Terrors of Pangaea: Lost on the Last Continent, #1

By John C. Wright

Colonel Preston Lost is a man of many talents. One of the youngest to achieve the rank of colonel, Lost found himself unable to return to civilian life after the war. He was a man born at the wrong time. Chivalry was dead, and there were no more crusades or mighty deeds to be done.

 

Sport fishing and big game hunting became first a pastime, then an obsession, but the times were against him, and the nations outlawed such sport, as they did anything dangerous, rare, or worthy of manhood. Basically, anything he saw as "fun" or "challenging." His aerospace plane had, at first, been merely another pastime.

 

And then he saw the unidentified flying object.

 

Lost didn't think of himself as reckless. He believed in preparation, proper equipment, and patience in stalking the prey. But, in reality, he was not a cautious man. If he was, he wouldn't have followed the spaceship into the black storm clouds above the Bermuda Triangle.

 

Now he's at the end of time, having crash-landed on Pangaea Ultima with few supplies and no way of returning home. But Lost is a man of many talents, and anything should be possible for him. Or, is it possible that this time, Lost has met his match?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Theogony Books
• Release date: Feb 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781950420810

Book preview

Chapter 01 The Hole in the Air

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Colonel Preston Lost did not think of himself as reckless. He believed in preparation, proper equipment, and patience in stalking the prey.

But, if truth be told, he was not a cautious man.

When the storm clouds parted, and he glimpsed the glowing, unearthly craft he chased through the wild hurricane above the Bermuda Triangle, Preston Lost gritted his teeth in an odd smile, gripped the joystick, dropped the nose of the super high-speed pursuit plane sharply down, opened the throttle of the jet engines, and ignited his afterburners.

He squinted through the small, sloped, triangular windows of his rocket plane. The solid sheets of rain blocked his sight. The unidentified flying object was disk-shaped, bathed in a nimbus of strange light, and changed course and speed with sudden, strange jerks of motion that defied normal laws of inertia. It moved like no aircraft and no missile known to man.

The flying disk dove into the black cloud. At furious speed, Preston dove in after, engines roaring. The winds roared louder. Preston had little fear of being spotted.

The cockpit vibrated, and the hull groaned. More than one of his gauge needles crept toward red.

The magnificent machine was dubbed the Shooting Star VII. She had been built for one purpose. This purpose.

The black hull was bat-shaped, streamlined to the ultimate degree. She had no tailfin, no large surfaces to reflect radar. She was, in fact, an aerospace plane. No ordinary jet, she was driven by a combination of ramjets and liquid-fuel rockets. She could achieve supersonic speeds and low earth orbit.

Equally sophisticated was her military-grade detection gear. He lost sight of the flying disk amid turbulent cloud and the hellish flares of lightning. But his instruments continued to mark the location of the fleeing quarry.

The altimeter blinked a warning. Sea level was approaching. Somewhere below the curtain of cloud, the wind-lashed ocean waters were waiting. Preston’s eyes narrowed. Did the flying disk intend to ditch?

The cloud wrack parted. Preston, lightheaded from his dive, wondered if he were hallucinating. For it looked like the cloud had opened a huge, red eye. It was staring at him.

Like a hooded lantern opening, a strange, bright, ruby beam, wide as a highway, spilled out from the center of the apparition and splashed across the knotted textures of surrounding cloud. Perched between the clouds was an erubescent maelstrom surrounded by streamers of bright vapor, with a tightly-wound spiral of electric discharges circling them in turn.

Into the spotlight beam of red now shot the flying disk as it jerked into yet another impossible, right-angled turn and was yanked into acceleration even more impossible.

It flew toward the vortex, directly toward the middle. The eye-shaped apparition now grew wide, as if startled at the approach of the disk. Or as if opening in welcome.

For suddenly Preston realized what he was seeing—the resemblance to an eye was accidental. The white vapor clouds formed the sclera; the flares of Saint Elmo’s Fire formed the iris; the red light was issuing from the pupil. But it really was a maelstrom, a whirlpool.

