Shadows Out of Time

He inched forward, craning his neck. The guard was sprawled in the sand, clearly wounded, though he held his gun ready, waiting to see if Garner would come for him. There was only the soft whisper of sand shifting in a light breeze. Soon it would be dawn.

Phillips watched as the wounded man tried to swing around, back to the safety of the machine, but he must be badly injured. Phillips ran forward and the man saw him, but too late. A quick stutter of bullets finished him. Phillips went down the dune face. He saw Garner, face-down in the sand that was already starting to cover him. A quick inspection showed him that the engineer was dead. The pilot! Phillips was thinking. But he knew that to Garner, escape had never been more important than the mission. He and O’Reilly had known from the outset their chances of getting out alive had been slim.

There were more rumblings from the escarpment and Phillips saw to his horror that the thing from the underworld had pushed itself out of the cleft, raising its upper body, a grotesque fusion of bloated limbs and claws, limned in moonlight. Around it, scores of smaller creatures hopped and slithered, a nightmare host. They began the ascent of the dune and Phillips knew that he was their target. And the machine — they would tear it apart. He opened fire, shouting like a madman as the rain of bullets tore into the front rank of the monsters, shredding them like so much paper. But it was like trying to hold back the sea.

Behind him, he heard the sudden roar of the helicopter’s engine. He swung round. From the pilot’s cabin he saw a hand waving at him. O’Reilly! He’d made it down the escarpment and slipped into the helicopter while the gunfight was ensuing.

Phillips shouldered the empty weapon and raced up the sand. He swung up into the body of the craft and O’Reilly lifted it, like a huge, fat insect, into the dawn skies. Phillips clambered through to join O’Reilly.

“Jake was the expert, but I trained on these birds,” said the engineer. His face was set, a terrible mask in the poor light. “I reckon the Mauritanians know Al-Qaeda is using them, otherwise they’d have sent jets in to blow this one out of the sky. Which suits us for the time being.”

“I’m sorry about Garner.”

O’Reilly nodded grimly, masking what he must have been feeling. Phillips knew he and his buddy must have had any number of brushes with death. It would have welded a particular bond between them, strong as any pair of twins.

“Comes to us all in this game,” said O’Reilly. Whatever regrets he had, he was going to face them later. Not now, not while the job had to be finished. He looked back at the escarpment. “Let’s give these bastards a farewell present. These machines usually carry a heavy payload.”

He swung the helicopter around in a wide circle and came back to face the things that had burst from the tall cleft. The central colossus, now a dark green, splotched worm, with row upon row of serrated teeth ringing its open mouth, lifted itself higher as if it would challenge the machine and snatch it from the sky. O’Reilly knew how the firepower of the machine operated, though. He fired off two missiles and swung the nose of the helicopter up and away. The thundering blast of the explosions buffeted the aerial machine, but O’Reilly wrestled control back and swung around again.

Phillips saw the huge worm writhing on the sand, smashing rocks this way and that. Most of its head had been blasted to pulp. Around it the smaller creatures gathered and then, as one, plunged into the dying monster, feeding avidly like sharks ripping apart an injured whale.

“We’ll head east to Mali,” said O’Reilly. “They won’t like it, but we can sell them this bird and head for home down the Niger river. I’ve got friends in Niamey, the capital.”

Phillips nodded. He knew the place, which would be as safe as any in this otherwise hostile terrain.

The helicopter had long crossed Mali’s western border by the time the explosion deep in the desert of Mauritania had detonated. If anyone saw the small mushroom cloud that plumed up into the night sky, they kept it to themselves. The desert was full of storms. One more was of no concern.

Out of Time GEOFFREY HART

The Adversaries knew they’d disappear from the galaxy after their too-brief existence, for they were mortal and bound by time — and they had attracted the attention of the Voices, who were neither. In what time remained to them, the Adversaries fashioned a trap they knew the Voices could never resist: a place with such a paradoxical relationship with time that even the Voices could never fully grasp its properties without entering the trap. Having entered, they found they could not escape. The trap had worked, and the physical forms of the Voices were imprisoned. The Adversaries knew that like all things material, the trap could not endure forever. But it might endure long enough for some future race to find a better solution.