Ozzie Sharp drained the last of his cold coffee and paced down the line of radar and communications operators. He briefly considered going forward and getting another cup, but his tongue felt like it had grown fur, his stomach was starting to go sour and the combination of the coffee and the cabin noise of the aircraft was making his bladder twinge already. Better save it until he needed the caffeine.
He looked for a place to set down the cup, but most of the flat, stable surfaces in an AWACS aircraft are for work. He kept the cup clenched in his brown fingers and turned his attention back to the radar displays.
Ozzie wasn’t a big man, but he was built like a fireplug. There were traces of gray in his curly black hair, but he still moved in a way that suggested that if there was a brick wall between him and where he wanted to be it was too damn bad for the wall. Like the crew, he wore a dark blue Air Force flight suit. But there was no insignia of rank on Ozzie Sharp’s flight suit because he had no rank.
“Anything?” he asked the operator at the end of the line.
“Not a thing,” the operator said, never taking his eyes off the screen. The operator didn’t add “sir” and Sharp understood the significance of that perfectly.
Well, fuck ‘em. Ozzie Sharp had been sent here from Washington because he was one of the best trouble shooters in the agency. This was trouble and he meant to get to the bottom of it.
So far he was just a passenger. The general had set this operation up before he arrived and all Ozzie had to do was ride along. The general might be content to command from the ground, but Ozzie Sharp wanted to be where the action was.
The AWACS was further west than usual. Whatever was out there was tricky. Moving the plane out over the Bering Sea made it easier to burn through the jamming and pick up the weak radar returns.
Orbiting nearby were two F-15 Eagles with conformal fuel tanks for extra range and Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles to deal with whatever they encountered. Perhaps more importantly, the fighters also carried a variety of sensors including special video cameras to record what they found.
Back at the base were more Eagles, two KC-10 tankers on alert, and another AWACS, ready to take up station when this group reached the end of their endurance. They had been doing this for four days now, but no one was getting bored.
The operator, a skinny kid with a shock of dark hair, turned to his passenger and tapped his screen. “Ivan’s out in force today.”
“What’s that?”
The radar operator grinned. “Our opposite number. An Illuyshin 76 AWACS.”
“Observing a test?”
The operator shrugged. “Maybe. But if I had to guess I’d say they’re looking for something in that fog bank-just like us.”
“With just the AWACS?”
“Nossir, that’s not their style. But they like to hold their interceptors on the ground until they’ve got a target and then come in like gangbusters. Their birds are probably faster than ours but they don’t have the range.”
Sharp nodded. It was a well-known fact that the Soviets were years behind the West in jet engine technology. What the Americans achieved by sophisticated engineering and advanced materials, the Russians got by brute force at the cost of higher fuel consumption.
But high-tech or low-tech, the effect was the same, Sharp reminded himself. When those interceptors came they could be damn dangerous.
“Make sure our people know about this,” he told the operator.
“Already done,” the operator replied, pleased he had anticipated the civilian.
The operator turned back to his screen, scowled at it, then reached over and fiddled with the controls.
“Hello, hello,” the operator said to himself. “Looky here.” Then he thumbed his mike.
“Okay, we’ve got contact. Bearing 231 and range approximately 220 nautical miles. Height 500.”
The pilot’s voice squawked in his earphones. “Five thousand?”
“Negative. Five hundred.”
“Understood,” the pilot came back. “Five hundred feet.”
“Eagle Flight,” the flight controller’s voice came on the circuit, “you are cleared. Now go!”
“Eedyoteh!” Go!
Senior Lieutenant Sergei Sergovitch Abrin of the PVO-the Soviet air defense forces-eased the throttle on the Mig 29 Flanker forward. The plane rolled down the rain-slick runway gathering speed as it came. In his rear view mirror he could see his wingman behind and to his right. He was vaguely conscious that the second pair of his flight was taking off on the parallel runway several hundred meters to his left.
The weather was abominable, fog and occasional flurries of snow and rain. But that was nothing out of the ordinary and Senior Lieutenant Abrin had nearly a thousand hours flying out of this base.
As they passed the critical point, he eased back on the stick and the powerful interceptor lunged into the air. Even as he climbed into the overcast, Sergei Abrin ran another quick check of his systems.
A Mig 29 had the range for this mission and no Soviet interceptor carried a more powerful or sophisticated radar than the one in the nose of his Flanker. Whatever those things were they were damn hard to pick up on radar and he would need all the power he had.
Satisfied, he watched the altimeter wind up and considered what he and his men were heading into.
For weeks now the powerful warning radars along the coast of Siberia had been getting anomalous and faint returns from out over the narrow sea that separated Russia and Alaska. Recon flights had shown nothing and previous attempts to intercept these things had failed. After the usual dithering and indecision, Moscow had decided to make a serious effort to discover what was happening on this most sensitive of borders.
An early warning aircraft had been assigned and interceptor squadrons were given permission to depart from their regular training plans to investigate in force the next time something was sighted. They were also fitted with long-range fuel tanks and given full loads of fuel-a departure in the defection-conscious Soviet air force. If that wasn’t enough to convince the pilots how serious this was, the KGB showed up and installed a number of very black boxes in each aircraft.
Senior Lieutenant Abrin thought of himself as a man of the world, as befitted the son of a medium-high party official. He had his own theory about this thing.
It was no accident that nearly invisible aircraft were flying along the US-USSR border. Obviously the United States intended this series of provocations as a tactic to wring further arms concessions from the Soviet negotiators in Vienna.
Well, they would learn the folly of their ways. For longer than Sergei Abrin had been alive, the men and machines of the PVO had stood between the Motherland and the Capitalist aggressors. If they wanted to play games over this narrow sea they would find that the Red Air Force could play also-and far better.
Still, he thought as his interceptor raced out over the ocean. This was a bitch of a day to be flying.
“Go!”
Patrol Two kneed the dragon and pulled on the reins. In response the beast swept into a wide, gentle turn. He was obviously happy to be going home and so was Patrol Two.
The squadron leader’s instructions had been explicit. Head out on this track for four day-tenths, then reverse course and return to the temporary base the dragon riders had established on one of the small islands. Each rider had set out alone on a slightly different course to cover as much of this strange new world as they possibly could in the least amount of time. The squadron leader didn’t want to stay on the island too long for fear of discovery and for once Patrol Two fully agreed with him. They would pause another day to rest their dragons and then they would leave this ill-begotten place.
This particular corner was worse than most, Patrol Two admitted as the dragon’s strong wingbeats bore them along. Not only was there the strangeness here that made dragons uncomfortable and dampened the effect of magic. Here there was also constant fog mixed with freezing rain and snow from thick, low-hanging clouds that forever darkened the sky. Were it not for the dragon’s homing instinct and the fact they had flown a straight course out, Patrol Two wasn’t at all sure they could find their way back to their fellows.
A weak sun broke through a ragged hole in the clouds, turning the sea the color of fresh-beaten lead. Patrol Two frowned. The sun seemed to be in the wrong place. Then a shake of the head. Well, it wasn’t the only thing that was wrong here.
A window popped up on Craig’s screen. In it, in full color and three dimensions, was a robot.
“Ready, master,” the robot intoned.
“Ready for what?” he snapped. All his worker robots looked alike. Then he saw the designation in the status line under the window. “Oh, the jammer! Then turn it on!”
The robot nodded and winked out while Craig turned his attention back to the warbot he was designing. But now he was smiling.
He had suspected all along that the dragon riders who flitted around the edges of his realm had some kind of communications system. It was magic rather than radio and it had taken a lot of work to discover just how it worked. Once he knew, he had set his robots to work building jammers. Now he had just cut his enemies’ communications link.
Maybe that will clear those damn dragons out of my airspace, he thought as he went back to work on the warbot.
“Now go!”
Major Michael Francis Xavier Gilligan grunted and broke out of the holding pattern. A quick check of the cockpit panels, a fast glance to the right to make sure Smitty, his wingman, was still in position and he concentrated on his descent. Five hundred feet wasn’t a lot of altitude for a high-performance fighter in this kind of weather. A few seconds inattention and you’d fly right into the water.
Bitch of a day to go flying, Gilligan thought to himself. Then he turned his full attention to the job at hand.
Patrol Two looked down at the now-useless communications crystal and swore luridly. Between the winds and the fog, the rider and dragon were perilously close to being lost. And now this!
This, thought Patrol Two, is turning into one bitch of a day.
Sharp hunched over the operator’s shoulder, staring at the big screen as if he was about to dive into it.
“Incoming aircraft!” one of the other operators sang out. Sharp jerked erect and hurried to the man’s console.
“We got four, heading our way from the East.” The operator looked at the screen again. “Probably those tricked-up Flankers.” He studied the radar signature analysis. “Yeah, four Flankers incoming.”
“Are they after us or Eagle Flight?” Sharp demanded.
“They’re heading into the area Eagle Flight is going for. Uh oh!” The operator spoke quickly into his mike. “The Soviets just lit up their air intercept radars.”
“Are they after our guys?”
The operator studied the screen intently. “They’re headed in that direction. No, wait a minute. I don’t think so. They seem to be after the same targets we are. The IL-76 must have picked them up just after we did.”
Ozzie Sharp scowled mightily at the screen. All of a sudden the air over that God-forsaken patch of ocean was getting awfully crowded.
* * *
“Smitty, check your ten,” Gilligan called to his wingman. “Do you see that?”
Off to their left and slightly below them, something dark was threading its way through a canyon between two banks of clouds.
“What the hell is it?” Smitty demanded a few seconds later.
“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s doing a hundred knots and it keeps ducking in and out of those clouds.”
Gilligan touch-keyed his mike to transmit the report, but there was silence in the earphones.
He tried again. Still nothing. He switched radios. Nothing. He tried different frequencies, he checked the circuit breakers, he ran the radio checklist. Still nothing. He could get Smitty but that was all. Meanwhile the thing appeared out of another cloud.
“Smitty, can you raise anyone?”
“Negative, sir.”
Gilligan considered for a minute. Whatever this jamming was it apparently wasn’t strong enough to block him from talking to his wingman, but there was no way to reach anyone else. It had been made crystal clear to him that one way or another the information he collected had to get back.
“Smitty, have you been getting this on tape?”
“Yessir.”
“Then make sure you’ve got a good image and then split off. I’m going in for a closer look.”
“The hell you say!”
“As soon as you’re sure you’ve got a good image, split off and get the hell out of here. That information has got to get back.”
There was a long crackling silence on the radio.
“Am I supposed to say ‘yes sir’?” Smitty said finally.
“You’re supposed to get that damn information back. Anything else is up to you. Now, have you got it?”
“On the tape.”
“Then go. Remember. No matter what happens to me, you’ve got to get that data home.”
Gilligan watched as his wingman broke off. Since his first day in flight school he had been drilled that a fighter never, ever, flies alone. Suddenly it was awfully lonely.
Well, the sooner I do this, the sooner it will be over. Reaching down, he activated his camera. Then just to be on the safe side he armed the two Sidewinders hanging under the fuselage. He left the Sparrows unarmed. That thing might have a fuzzbuster tuned to the targeting radar’s frequencies and he didn’t want to fight unless he absolutely had to. Finally he checked the status of his 20mm cannon.
One good pass, Gilligan told himself. One pass so close I can see the color of their eyes.
It was the sound that first alerted Patrol Two. The hissing roar that sliced through the eerie silence of the fog banks. The dragon rider had only a brief glimpse of something moving up behind and to the left. Something very, very fast and headed straight at them.
To a dragon rider that meant only one thing: Dragon attack! No time to turn into it and fight fire with fire. Patrol Two grabbed an iron seeker arrow out of the quiver and brought the bow up with the other hand. Twisting around in the saddle even as the arrow fitted into the bow and not waiting for the seeker to get a lock, Patrol Two got off one shot. Then the rider pressed flat against the beast’s back and yanked the reins to throw the dragon into violent evasive maneuvers. The dragon, unsettled by the roaring monster, responded enthusiastically and dropped into a writhing, spiraling dive into the fog.
The arrow’s spell wasn’t capable of making fine distinctions. It had been launched at a moving target and that was sufficient. The arrow flew straight to its mark and hit the plane’s right wing about halfway out toward the tip.
As soon as the point penetrated the thin aluminum skin the arrow’s death spell activated. It didn’t know it was trying to kill an inanimate object and it was as incapable of caring as it was of knowing.
Like most things magic, the spell didn’t work perfectly in this strange halfway world, but it worked well enough.
