The Dragon bellowed and charged. He came crunching through the piles of slag, and even the occasional hut. Whichever direction the puppy ran, that way Kask came following. Anything in the way got crushed.
As Kask’s operator worked in vain, the other Phaestor joined him, trying to override the raw power of Kask’s furious intention. Nothing could stop the monster. The young Phaestor began to panic. Their own charges went forgotten while they frantically tried one control circuit after another. All over the camp, the prisoners began to straighten in wonderment and confusion. Nothing like this had ever happened before.
Ibaka ran for the big tower in the center of the camp. Maybe he could hide under that. But when he got closer, he saw that it stood high stilts. It would provide no shelter at all. He ran through its legs and kept on going. Kask followed—he came crashing through the same space, unmindful of the discrepancy of sizes.
Kask knocked out one of the tower’s spindly legs. The tower teetered—the prisoners cheered as they realized. The tower began to topple. Slowly, slowly, it came tumbling down. A great roar of triumph went up. The prisoners came running, carrying their pitchforks and shovels. Those without tools picked up pieces of jagged metal from the ground, or even rocks.
The Vampire controllers tried to leap free of the tower, but the growing mob of prisoners chased them across the broken ground, herding them, sweeping them up against a broken wall. The grinning slaves caught their masters and brought them down. The pitchforks rose and fell, stabbed and stabbed again. The shovels thudded into the bloody bodies. They clubbed the Vampires viciously, over and over again, flinging their limp forms back and forth. The Vampires had long since died, but the prisoners didn’t care.
Sawyer and Finn did not join in the riot. When Sawyer saw the tower start to tumble, he ran toward it. When the controllers ran, he jumped into the debris, looking for a weapon of any kind. Lee-1169 came in right behind him. Sawyer grabbed the first rifle, tossed the second to Lee, and a third for his brother. Lee grabbed the last weapon, and the two of them leapt free. All around them, the control consoles sparked and sputtered as their self-destruct fuses began activating. Exultant prisoners began pulling off their hated headbands and throwing them to the sky as hard as they could. They knew they had only seconds to spare before the Dragons sent out an all-band paralyzing signal—or worse, the death impulse.
Sawyer, Finn, and Lee discarded their own headbands, then ran as hard as they could—the blast of the tower flattened them to the ground, deafened them—but they jumped up again immediately and kept on running. Sawyer grabbed Finn; the stocky man stumbled, but he kept up with the others. “Come on!” Lee yelled, “Rations! We’ll need food!” And the three of them ran for the hut that served as the camp’s kitchen.
There, they found Harry, also unbanded and stuffing a sack with packets of food and other supplies. He grinned and tossed them sacks of their own and the four of them began pulling down piles of stores from the shelves—weapons, battery packs, blankets, everything.
Outside again, they hesitated—out onto the plains? Or up the canyon?
From here, they could see prisoners running in all directions. Many had already scattered up into the junk where the orphans ran. Scrawny children who had come out to watch the riot, now came scrambling down the hill to look for food and clothing. The prisoners scattered and fled.
And now, coming through the rubble like a crushing machine, bearing his struggling prize high over his head, Kask strode like a conquering giant. Ibaka screamed and yelped. Slash came shouting after, beating at the giant with a stick. Mostly, he ignored her. Once he stopped and turned and started after her, but she ducked away. Kask had no interest in the boy-child, so he continued back on course. And again, Slash came hammering after.
“The main access elevators up the cliff?” suggested Lee. “I know the city. We can disappear—”
Sawyer shook his head. “Too many guards at the top. They’ll shut off the power. Then they’ll come down in force.” He pointed up. “And besides, they have gun emplacements everywhere. No. We’ll have to go up the canyon and hide out until we can find another way up.”
“Why not the desert?”
“No chance. Where can you go? They’ll scan us from the air and pick us off like vermin.”
“All right.” Lee agreed with a nod. “Let’s go.”
“Finn?”
“I can travel.”
Harry shouldered his pack and followed. “If you fellows don’t mind, I’d like to come with.”
