The next four days saw that scene replayed three times. None of those who followed were as admirable as Lord Trassahn, but perhaps that was fortunate. Late evening of the fourth day found me up on the mountain slope, sitting on a sun-warmed rocky outcrop with a coffee mug in my hands and dark thoughts on my mind.
"My Lord?"
I looked up. "Hm? Oh. Hi, Stefan," I said distractedly, my eyes drifting back to once again blindly regard the scenery. "What can I do for you?"
"My Lord . . . is there something amiss?"
I felt one corner of my mouth turn upward slightly. "No; just up here, visiting," I replied, gesturing toward a low earthen mound nearby, "talking about old times. That sort of stuff."
Stefan's eyes flicked over to the unmarked grave for a moment then slid back to mine. His lips compressed into a thin flat line, but he said nothing.
I returned the gaze of Dithra's agent for a long moment, then sighed and shook my head. "Well, yeah; a lot of things, actually. I guess I just don't like where all this is going." I dropped my eyes to my coffee mug, noted its contents were well on the way to becoming a lump of ice. I dumped it on the ground and refilled my cup with the thermos I brought with me. "It just feels wrong, like I'm screwing-up somewhere." I shook my head again. "It's strange, but what I have to go up that mountain and do, the thought of failure doesn't bother me all-that much. It's the thought of success that's scaring the crap out of me.
"There's this word that keeps floating around in my head, and it's tying my stomach into knots. All my life I've fought against the creatures that were described by this word, and now it seems increasingly likely that I'm going to end up joining their ranks. That, or die." I raised a hand to gesture, looked at it, let it fall back to my lap. "Remember the gorge, Stefan? Remember that patch of ice I hit? I feel like I'm back on that ice, Stefan, sliding into the abyss. And this time, there's no tree for me to grab."
I sighed, rubbed at my burning eyes. Sleep, what little any of us could get, had come hard for me these past several days. "I'm just a dumb, worn-out old grunt. I mean, just what the hell am I doing? A soldier should follow orders, not give them."
Stefan was silent for a long time. "Even when the soldier knows the orders are wrong, my Lord?" he finally said.
I looked up at Stefan. "Say again?"
"I said, what if the soldier knows that following his orders will lead to nothing but horror? Should he follow them then?" The ex-Stasi agent looked out at the darkened tree line, his eyes distant. "Once, not very long ago," he continued at last "there was a Russian officer sitting in a place deep underground. The machine in front of him was telling him, again and again, that his homeland was being attacked.
"His orders, my Lord, were to pass that information on to his superiors. He refused to do so, and was cast aside into disgrace and eventual madness. And yet, if he had followed his orders, if he had been what the Soviets considered a 'good soldier' and passed along what he correctly believed to be false information, it is quite possible that all of us would now be dead," he finished simply, then looked back at me. "There are indeed many times, my Lord, when being a good soldier means obeying one's superiors. Sometimes, however, it means realizing that those superiors are wrong and must not be obeyed. And, sometimes the only way to stop them is to take the trappings of power away from those who consider themselves your superiors, before it is too late."
Stefan looked at me for a moment more in the gathering darkness, then reached out and carefully gripped my shoulder. "You are indeed on a slippery slope, my Lord, but, much like the last time, you are not on it alone. Do what needs to be done, my Lord. I, at the least, will be there."
"Feelin' better?"
I looked up from the hardware, a wry smile curving my lips. "You too, Deebs?"
Deebs snorted. "Whaddya mean, 'you too?' You've been moping around like a sick dog for days now. So; you snappin' out of it?"
I looked at him for a moment more, then chuckled quietly. "Yeah; I think so. I just needed someone to slap me up-side the head and help me get my priorities straight." I rubbed the back of my neck, then refocused on what lay on the test bench before me. "So; what the heck are we trying to do here?"
"Well, you've worked with this rig before, right?" The Texan gestured at the conglomeration of boxes and puck-shaped sensors, all hay-wired into the back of a small, round display unit with a data plate marked AN/APR-39. "We had 'em on the Mohawks, and I hear they're still usin' them on the Apaches and stuff."
I waved him off. "Yeah, yeah; the radar warning system. But so what, Deebs? Somehow I don't think I'm going to have to worry about Ahnkar having a SA-6 battery in his hip pocket."
