Mammoth Dawn (4 page)

Below them in the valley, under the light of the waxing moon and a billion stars in transparent Montana air, the herd of elephant-mammoth hybrids settled down for the night. Many of the big dark shapes still moved about restlessly. While some slept like mounds of dirt near the watering hole, others paced around, munching on sedge grass. Eerily, some of the mammoths on the fringe looked as if they were keeping watch.

Cassie busied herself, happy to be out camping, much more comfortable here within sight of her mammoths than up around the administration buildings. She never tried to understand the protesters, preferring to ignore them by staying far from the gate. “People always find something to complain about, especially when somebody else is successful,” she had said once.

The young woman had outdone herself with the fire, the bedrolls, the childishly simple dinner of hot dogs roasted on twigs over the flames, a speckled blue-enamel coffee pot hung over the coals. All they needed was marshmallows (and Alex wouldn’t have been surprised if Cassie had them stashed in her saddlebags). A perfect evening, in every detail.

Helyx could have provided the most sophisticated camp equipment, thermal chargers for foodpacks, heated sleeping bags and damp-resistant tents. Alex could have assigned workers to set up comfort-weave tents, groom the clearing, erect tables, string lanterns, even prepare a gourmet meal.

But this was better, much better.

“When do we start singing ‘Kum-bay-ya’?” Alex said with a grin to his wife.

“I have a strummerpack,” she answered, calling his bluff.

Alex’s implanted pager tingled, and he recognized the source. He reached up, touching a contact point. “What’s the trouble, Ralph?”

Helen frowned at him, mouthed the words,
I thought you turned that off?

“Can’t figure, Boss.” His usually casual voice now sounded pinched with concern. “We’re getting pinged by microwaves. Somebody’s interrogating a passive receiver. Must be located somewhere around the ranch buildings.”

“Not one of ours?”

“No chance. Just a simple incoming pulse from some airplane, flying pretty high. Don’t think anybody could get much from that, maybe just a location marker. The pulse could be hitting some tiny receiver that shoots it back with a li’l information attached, I’d guess. Not powerful enough for us to track down where it is, though.”

“Probably some new gear brought in by the demonstrators at the gate,” Alex suggested. He didn’t need a new technical puzzle to ruin his jealously planned evening.

“Could be, Boss. Those Evo types have plenty to spend on new toys.”

“Keep on it.” He disengaged the pagerlink, saw both Cassie and Helen staring at him with concern. He made a placating gesture but didn’t volunteer any details. The ranch hand would assume it was yet another corporate emergency such as had canceled their first three outings; Helen, though, could read his expression much better. Her molasses-brown eyes trapped him again, looking like bottomless wells in the smoky campfire shadows.

He leaned against Helen as they both stared into the throbbing orange and yellow embers. Their clothes smelled of sweat mixed with the musk of mammoths. Alex preferred this sharp but resonant aroma to the infrequent, expensive perfumes his wife felt obligated to wear at ecological fundraisers—like the recent one she’d skipped in Miami.

Under the stars, Alex helped with the bedding down chores, glad for the chance to get his hands dirty rather than just pound on a computer keyboard all day. It felt good, and safe, to be out here, “just like a real person.”

The crackling wood made him think of the prehistoric hunters, Cro-Magnon warriors who had tracked herds like this using spears and pits and cliffs to kill the giant animals for food, fur, and ivory.

Like the restored bison on the Great Plains, Helen’s dream-experiment might turn out to be so wildly successful that large numbers of these once-extinct creatures could roam the open Montana range. They might wander north into Saskatchewan and Alberta, heading up toward the subarctic regions for which their huge bodies were designed.

He had been so focused on working one generation after another, converging toward a full-blood woolly mammoth, that he had not let his mind wander far into future possibilities.

“Maybe one day we’ll have a large herd of mammoths that breed true and reproduce in the wild.” He ran fingers over Helen’s hair, recalling Kinsman’s concern (one of his few legitimate ones) about the impact a sizable group of such huge grazers would have on the landscape and environment. What if they had to thin the herd? “Can you imagine if we had enough of them that we could even sponsor a good old-fashioned mammoth hunt?”

