"That is a chance I must take."
Gilligan opened his mouth and found he didn’t have any more arguments. Karin obviously wasn’t thinking straight, but that didn’t matter. She was driven by an overpowering urge to do something, anything, except the intelligent thing, which was sit and wait.
Intellectually he could understand that. He felt the same way. But the kind of training it takes to fly a high-performance jet had drummed the value of patience into him. Dragon riding didn’t demand the same qualities, or maybe Karin was still too inexperienced to have learned them.
Gilligan considered knocking her out and tying her up. But Karin was lithe and strong. Then he considered Stigi’s likely reaction if he tried it and quickly discarded the notion.
The dragon rider set her jaw defiantly. "You have your own rations and equipment. I am sure that you will have no trouble reaching the far end of the island. I will give you a note so that your story will be believed should you meet one of our patrols. Then you can send help on to me."
"You’re crazy, you know that?"
Karin shrugged. "I have my duty."
Mick stepped forward and grasped her hands in his. "I’m not going to let you do this. Not alone." Karin looked at him and then smiled.
Hell of an expeditionary force, he thought as he pulled her close and kissed her hard. Two crazies and a gimpy dragon. Then he opened his eyes and looked at the woman in his arms.
Still, he thought, there are compensations in being crazy.
They spent the rest of the day packing and headed out across the plain the next morning. Karin took the lead with Gilligan beside her. Stigi followed at her heels like an overgrown hound.
The morning was bright and the sky was painted pastel blues and pinks by the rising sun. Except for an occasional broken limb or an uprooted tree there was nothing to suggest what had happened here two days ago. The plains animals had returned to their normal habits and several times they passed herds of them grazing in the distance.
Once Stigi bridled and snorted as though an animal had come near, but he quickly relaxed and resumed walking. Either there had been nothing there, Gilligan decided, or whatever it was had gotten a look at Stigi and decided not to try anything.
Thirty-four: REC0N BATTLE
For three days they trekked across the plain. The tree-studded veldt gave way to grassy savanna and the grass grew shorter and sparser. The soil was brick red now and vegetation grew poorly. Water was something you found in greenish sinks instead of rivers or streams and trees became a memory.
Several times they saw large columns of dust to the north, as if distant armies were on the march. They tried to go between them and saw nothing. The herds had been left behind them on the veldt and now even the antelopelike runners were scarce.
There were signs, however. Twice they crossed ground which had been torn up by treads. Once the tread marks were accompanied by what appeared to be enormous footprints, as if some unimaginable two-legged beast had been following the vehicles.
On mid-afternoon of the third day they were approaching a low ridge of reddish earth when Karin called a sudden halt.
"Wait." She held up her hand and dug something out of her pouch. "There is magic ahead of us."
Gilligan reached for his gun. "What kind?"
"It doesn’t tell me that, only…"
With a thundering roar a tank burst over the hill. Beside it came three two-legged robots, springing forward on back-flexing limbs. While the tank nosed up and over the hill, the robots leaped over the ridge like giant grasshoppers.
Stigi reared back, wings spread and neck extended, and roared a challenge. Karin dropped to one knee and had the bow off her shoulder and an arrow nocked in one fluid motion. Without seeming to aim she fired at the tank.
The arrow hit the tank’s armor without seeming effect. With a roar of its engine it continued down the hill straight at the party.
"Run for it!" Gilligan yelled and dashed to his left to try to circle the attackers. Seeing his action, Karin broke right.
Stigi had a different idea. The dragon inhaled and blasted a gout of flame straight ahead, bathing the tank in fire. The flame splashed off the tank, but here and there it caught. A tiny tongue of orange licked out of the deck behind the turret. It spouted thick black smoke and grew larger. The tank stopped and the tongue turned into a gout of orange and black as something in the machine’s engine compartment caught.
Meanwhile Karin had dropped to her knee and fired another arrow at one of the robots. Again her aim was true and again the robot continued to advance apparently unheeding.
Karin tried to run again, but as she rose she got tangled in the lower limb of her bow and went sprawling into the sand. She rolled to the side and threw her arm up in a futile attempt to shield herself from the advancing robot.
The robot never noticed. It continued unerringly straight toward the place where she had been. Then it emitted a despairing whine and toppled into the sand beside her.
Karin looked up, shook sand from her eyes and tried to locate Mick and Stigi.
Mick’s sudden dash had attracted the attention of two of the robots and now he was frantically dodging blasts of energy from their snout cannon. By a combination of broken field running and dive-and-roll, he had managed to stay ahead of them so far, but the robots had split up and they were coming at him from different directions.
Karin grabbed another arrow, but Stigi reached Mick first. With a roar, the dragon charged full on into one of the robots, catching it at knee level in a way that would have earned him a clipping penalty if they had been playing football. The robot lurched forward onto its snout, then got its feet under it and tried to rise.
It got halfway up when a whipping blow from Stigi’s tail hammered it to the ground again. This time the robot didn’t try to rise. It swiveled its body around to face the on-rushing dragon and let loose with a bolt from its cannon.
Fortunately energy cannons don’t work any better than regular ones when the barrel is full of sand. There was a muffled "whump" and the cannon barrel glowed cherry red and went limp. Stigi grabbed the fifteen-foot-tall robot in his powerful jaws and shook it the way a terrier shakes a rat, slamming it into the ground and tossing it into the air until pieces began to fly off.
Meanwhile, Karin’s arrow had found the third robot. It took two more steps and collapsed with the iron arrow sticking straight out of its back.
Craig frowned at the glowing display. He had sent a light scout force scooting along the southern edge of the play area to try to get behind his opponent’s main body. Now something had knocked them out.
Sending a stronger force south to engage whatever his scouts had hit was bad strategy. It would dilute his main strength. He decided to send a recon flier south to check it out. Then he turned his attention back to the battle that was shaping up between his warbot columns and his enemy’s main force. If he worked quickly enough he might be able to catch them in a pincer.
"Mick, are you all right?"
Gilligan put his hands on his knees and bent forward to take deep, heaving breaths. He was too winded to talk so he shook his head and made a waving off motion to Karin.
Mechanically, Karin walked over to the third robot and pulled her arrow out of its back.