Fic, Dreadnought, Part 1 of 8. Ryan, 15
Oct. 3rd, 2020 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fredbassettTitle : Dreadnought, Part 1 of 8
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 15
Characters : Ryan, Claudia, Becker, Lester, Lorraine
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Word Count: 20,000, split into eight parts.
Summary : Waking up in the Permian under a pile of rock wasn’t a high point in Ryan’s life, nor was jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, but then help comes along from a very unexpected direction.
A/N : This fic was started four years ago for the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
primeval_denial art fic challenge for this wonderful artwork by the very talented ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tli. Naturally, it grew into an utter monster all too quickly and when it became obvious I’d never finish it in time, I wrote The World After as a prequel.
Ryan was hungry, thirsty, lighter by several kilos and closer to running out of ammunition than he liked (he had high standards when it came to the proper amount of ammunition). In fact, he was very close to running out of everything, particularly patience.
Waking up more than half dead under a pile of rocks hadn’t been the best start to a day he’d ever had and, as he’d clawed his way out of the makeshift cairn, he’d cursed Cutter and his very obvious lack of medical knowledge with every swearword he’d ever picked up. After over ten years in the army, Ryan had amassed quite an impressive vocabulary and it had been nice to be able to let rip, even if it had been only in his head, as by the time he’d escaped from his makeshift grave, he’d been too exhausted to manage even a groan. Attempting to stay alive over the next week hadn’t been easy, but he’d managed it, aided by the ration packs, field dressings and the extra syringes of morphine he’d scavenged off the bodies of his dead comrades.
Now, a month later (if the tally stick he’d been keeping was correct), he had the following to his name: 54 rounds for his M4, 70 bullets for his SIG Sauer P226 (and three spare SIGs with almost as many bullets), five assorted combat knives, three field dressings, two syringes of morphine, five blister packs of painkillers (six to a pack), 11 water purification tablets, several fish-hooks and three small reels of twine, two hand mirrors (bloody useful for lighting fires, and moderately useful for telling him just how awful he looked), four canteens of water, and other assorted items that he’d stowed into one backpack and hung onto like grim death (which is what he’d felt like most of the time) even when he’d been on the run from things that really shouldn’t have existed outside a museum.
His clothes were filthy (he’d drawn the line at stripping anything like that off his dead comrades), his stubble was now a short beard, and he smelled like a Sumo wrestler’s jockstrap, but he was alive. He was also thoroughly sick of the sodding Permian. It was too hot, too dry and was going to get a fucking crap write-up on Trip Advisor if he ever got back in front of a computer screen again. Which, at the moment, seemed highly unlikely.
He’d been forced to move away from the anomaly site to refill his water bottles and find food (the gopher-like burrowing creatures tasted like guinea pig and were relatively easy to catch, but he was getting a bit fed up of the lack of variety in his diet). Other than when sleeping, he’d spent most of his time watching the same barren patch of ground where the anomaly had once been from the small shelter he’d built out of a mix of rock and scrubby bushes that he’d cut down and dragged into position as soon as he’d felt able to do any manual work. Anomaly watch had got boring very, very quickly, and was soon even more tedious than the time in Iraq when he’d spent a week in a small cave on a hillside watching someone who’d turned out to be innocent of everything apart from an improper relationship with a goat.
He watched as one of the gopher-things popped out of a burrow about 20 metres away and looked at him.
“Not hungry,” he told it.
It stared at him for a few moments and then disappeared, presumably to tell its friends and relations what crap company he was.
“We could play I-Spy if you want.”
That didn’t tempt it back. Presumably because once you’d done something beginning with S and something beginning with R, there wasn’t much left.
Ryan pulled a battered pack of cards out of his jacket pocket and started yet another game of Patience, even though that particular commodity was now in very, very short supply. He couldn’t decide whether to stay there in the hope of the anomaly returning (after all, it had done so before) or wander off somewhere at random and look for another one. But the Permian was a big place (or did he mean a big time?) and he had no idea in which direction to walk.
One thing that kept coming back to mind, though, was the fact that Helen Cutter had been hoping to find an anomaly to the future somewhere around there, and Ryan was beginning to think that anything would be better than sweating like a pig, playing himself at cards and talking to gophers. Or even eating gophers. Next, he’d be talking to gophers he’d eaten, and that wouldn’t be a good development.
He picked up a stone and scratched a rough shape on one side. Tails he stayed, heads he buggered off. He flipped the stone in the air. It turned over and over, time seeming to slow down as it so often did in combat and other stress situations until it finally landed with the scratched side uppermost. It wasn’t exactly a masterful representation of Lester’s face, but he felt he’d got the nose right, if nothing else.
Heads. Time to go.
Ryan gathered up the cards and stowed them back in their packet in his pocket. He took down the strips of wind-dried gopher he’d been preparing and put them away as well. Everything else was already in either his pack or his various pockets. Ryan was a firm believer in being ready to take off at a moment’s notice, even if it had been a few days since he’d last caught sight of a Gorgonopsid.
There was one last thing to do, though. He pulled out a small notebook and wrote in it in pencil what he thought was the date, and his name, along with the words: Gone looking for an anomaly. He wondered for a moment if there was something else he should write and then added the words: I ATEN’T DEAD. He couldn’t quite remember whether he’d got the quote right, but if Connor was still alive, he knew their resident geek would get the reference. Connor was a big Terry Pratchett fan and he’d been the one to introduce Ryan to Discworld in the first place. He stuck the note into a small ziplock plastic bag, pierced it with a piece of fishing line and secured it to one of the largest rocks in his shelter.
He slung the pack over his shoulder and set off down the slope.
*****
The first anomaly he found took him to somewhere hot, wet, with large trees, dragonflies the size of microlights and air that made breathing difficult. He stayed no more than ten minutes. He might be sick of the Permian, but he wasn’t that bloody desperate. Not yet, anyway.
It took another week to find a second one, and after taking one look at the enormous volcano belching out chunks of rock the size of a house, he quickly retreated to the monotonous black sand that he had come to heartily loathe. But having made his mind up to leave the site of the original anomaly, Ryan stubbornly stuck to the course he’d chosen and just carried on walking. He filled his water bottles up when he could, clobbered the occasional gopher-thing with a home-made slingshot when he needed food, and did his best to stay out of the way of anything bigger than him. He also did his best to ignore the fact that he still tired very easily.
Three more days took him even further from the site of the original anomaly, and Ryan was at last starting to question whether he was doing the right thing or not. With little to do but think, Ryan finally reached the conclusion that if he didn’t find a more promising anomaly by the end of the day, he’d make an attempt to retrace his steps.
After a long day’s walk, Ryan started to look around for some sort of shelter for the night. A low cliff looked promising. At least it would keep the wind off his back for the night. As he turned towards it, a low rumbling growl from behind him alerted Ryan to the fact that he wasn’t quite as alone in the landscape as he’d hoped. A quick glance over his shoulder told him that trouble with a capital T had just arrived in the shape of one of the Permian’s apex predators. The gorgonopsids were strong, fast and vicious.
Ryan broke into a run, cradling his M4 in his arms. He had no desire to expend bullets on the thing, but he might not have any choice….
The sudden brightness of the anomaly that flared into life only a few metres in front of him took Ryan by surprise, but he didn’t break stride, entering it at a run, going from the harsh sunlight of the Permian into a monochrome world with a sky wreathed in cloud.
Expecting the gorgonopsid to charge after him, Ryan flung himself sideways as soon as he’d cleared the anomaly, taking care to hang onto his rife against the insistent magnetic pull of the pulsating ball of light. He hit the ground, jarring his shoulder, but managed to come up onto one knee with his M4 ready to fire.
The gorgonopsid did exactly what he’d expected and charged straight after him, but unlike him, the creature made no attempt to check its hot pursuit and promptly ran straight over the edge of a cliff.
Ryan drew in a slightly shaky breath before standing up and cautiously approaching the broken edge. Until that moment, he had always thought he’d got a fairly good head for heights, but that almost deserted him when he looked down into a gorge that could have swallowed the Grand Canyon twice over. He took an involuntary step backwards. In the same moment, the light from the anomaly abruptly winked out, leaving Ryan standing there with his mouth open in shock. He’d wanted to leave the Permian, but he would have liked the chance to do a recce before deciding to whether to stay or not. As it was, it looked like he was stranded in an equally forbidding environment.
Moving slowly and carefully, Ryan examined the area immediately around him.
