‘Very well.’ The dinosaur emperor picked up the phone from the conference table. With an anxious heart, Joya watched as he flexed his thick finger and laboriously pressed one enormous button after the other. Then she heard the muffled sound of it ringing. After a few seconds the ringing stopped and she knew Kachika had picked up the rice-sized receiver at the other end of the line.

The supreme consul’s voice came through the receiver. ‘Hello, who is this?’

Dadaeus spoke into the phone. ‘Is this Supreme Consul Kachika? This is Dadaeus. Right now—’

At that very moment, Joya heard a chorus of faint clicks all around her, as if all of the second hands on a wall of clocks were moving in unison. She knew it was the sound of mine-grains exploding in the dinosaurs’ skulls. The dinosaurs in the room stiffened, and time seemed to stand still. The phone receiver tumbled from Dadaeus’s claws, falling to the table near Joya with a deafening clatter. Then all of the dinosaurs came crashing down, leaving Joya’s horizon disconcertingly empty. The tabletop shuddered for several moments. When it stilled again, Joya crawled onto the receiver. Kachika was still on the line.

‘Hello? This is Kachika. What is this about? Hello?’

Her voice caused the earpiece to vibrate, sending pins and needles through Joya’s body.

‘Supreme Consul, it’s me, Joya!’ she shouted.

But her pheromone speech was no longer being converted into sound, and Kachika could not hear her on the other end of the line. The palace’s translation system had been taken offline by the mine-grains. Joya said no more. She knew she was too late.

Shortly thereafter, the lights in the hall went out. Dusk had fallen outside, and the room was thrown into semi-darkness. As Joya began the long hike across the conference table, the rumble of traffic from the distant city faded and a grim silence settled in its wake.

By the time she’d reached the table’s edge and begun her descent to the floor, the soundscape had changed again. Now the hall began to fill with the shrill discordance of far-off panic, the frightful pounding of fleeing feet and the unearthly screechings of dinosaurs in pain. There came the intermittent wailing of police sirens. And then the first muted rumbles of faraway explosions. Inside the palace itself, however, all was eerily quiet, for every last imperial dinosaur had been exterminated by cranial mine-grains.

When Joya finally reached the window, she stared out at the gargantuan metropolis of Boulder City, now shrouded in twilight gloom. Thin columns of smoke rose into the dusky sky, and more and more kept appearing, orange flames gleaming at their base. The city’s skyline flickered in and out of view. As the fires multiplied, an infernal glow filtered through the window, throwing shifting patterns of light and shadow across the high ceiling above Joya.

17

The Ultimate Deterrent