Outlanders 24 Equinox Zero, page 4
He received another surprise a second later when he realized the sub-human wasn't alone. A group of people wearing little more than their own shaggy hides crept out of the undergrowth. Kane studied their harsh, strong features. Their hair ranged in color from dark to fair to brindled red. All of the men affected grizzled beards. The women wore their unruly mops of hair bound up with rawhide thongs. Necklaces of painted bone and animal teeth banded their throats. In fact, all of them, men and women alike, had the
bearing and feral expressions of animals.
At a quick count, Kane estimated there were perhaps a dozen adults, with a few children mixed in. He groaned inwardly at the concept of primitive people cruelly snatched from their own time and clime and dropped in an alien environment. What made it worse was that they were abducted at the whim of a machine, a malfunctioning computer program. Even the people who had written the programs were two centuries dead.
Kane couldn't help but feel a surge of pity for the hapless sub-humans who clustered in the brush and waited for the snake to die so they could eat. Wherever or whenever they came from, he doubted Thunder Isle was much of an improvement.
A mission a few months ago had brought him, Grant and Brigid to the Operation Chronos installation, a place they assumed had been uninhabited and forgotten since the nuclear holocaust of two centuries before. Only much later did they find out the installation was inhabited by an old enemy, the brilliant but deranged dwarf, Sindri. He himself told them while he investigated the installation, he found that the temporal dilator's chronon wave guide conformals ran wild on random cycles. They either reconstituted trawled subjects from the holding matrix or snatched new ones from all epochs in history. Thus, everything from people, to animals and plants were randomly trawled from past epochs.
Sindri managed to get control of the dilator and use it a bit more judiciously. One of the uses to which he put it was trawling Domi out a microsecond before her death in Area 51. Whether the little man was responsible for bringing Monstrodamus out of the Chronos holding matrix was still unknown. His tamperings with the technology caused it to be dangerously unstable. With a contribution from Brigid, the dilator overloaded and reached critical mass, resulting in a violent meltdown of its energy core.
When the radiation in the installation ebbed to a nonlethal level, Kane, Grant and Brigid returned. No trace of Sindri was ever found, but none of them believed he had perished, since he had escaped what appeared to be certain death twice before. It was a more likely scenario that he used the facility's mat- trans unit to gate to his space station haven, Parallax Red.
In the weeks following the incident, Brigid and Lakesh made several visits to the Operation Chronos redoubt, salvaging what could be salvaged. However, the predatory dinosaur had become a definite menace to not only the people of New Edo, but also to the Cerberus personnel who made frequent visits to the Chronos station. Only a few days before, the monster had pursued and nearly devoured Philboyd, who had been foolhardy enough to stroll outside the facility's perimeter.
Kane had no great admiration for the supercilious astrophysicist, but when Lakesh asked him to end the threat of Monstrodamus in order to make Thunder Isle a viable alternative to the Cerberus redoubt in Montana, he eagerly accepted. Over the past month or so, living in Cerberus had grown more and more claustrophobic with the infusion of new arrivals—one in particular.
Ordinarily Grant would have acted as Kane's partner in the monster hunt, not the diminutive Domi. However, the big former Magistrate was still recovering from the same neurological trauma that had incapacitated Kane a short time before. Kane noted sourly that Grant had felt well enough to gate to the Cube in the company of Shizuka, the commander of New Edo's military arm, the Tigers of Heaven. Even now Grant, Brigid and a couple of other Cerberus personnel waited for him and Domi to return—or at least receive a report about the progress of the hunt.
Kane saw how the heavy trunk of the snake drooped limply to the jungle floor. Although postmortem spasms still rippled along its body, the grizzled man Kane thought might be the chief of the tribe stepped tentatively toward the serpent. In one blunt- fingered hand he grasped a stone-bladed ax by its gnarled wooden haft.
Straddling the snake's body from the rear, he brought the ax down swiftly, chopping off the reptile's head with a single blow. The people whooped in a gleeful chorus and rushed out of the underbrush. They fell onto the snake with stone knives and even bare hands, slashing, slicing and tearing. Within seconds all of them were blood-spattered as they stuffed dripping gobbets of raw reptile flesh into their mouths.
