by Lee French
Bobby had no interest in hurting this guy, let alone killing him. He had no gun and presented no physical threat. No one deserved to die for the crime of working late. When Lisa hesitated and shrank, he knew she couldn’t handle this situation. He had to take control, dragon-style. The sub-swarm darted out from behind Lisa and into view, surrounding her head as a weird sort of halo.
The man’s eyes bulged and he stumbled backwards, sloshing coffee onto his shirt. “Oh my God. What are you?”
Lisa looked from side to side and covered her face. “Oh my gosh,” she whispered, mortified. “Bobby, what are you doing?”
The man’s eyes bulged and he stumbled backwards, sloshing coffee onto his shirt.
“Sam!” Bobby called out as forcefully as he could.
“What happened?”
Relieved he wouldn’t have to go find her, Bobby tried to figure how to sum up the situation without sounding like a complete ass. “There’s a guy in the break room and Lisa needs help.”
Tony ran in. He looked around, blinked several times, and chose to grab Lisa and pull her out of the room. Fat lot of help either of them were.
Sam showed up, panting from the sprinting, and almost ran into the wall. She caught herself on the doorframe, and Bobby hoped that only happened because she’d gone too fast to stop properly. Instead of leaping in to do whatever she could, she scanned the room and stood there, staring.
Bobby wanted to smack his forehead again. “Tell him to sit and calm down or the dragons will eat him. Hands out in plain sight.”
He saw her gulp and nod. “The dragons won’t hurt you if you take a seat and keep your hands where I can see them.”
Thank goodness she only needed to be prodded. The dragons backed off, giving him room to breathe and follow her directions. They stayed close enough to dive in and do unpleasant things if he chose not to. “You’ll need to ask him about the Space Time Anomaly and MB-02. I’ll help if’n you need it.”
The guy, his eyes darting from Sam to the dragons and back several times, put his hands up. “Don’t hurt me.” He edged to the seat and dropped down into it. “I’m just a software engineer, not a spy or anything. I probably don’t know anything about whatever you want.”
Sitting in the other chair, Sam rested her forearms on the table and leaned on them. “We know this project is about trying to reproduce a space-time event. What do you know about the original event? ”
Bobby landed on the table, and the rest of his dragons followed suit. They formed a line in the middle, ready to defend Sam at any moment.
The guy gulped. “Almost nothing. My job is about data analysis and extrapolation. I don’t have access to the raw data, just an exemplar set for formatting and ranges.”
Frowning, Sam nodded. “Then can you tell us anything about the MB-02 project?”
“Sorry, never heard of it. I saw that’s on the new map they distributed a couple of weeks ago. That building was empty before that so far as I know. I figured it was some new project thing they haven’t set up yet.”
Bobby currently had no stomach for the bottom to drop out of, nor did he have blood to run cold. “This is a trap. We gotta git.”
“Okay. Just one other thing.” Sam took a deep breath and fixed him with a piercing stare. It had to be the most bold thing he’d ever seen Sam do. “Have you ever seen anyone, even in a photograph, with eyes like mine before?”
The guy blinked and stared at her eyes. “No. No one, ever. They’re…” The intensity of her gaze must have bothered him, because ducked his head and looked away. “Um, you have nice eyes. Nice to look at, I mean.”
“Thanks. We’ll go. I hope you don’t get into trouble over this.”
“Damn, me too. I guess if we all just keep quiet, everything will be fine.”
“We didn’t take anything,” Sam said with a small, shy smile, “so there’s no evidence if you don’t tell.”
The guy echoed her smile. If he had regular eyes instead of robotic dragon ones, Bobby would have goggled at the fact these two geeks tiptoed on the edge of flirting at a time like this. “Sam, we gotta go. Sooner, not later.”
“Right.” She ducked her head and shuffled out of the room. The dragons took off and followed her.
“Wait, um, wow, this is weird and awkward, huh? I’m Mike.”