He was on a high promontory of reddish-grey rock that looked like some kind of weathered sandstone. The walls of the valley had been sculpted into graceful shapes, with sweeping curves and protruding ledges that were coming very close to triggering an attack of vertigo. From what he could see, the rock tower he was standing on was connected to a high wall by a narrow, natural walkway, but it was difficult to be sure in the overcast gloom induced by the thick layer of cloud that blotted out the light of the sun, leaving the world looking like something out of an old sepia photograph that had been left out too long in the light.
It wasn’t the best of situations but, on the upside, he hadn’t been killed and eaten by a gorgonopsid. He had food and water in his pack, and he wasn’t in the sodding Permian any more. That had to count for something.
An hour later, Ryan was starting to think his optimism might have been somewhat misplaced. He’d managed to make his way carefully across the natural causeway without mishap, but then his luck had started to run out. The next terrace was some 20 metres above his head and Ryan couldn’t for the life of him see a way of getting up there. The rock was extremely friable and, more to the point, considerably overhung. Ryan had done some climbing but not for a while, and not whilst carrying a heavy pack and a rifle.
Going down looked equally impossible. One of the things he didn’t have was a rope, and even if he’d had one, it wouldn’t have done him much good. Ryan leaned against the rock and did his best to think the problem through calmly and logically.
A moment later, both calm and logic were abruptly abandoned when he caught a glimpse of movement at one end of the small plateau. Three claws gripped the edge and then a large, hairless head appeared. Ryan’s finger tightened on the trigger as he brought the rifle up to his shoulder. He’d never been one to shoot first and ask questions later, but he’d make an exception for these bastard things.
It looked very much like he’d found the anomaly to the future that Helen Cutter had been looking for.
And the future held a whole heap of trouble.
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 15
Characters : Ryan, Claudia, Becker, Lester, Lorraine
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Word Count: 20,000, split into eight parts.
Summary : Waking up in the Permian under a pile of rock wasn’t a high point in Ryan’s life, nor was jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, but then help comes along from a very unexpected direction.
A/N : This fic was started four years ago for the
primeval_denial art fic challenge for this wonderful artwork by the very talented tli. Naturally, it grew into an utter monster all too quickly and when it became obvious I’d never finish it in time, I wrote The World After as a prequel.Ryan was hungry, thirsty, lighter by several kilos and closer to running out of ammunition than he liked (he had high standards when it came to the proper amount of ammunition). In fact, he was very close to running out of everything, particularly patience.
Waking up more than half dead under a pile of rocks hadn’t been the best start to a day he’d ever had and, as he’d clawed his way out of the makeshift cairn, he’d cursed Cutter and his very obvious lack of medical knowledge with every swearword he’d ever picked up. After over ten years in the army, Ryan had amassed quite an impressive vocabulary and it had been nice to be able to let rip, even if it had been only in his head, as by the time he’d escaped from his makeshift grave, he’d been too exhausted to manage even a groan. Attempting to stay alive over the next week hadn’t been easy, but he’d managed it, aided by the ration packs, field dressings and the extra syringes of morphine he’d scavenged off the bodies of his dead comrades.
Now, a month later (if the tally stick he’d been keeping was correct), he had the following to his name: 54 rounds for his M4, 70 bullets for his SIG Sauer P226 (and three spare SIGs with almost as many bullets), five assorted combat knives, three field dressings, two syringes of morphine, five blister packs of painkillers (six to a pack), 11 water purification tablets, several fish-hooks and three small reels of twine, two hand mirrors (bloody useful for lighting fires, and moderately useful for telling him just how awful he looked), four canteens of water, and other assorted items that he’d stowed into one backpack and hung onto like grim death (which is what he’d felt like most of the time) even when he’d been on the run from things that really shouldn’t have existed outside a museum.
His clothes were filthy (he’d drawn the line at stripping anything like that off his dead comrades), his stubble was now a short beard, and he smelled like a Sumo wrestler’s jockstrap, but he was alive. He was also thoroughly sick of the sodding Permian. It was too hot, too dry and was going to get a fucking crap write-up on Trip Advisor if he ever got back in front of a computer screen again. Which, at the moment, seemed highly unlikely.
He’d been forced to move away from the anomaly site to refill his water bottles and find food (the gopher-like burrowing creatures tasted like guinea pig and were relatively easy to catch, but he was getting a bit fed up of the lack of variety in his diet). Other than when sleeping, he’d spent most of his time watching the same barren patch of ground where the anomaly had once been from the small shelter he’d built out of a mix of rock and scrubby bushes that he’d cut down and dragged into position as soon as he’d felt able to do any manual work. Anomaly watch had got boring very, very quickly, and was soon even more tedious than the time in Iraq when he’d spent a week in a small cave on a hillside watching someone who’d turned out to be innocent of everything apart from an improper relationship with a goat.
