If she was right about what was happening.
Logic suggested that she should sit tight and hope that the Chinese turned the gate back on soon. This parallel world, minus man’s pollution, was cooler. A few hours after sunset, she would be at risk for hypothermia. All the nearby fallen branches and trees were covered with moss; building a fire with the damp wood was going to take her survival skills. She had no matches but she did have a pistol. If she could find enough dry tinder, she might be able to use the muzzle flare to light it.
Something moved in the forest close by.
Her heart leapt painfully in her chest at the sound, as if it knew something horrible was hunting her.
A deep breathy roar came from downwind. If the beast could smell, it would pick up her scent. She pulled her pistol and checked the magazine. It was a .45 caliber with ten rounds in the magazine. She flipped the safety off. She noticed her hands weren’t shaking. Was it because she wasn’t afraid to die? This was the death she wanted; on an alien planet, dealing with extraterrestrial life.
If the Chinese never turned the gate back on, there was no way she could survive for long. Not crippled.
“If this is your idea of a joke,” she whispered to the God she rarely acknowledged. “I don’t think it’s very funny.”
Something large came crashing through the forest bracken. She steeled herself, knowing that she only had ten rounds, plus another ten in the spare magazine. Twenty bullets until she was rescued. If she was rescued. She couldn’t afford to waste even one.
The younger brother of Perkins’ dinosaur broke through the screen of ferns. It rushed at her, jaws open. She aimed at its dark eye.
Why am I fighting so hard? I’m just going to die.
Obey the first rule! Stay alive!
She squeezed the trigger. The dinosaur roared with pain as the bullet plowed through its eye. She flung herself forward, out of the chair, as the beast lunged at her. Its hot breath blasted across her back, reeking of spoiled meat.
There was a clang of metal and the whine of servos as the dinosaur bit down on her wheelchair. She rolled through dead, molding leaves, trying to put distance between her and the beast. The dinosaur shook its head just like a crocodile would to tear chunks of meat from a large prey.
A .45 didn’t have the stopping power for a body shot. Getting a head shot from a prone position was going to be nearly impossible. She struggled to sit up, cursing her ruined body.
The dinosaur flung aside her wheelchair. It sniffed loudly, casting about for her.
She levered herself up, took aim on its head, and waited for it to turn.
There was crashing in the forest nearby. A second breathy roar of an adult dinosaur.
They’re pack hunters, she thought. Maybe a mated pair, or two juveniles, since this one is smaller than the male inside the cooler.
The wounded male turned to face her. It spotted her with its one good eye. She shot. The first bullet cut a groove along its heavy bone eye ridge. The second missed. Then she had no choice. She rapid-fired into its body as it loomed over her. The pistol thundered in her hand, slamming her onto her back.
The beast stood over her, its mouth wide to show off massive sharp teeth. And then slowly, gracefully, it toppled over dead.
She had one moment of elation and then the second dinosaur crashed into the clearing. She aimed and fired. The hammer fell onto the empty chamber with a loud click. She was out. She fumbled to roll to the side so she could pull the spare magazine from its pouch. The larger but less decorative female charged, rumbling dangerously. She wasn’t going to make it. She wasn’t going to…
A shrieking bolt of light pierced through the female’s chest. The beast crumbled, landing inches from Lain’s feet. The last of its breath washed over her.
What the hell? Lain rammed the magazine home. She lay in the deep rich moist loam of the forest, panting. Her wheelchair sat twenty feet away, canted on its side, looking extremely battered.
She caught movement out the corner of her eye. She rolled quickly, bringing up her pistol.
A humanoid stood a dozen feet away, bow in hand, string pulled taut, arrow ready. It took her a second to realize that it was nonhuman.
“Shit,” Lain whispered. First contact. A lifetime of dreaming of it—all the possible ways it might take place—and her mind went blank. “Shit.”
They stared at each other.
He was at least six and a half feet tall, wide shouldered and lean. Pointed ears said he wasn’t human but he had to be at least a distant genetic cousin. His black hair and almond-shaped eyes hinted that he was closer to the Asian branch. If she had to guess an age, she would put him at seventeen. Tribal tattoos done in blue ink covered his arms in a complex design reminiscent of Celtic knots. He wore knee-high boots, leather pants and a vest of overlapping scales that seemed more organic than handcrafted. He seemed to be wearing nothing fashioned out of metal; all his weapons were wood, leather and stone.
Primitive as his weapons might be, he could still kill her. It was a basic truth that xenobiologists had always acknowledged—first contact could easily be deadly to both sides.
They stared at each other, weapons aimed.
“I don’t want to hurt you.” Lain cautiously lowered her pistol. “And hopefully you don’t want to hurt me, but I am not going to make my last act in this world killing off an intelligent being.”
The male lowered his bow.
Lain breathed out in relief. Mutual destruction averted, at least for the time being. She risked glancing at her wheelchair still lying on its side. She snapped her fingers. Its legs flailed for a moment and stopped. It needed to be righted before it could function properly—if it wasn’t totally broken.
She started to crawl toward it, keeping her pistol in position so she could quickly bring it up. “Yes, I might be thrashing around on the ground like a beached whale, but I’m still dangerous. I’m a cripple but I have powerful machines that make me greater than this broken shell. With machines I have flown up to the stars, walked on the moon.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Was supposed to swim the seas of Europa—that’s a moon to Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, although your people might think it’s just a star.”
She reached her chair and struggled to right it. “Of course it would help if my powerful machine was working.”
The male crouched down, cocking his head in what seemed to be puzzlement. She reminded herself that it was dangerous to assign human emotion to the gesture. It seemed, though, that he was curious about her. She knew that she was damn curious about him. Her training, though, stressed that her first priority was to stabilize her environment. Dead scientists learned nothing but the truth of their own mortality.
She finally managed to right her wheelchair. “Load.” It whined as it tried to comply. After a second, it shuddered and its operating system crashed. “I am starting to suspect that there is a god and he has wicked sense of humor. He’s probably doing all this just to teach me a lesson. I’m just not sure at all what I’m supposed to be learning.”
She manually set the chair’s armature to load position. “I think part of it is that I’m supposed to remember that it is my mind that matters most, not my body. True, this would all be marginally easier with two sound legs, but not much. Without a gun, I would have been in a bad way with those dinosaurs, crippled or not.”
She climbed into the chair and rebooted the operating system. “And I think God was also reminding me that regardless of where I would have gone, I would have needed machines to operate. When I went to the moon, I needed a space suit. In the seas of Europa, I would have needed a diving suit. And if they ever got that insane trip to Venus finalized—you should have seen that gear. All machines to move this fragile container I have about, because what’s important is what’s up here.” She tapped her head. “It’s my mind that makes me special. And there’s nothing wrong with it. And machines let me use my mind, be it on the moon, or Europa, or wherever this place is.”