Dragonback 04 Dragon and Herdsman (9 page)

"Yes, I know," Draycos said. "My question was whether the
hull-wrap would work in water, or whether there would be some sort of
bubble effect that would be detected."

"No idea," Jack admitted. They reached the edge of the clearing
and he shifted grips on his two K'da to guide them through the opening
in the bushes. "As far as I know, Uncle Virgil never tried hiding in
water. But remember how busy that river is. All chat churning white
water and floating silt would work in his favor."

"Agreed," Draycos said. "Then we are left with only the question
of what precisely Uncle Virge will do once Colonel Frost turns his
attention to us."

"Well, he won't just charge to the rescue, that's for sure," Jack
said, chewing at his lower lip. "That Kapstan can probably outgun him
four to one. My guess is that he'll stay underwater and try to move
downriver."

He looked down at his chest. "Which is why you don't want to hole
up in the foothills, isn't it?" he said with sudden understanding. "You
want us to make for the river and try to link up with the
Essenay
there."

"Exactly," Draycos said. "Provided Alison's friends don't arrive
first, of course."

"Yeah, well, I'm not going to hold my breath on that one," Jack
said grimly, trying to remember the geography they'd seen on their way
in. The river cut straight through the middle of the forest, which
meant that as long as they kept going north they were bound to hit it.

That was the good news. The bad news was that he also remembered
it being a good fifty-mile trek.

Fifty miles of unknown territory and unknown dangers, with sixty
barely sentient K'da and ten wide-bodied Erassvas to drag along with
them.

"Gangway." Alison's voice came from behind him. Jack turned, and
saw her guide the green dragon through the bushes.

And behind them in more or less single file was the rest of the
herd.

The herd
. Jack felt an unpleasant shiver run through him.
Draycos had so often pointed out what a proud and noble people the K'da
were. Yet here, through some horrible twist of fate, they'd been
reduced to something no better than animals.

Maybe Draycos had been right. Maybe they
would
be better
off dead.

"Well?" Alison prompted.

Jack took a deep breath. "Right," he said. Stepping to the other
side of the green dragon, Jack got a grip on the K'da's crest. "Let's
go."

The first hundred yards were easy. The Erassvas had obviously been
all through this area; the path meandered around in what Jack was
starring to realize was typical Erassva fashion. A dozen somewhat
narrower trails led off the main path in various directions where one
or two of the big aliens had gone exploring for berries and other food.

At the end of that hundred yards, though, the trail came to an
abrupt halt at the edge of a twenty-foot cliff. "Well, we needed to
head west sometime anyway," Alison said as she and Jack surveyed the
drop-off. "Let's go back to that last left-hand bunny trail and see how
far it'll take us."

"Sounds good," Jack agreed. He hadn't had a chance yet to tell her
about the change in their travel plans, but there would be time for
that once they'd gotten past this cliff. "Go ahead and check it out.
I'll bring Greenie and follow—"

"Jack?" Colonel Frost's voice came suddenly from his left
shoulder. "Can you hear me?"

"Don't answer," Alison said sharply.

"I know," Jack said, double-checking that the comm clip's
transmitter was still off.

"I know you can hear me Jack," Frost went on. "I'm sorry about
your uncle—I really am. Please believe me when I say that we really did
want him alive. But he took one gamble too many. I'm afraid he and your
ship are both gone."

Jack set his teeth firmly down on his tongue. Frost was trying to
goad him into talking, he knew, hoping for some anguished cry of anger
or denial or defiance that could be traced.

But he wasn't going to fall for it. Draycos's trick had worked, he
told himself firmly, and the
Essenay
was safe. It had to be.

"Just one of the many hazards of carrying missiles aboard a ship
that was never designed for them," Frost said. "Those were highly
illegal for you to have, by the way."

Jack looked surreptitiously at Alison. She was gazing back at him,
a thoughtful look on her face that he didn't care for at all.

"Sadly, there's nothing any of us can do about that now," Frost
said. "Except, of course, to make sure you and your K'da don't suffer
his same fate."

