Evolution

Evolution by Stephen Baxter Page B

Book: Evolution by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online
Authors: Stephen Baxter
Tags: Science-Fiction
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everywhere.
    Even the largest duckbills had been smashed to the ground. They lay, broken and twisted, under scattered sand and mud. A group of raptors lay together, their lithe bodies tangled up. Everywhere the old lay with the young, parents alongside their children, predators with their prey, united in death. Most disasters, like floods and fires, selectively affected the weakest, the young and the old and the ill. Or else they targeted species— an epidemic, perhaps, carried by an unwitting host across a land bridge between the continents. But this time, none had been spared, none save the very fortunate, like the suchomimus.
    The suchomimus saw a silver fish. It twitched, carried a dozen kilometers in seconds, still alive. The suchomimus’s gut rumbled gently. Even now, as the world ended, she was hungry.
    But the wind’s work was not yet done. Already, over the ocean, the air was rushing back to fill the vacuum created at the impact site. It was like an immense inhalation.
    The suchomimus, toying with her fish, saw the wall of darkness bear down once more. But this time it came from inland, and it was laden with debris, with dirt and rocks and uprooted trees and even a huge male tyrannosaur that writhed lifeless, high in the air.
    Once more the suchomimus dived at the sand.

    • • •
    From the furies of the crater the shock front continued to spread out, like a ripple around a fallen stone. Further inland, where Giant had raided the tyrannosaur nest, the front had wrought devastation around a great circle big enough to have been wrapped around the Moon.
    Tornadoes spun off the advancing front like willful, destructive children.
    To Giant, the twister was a tube of darkness that connected sky to ground. At its feet, what looked like splinters rose up, whirled and fell back. The giganotosaurs’ ancestors had invaded a continent. Now Giant reared up and hissed, bobbing his head, eyes triangulating on the approaching menace.
    But this was no saurian competitor. As the twister approached it grew ever larger, towering high above him.
    At last something in Giant’s mind focused on those twigs scattered at the feet of this climatic monster. Those “twigs” were trees, redwoods and ginkgoes and tree ferns, scattered as easily as pine needles.
    His brothers made the same calculation. The three of them turned and ran.
    The base of the twister tore casually through the blanket forest, destroying trees, scattering rock. Animals weighing five tons or more were hurled into the air, great slow-moving herbivores suddenly flying. Many of them died of shock even before they hit the ground.
    In her burrow, Purga was shaken awake by the rattling of the earth. She and her mate huddled closely around the two pups, and they listened to the howling of the wind, the clatter and crunch of trees being shattered, the scream of dying dinosaurs.
    Purga closed her eyes, baffled, terrified, longing for the noise to stop.
    And in the foothills of the Rockies, the mother azhdarchid sensed the approach of the mighty wind. Hastily she folded up her wings and waddled on wrists and knees toward her nest.
    Her young clustered around, but she had no food to give them, and they pecked at her angrily. The chicks were still flightless, their wing membranes yet to develop. For now they had only loose, useless flaps of skin trailing between their flight fingers and hind legs. And yet they were already beautiful, in their way; the scales that clustered around their thin necks, a relic of their reptilian ancestry, caught the high sunlight, gleaming and glistening.
    But now clouds raced across the sun. The twisters would not reach so high. But the shock front was still a broiling wall of turbulent air, still powerful even so far from the impact site.
    A first gust buffeted the nest. The chicks screeched and stumbled.
    Without thinking the mother flapped her wings, taking to the air. A primitive imperative had taken over. There would always be more broods, if

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