"Why 'Dragonback'?" Alison asked suddenly.

Jack frowned. "What?"

"Grisko called you Dragonback earlier. When you walked off talking to your gun."

Jack's ears reddened again. Probably the whole group had heard that. Terrific. "I have a tattoo of a dragon across my back," he said. "A big one."

"Something to do with the old Dragonback warriors?"

"Nope," Jack assured her. "In fact, I never even heard of them until a month ago."

She grunted and resumed her firing. Five minutes later, her clip of cartridges was empty. "I'm off," she announced, slinging the Gompers over her back again and starting backwards in a reverse elbows-and-knees crawl. "Make sure you fire your whole clip before going back if you don't want Grisko to scorch your ears off Hitting the targets once in awhile would be nice, too."

"Thanks," Jack said dryly. "I'll see what I can do."

"And keep your head down," she warned.

A minute later, she was gone, vanished into the cover of the trees. "Well, that was fun," he muttered.

"She has great courage," Draycos said. "I can hear it in her voice."

"Or else she's just plain stupid," Jack said, picking a target and firing off a round at it. "Her and her family both. How do people let themselves get so desperate for money?"

"Many times it is not their fault."

"Most of the time it is," Jack said stubbornly.

"That sounds like your Uncle Virgil's philosophy."

"Leave Uncle Virgil out of this," Jack said, firing two more shots. Missing both, probably. "Anyway, he knew how the real world worked."

There was a short silence, just long enough for Jack to realize that Draycos could easily have reminded him what Uncle Virgil had done for a living. "Have you no compassion for the weak?" the dragon asked instead.

"Compassion wasn't a big priority where I grew up," Jack said. "And I never saw it do anyone any good."

"No one?"

Jack glanced a glare down at him. "How come we only have these big moral discussions when Uncle Virge isn't around to help me defend myself?"

"Do such discussions make you uncomfortable?"

Jack shook his head impatiently. "Can we just skip this?"

"Of course," Draycos said, as if he hadn't been the one who'd brought it up in the first place. "Shall I give you my report on the nighttime patrols?"

"Yeah, sure," Jack said. "Go ahead."

"There are four separate teams," Draycos said. "Two soldiers in each. They pass within view of the main headquarters' entrance approximately once every twenty minutes."

"How regular is that twenty minutes?" Jack asked.

"Close, but not exact," Draycos said. "The period has ranged from eighteen to twenty-five minutes."

"Do they always come from the same directions each time?"

"Again, approximately," the dragon said. "I have noted slight differences in the direction of approach, but nothing significant."

"A regular patrol pattern, then," Jack decided, his annoyance at the dragon forgotten. Draycos might be the local expert on morals and ethics, but putting puzzle pieces together was where Jack got to shine. "If there's one thing Uncle Virgil taught me to love, it's regular patterns."

"There may still be alarms on the doors," Draycos warned.

"I'm sure there are," Jack agreed. "And on the computer, too. But I know how to handle those. My biggest worry was getting shot on the way there."

"Do we then make our attempt tonight?" Jack fired his last two rounds while he considered. "Let's give it one more night," he said. "If the patrol pattern is still the same, we'll go tomorrow."

"And if we are successful?"

"Well, we're sure not going to hang around any longer than we have to," Jack told him, slinging his rifle and starting to back up. As before, the technique felt a lot more awkward than Alison had made it look. "If Uncle Virge is on the ball, he'll have the Essenay stashed somewhere nearby. Once we've pulled everything the Edge has on Djinn-90 fighters, we'll whistle him up and get out of here."

"And if we do not find what we need?"

"If they've got it, we'll find it," Jack said confidently. "If not... well, we'll worry about that when it happens."

He reached the cover of the trees and stood up. "Come on. Let's go see how I did."

"Not very well, I am afraid," Draycos said. "But do not be discouraged. Long-range shooting is difficult to master."

"It could have been a lot harder," Jack pointed out. "A machine gun, or even a semiautomatic projectile rifle ..." He trailed off, a strange thought striking him.

"Is there trouble?" Draycos asked.

"I was just thinking," Jack said slowly. "A flash rifle doesn't have any kick. No recoil. You understand?"

"Yes."

"That makes it a lot easier to learn," Jack went on. "But it's also a whole lot more expensive to shoot. Does that sound like the kind of weapon you'd want beginners to start with?"

Draycos was silent a moment. "You are being taught to march and stand in formation," he said. "From your books you are being taught the words and expressions soldiers use, and a great deal of technical information. Now you are learning how to shoot the easiest of possible weapons."

"And, if you believe Alison's numbers, all of this is happening in a quarter of the time regular soldiers need for their training," Jack finished for him. "This is starting to feel a little creepy."

"Yet as you yourself said, you are only being trained as garrison assistants," Draycos reminded him. "Perhaps this is adequate for such duty."

"Maybe," Jack said. "But like Alison said, you can get just as dead in a garrison as you can out in the field."

Still, he reminded himself as he continued through the trees, he wouldn't be staying for that part of the operation. Tomorrow night he and Draycos would pull the information they needed, and then they would be out of here. "Anyway, I'll bet I did better than you think," he added.

"You have a tendency to shoot high," Draycos told him.

"I do not," Jack insisted. "You wait and see. You'll be eating those words for your dinner."

"Pardon?"

Jack sighed. "Skip it."

Alison and Jommy, to Jack's complete lack of surprise, came out first and second in the final tally.

To his rather annoyed surprise, he found that Draycos's evaluation of his own shooting skills had been correct. He himself had finished a less than glorious eighty-seventh.

But at least he'd only collected three sniper hits. Most of the others, blissfully unaware of their true position in Grisko's shooting gallery, had up to two dozen of the little marks.

Alison, naturally, had only one.

Dinner that night was grumpier than usual. Most of the recruits seemed to think it had been a highly unfair trick to play on them, and the majority seemed to blame Sergeant Grisko personally for it. Jommy in particular was highly indignant, apparently feeling that his twenty-one hits took a lot away from his otherwise impressive second-place score.

Jack stayed out of the debate as best he could. There was no need to get them thinking about his own low sniper hit rate. It might lead to the unpleasant suspicion that he had been in on the scam from the start.

After dinner there was a twilight marching drill, using real Gompers flash rifles this time instead of the candy canes. Unloaded, fortunately. Then came more study time, bedtime preparations, and finally lights-out. Jack waited until the rest of the barracks was asleep, then gave Draycos his meager meal and sent him to his washroom window to watch.

It was somewhere in the middle of the night when he suddenly awoke.

For a minute he lay motionless in bed, trying to figure out what had awakened him. Then, suddenly, he got it.

There was a rush of cool air rippling over him from the washroom area where Draycos was supposed to be watching. Not the usual light breeze that came from having the window open a crack while the dragon peered out, but something stronger.