Ice Dragon

Chapter 9

Stramod had been as competent a commander as the now very dead Conciliator leader had been an inept one. He had made full use of one of his most-cherished projects, a long-secret series of tunnels dug from the subbasement of the central building out to the edges of the grounds. When the attack came in and it became obvious that a direct counter-attack on the surface would be suicidal, he had led the fourteen picked men of his action squad through the tunnels to take the Conciliators in the rear. Their hunting rifles could hit accurately at several times the effective range of the beamers, and their surprise had been almost complete. Blade and Leyndt had made an invaluable diversion by concentrating nearly a quarter of the enemy's total strength in one place, standing around in the open, «fat, dumb, and happy.» After panic set in among the soldiers, a counter-attack from the main buildings finished off the battle.

Blade's thigh wound was only a shallow flesh wound, painful as it was. Leyndt, newly clothed and conscious, treated it with dressings and tissue-restoring salves, and assured Blade that it would heal within a few days if he could manage to stay off the leg. Stramod laughed harshly at that. Leyndt looked at him, somewhat puzzled.

«But surely; Stramod, now that they know our strength, they'll think twice before attacking again?»

«I doubt it. If they sent a whole company against us the first time, they must know or suspect this is a major base of our Union. And if they suspected it at first, they know it now. The only thing that gives us more than an hour or two of safety is that it should take them some time to assemble a larger attacking force. I doubt if they will try with a single company again. And by the time they arrive with a legion, we and everything we can carry on our backs must be well away from here.»

Leyndt opened her mouth as if to protest, and Stramod frowned at her. «Doctor, you must know that in such a situation the Action Leader commands.»

«I know,» she said slowly. «But-after so many many months here, undisturbed, not running or watching, to move on again-«

«I understand,» said Stramod more gently than Blade would have believed possible for him. «And that is not all. If this attack seems to be part of a general campaign against the Union, which it well may be, we must flee entirely outside Graduk lands. We must get Blade and Nilando with their knowledge of how to fight the Ice Dragons to a safe place. And the only such now will be among the Treduki. Even the most fanatical Conciliators will not urge a search of five hundred Treduk villages for our people. It would take the whole army twenty years, and half of it would die in the searching. We must flee.»

Leyndt sighed and nodded. Blade felt much sympathy for her, and took her gently in his arms, in spite of Stramod's frown. She had barely been rescued from the nightmare of mass rape, to be told that she must now flee and take up at best the life of a guerrilla sheltering among primitive people many thousands of miles from all she was used to. Stramod pushed the evacuation forward as rapidly and as efficiently as he had pushed his men forward to the surprise attack. The Conciliator soldiers were dragged into the basement so that no air search would see them lying about and so sound the alarm, stripped of all usable gear and clothing, then piled into one of the tunnels and the demolition charges fired to bring down the roof of the tunnel on them. It would be long odds against the bodies ever being found; Stramod emphasized the terror value of this complete vanishing of a hundred-odd Conciliator soldiers. The men of the attacking force would be looking nervously over their shoulders, waiting for some secret weapon to leap out at them, tense, trigger-happy, quite likely to inflict many casualties on themselves. Blade and Nilando grinned appreciatively at the notion.

That was only the first step. Armed parties went out, to clear the grounds of possible surviving soldiers, lay ambushes for any new patrols, provide warning of new attacks, and hopefully hold open a corridor for retreat into the mountains. Working parties set demolition charges all over the clinic, destroyed any written material that could not be removed, packed up anything light enough to carry and valuable enough to be worth salvaging. Those not assigned to either the patrols or the working parties received personal weapons and packed their own gear.

Leyndt now seemed to have fully recovered from her shock, but Blade noticed that her hands sometimes shook for a moment as she bustled about, packing key records and a kit of medical supplies that would enable her to cope with emergencies on the march. Blade recalled that he had never had a chance to complete his explanation of his theory about the aliens, and if he and Leyndt wound up separated, he might have a long search for another, equally reasonable person to talk to about it.

Stramod drove everybody as though Conciliator soldiers were already descending from the sky on them. The ones that had launched the first assault had come in by the back roads in five large trucks, which the patrols discovered as they went out. More than a few people suggested that they use the trucks when they moved out, but Stramod said no. In the trucks the refugees would be far more conspicuous than if they were on foot. Both Nilando and Blade supported Stramod, and the others gave in.

