Dragonback 02 Dragon and Soldier (14 page)

"What is?" Jack asked, turning back to the window. "Her obsession
with dragon tattoos?"

"That she noticed your conversation with Sergeant Grisko and
wondered about it," Draycos said. "She is quite observant."

Jack closed his shirt down to where it had been before Alison
showed up. "Observant
and
nosy," he agreed. "I wonder if they
know this is her second try at joining a mercenary group."

"I do not know," Draycos said. "Do you think you should tell them?"

Jack gazed out the window, weighing his options. Below them, the
shadows were lengthening still more. Above them, the sky was definitely
beginning to darken. "No," he decided at last. "But let's keep an eye
on her."

The last twenty miles were spent traveling at treetop height, with
the Lynx dodging its way around the handful of taller trees and an
occasional hill or tall rock.

Jack gazed out at the blur of green shooting past his window,
fully expecting to crash and burn any minute. Uncle Virge could have
pulled off this kind of maneuver easily. But it wasn't Uncle Virge
running the controls up there.

Fortunately, the pilot knew what he was doing. He ran the course
without so much as a single serious bump, and a few minutes later had
set them down in a small clearing at the base of a rocky cliff face.

If parts of the Carrion training base had been spartan, the Kilo
Seven outpost was downright primitive. The only solid structure was a
flimsy looking prefab building about the size of a one-bedroom hotel
room. Grisko identified it as the outpost HQ, and the place where Tango
Five Zulu would be setting up their computers and listening gear.

The rest of the outpost consisted of four tents scattered beneath
the trees. Two of them looked like sleeping quarters for the soldiers,
with the other two probably serving as mess tent and storage facility.
To the west, downslope from the rest of the camp, was the distinctive
narrow tent of a latrine.

Further out, to the north and south of the camp, Jack spotted two
small defensive positions. They weren't much, little more than foxholes
with a couple of long gun muzzles poking out. Still, it was nice to
know that the enemy couldn't overrun the place without the Edge at
least being able to put up a fight.

The sun was down by the time they left the Lynx. The mercenaries
set to work immediately, unloading their gear and taking it to their
assigned tents. Jommy and the rest of Tango Five Zulu were also busy,
lugging their computers and other equipment to the headquarters
building.

Jack, to his complete lack of surprise, found himself assigned to
night sentry duty.

His post was about sixty yards south of the camp, perhaps forty
yards beyond the defensive foxhole on that side. All sixty yards of it
were downhill. "Here's your cage," Grisko said, stopping beside a tree
that looked rather like an elm with a bad skin condition.

"Cage?"

"Your sentry post," Grisko said with exaggerated patience. "Didn't
you read the manual?"

"I must have missed that part," Jack murmured. He
had
read
the manual, thank you, and there had been no mention of the term "cage"
being used for a sentry post.

But there was nothing to gain by pointing that out. He'd
apparently been put on sentry duty for waking up Grisko aboard the
transport. He didn't really want to see what would happen if he added
to his crimes by arguing with the man.

"Well, then, pay attention now," Grisko growled. He pointed to a
group of four small round monitors that had been nailed to the tree
trunk. Each of the monitors showed a slightly fuzzy image, and each had
a control stick embedded in the trunk beneath it. "There's your Argus
system. You
do
remember Argus systems, don't you?"

"Yes, sir," Jack said, more confidently this time. Argus was a
passive observation system for sending images from one area to another.
The far end, called the eye, could be up to five hundred feet away,
with a fiber-optic cable linking it to one of the monitors here at the
sentry post. The direction each viewer was pointing could be shifted by
means of a wire control system. The control line ran through its own
cable alongside the fiber-optic one, connecting to the lever beneath
the monitor.

Jack could remember thinking when he first read about it that
Argus had to be the most ridiculously primitive system in the known
universe. It was only later, as he read about electronics and
power-source detectors, that he had realized there was actually a good
reason for the system. Out here in the middle of a forest, the
electronics of a normal sensor system would stand out like a nightlight
in a dark room. Argus, on the other hand, would never even be noticed
unless the enemy happened to trip over one of the cables.