And this whirlpool, like that around a bathtub drain, led into a pipe, a tunnel. A tunnel, yes, without walls, and opening into a direction that seemed to have no place to be in three-dimensional space. But still a tunnel.

The thing was impossible. It was a hole in midair.

The red pupil was like a porthole, a window. A window into where?

The vapor he was seeing was flooding toward the opening. Earth’s sea-level air pressure was forcing atmosphere out into some region of lower pressure. The electrostatic discharge was to be expected when two masses of air at different temperatures collided. But where did the hole in midair lead?

This storm had risen very suddenly, and the flying disk, levitating serenely over the dark waters off Bermuda under the moonlight, had changed course, unaffected by the rising winds, and darted down toward the gathering storm clouds.

Perhaps the storm had been caused by the sudden drop of pressure?

The flying disk fled into the red beam, and grew suddenly smaller as if with distance. His detection gear went haywire. Active radar said the thing was gone; passive radar said it was present but dwindling in cross section.

The pupil of the apparition began to close. The game was escaping.

There was no time for deliberation. He either had to ignite his rocket engine and try to guide his craft into the narrowing ring of electrical fire and screaming winds, or he had to abandon the chase and pull up, hoping against hope that he could bring his nose up sharply enough so as neither to rip his wings off nor to pancake into the sea.

Preston Lost, in truth, was not a cautious man. He had hunted game in India, Africa, and Greenland, on and under the sea. He had climbed mountains and flown experimental planes. But those dangers were known. This was the unknown.

He flung his craft toward the vortex, and he ignited his rocket. Three gravities of acceleration smothered him as with a giant, invisible hand.

Beams of red light from some unknown sun, dimmer than the sun he knew, splashed into the cockpit, momentarily blinding him. At the same time, the column of compressed, rushing air being sucked into the closing eye of the maelstrom picked him up like a vacuum cleaner picking up lint from a rug.

The Shooting Star went into a flat spin. A blurred world of cloud and lightning tumbled past the triangular windows of the cockpit. Preston’s seat automatically flattened, putting him in a prone position, and his altitude suit inflated. But the acceleration was too great for his body.

The edges of his vision turned black. His hand fell from the deadman switch which kept the rocket thrust roaring. In a strange, sullen silence, the pursuit plane seemed to be plunging down a spinning tunnel walled with boiling clouds and blinding stabs of lightning.

Preston Lost, groaning, opened his eyes. Had he blacked out for a moment? Of the maelstrom, the storm, the clouds, there was no sign. The horizon was turning in a lazy loop in the canopy windows, earth and sky and earth again. The whistling in his ears told him he was in a stall, his wings at no angle to catch the air.

Below him was a chain of active volcanoes. The ground was bright with burning patches of forest, and the air was black with smoke.

The broken landscape rushed up to meet him.

He groggily pushed the stick forward. Tailfin-less, the chance of a stealth craft regaining control was slim. But there might be a way.

He opened the split ailerons to the full, hoping their drag would pull his wingtip back, and, in combination with the forward wing yaw, would increase the overall drag and produce a stabilizing yawing moment.

A change in the pitch of the scream of the air told him it was beginning to work. Perhaps not soon enough. He saw tumbled crags, rocks, and patches of forest fire spin past his view. But there, glinting like a silver coin, was a mountain lake. He worked the controls, uttered a two-word and probably blasphemous prayer, grinned like a maniac, and yanked on the stick.

Out of the crimson sky plunged a creature. Its wingspan was equal to that of his plane. Its skin was naked leather, and its wings were triangular sails of membrane. The freakishly narrow head had a miter of bone above and a beak like a saber below. The monster was tiger-striped with red, yellow, purple, and black; its belly was blue; yellow rings of color surrounded its staring, lidless, lizard-like eyes; a scarlet wattle dangled rakishly from its cockscomb.

