Ice Dragon

Chapter 12

«Somebody's tracking us!» said Pnarr sharply.

Blade came out of his half-doze in an instant and looked at the control panel. The indicator light on the device that picked up radar waves aimed at the flier was flashing on and off like a demented firefly. He looked out the window. As it had been for the past half-hour, the shimmering, scarred surface of the glaciers was marching past below. There was nothing to show that any living creature might be down there. Nor, except for occasional black spurs of rock, was there anything to show that the whole world and indeed the whole universe had not turned to ice.

«Try to get a fix on it,» he said to Pnarr.

«That will attract attention,» said the pilot. «They'll know why we're up here.»

«They'll know we're not on a joy-ride regardless of what we do,» said Blade shortly, then regretted his irritation. Even Pnarr's iron nerves might reasonably be getting stretched by the strain of this endless flight into a northern nowhere, with no idea of when they might flush their quarry-or themselves become the hunted.

But Pnarr ignored Blade's tone and obeyed his orders, swinging the flier around in a wide circle while recording the indicator's readings as he did so. At the end of the circle he turned to Blade and said, «About a thousand valh, bearing two sixty. Do you want to fly directly over it?»

Blade nodded. «I want to attract attention. We'll never find out who's up here if they stay in hiding.»

«Or what,» said Pnarr shortly, and turned back to the controls. The flier banked again as he turned it onto a course that would take it nearly over the source of the sca

They made three passes over the area, while the sca

The hours rolled by, the glaciers rolled by; Pnarr put on the auto-pilot and came back into the cabin for a meal of assorted concentrates, each one more tasteless and less chewable than the preceding. Leyndt curled up on the floor in a pile of blankets and went to sleep. Watching her made Blade yawn and want to join her; instead he splashed water on his face and went through a series of exercises until the knots in his muscles untied themselves.

More time went by, and both Pnarr and the fuel gauges made it plain that they were finally approaching the northern limit of their range. Another half-hour, and they would have to turn back southward. Then it was another twenty minutes, another ten, another five… Pnarr went forward to disengage the auto-pilot and take over the controls for the turnabout; Blade went aft to wake up Leyndt and tell her the bad news. He was on edge with frustrated anticipation; his great blow had after all been delivered into the empty polar air. He would have to settle down to the fight against the Ice Dragons alone, without knowing whether they were only pawns expended by the real-

The emergency alarm screamed like a trapped animal. Pnarr sat bolt upright in his seat, staring at the detector screens. Blade dashed forward into the cockpit and stared over the pilot's shoulder. Swimming in the darkness of the screens like luminous fish in a dim aquarium were five blips. They were approaching from the left, at a speed three times that of the flier, a speed that should bring them within sight almost at once. Blade lunged toward the left-hand window, stared out-and seconds later felt a churning mixture of cold apprehension and exaltation.

The five needle-slim shapes pacing the flier, wingless, finless, exhaustless, more featureless than the glaciers themselves, were as far beyond the flier as it was beyond the boats and pony carts of the Treduki. Their formation was so perfect and so rigid that they might have been fastened together by invisible bars, then suddenly it split apart in a metallic shimmering of sunlight spraying off polished hulls, as the five machines scurried to take up positions around the flier-two dead ahead, one dead astern, one off either wing. They matched its course and speed with as little effort as two men walking side by side might have done. For a moment Blade toyed with the idea of asking Pnarr to test them further by trying to change course, then rejected it. He had no idea what orders these machines or their pilots-if they had pilots-might have, or what they might interpret as a hostile move. Nor at this point did he care about minor details. They had alerted the hounds, and now the pack had found them and was leading them to the hunter.

For two hours more they flew north surrounded by the pack. Pnarr sat in the pilot's seat, hands rock-steady on the controls, face set like a rock also. In his pale face with the faint glaze of perspiration, Blade could however read no indication of fear.

Leyndt's face was also set and sweating, but her eyes were continually roving from the escorts to Blade and back again. She said very little, and that in a voice even more carefully controlled than usual. Once she said:

«Obviously a method of controlling gravity for both lateral and vertical motion. Also probably some form of repulsor field. They keep a constant distance from each other with remarkably few adjustments.»

— and another time she said:

«No signs of weapons. But against our flier, perhaps they would attack by ramming. Anything capable of those accelerations and decelerations would be strong enough for that.»

Apart from that she was mostly silent, but occasionally her hand would creep out and into Blade's, seeking the reassurance he could give her by squeezing it gently.

Blade's initial apprehension was gone, replaced by the every-sense-at-peak-efficiency reaction that usually came to him in the midst of a crisis, one that had saved his life more than a few times in both Home and X Dimensions. What had bothered him at first was not so much fear of losing his life, but of losing it before finding out anything about the aliens. Now that he could reasonably assume they were not simply going to destroy him on the spot, he could settle down to observing them as closely as possible. What chance he had of getting his observations out to the Union camp many thousands of miles to the south was another question entirely.

The endless flight over the endless ice attacked his sense of time to the point where he could not have told exactly how long it was before the five hounds began sliding downward, carefully matching their angle of descent to the flier's capabilities. They dropped steadily downward, toward a line of black fang-cragged peaks that jutted even above the miles-thick ice, slowing as they did so. They swept low above the peaks-and then Blade saw it.

A square of ice half a mile or more on a side had been planed flat as a table top and burnished to a dazzling blue-white sheen. In the center rose a low black rectangular structure, featureless at this height and distance; around the edges of the square rose alternating green and red cones. The whole square seemed to be covered with a fine grid of intersecting lines, like strings of beads laid across a mirror. The flier swept in toward the edge of the square, its guardians still holding formation around it, while Pnarr wondered out loud how in the name of all the seventy-nine spirits of the air he was supposed to land there.