to the ground. Its blood continued to hose the grass, turning it black instead of dun.

  “Halt!” resumed the speakers as the vehicles swept past the squirming corpse. “If you move, I’ll blow you away!” The nearly synchronized words created harmonics which alone might have been enough to make Eisley’s skin crawl.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he muttered as he turned. Sue patted his rump, not in affection so much as a signal to urge him to run beside her as she bolted.

  Behind them, the voices followed, “Halt…!”

  * * *

  “Wait,” shouted Selve, and the word bounced off the ceiling of the cavernous basement lab. Isaac Hoperin tugged a sleeve for attention, but the male Traveler shrugged him off. Selve touched Astor, who, stepping backward, was cradling Keyliss’s head and torso. The maimed Traveler’s hand trailed on the ground. “Wait, Astor,” Selve continued, even though his bigger colleague showed every sign of intending to walk through him. “Take her back to that side. I’ll program the reversal.”

  “You can’t!” Astor snapped. The weight of the body she held did not affect her, but the delay was driving her wild. Keyliss’s chest was rising and falling with breaths as swift as those of a panting dog. The mutilated plane of her right side was gray with the gauze of film that protected it. Though the film was wholly beneficial, it had the look of gangrene. “We don’t have the time for you to fool around. Get out of the way and get to work on the program!”

  “Any of you, who were those creatures?” demanded Robert Shroyer. It was the third time he had asked the question since Selve had found the parameters he needed and plucked them all vertiginously back into the engineering building.

  “We’ve got the time, it’s faster,” Selve insisted. “If I wait for the field to dissipate, it’ll be ten extra minutes. We’ll ride back on the first reversal. We’ll have Keyliss fully dissociated before the reversal shock hits her.”

  “Mr. Eisley was just there,” said Mustafa Bayar. “In the docking area. Where are they now? Are they all right?”

  Astor nodded abruptly to Selve. “Go,” she said. Selve broke from the group, running toward the control panel.

  The female Traveler turned back to Dr. Layberg. He was breathing heavily, more from the events on the other side of the transition than because he carried the lower half of Keyliss’s body. “Back where we were,” Astor said curtly. No one else in the room existed for her at this moment but Keyliss and the local helping to carry her. She began shuffling around with her share of the burden. “Keep out of the way, then, or you’ll … Keep well back.”

  The excited group halved, then fragmented. Isaac Hoperin started to follow Astor with his questions because Selve had rushed past as if he were not there. Professor Gustafson caught the physicist’s arm. “I don’t think now, Isaac,” the older man said. He had not understood Astor’s previous warning against being transported from the unmarked docking area. First Dr. Rice, now whatever it was that had happened to Keyliss, to all of them. “We’ll have to talk about many things, but for the moment I don’t want anything worse to happen.”

  Robert Shroyer had started to follow Astor in red-faced determination to get an answer. Professor Gustafson’s words made the chairman pause, then recoil. His anger had been a reaction to the fear he had felt so recently. The possibility of a further nightmare trip if he were not careful stopped him. He was trembling.

  Arlene Myaschensky walked down the long aisle toward the stairs at the other end. The plump woman did not seem a part of the group around her. She had rather the aspect of an atheist in a crowd of Christmas shoppers, affected by common stimuli but separate nonetheless.

  Selve’s haste had drawn Mike Gardner back into the enclosure. There was nothi
ng for the graduate student to do, though. The Traveler’s fingers danced over the terminal keyboard, using his left hand for the alphanumeric pad and his right for the function keys. At intervals, Selve reached down and changed a setting on one or another of the control panels.

  Rather than interfere with what he could not help, Gardner said, “Are you okay, Arlene? Did—well, what went wrong, I mean?”

  Myaschensky looked at her fellow, then down at herself. Her flesh was white and puffy through the gaping seams of her sweater; the camera still flopped against her back. She reached around carefully and lifted the strap away from her neck where the skin had been badly chafed during the fight. “I guess I’m all right,” she said. “I’m going to soak in the tub for a couple of hours.” She took a deep breath.