"Yeah, I'll bet you do," Grisko grunted. Reaching to a small
rectangular plate beneath the monitors, he flipped up its protective
cover. Underneath was a glow-in-the-dark schematic of the area, with
Jack's outpost in the middle and the edge of the main camp behind him
along the bottom. "Here's where your eyes are located," he said,
tapping the map in four places. "You'll be relieved at midnight.
Don't
fall asleep."

He turned back toward the camp. "What if there's trouble?" Jack
asked.

Grisko frowned. "Like what?"

"Like the enemy shows up," Jack said. "Do I get a comm clip or
something to call in an alarm?"

Grisko was looking at him as if he was crazy. "Don't be absurd,"
he said. "The enemy doesn't even know we're here."

"But—"

"Tell you what," Grisko cut him off. "If they come this way, you
haul out your Gompers and start shooting. We'll notice. Trust me."

With that he stalked off into the growing darkness, the matting of
dead leaves crunching under his feet. He disappeared from sight,
leaving only the sound of his footsteps to mark where he was. A dozen
seconds later, even those had faded into silence.

And Jack and Draycos were alone.

Jack had never liked the woods. He'd never much liked the outdoors
in general, for that matter. Nearly all of his life had been spent in
cities or spaceports, or in spaceships like the
Essenay
. Places
with bright lights, and people, and no strange noises.

Occasionally when he and Uncle Virgil had been running a scam,
they'd had to spend time in someone's country estate or mountain
retreat. But at least there they'd mostly been inside at night. Nature
had been something beyond the walls, safely out of view.

His last brush with nature had been on Iota Klestis a month and a
half ago. He'd taken a few short trips outside the ship, mostly during
the day but once or twice at night. That was how bored and restless
he'd been.

But at least there he'd had the comforting bulk of the
Es-senay
at his back, and Uncle Virge's watchful eye on the surrounding terrain.

Uncle Virge.

He stared out into the woods, an all-too-familiar pang of
uncertainty and loss and fear whispering through him. The first time
he'd felt it was back when he was three years old and finally realized
that his parents weren't coming back to him. He'd felt it again a year
ago at Uncle Virgil's death, when he'd suddenly found himself alone in
the universe with nothing but a computerized personality to look after
him.

Now, here in the darkness of the night, he was feeling it for a
third time. Because whatever happened with Draycos, he knew down deep
that his relationship with Uncle Virge had been changed forever.

The thought was as frightening and alien as the dark woods around
him. Up to the time when he'd met Draycos, Jack's life had been fairly
simple and more or less comfortable. For all the annoyances inherent in
Uncle Virge's personality, the computer really was mostly easy to get
along with.

More to the point, he was the only friend Jack had.

The strange noises of nature were beginning to whisper through the
darkness around him. Mostly insects and small animals, he guessed, with
an occasional bird or bat-like something flapping past overhead. Up
above the trees he could still see the sky, but here at ground level it
was already night.

And then, suddenly, something big and heavy landed on the back of
his neck.

He jerked away with a gasp, his hand reaching automatically to
swat it away, even as he realized it was just Draycos popping out from
his jacket collar. "Geez!" he hissed. "Don't
do
that."

"Do not do what?" Draycos asked, landing on the leaves beside him
with a soft crunch.

"Never mind," Jack growled, feeling like an idiot. "You startled
me, that's all."

The dragon cocked his head. "You do not like it out here," he
declared.

Jack snorted. "No kidding, Sherlock."

"Pardon?"

"Skip it." Shaking away the introspective thoughts, Jack stepped
over to the Argus monitors for a closer look. There were two filters on
each, he saw, either of which could be slid over the image.
Experimentally, he tried one.

The image didn't change much. He tried the other, and suddenly,
the darkness was pockmarked with scattered bits of light. "Ah-ha," he
said, feeling about as pleased as he could under the circumstances.
"That's the infrared. The other one must be deep UV."

