by Timothy Zahn
"While a tributary of that same river is the water that flows through Mer'seb," Draycos said. "The Parprin town we have just left. Correct?"
"Sounds right," Jack confirmed, stifling a yawn. "So what?"
"So this," Draycos said. "The place we were shown on the map is not the place we are going."
CHAPTER 14
Jack sat up straight, his tiredness suddenly gone. "How do you know?"
"I am a poet-warrior of the K'da," Draycos reminded him. "The reading of maps is part of my profession. I have been watching the ground through the window."
Jack's stomach was trying to do somersaults. "How far off are we?"
"Our course from Mer'seb should have taken us at an angle slightly north of east," Draycos said. "We did indeed set out in that direction. But approximately one hour ago we changed gradually to a more northerly direction."
Jack glanced at his watch. They'd been in the air about an hour and a half. Thirty more minutes until landing.
Or at least, that was what Grisko had told them. Maybe the sergeant didn't know something had gone weird, either.
Then again, maybe he did. "So where are we headed?"
"If we are still to land in one half hour, I believe we will arrive near the western edge of the Gray Hills," Draycos said. "Perhaps three hundred miles north of November Six.
"And if we don't stop in half an hour?"
"All regions beyond that are either neutral or considered enemy-controlled."
Jack chewed at his lip. Terrific. "So what do we do?"
"There are two squads of fully armed soldiers aboard," Draycos reminded him. "They could be made aware of the situation."
The dragon had a point. If the pilot was an enemy agent trying to take them to the wrong place, two squads of Edge-men ought to be able to argue the point with him. Surely none of them wanted to end their trip in enemy territory, either.
On the other hand, having a gun battle in the middle of a flying transport didn't sound like a very smart idea. "I'd better talk to Grisko," he decided. "Come on, get aboard."
Obediently, the dragon stepped onto Jack's outstretched hand and slithered up his sleeve. Sealing the neck of his shirt again, Jack headed out.
Grisko was sitting alone in the back, on the opposite side of the Lynx from Jack's seat. He'd probably picked that spot so he could watch the rest of the group.
Though at the moment he wasn't watching anything at all. His eyes were closed, his head sagging slightly against the headrest.
Jack pursed his lips. The sergeant was probably not going to like this. "Sergeant Grisko?" he said quietly.
Grisko's eyes remained closed. "What is it, Montana?"
"I think we're off course, sir."
Grisko pried one eye open and squinted up at him. "Excuse me?"
"We're not headed for November Six," Jack told him. "We seem to be going somewhere north of there."
Grisko pried the other eye open, and for a long moment he seemed to be studying Jack's face. "Good observation," he said at last. "As it happens, our orders have been changed. The Shamshir moved their transmitter yesterday to point Kilo Seven. We're moving with it."
"Oh," Jack said. So that was it. All nice and simple and reasonable. Certainly a lot less threatening than a daring midair hijacking.
Which left only one little problem. Uncle Virge was still heading for the area around November Six, which meant that Jack's plan for getting the Djinn-90 information was no longer going to work. Worse, when it came time to wrap this up and make a run for the tall grass, his primary escape route was going to be sitting on the ground three hundred miles away.
Grisko was still gazing up at him. "Is this a problem for you?" he asked.
"No, sir," Jack said, trying to sound as unconcerned as possible. "Sorry to have wakened you."
"Half an hour to the base," Grisko said, closing his eyes again. "Better get some rest. I've got a strange feeling you're going to be on sentry duty tonight."
Jack grimaced. "Yes, sir."
He returned to his seat and curled up again beside the window. Even in the few minutes he'd been away the shadows of the trees had visibly lengthened along the ground. Sunset couldn't be too far away.
"I do not like it," Draycos murmured from his shoulder as he slid open the neck of Jack's shirt again.
"Me, neither," Jack agreed. He pulled his shirt open a little more and shifted in his seat so that the dragon would have a better view out the window. "You first."
"I am not familiar with your transmission science," the dragon said. "But with the K'da and Shontine, a device that can reach between stars is large and not easily moved. Certainly not in a single day."
"That's mostly true here, too," Jack agreed. "The Essenay's got a compact InterWorld transmitter built into it, but Uncle Virgil was always setting up deals and scams across the Orion Arm. He couldn't risk having them traced back to him through a commercial InterWorld site."
"Even our largest ships cannot carry such a transmitter," Draycos said. "Are such common here?"
