Deadly Memory (Living Memory Book 2), page 6
He scuffed one shoe in the dirt. “You said something about money?”
CHAPTER NINE
“But he’s suffering,” Samira said. “He might even be dying. You know what it means when a bird starts plucking out its feathers. You think it’s different for Charlie?”
Paula set a cup of tea on the table in front of Samira and laid her white, wrinkled hand onto Samira’s smooth, dark one. “It’s not a surprise. He’s trapped in a tiny space, bored, scared, cut off from anything he’s ever known. It’s a pretty stressful situation for him.”
“Then why don’t you let me try to change that?”
Paula sighed. “It’s a risk. I don’t know what will happen if we send him those memories. I have no idea what he understands. Will he think another one of his kind is nearby, communicating with him? Will he go crazy and try to break out of his enclosure? It could ultimately be worse for him.”
“Doing nothing is a risk, too. If he gets sick, we won’t be able to treat him. He’ll just die.”
Paula took a sip of her tea. Samira let her think. Paula knew as well as she did how easily animals brought back from extinction died. Even bringing back a relatively recent animal like a Tasmanian wolf, the last of which had died in 1936, meant providing an appropriate environment for an animal whose natural habitat no longer existed. The team that had finally succeeded in raising Charlotte to adulthood had lost six Tasmanian wolves before she had finally thrived.
Tasmanian wolves were simple, though, compared to Charlie. They were mostly solitary creatures that had fed on animals that still existed in the world today. Charlie had fed on two-ton hadrosaurs. Even the chemical makeup of the atmosphere had been different in the Cretaceous, with more oxygen and less nitrogen. The most important piece, though, in Samira’s opinion, was the social component. Charlie was an intelligent and highly social creature cut off from his kind. They had to address that aspect of his health, or he wasn’t going to survive.
Samira was about to open her mouth to make some of those arguments when Paula nodded as if she’d been listening to her thoughts all along. “I think you’re right,” she said. “I’ve been too cautious, too afraid to make a mistake with the only specimen we will ever have. We need to communicate with him, and those scents are our best shot.”
It took a lot more work than Samira anticipated to bring the scents to Charlie. The liquid that stored the memories was volatile, evaporating quickly when exposed to the air. The machine they used to aerosolize tiny amounts of it wasn’t designed to be portable, and it connected to a mask made for humans. They needed to be able to pump the scent into his cage using as little as possible of the irreplaceable liquid.
After a frustrating several hours spent sterilizing all the equipment to be sure they weren’t bringing in contaminants that could harm Charlie, they finally brought what they needed inside and set it up. Charlie watched warily as they hooked the tube up to his air supply.
They had chosen a memory they thought would be less traumatic than others, a scene with five maniraptors sharing meat together on a rocky beach. The male whose memory it was felt emotions of camaraderie and the hope of being respected by the group. There was some social stress involved, but nothing like the panic and trauma of the asteroid strike. Of course, the scene might have more significance to Charlie than they realized, but they couldn’t control that.
“Hello, Charlie,” she said, as she always did. “This is Samira.”
HA-MEE-KAA!
“That’s right. We brought you something. I hope you like it.”
Paula fiddled with the controls, the hazmat suit making her movements clumsy, then flipped a switch. “Okay,” she said. “Here goes nothing.”
At first, Charlie made no response. Then his eyes widened and his nostrils flared. He tilted his head up, his muscles taut as if to attack.
“It’s a male scent marker,” Paula said. “It shouldn’t be a threat to him. At least if we understand it right.”
Without warning, Charlie lunged, his body careening through the air, claws and teeth first, like the fearsome predator he was. He crashed into the grate that the scent was coming from, tearing at the metal, gouging it with his claws and trying to get purchase with his teeth. He screeched a sound they’d never heard him make before, full of emotion. Samira knew he was an alien creature with wildly different means of communication, but it wasn’t hard to hear rage and longing in that sound.
“Whoa,” Alex said. He sat in the observation room, watching the sensors. “Chemical readings are off the charts. He’s pumping some serious alkylpyrazines into the air.”
“I’m shutting it down,” Paula said, reaching for the switch.
“No,” Samira said. “Give him a chance. Switch to the next memory. Let him figure it out.”
“He’s going to hurt himself,” Paula said, but she did as Samira asked.
As the next cascade of scents drifted into his cage, Charlie froze, pausing his furious clawing at the grate. His body relaxed, then slumped to the floor. He rested his head between his feet. Samira cautioned herself against anthropomorphism, but she couldn’t help thinking that if he’d been human, he would be crying.
When he caught the scent marker of another maniraptor, Prey thought at first that his roost mates had come for him. He called back, flooding the air with information about his location and his captors. It didn’t take long for him to realize the truth: the scents were stale, mere recorded memories. Not only that, they were quite old, judging by the quality.
The memory changed, and he saw the tangled cliff dwellings of Ocean Roost, felt the cool air, smelled salt on the breeze. Home. But he was not home. He was here, trapped by hairless mammals in a cage with invisible walls. The mammals were watching him. They were doing this. They had robbed Ocean Roost’s library, and now they fed him these scents of his past life to torture him and keep him weak.
