Dragonstar Destiny (4 page)

Linden fired again, wildly, running at an opposite angle in hopes of distracting the allosaur, but his shot missed.

However, the explosion did bring Alexandra to her senses. Her training had her gun in her hand instantly, and she fired two blasts into the dinosaur before trying to run away from the thing.

But it was too late.

The allosaur took an incredible leap into the air. It landed just meters from her, and dipped down with one of its heads, even as another rifle shot from Linden slammed into its larger tail.

Alexandra screamed as she saw the thing’s jaws close down on her.

There was a loud snap as teeth crushed bones and human blood gushed from the allosaur’s mouth.

“No!” cried Timothy Linden,

He fired the last of his ammo into the beast’s neck, still in shock over what he’d witnessed. The death of his lover ... the end of his companion ... It was too much to take.

The allosaur jerked about with his new sting of pain, and its pair of heads seemed to have a single mind. A severed arm and a hank of blond hair hung from one set of jaws; the other set snapped in Linden’s direction.

He threw down his rifle and pulled out his handgun. The allosaur was already advancing as he fired at one of the beast’s heads, but only grazed the skull.

The allosaur charged on toward him.

Desperately Timothy Linden ran for the cover of the rocks. On fire with adrenaline, he did not even think this was where the radiation emanated. He became a soldier, retreating for survival.

The rocks formed a crevice and instinctively Linden ran for this cover. The allosaur snarled as it bore down upon him. Linden took a moment to fire into one of its eyes, rupturing it. The allosaur roared with pain, halting for a moment and digging with a claw as though to pluck the bullet from its extra head.

Linden seized the opportunity, to retreat farther into the crevice, into the shadows, back-first, watching the great wounded beast that wished to kill him. Blood trickled from the ruined eye as the allosaur jumped after him, just able to squeeze its large body into the crevice.

Again, Linden fired into the wounded head, and didn’t wait to see what damage he’d done. He moved back farther into the dimness, sensing an emptiness.

The cry of the allosaur echoed into the darkness behind him.

A cave!

It was some sort of small cave—protection enough, surely, from this aberration. Linden ducked into the small opening, moved back into darkness, away from the allosaur,

The creature knew he was there, no doubt about that. It could smell him still. But there was no way now it could get at him. All to the good ... at least for the time being.

Linden leaned against a cool wall and rested, letting the reality of his situation sink in. The place was curiously dry for a cave, and Linden sensed it went farther back, which meant there might be another exit. He could wait here for a while—he knew that the beast wouldn’t linger long at the entrance—or he could try another way out.

The former method seemed the safest. But then, as he sat there, his grief for Alexandra began to build to a point past bearing. No, he thought. Better to keep moving.

Besides, this cave virtually invited exploration—and he was here, after all, to discover the source of the radiation. Too bad he didn’t have the necessary gear ... but he did have a small flashlight on his belt.

He unclipped it and turned it on.

The small cone of light played over moistly gleaming rock , over stalactites and stalagmites in the distance, over a narrow path that dived down into further darkness like a gullet into the ground.

The pained roar which echoed through the narrow cave reminded him that a pair of gullets waited for him outside.

He decided to use this opportunity to explore.

After checking to make sure all of him was in order, and he didn’t have any wounds he was unaware of, he did just that, cautiously moving down the steady incline. He was quite aware there might be other creatures down here—but this was far better than sitting and listening to the growls of the thing that had killed Alexandra. wrapped up in his grief and fear. Besides, he was here to explore, to discover the nature of the radiation. He didn’t have the equipment, but he did have his own superior observational abilities and intelligence. That would do for now.

That beast, thought Linden as he carefully navigated his way down the incline. That beast was quite remarkable. They’d seen nothing like it ... Was it an older mutation ... was it
born
that way? Or was it like the others—had it been a normal allosaurus affected by the changes in the
Dragonstar’s
interior so that it grew new limbs, grew that extra head? God knew that
something
was going on ... something, for example, that had rendered a whole portion of the saurian populace into bloodthirsty savages who had killed and eaten that science fiction writer.

If he could be the one to discover this secret of the
Dragonstar
... If he alone knew what was going on in the depths of the machinery that ringed this cylindrical ancient world, then that secret might help him get back to Earth. And that secret might be used for the benefit of the Third World Confederation.

All these thoughts buzzed in his head as he descended, working hard to keep from thinking about Alexandra in those awful jaws.

Then, below him, he heard a buzzing sound.

