Nothing But Blue Skies (40 page)

‘Peaches,' Gordon muttered. ‘The colours of its wings sound like the taste of peaches.'

‘It's all right,' Gordon said. ‘It came as a bit of a shock, that's all. Was that - is that what it's like, having a third eye?'

The voice inside his head sighed, the wheezing sound of rapidly draining patience.

‘I'll be fine,' Gordon said, oversimplifying to an almost criminal degree. ‘Yes, that was a dragon all right.' An alarming thought occurred to him. ‘Just a moment,' he said. ‘Are you linked in to the rest of the network?'

‘I don't want anybody else - well, anybody else in this building - knowing what I'm about to do. Can you run some kind of encryption program or something?'

> I guess so. But then I'd have to decrypt it before I could understand it myself. Actually, since all this data and stuff's going through your head before it feeds back to me, the best thing would be, like, just ordinary background noise. Not so loud you can't hear yourself think, just loud enough that
they
can't hear you think. Whaddaya think?

‘What,' Gordon said dubiously, ‘like they do in films, you mean? Go into the bathroom and turn on all the taps?'

> Yeah, that'd do just fine. Use the faucet, Luke. Sorry, that was rilly, like, unworthy of me
.

‘There isn't a bathroom. Is there? I can't see at all with this teapot thing over my head.'

So he tried. He saw the office he was in (it was mostly in A minor, the walls maybe a semitone sweeter), and the washroom adjoining, and the wash basin, and the taps. He wondered what they'd smell like if they were turned full on instead of full off. Roses, he discovered.

> OK, that's plenty loud enough. Any more'll make 'em suspicious. Completely paranoid, all of them
.

‘Now,' he said, ‘I want to see all the command paths and subroutines and whatever the hell you call them that make these anti-dragon fields work. Can you show them to me?'

> Course I can. But they're rilly boring, believe me. You won't like them
.

‘Doesn't matter. Please.'

He saw - It was amazing: vast nebulae of frozen spun-glass and candyfloss, glittering threads of ice and wire-thin stalactite, coral reefs of twinkling light, at first glance fuzzy and hazy, on closer examination sharp, thin, precise and unimaginably many. ‘Is that it?'

> Yes. No, sorry, wrong one, that's just the thing where you can change the colour of your desktop. Here's what you wanted
.

The urge to reach out and grab, to jump into it like a diver off the high board and go crashing and splintering through all that thin, brittle light - ‘Yes,' he said. ‘Thanks. Now, how do I turn them off?'

> Want to. That'll do it
.

So Gordon wanted to; but he couldn't, it was too beautiful. The thought of all that scintillating loveliness going dark was unbearable. He couldn't—

Startled, his mind jumped - and all the lights were suddenly gone. He tried to scream, but nothing came out except the smell of dust.

> You are such a blonde, it's practically surreal
, Lucy said, fondly contemptuous.
Never mind, it's all done. Just as well you got me to look after me, you big—

And then light (horrible, crude, painful) exploded all around him. Frantically he closed his eyes, but it had all gone.

‘On your feet,' someone was shouting; they'd pulled the tea cosy off his head, ripped out the needles from his hands, undone the clamps around his feet. Their actions had all the signs off setting someone free, and the exact opposite effect. Gordon couldn't struggle; he didn't even know how to, because his stupid little human body was so small and flat, and there weren't any controls to make it do what he wanted. ‘Lucy!' he tried to yell, but nothing came out except sound. Then one of the soldiers stamped down hard on his foot, and he stopped trying.

 

‘Four dragons,' Mr Willis said cheerfully. ‘It's like I always say. Stand still long enough with your mouth open, and some bugger'll come and stick chocolate in it.'

The four dragons scowled horribly at him, but that was all. They stood in the middle of the floor of the big, high, empty room like exhibits in the Natural History Museum, while a dozen or so white-coated extras fluttered round them with clipboards and things that went beep. In the far corner, Paul, Zelda and Neville shuffled their feet nervously and tried not to think about the machine guns being pointed at them by four not-very-nice-looking soldiers.

‘Of course,' Mr Willis went on, ‘if I had a fifth dragon I could link 'em all up in series, and then I wouldn't need any relay stations or boosters at all. Hey,' he called out, ‘Your Imperial Majesty. Do you think there's any chance of some of your loyal subjects coming down here trying to save your Imperial arse? Hope so.' He spread his arms. ‘As you can see, we've got the room.'

Zelda was looking at the latest piece of machinery to be wheeled in. It looked like an ordinary digger, except that where the bucket should have been there was a big circular saw on one arm and a heavy-duty road drill on the other. There were three whitecoats standing next to it. One of them had his nose in what she took to be the owner's manual, and the other two were trying to grab it from him. In spite of herself, Zelda wanted to smile. When the evils that plagued mankind escaped from Pandora's box, she reflected, the small, quiet creature that got left behind to be humanity's sole source of help and solace wasn't Hope, as the story books said. It was Incompetence.

‘Now then,' Mr Willis was saying, ‘soon as you blokes have figured out how to work that can-opener thing, maybe we can make a start.' He looked the dragons up and down like a farmer at a livestock auction. ‘That one,' he said, pointing at Karen. ‘The difficult bitch who trashed my building. Open her up and let's get cracking.'

Karen was dimly aware of the rage and fear emanating from her father and her cousin; it manifested itself as an unbearable itch between her ears, where her third eye was, as nagging and illogical and real as toothache in the tooth you had out last week. She tried to join forces with it, to produce enough strength of mind to short out this horrible human contraption that had made her neither human nor dragon but merely a scale-wrapped box of components ideally suited to use in the telecommunications industry. If she could have laughed, she would have, at the thought of her third eye, everything she was, being used to bounce the news and the cookery programmes and the afternoon soaps from one hemisphere to the other, like a flat stone skipping on water. Oh, she'd wanted to be human; how more human could you get? All human life was there in their TV and their phone calls and their faxes and e-mails, every last scrap of bickering, devious trivia. When she was nothing but a signal processor, she wondered, would she still understand the data she forwarded, or would it just be ones and zeros, nos and yesses, pulse/not-pulse? No question about it, she'd rather be dead than face either alternative.