Despite the insanity of this encounter, his name made Bobby pause. Given what Kaitlin said, they could at least expect him to not say anything. Still, they needed to get out of here before the trap sprang. The dragons trilled at Sam and flowed around her, hoping she’d hurry up.
“Sam,” she told the guy, then paused at the doorway. “It was nice to meet you. Sorry for the scare and trouble.”
“Yeah. It’s okay.”
More dragon trills goaded Sam into moving again. With a last glance back at Mike, she hurried to the front door. Tony and Lisa stepped outside a few steps ahead of her and she pulled the door shut behind herself.
Too frustrated to be civil, Bobby had exactly nothing to say to any of this crew. Lisa stepped into her pocket and dragons picked it up. Tony’s body twisted and squished into a giant tumbleweed and he rolled east. One dragon followed it.
Sam, though, stopped with the thumb drive in her hand and checked the door. It opened and Mike popped his head out, smiling like an idiot when he saw her. “Hey, um, can I give you a lift someplace?”
“Tell me you ain’t seriously considering that.”
A dumb smile of her own sprouted on Sam’s face. “Yeah, that’d be great.” “Maybe he knows more and I can get him to open up.”
Bobby the dragon hovered and stared at her in disbelief. “And maybe he’s one of them and’ll stuff you in the trunk if’n he gets half a chance.” When she didn’t respond to that but did take Mike’s hand, Bobby’s dragon rolled its eyes. “Fine, but I ain’t letting you go alone. Drop the drive and I’ll bring it along, so we can have a getaway if’n it goes all wrong.”
She scuffed a shoe to cover the sound as she dropped the drive. Bobby scooped it up and watched her walk away from the small puddle of light outside the building with a random guy. He decided his mood would only get worse if he had to listen to them being nerdy at each other. The thumb drive in his claws, he landed on the back bumper of Mike’s dark blue sedan and held on.
Aside — Camellia
Privek had said they would come here, and they did, which made Camellia wonder how much he’d held back about these people. Probably a lot. Privek struck her as a guy who kept lots of secrets and rarely parted with one willingly. That, of course didn’t matter now.
They traveled in a highly unexpected way, and she had no idea how to follow them. Sure, she’d entertained the possibility it would be Mitchell and Cant again. They certainly knew how to get things done and weren’t afraid to do it. Based on what they’d said in Albuquerque, though, she figured they’d be benched in favor of others who’d need a vehicle to get here.
It surprised her more that they went to the second building. Privek said to expect them at the first building, and to follow them out of it. He’d never mentioned a second site, not even as a vague possibility. She had no idea why they came to the base in the first place, let alone why they’d trooped from one building to another.
While they’d been inside, she’d considered calling him, except she had nothing to report. This qualified as a wrinkle, not earth-shattering news. Wrinkles needed to be ironed out at the time and dealt with. Her mission involved one thing and one thing only: finding a way to follow them to their compound so Privek could use the GPS in her phone to pinpoint it.
They spent a lot more time in this building. Her jaw dropped when the employee offered the last one a ride. Those two obviously had some sort of something going on between them, even with only an hour or two spent building it up. Did men ever think with anything besides their dicks?
She watched them walk to his car, parked in darkness, and realized she owed that guy’s libido her thanks, because he made it possibl
e for her to follow them. Hurrying over, she noticed the dragon landing on the bumper. It carried…a USB drive? Interesting. Why didn’t the woman just take that? For that matter, why not carry the dragon in her pocket or purse?
Never mind. The rear lights came on and she let the car back up past her, then hopped on when she thought the occupants and dragon wouldn’t notice over the bump between the tiny parking lot and the road. Holding onto the spoiler, she made sure to keep her head away from the dragon so it wouldn’t hear her breathing.
Chapter 15
Bobby had no interest at all in listening to Mike and Sam together. The guy somehow forgot the fact that he’d run into her while she’d been breaking into his workplace, and might be in control of a small quantity of tiny robot dragons. Didn’t he have to get a security clearance to work on a part of the Maze Beset project? This completely explained every time he’d ever heard about governmental incompetence.
