When I finally awoke, it was morning. The big carnosaurs were gone, except for a few stragglers who lay next to the sauropod carcasses, too stuffed to move. Glancing down, I saw the decapitated dinosaur lying on its side at the base of the tree. In the light of day, I could see that it was a Megaraptor. The crocs had chewed on it a little, but the carcass was largely untouched. One arm was missing, but it was clearly not a recent injury, let alone one from last night. I wondered if it had been lost in some previous conflict with a Giganotosaurus. A short distance away, there was another, hideously mutilated raptor carcass. I looked up, and met Carlos’s gaze. “There were six of them,” he told me. “Caproni filmed the whole thing, though I doubt if many people will want to see it. It looks like they weren’t interested in the sauropod carcasses. They were after the gigans, especially the little one. Two went after the little one, while the other four slashed the s* out of the adult. The gigan evened the odds real quick, though. It beheaded one, sent another away with one leg barely on, and then it turned around and walked right over that one. Last we saw of it, it was running into the woods with ten feet of intestine hanging out. I imagine it’s dead by now.”

I looked to my right, and saw Di sleeping on the next branch. Carlos leaned over and whispered in my ear, “She called out your name, you know. Once when the plane went down, and once when you were trying to get back up the tree.” Then he continued, in a normal voice, “We finally contacted the Ora. The others will be coming soon.”
Sure enough, it was less than twenty minutes before the Ora came in sight. They parked the Ora directly beneath the tree, allowing us to slide down the rope and land on the roof. Di allowed me to rest on a cot in the upper deck of the Ora, where she and the other women of the expedition normally slept. Once, I peered out through half-closed eye and saw her sitting beside me, her chin resting on the mattress.

That evening, Dianna and I had dinner together. We both felt awkward, and didn’t talk much, but it was still nice to have each other’s company. I finally told her the story of my “dog fight”: “It happened in 2059. It was the last big year in the campaign against the drug cartels. All along, it had been a war of attrition. We destroyed, on average, 90% of their crops—not counting the loss of productivity from area-denial agents. Meanwhile, they shot down 20% of our planes, mainly with missiles and flak guns. The only question was, which side could sustain their losses longer. The cartels were stretched to the limits of their resources, but they still had enough for a last push back. They started using things they had held in reserve before. One of those was the Black Baron.

“The ‘Black Baron’ was a pilot, or, for all we knew, several pilots, flying a turboprop military trainer. It had been fitted with a full complement of weapons: missiles, machine guns, and a ‘Cyrano’ 57 mm cannon. It was painted black, with a red devil’s face on the nose. It wasn’t the only fighter they deployed, but there was no mistaking it. It appeared regularly in certain areas. Our planes were utterly defenseless. Have you ever seen an eagle go after a pigeon? It was worse than that. Our standard planes were ‘flying wing’ tankers. They had no tail and no discrete fuselage, just one huge delta wing, 60 meters in span and fat enough for a man to sit in the leading edge. They got the nickname ‘flying tortoises.’ The closest thing we had to weapons were some obsolete chaff launchers in the rear. In the event of hostile fire, the only thing we had going for us was that, apart from us, there wasn’t much in the plane to be hit. Even so, we might have been safe if we had had a military escort. But that was ruled out as a matter of legal etiquette. Officially, we were a civilian `agricultural’ project. Under any other name, what we were doing would have been illegal. Involving military air craft would have meant abandoning that pretense. So, the only remotely effective defense we had was protection in numbers. They sent us out in scores, even in hundreds. On a good day, an encounter with serious resistance would only wipe out half of them.

“When I met the Black Baron, I was flying in a mid-sized formation: two dozen planes. With a full load, the Tortugas had a speed of barely 200 kilometers per hour and a ceiling of well under 1800 meters. On this occasion, we were spraying secondary-growth rain forest between two mountain ranges. Guns in the mountains could shoot down at us. We flew in a zigzag formation, two alternating lines of planes. I was seventh in the staggered line

“The first plane in set off a cluster of off-route mines planted in the trees. That’s a mine turned on its side, designed to fire at passing vehicles. They launched a bunch of sub munitions, which exploded if they got near enough to an aircraft. All this made for a solid cloud of flak halfway across the valley. 3 planes got hit, one of which had two engines fail. That was enough to foul up our mission, because it wasn’t safe to turn around, so every plane behind it had to slow down or maneuver to get around it. Of course, we also had to crowd in to the middle to avoid the thickest of the trees. And, the narrowest part of the valley was still ahead of us.

