Read Online Evolution by Stephen Baxter - Free Book Online

anymore.
    She had always been the weakest of her brood. She would not even have survived the first days after her hatching if not for the chance decimation of her siblings by a roaming marsupial predator. She had grown to overcome her physical weakness, and had become an effective hunter. But in a dark part of her mind she had always remained the weakest, robbed of food by her siblings, even eyed as a cannibalistic snack.
    Add to that a slow poisoning by the fumes and dust of the volcanoes in the west. Add to that an awareness of her own aging. Add to that the hammer blow of her lost brood. She hadn’t been able to get Purga’s scent out of her head.
    It had not been hard to pursue that scent out of her home range, across the floodplain to the ocean shore, and now to this new place where the scent of Purga was strong.
    Wounding Tooth stood still and silent. The burrow, her nose told her, was right under her feet. She bent and pressed one side of her head against the ground. But she heard nothing. The primates were very still.
    So she waited, through the long hours, as the sun rose higher on this last day, as the comet light grew subtly brighter. She did not even flinch when meteors flared overhead.
    If she had known about the giganotosaur that watched her she would not have cared. Even if she could have understood the meaning of the comet light, she would not have cared. Let her have Purga; that was all.
    It was a peculiar irony that her high intelligence had brought Wounding Tooth to this. She was one of the few dinosaur types smart enough to have gone insane.

    • • •
    It was not yet dark. Purga could tell that from the glint of light at the rough portal to the burrow. But what was day, what was night in these strange times?
    After several nights bathed in comet light, she was exhausted, fractious, hungry— and so was her mate, Third, and her two surviving pups. The pups were just about large enough to hunt for themselves now, and therefore dangerous. If there was not enough food, the family, pent up in this burrow, might turn on one another.
    The imperatives slid through her mind, and a new decision was reached. She would have to go out, even if the time felt wrong, even if the land was flooded with light. Hesitantly she moved toward the burrow entrance.
    Once outside, she stopped to listen. She could hear no earth-shaking footsteps. She stepped forward, muzzle twitching, whiskers exploring.
    The light was strong, strange. In the sky cometary matter continued to fall, streaking across the dome of the sky like silent fireworks. It was extraordinary, somehow compelling— too remote to be frightening.
    An immense cage plunged out of the sky. She scrabbled back toward the burrow. But those great hands were faster, thick ropy muscles pulling the fingers closed around her.
    And now she faced a picket fence of teeth, hundreds of them, a tremendous face, reptilian eyes as big as her head. A giant mouth opened, and Purga smelled meat.
    The dinosaur’s face, with its great, thin-skinned snout, had none of the muscular mobility of Purga’s. Wounding Tooth’s head was rigid, expressionless, like a robot’s. But though she could not show it, all of Wounding Tooth’s being was focused on the tiny warm mammal in her grip.
    Her limbs pinned against her belly, Purga stopped struggling.
    Oddly, Purga, in this ultimate moment, knew a certain peace that Wounding Tooth would have envied. Purga was already in her middle age, already slowing in her movements and thought. And she had, after all, achieved as much as a creature like her could have hoped for. She had produced young. Even encased in the troodon’s cold reptilian grip, she could smell her young on her own fur. In her way she was content. She would die— here and now, in heartbeats— but the species would go on.
    But something moved beyond the troodon’s bulky body, something even more massive, a gliding mountain, utterly silent.
    The troodon was unbelievably careless.