No. That wasn’t right, was it? These creatures didn’t know how to speak with scent. They wore costumes to prevent scent from passing from one to the other and communicated vocally, like males. They probably didn’t understand what these scents meant any more than prey animals in the field understood anger or affection. But if so, why were they doing it?
The only reason he could think of was for communication. His pitiful attempts to repeat their vocalizations had failed, so they were making equally pitiful attempts to speak his language in return.
Samira was behind this, he knew it. She was different from the others. Prey had been told the names of the other creatures, but he didn’t remember. The sounds were hard to hold onto; if he didn’t hear it repeated many times, he often forgot it later. But he didn’t care about the others’ names. They treated him like an animal in a cage. Samira was the only one who saw him as a person.
The small one with the wrinkled face, presumably Samira’s servant, manipulated a mechanism of some kind, and scent after scent flooded into his cage. The more he experienced the memories of others, the more vividly his own past came back to him. He remembered Soft Meat and Distant Rain and Sharp Salt and the end of the world. Were they all dead? Or were they held in cages of their own? It seemed unlikely that the hairless mammals could have very many of these cages, but what did he know of their capabilities?
Then without warning, there came a memory of his own.
Fifteen days until impact.
The strain threatened to overwhelm him, as did the punishing schedule, working as a member of the telescope by night and to create the hibernation pits with Distant Rain during the day.
He worked side by side with her as dusk fell, hauling containers of test liquid around and doing whatever she told him, even if he didn’t understand it. They worked directly in one of the pits now, not wanting to waste the time required to travel back and forth between the factory and the site.
Despite the pressure, Rain’s enthusiasm for the work kept things positive. He wished he could have worked for her all these years instead of Sharp Salt. She was a much better leader, valuing his abilities and motivating him to succeed. She treated him like an equal instead of a servant. Like a friend, even. They were both so tired it made them silly, cracking inappropriate jokes about the coming apocalypse even as they labored to survive it.
He would have to leave soon and return to the telescope yet again. He didn’t know if he could stand another night standing in a field staring up at the sky, female domination or no. Eventually his body was just going to give out. Trying to survive the asteroid might kill him before the asteroid itself did.
In the growing darkness, he tripped over a spur of rock and sprawled right into Rain, knocking her flat. He struggled to get up, flooding her with scents of apology and embarrassment, but he tangled in her limbs, and fell flat again. Her scent overwhelmed him, and it was… amusement? She was laughing at him.
No, she was laughing with him. Her crazy, exhausted hilarity infected him, too, as his scents mingled with hers, no longer embarrassed but overwhelmed by the humor of it all. The pure ridiculousness of lying on top of each other in a pit, trying to save a civilization who wouldn’t believe them, as extinction rained down from the sky.
Suddenly, there was another scent in the air. Prey realized how close his body was to hers. They were alone in the pit. Prey knew he wasn’t much to look at, physically. He was small and drab even for a male. He had long ago given up visiting the breeding grounds, where females regularly overlooked him for more attractive choices, leaving him frustrated and ashamed.
But the scent coming from Rain made it clear what was on her mind. And there was no one else around.
Males rarely had any choices when it came to sex. Females ran society and chose whomever they liked, or fought with each other about mates without reference to the males themselves. Even in the act itself, the overwhelming domination of a female’s sexual pheromones gave a male little option but to submit, just as they did in every other aspect of life.
As Rain’s pheromones rushed over him, Prey gave himself over to the feeling. He pulled his body in close to hers, expecting her to take control of the experience. Almost as soon as they had started, though, the rush of pheromones stopped, drifting away into the night. Of course. She was regretting the impulse already. No one had ever actually wanted Prey. How could he have thought otherwise?
He was about to clamber up and apologize again, but she wrapped herself around him. She leaned her face in next to his so they were eye to eye.
Do you want this? she sent.
She was asking him?
More than survival, he sent back.
A wash of amusement from her spread over him, and then the pheromones began again, more gently this time. The scent prompted his response, but so subtly he knew he could have resisted if he wanted, could have run away and left her. He had never heard of such a thing. He threw himself into her embrace…
Prey lurched back into the present, mind reeling. Rain! The intimacy of the memory made him long for her. They had grown so close in those final days and weeks. All the dreams they had for how society could be different, the shared ideas for technology and scientific discovery. All of it lost.
It prompted a cascade in his mind, filling in all of the experiences and connections he had forgotten. He remembered the telescope and the asteroid and the hibernation chambers. He remembered the fighting at the end, and the many who didn’t make it. They had intended to wake after only a few months. How long had it been? Were these hairless mammals from some other place in the cosmos? From Mars or Jupiter or one of the other bright objects in the sky? Had they come with the asteroid?
A thought struck him: What if the asteroid had not been a chunk of rock, as they had assumed, but a raft, specifically designed by creatures to travel between the planets as one might float from shore to shore across a lake? Had they come, then, on a mission of destruction? Had they killed his species to claim the Earth for themselves? Perhaps their own planet had become uninhabitable, or they just wished to expand and claim more for themselves. That would explain why he had awakened, not in the hibernation chamber, but in this prison.
Was there any hope in trying to defeat a species that could travel across the stars as easily as a lake, who could harness lightning and fashion a cage out of the very air? He had no idea how many of them there were or what weaknesses they had. Well, he did know they were made of flesh, and presumably they bled like any other animal. They looked easier to kill than most. But kill one, and the others could use their lightning on him. He might not even make it out of the cage.
But Samira treated him differently than the others. Maybe instead of waiting for them to make a mistake, he should try to communicate. She seemed to want to talk, and talking was the only way he would ever learn where he was and what had happened. At least then he would know what he was really up against.
He knew they communicated through sound, but their noises all sounded like grunts to him. He was learning to distinguish them a little and infer meaning, but with nothing to go on, it was very slow. As far as he could tell, they communicated thoughts in tiny, discrete pieces, with each noise symbolizing a single thing. It seemed a very limited way to communicate, because relationships among the objects and actions had to be inferred by adjacency, instead of mixing concepts together in smells to demonstrate how they related. It was a language without subtlety, trapped in a purely linear progression. Still, he wanted to learn.
HA-MEE-KAA! he said.
Samira shot to her feet. “Yes,” she said, followed by a stream of sounds he couldn’t decipher. “Yes,” however, was a sound he recognized as indicating an affirmative.
EH, he tried. YEH.
He couldn’t make the hissing sound at the end of the word. They held still, listening, but not understanding.
NE, he said. YEH. NE. YEH. He alternated shaking his head back and forth and bobbing up and down. Why couldn’t they understand what he was doing? It was their language, after all.
Finally, Samira caught on. “No!” she shouted. “Yes! No, yes, no, yes.”
YEH YEH YEH, Prey said.
The hairless mammals sprang into frantic action with a cascade of sounds he had no chance of deciphering. Samira waved her hands to silence them. She stood in front of Prey and pointed to the side of her head, where her ear was. “Hear,” she said. “Can you hear me?”
YEH, Prey said.
She made more noises to the other mammals, and something happened to the sound coming through the mesh box at the top of his cage. Samira touched her ear again and moved her mouth in the same way as before, but this time no sound came out. He realized they had stopped whatever technology they used that transmitted the sound from her suit to his cage.
NE, he said.
Another explosion of excitement from the mammals as the sound from the box returned.
Finally, Prey thought. He moved as close as possible to the invisible barrier, turning his head sideways so that he could look Samira in the eye. He reached his own feathered arm to his face and pawed at his nostrils with one claw.
She watched him intently. She took a step forward and touched a finger to the front of her mask, pointing at her nose. “Smell,” she said. “Can you smell me?”
NE, he said.
Samira’s heart thudded in her chest. She had just spoken, actually spoken, with an intelligent non-human. As far as she knew, it was the first time that had happened in the history of the world.
“You have to send him my scent,” she said.
Alex frowned. “How would I even do that?” he said.
“Come on,” she said. “He’s asking to smell me. I’ve been sweating in this suit for hours; we just have to connect my suit to the pump.”
“That would expose him to any bacteria that’s in there with you,” Paula said. “It would break our sterile environment, put him at risk of illness.”
Samira slapped her hand against her suit in frustration. “He’s the last of his species, and he’s locked in a cage. He’s trying to talk to us. We have to give him something.”
“It’s a risk,” Paula said.
“Besides, it goes two ways,” Alex said. “Remember, that thing’s a killer, and it dominates its prey through scent.”
“So make it one way,” she said. The equipment they’d used to set up the pump was the same they used for the airflow in their suits. She was tired of precautions. It was the work of a moment to detach the air tube bringing fresh oxygen to her suit and connect it to the pump.
“Samira, stop. This is not a good idea,” Alex said, but Paula held up a hand. “Let her go.”
Samira ran the pump for just a second, then reconnected herself to the air. “It shouldn’t take much,” she said. “He’s got the nose of a bloodhound.”
“Sensors are picking up a lot of alkylpyrazines again,” Alex said. “He’s reacting.”
Samira looked at Charlie and tapped the mask in front of her nose. “Can you smell me?” she asked.
Charlie met her gaze and squawked his bird-like cry. YEH. YEH. YEH.
CHAPTER TEN
Kit woke to chaos. He heard shouting, the slamming of doors, someone crying. He dressed quickly and ran out into the lobby of the hotel they had commandeered to serve as their headquarters in Chiang Rai.
Mai stalked through the lobby, her serene manner of the day before replaced with fury. She hurled orders in rapid Thai, sending aides and ministers rushing to do her bidding as more rushed in to answer her summons.
Arinya stood beside her, prioritizing the flow of people and keeping things organized. Kit made his way around the outside of the group, allowing himself to be seen without interrupting.
It didn't take long to understand what had happened. In a coordinated, surgical strike, an unknown group had raided their drug labs in both Thailand and Myanmar, destroying the equipment and stealing the domination chemical. All of it.