“At the bottleneck, flak guns opened up. We started dropping our loads and pulling out. The first two got out with no problem. The plane with the broken engines was third, and it had trouble pulling up even with its load gone. The rest of us had to slow down and delay our own drops. The flak guns started eating away at planes here and there. One lost a pilot to a lucky shot, and a copilot took over. Then the hostile plane came down. The first we knew about it was when a missile blew out the whole cockpit of the plane ahead of me. It didn’t go down right away. Sometimes, one of these planes with no crew left alive would fly until they ran out of gas and then coast to a stop. The plane yawed right, into my path. I dumped everything I had and managed to pull up enough to get over it. A plane that had been ahead of me had to swerve to avoid me, and clipped another plane. They both went down. I almost rear-ended another plane, but at the last moment, it went down with the cockpit shot out. The Black Baron went right in front of me, blasting away with 14.5 mm wheel guns and that damn cannon. The planes that it didn’t get were driven right into the flak guns, the trees and each other.

“The Black Baron did a loop and shot up the planes behind me. It fired one more missile, a few short bursts with the cannon, and a steady stream of wheel gun fire. That was it—the entire flight, gone. Another plane came barreling up behind me, still in a steep banking ascent that the pilot started just before he was blown away. It almost tore my wing off. The whole time, we were getting major flack. Our radio man was killed. Then the cannons went quiet, and the Black Baron closed in.

“The first thing he did was fire the cannon. Pow-pow-pow-pow: half the engines are gone, and there’s a hole in my wing big enough to fly another airplane through. I barely kept it in the air. As it was, I ended up tilting to port. Then the wheel-guns started up. Every time one went into the plane, I heard it knocking around. These were smart shells, homing in on parts and crew. One of them found my copilot. When the wheel guns went silent, I was the only one left alive. I suppose the Baron thought I was dead. I was a little uncertain myself.

“I expected a coup de grace with the cannon or another missile. Like I said, even a Tortuga with no crew could still coast its way to a landing and get back in service. I had seen at least eight air-to-air missiles in the racks. The only reason I can conceive why he didn’t do it is that those missiles are worth almost as much as our planes.

“What he did instead was try to ram me. It’s a lot more practical than it sounds, against an unmanned aircraft. He slowed down and nosed up alongside me. First he sliced into the skin of the dorsal surface with his own wing. I was tempted to roll and take him with me. He probably thought the same thing, without realizing I was still alive, and went around to get at me from below. He jammed into the tip of my high wing. I started to roll…”

“—and then you brought the wing down,” Dianna said. There was a darkly satisfied tone in her voice.
“That I did,” I said. “I saw his canopy fly off, followed by one propeller. After I landed, they found blood and hair on the bottom of the wing. They also found this.” I solemnly took something out of my vest. Dianna gasped. I twirled the 14.5 mm shell in my fingers. “They found this in the floor of my plane, right under my seat. The explosive filling was removed, of course.” I shook it, and it rattled. “The bomb squad filled it with shrapnel they found in the rest of the cockpit, and gave it to me as a souvenir: the bullet with my name on it.”

“Wow.” There was a long pause. “God must think you are one special guy.”
I shook my head. “I survived by driving two other planes into the ground. Were the people in them not special enough?”
Dianna tried to turn the conversation. “You did quit your job, of course…”
I laughed. There was a trace of bitterness there, but it was still a healthy laugh. “The Colombians had me under contract. I flew for them at least a year, or they paid me nothing. I made a counterproposal: They let me go with pay for seven months’ work, or I showed this souvenir to the newspapers. A satisfactory arrangement was reached.” After a long pause, I tossed the shell to Di. She yelped in surprise. “Take it. It’s a gift.”

All the while, other people were talking and moving around below us, but we were not disturbed. Not until we heard Carlos speaking to Diego.
“I don’t hold what you did against you,” Carlos said, in a calm but utterly chilling tone. “A lot of people in your position would have done the same thing. Even I might have done it. But that doesn’t remove the need for discipline.” Diego said something I couldn’t make out.

I froze in alarm when I heard the sound of a drum being removed from a shotgun. “This is what we used to do in the army. If you slept or ran out on your duty and left your mates in a lurch, you had to play a game. It’s traditionally known as Russian roulette.” I heard the plink of shotgun shells hitting the deck. “We use different numbers of shells, mostly based on how serious the offense was. Sometimes, we’d leave only one shell in. Sometimes, we’d only take one out. I’d say you deserve about five. See? Every other shell, gone.” The drum went back in with a loud slap. I ran downstairs. “Round and round it goes. Where it stops, nobody knows…”

I reached the deck and found Carlos with his back to me. He had Diego backed into the corner of the lab. Just as I opened my mouth to call for help, Carlos pulled the trigger. The roar of the gun resounded through the lab. Carlos turned around and smiled. “Hi, Ted,” he said. Then he stepped aside. Diego was slumped against the wall, his chest a mass of red. Carlos nonchalantly picked up a shell and bit into it. His lips and teeth were stained pink.

