Primordia 3: The Lost World—Re-Evolution

by Greig Beck

  They paused as two massive chicken club sandwiches, overflowing with tomato, chicken breast, lettuce, tomato, peppers, and crispy bacon arrived at the table. Potato chips surrounded the plate.

  Ben and Drake nodded their thanks to the waitress, and the aroma of bacon wafted over everyone.

  Drake lifted his napkin. “Now, Captain Cartwright here is going to give you a brief overview, and I want you to listen closely. Then all of you take a few minutes to think about it and ask questions while we eat our lunch.” He looked hard at each of them until they nodded.

  Ben took a sip of his coffee. “Before I start, know that there is no dishonor in saying ‘no’ to us. And indeed, it might be the smartest thing to do. This job will be for insane people only. Drake and I will be leading a small team in. I hope we’ll be leading that same team, plus one, out. If we make it, you’ll all be rich. And if we don’t, you won’t need the money anyway.”

  Shawna sneered. “Is this where you tell us that what you’re about to say is confidential?”

  Ben shook his head. “I don’t give a shit who you tell. No one will believe you anyway.”

  Chess rolled his shoulder and looked like he was about to take one of Ben’s chips, but changed his mind. “Okay, Captain Cartwright, we’re all ears.”

  Ben began.

  CHAPTER 16

  Venezuelan National Institute of Meteorological Services

  “At last.” Nicolás leapt up to pull the battered notebook from the shelf.

  Mateo leaned back in his chair. “At last, what?”

  Nicolás held up the book. “The big wet, the monsoon of madness, the wettest season, it’s all due to return in just two months.”

  Mateo ran a hand through silver hair and sighed. “Oh, yes; your first love.”

  Nicolás flipped pages to his last entry, entered nine years and 10 months ago when he had only just joined the Meteorological Services. He left the book open and rested on his elbows, staring down and reading the notes again as he’d done too many times now to count.

  The wettest season came every 10 years, almost to the day, and always over just one part of the Amazon. Down in the darkest center of the still mainly unexplored jungle, a localized hurricane developed, but coming out of nowhere and always centralized. Strangely, it stayed centralized and just over one of the towering tepuis or flat-topped mountains.

  Then, in just 24 hours, it dissipated and vanished, as quickly as if a switch had been thrown and so completely it was like it was never there. The anomaly had intrigued him for 10 years since he had seen it right here with his own eyes.

  Well, he thought, as much as one could see. Nothing could pierce its cloud cover—radar, satellite images, even X-rays were all deflected. But he had seen something in there.

  Nicolás rolled his chair along to his computer and quickly searched his files. He found what he was looking for and pulled up the satellite video he had recorded from high above the plateau from all that time ago.

  He had spent months cleaning it up and now he played it again, for probably the hundredth time. The silent film showed a balloon with people in it entering the cloudbank, and then what looked like it being attacked by something that came out of the cloud, something big. Using the passenger balloon for scale, the bat-like creature had to have been about 30 feet across.

  Nicolás knew that the Amazon had her secrets, but none he thought as compelling and mysterious as this one. He looked over his shoulder at the sound of the senior meteorologist’s voice.

  “Hey, this year, we have all the new meteorological equipment you can use to measure the storm’s intensity. Also, if you’re really lucky, you may get permission to fly one of the drones in for a closer look.”

  Nicolás nodded with little enthusiasm and played the video again. “A closer look.” He breathed slowly, watching the strange events, still trying to understand what he was seeing. He knew that the drones couldn’t get too close or they’d lose power and fall to the jungle floor, as dead as a dodo.

  He had researched the phenomena extensively, finding many references stretching back hundreds of years. With the Internet as his research base, he crosschecked other phenomena that occurred around this time and found a single peculiarity—a comet, called Primordia—that came close to the Earth once every 10 years, and always in years that ended in 8…just like the year when he had witnessed the balloon. And now, just like this one. A theory had formed that begged to be proven.

