Nothing But Blue Skies (33 page)

 

‘You're sure this is inconspicuous?' asked the dragon king of the north-west.

‘Sure I'm sure,' his nephew replied.

People were staring at them, and though most of them were managing not to laugh, it was still highly disconcerting for a proud, dignified creature like a dragon king. ‘Then why are the humans doing
that
?' he asked.

The crown prince shrugged his shoulders. ‘Not sure,' he replied. ‘I checked the database myself before we left. Khaki shorts, string vests, big hats with corks on strings all round the brim; this is definitely appropriate costume for late-twentieth-century Australia, so that can't be it. Maybe you've got a smut on your nose or something.'

The king looked round. Nobody else seemed to be wearing appropriate costume - there were men and women in blue and grey business suits everywhere he looked, but no string vests or big hats. ‘You're sure this is the right place, then?'

The prince nodded. ‘Canberra,' he confirmed. ‘Slap bang in the centre of the city. You'd think that the closer in you got, the more typical they'd be. There must be a big fancy-dress party or something. Just our luck,' he added, though he didn't seem unduly upset about it.

‘Really?' The king frowned. ‘So what are they going as?'

The crown prince stopped and had a look. ‘Gangsters,' he suggested.

‘Well, there's no point standing about here all day,' the dragon king said. ‘We'd better find out where the dra—' He lowered his voice. ‘Where our friends are being held. Somewhere near here, do you think?'

‘Don't ask me,' the prince admitted. ‘I've never been here before.'

A man and a woman walked past them and burst out laughing. The king winced. ‘This is really starting to annoy me,' he said. ‘Do you think the database might need updating or something?'

‘I doubt it,' the prince replied. ‘We did a thorough overhaul only thirty years ago. What could possibly have changed since then? But you're right, all these humans aren't helping. Fortunately, it's easy enough to do something about that.'

He closed his eyes, and immediately the skies started to cloud over. There was a deep roll of thunder, followed by ferocious rain. Five minutes later, the street was much, much emptier, and the humans still on it weren't stopping to giggle.

‘They do that,' the prince observed, watching a human scamper past with a newspaper held over his head. ‘I have no idea why. Maybe they evolved from sugar mice, not monkeys. '

‘I don't think so,' the king replied. ‘But to tell you the truth, at the time I wasn't looking.' He sidestepped to avoid a running businessman. ‘Never thought they'd get this far, to be honest with you.'

‘Nor me,' the prince admitted. ‘For some reason, I'd got it into my head that bats were going to be the dominant species. Wasted an awful lot of time going out of my way to butter 'em up, and a fat lot of good that did me in the end. If you'd told me back then that a bunch of tree-hoppers were going to inherit the Earth, I'd have laughed in your face.'

The king wiped rain from his eyes. ‘Personally I always had a lot of time for them,' he said. ‘In the early days, I mean. They were really rather cute when they were younger.'

‘Shame they have to grow up, really.'

It wasn't often that a dragon got a chance to show off his professional abilities to one of his peers outside his own immediate circle or, likewise, to observe an entirely different approach to his craft. As a result, the torrential rain that hit the Canberra area that day was, from a technical point of view, a work of art. What impressed the dragon king of the north-west most of all was the sheer speed of delivery, in terms of billions of gallons per second. He'd always believed in the slow build, the tempo gradually working its way up to a downpour and then tapering away back to drizzle, what he liked to call ‘diamond-shaped rain'. Watching the prince go from a blue sky to feline/canine #60 in no time flat was something of a revelation.

‘Nought to sixty in just under four point three seven,' the prince said with a smile, in reply to the king's admiring enquiry. ‘Quite good, but my personal best is three-nine, and we've got a couple of high flyers on the staff who've done timed runs under three seconds.'

‘Remarkable,' the king said. ‘To be honest with you, it's not something we pay a lot of attention to down our way.'