  Gardner was frowning at her in concern. Beyond him Selve was snapping his fingers while the computer ran an involved series of procedures. Selve never cursed—none of the Travelers did—but his nervous frustration was obvious in his stance and gestures. The Traveler’s suit was stained by plant juice and the blood which had spurted when Keyliss toppled.

  Arlene said calmly, “There was something back there that was purple and had eight legs. Like a joke. But it wasn’t a joke. I think I need to get home.”

  Mike Gardner rubbed his palms against his trousers as he watched Myaschensky walk stiffly away. Behind him, Selve shouted in triumph. The knife switch on the control panel clunked home. The male Traveler brushed past Gardner and ran back down the aisle toward Astor. Gardner watched the two healthy Travelers clasp arms briefly above the sprawled and drooling Keyliss. Mustafa Bayar was speaking animatedly to the three faculty members. The Turk gestured frequently toward the Travelers—or toward the patch of aisle from which the two interlopers had disappeared minutes before.

  Sara Jean Layberg was holding her husband’s hand. Gardner noticed neither of them were speaking. They were close enough to the pillared windings that it would have been difficult for either to be heard over the summoning vibration. Mike looked at the couple and licked his lips. He began to walk toward Mustafa and the faculty members.

  It was more comfortable to think about the people who had been snatched away.

  * * *

  Deeper into the forested belt, the trees grew taller. Their barrellike trunks splitting into two, four, even a dozen slimmer stalks from a common base, each individual stalk the thickness of Eisley’s thighs. Where they crisscrossed from adjacent clumps, the boles not only spread dense curtains of foliage but also barricaded routes of escape.

  Sue and Charles had started out running; now they ducked and clambered their way through an obstacle course. The screech of weapons behind them was a reminder of why they fled. It was impossible to tell what the beams’ target was meant to be this time.

  A score of hand-sized creatures flushed so suddenly that Eisley could not tell whether they had leaped or flown from the ground cover. They chittered glassily. Sue cried out and flung the jacket she carried toward the leaves which flapped behind the covey.

  Charles Eisley, shifting direction to snatch up her heavy jacket again, staggered and banged into one of the trees instead of making a smooth maneuver of it as he had intended. He was almost blown already, though they had run less than two hundred yards. “Dear God,” he whispered.

  Schlicter was gone through another stand of trunks growing like fingers from a palm. She paused and swung herself back to where she could see her gasping lover with the jacket in his hand. “Leave it, Charles, Jesus!” she cried. “It’s too heavy to fuck with now.”

  The diplomat swallowed and began to stumble onward again, the jacket of studded black leather swinging from his hand. “Can’t, they’ll find it,” he said in a voice intelligible mostly from context. “Don’t let ’em know we’re here.”

  “Oh, Charles, they wouldn’t be here if they didn’t know, would they?” the woman said, but she reached out to help Eisley through the immediate tangle. He continued to grip her jacket.

  The watercourse Eisley had expected was a stream twenty feet wide and shallow enough to show bottom all the way across. At its gravelly margin, the short-trunked trees made space for plants like giant dandelions whose stems oozed amber sap when Schlicter trod them down. She paused and threw a glance at Eisley.

  “We’ve got to,” the diplomat said. The open water gleamed like a killing ground in the brilliant sunlight. The current cast dazzling highlights where larger stones broke the surface. Touching his mistress’s wrist with his free hand, Eisley splashed into the stream. Sue ran with him. From the hollow in which it laired during the daytime leaped a carnivore the size of a pickup truck.

  The beast was four-footed, like the grazers on the hillside above. There could be no doubt regarding its own diet, however. Its forepaws crossed its hind legs in midstride. As the forelegs extended, claws the length of Schlicter’s fingers sprang out of their sheaths in all twelve front toes. The jaws were as long as a crocodile’s. They were raggedly armed with curving black teeth. The withers bulged with a muscular hump. Tensed, the muscles would rip the foreclaws through bones orders of magnitude heavier than those of the two humans.

  Eisley slung the jacket as an instinctive follow-through of the motion by which he had turned toward the attack. Though the predator did not give tongue, the crash of its tons leaping to slaughter was as obtrusive as a safe hitting the pavement. “Go!” Eisley shouted as Sue seemed to pause in the gout of spray.

