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Boundary-ARC

Table of Contents

Part I: FOSSILS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Part II: QUARRELS

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

PART III: FAERIES

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

PART IV: BLUEPRINTS

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

PART V: NIKE

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

PART VI: PHOBOS

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

PART VII: MARS

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Illustrations

Boundary-ARC

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Paradigms Shift, Worlds Collide!

A daring and resourceful paleontologist uncovers something at the infamous K-T boundary marking the

end of dinosaurs in the fossil record – something big, dangerous, and absolutely, categorically impossible

. It’s a find that will catapult her to the Martian moon Phobos, then down to the crater-pocked desert of

the Red Planet itself. For this mild-mannered fossil hunter may just have become Earth’s first practicing

xenobiologist!

A new hard SF thriller from best-selling alternate history master Eric Flint and ace game

designer Ryk E. Spoor.

“[Eric Flint is] an SF author of particular note, one who can entertain and edify in equal, and major,

measure.” —Publishers Weekly

Cover Art by Kurt Millar

Hardcover

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

First printing, March 2006

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN-10: 1-4165-0932-1

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-0932-5

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

http://www.baen.com

Production by Windhaven Press

Auburn, NH

Electronic version by WebWrights

http://www.webwrights.com

Part I: FOSSILS

Problematica, n: a term used in paleontology to refer to fossils that appear to be either of

unknown taxonomic origin, or whose occurrence in the location they are found contradicts

current beliefs of the field.

Chapter 1

“Dear God, I’m going to die,” muttered Joe Buckley, as the SUV bounced from one rutted pothole to

another.

“Oh, come on, Joe, I don’t drive that badly.”

The silence caused Helen Sutter to glance over at Joe. His face was pale under its tan, contrasting all the

more with his dark hair. His habitually cheerful expression was currently replaced by that of a man who

has discovered he has a terminal illness and just two weeks to live. “...Do I?”

“Eyes on road! On the road!!! UNGH!”

The “ungh” was from the SUV’s particularly hard, bottoming-out-the-shocks landing following yet

another acrobatic leap across the roadbed, in an attempt to leave the rough dirt track and strike out

across the rocky terrain nearby.

Helen gave a restrained curse and hauled on the steering wheel. The SUV responded, skidding slightly,

but heading back into the center of the dirt track leading to the Secord ranch. Holding the line with one

hand, Helen brushed her blond hair out of her eyes; as usual it was escaping the ponytail it was

supposedly tied into. Despite the fact that it was early in the season and only eleven in the morning, Helen

could feel a thin film of sweat on her forehead.

Well, that’s the life of a paleontologist, she thought ruefully. Pay all your grant money for the chance to

break rocks, instead of getting sentenced to hard labor and doing it for free.

“What’s wrong with my driving?”

“Nothing, nothing.” Joe paused. “If you’re in the Baja 500.”

“Oh, all right, I’ll slow down. But who cut down your testosterone ration? As I recall, the first year we

came out here, you almost got yourself killed trying to offroad along an arroyo. Nearly lost us our dig,

too. Then the second year, you—”

“Hey, all right, already. It’s just that I want to survive this summer. It’s my last year.”

Helen smiled a bit sadly. “I know. We’re going to miss you, Joe.”

“I’ll miss it, too. But... push comes to shove, this is ultimately just a hobby for me. If I hadn’t taken your

course on a whim as an undergraduate, I never would have gotten interested in paleontology at all, it’s so

far removed from my own field of EE.”

“Yeah, I understand. Now that you’re closing in on your PhD, you don’t have any choice but to clear

everything else aside. I know, I’ve been there. We’ll still miss you a lot—and take it from a pro that your

skills as a paleontologist are a lot more than those of a ’hobbyist.’”

“Thanks.”

The gate to the Secord ranch leaped into view as the SUV crested the hill and charged down the other

side. Helen expertly maneuvered the vehicle through the gateway and pulled up to the sprawling ranch

house in a cloud of dust.

Joe got out, pausing to let his legs steady, and possibly to give himself an excuse to watch Helen going

first. As he was a several-year veteran, she ignored the matter. She was used to the fact that she got a lot

of stares; in what was still a male-dominated profession, just about any woman got them. And in her

case, a woman whose figure was still very good for someone close to forty years old. For a miracle,

even, her face wasn’t showing the wrinkles you’d expect from years of wind and sun in rugged country.