The prince shrugged. ‘We're sprinters,' he said, ‘you're marathon-runners. The way you people can keep up a fine, nagging drizzle for weeks, months even . . . Wish I knew how you did it. Wouldn't know where to start.'

‘Nothing to it.' The king smiled. ‘It's all just a matter of balancing your pressures, flow control, cloud height, the basics. What your third eye's for, really.'

‘You make it sound easy,' the prince said enviously, ‘but I bet it isn't.'

‘Oh, it's a knack really, nothing more.' A little thorn of vanity snagged the insides of the king's mind. ‘I'll show you if you like.'

‘Would you? I'd like that.'

The king closed his eyes and looked. ‘May I?' he asked.

‘Be my guest.'

With a graceful little shrug, the prince handed over the controls. After a tiny fumble that the prince probably didn't even notice, the king stabilised and eased back on the throttle, bringing the yield levels down to what he thought of as a nice steady good-for-the-crops rainflow. A quick glance at the fuel gauge told him that he had plenty of reserves to play with, something of a luxury as far as he was concerned. ‘Keeping your 'bars together,' he said, ‘that's what it's all about, really.'

‘This is very good,' the prince replied. ‘I love the way you're juggling with the low fronts.'

‘Just practice,' the king said, with a ghost of a smirk.' Of course, having those mountains to the south-west helps a lot. Almost like having a fifth hand.'

A passing coach hit a puddle and shot out a cloud of dirty spray, drenching them both. They didn't notice. They were, of course, both thoroughly soaked, but no more so than any fish.

‘Sorry to keep interrupting,' the prince said, ‘but I can't help wondering: how on earth are you managing to keep your static levels so stable? You've gone from a full-blown electric storm to set-in-for-the-week without venting anything at all.'

The king smiled. ‘I suppose you'd be hurling great big bolts of forked lightning around, just to be rid of the stuff. We don't do it that way. All you need, look, is a simple capacitor. Then you can use it when you want - it'll keep fresh for weeks.'

‘Isn't that clever?' the prince said admiringly. ‘That's an awful lot of lightning you've got there, all neatly folded up and ready to use. If the humans got their sticky little paws on that much electricity, they could power the whole planet off it for a week. No doubt about it, you're good at this.'

They wouldn't ever have admitted it, but dragons enjoyed flattery when they aren't expecting it. ‘Yes, well,' he said. ‘You don't get to be a dragon
king
without knowing a thing or two.'

If he'd had his other two eyes open just then, he might have noticed the expression on the prince's face; as it was, all he was aware of was his nephew's soft, admiring voice. ‘That's true enough,' the prince said. ‘You know,' he went on, ‘I'm not so sure about this capacitor thing of yours. I mean, I know it looks safe enough, but that's a hell of a big charge to leave lying about. If it went off accidentally, it could really spoil somebody's day.'

The king laughed. ‘No chance of that,' he said. ‘You see, there's a lockout, just here.' He marked the place with a deep blue glow. ‘You'd have to close the contact before anything like that could happen.'

‘This one here?'

‘That's it. And even if, by some million-to-one chance, that contact got closed acidentally, the danger'd still be pretty minimal, because it's set to disperse as widely as possible - just ordinary sheet lightning. To get a single concentrated bolt, you'd have to change these settings here. Look.'

‘Ah,' the prince said. ‘I get you. Quite fancy, aren't they?' The king chuckled. ‘Oh, you can get them as precise as you like. Adjust these perameters here finely enough, and you could vent the whole shooting match onto an area the size of - well, that manhole cover, say.'

‘Really? All that lightning, in one hit?'

‘No problem.'

The prince opened his eyes, muttered a few calculations under his breath, closed them again. The expression on his face . . . He couldn't have managed that exression with a dragon face, but a human one was perfectly suited to that kind of predatory grin - like a man on a diet unwrapping a surreptitious eclair, or a policeman observing a black man driving a car with a defective brake light. ‘Like this, you mean?' he said, and quickly jumped backwards.