"No, no, no!" Deebs flagged me down "That isn't the kind of stuff that I'm tryin' to sweet-talk this little feller into lookin' for. Y'see, I had a little talk with Stefan about how you folks do some of that, um, that weird stuff you do, and it got me to thinkin'. Now could you, ah, could you like turn into a dragon for a little bit?"
I stared at Deebs for a long moment, then shrugged and closed my eyes. I concentrated, and the usual pain of change assailed me. When my forepaws touched the ground I opened my eyes and looked at Deebs enquiringly.
"Good, good, now just stay right there while I fire this thing up." Looking very much the mad scientist, the scene spoiled only slightly by his green Army-issue coveralls, Deebs closed a switch on the test bench and a soft whine began to emanate from the equipment. The APR's little display screen flickered, then start-up text began to scroll across it. "Y'see, there's an old rule you prob'ly know already," he continued distractedly as he scanned the text "that if something uses energy, that energy can be detected and located. Well, I'm bankin' that whatever stuff you folks're usin' it's still energy, and with a little tweakin' this little critter can detect it." The screen paused for a moment then went blank, and Deebs straightened. "All right, now do one of them weird things."
Do one of them weird things. Jeez. My mane jangled musically as I shook my head in amusement, then after a moment's thought I reached up and tapped my little translator pattern. It began to glow softly. "Like this?" I asked.
"Um, yeah . . . ." Deebs peered at the little screen, frowned, poked at a control, then peered at the screen again. "Ah, you are doin' something, right?"
"Yes, Deebs," I replied wryly, perfectly understandable human speech issuing from my draconic jaws, "I'm doing something."
"Well, hell," my logistics NCO growled, then proceeded to check all his connections, ran an equipment self-test, tweaked stuff some more, ran another self-test, et-cetera, until finally he straightened with a curse. "Damn it, I was sure this was gonna work!" Baffled, he scratched at his shoebrush-like hair. "Maybe I have the freqs wrong. . . . No; that's not . . . . Aw, hell."
I looked at Deebs, back at the pile of hardware, then back at Deebs. "Okay, I think I'm getting the idea as to what you're trying for. Let's see. . . ." I thought for a moment, then used one of my talons to scribe a small pattern in the barn's dirt floor. After a little more thought I added to it, paused, then added a bit more. Finally satisfied with it, I then placed a talon-tip against the pattern and fed it a little Power. The pattern responded with the usual blue-black glow, the light flickering strangely at its edges. "How about now?"
"I got something! I got a line!" Deebs crowed, pointing to an amber line on the APR's display that radiated from the edge closest to my pattern to almost the center of the screen. "I even have vector and range! What the hell did you do?"
I opened my jaws, hesitated, closed them again, thought for a bit. Finally I sighed. "I'm sorry, Deebs, but if I told you, and things go south next week . . . ." I gave him a pleading look. "It could hurt us very badly," I finished lamely.
The Texan frowned, but then understanding dawned and he nodded at last. "Okay; I know what you're gettin' at. Forget I asked."
"Thanks, Deebs," I replied, suddenly chilled to the bone by the thought of how close Deebs had come, and how quickly. If he could get this far working alone, what would, say, the military scientists at the Signal Warfare Laboratories be able to achieve? I shuddered, but then set about duplicating the pattern on the face of each of the APR's sensors. Soon the gizmo could track me wherever I went, the little amber line following me unerringly as I moved about. "That should do it," I rumbled at last. "Now; what about all the other hardware?"
"We're gettin' there," Deebs responded, reluctantly shutting down his test bench "though there's a few parts and such I'm still waitin' for." He turned and regarded the main assembly. "Grease is just about done with the rail, and we'll try a few dry runs with it sometime tomorrow, make sure it works right." At that he turned and gave me a devilish grin. "Just wouldn't do to have that momma hang-up on you, now would it?"
I chuckled. "No, I suppose it wouldn't. What about this thing?" I gestured with one set of talons. "Get it running, yet?"
"That critter is a whole different story," Deebs sighed. "Got a whole bunch of problems to iron-out with that thing . . . though. . . . ." He trailed off, glanced back at his test bench, then back at me, a speculative gleam coming to his eye. ". . . .Though, maybe if I explained them to you, maybe between us we might be able to come up with something."