The Iron Dragon's Daughter (51 page)

The e-m fields abruptly steadied, merged, collapsed into a narrowing spear and disappeared altogether.

"We've got our gate," the dragon reported.

Hell Gate blossomed at the far limit of visual, an uncertain blackness against the starry bowl of space. Beyond it were two bright specks, Rocket's comrades moving into position where they expected a different gate entirely to open.

Rocket's voice rose in disbelief. "Damn you, what do you think you're doing? Things are unstable out there—one wrong action could harrow the upper world and the lower alike. You can't go through Hell Gate."

He looked so pale and tormented that Jane wanted to hug him. I love you, she thought. I want you. But something strong and perverse within her wanted not to comfort but to goad and provoke him. She didn't understand this impulse at all, but she was helpless before it. Melanchthon chuckled with disgust.

"Watch me."

"I am a defender," Rocket said in a choked voice. His face was highly colored; his temper barely contained. "Do not presume on my emotions, Lady. I will not throw over my honor for you—I will not!"

"Nobody's asking you to."

Squeezed out of nothingness, Hell Gate was a shimmering lenticular hole in the void. The two lead pilots, anticipating the wrong set of conditions, could not bank sharply enough to follow her in. They peeled away, their dragons bellowing with frustrated combat-lust. But Rocket's mount kept on her tail, hot in pursuit. Desperate with the need to engage and destroy.

"This is the last warning you get!"

"Warn away—you're wasting your breath. I'm beyond all that now."

"
Jayne
!"

Hell Gate exploded in her face.

They were flying high above a turbulent white ocean. Its surface bubbled and frothed, throwing up spikes half a mile high and as bright to look upon as an electric light bulb. One shot up beneath them and was only barely evaded. Just as it looked about to collapse, the spike was drawn rapidly back down into the ocean and reabsorbed.

"What the fuck is
that
?" Jane asked.

"Quantum uncertainty—chaos—unformed matter—the stuff of creation," Melanchthon said distractedly. "There's no adequate name for what it is. Who gives a shit? Just make good and sure none of it touches us."

Ahead, a white seashell shape that Jane could have covered with her outstretched thumb tumbled slowly in a featureless sky. Spiral Castle!

Rocket loosed an air-to-air missile at them.

It flew with single-minded fury. The dragon's tracking devices translated the missile's hunting song into a rising electronic squeal. Just as it peaked, Jane slammed the dragon left. The missile slipped past one wing. A spike of the primal ocean rose beneath them and she threw them right again. "Cer-fucking-
nunos
! Why can't we get above this crap?"

"Local conditions—this is as high as we'll go. Forget that. Your flyboy is too close. Brush him back."

Belatedly Jane remembered her rear guns and squeezed off a burst. Rocket's dragon slid to one side and back again, losing next to no speed at all. Jane swung around a rising pillar and glimpsed him dipping under a falling loop of primal matter for a fractional gain of distance. He was a crackerjack pilot, there was no denying that.

Two black explosions blossomed in the air beyond Rocket. His fellow warriors appeared in his wake.

"Yo, buddy, you miss us?"

"Hope you left something for us."

They fell into formation. All three were intermittently visible and invisible among the twisting, rising, and falling tentacles of light. Abruptly Rocket's voice rose, clear and surprisingly high, over the radio, singing:

"I weep for my lady—she is dead!

Oh weep for my lady! though our tears

Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!"

A swaying starburst slammed up before her, and Jane just barely managed to evade it. "He's crazy!" she said. "What the hell does he think he's doing?"

"Singing your dirge." An odd inflection, almost of regret, entered Melanchthon's voice. "It's a Corps tradition. Ignore it." The deeper-than-bass rumble of 8607 welled up under Rocket's and was joined by the doubled voices of Hawk and his 2928, and of Spitfire and his 6613, all merging into one:

"Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when she lay,

Thy daughter lay, pierced by the shaft which flies

In darkness?"