The stench of fresh blood and burst bowels wafted up to Kane in the tree, but he didn't look away even though he felt a little sick to his stomach. Moving very slowly, he put the trans-comm back in the war bag. Despite being concealed by leafy branches, he didn't want to do anything that might draw the attention of the sub-humans. As far as he knew, they very well could consider his flesh a lot more appetizing than snake. He wished they would take their kill and move on, since other predators could get a whiff of the blood and viscera, move in to investigate and keep him treed even longer.
Almost as soon as the thought registered, he sensed rather than felt a sudden displacement of air, then he heard a flapping, as if a wet strip of carpet were being shaken out above him He looked up just as the bird-thing landed on the limb only a couple of feet above him Although the creature wasn't fearsomely large, the bough sagged beneath its weight, bringing it even closer to Kane.
Gripping the limb with hook-clawed feet, the thing was at least four feet tall with a wingspread of not less than ten feet. It was covered not with feathers but a pimpled, naked hide that reminded Kane of the skin of a shaved dog. The leathery, membranous wings resembled those of a bat, but it didn't look like a bat in any other particular. Sprouting from the first joint of the wings were four curving talons.
The creature's long beak darted toward Kane's upturned face. He glimpsed how it was spiked full of sharp, conical teeth as he evaded it with a sideways twist. His sudden motion half dislodged him from the branch on which he lay, and he clutched at the monster's feet. He got two fistfuls of the wings, noting that the flesh felt like damp doeskin.
The bird-thing struggled, pecking at the back of his skull, whipping its head and neck about and trying to flap its wings all at the same time. The point of its beak stabbed down on the back of Kane's right hand, bringing with it blood and a fierce pain.
Kane lost his grip and dropped down the tree, angling his body to land on a limb. Leaves slapped his face in a rush, swiping his sunglasses away. A momentary glimpse of a thick branch below filled his vision. Twisting, he managed to loop an arm over it, feeling the tough bark scrape against his flesh. The branch shook and bowed as it took his weight. He held on tightly, kicking with his feet as though he were running in place as he tried to find some purchase, desperately afraid the branch would crack at any second.
Making a whistling, squawking cry, the bird-thing dropped to a lower branch. A spot of his blood shone on the tip of its beak. Apparently the monster had gotten a taste of him and wanted more.
Barely able to throttle the panic filling him, Kane glanced down, spotted another limb five feet below and dropped. Better prepared this time, he easily caught hold of the limb, swung himself under and over it, coming to a three-point rest on the thick limb just as the winged thing landed on it. The limb bent, sagged, and then the splintering crack of wood filled Kane's ears for an instant. Right at his feet, the crack opened like a gaping mouth pulled back in a dea rictus, showing more and more of the white wood inside.
The winged monster slipped on the bough and nearly spilled down the smaller branches feeding out from the main one. It caught itself, throwing its head forward desperately to shorten its center of balance. It fluttered its wings frantically.
Kane clawed for the strap of his USAS-12 shotgun, trying to bring it around, but the barrel caught in twigs and smaller branches. Before he could free it or draw his handblaster, the split in the limb widened, dropping it to fashion a reversed L.
Kane fell and the creature came down on him hard, falling on him and enfolding him in its wings like an overeager lover. He secured a hold on its head, one hand around its neck, the other clasping its beak, keeping it closed. As he and the winged monster plunged down, the rough bark of the limbs scratched his arms and drew blood, and he banged his head against the tree trunk.
A pained grunt escaped between his teeth as he slammed hard against the ground, but the impact was considerably softened by the marshy soil. The air wasn't even driven from his lungs. He struggled against the winged carnivore's weight, trying to push it off him, expecting to feel the frenzied rake of hind claws that would disembowel him at any moment. To his surprise, all it did was flutter its wings feebly. He had wrung the creature's neck as they fell together, its hollow bones breaking easily.
He flung the body away from him and was immediately encircled by a knot of sub-humans. They glared at him from beneath their beetling brows. The men didn't appear to be afraid of him at all. Instead they seemed angry that his sudden appearance had interrupted their feast.
