Never Deal with a Dragon

by Robert N. Charrette

  From his aerial perspective, Sam observed activity a few dozen meters in front of the panzer. The earth was mounding, and Sam’s first thought was that concealed enemy troops were breaking cover. The notion was soon dispelled when he saw the soil moving by itself. Rocks and pebbles rolled toward a central bulge that heaved itself up, making a wall across the panzer’s path. Before Sam could warn Begay, the Thunderbird plowed into the weird obstacle.

  Deprived of the sound, Sam could only imagine the grating and pinging of the gravel on hull of the speeding panzer. He feared that the debris would clog or damage the cooling vents, a fear more than justified as metal shrapnel from the protective louvers exploded out from the sides of the T-bird. The panzer charged on another ten or twenty meters, but the gravel still swirled around it in an unabated storm. Fist-sized cobbles struck the vehicle, rebounded, then struck again like maddened bees defending a hive from an interloper. The slowing panzer was nearly lost to Sam’s sight in the swirling haze of sand and grit.

  “How in hell do you fight dirt?”

  Sam didn’t think that the question was meant for him. Besides, he had no idea. Then he noticed something. “The gravel cloud’s only five meters tall.”

  “Right.” The rigger’s response was clipped, but Sam knew Begay had understood when the Thunderbird rose up on a column of superheated air, her main thrust directed straight down. Soil and rocks were kicked out and away, only to curve about and rejoin the agitated mass. At first, it seemed that the T-bird’s action only made things worse, for the gravel storm rose up along with the panzer. Then Sam saw that the malefic sediment was attenuating, being stretched as though it were somehow tied to the more placid earth. As the panzer reached ten meters, the surging mass fell back. Only fugitive pebbles and streams of sand cascaded from the now rapidly rising Thunderbird.

  Then sudden flame washed the belly of the panzer, taking the titanium compound of the already heated nozzles past its melting point. The Dragon had returned to attack from an unexpected angle. Its thrust directors warped and partially fused, the Thunderbird canted to port and lost height. Starboard thrust vents opened momentarily, increasing the panzer’s speed to the left before they closed as the force of the laboring turbines was redirected aft. With that, the fall became a swooping dive that the rigger could control. Black smoke boiled from the Thunderbird’s underside, but the chain gun whirled, sending avenging slugs toward the Dragon. The beast ducked out of sight.

  The Thunderbird’s flight was wobbly. When she plowed a furrow through a thin ridge and slumped down the far side, the panzer slewed drunkenly to a halt. Sam was impressed with Begay’s skill in managing to reach a thrust balance that had kept the panzer aloft.

  “Where is it? Where is it?” Begay’s voice howled through the speaker.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Where’s the fragging Dragon?”

  “I don’t see it. It must have gone to ground.”

  “Drek!”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Me? I’m fine. The opticals have been sandblasted till they’re frosted, the cooling system’s skragged, and I got no lift. I’m just fine. Where is that fragging wizworm? I want its hide!”

  Sam scanned the area, spotting the Dragon as it circled around to come at the valley where the Thunderbird was idling. Sam reported the sighting to Begay.

  “Roger.”

  On full magnification, Sam could see the armor shielding on the T-bird’s starboard weapon pod retract. If Begay was readying the surface-to-air missile that nestled there, it meant he was through fooling around. The rigger had told Sam that such smart SAMs were hard for panzer runners to come by. They were reserved only for those times when life and liberty depended on a swift kill.

  The Dragon banked around a rock tower and swept in. The swiftness of its reappearance surprised Sam, but Begay was ready with a missile that rose toward the serpent on a tail of smoky fire. The beast’s long, serpentine shape contorted in an attempt to evade the oncoming weapon and just barely succeeded. Huge wing feathers fluttered away, singed by the rocket’s passage. The beast craned its neck around, which let it see the missile begin a curving arc to return to its target.

