Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 4, July 2014 Read online

  “School’s not for another month.” She lowered her gaze to the table. “My father would believe me.”

  “Well, your father could tell stories, that’s for sure.”

  “I’ll email him from the library. I’ll send him a photograph.”

  “Who’s going to give you a camera?” scoffed her mother.

  #

  Dr. Huntington and a CERN technician had overseen the pallet-loading of the scientific instruments. The Customs documents were in order. He waited in Geneva for his flight.

  He’d gambled a lot on this. If there truly was a mass singularity in the Mediterranean, this could lead to a Nobel. He’d called in favors from the Royal Astronomical Society, ex-Navy officers, and two members of the House of Commons.

  There was something very heavy in the Mediterranean. And the fact that there was no earthquake ruled out a mere shift beneath the crust. But a black hole should have simply passed through the Earth.

  He needed to get hard data before the Yanks did.

  #

  Yasmine panted, trembling from exertion in the cliff cave. The rocks were too heavy to lift unaided, so she was using salvaged rebar to lever them aside. Each movement ended in a heavy thud. Yesterday she’d tried using pieces of driftwood, but that hadn’t worked out. This morning she’d hauled the metal bar up into the cave.

  She sat on one of the rocks to rest sore muscles, wiping away sweat. The day was hot, even in the shade of the cave. Her blouse was grimy with sand and sweat. Beneath the rocks, the creature was no longer scraping. The long black crest of its head was free. One large eye watched her from the shadows.

  As savior, or as prey? Yasmine was excited, but not stupid.

  Miraculously there was no blood on the dinosaur. The day before, she’d been afraid it would die, crushed or suffocated. But it seemed in good health, just trapped. One more rock and its long jaw would be free. Whether she continued after that would depend on whether it tried to bite her. If it did, she’d go to the authorities.

  With photographs.

  No one would loan their phone, so she’d borrowed Signora Gonzi’s old Nikon. It was in a plastic bag, because her neighbor had warned her there would be hell to pay if she got sand in the mechanism. Yasmine had told Signora Gonzi she was taking pictures of a lizard to email her father. As her teachers would say, a small vocabulary mistake. One point off.

  After another swallow from her water bottle, she gripped the rebar in her sweaty hands. She wished it were longer. Archimedes said all you needed was a long enough lever. He never dug out a dinosaur.

  #

  One doesn’t simply drive into NATO Base Sigonella. Dr. Huntington seethed with annoyance by the guard booth, standing in the shade of the taxi van. The meter was running while papers were checked, phone numbers called, and paths of NATO bureaucracy traversed like a Mobius strip. Mostly in Italian, which Huntington didn’t speak. Somewhere on the other side of the gate, a helicopter from HMS Trafalgar was waiting. But in between were Italian soldiers with M-16s.

  Authorization finally trickled down the command chain, but not for the taxi van. Huntington paid off the Sicilian driver. Soldiers scanned the CERN equipment for explosives and transferred it to an army truck.

  They drove through the base to the military airstrip. Italian Air Force training jets were parked with a US Air Force C5 cargo plane and some search and rescue helicopters. Farther out on the field, isolated like a pitbull in rabies quarantine, squatted an attack helicopter with British Royal Navy insignia.

  The Italian corporal parked the truck near it, and the helicopter pilot climbed out.

  “Dr. Huntington?” said the pilot.

  “You’re from the Trafalgar?”

  “Yes sir. Lieutenant Spencer.”

  The pilot and the Italian corporal loaded Huntington’s equipment aboard the helicopter. The aircraft smelled of aviation fuel. Two large engines were mounted vertically, one on each side of the fuselage. Below and in front were wing stubs with brackets for missiles.

  When the loading was done, the pilot and Huntington climbed into the cockpit. The lieutenant handed him noise-canceling headphones and started the engines.

  Even with the headphones, Huntington could feel the raw power of the engines.