Preston’s wings thrummed. He was beginning to pull out of the spin. Had the plane been under control, he might have avoided the collision. The monster was diving headlong, its beak opened like scissors. Preston yanked the stick; the craft poised as if balanced on one wing for a moment and hesitated.

The collision sprayed the black blood of the creature across his small, triangular windows, blinding him. He heard the scream of metal and felt the stick jump in his hand as he lost purchase. He felt, rather than heard, fragments and scraps of wing material peeling off into the air. The ceramic composite of his hull could withstand the heat of supersonic friction but was not designed for impacts. The wing lifting surfaces shattered like a china plate.

He heard the ramjet stall out. Particles of bone and flesh, moving at the speed of machinegun bullets, tore into the delicate fan blades of the intakes.

Most jets allowed the pilot to eject from the cockpit, but this rocket plane was a compromise between jet and spacecraft, and it had no such feature. He had to land with her or die with her.

But this compromise cut both ways. A safety circuit cut off the ramjet fuel before the debris from the intake tore the engine apart; he still had power. Solid fuel rockets do not need air intakes. They carry their own oxygen.

The fuel gauge showed only 15,000 pounds of propellant left. Eighty seconds of flight time. At high speed, even the reduced wing had enough intact surface to provide lift. He felt the stubby wings bite, heard the air scream, and felt the stick respond.

The plane bucked like a bronco. One wing was more damaged than the other. He entered a tight curve, wrestling the plane into a spiral.

The radar showed him he was above a torn, rocky, mountainous landscape. The infrared scopes gave insane readings, as if the ground below were on fire. But then the scope showed a round, flat surface. From the size and position, it might have been a mountain lake, but the temperature reading was too high.

He ignored the readings. The scope must be damaged. The rocket had a fixed rate of exhaust. There was no throttle, no brake. The best he could do was find the moment in his wild spiral when his nose was pointing in the right direction and cut the rocket.

The craft was flung like a stone from a sling into straight-line flight. Now he wrestled with the ailerons, praying for level descent. The proximity alarm screamed. The peaks were close.

Grimacing, he drew his service revolver, aimed, and blew out the bloodstained window. The wind shrieked into his faceplate, blowing fragments of glass throughout the cockpit.

He saw the lake, round as a silver dollar, slide past his tiny window. A rocky texture of mountain peaks of black rock, plumed with volcanic clouds, surrounded the upland valley holding the lake. Dozens of cones were active. Lava crawled in slow, wormlike streams and waterfalls, glowing.

It was an insane world. The moon was four times its proper size. The sky was so purple as to be almost black. Dark green jungle stretched to the horizon. He saw long-necked monsters rear above the trees and bat-winged flying things against the wine dark sky. Plateaus lifted their high, flat heads above the jungle canopy. A line of steep mountains reared jagged peaks. Was his altimeter malfunctioning? These mountains were higher than the Himalayas.

He opened the flaps, cutting his airspeed. It was not enough. One last trick was left. His fantastic plane boasted a dozen cold nitrogen gas thrusters; he opened the valves of the four nose nozzles to their fullest. These were meant for zero-gee maneuvers, not for this.

It was enough, barely. The lake swatted him like an earth-sized hammer. He discovered the scope reading had been accurate. The water, mingled with steam, that sprayed in through the broken window was boiling hot.

* * * * *

Chapter 02 The Unearthly Earth

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Boiling water gushed in a stream through the broken window of his rocket plane and splashed across the faceplate of his pressure suit. The visor bubbled and darkened, blinding him. He could feel the flesh-roasting heat of the boiling lake water through his suit fabric, but the seams were airtight so he wasn’t scalded.

Frantically, Preston hit the quick-release lever of his harness and leaped out of his seat. Underfoot, he could feel the hull of his plane beginning to tilt its nose upward. From the sound behind him, he could hear water gushing in. He holstered his pistol and yanked off his helmet to allow himself to see: it was like sticking his head into a sauna. Steam was filling the interior of the aircraft.

The Shooting Star was submerging.

