Dragonback 02 Dragon and Soldier (6 page)

He was at the edge of a large gravel pit that stretched out for
probably a hundred yards, maybe fifty feet deep at its lowest point. A
dozen electronic targets had been set up at various places in the pit.

"Nothing like starting us off at long-range work," Jack muttered,
unlimbering his rifle and flipping off the safety. "Whatever happened
to 'Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes'?"

"Pardon?"

"Skip it." At least there was a conveniently shaped notch on top
of one of the rocks where he could brace the rifle. Setting the muzzle
into the notch, he started to get to his knees.

"Keep your head down," a girl's voice ordered.

Frowning, Jack rolled over onto his side and looked behind him.

It was Alison Kayna.

She was coming from the trees behind him, wriggling across the
open ground using the same elbows-and-knees crawl Draycos had just
taught him. Naturally, she was doing it better. "What did you say?" he
asked.

"I said keep your head down," she repeated, angling toward a
section of rock near Jack's. "They'll have snipers targeting us from
the far side of the gravel pit."

Jack shrunk down a little behind the protection of the rocks.
"Snipers?"

"You don't think this is just target practice, do you?" Alison
asked, puffing a little as she reached the rocks. "You've seen the
games Grisko likes to play. You think he'd pass up a golden opportunity
like this?"

"A golden opportunity for what?" Jack demanded. Suddenly the rock
he was leaning against didn't feel nearly so solid and secure anymore.
"Blowing our heads off?"

"Oh, get real," she scolded, unslinging her Gompers from across
her back. "They'll just be using marker lasers."

"Never heard of them."

"They cause a mild skin reaction. You don't even feel it, but the
mark shows up like a spot of sunburn."

Jack began to breathe a little easier. "Temporary, I hope."

"It lasts a day or two." Alison eased an eye up into a gap between
two rocks. "Shows where you got careless."

"Nice of them to tell us about this," Jack grumbled, rolling back
onto his stomach and sidling his way over toward a lower and better
protected gap in the rocks. "Good thing you know your way around this
stuff."

"I did some research," Alison said. "I gather you didn't."

"Not really," Jack said. He lined up his sights on one of the
distant targets, wondering if someone across the way was lining up
sights on him. "I figured they'd be giving us all the training we
needed."

"I wasn't talking about training," Alison said. "But that's
another point."

Carefully, Jack squeezed the trigger. There was a brief flash of
laser light accompanied by a soft hiss, and the spent power cartridge
ejected from the chamber. It rolled across the grass, trailing the
stink of chemical reactant behind it. "What's another point?"

"The training." There was a hiss from her direction as she
squeezed off a shot of her own. "Doesn't it strike you as odd that we
haven't even gotten to look at real weapons until now?"

Jack shrugged, lining up on another target. "It's only been five
days," he pointed out.

"Out of a total of ten," she countered. "Ten days of basic
training, then off we go. With most armies, this would run six weeks or
more."

"Yeah, but most of them would be going off to real wars," Jack
reminded her. "We'll just be doing garrison support duty."

"That's what Grisko
says
," she said ominously. There were
two more hisses from her position. "You run into a boy named Rogan
Mbusu yet?"

"Sure," Jack said. "Short kid, big ears. Claims to be fourteen."

Alison snorted. "Yeah, I've talked to him," she said scornfully.
"He's lucky if he's even seen twelve. Legally, you know, you're only
supposed to indenture kids fourteen and older."

"So the Edge bends the rules a little," Jack said. "What's your
point?"

"My point is I don't want to do even garrison duty with some kid
who's too young to know which end of his rifle goes where," she said
darkly. "Garrison workers can get just as dead as regular troops, you
know."

Jack grimaced. "You sound like my uncle. How come you know so
much?"

"Like I said, research," she said.

"Like my Aunt Fanny," Jack retorted. "Come on, you didn't get this
from any book."

Her lips compressed into a thin line. "If you must know, this is
my second try at this," she said. "I washed out of the first merc group
I was indentured to."

"And you came back for more?"

She shot him an icy glare. "My parents need the money. Yours
don't?" Without waiting for a reply, she turned back to her shooting.

Which was just as well, since Jack didn't have a ready answer for
that one.

For a few minutes they shot side by side in silence. Jack
alternated between several targets, wondering how he was doing.
Probably pretty lousy. Grisko would have a way of matching up the hits
to each of the trainees' guns after they were all done, but that didn't
do Jack any good right now.

"Why 'Dragonback'?" Alison asked suddenly.

Jack frowned. "What?"

"Grisko called you Dragonback earlier. When you walked off talking
to your gun."

Jack's ears reddened again. Probably the whole group had heard
that. Terrific. "I have a tattoo of a dragon across my back," he said.
"A big one."

"Something to do with the old Dragonback warriors?"

"Nope," Jack assured her. "In fact, I never even heard of them
until a month ago."

She grunted and resumed her firing. Five minutes later, her clip
of cartridges was empty. "I'm off," she announced, slinging the Gompers
over her back again and starting backwards in a reverse
elbows-and-knees crawl. "Make sure you fire your whole clip before
going back if you don't want Grisko to scorch your ears off. Hitting
the targets once in awhile would be nice, too."

"Thanks," Jack said dryly. "I'll see what I can do."

"And keep your head down," she warned.

A minute later, she was gone, vanished into the cover of the
trees. "Well, that was fun," he muttered.

"She has great courage," Draycos said. "I can hear it in her
voice."

"Or else she's just plain stupid," Jack said, picking a target and
firing off a round at it. "Her and her family both. How do people let
themselves get so desperate for money?"

"Many times it is not their fault."

"Most of the time it is," Jack said stubbornly.

"That sounds like your Uncle Virgil's philosophy."

"Leave Uncle Virgil out of this," Jack said, firing two more
shots. Missing both, probably. "Anyway, he knew how the real world
worked."

There was a short silence, just long enough for Jack to realize
that Draycos could easily have reminded him what Uncle Virgil had done
for a living. "Have you no compassion for the weak?" the dragon asked
instead.

"Compassion wasn't a big priority where I grew up," Jack said.
"And I never saw it do anyone any good."

"No one?"

Jack glanced a glare down at him. "How come we only have these big
moral discussions when Uncle Virge isn't around to help me defend
myself?"

"Do such discussions make you uncomfortable?"

Jack shook his head impatiently. "Can we just skip this?"

"Of course," Draycos said, as if he hadn't been the one who'd
brought it up in the first place. "Shall I give you my report on the
nighttime patrols?"

"Yeah, sure," Jack said. "Go ahead."

"There are four separate teams," Draycos said. "Two soldiers in
each. They pass within view of the main headquarters' entrance
approximately once every twenty minutes."

"How regular is that twenty minutes?" Jack asked.

"Close, but not exact," Draycos said. "The period has ranged from
eighteen to twenty-five minutes."

"Do they always come from the same directions each time?"

"Again, approximately," the dragon said. "I have noted slight
differences in the direction of approach, but nothing significant."

"A regular patrol pattern, then," Jack decided, his annoyance at
the dragon forgotten. Draycos might be the local expert on morals and
ethics, but putting puzzle pieces together was where Jack got to shine.
"If there's one thing Uncle Virgil taught me to love, it's regular
patterns."

"There may still be alarms on the doors," Draycos warned.

"I'm sure there are," Jack agreed. "And on the computer, too. But
I know how to handle those. My biggest worry was getting shot on the
way there."

"Do we then make our attempt tonight?" Jack fired his last two
rounds while he considered. "Let's give it one more night," he said.
"If the patrol pattern is still the same, we'll go tomorrow."

"And if we are successful?"

"Well, we're sure not going to hang around any longer than we have
to," Jack told him, slinging his rifle and starting to back up. As
before, the technique felt a lot more awkward than Alison had made it
look. "If Uncle Virge is on the ball, he'll have the
Essenay
stashed somewhere nearby. Once we've pulled everything the Edge has on
Djinn-90 fighters, we'll whistle him up and get out of here."

"And if we do not find what we need?"