  The lieutenant’s voice spoke through the headphones. “This is a Royal Navy Swordfish. Twin 2000 horse power turboshaft engines. Ever flown in one before?”

  “No.”

  “The standard airman joke is, a Swordfish doesn’t fly. It beats the air into submission.”

  #

  In the Dingli town library, Yasmine emailed the photographs to her father. She hadn’t heard from him since December, his annual Christmas-spamming acknowledgement of her existence. She kept every one of his emails.

  Yasmine emailed her father in America a couple times a month, keeping him up to date on her life. If nothing else, it was a chance to practice her English. The emails didn’t bounce, but he didn’t reply, either. She figured that was because a grown man didn’t have time for his daughter.

  The photographs would change that.

  #

  The helicopter approached HMS Trafalgar, a compass sliver of metal floating in the sea. The lieutenant had explained to Huntington that the Trafalgar was a helicopter carrier. It boasted eight Swordfish naval assault helicopters and two Sea Harrier VTOL jump jets. Huntington could make them out as the Swordfish neared the carrier.

  The helicopter hovered briefly over the flight deck before setting down. A deck crew approached as Huntington climbed out. He felt heat radiating from the nearest engine. The deck beneath him rolled gently with the sea.

  “Dr. Huntington?” A petty officer saluted him.

  Huntington noticed that the captain hadn’t come to meet him. He’d beaten the Yanks to the mascon locality, but if the captain didn’t cooperate, it would all be for naught.

  No one remembers the second discoverer of anything.

  #

  Yasmine had no fear of the creature now, working close to reptilian jaws as she struggled to remove the remaining rocks. The pterodactyl remained docile. It didn’t look like the Wikipedia pictures. The body shape was right, but the skin color was black, not olive green. Even its eyes were black, all pupil with no iris. But pictures were just guesses. Scientists only had fossils to go on.

  The how baffled her. How could a live pterodactyl exist? If scientists had cloned it, how had it gotten here?

  Rocks still pinned its legs, but she’d freed the wings. Her arms, legs and back ached from lifting. Scrapes from the rocks covered her hands.

  “You’re a lot of work, you know that?”

  The creature didn’t respond. Yasmine sighed. She dropped the rebar with a clank and picked up her backpack. Unzipping it, she pulled out one of the dinosaur books she’d checked out of the library. The angle of the sun filled the shallow cave with light. She sat on a rock next to the pterodactyl, flipping through pages to the pterosaur chapter. She eyed the pterodactyl critically and jabbed her finger at the page.

  “You’re not in here,” she said.

  The pterodactyl’s large wing unfolded, long bones and muscles articulating as the skin stretched between the bones. Very carefully, like a predator wary of scaring off its prey, the top part of the wing, where the talons were, stretched toward her and turned the page.

  #

  Dr. Huntington sipped afternoon tea in the officer’s wardroom, scone untouched.

  “Join you, mate?”

  Huntington looked up to see Lieutenant Spencer, the pilot who’d flown him here from Sicily. He nodded. The officer sat down.

  “Found your mountain yet?” asked the lieutenant.

  “Who told you about that?”

  “Everyone on board knows.”

  He’d only told the captain, who’d apparently told the crew. Had they told the Yanks? “It’s not a mountain.”

  “Good. As a pilot, I prefer mountains
to stay put.”

  “I’d make more progress if your captain would steer the ship in a grid pattern as I requested.”

  “A grid? Like, if it’s 3 AM Tuesday, Trafalgar will be at these GPS coordinates? The Iranians would jolly love that. You’re looking for something smaller than a mountain, but bigger than what?”

  “Something very small and dense. Impossibly compressed matter.”

  The lieutenant tapped Huntington’s plate. “Here’s your answer. A Royal Navy scone. Things don’t get denser than that.”

  #

  “Intelligent?” said Yasmine’s mother. “You mean your animal does tricks, like a dog?”

  Yasmine shook her head, exasperated. “It thinks. It watches me and learns.”

