makers, whoever they are, they might have a million-plus-year-old civilization, given that they can move stars around, but the Hets aren’t anywhere near that advanced.”
“That’s right,” said Klicks, and then his face clouded. “Oh, shit, of course they left the dinosaurs alone until very recently. The Hets, the Hets died out, almost completely. It’s—” Klicks was shaking slightly. “It’s horrible. God, the destruction.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then staggered toward his crash couch and held onto it for support. “Brandy, you were right. The Martians are inherently violent. They seethe with the need to conquer.”
His breathing was growing ragged; his eyes were haunted, darting. “The original viral globs lived as parasites within different types of Martian animals. But eventually the viruses developed intelligence. They wanted to enslave creatures that had manipulatory appendages. In the Martian seas, there was a creature that looked kind of like a hand—five tubular extensions coming out of one side of a central disk. At the ends of each of their five finger-like tubes, the creatures had circles of extruded iron filaments controlled by sphincter muscles. They’d evolved these appendages to pop open a type of Martian shellfish, but the ancestral Hets enslaved the Hands and used the iron filaments as general manipulators.”
Klicks’s head was shaking back and forth, but he seemed unaware that he was doing it. “Eventually the Hands built spaceships for the Hets, ships that moved by polarizing gravity. The Hets visited Earth and the belt planet. On both, they found animal life that might indeed develop intelligence someday. The belt world was small enough for the Hets and their Hands to move around comfortably, but Earth was much too massive. A project was begun to—to
“These early Hets saw, hanging there in their southern sky, the rosette, the cluster of arranged suns—yes, it’s that old. They knew there were other creatures out there, somewhere. And they hated that fact—hated that there were minds that they couldn’t reach, couldn’t enslave. The Hets assumed that any intelligence would be as violent as their own, so they forced the Hands to build war machines, ready to meet the rosette-makers whom they felt were bound to come and try to conquer them.”
Klicks’s arms were trembling as he spoke. His voice had gone hoarse; sweat appeared on his brow.
“The Hands were small creatures, far too puny to accommodate enough viral material to constitute a very astute slaver mind. And the Hand children were far too small to contain any meaningful concentration of Het viruses and therefore couldn’t be controlled at all. At last, the Hand children turned the war machines their parents had been forced to build against the entire planet. The holocaust was incredible. It wiped out almost all life, including every last one of the Hands and most of the proto-Hets. Both Hand child and Hand adult preferred death to a life of enslavement.”
Klicks’s fists were clenching and unclenching like beating hearts. I went to the tap and got him a Dixie cup full of water. He downed it in one gulp. “Mars was left almost completely barren after that uprising,” he said. “Without animal vehicles, the viruses were scattered and lost their capacity for intelligence, although the memories of all this were still stored in their RNA. Earth was left unattended, the gravity-suppressor satellites still running.
“On Mars, something like forty million years—correction: eighty million Earth years—passed before the viral life re-evolved into intelligent creatures, the current Hets. But the Hands had done their job well: the only animal life left on Mars was microscopic.” He shuddered, his shoulders rising and falling with his ragged breath. “The Hets,” he continued, “developed a remarkable bioengineering technology. Viruses, of course, have the innate ability to substitute their genetic material for the native DNA in a cell. Well, the Hets took that a step further. They can selectively substitute nucleotide strings, manufacturing replacement genetic instructions and snipping and splicing at will. They used this ability to directly modify animal DNA. Still, it took them almost fifty million Earth years to evolve new hosts large enough to use as vehicles. But this time out, the Hets resolved to use only biological devices that had to be controlled mentally; never again would they use machines that might be seized by their slaves and used against them.
“At last, intelligence did develop in the natives of Tess.” He was so lost in the story that he wasn’t censoring himself anymore. “The Hets set out to enslave those creatures, too. They returned to Tess in their living spaceships and began a terrible war against the natives, a war that still rages on.”
Klicks was shaking from head to toe, like a man on an adrenaline high, rage coursing through his system. “God, Brandy, I feel like killing—something. Anything.
“Miles?”
He looked at me, a hint of calm returning to his face. “God, that felt good.” A pause. “I’m in control now, I think. Do me a favor: don’t ask me any more questions about the Hets. Even the memory of their hatred for life is enough to drive you out of your skull.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve—”
Something funny about the light levels from outside—
I started to turn—
The
A tail. A dinosaur tail. The part that had connected with the timeship was almost twice as high as a man. The tail was flattened from side to side, a giant tapering structure covered with wrinkled gray leather. It was still pulling back and back, until finally the creature it belonged to was fully visible.
A sauropod, a member of that giant quadrupedal group typified by what most people still called
Sauropods were rare in the Upper Cretaceous, and none had ever been found in Alberta—too wet for them, according to one school of thought. Still, at this time there was
The tail had finished pulling back and now was reversing its course, slicing through the air toward us, zooming in to dominate the view out the window—
The first impact clearly had been just a warm-up. Klicks and I went flying when the tail connected with full force. He landed in a heap by his crash couch; I ended up smashing into the washroom door panel. I tried to rise to my feet and looked over at Klicks, who was bracing himself against the fake wood-grain molding around the edges of the radio console. His eyes were closed as he listened to that inner voice once more. “They’re going to take our timeship one way or another,” he said.
Countdown: 0
In one era and out the other…
