Free Dinosaurs & A Dirigible by David Drake Page B

flung out of the truck box. They straightened and unslung their weapons.
    A man wearing a yellow hard hat stepped from the forest behind where the grapple skidder had crashed. He obviously had no idea what had been going on. He was only twenty feet from the tyrannosaur when he and the beast saw each other.
    The man turned and ran, losing his helmet to a low branch. The tyrannosaur followed with the shocking acceleration of a terrier jumping a rat. The long, rigid tail flicked side to side, parallel to the ground, balancing the huge body as the beast vanished into the forest.
    Louise’s floater pogoed twenty feet in the air in the middle of the logging road. She was trying to load the capture gun one-handed without losing control of her little vehicle.
    Nikisastro pointed to Louise and shouted. His three guards raised their submachine guns.
    Vickers’ surroundings shrank to the dimensions of his sight picture. Everything else was a gray blur which had no present meaning. His breath steadied; his arms were as firm as a sandbag rest. The top of the front blade in the center of the rear circle, the sight’s protective horns flaring to either side. The driver’s throat above the post because the Garand was sighted for one hundred yards and Vickers had to allow for bullet drop at the doubled range.
    He didn’t feel the sear’s crisp release. A puff of white from the muzzle, the steel buttplate recoiling hard against his shoulder, and the empty brass sailing a high arc to the right dripping its own faint trail of smoke.
    Vickers let the recoil help him turn, bringing the sights down on the first of the gunmen in the back of the pickup. His squeeze started as the front post steadied and continued through the fraction of a second after powder gases blew their miniature white curtain from the muzzle again.
    Recoil, the third target with his submachine gun already shouldered. The second Javan toppling backward out of the truck box at the periphery of Vickers’ circle of vision. Squeeze and the submachine gun flying apart in a spray of sparks. The gun’s shredded magazine flung cartridges in all directions as the armor-piercing bullet wobbled on and through the gunman’s chest.
    The muzzle blast of Vickers’ high-velocity cartridges was terrific, but he heard only the third wham! as he started to relax and the world softened again into color. The driver fired a long burst into Louise’s floater.
    Vickers hadn’t missed. His bullet had stabbed in and out of the Javan’s upper chest, severing one of the pulmonary arteries on its passage. There was a hole in the windshield of the truck behind the man, and a mist of blood coated the glass.
    Despite that, the bullet had no shock effect because the fellow had been pumped with adrenaline when it hit him. The armor-piercing projectile hadn’t struck a major bone or the spinal column, and the volume of oxygenated blood already in the brain was sufficient to sustain consciousness for a full minute. The Javan carried through the action he had started, unaware that he was already dead on his feet.
    The batteries in the base of the floater ruptured in a yellowish haze. Louise dropped the capture gun and grabbed the control yoke vainly with both hands. The floater dropped with a sickening lurch.
    The solar array spilled air. It tilted like an ownerless umbrella cartwheeling down the street. Louise tried to cling to the guardrail. The floater flipped upside down and plunged to the ground. Knapsacks flung their contents across the stripped dirt.
    The Garand steadied in Vickers’ hands. This time the front post was on the driver’s forehead. The bullet, striking three inches below the point of aim, blew out the back of the man’s skull in a spray of blood and fresh, cream-colored brains.
    Nikisastro saw Vickers for the first time. He opened his mouth to shout, but he must have known that would be useless. He ran toward the cover of the trees.
    That too was useless. A running enemy was