"If they've got it, we'll find it," Jack said confidently. "If not
. . . well, we'll worry about that when it happens."

He reached the cover of the trees and stood up. "Come on. Let's go
see how I did."

"Not very well, I am afraid," Draycos said. "But do not be
discouraged. Long-range shooting is difficult to master."

"It could have been a lot harder," Jack pointed out. "A machine
gun, or even a semiautomatic projectile rifle . . ." He trailed off, a
strange thought striking him.

"Is there trouble?" Draycos asked.

"I was just thinking," Jack said slowly. "A flash rifle doesn't
have any kick. No recoil. You understand?"

"Yes."

"That makes it a lot easier to learn," Jack went on. "But it's
also a whole lot more expensive to shoot. Does that sound like the kind
of weapon you'd want beginners to start with?"

Draycos was silent a moment. "You are being taught to march and
stand in formation," he said. "From your books you are being taught the
words and expressions soldiers use, and a great deal of technical
information. Now you are learning how to shoot the easiest of possible
weapons."

"
And
, if you believe Alison's numbers, all of this is
happening in a quarter of the time regular soldiers need for their
training," Jack finished for him. "This is starting to feel a little
creepy."

"Yet as you yourself said, you are only being trained as garrison
assistants," Draycos reminded him. "Perhaps this is adequate for such
duty."

"Maybe," Jack said. "But like Alison said, you can get just as
dead in a garrison as you can out in the field."

Still, he reminded himself as he continued through the trees, he
wouldn't be staying for that part of the operation. Tomorrow night he
and Draycos would pull the information they needed, and then they would
be out of here. "Anyway, I'll bet I did better than you think," he
added.

"You have a tendency to shoot high," Draycos told him.

"I do not," Jack insisted. "You wait and see. You'll be eating
those words for your dinner."

"Pardon?"

Jack sighed. "Skip it."

Alison and Jommy, to Jack's complete lack of surprise, came out
first and second in the final tally.

To his rather annoyed surprise, he found that Draycos's evaluation
of his own shooting skills had been correct. He himself had finished a
less than glorious eighty-seventh.

But at least he'd only collected three sniper hits. Most of the
others, blissfully unaware of their true position in Grisko's shooting
gallery, had up to two dozen of the little marks.

Alison, naturally, had only one.

Dinner that night was grumpier than usual. Most of the recruits
seemed to think it had been a highly unfair trick to play on them, and
the majority seemed to blame Sergeant Grisko personally for it. Jommy
in particular was highly indignant, apparently feeling that his
twenty-one hits took a lot away from his otherwise impressive
second-place score.

Jack stayed out of the debate as best he could. There was no need
to get them thinking about his own low sniper hit rate. It might lead
to the unpleasant suspicion that he had been in on the scam from the
start.

After dinner there was a twilight marching drill, using real
Gompers flash rifles this time instead of the candy canes. Unloaded,
fortunately. Then came more study time, bedtime preparations, and
finally lights-out. Jack waited until the rest of the barracks was
asleep, then gave Draycos his meager meal and sent him to his washroom
window to watch.

It was somewhere in the middle of the night when he suddenly awoke.

For a minute he lay motionless in bed, trying to figure out what
had awakened him. Then, suddenly, he got it.

There was a rush of cool air rippling over him from the washroom
area where Draycos was supposed to be watching. Not the usual light
breeze that came from having the window open a crack while the dragon
peered out, but something stronger.

Silently, he climbed out of bed and padded barefoot across the
cold floor to the washroom. If this was nothing but a matter of the
wind having shifted direction during the night, he promised himself
darkly, he was going to be very annoyed.

The wind hadn't shifted direction. The breeze was stronger because
the window had been propped wide open. And Draycos was gone.

All right
, Jack told himself urgently.
Don't panic
.
Draycos wasn't lost, after all. He was just misplaced a little.

All right
. First off, it was for sure that none of the
roving patrols could have gotten him. Certainly not without making a
lot
of noise in the process. Wherever Draycos had gotten to, he'd gotten
there voluntarily.