Dino Squad

By Tom Wright

This is the complete trilogy collection of the Dino Squad novella series.

WARNING: This book contains action. Lots of action. Dinosaur-fighting action. Jurassic Park meets Transformers.

Raptors wage war with their dinosaur foes across the galaxy, and they've set their sights on Earth. If they can't take the planet for themselves, they plan on destroying it like they did 65 million years ago.

Human-friendly dinosaurs team up with the United States military, forming the Dino Squad. Their goal? Repel the raptors, save the planet.

Or die trying...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Moonlight Crew Publishing
• Release date: Aug 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781516303311

Tom Wright

I’m Tom Wright. Web guy by day, author… also by day. My wife, Molly, co-founded the Austin Science Fiction/Fantasy Book Club, so I read SF/F pretty regularly. After several books, I can firmly say I enjoy fantasy with lots of action. I write what I enjoy, hence the popcorn fantasy. I live in Austin, TX with Molly and our two daughters.

Book preview

Stats

Tyrannosaurus Rex:

Height: 4 meters

Length: 12 meters

Weight: 8100 kg (9 tons)

Stegosaurus:

Height: 3 meters

Length: 9 meters

Weight: 3000 kg (3.4 tons)

Triceratops:

Height: 3 meters

Length: 9 meters

Weight: 5400 kg (6 tons)

Velociraptor:

Height: 2 meters

Length: 4 meters

Weight: 68-136 kg (150-300 pounds)

Human:

Height: 1.8 meters

Weight: 72 kg (160 pounds)

Pterodactyl:

Length: 2 meters

Wingspan: 10 meters

Weight: 22 kg (50 pounds)

Brontosaurus:

Height: 5 meters (at hips)

Length: 27 meters

Weight: 35,000 kg (38 tons)

Megalodon:

Height: 10 meters

Length: 30 meters

Weight: 150,000 kg (170 tons)

Book 1: Raptor Threat

Chapter 1

Rexie

GRAWRR!

Rexie’s translator beeped on the side of her head, muttering, Frustration. Anger. Rage. Frustration. Fear-inducing. It was rare when the translator didn’t parse the dinosaur’s language into formal human speech. Rexie’s roar communicated something more primal than normal. She was angry.

Two velociraptors leaped away, ducking behind the cover of stacked cars, wary of engaging an enraged tyrannosaurus rex. The gray-skinned raptor behind Rexie ducked, barely avoiding a broken neck from Rexie’s swinging tail. That raptor had delivered the t-rex a healthy shock with projectile stun gun-modified hands, resulting in Rexie’s fury.

Rexie turned, her eyes flashing with menace. The raptor cowered before her, hands raised in supplication. He trailed off as his hand sparked, a stun bolt racing from one claw to the next. A guilty expression crossed his scaly face as he looked between his hand and the t-rex before him. Rexie roared again, even louder this time, drowning out her translator’s mechanical voice. Rage. Fury. Rage. Fury. Fury. Fury.

The raptor raised his hands and fired, twin stun bolts racing into Rexie’s open mouth. He turned and ran, his powerful back legs propelling him away from the colossal t-rex.

Trike

Trike stood off to the side, shaking his massive three-horned head back and forth. Now he’s done it, he said. His voice came out in a warble, translated by the machine covering his voice box.

Done what? What did the raptor say? his human companion asked. Stacy sat astride Trike’s back in a high-tech saddle, her combat uniform blending in with Trike’s dark green and brown scales.

Made her even angrier. What is he, suicidal?

Rexie ran after the retreating raptor, covering a lot of ground with each rocket-assisted step. She left shattered cars in her wake. The raptor screeched, the words lost on the human’s ears. Trike just shuddered with grim anticipation. This is gonna hurt.

Trike watched Rexie lower her head, rearing to the side as she caught up to the raptor. With an abrupt motion, she slammed her head into the smaller dinosaur, sending him through the concrete wall of a building. After looking into the newly-made hole in the wall, confirming that the raptor went through several more walls, Rexie roared again, long and loud. Trike heard the translator as he listened to Rexie’s triumphant battle cry. Satisfaction. Extreme satisfaction.

Trike’s human rider noticed two raptors converging on Rexie’s position. She yelled, Look out!

Trike didn’t wait for Rexie to engage the raptors. He lowered his head, his upper horns parallel to the ground, and fired two grappling hooks into the building across the street. Two cables stretched out between him and the embedded hooks. Trike braced himself as the two raptors slammed into his taut cables, one clotheslining himself. The other leapt to avoid a similar fate, but caught his feet on the cables and tumbled forward in a broken heap. Rexie gave Trike a brisk nod of gratitude. Trike detached the cables before nodding back. He surged forward to find more raptors to fight. Blackened, singed footprints marked the pavement where Trike stepped as he activated his foot-rockets to move more quickly.