"Better turn it off," Alison said. "Out here in the middle of
nowhere, even electronics as small as a comm clip can sometimes be
detected."

"Yeah, that part of Sergeant Grisko's training I remember," Jack
said. He switched off the comm clip, cutting Frost off in midsentence.
"We'd better get out of here."

"Right," Alison said. "You take Greenie and get everybody moving
down the path. I'll hang back a ways and play rear guard."

Beneath Jack's shirt, K'da claws brushed lightly but urgency at
Jack's skin. "Better idea: you take them," he said, thinking fast. "Now
that we're out of the main Erassva stomping grounds, I can go ahead and
set that booby trap I was going to use earlier."

A slight frown creased her forehead, but she nodded. "Okay, but
don't be too long," she said. Getting a grip on the green K'da's crest,
she turned him around and started maneuvering her way back though the
crowd of K'da and Erassvas that had gathered behind them.

"Is something wrong?" Hren asked as Alison and Greenie reached the
side trail and started along it. He didn't seem particularly worried,
merely curious.

"A small change in direction," Jack assured him as he passed the
other. "Stay with Alison and help her keep the Phookas together."

"I will," Hren promised.

Jack reached the back of the crowd and continued on. A wide
S-curve later he was out of their sight. "Okay, buddy, we're on," he
murmured.

There was a surge of weight against his shoulders, and Draycos
leaped out of his shirt. "What is the plan?" the dragon asked, his gold
scales glistening in the sunlight filtering through the mass of
branches high above them.

"The plan is to keep Frost and his band of pirates from catching
us," Jack told him grimly. "I just wish I really had something to use
as a booby trap, like Alison thinks I have."

"You do," Draycos said. "You have me."

"Yeah, I figured you'd say that," Jack said grimly. "Problem is,
they know about you now. That means no more sneak attacks."

"Perhaps," Draycos said calmly. He rose partially up on his hind
legs, his neck stretching upward as he tried to look past the bushes
and branches. His tongue flicked in and out of his mouth a few times as
he smelled the air. "I may yet have a few surprises for them. What will
you do while I am gone?"

Jack made a face at the other's implied order that he stay back
here where it would be safer. But Draycos was right. He hardly needed
Jack's help at this sort of thing, and the boy would just be in the
way. "I thought I'd try to hide the spot where we left the path," he
said.

"Good," Draycos said. "I will be as quick as I can."

Turning, he headed back toward the clearing, moving like a whisper
of breeze through the grass and bushes.

Taking a deep breath, Jack moved to the side of the path and began
gathering loose branches and small shrubs to hide their path.
"Warrior's luck," he murmured to the empty air.

Like most forests Draycos had seen, the ground here was covered
with grasses, reeds, and dead leaves. Even Jack and Alison, who were
trying to be quiet, had made considerable noise as they'd worked their
way through the undergrowth. The Erassvas, who seemed to have no
concept of the danger they were in, had sounded more like a set of
brush-clearing machines.

Draycos himself knew several techniques for moving quietly.
Trouble was, most of them involved slow stalking and right now he
needed speed as much as he did silence.

Fortunately, with the trees as close together as these were, there
were ways of traveling that would allow him to have both.

He leaped straight upward, grabbing onto the trunk of the nearest
tree with his claws. His next leap cleared a row of bushes and landed
him on a thick branch two trees over. He trotted along that branch to
the trunk, then out again along another even thicker branch until he
had a clear path to the next tree.

Two minutes and eleven leaps later, he had made it back to the
edge of the clearing.

He was just in time. At the far side, six men in combat suits were
marching in a two-by-two formation along the path Jack and Alison had
first taken into the forest. As they reached the clearing, their guns
swept warningly across the lounging Erassvas. Fortunately, the aliens
made no sudden moves, hostile or otherwise. A few of them gazed
curiously at the invaders, but most ignored them completely.

Draycos eased his way a little farther around the side of the tree
trunk he was clinging to, studying the mercenaries as they headed for
the clearing's center. They were walking openly, almost carelessly,
with no attempt at caution or concealment.

