Bones of the Earth (16 page)

Fear clutched his heart. It was a trap! Molly must have fed him her information in order to force his hand. He saw that now. He'd believed her, and made his move prematurely, and was caught. In a second, Griffin's uniformed goons would come pouring into the room to seize him.

“Um … We're ready if you are,” Leyster said.

He placed a hand on the switch, knowing how useless the gesture was.

He pulled.

They all went away.

For a long, silent minute, Robo Boy waited. He hoped it was the old Irishman who would come for him. He'd heard the young version was pretty brutal. They said he liked to break bones.

But nobody came into the room. The change in the roster hadn't been a trap, after all, but only the gnostic and unfathomable workings of Griffin's bureaucracy.

Which meant—he could hardly believe it—that he had succeeded! He might not have bagged Salley, but he'd gotten Leyster and eleven others, and that would have consequences back home in the present. They couldn't hush this one up! There would be hearings. With luck, they would expose time travel and Darwinism for the diabolically-inspired lies they were.

He had struck a blow for God. Now they could arrest him, torture him, kill him, and it wouldn't matter. He would die a martyr. Heaven, which would never have received him in his old, sinful state, was open to him at last. He was finally, truly, saved.

He leaned back against the wall, breathing shallowly.

Not long after, he heard a wolf-whistle outside.

“Oh, baby!” somebody cried happily. “I think I'm in love.”

“You wish.”

Salley swept into the room. She wore a red silk evening gown, and her hair was piled up elaborately on her head. Silver raptor teeth dangled from her earlobes.

“I have to be in Xanadu Station for a fund-raiser,” she said, handing him a transit form. “Fire up your machine and send me forward.”

His heart was still pounding like a jackhammer. But Robo Boy put on his pig face and went over the form slowly and carefully. Everything was in order.

Best to play it bland.

“I thought you were supposed to be on the Baseline Project expedition,” he said.

“Yeah, well, plans change,” Salley said carelessly. She stepped into the cage. The gate slammed shut. Automatically, he double-checked the authorization codes, did a visual confirmation of Salley's identity, and pulled the switch.

She was gone.

Thirty seconds later, Salley walked into the room again. She was a good twenty years older than the Gertrude Salley who had just left, and there was a small, moon-shaped scar by the corner of her mouth.

“Hey!” he said, genuinely shocked. “You can't be here! That's against the rules!”

“And you care about the rules one fuck of a lot, don't you, Robo Boy?” the woman said. Her eyes burned with wrath.

He shrank away from her. He couldn't help it.

“Two decades ago, when I was young and innocent, I was made co-head of the first Baseline Project expedition. It was a simple but important gig. Starting at a hundred thousand years before the end of the Cretaceous, we were going to perform a series of mapping, recording, and sampling functions. Atmosphere, mean global temperature, gene specimens from select species. Then we'd hop back a million years and do it all over again. Seven weeks to do the Maastrichtian. Another five to cover the top third of the Campanian. Am I boring you, Robo Boy?”

“I—I know all this.”

“I'm sure you do. But something happened. There was an explosive device among our supplies. People died. Does any of this sound familiar to you?”

“I don't know what you're talking about!”

She curled her lip scornfully. “Yeah, I didn't
think
you did.”

Then she spun on her heel and strode to the time funnel. She stepped into the cage, and pulled the door shut.

“You're not going anywhere! I'm calling Griffin. You're in big trouble now.”

The woman took a plastic card from her purse and touched it to an inside wall. “Good-bye, Robo Boy,” she said, “you little shit.”

The car went away, and with it Salley.

The very first thing he had been told, when they trained him to operate the time funnel, was that under no conditions could the car be launched without his pulling the switch. It had never occurred to him that they would lie about such a thing.

Evidently they had.

For a long time he stood perfectly motionless. Thinking.

But finding no answers.

The important thing was to remain scientific. He must assume the language, behavior, and even the thought-patterns of his enemy. He must never let down his guard. He was a warrior. He was Thrice-Born. He was being tested.

