Ice Dragon

Chapter 12

«Somebody's tracking us!» said Pnarr sharply.

Blade came out of his half-doze in an instant and looked at the control panel. The indicator light on the device that picked up radar waves aimed at the flier was flashing on and off like a demented firefly. He looked out the window. As it had been for the past half-hour, the shimmering, scarred surface of the glaciers was marching past below. There was nothing to show that any living creature might be down there. Nor, except for occasional black spurs of rock, was there anything to show that the whole world and indeed the whole universe had not turned to ice.

«Try to get a fix on it,» he said to Pnarr.

«That will attract attention,» said the pilot. «They'll know why we're up here.»

«They'll know we're not on a joy-ride regardless of what we do,» said Blade shortly, then regretted his irritation. Even Pnarr's iron nerves might reasonably be getting stretched by the strain of this endless flight into a northern nowhere, with no idea of when they might flush their quarry-or themselves become the hunted.

But Pnarr ignored Blade's tone and obeyed his orders, swinging the flier around in a wide circle while recording the indicator's readings as he did so. At the end of the circle he turned to Blade and said, «About a thousand valh, bearing two sixty. Do you want to fly directly over it?»

Blade nodded. «I want to attract attention. We'll never find out who's up here if they stay in hiding.»

«Or what,» said Pnarr shortly, and turned back to the controls. The flier banked again as he turned it onto a course that would take it nearly over the source of the scanning. Then he throttled back the engines, while Blade and Leyndt took up positions at the windows, staring down through the sun glare of the ice for any trace of radar screens, buildings, or anything built by hands-or claws or tentacles, Blade reminded himself.

They made three passes over the area, while the scanning from the ground remained steady. Blade and Leyndt stared down until the glare made their eyes burn and run, without seeing anything. Blade was not sure whether he was disappointed or not. Pnarr sent the agreed-upon «first contact» message back to the refugee's station in the woods near the lake; Blade hoped somebody was also listening out there among the glaciers. The more seriously the Ice Master-or somebody-took this flight, the happier he would be. They flew on, with Blade hoping his sensation of having crossed somebody's trip wire was correct.

The hours rolled by, the glaciers rolled by; Pnarr put on the auto-pilot and came back into the cabin for a meal of assorted concentrates, each one more tasteless and less chewable than the preceding. Leyndt curled up on the floor in a pile of blankets and went to sleep. Watching her made Blade yawn and want to join her; instead he splashed water on his face and went through a series of exercises until the knots in his muscles untied themselves.

More time went by, and both Pnarr and the fuel gauges made it plain that they were finally approaching the northern limit of their range. Another half-hour, and they would have to turn back southward. Then it was another twenty minutes, another ten, another five… Pnarr went forward to disengage the auto-pilot and take over the controls for the turnabout; Blade went aft to wake up Leyndt and tell her the bad news. He was on edge with frustrated anticipation; his great blow had after all been delivered into the empty polar air. He would have to settle down to the fight against the Ice Dragons alone, without knowing whether they were only pawns expended by the real-

The emergency alarm screamed like a trapped animal. Pnarr sat bolt upright in his seat, staring at the detector screens. Blade dashed forward into the cockpit and stared over the pilot's shoulder. Swimming in the darkness of the screens like luminous fish in a dim aquarium were five blips. They were approaching from the left, at a speed three times that of the flier, a speed that should bring them within sight almost at once. Blade lunged toward the left-hand window, stared out-and seconds later felt a churning mixture of cold apprehension and exaltation.

The five needle-slim shapes pacing the flier, wingless, finless, exhaustless, more featureless than the glaciers themselves, were as far beyond the flier as it was beyond the boats and pony carts of the Treduki. Their formation was so perfect and so rigid that they might have been fastened together by invisible bars, then suddenly it split apart in a metallic shimmering of sunlight spraying off polished hulls, as the five machines scurried to take up positions around the flier-two dead ahead, one dead astern, one off either wing. They matched its course and speed with as little effort as two men walking side by side might have done. For a moment Blade toyed with the idea of asking Pnarr to test them further by trying to change course, then rejected it. He had no idea what orders these machines or their pilots-if they had pilots-might have, or what they might interpret as a hostile move. Nor at this point did he care about minor details. They had alerted the hounds, and now the pack had found them and was leading them to the hunter.

For two hours more they flew north surrounded by the pack. Pnarr sat in the pilot's seat, hands rock-steady on the controls, face set like a rock also. In his pale face with the faint glaze of perspiration, Blade could however read no indication of fear.