The deck was at a steep slant and growing steeper. The cabin was compact and narrow. There were two hatches: a round hatch aft and an oval hatch above the wing.

The round hatch led to the service module aft of the cabin. Here, oxygen, water, and electrical power were stored. Certain tools, food and potable water, and other gear that might have been useful was also stowed there, but Preston saw that the hull was warped from the crash-landing, and the seam around the hatch had sprung. Water and steam came in around the rim, which was no longer true to the frame.

There was a tightly-folded inflatable raft strapped against the cabin hull to one side, and a backpack packed with survival gear strapped to the other. Here also was his elephant gun.

He threw his backpack, weapon, and cartridge belt in a hasty, clattering mass over one shoulder and then put his hands to the wheel of the oval exit hatch.

The wheel turned. He pulled, but the oval hatch did not budge.

The lights of his control panel flickered and died as the electrical systems in the service module submerged.

The boiling water was already lapping his boots, and the deck was now slanted almost to the upright. Preston put his toes sideways into the slats ribbing the hull, even as the groaning deck turned vertical. There came a loud report aft, and the hatch to the service module came free of its hinges. Preston was now inside the narrow hull with a gargling geyser erupting from the rear bulkhead. The ship was going down quickly.

He realized that the air pressure inside the cabin was rising with the water, and this pressure was holding the hatch shut. The screaming whine in his ears was the air pumps, which had automatically come on when the hull was breached.

He flattened himself as best he could against the hull, covered his face with one elbow, pried open the safety tab, and pulled the cord to trigger the explosive bolts.

The ringing in his ears told him he had gone deaf for a moment. The oval hatch soared, spinning, in a parabolic arc across the wing. He did not hear the sound of it bounce against the shattered, glassy surface of the great, black, curving wing, nor the splash as it fell into the bubbling waters.

With hands and feet on the slippery hull, he climbed to the nose of the craft, which was rearing upward toward a sky the color of rosy wine.

The flying monster that had slammed into the intakes, partly chewed by the turbine blades, was still lodged there, a tangle of naked, membranous wings and a gargoyle skull as narrow as a knife. The creature’s large body, easily twelve feet in wingspan, dripping with black blood and white boiling water, was hauled up into the sky as the Shooting Star continued to raise her prow.

Preston’s helmet was gone; the sauna heat plastered his hair to his brow and made him blink. The savory smell of boiling meat was in his nostrils.

More by instinct than thought, he shrugged the rifle off his shoulder into his hands, broke it, and inserted two rounds. The rifle was a magnificent Holland & Holland double rifle. The round was a .700 Nitro Express, which was as long as a lady’s finger. The piece handled like a shotgun, with the weight needed for powerful cartridges and heavy bullets.

The nose of the craft was broad and flat. He put his feet under him and stood. He stared, squinting in amazement. The world around him was impossible.

The clouds above were red and dim as if it were twilight, but the sun, a rose-hued bubble, was overhead. The disk was dim enough to look at directly without wincing.

The heavens were imperial purple, and stars burned pale as ghosts. The moon was also visible, if four times its accustomed width. It looked gigantic, ready to topple onto his head. But he saw the mottled markings; it was clearly Earth’s moon. He had just been looking at it above the Caribbean skies.

About him loomed mountain peaks, white with snow and black with rock. From a near peak poured smoke in vast, inky clouds, giving a heaviness to the hot air as if a storm were forever brewing, forever about to break. It smelled of ash, and the pall covered a quarter of the sky.

Closer, he saw the high lake was in the crotch of a saddle between three mountains. The rocky slopes were lush and green, but long streaks of gray where the vegetation was dying formed claw marks across the crumpled knobs and steeps slopes.

The verdure was tropical: cycads, palms, mangroves. Lianas, vines, and mosses dripped from heavy limbs in gross profusion. Here and there, orchids opened their bright, fleshy blooms. The smell of humid rottenness was everywhere.

Earth’s trees.

But in the sky was a circling flock of bat-like, naked flying things, with narrow skull-like faces beneath miters of bone.

