Free Dragon City by James Axler Page B

Behind him, Rosalia’s dog was barking fearfully.
    “What the hell’s going on?” Grant asked as he saw the startled pilot, Mahood, struggling with the controls.
    Grant was surprised to see that the piloting system was not the advanced, sleek dash he’d expected. Rather, old-fashioned dials and plates had been wired together and a bucket seat was positioned in front of two stick-style yokes, something like an ancient whirlybird.
    Mahood, an olive-skinned Iranian with glistening sweat in the pebbledash stubble atop his head, looked at Grant with wide eyes, shouting something in his own tongue.
    “Again,” Grant instructed. “In English.”
    “A light ray,” Mahood translated as he fought with the yoke. “Laser. Laser beam.”
    Even as he said it, Grant saw another blast zap past the cockpit windows, bloodred and ascending in a thick vertical line that was at least a dozen feet across.
    “Shit,” Grant growled. One hit from that thing and they’d lose a wing…or worse. “Can you get us down?” Grant asked urgently, placing a hand on the back of Mahood’s seat to keep himself steady as they rolled and yawed.
    “No, no, no, no, no,” Mahood spit as he struggled with the controls, banking the chopper so that Grant had to hang on to stop his head from slamming against the ceiling. Through the cockpit window, Grant could see the narrow crescent of the moon, a thin sliver of white hanging in the darkening blue sky.
    Grant was an accomplished pilot himself and he stared at the bucket seat that Mahood sat in, his ample backside resting atop a fluffy pink cushion at odds with the worn brown leather of the ancient seat belt. “Want me to take over?” Grant asked.
    Mahood pulled up on the stick as another thick blast of laser light cut through the air ahead of them, its edges crackling like lightning. “We need to land right now,” he explained in his fractured English. “I got her but I don’t think we’re—”
    Another blast lit the cockpit, and something on the far right of the dash suddenly burst into flames. Mahood stretched out his sandaled foot and kicked at the flames, stamping them until they went out.
    “Must land here, Mr. Grant,” he explained. “But quickly.”
    “Yeah,” Grant agreed, “I can see that.”
    Mahood banked in on a tight vector as Grant hurried back to the cargo hold, where his four allies were anxiously waiting. Swiftly he explained the situation to them as the ancient chopper rocked in the air, illuminated by another of the all-powerful crimson beams of laser light.
    “Be ready, people,” Grant said. “We might have to ditch.”
    Rosalia looked up from where she was steadying her dog. “What is that light show, anyway?”
    “Looks like a pulse laser,” Grant explained. “Single shot but deadly as hell. I don’t think it’s tracking us. Looks more like it’s automated to react to anything in the sky. But it’s a wide enough beam to cut us if we get unlucky.”
    “Local defence, huh?” Rosalia hissed. “Painful.”
    Touchdown was as rough as it was unexpected. Grant opened the cargo door and urged his companions out.
    “Been a pleasure, man,” Grant said over the radio communicator as he stepped up to the open door. “Clear skies.”
    He jumped out into the courtyard where Mahood had landed and sprinted for the cover of the nearby buildings.
    As Grant reached the edge of the courtyard the laser blasted again, rushing up into the sky in a column of bloodred lightning. From high above there was an explosion as something went up in flames—the chopper, Grant realized.
    He peered up, his eyes aching as they struggled to look into the red beam of the laser. And then it switched off, as suddenly as it had fired, and the sky seemed to be plunged into darkness, the single slit eye of the moon a blurred white streak on his retina.
    Grant saw that the chopper had been cut in two by the laser light, an expanding ball of flame bursting from its side as the pieces began to