There was a strange, unworldly beauty to the song. Fleetingly Jane had a shivery glimpse of what it might be like to have Melanchthon subservient to her, broken to her will, undiminished in strength and intelligence but compliant. "Pussies!" Melanchthon roared. "If you had any self-respect, you'd eject those parasites and join with me. Cocksuckers! Slaves!" But the singing went right on, uninterrupted. A forest of chaotic waterspouts separated them from their pursuers, but by slow and steady increments the distance was shrinking.

"I'm not dead yet!" she shouted at them.

Heedless, her pursuers sang the dirge to completion. The song did not distract them from the business at hand but, rather, served to focus their concentration. When it ended, they were closer than they had been when they'd begun.

"Slide aside, Rocket," Hawk drawled, "and I'll loose an AAM."

"No."

"Hey, trust me on this one. I'm that close to a lock."

"No!"

"We're coming up on the turnaround point," Spitfire said. "We've got fuel enough for another two-three minutes if we expect to get back to base intact. Give us our target!"

"No, I've got her." Rocket's dragon hung tantalizingly on the edge of Jane's blind spot, flickering in and out of her peripheral vision. Ironically, his proximity was sheltering her from his comrades' missiles.

"Rocket, get the fuck out of my way!"

"A three-way convergence and release, boss-man. That's how the book calls it."

"I've got her, I tell you."

He was drawing slowly closer, into the hammerlock slot, where no conceivable evasive tactic could dislodge him. Even if Rocket's dragon weren't younger, stronger, faster—and Jane had no reason to doubt that he was—she was no pilot. She had not a fraction of Rocket's fighting skills.

Spiral Castle was getting closer, but slowly, too slowly.

"Here comes the moment of truth," Melanchthon muttered. On the navigationals Jane saw four pinpricks of light creeping up on a curved orange line—the extremes of the dragons' range. None could cross it and hope to return home alive.

Already, Hawk and Spitfire were reining in their frustrated mounts, veering off well short of the line. As their commander failed to follow, they called to him in voices suddenly fearful:

"Heads up, Rocket!"

"Yo, buddy! Turn back."

"Rocket!"

Jane squelched their fading voices. On virtual she saw Rocket's face, his eyes fixed on her own virtual image. In the false-color exteriors, she could make out the curved line of her own contrail, visible in the high UV and low IR frequencies, the superheated ion trace of a hundred true names painstakingly gathered and now being squandered in one prolonged and reckless burst of speed. Rocket's dragon was almost to the orange line.

"Now I'm giving
you
one last warning—turn back!"

"No chance," he said grimly. "We're going down together."

"You wish!" she crowed.

Over the screens Rocket looked like a young god. The battle-light blazed furiously about his face. It snapped and crackled in the cockpit. His fleeing fellow warriors must have said something to him, for his face suddenly twisted. "She's mine!" he yelled. "Nobody nails her but me!"

"Come and get me, loverboy!" Jane jeered. "Anything you can catch, you can have!"

Rocket's dragon crossed the line.

"Shit," Melanchthon muttered in so dark a tone that it cut right through Jane's exultation.

"Shit? What do you mean—shit?"

"Work it out for yourself."

8607 was in Jane's blind spot now, just off to one side of her exhaust, hanging out of range of her guns. But not out of range for his missiles. She slammed her dragon right, left, left again. Rocket hung onto her with effortless grace. He wasn't going to turn back. And Spiral Castle was still far, far away.

"We can't outfly him!" Jane cried in sudden despair. "We're not going to make it."

"Then give me the mestizo's true name."

"What?"

"His true name," Melanchthon growled. "I've got the programming and I know how to use it. Give me his name and I can command him to destroy his mount under himself."

"No!"

"I know you have it. It burns in your brain like a lodestar." The dragon reached dark tendrils into her. She could easily have shut him out by snapping his electrical systems quickly off and on. But at these speeds, they could not afford even the briefest distraction. It would have killed them both.

"Rocket," she cried. "Turn back! Turn!"

The dragon's touch was deliberately foul in a crude and cartoonish way, like a hand dipped in black molasses and dragged across the front of a white cotton blouse. Quick as a wet rat on a garden wall, it scuttled into her hoard of memories.

