***
Kit went down the wooden stairway to the cellar and pulled the string that switched on the bare light bulb in the ceiling fixture. All around her was her father’s larder of supplies. Every wall of the concrete cellar was lined with wooden shelves jammed with boxes and every box contained something that now seemed more essential than it had just days before. There were cases of canned goods, from beets to chili to garbanzos to beef stew, big cartons of bandages and medicines, and stacks of household supplies that would put a wholesale store to shame. On one shelf she spotted what she was looking for: a plastic storage box jammed full of cartridge packages labeled Winchester 30-30, an almost infinite supply for her rifle. She took out a couple of cartridge cases along with some gun oil and cloth and then pushed the box back in its place on the shelf.
“Thank you, Daddy,” she murmured, thinking of the debt she owed to her father’s survivalist tendencies. He had believed the ranch should be able to withstand a nuclear winter, an economic collapse, terrorism, or an environmental catastrophe, despite Kit’s doubts and those of her mother before her. Now she realized his prodigious setting-aside of food and gear would be his greatest legacy to her. A bitter sense of loss gnawed at her heart, but she fought it. She knew what he would say.
“Never give up hope, Little Girl. A cattleman lives on hope—hope that the weather will be better next year, hope that the price of beef will rise, hope that the barn can take another windstorm. You’ve always got hope to go on, no matter how bad things get.”
She went back upstairs wondering exactly what she could hope for. As she stepped into the pantry hall and closed the basement door, she spotted Chase Armstrong out the back door, puttering around the creature’s fighting machine. He was investigating the control knobs and gadgets that lined the inside of the cockpit. She watched the supple movements of his tall athletic frame as he leaned over the machine. “I’m lucky he came along,” she murmured. She already knew he could be counted on in a tussle with a tyrannosaurus. And the handsome face and those hanks of dark hair hanging down the back of his neck didn’t hurt. Maybe Daddy had a point about hope. That kiss on the hilltop had been the promise of better times ahead, hadn’t it?
She went into the kitchen, sat down at the table and began breaking down her rifle and oiling the parts. No telling how soon she might need it. She wanted it clean and reliable when the time came.
From the living room came the sound of a woman’s scream, a recorded scream, not a real one. Kit got up and went to investigate. She stifled a laugh when she saw Dr. O and Gar watching a movie the professor had put on the DVD player. Ogilvey sat on the couch and the creature stood in its corner staring at the old black-and-white classic King Kong. The screamer was Fay Wray, perched atop a tree while Kong and tyrannosaurus battled for the right to possess her. Gar and Ogilvey talked softly over the soundtrack, one moment laughing, the next serious.
Kit couldn’t make sense of Gar’s cacklings, nor for that matter Ogilvey’s pidgin-dinosaur replies, but she settled against the door jam and listened to them for a moment. Ogilvey chatted excitedly, deriving a boyish pleasure from sharing knowledge with his new friend. She could tell this wasn’t just an adventure for David Ogilvey. This was the culmination of his life—what he had been made for. It’s incredible, she thought, that times like these can make anyone happy.
Fay Wray screamed again when Kong and the rex knocked her tree down in the heat of battle. Ogilvey and Gar fell into a mesmerized silence, watching the mammal-reptile dominance struggle escalate toward its Hollywood climax.
“Who’s he rooting for?” Kit asked. Both Ogilvey and Gar cast surprised glances at her.
“Good question,” Ogilvey chuckled. “I hadn’t thought to ask him. But let me tell you, things are going great here.” He picked up the remote control and paused the video. Gar uttered a disappointed whine but Ogilvey ignored him for the moment. “I thought watching movies might be a way to explain human culture to Gar. I figured this one would look familiar to him, with all the Mesozoic flora and fauna. Anyway, discussing the plot is helping me decipher Kra-naga.”
“Kra-naga?” Kit puzzled. “What’s that?”
“The pteronychus call themselves Kra, and Kra-naga is the name of their language.”
Gar pointed a talon toward the set. “Ogil-vee, Tee-Vee anaka.”