He turned the corner of a building to see Spike in the next intersection a block away. The giant stegosaurus swung his four-spiked tail from which he earned his namesake, swatting leaping raptors this way and that. His armored sides and dorsal plates showed scoring where vicious raptor claws had landed hits and were turned away. Smoke wafted from his front-mounted cannons, lazily extending skyward as if mocking the frantic pace of the battle. Street vendors cowered behind cars and ducked into storefronts to escape the seething fight. Luckily, the raptors focused on Spike instead of any unarmored passerby. But with those humans so close, Spike can’t use any of his big guns, thought Trike.

Stacy sent out non-lethal concussive blasts from her heavy artillery gun. The blasts would stun the opposing raptors without incapacitating Spike, owing to his heavy armor. At least, they would if they stopped hitting Spike dead on.

"Are you trying to hit him?" Trike asked, his translator sending the message to Stacy’s earpiece.

Spike’s fine. And I’d aim better if you would stop moving around so much.

Trike snorted. He almost stopped her, but one of the concussive blasts hit a pack of the snarling enemy, leaving them sprawled on the sidewalk. Various bits of electronics lay scattered beneath their twitching bodies. Terrified vendors ran away from the downed dinosaurs, their fear of the raptors outweighing their anger at losing their wares in a random street battle. Got ‘em, Stacy said, the satisfaction evident in her voice.

Spike hunkered down, tucking his legs underneath his shell-armor. The remaining raptors leapt simultaneously, sensing weakness in their single foe. Before they landed, Spike activated the heat vents from his charged armor, blasting the airborne dinosaurs away in a wall of super-heated air. The raptors slammed into the surrounding buildings, slumping down against the walls. Those who could still move tried to tend their scalded skin.

Trike looked overhead as Tara swooped by, while Spike looked after the scared and angry street vendors.

Tara

Tiny rockets from Tara’s body harness detonated above a snarling pack of raptors. The stun-rockets were necessary in the crowded downtown streets to keep human casualties to a minimum. But if Trike would just let me finish these raptors once and for all…

Tara only kept a few pieces of ordnance in her harness, or flight would be impossible. Even then, she could only keep the smallest available explosives. For this mission, she’d wisely chosen the stun-rockets, and used them sparingly. Her heat cannon, however, doubled as an engine to keep her aloft, so she used it liberally, splashing the waves of heat down on any unsuspecting raptor she saw.

She dipped low, using the cannon to power through her human companions’ helicopter downwash, now speeding ahead of the choppers. Tara spread her olive-tan wings, gliding from target to target, dousing each from behind with an incapacitating bout of heated air. It’s a target-rich environment, she thought, downing another raptor. Human soldiers dropped from the following helicopters, subduing the injured raptors for later retrieval.

Bullets ripped through the air beside her, and her display lit up in flashing red. A shrill alarm sounded in her earpiece, and she banked sharply as an enemy combatant peppered the air with gunfire. Tara quickly played back her flight camera, watching the display until it identified the last known position of her assailant. It was a human soldier, a male by the looks of it. One of White Eye’s human forces. The traitorous humans called themselves the Raptor Guard. Pesky humans, she screeched, turning to flank the enemy soldier.

Stacy’s voice sounded in her earpiece. Hey, I can hear you on this channel!

Tara snorted, her translator picking it up but staying silent. She’d turned down the settings so it only translated what she said directly, instead of picking up each of her expressions. Naturally finding the sun and angling until it was behind her, Tara dove on the human soldier’s position, letting loose a stun-rocket. She pulled away, content to let her display record the hit and relay it to her. As soon as her display confirmed that the human was incapacitated, Tara turned her attention to finding the next target. She flew well ahead of the combat choppers assigned to her, not waiting for them to catch up.

Tara found several raptors all too soon, but none of them registered as White Eye, the lieutenant in charge of this raptor division. Of course, White Eye wasn’t his real name, but the humans couldn’t hope to speak her language, so they came up with White Eye because of the white splash of skin around his right eye. The rest of him was a mottled brown-gray, but the white splash set him apart from the other raptors. At least to the humans, she thought. I’ll never understand why they think we all look alike. She snorted. And those raptors aren’t even the same color…

She’d have ignored this bunch to continue her search for White Eye in the battle, but several of the raptors held human hostages. Her display showed plastic bags littering the ground, presumably from the humans that only minutes before were peacefully shopping in the downtown main streets. Stupid diversions. The raptors didn’t need the humans, not as far as Tara knew. They used the hostages to limit her team’s actions.

Tara couldn’t use her heat cannon with the humans so close. She double-checked her ordinance, not keen on firing an explosive round at several human hostages. Settling on a weapon, she let loose three stun-rockets into the group of raptors, dropping each of them and the humans unconscious to the ground. And those humans will probably complain that they were stunned, even though I saved their lives. She clicked her teeth together in frustration. Before she could radio in their location to her human teammates for retrieval, a sudden blur passed in front of her display. She pulled up, but not before an uncomfortable weight settled on top of her.

