Ice Dragon rb-10

by Джеффри Лорд

  One can indeed, thought Blade. But he was not sure whether that included a biologist and surgeon learning the physics and electronics necessary to create by the hundreds the wands and Masters’ suits. And how did the Ice Master keep himself supplied, if indeed he skulked in the icy wastes to the north? No, the Union leaders were either not considering all the facts-or considering them and rejecting the conclusion to which they might lead.

  «In any case,» Stramod was going on, «five years ago the Ice Dragons appeared, ravaging Treduk villages. The Council immediately decided that the Ice Master was creating them, and sending them out as a warning of his new powers. If we aided the Treduki, the Master might hurl something far worse than the Dragons against us-a mutated plague virus, or worse. They expelled from their ranks all who would not accept this, and the Conciliators now rule as a dictatorship.»

  «We must be somewhat just to them,» put in Doctor Leyndt. «The people fear and despise the Treduki so much that an alliance with them would probably have brought down the people’s wrath on the head of any Council that proposed it.»

  «True enough,» said Stramod sourly. «Your people, Leyndt, are not noted for tolerance of the strange or different.» There was an ugly bitterness on the blue face as he said that.

  Leyndt put a gentle hand on his arm. «Don’t let it fester, my comrade. You have found a home here, and work to do-work that in the end will confound and convert those who scorned you.»

  «I hope so,» he said shortly.

  Leyndt went on. «But the Ice Dragons must be stopped, first, and then the Ice Master’s allies tracked down, his lair discovered, and both destroyed. Our Union has sworn this, but we also know that we must operate in the shadows, to the very end. The Council would willingly destroy us for risking the wrath of the Ice Master; the people for cooperating with the disease-ridden Treduki. Perhaps afterward, when the Ice Master is gone and the Treduki have fought side by side with us against him, we can reveal what we have done. But I fear that we shall all of us, even if successful, go to the cremation chambers in the end with none knowing how much we have done.» She said the last with a sober pride.

  Blade was nodding. Though he now knew much, he still wanted to know more. «But that is only the last twenty years, you said? What about the glaciers? Nilando said they had been advancing for a thousand years.» He tried to strike a light note. «I doubt the Ice Master was responsible for those, even if he now lives among them.»

  «You’re right,» said Leyndt with a smile, and as she smiled she again seemed to glow with a clean, calm flame. «Our astronomers were fairly primitive a thousand years ago, but what they left in their records is enough to suggest what happened. A vast mass of gas and dust moved into our planetary system from interstellar space and cut off much of the light of our sun from our planet for over two hundred years. Over two-thirds of the population died during those two centuries, with most fleeing into the tropics and becoming our ancestors. Those who stayed farther from the equator found themselves too busy surviving to retain much of their civilization, and so they became the ancestors of the Treduki.

  «After two centuries, the cloud drifted out of the system again, and disappeared into space. But the damage had been done. Our world’s climate had been altered, and the glaciers were inexorably on the march, faster and farther than they could ever have done in the normal course of climatic cycles. The cloud was a most rare and strange astronomical phenomenon, from what we know today. One of the few things about which the Council still permits free debate is its nature and origins. The astronomers are divided into factions that battle almost as savagely as the Treduki battle against the Ice Dragons.»

  Blade wondered if any of the astronomers had thrown into the debate the theory he himself now held. No doubt it would have been violently attacked. But the uproar might have started some people thinking along new lines. Or, as he had asked himself before-perhaps people had already gone through the same line of reasoning as he had, but shied away from the conclusion to which it led? He would not be surprised. It was a frightening conclusion.

  Consider. Electronics beyond anything even the Graduki appeared to have. Ice Dragons in numbers that would have required a huge biological factory. How to build and supply one in the northern wastes? And a thousand years ago, a cloud of dust and gas moving purposefully from interstellar space, hanging in place long enough to tip the world’s climate toward a new, fast-moving glacial age, and then departing. A cloud for which the astronomers could not agree on a natural explanation.

  Answer. There was no natural explanation. The Ice Master had allies, beings from beyond this world, beyond its planetary system, allies who had come to this world with the gas cloud and now lurked along with the Ice Master and his-or their-creations in the glacial wastes. Why they had come, altering the world’s climate and now aiding the Ice Master, Blade did not know. Nor did he know why the Ice Master had allied himself with them.

  But that this world’s troubles had origins beyond the human Blade was as certain as if he had seen it carved in the living ice of the glaciers. And in contemplating all of it for the first time, from beginning to end, he found himself feeling as cold as if he himself were frozen into the heart of a glacier.

  These people did not know their real enemy. So he would have two battles. First, convincing them he was right. Second, leading them against the enemy. And in the process, learning more about this tantalizingly glimpsed horror from the stars, and then learning how to fight it-or perhaps learning that there was no way to fight it at all? Blade for the first time, was seriously concerned that all his skills and training might be unable to help these people cope with their problem. And at that thought, he went even colder. Futility was not a good feeling.

