Nothing But Blue Skies (32 page)

The man gulped, hopped into the jeep, hopped a bit too far, slumped against the insecurely fastened passenger door, fell out onto the tarmac, nutted himself and went to sleep.
Oh, for crying out loud
, Karen muttered to herself. Then she got in and started the engine. That was when the helicopters showed up.

Karen had a bet with herself. She bet ten pence that the big helicopter - the one with the Oerlikon cannons sticking out of the side windows - would crash-land slap-bang on top of the concrete shed. A moment or so later, she made a mental note that she owed herself money.

Fortunately for her peace of mind, the other two helicopters went away. She watched to see which direction they headed in, then set off after them across a flat stretch of desert and up a steepish hill. Once she reached the top, she had a pretty good idea where she was meant to go.

The problem would be getting in, or at least getting in without massive loss of life. The huge square building was ringed with high wire fences studded with searchlight towers and heavy-weapons emplacements. It didn't take a Sandhurst education to figure out what would happen if several of them started shooting at the same time. True, once that happened getting in would be a simple matter of picking her way carefully through the rubble; but she had reason to believe that there were people she cared for inside there. Had to find a better way.

She thought about it for a while, sitting in a jeep on top of an escarpment with a splendid view out over a huge, empty desert.

Stuff it
, she thought.

Karen closed her eyes, all three of them, and tried to remember who she really was. Normally the whole procedure would have taken no more than a tenth of a second, so fast as to be invisible, but it had been a long time, during which she'd made various promises to herself whose threads had now seized, whose lids refused to come off, whose sashes had been painted shut . . .

She remembered her arms and legs first; and they started to grow. Then her spine shot up, like Jack's beanstalk, until standing upright and supporting the weight of the upper part of her body became downright painful; so she dropped onto all fours, just as her fingers sprouted like crocuses in spring into arched talons. The joy she felt when her wings came back startled her by its intensity; a second or two later, she simply couldn't understand how she'd managed to live so long without them and not go mad with grief and frustration. Getting her own snout and jaws back was sheer bliss, like getting out of a pair of trousers that fitted you before you put on those extra inches. The wonderful sense of balance the weight of her tail gave her; the deep satisfaction of being twenty feet long again; the shocking realisation of how much she'd missed through throttling her vision back to fit into human eyes; when she tried to remember her human body, it was like snatching at the shirt-tails of a dream, the last fragments of an absurdly impossible illusion. It was impossible to live in something that small and crude, surely.

The first few wing-beats were agony, and she dropped down onto her feet, like someone who's tried to climb into a bath that's far too hot, or stood up suddenly without realising their feet have gone to sleep. This time she flexed her wings carefully in slow motion before trying to put any force behind them. It did the trick, slowly squeezing the cramp like toothpaste out of the muscles and tendons. Before she knew it she was twelve feet off the ground, relishing the lightness of her broad, thin-walled hollow bones. She could feel the beating of her two redundant hearts, and the sense of supreme self-confidence she drew just from knowing how incredibly strong her chest and back muscles were, filled her with arrogant joy. For the first time in her life, she was self-consciously being a dragon, understanding what it meant to be who she really was. It would have been perfectly easy for her to believe that this moment was what she'd been aiming for all along, the purpose of the experiment, the real reason why she'd done it; it was one of those moments that change everything, when suddenly you know instead of just suspecting.

Calm down
, Karen told herself, and made herself remember what had been in her mind (that funny little black-and-white human mind) when she started this. The recollection made her want to burst into tears. This was just a temporary expedient, to get her from where she was now into the building without risking an artillery duel between the various gun emplacements (whereas if they all fired straight up in the air, at her, there could be no harm done . . .) Once she'd crossed those miserably few wing-beats of air onto the roof of the building she'd have to put it all away again and get back into her work clothes—

Fit herself back into the bottle? No, she couldn't, the very thought was enough to make her panic. Not going back in there,
not
. . . But she had to.

Duty calls
, she thought.
Ah well
.

Two wing-beats and she was airborne and climbing. She gained a little height, put her wings back and started to glide, fluttering from time to time just to slow herself down and keep on course for a perfect landing. She noticed the first two or three anti-aircraft shells - so that was how a windscreen felt on a motorway, she thought, when the flies hit it - and then tuned them out as irrelevant. The thought that they could harm her, that anything could harm
her
, wasn't worth the neurons it was coded onto. She saw one coming, swallowed it neatly, turned it round with the tip of her tongue and spat it out as far as she could make it go (and that's the true story behind the so-called Adelaide Sewage Farm Bombing). As the felt roof grew larger beneath her she tasted her airspeed with her third eye, and when the flavour was just right, she spread her wings, catching the air like a fish in a keepnet, and stuck out her legs. Good landing; no shock of impact as her talons touched down, it was as effortless as stepping off the last stair. With a sigh, she walked out of the sky and let her knees take her insubstantial weight.

Well
, she told herself,
here we are
.

The guns had stopped firing. The alarms were still blaring away - why was it, she thought, that humans thought it helped in times of emergency to have a noise so loud you couldn't hear what your superior officers were trying to tell you to do? - and there were people running about in all directions in the courtyard below. The temptation to play with them was hard to resist (but resisting that temptation was the very essence of duty, and duty was calling). It was time to go back.

Karen didn't want to go back. Back, she told herself, sucks.

—And really, was there any need? She was a dragon, dammit. All she had to do was stick out a claw, peel the lid off this silly building and keep breaking bits off it till she found what she was looking for; her father, of course, and—

—And . . .

