Dinosaur World Omnibus Read online

“What?” I ask, realising there was no humour to Summer’s voice. No fear either, more curiosity than anything.

  “Thought I saw something over the rise,” he says. “Spring, stop this thing would you?”

  The communications girl obeys and the draconyx grinds to a halt, almost reluctantly from what I can tell of dinosaur behaviour. Summer pulls out a set of binoculars and studies something in the distance. I strain to look but can’t see anything: if he managed to see something without the aid of the binoculars while moving at speed on the back of a bumpy dinosaur I take my hat off to him.

  “Yeah,” he says, handing me the binoculars. “Take a look at that.”

  I do so, frowning as I peer through the glass. There’s something reflecting light over by the far trees. Something which seems to have a fairly large mass in fact. It could just be a trick of the light of course, but if both Summer and I have come to the conclusion that it’s a mite odd it means it’s worth investigating.

  “Well?” Spring asks, and I realise we haven’t said anything aloud yet.

  “Probably nothing,” Summer says. “But regulations say we should check it out. We should head back for the lieutenant.”

  Spring adopts that cute annoyed look of hers and I understand why: Summer didn’t explain anything at all to her. Deciding the cute annoyed look is kinda cute I opt not to tell her anything either as I hand the binoculars back to Summer.

  Spring turns the draconyx around and whips the reins, sending the beast off at a gallop. I dig in my knees and feet, clasping my hands upon the dinosaur hide for dear life. Behind me Summer almost tumbles off, and only manages to stay on because he encircles my waist with one big, strong arm. Spring alone seems light enough not to be bothered by the sudden increase in speed and the smooth bumpiness of the ride. That she’s getting her own back on us isn’t lost to me, or my jarring teeth. To have Summer’s arm holding me like this almost makes it worthwhile, but sometimes I wish Spring didn’t have to be so petulant.

  Still, she’s ten times the woman that Professor Harper is.

  Harper and the lieutenant have just reached the outskirts of the field by the time we come upon them. I can’t help but feel that’s strange. I know they’re on foot, but I would have thought the lieutenant would have made Harper move at a fast trot at the very least. Nor does Harper look especially annoyed, so I can’t see the delay has been down to the lieutenant shouting at her. Perhaps Harper feigned a sprained ankle or something and for some reason the lieutenant fell for it. I’ve never taken her for a soft touch, but maybe she’s made friends with the professor or something. The very thought rankles me no end.

  Summer briefly explains what he’s seen, but the lieutenant’s not too happy about the suggested detour and doesn’t bother to hide it.

  “If it’s not on our route,” she says, “we don’t need to know what it is. Like you say, it’s probably nothing. Just a reflection of this weird sun.”

  “What’s with the sun anyway?” Spring asks. “It’s a lot hotter on Ceres than anywhere else in the Jupiter system.”

  It seems no one’s ever been able to figure out how the sun thing works here.

  “Ma’am,” Summer says to the lieutenant, “regulations say we have to check out any potential criminal activity.”

  “And what potential criminal activity could you have found?” the lieutenant asks.

  “If it’s a manmade construct it means whoever put it there came here illegally. We have to check it out, just to make sure it’s nothing.”

  Summer’s a brave one, I’ll give him that. The lieutenant narrows her eyes at him, but we all know he’s right. Quoting regulations at a superior officer is never a good idea at the best of times, and I can see in Winter’s eyes that all she wants to do is get out of here. But regulations are regulations and we have to make the sidestep.

  “All right,” the lieutenant says begrudgingly. “Corporal Summer, take custody of the professor here. The three of you take that dinosaur and clear the way to the next rise, see what’s over there. Autumn, you’re with me. We’re going for a quick look, and when we find nothing we’re coming to rendezvous, Summer, so things better have got underway by then.”

  Summer nods, snaps off a salute, and motions with a genial smile for Harper to climb aboard the dinosaur express. Spring retakes her position behind the reins and they move off slowly.

  I look to the lieutenant, who takes a swig of whiskey and grumbles something about this taking far too long as it is and not having the time to check on every damn fool thing shining in the trees. Or words to that effect. I can’t say I disagree with her, to be honest. We’re here legally, but only because we’re a retrieval operation. The instant we found Harper we should have lifted off. With the damage to my shuttle and the quake preventing an easy route to Winter’s it’s made us stay far longer than we should have. There’s every chance that our debriefing’s going to turn into a stern telling off. If we’re here too much longer we might even face disciplinary action, even court martial. Risking our jobs just because we’ve seen something which may be nothing more than light reflecting off water seems a little foolish. Even if it does turn out to be someone having built a home on Ceres, there’s not a lot we can do about it. In theory we could drag them back with us and extract them along with the professor, but without knowing who they are we might well be treading on government toes. The Jupiter system of course does not have the single government, with each satellite having its own rulers, most of them having separate countries on just the one world, and therefore separate governments. But the law against trespass on Ceres is universal so in theory it shouldn’t matter who these people are, we could still legally extract them. Depending on where they’re from it might open a can of worms over what they were doing here, and why we side-tracked from our own mission long enough to even find out they were there.

