This is hopeless, Queen thought. “Back to the city,” she called. “We can lose it in there.”
It was the only plan that had a chance of working. They could lose themselves in the streets or hide in buildings made of sterner stuff than the little stone shed where they had first sought refuge. They might even be able to find more weapons. But she didn’t move and neither did Rook. It was all for one and one for all. If Bishop refused to flee, then they weren’t going anywhere, and Bishop, unfortunately, seemed to have lost the ability to understand English.
The Carcharodontosaurus gave another screech and leaped again, this time to the side, thrashing its tail violently, as if to swat at an annoying insect. Huge drops of blood splattered the ground where it had been, but as it landed, Queen saw that it was bleeding from two wounds: the gash in its belly, and some kind of puncture on its torso, just behind its foreleg.
It yelped again, and there was an eruption of blood from its snout. Then, a series of red blossoms sprang up on its right flank and the monster went into a frenzy. Even Bishop yielded ground as the dinosaur started rolling, flinging gobs of blood, as it scratched the air and whipped its tail to drive off whatever was attacking it. Over its agonized shrieks, Queen heard a loud, mechanical sound, similar to the noise she and Rook had heard just before encountering the creature.
The sound of gunfire.
The dinosaur abruptly leapt up and ran for the city gates.
Queen dropped flat when she’d recognized the noise for what it was, but when no further shots came, she got back to her feet. Rook was already up and heading toward Bishop, who hadn’t really moved much at all. The big man just stood there, his chest heaving from exertion, his arms trembling as though he thought the fight might resume at any instant, his eyes…
His eyes were blood red with primal fury.
“Bish?”
He blinked, and as if by magic, his eyes were normal again. The red had simply been blood trickling down from a gash in his forehead.
There was movement in the periphery of Queen’s vision, just beyond Bishop, and when she turned her head to look, her glasses immediately tagged three figures — one with green, and two more in yellow. A name and several lines of information appeared in one corner of the display. The facial recognition software had recognized Felice Carter, an American scientist, formerly with a now defunct bio-tech firm called Nexus, which was itself a division of Manifold…
Queen felt a slight chill at the name and stopped reading, peering instead at the other two figures. One of them was a small wizened-looking African man, lugging, almost dragging, an enormous M240B machine gun that Queen knew belonged to Bishop. The other man wasn’t African, but looked Asian, though it was difficult to tell, since most of his face was obscured by a veritable mummy-wrap of bandages that completely covered one eye. He wore camouflage BDUs and carried a long rifle—
“Knight!” Rook exclaimed, running toward the approaching trio. “Man, you look like I feel.”
Queen gasped. Of course it was Knight. The bandages must have fooled the facial recognition software, she thought. Oh God, what happened to him?
She ran after Rook. It was only when she reached the little group and threw her arms around Knight in a hug that made him wince, that she realized Bishop still hadn’t moved.
47
Felice stared at the display on her computer, amazed at the story it told. At first, it had all seemed unbelievable. These four relentless soldiers finding each other in a cave deep beneath the Congo rain forest seemed unlikely, but now that she studied the map of Queen’s and Rook’s journey, from the shores of distant Lake Natron, everything made sense. Joseph Mulamba had, without realizing it, set them all on the path to this reunion.
Fearing that the wounded Carcharodontosaurus might recover his courage and come after them once more, the group had postponed all discussion until they reached the relative safety of the recess atop the landslide, the vantage point from which Felice, Knight and David had watched Bishop’s mad dash across the cavern floor. The rebel fighters had taken a few potshots from the shelter of the passage, before losing interest and heading back to the surface, leaving the others free to follow Bishop, which had turned out to be a fortuitous decision.
Introductions had been made — Felice had not failed to notice that the two new arrivals were also named for chess pieces — and then Queen and Rook began telling their story. Someone had suggested they link Queen’s q-phone — a functional version of the broken devices that Knight and Bishop had possessed — to Felice’s laptop, and the entire journey had been revealed, with several hours of video and a map of the superhighway used by a forgotten civilization.
The Ancients had established their trade route right through the middle of the subterranean lost world where dinosaurs still roamed. That isolated ecosystem, which skirted the edge of Lake Natron, had been created in the vast spaces left by earlier volcanic activity, and was sustained by unseen extremophile microbes, which turned carbon and carbon dioxide into natural gas compounds that had been burning for millions of years. They provided the necessary energy for the food web. Felice suspected that the archaeologists who would one day study the site would discover that the Ancients had done a lot more than simply pass through the lost world. Had they perhaps learned how to utilize the naturally occurring fuel for cooking and other uses?
When the story was finished, Felice took advantage of the uplink to check the last results from the data she and the science team had collected at Lake Kivu. Most of her suppositions were confirmed. She skimmed over the gene sequence of the extremophile, which was indeed a variant of E. Coli. She would need a laboratory to fully make sense of the information, but it was clear that the organism had adapted to live and thrive in conditions where other microbes would have died. She was eager to compare it with the soil sample from the cavern, and begin experimenting with it under controlled conditions. If her hypothesis was correct, they might very well be able to produce enormous amounts of ethanol using a very small amount of carbon, along with water and carbon dioxide.
Indulging her scientific curiosity took her mind off the horror and misery of everything that happened in the last few days. The respite was brief, though.
“Felice,” Queen said. “Pack up. Time to go.”
While she had been poring over the data, the four soldiers had busied themselves with more immediate concerns, tending to injuries and discussing what would happen next. The joy of their unexpected reunion had quickly given way to a grim solemnity. Felice thought she understood it. They had been through hell. Queen and Rook had suffered the one-two punch of witnessing Mulamba’s death, followed by a nightmare journey without food, water, sleep or hope. Knight had been maimed, and although he refused to stop pushing himself — or perhaps because he had pushed himself this far — he was feverish, probably suffering from an infection that, if not treated, would kill him. And Bishop…
Felice wasn’t sure how Bishop was even able to stand. The raptors had almost torn him apart, but his physical injuries — which didn’t seem to have slowed him down much — were only scratches on the surface, hiding a much deeper wound to his psyche. He had barely spoken since the reunion, and while his teammates seemed to take that in stride, Felice was worried that something had broken inside him.
She slid the computer into her pack and rose as the others began moving down toward the ledge, with Queen in the lead. “What about the rebels?”