It was more a subliminal bass hum than a buzz, actually ... and Linden could feel it in his feet, beginning to travel up his legs like an attenuated shiver.

Oh yes ... by God, there was something down here.

It gave him a spooky feeling ..
.
a feeling of the numinous. If he left everything up to his natural instincts, he knew he would turn tail, go back up to the mouth of this tunnel, and just wait until the two-headed allosaur was gone. But Timothy Linden had above all a strong training and a strong sense of duty ... to say nothing of his natural scientific curiosity.

So after only a short pause to strengthen his resolve, he continued downward.

The walls at this point began to widen, and the stalagmites and stalactites on the floors and the ceilings began to disappear, creating more the resemblance of an esophagus.

And then, Linden no longer needed his small flashlight. Faintly at first, and then more strongly as he descended, the walls began to glow.

He switched off his light as the tunnel angled abruptly and he walked into greater luminescence.

He realized then that the tunnel was no longer of rock.

It was of metal. A dull grey metal that at first could easily be mistaken for stone, but metal nonetheless. The light emanated from strips in the walls and it shone softly, perhaps even gloomily.

This continued on for some meters. Then, up ahead, it steeply angled down. Linden progressed cautiously, unable to make out what lay ahead because of all the angling and uniformity.

Then suddenly the floor slipped from underneath him. With a yelp, he fell and began to slide down an abruptly steeper angle, feet-first.

It seemed as if he slid for only a short time, but he wasn’t sure, he was so involved in trying to stop himself.

The chute dumped him all asprawl in a small round chamber.

It was the end of the tunnel. There seemed to be no other way out. The walls around him were curved and shiny, almost of a translucent glassy nature now.

He stood, and just as he began to despair from the thought of dying down here of thirst and hunger, unable to clamber back up that chute, the walls began to change.

And then Timothy Linden began to scream.

LOOKING OFF
to his left, Mishima Takamura took a moment to appreciate the way the terrain of the Mesozoic Preserve in the distance faded away, misting into muted, pastel colors. Like the work of a Kyoto artist, nutshell-browns and minted greens dappled with watercolor oranges and grays. But instead offending at the horizon, it surged upward, curving in upon itself and rising skyward until it hung suspended over his head, sixty-five klicks distant.

Inside the closed world of the
Dragonstar,
there was no such thing as a horizon.

Like time in a bottle, a piece of the Earth’s history had been locked away within the immense cylindrical vessel. Mishima looked out upon a perfect reproduction of the Mesozoic Era.

Takamura maneuvered a four-man omni terrain vehicle down a rocky hillside, toward an artificially created stream. Seated in the back seat was a muscular black man—James Barkham, an IASA small-craft pilot, who held an HK-99 heavy assault rifle at the ready, scanning the nearby foliage for any unwelcome predators. In the front passenger seat sat Rebecca Thalberg, monitoring readouts on a portable scanning device.

Becky was the most attractive biomedical specialist Mishima had ever seen. Long, curly hair, shining blue-black like a raven’s hood, and naturally thick lashes accenting her dark almond-eyes, Smiles came easily to her full lips, and her wit gleamed sharp and bright. Mishima found her totally captivating, and he wished that she would eventually notice how he felt.

Sure, it looked like he might be able to have something going with Kate Ennis, the holo-journalist from NBC, but there was something about Becky Thalberg which made her special. Mishima couldn’t pin it down, but it might have been her mental
toughness,
her ability to survive under some of the worst conditions any of them had so far endured. Not that she was not a gentle person, though. Rather, Becky possessed a will, a
spirit,
that was seemingly unbreakable. Whatever the world wanted to throw at her, she always appeared ready to catch it and throw it back with equal force. Mishima liked that quality in people, and when combined with a woman so sensuously attractive, it made Becky irresistible.

“Something up ahead,” she said, not looking up from the screen of the scanner.

“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” asked Barkham. He wiped some sweat from his shining black forehead with his sleeve.

“Animal. Looks like a carnivore from the size of it. Moving pretty fast, too. Coming this way.”

“You want to put up the dome?” asked Mishima. He had cleared the rocky slope and was moving along an alluvial plain toward a crisply running stream. The plan had been to follow it toward its source in the hull, or at least discover how its fluid, dynamics had been constructed.

“No, not yet,” said Barkham. “We’re out in the open, so it can’t surprise us. Where is he now, Becky?”

“Starboard side, less than a hundred meters into those trees. He’s slowing up. Maybe he’s picked up our scent and he’s trying to recognize it.”

