Free Dinosaurs & A Dirigible by David Drake

topped a ridge. At first he thought it was the sound of a distant storm, but it was too constant for that. “Louise?” he said. “Do you hear that noise?”
    She looked at him. “Yes,” she said, “but I don’t know what it is. It isn’t the tyrannosaur.”
    The tyrannosaur had brushed a tree, pulling aside the shrouding vines. The bark beneath was rough. Scales the size of Vickers’ thumbnail glittered against it. Most were dark, but one was a bright yellowish green.
    “We’re getting very low on power,” Louise said.
    The charge indicator was in the red zone. Vickers grimaced. “We’re nearly up with him,” he said. “Hold on for as long as you can.”
    The terrain climbed. When the floater crested the ridge, the sound hit them redoubled. Superimposed on the rumble of diesel engines was the high scream of a chainsaw. They were nearing the logging operation.
    Louise’s face set. Neither she nor Vickers spoke.
    A hump in the ground ahead might once have been a fallen tree. Insects and microbes had reduced it to a mauve pile, covered now by broad-leafed ferns. The tyrannosaur had ripped through the obstruction without swerving. Torn fronds quivered at the edges of where the punky wood had fallen in to fill the gap.
    Louise pulled back on her control yoke. The floater lifted a foot, then staggered and dropped like a man falling down stairs.
    “We’ve got to get into the sun—” she shouted as the floater crashed through ferns in an explosion of brown spores “—light!”
    They came out the other side of the fern thicket. Louise fought her controls. The floater balanced but would not rise. The charge indicator pulsed red, and a warning buzzer sounded.
    “We don’t—” Louise said, and the tyrannosaur thirty feet away cocked its head toward them. Its belly scales were cream-colored, while its back was slate gray with vertical green stripes. The beast disappeared through a screen of elephant ear plants.
    Vickers stepped off of the floater without thinking at the conscious level. He’d gotten the Garand only halfway to his shoulder before the sudden target vanished. He ran after the tyrannosaur, holding the butt of the heavy weapon in the crook of his right arm so that he had a hand free to grab supports.
    Surface roots, hard and slippery, spread a net across the ground. Vickers stumbled. He caught himself on one of a trio of arrow-straight stems springing from a common base. Spines or an insect stabbed his palm, but the pain didn’t register for the moment. He continued to jog along the dinosaur’s track.
    Behind him, Louise spiked skyward in the lightened floater. Vickers hoped it wouldn’t lose power before she could deploy the solar array, but that was out of his hands.
    The ground climbed. The slope was no more than one in five, but Vickers’ legs were weak for lack of use in the past several days. He didn’t let himself think of failing. He would catch and finish his quarry if he had to crawl on his belly to do so.
    The noise of snorting engines hit Vickers like the first rush of a storm. He shouldered through a stand of saplings. Sword-shaped leaves sprouted directly from their trunks. Sunlight dazzled him.
    He was at the edge of a wide logging road. Diesel exhaust mingled with the sharp smells of turned earth and freshly cut vegetation. To his left, a four-wheeled grapple skidder with a ’dozer blade in front and a hydraulic grab on the other end rolled thunderously down the middle of the road at a walking pace. The grab held the butt end of the hundred-and-fifty-foot tree the tractor was dragging toward the aerostat tethered at the edge of the forest a quarter of a mile away.
    The tyrannosaur was a hundred yards down the road to the right, among half a dozen Indonesian sawyers. Most of the men were running. A pair of bare legs protruded from the beast’s jaws. The tyrannosaur’s skull flexed like that of a snake swallowing. Peristaltic motion of the throat muscles dragged the victim the