The door to the ranch house opened. “Welcome back, Doctor Sutter!”

Jackie Secord stepped aside and ushered them in with a wave of her hand. Combined with Jackie’s

striking appearance, the gesture had a dramatic flair to it that was absurdly out of keeping with its humble

purpose.

But that was pretty typical of the young woman. She was mostly Indian in her ancestry, on her mother’s

side. Her good-looking but intense face, black hair, black eyes and dusky complexion sometimes

reminded Helen of a cartoon version of a Foreign Spy.

Natasha, with a rural Montana accent. To make the absurdity perfect, Jackie was a graduate student in

engineering—and shared with Joe a fascination with space exploration. Her looks and liking for dramatic

gestures aside, the young woman was about as downhome American as anyone could get.

Despite her intentions to become an astronaut, Jackie shared Joe’s longstanding side interest in

paleontology. That interest, as with Joe’s, had been triggered off years before by Helen herself—but not

as a student. The first time Helen had showed up in the area, she’d introduced herself to the Secord

family since they were one of the largest landowners around and she needed their permission to conduct

digs on their property.

Their daughter Jackie—then eighteen years old and a high school senior—had promptly attached herself

to Helen as a combination guide and gofer. Since then, Jackie had become one of Helen’s main local

contacts and a constant, helpful presence at the digs. She’d developed into a top-notch amateur

paleontologist, in fact, and usually tried to spend at least part of her summers on one of Helen’s digs.

“What’s with the ’Doctor Sutter’ business, Jackie? It’s been ’Helen’ for years remember?”

Jackie grinned. “I figure I gotta practice up on my formalities. I’m not all that far behind Joe when it

comes to getting my doctorate—and God help me if I start breezily referring to the head of my

committee as ’Frank.’ So what’s up for this year?”

“Same as ever,” Joe said, coming in after Helen. “Spend a couple months working ourselves to death to

dig out a few fossils just like the ones everyone else has. Write some papers about them that no one but

us and the reviewers will read. Then Helen and company write another grant proposal.”

“And Joey’s still the optimist, I see.”

Joe winced. He detested being called “Joey,” Helen knew. But some years before, when they’d both

been undergraduates, Jackie and Joe had been casually “sorta-dating” for one summer. Her pet

nickname for him had probably seemed cute then. Now, of course, it was inescapable, though he

wouldn’t put up with anyone else using it.

Laughing, Helen nodded. “As always. Seriously, I thought we might try that area a bit north of the last

dig. The indications we had seem to show that some of the random fossils come from that area in the

runoff.”

“You stop by Jeff’s?” Helen wasn’t sure, but Jackie’s gaze seemed somewhat more intense than usual.

Jeff Little owned a souvenir shop in the nearest town, and specialized in buying and selling fossils from the

local rockhounds and collectors. If a new group of fossils started showing up, he was generally the first to

know.

“Yes, we did. He didn’t seem to have much new, except one bone that might—might—have come from

a dromeasaur or related species.”

There was no mistaking the gleam in Jackie’s eyes now. “Well, Jeff doesn’t get all the good stuff. After

the time I’ve spent working with you, I can spot the real winners out in the field if I run across them.

Most of that stuff he gets is junk.”

“Sure, you showed me your better pieces last year, too. Saves us having to bargain with Little for them.”

“I’ve got something really nifty this year, I think. Came down in the year’s runoff, and I think I’ve got a

good idea where it came from. Be right back.” Jackie trotted upstairs to fetch her prize.

Jackie’s mother had come in from the kitchen by then. “Would you like some lemonade?” she asked.

Then, gestured at the couches and armchairs scattered about the sprawling ranch-style living room. “And

why don’t you two sit down a spell before you go out there to start your digging?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Joe said, sighing histrionically. “A chair that isn’t bouncing up and down will be a

comfort.”

“Cut it out, Joe!”

Jackie came clattering down the stairs, holding something behind her. “Ready?”

“Let’s see it.”

A few minutes later, Helen looked up. “Joe, take a look at this.”

Joe put down the lemonade Mrs. Secord had handed him, rose from the couch and joined Helen in

staring at the object.

It resembled nothing so much as a large blackish shoehorn—Helen estimated it at around fifteen

centimeters long and ranging from three to six centimeters wide, with a concave side and a little hook on

the narrow end.

