Napoleon (Silver Edition)

by Wayne Kyle Spitzer Copyright © 2017-2021 Wayne Kyle Spitzer. All Rights Reserved. Published by Hobb’s End Books, a division of ACME Sprockets & Visions. Cover design Copyright © 2021 Wayne Kyle Spitzer. Please direct all inquiries to: HobbsEndBooks@yahoo.com All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this book is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. Prologue | The Visitor They lay in the still of the valley, huddled in groups against the freezing cold. A late Cretaceous dusk had fallen, forcing a respite from their grueling march south; now the hadrosaurs slept—the clouds of their breath like pulsing gray ghosts. An animal cried out from somewhere behind them. Seeker raised her head; to her—youngest of all the calves—the call sounded like another duckbill. She looked about, blinking. The snow had stopped. The moon shone; all was silent. She lay her head down. The call sounded again, closer, followed by a dry rustling and breaking of branches. Seeker mewed and rose with a start. She shuffled around, her back to the herd, and stared into the night with her cow-brown eyes. Moonlight lay pale and cold across the life-giving cattail marsh; nothing moved. She reared up on her hind-legs for a better view. Still nothing. She dropped onto all fours. Then the lost animal cried out from the trees on the far side of the water—but this time, its voice sounded strained, almost sickly. Seeker hesitated. She glanced at the herd, then back to the trees. (Something was urging her to investigate: perhaps just the herding instinct intrinsic to all her kind, perhaps just curiosity—her own particular quirk.) Head bobbing, she waddled forward. She splashed through the shallow water, its ice broken earlier by the thirsty bills of the herd, and entered the trees, dripping. The moon was swallowed by a canopy of needles. Pausing in the darkness, she sniffed the crisp air; the calf detected nothing but the pine’s bitter fragrance. She mewed nervously. There was a fleet-footed thud-thud-thud-thud, which blew through the trees and was gone. It was followed by a series of gentle clicks and splashes, as if pine-cones had shaken free of the branches, falling onto the ice and into the water. But there was no wind, and all was still. Seeker whimpered. Water coalesced along her underbelly, pattering against the ground. She shifted her meaty bulk and turned toward the herd, began walking ... And froze. Her path was blocked by a lithe, pale shape—alone in the moonlight at the center of the marsh. It stood poised on two powerful hind-legs, its knees and ankles flexed like a bird’s. Its neck curved in an S from the razor-toothed head to its upper body, which lay nearly horizontal, and its tail was held high and rigid as a lance. The forelimbs were bent as if held up in prayer, and from them dangled smart little hands, long delicate fingers, curved talons. The thing was four feet tall from its long wolfish snout to its narrow feet, and each of those feet bore a unique and wicked killing tool: a glinting, sickled, triple-sized claw. It was a bird of prey in no need of wings. (Sixty-five-million years later, men would rightly call it, Velociraptor: the “Speedy Hunter.”) Seeker had no name for it, only a profound, instinctual terror, and backed away farther among the trees. The raptor crept toward her across the ice, moon-glow flashing off its killer spurs and ashen hide, its black stripes, its red eyes. Seeker turned—and bolted. Her heart thumped as she raced through the shadows. Listening, she heard the raptor bounding after her, gaining fast. Its hot breath fell on her shoulders—and was gone, suddenly. She broke from blackness into a moonlit glade, which she cut across without pause. Breathing heavily, she began to falter. Her mouth hung wide; her tongue lolled out streaming ropy strands of saliva. Finally she could maintain the sprint no more, and galloped to a halt in the middle of the glade. Panting and drooling, she looked behind her; the raptor had come to a stop, as well. It stood perched on one leg at the edge of the glade, balanced like a flamingo, its tail straight out. The tortured call came again, now from the dark woods opposite the glade. Seeker faced forward and bleated a response. Nothing came back. She shifted her feet and looked to the raptor. It remained poised, its raised leg folded beneath its belly. At last the invisible hadrosaur answered, and Seeker turned. This time the cry did not end, but quavered like moonlight on water. She tilted her head, and her brown eyes rolled. Dim recognition warmed her walnut-sized brain. It was another juvenile. She hooted back, making a baying sound which rolled over the trees and was gone. Then she started trotting toward the northern edge of the glade, toward the sound’s origin, pausing once to glance at the raptor. Its blood-red eyes appraised her: huge, round, cold. It didn’t follow. The sickly call grew stronger as Seeker neared the trees, and something stirred deep in the shadows. Eagerly, the calf moved toward it. Abruptly, the strange cry stopped. There was another blurred thudding among the trees. Seeker took a single step past the tree-line ... and paused. She tested the air; there was no hint of her own— A horrible screech rang out, and she whirled. The raptor was right behind her—trying to shake a weasel from its foot! (In sneaking up on her, it had accidently stepped into the fiery mammal’s burrow.) Killing it promptly, the raptor flicked the animal into its gullet and turned to face her, swallowing. Seeker yelped, scrambling west, but spied more raptors blocking her path. Terrified, she