“What the fuck?” Mick Gilligan yelled, but there was no one to hear. His radios, like every other piece of electronic equipment in his Eagle had gone stone dead.
Unlike the F-16, an F-15 does not have to be flown by computers every second it is in the air. But everything from the fuel flow to the trim tabs is normally controlled by electronic devices.
As a result Major Mick Gilligan didn’t fall out of the sky instantly. But everything on the plane started going slowly and inexorably to hell.
One of the things that went was the automatic fuel control system. Normally the F-15 draws a few gallons at a time from each tank in the plane to keep everything in trim. When the electronics died, Major Gilligan’s plane was drawing from the outboard left wing tank. Rather than switching, it kept draining that tank, lightening the wing and putting the plane progressively more out of trim.
Gilligan didn’t notice. He was too busy dealing with the engines. Losing the electronics meant they were no longer automatically synchronized. Almost immediately the right engine was putting out more power than the left. By the time Gilligan had taken stock of the situation, the exhaust gas temperature on the right engine was climbing dangerously and the left engine was going into compressor stall.
He didn’t waste time cursing. He put both hands on the throttles and started jockeying the levers individually, trying to get more power out of his left engine and cut back the right before the temperature became critical.
It wasn’t easy. Without the electronic controls the throttles were sluggish and the engines unresponsive. Gilligan was like a man trying to take a shower when the hot water is boiling and the cold water is freezing. It’s painful and it takes a lot of fiddling to get things right. Gilligan was fiddling furiously.
Gilligan looked up and saw the windshield was opaque with dew. The windshield wipers had quit working along with everything else. He also saw by the ball indicator that the plane was banking right and descending. Instinctively he corrected and put the throttles forward to add power and get away from the water. The engines seemed to hesitate and then they caught with a burst of acceleration that pressed Gilligan back into his seat.
It almost worked. In fact it would have worked if Gilligan hadn’t forgotten one other automatic system. When the power came on, the Eagle’s nose came up. Too far up. The Boundary Layer Control System that is supposed to keep the F-15 from stalling at high angles of attack was also dead. The nose went up and then back down as the Eagle stalled and plummeted toward the ocean.
Senior Lieutenant Abrin had lost contact with his base and the rest of his flight, but his radar seemed to be working perfectly. He watched on the screen as the Americans performed the highly unusual maneuver of splitting up and one of them turned back. Then he saw the other plane make a pass at something and then disappear from the screen.
That was enough. He quickly turned his plane in that direction to see what had happened.
Patrol Two broke out of the clouds almost in the water. Frantically the rider signaled the beast to climb for everything he was worth. The dragon extended its huge wings fully and beat the air desperately to keep from smashing into the sea. Spray drenched dragon and rider alike, but somehow they avoided the ocean.
The dragon beat its wings strongly to climb away from the water and suddenly roared in pain.
Fortuna! Patrol Two thought. Somewhere in the last minute’s violent maneuvering the dragon had injured himself. The rider touched the communications crystal worn on a neck thong, but the bit of stone remained cold and dead.
Gilligan reached for the yellow-and-black handle next to his right leg. I hope to Christ this still works, he thought as he pulled the ejection lever.
The ejection seat was designed as a fail safe, electronics or no. The canopy blew off and Gilligan was blasted into the air scant feet above the water.
There was a whirling rush and then Gilligan was kicked free of the ejection seat. Suddenly he was dangling under his parachute, floating down in a clammy fog to the water he knew had to be below him.
Below and off to one side he saw a tiny splash as his ejection seat hurtled into the Bering Sea. Then the fog closed in around him and all he could see was cottony grayness.
Gilligan cursed luridly. In the personal effects compartment of his ejection seat was his map case and in that map case were several letters he had intended to mail-including the alimony check to his ex-wife which was already a week overdue.
Sandi’s lawyer is going to kill me! he thought as he floated soundlessly through the fog for an unknown destination.
Patrol Two was in no better shape. The dragon was favoring its right wing in a way the rider knew meant the beast would not be able to bear them up much longer.
Pox rot this place! Patrol Two swore silently and then concentrated on trying to remember the way to the nearest land. It was a terrible place to set down, but from the way the dragon’s chest muscles tightened with each wing beat Patrol Two realized they would be doing well to make it at all.
Lieutenant Smith hadn’t seen Major Gilligan go in, nor had he heard the distress cry from the F-15s transponder. But the major was supposed to make a quick pass and come back to join him. As the minutes ticked by, the lieutenant became increasingly worried. Something had to have happened to his commander.
Smith hadn’t gotten a good look at whatever it was, but he knew his video
camera had it all down. That part of the mission was over. Now all they
had to do was get back safely. He concentrated on guiding his plane back
on what he was pretty sure was a reciprocal heading while he kept running
through the channels on his radios. Mick would be along, he was sure. And
if he wasn’t then that video tape was doubly important
Suddenly Smith’s radar and radios were working again. Quickly he shifted to his assigned frequency, keyed his mike and began reporting what had happened.
Lieutenant Smith wasn’t at all sure what he had seen down there, but he was reasonably sure the Soviets didn’t have anything to do with it.
Patrol Two stayed in the open to make searching for land easier, but the rider also kept close to the clouds to hide quickly if need be. Off on the far horizon, the rider saw a thin line that seemed to be land. The dragon saw it too and surged forward, its wing beats picking up strength as it flew.
Patrol Two was just starting to relax when another of the roaring gray monsters burst out of the clouds above and in front of them less than half a bowshot off.
Instantly, the rider rolled the dragon right and ducked into the clouds. As the misty gray swallowed them up, Patrol Two had a quick glimpse of the thing rolling into a turn to follow them.
So stiff, Patrol Two thought. Its wings don’t move even in a turn and the rest of the body stays rigid as well. Whatever the things were, they weren’t dragons.
Senior Lieutenant Abrin spent the next ten minutes dodging in and out of the clouds looking for the thing again. Although his plane did not have a video imaging system like the F-15s and it had all happened so quickly he hadn’t had time to turn on his gun cameras, he had gotten a good look at the object before it disappeared.
Lieutenant Abrin had no doubts about what he had just seen. His most prized possessions were a Japanese VCR and a bunch of bootlegged American movies. The more he thought about it the more obvious it was to him what was going on.
“Comrades. Do we have any information on Spielberg making a movie in this area?”
Warm! Mick Gilligan thought as he spluttered his way to the surface. The water’s warm.
By rights it ought to be nearly freezing. But it was nearly as tepid as the Caribbean.
Nothing but surprises, he thought as he pulled his seat pack to the surface with the cord attached to his leg. At least this one is pleasant. He unsnapped the cover on the top half and inflated his raft.
Wait a minute! There are sharks in the Caribbean. He redoubled his struggles to get into the raft.
It wasn’t easy. An Air Force survival raft is about the size of a child’s wading pool and it is designed to be stable once the pilot is in it, not to be easy to get into. Gilligan was encumbered by his arctic survival suit, his G-suit and his flight suit. He wanted to hurry for fear of sharks, but he didn’t want to splash too much for fear of attracting them. If there had been anyone to watch, it might have been fairly amusing. But there wasn’t and Gilligan himself wasn’t at all amused.
Once he had flopped into the raft he tried to orient himself. The one thing that hadn’t changed was the fog. It was dense and thick everywhere. The air was a good deal colder than the water, so that wasn’t astonishing, but it didn’t explain why the water was so warm.
He pulled the seat pack into the raft and set it on his lap while he undid the catches on the bottom. Inside was a standard Air Force survival kit, including food, medical supplies and a lot of other necessities. Right now he was most interested in the radio and the emergency transponder.
The radio was about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Eagerly Gilligan extended the antenna and trailed the ground wire over the side into the water. Then he tried the radio. Only a hiss and crackle of static came out of the speaker.
Grimacing, Gilligan carefully clipped the radio to the breast pocket of his flight suit. Next he pulled out the transponder and examined it.
The transponder was bigger than the survival radio, but it did more. When it received a signal indicating an aircraft was in the area it transmitted a powerful homing signal. Just now it was silent as the grave.
Gilligan punched the self-test button on the receiver and watched the LED indicator light up. Then he studied the other indicator for a few minutes and his expression got grimmer and grimmer.
Every military aircraft and almost all airliners and business aircraft carry beacons which would trigger his transponder. Gilligan knew for a fact that an AWACS and several other aircraft should have been within range. If even one plane was above the horizon, the device should have been screaming its little electronic heart out. Yet the self-test said it was working.
Either the self-test was lying or there were no planes above the horizon. Considering what the rest of this business had been like, Gilligan didn’t think the transponder was broken.
He pulled out his compass. He didn’t expect it to work this far north and he wasn’t disappointed.
There was one very non-standard item in Major Michael Francis Xavier Gilligan’s survival kit. A 9mm Beretta automatic with three fourteen-round magazines and a black nylon Bianchi shoulder holster to match. He inspected the pistol, slammed one of the magazines home and jacked back the slide. Then he struggled into the shoulder holster’s harness.
Then he felt a lot better.
* * *
Back at the base the people were feeling worse as the minutes ticked by.
The general wasn’t happy, Ozzie Sharp wasn’t happy, the squadron commander wasn’t happy and unhappiest of all was the young captain who ran the base’s rescue operation.
“We got on his last known position quickly and flew an expanding spiral search,” the captain explained. “Then we did it again with a different aircraft and crew. We have had aircraft on top almost constantly. There is no voice communication and no transponder signal.”
“What about the Russians?”
“They say they haven’t seen any sign of him.”
“And you believe them?”
“It’s credible,” Ozzie Sharp said. “The Russians returned to their base with all their missiles still on their wings.” No one bothered to ask how he knew.
The general grunted. Then his head snapped up and he transfixed the young captain with a steely-eyed stare.
“Why the bloody hell can’t you even find the area where he went down?”
“Sir, this is a very unusual situation. He had sent his wingman back, so we don’t have as much information as we normally do.” The captain thought about explaining how well they were doing to have gotten this far in the few hours since the missing pilot’s wingman had broken out of the dead zone. Then he caught the general’s eye again and decided not to.
“Have your crews found anything unusual?” Sharp asked. “Any unusual readings or problems with your instruments?”
“None, sir. As far as we can tell, there’s nothing in that fog but more fog.”
The expression on Sharp’s face made the general seem mild by comparison.
“We’re going over the area again,” the captain offered quickly. “But so far there’s no sign of Major Gilligan or his plane.”
“Nothing on the transponder?” the general asked.
“Nossir,” the officer said.
“Captain, I thought this sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“It isn’t, sir.”
It’s as if he dropped off the face of the earth, the captain thought. But it was bad form to say something like that.
Major Gilligan drifted through the fog and tried to figure out what the hell had happened to him. He didn’t have the faintest idea where he was, but increasingly he doubted it was anywhere near Alaska. There was still fog all around him, but when the sun broke through it was bright, warm and too high in the sky, totally unlike anything he had experienced in Alaska.
He could hear the sound of surf off to his left. Surf usually meant land of some kind, so that was as good a direction as any. Besides, the fog seemed to be marginally thinner that way.
Major Michael Francis Xavier Gilligan began paddling grimly toward the sound of the waves.
Gilligan saw the land almost as soon as he broke out of the fog bank. One minute he was paddling along surrounded by whiteness and the next he was out under sunny skies with only an occasional puff of fleecy white clouds. Behind him the fog looked like a wall.
Ahead of him he could see a shore fringed with trees, and hills behind. Between him and that shore waves beat on a reef, making the noise that had drawn him here.
Gilligan studied the situation as best he could sitting in his raft. Fortunately the current wasn’t strong here and the tide was high. He thought about trying to find a channel, but he decided that would cost him more energy than he could afford. So he picked the best-looking spot and paddled toward it.
It took perhaps an hour for Gilligan to negotiate the reef and another forty-five minutes or so to cross the lagoon behind it. As he crossed the lagoon, Gilligan had a chance to admire “his” island. It was worth admiring, he had to admit. The black sand beach was smooth and unmarred. The trees behind it were tall and tropic green. The place looked like a travel poster.
A travel poster for a deserted island, he thought. There was no sign of footprints, tire tracks, roads or trails. The detritus along the tide line included not one beer can, plastic jug or bottle.
Reflexively he scanned the sky for contrails. There were very few places in the world where you could not see jet tracks in the sky, but apparently this was one of them. Except for the clouds and the fog on the water behind him there was nothing in the sky but the bright tropical sun.
Wherever I am, with scenery like this there’s sure to be a Club Med or something close by.
