"Tolerance"
                    copyright 2008 by Dave Van Domelen
               based on properties owned by Privateer Press
         used without permission, but hopefully with forebearance
===========================================================================

     The stolen Hummvee swerved abruptly to the left, and Melissa Paley
cursed.  It usually shocked people when she did that, since she looked every
inch the "ivy-covered professors in ivy-covered halls" stereotype.  But given
the situation, a gray-haired lady swearing a blue streak wasn't even in the
top ten most shocking things.
     "Sorry, Prof, spotted an unexploded Spikodon cluster in the road," Terry
apologized.  She didn't remember his last name, she was always horrible with
human names.  Linnean taxonomic bionomial nomenclature she had no problem
with, but people?  Pfah.  He was just another eager young college student
who'd joined Green Fury after discovering that he was one of those rare
people that the Terrasaurs didn't try to eat.
     "I'm not a...oh, never mind," she sighed.  She'd stopped being a
Professor when they'd kicked her out of Brown for her membership in a
"terrorist" organization.  But to kids like Terry, if you had gray hair and
had ever held a piece of chalk at the front of the room, you were a
professor.  "Just try to get closer to that group of Cardinones.  I need to
get some readings on their infrared signatures."
     "You mean the Carnidons?" he started jinking the military vehicle in the
right general direction, at least.
     "The plural of Carnidon is Cardinones," she sighed.  "It's Latin."
     "Sorry, prof, the only dead language they made me learn in college was
Fortran," Terry shrugged.  "I'll see how close I can get, but there's a lot
of stuff running around that's not a Terrasaur and would be perfectly happy
to eat us both."
     Melissa nodded, a wisp of white hair escaping her bun and bobbing in the
wind.  Specifically, minions of the so-called Lords of Cthul had been
summoned by some fool, probably a fool who still had tenure in the literature
department at the nearby University of Chicago, and only the timely arrival
of an Armodax with his herd had saved the city from immediate enslavement.
When would those idiots in GUARD realize that the Terrasaurs were here to
save the planet?  If necessary, of course, they'd be saving the planet *from*
humanity rather than *for* humanity, but energy that the global response
organization wasted fighting the Terrasaurs meant that real enemies of the
planet were unopposed at critical times.     
     "This close enough, prof?" Terry asked.
     "Should be," she nodded.  "Try to hold it steady," she added as she
pointed an infrared scanner at the pack of Cardinones.  She had a theory that
the similarity in appearance between them and the truly gigantic Terra Khan
and Armodax was no coincidence.  Biologically speaking, there was no way
something as large as Armodax could sustain a breeding population, but the
smaller Terrasaurs were within the realms of plausibility.  That suggested
that under the right conditions, a Carnidon could grow into a sort of "pack
alpha" two to three times larger than its brethren.  It seemed to be a
response to exotic stimuli, such as radiation.  And this particular pack was
headed for the U of C's nuclear reactor.  A purely research installation, of
course, but it might be enough to trigger a mutation.  So she needed a good
baseline of their metabolic rate...growth into an "alpha" form would be
presaged by a rapid boost in metabolism.
     "Aren't they awesome?" Terry asked as Melissa took her readings.  "I've
never managed to get this close to a Carnidon before...the closest I've been
to any of 'em was that Raptix that decided not to eat me back in Boston.  Do
you think they understand that not all humans are their enemies?"
     "It's hard to gauge their ability to understand, Terry.  Even if they
have intelligence on a par with humans, they're as alien a species as the
Martians.  More alien, in fact...at least the Martians seem to share
humanity's greed.  But they seem to be willing to accept us into their pack,
at least.  I've never been much of a behavioral expert, my experience runs to
the biomechanicals...and a lot of the groundbreaking work in xenocognition
happened long after I finished my college education."  She double checked her
readings, then stowed the hard-to-replace sensor.  "Okay, Terry, you can go
back to driving like you're in a video game.  Just keep the pack in sight, if
they go where I think they're going, we'll want to be nearby.  Just not TOO
nearby," she added, almost as an afterthought.  
     "Is this a 'save the planet' mission or a 'seeker of truth' mission?"
Terry had asked an hour ago, when she dragooned him into being her driver.
She'd never been a good driver, and she couldn't operate the sensors and
drive at the same time in any case.  
     "Can't it be both?" she'd countered.  Still, sometimes she wondered how
much of her old life still drove her new one.  She was a "terrorist" now,
part of the radical Green Fury, reviled as a Monster Sympathizer...she found
the Terrasaurs a lot easier to sympathize with than her own species these
days.  But old habits died hard, and before she'd found her new cause in the
jungles of South America, she'd been just as driven by the old cause, the one
that had taken her to those jungles in the first place.  The quest to KNOW.
     A stab of silly regret shot through her.  If only she'd been part of the
first expedition instead of the second, she might have picked somewhat more
dignified names for the creatures.  Not that a Brontox cared what you called
her in human language, she only cared about her young.
     "It's getting pretty thick up ahead," Terry warned.  "Armodax is
fighting one of the big tentacle guys...can't tell if it's Cthugrosh or
Yasheth, though, can't see if he has legs."
     Melissa turned her attention to the brawling figures visible in glimpses
between the shattered buildings.  "Yasheth.  The mouthparts give it away."
     A trio of the flying horrors the press had dubbed "Squix" swooped
towards the herd of Cardinones, and Melissa stifled a gasp.  She wanted to
scream out a warning, but stopped herself.  There was no way her voice would
carry so far, and all she'd accomplish would be to look like a frightened old
woman.  
     Terry had no such inhibitions.  "Watch out!" he shouted, steering
towards the battle.
     "You idiot!" Melissa hissed.  "What do you think you're going to do, ram
a flying creature with the Hummvee?"
     "There's a LAW under the back seat!" he explained.  "If you can blow one
of the Squix up, the others might bail...come on, you know Carnidons can't
deal with Squix, and I don't see any Rapitixes around to save their bacon!"
     "Right, of course," Melissa muttered, digging around and pulling out the
case containing the Light Antitank Weapon.  Everyone in Green Fury, even the
white-haired academics, practiced with standard military weaponry...they
certainly managed to "liberate" enough of it.  Melissa had never fired a LAW
before, but she know how it was supposed to work.
     Open, extend tube, check the various bits, this end towards enemy, line
up the sights, FIRE!
     The recoil, while practically nonexistent, still startled Melissa enough
that she almost dropped the weapon.  The missile streaked across the
intervening distance and buried itself into the squamous flesh of a Squix
before detonating with a muffled thump.  This distracted another Squix enough
that a Carnidon managed to get a mouthful of its tentacles and pull it to the
ground, where it was stomped to death by the herd.  They didn't try to eat
it, having apparently already learned that particular lesson...Squix meat was
subtly WRONG.  Eat too much and you grew tentacles yourself.
     "YAHOO!" Terry whooped.  "Oh sh...the last one's coming this way!
Buckle up, it's time for some fancy driving!"
     But the Squix was upon them while Terry was still turning the Hummvee
around, moving with a speed that suggested it hadn't physically traversed all
points between where it had been and where it was.
     "AAAAAA!" Terry shouted as the tentacles wrapped around him and lifted
him into the air.  The Hummvee lurched briefly as the seatbelt held, but then
another tentacle snapped it and Terry was carried off.  Melissa grabbed the
wheel in a panic, barely keeping the vehicle from tipping over before it
crunched into a hastily-abandoned Prius, slamming her into her own safety
harness.
     The Cardinones watched this happen with a disinterested expression, one
of them fixing Melissa with an almost bored look before the herd turned as
one and headed back in the direction of the nuclear reactor.
     Dazed by the impact and shocked by the loss of Terry...Newcombe, that
was his name...Melissa came to a realization.
     "They tolerate us, but that doesn't mean they've accepted us into their
pack," she gasped into the digital voice recorder she had painfully pulled
out of her vest pocket.  "They really don't care if we live or we die, do
they?"  Gasping at the pain of what were at least bruised (if not broken)
ribs, Melissa undid the safety harness and moved over to the driver's seat to
see if the vehicle could still move.  She'd decide if she wanted to run or
follow the herd once she knew if she could get anywhere in the first
place...she certainly didn't feel up to walking very far.
     "Still," she dictated as she got the engine to turn over, "given the
state of the world and the monsters that fill it, maybe the best we can hope
for from them is tolerance.  It's certainly better than we humans have showed
other species...."

