Rick Cook - The Wizardry Quested

"Someone trying to build a golf course?"

"No, Your Honor. The species is being hunted to possible extinction by the Las Vegas police."

"What is this thing? King Kong?"

A couple of spectators chuckled.

"It’s, uh, a reptile," the plaintiffs council said. He looked at his Fish and Wildlife expert for support.

"A large reptile," Hanborn added miserably.

For the first time the judge looked interested. "What kind of reptile?"

"Uh, if Your Honor will just read Exhibit A attached to the petition you’ll find a description."

Judge Schumann flipped through the document Reptile, large, species unknown. Wings:

Maximum Mazie Schumann jerked her head up and slammed her gavel down. "Court’s in recess." She glared down at the counsels’ tables. "I want to see the parties in my chambers. Now."

Mazie Schumann had started out as a dancer in the Las Vegas shows. While she was strutting it by night she went to college by day and then to the University of Nevada law school. When she graduated she traded feathers and beads for a gray wool suit and a job with the Clark County District Attorney’s Office. Thanks to her abilities, drive and political skill she eventually wound up on the Federal District bench. If she was not a towering legal scholar, she was smart, politically savvy, and a hard-boiled no-nonsense judge who retained a streak of the theatrical. The media loved her, lawyers respected her, criminals feared her and nobody, but nobody, trifled with her.

Just now Maximum Mazie felt she was being trifled with.

"Now," she demanded as soon as her clerk closed the door to her office. "What the hell is this? A publicity stunt for a casino?"

"No, Your Honor," McWilliams said smoothly, "it’s not a publicity stunt. It’s:"

"Crap," Judge Schumann finished. "That’s what this is. Mr. McWilliams, do you know how long it takes to bring a civil case to trial in this district?" McWilliams knew almost to the day, but he also knew when to shut up and take his licking. "No, Your Honor."

"Nearly two years. Two blessed years to get a serious case to trial and you come marching in here wasting this court’s time with crap. I know a load of crap when I see it And this," she said, tapping the petition with a blood-red fingernail,

"is prime-cut, table-grade crap."

"Precisely, Your Honor," Sculley said. "That has been the state’s contention:"

"Don’t gloat, counselor. You’re as much a part of this as they are." Sculley went from gloating to wilting in one smooth transition.

Judge Schumann cocked an eye at McWilliams. "Anything from the petitioner?" McWilliams was more experienced than Sculley and he knew when to keep his mouth shut Hanborn shrank into his chair and devoutly wished he was somewhere, anywhere, else.

"All right I’m going to grant this petition. That makes it a matter of public record. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the newspapers don’t get hold of this." She glared at Hanborn and McWilliams. "As a judge I can’t comment on the matter to the media. That means you two will have to explain this pile of horseapples to the taxpayers."

Sculley shifted in his chair. "Ah, Your Honor:"

"Mr. Sculley, you are trying my patience. That is the second time today and no one has ever done it a third time. Now get back out there, all of you, and let’s get this farce over with."

They were still in the traffic pattern when Charlie got a radio call that obviously displeased him. He reached over to the microphone jack and wiggled it firmly. "Say again tower, you’re breaking up. Over." Thanks to Charlie’s fiddling the transmission was nicely garbled.

The old pilot chewed his mustache for an instant as he listened to the transmission, then he reached down and switched off the radio. "Pissants," Charlie yelled to Mick.

Charlie did not waste a lot of time gathering altitude. While they were in the tower’s control zone he made a pretense of staying above the FAA minimums. As soon as they were beyond visual range of the tower and over the open desert he pushed the wheel forward.

As an ex-fighter jock, Mick Gilligan was a member of the high-and-fast school of flying. Charlie, on the other hand, belonged to the "low and slow" school. Gilligan had no objection to flying low-within reason. But he considered having to pull up to get over barbed wire fences decidedly unreasonable. A couple of times Gilligan saw puffs of dust where the Colt’s wheels had touched the ground. After that he tried not to look.

Back in the cabin the other passengers had their own problems. Flying sideways is unsettling, the noise and vibration were terrible, and the humans were sharing the space with a dragon who’d never been in an airplane before. Fluffy didn’t get airsick, but he wasn’t a very good traveling companion. Although he was too young to fly the dragon had the reflexes of a flying creature, which meant he kept trying to use his body to control his "flight." Moira tried valiantly to keep the body under control, but with very mixed success. Every time the plane lurched, Fluffy instinctively tried to spread his wings. After being smacked in the face a couple of times, the occupants of the seats learned to duck when the plane lurched.

"They’re not responding," the air traffic control supervisor told his visitors. Lake most air traffic controllers, the supervisor had a strong sense of what was proper. In his book having a bunch of police and other gawkers invade his control center was highly improper. However, as an ex-Air Force controller he was disinclined to argue. The best he could do was keep them out of his people’s hair, be civil to them and hope they would get out of his control center soon.

"Isn’t that illegal? Ignoring air traffic control?" asked one of his visitors, a blocky middle-aged man in an expensive suit. The supervisor had already sized him up as the one who was running this show. The police captain and other officers, as well as the gaggle of civil servants from federal and state agencies, didn’t seem to count for much.

"Maybe their radios are out," the supervisor said, more to annoy his unwanted guests than out of any belief. Charlie had only been in town for a couple of weeks on this visit, but already the controllers knew him and his plane.

"Where are they going?"

The supervisor glanced over a controller’s shoulder. "North and a little east."

"Didn’t they file a flight plan?"

"Yeah, but they’ve already deviated from it. Besides, according to the plan they’re coming back here."

"Well, stop them," the suit snapped. The supervisor just looked at him until he realized now stupid that was and reddened.

It’s easier dealing with the DEA, the supervisor thought.

"I mean, can you alert the airports within range and have them report when it lands?" the suit asked in a lame attempt to cover himself.

"If they land at an airport. From the looks of that plane it can set down on any strip of flat desert from here to Idaho."

The suit clearly didn’t like that. The police captain, on the other hand, seemed less concerned. Clearly he was just glad to get the problem out of his jurisdiction.

"Well," said the civilian, obviously trying to control his temper, "can you follow them on radar?"

"For a while. But they’re descending rapidly. If they get right down on the deck we’ll lose them in the clutter."

"How fast can you get a plane after them?" one of the lesser suits asked. The supervisor shrugged. "Ask the police, or maybe the DEA. Or you may have to rent something."