After pulling his raft up on the beach above the tide line, Gilligan stripped off his life vest, arctic survival suit and G-suit, stowed his gear, checked his radios again and started off down the beach. Either this place was as deserted as it looked or it wasn’t and he stood a better chance of finding either people or food if he stayed on the beach.
After almost an hour of walking he found nothing to show that the place was or ever had been inhabited. He had stopped twice to empty the sand out of his boots. Finally he tied the laces together and slung them around his neck so he could walk barefoot through the fine black sand.
Crabs skittered across the beach, gulls wheeled over the water and an occasional brightly colored bird flashed through the trees. But there was not a single sign of human life.
Damn it, he thought, scanning the sky again. Places like this just don’t exist anymore. He looked down the long, pristine stretch of beach. And if they do, I want to retire here!
He had been walking perhaps half a mile barefoot when he found a place where a boat had pulled up. Not a boat, he corrected, an amphibious tractor. The signs were clear enough. The place where it had come out of the water had been washed away by the tide, but he could clearly see where it had pulled up above the tide line and then the tread marks where it had churned over the soft sand and in among the trees between the tread marks was a furrow as if the vehicle had not retracted its rudder. Following the line he could even see where several branches had been broken off in its passage.
Gilligan paused and considered. An amphtrack implied military. Even in backwaters like this civilians didn’t own them. That meant there was an element of risk in meeting the tractor and its crew. On the other hand, there was also the possibility of rescue.
He studied the marks carefully. Although he was no expert, he knew that the amphibious tractors of the U.S. Marines drove through the water on special treads with extra-deep cleats. Soviet equipment used regular treads and either propellers or water jets. But the sand was much too fine and soft to give him any clue. He could only see that something big and not wheeled had come this way.
What the hell, this is the era of glasnost. We’re all supposed to be friends these days. He sat down on a tree root and put his boots on. Then he checked his pistol. Still, it never hurts to be careful.
Cautiously, Major Mick Gilligan set off into the forest in pursuit of the vehicle.
The trail was surprisingly difficult to follow. The amphtrack had not torn up the forest floor as much as he expected. There were no clear tread marks and in many places broken branches offered clearer indications than the tracks. Still, you can’t move something that big through a wooded area without leaving a plain trail.
Except for the breeze in the trees and an occasional bird or animal call, the woods were silent. There was no sound of an engine, which made Gilligan even more cautious. But there were no voices, either. Perhaps they were too far ahead for him to hear.
Gilligan was a pilot, not a woodsman. He had to divide his attention between trying to follow the trail, trying not to walk into a tree and trying to scout ahead. So it wasn’t surprising he stepped into the clearing without seeing Patrol Two standing in the trees on the other side.
Then the dragon rider shifted. Gilligan caught the motion and looked up.
Then he stared-first at the weapon and then at the wielder.
The bow was nearly as tall as she was and the limbs were of unequal length. Gilligan remembered seeing something like that when he had been stationed in Japan and he had gone to a demonstration of traditional Japanese archery. But the person carrying it was anything but Japanese.
To Gilligan she looked like something out of a Robin Hood movie. She wore thigh-high boots of soft brown leather, tight breeches that bloused out at the thigh and a fleece-lined vest over a close-fitting tunic. She was tall, nearly as tall as he was, and slender. Her hair was cornsilk blonde and freckles dusted her nose. The eyes were pure, pale blue and very, very serious. The arrow in her bow was aimed straight at his midriff.
“Uh, hi,” Gilligan said.
Karin studied the stranger carefully without shifting the aim of the arrow. He was a big man, broad shouldered and apparently well muscled, although it was hard to tell through his clothing. He wore a drab green coverall with straps, pockets and strange black runes scattered over it. The thing in his hand was black and shiny and he handled it like a weapon, although Karin had never seen its like.
In all their patrolling, the dragon riders had never seen a human in this place. Indeed, they had been told there were only two humans among the enemy and they never left their castle. Where did this one come from?
He didn’t act like one of the enemy, she thought. In fact he seemed more confused than hostile. Still better to be safe, so she simply nodded to him without moving the bow.
“I’m Major Michael Gilligan, United States Air Force. I, ah, had a little trouble back there and I need to contact my unit.” He stopped, as if expecting a response. “Um, I don’t suppose there’s a phone around here anywhere?”
“Air Force? You are a flier then?”
“Yes, ma’am. Only, as I say, I had a little trouble and came down in the water.”
“And your mount?”
“Down at sea.”
The poor man’s dragon had drowned! To Karin, who had only narrowly avoided the same fate, the tragedy was doubly poignant.
“I’m very sorry,” she said, lowering her bow. “I am called Karin and I too am a flier.”
Slowly and with exaggerated care, the man put the black metal thing in a
pouch under his armpit. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am. Ah, about that phone
. . . ?”
“I do not think you will find one here,” Karin told him, not quite comprehending what a “phone” was.
“I kind of figured that,” he said. “Where are we, anyway?”
“I am not quite sure,” she admitted. “I think it is the western shore of the main island in the Bubble World.”
“Bubble World?” he asked blankly.
“The World between the Worlds. I do not pretend to understand it, but our wizards say that it is connected at one end to our World and at the other end to the World from whence came the Sparrow.”
“Sparrow? Excuse me, ma’am, but I’m just plain confused.”
“Of course! You must be from the other World, the Sparrow’s World.” She smiled. “This must all be very strange to you, I know.”
“Yes, ma’am!” he said fervently. “It certainly is that.”
“Well, come back to my camp then and we can talk. Oh, and stop calling me ma’am. I am neither a witch, a wizard nor an elder and I am called Karin.”
He looked at her in a way Karin found rather pleasant. “No ma’am-I mean, Karin-you are definitely not an old witch!”
This, Major Mick Gilligan told himself firmly, has gotta be a hallucination. He was probably lying in a hospital bed somewhere drugged out of his skull after being fished out of the Bering Sea. He wondered if his nurse looked anything like Karin.
Still, he thought, hallucination or not, I’ve gotta play it like it’s real. So far it hadn’t been too bad. Stuck on a deserted island with a beautiful girl, even a beautiful girl who thought she was William Tell. No, that wasn’t half bad for a hallucination.
“My camp is just over there,” Karin said, pointing toward an especially thick clump of trees.
“Where’s your vehicle?” Gilligan asked.
“No vehicle, only Stigi and myself,” Karin told him as they stepped into the camp.
“But we’ve been following . . .” Gilligan began.
Then he saw the dragon.
Stigi was only average size for a cavalry mount-which is to say he was eighty feet long and his wings would probably span as much when fully extended.
An eighty-foot wingspan on an airplane wouldn’t have impressed Gilligan particularly. Eighty feet of bat wings on a scaled, fanged monster who looked ready to breathe fire at any second was very impressive.
Gilligan’s jaw dropped and he licked his lips. “That’s, that’s a . . .”
“That is Stigi,” Karin supplied, strolling over to the monster and patting its scaly shoulder just in front of its left wing.
The dragon raised its head about ten feet off the ground and regarded Gilligan with a football-sized golden eye.
“Does it fly?”
“Of course he flies,” Karin said. “How else would we get here?”
“Hoo boy,” said Major Mick Gilligan. “Oh boy.”
Karin’s camp was well off the beach, in a fold in the ground well-shaded by trees. The dragon took up a good half the space, but there was still room for a small fire and a simple canopy made with something like a shelter half.
“This is pretty cozy,” Gilligan said as he looked around.
“I am a scout,” Karin explained. “There is always the possibility of being caught away from my base and having to forage. So,” she shrugged, “we are prepared.”
“There aren’t many places we can land away from our bases,” Mick told her.
“If something goes wrong we have to bail out.”
“Bail out?”
“Use our ejection seats.”
“Ejection seats?”
He looked over at the dragon. “Yeah, I guess you don’t have much call for those.”
“Now,” Karin said, settling herself on a log by the fire, “what happened to you, Major?”
“It’s Mick, as long as we’re on a first-name basis.”
Karin frowned prettily. “I thought you said your name was Major.”
“No, that’s my rank. My first name’s Michael, but everyone calls me Mick.”
“Ah,” Karin said. “When Stigi and I are in the air we are called Patrol Two.”
“That’s like a call sign. I was Eagle One on my last mission.”
“What happened to you?”
Gilligan sighed. “Kind of a long story. Basically we were getting some peculiar-ah, indications-from an area out over the ocean and they sent us out to look. My wingman and I found something, but we couldn’t communicate with our base. I sent him back and went on in for a closer look. There was a little tussle and I came out on the short end.”
It was Karin’s turn to sigh. “That is more or less what happened to me. I was out on single patrol, near the great fog bank where this World connects to yours, when I was attacked from behind. I managed to avoid the attacker and I even got a shot off at it, but in the maneuvering Stigi sprained his wing.”
“Sprained it?”
“Our dragons seldom hurt themselves so, but this is a strange place and things are not exactly as they are in our world.”
“They’re not as they are in our world, either,” Gilligan said, looking over at Stigi. The dragon’s head was resting on the ground but one unwinking yellow eye was fixed on Gilligan.
“What jumped you, another dragon?” he asked as he turned so he didn’t have to look at the dragon looking at him.
Karin frowned. “Something strange. It was all gray and roared as it came.
I did not get a good look at it.”
Uh-oh, Gilligan thought. Gray and roaring and came at her from behind. Hoo boy.
To cover himself he asked the first non-personal question that came to mind. “You keep talking about different worlds. What do you mean?”
“There is our World, where magic holds sway. There is your World, where I gather magic works poorly or not at all?” He nodded and she went on. “And there is this World, where both the things of our world and the things of your world work after a fashion. But this World is new. Some say it was created by our enemies.”
“Your enemies?”
“Powerful wizards who command legions of non-living beings,” Karin explained. “It is said they prepare war against both your world and ours. But surely you know this?”
“All we know is that there’s something funny going on out over the ocean. We thought maybe it was someone from our world. That’s why I was sent to investigate.”
The dragon rider frowned. “If that is all your people know then surely you must return to bear word to them.”
“That’s my plan.”
Karin sighed. “I wish I could contact my base, but my communications crystal stopped working just before I was attacked. I am sure my squadron commander would know what to do.”
“You seem to be doing all right,” Gilligan said, looking around the camp site.
Karin smiled. She had a wonderful smile, Gilligan noticed. Then she sobered. “Thank you, but I feel so inadequate. I have been a rider for just two seasons. I have never been in combat before. In that time there has been no one to fight.”
“I know the feeling,” Gilligan told her. “I’ve been in for ten years, I’ve got about 1800 hours in F-15s and I’ve never been in combat either.” He had missed Iraq because he’d been in the hospital with hepatitis, but he didn’t tell her that.
Karin looked astonished. “Ten years and never a battle?”
“We’ve been at peace all that time,” Gilligan said. Well, more or less. “Actually we’ve been at peace for almost twenty-five years and we haven’t had a major war in nearly fifty.”
“Forgive me, but if that is so then why do you maintain fighting fliers?”
“Because for most of that time we’ve been close to war. My nation and another great nation were ready to go to war at a moment’s notice.”
“Yet you did not? You must be remarkably peace-loving in spite of it.”
Gilligan grinned mirthlessly. “Not peace-loving. Scared. We got too good at it. We developed weapons that would let us destroy cities in an eyeblink. Weapons we had no defenses against. All of a sudden a major war didn’t look real cost effective.”
Karin shivered. “I do not think I would like to see war in your world.”
“Neither would we,” Gilligan told her.
“But,” Karin said thoughtfully, “with such weapons you would be powerful allies against our enemies.”
“Maybe. I don’t make policy, but I’m sure willing to carry the word back to the people who do.”
“We must get you back to your World, then.”
“You mean you can get me home?”
“The Mighty at the Capital certainly can. The Sparrow knows how.”
“But first we’ve got to get to your Capital. Are they going to come looking for you?”
Karin shrugged. “Probably. But they dare not search too long or too hard. Magical methods work poorly here and we are too close to our enemies’ hold to risk many riders and dragons.”
“So they aren’t likely to find us.”
“No, but I do not think that will matter. Once Stigi’s wing is healed, he will be able to carry us back to my people.”
Gilligan looked over at the snoring dragon. “You mean that thing can really get us out of here?”
“In easy stages, of course. Stigi can carry two for a ways and there are many reefs and islands where we can rest.”
“That’s something to look forward to, anyway.”
“Meanwhile,” Karin said, getting up. “It is late and morning comes early.
Let us to bed.”
Mick Gilligan fell asleep that night and dreamed about flying and girls with blonde hair and freckles.