Mishima slowed the OTV and peered into the copse of cycads and ginkgoes off to the right. He had very little experience roaming about in the Mesozoic Preserve, and he had a great fear of the carnosaurs. Riding about with the protective dome up seemed foolish to him. He wondered if Barkham was like a lot of guys who only wanted a chance to pull off the macho deal of bagging a dinosaur. The idea of killing living creatures just for “sport” or, worse, to prove one’s self-worth, was abhorrent to Mishima. If there was a predator out there, he would just as soon have the dome up.

“Looks like he’s veering off a bit,” said Becky. “Still coming this way, but up ahead of us.”

Just then, there was a burst of color and sound breaking free of the lush greens of the forest to the right. Looking that way, Mishima watched a yellow-and-brown-speckled gorgosaurus wade into the clearing. Its snout was smeared with the dark red crust of drying blood, and it had apparently just finished feeding. Less than four meters tall, the dinosaur was hunched over, its head thrust forward while it balanced powerful hind legs by keeping its thick tail rigid and parallel to the ground. Mishima stopped the OTV and watched the beast hop-skip past them, less than thirty meters distant, and hunker down by the stream bank.

Plunging its snout into the water, it slurped water noisily and scrubbed at its blood-crusty jaws with its small foreclaws. It ignored completely the humans who watched warily.

“Just washing up after a meal,” said Becky. “Its mom taught it well, I guess.”

“Just keep an eye on it, anyway,” said Barkham.

“God, that thing’s hideous!” Mishima couldn’t help feeling the fear and revulsion well up in him.

Becky grinned. “Oh, they’re not so bad once you get used to them. Dr. Lindstrom says they’re fairly predictable.”

“Right,” said Barkham. “Eat. Sleep. Eat. Sleep. That’s pretty easy to predict, don’t you think?”

Becky giggled softly. “Oh, there’s more to them than that, Jim ...”

The gorgosaur finished his drinking and washing routine, and pushed away from the bank still hunched over. It looked awkward leaning on its foreclaws as it lashed out with its heavy tail, using it as a counterweight. The practiced movement seesawed the creature’s head upward, and it attained its normal bipedal stance. The entire maneuver had occurred in an eye-blink. Mishima found the carnosaurs to be surprisingly agile, and as he stared at the gorgosaurus, he could not keep from thinking of what it would be like to be snapped up in its terrible jaws ...

The dinosaur stood upright now, tilting its head so that it could view the OTV more squarely. Its tongue slithered in and out as though tasting the scented air.

“Watch it now,” said Mishima.

“I got him covered,” said Barkham, apparently in no great hurry to rip the beast’s hide with a banana clip of slugs.

“If he’s just finished eating, we don’t have anything to worry about,” said Becky. “The only thing he probably wants right now is a place where he can flop down and go to sleep.”

“You’re sure about that?” Mishima had pulled the OTV to a full stop. It was probably a good idea to wait until the meat-eater made his next move.

“Don’t forget that Ian and I spent a couple of weeks running away from these boys,” said Becky. ”We learned a few things that kept us alive.”

You know ... every time I think about what you’ve been through, I am amazed,” said Mishima.

“I can dig it,” said Barkham. “I was only out here a couple
days,
and I was freaked by it. You’re one tough cookie, Dr. Thalberg.”

Just then the gorgosaur turned his head away from the OTV, apparently not finding it very intriguing. Taking ponderously slow steps, it ambled away from the river and plopped down under a shady stand of cycads within twenty meters of the stream bank. The beast rolled over on its back and leaned against the base of the largest tree trunk. Its hooded eyes closed to slits and it was quickly torpid.

“We can get past him,” said Becky. “He’s going to be out for a while—getting in some serious digestion.”

Mishima looked at the dinosaur warily. It looked like a miniature tyrannosaurus, a very dangerous-looking creature. To roll the OTV so closely past its sleeping hulk seemed crazy, foolhardy. If it awakened, it could easily pounce on the vehicle before Mishima could escape. The thing’s head seemed to be more than half jaws and teeth. Just looking at it made chills race up Mishima’s spine.

“I’ll keep it right in my sights, man,” said Barkham. “If it makes the slightest move, it’s done for ...”

“Let’s go, Dr. Takamura,” said Becky. “It’ll be okay.”

