by Chuck Dixon
Flashman and the Dragon, by George MacDonald Fraser. First edition. Knopf, 1986.
Flashy provides a vivid account of the Opium Wars that occurred concurrently with the start of the Taipings’ rise to power. A ripping yarn filled with period-accurate nomenclature and dialogue that helped inform the style of my own work.
Pirates of the Cretaceous
Bad Times Book Six
“For immortality is but ubiquity in time.”
Herman Melville
1
Somewhere in Chula Vista
The two-lane strip of asphalt was the only sign that man had ever been in the ancient hills.
As she drove, Caroline Tauber’s thoughts wandered from how she’d gotten here and what might be coming next. Green heights of acacia-covered hills rose on either side of the road that wound its snaky course eastward. The roadway sloped down to where it curved around the face of a mountain. From verdant shadow, they moved under the Mexican sun to follow the narrow band of asphalt that ran above a two-thousand-foot drop with only rusted sections of guardrail between them and oblivion.
She was piloting the soccer-mom van she and Dwayne had rented in Cabo for a kind of vacation. A kind of couples vacation shared with Rick Renzi as he recovered from injuries suffered in prehistoric Nevada. Rick was dozing in the back seat with his leg, in a hip-to-ankle cast, propped next to the car seat holding Stephen, the infant son of Caroline and Dwayne Roenbach.
The petite warrior woman sat in the passenger seat across from Caroline. Unlike the boys in the back seat, N’itha was awake and alert. She scanned the verges of the road ahead as well watching in the side mirrors for any pursuit. Raised in a world of constant threat and unexpected perils, N’itha had the senses of a natural warrior and hunter. Dwayne had sent her back from an ambush to warn Caroline and make sure they all got away. They were two days distant in the mountains of western Mexico with no sign of anyone on their tail. Next to her fierce devotion to Rick Renzi, was N’itha’s loyalty to Caroline and Dwayne and their little boy. She turned her dark, wide-set eyes from the road for a moment to regard Caroline.
“Dwayne is a good man,” she said in her strangely accented English. “Tough as balls. He is safe.”
“He is a persistent one. Hates to lose. It’s a Ranger thing,” Caroline said. She loosened her grip on the wheel, fingers pained.
“Ricky is Ranger too. Very good men. Strong.”
“Yes, they are. We are lucky girls.”
“Lucky?” N’itha’s head tilted, bright white teeth visible between parted lips to form the word.
“Fortunate. Favored by fate. Or God, maybe. Basically, we both found good men.”
“Yes. Lucky. We are lucky girls.”
They returned to silence. N’itha’s concentration returned to scanning the way ahead and behind. And Caroline’s thoughts were once again consumed with wondering where and when Dwayne Roenbach was.
2
Somewhen in Chula Vista
Eight miles north and west, and a million lifetimes away, Dwayne Roenbach wondered the same thing.
Something huffed behind him. A shift of sand.
Dwayne rolled to his back and into a crouch, the needle gun leveled in his hands.
On the crest of a slope behind him, a mounted figure sat watching, the rising morning sun at its back. It was a man with copper-colored skin, his chest bare. He wore a jaguar skin girdled at the waist. Atop his head was a wooden headdress fashioned like the snarling head of a snake with long, tattered feathers rising from it. The man’s face was painted stark white with black circles drawn about his eyes, and he stared at Dwayne as though from the mouth of the fanged serpent. Across the pommel of his saddle rested a matchlock musket. In his clenched teeth, he held a smoking fuse. His mount stamped its feet and huffed through its nostrils once more.
An Aztec.
Sitting on a camel.
And, as Dwayne weighed his options, a score more of the mounted warriors topped the ridge behind the first.
Few creatures can outrun a camel at full gallop. If he was going to escape them, he’d have to use the terrain.
A snap spray of projectiles from the needle gun, and he was down the slope in a sliding trot. The riders above him made whooping noises. They could not follow him into a narrow break in the rocky ground. A boom sounded behind him. A lead ball struck the wall above him to shower him with stone shards.
