Dragon And Soldier

Chapter 6

She was coming from the trees behind him, wriggling across the open ground using the same elbows-and-knees crawl Dray-cos had just taught him. Naturally, she was doing it better. "What did you say?" he asked.

"I said keep your head down," she repeated, angling toward a section of rock near Jack's. "They'll have snipers targeting us from the far side of the gravel pit."

Jack shrunk down a little behind the protection of the rocks. "Snipers?"

"You don't think this is just target practice, do you?" Alison asked, puffing a little as she reached the rocks. "You've seen the games Grisko likes to play. You think he'd pass up a golden opportunity like this?"

"A golden opportunity for what?" Jack demanded. Suddenly the rock he was leaning against didn't feel nearly so solid and secure anymore. "Blowing our heads off?"

"Oh, get real," she scolded, unslinging her Gompers from across her back. "They'll just be using marker lasers."

"Never heard of them."

"They cause a mild skin reaction. You don't even feel it, but the mark shows up like a spot of sunburn."

Jack began to breathe a little easier. "Temporary, I hope."

"It lasts a day or two." Alison eased an eye up into a gap between two rocks. "Shows where you got careless."

"Nice of them to tell us about this," Jack grumbled, rolling back onto his stomach and sidling his way over toward a lower and better protected gap in the rocks. "Good thing you know your way around this stuff."

"I did some research," Alison said. "I gather you didn't."

"Not really," Jack said. He lined up his sights on one of the distant targets, wondering if someone across the way was lining up sights on him. "I figured they'd be giving us all the training we needed."

"I wasn't talking about training," Alison said. "But that's another point."

Carefully, Jack squeezed the trigger. There was a brief flash of laser light accompanied by a soft hiss, and the spent power cartridge ejected from the chamber. It rolled across the grass, trailing the stink of chemical reactant behind it. "What's another point?"

"The training." There was a hiss from her direction as she squeezed off a shot of her own. "Doesn't it strike you as odd that we haven't even gotten to look at real weapons until now?"

Jack shrugged, lining up on another target. "It's only been five days," he pointed out.

"Out of a total of ten," she countered. "Ten days of basic training, then off we go. With most armies, this would run six weeks or more."

"Yeah, but most of them would be going off to real wars," Jack reminded her. "We'll just be doing garrison support duty."

"That's what Grisko says," she said ominously. There were two more hisses from her position. "You run into a boy named Rogan Mbusu yet?"

"Sure," Jack said. "Short kid, big ears. Claims to be fourteen."

Alison snorted. "Yeah, I've talked to him," she said scornfully. "He's lucky if he's even seen twelve. Legally, you know, you're only supposed to indenture kids fourteen and older."

"So the Edge bends the rules a little," Jack said. "What's your point?"

"My point is I don't want to do even garrison duty with some kid who's too young to know which end of his rifle goes where," she said darkly. "Garrison workers can get just as dead as regular troops, you know."

Jack grimaced. "You sound like my uncle. How come you know so much?"

"Like I said, research," she said.

"Like my Aunt Fanny," Jack retorted. "Come on, you didn't get this from any book."

Her lips compressed into a thin line. "If you must know, this is my second try at this," she said. "I washed out of the first mere group I was indentured to."

"And you came back for more?"

She shot him an icy glare. "My parents need the money.

Yours don't?" Without waiting for a reply, she turned back to her shooting.

Which was just as well, since Jack didn't have a ready answer for that one.

For a few minutes they shot side by side in silence. Jack alternated between several targets, wondering how he was doing. Probably pretty lousy. Grisko would have a way of matching up the hits to each of the trainees' guns after they were all done, but that didn't do Jack any good right now.

"Why 'Dragonback'?" Alison asked suddenly.

Jack frowned. "What?"

"Grisko called you Dragonback earlier. When you walked off talking to your gun."

Jack's ears reddened again. Probably the whole group had heard that. Terrific. "I have a tattoo of a dragon across my back," he said. "A big one."

"Something to do with the old Dragonback warriors?"

"Nope," Jack assured her. "In fact, I never even heard of them until a month ago."

She grunted and resumed her firing. Five minutes later, her clip of cartridges was empty. "I'm off," she announced, slinging the Gompers over her back again and starting backwards in a reverse elbows-and-knees crawl. "Make sure you fire your whole clip before going back if you don't want Grisko to scorch your ears off Hitting the targets once in awhile would be nice, too."

"Thanks," Jack said dryly. "I'll see what I can do."

"And keep your head down," she warned.

A minute later, she was gone, vanished into the cover of the trees. "Well, that was fun," he muttered.

"She has great courage," Draycos said. "I can hear it in her voice."

"Or else she's just plain stupid," Jack said, picking a target and firing off a round at it. "Her and her family both. How do people let themselves get so desperate for money?"

"Many times it is not their fault."

"Most of the time it is," Jack said stubbornly.

"That sounds like your Uncle Virgil's philosophy."

"Leave Uncle Virgil out of this," Jack said, firing two more shots. Missing both, probably. "Anyway, he knew how the real world worked."

There was a short silence, just long enough for Jack to realize that Draycos could easily have reminded him what Uncle Virgil had done for a living. "Have you no compassion for the weak?" the dragon asked instead.

"Compassion wasn't a big priority where I grew up," Jack said. "And I never saw it do anyone any good."

"No one?"