Quite a collection of brass, Willie Sherman thought to herself. It wasn’t the biggest group she’d ever worked with and it wasn’t the highest ranking, but it was still two generals, a gaggle of colonels of both types and a brother who was obviously some kind of high-up spook. Pretty impressive.
Not that Master Sergeant Wiletta Sherman was impressed. After being in for eighteen years there wasn’t a lot left that could impress her.
Less than twenty-four hours ago she had been at Edwards AFB in the California desert helping to test a new filmless imaging system. She had been ordered to Alaska so quickly she’d just had time to throw a winter uniform into a suitcase and grab a few toiletries.
Unfortunately whoever was responsible for this building had never heard of the DOD energy conservation guidelines. It had to be eighty-five degrees and she was already sweating in her heavy blue wool uniform.
If it weren’t for all the brass she would have taken her jacket off. But no one else had, so she just sweated.
“Everybody here?” asked the ranking two-star. “Okay, pull it up and let’s see what we got.”
Willie hit a couple of keys to call up the file on the screen. Before she got here someone had already gone through the tape, picked out the best images and digitized them. So all she had to do was the processing.
The workstation she was using wasn’t much bigger than a personal computer tied to a compact refrigerator, but it had cost the government nearly a million dollars. She didn’t know how many millions had gone into the software, but it obviously hadn’t been cheap. For Willie, who had started her career analyzing photographs of North Vietnam with a binocular microscope, it was a lot more impressive than her audience.
After a couple of seconds the image flashed on the screen. Willie looked at it and her eyes went wide. Some asshole was playing tricks, in front of the goddamn generals, no less!
The picture was obviously taken at long range but it was clear enough. Against a background of fleecy gray clouds a dragon sailed along with its wings extended. There was a rider on its back just forward of the wings.
Beautiful job, though. There was no sign of a matte line or the kinds of shadow inconsistencies that usually trip up faked photographs-not that that was going to save the poor bastard who was responsible.
Willie braced for the inevitable explosion. It didn’t come. All the generals and colonels were staring at the picture as if it made sense. Some of them looked sideways at each other, as if they wanted to say something, but none of them opened their mouths.
“Hmm, ah yes,” the major general said. “You’re sure this is, ah, correct?”
“I unloaded the tape and digitized the image myself,” said the colonel in charge of the base’s imaging section.
“And this is the best image that was on the tape?”
“Ah, yes sir,” said the colonel. “None of them are any better and they all, um, show the same thing.”
The major general looked over at the black man in the flight suit with no insignia and the brother looked back at the general. Not a muscle in either man’s face moved.
“Well then,” the general said briskly. “We’ll have to use this one.” He peered at the screen again. “Although it is a little out of focus.”
It’s a dragon, you fucking moron! Willie Sherman thought. But in the Air Force there are times when you protest and there are times when you keep your mouth shut. In her climb to master sergeant she had learned which was which and this was definitely a time to shut up and soldier.
“Let’s check it against known aircraft first,” the head of the image processing section said.
Try checking it against Saturday morning cartoons, Willie thought. But she entered the command anyway.
Quickly the machine ran through the profiles of Soviet and NATO aircraft.
“No match, sir,” Willie reported without taking her eyes off the screen. Even smiling would be bad form and she wasn’t sure she could keep a straight face if she met someone’s eyes.
The major general nodded. “A new type then.”
“That’s what we suspected all along,” the man with no insignia said.
“Let’s see if we can get some more detail,” the imaging colonel said. “Try stretching the contrast.”
Without comment Willie used the mouse to indicate the new contrast range. Instantly the dragon and rider seemed to fuzz and smooth out as every shade of color broke down into sixteen closely related shades.
“Look there along the trailing edge of the wing,” said one of the other colonels. “That’s obviously some different kind of material.”
“Radar absorbing,” said the spook. “If you look at the way the trailing edge is scalloped you’ll see that it has some resemblance to the trailing edge of the B-2.”
“Might also be radiators to dump infra red,” one of the other colonels said.
The brigadier general rubbed his chin. “Plausible. Okay, assume they’re radiators. They’d be flat black, wouldn’t they?”
The imaging colonel nodded. “That gives us a color reference. Make them flat black.”
I can’t believe you people are taking this seriously! Willie thought. But what she said was, “Yes, sir.”
Making the rear of the wings flat black changed the colors on the rest of the image, muting them and fuzzing the details even further.
“Okay,” the two-star general said. “Now, where are the tail surfaces?”
“If you look closely at the tail boom you’ll see it’s somewhat flattened,” the imaging colonel told him. “The entire thing is apparently an empennage.”
“Enhance that, will you?” the brigadier asked. “Let’s see if we can bring out the detail along the boom.”
“Try compressing the tones there,” suggested the imaging colonel.
Willie marked out the tail with her mouse and compressed the colors. Now four or five shades on the tail were rendered as one. The thing on the screen didn’t look like a dragon anymore, but it didn’t look like much of anything else either.
Slowly and gradually, one change at a time, the gaggle of officers used a million-dollar workstation to enhance a clear picture of a dragon into something they could accept.
By the time they broke for dinner they were arguing over the serial numbers on the tail.
It was still cool and gray when Mick awoke, but Karin was already stirring. She had taken the quiver from the pile of harness and slung it over her shoulder.
“What are you doing?” he asked, throwing back the blanket.
“I must hunt to feed my mount,” the dragon rider said, holding her bow horizontally and sighting down the string.
Mick Gilligan compared the monster before him to his dog at home and then computed the amount of dog food it would take to make a meal for a fifty-foot-long golden retriever.
“An elephant a day?”
“Not so much,” Karin shook her head and then brushed a wisp of golden hair off her forehead. “Dragons are related in part to lizards and magical besides. They do not eat as much as you would suppose.”
“Still, its going to take a lot of meat.”
“I know where to find that. There is open country not far from here and large game to be had. Will you hunt with me?”
At home Mick had gone deer hunting occasionally, without much luck. On the other hand the thought of being stuck in camp all day with an overgrown iguana with a sore wing didn’t appeal to him either.
“Sure,” he said. “Let me get boots on.”
Karin led off at a brisk pace through the forest. Trailing behind her Gilligan found himself admiring the way she moved lithely through the undergrowth-and the swing of her hips in her tight riding breeches. He shook the thought off and tried to concentrate on business.
Gradually the trees thinned and the underbrush diminished until the forest became almost parklike. Once a herd of deer or something like them went bounding away at their passage. Karin ignored them, obviously intent on bigger game.
After perhaps three miles the forest petered out altogether and they moved out onto a broad plain. The trees were reduced to occasional clumps and the grass varied between knee and waist high.
Karin stopped and raised her head as if she was sniffing the air. Then she pointed off to their left and, motioning Gilligan to silence, she started off in that direction.
Gilligan heard their prey before he saw it. The wind brought crackling and crashing as if a number of large animals were moving about. As they got closer he could smell them as well, a faint odor that reminded him of nothing so much as the elephant house in the zoo.
The dragon rider moved through the grass silently with a grace that made it seem effortless. Gilligan, trying to move quietly, found it wasn’t effortless at all. He had to keep his eyes on the ground in order to keep from stepping on dry leaves or twigs. He was so intent on trying to move quietly he almost ran into Karin when she stopped suddenly. Then he looked up and saw what they were hunting.
Dinosaurs! Gilligan thought. There were about a dozen of them in a clump of trees perhaps a hundred and fifty yards off. They were bipedal and balanced themselves with their long tails while they used their smaller forearms to pull branches down to the small heads on their snakelike necks and then nipped off the leaves and buds. They were striped dusty gray and green and they didn’t look like any dinosaurs he had ever seen pictures of. But they were definitely large and reptilian.
While Gilligan had been staring at the animals, Karin had slipped to one side and dropped down on one knee. Slowly and carefully she drew the bow to full extension, string and arrow kissing her lip. Then she released.
Suddenly an arrow sprouted from the flank of one of the dinosaurs. The beast stopped feeding, looked down at its tormentor, honked once and then dropped like a sack of sand.
Instantly the other dinosaurs fled, honking and bellowing, knocking over a small tree in their flight.
As the noise of the herd faded into the distance Karin and Mick moved up to the carcass.
“They have no fear of humans,” Karin said, surveying her kill. “If all the beasts on this island are like that I will have no trouble keeping Stigi fed.”
“As long as they don’t stampede toward you when you shoot one,” Gilligan said.
“Such animals almost always run upwind when frightened,” Karin told him.
“That way they can smell what is ahead of them.”
“Great,” Mick said, looking at the kill. “Now, how do we get it back to camp?”
“That will not be necessary. Stigi can walk. I will go and get him. Can you stay here with the kill?”
“Sure.”
“Oh, and do not let predators get at the carcass. Stigi expects to be first on a kill and it upsets him when he is not.”
Mick thought of Stigi angry. “Right,” he said.
Karin nodded and strode off the way they had come.
“Hey, wait a minute! How do I keep predators off this carcass?”
Karin turned back to him. “Use your weapon,” she called and then disappeared in the brush.
Mick drew the 9mm automatic and looked at it sourly. Then he looked over at the elephant-sized monster he was supposed to be guarding. Then he thought about the kind of thing that was likely to prey on something the size of an elephant.
“Right,” he said again.
* * *
The sun was close to the horizon when Stigi waddled out of the forest with Karin alongside. Mick moved to meet them, but Stigi drew back his head and hissed like a jet engine starting up. Mick took the hint and backed off.
“He does not like you,” Karin said, quite unnecessarily. “Perhaps it would be better if you gathered wood for a fire. It looks as if we shall have to camp here tonight.” Mick noticed that both his and Karin’s packs were tied to the saddle.
Mick retrieved the hand axe and started gathering firewood. After he saw Stigi tear into the carcass he spent as much time as he could with his back to the dragon. Stigi’s manners ran to the enthusiastic rather than the polite and Mick, who hated the chore of field dressing a rabbit, was a little put out by the sight.
By the time Mick had a double armload of firewood Stigi had finished his meal. The dragon followed docilely behind Karin and settled down near the fire with a belch that smelled like smog in a butcher shop.
Their own dinner was a thick stew of parched grain, dried fruit and jerky from Karin’s pack. By mutual agreement they had decided to save Gilligan’s rations against future need.
While they ate Stigi washed himself with his tongue like a giant cat and then curled up and went to sleep. With his belly full he snored astonishingly loudly.
Around them the plain was alive with the sounds of night birds and the roars of hunting predators. Gilligan took to running his thumb over the butt of his pistol and searching the darkness.
“Nothing will come close to us,” Karin told him, catching his expression.
“They are afraid of Stigi and the fire.”
“What about scavengers after the carcass?”
Karin shook her head. “Especially not the scavengers. Besides, if something did approach Stigi would sense it instantly and waken.”
“What’s left of that carcass is going to get pretty ripe in a couple of days.”
“We will not be here that long. Indeed, we would not have camped here tonight if darkness had not caught us. We need to be back among the trees for safety.”
“Doesn’t that just make it easier for things to sneak up on us?”
“Not the predators.” Karin pointed outside the firelit circle. “That.”
Mick followed her arm with his eyes. Off in the distance there was a greenish glow against the sky, as if there were a city lit entirely by mercury vapor lamps just over the horizon.
“What is that?”
“Our enemies’ hold,” Karin said grimly. “A great castle and fortress.”
“So close? They must be on the next island over.”
“No,” Karin told him. “They are on this island.”
Mick started. “Then what the hell are we doing sitting around a campfire?”
“Keeping off predators,” Karin said sharply. “Without the fire they would be a danger, Stigi or no.”
“Besides,” she added, relaxing slightly, “those of the castle do not hunt by night.”
“If you say so,” Mick said neutrally.
“Such has been our experience.”
Despite the roaring and the snoring, Mick finally got to sleep that night. But he didn’t sleep easily or comfortably and his dreams weren’t nearly as pleasant as they had been the night before.
Craig looked down from the balcony and out over the serried ranks of his handiwork.
The narrow valley was full of rank upon rank of war machines. There were warbots ranging from two-ton Fleas to 200-ton Deathbringers, there were tanks and armored cars and artillery and jeeps and scout cars and missile carriers and on and on. They were there by the companies and battalions and regiments, by the hundreds and the thousands. They packed the valley and spilled back through the enormous portal at the valley’s head into the very bowels of the mountain. And over it all, perched on a reviewing stand carved out of living rock, was their creator.
Looking them over, Craig reflected he had come a long way since those first crude robots.