White Eye’s vicious raptor face snapped and snarled as his jump brought him on top of Tara, nearly bringing her to the ground. Her training kicked in before she had a chance to panic. Tara activated her heat cannon, pointing it at the ground while turning it up to maximum thrust. At this level, flames licked out as she reversed their descent, rocketing upward as they gained speed. She tucked her legs in to keep them from the roaring flames, but White Eye wasn’t so lucky. He screamed violently in her face as he kicked, trying to avoid the searing-hot jets pouring downward.

Tara considered contorting herself to point the jets directly at White Eye, but he had a firm hold on her harness with his claws. Good thing it’s only my harness, she thought, still angling skyward. White Eye’s claws would have made short work of her if they’d hit anywhere else; most armor was too heavy for a flier, so she was exposed to enemy weapons. She watched his eyes register how high they were going, glancing this way and that for a safe jumping point. Tara lunged her head forward, clamping down onto White Eye’s shoulder to try and keep him in place. Just a little higher… In a few more seconds, he’d be much too high for a safe fall.

White Eye tore away, shrieking in pain as he freed himself from her beak’s grasp. He reared up with his hind legs, pressing them against her harness’ undercarriage, and kicked away from Tara as they cleared a nearby office building. Tara tumbled in the air, righting herself just in time to watch White Eye land on the roof and roll to a stop. He didn’t stay down long enough for her to get a clean shot, instead sprinting toward the service stairs. She cursed to herself as he disappeared into the building, her stun-rocket exploding harmlessly behind him.

Spike

Tara’s voice came through on Spike’s earpiece. White Eye just escaped into the building on the corner of 1st and Main.

Spike acknowledged, then turned to the next prone victim, a middle-aged white man. Do you require medical assistance? He didn’t wait for a response as he looked through his eye-band’s display, selecting the x-ray setting. A quick scan didn’t show any broken bones. You appear to be experiencing shock. This is a normal reaction to a traumatic event, further exacerbated by probable first exposure to foreign celestial entities.

The man stared at him blankly. Stacy’s voice sounded in Spike’s radio. Spike, let the post-trauma team handle them. We need you in the building just south of you.

He looked up the street to see Stacy pointing to the building, Trike carrying her toward it with his rocket-propelled steps. Of course. He turned back to the street vendor. Post-traumatic stress disorder is one of the many-

Spike! Stacy cut in urgently.

Right, right. He headed to the indicated building, calculating White Eye’s probable moves on the way. He accessed city records and downloaded the building’s schematics into his display as he surged forward, noting all of the exit points the velociraptor could use. If he wants to make it out with the highest chance of survival… he thought, drawing lines through the schematics on display. Trike drew up alongside him, and Spike said, According to my calculations from when Tara last saw White Eye to his most likely point of exit compared to his most recent attack-

Spike! This time it was Trike who cut in.

White Eye should come out those glass doors in… ten seconds. Spike settled back, arming his onboard weapons while shutting down the armored panels that were too damaged to function. Trike waited tensely beside him, Stacy fidgeting nervously on his back. She held a gigantic gun in her arms, despite her rather tiny frame.

After a full twelve seconds passed, Trike glanced at Spike. Uh, Spike?

I don’t understand. I used the calculations for anyone who would most reasonably-

Trike snorted in exasperation. Spike! Since when is White Eye reasonable?

Well, in terms of survival-

The sound of shattering glass cut him off, the shards tinkling to the ground from a broken window high above in the office building. Stacy aimed her gun in an instant while Trike and Spike gazed up. White Eye stood at the edge of the window, dangling a white man in a suit in his grip. Spike ran the calculations in his head as he spoke. Updating my calculations… Indications that he will drop the human captive, oh. Well. Spike stopped speaking as White Eye threw the human from the window, then turned and disappeared back into the building without watching the human plummet to the earth.

Trike powered his rockets, running to cushion the man’s fall. Spike located Tara on the overhead map on his display, then sent her his camera-view of the man. Before he hit the ground, Tara swooped in from above, gradually pulling up so as not to shock the man from his fall too abruptly. Thank you, Tara, Spike said, his translator intoning over his guttural voice.

No problem, love, she answered, depositing the shaken man safely on the sidewalk.

Spike sent the building’s blueprints to Trike’s display, which also showed on a rear-facing monitor so Stacy could read them. He plotted White Eye’s most likely course since his last sighting at the window, showing his conjecture with a glowing red line on the display. He and Trike ran through the front glass doors, Stacy ducking down on Trike’s back as they burst through the shattering mess. Office workers cowered against the walls and around the front reception desk, now more terrified of the two gigantic dinosaurs in their midst than the battle outside.

Citizens, Spike said, turning up his translator volume. Please remain calm. You are experiencing-

Spike! said Trike and Stacy together. Spike glanced at Stacy. Leave it for the post-trauma team. We have a job to do!

He nodded, heading for the stairs. "Guard the