“Some kind of brachiopod relative?”

“Not one I’m familiar with. Look at these marks here.”

Joe frowned, then took the object and studied it more closely. “Well, it’s definitely a fossil, and... Those

sure look like muscle attachment scars. But what’re they doing on both sides of this thing, if it’s a shell?

Should run down only one side, shouldn’t they?”

“That’d be my expectation, too. But if this is a bone, why is it so thin and concave? I’ve never even

heard of anything like that.”

Joe was good at visualizing anatomy—much better than Helen, in fact, who always had to sit down and

sketch it out a piece at a time. His face now screwed up in concentration. “If you had a... no, no, that

wouldn’t make sense. Oh, but maybe... no, not that either. I suppose if...”

He turned the fossil over, examining the backside carefully. “Darn. No sign of it being a piece of

something else, either, which might have explained it.” He turned it over and over a couple more times,

shifting his point of view as though it might suddenly become an obvious and familiar fossil from some

different angle, then handed it back to Helen.

“Okay, you win, Jackie. I’m beat. Do you know what it is?”

Jackie shook her head, looking excited and trying not to—after all, she wasn’t a high school girl any

longer, and hadn’t been for a number of years. “No, not really. I knew it didn’t look like anything I’d

seen before, but I was sure you people would know right away. Are you guys putting me on? You really,

truly don’t know what it is?”

“Really, truly, Jackie,” Helen said. “I’ve never seen anything like it, or heard of anything like it. You say

you know where you found it?”

Jackie looked hurt. “Of course I do, Helen! Haven’t I been keeping a journal since my second year

doing this?”

“I’m sorry. I should have said: will you show us where you found it, and where you think it came from?”

“Of course. Let me get my hiking boots on, and we’ll go out there now.”

“There” turned out to be a few miles out, not all that far from the old dig site, but to the northwest up a

small arroyo. “I found it lying over here, half under some sand. I think it washed down from somewhere

up the arroyo.”

Helen measured the area by eye, trying to visualize the rains, the wash coming down, the size of the fossil.

She thought Jackie was right. “Let’s go up a ways, then, and see if we find anything.”

Luck, luck, luck.

The word kept repeating itself over and over in Helen’s mind, as she stood there looking at the wall of

the arroyo in a state of half-shock.

“Jesus Christ,” Joe repeated for the fifth time, finally straightening up from his examination. “Helen, that’s

a Deinonychus, or I’m just a first-year student.”

“And if the rest is in the same condition, we’ve got ourselves a fully-articulated skeleton.”

Amateur or not, Jackie understood how very rare that was, and her excitement was only restrained by an

attempt to be more professional and dignified than the professionals around her. Theropod skeletons, like

the Deinonychus , were rare enough to be noteworthy, but fully-articulated skeletons—skeletons that

had remained pretty much connected as they had been in life—were vanishingly rare.

Helen glanced down the arroyo, frowning. “Odd, though.”

“What’s odd?”

She pulled out the unknown fossil. “If this came from here, there’s no way it’s a shell. Not of a

water-dweller, anyway.”

Joe nodded. “These are land formations; late Cretaceous, maybe even Maastrichtian.”

“No ’maybe,’ involved, Joe. Look at where your hand is.”

Joe looked at the rock wall he’d been leaning against. “What—”

He suddenly started laughing. “You can’t be serious, Helen! It’s like pulling three jackpots in a row at

Vegas!”

“What is it?” Jackie asked, seeing the narrow, dark band both Joe and Helen were staring at. Then she

whipped around, eyes wide. “You mean...?”

“Yes.” Helen was hardly able to believe it herself. “It looks like our fossil is sitting right smack on the

K-T boundary.”

“Where the comet—um, sorry.” Jackie caught herself before finishing the sentence. She tended to forget

that the Alvarez Hypothesis was a still a touchy subject for a lot of paleontologists, even if she herself

thought it was a darn neat idea.

“Yes, where the comet.” Helen said the words in a half-snort, half-chuckle.

Fortunately for Jackie, Helen was less hostile to the Alvarez Hypothesis than most members of her

profession. She didn’t doubt at all that an impact had happened at the K-T Boundary, which marked the

end of the Mesozoic Era. She simply questioned whether it had the world-wide cataclysmic effects that

the hypothesis proposed. There were other impact craters about as big as the one in Yucatan, after all.