Jack glanced a glare down at him. "How come we only have these big moral discussions when Uncle Virge isn't around to help me defend myself?"

"Do such discussions make you uncomfortable?"

Jack shook his head impatiently. "Can we just skip this?"

"Of course," Draycos said, as if he hadn't been the one who'd brought it up in the first place. "Shall I give you my report on the nighttime patrols?"

"Yeah, sure," Jack said. "Go ahead."

"There are four separate teams," Draycos said. "Two soldiers in each. They pass within view of the main headquarters' entrance approximately once every twenty minutes."

"How regular is that twenty minutes?" Jack asked.

"Close, but not exact," Draycos said. "The period has ranged from eighteen to twenty-five minutes."

"Do they always come from the same directions each time?"

"Again, approximately," the dragon said. "I have noted slight differences in the direction of approach, but nothing significant."

"A regular patrol pattern, then," Jack decided, his annoyance at the dragon forgotten. Draycos might be the local expert on morals and ethics, but putting puzzle pieces together was where Jack got to shine. "If there's one thing Uncle Virgil taught me to love, it's regular patterns."

"There may still be alarms on the doors," Draycos warned.

"I'm sure there are," Jack agreed. "And on the computer, too. But I know how to handle those. My biggest worry was getting shot on the way there."

"Do we then make our attempt tonight?" Jack fired his last two rounds while he considered. "Let's give it one more night," he said. "If the patrol pattern is still the same, we'll go tomorrow."

"And if we are successful?"

"Well, we're sure not going to hang around any longer than we have to," Jack told him, slinging his rifle and starting to back up. As before, the technique felt a lot more awkward than Alison had made it look. "If Uncle Virge is on the ball, he'll have the Essenay stashed somewhere nearby. Once we've pulled everything the Edge has on Djinn-90 fighters, we'll whistle him up and get out of here."

"And if we do not find what we need?"

"If they've got it, we'll find it," Jack said confidently. "If not... well, we'll worry about that when it happens."

He reached the cover of the trees and stood up. "Come on. Let's go see how I did."

"Not very well, I am afraid," Draycos said. "But do not be discouraged. Long-range shooting is difficult to master."

"It could have been a lot harder," Jack pointed out. "A machine gun, or even a semiautomatic projectile rifle ..." He trailed off, a strange thought striking him.

"Is there trouble?" Draycos asked.

"I was just thinking," Jack said slowly. "A flash rifle doesn't have any kick. No recoil. You understand?"

"Yes."

"That makes it a lot easier to learn," Jack went on. "But it's also a whole lot more expensive to shoot. Does that sound like the kind of weapon you'd want beginners to start with?"

Draycos was silent a moment. "You are being taught to march and stand in formation," he said. "From your books you are being taught the words and expressions soldiers use, and a great deal of technical information. Now you are learning how to shoot the easiest of possible weapons."

"And, if you believe Alison's numbers, all of this is happening in a quarter of the time regular soldiers need for their training," Jack finished for him. "This is starting to feel a little creepy."

"Yet as you yourself said, you are only being trained as garrison assistants," Draycos reminded him. "Perhaps this is adequate for such duty."

"Maybe," Jack said. "But like Alison said, you can get just as dead in a garrison as you can out in the field."

Still, he reminded himself as he continued through the trees, he wouldn't be staying for that part of the operation. Tomorrow night he and Draycos would pull the information they needed, and then they would be out of here. "Anyway, I'll bet I did better than you think," he added.

"You have a tendency to shoot high," Draycos told him.

"I do not," Jack insisted. "You wait and see. You'll be eating those words for your dinner."

"Pardon?"

Jack sighed. "Skip it."

Alison and Jommy, to Jack's complete lack of surprise, came out first and second in the final tally.

To his rather annoyed surprise, he found that Draycos's evaluation of his own shooting skills had been correct. He himself had finished a less than glorious eighty-seventh.

But at least he'd only collected three sniper hits. Most of the others, blissfully unaware of their true position in Grisko's shooting gallery, had up to two dozen of the little marks.

Alison, naturally, had only one.

Dinner that night was grumpier than usual. Most of the recruits seemed to think it had been a highly unfair trick to play on them, and the majority seemed to blame Sergeant Grisko personally for it. Jommy in particular was highly indignant, apparently feeling that his twenty-one hits took a lot away from his otherwise impressive second-place score.

Jack stayed out of the debate as best he could. There was no need to get them thinking about his own low sniper hit rate. It might lead to the unpleasant suspicion that he had been in on the scam from the start.

After dinner there was a twilight marching drill, using real Gompers flash rifles this time instead of the candy canes. Unloaded, fortunately. Then came more study time, bedtime preparations, and finally lights-out. Jack waited until the rest of the barracks was asleep, then gave Draycos his meager meal and sent him to his washroom window to watch.

It was somewhere in the middle of the night when he suddenly awoke.

For a minute he lay motionless in bed, trying to figure out what had awakened him. Then, suddenly, he got it.

There was a rush of cool air rippling over him from the washroom area where Draycos was supposed to be watching. Not the usual light breeze that came from having the window open a crack while the dragon peered out, but something stronger.

Silently, he climbed out of bed and padded barefoot across the cold floor to the washroom. If this was nothing but a matter of the wind having shifted direction during the night, he promised himself darkly, he was going to be very annoyed.

The wind hadn't shifted direction. The breeze was stronger because the window had been propped wide open. And Draycos was gone.