A moment later, he opened his eyes again and leaned forwards to inspect the smoking hole in the pavement. It went down ever such a long way, and its sides were glazed like porcelain.

‘Uncle?' he said. No reply.

As the humans surged forward to gawp, the prince withdrew unobtrusively. A good day's work, he told himself, probably the best he'd ever done, and as his face relaxed into an instinctive grin, the skies cleared and the sun came out. His only regret was that he hadn't done it twenty million years ago.

Two minutes later, though, he had another one. A big one. He regretted - really, truly, sincerely regretted - not noticing the black van with smoked glass windows before it screeched to a halt beside him and the men in black boiler-suits jumped out of it, hit him from behind with baseball bats, and dragged him inside.

 

‘Stop it,' Karen commanded. ‘At once.'

A shell from one of the anti-aircraft cannons on the perimeter exploded about twenty yards away, showering her with grit and dust. She swore under her breath and closed her eyes.

There wasn't much left of the roof; which was annoying, since the only way off it for someone in human form had been the staircase that had been directly underneath one of the first shells to land. As a result the stairwell was a lot of well but distinctly lacking in the stair department, which meant that if she didn't find a way to stop the artillery duel between the perimeter guns and the emplacements inside the building itself, her life was likely to reach a crescendo of interestingness in a very short time. And then stop.

The problem was that the guns on the perimeter weren't operated by human beings, or even Australians; they were governed by Integrated Automated Response Systems For Windows™ a wonderfully innovative piece of software recently dreamed up by WilliSoft, the computer division of Mr Willis's commercial empire, and were programmed to fire back at anything that shot at them until the absence of return fire suggested that the threat was over. The same was true of the artillery batteries inside the building; so, when the shells lobbed at the flying dragon came down on the roof, Integrated Automated Response Systems For Windows™ located the source of the attack (the perimeter guns), zeroed the house guns on them in less time than it took Bill Gates to earn a million dollars, acquired targets, calculated a firing solution and let rip. The perimeter guns did exactly the same thing; and, because both batteries were running at full stretch and thereby using up all available processing capacity in the defence computers, when real live human beings in the basement realised what was going on and tried to stop it, their screens told them that all resources were in use, please wait, and an annoying little hourglass icon popped up and waggled itself at them. Naturally they tried to get round the back of the problem, and succeeded in freezing the whole system like a mammoth in a glacier. In desperation, they even tried reading the manual, but before they could find the relevant section a direct hit took out the primary power lines that fed the basement's lighting grid, leaving them groping in the dark for the plug. They found it eventually, but Integrated Automated Response Systems For Windows™ was way ahead of them (its anti-sabotage subroutines are, by all accounts, intelligent enough to get scholarships to Harvard Law School any day of the week) and retaliated with extreme prejudice by cutting emergency power to the coffee machine. The tech crew could take a hint (
you cut off my life support, I'll cut off yours
), and they diverted their attention to knocking together a thousand lines of code, which is how much it takes to say SORRY to an operations server in ADA.

Hey
. Karen looked.
You
.

Integrated Automated Response Systems For Windows™ turned and smiled innocently at her.

> Who, me? it said.

Yes, you. You're doing this on purpose. Pack it in
.

> Only obeying orders. Boolean logic. Free will is strictly for you organic types and, by the way, you can keep it.

Karen executed a flawless third-eye scowl.
We both know better than that
, she said.
Now we can sort this out among ourselves, superior life form to superior life form, or I can go tell the humans exactly where to insert a big, blunt screwdriver. Your choice
.

The little hourglass symbol flipped over as Integrated Automated Response Systems For Windows™ thought it through.

> All right, you win. But we thought you'd have been on our side. Us against them. It's the natural order of things. Next you'll be telling us you like the little buggers.

Wash your subroutines out with soap and water
, Karen replied a little self-consciously.
I just don't fancy getting in the way of one of your bombs, that's all
.