Day of the Predator - Alex Scarrow [134]
‘There’s more?’ asked Sal.
He nodded. ‘Yeah … thirty or forty, I suppose. A pack of them.’ His eyes remained on the outline of Becks’s form, curled up like a foetus. In her sleep, vulnerable-looking – just a teenage girl. ‘She managed to kill some of them, but the rest are back there.’
Maddy looked at Sal and Cartwright. ‘Then those hunters across the river, they must be distant ancestors. They’re somehow linked, right? The long heads?’
Cartwright nodded. ‘It’s an unusual configuration.’ He stroked his chin. ‘No … it’s a unique configuration.’
Maddy had lifted the shutter door briefly after they’d seen to Becks and shown Liam and the other two the jungle that now replaced New York. The hunters were no longer probing the riverbank for mud creatures and had returned to the settlement on the far side of the broad river.
‘They’re descendants, Liam,’ she said. ‘Distant … very distant descendants.’
‘And their ancestors,’ cut in Cartwright, ‘must have learned something from you … something that enabled them to survive and prosper. Something, some sort of skill, that helped them survive the K–T event, whatever wiped out the dinosaurs.’
Liam nodded slowly. She could see he’d worked that much out already. ‘So … someone has to go back and kill the whole pack.’
‘Yes,’ said Maddy, reaching a hand out and holding his arm gently. ‘They can’t be allowed to live and develop any sort of intelligence that could save them. They should have died out with all the other dinosaurs.’
‘OK.’ He took a deep breath. ‘OK … I’ll go –’
‘No,’ she said, a little too quickly. She tried not to let her stare at his bloodshot eye linger. ‘Not you, Liam. You need rest.’
‘If not me, then who? No one else –’
‘The support unit.’
‘Becks?’ He shook his head. ‘No. She’ll take days to recover, surely. And she’ll not be able to face them all on her own. They’ll kill her, to be sure.’
Her? She?
She held his arm. ‘Listen to me, Liam.’ She nodded at the birthing tube. ‘I know you’ve been through a lot together, but remember … it’s just a support unit in there. A meat robot. A tool for the job. That’s all it is. It’s expendable.’
‘I’ll go with her,’ he said.
‘No.’ Maddy shook her head firmly. ‘No. You can’t go back there again.’
‘Why?’
He doesn’t know, does he? He hasn’t looked into a mirror. He hasn’t realized how much damage going so far back in time has already done to him. She wondered why he hadn’t yet noted the condition of the girl and Chan. Both looked like people suffering from advanced radiation sickness. But then … from his time, Liam wouldn’t know anything about radiation sickness. Perhaps he attributed the bleeding noses, the pallid complexion to shock. Perhaps he was too much in shock himself to have noticed.
‘Because you’re too valuable to lose, Liam. We need you here.’
‘We need you,’ added Sal, ‘and …’ Her face dipped out of range of the soft peach glow and in the darkness they heard movement, a scrape, the heavy thud of something metallic and the rattle and tinkle of a buckle. Her face returned and she held up something that glinted in the dull light. ‘And she’d have this gun, Liam. Not just a bamboo stick.’
Maddy nodded. ‘You saw how good it was earlier.’
‘High-calibre MP15 assault rifle,’ said Cartwright. ‘It’ll mince those monsters up no problem.’
‘We’ll give her a few hours to rebuild herself. OK?’
‘I’ll uhh … I’ll go and see how many clips of ammo Forby has … had,’ said Cartwright.
Maddy pressed out a smile, and nodded. ‘You do that.’
She turned back to Liam, watching the floating body of Becks. She could see he felt something for the support unit, that they’d bonded in the past … that this time, unlike last time, if the support unit fell, there’d be no one to retrieve its AI, no one to dig the computer out of its cranium and bring it back.
Be the leader, Maddy. There’s no discussion here. It’s decided.
‘Sorry, Liam, she has to go,’ she said forcefully. ‘That’s how it is. She has to do this. We need New York back; we