The break widened to a wash that ended in some scrub pines below. He considered using the silver band on his wrist for an instantaneous escape. Too many uncertainties. He was better off in the situation he was in, as bad as it was.
He turned to look back at the hillside. Dust rose from a source out of his sight over another rib of the slope. They knew this ground. They knew right where he was heading. Dwayne picked up the pace to sprint hard for the tree line. From the shelter of the trees, he could pick enough of them off to discourage them.
That was the plan anyway.
Like most plans, it all went to shit when more half-naked men covered in paint rushed out of the trees, pounding toward him on bare feet.
Dwayne took to a knee and sighted on the man in the lead. The guy was painted red with a pattern of white dots from head to toe. A smoking musket in his hands. His face hidden by a carved wooden jaguar mask that covered his head. The whites of his eyes gleamed from the open mouth of the mask. Needles to the legs dropped the guy sprawling. His lit matchlock musket went off with an explosion of sparks and smoke. More needles dropped a second guy swinging a long wooden sword; the blade spiked along its edge with gleaming black stones. A third guy stumbled with a pair of needles driven through his neck. The others turned and ran for the shadows under the trees.
A keening cry rose off to Dwayne’s flank. He turned to see first one, then another and another of the camel riders round the foot of the slope. He turned to draw a bead on them. From the tree line, musket fire erupted. Thick white smoke drifted through the hanging boughs. Lead balls raised gouts of dust and pebbles all around Dwayne’s naked position.
He’d come to the “anything’s better than this” place in his situation. He laid the needle gun on the ground to touch the bracelet at his wrist. His fingers touched the iridescent blue display strip.
Nothing happened.
Dwayne ran fingers along the strip again as he had done before. Again, no result except the display went dark.
“Shit. Shit. Shit,” he said.
He stood and raised the needle gun at the camel riders loping straight at him. The one in the lead swung a stone cudgel, whirling over his head on a leather thong. The man whooped, eyes wide with fury in a mask of black paint, hair braided with beads flying in a wild mane.
A stream of needles drew a honking sound from the camel as it dropped, sliding. The howling man leapt airborne from the big animal’s back. He loosed the cudgel as he dropped. The rounded stone head struck Dwayne with a glancing blow to the head.
Dwayne stumbled, dizzy. The world went white then black then white. He struggled to stay on his feet. He raised the needle gun at the other camels loping close to ring him in. He was surprised to find his hand empty. The needle gun was gone. The men dropped from their mounts; weapons raised and closed in.
The ground rushed up to meet him, and Dwayne’s world shrunk around him in a field of inky darkness.
His tongue was thick and tasted of metal. His nose was stoppered with blood, so he breathed through his mouth. Small hands touched him gently. Opening his eyes brought a wave of nausea. Above him, the sky was black with a spray of stars. He tried to sit up and found that his legs were bound above the knees and at the ankles. The effort brought on a jolt of blinding pain to his head.
Hands pressed him back to a reclining position. A woman with jet black hair framing a heart-shaped face. Ebon eyes that held no affection regarded him. Her breasts were small and bare. Her only clothing an animal skin held about her waist with a beaded girdle. She was young. Probably not out of her teens. The lobe
s of her ears were pierced with a pair of lapis stones the size of the tip of his thumb.
His hands were free. He reached for her. She slapped them away as though he were a child. He was weak with pain and exhaustion. He lay back once more as she placed a wet rag to his head.
She spoke to him in a sing-song voice in a language he did not understand. Her voice turned into Caroline’s softly singing as she rocked their son to sleep. And then all was gone, and only silence remained.
He woke again with sunlight stabbing into his eyes. He rolled to his side, where he lay on bare earth. A foot kicked him onto his back once again. A rough hand grabbed him by his hair to turn his face. A man crouched by him. The man with the mask of black grease; the man who took him down with the stone club.