“Riot shells,” he said, “full of rock salt. Somebody decided to dye it red for extra effect. Diego should figure it out when he wakes up.”
“If he had a heart condition,” I said, “you might really have killed him.”
Carlos grinned wider. “Who says I wasn’t trying?” He stalked out. I checked Diego’s pulse, and found that his heart was racing. After a few minutes, he got up and ran out of the Ora. To my knowledge, neither he nor Carlos has ever spoken about the incident. I suppose both of them will say I made it up. But I know what I saw.

I returned to Dianna. We talked some more, mostly aimless chatter. Finally, Dianna said, “I’ve had a really rough time the last few months. And the whole time, you’ve always been there for me. I, well, wanted to say thank you.” She leaned over and hugged me. I think my heart must have been beating as fast as Diego’s. I wanted to tell her how I felt. I wanted to show her. I yearned to kiss her on the lips. I nearly did. But I remembered the Starship. I had felt the same dangerous thrill at the stick of that plane. In the end, it was that thrill which had caused the disaster. I had a feeling that if I said and did what I wanted, the woman in my arms would not reject me. But I also had a feeling that it could lead to another disaster, which might be even more painful than the physical danger I had gone through in the plane crash.

I gently disengaged from Dianna. “You’re welcome,” I told her. Then I briskly walked out. I stepped out of the Ora, and walked for the better part of a hundred yards into the Cretaceous night. I had no weapons, and there had been reports of noasaurs prowling around camp. But I didn’t care. I stared up at the stars and the moon, shining brighter than they would in the clearest skies in the present. I felt as if my heart had been broken twice: first by a plane, and then by a woman.
I never heard the approaching footfalls. “Hey, Ted,” Carlos said. He did not try to start a conversation, but simply stood beside me, gazing up at the skies.
I finally broke the silence. “I haven’t told her yet.”
Carlos nodded. “That’s probably the right thing.” After long minutes of silence, he said, “Want to try to recover the Starship?”
“Hell no. I’d just as soon dynamite it.”
Carlos looked directly at me. “It’s been pretty bad, hasn’t it? But c’mon. That’s not really what’s on your mind. “
“I suppose, ‘Why?’ Just generally, why things are the way they are. Does that even make sense?”

Carlos grinned, his teeth glinting in the moonlight. “Maybe not, but I definitely understand. When I was at war, I would think ‘why?’ every day, every night, every hour. I would keep wondering if Somebody out there wasn’t looking after me. And sometimes, I wanted to tell that Somebody, ‘F* off! I just wanna live my own life!’” He chuckled. “It messes with your head. But if you’re really fit for the job, eventually you learn to stop asking so many questions, and just deal with whatever comes at you.”
“Have you ever actually done that?” I asked pointedly.
Carlos laughed long and loud. “Okay. So it’s more of an ideal than it is a practical philosophy. But I have learned to deal with it, and I think you will too. And who knows? Maybe, once you stop searching all the s* that goes on for mystical signs, Somebody will actually show you what you’re really meant to know.”

I smiled. “There’s a story in the Bible about a prophet who asked God to speak to him,” I said. “Afterward, there was a storm, and an earthquake, and probably some other stuff I can’t think of off the top of my head. But in the end, God really spoke through a still, small voice.”
Carlos nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. “Sounds like a very practical man. I like that. Incidentally, have you noticed what you’re standing in?” I looked down, and yelped in surprise. I had been dimly aware that I was standing in a depression. The moonlight revealed it for what it was: a giganotosaur track! Carlos laughed again, not unkindly. “See, Ted? That could be a lesson to everybody: If you’re looking for signs, look down before you look up. Now, let’s mosey on back to the Ora, shall we?”

I went back, feeling somehow comforted. I was still confused over what (if anything) to do about Dianna. But, when I looked past my imagined grievance with the Almighty, I could see that it had been the wrong time to try to start a romance. For the rest of the trip, I did my best to keep are interactions casual, and before long, I was back to thinking of her as a friend and coworker. And so it remained—until the next time we faced life or death together.