McCaffrey, Anne - DP 1 - Dinosaur Planet.pdf - Anne McCaffrey - aro164

Dinosaur Planet

Cover

DinosaurPlanet

Dinosaur Planet

by Anne McCaffrey

VERSION 1.2 (DEC 2, 2002) by Bibliophile. If you find and correct errors in the text,

please update the version number by 0.1 and redistribute.

DinosaurPlanet

CONTENTS

CONTENTS............................................................................................................................

............ 2

C H A P T E R

ONE.................................................................................................................................. 3

C H A P T E R

TWO............................................................................................................................... 12

C H A P T E R

THREE............................................................................................................................ 25

C H A P T E R

FOUR.............................................................................................................................. 32

C H A P T E R

FIVE................................................................................................................................ 40

C H A P T E R

SIX.................................................................................................................................. 54

CHAPTER SEV-

EN............................................................................................................................ 61

C H A P T E R

EIGHT............................................................................................................................. 74

C H A P T E R

NINE............................................................................................................................... 79

C H A P T E R

TEN................................................................................................................................. 89

CHAPTER ELEV-

EN.......................................................................................................................... 98

C H A P T E R

TWELVE....................................................................................................................... 103

DinosaurPlanet

CHAPTER ONE

Kai heard Varian’s light step echoing in the empty passenger section of the shuttlecraft just as

he switched off the communications unit and tripped the tape into storage.

“Sorry, Kai, did I miss the contact?” Varian came in out of breath, her suit dripping wet,

carrying with her the pervasive stench of Ireta’s “fresh” air, which tainted the filtered air of the

shuttle’s pilot cabin. She glanced from the unlit communications panel to his face to see if he

were annoyed by her tardiness, but a triumphant grin cut through her feigned penitence. “We

finally captured one of those herbivores!”

Kai had to grin in response to her elation. Varian would spend long hours tracking a

creature in Ireta’s damp, stinking jungles; hours of patient, obstacle-strewn search which, all

too often, proved unproductive. Nevertheless, short of resorting to Discipline, Varian found it

nauseatingly irksome to sit still in a comfortable chair through a Thek relay. Kai had wagered

with himself that she would manage to avoid the tedious interchange with some reasonable

excuse. Her news was good and her excuse valid.

“How’d you manage to capture one? Those traps you’ve been rigging?” he asked with

genuine interest, though those same traps had taken his best mechanic from completing the

seismic grid his geologists needed.

“No, not the traps,” and there was a hint of chagrin in Varian’s tone. “No, the damned fool

creature was wounded and couldn’t run away with the rest of the herd.” She paused to give

her next statement full emphasis. “And Kai, it bleeds blood!”

Kai blinked at her announcement. “So?”

“Red blood!”

“Well?”

“Are you a biological idiot? Red blood means hemoglobin ...”

“What’s odd about that? Plenty of other species use an iron base.”

“Not on the same planet with those aquatic squirmers Trizein’s been dissecting. They use

a pale viscous fluid.” Varian was fleetingly contemptuous of his failure to recognize the signi-

ficance. “This planet’s one mass of anomalies, biological as well as geological. No ore where

you should be striking pay-dirt by the hopper-load, and me finding creatures larger than any-

thing mentioned in text-tapes from any planet in all the systems we’ve explored in the last four

hundred galactic standard years. Of course, it may be all of a piece,” she added thoughtfully,

as she pushed back the springy dark curls that framed her face.

She was tall, as so many types born on a normal-gravity planet like Earth were, with a

slender but muscularly fit body which the one-piece orange ship suit displayed admirably.

Despite the articles dangling from her force-screen belt, her waist was trim, and the bulges in

her thigh and calf pouches did not detract from the graceful appearance of her legs.

Kai had been elated when Varian had been assigned as his co-leader. They’d been more

than acquaintances on shipboard ever since she had joined the ARCT-10 as a xenob-vet, on

a three galactic standard year contract. While the ARCT-10, like her sister ships in the Explor-

atory and Evaluation Corps, had a basic administrative and operations personnel who were

ship-born and ship-bred, the complement of additional specialists, trainees and, occasionally,

high echelon travelers for the Federated Sentient Planets changed continually, giving the

ship-bred the stimulation of meeting members of other cultures, sub-groups, minorities and

persuasions.

Kai had been attracted to Varian, first because she was an extremely pretty girl and

second, because she was the opposite of Geril. He had been trying to end an unsatisfactory

relationship with Geril, who had been so insistent that he’d had to change his quarters from

the ship-born to the visitor area of Earth-normal section of the compound ARCT-10, in order

to avoid her. Varian happened to be his new next-door neighbour. She was gay, bubbling with

humour, and intensely interested in everything about the satellite-sized exploratory vessel.

She infected him with her enthusiasm as she chivvied him into taking her on a guided tour of

the various special quarters which accommodated the more esoteric sentient races of the

FSP in their own atmosphere or gravity. She’d been planet-bound, Varian had told him, on

how many diverse planets did not signify, so that she felt it was high time she saw how the

Explorers and Evaluators lived. Especially since, she added, as a xenob-vet, she often had to

correct some of EV’s crazier judgments and mistakes.

Varian was a good narrator and her tales of planetary adventures, both as a youngster

trailing after xenob-vet parents and as junior in the same specialty, had fascinated Kai. He’d

had the usual planetary tours to combat ship-conditioned agoraphobia, and indeed had spent

a whole galactic year with his mother’s parents on her birthworld, but he felt his must have

been dull worlds in comparison to those generating Varian’s wild and amusing experiences.

Another way in which Varian excelled Geril was in her ability to argue pleasantly and ef-

fectively without losing her temper or wit. Geril had always been oppressively serious and too

eager to denigrate anything of which she did not unconditionally approve. In fact, long before

Kai heard that Varian was to be his co-leader, he had realized that she must have had Discip-

line, young as she appeared to be. He’d gone as far as to tap for a print-out of her public his-

tory from the EV’s data banks. Her list of assignments had been impressive even if the public

record did not give any assessment of her value on those expeditions. However, he noticed

she had been promoted rapidly: this, combined with the number of assignments, indicated a

young woman slated for increasing responsibility and more difficult assignments. Granted her

addition to the Iretan expedition had been made almost at the last minute when life-form read-

ings had registered on the preliminary probe, but, with her background, Ireta ought not to

McCaffrey, Anne - DP 1 - Dinosaur Planet.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: