cover of their diplomatic status?'
'Uthik, shut up!' Skirvon said harshly.
'I won't!' Dastiri shot back. 'This bastard thinks he can threaten us? Well, he's wrong!' He turned his glare on the Ternathian. 'Go ahead,' he sneered. 'Tell us what you're going to do to us! Just remember, our soldiers are coming!'
'Really?' Something about the Ternathian's smile tightened Skirvon's belly muscles even further.
'I'm afraid you've been operating under a bit of a misapprehension, Master Dastiri,' Simrath continued, reaching back into his jacket and withdrawing his revolver once more. 'I really am Viscount Simrath, and I really am Emperor Zindel's accredited representative to these negotiations. But I'm also Platoon- Captain chan Baskay, Imperial Ternathian Army, on assignment to the Portal Authority Armed Forces.
And I'm afraid that at the moment, I'm feeling much more like Platoon-Captain chan Baskay and very little like a diplomat.'
Skirvon swallowed again, harder, and chan Baskay smiled icily.
'Under Ternathian military law, Master Dastiri, I have full authority to conduct summary courts-martial in the field and to carry out their verdicts.'
'You can't bluff me,' Dastiri sneered. 'Not even you could be stupid enough to think you could get away with murdering an Arcanan diplomat!'
'Perhaps not,' chan Baskay conceded. 'On the other hand, I am 'stupid enough' to execute a murdering piece of scum.'
He raised his pistol hand, and despite himself, Dastiri's eyes widened as the Polshana's muzzle aligned itself with the bridge of his nose. Chan Baskay's free hand waved two troopers standing behind Dastiri out of the line of fire, and the Manisthuan's nerve seemed to waver for a moment as the cavalrymen stepped aside. But then his mouth tightened once again, and he glared back at chan Baskay, as if his momentary weakness had only made him even angrier.
'I would most earnestly advise you to give me a reason not to kill you,' chan Baskay said.
'Fuck you!' Dastiri spat.
'Wrong answer,' chan Baskay said, and squeezed the trigger.
The black hole which appeared in Dastiri's forehead wasn't all that big, actually, a corner of Skirvon's brain reflected. But the entire back of the younger man's skull disintegrated in an explosion of red, gray, and splintered white bone. The body was flung backward. It thudded to the ground, quivering slightly, and chan Baskay brought that deadly muzzle to bear on Skirvon's forehead.
'You have five minutes to convince me not to kill you,' chan Baskay told him. 'I'm sure you know the sorts of things I'd be interested in hearing. And, just as a reminder, don't forget that Trekar will know the first time you lie to me. And if you ever lie to me again, Master Skirvon, I'll be very, very unhappy with you. Is that clear?'
Chapter Three
Commander of Five Hundred Cerlohs Myr, CO of the First Provisional Talon, Arcanan Expeditionary Force, settled himself even more deeply into the cockpit hollowed out of Razorwing's neck scales. He felt the deep, subterranean rumble vibrating through the accelerating battle dragon, felt the prodigious power of Razorwing's sweeping pinions, and a matching flood of eagerness poured through him, for t here was nothing-nothing in all the universes mankind had ever explored-which could equal the sheer thrill of piloting a battle dragon into combat.
Not that anyone's had all that much combat experience over the last couple of centuries.
The thought flickered through the back corners of his brain as the air stream began to scream just above his head. Battle dragon pilots didn't use the saddles transport pilots favored. They rode their mounts in a prone position, strapped into their cockpits-the depressions which centuries of careful breeding had formed in the backs of their dragons' huge, scaly necks. Carefully sculpted scutes in front of that depression acted as baffles, protecting it and fairing the airflow. At a battle dragon's maximum speed, that airflow could severely injure any limb which strayed into it, but the curved scales bent it up and around, leaving the pilot in a pocket of absolutely calm air, like the eye of a hurricane.
Of course, Myr could count the number of times he'd taken Razorwing to the dragon's true maximum speed on his fingers. That kind of flying was frowned upon during peacetime, even in the combat strikes, because of the potential for injuries. And not just injuries to pilots. In fact, replacing a dead or crippled pilot was the easy part; a fully seasoned and trained battle dragon like Razorwing took literally decades to hatch, raise, and train.
That was part of the reason the Air Force never had enough of them. They were expensive, they were irritable, they were dangerous, and-in peacetime-they were far less useful than the bigger, slower, more placid transports. There were those who'd argued for years that the combat strikes should be reduced even further. Aside from providing occasional support against unusually large and wellorganized groups of brigands, they didn't really have a peacetime function which couldn't be filled just as well by the transports. After all, a properly trained transport dragon could fly aerial reconnaissance missions just as well as a battle dragon, and battle dragons were poorly suited to transport and SAR
operations. Their function wasn't to carry or rescue things … it was to kill things.
The Air Force had fought off the pressure to completely dispense with battle dragons, but it hadn't been easy, especially after so many years in which no external threat to the Union of Arcana had ever been encountered. The decisive argument, in many ways, had been the time and incredible expense which would be required to reconstitute an aerial combat capability from scratch if the breeding and training programs were allowed to lapse. The fact that certain members of the Union Parliament had been determined to protect their constituencies' lucrative Air Force contracts hadn't hurt, either, of course.
But if the Air Force had managed to keep the breeding programs going, it had still been forced to accept severe reductions in total numbers. The slow, steady build-down of the combat forces had been going on for better than ninety years now, and the Air Force's ability to project fighting power and provide ground support was at an all-time low.
Which, of course, explains why Ekros dropped a godsdamned war into our laps now, Myr thought sourly. Or, at least, as sourly as it was possible for a man to feel as the incredible power of the dragon under him carried him through the endless heavens at better than two hundred miles per hour.
The lumbering transports were already out of sight, left far behind as the battle dragons sped ahead at two- thirds again their maximum speed. Not even a battle dragon could sustain that sort of sprint speed for long, but Two Thousand Harshu had stressed the vital necessity of hitting the enemy as quickly as possible.
Myr would have preferred to spearhead the attack in person, and his Razorwing could have flown the mission. Razorwing was a 'black,' after all-a lightning-breather. But a commander of five hundred had no business getting entangled in the opening stages of an attack like this one. Myr's job was to coordinate everyone else, and no one had commanded an attack on this scale since the unification wars.
He'd selected Commander of Fifty Delthyr Fahrlo for the most ticklish aspect of the operation. Fahrlo's Deathclaw was a 'black' like Razorwing, and he was also well over eighty years old. Still in his prime, for a battle dragon, but with decades of experience behind him. It might be experience acquired in training missions, rather than on actual combat operations, but Deathclaw was still the most qualified beast for the mission, and Fahrlo had amassed an enviable record in his strike's exercises over the three years he'd piloted Deathclaw.
Now it remained to be seen just how good Myr's choice would turn out to be. As he gazed ahead, the five hundred saw the swamp portal looming up, growing rapidly closer and bigger, and wished his mouth didn't suddenly feel quite so dry.
Petty-Armsman Harth Loumas checked his watch.
It was just about time for another sweep, and he yawned and stretched deliberately, locking his fingers above his head and twisting his back to encourage the kinks to depart. Then he settled back on his haunches, closed his eyes, and once more reached out across the miles of water and mud with his Talent.
Loumas had always taken his duties and responsibilities seriously. Given the … energy with which Company- Captain chan Tesh had stressed Platoon-Captain chan Baskay's concerns over the Arcanan diplomats' attitude, he