“He wants to see more,” Ogilvey smiled. “Quite taken with Hollywood. And quite talkative too. He can pronounce all the English vowel sounds and most of our consonants. The only ones giving him trouble are those where his fangs get in the way—B, M, P and W. He has a lot to say, I can tell you that. He says he followed us to this house hoping to make peace.”
“Peace? You mean a truce?”
“Yes. That is, if I’m translating the word ikkoo-nek properly. That’s the devil in the details, Kit. The nuances of his language still elude me. I can’t be sure if he wants to arrange a surrender or an armistice. The two concepts are related but I have no way of attaching one meaning or the other to what he says. He might have come here to be our greatest ally or simply to become our new master. I still can’t decipher which. I’ve tried the usual linguistic tricks, looking for cognate words or rules of grammar in common, but with no luck. Until I get a finer grasp, I can’t quite be sure where he stands. I’ll keep working on it, though.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Kit, realizing she had another reason for hope. Dr. Ogilvey was the perfect compliment to Chase, the consummate dinosaur fighter. In contrast, the paleontologist, older and less physically able, was the perfect dinosaur peacemaker. His scientific training and insight born of age more than compensated for his physical shortcomings.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to a sheet of paper on the coffee table with penciled scribblings all over it.
“A paleogeography lesson,” Ogilvey replied. “Sit down and let me explain.”
She joined him on the couch. Gar, still shackled and not built for human furniture anyway, hunkered down nearby on the Persian rug.
Ogilvey pointed a thumb at Gar. “He’s quite the artist. I asked him where he’s from—or was from, sixty-five million years ago. He’s drawn it out for me.”
She looked carefully at the outline on the paper. It was obviously a map, but not of any place she recognized.
“It took me a minute to spot it, too,” said Ogilvey. He traced the continental outline with a finger. “The coastline of the Cretaceous inland sea came through Montana back then.”
“Oh, I see it now,” she said. “It’s a map of North America, but with a long inland waterway stretching from the Gulf of Mexico… all the way up here.”
“Correct,” Ogilvey confirmed. “And right here where Montana would ultimately lie, was—”
“Arran Kra,” Gar interjected in his raven-like voice.
“Yes!” Ogilvey tapped his finger on a dark dot drawn beside the coastline. “Arran Kra. If I understand Gar right, that’s their capital city. Arran Kra was the center of their civilization.”
“It’s the buried city you found, isn’t it?” asked Kit.
Ogilvey smiled smugly. “Umm hmm.”
Gar bobbed his head in affirmation. “Gah!”
Kit eyed the pteronychus thoughtfully. “Why do I get the feeling he understands what we’re saying?”
“Because he does,” Ogilvey stated matter-of-factly. “He’s an extremely quick learner, just a little hampered when he speaks our language. You see, he lacks some of the necessary prerequisites for human speech.”
“Like what?” asked Kit.
“Like lips.”
Kit looked at Gar’s toothy jaws. “Oh yeah.” She smiled. “I can see how that would be a problem.”
“For the time being,” Ogilvey went on, “I think it’s better for me to imitate his language. I can make most of their sounds, more or less.”
Kit turned her attention back to the map. She pointed to a second pencil dot on the eastern shore of the inland sea in the area of Ohi
o. “What’s this dot over here?”
“Oh, that,” Ogilvey said with a note of consternation. “That was the capital city of the Kra’s ancient enemies, the Khe. They were, I believe, another tribe of pteronychus.”
Gar nodded.
“If I understand correctly,” Ogilvey continued, “the Khe perished in the asteroid impact sixty-five million years ago. However, if it had not been for the Kra’s fear and loathing of the Khe, then Gar himself might not be here.”
“How is that?”
“Well, the Kra astronomers knew exactly when the impact would occur. They saw the asteroid circling the sun one last time and did everything they could to prepare for it, although in the end the catastrophe was far greater than they anticipated. Curiously, they were at a point much like our own civilization. They had just begun exploring the moon. They had a permanent base there at the south pole, which they protected from the Khe with a deadly light ray, as we have seen.”
“But how does that explain Gar being here sixty-five million years later?”
