Day of the Predator

CHAPTER 79

65 million years BC, jungle

Becks watched the pyre of logs and branches burn. Amid curling tongues of flame she could just about make out the outline of the several dozen bodies she’d stacked on top. The log bridge was gone now, its counterweight device dismantled like their windmill and tossed on the fire as kindling. The palisade, the lean-tos, all gone as well. The assorted rucksacks, baseball caps, jackets, mobile phones that had flown back into the past, all of them tossed on the fire.

By morning those things would be nothing more than soot or contorted puddles of plastic that would eventually break down over tens of thousands of years into minute untraceable contaminants.

Her computer mind took a moment to make a detailed audit of all the other items of forensic evidence that marked their two-week stay here. The human bodies she’d been unable to retrieve: Franklyn, Ranjit and Kelly. Of those, only Franklyn had died in a location that would one day yield fossils, and even then it was statistically unlikely that his body was going to be preserved in a way that would produce anything. A corpse needed to be almost immediately covered by a layer of sediment to stand a chance of that. Those three bodies, wherever they lay, were exposed to the elements, to scavengers.

Bullets and casings littered the clearing. But they too would soon become unidentifiable nuggets of rust in this humid jungle. Perhaps, a hundred years from now, no more than stains of oxidized soil on the jungle floor.

She was satisfied that the sheer weight of time and natural processes would wipe their presence clean. There was always the remote possibility that a footprint or the unnatural scar of an axe blade on a tree trunk might just, somehow, become an immortalized impression on a fragment of rock. But the probability factors she crunched yielded an acceptable contamination risk.

Her partially healed stomach wound had ripped open as she’d laboured on the funeral pyre, but a dark plug of congealing scab prevented any further valuable blood leaking out of her. The dressing on her arm had also unwound earlier, revealing red-raw muscle tissue and bone. A layer of skin over the top of that would have offered her damaged limb some protection — instead the fragile workings of her arm were now clogged with dirt and twigs and leaves and all manner of bugs.

An infection advisory flashed quietly in the background of her mind, along with several others that warned her that her biological combat chassis had suffered enough damage to warrant immediate medical attention. As she watched tongues of orange lash up into the Cretaceous night sky towards a moon a hat size too big, she detected the first precursor particles of the scheduled window and stepped towards the open ground where it was due to open.

She looked back one last time at the fire and picked out the dark twisted limbs of the hominid species amid the flames. For a moment she felt something she couldn’t identify: sadness, was it? Guilt? All she knew was that it came from a part of her mind that didn’t organize thoughts into mission priorities and strategic options.

A sphere of churning air suddenly winked into existence in front of her and calmly, impassively, she stepped forward through sixty-five million years into a dimly lit brick archway.

The first face her eyes registered through the shimmering was Liam O’Connor’s. He smiled tiredly and she momentarily wondered if his mind was flashing the human equivalent set of damage advisory warnings.

‘Welcome home, Becks,’ he said softly and then, without any warning, he clasped his arms around her. ‘We did it!’ he muttered into her ear.

She processed the curious gesture and her silicon swiftly came back with the recommendation that returning the demonstration of affection would be an acceptably appropriate response. Her good arm closed around his narrow shoulders.

‘Affirmative, Liam… we did it.’