The man Kane had christened Chief bared blood- filmed teeth at him in either a snarl or a ferocious grin. He gestured with his ax, and two men pulled Kane to his feet. As outnumbered as he was, he decided not to struggle even though his shotgun and pistol would have evened the odds within seconds.
Chief eyed Kane suspiciously and made a gobbling sound. If there were words within the gobble, they were completely unintelligible. The man had to have commented on Kane's clothes because the others gathered around him. The men and women showed great interest in the fabric, fingering the cloth of his shirt and pants, putting their hands into the pockets. All of them stank with a strong, vile smell as human as it was animal. A woman showed a great interest in the zipper of his fly. It seemed to intrigue her more than anything else.
Chief tried to tug the shotgun from his shoulder, but Kane grasped the strap tightly and shook his head. "Nope. Can't let you have it. Sorry."
With a snarling grunt, the man yanked more insistently on the strap. Kane didn't relinquish his grip. "It's dangerous," he said, trying to sound very earnest and reasonable. "You could hurt someone."
Chief glared at him, shook his ax under his nose and uttered several slobbery grunts. Kane figured he was being warned to cooperate. He smiled sweetly into Chiefs face. Chief didn't smile back. Instead he uttered more gobbling grunts and clucked a couple of times.
Two sub-humans grabbed Kane's arms and tried to force them up behind his back. Before they could complete the hammerlock, Kane said, still as inoffensively and unthreateningly as he could manage, "I'm about to break some of your bones. I hope you don't take it personally."
Kane lifted his leg and stomped down as hard as he could with his boot heel, mashing it into the instep of the man on his left. Since the subhuman wore no shoes, Kane heard and felt the delicate metacarpal bones break beneath his heel.
The sudden, overwhelming pain caused the man to involuntarily release Kane's upper arm, freeing him to deal with the second captor. Kane fell back, wrenching free of the man on his right and shooting his left elbow into his throat with a meaty thud. The man staggered, holding his throat in both hands, his tongue protruding from his mouth. His feet skidded on the slippery bank of the river, and he toppled into the water with a great splash. The woman who had been interested in Kane's fly shouted something. She sounded very angry.
Growling deep in his throat, Chief lunged forward, swinging his ax. Kane easily avoided the blow by pivoting his upper body to the left. He swung out with his right fist. He felt a good solid impact run up his arm. His knuckles connected squarely against Chief s jaw, snapping his head over with a small spray of spittle and blood flying from his mouth. Chief didn't fall, but he dropped his ax and stumbled for several feet, arms windmilling as he tried to keep upright.
The subhuman thrashing in the water suddenly screamed, a hoarse shriek of mingled terror and pain. Involuntarily every head turned toward him
A serpentine body lashed out from the foaming surface of the river, coils of scaly, sinewy flesh looping and humping. Jaws at least two feet across grabbed the subhuman by his right shoulder. It dimly resembled an eel.
The subhuman screamed again as he was slung around like a rag doll, his feet kicking the water to a froth. He beat on the creature with his free hand. His companions on the bank screamed, as well, and hurled their weapons at the water monster. The spears and stone ax heads rebounded from the muscular coils. The creature gave them no notice.
Kane moved on impulse. He unholstered his pistol and shouldered the primitives aside. He slid down the bank into the river. Still holding its captured prize, the creature turned toward him, the black eye on the side of its wedge-shaped head glinted as it focused on him, trying to decide whether he was a new meal or a threat.
Wading forward, Kane didn't wait for the creature to make up its mind about him He slammed the bore of the handblaster into its eye and squeezed the trigger. The sharp report of the shot was muted, but the shock of impact registered strongly up his arm. Shudders ran through the serpentine creature, and the grip of its jaws on the subhuman weakened. A moment later, it released its hold and sank beneath the surface, coils still quivering.
Breathing raggedly, the wounded subhuman allowed Kane to drag him out of the river and back onto the bank. Blood streamed from the subhuman's gnawed flesh, but the wound didn't look particularly serious. Kane smiled at the tribe. "See, I'm somebody you should thank, not eat."