Cassie, very protective of the animals, glared across the fire at him. “What! Use guns on my mammoths?” She had been working here only two years, but the mammoths were
hers
. “Not unless you play fair.” The girl’s firm lips curled into a devilish grin on her freckled face. “Dress your big-game hunters in furs, then send them out with stone axes and sapling spears. Pleistocene rules. I don’t think you’d get many takers.”

“Not me,” Helen said. “Not for all the testosterone in the world.”

Alex returned a noncommittal smile. He did not argue, but he knew both women were wrong. Over the years, he had encountered any number of too rich, too bored, dot-com millionaires or genetics patent holders—people who had delusions of immortality and an overblown sense of necessary machismo.

Even with Pleistocene rules, Alex knew he could find plenty of takers.…

O O O

As he bedded down next to Helen, the moon continued to rise, spilling silver light. Even here, as isolated as one could be in the continental U.S., he felt as if he were under a spotlight. He couldn’t sleep, and he knew Helen was awake and thinking beside him.

Below, the mammoths sounded restless. Snuffles and loud snorts rippled through the big animals. Most of them seemed awake. On the other side of the fire, young Cassie sat alone, her knees drawn up to her chin as she stared down into the valley, reflecting the animals’ uneasiness.

Alex couldn’t imagine what possible threats or predators could worry the gigantic prehistoric beasts this deep within ranch property. “Are they like this every night?”

Impishly, Cassie raised her eyebrows. “I
do
have quarters of my own back in the complex, Dr. Pierce. Sleeping outdoors is a treat for me, too.”

A bright meteor streaked overhead, low and horizontal, like a rocket on the Fourth of July. It came over the line of trees on the ridge, flying hot, traveling with a speed and deadly accuracy that surpassed any shooting star.

Make a wish …

Helen was already on her feet, leaping out of the blankets on the damp ground. “It’s heading toward the lab complex!”

The trail of fire faded into orange against midnight blue, and the incandescent arrow struck the valley behind them with a bright flash. The main Helyx compound. A muffled
whump
.

As Alex lurched to his feet, the implanted pager tingled again. “Boss, we’ve been hit down here. Somebody sent in a mini-cruise, I’d say. Hit the pines close to the Hospital … still trying to assess the damage.”

“A mini-what?” Alex subvocalized, and his words went back to Ralph.

“Backpack-sized cruise missile, Boss. Short-range, with a nose full of high explosive. A man can carry one a fair way, then launch it from a rack.”

Helen was already racing for her horse while Alex paused to get an update. “I’m going there!” she shouted and swung herself up bareback. “Short Stuff and Middle Man are still in the corral.”

“Wait! You can’t do anything—”

“Just work things out with Ralph,” she called over her shoulder, then raced her horse down the four-wheel-drive road and disappeared into the shadowed trees. He had never seen her ride like that before.

Reacting on instinct, Cassie was at their supply packs. She withdrew the two shotguns she had carried with them, ostensibly for protection against coyotes or bears.

Alex didn’t need to think hard about who might have done such a thing. “Kinsman was a decoy,” he said to Ralph. “Him and his supposedly reasonable discussion, he was just a plant to get inside. But how could they target the hospital in the dark and from so far away?”

“I’m willing to bet they targeted this place with those microwave echoes I keep hearing. If Kinsman planted some sort of passive echo locator—”

“His pen! Damn, I didn’t even think! He left it on purpose. They could have targeted from that. I’m packing up Cassie, and we’ll be right down there.”

Before Alex could switch off, the Security chief said, “Wait—that’s gunfire. Jesus, those bastards are coming in from the South Gate!” Ralph’s voice strayed for a moment as he barked orders to a security crew, who scrambled in response. “The Hospital’s in flames, Boss. We’re sending people in to try and rescue the animals.”

“Keep yourself safe,” Alex barked. “Helen’s already on her way.” He thought of the two adult mammophants in the corral, the wonderful dodos and moas, all the exotic and frightening animals he kept in the solid-wall pens in the back of the Hospital. And all of his people. He prayed his wife would be safer down there with Ralph and his crew than up here. “We’re coming in—”

Another thin patter of popgun shots rang out. Alex thought he was getting Ralph’s background noise until Cassie cried, “Just below us!”

“Ralph, we’ve got intruders up here, too.”

“Clement Valley! Jesus, do you want me to send a—”

“You just do your job there. And watch Helen’s back, dammit.”