When they got out of the car, Bobby flew into Sam’s pocket. If anything happened to her, he’d be there to help get her out of it. He settled in, worried about five hundred things going sideways, only to find himself listening to them using words he’d never heard before. They may as well have been speaking Swahili for all he understood.
He did understand when they ordered coffee and sandwiches, at least. From the noise level in the place, he figured they’d be here for a while. Any unpleasant surprises Mike meant to spring would likely come after the meal, which meant he could settle back and ignore them. Since he had nothing better to do, he threw himself back at his body to fill Jayce in.
For the first time, he felt something during the brief moments between dragon and body. It reminded him of falling, then he woke up in his body, in the darkness of the trunk. The distance must have affected him, since he hadn’t tried it from so far away before.
After checking with the dragon in the car for nearby witnesses or the park ranger, he pulled the release to open the hood and climbed out to find himself in the back of a nearly abandoned big store parking lot. Jayce had picked the one spot with a malfunctioning light, or he might have climbed up somehow and smashed it.
He shut the trunk and stretched. Jayce stepped out of the car, holding a bag of food out. “Aw, you shouldn’t have,” Bobby said with a smirk, finding a fat foot-long sandwich inside.
“I know, but I’m a nice guy.”
“Mmhmm.” With only one hand, getting the sandwich out, peeling the paper away, and holding onto all of it proved a challenge. For food, he could make an extra effort. “This ain’t gonna make me forget having to deal with a dragon what didn’t know heads nor tails about you getting some with that ranger.”
Jayce blinked in surprise, then laughed. “Huh. Sorry about that. She asked me.” His grin turned decidedly smug.
“You expect me to believe that after you talked her into letting us through the gate, when you left, she asked to jump you?”
“Of course not.” Jayce snorted. “That’s ridiculous. She asked me out to dinner. I just got creative regarding what ‘dinner’ entailed.”
“And I got to watch,” Bobby grumbled. “You know, I can’t actually turn it off. I can ignore it, more or less, but I can’t just not see it. Especially when the dragon wants to know if that lady is trying to kill you because you’re making funny noises it thinks might be on account of pain. You’re lucky it didn’t just attack first and ask never.”
Lisa returned, sparing him the indignity of being laughed at for several minutes. He got most of his hand back when that clump of dragons returned, too, and he attacked the sandwich with fervor.
After checking around for anyone else and not finding them, Lisa bit her lip and asked, “Is Sam okay?”
“Yeah,” Bobby gave a little amused huff, “she and that Mike guy are geeking all over each other.”
“Is that what they call it in Atlanta?”
Reaching out, Bobby punched Jayce in the arm. It hurt, because even though Jayce had his own flesh for now, he still had more muscles in his wrist than Bobby had in his thigh. “I mean they’re talking about computers and stuff. It was boring. She’s hoping to get him to reveal he knows something else accidentally, but this whole thing was pretty much a big damned waste of time. Soon as Tony gets back, we should head to where she is.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Lisa pulled a box of crackers out of her nowhere pocket and nibbled on them. “They updated that map two weeks ago. It’s too bad we didn’t look up a map from two weeks ago to see what they changed.”
Bobby shrugged. “I got a feeling this was a trap of some kind, but it’s a weird trap. I mean, ain’t nothing been sprung I can see. We came, we left. What in heckbiscuits they hope to accomplish by having us do that?”
Jayce rubbed his chin. “They could already have the location of the farm. This might have been intended to lure some of us out so they could attack while we’re gone.”
Halfway through a bite, Bobby stopped and looked down at his sandwich. If the suits were assaulting the farm right now…he could do exactly nothing about it. It would take him at least five hours to fly up there, by which time it would be over and done. Besides, they left capable people behind, and Kaitlin should be able to warn them about anything major. Right?
Lisa blanched and put her crackers back away. “Clive is still there. They wouldn’t hurt him, would they?”
“I doubt it.” Jayce shrugged. “They’ve been more or less going out of their way not to hurt anyone but us. But they might take him to use as leverage against you.”
“Oh, God. We have to go back.”
