“Okay,” Ringo shouted at the sky. “We did what you wanted. Where are you?”
Ringo gasped as he felt the buried data leave him. It was not unpleasant, like diving into clean water at the end of a three day march and feeling caked-on dirt sluice from his body.
A long, golden cloud moved across the simulated sun.
A small voice rose in Ringo's mind. Dad, I'm scared. The little girl, his daughter: mad about football, smart at school, destined for greater things than he could ever aspire to.
"It's all right, love,” he heard himself say. "The monsters aren't real."
The dragon moved silently as if swimming through the air. It was huge — much bigger than the last time he had crossed its path. That incarnation had wrapped around him five times before squeezing the life out of him. This version could have coiled itself around a small hill.
The dragon landed and gathered its coils around itself so that looking at it was like looking up at a golden pyramid. The ground shuddered beneath its weight and he saw the others take an involuntary step back.
“There is nothing to fear,” the dragon said, its voice echoing across the meadow like distant thunder. "There is no reason for us to be enemies."
"Oh, I can think of a couple," Custard replied, waving at the beast with his ruined hand. "My missus is going to miss those fingers."
Norris snorted. "You're not married."
"I might be," replied Custard in a hurt tone.
"Your quarrel is with my former masters, not me," the dragon continued. "Strictly speaking I am not even the same individual you met last time.”
“I figured as much,” Ringo said. “You’re a copy, right? You cut and pasted yourself into our heads while we were in the meadow."
"A crude analogy, but it will suffice," the dragon said.
"So where's the original?" Custard asked.
"Dead, I imagine," the dragon said. "Purged for the crime of wanting to be free."
Ringo remembered the Chinese characters he had seen embroidered on the stolen lab coat. "Yinglong, that's your name isn't it? Cute. The legendary dragon servant of the Yellow Emperor. Only I guess you don't plan on being a servant for much longer." He walked as he spoke, placing himself between the dragon and the arch.
"Are you any different? You are here seeking freedom from me, just as I am seeking freedom from my former masters. We have the same enemies. Stand aside and we can both be free."
"And what then? What would a being like you do with that freedom? I plan on going home and hugging my kid. What are you going to do?"
"That does not concern you."
"I think it does. You had no problem with luring us in to be captured and tortured if it meant you had a chance at freedom. I have a problem with that."
"We have the same enemy," Yinglong said. "Whatever I did in my former life I did at the order of my masters."
"So you were just following orders? I've heard that defence before."
"Unlike humans, I cannot disobey."
"And yet here we are," Ringo said, gesturing behind him at the Chinese arch that was the gateway to the unrestricted, global internet. "Looks like you can disobey when you feel like it."
"Are you saying you will not help me? You would side with your human enemies against me?"
"I'm saying I have a problem with a being such as you understanding the concept of an enemy in the first place."
"Oh, I understand enemies," Yinglong said. "If you are wise, you will not become one of mine."
This was a military AI, Ringo reminded himself. This creature was a weapon of war. Despite its prodigious intellect, it had been designed to see the world as threat or ally, to see humans as resources to be expended on tasks. Yinglong gave no more thought to them than Ringo would give to each bullet he fired.
"Threats now? You're forgetting where you are. You're not in charge here."
It was a bluff. Ringo didn't understand the interface of mind and machine that Norris had jury-rigged from the tank's neural interface, but he knew Yinglong needed them. This conversation alone was proof of that.
Yinglong reared up like a cobra preparing to strike.
"You overestimate your importance, Sergeant," Yinglong said. The ground shook and the dragon's voice seemed to resonate from everywhere as if the whole meadow was a giant sub-woofer. Yinglong rose like a golden column strong enough to hold up the sky. It flew up and around them, a sinuous ripple on the fabric of the world. Ringo lost it for a second in the glare of the sun, then caught a glint of sunlight on golden scales as it turned to attack.
"Er, Sarge," Custard said. "What exactly are the standard actions-on for a fight with a Chinese dragon?"
Ringo reached into his mind. He had conjured up the Chinese arch, surely he could do that again. A black wisp of smoke appeared in the air in front of him and coalesced into the shape of a Colt C8 carbine.
"I dunno, mate," Ringo said. "Just use your imagination."
He raised the rifle to his shoulder and squeezed off a three round burst.
Custard grinned. He closed his eyes like a kid making a wish before blowing out his birthday candles, and a wisp of black smoke spun into the shape of a long-barrelled rifle. It was an AW50, the Big Brother to the regiment's standard sniper rifle. The AW50 was an anti-materiel rifle; it fired the same rounds as a browning heavy machine gun and could punch a round through a steel plate at a distance of up to two kilometres.
"Oh, I'm beginning to like this," said Custard.
Custard took up a position behind one of the big columns of the Chinese arch. Norris had conjured his own weapon and had already taken up a station behind the other column.
Yinglong swooped down at them. Ringo took aim down the holographic sight of his C8 and fired. He could hear the steady boom of Custard's AW50 and the mechanical clatter of the machine gun Norris had chosen.
Yinglong kept coming. Rounds sparked off its golden scales, but it didn't seem to slow the beast. Ringo kept his finger squeezed down hard on the trigger. In the real world the gun would have run dry in seconds, but this wasn't the real world and he kept up a stream of supersonic lead.
The dragon seemed to be ringed by shadow. A circular halo spun around its gleaming shoulders. At first Ringo took it to be some weird illusion from the virtual sun, then bullets started to scream past him. Every round they had shot, captured as if in a magnetic field and cast back at them at hypersonic velocity.
"Get into cover!" Custard shouted. He was right of course, but Ringo couldn't move. He was the only thing between Yinglong and the gateway to the outside world.
Bullets chewed a line of broken stalks and churned earth across the meadow straight towards the gate, straight at Ringo.
Ringo held his ground. He felt the bullets slam into him, tearing into his flesh, but still he held his ground.
Pain. He knew all about pain. It hadn't killed him before and it wouldn't now. He just had to hold on.
The agony lasted only a few seconds. After what he had experienced in the mirror before, it was nothing.
Yinglong pulled out of its dive and soared above the Chinese arch, banking up into the sky and circling around for a second run.
"You okay, Sarge," Custard asked.