His name was Raymond Bois. The girls all called him Robo Boy. He never could figure out why.

8

Hell Creek

Lost Expedition Foothills: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Senonian epoch. Maastrichtian age. 65 My B.C.E.

They tumbled out of a hole in time into a bright, blue-skyed day, whooping with excitement. The team had been deposited on a gentle rise above a small, meandering stream, which the students inevitably decided to name Hell Creek, after the famous fossil-bearing formation.

Leyster consulted with Lydia Pell, and they agreed to let the group skylark for a bit before putting them to work. It was their first time in the Maastrichtian, after all. It was their first time in the field and on their own. They needed to gape and stare, to point wonderingly at the distant herd of titanosaurs that was browsing its way across the valley, to breathe deep of the fragrant air and do handstands and peer under logs and flip over rocks just to see what was underneath.

Then, when Pell judged they'd let off enough steam, Leyster said, “Okay, let's get these things unpacked and sorted out.” He waved an arm toward a stony bluff above Hell Creek. “We'll pitch our tents over there.”

Everybody leapt to work. Jamal pulled the Ptolemy rocket launcher from the first pallet. “When do we send up the surveyor satellite?”

“No time like the present,” Leyster said. He ran a thumb down his mental list of who'd had what training. “You and Lai-tsz take it off a safe distance. Nils can carry the tripod.”

“Who gets to push the button?”

Leyster grinned. “Paper-scissors-rock works best for that kind of decision.”

Twenty minutes later, the surveyor went up. Everybody stopped whatever they were doing to gawk as the dazzling pinprick of light curved up into the sky, tracing a thin line of smoke behind it.

“You have just launched the missile,” a priggish voice said, a little too loudly. “Its electromagnetic signature has been picked up by a detector wired to this recording.”

Leyster turned, puzzled. “What?”

“In sixty seconds, an explosive charge will destroy the time beacon. Please stand clear so you won't be hurt.”

It was Robo Boy's voice.

The surreal intrusion of someone he knew to be millions of years distant bewildered Leyster for an instant. He watched, uncomprehending, as Lydia Pell tore at one of the pallets like a terrier, wildly throwing packs and boxes aside. She emerged with the time beacon.

“You have fifty seconds.”

The voice came from the beacon itself.

There was a Swiss Army knife in Pell's hand. She shoved a blade into the seam of the beacon's casing and twisted, breaking it open.

“You have forty seconds.”

The top half of the beacon went flying away. She reached down into the bottom half.

To Leyster's eye, there was nothing to differentiate one part of the beacon's innards from another. It was all chips, transistors, and multicolored wiring. But Lydia Pell clearly knew what she was looking for. She'd been an officer in the U.S. Navy before going for her postgraduate degree, he knew. Hadn't somebody said something about her having been in demolitions?

“You have thirty seconds. Please take this warning seriously.”

She wrenched something free. The bottom half of the beacon fell to the ground.

Lydia Pell turned away from the others, and shouted over her shoulder, “Everybody get down! I'm going to throw—”

“You have twenty seconds,” the device said.

Then it went off in her hands.

Gillian was saying something, but Leyster couldn't tell what. His ears rang terribly from the explosion. He couldn't hear a thing.

He was the first to reach Lydia Pell's body.

The terrible thing was that she wasn't dead. Her face was gray and streaked with blood. One hand had been almost blown away, and the other was hanging by a shred of flesh. What remained of her blouse was darkening to crimson. But she wasn't dead.

Leyster whipped off his belt and wrapped it around Lydia's wrist, above the exposed bone. I'm going to have nightmares about this, he thought as he pulled it tight. I'll never be able to get these images out of my mind. To the far side of the body, Gillian was making a tourniquet for the other arm.

Small fragments of the bomb specked Lydia Pell's face. One larger shard had torn quite a gouge in her cheek. A little higher and she would have lost an eye. Daljit knelt by her head and, bending low, began daintily extracting the fragments with a pair of tweezers.