  Politics, as you can see, are not something I ever like to get involved in, and here I and the lieutenant are in total agreement. We’ve found Harper and should be leaving, but events are conspiring against us.

  I catch the lieutenant staring at me as we move. “Tell me about it,” she mutters, and clearly our minds are at last in sync. “Quick look, Corporal,” she tells me. “And I mean quick.”

  I nod but say nothing. The less I speak the quicker I walk.

  We make good time across the field and enter the trees cautiously. Thus far the daspletosaurus is the only carnivore we’ve seen, yet whatever tore my shuttle apart is likely around somewhere, and the trees are a perfect place for an enemy to hide. Ordinarily we would not even be passing through them, but there’s no other way to find what Summers and I saw, so we move through regardless of common sense. The lieutenant and I both have our rifles to hand, the safeties off and held almost to our shoulders. Should anything leap out we don’t want to have to think before cracking off a shot or two.

  I take note of the trees as we move through them. They’re not that different from those back home. Tall trees with thick trunks and large leaves. There are a lot of ferns in this area, which I believe was the principal food for dinosaur herbivores, so that at least makes sense.

  And then I frown. There’s been something nagging at me ever since coming here, before that in fact, and I’ve just realised what it was. Harper came here to study plants which could only be found on Ceres, plants which have been extinct on Earth for millions of years. I can see before me ferns and various other plants suitable for dinosaur consumption. But how could someone bring plants back to life? Even if DNA stretches to plants, which I have to admit I don’t know for certain, how could scientists possibly have located enough complete DNA strands to successfully bring them back? Dinosaurs are a stretch enough of the imagination as it is, but plants?

  I guess since no one knows who built Ceres to begin with, no one knows the methods they used for populating it with life. There are even people back home who think God put Ceres here and sparked life anew upon it. It’s a common enough theory among the religio
us groups, since Ceres has started with early life, just as Earth did. And since no one has yet to put forward a decent theory of how life settled on Ceres it’s as good as any I guess. In fact, Ceres being declared a sacred world is one of the major reasons it’s forbidden to come here. Catholics see it as a second Garden of Eden, upon which it is sacrilege to tread. That would of course make me and the others serpents, which is an analogy with which I’m not entirely comfortable.

  The lieutenant’s trying to get my attention and I silently curse myself for drifting off during a combat exercise. She has her back to a tree and is holding up two fingers, moving them forward. She’s either telling me to precede her or she’s trying to call an aeroplane down to landing. I go for the former and raising my rifle I drop to a crouch and move swiftly to the edge of the treeline.

  Beyond there is indeed something, although it’s entirely surrounded by further trees, with moss and vines growing all about and across it. Whatever I had expected, however, this is certainly not it. The thing is made of metal, mostly, and measures about thirty metres in length. And that’s only because it’s not all here. Its basic shape is cylindrical, although there are pieces torn away, leaving gaping holes across its side. My foot brushes against a piece of metal grown over with plants, and I reckon there must be a thousand more pieces of debris scattered about the place.

  Looks like my assessment of the lieutenant’s finger signals might not have been that much in error after all.

  “We’re getting serial numbers,” Winter tells me in her usual gruff tone, “checking for survivors, then getting back to the others.”

  I nod mutely. That it’s a commercial plane is obvious: I can even still make out the company logotype flared across its side. By the growth of the forest all over it I suspect it’s been here some time, maybe even going on a dozen years or more. I don’t know enough about planes to be able to tell how old this particular model is, but the lieutenant’s right. If we can find serial numbers, or better yet a black box, we’ll have something to take back home with us to aid in the identification.

  The lieutenant disappears inside the plane and I scan the outside one more time just to make sure there are no obvious signs of activity. While it’s doubtful there would be any survivors in a wreck like this it’s always possible. But there’s nothing, no indication at all that anyone walked away from this. And even if they did, the forest closing in would have wiped away all traces a long time ago.

  I join Winter in the plane. It’s dark inside, shafts of sunlight spraying down through cracks or holes in the bodywork. There are rows of seats here; some still intact, although in the main they’ve been torn away from the ground. A few of the seatbelts are still fastened and there are traces of bones upon some of them. One contains what appears to be a complete skeleton, lying almost horizontally in an upturned chair as though waiting for the pilot to flag up the ‘unfasten seatbelt’ sign.

  Playing the laser sight of my rifle about the plane I can see nothing moving, no signs of life at all. It seems when this plane came down there were indeed no survivors.

  I find the lieutenant in the cockpit and mention such to her.

  “You think,” she asks as she rummages around in search of the black box, “any survivors would necessarily unstrap their fellow passengers and give them a proper burial?”

  “It’s what a decent human being would do, yes.”

  She pauses in her search, looking at me as though trying to determine whether I’m serious. I’m not naïve, and straighten my back in protest at her treating me like a child.

  “Passenger plane crashes,” she says slowly, “on the forbidden dinosaur world. You’re lucky enough to survive, everyone else around you is bleeding and dying, most of them are already dead. First thing you do is stop to see if anyone else made it, and bury those who didn’t? Did you even see that daspletosaurus we faced earlier?”