Mishima swallowed with some difficulty and keyed in the OTV’s forward engines. The low-mass turbines whined and the vehicle surged forward across the flat terrain. As they drew even with the torpid beast, its left eyelid fluttered and its nostrils flared instinctively, but it did not move. Mishima keyed in the highest velocity available and the OTV zipped away from the gorgosaurus. As they moved off he felt the twisted fist in his gut begin to relax.

“Okay,” said Becky. “We’re clear ... Just keep an eye out for anything else.”

“Yeah,” said Barkham as he wiped his high forehead again. “This water probably draws all kinds of things down for a drink.”

“We have to follow the stream,” said. Mishima, “The scanners indicate that the water is forced through bulkheads between the inner and outer hulls. There
must
be pumps and reservoirs making the water run. That means there has to be
access
to
that machinery.”

“Don’t bet on it,” said Becky, “There’s no real way to figure on the logic of the aliens who built this ship. You should know that, Doctor.”

She was right, Mishima knew. But his strongest suit was probably his unquenchable optimism, and he had vowed that he would never let the engineering mysteries of the
Dragonstar
defeat him.

“I’m not betting on anything, Rebecca,” he said after a pause. “I’m just playing out a hunch. After all, we don’t have any alternatives.”

“He’s right,” said Barkham. “There’s no way we can break through the temple hatches to the control-section.”

“I just keep thinking that those hatches were sealed for a very good reason,” said Becky. “That maybe we shouldn’t mess around with something we don’t know anything about.”

“Of
course
they were sealed for a reason,” said Mishima. “To keep us out! And that tells me the alien intelligence which is controlling this ship feels we might be able to alter its flight! That’s why they are trying to keep us out of there. And that’s why I want to get back in!”

“But we don’t know anything about faster-than-light travel,” said Becky.

“There are theories ... ” said Mishima. He glanced at her for all instant, then back to the ever-changing landscape ahead. As the stream wound its way through a marshy strip and shining mud flats, he guided the OTV along its banks relentlessly,

“Theories? This ship isn’t running on any of your theories! Even if we
could
figure out where this ship is taking us, do you really believe you could alter its course and navigate us back to Earth?” Becky shook her head at the thought of such an improbable outcome.

Mishima did not immediately reply, pretending to be studying the proper course ahead. As much as he would have loathed to admit it, Becky was on target. After several months of hands-on study and tinkering inside the alien control-section, Takamura and his team of engineers and physicists had been able to learn very little about alien technology, Under the harsh light of rational thought, Mishima’s plan of somehow sneaking back into the control-section and jury-rigging the hyperspace navigational system with some chewing gum and bailing wire seemed pretty absurd! Maybe Becky was right: perhaps Mishima was just bullshitting himself ...

Then why was he pursuing his hunch, his Rocky-Jones-and-the-Rocket-Rangers plan, so doggedly? The question had occurred to him more than once, and he probably didn’t want to answer it truthfully. But the motivation was actually quite simple—it gave him something to
do!

The thought of being trapped inside the giant ship, hurtling through the absolute nothingness of tau-space, and
having no control,
was an especially scary one for Takamura. He had lived his life by keeping things orderly and
very
controlled, everything planned in advance, everything functioning within well-defined parameters.

That all went down the tubes when the
Dragonstar
sealed itself up and kidnapped everybody to hell-knows-where.

“What’s that up ahead?” asked Barkham, pointing over Mishima’s shoulder.

He had been driving in that semiconscious state where your eyes are seeing and your brain is responding but your
thoughts
are off in a faraway land. Barkham’s voice brought him all back to the present situation and he looked up to see a large outcropping of rocks which seemed to jut straight up out of the earth. The stream flowed into the rocks through a dark aperture which took on the familiar configuration of a cave mouth as the OTV moved even closer to it.

“Looks like this might be something interesting,” said Mishima. In front of the entrance to the cave, spread out across a sere plain to the right to the stream, milled a small herd of triceratopses. Several of the rhino-like beasts looked up from their grazing as the OTV rumbled into their territory. Two of the larger males started to lumber up for a closer look.

“Better put up the dome,” said Becky. “They probably won’t hurt us, but they’re going to sniff us out a little.”

Mishima keyed in the smoked Plexiglas dome which eased up out of the body and sealed them inside the cabin. Mishima slowed the vehicle down until it matched the heavy gait of the closest ceratopsian, which was now abreast of the OTV and giving it a cursory once-over. Several times it tilted its bony, flanged head and nudged the side of the vehicle, more out of curiosity than hostility. All the same, Mishima felt uneasy with the armored dinosaur keeping pace with them as they closed in on the cave entrance.