  Nicolás drummed his fingers on his desktop. He’d waited 10 years for this event, and in a few months, it’d pass by for yet another 10. He sat for a few more moments and then leapt up, pulling the office stationary from a tray and scribbling furiously on one of the pages. He then handed it to Mateo.

  The older man looked at it for a moment and his eyebrows rose. “You’re taking leave?” He slowly turned in his seat, his mouth hiked in one corner. “And surprise, surprise, right when the wettest season is going to be occurring in the Amazon.”

  Nicolás nodded.

  “You aren’t planning on doing anything stupid, are you?” Mateo lowered the form. “Curiosity killed the cat, my young friend. And down in the Amazon, curiosity killed and ate the cat.”

  “I just want a closer look.” Nicolás grinned and shrugged. “And after all, everyone knows that cats have nine lives.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Western mountain slopes, Appalachia, 100 Million Years Ago

  Andy paused to wipe his brow. He’d been climbing for many days and had many more to go.

  Back in his own time, he’d been climbing in the Appalachian Mountains before when he was searching for fossil sites. Most paleontologists were curious about the ancient lifeforms up here, as there were large gaps in the primordial record due to the fact that most of Appalachia’s fossil-bearing formations were destroyed by the Pleistocene Ice Age.

  But back then, or forward then from now, though the mountains were large, they were nothing like the formidable peaks they were here and now. In the Cretaceous, the mountain range traveled all the way down through Alabama and into the northern edge of the ocean that was the submerged state of Florida.

  Where he was right now, he estimated he was only at about 4,000 feet elevation. But further north, they would be three times that and impassable to someone like himself. Over the next 100 million years, they would be weathered down to leave their granite cores and their slopes mostly covered in a gentle forest.

  Andy looked out toward the west where there was a world of green as far as the eye could see. There was a steamy mist hanging over the treetops, and it was unbroken, primitive, and teeming with life. It was a green world, all except for right at the very edge of the horizon where something glinted like polished silver.

  He was past the worst of his climb now, and he expected it would get easier as he descended. The atmosphere was pleasant here, cooler, but still with humid breezes wafting up through the valley’s conifer forests and fern-filled meadows that interspaced the mountains. Where he was, the trees were sparser and generally growing in stands like tall conifer oases, with strappy-leafed plants at their base and more exposed rock.

  So far, he had encountered a variety of smaller dinosaurs and several carnivorous theropod species, but they were small enough to not be a bother to him. Most he recognized, but some were unidentifiable, sporting strange beaks, horned or crested heads, and one that was even covered in what looked to be long rudimentary hair. These were the species that were probably unique to this area and were scrubbed from the fossil record by erosion.

  However, he had several encounters with nodosaurs, the large, herbivorous, armored dinosaurs resembling tank-sized armadillos. Interestingly, it was one of the few dinosaurs that he felt he’d already seen from his own time. That was because in 2011, a specimen was found deep in a mine so well preserved that its head and front half of its body were still intact, and even more amazing, not compressed, but in a 3D form.

  The nodosaur fossil was so amazingly preserved
that it was still showing some coloration—spots and coffee-brown patches surrounding the huge osteoderms, the huge spikes and plates, and the smaller coin-sized scales in between.

  Andy had approached one of the great beasts, thinking they might be like armored cows. But he ended up having to run for his life when he was charged. Even though the nodosaur was a plant-eater, it was 18 feet long and easily a 3,000-pound behemoth that had two 20-inch-long spikes jutting out of its shoulders. Instead of being like a cow, it’s more like a bad-tempered mutant rhinoceros, Andy thought as he had scrambled into a stand of trees.

  Luckily for him, they shared another rhino-like trait in that they had terrible eyesight, so once Andy stopped moving and hid, he probably vanished to the brute. In addition, a tiny brain meant it lost interest quickly.

  A big body, and sparse food, meant it was rightly being territorial, he surmised. From then on, he had learned to give them a wide berth whenever he encountered them.