froze. The predators—both the one nearest her and the new ones—began making noise, squawking and clicking their sickle-claws. Her heart pounded. Looking north to the nearby forest, she recalled a bad place devoid of smells and knew she could not flee there. That left east, from which the phantom animal cried out again. She scanned the darkened trees in that direction. Had it moved? Seeker did not know. But without further hesitation, she galloped toward the sound. The squawking and clicking of claws stopped. Glancing back, she saw the raptors converge and file after her; but they did not try to overtake her. The reason became clear when she reached the end of the glade, and the mysterious animal emerged into moonlight. It was another raptor—still mimicking the voice of its prey. Seeker cried out, skidded, and cut sideways. Too late. The snarling predators—now of sufficient number—fell upon her, the closest one leaping onto her back, raking the flesh with its sickle-claws. She moaned and rolled her eyes, saw another sweep up beside her. It struck at her underbelly and she swerved, knocking it off its feet. It squealed beneath her elephantine pads and disappeared behind them. She pushed ahead—blood dotting the snow—aiming for the forest on the south side of the glade. Suddenly one of the killers closed its jaws about her tail, and she screamed. Another put on a burst of speed and bit into her neck. Still another struck at her left hind-leg, severing the tendons with its clawed hand. Her hind quarters collapsed in the snow and plumes of white billowed. The calf trumpeted woefully, crawling without direction, the predators consuming her like disease. And then the head of a new, bigger animal darted into the fray—and the raptor at her throat was itself bitten about the neck. The wounded calf saw its assailant lifted from the snow, its legs kicking wildly, and borne away, squealing. At the same instant, there was a howl of pain from behind her. Craning her neck, she saw the raptor on her tail plucked similarly away, caught between the jaws of an animal twice its size. The darkness echoed with wet, crunching sounds as the remaining raptors fled. Seeker started to crawl away. She’d managed to drag herself only a few feet before something fell into the snow beside her. It was a raptor head. She yelped—and began crawling faster. A dim shadow fell across the moonlit snow before her. It was joined by another. And another. She struggled to raise her head, saw a pair of large, bird-like feet planted firmly in the snow. (They had three splayed toes each, and were the color of blood.) Six more pairs were moving into position, three to each side. An animal snorted. Seeker mewed, forlornly—and fell onto her side. She was so tired now. So very— Everything went black, suddenly. She turned her head in the snow, gazing skyward, and saw that something had blotted out the moon. A shape. The killers saw it, too. Breaking formation, they milled about beneath the intruder and began to howl. The huge shape did not respond. It merely floated there, silently. Its lines were such as could not be found in nature. Its presence was terrifying to Seeker. She cried out, trembling, and tried to crawl away. She could not. Bleeding, she cowered in the snow. In contrast, the predators went into a frenzy, jumping on and off boulders, snapping at the sky. The shape began to move: a perfect, black slab turning low above the glade. It hummed with an unearthly cadence—and opened. White light flooded the world. The killers yowled. God had come to the Cretaceous. I | The Present The rock façade slid aside, revealing a stainless-steel ramp which gleamed with real sunlight. The ramp was clean and polished and scarred by Brillo pads. It banged as something crashed against it. Shadows fell down its length and distant sounds echoed above. A gruff-toned man barked orders. Others responded, chains rattled. Dark blood rolled down the ramp. “She’s away!” someone called. Metal bucked and flexed and there was a thunderous tumbling sound. A black mass hit the marshy floor of the habitat, splashed. Water swirled around blood-caked hooves. The rock façade slid shut. Shadows passed over the steer’s carcass, patterned by elongated hind limbs which were muscular and yet gracile. They were flexed at the knees and ankles. Feet that might have belonged to some monster bird splashed through the water. An animal snorted. The b****y lump beneath the sunlamps twitched as Napoleon passed it by. Jan shook her head, watching. Her animal had never declined a carcass before, in spite of Nimson’s assertion that a Nano-T would refuse “cold” meat (even, he’d said, if the creature had taken well to captivity, like Napoleon). But as with most behaviorists, he’d neglected to consider the individual creature. He had changed his mind after watching Napoleon devour a dead goat, horns and all, and then literally ask for seconds. But something was eating her specimen, because not only was he ignoring his food, but his color was changing, fading from gray to beige, beige to yellow, yellow to green. Only his stripes remained the same—black and jagged like a tiger’s. They moved over his muscles like war paint as he crossed the length of his habitat, sniffing at the two-inch-thick glass. If not for the fresh steer, Dr. Jan Vasquez would have thought he was stalking something. She sat down at the interaction console and punched up the icons for, “Good afternoon, Napoleon.” They were a yellow happy-face, a sun which was three quarters shaded, and a black representation of an Albertosaurus Lancensis, also known as “Nanotyrannus,” or “Nano-T.” The “Pygmy Tyrant.”