He shut down his link and studied the shadowy trees. Another few shots, yes, nearby. One of the mammoths bellowed in surprise, or perhaps pain, sounding like a squeaky cannon.

“Hey!” Cassie tossed Alex one of the shotguns, and he caught it instinctively. The weapon felt hard and cold and strange in his hand. She looked at him with an anguished face. “Maybe that missile hitting the Hospital was just to get our forces away—so they could come up here and kill my mammoths.” She swung herself up onto her already frightened mare and bent low, snatching the tether rope. “I’m going down to the herd.”

The gunshots came faster as she rode hard down into the valley.

“Wait!” Alex called after her—pointlessly—then got his butt in gear.

He mounted his own gelding and followed her into the darkness. Here he was, the head of a gigantic international corporation—and his wife and a young girl had both jumped into action while he stood around and talked to himself.

The horses were already uneasy with the smell of the mammoths, and the pattering gunfire spooked his mount even more. He caught up to the young ranch hand as she tried to see down into the darkness. “You leave the mammoths alone!”

“Quiet!” he urged, fearing the shadowy attackers might target Cassie instead of the animals.

Sharp, flat shots from their left.

Alex saw dim shapes running, stalking closer, as if intimidated by coming so close to the prehistoric beasts. Simple rifles would have little effect on a woolly mammoth, he thought—just before another round of muffled percussive bangs.

A few seconds, then distant explosions came from the open valley floor.

“Grenade launchers.”

“You bastards!” Cassie screamed.

“Hush! They don’t know we’re up here.” He and the young ranch hand were still on a slope above the trees, a hundred meters from the open grassland. They urged their horses closer. It was quiet for a moment, a deathly stillness.

The mammoths churned about, grunting, drawing closer like covered wagons circling against a Comanche attack. Amazingly, acting on instinct, the bigger bulls formed outer ranks, clearly to protect the rest of the herd. The alpha male, Bullwinkle, with its huge tusks and russet fur, snorted and moved forward like a locomotive, looking for an enemy.

No sign of the shadowy figures, but the fringe forests offered plenty of cover.

Alex knew that Cassie’s first thought was for Majestica, the pregnant female about to give birth to the first pure mammoth. They rode toward her, and Alex prayed the beasts could tell the difference between friendly humans and deadly ones.

Abruptly, scarlet fireballs burst a hundred meters away … and another right on top of them. One of the wild grenades struck Majestica between the shoulders, and the impact knocked even the giant female battleship flat to the ground, her upper body cratered with ragged, flashburn wounds.

Cassie screamed. She threw herself off her horse and raced to the fallen pregnant female.

Alex waved his shotgun around, then took a few high potshots, hoping the retaliatory gunfire would at least stall the attackers, send them scrambling for cover. But it was a pitiful gesture at this range. None of the terrorists came out of the tree line.

Gunshots rang out and ineffectual bullets peppered the mammoth-elephant hybrids, sending them trumpeting into a frenzy. Some charged, stopped, trumpeted. But the big male Bullwinkle thundered into the night, toward the attackers hiding in the trees.

Alex dismounted and came up beside a determined but weeping Cassie. His heart wrenched, knowing they had all been betrayed. The young woman impatiently swiped tears from her eyes and got to work. “Damn, Dr. Pierce—I don’t have the equipment for this!”

Back in the forest, startled shouts turned to shrieks. Alex could well imagine the giant bull trampling the bastards into paste on the ground. Bullwinkle hooted, a powerful bellow that brought more shrill screams. A grenade burst near the beast, then the big mammoth was into the trees, smashing branches, splintering trunks, following the panicked outcries.

More screams. He did not think further about what Bullwinkle was doing. He could see only the pregnant mammoth’s blood shining dark and wet in the moonlight. “Don’t worry. I’ll help,” he said to Cassie. Corporate CEO bullshit, but it seemed to be what she needed to hear. He knelt beside her, trying to anticipate what the young woman was trying to do. She worked with utter concentration, adrenaline, and desperation, staving off panic.

As he tore off his shirt and wadded it up into a large pad—nowhere near enough, he saw, pressing it into the gaping wound—he heard a faint sound and looked around. Other mammoth hybrids bellowed, but the gunfire had halted for the moment. Bullwinkle’s work?