  In the mountains, the opening of the landscape presented him with another challenge. Andy was used to scurrying between tree trunks, under palm fronds, and slithering through bracken to get where he needed to go. But up here, he had to cross areas of open slopes.

  He had been crossing a fern meadow on one such slope, thinking how quiet it was, wishing he had his sister here to enjoy it with. But that daydreaming meant he had let his guard down. He became inwardly focused and stopped using his spatial awareness, just for an instant or two, and then from overhead the sunshine had been blotted out for a moment.

  Andy was immediately on guard, but still instinctively cringed down and froze, just for a second, as a breeze wafted down on his long hair.

  Something heavy landed behind him, and he didn’t even bother to turn; he didn’t need to. He knew enough about this place to know that if something was creeping up on you, it wasn’t because it wanted to make friends.

  He began to sprint for the next stand of conifer trees and the terrifying scream from over his shoulder came from an enormous throat that told him he only had a short head start.

  Andy was only 50 feet from the trees when he chanced a glance over his shoulder—and it was as bad as he expected. The monstrous pterosaur was around 70 feet tall from nose to tail and had a wingspan of over 50 feet.

  He immediately knew what it was and cursed himself for not expecting it: a Quetzalcoatlus. It was a pterosaur species known from the Late Cretaceous of North America and probably the largest flying animal to have ever existed on the planet.

  The worst thing for Andy was they had good locomotion on the ground using their folded wings as front legs, and with their giraffe-like long neck, they could lunge forward to spear their prey in a serrated beak that was itself around eight feet in length.

  Andy pumped his arms and legs, and upon reaching the stand of trees, dived and crawled in among bushes and tangled roots. He scared a small creature from its hiding place that squealed and made a break for it—the four-legged, barrel-bodied thing could not have known that Andy wasn’t the real threat, and its fast-moving shape distracted the monstrous flying reptile that caught the fleeing creature with ease.

  “Sorry, pal,” he whispered.

  Andy flopped back, breathing hard. He stayed down, hoping the massive flying reptile wasn’t smart enough to be able to tell the difference between a small four-legged dinosaur and a weird, hairy, two-legged human.

  Andy sucked in air and watched as the Quetzalcoatl shook the creature in its beak to break its neck, and then lowered its giant frame to then spring upward, spreading bat-like wings larger than an airplane. It immediately caught a thermal on the slopes and rose higher into the pale blue sky.

  He watched it with open mouth and marveled at its magnificence. He’d been here 10 years and every now and then he saw something that made him think it was all a dream. It vanished behind the peak, and he relaxed a little.

  “You asshole, you should have known better,” he groaned to himself. I’m either getting old or dumb, he thought. He knew that giant pterosaurs lived in this time and in this area. And just like the condors of home that also had large wingspans and preferred high altitudes for their nesting so they captured the updrafts to make take-off easy, of course the Cretaceous giants of the air would be nesting in the mountains.

  Dumb. And dumb gets you dead, he cursed.

  “Gluck.”

  Andy eased up to sitting and opened his bag, seeing the miniscule version of the thing that nearly ate both of them staring up at him.

  “Nasty bird.” Gluck seemed to frown, but only for a moment. “Andy good?”

  Andy sucked in one last big breath and nodded. “Yeah, Andy good. This time.” He looked around. “But Andy needs to pay attention or we both won’t be good.”

  He looked out through the trees and into the distance. He could still make out the reflective glint on the horizon. He knew it had to be a large body of water.

  “My sea,” he said and looked down into the bag. “But I think we’ll travel at night until we’re out of the mountains; otherwise, we’ll both end up as bird shit.”

  “Gluck.”

  “Yeah, I’m hungry too.” He closed the bag. “We’ll make camp soon and have dinner, I promise.”

  CHAPTER 18

  1958—The Wettest Season

  Project Archimedes capsule, 87 Nautical Miles above South America

  Lieutenant Redmond “Red” Gordon was jammed in tight. There were so many dials, tubes, buttons, switches, and electronics surrounding him that he could feel the electromagnetic waves all the way to his back teeth. Added to that, they made the heat in the compact space capsule nearly unbearable and the bulky flame-retardant suit he wore was like a layer of canvas pillows.

