Jupiter's Glory Book 1: The Dinosaur World Read online

  In the sky I could see the three fighter jets turning for another pass. The tree cover was not enough to protect me from their sight and I knew if they launched missiles at us there was nothing I could do to survive. My only trump card was that I had worked my way out of the shuttle before Arowana so would have a head start on her.

  “Move,” Arowana said from behind me. I looked over to see she was holding her gun on me again. Her attire was torn and grimy from the crash, but if she had been injured she did not show it. In her other hand was a metal case, like the briefcase my dad always used to take to work, only smaller and more lightweight.

  “That’s what they’re after,” I said. “That’s the tech you stole.”

  “I said move.”

  I looked to the sky, but the jets were pulling away, perhaps seeking new orders.

  “They haven’t blown us up,” I said. “My guess is now they’ve shot us down they don’t want to risk damaging whatever’s in that case.”

  “Guess all you like. Start walking.”

  “Walking? Walking where? There are dinosaurs in that forest.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “This is the dinosaur world you’ve brought us to.”

  “Yes, of course there are dinosaurs on the dinosaur world. I’m just saying you’re being ridiculous if you think there are monsters in there just waiting for you to stumble into their territory.”

  “What else are they doing?”

  “Dinosaurs have never eaten people before, so they won’t necessarily see us as prey; the crashed shuttle will have chased away even the hungriest animal; and you’re equating dinosaurs with monsters too readily.”

  “Why do I get the feeling you just listed things for me?”

  “Lions. You’d stand as much chance of being killed here by a dinosaur as by a lion in the steppes of Africa.”

  “If you’re trying to convince me predators only hunt when they’re hungry, forget it. I’m not going in there.”

  “I’m not asking.”

  “And if I don’t you’ll shoot me?”

  “Or Captain Taylor will.”

  I glanced over my shoulder to see the first of the jets coming in for a landing. The beach was so long and empty it would act like a natural runway. A part of me still wondered what Taylor would do once she caught up to us, but raising my arms and surrendering to her did not strike me as the best of options.

  “Talk to me,” I said. “Tell me you have a plan.”

  “I don’t care whether you think I have a plan. Get moving.”

  I was wary of surrendering to Taylor, but Arowana’s gun made me even more nervous. Before she had bundled me into the shuttle, I had never met Arowana so I did not know what she was capable of. Taylor had called her private, which meant she was one of the would-be soldiers working for the firm. Already that told me she was nuts, just like they all were.

  “All right,” I said, not wanting to die on a godforsaken world. “I’m moving, just lower the gun.”

  “Less talk, more walk.”

  As we made our way from the shuttle and into the dense forestlands of Ceres, I had a terrible feeling that was going to become our mantra.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “So, why’s a nice girl like you running with a crowd like that?”

  Arowana glanced at me with disdain but did not answer. We had walked in silence through the forestland for an hour before coming to the edge of a cliff, or what I liked to refer to as a cliff. Gazing down the red crumbling rocks, I could see where the ground turned to a desert-like scrubland. The fall from the cliff would only have been a couple of storeys, not enough to break bones if the tumble was controlled. The ground underfoot was mainly gravel, and what we had assumed was forestland had turned out to be more like a copse. It was possible the surface of Ceres radically changed from one relatively small area to another. I fought to remember what it had all looked like from the air, but in the panic of being shot at I had forgotten most of the details.

  Arowana was sitting on a large rock she had found close to the edge of the cliff. Her gun was kept on the rock beside her so I would not get any funny ideas in my head, while her precious briefcase sat on the ground to her other side. She was sitting there because she had been injured in the crash but must have had extraordinary training for me not to have noticed. Having removed her shirt, she had torn it into strips to make ugly-looking black bandages. The wound was on her arm, just above the elbow, and after cleaning it as best she could without equipment or water she was binding the injury as a temporary measure.

  She had yet to even bother asking whether I had been injured in the mess she had created.

  I also figured I wasn’t about to get an answer to my question so sat down and checked over my own body for injuries. Aside from my hands, which were cut from the broken glass, I was in pretty good shape. The bleeding had stopped and they stung more than anything, but I was not going to let my companion see that.

  I was also tempted to remove my shirt as well. It was blisteringly hot sitting on those rocks but I knew if I removed any clothes I would just end up losing them, and then I would get sunburn. Arowana was not so bad off, for she had the foresight to have worn some kind of vest beneath her shirt. A black vest, obviously, since I could hardly have imagined her wearing anything else.

  “What’s in the case?” I asked.

  She continued to bind her wound in silence.

  “I’m a dead man because of that case,” I told her. “I think I have the right to know what’s inside.”

  “There are no rights on Ceres,” She said without looking up. With the lack of passion she put in the words she may as well have been reciting football scores. “You do what I tell you because I have a gun. I don’t do what you tell me because you don’t have a gun.”

  “If you’re so hot on shooting me, why haven’t you done it already?”

  She looked up and regarded me seriously. “Do you want me to shoot you?”