The tribe glared at him, and Kane wondered if they were unhappy that the monster eel had submerged and was thus beyond their bellies. The men and women shifted closer, growling angrily. Kane had no idea what the growls meant, but he stayed balanced on the balls of his feet, raising his hands for protection, waiting for the next assault although every instinct told him to attack.
Magistrate martial-arts training borrowed shamelessly from every source—from tae kwon do to savate to kung fu. The style was down and dirty, focusing primarily on the aspects of offense rather than defense. Magistrate doctrine taught never to be defensive when any opportunity presented itself to go on the attack. Most Mags had no idea when or even how to back off, but over the past couple of years Kane had learned the wisdom of a discreet withdrawal.
He didn't want to fight the primitives, and he certainly didn't want to be forced into a position where he had to use his blasters on them. They were abductees, prisoners on Thunder Isle, and though they might be better off dead in the long run, Kane had no intention of making that decision for them. By the same token, if the situation turned really ugly, he wasn't about to fend off a mob of sub-humans with only his bare hands, compassion be damned.
Sliding his finger into the trigger guard of the shotgun, Kane considering firing a round over their heads, in the hopes of driving them off. Before he made up his mind, he heard a loud, earsplitting crack that he recognized as the report of Domi's blaster. As the thunderous echoes rolled across the sky, the primitive clan clapped their hands over their ears, eyes wide in astonishment, their mouths forming O’s of wonder and fear.
Kane took instant advantage of their surprise and lunged into the foliage on the other side of the tree.
From behind him he heard a savage cry of anger erupt from many throats simultaneously. Heart pumping hard, he felt his familiar angry repugnance at being forced into the role of prey. His many years as a Magistrate had accustomed him to being the hunter, not the hunted.
He plunged through the closed-canopy foliage, and though sun shone bright in the sky, little of it penetrated to the treacherous morass of foul water, giant ferns and creepers that formed the jungle floor. It was like a world of endless green twilight. The heat was suffocating, and sweat saturated his shirt. His breathing was labored.
Slogging through a patch of mud, the stench of marsh gas filled Kane's nostrils and awoke nausea in his stomach. Still, the sulfurous stink wasn't much more nauseating that the effluvium exuded by the sub-humans.
His wet boots squished loudly with every footfall. Kane wished he could be stealthy, but he knew he couldn't without sacrificing speed. He wanted to put as much distance between himself and the tribe of primitives as quickly as he could, and then make contact with Domi. He sucked in great gulps of the humid air as he struggled across roiling, muddy creeks, sinking almost to his knees in some places.
Reaching higher ground, he stopped to catch his breath and listen. He heard the bawling of the pursuing sub-humans, but they sounded far away. The chief, though angry, probably wasn't too enthusiastic about a prolonged chase, not when they had fresh meat to eat.
Kane unzipped the war bag and withdrew the transcomm. He thumbed up the cover and pressed the key to open the channel to Domi. He heard the circuit engage—then the flat snapping of a rifle shot followed a second later by a roar that combined the worst aspects of a siren, steam valve and the howl of a dying dog.
The sweat beaded at his hairline instantly turned ice-cold. He had no doubt that the roar had erupted from the throat of Monstrodamus.
Chapter 4
At the first trilling of the trans-comm, Monstrodamus jerked erect with a startled snort. The noise sounded like an old man clearing his nasal passages, but a thousand times magnified.
Almost in the same instant, Domi's finger reflexively squeezed the trigger of the M-14. The shot sounded obscenely loud and the round missed the dinosaur entirely, smacking into a tree fern amid a mushy explosion of splinters. Monstrodamus paid no attention. Its maw gleaming crimson with the saber- toothed cat's blood, it voiced a prolonged bellow that to Domi carried in it notes of outrage.
Before she could track the creature with the blaster, Monstrodamus bent over so its upper body was parallel to the ground and charged her with long, hopping steps. Domi sprang to her feet and cartwheeled out of the creature's path, ducking under a canopy of overlapping ferns. The carnivorous dinosaur heeled around, trampling her blaster underfoot and making a panting sound that reminded her of an idling engine. She guessed it was trying to fix her new position.