So it was on foot that sixty-odd men and women from the Union headquarters moved out some four hours after the last shot of the battle with the soldiers. Stramod and Blade would have liked to have moved out even sooner, but that would not have been humanly possible. They could only head into the hills and hope the Conciliators had not thrown an impenetrable cordon around the whole area. Stramod doubted it, but Blade was disagreeably aware of war's habit of taking the one thing you most doubted would happen and hitting you over the head with it.

As they passed over the crest of the first hill and started down the path into the wooded valley below, the rear guard still on the crest saw the smoke and flames rise into the sky over the treetops behind them. The demolition charges were going off, and now it mattered little when or whether a Conciliator legion descended on the resort itself, for there would be nothing for it to capture, interrogate, or carry away except blackened rubble.

Stramod turned to Blade as he saw the coiling smoke clouds and shrugged wearily. «That is one chapter in our history closed. But we got the people away safely, thank the High Spirits of the Hills. And with the people, we can go on. If they had all been burning in that smoke and flame…» He left the thought unfinished and turned away to scuttle down the hill and resume his place at the head of the line. After a moment's further looking, straining his eyes to see if he could catch a glimpse of low-passing fliers, Blade shouldered his beamer, readjusted the straps of his heavy pack, and moved on in his assigned place at the rear of the line.

They were well down in the valley and the day was drawing toward evening before they heard the whistle of fliers overhead. But those were not the danger, for they could not land on anything except flat, clear ground or water; Blade knew that the Graduki had never invented the helicopter. Pursuit on foot was another matter. Although Conciliator soldiers tended to be city-bred and therefore indifferent woodsmen, so were most of the Union people. It was at Nilando's suggestion that those few who had camping or hunting experience, or came from farms, were placed at the rear of the line to wipe away as much of the traces of their passage as possible. Otherwise, as Nilando put it, «a blind and half-witted girl-child could follow us.» Apart from that, there was little to do but keep going, to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the abandoned resort, certain to be the first goal of the enemy.

The Union people kept going, in fact, until it was almost too dark to find a proper campsite. Many of the people were by now so exhausted that they simply staggered to a convenient patch of ground, unrolled their sleeping bags, and fell asleep without further movement. But Stramod posted sentries, and when he had made the rounds of the sentry posts, he called Blade, Nilando, and Leyndt aside for a private conference.

He repeated what he had said to Blade earlier: the need to find safety in flight to the Treduki. But how? Even assuming they could evade the searches for that length of time, it would take several months to reach Treduk territory on foot. Such a trek would be as far beyond the abilities of most of the people as would be swimming an ocean. Nor did a voyage by sea hold much more promise. To reach the coast they would have to travel for several days through the most heavily populated area of the Graduk lands and then steal a ship without detection and travel north for more than a week without being over taken by Conciliator ships or fliers. And even if they reached the coasts of the Treduk lands, they would have no few days' march overland before them still; Graduk raids from the sea had driven the Treduki well inland. (Nilando nodded grimly at this, and for the first time seemed to be feeling some resentment at having to cooperate so much with the sworn enemies of his people.)

But, among the pilots assigned to a flier base on a lake less than two days' march away, there were four who were Union members. Two or at most three of the fliers would be enough to carry every person in the group as far north as Tengran. There they could hide or if necessary destroy the fliers and vanish into the woods, at least if the Treduki would hide them. The base was of course well guarded, and entering it and finding both the pilots and fully fueled fliers would be a risky proposition. But unless the Union elsewhere was still by some miracle strong enough to provide them with a hiding place, they had no real alternative.

«And,» went on Stramod wearily, «if we wait to find out for certain what has happened to the Union elsewhere, it may be too late for us. None of the messages sent out received any replies, which leads me to think the worst. Here we have the most important part of the Union, at least for the moment, and it must be saved.»

Nilando nodded; Blade kept his peace. He knew he and Nilando would come more into their own when they had reached the Treduk lands. Meanwhile, he was prepared to leave the leadership to Stramod, who had all the selfconfidence and gambler's temperament the situation demanded. But Leyndt had her own objections.

«Whatever we must do cannot be done with men and women so exhausted they can barely walk, let alone fight. They need rest. Trying to fight or march before they are rested will kill them all just as surely as waiting until the Conciliators track us down.»