He watched as one of the gopher-things popped out of a burrow about 20 metres away and looked at him.
“Not hungry,” he told it.
It stared at him for a few moments and then disappeared, presumably to tell its friends and relations what crap company he was.
“We could play I-Spy if you want.”
That didn’t tempt it back. Presumably because once you’d done something beginning with S and something beginning with R, there wasn’t much left.
Ryan pulled a battered pack of cards out of his jacket pocket and started yet another game of Patience, even though that particular commodity was now in very, very short supply. He couldn’t decide whether to stay there in the hope of the anomaly returning (after all, it had done so before) or wander off somewhere at random and look for another one. But the Permian was a big place (or did he mean a big time?) and he had no idea in which direction to walk.
One thing that kept coming back to mind, though, was the fact that Helen Cutter had been hoping to find an anomaly to the future somewhere around there, and Ryan was beginning to think that anything would be better than sweating like a pig, playing himself at cards and talking to gophers. Or even eating gophers. Next, he’d be talking to gophers he’d eaten, and that wouldn’t be a good development.
He picked up a stone and scratched a rough shape on one side. Tails he stayed, heads he buggered off. He flipped the stone in the air. It turned over and over, time seeming to slow down as it so often did in combat and other stress situations until it finally landed with the scratched side uppermost. It wasn’t exactly a masterful representation of Lester’s face, but he felt he’d got the nose right, if nothing else.
Heads. Time to go.
Ryan gathered up the cards and stowed them back in their packet in his pocket. He took down the strips of wind-dried gopher he’d been preparing and put them away as well. Everything else was already in either his pack or his various pockets. Ryan was a firm believer in being ready to take off at a moment’s notice, even if it had been a few days since he’d last caught sight of a Gorgonopsid.
There was one last thing to do, though. He pulled out a small notebook and wrote in it in pencil what he thought was the date, and his name, along with the words: Gone looking for an anomaly. He wondered for a moment if there was something else he should write and then added the words: I ATEN’T DEAD. He couldn’t quite remember whether he’d got the quote right, but if Connor was still alive, he knew their resident geek would get the reference. Connor was a big Terry Pratchett fan and he’d been the one to introduce Ryan to Discworld in the first place. He stuck the note into a small ziplock plastic bag, pierced it with a piece of fishing line and secured it to one of the largest rocks in his shelter.
He slung the pack over his shoulder and set off down the slope.
*****
The first anomaly he found took him to somewhere hot, wet, with large trees, dragonflies the size of microlights and air that made breathing difficult. He stayed no more than ten minutes. He might be sick of the Permian, but he wasn’t that bloody desperate. Not yet, anyway.
It took another week to find a second one, and after taking one look at the enormous volcano belching out chunks of rock the size of a house, he quickly retreated to the monotonous black sand that he had come to heartily loathe. But having made his mind up to leave the site of the original anomaly, Ryan stubbornly stuck to the course he’d chosen and just carried on walking. He filled his water bottles up when he could, clobbered the occasional gopher-thing with a home-made slingshot when he needed food, and did his best to stay out of the way of anything bigger than him. He also did his best to ignore the fact that he still tired very easily.
Three more days took him even further from the site of the original anomaly, and Ryan was at last starting to question whether he was doing the right thing or not. With little to do but think, Ryan finally reached the conclusion that if he didn’t find a more promising anomaly by the end of the day, he’d make an attempt to retrace his steps.
After a long day’s walk, Ryan started to look around for some sort of shelter for the night. A low cliff looked promising. At least it would keep the wind off his back for the night. As he turned towards it, a low rumbling growl from behind him alerted Ryan to the fact that he wasn’t quite as alone in the landscape as he’d hoped. A quick glance over his shoulder told him that trouble with a capital T had just arrived in the shape of one of the Permian’s apex predators. The gorgonopsids were strong, fast and vicious.
Ryan broke into a run, cradling his M4 in his arms. He had no desire to expend bullets on the thing, but he might not have any choice….
The sudden brightness of the anomaly that flared into life only a few metres in front of him took Ryan by surprise, but he didn’t break stride, entering it at a run, going from the harsh sunlight of the Permian into a monochrome world with a sky wreathed in cloud.