Now for the test. He had marked off hundreds of square miles of desert south of the castle for a proving ground. There he would pit his creations against each other to test his tactics and designs. When the battles for the control of the new world began he wanted his armies to be perfect.
Flanked by his robot servants, Craig shifted in his elaborately carved chair. The other chair on the platform was empty. Mikey had sent word at the last minute that he would be too busy to watch the show.
As if he’s done anything since we got here, Craig thought. Aside from a few robots he had whipped up for his own use, Mikey had never touched his engineering workstation. Craig seldom saw him anymore and he palmed him off with vague explanations when he tried to ask about his work.
Even if he was busy, he could have taken a couple of hours to see at least part of the parade, Craig thought. He realized that part of it was disappointment. He was sure Mikey would be impressed when he saw the super-weapons he had whipped up. But no, he’s too busy even to come to the damn parade.
Well, it didn’t matter. He’d created all this and now he’d work out the winning tactics on the game board of the desert. When the time came Mikey would be plenty impressed with how his armies performed in battle. That was really all that mattered.
He turned to the robot to his right. “Move out,” he commanded.
The valley filled with the ear-splitting noise of ten thousand engines starting up. Clouds of dust roiled over the scene as Craig’s army began to move.
On wheels, on tracks, on legs and on cushions of air, the forces Craig had fashioned out of magic and engineering began to pass by their creator in review. In spite of the noise, the choking dust and the diesel and gasoline fumes, Craig hung over the balcony rail and watched entranced for hours.
Karin was as good as her word. They were breaking camp at dawn and by the time the sun was full up they were back in the forest. By mid-day they had found another camp site. The hillside Karin chose was not far from the plain and its plentiful supply of dragon fodder, but the trees were tall and broad enough to provide cover even for a dragon. There was a rock outcropping with an overhang that would shield their fires from prying eyes and could serve as a lookout spot as well. At the foot of the hill a small stream wound through the forest.
By the time they had returned to their old camp site and brought their goods to the new spot, it was late in the afternoon. This time Karin insisted on gathering the firewood and she brought in several armloads of dead branches.
“The wood is neither green nor rotten,” she explained as she threw down the third load. “It makes almost no smoke.”
Dinner that night was a stew of dried meat, grain and dried fruit, all from Karin’s rations. Tomorrow they could explore and see what kinds of food they could find in the forest. For tonight it was easier to eat what they had.
“So tell me about dragon riding,” Gilligan said as they scraped the last of the stew out of their bowls.
“It is much the same everywhere, is it not?”
Gilligan shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. We fly airplanes, not dragons.”
Karin looked at him strangely.
“Machines,” Gilligan explained. “Non-living flying things.”
“I see,” Karin said slowly and then seemed to gather herself. “Well, it takes several years to become a flier. You must bond with your dragon, of course. Then you must learn how to maneuver, how to fly in formation and combat tactics.”
“You mean you actually fight air-to-air combat on those things?”
“Yes.”
Gilligan whistled. “That must be something to see. I imagine your tactics aren’t anything like ours.”
“Well,” Karin said slowly, “there are many things to consider. In general, the rider who starts with the best position will win. That usually means diving on your enemy from above with the sun at your back. But of course there are many other things you must consider. Relative strength, level of training.”
“It’s the same with us,” Gilligan told her. “If we get in close we try to have the advantage in height and position. Diving out of the sun is a favorite tactic.”
“We do that also,” Karin said.
“Do you break off after one pass?”
“We might. It depends on numbers and your dragon’s fighting potential. Some dragons, like Stigi, are very strong and fierce. In a melee I would have a considerable advantage.” She paused and frowned. “Still, there are a great many things which can happen in such a situation. Diving on an enemy and past him is surer.”
“Have you ever been in a dog fight?”
“Crave pardon?”
“That’s what we call short-range air-to-air combat. Dog fights.”
Karin considered. “I see. Yes, the expression is somewhat apt. But no, I have never been in battle of any sort.”
She hesitated for a minute. “Mick, may I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Are you bonded to another?”
Mick looked up from the fire. “I beg your pardon?”
“Bonded? I do not know your customs, but do you have a life companion, a mate?”
“We get married,” Gilligan told her. “I was. Not any more.”
“Your wife died? I am sorry.”
“No, we’re divorced-that means we ended the marriage.”
Karin grew solemn. “Among us that is not a thing done easily.”
“It isn’t easy with us either,” Gilligan said, thinking of the lawyers, the interminable conferences, the constant phone calls and the months of aching, gaping hurt.
“Forgive me for asking, but how did your wife displease you?”
Gilligan smiled mirthlessly into the campfire. “She didn’t displease me. I displeased her. I think. Or maybe we just displeased each other. Anyway, she had her choice of rotating to Alaska with me or leaving me, so she left.” He snapped the twig and threw it into the fire.
“Look, it was nobody’s fault. Okay? It’s just that I’m a pilot and an Air Force officer and she couldn’t handle that.”
For a while neither of them said anything. “I understand, somewhat,” Karin said slowly. She sighed. “I was to be married once, while I was in training. But Johan wanted me to give up flying. I could not do that.”
The fire turned the pale skin of her cheeks ruddy and painted reddish highlights into her blonde hair.
“I couldn’t either. God knows I loved Sandi, but I just couldn’t give it up.”
Karin looked up at him and smiled slightly. “We are two of a kind then.”
“Guess so,” Gilligan agreed.
They sat by the fire for a while in companionable silence.
The next morning Karin took Stigi out into the open and carefully exercised him. She was frowning when she led him back into camp.
“How’s the wing?” Mick asked, seeing her expression.
“Not good. It is healing, but only slowly. It may be another half-moon before Stigi is strong enough to bear us away.”
“Is it infected or something?”
“Nothing like that. It is simply taking more time than it should to heal. If I did not know better I would think he was not properly fed.” She sighed. “As it is, I suspect it is simply the nature of this place. It is harder for dragons to stay aloft here, you know.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
She led Stigi back to his resting place and spent the next hour or so grooming him and talking to him. To Mick, lounging under the overhang, the sight was remarkable. Beauty and the Beast, he thought.
Karin was still frowning when she left Stigi and came to sit beside him in the shade.
“Something else wrong with Stigi?”
“No. Nothing like that.” She dropped down beside him.
“What then?”
Karin bit her lip. “Mick, there is something else you should know. After last night . . . The way you describe your mount . . . I think I am the one who brought you down.”
“I know.”
She turned to him wide-eyed. “You knew? And you did not tell me.”
“I pretty much figured it out the first day. I got a better look at you than you did at me and unless there were other dragon riders in the area it pretty much had to be you.”
“And you made me gather up my courage to tell you! Thank you very much, I am sure.”
“Hey,” he said, laying a comforting hand on her shoulder, “I was the one who hurt Stigi. I wasn’t sure how you’d take that.”
“Yes, but you did not mean to.”
“And you didn’t mean to shoot me down.” He grinned. “We’re even. By the way, how did you bring me down?”
“With this,” Karin said, reaching behind her and drawing an arrow from the front part of the quiver.
“Do not touch it,” she admonished as she held it up for his inspection.
Gilligan saw the whole arrow, from head to fletching, was made of iron.
Karin pointed to two black dots, one on each side of the broad arrow head. “These crystals on either side of the head are eyes,” she explained, pointing to the shiny black buttons. “When both can see their target the arrow’s aim is true. There is a spell to keep the target centered in each crystal.”
“Like a guidance head,” Gilligan nodded. “But that still doesn’t explain how an arrow brought down a twenty-eight-million-dollar aircraft with triply redundant everything.”
“The death spell,” Karin told him. “It paralyzes anything the arrow strikes.”
“So that’s why my electronics went to hell.” He shook his head. “I’m damn glad Congress is never going to hear about this.”
There was very little they could do. They did some exploring, hunted a bit and gathered berries and other wild foods from the forest. But that did not take much time. Karin spent an hour or two working with Stigi every day and another half hour or so grooming him. Mostly they lazed around camp and talked while they waited for Stigi’s wing to heal.
There was one chore that needed to be done regularly. Stigi was very efficient at converting dragon food into dragon droppings. Although he was partially housebroken and used a spot down hill from the camp, the spot had to be shoveled out and spread around, well mixed with earth. Otherwise the smell and insects would have made the camp uninhabitable.
Using her hand axe, Karin made them two wooden scoop shovels. They looked a little odd to Gilligan and the handles were too short for his taste, but they were much better than using hands.
Every two or three days Karin or Gilligan would “clean the catbox,” as Gilligan insisted on calling it. It was hard, dirty work but it was at least something to do.
“Well, this part of the woods should be green next year,” Gilligan said, stretching backwards to try to get the kinks out of his back. “You know this is one thing we never had to worry about with an F-15.”
Karin tamped down a mound of mixed earth and dragon dung and looked up.
“Back at the Capital the grooms and stable hands would take care of such chores. But it is part of dragonriders’ training to be able to care for our mounts in the field.”
“Does that include making shovels out of expedient materials?”
“Expedient . . . ? Ah, I see.” She smiled in a way Gilligan found utterly charming. “No, I learned that from my uncle when I was growing up on the farm. He would make such implements to take to the village and sell.” She looked down at the scoop beside her. “I think he would find these a little crude, though.”
“You grew up with your uncle?”
“My parents died when I was young,” Karin said. “A hard winter, not much food and some malevolent magic.” She shrugged. “Life was hard before the Sparrow brought us new magic.”
“Who’s this Sparrow?” Mick asked, as much to keep her sitting beside him as to keep from going back to shovelling.
She turned to him, her blue eyes wide. “You must know the Sparrow. He comes from your world.”
“The only Sparrow I know is an air-to-air missile.”
“This Sparrow is a mighty wizard. Near four years ago he broke the entire Dark League of the South in a great battle of magics. Since then his new magic has spread across the land, driving back the dark.”
“From my world, you say? Do you know where?”
“ ‘Tis said from a place called the Valley of Quartz.”
“Silicon Valley? Yeah, I suppose if we had wizards that’s where they’d be.
Have you ever met this guy?”
Karin shook her head. “I am not stationed at the Capital. I have seen him once, though. He and his fellow wizards, Jerry and Danny.” She stopped. “Are those more of your air-to-air missiles?”
He smiled. “If they are I never heard of them.”
“Well, no matter,” the dragon rider said with a glance at the horizon. “It grows late. If we do not finish soon we will have to bathe in the dark.”
Gilligan stood up. “I guess you’re right.” He reached down to help her up and when she stood up they were almost nose to nose. He held on and their eyes locked. Then Karin dropped her hands and broke away.
“Quickly,” she said with a breathless little laugh. “We would not want to have to finish on the morrow.”
Even working at their best pace, it was still nearly dark when they got back to their camp. Karin went to the stream to bathe first and Mick stayed behind to build the fire and start dinner. Once the fire was going and the stew was bubbling in its pot, he had nothing to do but stare into the flames and think.
Karin came back from the stream with her clothes over her arm and her blanket wrapped around her.
“I feel cleaner without them,” she explained. “They need to be washed.”
“I wish to God you’d put them on,” Gilligan said tightly, keeping his attention riveted on the fire.
“Why?”
“It’s easier to take.” He looked up at her. “Dammit, lady! Do you have any idea how hard it is on me to keep my hands off you anyway?”
“Then why try?” Karin asked softly, letting the blanket drop.
The flames traced out the curve of her hip and the swell of her breast and the light put a ruddy glow in her cheek and highlighted the pale strands of her hair.
Mick sucked in his breath at the firelit vision before him. Then he stepped forward and clasped her to him.
“I never did get my bath, you know.”
Karin giggled and nuzzled the pit of his shoulder. “You smell all right.”
“And if you keep that up, I’m not going to get any sleep either.”
“Are you complaining?”
Gilligan leaned over and kissed her. “Hell no. Just observing.”
The fire had long since died and the only light came from the stars that powdered the sky. There was not enough light to see, but that didn’t matter and hadn’t mattered for hours. Being shot down, the dragon, none of it mattered. He hadn’t felt this good since Sandi . . . well, not in a long time. And maybe not even then, come to think of it.
As he bent to her again he noticed that Stigi had very ostentatiously turned his back on them.
At last they both relaxed, soft and sleepy and warm in each other’s arms.
“What is it?” Karin said, feeling Mick tense suddenly.
“I’ve got to go back, you know,” Mick said softly. “If I can find a way out, I’ve got to go back.”
Karin shifted and snuggled more closely to him. “I understand. I too have my duty.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“It leaves us with meanwhile,” Karin told him. “We have meanwhile.”
“Yeah,” Mick said, reaching out to caress her. “We have meanwhile.”
