Wrath Of Athena

By Dale Cozort

For eighty million years, the Tourists have taken Snapshots of Earth, creating living replicas of continents. Life in the Snapshots quickly diverges from the real world, creating a universe where humans and animals from Earth’s history fly between Snapshots, exploring, fighting, and sometimes meeting themselves.
A fly-by-night petting zoo lands in Madagascar-24M, the Snapshot of Madagascar the Tourists made 24 million years ago, and promptly finds itself slapped in quarantine. After all, exotic animals from off-Snapshot are a risk, for people, local wildlife, and the environment.
Scott Hardy’s title may be Assistant Veterinary Engineer, but his actual job is shoveling crap out of cages and protecting the “talent”—the nubile youths hired to run the petting zoo.
That doesn’t include protecting the zoo’s star performer, Athena Anders, Hardy’s redheaded, volatile, dish-hurling, on-again-off-again girlfriend. Not because Athena isn’t talented, but because she does just fine taking care of herself. The one thing Athena really loves are the zoo’s stars, a pair of talking dinosaurs.
Then the dinosaurs go missing. And it’s mating season.
The only thing worse than the havoc a pair of breeding dinosaurs can create on an unprotected, unsuspecting world? The wrath of Athena when she finds out who’s responsible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dale Cozort
• Release date: May 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310938856

Dale Cozort

Dale Cozort lives in a college town near Chicago with his wife, daughter, three cats and a lot of books. Dale is a computer programmer and teacher as well as a long-time science fiction fan. He has a huge and diverse range of interests, ranging from computers and history to martial arts. He loves animals and did a stint as a foster home for orphan Samoyeds. He has spent his last three summers perfecting his craft under instructors like science fiction grand master James Gunn and Nebula winner Kij Johnson.He is online at:Blog: http://dalecoz.livejournal.com/Web Address: www.DaleCozort.com

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Wrath of Athena

A Snapshot Novella

By Dale Cozort

To My Family and My Online and Real World Writing Groups

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 Dale Cozort

Published by: Chisel & Stone Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transferred in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Author's Note:

As with all my writing, Wrath of Athena is the product of tiny bits of time fit between work and family obligations. It's also the product of a wife and daughter who respect my writing time and individuals in writers' groups willing to read pieces of the original rough drafts and suggest improvements.

Like most writers, I stand on the shoulders of previous authors, borrowing from and expanding on a body of stories that thrust individuals into exotic times and helped inspire me to write this book.

I would like to especially thank the following groups and people for their help:

The Writing Wombats for being there for me when I got discouraged, and especially Pat Shaw, who made this a much better story with suggestions, critiques and by helping me stay on task.

Members of Point of Divergence, the alternate history writers group, many of whom suffered through early versions of this novel, and especially David Johnson and Kurt Sidaway for their critiques and suggestions.

Members of my Sunday writing group for helping me stay excited about writing and of my Thursday evening writing group for their many suggestions.

If you enjoy the novel, feel free to check out my other novels on Amazon or your other choice or online bookstore or drop by my website and my blog:

Website: www.DaleCozort.com

Blog: http://dalecoz.livejournal.com

Wrath Of Athena

June 6, 2007. We got out of US-53 Snapshot's California one step ahead of state health officials, state wildlife officials, animal rights protesters and a plethora of creditors, in a plane that, as always, smelled of generic animal pee, a blend of urine from hundreds of animals from a dozen Snapshots, none of the animals big or dangerous.

Plethora. I love that word, partly because Athena had to look it up the first time I used it. That and ubiquitous. You'll figure out why using words even Athena has to look up is important to me, but let's not get sidetracked. Well, except maybe for a brief explanation of Snapshots and Tourists, for anybody who fell asleep in Geography.

Imagine each Snapshot as a photograph hanging from a necklace, a moment captured in time, except everything in it is still living and dying and evolving and making love and stuff. But it’s self-contained, cut off from Dirtball Earth. We know jack shit about the Tourists except that they’ve been taking continent-sized Snapshots of Earth for millions of years and the rest of us live with the consequences. But there are Vents, sort of wormhole passages that let us travel from one Snapshot to the next one on the necklace—if we get past the Babble Zones, which are a nightmare all their own. Anyway.

Why no big animals in our zoo? You can only get from Snapshot to Snapshot by flying through the Vents. When you fly, pounds cost money, so we don't have full-sized elephants or dinosaurs bigger than a good-sized dog. When you run a fly-by-night petting zoo, you don't do dangerous animals, big or small, because dangerous means likely to take a customer's arm off and send you flying by night before revenue matches fuel and food costs, much less paying the help.

Being part of the help, I take it personal when the help doesn't get paid. I'm Scott Hardy. Job Title: Assistant Veterinary Engineer. Actual job: Shoveling crap out of animal cages, plus some keep your hands off the talent duty. The talent equals our animal handlers, young, nubile girls and guys dressed to keep our audiences from noticing that our animal shows are boring. Young, nubile skin is cheaper than good animal trainers, so we mostly go with nubile skin. The downside: locals get drunk and try to get hands on with the talent. Then I have to get hands on with the drunks.

The Vent from US-53 California goes to the west coast of Madagascar-24M, the stretched, North America-sized Snapshot of Madagascar the Tourists made 24 million years ago, give or take a few million years. Most people are used to the exact dates on the more recent Snapshots, like US-53—copied from Dirtball Earth in summer of 1953—or Europe-42, taken in the summer of 1942, but when the Snapshot is millions of years old, our scientists are ballparking the age.

West coast Madagascar is the old, settled area, if you call having forty year old towns old and settled. Madagascar Snapshot still has a Wild West reputation, so I was pleasantly surprised to spot the unmistakable silhouettes of a mall and a nuclear power plant as we flew into Westport Airport. The marks of civilization.

One problem with being a fly-by-night private zoo is that the Snapshots you fly to don't always roll out the welcome mat for you. Animals from off-Snapshot are a disease risk, for both people, and local wildlife. Westport promptly put the zoo in quarantine. Quarantine equals all the usual expenses, but no revenue.

Our owner, James Tiberius Smoot, had a plan to keep out of quarantine—going through the Vent close to a passenger airliner, so Westport's radar wouldn't see us. Like many of James T's schemes, that one fell through.

Sometimes, on the right Snapshot, quarantines can be avoided with judicious financial transactions, but Madagascar-24M isn't that kind of Snapshot. It was settled by blue collar types, a generation away from subsistence farming in the border South, pulled north out of the Bible Belt to work in Midwestern factories and mines during World War II and the Korean War. They’re farming people at heart and into that Old-time Religion. Not into bribery, unless it's more subtle than old James T can do it.

So the animals went into