“If you can keep up—”
“I can keep up.”
The four of them hurried away from the labor camp. In the distance, they could already hear the sirens of the Dragon Guards. Soon, the high-pitched shrieks of their beams would follow.
The Captain of the Guard
The battle-robots and the Dragon Guards came pouring out of the elevators; first one elevator emptied, then the other. The Dragons took up immediate defensive positions around the base of the elevator tower; the robots moved out beyond them, picking their way like spiders, their periscopes scanning in all directions. They shot at anything that moved. The elevators immediately shot back to the top of the cliff.
Again the elevators dropped to the surface and disgorged another cargo of Dragons and robots. Again and again, the elevators repeated their trips, until a whole a company of warriors had taken up their positions around the base of the tower.
Now, the battle-robots began spreading out across the broken ground toward the labor camp. First one line of robots would advance and take scanning positions, then the next. The Dragon Guards moved stolidly behind them. In this way, they advanced steadily toward the canyon.
Occasionally, the robots would slash out with their beams, cutting down anything larger than a rat that moved. Pretty soon, nothing moved. Only a few bodies lay smoldering in the acrid air.
A roar came bellowing out of the distance—a Dragon’s voice. “Don’t shoot,” it called. “Don’t shoot.”
The robots swiveled their guns to focus on the probable target. Something moved behind a heap of metal pipe casings.
Captain Lax-Varney, the Lady’s new Captain of the Guard came forward and peered across the intervening space. He thought he recognized the voice. “Hold fire,” he ordered the robots. He roared out his answer. “Who goes there? Identify yourself.”
“I have the Lady’s gift. I caught it. I want to bring it in and reclaim my honor,” the voice called back. “I hatched from the egg of Yetzl. I trained on Gzorny. I served under the glory of Naye-Ninneya. I wear the name of Kask and bear the insignia of the Jewelled Dragon, Left Claw, Fourth Cusp.”
Lax-Varney rumbled unpleasantly. He did not like this task, but he had no choice. He had just gained this promotion. He wanted to keep it. If he failed here, in this task, he would die in the same disgrace as his predecessor. He suspected a trap.
He considered his options. The escaped prisoners would certainly seek to regain access to the city. He didn’t dare let that happen; but without access to the master-devices for the headbands, he had no means of regaining control over any individual prisoner. Fortunately for Lax-Varney, this situation already had a clear resolution—the Dragon-Lord had given him definite orders.
He called out, “No such name as Kask exists. No such person exists. The Claw no longer records that name. The family no longer acknowledges it. No such person as Kask ever existed. You lie.”
“I stand here now. I’ll come out and you can look at me.”
Captain Lax-Varney gestured to his troops; they moved up to flank him. “Come on out then,” he called.
From behind the heap of rubble, something moved—in the brightness, they could clearly see the shape of it—a Dragon. He held something small and furry above his head. The thing squeaked and squirmed unhappily.
Lax-Varney recognized the Dragon. He wished he didn’t. He wished he didn’t have to give his next order, but he did. He turned around slowly, ponderously. He tur
ned his back on the unfortunate Dragon. “He lies,” the Captain said to his troops. “Therefore he dies. Kill him.”
Across the intervening space, Kask realized immediately what the turning of the Captain meant. “No!” he shouted. “I have served honorably! I deserve loyalty!”
“Kill him!” Lax-Varney bellowed at his troops.
They hesitated. They had never had to shoot a brother Dragon before. Some of them knew this warrior-lizard. Most of them believed that killing a brother would disgrace the corps. They couldn’t do it. They couldn’t believe that Lax-Varney had even ordered it.
“Let me approach!” called Kask. “Let me have a fair hearing! I carry the Lady’s gift. She wants it back!”
Lax-Varney lashed his tail angrily. He growled something at his troops. They lowered their weapons, but now they turned their backs to Kask as well. “Robots!” ordered Lax-Varney. “Fire at will. Destroy the target. Now.”