  There was such curiosity in those dark eyes that a wave of anxiety passed over me. “No,” I said in a voice smaller than I would have liked. “Not especially.”

  “Then stop asking me questions.”

  “I can’t help it. I ask questions when I’m nervy.”

  “Then ask questions I might answer.”

  “Fine. Why does Securitarn have military ranks?”

  “That’s the question you’re going with?”

  “It’s just I’ve always wondered. I’m an engineer. I get paid to be an engineer and my job title is engineer. But when the firm hires security it treats them like an internal police department. Or the army, or whoever it is that has captains and privates. Securitarn is a security firm. We’re not government.”

  “Yet we have government contracts.”

  “Contracts, yes. There are cleaning firms that have contracts with the government, it doesn’t mean the woman cleaning the toilets is a general.”

  I knew I was speaking just to hear the sound of my own voice, because I was terrified of being stranded, terrified of Captain Taylor finding me, terrified of the company I was keeping. It did not matter, because it was a valid question. I had never asked it before, but since I was on the verge of dying I did not see I would be losing much.

  Securitarn, as the name suggested, was a security firm. It installed security devices – burglar alarms, that sort of thing – and was continually developing new technology. The firm had some of the top scientists in the entire Jupiter system, and top scientists always needed guarding. That was why Securitarn also employed the best security guards. That a security firm would need security guards was a no-brainer, but somewhere along the line they had adopted ranks. The ranks meant nothing outside of Securitarn but, so far as I had ever been able to determine, it was just the firm’s way of getting out of calling everyone supervisor and assistant manager.

  “I don’t know,” Arowana said. “I don’t know why they use military terms, and I don’t much care.”

&nbs
p; “Thanks for clearing that up.”

  “If you want my opinion?”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Firstly, since we have those government contracts, it might put the government at ease when they’re presented with new technology from someone of a rank they recognise.”

  “I would have thought that would have annoyed actual people of rank.”

  “Possibly. I think it’s also, though, because Securitarn often hires from the military. It’s a way of allowing employees to retain the ranks they may have lost through dishonourable discharges.”

  “Dishonourable …? You’re telling me Securitarn’s security force is made out of people that got kicked out of the army?”

  “Not all of them. Just the good ones.”

  “And what about Captain Taylor?”

  “I honestly have no idea. It’s not the type of question that comes up in polite conversation.”

  I had to give her that one.

  I saw she was looking behind me by this point and I glanced casually over my shoulder; then almost fell down the cliff side as I scrambled back to my feet. There was a creature – a dinosaur – pecking around the grassy gravel at the edge of the trees. It could not have been standing more than twenty paces from me, but did not seem to have noticed me yet.

  The creature had a somewhat oval torso, with long running legs descending from powerful thighs and ending in claws capable of slicing through flesh with one strike. Behind the creature extended a thin whip-like tail longer than the rest of its entire body. Its arms were longer than I expected from a dinosaur and nowhere near as useless, the three claws of each hand almost resembling that of a primate as it scratched the ground. I tried and failed to see whether it possessed a thumb, but even if it didn’t there was certainly a ghost of one there. The thing’s neck was long for an animal, short for a dinosaur, ending in a bullet-shaped head slit horizontally to reveal a splay of razor teeth. Its eyes, set into the side of its head, were large, indicating the thing was an active predator, possibly a nocturnal one. Its body was covered in a thin layer of what appeared to be fur, possibly feathers, but I had no inclination to go over to check.

  “Dinosaur,” I whispered, annoyed at hearing my voice crack. “Arowana, shoot the thing.”

  “Why would I want to shoot it?”

  “It’s a dinosaur.”

  “We’re on the dinosaur world, we were bound to run into one at some point.”

  Daring to take my eyes from the beast, I glanced over to see Arowana had finished binding her wounds and was no longer sitting on the rock. The gun was back in one hand, the briefcase in the other, and she did not look bothered at all.

  “I get it,” I said. “You’re not afraid of dinosaurs. Now shoot in the sky or something.”

  “Now you have something against the sky?”

  “I meant to scare it away.”

  “Scare the sky away?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  Her coy smile told me she was doing what every woman had done through my entire life: she was playing with my mind.

  “Gordon, that’s an ornitholestes.”

  “I don’t much care what it’s called, just do something.”

  “Why? It’s not going to hurt you. Look at it. It’s tiny.”

  I looked again and had to admit the creature would probably not stand much higher than my knee. It was still a dinosaur, though, and the only thing I knew about dinosaurs was that they liked to eat people.

  “It’s foraging for small mammals,” Arowana said. “It’s rather ingenious, actually. It uses its hands to grab its meal, then slice them with its teeth.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “Because studies of its teeth indicate they were not used for clamping onto prey, but for slicing through them. For that to happen, the dinosaur had to keep its meal stable, which is where the hands come in. How many fingers would you say it had?”

  I did not much care, but answered anyway. “Three on each hand.”

  “The fourth is near invisible. Oh, look.”