  She’s right, and that annoys me. Smaller carnivores would easily swarm over this wreck and strip it bare, and anyone in their right mind would want to put as much distance as possible between that situation and themselves. Without a complete passenger manifesto, however, there’s no way we’re going to be able to tell whether anyone made it out of the plane. And even if they had, they would have been swallowed by the jungle long ago, or else a theropod or two.

  “Got it,” Winter says, tugging free the black box. It isn’t of course an actual black box; it’s more like a chip the size of a woman’s thumbnail. Winter removes a device from her bandolier and slots the chip inside. She shakes her head at the data she receives. “Commercial plane, like we thought. Went down fifty years ago. I’ll check it against records when we get off-world,” she adds, shoving the device back into her bandolier. “Right now there’s nothing we can do. The plane’s been sitting here half a century, nothing we can do about that.”

  “Then we just find Spring and Summer and pretend we didn’t stumble upon this at all?”

  “No, we find Spring and Summer, get off Ceres and file a full report. Then this incident can be looked into. But without anyone alive here to rescue there’s no way another team’s going to be sent here. It’ll cross off one mystery though, and will give the families peace of mind at last.”

  That’s true, as is the fact that we can’t do any more here. The lieutenant heads back out the plane, keeping he gun handy in case any carnivores have taken the opportunity to set an ambush or something. I hang back for several moments, visually scouring through the detritus. I see a small device lying in the dirt and moss and tug it free. It’s a music device, and I smile as I think about how someone must have been sitting there listening to his or her favourite songs, entirely unaware of the impending doom they were plummeting towards. It’s amazing how little such devices have changed over the years. By the Twentieth Century human society was being pushed towards commercialism, so that technology was becoming obsolete a year, even six months after it was unveiled. There was a sudden stop in societal progress, such as space exploration or feeding the hungry, as the world made a profit-making move to owning the next big thing.

  That all changed with the colonisation of other worlds, and while I’m sure a lot of places in the solar system are still commercially-minded, no one system can afford to be exclusively so, else they would fall out of communication with the rest of us. And that would be fatal.

  This music device is testimony to the fact that technology doesn’t always move forwards too quickly. A song is a song, after all; and if it can be stored on a small device there’s not much room for improvement.

  I pocket the device and head out after the lieutenant. I don’t like leaving all this behind, and would very much like to bury the bones of the long-dead. But Winter’s right. We can’t stay on this world longer than we’re supposed to, and we’ve already overstayed our welcome. There’s no one alive here now, and we have to re-join the others.

  With deep sadness I depart the plane also and head back into the forest, leaving the wreck once more to the moss and lichen which now rule what was at one time a noble conqueror of the sky.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The lieutenant briefly fills the team in on what we found, although doesn’t dwell on it. Summer and the others report they’ve come to a lake and that we have two options to continue our journey to the shuttle. Go around the lake or cross it. Since we’re already having to skirt around the quake area in the first place, adding extra time by skirting around a lake as well is not something Winter’s going to go with. It comes as no surprise to me then when she declares we’re going to build a raft and go across. It will mean leaving the draconyx behind of course, but the lieutenant wants to waste no time.

  Summer directs us to the lakeside, and I stop, staring at the vast expanse of water. Strangely it never really occurred to me that there would be any great bodies of water on Ceres, when of course there would have to be for the life to survive. I had heard somewhere that there were no oceans on Ceres, but I don’t now know how true that was. It’s
possible of course the information was right and that there are no actual oceans, but a number of extremely large lakes and lagoons. The body stretching before me would attest to this theory, and I all at once agree with Winter that we shouldn’t try to work our way around it.

  I would not like to estimate the length of the lake, although I can’t see its end when I look to either side. Across from us I can see the jungle rising in the distance, but the mild fog upon the lake blurs the images to almost obscurity. It’s as though the trees are beckoning like some dark will-o’-the-wisp, enticing us out to our doom. The water itself appears muddy, but not in a polluted way. Without human beings Ceres has to be the most unspoiled body of life in the entire solar system. I don’t know much about lakes and can’t say whether the water will become clearer the farther we move out into it; but it stands to reason that it would, with deeper water and less contact with the mud.

  Of course, none of us has any idea what might be lurking within this lake, and I can’t believe it would only contain herbivores. I must admit I didn’t research any water-based prehistoric creatures prior to coming down to Ceres, and it’s an oversight I’m beginning to regret already.

  Under instruction, we set to forming the raft. It’s an exercise all soldiers have to go through when you’re part of a unit like ours. Basic raft-building is a matter of selecting the right wood, cutting it down, forming beams and binding them together. But we’ve never been a unit to do anything by the basics, and we have no idea what might be in that lake. None of us want our lives to be placed in the hands of a few pieces of wood, no matter how sturdy.

  The vessel we’re constructing then may take a little longer, but it’ll stand a much better chance of getting us across. It will be larger than the basic raft, with barriers upon the edges and a defensible central pillar in which we can hide and be able to mount a gun or two in order to fight back. It’s ambitious, and something none of us has likely attempted before, but it should only take a couple of extra hours. We will no doubt be exhausted come the end, but it will be worth it if it saves our lives.