Dragon's Teeth

Read Dragon's Teeth for Free Online Page A

Book: Read Dragon's Teeth for Free Online
Authors: Mercedes Lackey
Tags: Fiction, General, Historical, Fantasy, dark fantasy
exhibit had been booked there for a month. He had put that together with the discovery that common chickens and other creatures could be regressed to their saurian ancestors—the pioneering work had already been done on the eohippus and aurochs—and had seen a goldmine waiting for both the zoos and GenTech.
    “How could they do this to me?” Mary whined. “They had such a promising record! I was going to ask them for a corporate donation! And now—this—”
    “Money,” Ken hissed. “They’re all money-grubbing bastards, who don’t care if they sell poor animals into a life of penal servitude. Just wait; next thing you’ll be seeing is DinoBurgers.”
    Howard winced, and pulled the collar of his unbleached cotton jacket higher. “So, what have we got?” he asked. “What’s the plan?”
    Ken consulted the layout of the facility and the outdoor pens. It had been ridiculously easy to get them; for all the furor over the DinoSaurians, there was remarkably little security on this facility. Only signs, hundreds of them, warning of “Dangerous Animals.” Ridiculous. As if members of P.I.D.A. would be taken in by such blatant nonsense! There was no such thing as a dangerous animal; only an animal forced to act outside of its peaceful nature. “There are only three dino-animopersons at the moment, and if we can release all three of them, it will represent such a huge loss to GenTech that I doubt they’ll ever want to create more. There’s a BrontoSaurian here—” He pointed at a tiny pen on the far northern corner of the map. “It’s inside a special pen with heavy-duty electric fences and alarms around it, so that will be your target, Howard. You’re the alarms expert.”
    Howard looked over Ken’s shoulder, and winced again. “That pen isn’t even big enough for a horse to move around in!” he exclaimed. “This is inhuman! It’s veal calves all over again!”
    Ken tilted the map towards Mary. “There’s something here called a ‘Dinonychus’ that’s supposed to be going to the San Diego Zoo. It looks like they’ve put it in some kind of a bare corral. You worked with turning loose the rodeo horses and bulls last year, so you take this one, Mary.”
    Mary Lang nodded, and tried not to show her relief. The corral didn’t look too difficult to get into, and from the plans, all she’d have to do would be to open the corral gate and the animal would run for freedom. “Very active” was the note photocopied along with the map. That was fine; the rodeo horses hadn’t wanted to leave their pens, and it had taken forever to get them to move. And she’d gotten horsecrap all over her expensive synthetic suede pants.
    “That leaves the Tricerotops in the big pasture to me.” Ken folded the map once they had all memorized the way in. “Meet you here in an hour. Those poor exploited victims of corporate humanocentrism are already halfway to freedom. We’ll show the corporate fat cats that they can’t live off the misery of tortured, helpless animals!”

    Howard had never seen so many alarms and electric shock devices in his life. He thought at first that they were meant to keep people out—but all the detectors pointed inward, not outward, so they had all been intended to keep this pathetic BrontoSaurian trapped inside his little box.
    Howard’s blood-pressure rose by at least ten points when he saw the victim; they were keeping it inside a bare concrete pen, with no educational toys, nothing to look at, no variation in its environment at all. It looked like the way they used to pen “killer” elephants in the bad old days; the only difference was that this BrontoSaurian wasn’t chained by one ankle. There was barely enough room for the creature to turn around; no room at all for it to lie down. There was nothing else in the pen but a huge pile of green vegetation at one end and an equally large pile of droppings at the other.
    Good God, he thought, appalled, Don’t they even clean the

Similar Books

Gossip Can Be Murder

Connie Shelton

New Species 09 Shadow

Laurann Dohner

Camellia

Lesley Pearse

Bank Job

James Heneghan

The Traveller

John Katzenbach

Horse Sense

Bonnie Bryant

Drive-By

Lynne Ewing