But even before Lax-Varney had completed the order to shoot, Kask had already leapt sideways, back behind the cover of the moldering refuse. The beams of the robots slashed into it, igniting it.
Kask took off headlong for the hills—
Death Canyon
The beams sizzled through the air. Suddenly, the robots spread out through the camp, moving faster than a man could run. They fired their weapons in rapid bursts, burning and blasting a path for the Dragons to follow.
Kask ran for cover. He held Ibaka close to his chest and charged toward the broken opening in the cliffs. He didn’t think he could outrun the robots in the open. Maybe he could dodge them in the rubble. “No! No! That way!” squealed Ibaka, squirming in Kask’s heavy grip, and pointing toward a gap. Without thinking, Kask followed Ibaka’s course—around the mounds of fermenting soil, the path widened and gave Kask room to run at full tilt.
Suddenly, it forked—Ibaka pointed again. “To the left! To the left!” Kask went charging to the left. He realized where Ibaka wanted him to go—up Death Canyon. He lowered his head and bellowed like a bull. “If I must go into Death Canyon,” he recited,37 “then I will do so at a run!”
It thrilled him oddly to pound across the ground like this, up the slope and into the heart of legend, the place where unnamed horrors lurked. He loved the blood-surge of action, the excitement of the chase. Up through the rubble and wreckage, up the slopes, up the hills, up the hidden pathways of the children—again and again, he followed Ibaka’s direction.
Ahead now, the path became narrower and more jagged. Some of the prisoners had come up this way. Some of the scrawny children too. Kask overtook them and pounded on. They leapt out of his way in panic, then stared at him in amazement as he hurtled past.
Sawyer, Finn, Lee, and Harry heard him thundering and roaring long before he reached them. “Dragon coming—” said Finn.
“Dragons scream when they come?”
Finn pulled his brother out of the way just in time. Kask charged past them without even noticing their presence. Down below, the sound of the battle-robots came screeching up the canyon. Kask had more pursuers than they realized. Sawyer and Finn exchanged terrified glances. “Uh-oh—”
Lee and Harry heard it too. “Come on!” They shouted.
A gender-female human boy, skinny and dirty, came running after them. “No, not that way—that leads to a dead end!” But too late. They didn’t hear her. She followed after, screaming incoherently.
Kask reached the end of the path first—some kind of abandoned installation. Pipes and tubes lay tumbled everywhere, broken and scattered. Sawyer and Finn came skidding in after the Dragon; then Lee and Harry. They stopped in dismay. Three other prisoners came running after, almost bumping into them; Sawyer recognized them from the slave camp. Still more came hurrying up the path.
“Which way?” demanded Kask.
Ibaka pointed at a hole in the wall, the outlet of a pipe. The faintest trickle of dirty black water dripped unsteadily from it.
Kask and the humans all looked at each other. They looked to Ibaka.
“Well, I can get into it,” said Ibaka. And then he understood. “Oh,” he said.
“I’ll kill him,” Sawyer muttered. Ibaka flinched.
Slash came hurtling into the clearing then. She ran directly up to Kask. “Give me the puppy,” she demanded. From down the canyon came the noise of guns.
Kask ignored her. He looked to Sawyer and Finn. “We must fight!”
“We can’t win!”
“Then we’ll die like heroes—with honor!”
“You can have my share of honor! I have other plans.” Sawyer said. He started looking around.
Kask expressed his opinion of that course of action. He spat at Sawyer’s feet. Sawyer stepped back distastefully. The puddle of Dragon spit smoldered and smoked. “Nice,” he admitted, with wry admiration. “Very nice.”
A beam shattered the rocks overhead, triggering a small avalanche. They ducked out of the way as part of the cliff came sliding downward, missing them by only a few meters.
Finn Markham nudged his brother in the ribs. “I like this better. This looks like much more fun than shoveling shit for the rest of my life.”
Sawyer grinned back. “But at least this we have experience with.”
Finn grunted. “Well, I sure hope you have a Plan B—”
“Me? Why don’t you come up with a good idea once in a while?”