“I was getting to that, my dear. You see, the Kra realized the earth might be uninhabitable for thousands of years after the impact, due to toxic fumes, cold, and darkness. So they came up with an ingenious way to escape extinction. They did it without surviving.”
“What?”
“It was impossible to provision a space colony for a thousand years, so they hit upon the scheme of robotic cloning. Like our own species today, the Kra had mastered the art of reading genetic information from DNA sequences. And, being one step farther along than us, they had also mastered the art of test-tube reproduction. That is to say, they could produce offspring entirely within glass vessels. They provisioned their station on the moon with enough chemicals to produce an army of Kra and an automated machine to start the reconstitution process when the earth became livable again. Overseeing it all was an earth-monitoring computer called the Watcher, tasked to detect the return of normal temperatures and a breathable atmosphere. Once the Watcher was set in motion, despite the original crew dying of old age long before the earth was habitable again, there would still be a means to get the result we see today.”
“But wait a minute,” Kit balked. “If the earth was uninhabitable for a only thousand years, why wait sixty-five million?”
“Ah, the final piece of the puzzle.” Ogilvey paused as if he were savoring delicious wine. “When the asteroid hit the earth, it threw out such a mass of rock and debris that the moon itself was bombarded for years by a meteor storm. The station was damaged so badly its garrison was killed and the Watcher ceased to function. It lay silent for eons frozen in its dark crater, until our astronauts unwittingly set its programs in motion again.”
Chase had appeared in the kitchen doorway while they were talking. “That’s awesome,” he said. “But why send down tyrannosaurs and utahraptors and all the rest?”
Ogilvey grinned. “The Kra are only doing what you have been doing Chase—re-establishing vanished species. For them that means using computer banks of genetic code stored on the moon, containing the DNA sequences of every creature known to them. They’re replicating not only the Kra, but every other Cretaceous plant or animal for which they’ve got a genetic code, and there are many.”
“What a concept,” Chase marveled. “A computerized Noah’s Ark in space.”
“Ih-hee-hee!” Ogilvey laughed. “Right you are, Chase! But the computers themselves were knocked out. Talk about a computer crash! That one little glitch set them back sixty-five million years.”
“Species reintroduction on a global scale,” Chase murmured. “It makes our wolf project look easy.”
Ogilvey pointed to a dotted outline on the map paralleling the inland waterway on its western side. “See this area running from Montana down to the Gulf Coast of Texas? This is the territory Gar calls Kra-Gol. It’s the land of the Kra, the extent of Gar’s ancient homeland. It corresponds to the migration route of the great dinosaurs that are now being returned to the hills around us here in Montana. The Kra were hunters and herders as well. Their ancestors followed the great beasts from their summer nesting grounds in Montana down to the warm regions where they passed the winter.”
“That’s the same route modern whooping cranes fly,” said Chase.
“Or a hundred other types of bird,” Ogilvey agreed. “Modern birds are just another type of dinosaur, ones with wings. And their migrations still follow the old routes.”
“But how can dinosaurs do it?” Chase asked. “That’s too far to travel on foot.”
“Igga na hoogahs,” Gar interjected.
“Not for dinosaurs,” Ogilvey translated. “By that, he implies that my behavioral maximization theory has merit. Dinosaurs were every bit as capable as modern species, and even more so.”
Chase scowled. “I doubt people who live along those routes would sit still for this if you gave them a choice. I have enough trouble with ranchers just trying to reintroduce a few wolves. How can you expect people to live with dinosaurs in their back yards? Dozens of species—”
“Hundreds,” Ogilvey corrected. Gar cackled a few words and Ogilvey corrected again. “Er, thousands. Apparently, it did not occur to the Kra planners that humans would ever exist or that anyone else would populate the places where the Kra expected to carry on their way of life. He has no answer for your question.”
Kit interjected, “I don’t think they plan to ask permission, anyway.”
The professor paused, scratching his beard. “Speaking of humans, he keeps referring to us by a word whose meaning I haven’t quite deciphered. Hoonah. It means either a type of mammal or a type of food. I’m not sure which.”
“Maybe both,” Kit said with a shudder.
Gar stayed silent.
Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall Page 42