"Pardon?"

" 'UV' is short for ultraviolet," Jack explained, sliding the
infrared filters over the rest of the monitors. "It's a kind of light
we can't see directly, but there are some species and some kinds of
equipment that show up real well with it."

"And infrared?"

"Infrared is heat," Jack told him, peering at each of the monitors
in turn. Nothing but small animals and birds, at least as far as he
could see. "Anything warm gives that off. Those thugs who were looking
for us back on Vagran were using IR detectors. Back when we were hiding
out on that Wistawki balcony, remember?"

"Yes," Draycos said. "I was somewhat surprised at the time that
they did not locate us."

Jack shrugged. "You probably don't look like anything anyone's
ever seen before. Matter of fact, you might not even look alive—we'd
have to do a heat profile on you to know for sure. Either way, I
guarantee you don't look like a human."

"That could be useful."

"It already has been," Jack pointed out.

"True." Draycos studied the monitors. "The images are not very
clear."

"They sure aren't," Jack agreed. "I guess that's the best you can
do without electronics and power sources."

The dragon hopped up onto a nearby stump and craned his neck.
"Perhaps I should explore the perimeter."

"Oh, no," Jack said quickly. "Forget it. You just stay put, right
here."

Draycos twisted his head around to look back at him. "You do not
need to be afraid, Jack," he said, his voice low and soothing. "I am a
poet-warrior of the K'da. I will protect you."

"I appreciate your confidence," Jack said. "But Good Intention
Highway isn't one I want to travel just yet."

The tip of Draycos's tail twitched. "Do you refer to the saying,
'The road to hell is paved with good intentions'?"

Jack frowned. "Yeah. Where did you hear that?"

"Uncle Virge quoted it to me," the dragon said. From his stump he
jumped up onto the side of one of the trees and clung there by his
claws, gazing out into the night.

"During one of your late-night poetry sessions?"

"Yes. He has many such sayings with which to illustrate his
points."

Jack felt his mouth twist. "Let me guess. His main point is that
he wants you to go away and leave us alone."

"That is the core of it," Draycos confirmed. "He does not feel
that the survival of my people should be any concern of yours."

Somewhere ahead, a twig suddenly snapped. Jack jerked, snatching
up his Gompers and pointing it into the darkness. "Do not be afraid,"
Draycos assured him quickly. "It was merely a small animal obtaining a
meal."

Jack lowered the flash rifle, letting his breath out silently.
"Okay," he said.

Draycos pushed off the tree trunk and dropped back down to Jack's
side. "I do not understand your fear," he said, looking up at Jack's
face. "I would have thought that in your previous profession you must
have faced danger many times."

"Not like this," Jack said, shaking his head. "I was always a kid
before. Even when we were breaking into bank vaults, I knew the police
weren't going to shoot unless I pointed a gun at them or tried to get
away."

He plucked at a fold of his uniform jacket. "Here, it's all
different. Here, I'm a target. Not because I'm breaking any laws, but
because I'm wearing this uniform.
Just
because I'm wearing this
uniform."

"That is the way of the soldier," Draycos reminded him. "Part of
your task is to draw danger away from the weak and powerless."

Jack snorted. "Just what I always wanted."

Draycos cocked his head. "It is an honorable profession, Jack."

"Maybe where
you
come from it is," Jack retorted.

"It is not so here?"

"How would I know?" Jack sighed. "All right, yeah, I suppose it
is," he conceded. "At least most of the time. But we sure don't seem
very popular here on Sunright."

"I do not understand."

"You saw the people on the march through town today," Jack said.
"Well, no, probably you didn't. The point is that they weren't exactly
cheering us on."

"One does not usually cheer in the middle of an attack."

"This was before the attack," Jack told him. "They were just
staring at us, watching us march. Like we were invaders instead of
protectors." He snorted. "
After
the attack, it was even worse.
Then, they were afraid to even get near us."

Draycos was silent a moment. "You are mercenaries, not regular
soldiers," he pointed out. "Perhaps that is the difference."