They'd got the modified digger's engine going. Idly, she wondered what the sound of its engine tasted like; now, of course, she'd never know.

All for love. Her fault.
Damn
.

At that precise moment, in a small room on the other side of the building, Gordon Smelt and Lucy 1.1 cut the power to the dampening-field generators, and four dragons suddenly realised they could move again. They moved.

Sssss'n was the first to react; she hopped like a huge Fabergé frog and landed right on top of the can-opener-on-wheels, flattening it so comprehensively that when she stood up again, all that remained was a wafer-thin sheet of what looked like tinfoil. That was fine, strategically and tactically; Sssss'n had done her duty. Unfortunately, so did Karen's dad, the adjutant-general to the dragon king of the north-west - or, to be precise, the
previous
dragon king of the north-west, lately assassinated by the crown prince of the south-east, who happened to be standing next to him.

With a roar that slammed half the atmosphere out of the room, he jumped on the crown prince's back, sank his claws in under the prince's scales, and tried to bite his head off. If he'd stopped to think, he would probably have remembered that in all the history of their species, no dragon had ever succeeded in killing or even badly damaging another; but white-hot outraged loyalty and common sense don't go together all that well.

The crown prince took maybe a quarter of a second to realise what was happening; then he fought back. He was bigger, stronger and older than the adjutant-general, and these advantages more or less made up for the determination and ferocity of his enemy's attack. He rolled, using his body weight to throw the adjutant-general off him, though it cost him about a dozen scales; the shock of the pain stopped him short, dissipating his advantage and giving the adjutant-general an opening for a fresh onslaught. He sprang like a tiger (well, not in the least like a tiger; that'd be like saying ‘the atomic bomb exploded like a small firework') but the prince had guessed what was coming and wriggled sideways, so that the adjutant-general sailed over his back and landed like a derailed train.

‘Dad!' Karen wailed, stricken with horror and embarrassment. She looked up at S'ssssn. ‘Do something!' she pleaded.

S'ssssn swore under her breath. She'd been planning to do something, all right; she'd been on the point of taking out all the field-generator hardware, followed by Mr Willis, followed by his building and, if she had any say in the matter, the rest of Australia; external threats before internal squabbles, particularly since the prospect of the two dragons (two
male
dragons, she noted with contempt) hurting each other was so remote. But she'd just been given a direct order. She could defy all the laws of physics, but not the chain of command. With a sigh, she jumped into the mêlée and tried to separate the men.

As for Karen: Karen stood there, hating what she was seeing, unable to do anything about it.
Duty
, she thought;
bloody duty. Humans wouldn't behave like this
.

A rolling three-ply mess of dragons hit the wall, making it shake. Mr Willis's soldiers were blazing away with their machine guns, having about as much effect as a watering can on the sun. Karen looked for Mr Willis himself, and saw him in the far corner of the room; he'd grabbed a machine gun and was pointing it at the three human hostages.

‘I'll shoot,' he yelled. ‘So help me, I will!'

Karen did the maths. A bullet from Mr Willis's gun would leave the muzzle at around fifteen hundred feet per second, and would need to go at least five yards before it hit Paul, the nearest hostage. She wouldn't quite have time to stop halfway for a cup of tea and a sandwich, but she wouldn't exactly be pressed for time, either.
Make my day
, she thought, and pounced.

In the event, she got there before Mr Willis had even pressed the trigger. She landed on all four feet simultaneously, like a cat, shielding the hostages with her body and reaching out for Mr Willis with her tail. One flick with the very end, and she could decapitate him like a hard-boiled egg—

‘No!' Paul screamed. ‘No, please!'

Why?
she thought; and then remembered. Mr Willis was Paul's father. Yes, but he'd been about to shoot him. Apparently, that didn't make any difference.

‘Don't listen to him,' the other male hostage was yelling. ‘Squash the bastard. Now, quickly, before anything else goes wrong!'

Karen lowered her tail. Without his magic weapons, Mr Willis was no threat to anybody. Killing him would be - well, not murder; but not justifiable pesticide, either. It'd be spite. So she breathed on him instead, and the force of her breath sent him scudding across the polished floor on his back, smack into the far wall.

Magic weapons; that reminded her. It'd be a prudent move to get rid of those field generators, just in case. She realised that she didn't actually know why they'd chosen to shut off when they had. The most usual reason for the failure of expensive electrical equipment, she knew, was the expiry of the warranty on the previous day; but this could be some kind of intermittent fault, and she didn't want the dratted things coming on again unexpectedly.

‘Hello.'

Karen jumped in the air, only just managing not to squash the humans as she landed. There was a dragon - another dragon - standing right behind her.

‘Hpq,' she said, catching her breath. ‘What the hell are you doing here? I told you to stay put.'

Her oldest and dearest friend pulled a face. ‘I know,' he said. ‘Which meant I had to come after you sooner or later. Actually, I got a call, from some female called Lucy. Sounded just like one of us but not, if you see what I mean. Anyway, she said that you were in trouble and Gordon felt you could use some help, if that makes any sense to you.'

‘Who's Gordon?'

‘No idea. Who's Lucy?'

‘Haven't a clue.'

‘Fine,' Hpq said. ‘Glad we've got that cleared up. Why's your father trying to strangle the crown prince of the south-east? '