  I did look. The ornitholestes snapped forward, grasping something from the wispy grass at the edge of the trees. It raised the thing with the speed of a striking cobra and bit into its throat, shearing through its windpipe and causing blood to gush into the air. Its snout turned red as it tore out great chunks as the prey thrashed its last. The image was doing nothing to steady my nerves regarding the thing.

  “How do you know any of this?” I asked. “Please don’t tell me you’re a dinosaur nut.”

  “By dinosaur nut, do you happen to mean palaeontologist?”

  “Scientists and eight-year-olds. They’re the only people interested in dinosaurs.”

  Arowana cocked an eyebrow. “It seems, Mr Hawthorn, your pig-headed arrogance knows no bounds. Here.” She shoved her briefcase at me. It thumped into my chest and, even though there was enough force behind the shove for it to hurt, I did not drop it.

  “Why are you giving me …?”

  “Because I want at least one hand free. And if I’m holding the gun and you’re holding the case, it means you don’t have both hands free, either. So you don’t have one up on me.”

  “You know, Arowana, I don’t like you.” I glanced back to the dinosaur but, satisfied with its meal, it was moving off into the undergrowth without even having paid us any attention at all. At least that was one weight off my mind.

  “We still have a few hours of light left,” she said. “If we head down and keep these rocks to our left we should be able to make camp once we reach the end.”

  “Reach the end? Why do I get the feeling you know where you’re going?”

  “I don’t care about your feelings, Hawthorn.”

  “Evidently. But you came here with prior knowledge of dinosaurs. That tells me we didn’t just happen to crash on Ceres. This world wasn’t a convenient place for us to try to lose Captain Taylor. All this time I’ve been assuming we were on the run, but we’re not, are we? You have somewhere to go, somewhere special. This was planned.”

  She looked annoyed but not angry. “Would it get you moving if I agreed with whatever you want me to agree with?”

  “It might.”

  “Then yes, I’ve prearranged everything. I have a mansion and a hot tub waiting for me at the end and as soon as we reach it we’ll be safe under a flag of diplomatic immunity. Maybe we’ll even invite Captain Taylor in for a dip herself before we kick her off our property. Happy?”

  “No,” I grumbled, “but I’m moving.”

  Getting down the crumbling rocks did not prove difficult, even with the briefcase in one hand. I had half a mind to toss the thing off the cliff and see what reaction I got from Arowana, but I was afraid she would just shoot me or the case would blow up or something. I had no idea what was inside, but since we had been shot down over it I figured it had to be something important.

  My companion made it to my side a moment later and we began to walk parallel to the edge of the drop. The cliff wall offered us protection on the left, which was why I figured Arowana had chosen that we should walk that way, and the farther we travelled the higher the rock wall became. There were haphazard piles of stones on the ground at various intervals, indicating that the crumbling cliff became unstable at times, but we pressed on regardless. About the only good thing at the time was that the wall blocked out the worst of the sun’s rays. Not that we would be having that problem much longer; as Arowana had said, it would be dark in a few hours.

  We walked the gravel track for some time, neither of us saying much more than we had when we had been passing through the trees. Arowana did not want to talk and in truth I did not much want to listen, so we were evenly matched.

  “Wait.”

  The word had been the first spoken in so long that I almost did not hear it. Arowana had stopped behind me and had fallen into a crouch as she examined the ground. I approached with a frown, taking especial note of the fact she was not paying any attent
ion to the gun she was holding. I debated whether to wrestle it from her, but even if I succeeded all it meant would be that I would be the one holding the gun and she would be the one looking over her shoulder. Eventually we would stop to sleep and I did not want to have to keep an eye open for her jumping me.

  “What?” I asked, my irritation showing through without me even trying. I was hot, I was tired, my feet were aching and the Securitarn self-claimed military wanted to kill me. It was not turning out to be a pleasant day.

  “This isn’t good,” she said.

  I had a look at what she was holding in her hand. Her mind was elsewhere, her fingers absently crumbling whatever it was. It looked like some form of rock, but it was of a darker hue than that which had fallen from the cliff side.

  “You found a fossil?” I asked, wondering whether she would ever tell me what the matter was.

  “A fossil? You’re on a world with living dinosaurs, Hawthorn.”

  “What better place to find dead dinosaurs?”

  “Cat faeces,” she said randomly. “It’s not especially fresh, but cats are territorial.”

  It finally clicked what she was saying. “Jeez, Arowana, you don’t have play with it.”

  “I’m not playing with it. I’m examining it.”

  “You can’t tell me you’re an expert on cat poop. First you can name the only dinosaur we’ve seen in this place and now … now this. You’re making this up.”

  “I’m not making anything up. If you don’t start looking at this seriously we’re going to die.”

  “Die? From a cat?”

  “There used to be a subfamily of cats called machairodontinae. The most famous animal in that subfamily …”

  “I used to have a cat. You can’t tell me cats are going to descend on us and kill us.”

  “… was the sabre-tooth.”

  That was enough to give me pause. I knew practically nothing about dinosaurs but even I knew what a sabre-tooth was.