Yet Arthur Neverlin knew Draycos had survived the Iota Klestis
ambush. More than that, he'd seen the K'da poet-warrior in action.
Could he have failed to warn Colonel Frost?

Draycos's jaws cracked open in a tight smile. No, of course Frost
knew. Those six soldiers marching across the clearing weren't the
attack force at all.

They were the bait.

Draycos took another, more careful look. This time he saw them:
two pairs of camouflaged soldiers slipping quietly through the forest a
few feet outside the edges of the clearing, one pair on each flank. An
attacker careless enough to throw himself at the men in the clearing
would find himself in a deadly crossfire.

The six mercenaries reached the center of the clearing and
stopped, looking around and quietly talking among themselves. The two
outrider pairs stopped, too, standing back-to-back and watching for
trouble.

Back-to-back was a good defensive formation. Unfortunately for
them, Draycos also knew how to deal with that one. Fixing their
locations in his mind, he started to climb farther up the tree.

And then, from behind him came a soft crunch of leaves.

He twisted his head around, legs tensing for a powerful thrust
that would shove him away from the tree and out of the line of fire.

But it wasn't a Malison Ring soldier back there. Nor was it Jack
or Alison.

It was one of the K'da.

Draycos hissed between his teeth. He'd noticed this particular
K'da the minute Jack had entered the clearing earlier. She was
beautiful and graceful, with the gray scales he'd always wished he'd
been born with. She reminded him strongly of one of his best friends
when he was growing up, a friend named Taneem who had later died in a
Valahgua attack.

But Taneem had been smart and funny and kind. The bright silver
eyes now turned up toward him held none of those qualities.

He took another look around the side of the tree. The soldiers
were still talking together, but he knew that wouldn't last much
longer. If he didn't go now, he wouldn't have time to get into position
once they all started moving again.

He turned back to the gray K'da. She was still watching him, her
head cocked slightly to the side as if trying to work out why in the
world this golden stranger was hanging on to a tree when all the really
tasty grubs were on the ground. If Draycos headed off to the attack,
the main group of soldiers would reach her before he could get back.

And bait or not, they certainly had live ammunition in their
weapons.

Perhaps they would be better off dead
. Draycos had said
that earlier to Jack, and he was still wincing at the callousness of
his words. If they had been any other species of nonsentient animal, he
would certainly have treated them with compassion and care. How could
he do less for his own people?

Even if they were his people in name only?

Climbing down the tree, he padded as quietly as he could to the
silver female's side. "We have to go," he said.

Her silver eyes blinked at him, but otherwise there was no
response. "We have to go," Draycos tried again, switching this time to
the K'da language. Still nothing.

With a sigh, he flipped his slender tail up to catch her at the
spot behind her crest that he'd shown Jack. "Come," he said, and
started down the path.

He'd expected her to resist. To his mild surprise, she followed
him willingly.

Early in their relationship, before Draycos had discouraged such
talk. Jack had occasionally referred to him as his pet dragon. Now, it
seemed, Draycos had picked up a pet dragon of his own.

They reached the left-hand path where Alison had taken the group,
to find that the opening had vanished behind a wall of freshly cut
bushes supported by a few large branches. Clearly, Jack had been busy
in his absence.

Still, a good woodland tracker would have little trouble spotting
the camouflage. Draycos would have to do something about that. "Go—over
the top," he instructed the silver K'da, unhooking his tail from her
crest. "Go on—jump."

She frowned, peering closely at his eyes. "Jump over the barrier
and join the others," he repeated, fighting hard to keep his voice
steady. The clock was counting down here, and he still had a lot of
work to do. "Go on.
Go
."

Her frown cleared. With an effortless bound, she leaped over
Jack's barrier, landing beyond it with a crunch of grass and leaves
that made Draycos wince. But at least she was gone.

A few feet down the main path another side path headed off to the
right. Draycos moved a couple of paces down it and sliced off a pair of
good-sized bushes. Dragging them back to the opening, he propped them
up to block the path. He interwove some branches through them to keep
them from falling over, then arranged some leaves at their bases to
hide the slashed ends.