Free Emperor Mollusk Versus the Sinister Brain by A. Lee Martinez Page B

in this case, I think they were triggered.” I pointed to a device, a small missile lodged in the side of the saucer. “That must be what shorted the force field. It’s probably equipped with some kind of signal generator that gets the pterodactyls frenzied. Clever. The sensor interference makes the small device almost undetectable, and once the field is down, the reptiles do the rest.”
    “Don’t tell me you made that too.”
    “I’d experimented with frequency sensitivity in the wildlife but hadn’t done anything with the research. Someone must’ve carried it forward to practical application.”
    “Is there nothing you’ve touched that can’t be made into a weapon?”
    “Everything is a weapon,” I replied. “It’s just a matter of being creative enough.”
    Zala took aim with her rifle. “I’ll destroy the device. The creatures should leave, and we might be able to salvage something of worth from the saucer.”
    “That could backfire on us. We don’t know how the pterodactyls will react.”
    “No, but we do know that trekking through the forest with what we have is probably inadequate for our survival.”
    She made sense, but in a situation like this, it paid to weigh the variables. While I was pondering, she fired her rifle from the hip. The shot was dead on. The missile blew to bits. The pterodactyls responded with shrieks and a few lasers blasted in random directions. One came dangerously close to slicing off Zala’s head. Another reflected off Snarg’s thick armor. The ricochet killed a reptile. The pterodactyls took to the sky in a chorus of caws and screeches.
    “Looks like you were right”—Zala snapped her fingers—“there was nothing to worry about.”
    Something fell from the sky, landing just a few feet away from us. The metallic polyhedral embedded itself in the soil. We remained still, waiting for more to fall.
    “Another weapon?” asked Zala. “A bomb perhaps?”
    Snarg extended the spikes along her back. She only did that when especially tense. My exo detected an ultrasonic whine signal.
    “Destroy it,” I said.
    Zala fired several bolts into the device. They only blackened its shell without damage. The frequency remained, and Snarg clawed the ground and twitched.
    The island rumbled. The roar of charging nodosaurids was much too close and getting closer. The canopy made direction impossible to figure, but we had only a few seconds before they would be upon us.
    I grabbed Zala, activated my rocketpack. We flew upward just as the two-headed nodosaurids came crashing through the jungle, knocking down trees and crushing everything in their way. We hung suspended while underneath my ship was pulverized by the rampaging herd. The creatures’ extra heads didn’t make them smarter, only more likely to panic. And several hundred tons of panicked, armor-plated dinosaurs were enough to finish my saucer off. The nodos smashed it with their tails and butted it back and forth like a giant Frisbee.
    It was several minutes before the device that had triggered their rage stopped emitting. Whether some stubborn nodo stepped on it or someone just cut the signal, the dinosaurs calmed. The herd milled about in the clearing and wreckage they’d created.
    I’d hovered close to the canopy to avoid detection by any zealous pterodactyls, but it was only a matter of time before they spotted something smaller than them to blast from the sky. I landed, set Zala down. The nodos brayed, gave us some room but otherwise ignored us.
    “Oh, Emperor.” Zala nodded toward Snarg, trampled into the ground. “I’m sorry.”
    “Don’t be.”
    Snarg raised her head and spit out some dirt. She crawled out of the hole and coiled up at my side.
    “By the Seventh,” said Zala. “What does it take to kill that thing?”
    “More than a few enraged nodosaurids.” I bent down and picked out a piece of scrap I couldn’t identify. Just junk now.
    “We should get moving,” I said.
    We’d both seen the plume