High Wizardry New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Page B

people in here didn’t look nice—that purple Jell-O thing for one—but none of them felt bad: just weird. T hese creatures with the guns, though, had an unfriendly look to them. Most of them were mud-colored warty-looking creatures like a cross between lizards and toads but upright, and not nearly as pretty as a lizard or as helplessly homely as any toad. They went about with a lumpish hunchbacked swagger, and their eyes were dark slitted bulges or fat crimson bloodshot goggle-eyes. They looked stupid, and worse, they looked cruel….
    Oh, come on, Dairine told herself in disgust. Just because they’re ugly doesn’t mean they’re bad. Maybe it’s just some kind of military expedition, like soldiers coming through the airport on their way home for leave.
    —but with their guns?
    “Father’s name,” said the computer.
    “Harold Edward Callahan,” said Dairine. She was looking with a combination of interest and loathing at one of the warty creatures, which was working its way toward her. In one arm it was cradling a gun that looked big enough to shove a hero sandwich down. In its other hand, a knobby three-fingered one, it held the end of a leash, and straining at the leash’s far end was a something that looked more like the reonstructed deinonychus at Natural History than anything Dairine had ever seen. A skinny little dinosaur it was, built more or less along the lines of a Tyrannosaurus, but lithe and small and fleet. This one went all on its hind legs, its long thin tail stretched out behind it for balance: it walked with a long-legged ostrichy gait that Dairine suspected could turn into an incredible sprint.
    The dinosaur on the warty alien’s leash was dappled in startling shades of iridescent red and gold, and it had its face down to the floor as it pulled its master along, and the end of that long whiplike tail thrashed. And then it looked up from the floor, and looked right at Dairine, with eyes that were astonishingly innocent, and as blue as a Siamese cat’s. It made a soft mewling noise that nonetheless pierced right through the noise of the terminal.
    The warty thing looked right at Dairine too—and cried out in some lan-guage she couldn’t understand, a bizarre soprano singing of notes like a synthesizer playing itself. Then it yanked the leash sharply and let the deinonychus go.
    Dairine scrambled to her feet as the deinonychus loped toward her. Terrified as she was, she knew better than to try to run away from this thing. She slammed the computer’s screen closed and waited. No kicks, she told herself, if one kick doesn’t take this thing out, you’ll never have time for a second— It leapt at her, but she was already swinging: Dairine hit the deinonychus right in the face with the computer and felt something crunch. Oh, please don t let it be the plastic! she thought, and then the impetus of the deinonychus carried it right into her. Its broken jaw knocked against her face as it fell, and she almost fell with it. Dairine stumbled back, found her footing, turned, and began to run.
    Behind her more voices were lifted. Dairine ran like a mad thing, pushing through crowds wherever she could. Who are they, why are they after me? And where do I run…?
    She dodged through a particularly dense crowd and paused, looking for a corridor to run down, a place to hide. Nothing. This part of the Crossings was one huge floor, very few niches to take advantage of. But farther on, about half a mile away, it looked like the place narrowed….
    She ran. The noise behind her was deafening. There was some shooting: she heard the scream of blasterbolts in the air, the sound that had set her blood racing in the movies. But now it wasn’t so exciting. One bolt went wide over her head. It hit a low-floating bit of the ceiling off to one side of her, and she smelled the stink of scorched plastic and saw a glob of it fall molten to splat on the floor. Dairine sprinted past it, panting. She was a good runner, but