Leyndt's face was also set and sweating, but her eyes were continually roving from the escorts to Blade and back again. She said very little, and that in a voice even more carefully controlled than usual. Once she said:

«Obviously a method of controlling gravity for both lateral and vertical motion. Also probably some form of repulsor field. They keep a constant distance from each other with remarkably few adjustments.»

— and another time she said:

«No signs of weapons. But against our flier, perhaps they would attack by ramming. Anything capable of those accelerations and decelerations would be strong enough for that.»

Apart from that she was mostly silent, but occasionally her hand would creep out and into Blade's, seeking the reassurance he could give her by squeezing it gently.

Blade's initial apprehension was gone, replaced by the every-sense-at-peak-efficiency reaction that usually came to him in the midst of a crisis, one that had saved his life more than a few times in both Home and X Dimensions. What had bothered him at first was not so much fear of losing his life, but of losing it before finding out anything about the aliens. Now that he could reasonably assume they were not simply going to destroy him on the spot, he could settle down to observing them as closely as possible. What chance he had of getting his observations out to the Union camp many thousands of miles to the south was another question entirely.

The endless flight over the endless ice attacked his sense of time to the point where he could not have told exactly how long it was before the five hounds began sliding downward, carefully matching their angle of descent to the flier's capabilities. They dropped steadily downward, toward a line of black fang-cragged peaks that jutted even above the miles-thick ice, slowing as they did so. They swept low above the peaks-and then Blade saw it.

A square of ice half a mile or more on a side had been planed flat as a table top and burnished to a dazzling blue-white sheen. In the center rose a low black rectangular structure, featureless at this height and distance; around the edges of the square rose alternating green and red cones. The whole square seemed to be covered with a fine grid of intersecting lines, like strings of beads laid across a mirror. The flier swept in toward the edge of the square, its guardians still holding formation around it, while Pnarr wondered out loud how in the name of all the seventy-nine spirits of the air he was supposed to land there.

As they passed over the edge of the square, the question was answered for them. It felt as though the flier had suddenly plunged nose first into a miles-deep bowl of oatmeal. It rocked and shuddered as whatever force was reaching up from the ice below dragged it to a dead stop, from five hundred miles an hour to zero in seconds. Blade gaped at the realization of what was involved in doing this, and doing it while acting equally on every molecule of matter caught within the field, so that the occupants of the flier did not hurl forward and pulp themselves against the cockpit windows. These beings could play games with gravity the way a child played with a chemistry set!

He was so caught up in marveling at the science represented by the field that for a moment he was not aware that it was now lowering the flier gently toward the ice. Blade looked out the window at the black building, found it as featureless close up as it had been from a distance, turned to look at the cones bordering the grid. The green ones, he noted, had four small yellow antennas sticking out of their points in an X-pattern, while the red ones ended in a translucent oval lens. He also noticed that at each corner of the grid a circular disc had flipped open, revealing a yawning black hole. Into these the five escorts were now dropping, each one flipping neatly up on end like a man making a precision dive and sliding vertically down out of sight. As the last one vanished, the flier itself touched down with a gentle bump, rocked for a moment as the field went off, then settled in place.

Blade found Leyndt holding onto both his arms. He could hardly blame her. He felt some need to hold onto a piece of reality himself, to fight off the massed fantasy that was pressing in on him from outside. After a moment, though, he gently disengaged her fingers and said, «Let's get on our clothes and go outside.» He grinned. «These people seem to have been rather polite so far. I'm sure they won't forget to send up a reception committee to greet us at the door.» She feebly imitated his own grin and turned away to the clothes locker.

Blade turned to Pnarr. The pilot was unbuckling himself and standing up, without taking his eyes off the scene outside. He looked tense but controlled and alert; he had never seemed to Blade the type to panic. Blade turned away and began pulling on the insulated trousers and parka that Leyndt handed him.

In a few minutes all three of them were suited up; each also carried a pack filled with emergency rations, ice-climbing gear, recording equipment, and spare charge packs for their beamers. Blade did not expect to need any of this, but was determined to be ready for exploration if the proprietors of their establishment allowed them the chance for any.

The cabin turned misty with condensation as the freezing air from outside poured in through the open hatch. Blade lowered himself down to the ice, tested his footing, then helped Leyndt down. Pnarr came last, locking the hatch behind him and giving the fuselage a furtive pat as he jumped down. They turned toward the black building, still as featureless as ever, but now sprawling squat and grim. Blade guessed it was at least five hundred feet by four hundred; its jet-black sides reflected not a glimmer of light. There seemed nothing better to do for the moment than to walk toward it.

They were only about a hundred feet from it when a door slid open at its base and the Ice Master stepped out to meet them.