The Manicouagan, to name just one. But they’d had no discernable ecological effects at all; not even

regional ones, so far as anyone could determine.

Nor had anyone ever really explained, to Helen’s satisfaction, exactly how the impact had killed off so

many species. Nor the peculiar mechanism by which it had killed off some, but not others. In what

mystifying manner, for instance, had it killed off all ammonites—but spared their close relatives, the

squids and the octopi? These were the sort of nitty-gritty questions that paleontologists focused on, and

that physicists tended to ignore.

Still, she was willing to entertain it as a valid and testable hypothesis. In truth, she’d privately admit to

herself, Helen’s residual animosity toward the Alvarez Hypothesis was emotional rather than intellectual.

Like most paleontologists, she was often rankled by the over-bearing arrogance of many of the physicists

who were so charmed by the hypothesis and took it as Revealed Truth. When they pontificated on the

subject, physicists tended to dismiss the inconvenient facts paleontologists kept bringing up, much like an

exasperated adult brushes aside the foolish questions of little children.

One of those facts, however, was that there was no evidence that any dinosaur had survived till the end

of the Cretaceous. But now...

It looked as if they’d found the evidence.

“Yes, where the comet,” she repeated.

She dusted her hands off on her jeans, and straightened up. “It’s going to be a hike back and it’ll be

getting dark in a few hours. Even if it weren’t, we can’t do anything yet. This is on your folks’ land,

Jackie. We’ll have to get their permission to dig here, and I’ve absolutely got to call the Museum of the

Rockies. Probably a few other people.”

She took a long, slow breath. “This is going to be a big dig, Jackie. Whatever your funny fossil is, it’s led

us to the mother lode.”

That night, on the telephone from her motel room, she conveyed her excitement to the director of the

Museum of the Rockies. It wasn’t hard, actually. Ever since the days of Jack Horner, the Museum had

prided itself on its eminence in the world of paleontology, especially dinosaur paleontology. The director

immediately grasped the significance of finding what appeared to be an articulated velociraptor skeleton

on the very edge of the K-T boundary. He promised to give her the full support of the museum.

In fact, he even came out himself, three days later. By then, Helen, Joe, and Jackie had been joined by

Carol Danvers and Bill Ishihara, the other members of Helen’s team. Three days of careful digging had

uncovered the entire lower half of the fossil. And, in the process, had found the leg bone of another

velociraptor underneath it, the body apparently extending off to the side of the first.

Helen heard the footsteps coming up behind her, but continued scraping away. The smell of chipped

rock, a dusty hot scent that always reminded her of striking flints, lingered strongly in the bright heat of a

Montana summer.

“Dr. Sutter?”

She finished freeing the small round stone that had been in her way, then stood up, dusting off her hands

before extending one for a handshake. “Hello, Director Bonds.”

Bonds was sweating and trying not to show how winded he was from the walk. He’d been quite a field

scientist himself before he became director of the museum, and was probably a little embarrassed to

discover how far out of shape he was from a few years of chair-warming.

At a gesture of invitation from Helen, he squatted at the edge of the work area, the others clearing out of

the way. “Marvelous. Simply marvelous. A death scene, you think?”

Helen scratched her chin thoughtfully. “Too early to tell. There’s something... Well, let me hold off before

I jump to conclusions. But look at this. See? That’s the K-T boundary, all right. There’s no doubt about

it.”

“Jesus.” The director was practically bouncing up and down in restrained professional excitement.

“No-one’s ever found a dinosaur this close to the boundary!”

“Close?” demanded Helen. “It’s not close. It’s right on it.”

Chapter 2

Two weeks later, Bonds was back again, bringing more help and equipment. By then, Helen and the

people on her crew had managed to clear the first skeleton, half of the second, and had discovered yet a

third on the other side of the first. To say the museum director was happy would have been an

understatement on a par with saying the Titanic had experienced some difficulty on its maiden voyage.

Helen, Joe, and Jackie were also clearly happy, but someone who knew them better than the Director

might have noticed something a bit odd in their reactions. They welcomed the newcomers and showed

them around, agreeing that it was clearly a death scene, but that they hadn’t drawn any firm conclusions

as to the sequence of events yet.

That was true enough, as far as it went, Helen thought, but...