«I thought you had injections-«

«They will not create energy where none exists. When the time comes to take the base, well and good. But now they must restore themselves by natural means. That is my professional opinion as a doctor, as well as a leader of the Union. And I speak for the good of the Union.»

Stramod's face clouded, but he nodded in recognition of both her facts and her position. Then he shrugged. «Very well. We will not stay in one place tomorrow, however, if I have to carry all the people on my back. Do you think they can march as far as the end of this valley?» He sketched out a route with a gesture across the unfolded map on his lap.

«I suppose so.»

«Good. From there on to the base-«his hand moved to the northern end of a large lake «-is mostly open country. We will do well to cross as much of it as possible at night. And we will have to contact our people at the base and make plans for penetrating it and boarding the fliers. But that, I agree, can wait a day or two.» He stretched, lifting his unnaturally long arms above his head until it seemed that they would brush against the branches high above, then yawned. «Perhaps we should all plan on getting some sleep now.» He lay down on the bare ground and was asleep before the others could rise to their feet.

Nilando strode off to inspect the sentries, while Leyndt and Blade moved a little apart, as far from the others as the limits of the campsite permitted, and sat down close together. Leyndt was grimy, her auburn hair snarled like a thornbush, her eyes red with fatigue, and when she sat down it was as though her legs had collapsed under her. But the long-fingered hands she held out to Blade, the hands whose fingers gently caressed and pressed his own aching muscles and changed the dressings on his thigh, were as strong and steady as they had ever been. And those redrimmed eyes did not look away from him as she spoke.

«You had something to tell me just before the attack struck, didn't you? I could tell that it was there, and that it was something desperately important. Were you planning to tell me you thought that aliens might be aiding the Ice Master?»

Blade could not have said anything for a moment, even if there had been any need to speak. Then he recovered himself enough to grin at the two-minds-with-a-single thought coincidence.

«I was. When did you begin to support it?»

«As long as two years ago. I don't know all the facts, and perhaps I don't interpret the ones I do know well enough. But from what I know and from what I conclude from that, I feel very much that you are right. The Ice Master himself has masters-or at least allies.»

«Did you say anything about this to anybody else?»

«Only Stramod. He knows the Ice Master well, of course, and would have perhaps been able to learn more to throw light on the idea. And he is a man with the courage to face such a fact, if he believes in it. The others, most of them, would despair and drift away. And of course the Treduki-«

She did not need to finish that. Blade could see how the Treduki, except for tough-minded specimens like Nilando and Rena, might be reduced to panic by the notion that some of their enemies were not even human. But their fears were a matter for later.

«What did Stramod say?»

«He laughed. Said I was underestimating the Ice Master, who could with only a little help do all that has been done.»

«Including the glaciers?»

«He did not mention those.»

Blade nodded. «So perhaps he is afraid to admit it after all?»

«Possibly. Or perhaps he thinks as I do. To let people come to believe in aliens might destroy the Union.»

Blade's temper flared. «The aliens will destroy a damned lot more than the Union if they exist and if they go on the way we think they have! Even if we find a way to fight the Ice Dragons, if aliens are helping the Ice Master they will give him something else to use against the Treduki to rake in slaves and sow terror. They are the real enemy, not the Conciliators, not even the Ice Master!»

«If they exist.»

Blade got his temper under control and looked grimly at her. His voice was deadly serious when he asked:

«Do you, deep inside, doubt they exist?»

«No.»

He reached out and stroked her cheek. «Thank God for small favors. Now all we need is a way of convincing the others. And then a way to destroy the aliens.» He chuckled, less grimly. «That's like saying that all we need is to find a way of turning all these trees-«he gestured upward and around «-into roast meat.»

She laughed, and he was glad to hear her do so. Then she sobered again and asked, «How are we ever going to get the facts we need?»

Blade shook his head. «That I don't know at this point. But we both have to start thinking about ways.»

Leyndt reached for the fastening of her tunic. «That is another thing we can put off for a day or two.» She shrugged the tunic up over her head, and her bare shoulders and breasts gleamed faintly in the light that crept through the trees from the campfires. Blade reached out almost by instinct and cupped the breasts, feeling the nipples stiffen.

Leyndt gave a little moan. «Yes. Yes. We may not have much time left. We have to live all we can in that time. Live.» The last word was a gasp, one that died as their lips met.