Fire with Fire(32)
A blackish-brown shape burst out of the brush, well in advance of the approaching thumps. Caine almost fired, then flinched his finger off the trigger—just before he realized it was going too fast for him to hit, anyhow: the creature had already swerved to one side, evidently either avoiding Caine or taking evasive action. Probably evasive action—because the heavy pounding sound was now right behind it.
The sound seemed to break free of the same dense thicket in a dusty burst of tubers, shoots, and fronds, all erupting away from the pavonosaur that churned to a stop in the midst of the savaged foliage. The predator searched right and left—and then snapped erect as it noticed something it had evidently never seen before.
A human.
Caine stared back at the monster. The pavonosaur’s body had a narrow cross section, tapering into a long, sharp, paddlelike tail that might have belonged to a monstrous tadpole. Its head completed the suggestion that this creature was built for speed both on land and in the water: the long, thin snout—more reminiscent of a crocodile than a dinosaur—was not scaled, but was the tip of a seamless carapace that swept back around and over the eye-and-ear sensor cluster, ending in a small, bone-finned crest that covered the rear of the skull. The mouth cycled through a panting open-closed motion, revealing not teeth, but a set of serrated ridges, threatening like three serried ranks of wood saws.
Caine swallowed, held as still as he could, cheated the barrel down a little lower. It’s a young one. Three meters toe to top, at most. Aim low and shoot steady. Twenty rounds in the box, staggered between dum-dums and tungsten-cored discarding sabot. He can’t take more than four or five hits. Can he? Can he? Jesus, let’s get this over with: start your charge, you ugly bast—
The pavonosaur’s head swung back in the direction his prey had fled, and with a hissing rattle, he leaped along that course—
Because the black-brown biped was still there.
Caine—maniacally focused upon the pavonosaur—only now noticed that the first creature had not made good its escape. Or, if it had, it had returned. What the hell—?
It’s trying to help. No other possible reason.
Caine had swung the gun, tracking the pavonosaur, before he was aware of doing so. He squeezed the trigger twice, shouted “Hey, HEY!” in the intervals between the recoil of the rounds.
Neither hit. But the pavonosaur swiveled its head in his direction so quickly that Caine wasn’t sure he saw the motion: one moment its head was lowered in pursuit of the biped, the next it was staring at Caine.
Staring back, leaning forward into a challenge posture, wondering if this meant he was suicidal, brave, or both, Caine shouted: “HEEYYY! SHIT-HEAD!”
The pavonosaur answered with a painfully high-pitched screech and came streaming over the ground, bent low and forward as it sprinted toward him.
Caine leaned low into the sights and fired one, two, three rounds—
The third clipped the pavonosaur in the shoulder. It came more quickly, if that were possible, without a single waver in its stride.
Caine was about to start hammering out the rest of the clip but saw a change in the creature’s gait. It was slowing—but not because it was hurt, or reconsidering its charge: it was preparing to gather its legs under it to jump up on the rock that Caine had slept upon.
Wait: right before it jumps—was an instinct more than a thought. Fortunate, because the pavonosaur was quicker than human cognition. Even as Caine was realizing that the creature was going to give him a split-second opportunity to fire at a stationary target, the monster had half-contracted into its preparatory crouch.
Caine saw the torso rise into his sights; he fired three fast rounds. He rode the recoil of the last back down and kept firing, steady and sustained, about one round every second.
At least two of the first three hit: the pavonosaur stopped just as it was about to uncoil upwards into its leap, tried to recover, caught another round square in the center of its chest. That produced a dark coppery-purple stain and a screech that was equal parts shock, pain, and indignation. It tried to reset for its jump, but Caine’s steady volume of fire kept the monster from regaining the initiative. Two rounds went wide or high: two more hit its torso—and the animal staggered back, either unaccustomed, or completely unadapted, to a flight reflex.
That moment of delay was the fateful—and fatal—moment in its attack. Caine’s bullets now hit regularly. More purple spattered outward, this time lower in the belly. Then a thin, pulsing spray—brighter and more coppery—at the base of the neck. Two more hits and the pavonosaur slumped over with a crash that Caine could feel through the rock under his knees.