Free Empress of the Sun by Ian McDonald

shotgun.
    ‘I have absolutely no idea,’ Sharkey said. He stopped in his slow turning. ‘Ah! “Seek and ye shall find, knock and the door shall be opened unto ye.”’ He pointed with his shotgun. Fallen branches, white splintered wood still exposed. A hole in the forest.
    The impeller lay on its side, taller even than the tip of the feather in Sharkey’s hat. The branches had broken its fall but the casing looked battered and dented. Sharkey peered into the open end.
    ‘The fan blades look intact,’ he said. ‘Mchynlyth would know better.’ Sharkey opened up the inspection hatch.
    Out in the forest, branches crashed. Everett looked away from the fallen engine. The sound of thrashing foliage was coming towards them. Louder. Closer. Everett’s every sense was alert. Something was moving, something that did not disappear when you looked at it. Something big.
    ‘Sharkey, that something …’
    Everett saw it in the split second before it burst through the screen of leaves and creepers. It was blue and big. Very big. Proper Jurassic Park carnosaur big.
    Sharkey looked up.
    ‘Run!’ he yelled. Everett was three steps ahead of him.Everett glanced behind to see the hunter crash into the little clearing in an explosion of twigs and leaves. That one glance told him everything. Big as a house. Long neck, tiny beady eyes. Two strong legs. Claws like sabres on the short forearms. Teeth. Way too many teeth. Shimmering electric blue. And coming fast.
    ‘Where?’ Everett shouted.
    ‘Anywhere!’
    Everett looked at the shotgun in his hands.
    ‘Do you think …?’
    ‘You’d only annoy it,’ Sharkey panted.
    ‘It looks pretty annoyed anyway … whoa!’
    Everett’s boot caught an exposed root. He went over and down, hard. He came up to see a head the size of a family hatchback bearing down on him. Jaws opened. There could not be that many teeth in the universe. Rotting, half-chewed, undigested flesh gusted in his face. Then Everett saw a halo like a crown of golden thorns appear above the carnosaur’s head. The halo spun, glittering in the sunbeams striking down through the canopy of leaves. The carnosaur’s eyes went dull. The head pulled back. It drew itself up to its full height, shook its head as if trying to dislodge a fly from an earhole, then turned around and stalked back into the deep forest, still shaking its head.
    The halo lifted from the carnosaur’s head and disappeared.
    A face looked down into Everett’s. Wide eyes, with widegolden pupils and a black slit of an iris. A transparent membrane flicked across each eye. Two slits where a nose would be. The mouth a wide gash with almost no lips at all. Ears like little commas set low on the long, backwards-sloping skull. The skin was silvery, with the powdery consistency of the minute scales of moth wings. The hair was a thin Mohican from just above the eyes over the top of the skull to the nape of the neck. Long thick hairs lay flat. The eyes flicked their membrane-eyelids again and the hair rose and Everett saw it was very fine quills. The crest ran with rainbow colours and lay flat again. The nostrils flared. Not a human face. Never a human face. But it looked Everett up and down with purpose and intelligence. The lips moved. Music like birdsong came out.
    The thing repeated the snatch of birdsong.
    ‘Are you trying to talk to me?’ Everett said.
    The creature’s crest rose again. The air around its skull sparkled: the same halo that had circled the carnosaur’s head now appeared behind the creature’s head, a crown of living gold.
    ‘Everett, on my word, roll away. I have a clear shot,’ Sharkey called. From the edge of his vision Everett could see Sharkey, shotgun levelled. At the same instant the creature saw him too. The creature pointed, the golden aura flickered, something flashed in the light and Sharkey had a twenty-centimetre blade hovering at his throat.
    ‘Okay,’ Sharkey said, but he did not put the shotgundown. The creature snapped