  The couple’s brief hesitation short of the creek edge gave them the reserve of strength they needed to dash across the water. The current was strong enough to have swept its channel silt free. It was not, however, the sort of torrent that rolled all the pebbles away from the polished domes of quarter-ton boulders. The stream-bed footing was good. The drag of the few inches of water on the fugitives’ feet was lost in the panic of the moment.

  Now in direct sunlight, the predator’s rufous scales glared like iron from the forge; while the creature lay in wait, shadows had made its hide resemble dull patterns of earth and leaf mold. The eyes were set close beneath a brow ridge. Their view to the sides was limited, but they provided a sharp, range-determining view for a predator which killed in a quick lunge from cover—good enough to permit the clawed forelegs to scissor together on the flying jacket.

  The motion was preternaturally swift. The beast rocked back on its haunches in the water. Its hind legs were relatively short, like those of a bear. Only as a carnival act could they alone have supported a creature weighing several tons. The foreclaws rent the jacket with a jerk to either side. Fluff from the quilted lining twisted in the air. The odors of cowhide and human body oils were unfamiliar but piquant to the predator. It stuffed both halves of the shredded garment into a mouth whose black-toothed jaws could have held either human as easily.

  Sue and Charles had gained the far bank in the interval. As Eisley tried to duck out of sight around a slanting tree bole the way his mistress had done a step before, his foot slipped. He rang his head on the solid trunk, then flopped to the ground, stunned and visible. The predator’s eyes focused as if its ridged snout were a gunsight turned toward Eisley.

  The creature gathered its haunches beneath it, just as three of the egg-shaped Vrage utility vehicles squirmed out of the dense forest. The heavy vegetation was an obstacle to the humans and a maze for the Vrage cars. To the trucks with their loads of ready infantry, the belt of forest was an impassable barrier. The gunners had dismounted where the trees began to flare with multiple trunks. The Vrage weapons carved easily through the wood, but that alone was not enough to form a path. Armor-suited soldiers were now struggling to drag clear the fallen trees. Inattention had already fried one Vrage with the beam of a fellow who had meant only to section a tree trunk.

  The lighter vehicles had penetrated the forest with varying degrees of success. The initial trio had been successful enough to burst straight in on an active carnivore.

  One car slewed and stopped in midstream. Schlicter, sta
ring in shock from the far edge, noted that the current rippled normally beneath the vehicle. The black windscreen hinged up. An alien like those on the truck beds aimed his weapon point-blank.

  The magenta blur registered on the carnivore’s peripheral vision. The beast did not leap. Instead, it slashed one foreleg sideways, the bite of its claws creating six instant jets of chlorine. The carnivore jerked the Vrage from its car as neatly as a thumb could lift an eyeball.

  “Come on, get going,” Charles Eisley gasped. He slithered on his belly past the trunk on which he had laid open his scalp. Sue, transfixed by the battle on the water, was not sure whether the man was speaking to her or to himself.

  Twenty feet from the carnivore, another Vrage lifted his viewscreen to shoot. He clamshelled the cover back as fragments of the first victim rained from the angry creature’s mouth. The motion was a flag to call the beast whose jaws frothed in irritation from the halogen spray to which they had been subjected. The carnivore sprang in a flat arc, its clawed forelegs extended as they would have during an attack on one of the young grazers on its way to water. The Vrage might have had a chance if he had scuttled clear instead of clamping closed his vehicle. The car shattered like eggshell before a bullet when the predator struck it.

  “Sue! Quick!” Eisley said.

  “Jesus!” the woman gasped as she whirled back into the business of survival.

  The two humans scrambled away from the creek, hidden again by the foliage. Eisley’s shoes squelched angrily, but he had recovered his composure and much of his strength.

  Behind them, the stream was a raving battleground for the great predator and the increasing number of aliens who slashed for its life. Unlike the herbivore on the hither slope, which itself had been a long time dying under the concentrated fire of a dozen guns, this brute combined the tenacity of its normal prey with bloodlust and agility. The beams that carved across it in microns-thin lines served only to madden it.