It was totally irrational, she knew. There was no safe place he could go. "You've got to listen to me!" She heard him chuckle, a low and nasty noise compounded equally of desire and tears. "Rocket!"

The squeal of a second air-to-air being brought on-line sounded on the tracking systems. A sharp beeping as it searched for a radar lock. A glad cry as it found it.

"His name!" The dragon was closing on his prey. Jane resisted, throwing out random snapshot recollections in his way: Ratsnickle standing, prick in hand, sneering at her. Gwen trying on a new necklace. Smidgeon sitting in the shadows behind a scrap iron box, weeping, while Rooster looked on in disgust. Being dragged up the twisting spine of House Incol—Melanchthon snatched greedily at what he saw there.

"Kunosoura!" he cried, just as the missile was launched.

For the space of an eyeblink Jane saw a spherical wave front race away from them at Mach One. There must have been some tangential influence to Rocket's half sister's true name, for at its touch the missile veered crazily, spinning end over end toward the glowing ocean. A rising dome of blistered white touched it and without transition the missile simply ceased to be, melted back into its own potential. Lesya's true name as well collapsed upon its own syllables and ceased to be.

A third missile was being brought up. Jane could hear its voice in her earphones, and Rocket's too. He was crooning quietly to himself in a crazed kind of amalgam of anger, lust, and despair. "Come on, baby. A little closer. Yeah. Yeah, I've got you now. I've got you sweet and nasty." He held 8607 tight and steady behind her, just off-range from her guns. The beeping began. "Ohhh yeah, you're mine now."

"Does your word mean nothing?" Melanchthon demanded. "You've been lying to yourself all along, fantasizing that you could provoke your half-breed leman into stopping you from your actions, rescuing you from their consequences, knocking the dagger aside, sweeping you up in his arms and carrying you away to a pink, warm, satin-coverleted bed where you'll be as safe and comfy as two maggots in an acorn forever. Bullshit! It doesn't matter how he feels or what he wants. He can do nothing now but kill you. The universe has backed you into another corner—you can kill or die. There are no other choices. Doesn't that make you angry? Doesn't it make you want revenge? Or are you going to truckle to Dame Fate one more time, to be crushed and for all I know resurrected to run the maze of torment again and yet again? Stand up on your hind legs for once!"

A glad cry arose from the third missile.

It was inevitable. There was nothing else she could do.

"Tetigistus," Jane murmured.

Melanchthon roared his triumph as the missile, caught in the act of launching, exploded directly in front of 8607. Rocket's dragon tumbled away in pieces.

Jane couldn't watch. She was crying with rage.

Kill the Bitch, she thought desperately. The spikes were rising wildly about her, hundreds of them, twisting like tornadoes. If I have to die, let these be my last words, my final thought. Kill the fucking Bitch. Her heart was racing. Kill the Bitch kill the Bitch kill the Bitch kill the Bitch. The words ran together in her mind, becoming a scream, a mantra, a kind of hysteric prayer, a last grudging acknowledgment of the Goddess's power.

Spiral Castle grew larger and larger, filling her vision with its chalky white walls. Jane felt like a gnat assaulting a continent. Melanchthon was laughing—
laughing
!—as they flew, all weapons firing, the pure embodiment of madness and destruction. The dragon's iron body shuddered spasmodically as two by two the missiles were launched. I am the shattering stone, Jane thought. I am the arrow in flight. It was her own thought, but it tasted like the dragon's. The cabin was heating up, sweat tickling down Jane's face and pouring from her armpits and down her sides, where her body was already slick and itchy. She didn't give a damn. This was what she had been born for, built for, plotted for tedious years of exile from the skies to attain.

This was the death of everything.

But as Spiral Castle continued to swell, filling the universe, and the ocean grew strangely still beneath them, something began to happen to the dragon.

It started as a failing responsiveness at the tips of his wings and spread rapidly. Columns of alphanumeric readouts sank toward zeros. His extremities numbed. All feeling was lost on the skin. Great masses of status data went flat. Wisps of white mist obscured the quantum ocean below. They were flying through a tepid, oxidizing milkiness. Patches of corrosion grew upon the dragon's exterior. Holes appeared in his skin.