Mikey was standing at the battlement braced like a sea captain facing into a storm. His hair was blown back and his clothes had been whipped about, but he stood firm and unrelenting, looking out over the valley. As he gazed on the roiling clouds of dust and debris below his smile reminded Craig of a picture he had seen once in Sunday school, of Moses looking out over the Promised Land.
Craig shook himself and looked around. The pennants on the castle towers had been torn to shreds by the blast. Half the roof tiles had been blown off the conical roof of the nearest tower and the chamber below gaped up. His robot guide lay in a twitching heap, unable to rise.
Mikey said something, but it didn’t register on Craig’s numbed and ringing ears.
"What?"
"I said, ’Neat huh?’ " Mikey half-shouted.
"What in the hell was that?"
"Like I said, a water balloon."
"Like hell!"
Mikey’s smile grew broader. "Nope. Take a sphere of water-just ordinary water-and squeeze it real hard. Pretty soon the atoms disassociate into hydrogen and oxygen. Then if you squeeze it hard enough those hydrogen atoms are forced close enough together that they fuse." He threw up his hands. "Poof! Instant H-bomb."
"Jesus Christ," Craig said. Then he looked out over the dust-filled valley. "Jesus H. Fucking Christ on a goddamn rubber crutch!"
"Hey, that was nothing. The castle’s shields took most of the blast so we only got a little of it. And the best part is that the spell to compress that water is so simple I can make my H-bombs any size I want. A hundred megatons, two hundred, even a thousand megatons, no problem."
Craig leaned against the battlement to ease his shaky knees. "That’s some water balloon. You ought to put one of those things in the nose of an ICBM."
"ICBMs? We don’ need no steenkin’ ICBMs. Combine that with the teleportation spell. What do you think would happen if you shoved a mother big bomb down into the planet’s crust?"
"Jesus," Craig breathed. "You could sink half a continent!"
Mikey’s smile grew wider. "If you do it right you should smash the world." He looked out past Craig, past the fortress and past the dissipating cloud.
"The whole fucking world," he repeated dreamily.
Thirty-three: A FRIGHTENED DRAGON
In spite of the night’s activities, Karin and Mick got an early start. Mick caught a quick bath in the freezing stream at first light while Karin spent time with Stigi. Then they set out on the hunt as dawn turned the sky red.
The pickings weren’t as easy as they had been. The dinosaurs had learned to be wary of the humans and keeping Stigi fed now involved more stalking. Fortunately Karin was adept at hunting with a bow.
Still it was nearly noon before they found a likely looking herd and moved into position downwind for the stalk.
Karin was just sizing up the situation when a second sun blossomed in the northern sky. In an instant the world turned overexposed blue-white with stark black shadows, as if a gigantic flashbulb had gone off behind them.
"Get down!" Mick yelled and pulled Karin down beside him.
"What…" The dragonrider tried to look back toward the source of the flash, but Gilligan reached out and forced her head down.
"Don’t look! Keep your head down and close your eyes."
"I…" Karin begin, but her voice was drowned out when the shock wave hit.
Gilligan pressed his face into the dirt and screamed at the top of his lungs as the wall of dust and flying debris passed over them. The wind yanked at his flight suit and the wind-driven sand stung his exposed skin. He kept his head down and his eyes screwed shut until the gale ceased.
When he opened his eyes Karin was staring at him in shock. She tried to get up but at that instant the ground shock wave hit them and she was knocked first to her knees and then flat as the earth trembled beneath her. She lay on her stomach and clutched at the ground with clawed fingers as if she was afraid the shaking would throw her off.
Gilligan waited until everything was still and probably quiet-his ears were ringing so he couldn’t tell-before he climbed shakily to his knees and looked around.
Dust stained the sky an ugly mustard yellow and dimmed the sun to a reddish disk. One of the nearby trees had been blown down and limbs had broken off several others. In the distance a herd of reptiles stampeded blindly, bellowing their panic across the plain.
"Okay, you can get up now."
Karin’s face was white where it was not smudged with dirt and her freckles stood out starkly.
"Mick, what was that?" She clung to his forearms to hold herself erect.
"Let’s get out of here," Gilligan said grimly.
"But Stigi needs to eat."
"He’ll have to hunt for himself if we both die of radiation poisoning. Now let’s get the hell out of the open!"
She bent and retrieved her bow. "He will be frightened," she said by way of agreement.
He’s not the only one, Gilligan thought.
Karin was right. Stigi was blundering around roaring in fear and pain. The campsite was a wreck where the dragon had lumbered through it, flattening shelters and mashing things into the dirt.
The dragon rider set about the task of trying to calm her mount while Gilligan gathered everything of value and flung it under the overhanging rock for protection from fallout. He kept his eye on the skies, looking for rain clouds.
"Karin, get over here!"
"But Stigi needs me."
"Bring him here then. But get the hell under cover."
She led the dragon over to the rock shelter, still patting his great scaled neck and talking to him in soothing tones.
"Get in here with me and have him lay down next to the overhang so he blocks the entrance," Gilligan commanded.
For once Stigi did not object to Gilligan’s proximity. It was hard to imagine an eighty-foot monster cowering, but this one was shivering from fang to tail tip. Karin kept patting his back and talking to the dragon even after it lay down.
Gilligan checked his shoulder holster and found that about a handful of sand had gotten into it when he hit the dirt. Rummaging through the haphazard pile of equipment he found his cleaning kit and proceeded to field strip and clean his Beretta.
Objectively it didn’t help much, but it made him feel better.
"You said you would tell me what that was later," Karin said after a time. "Is now later enough?"
"It was an air burst," Gilligan said tightly. "I don’t know how big because I don’t know how far away."
He looked out around the quaking dragon at the sky. "Pretty far, I think. There’s no sign of blast-induced rain."
"It wasn’t natural, was it? I mean it isn’t something that just happens here?"