I stared at the beautiful nude before me. In contrast to my American huntress, Dharma was small and supple, her body taut from a mastery of yoga.

“Well, Jason Sloan, at least your programming is getting more interesting.”

Spreading out the blanket, I bundled Dharma up, then carried her into the next chamber. Oscar was gone, having left the escape hatch open. Ducking through, I stepped outside, then placed the girl on the ground in order to reseal Oceanus behind me.

The late afternoon sun cast long shadows across the cooling sand. Slinging Dharma over my right shoulder, I followed Oscar’s tracks, four zigzagging impressions resembling a serpent’s trail leading southeast. Despite the flat landscape, the cephaloped was nowhere in sight, a fact that quickened my step.

I felt the vibrations before—a distant pounding—like a quarter horse approaching the first turn. As I quickened my pace the sound became louder, the source clearly locked in on my presence. I spun around to see what my Omega dream had conjured up this time.

“Holy shit.”

Words cannot adequately describe the animal chasing me. ABE told me it was seventy-five feet, but even half a mile away all I could see was the crocodile’s head, which was green over yellow and as big and wide as my first-grade elementary school. Four powerful legs churned the sand into dust clouds, which were beaten aside by its prodigious tail, the appendage lashing back and forth behind its thickly scaled frame.

Panic summoned ABE, and the bio-chip unleashed an ocean of adrenaline that momentarily rendered me a world-class sprinter, perhaps delaying the inevitable death-in-one-bite scenario by a few meaningless seconds.

And then I saw what appeared to be a second monster, two hundred yards ahead and to my right, a titanic female oozing postal truck–size eggs into a shallow crater it had excavated using its hindquarters.

MALE CROCODILIAN CONTACT IN FIFTEEN SECONDS. RUN TO THE FEMALE CROCODILE.

“Vanilla sway!”

THE MALE CROCODILIAN IS TRACKING ROBERT EISENBRAUN BY SCENT. DIVERT TO THE NEST.

Registering the earth-shaking wallops behind me, I cut hard to my right, heading straight for the mountain of olive-green scales that was seeding its young before me.

I was sixty yards away when the female’s head turned in my direction.

Fifty yards from her nest when Mama Croc spotted the approaching male.

At thirty yards I froze, and all hell broke loose.

Smaller than her male counterpart, the hissing female passed within ten feet of stomping me into vanilla swirl as she instinctively charged the perceived threat to her young. Dropping to the ground to avoid her swishing thirty-foot tail, I watched her bound away, then slid down the near side of the steep hole into the nest.

EISENBRAUN, LEAVE THE NEST!

But you just said—

LEAVE THE NEST! GET TO THE CLIFFS.