Expecting the gorgonopsid to charge after him, Ryan flung himself sideways as soon as he’d cleared the anomaly, taking care to hang onto his rife against the insistent magnetic pull of the pulsating ball of light. He hit the ground, jarring his shoulder, but managed to come up onto one knee with his M4 ready to fire.
The gorgonopsid did exactly what he’d expected and charged straight after him, but unlike him, the creature made no attempt to check its hot pursuit and promptly ran straight over the edge of a cliff.
Ryan drew in a slightly shaky breath before standing up and cautiously approaching the broken edge. Until that moment, he had always thought he’d got a fairly good head for heights, but that almost deserted him when he looked down into a gorge that could have swallowed the Grand Canyon twice over. He took an involuntary step backwards. In the same moment, the light from the anomaly abruptly winked out, leaving Ryan standing there with his mouth open in shock. He’d wanted to leave the Permian, but he would have liked the chance to do a recce before deciding to whether to stay or not. As it was, it looked like he was stranded in an equally forbidding environment.
Moving slowly and carefully, Ryan examined the area immediately around him.
He was on a high promontory of reddish-grey rock that looked like some kind of weathered sandstone. The walls of the valley had been sculpted into graceful shapes, with sweeping curves and protruding ledges that were coming very close to triggering an attack of vertigo. From what he could see, the rock tower he was standing on was connected to a high wall by a narrow, natural walkway, but it was difficult to be sure in the overcast gloom induced by the thick layer of cloud that blotted out the light of the sun, leaving the world looking like something out of an old sepia photograph that had been left out too long in the light.
It wasn’t the best of situations but, on the upside, he hadn’t been killed and eaten by a gorgonopsid. He had food and water in his pack, and he wasn’t in the sodding Permian any more. That had to count for something.
An hour later, Ryan was starting to think his optimism might have been somewhat misplaced. He’d managed to make his way carefully across the natural causeway without mishap, but then his luck had started to run out. The next terrace was some 20 metres above his head and Ryan couldn’t for the life of him see a way of getting up there. The rock was extremely friable and, more to the point, considerably overhung. Ryan had done some climbing but not for a while, and not whilst carrying a heavy pack and a rifle.
Going down looked equally impossible. One of the things he didn’t have was a rope, and even if he’d had one, it wouldn’t have done him much good. Ryan leaned against the rock and did his best to think the problem through calmly and logically.
A moment later, both calm and logic were abruptly abandoned when he caught a glimpse of movement at one end of the small plateau. Three claws gripped the edge and then a large, hairless head appeared. Ryan’s finger tightened on the trigger as he brought the rifle up to his shoulder. He’d never been one to shoot first and ask questions later, but he’d make an exception for these bastard things.
It looked very much like he’d found the anomaly to the future that Helen Cutter had been looking for.
And the future held a whole heap of trouble.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2020-10-03 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-03 07:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-03 05:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-03 07:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-04 08:49 pm (UTC)Great opening chapter with too many good lines to quote.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-05 01:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-05 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-05 08:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-06 08:44 am (UTC)Talk about frying pans and fires!
Super insight into Ryan's state of mind - and I heartily agree about Cutter's lack of medical knowledge. :)
Am I awful for giggling at the Gorgonopsid chasing him through the anomaly and then running straight over the cliff? Permian version of Wile E Coyote...
(and *snorfle* for my autocorrect wanting to change the gorgonopsid to gorgonzola!)
no subject
Date: 2020-10-06 02:28 pm (UTC)LOL, I like the idea of being chased by a gorgonzola!
no subject
Date: 2020-10-08 06:08 am (UTC)An actual cliffhanger!!
I absolutely loved this opening. Poor Ryan, completely fed up but managing brilliantly, though I am worried about his health...
What the hell is he going to do now though??!
no subject
Date: 2020-10-08 06:10 am (UTC)I don't think his health is too bad now. Hot, dry conditions have helped. But yes, he is very fed up.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-13 06:07 am (UTC)Poor soldier boy has to face a whole heap of trouble. But if anyone can do, it's Ryan.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-14 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-20 05:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-20 05:20 pm (UTC)I can never resist a bit of ominous imagery.
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Date: 2020-12-26 09:21 pm (UTC)I am still worried about how he knows what guinea pigs taste like 😯
no subject
Date: 2020-12-26 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-03 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-03 08:20 pm (UTC)