  “If you teach it tricks, you can earn money from the tourists.”

  “No. If I show someone, they’ll take it away.”

  “So sell it to them.”

  “I don’t want to sell it!”

  Her mother snorted. “It’s imaginary anyway.”

  “It’s not imaginary. It’s your fault if you won’t come look at it.”

  Her mother rolled her eyes and took a swig of her beer.

  “I emailed Father the pictures,” said Yasmine.

  Her mother gave her a scornful look. “Your father didn’t want you. Don’t you get that?”

  Yasmine felt the tiny flame of hope in her heart dim.

  #

  The next day, Yasmine offered the pterodactyl a fish. Before, she’d tried giving it food and water, human things from her backpack. Maybe it was repelled by the smell of plastic, the smell of Yasmine. This was fresh from a fisherman’s early morning catch. She figured fish hadn’t changed for millions of years. The creature should recognize it.

  The pterodactyl looked at the fish. It looked at Yasmine.

  “Eat it!” she said.

  The empty black eye looked into hers.

  She put the fish’s head in her mouth, closing her teeth on it gently, then held it out to the pterodactyl.

  It cocked its head. The eye didn’t blink.

  “Fine. Starve if I care.” She re-wrapped the fish in the paper from the fishmonger.

  There were only a few rocks left pinning the pterodactyl’s legs. She rolled a small rock into place as a fulcrum. Then she eased her weight onto the bar. With her full weight on it, the rock didn’t budge. Which surprised her, because this wasn’t as large as some others she’d moved.

  She dropped the bar with a clank, then knelt on bare knees by the rock, carefully feeling under the edges. After a minute, she realized the problem.

  The rock wasn’t loose. It was part of the cave floor. Yet it seemed to be pinning one of the legs. She lay down, squeezing her hand into a crevice between rocks. She could touch the leg, feel the scales, sense the bone and muscle within. As she felt downward along its leg, something touched her back.

  The pterodactyl’s jaw.

  She froze, holding her breath. After a long moment, she exhaled and resumed her blind groping. She squirmed forward, forcing her arm farther into the crevice.

  And there, where she should have felt a gap around its leg, or rocks pinning it, she felt where the leg met solid rock. There was no hole, no crevice. The leg simply joined solid rock.

  #

  Dr. Huntington found the captain on the bridge.

  “I know where it is.”

  “Where what is?” said the captain.

  “The mascon. It’s on Malta. Or under Malta. We have to go there.”

  “How do you know it’s there?”

  “Because I finally got enough bloody data to do a triangulation!”

  “Malta is a mountain. From the sea floor.”

  “I know that,” said Huntington, annoyed. “But there’s more mass now. Way too much.”

  “We’ll see what we can arrange, Dr. Huntington.”

  “This is what I came for. You have to–”

  “I don’t have to do anything,” snapped the captain. “This vessel is not your bloody yacht. There’s a command hierarchy here, and you aren’t at the top of it.”

  #

  In the morning, Yasmine dragged herself into the cave. She’d cried herself to sleep last night, from loneliness and from knowing she couldn’t free the pterodactyl. She’d have to tell the authorities about the UXB and the cave. Once she did that, the area would be cordoned off. The dinosaur would be probed, scanned and analyzed. She’d never see it again.

  She clambered over rocks to the back of the cave. The pterodactyl watched her.

  She heard a sound beneath it in the rocks, a hissing whistle. She lay down on the rocky surface like the day before and cautiously reached her hand into the crevice, touching the creature’s leg. She felt sand spitting against her fingers, like a crab digging itself into a hole on the beach. Gingerly she felt downward toward the rock.

  Today, there was a sandy gap around the pterodactyl’s leg where it was buried in the rock. The sand and the gap hadn’t been there yesterday. Something was digging it free.

  She pulled her hand out of the crevice and brought her face close to the pterodactyl’s.

  “What are you?” she whispered.