  But he was thankful for the padding now, as the blast-off and acceleration had been like riding a 1,500-pound rodeo bull, and after several hours of being strapped in place, every single fiber of his body ached and screamed to be able to stand up and move around.

  Gordon was an engineer and test pilot with the U.S. Air Force, and he had been selected to pilot the new ballistic rocket system that was to make him the first man to fully orbit Earth, beating Russia by just a few years.

  In his ear was the constant professional command center babble of NASA, the newly formed space agency, and his constant companion, ground control leader Mitch Brammel. He looked up to the countdown clock and saw he had mere hours until he’d commence re-entry and be on his way to splashdown in the Florida Bay where he bet helicopters were already hovering.

  The Archimedes was coming up over South America, still at a height of 87 nautical miles, as Gordon began the re-entry checklist with ground control; all was going to plan. Until everything went dark. So dark, he thought for a few seconds that he’d gone blind.

  “Command center, come back.” Gordon licked suddenly dry lips. “Command center, come back. Ah, Mitch, are you there?”

  There was nothing, no sound, not even any static. There was only his own rasping breath.

  “Ames Command Center, this is Major Redmond Gordon requesting immediate response, come back.”

  Nothing. He was in a void of nothingness where there was no sound, no light, and no constant hum of the electronics. And the craft even felt different now. There was no sensation of the sliding acceleration as he skimmed above the atmosphere in a space orbit heading toward re-entry.

  “Damnit, Mitch, where are you?” Gordon cursed and brought a fist down on his thigh. His stomach began to flip and he knew why—gravity was kicking in and he knew he was in free fall.

  “Ah shit.”

  Gordon shook his head. “Come on, guys, don’t do this to me.” He tried the comms again, and again, and again, and by the fourth time, he knew he was alone.

  The words: total system failure, screamed in his head.

  “I’ve damn well trained for this,” he told himself to regain some calm over the waves of panic wanting to wash over him.

  There were manual procedures, processes, and inst
ruments for him to use, and he reached forward to a small compartment and grabbed a glow stick, broke it, and held it up. Manual clock face dials told him his speed, orientation, and altitude. Thankfully, he was well inside the atmosphere now but had reached a terminal velocity, and he had no idea over what.

  Now, there would be no automatic ejection of his capsule from the booster, and no capsule ejection meant no deployment of the parachutes. He had zero idea where he was, but he’d have to deploy himself or he’d be a smudge on some road, swamp, mountainside, or beach somewhere.

  Gordon sucked in a deep breath and shook his head to try and flick away streams of greasy perspiration that ran down his face.

  The altitude dial spun fast, and he counted down the seconds. He grabbed the manual disengagement lever and prayed he wasn’t too high or too low—too high and the air was too thin for the chutes to grab and open. Too low and he’d never slow himself enough to walk away.

  “Command center, I am manually disengaging and deploying. Mitch, I’m coming in hot.” He swallowed. “Hope you’re there when I arrive, buddy.”

  All or nothing, he thought, and gripped the red lever. “5-4-3-2-1…disengage.”

  There was a massive kick as small explosive charges blew the rocket’s nose cone, and his tiny claustrophobic home spun away from its ballistic missile thrusters. Gordon felt himself tumble once, and then the air brakes kicked in as the chutes now automatically unfolded—thankfully, they filled—and began to slow him down.

  Gordon stared hard at the altimeter as the feet counted down. He had jammed the glow stick in beside it, and it was a tiny pool of yellow light beside the dial that was now his whole world. He felt like some sort of tiny insect that had crawled into the back of a giant’s crystal radio set as he watched and waited.

  He blinked away more sweat; he had a ways to go, as he was still 2,000 feet up. But it would be eaten up fast. He gripped the armrests, preparing for whatever came next—he’d strike hard if he hit water or green. If it was rock, chutes or no chutes, he’d more than likely break apart.