“I did, remember? And we ended up here.”
Dead End
Sawyer climbed partway up the cliff so he could look down the canyon. As bad as the carnage sounded, the view of it looked even worse.
The battle-robots had no compunction about killing. They shot prisoners and children with equal accuracy. They didn’t care. They swept back and forth across the canyon, crashing through the rubble. They smashed and destroyed everything that lay before them. Their beams stabbed out with sudden fire, slashing and burning.
Sawyer jumped and skidded down from his perch. He’d already seen too much. But the terrible sounds continued—the screams of the injured and the dying, suddenly cut short by the higher, nastier screams of the beams of the battle-machines. They could hear them crunching steadily, nightmarishly after them.
“Come on!” shouted Slash. “Let’s get out of here!”
For the first time, they all looked at her—a gender-female human boy? Giving orders?
“Well, do you want to get out or not? This way!” She pointed.
Sawyer and Finn exchanged a what-have-we-got-to-lose look, shrugged, and followed after. The others came behind them, even Kask; he still carried the struggling Ibaka.
“What did they do here?” Sawyer asked her.
“—drainage, for some kind of installation further up the canyon. Nobody uses it for anything anymore.” She led them quickly up to where the water fell from a series of broken pipes into a brackish catch basin. The water flowed over the top, down a scumble of white rocks and disappeared into the dark opening of a huge sluice tube. “Down that way!”
The growing crowd of prisoners pushed close, eager to get away; they looked fearfully back down the canyon. Lee held them back. “Where does it lead?” he demanded.
Slash shook her head. “To another catch-basin, and then another, and another, all the way down.”
“Down to where?” Impatience edged his words.
Harry stepped forward. “I know where—you won’t like it. This goes all the way down to the tank at the bottom of the Old City detainment. You remember that, don’t you? This water feeds the pool.”
“Ugh,” said Finn, wrinkling his face in disgust.
“Wait a minute—” said Sawyer. “We can get out before it empties into the pool.”
“I wish I had your faith in Ghu—” said Harry, “—so I could wish as eagerly to meet my maker.”
“I don’t need faith,” said Sawyer. “I majored in urban plumbing.” He sat down on a rock and began pulling off his boots. “This thing has to have an access before it pours into the prison tank.
” He tossed his boots into the sack he carried full of rations and tied it to his belt. He slung his rifle over his shoulder.
“And what if you’ve made a mistake?” asked Finn.
“Then, my dear brother, I won’t have to worry about it, will I?”
“You, Soy, have taken all leave of your senses.”
“I know that. Do you have a better idea?”
“Yes! Let the Dragon go first.”
“Huh?”
“So he can catch the handle and open the access from the inside. What if you don’t have the strength? He will. Then he can pull the rest of us out.”
Kask shook his head and rumbled unpleasantly. “No. I will not let go of the dog-boy.”
“Give him to me. I promise you, we’ll bring him if you’ll pull us out on the other end,” said Sawyer.
Kask frowned. “I have never trusted a human before. Why should I trust you now?”
In answer to his question, a sizzling beam came screaming through the air, slicing a great chunk of rock off the cliff above them.
“How about that for an argument?”
Kask grunted and nodded his head. He thrust Ibaka into Sawyer’s arms. “If you don’t bring the dog-boy with you, I’ll kill you.”
“Yeah, yeah. I got it. Let’s go.”
Kask grunted again and began lowering himself into the tube. Just before he vanished, Finn called to him. “The rest of us will follow at one-minute intervals. You’ve got to catch us.”
“I will.”
“Okay, then—”
But Kask had already let go. The pipe swallowed him up and he slid away into the darkness.
Down the Tubes
The air stank of smoke and burned flesh. The scorching beams came more frequently now. Rocks tumbled from the cliffs on all sides. The abrupt screams of the dying sounded frighteningly close.
“They won’t stop until they’ve cleaned out the entire canyon—” Lee said. More prisoners kept arriving every moment. They crowded into the narrow space surrounding the catch-basin, shouting in panic.
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