Pack Animals - By Peter Anghelides Page 0,40
It reminded her of the monstrous thing that had attacked her at the mall.
Ah, the monstrous thing that had disappeared into thin air in front of Gwen. It had reappeared in the security room – where she’d found the double-headed alien buds.
Could the bat-creature have been transmitted through the CCTV signal? And could this dinosaur have been sent to the Hub through Gwen’s PDA?
Toshiko levered herself up from behind her workstation, and clattered her fingers across the keys of her terminal, oblivious to the noise, no longer caring whether the sauropod heard her. With a few further deft keystrokes, she had closed down all the CCTV monitoring in the Hub. The dinosaur wasn’t going to get transmitted accidentally to one of her unsuspecting colleagues.
On the other hand, it wasn’t going anywhere, was it? The tail swished irritably, and flung Gwen’s workstation chair into the shallow pool at the base of the steel tower.
Toshiko tapped a couple of additional instructions into her computer, and heard the satisfying shunk sound of the Armoury door unlocking.
The dinosaur shuffled some more, denting the walkways, and kicking the Armoury door as it opened outwards. Toshiko tried to assess which way the creature would move. The gap between its legs widened.
This would be like running across a motorway, only the risk here was deadlier.
Toshiko threw herself forward, hardly daring to breathe. She practically fell into the Armoury. When she started to breathe again, she took in ragged lungfuls of air.
The Armoury rattled around her as the sauropod leaned heavily against the frame of the room. Toshiko stared at the racks, frantically trying to remember where the weapon was. For a dreadful moment, she wondered whether it had been removed by one of the others.
No, there it was: the Jamolean lance. She wrenched at it, catching her fingernails against the rack. The power pack had not depleted, she noted thankfully.
The Armoury clattered and shook once more. The pteranodon’s defiant shriek echoed in Toshiko’s ears. The sauropod’s flank pressed against the gap where the door had been, and the whole frame began to buckle under the pressure.
Toshiko pressed the barrel of the weapon against the tough flesh of the dinosaur’s hide, and pulled the trigger.
She could feel the heat from the energy weapon as it discharged into the creature’s side. A protesting bellow of shock and pain roared around the Hub. She pressed herself back into the Armoury, sheltering as best she could behind the racks that held the alien arsenal, praying silently that the backwash of heat from the fired weapon would not detonate any of the others. In only a few seconds, the whole room had become as hot as a dry sauna.
The exothermic reaction started by the Jamolean lance seared and burned around the Hub, until the sauropod collapsed into a smouldering heap. Toshiko stayed back for several minutes until the effect was completed. When she felt brave enough to venture out, the pteranodon was pecking at the shrivelled, charred remains. Toshiko was sure she could see a glint of Cretaceous amusement in those reptile eyes.
The whole Hub smelled of heat and charred flesh. Toshiko slumped into her workstation chair, and wiped the back of her hand across her perspiring forehead. She started to bring the CCTV back online, and smiled at the thought that her vanquishing of the creature had not been caught on camera. As she worked, she began to think what else might connect the creatures she’d seen – the bat-thing, this pseudo-diplodocus, even the Weevils… and then she had it.
It was that catalogue device they’d stored away some three months ago. After some thought, Ianto had named it the Vandrogonite Visualiser, though Jack had quibbled that just because it was found in the possession of a Vandrogon that didn’t mean the race had manufactured it.
Toshiko decided that it was time to get the Visualiser from the Vaults.
FOURTEEN
The front wheels of the chair jarred against the ambulance door for the third time, and Jack gasped in pain. ‘Sorry,’ said Owen, who was steering. ‘I’d usually ask a porter to do this.’
‘I’m honoured,’ winced Jack, who had insisted on getting into the wheelchair in the first place. He wanted to escape the ambulance before it left the zoo.
Owen warned him that the foot was ‘hanging by a thread’. Except that he used medical terms that sounded like tendons or subcutaneous exposure or something. Didn’t matter, thought Jack. Whatever it was called officially, it hurt like hell. And yet he had literally hopped into