Karin giggled. “Remember today is a hunting day. We will be walking and away from camp almost the whole day.”
“So?”
“So you said you needed sleep.”
“Right now,” Gilligan said into her ear, “there are things I need more.”
Craig was deep in the design of a new kind of battle armor when one of Mikey’s robot servants came for him.
“The Master commands your presence,” the robot said in a Darth Vader voice of doom.
“You mean Mikey?”
“The Master. Come.” With that the robot pivoted on its heel and marched out the door with Craig hurrying along behind.
Mikey was up on the battlements, standing next to a troughlike contraption and looking out over the valley.
“What’s shaking, dude?” Craig said as he puffed up with the robot guide.
“Shaking? A whole lot. I want you to see my latest invention.”
Since Mikey had ignored everything he had done since he made the giant robot, Craig didn’t think this was quite fair. But he didn’t object. Instead he bent over and inspected the device.
“What is that thing?”
“It’s a water balloon. The best goddamn water balloon you’ve ever seen.”
It didn’t look much like a balloon to Craig. Just a featureless silvery sphere, like those mirrored balls people used to put on pedestals in gardens. The sphere was resting in the trough and there were some springs and some other, less identifiable, bits of machinery underneath.
“What does it do?”
“Watch,” Mikey told him. “But put these on first.” He snapped his fingers and the robot stepped forward and proferred a couple of smashed ham sandwiches.
“Not those, you fucking moron!” Mikey said. “Give him the goddamn goggles!
“Jeez, Craig, you need to do something about these robots. They’re so fucking stupid.”
Craig started to tell him it wasn’t one of his robots, but Mikey had already slipped on a pair of dark goggles and was looking back out over the valley. Craig took the pair of goggles the robot was holding out to him, wiped the mustard and mayonnaise off the lenses and slipped them on.
Mikey threw a lever on the side of his device and the silvery ball whisked down the trough and out over the valley in a high, lazy arc. Craig watched the ball shrink to a dot and then lost it in the sun.
Suddenly the world exploded.
Castle, valley and mountains all disappeared in a blaze of blinding radiance. Craig squinched his eyes shut but the sight was burned into his vision. He opened his mouth but he was bowled over backwards as if he had been slapped by a giant hand. Sand and bits of rock stung his skin and the wind whipped insanely about him. The parapet shook beneath him until he was sure the castle was coming down. The noise shook him like a terrier shakes a rat. All he could do was lie curled up in a ball and scream at the pain in his ears and the red after-images in his eyes.
Then it was over. As suddenly as it had come the noise and the shaking stopped. Cautiously, Craig opened his eyes and tried to climb to his feet.
Mikey was standing at the battlement braced like a sea captain facing into a storm. His hair was blown back and his clothes had been whipped about, but he stood firm and unrelenting, looking out over the valley. As he gazed on the roiling clouds of dust and debris below his smile reminded Craig of a picture he had seen once in Sunday school, of Moses looking out over the Promised Land.
Craig shook himself and looked around. The pennants on the castle towers had been torn to shreds by the blast. Half the roof tiles had been blown off the conical roof of the nearest tower and the chamber below gaped up. His robot guide lay in a twitching heap, unable to rise.
Mikey said something, but it didn’t register on Craig’s numbed and ringing ears.
“What?”
“I said, ‘Neat huh?’ “ Mikey half-shouted.
“What in the hell was that?”
“Like I said, a water balloon.”
“Like hell!”
Mikey’s smile grew broader. “Nope. Take a sphere of water-just ordinary water-and squeeze it real hard. Pretty soon the atoms disassociate into hydrogen and oxygen. Then if you squeeze it hard enough those hydrogen atoms are forced close enough together that they fuse.” He threw up his hands. “Poof! Instant H-bomb.”
“Jesus Christ,” Craig said. Then he looked out over the dust-filled valley. “Jesus H. Fucking Christ on a goddamn rubber crutch!”
“Hey, that was nothing. The castle’s shields took most of the blast so we only got a little of it. And the best part is that the spell to compress that water is so simple I can make my H-bombs any size I want. A hundred megatons, two hundred, even a thousand megatons, no problem.”
Craig leaned against the battlement to ease his shaky knees. “That’s some water balloon. You ought to put one of those things in the nose of an ICBM.”
“ICBMs? We don’ need no steenkin’ ICBMs. Combine that with the teleportation spell. What do you think would happen if you shoved a mother big bomb down into the planet’s crust?”
“Jesus,” Craig breathed. “You could sink half a continent!”
Mikey’s smile grew wider. “If you do it right you should smash the world.” He looked out past Craig, past the fortress and past the dissipating cloud.
“The whole fucking world,” he repeated dreamily.
In spite of the night’s activities, Karin and Mick got an early start. Mick caught a quick bath in the freezing stream at first light while Karin spent time with Stigi. Then they set out on the hunt as dawn turned the sky red.
The pickings weren’t as easy as they had been. The dinosaurs had learned to be wary of the humans and keeping Stigi fed now involved more stalking. Fortunately Karin was adept at hunting with a bow.
Still it was nearly noon before they found a likely looking herd and moved into position downwind for the stalk.
Karin was just sizing up the situation when a second sun blossomed in the northern sky. In an instant the world turned overexposed blue-white with stark black shadows, as if a gigantic flashbulb had gone off behind them.
“Get down!” Mick yelled and pulled Karin down beside him.
“What . . .” The dragonrider tried to look back toward the source of the flash, but Gilligan reached out and forced her head down.
“Don’t look! Keep your head down and close your eyes.”
“I . . .” Karin begin, but her voice was drowned out when the shock wave hit.
Gilligan pressed his face into the dirt and screamed at the top of his lungs as the wall of dust and flying debris passed over them. The wind yanked at his flight suit and the wind-driven sand stung his exposed skin. He kept his head down and his eyes screwed shut until the gale ceased.
When he opened his eyes Karin was staring at him in shock. She tried to get up but at that instant the ground shock wave hit them and she was knocked first to her knees and then flat as the earth trembled beneath her. She lay on her stomach and clutched at the ground with clawed fingers as if she was afraid the shaking would throw her off.
Gilligan waited until everything was still and probably quiet-his ears were ringing so he couldn’t tell-before he climbed shakily to his knees and looked around.
Dust stained the sky an ugly mustard yellow and dimmed the sun to a reddish disk. One of the nearby trees had been blown down and limbs had broken off several others. In the distance a herd of reptiles stampeded blindly, bellowing their panic across the plain.
“Okay, you can get up now.”
Karin’s face was white where it was not smudged with dirt and her freckles stood out starkly.
“Mick, what was that?” She clung to his forearms to hold herself erect.
“Let’s get out of here,” Gilligan said grimly.
“But Stigi needs to eat.”
“He’ll have to hunt for himself if we both die of radiation poisoning. Now let’s get the hell out of the open!”
She bent and retrieved her bow. “He will be frightened,” she said by way of agreement.
He’s not the only one, Gilligan thought.
Karin was right. Stigi was blundering around roaring in fear and pain. The campsite was a wreck where the dragon had lumbered through it, flattening shelters and mashing things into the dirt.
The dragon rider set about the task of trying to calm her mount while Gilligan gathered everything of value and flung it under the overhanging rock for protection from fallout. He kept his eye on the skies, looking for rain clouds.
“Karin, get over here!”
“But Stigi needs me.”
“Bring him here then. But get the hell under cover.”
She led the dragon over to the rock shelter, still patting his great scaled neck and talking to him in soothing tones.
“Get in here with me and have him lay down next to the overhang so he blocks the entrance,” Gilligan commanded.
For once Stigi did not object to Gilligan’s proximity. It was hard to imagine an eighty-foot monster cowering, but this one was shivering from fang to tail tip. Karin kept patting his back and talking to the dragon even after it lay down.
Gilligan checked his shoulder holster and found that about a handful of sand had gotten into it when he hit the dirt. Rummaging through the haphazard pile of equipment he found his cleaning kit and proceeded to field strip and clean his Beretta.
Objectively it didn’t help much, but it made him feel better.
“You said you would tell me what that was later,” Karin said after a time.
“Is now later enough?”
“It was an air burst,” Gilligan said tightly. “I don’t know how big because I don’t know how far away.”
He looked out around the quaking dragon at the sky. “Pretty far, I think.
There’s no sign of blast-induced rain.”
“It wasn’t natural, was it? I mean it isn’t something that just happens here?”
“No, it’s manmade. Or something made anyway.”
Karin eyed him sideways. “And you have seen them before?”
“Never. I always hoped I never would.” He slid the pistol back into its holster. “You remember I told you that we would fight an all-out war with weapons that could destroy a city in the blink of an eye? That was one of those weapons.”
“Then your people . . . ?”
“No!” Karin jerked back as if she had been slapped at the violence of his reply. “I told you we’d never use them unless we were attacked. Nobody would. We’re all too afraid of them.”
“I can see why.”
“Besides, if we did use them we wouldn’t set one off over a deserted plain like that and we wouldn’t use just one of them.”
“But you are expecting more of them. You make us stay under the rocks.”
“If there were going to be more we never would have gotten off the plain.
We’re here because of fallout.”
“What is that?”
He turned to her. “Nuclear weapons don’t just make a big explosion. They produce all kinds of poisonous byproducts. Even if the blast doesn’t get you you can still sicken or die. That stuff will be coming out of the sky for the next few hours and it will be dangerous for the next few days. That blast was a pure air burst so there won’t be as much fallout as there could have been. The wind is generally away from us so the plume may not reach us. We may be safe, but I don’t want to take chances.”
“What about Stigi?”
“You see any place around here that could shelter him?”
Karin shook her head reluctantly.
“Besides, he may not be as affected by this stuff as we are.” For all I know he’s got a nuclear reactor in his gut, Gilligan thought. He wondered if anyone had ever worked out the dose response tables for a firebreathing dragon.
There was no rain that night, and no more explosions. Sometime on toward dawn Gilligan finally drifted off into an uneasy sleep. He dreamed of ruined deserted cities and Karin with her hair falling out.
He awoke numb and muzzy headed. The sun was above the horizon, Karin was gone and so was Stigi.
He cast about frantically for a moment, but Karin’s pack and Stigi’s saddle were still where he had piled them. Obviously Karin expected to be back soon. Gilligan forced himself to sit down under the overhang and wait.
Perhaps an hour later Karin led Stigi back up the path and into the wrecked campsite.
Heedless of the possibility of fallout or Stigi’s steamwhistle snort, he raced across the clearing to meet them. “Karin, I was worried about you,” Gilligan said as he took her in his arms. They kissed deeply and then Karin broke away.
“Stigi was restless so I took him to the stream for a bath,” she explained. “It always calms him.”
“That wasn’t safe. We don’t know we’re out of the fallout plume.”
“Oh, but that thing did not leave poison here,” Karin said almost gaily.
“What makes you so sure?”
“This,” she said, digging into her pouch and producing a small object apparently carved out of jet. “Scouts carry these because sometimes we must forage abroad. It tells us if something is safe to eat or drink. I checked everything I could find and there was no sign of harm.”
“I don’t know how good it is at detecting fallout,” Gilligan said dubiously.
Karin returned the amulet to her pouch. “It has never failed us.”
Mick nodded. It was possible serious fallout hadn’t reached this far and they had nothing to worry about. If the fallout had reached them they were already facing a bout of radiation sickness. Logically there was no reason to believe Karin’s magic rock was telling the truth, but it felt better that way.
He hugged her again “I was worried about you,” he said with his nose and lips buried in the hair on her neck.
“I am sorry, love.”
“That’s the first time you called me that.”
Karin pulled her head away and laid her fingertips on his cheek.
“Well?”
“Well, I like it.” He kissed her again.
After a long moment Karin pulled away. “Mick, we have to talk.”
“Okay, about what?”
“What happened yesterday. We cannot stay here now.”
“You got that right. The best thing would be to move to the opposite end of the island, as far away from that castle . . .”
“No,” Karin cut him off. “I need to go the other way. I need to get as close to that castle as I can to spy out its defenses.”
Mick dropped his arms to his sides.
“One of those ‘defenses’ you’re talking about is nuclear weapons. That’s crazy!”
“Nevertheless,” Karin said quietly, “I must.”
“Look, at least wait until Stigi’s wing is healed. That’s, what, another week?”
“Longer than that, I fear. He apparently tried to fly yesterday in his panic and re-injured it.”
“So you’re going to walk?”
“I have no other choice.”
“The hell you don’t! You can stay here like a sensible person. Until help arrives or until that dragon can fly.”