“Yeah,” Bobby said with a sigh, knowing exactly how she felt. “But not until Tony gets back and we pick up Sam.” Resolved he could do nothing at the moment, he stuffed more sandwich into his face. The dragon accompanying Tony escorted him to the car a few minutes later.
“I guess it’s time to get moving,” Bobby said as his dragon reattached to his hand. “I can lead us thataway, and I’ll go into that dragon when we get close to see how she wants to play it.”
“Are you sure she’s okay?”
Her bright, earnest concern made Bobby wanted to pinch Lisa’s cheek or pat her on the head. “If’n she weren’t, the dragon in her pocket would let me know. If’n it couldn’t, I’d know that, too.” He gave her an encouraging smile. “I promise.”
The drive took them to the other side of the town. When Jayce parked across the street from the little strip mall, Bobby flung himself back into the dragon and found the pair still talking about stuff he didn’t understand.
“Sam, we gotta get going. Starting to think this was a setup to get us outta the way for an assault. Car is across the street.”
He saw her tuck some hair behind her ear and incidentally look at her watch. “Oh, my gosh, the time. I need to get going.”
“Oh.” Mike’s face fell. “Here’s my email address, and this is my username, we should meet up in game sometime.”
“I’d like that. Thanks for the nice time, Mike, I really enjoyed it.”
“Yeah, me too. Can I give you a lift someplace else?”
“Nah, I’m just going to disappear into the ether.” She laughed as she said it. Mike laughed, too.
“I sure hope that weren’t the biggest mistake ever.”
“So do I, but it was worth it. Now I have a contact inside the project.”
Unconvinced but unwilling to belabor the point, Bobby went quiet. He noticed the trunk pop open and up for no apparent reason and sent some dragons to check it out. They found nothing, so he hopped out and tugged on the release handle in case it had gotten stuck. Slamming it shut gave him a tiny vent for his worry and frustration. He really needed a much bigger one.
He wanted to yell. Because he had no cause to sit up on a high horse with these people, he kept quiet until they hit the freeway. “Did you look up everything there is to look up on that guy?”
“His name is Mike.” Sam pulled her hood up and shrank into it. “And no,
not yet. I have his email address now so I can get into everything, I just need anonymous wifi to do it. I’ll check him out when we get home.”
“If there’s a home to get to,” Lisa said with a light edge of panic.
“The drive back will be just as long as the drive there,” Jayce said. “We’ll be lucky to get back before noon. Everyone should try to get some sleep so we don’t have to stop on the way.”
Bobby stared out the window. Jayce was right, of course, though that did nothing to make him tired. As much as he didn’t want to think about what happened in Afghanistan, the place had a strange sort of certainty to it that didn’t apply here. Klein pointed him at bad guys, and he killed them.
Granted, the “bad guy” label had caused some problems, and he’d peered into the deep end of the pool there. Aside from that, the whole thing was really straightforward: identify, kill, move on. Stephen got professional about it, too. None of this fraternizing with the enemy stuff, not unless the enemy wasn’t really an enemy. Or something like that. His own discontent confused him, yet again, and he let out a heavy sigh.
“Bobby.” Lisa’s voice startled him out of what had become a good brood.
“Hm?” He rubbed his face to wipe away all the thoughts bouncing around inside.
“Why did you throw all the dragons in him?”
Bobby bit back the impulse to snap at her. “Because he’s a normal and coulda went for a phone to call security or somesuch.”
“But he wasn’t doing that. He was just standing there. You scared the petals out of him.”
The odd turn of phrase made him stare at her while he figured out what she meant. “Uh, you can’t just react to everything, sometimes you gotta do something before they do it first. Life ain’t about sitting around and waiting for it to hand you some eggs so you can make an omelet, you gotta go find the chicken yourself and take them.”
Lisa nodded meekly and turned away.
Tony, though, eyed Bobby. “Everyone was all surprised by how you took off.” He gestured to Jayce. “They all said you were cool and relaxed, and it must have been that Stephen talked you into it. But they were wrong, weren’t they?”