Keep calm, Leyster thought. There would be trauma. There might be concussion. There was always shock. Keep her warm. Elevate the feet. Check for other wounds. Don't panic.

It took a while to stop the bleeding. But they did. Then they cushioned her head, and elevated her feet. They cleaned and bandaged her wounds. They made up a cot, and eased her onto it. Twelve willing hands gently carried the cot into a tent.

By the time Leyster could hear again, there was nothing more to do for her.

A light drizzle was falling.

Leyster slogged uphill, following what he sincerely hoped was an abandoned dromaeosaur trail. Lai-tsz trudged along behind him. At first they had talked about the paucity of local fauna, and why, in the week since the titanosaurs had left, they had not seen any dinosaurs. Then, as Smoke Hollow fell behind them, and they were confident they would not be overheard, their talk turned to more serious matters.

“Can the time beacon be repaired?” Leyster asked.

“God only knows.”

“You're the only one here with any substantive knowledge of electronics.”

“Substantive! I've torn apart a few computers, patched together a couple of motherboards, hyper-configged a new device or two. There's a big distance between that and repairing something that was probably built a thousand years in the future. In our home future, I mean. Sometime after the Third Millennium.”

“So you're saying … what? Tell me you're not saying that you can't fix it.”

“I'm saying I don't know. I'll do my best. But Pell ripped the hell out of the innards, getting that bomb out. Even if I
can
fix it, it'll take time.”

“Listen,” Leyster said. “If anybody asks, tell them you've got a handle on it. Say it'll take you a week or two, a month at the outside. I don't want the crew fixating on the possibility that we might be stranded here permanently. Morale is bad enough as it is.”

Lai-tsz made a short, sharp sound midway between a laugh and a snort. “I'll say! Everybody's at each other's throats. Nils and Chuck almost got into a fight this morning over whose turn it was to take the dishes down to the stream and wash them. Gillian isn't speaking to Tamara, Matthew isn't speaking to Katie, and Daljit isn't speaking to anyone. And of course Jamal is being a real jerk. About the only stable ones left are thee and me, and sometimes I have my doubts about thee.” She waited a beat, then said in a small voice, “Hey, come on. That was a joke. You were supposed to laugh.”

“It's Lydia Pell,” Leyster said seriously. “If only she wouldn't make those noises. If only she wouldn't scream. She's using up our morphine fast, and that's not good either. Sometimes I think it would be best for all of us if she just …”

They walked on in silence for a while. Then Lai-tsz said, “So tell me something, Richard.
Are
we stranded here for the rest of our lives?”

Leyster blew out his cheeks, said, “Well, unless you can fix that beacon or somebody comes to rescue us … yeah, we are.”

“What are the chances of somebody coming to rescue us?”

“If they were going to rescue us, they'd've done it already. They would've popped up while the smoke was still in the air. Lydia Pell would be in a hospital now, with one hand reattached, and doctors working to grow a new hand to replace the other.”

“Ah,” Lai-tsz said, and nothing more.

They came to a branching in the path.

“This is where we part ways,” Lai-tsz said. “There's a gingko grove to the east that's shedding fruit. I'll have a knapsack full of pits when you get back. You can help me shell them.”

“Watch out for dromies.”

“Hey, no problem. You should see me climb a tree.”

“Um … dromaeosaurs can climb too. Rather well, in fact.”

She dismissed his worries with a wave of her hand. “Say hello to the Purgatory shrews for me.”

Leyster distractedly climbed the rest of the way up to Barren Ridge alone. He'd brought another day's worth of samples to place before the
Purgatorius
colony there. He called them Purgatory shrews, though of course they weren't shrews but ancestral primates. Still, they sure looked like shrews. And considering their insectivorous teeth, they had surprisingly catholic tastes. They liked almost everything he offered them.

He made the long trek from Smoke Hollow to Barren Ridge every other day to set out a new selection of roots, barks, and funguses at the foot of their favored tree. Purgatory shrews had the closest thing to human metabolisms of anything in the Mesozoic, and he figured that anything they ate would be safe enough for him to try.