“And meanwhile the ones in that castle will be brewing up who knows what kind of horrors,” Karin blazed back. “No. I have my duty as a scout and flier and I will not shirk it to lie around here while my very world is threatened.”
“I don’t know how it is in the dragon cavalry, but in the Air Force a recon pilot’s first job is to get the information back to his base.”
“A scout’s first job is to gather information. Having no way of getting anything back, I can only gather more.”
“I’ll bet you’ve got some kind of regulation against this kind of behavior,” Gilligan said with a shrewdness born of desperation.
“There is also a regulation saying regulations are guides and must be applied with wisdom. This is an unusual situation and I must take unusual action.”
Like me sending Smitty back and pressing on alone, Gilligan thought.
Somehow he felt that the universe was getting even with him for that.
“What about Stigi?”
Karin frowned. “That is the thing which made it so hard. I will take Stigi with me. He can walk and dragons can keep a fairly good pace.”
“Okay, you feel you’ve got to scout ahead. You could do it faster once Stigi’s wing heals.”
“It will heal just as well on the march as here.”
“And if you’re caught in the open?”
“That is a chance I must take.”
Gilligan opened his mouth and found he didn’t have any more arguments. Karin obviously wasn’t thinking straight, but that didn’t matter. She was driven by an overpowering urge to do something, anything, except the intelligent thing, which was sit and wait.
Intellectually he could understand that. He felt the same way. But the kind of training it takes to fly a high-performance jet had drummed the value of patience into him. Dragon riding didn’t demand the same qualities, or maybe Karin was still too inexperienced to have learned them.
Gilligan considered knocking her out and tying her up. But Karin was lithe and strong. Then he considered Stigi’s likely reaction if he tried it and quickly discarded the notion.
The dragon rider set her jaw defiantly. “You have your own rations and equipment. I am sure that you will have no trouble reaching the far end of the island. I will give you a note so that your story will be believed should you meet one of our patrols. Then you can send help on to me.”
“You’re crazy, you know that?”
Karin shrugged. “I have my duty.”
Mick stepped forward and grasped her hands in his. “I’m not going to let you do this. Not alone.” Karin looked at him and then smiled.
Hell of an expeditionary force, he thought as he pulled her close and kissed her hard. Two crazies and a gimpy dragon. Then he opened his eyes and looked at the woman in his arms.
Still, he thought, there are compensations in being crazy.
They spent the rest of the day packing and headed out across the plain the next morning. Karin took the lead with Gilligan beside her. Stigi followed at her heels like an overgrown hound.
The morning was bright and the sky was painted pastel blues and pinks by the rising sun. Except for an occasional broken limb or an uprooted tree there was nothing to suggest what had happened here two days ago. The plains animals had returned to their normal habits and several times they passed herds of them grazing in the distance.
Once Stigi bridled and snorted as though an animal had come near, but he quickly relaxed and resumed walking. Either there had been nothing there, Gilligan decided, or whatever it was had gotten a look at Stigi and decided not to try anything.
For three days they trekked across the plain. The tree-studded veldt gave way to grassy savanna and the grass grew shorter and sparser. The soil was brick red now and vegetation grew poorly. Water was something you found in greenish sinks instead of rivers or streams and trees became a memory.
Several times they saw large columns of dust to the north, as if distant armies were on the march. They tried to go between them and saw nothing. The herds had been left behind them on the veldt and now even the antelopelike runners were scarce.
There were signs, however. Twice they crossed ground which had been torn up by treads. Once the tread marks were accompanied by what appeared to be enormous footprints, as if some unimaginable two-legged beast had been following the vehicles.
On mid-afternoon of the third day they were approaching a low ridge of reddish earth when Karin called a sudden halt.
“Wait.” She held up her hand and dug something out of her pouch. “There is magic ahead of us.”
Gilligan reached for his gun. “What kind?”
“It doesn’t tell me that, only . . .”
With a thundering roar a tank burst over the hill. Beside it came three two-legged robots, springing forward on back-flexing limbs. While the tank nosed up and over the hill, the robots leaped over the ridge like giant grasshoppers.
Stigi reared back, wings spread and neck extended, and roared a challenge. Karin dropped to one knee and had the bow off her shoulder and an arrow nocked in one fluid motion. Without seeming to aim she fired at the tank.
The arrow hit the tank’s armor without seeming effect. With a roar of its engine it continued down the hill straight at the party.
“Run for it!” Gilligan yelled and dashed to his left to try to circle the attackers. Seeing his action, Karin broke right.
Stigi had a different idea. The dragon inhaled and blasted a gout of flame straight ahead, bathing the tank in fire. The flame splashed off the tank, but here and there it caught. A tiny tongue of orange licked out of the deck behind the turret. It spouted thick black smoke and grew larger. The tank stopped and the tongue turned into a gout of orange and black as something in the machine’s engine compartment caught.
Meanwhile Karin had dropped to her knee and fired another arrow at one of the robots. Again her aim was true and again the robot continued to advance apparently unheeding.
Karin tried to run again, but as she rose she got tangled in the lower limb of her bow and went sprawling into the sand. She rolled to the side and threw her arm up in a futile attempt to shield herself from the advancing robot.
The robot never noticed. It continued unerringly straight toward the place where she had been. Then it emitted a despairing whine and toppled into the sand beside her.
Karin looked up, shook sand from her eyes and tried to locate Mick and Stigi.
Mick’s sudden dash had attracted the attention of two of the robots and now he was frantically dodging blasts of energy from their snout cannon. By a combination of broken field running and dive-and-roll, he had managed to stay ahead of them so far, but the robots had split up and they were coming at him from different directions.
Karin grabbed another arrow, but Stigi reached Mick first. With a roar, the dragon charged full on into one of the robots, catching it at knee level in a way that would have earned him a clipping penalty if they had been playing football. The robot lurched forward onto its snout, then got its feet under it and tried to rise.
It got halfway up when a whipping blow from Stigi’s tail hammered it to the ground again. This time the robot didn’t try to rise. It swiveled its body around to face the on-rushing dragon and let loose with a bolt from its cannon.
Fortunately energy cannons don’t work any better than regular ones when the barrel is full of sand. There was a muffled “whump” and the cannon barrel glowed cherry red and went limp. Stigi grabbed the fifteen-foot-tall robot in his powerful jaws and shook it the way a terrier shakes a rat, slamming it into the ground and tossing it into the air until pieces began to fly off.
Meanwhile, Karin’s arrow had found the third robot. It took two more steps and collapsed with the iron arrow sticking straight out of its back.
Craig frowned at the glowing display. He had sent a light scout force scooting along the southern edge of the play area to try to get behind his opponent’s main body. Now something had knocked them out.
Sending a stronger force south to engage whatever his scouts had hit was bad strategy. It would dilute his main strength. He decided to send a recon flier south to check it out. Then he turned his attention back to the battle that was shaping up between his warbot columns and his enemy’s main force. If he worked quickly enough he might be able to catch them in a pincer.
“Mick, are you all right?”
Gilligan put his hands on his knees and bent forward to take deep, heaving breaths. He was too winded to talk so he shook his head and made a waving off motion to Karin.
Mechanically, Karin walked over to the third robot and pulled her arrow out of its back.
“Stigi, release!” she commanded. With a clank and a clatter, the dragon reluctantly dropped its much-mangled new toy so Karin could retrieve her arrow.
By this time Mick had gotten enough breath back to stand up and look around. Off in the distance he could see plumes of dust rising into the burning sky. Karin was staring intently at the flaming mass that had been the tank.
“Come on!” Gilligan grabbed her arm.
“But my arrow!”
“We don’t have time,” he panted. “Let’s get the hell out of here before reinforcements arrive.”
She nodded and they set off, Karin at a fast walk, Gilligan at an exhausted shamble and Stigi, prancing from pride, bringing up the rear.
After about a half a mile, they stopped for a moment to get their bearings and let Mick catch his breath.
“Were those more of your people’s creations?” Karin asked.
“The only place I’ve seen stuff like that is on Saturday morning cartoons.” He caught her puzzled look. “No, we don’t have anything like that.”
“The enemy then.”
“Whatever they were before it’s a safe bet they are our enemies now.” He looked out at the dust clouds in the distance.
“I’ll bet they are not alone either.”
“Probably not,” Karin said in a small voice. Then she put her head up. “We must go more carefully and quietly,” she added more firmly.
“What we must do,” Mick told her, “is get the hell out of here while we still have the opportunity.”
“You are free to go.”
“Look, we dodged the bullet this time, but only barely. What do we do if we meet a bigger force? And another thing. That unit is going to be missed. This place has about as much cover as a billiard table and when they start looking we’re going to stand out like bugs on a plate.”
“We must find out more,” Karin said stubbornly.
Mick threw up his hands.
“All right, but if we’re going to commit suicide, let’s at least do it intelligently. Let’s find some cover and rest while we work out the best approach.”
Finding cover turned out to be easier said than done. Finally they discovered a deep wash that offered some protection from ground level observation. Stigi hunkered down against the bank and made like a rock and Karin and Mick sat in the shade near his head.
“We had best move only at night from now on,” Karin said as she dropped down next to Gilligan. “That way they cannot see us.”
“Don’t bet on it. There’s a real good chance at least some of that equipment has infrared sensors. At night we will stand out even better.”
“What do you suggest then? Aside from turning back?”
“I think we’d better look for cover. The land’s been getting drier ever since we left our old campsite, so I don’t think we’re going to find any forests. But its also been rising. I’d be willing to bet that there are places not far from here that are cut up by arroyos and canyons. That’s not as good as trees but it will give us some cover.”
Karin nodded. “Since the land rises off to the east, that is the way we should go then.”
She stopped and frowned. “What is that sound?”
Gilligan’s hearing was damaged from years around jet engines, but he heard it too, a low, hissing whine. Unlike Karin he knew what it was.
“Get down!” he shouted.
The black bat shape glided over the gully without stopping or turning. There was no time to hide. Mick and Karin froze where they were. Stigi opened an eye and for an awful moment Mick was afraid the dragon would stick his head up to see what was going on, but there were no interesting smells or sounds so the dragon decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
Eventually the flier meandered off to the south and finally over the horizon. They stayed frozen a long minute more and then relaxed.
“A scout?” Karin said shakily.
“Probably. Trying to find those things we knocked out.”
“Then we had best move quickly. Perhaps we can reach those hills you spoke of by nightfall.”
She signalled Stigi to his feet and Gilligan shouldered his pack.
“What the hell is that?” Mikey demanded. He had taken his time coming in answer to Craig’s urgent summons and he obviously wasn’t happy about being called to give a second opinion on a piece of metal.
“I think it’s an arrow. We found it sticking in the hull of a burned-out tank on the edge of the wargame area,” Craig told him. “I don’t know how it works yet, but it’s magic somehow.”
“And all metal, too. What have you got out there? Robot Indians?”
“Whatever it is did a number on one of my Troll class tanks and three Springer Warbots. One of them was all messed up, like it had been run over by a bulldozer.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“I just figured you should know about it.”
“All right, I know. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to send some more patrols down that way. And mount more sensors on the stuff I’m testing.” He paused. “Oh yeah, I’m going to send drones out to map and scout this whole fucking island. Maybe there’s something out there we ought to know about.”
He looked at Mikey. “I thought maybe you had some magic or technology or something that could help,” he said hesitantly.
“Shit,” Mikey said informatively.
“Huh.”
“I said shit. S-h-i-t. Shit. That’s what all this robot stuff is. It’s shit.”
“How are we going to fight without weapons?” Craig demanded.
“And you call those weapons?” Mikey sneered. “Things that can be wiped out by arrows.”
He came around the table and moved close to Craig. “Listen to me, little man. The ones who brought us here have got power you can’t imagine. They gave us the ability to create fucking anything and what do you do? You waste your time with comic book toys.”
“They’re not toys!” Craig yelled. “They’re the most powerful weapons man has yet devised!”
“Man has yet devised,” Mikey mimicked. “That’s how limited your thinking is. This hasn’t got anything to do with man. We’re beyond man.” He stepped back and grew calmer. “You were a mistake, do you know that? Instead of spending your time really learning about how to dominate worlds, you hide down here with your toys. Why don’t you come up to the real world and let the Ur-elves show you what power is?”
“I don’t like them,” Craig mumbled. “They make me uncomfortable.”
“And because you’re uncomfortable you won’t take advantage of what we’re offered. Christ Jesus! Play with your toys. You’re too fucking pathetic to do anything else!” With that he turned and stomped off.
