Primeval: Extinction Event

by ABNETT, DAN

• ISBN13: 9781845766931
• ISBN10: 1845766938
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-03-31
• Publisher: Titan Books

Summary

When strange anomalies in time start to appear Professor Cutter and his team have to help track down and capture a multitude of dangerous prehistoric creatures from Earth's distant past... and distant future. A heady mixture of action and adventure, the crew are forced to confront terrifying creatures from the past and the future with gripping consequences. Get ready for a thrilling prehistoric ride! In this brand new original "Primeval" adventure Cutter and the team are forced to travel to Siberia to confront an anomaly problem on an incredible scale...

Author Biography

Dan Abnett is a prolific writer of both novels and comics. He has written for a diverse range of characters in comics, including the X-Men, Batman, Superman, Mr Men and Dr Who. He has written 25 novels for Black Library. His Black Library novel Horus Rising and his Torchwood novel Border Princes were both bestsellers.

Excerpts

One

The advance camp was an assortment of canvas prefabs erected a few
hundred yards from the river. After hours, you could hear the fast-flowing
water chuckling and gurgling like a gleeful baby.
It wasn’t a bad place to be, if you didn’t mind being nowhere. The
closest town, which wasn’t much more than an oblast station, was three
hours drive east, six if the day was warm and the track turned to mud.
The camp sat against a screen of grey conifers that hid the mossy,
misty depths of the forest. A patch of ground was being cleared to make
a landing strip, but it was slow work.
Technically, it was early summer, but this far north summer had only
managed to give the region the limpest of embraces. The nights were still
long, and the brief days were watery and cool, with hazy white skies that
turned the broad tracts of forest and the hills beyond into brooding
watercolour studies.
Walking up from the latrines to the north end of the camp, Dima
tamped a filterless cigarette against the side of its packet. He wasn’t going
to smoke it, but the habit kept his hands busy. The commanding officer
had restricted smoking privileges inside the camp, and it was prohibited
on open forest patrols. To Dima, this was another symptom of the pro-
gressive Westernisation of Russian culture. He’d read about it in one of
his sister’s glossy magazines. Smoking was banned in the West; you
couldn’t even light up in bars. Drinking was frowned on, too. Men were
transforming into what they called “metrosexual” creatures, all tanned
and toned and depilated, with a sudden interest in childcare and
macrobiotics.
It made him laugh. When signs of this creeping decay showed up in
the Russian Army, then it was time to man the barricades.
He played with the fat cigarette. The old habit would die hard in him
and he was proud of it. In the eyes of the West, he would be seen as a
dinosaur, a throwback, a primitive beast from the distant past, out-
evolved and threatened with extinction.
The reason he didn’t light it actually had nothing to do with the CO’s
orders. Cigarettes were a scarce commodity at the advance camp, and
there was no local store or bar to buy them from. A man guarded his
supply, and rationed it carefully. There was no way of telling how long the
deployment was going to last.
Routine manoeuvres, that’s what they had all been told – an un-
scheduled training exercise in the deep woods of the Krasnoyarsk Krai,
six weeks minimum, maybe more. Dima had hoped that the spring might
see his unit off on a more recreational deployment, perhaps on the Baltic.
Instead they got months in the damp and drizzle of Siberia.
Still, the prefabs were heated, the food was good and plentiful, and the
regimen none too arduous. He quite liked the woods. He liked the peace,
the stillness, the endless nature of the forest. Sometimes, on patrol, he
could lose himself. It felt as if the trees stretched away from him in all
directions, including time.
He liked the way the stillness could be broken by sudden, bright bird
song: clear notes, rasps, the band-saw buzzing of woodpeckers. There
were other sounds too, from deep in the woods, grunts and squeals made
by animals he had not yet identified.
A human cry broke the air.
Someone in the camp had shouted. Dima turned and caught sight of
a 4x4 coming down the loop track through the trees. Its top was down,
and its headlamps were switched on to combat the overcast gloom, even
though it was late morning. Dima stuffed the cigarette back into the
packet and jogged over to the side of the track, the folded skeleton stock
of his AK-74 bumping against his shoulder.
He raised his hand in a friendly challenge. The approaching 4x4
dropped a gear and began to slow down. There were

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Excerpted from Extinction Event by Dan Abnett
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