Chapter Nineteen

"Well come on, Hansen," the engineer demanded, showing his nervousness in an excess of enthusiasm. "It's time to go!"

Ritter knew only that the next few minutes would involve a situation different from every situation of his past life—and that there would be some danger. Anybody sane would be nervous under those circumstances.

Hansen looked around one more time. The image of the dragonflies sat placidly in the image of their thicket.

Hansen scowled and changed the window back to normal viewing with a quick brush of his hand. The falsely innocent landscape irritated him.

"Don't worry," he said in a voice closer to a growl than he'd intended. "We'll get there."

Hansen was nervous also. He did know what to expect on a visit to the Lomeri.

The aircar squatted on the other side of the observation room's clear windows. Penny sat in the vehicle, her head raised and her back turned ostentatiously to the men.

If you looked carefully—and Hansen always looked carefully, even when his eyes swept and his expression stayed as flat as the finish on his pistol barrel—you could note that a plane of air formed a reflecting surface in front of the woman.

Penny might have been viewing her own appearance. That was probably the act she performed most often. But it rather seemed that her eyes followed the activities of the men she appeared to ignore. . . .

"Yeah, right," Hansen muttered to himself. "Look, stick close, do what I tell you to. This oughta go slicker 'n snot."

He put his left arm around Ritter's shoulders; checked the fit of his pistol in its breakaway holster; and—

The engineer reached down toward his own weapon in imitation.

—they inserted.

The air was warm and humid. Some of the flies buzzing among the pink magnolia blooms lighted on Hansen's cheeks. They flicked away and returned moments later as sweat popped out of his pores. The soil underfoot was pebbles and grit, well enough drained to keep the magnolias comfortable despite the horsetail marsh within twenty meters.

Hansen couldn't see the horsetails. He couldn't see jack shit because of the mass of blossoms and shiny green leaves in all directions including up. Some of the damned magnolia bushes were three meters high.

Especially, Hansen couldn't see any sign of the Searchers' vehicles which he knew had to be parked here.

Ritter fluffed his loose garment away from his chest without any sign of discomfort. The engineer kept the humidity of the controlled climate in which he lived at 50%. Static had been more of a problem to his tests than contaminating water vapor was.

"Which direction?" he asked Hansen. As he spoke, he took a small magnetometer from his sidepocket to answer his own question.

Ritter didn't realize anything was wrong.

Hansen was very calm. He didn't know what the fuck was going on, and you never let yourself get into a flap when it's that bad. That could get you killed.

Something bellowed a kilometer or so away. The sound seemed to come from the west, but in this tangle of branches ramifying to interweave like a puzzle there were no certain directions.

"That's funny . . . ," the engineer said as he peered at his magnetometer. The loops holding his pistol holster to his belt were long and flexible. He raised and lowered the holstered weapon, checking the motion against the read-out.

Hansen thought about the image he had seen from his house. He didn't know much about vegetation, but the shape of the surrounding magnolias seemed correct for the brush he'd glimpsed from the window's higher vantage. He put out his hand, his left hand, because Krita's vehicle should be—

It wasn't.

"Do you have the place and time correct?" the engineer asked as he frowned at his instrument. "Because I'm not getting—"

"Hell, that's it!" Hansen shouted.

Sparrow's instinctive understanding of the Matrix had led him to twist his concealment of the dragonflies one step further than Hansen had realized. When the smith lifted the dimensional vehicles from his plane to this one, he'd also set the time horizon a millisecond out of phase with the spatial controls.

Hansen's window conflated the partial spacetime realities, but that was an image and this—

A two-tonne megalosaur, long-jawed and carnivorous, crashed through the magnolias at a dead run.

Ritter bawled in surprise. He juggled his magnetometer from his right hand to his left so that he could draw his pistol.

Hansen's instincts were different—nothing is as important as clearing a weapon when a weapon is needed—and his gun was pointing within a quarter second at the eyes and yellow-white palate tearing into sight.

Hansen didn't fire. The megalosaur was fleeing, not charging, and it ripped past several meters away.

The beast's tail and spinal column were almost parallel to the ground as it ran. The hips, covered with flattened scutes in a leathery, bronze-on-brown hide, were higher than either man's head.

Fleeing. Which meant—

"What was that?" the engineer shouted.

Part of Hansen's mind was viewing a present concealed from Ritter. His left hand blurred out of sight. His fingers touched a dragonfly's controls.

—something was chasing it.