They relaxed a bit once the Director left. Helen needed to talk to the new paleontologists alone, without

the Director hearing things that might make his funding the venture politically difficult. It was

extraordinarily hard to think that way, but with what they were finding, the circumstances were also

extraordinary.

“Funny.” One of the new guys, Michael Jennings, shook his head slightly. “The way the skeletons sit, I

don’t think they were fighting at all. Drowned, maybe? Flash flood?”

“Maybe,” Jackie said.

“Found any wounds?” another asked. “Broken bones? Evidence of toothmarks? Clearly they didn’t get

eaten much, or whatever did it would’ve taken them apart.”

“Yeah,” said Joe. “There’s some marks on the skeletons. Look here, around the pelvis.” He pointed with

a stick to the first skeleton.

The newcomers gathered around and shone flashlights on the exposed fossil, as the sun was starting to go

down and long shadows were gathering in the arroyo. For several minutes there was silence.

“What the hell made that?” Jennings finally asked, frowning at the three neat half-centimeter holes that

appeared to punch completely through the pelvic bone.

“Looks almost like a bullet hole.” That was offered in a jocular tone by one of the other new arrivals,

Ned Rhodes. But the quip trailed off a bit too abruptly.

“Too neat,” Jackie responded immediately. “My dad’s hunted all his life, and I’ve gone with him. A bullet

would’ve mushroomed when it hit the bone, if not sooner. And even if someone had been using

military-grade jacketed bullets, the holes are too small for the caliber guns you’d use to hunt big game.”

“Funny thing, too.” Helen extended her hand, showing several small, round, dark-brown pebbles. “These

are all over the area.”

Jennings took one and studied it, then, put it up against one of the holes. It was clear that they were

essentially identical in size.

“Bizarre. Cysts that causes bone loss, eats it away or something?”

Helen’s eyebrow quirked upward. “Now there’s an interesting idea, Mike. We’ll have to section a

couple of these, see what’s inside.”

“They all look the same size. Are they?”

“Within the limits of my field equipment, they’re identical. Perfectly spherical and measuring, by field

micrometer, 4.65 millimeters in diameter. We’ve measured ten of them at least, and all of them are just

the same.”

Dr. Sean Carter, the senior of the newcomers, had been silent until now. Finally he spoke. “Um, Helen,

don’t take this the wrong way, but are you sure... uh...”

“That there’s been no contamination of the site? Yes, I’m sure. And I’ve kept detailed notes from the

beginning. Even more detailed than usual, in fact.”

The newcomers were silent. Helen Sutter had the reputation, among other things, for being one of the

most meticulous field paleontologist in the country. Her notes were used as models in at least two

textbooks and an unknown number of classes. If she said she was taking unusual care, the only thing that

would have kept the site more pristine would have been not to dig it at all.

Carter was studying the bones and their positioning. Helen saw him judging angles, glancing along certain

lines, then picking up one of the dark brown pebbles and studying it pensively for a long time, while the

others continued their examination of the site.

It was clear to Helen, though, that none of them were looking at the precise features that Sean Carter

was. That was no surprise. If Helen had the reputation for being a fanatically careful field worker, Sean

Carter’s reputation for obsessive attention to detail made her look like a dilettante.

Carter never missed a single clue in the study of a fossil. There had been one wag a number of years

before who had jested that Carter could probably visualize the entirety of the Cretaceous in toto from a

single bone. What he was seeing in this death scene bothered him more and more. She could see his

brow wrinkling so it looked like he was in actual pain.

Finally, he turned back to Helen. “Could I speak to you for a moment?”

“Sure, Sean. Come on, let’s take a little walk. I’ll show you where the first fossil came from.”

Carter said nothing until they were well away from the others. Helen knew Sean Carter. He was the kind

of man who hated anomalies—they disordered his ordered view of life and his profession—but he also

hated avoiding the truth. The current situation was clearly causing him a strain.

“I’m not sure what you have here, Helen. I can tell you have an idea of your own, and I’m not sure I

even want to think about what it might be. But I’m worried, very worried.”

“What has you worried, Sean?”

Carter snorted humorlessly. “Helen, you’ve been doing this excavation. Don’t tell me you can’t see it.”

“Maybe I do, but I want to hear what you see, without me biasing your opinion.”

Eric Flint - Boundary

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