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Author's Notes:

     "Ivy-covered professors in ivy-covered halls" is a bit from a Tom Lehrer
song (Bright College Days), lest anyone think I came up with the line.

     I actually got someone who knows Latin to give me the proper
pluralizations of the various faux-Latinate Terrasaur names (obviously, Terra
Khan breaks the pattern):
     Brontox - Brontoxices
     Raptix - Raptices
     Spikodon - Spikonides
     Carnidon - Cardinones
     Pteradax - Pteradaces
     Armodax - Armodaces
     I forgot to ask about Rakodon, and the guy who answered (it was on Yahoo
Answers) has messaging disabled so I couldn't ask him in followup, but I'd
guess it'd be something like Rakonides.

     This story went through a lot of rough mental drafts before I sat down
and typed it up.  Melissa was originally more of a young firebrand, and she
was going to have her "they only tolerate us" realization as a Squix dropped
her into the maw of Cthugrosh.  And even as I wrote the abduction part, I was
waffling over whether it'd be Terry or Melissa (or both) who would get
snatched.  Still not sure why I decided to run it the way I did, sometimes a
story makes the decisions for the writer.  Maybe Melissa has a better agent
than Terry does and got a deal to be in the sequel.  :)

     Later note: It was correctly pointed out by a reader that the odds of
hitting anything with a LAW from inside a rapidly moving jeep are slim to say
the least.  But keep in mind that Monsterpocalypse is an inherently over the
top cinematic reality, where you'd even expect a totally untrained person to
manage that shot, much less someone who'd been given some training.  In such
worlds, LAWs never miss when fired by a viewpoint character, unless it's to
overshoot and hit something that then explodes and kills the target anyway.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.