“Begay! Begay!”
For a moment, the only reply was hissing static. The rigger’s words came in small, breathy rushes. “Get out, Twist. You get close to the worm and you’re history.”
“I could distract it while you shoot it.”
“Don’t be a fool.” His voice cut off as he was wracked with coughing. “The guns are gone. You’re lucky to be out there. Walk in beauty, Twist.”
The serpent swept into sight again. Wings fanned forward with feathers at maximum spread for braking. The neck arched back into an S-curve, and the jaws opened wide to belch forth flame.
Sam thought Begay still safe from that sort of attack. Surely he would have heard screams if the Navaho had been exposed to the flame? Sam looked down to see the comm light cold and dead.
Below him, the flames found a ruptured seal on a fuel tank. The side of the panzer blew out, sending a fireball with an oily black smudge of a tail into the sky.
The serpent beat its wings and gained altitude. It circled lazily, drifting in and out of the smoky column. As it rose, Sam recognized its markings. This was Tessien, the feathered serpent that worked with Hart. Drake must have sent it after him. Now Drake would have to answer for yet another life.
After what the Dragon had done to the panzer, Sam had no illusions about what would happen if the Little Eagle tangled with it. He banked away, seeking a thermal to take him up and away from the scene of carnage.
33
When an hour had passed, Sam was sure that Tessien was not following him. The Little Eagle was still headed north and the badlands had given way to flat prairie. He was not moving in the optimal direction, but the need to conserve fuel forced this course upon him. He needed to cover ground, and the further the Eagle could take him, the better. Because of the craft’s limited endurance, Sam took every advantage of the prevailing winds to glide as much as possible. All the while, he looked for a landing spot where alternate transportation might be available. Otherwise, he’d be walking once the Eagle landed. On the bright side, he was out of Sioux territory.
By now, though, he was physically drained, his head aching from interfacing with the Little Eagle’s sensors as he sought to evade pursuit. He wanted to rest, to stretch out somewhere and close his eyes for a while. The cramped confines of the drone offered no solace on the first count, but the autopilot would let him rest for a bit. He fed the Little Eagle’s computer the parameters necessary to maintain gliding flight and to take advantage of any thermals, and instructed it to signal any significant change in the prevailing winds. He didn’t trust the dog brain to pick a suitable course once the wind shifted. That done, he jacked out. Even confined and cramped as he was, sleep came fast. Dreams came, too.
Sam wandered in a Stygian darkness. To either side, black walls loomed over him and stretched away into the pitchy distance. A sound tapped regularly at the edge of his awareness like a distant clock, or was it a heartbeat? He felt a cold pressure against his back, but when he turned and stretched out his hand, he found nothing. And when he tried to take a step in that direction, he could not move his foot. Turning back, he took a few steps, and stopped again. The pressure returned, and a second attempt to walk in its direction met the same result. He took another few steps in the permitted direction before trying once more. Failure, again. He shrugged and walked on the only way he could. He continued for a ways, occasionally stumbling over unseen obstructions that evaporated just as he touched them. Resigning himself to barked shins, he pressed on while gradually noticing a dim light ahead. As he approached, the illumination resolved itself into a face. Janice? Maybe not. Hanae? He wasn’t sure. He needed to know, and began to run toward the image.
But then he was brought up short and almost fell. Looking down, he saw shackles around his ankles. Each band was linked to a heavy chain of gleaming steel links that stretched away into the darkness. Bending closer, he noted a small cloth label sewn to the metal. The inscription read, “Made expressly for Samuel Verner.” He laughed. It was ridiculous to find a custom clothes label on chains.
He resented the restraints and that resentment flared up into rage. Who had the right to shackle him? He bent to the chains and found no fastenings. When he pulled at them in frustration, they proved to be stiff and immovable, he beat at them with his bare fists. He needed a tool to smash them or to let him slip free of the bindings. He howled in fury.
Somewhere in the darkness around him a dog howled, too, echoing his outburst. No, the sound was too wild and lonely to be a dog. He was in the prairie; it must be a coyote. The plaintive voice was calling… calling. Calling him? No, that didn’t seem right. Calling…
Thunder rolled across the sky, shocking Sam awake. A look out the cockpit told him what he didn’t want to know. The boiling storm front seemed to fill the sky to the southwest. The thunderheads were too high for him to climb over and their leaden gray front was moving too fast to outrun. He knew enough about small aircraft to know that the Little Eagle would not withstand the fury of storm winds.
Sam disengaged the autopilot and dipped the Eagle’s nose down. Reluctantly he scanned the prairie below, looking for a landing site that would also offer him some shelter. He would be walking sooner than he’d hoped.
The Little Eagle dropped swiftly. Early in the descent, Sam spotted a small village, but the turns necessary to reach it would have put him into the teeth of the storm before he could bring the Little Eagle to earth. The grassland rushed past beneath the craft. No better opportunity appeared, and be began to regret having passed up the village. Time was running out.
His tail wind strengthened, forcing him to ease off to a shallower glide slope or else risk a dump. He thought about jacking back in; the added response-time from receiving the sensor data directly might give him an edge. The Eagle shuddered as the first of the storm’s winds reached her, and be knew the decision had been made. He could not afford to take his hands from the control yoke now. Seconds later, the drumming of rain announced the arrival of the storm.
Sam fought the bucking Eagle, trying to bring her down safely before the full force of the storm hit. His ground speed increased as the winds swelled, The prairie below vanished, replaced by a landscape as dark as his nightmare.
As the Eagle lurched downward, strange shapes loomed up and flashed past. Even as Sam fought to retain control, he could see that most were geological formations carved from rock by wind and rain and lit by the lightning. But the storm’s gathering darkness cloaked other, almost organic shapes. Hunched giants and monstrous creatures reached out of the storm to threaten him and his fragile craft. The Eagle twisted abruptly to the right, and Sam watched helplessly as the winds tore off the starboard wing tip, which tumbled away. Caught in a crosswind, the Eagle’s nose lifted just before slamming into a rocky spire. The port wing sheared away, leaving the craft a broken plaything for the gale. The battered fuselage was torn from the sky and slammed across the rough face of a mesa. The remains of the Little Eagle bounced three times before settling against a rocky bluff. Sam never felt those bounces; he lost consciousness when his head slammed back on the first strike.