Ice Dragon

«Right.»

«How far offshore?»

«Twelve valh.» (The standard Graduk measurement, equal to about two hundred yards.)

«And the shore is patrolled?»

«Damned right it is. You'd be picked up and squashed like bugs, trying to get across the beach.» Blade nodded. «I expected that. But are there any patrols offshore, on the lake side of the anchorage?»

«One boat, usually. Two or three men in it,» said the pilot. His face lit up as he grasped what Blade was getting at. So did Stramod's.

«Exactly,» said Blade. «We've got to get to the lake shore anyway. But once there, instead of marching clear around it and trying to get through the base, we can find boats and travel the rest of the way by water.» He turned to Stramod. «Are there any Union people you know living along the lake shore?»

Pnarr broke in before Stramod could reply. «Don't worry about that. One of the base sympathizers-a ground type, not a pilot-has a big boat on the lake. Big enough for all of you, I'll bet. Work out a rendezvous point and I'll have him be there. And it's a boat the patrol will let past into the anchorage because he uses it a lot to run out on service missions.» Pnarr's face was positively gleeful.

His good spirits were infectious; half or more of their problems seemed to have been washed away. Leyndt squeezed Blade's hand and he smiled back at her. There was still the problem of getting across to the lake, even though now the distance they would have to march was so reduced that they could in a pinch do it in a single night. Blade had a nasty feeling that if they tried that, they would face the prospect of having to abandon stragglers. But they would have won most of their battle by the time they reached the lake. At least if Pnarr was trustworthy-and Blade could judge only by what Stramod and Leyndt were saying to him.

Blade would have liked a word with Pnarr, or several words, to try to influence him. A fully fueled flier with a competent pilot was an essential part of his plans for discovering the truth about the aliens. But he had not had time to fully judge how to approach the man. And Pnarr himself had to make his way back to where he had left his car. There was, unfortunately, no way to gather together enough vehicles to carry them all to the lake shore without being noticed, and being noticed was the most important thing to avoid now. Next to missing the rendezvous, that is.

Blade did not really believe that they were not going to miss the rendezvous until thirty-six hours later, when he stood behind a bush on the shore of the lake, watching a broad-beamed slab-sided powerboat glide up to the shore until its bows scraped the rocky bottom. A man dressed only in shorts scrambled up onto the bow and threw a line ashore; Blade caught it and tied it to a bush. Then he whistled into the darkness behind him, and watched the darkness come alive as the party filed out of cover and stepped into the water, holding their weapons and gear above their heads. Although the water rose above most of their waists, they were silent, swift, and as efficient as any company of soldiers might have been.

Well, perhaps that was what they were turning into. They had had to leave nine people behind them along the grueling night march to the lake, nine people who could not go another step no matter how hard they tried. Fortunately the weather was warm and clear, and there were farms within a few hours' walk. Seven more had simply dropped out, refusing to trust themselves to the Treduki or the pilots, preferring to take their chances of slinking away into anonymity among those same farms. There was nothing to be done about either group; neither the weak in body nor the weak in heart would have any place in the north.

Nilando's urgings had kept a fair number of people going even after they left blood at each step; they, by all that was sacred, weren't going to collapse and let a damned Treduk call them weak! But more people were begi

Hobbling, gasping, limping, exhausted in body and mind, the survivors of the party had reached the lake shore just before the light became too strong to make traveling safe. An outbound flier screamed overhead at that exact moment, but they remembered their instructions and froze to the spot, not even looking up. Before the next one came over, they were under as much cover as a patch of forest could provide. They bathed their swollen feet, caught up on sleep, nibbled the last of their rations, and waited for darkness and the arrival of the boat.

The last two people in line were now passing Blade-Nilando and Rena, hand in hand, but with the other hand each holding a beamer high overhead. The water molded Rena's tunic against her lithe figure. Now Nilando was beckoning; Blade swung his own beamer up over his head and waded down into the water. He had barely scrambled over the side of the boat when its motor sprang to life and it began backing away from the shore and heading out into the lake.

Their craft was no speedboat, but the water was mirror-smooth and the wind as feeble as the puffs of air moving in a cave. It was as black as a cave, too, out on the water, with neither moon nor stars in the sky and the shores glowering in the distance without a light. Normally, Pnarr said, there would be a good many lights from the vacation homes and the like showing along the shore. But with all the uproar over the suppression of the Union, most people were too frightened to leave their homes in the comparatively well-patrolled cities and make their way to the lonely countryside. Sensible of them, Pnarr added, since if the Union really did want to launch a terror campaign the Conciliator soldiers couldn't do a damned thing about it! Bunch of stumble-footed incompetents, he concluded, with the normal lordly disdain of those who have their business in the high skies for those who plod along the ground.

It was two hours before the lights of the base showed clearly on the shore ahead, clearly enough to show the six big hydro-fliers anchored offshore and the complex of hangars and sheds that housed the others. To landward the base was well lit, with brilliant white lights pouring glare down on high chain-link fences. As they drew closer, Blade could see the shapes of sentries patrolling the fence. Getting in there from the shore would have been impossible. He went below and began to prepare for his assigned mission. In spite of his wounded thigh, he was still the best man for it.

When he returned to the deck, stripped to the skin and with his body blackened with camouflage cream, Stramod handed him a belt to tie around his waist, a belt from which hung six small but immensely powerful bombs and two fighting knives in sheaths. Beamers could not survive being submerged. Leyndt held out her hand to him and he grasped it briefly, but he was gri

One of the patrol boats was ambling slowly back and forth about two hundred yards away, the heads of three men visible inside it. He began to swim silently toward it, while the boat behind him continued on a course intended to draw the patrol toward him. Blade saw the patrol boat suddenly turn as its crew noticed the larger craft gliding across the water, heard a harsh challenge, saw one of the men in the patrol boat rise to his feet and flash a light toward the intruder. He gambled that they were now too preoccupied with the other boat to notice him, and quickened his stroke to a racing pace.