8. Hell Creek
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.”