  Chapter 8

  Since the Unionists had been keeping Blade confined to bed to simplify his interrogation rather than because his health required it, they let him up the next day. The place to which the rescued prisoners had been taken was in appearance an expensive private health resort back in the hills nearly a hundred miles north of Treniga. Actually it was the largest Union facility. Doctor Leyndt’s reputation for curing the Graduk elite of the consequences of their numerous vices was so great that it acted as a shield for any institution with which she chose to become associated. So the resort headquarters housed most of the Union’s records (insofar as they dared to write anything down), laboratories for research into methods of dealing with the Ice Master and the glaciers, and a floating population of between forty and sixty Union people plus other transients such as Blade and his companions. The Union people were not complacent about their security; guards patrolled the roads and radar scanned the sky and the land from the top of a nearby hill. But for the first time since arriving in this dimension, Blade felt that he could sit still in one place, look around him, and decide what to do for these people and what to take from them.

  He spent much time in the laboratories, and there further confirmed his beliefs that the Dragon wands were far beyond Graduk knowledge. In some things, such as the power charges that supplied the beamers, the Graduki had advanced well beyond Home Dimension science. In other respects (such as lacking atomic power, though not atomic theory) they were well behind it. Nowhere did he see any signs of the mastery of electronics needed to make the wands, nor indeed much of anything that Home Dimension could not have produced within a few years. The science of the Graduki, however impressive to the Treduki, offered little or nothing that might be worth taking home. What was worse, it offered little or nothing that might stand effectively against the aliens.

  If there were any aliens. In the peace of the resort, Blade sometimes found it hard to accept even his own deeply believed theory as other than totally fantastic. There were hundreds of acres of grounds, some neatly kept lawn but mostly wooded, streams curling through to form little ponds, sudden patches of wildflowers blazing blue and red and yellow against the greenery, a continuous pulse of life in the sounds of the birds and insects and the sighing
of the wind in the leaf-hung branches. He found that he thought best when wandering alone through these woods, although even the best thoughts that came to him there seemed unequal to the occasion.

  It was during one of these wanderings, one morning earlier than usual, that Doctor Leyndt found him. In spite of the chill, Blade was barefoot and wearing only a pair of trousers. He was sitting on the damp grass, just about to rise because of the dew soaking through the seat of the trousers, when the bushes in front of him parted and Leyndt stepped out.

  He had seldom seen her in anything except her medical tunic and trousers, and never in anything much less severe than these. Her grace and dignity and fine appearance were in spite of, rather than aided by, what she wore. Until today.

  Today the woman who stepped toward him wore a flowing poncho-like garment, a single piece of material with a hole in the middle for her head and others for her arms. It could not have been simpler in design, but the material itself had an iridescent shimmer in which a hundred shades of cool colors-blue and green and purple and occasional flecks of silver-gray-swirled and chased each other like fish in a bowl as her movements caused the garment to swirl. It covered her from neck to ankles; the long-toed flexible feet peering out from under it were bare. Her loosened auburn hair now flowed halfway down her back in a cascade with its own kind of shimmer and movement, and the proud austere face was bare of the makeup she usually wore, it seemed, to heighten that austerity.

  Blade rose as Leyndt approached. Her dress and manner were unusual and unexpected, but not in any way disturbing. In fact the sense he had always had before in her presence, that she was holding something back, had been much more disturbing. He moved toward her, and as he did so, she raised her hands, reached out, and took his.

  They stood there in silence for a moment. Blade was not surprised or disturbed now, either. Her hands were muscular, the grip of the long fingers firm and without fumbling or shyness, as he would have expected a doctor’s hands to be. But he was now closer to her than he had ever been before. He was very conscious of her scent-no perfume, just a woman fresh, clean, healthy. He was very conscious also that he had been a long time without a woman, except for that brief flurry of coupling with Rena outside the ruins of her village. And he was embarrassingly conscious that his mind was turning to wondering what she wore under that shimmering poncho, and the thought of her wearing nothing at all was arousing him. In his mind he firmly addressed that obstinate and self-willed rod of flesh, but as usual it remained deaf to the call of his allegedly higher faculties.

  Leyndt’s eyes roved downward with open approval, and Blade held his breath as they reached his swollen and upstanding manhood. This, he feared, might very easily strike a sour note and make the woman back off. Not only physically, but mentally.

  Instead, her hands let go of his and followed the course of her eyes-gently combing his eyebrows, tracing a path down over nose and mouth and chin, on to his chest, across the chest with a gentle probing at each bulge of muscle, farther down across the flat, hard stomach, and farther down still until they stopped where the eyes had First a gentle prod, then a firmer squeeze, then she jerked open the clasp of his trousers. They fell to his ankles, and before he could move to step out of them her fingers had returned to their work.