"Not really," Jack said, frowning. "Actually, not at all. The biggest StarForce ships have them, I know, and I'm pretty sure a few starliners do, too. But now that I think about it, I can't remember anyone else in Uncle Virgil's circle having one aboard their ships. Whatever he paid for ours, the price must have been astronomical." He snorted. "Either that, or he stole it."
"Then let us assume the Shamshir transmitter is not easily portable," Draycos said. "Moving it would cost them considerable time and effort. It would not be an operation they could hide."
Jack nodded. He and Draycos were definitely thinking along the same lines. "In other words, it should have taken a couple of weeks to get a new site prepared, break down the transmitter, and then move it. Which means we should have heard about this before we left Carrion."
"Correct," Draycos said. "And if they only began moving it yesterday, there would be no need for us to travel there tonight."
"We could have hung around Mer'seb for a few days while they got it set up."
"Correct," Draycos said. "That may imply the Shamshir are aware of our interest and are trying to keep us from succeeding. But it may also imply there is something else about this mission that we are not being told."
"Could be." Jack scratched his cheek. "Though I suppose there could be a simpler explanation."
"Which is?"
"That the Shamshir simply changed their minds about where to put their transmitter," Jack said. "And no one bothered to tell any of us about it until now."
"But timely information is vital to a warrior's job," the dragon objected. "Surely they would not hold it back from us."
"Hey, I'm just a raw recruit," Jack said. "Remember? Nobody has to tell me anything."
"Talking to the window?" a familiar voice asked pleasantly from behind his shoulder.
Jack clamped down on his tongue as he felt Draycos slide quickly back to his usual position. "Hello, Alison," he said, turning to face her. "Sure. Doesn't everybody?"
"Don't tell me," she said. She plucked his pack from the seat beside him, dropped it unceremoniously onto the floor, and sat down. "Let me guess. You were staring at the window because you needed a moment to reflect."
Jack made a face. "That was pathetic. I hope you didn't come all the way over here just for that."
"No, mostly I wanted to see what the view was like out there," she said, craning her neck to look past him. "And to find out what you and Grisko were talking about."
Jack felt his eyes narrowing. "What do you mean?"
She gave him a patient look. "You. Grisko. Talk. Two minutes ago. You need me to spell any of the words for you?"
"No, I've got it, thank you," Jack growled. "Not that it's any of your immediate business, but we were discussing the fact that we're not going to November Six. We're going to Kilo Seven instead."
It was Alison's turn for narrowed eyes. "Why?"
"According to Grisko, the Shamshir moved their transmitt
er."
For a brief moment he thought he could see an echo of the emotional swirl in her eyes that he'd noticed once before. But then she just nodded. "Oh," she said.
" 'Oh'?" he repeated. "That's all? Just 'oh'?"
"What more is there?" she countered reasonably. "If the transmitter's been moved, we move with it."
He shrugged. "I suppose."
She tilted her head, her eyes shifting down from his face to his chest. "So that's what they're all talking about, huh?"
Jack frowned. "What?"
She nodded toward his chest. "Your dragon tattoo. Nice."
Jack looked down. Sure enough, part of Draycos's jaw was visible through the partially open shirt. "Oh, it's lots nicer than that," he assured her, putting a little boasting into his tone. "It goes all the way around, and then some. See?"
He pulled the collar a little to the side to reveal more of the dragon's face. The last thing he really wanted to do was advertise Draycos's presence this way, and he was pretty sure Draycos felt the same way. But he'd met enough men with tattoos to know you didn't get one with the idea of hiding it. Alison was pretty sharp, and if he didn't brag about his dragon, she might wonder why. "Here—the head's the best part," he went on, reaching for the shirt's sealing seam. "Let me get this open a little more—"
"No, that's all right," Alison said hastily. "Really. I was just wondering if it was like the one the Dragonbacks wore."
"I already told you I never heard of the Dragonbacks until a month ago."
"Maybe you didn't," she pointed out. "But your tattoo artist might have."
"Oh." That angle hadn't occurred to him. "Is it?"
"Is it what? Oh." Alison shook her head. "Not even close. The Dragonbacks had their tattoos between their shoulder-blades, just below the neck. A little dragon, coiled around itself into a circle. Nowhere near as big as yours."
"You seem to know a lot about them."
She shrugged. "Like I said, I do my research. Always terrific to talk to you."
She got up and headed back forward to her own seat. "Interesting," Draycos murmured.
"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.
CHAPTER 15
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 spac
eships 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."