The view remained largely unchanged for ten minutes more, then Scar brought the shuttle down lower still so it sped along a straight lane between looming walls of trees. Below, three tracks, each five yards wide and spaced forty yards apart, had been crushed through a dense tangle of bluish bracken, parsleys and brambles. Soon they came in sight of the massive machine responsible: the beetle-shaped agrobot was two hundred yards long and a hundred wide, and mounted on three sets of three huge cage-ball wheels, which enabled so massive a machine to manoeuvre with remarkable accuracy. But it was going nowhere at the moment, since two of the cage balls had collapsed. Scar swung the shuttle in a wide circle around this behemoth, checking the ground below with infrared and carbon dioxide emission scanners. But nothing showed up, and Thorn wondered if Aelvor had yet started introducing large animals—or if he ever would. Perhaps he did not like what creatures like deer might do to his newly planted saplings.
After this survey, the dracoman finally brought the shuttle down directly behind the mechanical colossus. Even before the shuttle landed, its side-ramp doors began to open. Dracomen started disembarking the moment a wide enough gap opened; leaping fifteen feet down into the vegetation as if the drop was nothing to them. As soon as the shuttle settled, Scar unstrapped himself and stood up from his saddlelike seat. Thorn stood also and followed him out into the bracken. Here the dracomen only became visible when they moved—their scales transforming in both colour and texture to match their surroundings. Dressed in simple green fatigues, Thorn himself was the only one clearly visible.
Then, as if showing sympathy to him, all the dracomen simultaneously returned to their natural colour.
‘Remember,’ said Thorn, ‘we want to take some of them alive.’ Scar wrinkled his lips away from sharp ivory in a manner not exactly reassuring, then made a spearing gesture with his hand, and they set out. With their high-stepping birdlike gait the dracomen easily picked their way through the thick-growing brambles and bracken, then slowly they began to fade as they once again began to camouflage themselves. Thorn stood and watched them go, and really wanted to follow, but realized that would be pointless.
Landing directly on top of the Separatist encampment would remove any element of surprise, since the shuttle’s arrival would be detected long before. This highway for the massive agrobots was the nearest place to the encampment for a shuttle to find a plausible reason for landing. Aelvor had somehow caused the agrobot to break down at this point, so anyone listening and watching would think their shuttle contained a maintenance crew. It was a good plan since, on foot, dracomen could cover the intervening terrain very quickly. Thorn, being very fit and physically strong, and possessing reserves at their maximum, could also have covered the forty miles of forest easily enough, but in his case it was a question of how fast. He remembered once running with Scar through the foothills of the Masadan mountains, hunting a hooder on which they intended to plant transponders so that the monstrous predator’s location would always be known. Their pace then had been an even jog, and Thorn had thought it time they picked it up a little.
‘Can you go any faster than this?’ he had asked the dracoman on that occasion.
Scar fixed him with that big-eyed gaze, ‘Can you?’ Thorn accelerated until he was running full-pelt along the stony trail. He glanced at Scar and saw that the dracoman’s pace seemed almost unchanged, yet still he kept up.
After a moment Thorn said, ‘Show me, then.’
One moment Scar was loping along beside him, the next moment he took off like an ostrich, kicking up wet shale as he accelerated. Thorn watched him go, tracked him moving further along the path, then turning left up the slope until soon out of sight. After about five minutes he heard something approaching to his rear, and glanced back to see the dracoman speeding up behind him. Scar again settled to that jogging pace beside him.
‘In miles per hour?’ Thorn had asked.
‘Ninety to a hundred… on level ground,’ Scar replied.
‘Okay, maybe we’ll stick to my pace for now.’
It was a chastening memory.
Thorn now returned to the shuttle, donned his VR headgear, and began selecting views to observe. Soon the dracomen moved from tangled growth to clearer ground below the trees. They picked up their pace and became more visible, as their skin failed to compensate fast enough to the changing surroundings. Then, again almost as one, they returned to their natural coloration.
‘Scar,’ he said over com, ‘let me know when you’re about to attack. I’ll then launch and head over towards you. That might provide further distraction.’
Scar’s reply was merely a grunt, whereupon Thorn decided to shut up, sit back, and enjoy the show. A half-hour more of forest scenes resulted in him impatiently removing the headgear to go in search of a tab-pull coffee from the shuttle’s supplies. Returning to his seat and replacing the helmet, the first thing he heard was Scar’s voice: ‘We attack.’
Thorn spilt his coffee, swore, then quickly called up the feed from Scar’s camcom: pulse-rifles firing through the trees, shots stitching across a thick trunk, momentary glimpse of an autogun bolted to another trunk, an explosion, a tree falling. Two figures, human, a blurred shape between, and the double thump of stun discharge, two figures falling wrapped in small lightnings. Tents: chameleon cloth. Stun fire. A turbine winding up to speed somewhere. Thorn flicked through views, caught a glimpse of an AG scooter slamming into a tree. Another view: a man firing his weapon at the dracoman through whose camcom Thorn watched, muzzle-flash, flame and smoke then foliage and sky, then the dracoman was abruptly back upright again as the man turned away. A stun discharge threw the man down on his face. Then back to Scar, walking now.
‘We are done.’
Thorn sat very still, checked the time display in the corner of his visor, then shivered involuntarily. So much for his idea of launching the shuttle as a distraction. Abruptly the entire range of frames before his eyes then froze.
‘Scar cannot hear us,’ said Jack. ‘Observe this.’
Without Thorn doing anything, his VR gear selected a frame and the scene it displayed went into fast reverse, froze, then played forwards. He watched a man swinging his pulse-rifle round and begin firing. The shots slammed into a dracoman’s chest, juddering it to a halt then flinging it back. The man swung away to aim elsewhere. From a prone position the dracoman flipped forward and upright, fired on the man and brought him down, then it ran on. Half its chest was missing, the resultant cavity smouldering.
‘I’m glad they’re on our side,’ whispered Thorn.
‘If they really are,’ replied Jack.
Thorn’s view returned to encompass all the separate frames again. As the AI withdrew, he selected Scar’s frame in time to observe the dracoman brandishing a ceramo-carbide knife. Scar was busy removing leaf mould from around what looked like a small antipersonnel mine.