The hand pulled him upright. His gorge rose. He fought the urge to retch. His legs were still bound, but he could support himself in a sitting position with his hands behind him. The man with the black mask made a hooting sound at him and turned to speak to others seated around him. They regarded Dwayne with idle curiosity.
He took a chagal made from a gourd offered to him by the woman who tended him the night before. At least, he thought it was the night before. The chagal was filled with water, and he took a few sips. He kept them down and sipped more. Sick as he felt, his stomach growled with hunger.
This was some kind of camp on a shelf of land that dropped away to dense forest below. Two dozen men and a handful of women. The remnants of a cookfire smoldered and threw off the smell of cooked fat. What remained of the haunch of a large animal was on a spit over the fire. Probably all that was left of the camel he’d dropped with the needle gun.
Dwayne took stock. His clothing was still intact. They hadn’t stripped him of his sleeveless BDU tunic or pants. His sneakers were still in place. His equipment belt was gone and with it the automatic and revolver. The needle gun was nowhere to be found. His wristwatch too. Whether his captors confiscated them or tossed them away, he had no idea. He didn’t see them on any of the men within his sight. The guns and gear were chronal anomalies now, lost in a time and place where they did not belong. A time and place where their discovery could cause a technological disruption. He could hear Morris Tauber’s lecture on temporal contamination now. Well, to hell with that. This plane of existence was already fucked beyond all recognition. Some mook finding a rusted Colt or tarnished Tag Heuer couldn’t fuck it up any further.
Camels stood munching and spitting in the shade of trees, bridles tied to a hitch line. There were no children. And no tents. This was a raiding party, moving fast and light.
A man lay by the fire where women were unwrapping a poultice and wet leaves from his leg. He writhed in agony. He hissed through clenched teeth when a woman, a woman older than the one who’d tended Dwayne, touched the swollen flesh around a pair of wounds in the meat of his thigh. He was the guy in the jaguar mask that Dwayne brought down with needles.
The others ignored him now as the squeals of the jaguar man grew louder. Dwayne took stock of his situation. It was all bad. He was in the camp of an enemy he’d brought harm to. If the jaguar guy died, they’d take it out on him. Maybe take it out on him anyway. There was one of those swords with the black stone blades lying ten feet from him. He could make a crawl for it while they were all distracted by the wounded guy. If he could free his legs, he could run for it.
That was no plan at all. He could feel that his legs were numb from being bound. This gang would probably just laugh their asses off at him trying to make a getaway on legs that were asleep.
His nose was still so stuffed that he couldn’t breathe. He touched the bridge of his nose, and pain lanced from the spot. The nose was broken. Again. His nostrils were clotted with blood. He fought the urge to clear them. Dwayne had been in enough fights to know to leave his nose alone to heal. If he cleared it, he’d pass out for sure. He wanted to be conscious. If he passed out now, he might never be allowed to wake up again.
The wounded man was screaming now. Four of the men held him down, knees on his arms, seated on his shins. The older woman, some kind of shaman, was pressing hard on one of the swollen wounds. Thick black blood welled up from the jagged hole left by the needle. He threw back his head and shrieked. The man with the black mask stood over him, wearing a deep scowl. Black Mask did not approve of how his man was dealing with the pain. He judged his buddy’s manhood cheap. The contempt was plain on his face.
Black Mask waved the others away with angry barks. They released the wounded man and backed off. Black Mask was the boss, top dog, of this crew.
Whimpering now, the wounded man looked up at Black Mask, sucking air in gasps. The wounded man’s eyes were damp and pleading. Black Mask stood across him, straddling him, and raised the stone club high in the air. The club came down with a wet crunch. The wounded man went still and silent; his face bashed to meat.
“Fuck this,” Dwayne said.
He reached for the bracelet on his wrist to take another try to go anywhere, anywhen, but here and now.
The bracelet was gone. His wrist and hand were dark with the bruises made when the bracelet had been worked off his arm. His thumb joint was painfully swollen. They’d nearly broken his hand removing it. Blood dried in patches where it had broken the skin in passing.
