Free Dinosaurs & A Dirigible by David Drake Page A

rest of the way down.
    Vickers clicked his safety lever forward. He dropped into a sitting position for steadier aim. That was a mistake. After Vickers’ days in the rain forest, the logging road looked like bare wasteland, but the trash of branches and bulldozed saplings formed a muzzle-high screen between Vickers and his target.
    He staggered to his feet again. He was breathing hard from his run, and his skin was slick with sweat.
    A sawyer turned with his chainsaw raised. The cutting bar was nearly as long as the man wielding it was tall. White exhaust spurted as the Indonesian revved the saw’s two-stroke engine. The hooked teeth glinted in the sunlight that filled the clearing.
    The tyrannosaur paused. Vickers aimed, breathed deeply, and began to let his breath out slowly as his finger took up the trigger’s slack. The muzzle had been describing a three-inch circle in the air. Now it steadied.
    The torque and weight of the big saw pulled the bar down despite the Indonesian’s desperate efforts to keep it between him and the tyrannosaur. The beast’s huge head darted forward like that of a robin taking a worm. Vickers slacked his trigger instinctively lest he hit the man instead of the tyrannosaur.
    The sawyer screamed and tried to fling the saw like an awkward medicine ball. The tyrannosaur’s jaws clopped shut in a spray of blood, severing the man’s torso at diaphragm level.
    The grapple skidder blocked any further chance of a shot, though Vickers caught glimpses of the chaos across the road. Men screamed as they ran, but human voices were lost in the continuing roar of logging machinery. A bulldozer with a high land-clearing blade and a roof of heavy screen sat empty and idling. The space between its treads would have been excellent protection, but none of the panicked loggers thought to hide there.
    Nikisastro’s pickup turned into the fresh-cut road and accelerated. Ruts sent the vehicle bounding high on its suspension. The two guards in back clung to the sides for dear life.
    The tyrannosaur ignored the remaining sawyers. It strode off on a course converging with that of the grapple skidder. The beast’s movements were deceptively swift. Because of its size, what appeared to be a deliberate walking pace accelerated the tyrannosaur from a halt to about fifteen miles per hour in a single stride.
    Vickers ran into the road to get around the log bouncing behind the skidder. The tree’s top had been roughly trimmed, but some branches remained. One of them broke, springing toward Vickers and making him duck.
    The tyrannosaur’s head bobbed back and forth with each stride, like that of a bird hunting in short grass. The beast stepped close to the grapple skidder. The driver’s mouth opened in a silent scream. He jumped out the far side of his cab.
    The tractor’s huge rear wheel ground over him and rolled up briefly red. The driverless equipment rumbled on until it left the cleared roadway. It climbed partway up the bole of a giant tree and stalled there.
    A floater with its solar array spread swooped down on the tyrannosaur. Louise was piloting left-handed. She held the capture gun in her right, supporting the fore-end on the floater’s guardrail.
    The beast turned at the motion and darted its huge head in the direction of the floater. The muzzle of the capture gun recoiled up and to the right as Louise fired. She slid the control yoke in the opposite direction, curving past the tyrannosaur’s gape. Slamming jaws shredded a corner of the solar array, but inertia carried the craft free.
    Vickers gulped air to clear fatigue poisons from his blood. He didn’t dare shoot for fear of hitting a human being. There were men and pieces of abandoned logging equipment everywhere.
    The white truck skidded to a halt two hundred yards from where Vickers stood. The driver and Nikisastro got out of the cab, the former waving a submachine gun. The two guards in back had been clinging with both hands to keep from being