Bright against the dark purple sky was the flying disk he had chased through to this place. It moved across the cloud as quickly as the circle of a flashlight a kitten chases along a dark carpet.

It was coming back his way.

He turned. Streaks of contrail and rocket exhaust reaching across the dome of the dark heavens dove down like a finger, pointing at this spot.

The ringing in his ears diminished, and now he realized why he had so automatically readied his rifle. The sounds coming from the surrounding jungle were as of a stampede of many animals. Here also was the heavier tread, elephantine, of big game. The air shook with roars and calls, the hissing of lizards, the shrill cries of birds. He saw primates, perhaps lemurs, leaping from treetop to treetop in a flurry of motion.

Suddenly, there was a movement in the water nearby, an eddy. He brought this rifle around just in time. A large snakelike neck ending in a head the size of a coffin, with nightmare jaws filled with a clutter of serried fangs and two round, black froglike eyes protruding topmost, lunged out of the boiling waters toward him. The skin of the monster was white, translucent, like some freakish deep sea creature, but in shape and size, it was a dinosaur. It was a vertebrate. Its bones were visible as dark shadows beneath its flesh.

He discharged his first barrel with a solid roar into the gaping jaws. Pale fluids like the blood of squids leaped upward in a spray. Perhaps he missed the walnut-sized brain of the pallid monster, for it drove its white-splattered skull-like head toward him.

Preston was pulled off balance by his pack, slipped, and skidded down the slope of the hull toward the boiling waters his suit could not possibly withstand.

Frantically, he caught himself with one hand and braced his feet against the smooth angle where the curving wing blended into the curving fuselage.

The long neck of the monster was wobbling near. Its motions were blind and awkward, but it seemed to sense Preston was its prey.

The jaws snapped down. Preston one-handedly raised and fired his second shot. It struck the joint where jaw met neck and shattered bone and vertebrae.

It was not a clean shot. The recoil bruised his shoulder. He had been holding the double rifle stupidly, and the powerful weapon had a kick like a mule.

The great nightmarish head of staring eyes and jagged fangs now writhed. Up reared a massive pale body round as the hull of a yacht. Great flippers like those of a sea turtle flailed frantically against the aircraft wing, as if the monster were trying to climb out of the water.

A long, low noise like a woodwind issued from the elongated neck. A death rattle. The head flopped down over the wing. The plane tilted in that direction, and Preston slid toward the vast, pale corpse.

But even as the plane slid further under the boiling lake, more of the monster came to the surface. He saw the creature’s body extended to a nearby rocky tussock.

Without pause, Preston jumped onto the pale monster’s spine, and in three rapid leaps went from shoulder blades to pelvis to the tussock, a black rock covered with slippery moss and coral growths sharp as knives.

The backpack pivoted on his shoulder strap as he leaped, and it nearly dunked itself into the water, but the straps got tangled in the thorny coral. Little stingers came out of the coral and scratched the canvas.

Meanwhile, his rifle slid down the mossy slope and vanished under the roiling surface. The thing was a work of art, his best friend, and his only hope for survival. Without pause, he plunged his hand after.

The pain was blinding. He gripped the rifle stock and pulled. With his other hand, he opened the backpack, yanked out one of the bags containing four ounces drinking water, ripped it open with his teeth, and poured it over his scalded fist.

He had two hands, after all, but only one Holland & Holland.

While he was doing that, a snakelike thing issued from a niche in the coral. He caught it between the craggy surface and the butt of his rifle. Drops of boiling water flew up as he hammered the creature to death.

The thing struck, but neither bite nor sting penetrated his flight suit. Blood oozed from the cracked carapace. It was a thing that looked like an armored centipede, except that it was three feet long and as thick around as a garden hose. But with a dizzying sensation, he recognized it.

Preston, since childhood, had been fascinated with prehistoric animals. Many a museum he had haunted, many books he had collected, and many a paleontologist he had invited to dinner. He often joked he’d been born in the