  The Dragon’s distraction was enough for Begay. The orange tracers from the chain gun kissed the serpent’s side, creating a mighty explosion of feathers and blood. The beast dropped rapidly to earth behind a fold in the ground that shielded it from the rigger’s searching tracers. From what Sam could see, it was far from dead. As soon as the beast hit the ground, its powerful legs unfolded from their tucked position, and it ran behind a more massive formation to launch itself into the air once more.

  As the missile completed its turn and headed back, Sam was surprised to see the Dragon head straight for it. Was it mad with pain? Just when Sam thought that collision was inevitable, the beast belched forth flame to lave the oncoming missile, then twisted violently to the side. The missile burned past, once again singing the beast’s feathers. Bereft of its sensors and control surfaces, the missile followed a straight track down into the earth. Its warhead detonated, sending a geyser of rock and dust skyward.

  “Get it?” Begay asked.

  “No.”

  “Frag it!”

  The Dragon hadn’t stopped moving, turning sharply to slip over the ridge toward the panzer again. Its maneuver was too fast for Sam to warn Begay, but the rigger had anticipated. He was firing the chain gun as the serpent cleared a domed mound. For this pass, Begay used the main cannon as well. The big gun wasn’t suited for firing against an aerial target of the Dragon’s maneuverability, but one shell would be enough to blow the beast into hamburger. Unfortunately, the creature wasn’t giving Begay any such opportunity. Its flight was a masterful aerial ballet of twisting, sinuous flight. Avoiding the fire, it rushed in under the guns, and before the rigger could switch to the antipersonnel armaments, it swooped low over the panzer. One black-taloned claw caught the chain gun turret. The Dragon’s mass and momentum tilted the panzer over, while the vehicle’s own supporting thrust helped slam the Thunderbird into a rock face.

  The Dragon beat its wings and gained altitude, fanning away the cloud of dust raised by the panzer’s impact. Sam saw the Thunderbird half-buried under a small landslide, with a thin strand of gray smoke or steam hosing out from a rent on the engine deck. The barrel of the chain gun was gone.

  “Begay! Begay!”

  For a moment, the only reply was hissing static. The rigger’s words came in small, breathy rushes. “Get out, Twist. You get close to the worm and you’re history.”

  “I could distract it while you shoot it.”

  “Don’t be a fool.” His voice cut off as he was wracked with coughing. “The guns are gone. You’re lucky to be out there. Walk in beauty, Twist.”

  The serpent swept into sight again. Wings fanned forward with feathers at maximum spread for braking. The neck arched back into an S-curve, and the jaws opened wide to belch forth flame.

  Sam thought Begay still safe from that sort of attack. Surely he would have heard screams if the Navaho had been exposed to the flame? Sam looked down to see the comm light cold and dead.

  Below him, the flames found a ruptured seal on a fuel tank. The side of the panzer blew out, sending a fireball with an oily black smudge of a tail into the sky.

  The serpent beat its wings and gained altitude. It circled lazily, drifting in and out of the smoky column. As it rose, Sam recognized its markings. This was Tessien, the feathered serpent that worked with Hart. Drake must have sent it after him. Now Drake would have to answer for yet another life.

  After what the Dragon had done to the panzer, Sam had no illusions about what would happen if the Little Eagle tangled with it. He banked away, seeking a thermal to take him up and away from the scene of carnage.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  When an hour had passed, Sam was sure that Tessien was not following him. The Little Eagle was still headed north and the badlands had given way to flat pra
irie. He was not moving in the optimal direction, but the need to conserve fuel forced this course upon him. He needed to cover ground, and the further the Eagle could take him, the better. Because of the craft’s limited endurance, Sam took every advantage of the prevailing winds to glide as much as possible. All the while, he looked for a landing spot where alternate transportation might be available. Otherwise, he’d be walking once the Eagle landed. On the bright side, he was out of Sioux territory.

  By now, though, he was physically drained, his head aching from interfacing with the Little Eagle’s sensors as he sought to evade pursuit. He wanted to rest, to stretch out somewhere and close his eyes for a while. The cramped confines of the drone offered no solace on the first count, but the autopilot would let him rest for a bit. He fed the Little Eagle’s computer the parameters necessary to maintain gliding flight and to take advantage of any thermals, and instructed it to signal any significant change in the prevailing winds. He didn’t trust the dog brain to pick a suitable course once the wind shifted. That done, he jacked out. Even confined and cramped as he was, sleep came fast. Dreams came, too.

