Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall by Thomas P Hopp
***
Frank’s latest electronic contraption was spread out on a tabletop in the operations center, looking like a kid’s Radio-Shack project. It was a timer to delay the van’s broadcast of Clem’s next command sequence long enough for them to move a safe distance away. Frank was putting the assorted pieces together according to a design that was obvious only to him. Diedre assisted by holding a printed circuit board in place as he soldered it down. She had long since finished her part of the plan by burning the commands onto a memory chip that now lay on her computer desk.
Lloyd had hovered over them while they worked, annoying them by grumbling about details and obsessing about how they would learn whether the computer in the van sent the command sequence. He had volunteered to stay and watch the screen but Diedre and Frank argued it was suicidal to stay anywhere within a hundred yards of the van. This time Phaeon would be ready with their coordinates and might make a more effective counterstrike. She was glad Lloyd had accepted majority rule and agreed to let Frank use a timer. Then, mercifully, he had made himself scarce.
“That’s it.” Frank snapped a plastic cover onto the small black project-box. “All wired up and ready to go. It’s even got an LED display on the front. Watch this.” He pushed a small button on the side of the box and the red LED set itself to 60 and began counting down by one-second increments. “Put this in line with the van’s radio dish and it’ll keep the transmitter silent while the computer gets ready for the uplink. When the timer hits zero, the carrier signal comes on and the commands are sent immediately, all without human intervention.”
Diedre watched the timer descend through 49, 48, 47…
“You’re sure it’ll do what it’s supposed to?”
“Pretty sure.”
Diedre walked over to her computer to get the memory chip.
It was gone.
“Hey,” she said. “Who’s got the commands?”
Frank glanced around the room and they looked at each other in alarm.
“Lloyd!” Diedre cried. “He was hanging around this desk before he disappeared.”
“That fool!” Frank shouted. “Come on, Diedre.”
They ran out the door, sprinted down the hall and rushed into the daylight outside the basement doorway.
“You idiot!” Frank bellowed, looking down the sloping campus lawn. The TV van’s satellite dish had been moved out of its straight-forward stowed position and was slued up to point at the moon.
Frank broke into a dead run downhill toward the van and Diedre followed close on his heels. Across the intervening hundred yards of sloped lawn she saw Lloyd inside the van’s open side door, sitting at the control desk. No doubt he was already transmitting the commands from her memory chip. She cursed herself for not having guessed Lloyd would try something like this. Now she remembered what he had muttered just before he wandered off. “I’m going out to spend some time with Linda.”
“Lloyd!” she shouted as she ran. “Get away from there!”
She overtook Frank, whose heavy legs were tiring, and rushed to the wrought iron fence between her and the sidewalk. Never mind that she couldn’t get past. She grabbed the black iron bars and shouted, “Lloyd! You don’t have to do this.”
She was sure Lloyd could hear her from just across the sidewalk, but he didn’t turn around. He was fixated on the computer screen flickering in front of him. Diedre was about to shout again when a wall of blue light burst out of the sky. The beam touched down a hundred feet beyond the van, silhouetting it in its glare and giving off a deafening sound like the rasp of an electric arc at earsplitting intensity. The air shook, sending vibrations right through her guts. She looked upward along the beam in horrified fascination. The shaft of blue-white light tapered up to a vanishing point at the lower tip of the crescent moon.
Just as it dawned on her how close and immediate death had become, Frank caught up and tore her hand free from the fence rail. “Come on!” he shouted, tugging her wrist and pulling her back in the direction from which they had just come.
She glanced over her shoulder as he dragged her back. The beam had touched down across the street on the grounds of an equestrian riding club. It looked like a titanic spotlight, a shaft of blue heat fifty feet wide where it touched the riding field like a huge acetylene torch, turning the soil red-hot and blasting smoke out on all sides.
“Hurry,” Frank tugged on her arm harder as the equestrian jumping rails ignited and the trees bordering the far sidewalk burst into flames. “It’s heading this way.” The wall of blue light advanced across the street, igniting the asphalt into flame and smoke as it came.
“Lloyd!” she yelled one last time, her voice now lost in the awful roar of the beam. Inside the van, Lloyd still faced the computer screen, heedless of death bearing down on him. When the beam moved onto it, the van immediately erupted into flames. Lloyd Andersen never got up from the control seat. He just vanished into the orange fireball.
“Lloyd!” Diedre screamed, but Frank shouted over her cry as he dragged her along, “Damn it Diedre, we’re next!”
The realization that he was right broke her fixation on Lloyd. She turned and ran up the hill for her own life as explosions tore through the van and shattered window-glass tinkled on the pavement. After a dozen paces she glanced over her shoulder. The beam had left the burning van behind and was continuing over the fence onto the campus lawn. It was coming straight at her.
Diedre and Frank sprinted up the hill, racing beneath a row of eucalyptus trees, each of which burst into flames just after they passed it. She could feel heat searing her shoulders from the foliage blazing overhead and knew in her heart that getting too near the van had been a fatal mistake. Her legs were aching, about to fail. They burned from the fatigue of running too far, too fast. And Frank’s labored breath became a series of groans of exhaustion and terror. Suddenly his legs gave out and he sprawled headlong on the ground. She wheeled around and grabbed his arm.
“Get up!” she yelled, tugging with all her might. But Frank’s energy was spent. He tried to rise, but couldn’t.
“Go on, Diedre,” he panted.
She wrenched him upward again, but his weight was too much for her to lift and she stumbled to her knees beside him. The beam closed in on them fast, turning a huge swath of lawn from green to red-hot as it came. She knew it didn’t matter whether she ran or not. Her only choice was to die here with Frank or a few paces from him if she got up. As the white-hot rim of fire approached to within twenty feet she threw her arms around Frank’s neck and buried her face in his bearded cheek. He clutched her tightly to him and shouted, “Goodbye, Diedre.”
“Goodbye, Frank.”
The instant of their death arrived—and passed. The blue light disappeared as if a switch had been thrown, leaving nothing but a thunderclap reverberating up into the sky, clear yellow sunlight, and the crackling heat of burning trees. She let go of Frank and rolled onto her back on the grass, panting and unable to believe she was alive. Frank lay face-down, gasping for air.
After a minute, he sat up and looked around in astonishment.
“It vanished, just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
Diedre sat up beside him. At the bottom of the hill, the van was the center of a whirling tornado of orange flame and black smoke.
“Lloyd—” she began, but there was nothing to be said. Lloyd was gone. A dozen feet from her, the edge of blackened and smoldering ground showed how narrow their own escape had been. Frank stood up and offered her a hand.
“Come on Diedre. It wasn’t after us. It just wanted the van. Let’s get back inside.”
She took his hand and stood up, but paused to look into the blue vault of the sky beyond the flames and smoke of the trees. “Clem?” Her voice quavered and a watery blur filled her eyes. In her tears the white scimitar shape of the moon seemed to float like a reflection. Clementine was up there beyond the blue of the sky in the black depths of space, orbiting silently above Phaeon. Lloyd Anderse
“Did you hear, Clem? Did you?”