Read Online Dinosaurs & A Dirigible by David Drake - Free Book Online Page B

the land is stripped a little barer, every year there’s tens of millions more people to speed up the decline. And everything’s fine. Just the way you’re fine when you fall out of a window—until you hit the ground!”
    Tracking was even less difficult than Vickers had expected. The tyrannosaur’s strides were as regular as a heartbeat, each of ten feet or so through the undergrowth. They were a little closer on uphills, and they strung into long gouges on downslopes: the beast’s heels dug in, and sometimes there was the mark of a dewclaw.
    The floater swept beneath a branch from which hung scores of football-shaped nests woven from plant fibers. Nesting birds with slim, curved beaks cried raucously at the humans’ sudden appearance.
    A wasp stung Vickers on the forehead. Another settled on his right wrist. He slapped the second one and was stung on the back of the neck. Wasps shared the tree with the birds; they swarmed to defend it, though fortunately they didn’t pursue the human intruders far.
    Louise swung the floater around a tree. Orange flowers sprang directly from the trunk. A stray sunbeam touched a bloom and lighted it into a torch flame.
    The angry splotch of a wasp sting glowed on Louise’s right cheekbone. “They’re evil, Henry,” she said.
    He glanced at her. “The ghosts, you mean?” he said.
    “They’re not ghosts, they’re aliens,” Louise said. “Alien to us, at least. Maybe you’re right about them, them being from another time.”
    Vickers shrugged. “I don’t know where they’re from,” he repeated. “If they’re real—”
    In his gut, he didn’t believe the slender, scaled figures existed. Intellectually he knew that the evidence suggested the—ghosts, whatever—had to be real, but the emotional core of Vickers’ mind refused to accept that.
    “—then they’re sure not human. Doesn’t make them evil, though.”
    “The Punan camp,” Louise said grimly. The vine-covered branch of a fallen tree whanged the side of the floater. She had mistaken the obstruction for the whippy weakness of a sapling. They were traveling recklessly fast.
    “They needed food for the tyrannosaurus,” Vickers said. His voice was wooden in its lack of affect. “They’re not human, so pigs and men are all the same. It’s only evil if men do it to other men.”
    There had been other villages like that one, half a world and half a lifetime away. Vickers hadn’t forgotten those villages either.
    “It’s all right with you, Henry?” Louise shouted. “It’s all right? What’s the matter with you?”
    “I said they weren’t evil, Louise,” Vickers replied softly. “It’s not all right, no. But there’s only three of them and—”
    His face changed. His mind was so completely in the past that he forgot to keep his expression neutral.
    “—I’ve got a hundred rounds. That should be plenty.”
    The terrain was rising. Louise twitched the floater abruptly upward. She had almost plowed into the ground while transfixed by a glimpse into the soul of a man she thought she knew.
    They flew on. By this time, they could anticipate the twists to one side or the other when major obstructions diverted the dinosaur’s course. The track swung back, as surely as a pendulum.
    “Do you suppose they’re taking it to their ship?” Louise murmured. “Or machine. I don’t even know what the Israelis’ apparatus looks like.”
    Vickers shook his head. The question didn’t touch his area of present focus, so he barely heard the words.
    They were getting close. A smell that at first Vickers couldn’t identify made the hair on the back of his neck lift. A combination of snake smell and carrion . . . Although the tyrannosaur appeared to be an active hunter rather than a scavenger, flesh caught between its teeth would rot. There were no tick birds here in the forest to clean the beast’s jaws like those of crocodiles on a mudbank.
    Vickers began to hear a rasping quiver whenever the floater