Free The Human Front by Ken MacLeod Page B

and a dozen others, including Purdie. We’d grabbed our stashed supplies and our improvised tools, and now awaited our chance. Another human wave assault, this time a crowd of Russians heading for the fence where the guards were belatedly turning to face the oncoming dinosaurs, thundered past. We dashed outbehind them and ran for an empty food-delivery truck, temporarily unguarded. It even had a plasma-rifle, which I instantly commandeered, racked inside.
    The Russians swarmed up the wire, standing on each others shoulders like acrobats. The guards, trying to deal with them and the dinosaurs, failed to cope with both. A bull dinosaur brought down the fence and two watchtowers, and by the time he’d been himself laid low with concerted plasma fire, we’d driven over the remains of the fence and hordes of prisoners were fleeing in every direction.
    Within minutes the first bombers arrived, skimming low, rounding up the escapees. They missed us, perhaps because they’d mistaken the truck—a very standard U.S. Army Dodge—for one of their own. We abandoned it at the foot of the cliffs, scaled them in half an hour of frantic scrambling up corries and chimneys, and by the time the bombers came looking for us we’d disappeared into the trees.

    Heat, damp, thorns, and very large dragonflies. Apart from that last and the small dinosaur-like animals—some, to our astonishment, with feathers—scuttling through the undergrowth, the place didn’t look like another planet, or even the remote past. Since my knowledge of what the remote past was supposed to look like was derived entirely from dim memories of
Look and Learn
and slightly fresher memories of a stroll through the geological wing of the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, this wasn’t saying much. I vaguely expected giant ferns and cycads and so forth, andfound perfectly recognisable conifers, oaks and maples. The flowers were less instantly recognisable, but didn’t look particularly primitive, or exotic.
    I shared these thoughts with Purdie, who laughed.
    “You’re thinking of the Carboniferous, old chap,” he said. “This is all solidly Cretaceous, so far.”
    “Could be modern,” I said.
    “Apart from the animals,” he pointed out, as though this wasn’t obvious. “And as I said, it’s not tropical, but it’s too bloody hot to be a temperate latitude.”
    I glanced back. Our little column was plodding along behind us. We were heading in an approximately upward direction, on a reasonably gentle slope.
    “I’ve thought about this,” I said. “What if this whole area is some kind of artificial reserve in
North
America? If it’s possible to genetically … engineer, I suppose would be the word … different kinds of humans, why shouldn’t it be possible to do the same with birds and lizards and so on, and make a sort of botched copy of dinosaurs?”
    “And keep it all under some vast artificial cloud canopy?” He snorted. “You overestimate the imperialists, let alone the Nazi scientists, comrade.”
    “Maybe we’re under a huge dome,” I said, not entirely seriously. I looked up at the low sky, which seemed barely higher than the tree-tops. It really had become lower since we’d arrived. “Buckminster Fuller had plans that were less ambitious than that.”
    Purdie wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Now that,” he said, “is quite a plausible suggestion. It sure
feels
like we’re in a bloody greenhouse. Mind you, none of us saw anything like that, from the bomber.”
    ”That was a screen, not a window.”
    “Hmm. A remarkably realistic screen, in that case. Back to implausibly advanced technology.”
    We wouldn’t have to speculate for long, because our course was taking us directly up to the cloud level, which we reached within an hour or so. I assigned my lads the task of guiding the others, who were quite unfamiliar with the techniques of low-visibility walking, and we all headed on up. First wisps, then dense damp