Hansen had reholstered his weapon. The practiced reflex of drawing and firing was actually quicker for Hansen than it would be for him to aim a weapon in his hand. Ritter waved his own pistol toward the flutter of quivering branches the megalosaur had left as it disappeared through the tangle.

A gun isn't a magic wand that you wave and hope something desirable happens.

The dimensional vehicle popped into sight. Magnolia branches wove through its angled legs.

In a gap through the upper foliage—

Hansen drew and fired. The thicket exploded in actinic radiation that crisped the nearest flies and stung the exposed skin of the men twenty meters away.

The Lomeri scout was mounted on a saddled iguanodont. The five-meter height advantage permitted the lizardman to look over the tops of the magnolia bushes. The Lomeri's instruments had warned it that the intruders were nearby—

But instinct and the fleeing carnivore had done the same for Hansen. He fired at sunlight winking through the foliage from the visored helmet that covered the Lomeri's flat skull.

"Get on the dragonfly!" Hansen screamed over the hissing echoes of his shot.

Hansen was carrying a directed-energy weapon. Though his bolt loaded the Lomeri's forcefield to a dazzling coruscance, it did not penetrate. The energy, rebroadcast all across the electro-optical spectrum, seared the iguanodont like a bath of live steam.

The bipedal beast honked and curvetted as it tried to paw its injured forequarters. The lizardman, thin as a wire armature, tried simultaneously to control his mount and point his short-barreled shoulder weapon in the direction of the shot.

Hansen fired again, down the track of foliage withered by his first bolt. The Lomeri forcefields were normally directional, convex bowls of protection which faced the front and danger.

The scout, broadside to Hansen as the iguanodont spun, took the shot in the middle of his ribcage. The creature's head and shoulders toppled backwards. His long feet retained the stirrups.

Reflex discharged the lizardman's weapon in a thunderclap of shredded vegetation.

"Get aboard!" Hansen shouted. The engineer swung his leg over the dragonfly's saddle, but there were more Lomeri coming. He aimed at them instead of—

Hansen shot again.

The scouts had seen what happened to their leading fellow. They dismounted with predatory grace, slapping their mounts aside to avoid being set up by the beasts' gyrations. Hansen's bolt re-radiated like a minuscule nova, but it did nothing to disrupt the attackers' movements.

One of the lizardmen managed to fire in the air, aiming along the ionized track of Hansen's bolts. He hit the injured iguanodont. This time the explosion was accompanied by a mist of blood, scales, and bone fragments. The beast whooped a gout of lung tissue.

"Get—" Hansen said.

Ritter fired as his buttocks settled on the dragonfly's seat. There was a high-pressure crack! at his pistol's muzzle, doubled instantly by a crack! that cut through the shouts and echoes.

Hansen expected a ricochet from the forcefield of the arching lizardman. The duplex projectile struck the Lomeri shield with a blue spark at the point of impact and a tiny jet of radiance through the forcefield where kinetic energy had already loaded the unit to maximum output. There was nothing unsophisticated about Ritter's equipment.

And nothing wrong with his aim, though the way his miniature plasma beam pierced the target's slit-pupiled eye might have been luck.

Hansen's left hand slapped the dragonfly's engagement control, hoping that he'd set the coordinates correctly despite the confusion—

And certain as he followed Ritter through the Matrix that there was no worse place to be than the thicket detonating in orange fury as the humans fled.

The dragonfly's legs flexed as the vehicle settled in the center of Hansen's observation room. Penny stared from outside. Her moist palms were pressed against the crystal barrier.

Hansen's exposed skin prickled. It would peel in a few days unless he chose to cure the harm by manipulating reality—

Which he would not do, because he'd been so sure he could dodge the Lomeri that he'd gone underequipped. When you screw up, a minor injury like a UV burn from your own weapon was maybe worth your life the next time. That made it a lesson to be treasured.

Ritter was gasping. A twig or a fragment from an explosive projectile had gashed the engineer's sleeve into rags, but the skin beneath appeared unharmed.

"Were those—" he said and hacked to a stop.

Hansen tried to adjust the dragonfly's controls left-handed. Now that he and Ritter were safe, he was all thumbs.

"Those were the Lomeri," he said. The inside of his throat had been savaged by ions released when he fired. "Pray you never get a better look at the bastards."

The barrel of Hansen's pistol glowed. He laid the weapon on the floor and set the controls with his right hand.

Penny strode into the room radiating fury and sexual excitement. The men and the borrowed dimensional vehicle were already phasing back to Ritter's home.