  Sam wandered in a Stygian darkness. To either side, black walls loomed over him and stretched away into the pitchy distance. A sound tapped regularly at the edge of his awareness like a distant clock, or was it a heartbeat? He felt a cold pressure against his back, but when he turned and stretched out his hand, he found nothing. And when he tried to take a step in that direction, he could not move his foot. Turning back, he took a few steps, and stopped again. The pressure returned, and a second attempt to walk in its direction met the same result. He took another few steps in the permitted direction before trying once more. Failure, again. He shrugged and walked on the only way he could.

  He continued for a ways, occasionally stumbling over unseen obstructions that evaporated just as he touched them. Resigning himself to barked shins, he pressed on while gradually noticing a dim light ahead. As he approached, the illumination resolved itself into a face. Janice? Maybe not. Hanae? He wasn’t sure. He needed to know, and began to run toward the image.

  But then he was brought up short and almost fell. Looking down, he saw shackles around his ankles. Each band was linked to a heavy chain of gleaming steel links that stretched away into the darkness. Bending closer, he noted a small cloth label sewn to the metal. The inscription read, “Made expressly for Samuel Verner.” He laughed. It was ridiculous to find a custom clothes label on chains.

  He resented the restraints and that resentment flared up into rage. Who had the right to shackle him? He bent to the chains and found no fastenings. When he pulled at them in frustration, they proved to be stiff and immovable. He beat at them with his bare fists. He needed a tool to smash them or to let him slip free of the bindings. He howled in fury.

  Somewhere in the darkness around him a dog howled, too, echoing his outburst. No, the sound was too wild and lonely to be a dog. He was in the prairie; it must be a coyote. The plaintive voice was calling...calling. Calling him? No, that didn’t seem right. Calling...

  Thunder rolled across the sky, shocking Sam awake. A look out the cockpit told him what he didn’t want to know. The boiling storm front seemed to fill the sky to the southwest. The thunderheads were too high for him to climb over and their leaden gray front was moving too fast to outrun. He knew enough about small aircraft to know that the Little Eagle would not withstand the fury of storm winds.

  Sam disengaged the autopilot and dipped the Eagle’s nose down. Reluctantly, he scanned the prairie below, looking for a landing site that would also offer him some shelter. He would be walking sooner than he’d hoped.

  The Little Eagle dropped swiftly. Early in the descent, Sam spotted a small village, but the turns necessary to reach it would have put him into the teeth of the storm before he could bring the Little Eagle to earth. The grassland rushed past beneath the craft. No better opportunity appeared, and he began to regret having passed up the village. Time was running out.

  His tail wind strengthened, forcing him to ease off to a shallower glide slope or else risk a dump. He thought about jacking back in; the added response time from receiving the sensor data directly might give him an edge. The Eagle shuddered as the first of the storm’s winds reached her, and he knew the decision had been made. He could not afford to take his hands from the control yoke now. Seconds later, the drumming of rain announced the arrival of the storm.

  Sam fought the bucking Eagle, trying to bring her down safely before the full force of the storm hit. His ground speed increased as the winds swelled. The prairie below vanished, replaced by a landscape as dark as his nightmare.

  As the Eagle lurched downward, strange shapes loomed up and flashed past. Even as Sam fought to retain control, he could see that most were geological formations carved from rock by wind and rain and lit by the lightning. But the storm’s gathering darkness cloaked other, almost organic shapes. Hunched giants and monstrous creatures reached out of the storm to threaten him and his fragile craft. The Eagle twisted abruptly to the right, and Sam watched helplessly as the winds tore off the starboard wing tip, which tumbled away. Caught in a crosswind, the Eagle’s nose lifted just before slamming into a rocky spire. The port wing sheared away, leaving the craft a broken plaything for the gale. The battered fuselage was torn from the sky and slammed across the rough face of a mesa. The remains of the Little Eagle bounced three times before settling against a rocky bluff. Sam never felt those bounces; he lost consciousness when his head slammed back on the first strike.

