The Dragon Circle (49 page)

Hanassa
! Dalleena swallowed. Felt the knife scrape her throat. The priest's muscles shifted. The tip of the knife pricked her skin. She winced and started. Warm liquid trickled down her neck.

“I will not be a sacrifice to your perversion,” she whispered. Anger fueled by fear sent jolts of energy through her veins.

Silently, she contracted her abdomen and shoulders, testing the level of pain lingering from her injuries.

“Irythros warned me against you, Hanassa.”

“Irythros!” the man spat. “A child among dragons. A meddler who breaks the law and reveals secrets!” He pressed the knife a little closer against Dalleena's neck. She winced and prepared herself for pain.

“What will you gain by taking a life?” Konner asked the IMP casually. His attention seemed to focus upon the man beside the priest rather than the man with the knife.

“I do not take a life,” the IMP replied, equally casual.

“You employ the assassin. By your own laws, that makes you an accessory before the fact. Punishable by five years imprisoned rehabilitation after a mind-wipe.”

“What about the twenty men you and your brothers killed?” Heat rose in the man's voice. “You are as guilty as the men who unleashed an avalanche of boulders.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Dalleena saw the man lift a black box of a weapon. A stunner, Konner had called it. At the same time, he moved forward.

The priest did not like that. He shoved Dalleena forward, elbowing the IMP aside. He stumbled and fought for balance. A blast of red light shot from the stunner into the shrubbery. Well away from Konner.

Konner lunged.

Dalleena rammed her elbow into the priest's gut. Then she stomped upon his bare foot. As he doubled over, she whirled and slammed the heel of her hand against his jaw and her knee into his groin.

Her ribs protested. She clenched her jaw against the pain.

Hanassa thudded upon the ground, rolled to his knees, and bounced upward.

“It will take more than your puny efforts to fell me,” Hanassa snarled. Gone were all traces of the priest's mild tenor voice, replaced by a deeper, harsher baritone. His body was bulkier than the man she had found suffering from a severe beating. Had he done that to himself?

She did not wait for an answer. Her foot swept across the back of his knees, and she turned and ran for the creek.

Heavy footsteps pounded after her. Booted feet that crashed through the underbrush.

“Stop or we shoot!” the IMP called.

“Shoot her and you die!” Konner replied. Sounds of a struggle.

The pool came into view. Dalleena angled southward and uphill. A tangle of calubra ferns slowed her down. She pushed them aside, vaulting over them. Pain lashed her ribs with each harsh breath. She tripped and rolled upon landing. The ferns loosed their pungent perfume. A sedating aphrodisiac.

Holding her breath, she jumped up and climbed the hill. A new, sharper pain began in her side. Breathing came hard. Her legs grew heavy.

Then miraculously, Konner was beside her. He braced her with an arm about her waist. Running became easier. His strength guided her back toward the sound of the cascade of water. After a long, dry summer, boulders formed a damp ford across the upper creek.

Konner leaped to the top of the first boulder. She grabbed his wrist with both hands. She clambered up beside him.

“We have to get outside the field,” he said when she faltered. “I'll activate it with them in and us out. They shouldn't be able to follow.” He bounded across a gap to the next boulder.

She followed more cautiously, afraid to imitate his leap and jar her abused bones upon landing. She slipped at the edge. He held her hand tightly, keeping her from falling over the cascade and landing upon a pile of broken rocks below.

“Stop,” the IMP leader yelled. He managed to shinny up the first boulder on his own.

Someone behind him fired one of the stunners.

Moss sizzled at their feet.

Konner halted and raised his hands. Dalleena did the same. They turned slowly to face their pursuers.

“I have no quarrel with you, Lieutenant Pettigrew,” Konner said.

“But I have a very large one with you,” the IMP replied. He rose from his crouch upon the first boulder. “You have broken the law many times and resisted lawful arrest. You have sabotaged an Imperial vessel. And now you flee again. Judge Balinakas will dish out many long sentences to you and your brothers.”

“We do not have to live with this animosity. We can share this planet in peace,” Dalleena offered.

“I have no intention of allowing you to strand me in this godforsaken wilderness, O'Hara. Where is the king stone?”

“Practically under your nose.”

Pettigrew looked down. So did the IMPs behind him.

A cold wind blasted Dalleena in the face. A thunderous beating of wings. She brought her right palm up and jerked her head right and left.

Irythros burst from the cloud cover. He screeched. The IMPs grasped their ears in pain.

Dalleena wanted to hunker down and cover her head. Konner remained standing. So she did, too.

A stream of flame ejected from the dragon's mouth. It brushed the top of Pettigrew's head, singeing his hair.

The lieutenant screeched to match the dragon. He bent so far over he fell into the creek, deep here near the cascade. How deep?

The IMPs let loose a volley of shots.

Konner jumped into the water. He flailed about, dove. Surfaced. Gasped. Dove again.

Dalleena peered into the churning water, scanning with her palm as well as her eyes. She couldn't sense anything.

The IMPs stood, rooted in place, exchanging worried glances. Hanassa danced around them in glee.

“Help him!” Dalleena screamed.

Konner surfaced again, flung water out of his eyes. Then once more he kicked up and back and plunged back into the water.

Favoring her ribs with one arm clutched across her midriff, Dalleena slipped into the water. Only a little deeper than Konner was tall. She felt about with toes and hands and senses.

Nothing but more water, sand, and a few slippery green things.

The current gently wove around her.