  Its dark eye looked at her.

  She looked more closely into the eye. And saw stars.

  #

  Lieutenant Spencer joined Dr. Huntington in the officer’s wardroom.

  “Weather’s getting worse,” said the lieutenant, “but we’re going north. That should cheer you, mate.”

  “The captain wasted a day heading south,” Huntington snapped. “Who was that supposed to scare? The Libyans? The Syrians?”

  “You’ve never been in the service, mate. Never question the brass. What are we doing when we reach Malta?”

  “Gathering more data. Look for signs of something unusual; not a black hole, but something that acts like it.”

  “What do you do when you find one? What’s it good for?”

  “It can't be a black hole, because that would destroy Earth. But if it were? You could drop things in it and watch what happens: Hawking radiation, particle-antiparticle pairs at the event horizon. We could use it as a power source, like a reactor. Connect two of them and you have an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, a space-time wormhole.”

  “And if it’s just a mountain?”

  Huntington sighed. “Then we go rock climbing.”

  #

  Within a day, the pterodactyl had freed its legs, and Yasmine pushed the remaining rocks away. It clambered over rocks with a grace that belied its large, awkward frame.

  Yasmine sat beside it at the cave opening, looking out at the Mediterranean. Clouds filled the sky, and sheets of rain moved across the beach and surf. She inhaled the smell of the downpour. The pterodactyl’s head swung slowly from side to side, scanning the horizon.

  She stroked its wing gently. “Can you fly?” she asked.

  Its eye looked at her, and she leaned closer.

  Looking into the eye, she saw an image of herself and the pterodactyl, sitting in the cave. In the image, the pterodactyl spread its wings, and the girl climbed onto its back. The pterodactyl stepped closer to the edge, the girl on its back, then leapt outward from the cliff, soaring across the water.

  The images began to repeat.

  Carefully, Yasmine climbed onto its back, holding tightly onto the bones at the front of its wings.

  “I’ll be late for supper. Not that anyone cares.”

  #

  Trafalgar was near Malta, cruising outside the twelve mile limit. The data from Huntington’s instruments puzzled him. The readings were clearer, but the mascon seemed to be moving.

  He needed to get closer to the island, but he knew better than to ask the Luddite captain. He finally tracked down Lieutenant Spencer.

  “I need to fly to Malta.”

  The lieutenant gave him an incredulous look. “You think I can just fly you there?”

 
“You’re a pilot.”

  “Mate, this is a warship, and those are warplanes. The natives get sticky about that sort of thing.”

  “The mascon coordinates are shifting. I have to follow it.”

  “Your mountain’s moving?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we can talk to the radar officer. A moving mountain should show up on radar, right?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  But it was better than talking to the captain. They took the stairs to the flight control tower. The tower swayed with the sea, rain beating against the metal.

  “Show me on the charts,” said the radar officer.

  Huntington pointed. “This is where it was earlier.”

  “What altitude?”

  “Sea level.”

  “Like a truck?” The officer shook his head. “I can’t pick things like that out of ground clutter.”

  “Is there anything unusual at all?”

  He studied the radar screen. “We have one UFO. Small footprint, low altitude. Maybe an ultralight, though he’d be bonkers in this weather.”

  “What’s his vector?” asked the lieutenant.

  “Appears to be heading out to sea.”

  The lieutenant cleared his throat. “Clearly a search and rescue situation.”

  #

  Beneath darkening storm clouds, the pterodactyl landed on a tiny outcropping of rock out at sea. An island large enough for a palm tree, but with a navigation beacon instead. There was no sand, only rocks slippery with algae. Waves crashed against the island, sending sea spray high into the air. Rain matted Yasmine’s hair against her face, and she tasted salt water. She was too exhilarated to be frightened. Shivering, she crouched at the leeward side of the creature.

  “You were supposed to flap your wings,” she shouted over the sound of the surf. She made flapping motions with her arms.