floor.
I scooped Tim up just before he ran under the hooves screaming, “Horsie!”
“Yes,” I told him. “Nice horsie.” And as I spoke, I put my foot in the right indentation, by dint of long practice, and threw my leg over, sitting astride the robot horse—which was about as comfortable as riding a flower pot. And possibly half as safe.
I knew what the guys had said about devising the robot horse as our main form of conveyance in these battles. They said, after all, the portals to other dimensions often remained open, which meant we might be seen by people on the other side. Human people. And while human civilizations might or might not have tanks or other vehicles, almost all human civilizations had at least had some portion of their history when they rode horses.
This seemed rather specious to me. There were human civilizations here on Earth that had never ridden anything. I suspected the real reason for the guys to have designed a robot horse was because they could. And because it was cool. Which was about par for the course. But right then and there, I wished my conveyance had been an Abrams tank. Though, of course, with dragons, that might simply have made me a ready to heat meal.
The robot horse reared, and I managed to stay on by grabbing its ear with one hand, while wrapping the other around Tim. With my third hand—All right, I realized I didn’t have one, as I tried to use it, and, instead, I let go of the ear, tightened the grip of my thighs on the horse’s middle, and punched the abort sequence into the set of buttons that Tim had been playing with. Whoever had thought of putting the buttons for the horse on the back of his neck was going to spend eternity in a very hot place. For that matter, why in heck did the horse have buttons? Exposed and easy to manipulate buttons?
“Horsie stand,” Tim said, and reached a chubby hand for the buttons again. I slapped it away. He wailed.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but the horse is mommy’s. You must let mommy—”
His wail reached fire-siren levels. Any minute now, my husband was going to break through the basement door, with an extinguisher in his hands. I fancied I could already hear him pounding on it.
“Shhh,” I said, and reached in the pouch to the side of the horse for a candy bar—what, like you never needed a power snack while battling evil?!—and thrust it at Tim. The shriek cut off and he said, “S’occulate” which had also been his first word, because some things are genetic.
I took the opportunity of his being busy—and increasingly stickier—with the candy bar to attach him to the waist belt of my armor. And then I punched a code into the horse that turned it around, and another code that was answered by the portal in the wall.
Yes, yes. Portals can be useful. The point, of course, is not to overdo it. And also not to make them span more than say thirty miles, and to make sure they stay in the same universe. They’d learned enough by the time they’d established this one, to know how not to get in trouble. The ones in Cheyenne Mountain, though . . .
This portal opened straight from my basement to the closed areas of Cheyenne Mountain. The areas where no one was allowed. Except Bill. And Mike. And Al. And the six of us. Because someone had to make sure that the breakthroughs—which I’m still convinced were the inspiration for a well-known science fiction series—that plagued the mountain, resulting from a portal we simply didn’t have the technology to close, didn’t spill out into Colorado Springs. And the world at large.
The portal opened in a flash of light, and I crossed through in the twenty seconds before it closed again.
The horse was running down a marble-paved hallway that looked like any government office. Bill’s voice came from the ceiling. “About damn time.” I didn’t answer, because I tried not to swear in front of the kids. Also, because I was busy pulling my lance from the holster across the horse’s chest.
It’s not really a lance, of course. It’s some sort of vibration weapon with a laser-tip, and one of the few things we’d found effective against dragons the last time they’d attacked.
I held it in one hand while holding on to the horse’s neck with my other hand—I really had to