She dropped below the surface, caught a glimpse of a white foot to her right. She grabbed. It kicked. She came up with a firm grasp of Konner's ankle.

“They can't swim in armor with field kits on their backs.” he choked out. “No time to undress.” The agony on his face mimicked what she had seen when she shared his vision.

Two IMPs struggled out of their heavy packs while their comrades unfastened shin guards and breast-plates. They still had arm, back, and thigh armor to remove. They'd never get into the water in time to help their lieutenant.

“You are not responsible if he dies, Konner,” she called to him as he dove once more.

“Yes, he is!” exclaimed Hanassa. He jumped up and down on the bank, brandishing his knife toward anyone who tried to enter the water. “Konner O'Hara alone determines if the petti-man lives or dies.”

Dalleena went under once more. When she could hold her breath no longer, she gave up. Clinging to one of the rocks while gulping long draughts of air, her right palm began to tingle. Then she spotted him.

“Konner!” She did not wait for him but swam a few strokes to her left, toward the opposite bank. She tugged on a limp white hand drifting above a tree snag.

Konner splashed right behind her. He plunged deeper.

Dalleena tried to clear branches and roots. The man beyond the visible arm remained stuck.

“Help us,” she called to the IMPs. “We can still save him.”

Hanassa drove his knife into the throat of the first man who tried climbing onto the ford of boulders.

The remaining IMPs felled him with a concentrated blast of stunners.

Not enough. Hanassa twitched and moaned, then rolled to his knees and crawled into the underbrush, still alive, still able to menace them all.

K
AT BIT HER LIP. Did she dare plunge the lander into the bay in pursuit of her brothers? She'd watched Loki and Konner closely when they executed this maneuver. She knew she could duplicate it. Was it worth the risk? Perhaps she should hover and monitor, waiting for them to emerge.

On the other hand, the lander needed a bath to clean off the growing green gunk.

“Go after them!” her Marine sergeant urged. “We can shoot them underwater.”

“Efficiency?” Kat snapped at him.

He ran numbers through the weapons array. “Saline content of the water will dissipate the focus by twenty-three point six percent.”

“Intensity?”

“I'm not a data tech,” the sergeant protested.

Kat glanced at the data. “Fifteen point zero two percent drop.” Close enough.

She aimed the craft into the water. She had to slow to a near stall to allow the transition of pressure to hit the hull gradually. Sensors distorted the moment she hit the water.

The ten men with her were combat troops, not pilots or techs. They understood weapons. She had to fly (drive) the lander and interpret the data.

“Look for this symbol in the data stream.” She pointed to the glyph that represented the cerama/ metal alloy common to any hull that could be exposed to the high radiation of space or intense heat of reentry. The same specs protected them from water seepage from increasing pressure.

The sergeant gulped and nodded. “Starboard. Seven point three degrees.”

“How far ahead?”

“Sixty meters to firing range. Sixty-five. Seventy.”

“Damn.”

“Port. Twenty-five degrees.”

“Can't. There's an outcropping between us.” Kat steered around it. By the time she cleared the pile of jagged rock, she'd lost contact with her quarry. Frantically, she searched the water ahead and her sensors for the tiniest glimpse of a man-made object.

“Something big on the ocean floor,” the sergeant said excitedly.

“Show me?”

He pointed to the sensor screen. Sure enough a long and dense object glowed with the distinctive glyphs of cerama/metal.

“That's one of the landers the O'Haras stole.” Disappointed and frustrated, she steered for it. “Suit up, Sergeant. You and two others are going to fly that thing back to base.”

“I'm no pilot.”

“You are now. You know how to fire the engines, rock it a bit to get it off the bottom and aim for camp.”

“How about if I take this one back to base and you maneuver that one off the bottom?”

“Fine.” Alone, Kat would not have to report to anyone. Alone with a lander, she could take her revenge without the restrictions of GTE military protocol.

“The controls are yours, Sergeant. I'll retrieve the lost one.”

Konner fought the white vortex. His mind swirled ever deeper into the whiteness. He clung to Dalleena's last words to him. “You are not responsible.”

His heart wanted to protest. Of course he was responsible. Pettigrew had chased Konner and become a victim of the chase.

His logical engineer's brain scoffed.

A violent, mechanical roar tugged him back toward reality.

He blinked rapidly. Outlines appeared before his eyes. Then color began to fill in the blank spaces.

“Dalleena?” he called.

A muffled grunt.

“Dalleena, where are you?”

“Here,” she croaked, less than a meter from him.

“How do you fare?” He swam the single stroke from his side of the snag. Her face looked pale. Tight lines drew her mouth down and furrowed her brow. He stroked the lines with a delicate finger. They did not fade.

“I tracked him and lost him,” she muttered.

“You are not responsible.”

“Neither are you,” she said. Then she shivered.

“You're chilling. We have to get out of the water.”

“We have to retrieve the body.”

“Leave it for the IMPs.”

“Tracker's code. I
have
to bring him back to his people for proper burial.”

“Later.” He tried dragging her away from the snag. She resisted. The glare she shot him should have sizzled his hair. “Very well.”

Without the press of time to save a living man making his movements clumsy and ineffectual, Konner freed Pettigrew's trapped foot with only two more dives beneath the surface.

The mechanical roar became a pulsing weapon. Konner looked shoreward. The IMPs crouched low, weapons drawn and aimed at
Rover
hovering above them.

A red electronic charge skimmed the edge of
Rover
's nose.