  It was the first time he had ever felt such a caressing totally balanced, like the woman doing it, with the delicacy and softness of a kitten and the sure strength and knowledge of a surgeon. Blade was not an iron statue, and knew very well that if he was expected to stand here like one much longer, Leyndt would find her expectations sorely disappointed. But on the other hand, neither would he make an abrupt move that might once again strike the wrong note.

  Slowly he lifted his own hands and grasped her by the wrists, pulling her hands away from his now solid manhood. His hands moved up her arms to the holes in the poncho through which they emerged, and vanished into the holes. As he had imagined, she wore nothing under the poncho. The curves he felt all flowed smoothly into one another. His hands kept creeping around her body until they met at her back-petal-smooth skin over firm muscles and a spine straight as a sword blade. Then he gently drew her against him.

  Now his lips dipped to meet hers, and her gasp at the pressure of body against body was instantly stifled. It remained stifled for a long time, but Blade’s still-roving hands told him of the shivers and the quick breathing growing in her. His lips moved from her lips down to her throat, to nibble gently at the firm flesh of her neck. She moaned softly. He bent her head forward and licked an earlobe. She moaned louder.

  His instincts told him she was now beyond hearing any «wrong notes» he might strike. He lifted the poncho, and without a word she raised her arms to let it slip freely over her head. He threw it aside and stared at her bare body gleaming in the morning sun.

  Nothing of what he had seen, heard, or felt before had lied; her body was perfect to the limits of what he believed possible in a human woman. Slender, firm neck and arms, wide creamy shoulders faintly dusted with gold-brown freckles, full breasts forming perfect cones ending in large pink nipples, a flat belly, taut but full thighs flanking a triangle whose curling hair held more brown than the hair of her head, legs neither long nor short but flawlessly curved.

  His fingers brushed the side of her neck, sprang lightly down past her shoulders to her breasts, played with the nipples. The pink circles seemed to warm to his touch; the centers thrust gently out, pushing at his roving hands. The hands dropped down farther, cupping the breasts and stroking the skin over her ribs; her mouth opened in an incoherent sound halfway between a moan and a choking. Her hands and arms stiffened as though an electric current had shot through them and seized his swollen manhood, pulling it hard against her groin. She moaned again, her knees relaxed, and she fell backward full length on the grass, pulling at his hands so hard that he nearly fell on top of her right there and then.

  Then he did come down on top of her and drove into her, finding her already wet, open, welcoming him as he entered, writhing and gasping and raising her legs to clamp them behind his back and her hands to twine around his neck. She pulled him against her as though wanting to make him dissolve and be absorbed by her, then her first climax came and she screamed out loud. Blade continued his thrusts as her arms and legs relaxed for a moment, then again they went tight and she screamed again.

  Four times she climaxed before the pressure in his own loins reached the bursting point. He poured himself into her with such force he was almost frightened; she screamed again, then went utterly limp beneath him.

  As they lay there glued together by the sweat pouring over both of them and dripping onto the grass, Blade found himself a trifle bemused. He was, most of the time, a vigorous, even aggressive lover, always ready to take the initiative, giving his partner full pleasure but not backing off for one moment in pursuit of his own as well. But this time he had sensed a harmony that Leyndt seemed to radiate, a harmony almost as audible as a musical note, and he had been reluctant to disturb it. And he had been well rewarded for this reluctance. The look in Leyndt’s eyes was unique-he would not have believed it possible to look utterly satiated in such a detached manner.

  Presently she rose, kissed him again in a rather sisterly manner, then pulled on her poncho and was off. There was a look of uncertainty as she did so, as if she feared that the detachment so long and so stubbornly maintained under such unlikely circumstances would fall apart if she spoke to Blade.

  This was, fortunately, not their last encounter, nor were the second and subsequent ones quite as improbable as the first. They learned to laugh in the midst of their loving, particularly when Blade discovered that Leyndt, the perfectly balanced Leyndt, was ticklish, and that a few strokes at the backs of her knees could make her as helpless as a child. They learned to talk, and exchanged memories of their lives and of how they had each arrived at this particular place at this particular time. Leyndt found nothing strange in Blade’s being from another dimension, as lon
g as he was at least fully human. In fact, she accepted him so much without question that he wondered if she might be prepared to believe in the existence of the aliens-or at least listen to his theory of their existence without considering him mad.

  After about two weeks, Blade was called to a conference with Leyndt and Stramod. They were the only two members of the directing bodies of the Union permanently in residence at the resort, and thus the only two there qualified to speak on matters of high policy. But Blade gathered from what they had said that the plans for him were in fact the result of much debate among all the Union leaders, with messages flowing back and forth. That made Blade a little uneasy. His long experience as a secret agent had taught him that sending too many messages risked discovery and destruction. And he had no wish to become the victim of the Union’s destruction through becoming the occasion for too many messages.

  Stramod was brisker and more cheerful than usual. The thought of being able even indirectly to strike a hard blow at the Ice Master could hardly do anything but improve his spirits. He was positively beaming as he explained the plan.