Charles Sheffield - Starfire

“Yes. Maddy Wheatstone will take care of that.” “I don’t know her. What will she do?” “Maddy will do whatever she has to do. I handpicked her and I’ve watched her grow for nine years. When you meet her, remember that she’s tougher than she looks. Tougher than you, Lopez. If she had to take you down, she could do it.” Rolfe stood up from the table, grunting as he tried to level his twisted shoulders. His big head tilted back to stare at the ceiling, where the light was noticeably dimmer. When he spoke his voice was far-off and dreamy. “Take you down, Lopez, all the way. End of discussion. It’s getting dark in there, Lopez. Dark. So let’s have a little excitement, shall we? Let’s explore the habitat.”

Gordy Rolfe went over to the transparent door, and for an unpleasant moment Nick thought that he was going to open it. The plant life on the other side was dark, lush, and somehow ominous in the fading light. But Gordy sidled along the wall, looking through and beyond it until he had reached the rolfe rovers.

“How do you get them into the habitat without animals in the habitat getting back in here?” Nick asked.

“You’ll see.” Rolfe pressed a rover’s back simultaneously in three marked places, and the rolfe came alive. It stood, rotated the blunt vertical column of its neck, and clicked along on jointed legs to stand in front of the door.

“Same principle as an air lock,” Rolfe said. “You can’t have both sides open at the same time unless you take special steps to neutralize the controls. Which we’re not going to do.”

He went to the communications console and changed a setting, then came back to the wall and operated two mechanical switches. Nick realized that the thick door, apparently solid, was built in two parts with a sizeable space between. When the nearer side swung open there was space within for a rover or a small animal.

But not big enough, thank God, for a tall human or a dangerously large animal. Nick watched as the rover stepped forward into the opening. The nearer side of the door closed, and the far side opened to allow the rover into the interior. The door closed again to a seamless whole. The machine stood for a moment, as though making up its mind, then pushed its way into the green gloom beyond.

“Where is it heading?” In spite of himself, Nick was intrigued. He was seeing a new side of Gordy Rolfe.

“Nowhere special. Questing.” Rolfe walked back to the middle of the room, where the displays were located, and sat down. “Come join me. I have no idea how long this will take.”

“Questing for what?” Nick sat down also and stared at the display.

“Particular life forms. Animals. The rovers rely on olfactory signatures as well as visual ones, but it’s still not easy to track because the vegetation was designed to be dense. In most places the visibility is only a few yards. That makes the thermal infrared sensor useless most of the time.”

The field of view on the display changed constantly as the rover advanced and shifted and sometimes backtracked. Twice Nick saw animals, once a possum and once something, maybe a fox, that ran so fast into the undergrowth he couldn’t be sure. Those were apparently not what the rover was after, because the machine made no attempt to follow.

The binaural sensors were active, too, reporting soft clicks from the rover’s articulated limbs along with the crackle of branches and the rustle of dry leaves. Nick was becoming used to those sounds when they were interrupted by a coughing grunt, right in front of the rover.

“What’s that?”

“Homing in. We’re getting close to the targets.” Gordy Rolfe was perched on the edge of his seat. “Here we go.”

The rover had tracked around a stand of broad-leaved bushes. It halted, showing a view of a small clearing bordered by towering ferns. Three creatures tore at a bloodied corpse on the ground.

Nick took one look at the gray scaly heads with their sword teeth, at the thick tails and the massive hind legs, “Gordy, you’re crazy! If they broke through here . . .”

Rolfe cackled. “Not a problem! Try again, Nick. See the plants around them — and see what the three are eating.”

Nick looked again. The eyes were large, but black and expressionless as a fish’s eye. The hide was gray and thick, scaly except for a softer patch on the front of the neck where the skin formed a pouch like a heavy dewlap. The color there heightened to a warm beige. The forelimbs, in contrast to the heavy hind limbs, appeared weak and useless and too short to grasp or hold a prey. The animals, squatting back on their haunches, were clearly and comfortably bipedal, certainly meat-eaters, and definitely dinosaurs.

The shock of recognition was so great that Nick had been oblivious to everything else. Now he could recognize the scale of what he saw. The dead animal they were eating was a fat rabbit, fully half as big as the beasts around it. And as Rolfe said, the plants were the key to sizing other objects. The ferns in the background loomed over the rover, but the rover rolfes were only a couple of feet high, designed to wriggle their way easily through the jungle.

The minidinosaurs gave the new arrival one quick inspection, growled, and went back to their feeding.

“ T. rex stock, of course,” Gordy said. “But I mixed in a fair amount of DNA from their own ancestors. You know, the early dinosaurs and most of the late ones weren’t particularly big. The ones we’re looking at are less than three feet tall.”

“You don’t build — full-sized ones. Do you?”

“Not anymore. Of course, I did it years ago. Everybody wants to do a T. rex for starters. I mean, it’s so famous you more or less have to try.”

“You failed?”

“Oh, no. The genoforming was no problem — it’s actually more difficult to create dwarf variations, like these, because you have to change the proportions from the original.”

Nick examined the animals in the holographic display more closely. The midget dinosaurs had massive hind limbs and a thick tail, slightly out of proportion to their size. They also moved a little clumsily — but each of those needle teeth was close to an inch long.

“They look pretty dangerous to me.”

“No more so than a dog of the same size, and not nearly as intelligent. Each one of these weighs about thirty-five pounds, though there are a few larger sizes in the habitat — up to a hundred pounds. Mind you, I’m not saying they aren’t dangerous at all. Even with these minisaurs, you wouldn’t want to go alone into the habitat without a weapon. They’re not pack animals, and they don’t hunt in groups, but they’ll gang up to make a kill. Two or three might easily bring down a human.”

“What do they eat?” The rabbit had been dismembered and little of it remained.

“Ah, now that’s a curious fact. They’ll eat most things if they have to, amphibians and reptiles and other dinosaurs. But given a choice, they seem to prefer mammals. It makes you wonder if that reflects some ancient struggle. You know, we usually think of the mammals as coming after the dinosaurs had died off, but there were mammals — small ones — long before that. One old theory was that early mammals did in the dinosaurs, by eating their eggs. And maybe a preference for mammalian meat is an evolutionary survival mechanism for the dinosaurs.”

“Would a dinosaur eat a human?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t see why not. We’d make a good meal for a pack of minisaurs. Of course, for a full-sized allosaur or tyrannosaur a human wouldn’t be more than an appetizer. Do you realize how much it takes to feed a full-grown T. rex? Or a big herbivore, like a titanosaur? I tried it. This whole habitat can support only a handful of large plant-eaters — and they crap like you wouldn’t believe. The tyrannosaurs were even worse; I had to keep importing meat from outside. That screws up the whole idea of a self-supporting habitat. It just wasn’t worth it, and I went to the miniature forms. I found that I can do the experiments I’m interested in just as well with them.”