It was shining loose on the wrist of the man now smiling at him. The man holding a club sticky with blood and brains.
3
Antediluvian
The Ocean Raj sat at anchor in the lazy current of the broad estuary. To the west, a sun the color of an egg yolk sank in a blood-red sky over the shore of what would be, tens of millions of years from now, the coast of China.
“We’re almost out of the good beer,” Chaz Raleigh said. The lawn chair under him creaked as he shifted to pull a dripping long neck from the tub between them.
“You look out at this, and that’s what you have to say,” James Smalls said from the lawn chair by his side. They both sat on the aft deck, sweating in the meager breeze coming off the jungled shore two miles distant. The stink coming off the banks of the river mouth was rank with a rot they could taste.
“You look at any scenery long enough, and it becomes same-old, same-old,” Chaz said with a shrug.
“I guess,” Jimbo said and fished a fresh Tsingtao from the melting ice.
“’Sides, I don’t mean the beer in this tub. I mean we’re down to four cases. Gonna have to start drinking Bud tomorrow.”
“That’s all we could ever get back on the reservation,” Jimbo said. Smalls was a full blood Pima and only joined the US Army to break out of the cycle of poverty in the res. He’d volunteered for the Rangers because he was told they were the baddest of the bad.
Chaz was a former Army Ranger himself and had served in Jimbo’s unit in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’d joined because his daddy was a Ranger and his granddaddy, too. In fact, his Grandpa Albert was among the first black men to pass through Ranger school back when Eisenhower integrated the military.
They both lay taking in the sights, smells, and sounds of the prehistoric wilderness drifting to them across the water from miles of distance either side of their anchorage. The sounds especially. Grunts and shrieks and the occasional deep roar rose from the dense forests that covered the highlands that marched inland. And below it all, the constant hum of insects. Flying bugs, the size of sparrows, struck bug zappers rigged up along the superstructure of the Raj. Showers of blue sparks and sizzling bug bits rained down on the decks all night, creating a sticky varnish that covered everything. The mostly-Ethiopian crew had the devil’s own time hosing and scraping the stubborn goo away every morning.
The zappers, each around the size of a fifty-gallon drum, were the work of Parviz and Quebat, the pair of Iranian gentlemen who maintained the shielded nuclear mini-reactor deep in the Raj’s hold. It was the reactor that had brought them here to the far past. It was the tireless atomic furnace that was allowing them to operate in a place seventy million years from anywhere th
ey could refuel the ship.
But even the mighty nuclear generator wasn’t invulnerable to the conditions they found here.
“Parviz told me we need to take on fresh water,” Jimbo said.
“They should tell Boats. We’re surrounded by water.”
“Not that easy. The Iranians tell me this water’s no good.
It’s like soup. They rigged up filters to catch all the shellfish and parasites. The sieves clogged up inside of five minutes. Boats says he can’t even get enough to feed through the evaporators. This river water teems, man. Take forever to fill the Raj’s tanks. And that reactor is a thirsty son-of-a-bitch.”
“Shit,” Chaz said. He flung his empty far out over the rail where it landed in the dark with a plunk.
Mo Tauber wouldn’t like that, but the Doc could go to hell right now.
Everything about this time and place caused problems for the Rangers and the crew of their cargo container ship. Curiously, the least of their worries was the giant carnivorous saurians that seemed to be everywhere on the land and in the water and, occasionally, in the sky. More challenging was the crippling heat and humidity. The Rangers and Boats, their former Navy SEAL skipper, had been deployed in hot places before. Scorching deserts and broiling jungles. But never anything like the cloying, constant sauna heat of this era. Their clothes stuck to their skin within seconds of exposure. The Rangers and crew went about stripped to skivvies most of the time.
The only relief was the frequent rainfall. It seemed to drizzle most of the day when it wasn’t an outright downpour. They thought they’d arrived here at the start of a monsoon season. But after weeks of low skies and near-constant precipitation, they realized these were the local conditions on a daily basis. Local meaning the entire planet, the Earth having no ice caps in this period.