He stopped at the door. “Oh yeah. From now on, if you’ve got anything to say to me, you come see me.”
“Goddamn motherfucker sonofabitch!” Craig screamed at the door. That arrogant bag of shit! Just tossing it off like all the work he’d done was nothing. Just didn’t count next to his high and mighty projects.
He grabbed the iron arrow off the table and threw it against the wall. It clanged off and the wastebasket scuttled under it to catch it as it fell.
Goddamn that sonofabitch! Why, he could take on NATO and the Warsaw Pact and stomp them both with what he had here. There wasn’t an army on earth that could stand against what was here in the castle and out in the wargame area.
With an angry gesture he turned on the scanner. The central display showed the arrays of forces in neat green and gold symbols. Around the edges were six smaller screens, each showing a view of part of the battlefield in full color. The units were poised and ready. Except for scouts nothing had moved since he found the destroyed patrol.
Looking at the main map he saw that a platoon of green tanks was just over a small rise from a battalion of yellow armor. Perfect situation for the kind of fast-moving ambush he loved. With the mouse he turned both units on and took control of the green force. Quickly he moved them into position hull down behind the ridge and opened fire on the advancing battalion at barely 200 yards.
Six yellow tanks died in the first salvo and four more before the yellows could return fire. Their first shots were ineffective but they were maneuvering for cover and the next green shots only destroyed two more tanks.
Twelve to nothing. It was the time to scoot, but Craig held his ground, firing salvo after salvo into the deploying yellow forces.
Now it wasn’t all one-sided. The yellow battalion had taken cover and was returning accurate fire. The battalion’s SP battery opened up, walking volleys of tank-killing shells toward his platoon’s position. First one and then another of his green tanks blew up and turned dark.
“Goddamn you!” Craig yelled and ordered his remaining tanks to charge directly into the lead elements of the battalion, all guns firing. He lost two more tanks in the wild charge and then he ran the survivors head-on into the remains of the battalion’s transport section. Tanks ground over jeeps, butted trucks off the road and smashed scout cars. Then the battalion artillery began firing into its own supply train and in seconds it was all over.
Craig screamed in frustration and scanned the board. There was a section of warbots in the next hex over, 130-ton monsters with limited flight capability. They were also on the gold side, but that didn’t matter. Taking direct command of the unit, Craig sent them hurtling toward the armored battalion even as it reorganized for the march.
The battalion was massacred before it could even deploy again. Salvo after salvo of missiles tore through the armored column. Multi-gigawatt battle lasers raked it from end to end, blowing up tanks and simply melting smaller vehicles. Finally the warbots themselves closed, smashing tanks beneath their enormous feet and picking up vehicles and flinging them for hundreds of yards.
“Yes!” Craig yelled and hunched over the screen. As fast as he could move the mouse he ordered a general engagement. Everything was to attack everything else.
What had been a relatively well-planned large-scale exercise turned into a mechanical armageddon. From one end to the other the central plain of the exercise area blazed with explosions, laser blasts and burning vehicles and robots. Artillery batteries fired on the units they were supposed to be supporting or turned their guns on each other. Recklessly tanks crashed together. Warbots tore other warbots limb from mechanical limb.
Where the battle wasn’t fierce enough or the destruction great enough, Craig took direct command of his units, overriding their carefully programmed tactics in an urge to slaughter. Blind and unheeding, robots charged forward in obedience to their master’s command. They didn’t even break stride when they reached laser range. Instead they slammed into each other, flailing with their arms and butting their heads against each others’ armored carapaces.
Finally it was over. On all the plain there were no more units capable of movement. Every damaged unit had fired off every available round, even if it meant beating the bare earth senselessly with machine guns. The few units that had ammunition they could not fire set it off in the magazines in an orgy of self-destruction.
Looking down on the destruction he had caused, Craig felt more relaxed. His fury at Mikey had died to a dull resentment. The guy was an asshole, but hey, it didn’t matter much. They’d go into battle soon enough and when they did, Craig would show him what this stuff was worth.
As he rose from his command chair Craig remembered about the scouts. He still needed to scout the rest of the island. Well, he’d start making more tomorrow.
The blue thing on the screen wove and interwove. It divided, branched and rejoined in a complex, twisting pattern that hinted at an order beyond human imagining.
“How goes the work, Sparrow?”
Wiz jerked his attention away from the screen and saw Duke Aelric standing behind him.
“About like you see. We’re making progress, but it’s slow going.” He reached for the keyboard and called up a second program with a couple of quick commands. Now a yellow thing joined the blue one on the screen. It wove in a complex and elaborate pattern that almost matched the blue one. Wiz moved the mouse and the two shapes melded together into a single form that was mostly green. Here and there, however, patches of yellow and blue still stood out vividly.
“The blue is what we’re producing. The yellow is the pattern you gave us,” Wiz explained.
The elf duke nodded. “Very good, Sparrow. You make excellent progress.”
They watched the shapes for a while without comment.
“Lord, you said there was something stronger behind Craig and Mikey,” Wiz said. “What?”
Aelric took his eyes from the screen. “Does it matter, Sparrow? More to the point, do you think you would understand the explanation?”
“Yes,” Wiz said levelly. “I think it does matter. As for the explanation, try me.”
“Very well.” Duke Aelric stared into the screen and stroked the line of his jaw with a long pale forefinger.
“Perhaps it would be easiest to say that the World as it is today exists because of choices, a multitude of choices made since the first instant of primal chaos. But each of those choices meant that other things were not chosen. In that dance of choose and choose again, some became strong and flourishing while others were made weak or even nonexistent. The patterns of the dance are not to the liking of all and there are those who would alter them.”
“So they’ve set themselves up against the caller in this cosmic square dance?”
“Cosmic . . . ? Ah, I see. No Sparrow, there is no caller to this dance. It is blind chance working itself out through the interaction of chaos and such forces as came out of chaos. But yes, there are-those-that would have things work another way and they seek to alter the pattern, given a lever to work through.”
“And Mikey and Craig are the lever?”
“So it would seem.”
“And we don’t know what it is these others want?”
“I would not wager that they could be said to ‘want’ anything at all, any more than a river ‘wants’ to run downhill. However I doubt very much that the World could survive in a pattern that would be more to their liking.”
They were both silent for a minute.
“Aelric,” Wiz said at last. “My Lord?”
“Hmm?”
“If Jerry and Danny and I can match their programmers are you strong enough to fight the ones who are behind them?”
The elf duke looked down at him with eyes gray and cold as a winter’s sea. “No Sparrow, I am not. Not I and all my kind could stand unaided against them.”
“Oh,” said Wiz in a very small voice.
“Nor is it needful that we do so,” Aelric continued. “The World as it is exists because it is stronger and more stable this way than in any other form it could easily reach. To say that a thing came about by chance is not to say that it can be altered effortlessly once it has happened.”
“You can’t unscramble an egg,” Wiz agreed and then frowned. “Only here you can unscramble an egg.”
“That does not mean it is equally easy.”
“So there’s something like an energy gradient these others will have to cross before they can settle the universe into another stable state.”
The elf duke paused as if tasting Wiz’s words. “That would not be an incorrect way to put it. Perhaps it would be more nearly right to say they seek to create the conditions necessary to tunnel through the gradient to another state.”
“Where did you learn about solid-state physics?”
Duke Aelric smiled. “Where did you learn about magic, Sparrow? We teach each other, I think.”
Wiz thought that Aelric knew a lot more about physics than he had ever taught Wiz about magic, but he didn’t pursue the point.
“You know this sounds an awful lot like cosmology.”
“What is cosmology?”
“One of our sciences. The branch of physics that deals with things like the beginning and end of the universe.”
The elf duke smiled. “Then this is cosmology.”
Wiz turned that over in his mind and then returned to the main point.
“What you’re saying then is that we can take them.”
“What I am saying, Sparrow, is that there is a chance that we can take them. But first and above all else, you must wrest this new lever from their hands.”
“That doesn’t sound very hopeful.”
“It is not hopeless, Sparrow. Leave it at that.”
He nodded with mock gravity. “Now, are there any other matters on which I may set your mind at rest?”
Wiz took a deep breath. “Yes. What does Lisella want?”
Again that marrow-freezing stare. “What the Demoselle Lisella wants is none of your concern, Sparrow. She has not bothered you again, has she? No? Then dismiss her from your mind.”
“But you’ve met her here.”
“How do you know?”
“Someone saw you.”
“Sparrow, you would do well to concentrate on matters of import, not my intrigues by moonlight. What is between the Demoselle and myself is none of yours. Now, is there aught else?”
“Just one other thing. Are those dwarves who are trying to kill me part of the Others’ plan?”
Aelric’s laugh was like the peal of a silver bell. “Believe me, Sparrow, they are not.” He sobered. “No, that is a matter between you and others of this world, mortal or non-mortal, I think. But be wary of them, Sparrow. They can be dangerous.”
Craig couldn’t really name the impulse that drove him to visit Mikey. He hadn’t seen him since Mikey had called his weapons “toys.” He didn’t really have anything he needed to talk to him about. But he still decided to go. Maybe he could explain to Mikey about his new robots. Maybe Mikey would apologize for the things he’d said. Maybe whatever, he hadn’t talked to anyone but robots for weeks.
Craig hadn’t been in Mikey’s part of the castle for a while and Mikey had made some changes since then. Where Craig’s work area was modelled on a laboratory, airy and brightly lighted, Mikey’s wing was gloomy as a smoggy twilight. The further he penetrated the dimmer and redder the light became until he felt he was pushing his way through blood-soaked gloom.
He turned the corner and started climbing stairs. The walls fell away as he climbed until the staircase seemed to stretch up into a bleak, blood-lit, starless sky. Come on, he told himself, this is just an illusion. You know you’re still inside the castle. But somehow that only made the illusion stronger. The wind whistled around him, tugging at his jacket and whipping his jeans against his legs. There were hints of shapes in the sky above him, huge dark-on-dark things that shifted and twisted in ways his eye couldn’t quite follow.
Craig shivered and stayed close to the center of the railless staircase. He thrust his hands deeper into the pockets of his windbreaker and kept his eyes on the stairs under his feet.
Suddenly he was there. There was no door, no anteroom. Just a pool of light at the top of the stairs and Mikey hunched over a desk in the middle of it.
As he reached the top Mikey regarded him in a not-quite-hostile manner.
“What brings you here?”
Craig shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I hadn’t seen you in a while and I just felt like coming to see you, you know?”
Mikey grunted and turned back to his work. Craig stood uneasily as the silence stretched out and the wind whipped and whistled around them.
“This is kinda spooky,” he said at last.
“I like it,” Mikey said without looking up.
The silence dragged out as Craig stared at Mikey’s back.
“You look like you’ve been learning a lot.” Craig tried to flog his enthusiasm. “It must have taken some real magic to put this place together.”
“Yeah,” Mikey said. “I’ve been learning. That and a whole lot more.”
“Oh?” Craig asked brightly. “Like what?”
“Like philosophy, man. I’ve really clarified my thinking.” He smiled and for an instant the old, charming Mikey flashed through. “You know who really owns something? The person who can trash it. Just fucking ruin it completely. That’s how you know the real owner.”
“But what about the guy who can use it? You know, build something with it?”
“So what? If he can’t protect it, he doesn’t really own it. It’s like a computer. The name on the paper may say it belongs to IBM or Pac Bell, but that doesn’t mean shit. The people who really owned those computers were people like me who could get at them any time we wanted to.”
Craig laughed nervously. “Man, you’re getting heavy.”
Mikey smiled. “Heavy times. Our friends now, they understand that. You know what those guys are really? They’re the greatest goddamn hackers of all!” The smile grew wider, dreamier. “Man, this is gonna be great.”
“Yeah, but there are people out there, you know?”
“So? If they can’t protect it, they don’t own it. Simple as that.”
“Yeah,” said Craig desperately, “but you don’t have to destroy something to prove you own it, right? I mean it’s enough to know that you can do it, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Mikey said with the same dreamy smile. “Sometimes that’s enough.”
“So all this is really theoretical, isn’t it?” Craig pressed. “I mean it’s not like you’re actually gonna destroy anything, are you?”
Mikey came out of his trance and regarded him closely. “Sure it’s all theoretical.” He turned away from Craig and back to the crystal thing on his desk. “Just theoretical.”
Craig hesitated, torn between a desire to press his companion for more assurances and the fear he might not get them. Finally he turned away, mumbled something about needing to get back to work, and started down the dark and twisting stairs.
Mikey didn’t even grunt goodbye.