  Warm rain roused him to an aching body. So far, he had survived the landing. Raising a hand to explore his most immediate pain, his fingers came away sticky with what the lightning showed to be blood. Did he have a concussion? Dazed, he stared at his bloody fingers as the rain sluiced them clean.

  Fitful flashes lit the barren landscape. The harsh white light washed out perspective, but Sam thought that the revealed formations looked too flat. A couple of twists of his head told him that he was only seeing out of his left eye. The other was swollen shut or gummed closed with blood. That was his hope, at least. He didn’t dare touch to see if the eye was still there.

  Another sharp pain announced itself in his side, but that one he was willing to explore. He slit open his palm in the process of discovering that his torso had been gashed open by a ragged strut torn from Little Eagle’s airframe. He winced at his own touch and vomited. New agony erupted from the convulsion.

  Then he was standing outside the wreck, looking at the devastation. He didn’t remember crawling free, but that was just as well. It would have been a tortuous process and he was feeling enough pain. He staggered back a step, his foot slipping in the thick, slick mud. He fell.

  Pain exploded in him as he slid down toward a raging thunder that was more terrifying than the storm. He fetched up on an overhang that stopped him from plunging into the crashing torrent that rushed through what had minutes—hours?—before been a dry gulch. His reprieve was momentary, for already he felt the ground shifting beneath him; his precipitous landing had weakened the overhang.

  Fear drove him from his perch and sent him scrambling upward. A detached part of his mind noted the blazing pain and the blood that flowed onto the slick mud. For every three meters he gained, Sam slipped back two, but he kept on climbing. He fainted for a bit, but the hungry water below spurred him forward as soon as he regained his fogged senses.

  He had almost reached the wreck again when his foot found a solid rocky surface under the mud. He leaned into it, a safe place amid the morass. Then his hands slipped and his body twisted away from the ledge. His ravaged side screamed its pain and his foot wedged against something hard, sending a new agony searing through his leg. He slipped downward, surrendering to the pain, embracing the darkness.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “Change?”

  The interrogative quavered with a faded hint of the brilliant trill the sasquatch’s voice must once have held. Sasquatches couldn’t speak
like people, but they could imitate almost any sound. Hart wondered how this one had come to associate the word with panhandling for money to buy more of the booze that stank on her breath. Most of her kind seemed unable to make the connection between the spoken word and communication. Why, Hart didn’t know. Another mystery of the Sixth World, she supposed. The large, furry bipeds could communicate with sign language, though, and this one’s fingers gestured in a fumbling way. Hart didn’t know the language, but it was obvious the sasquatch’s words were as blurred as any Human’s would be when drowned in alcohol. How could any thinking being do that to itself?

  “Change?” the sasquatch repeated exactly.

  Just like a recording, Hart thought, or a dog barking to get a cookie. She shook her head and motioned the sasquatch away. As the furry panhandler hung her head, her hopeful, idiot smile died. She shuffled down the street to collapse outside the bar.

  Hart shook her head. Disgusting.

  She went back to scanning the sky for a sign of Tessien. The Dragon had finally checked in with the transmitter it wore and she had given it the final approach vector to cut off the running panzer. Tessien had been out of contact for too long. Had something happened to it?

  Standing by the battered Chevrolet four-by-four she had rented in Grand Forks, Hart waited. There was no one in sight but that rummy old sasquatch. She didn’t like meeting out in the open, but no building in the town had enough space to house the Dragon. This street was at least in a nearly deserted part of town. That made it better than most for her purpose. Anyone who saw the pair would be more than happy to stay out of their way or else be on shadow business of his own.

  If Tessien came.

  The night cooled rapidly. Just after moonrise, Hart began to contemplate crawling into the vehicle to start its heater. When a cool breeze sprang up, she almost did so. Then she caught the musty odor of feathers among the high desert scents.