—
Whatsisface. Him. Thing. You know, on the tip of my tongue. Begins with P
.

—Rhymes with ‘small'
.

—And the human. Find them, scoop them up gently in her micrometer-precise claws (weapons so gentle she could use them to peel apart the membranes of a leaf) and fly away into the desert, where the scale was something sensible and a person could be a normal size without attracting unwanted attention. Then they could all go home. Wherever the hell, she reflected bitterly, that was.

Home wasn't where the heart was. Home was what guilt pinned you to, your dried, brittle wings forever stretched out in a pitiful mockery of flight. Home was where you belonged.

Bugger
, Karen thought; and put her wings up with a snap. She made herself small again: she was one of those umbrellas that folded away into a handy size for carrying in a pocket, she was the integral hood that packs away inside the jacket collar. A few seconds later, she was
tiny
, standing alone on a roof in the middle of a vast desert.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘E
xcuse me,' said the woman in the white lab coat, ‘but can you tell me the way to the staff canteen? I've only been here two years,' she explained.

The dragon nodded. ‘Of course,' he said. ‘Go down this corridor to the end, up two flights, at the top of the stairs turn left, then right, then right again till you come to a fire door; go past that, turn left, then left again, down one flight, brings you to a long corridor, sixth door on the right, you can't miss it. If you pass a fire extinguisher on your left, you've gone too far.'

The woman blinked. ‘Fine,' she mumbled, ‘thanks.'

‘No problem,' the dragon said, and smiled.

When the woman was safely out of earshot, Gordon grabbed the dragon by the sleeve. ‘How the hell did you know all that?' he asked. ‘Third eye?'

‘No, I was making it up,' the dragon replied. He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Actually, if she follows those directions she'll end up in the closed file store, but who gives a damn? Serves her right for not keeping her eyes open.' He pointed to the door next to him, which was clearly marked STAFF CANTEEN.

‘I see,' Gordon replied. ‘While we're on the subject, is your third eye or your X-ray vision or whatever it is showing you the way out of this building? Or are you making that up too?'

‘No need to get all hostile,' the dragon replied. ‘It's not far now.'

‘You said that half an hour ago,' Zelda pointed out.

‘So it wasn't far then, either. It's even nearer now. You've got to make allowances for the fact that I don't judge distances the way you do. Dammit,' he added, ‘most of the time I'd have trouble seeing distances this small without a glass.'

A siren went off, and before they could react they were passed by a platoon of armed men in the usual black boiler-suits running down the corridor at high speed. A moment or so later, another similar unit hurried by, going up the corridor. The canteen door flew open, and a third contingent spilled out into the corridor, half of them running one way, half of them the other. The dragon reached out and stopped one. ‘What's happening?' he asked.

‘Under attack,' the man said breathlessly. ‘They've captured the perimeter gun emplacements and landed a chopper on the roof. All units to battle stations.'

‘Who?'

The soldier shrugged. ‘The enemy,' he replied.

‘Ah. Which enemy?'

‘Search me,' the soldier said, clearly anxious to catch up with his unit. ‘Red Chinese. Right-wing extremists. Murdoch. Does it matter?'

The dragon took pity on him and let him go, whereupon he scampered off up the corridor like a little boy who was late for school. The dragon was frowning.

‘You don't think it's any of them, do you?' Zelda asked.

‘I know exactly who it is,' the dragon replied. ‘That's what's annoying me.'

An explosion somewhere on the same level made the floor shake. Neville slipped and nearly fell over. ‘All right,' Gordon shouted, ‘who is it? Don't keep it to yourself, for pity's sake.'

‘My daughter,' the dragon said, as another explosion made all the doors slam. ‘Silly girl,' he added. ‘I've told her loads of times not to do this sort of thing.'

A set of reflexes he didn't know he had allowed Gordon to avoid being flattened by a washing-machine-sized chunk of falling masonry. ‘Blows up a lot of buildings, does she?' he asked.

‘Oh, it's not her,' the dragon replied wearily. ‘They're doing it to themselves. But it's her fault.'

Gordon could remember similar examples of parent/child logic from his own early youth, but this wasn't the time for childhood reminiscences. ‘All right,' he said, ‘but can we please get out of here while there's still a here to get out of?'

The dragon sighed. ‘Unfortunately, no,' he said. ‘At least, I can't go with you, and I wouldn't recommend you wandering off on your own.' He batted away a three-foot section of steel girder just before it caved in Gordon's skull, like a kitten fencing with a ball of wool. ‘You might get lost. No,' he added, ‘I suppose I've got to go and find her before she causes any more upset.'

‘But what's she doing here anyway?' Neville interrupted, jumping neatly backwards as a crack appeared in the floor.

‘Rescuing me.' The dragon scowled, then allowed a faint smile to break through. ‘Actually, it's rather sweet,' he said. ‘But a card or a new pair of slippers would've done just as well. We have to get to the roof.'

He set off briskly down the corridor before the rest of them could argue. Gordon wasn't sure he wanted to follow, but didn't really seem to have much choice in the matter. ‘Wait for me,' he called out, and hurried after them. But the dragon was moving very fast indeed - Neville and Zelda were having to run to keep up - and they were still a long way in front of Gordon when a set of fire doors did that suddenly-snapping-shut trick he'd forgotten to warn anybody about, with them on one side and him on the other. He pressed his nose up against the glass panel just in time to see the clouds of gas billowing out of the air vents, and all three of them flopping down like discarded glove-puppets.