The first hundred yards were easy. The Erassvas had obviously been all through this area; the path meandered around in what Jack was starring to realize was typical Erassva fashion. A dozen somewhat narrower trails led off the main path in various directions where one or two of the big aliens had gone exploring for berries and other food.
At the end of that hundred yards, though, the trail came to an abrupt halt at the edge of a twenty-foot cliff. "Well, we needed to head west sometime anyway," Alison said as she and Jack surveyed the drop-off. "Let's go back to that last left-hand bunny trail and see how far it'll take us."
"Sounds good," Jack agreed. He hadn't had a chance yet to tell her about the change in their travel plans, but there would be time for that once they'd gotten past this cliff. "Go ahead and check it out. I'll bring Greenie and follow—"
"Jack?" Colonel Frost's voice came suddenly from his left shoulder. "Can you hear me?"
"Don't answer," Alison said sharply.
"I know," Jack said, double-checking that the comm clip's transmitter was still off.
"I know you can hear me Jack," Frost went on. "I'm sorry about your uncle—I really am. Please believe me when I say that we really did want him alive. But he took one gamble too many. I'm afraid he and your ship are both gone."
Jack set his teeth firmly down on his tongue. Frost was trying to goad him into talking, he knew, hoping for some anguished cry of anger or denial or defiance that could be traced.
But he wasn't going to fall for it. Draycos's trick had worked, he told himself firmly, and the Essenay was safe. It had to be.
"Just one of the many hazards of carrying missiles aboard a ship that was never designed for them," Frost said. "Those were highly illegal for you to have, by the way."
Jack looked surreptitiously at Alison. She was gazing back at him, a thoughtful look on her face that he didn't care for at all.
"Sadly, there's nothing any of us can do about that now," Frost said. "Except, of course, to make sure you and your K'da don't suffer his same fate."
"Better turn it off," Alison said. "Out here in the middle of nowhere, even electronics as small as a comm clip can sometimes be detected."
"Yeah, that part of Sergeant Grisko's training I remember," Jack said. He switched off the comm clip, cutting Frost off in midsentence. "We'd better get out of here."
"Right," Alison said. "You take Greenie and get everybody moving down the path. I'll hang back a ways and play rear guard."
Beneath Jack's shirt, K'da claws brushed lightly but urgency at Jack's skin. "Better idea: you take them," he said, thinking fast. "Now that we're out of the main Erassva stomping grounds, I can go ahead and set that booby trap I was going to use earlier."
A slight frown creased her forehead, but she nodded. "Okay, but don't be too long," she said. Getting a grip on the green K'da's crest, she turned him around and started maneuvering her way back though the crowd of K'da and Erassvas that had gathered behind them.
"Is something wrong?" Hren asked as Alison and Greenie reached the side trail and started along it. He didn't seem particularly worried, merely curious.
"A small change in direction," Jack assured him as he passed the other. "Stay with Alison and help her keep the Phookas together."
"I will," Hren promised.
Jack reached the back of the crowd and continued on. A wide S-curve later he was out of their sight. "Okay, buddy, we're on," he murmured.
There was a surge of weight against his shoulders, and Draycos leaped out of his shirt. "What is the plan?" the dragon asked, his gold scales glistening in the sunlight filtering through the mass of branches high above them.
"The plan is to keep Frost and his band of pirates from catching us," Jack told him grimly. "I just wish I really had something to use as a booby trap, like Alison thinks I have."
"You do," Draycos said. "You have me."
"Yeah, I figured you'd say that," Jack said grimly. "Problem is, they know about you now. That means no more sneak attacks."
"Perhaps," Draycos said calmly. He rose partially up on his hind legs, his neck stretching upward as he tried to look past the bushes and branches. His tongue flicked in and out of his mouth a few times as he smelled the air. "I may yet have a few surprises for them. What will you do while I am gone?"
Jack made a face at the other's implied order that he stay back here where it would be safer. But Draycos was right. He hardly needed Jack's help at this sort of thing, and the boy would just be in the way. "I thought I'd try to hide the spot where we left the path," he said.
"Good," Draycos said. "I will be as quick as I can."
Turning, he headed back toward the clearing, moving like a whisper of breeze through the grass and bushes.
Taking a deep breath, Jack moved to the side of the path and began gathering loose branches and small shrubs to hide their path. "Warrior's luck," he murmured to the empty air.
CHAPTER 9
Like most forests Draycos had seen, the ground here was covered with grasses, reeds, and dead leaves. Even Jack and Alison, who were trying to be quiet, had made considerable noise as they'd worked their way through the undergrowth. The Erassvas, who seemed to have no concept of the danger they were in, had sounded more like a set of brush-clearing machines.
Draycos himself knew several techniques for moving quietly. Trouble was, most of them involved slow stalking and right now he needed speed as much as he did silence.
Fortunately, with the trees as close together as these were, there were ways of traveling that would allow him to have both.
He leaped straight upward, grabbing onto the trunk of the nearest tree with his claws. His next leap cleared a row of bushes and landed him on a thick branch two trees over. He trotted along that branch to the trunk, then out again along another even thicker branch until he had a clear path to the next tree.
Two minutes and eleven leaps later, he had made it back to the edge of the clearing.
He was just in time. At the far side, six men in combat suits were marching in a two-by-two formation along the path Jack and Alison had first taken into the forest. As they reached the clearing, their guns swept warningly across the lounging Erassvas. Fortunately, the aliens made no sudden moves, hostile or otherwise. A few of them gazed curiously at the invaders, but most ignored them completely.
Draycos eased his way a little farther around the side of the tree trunk he was clinging to, studying the mercenaries as they headed for the clearing's center. They were walking openly, almost carelessly, with no attempt at caution or concealment.
Yet Arthur Neverlin knew Draycos had survived the Iota Klestis ambush. More than that, he'd seen the K'da poet-warrior in action. Could he have failed to warn Colonel Frost?
Draycos's jaws cracked open in a tight smile. No, of course Frost knew. Those six soldiers marching across the clearing weren't the attack force at all.
They were the bait.
Draycos took another, more careful look. This time he saw them: two pairs of camouflaged soldiers slipping quietly through the forest a few feet outside the edges of the clearing, one pair on each flank. An attacker careless enough to throw himself at the men in the clearing would find himself in a deadly crossfire.
The six mercenaries reached the center of the clearing and stopped, looking around and quietly talking among themselves. The two outrider pairs stopped, too, standing back-to-back and watching for trouble.
Back-to-back was a good defensive formation. Unfortunately for them, Draycos also knew how to deal with that one. Fixing their locations in his mind, he started to climb farther up the tree.
And then, from behind him came a soft crunch of leaves.