Scales Like Stars (Dragons...in...SPACE! Book 1)

by Dragon Cobolt

  “Merton is in danger!” Relix snarled. “It’ll grow back!”

  Lisa nodded, then dialed the laser rifle from pulsed fire to a cutting beam.

  “Wait!” Relix said. She closed her eyes. “Let me…” There was a faint slurp noise and suddenly, her wrist looked like a limp sock. “O kay. Now.”

  ‘What did you do?”

  “I removed the bone, most of the nerve cells, and as many blood vessels as I could. No need to actually have it hurt,” Relix said, flashing a toothy grin at Lisa. Lisa, despite herself, smiled back. Then she shouldered the rifle. She thought to herself: It’s just like cutting a rubber chicken in half with a lightsaber. She still closed her eyes as she swept the beam down in a smooth arc. The smell was intense – a stink of burning lizard – and when she opened her eyes, Relix was pulling her arm free. She flicked her wrist and a new hand grew out of the smoking stump.

  “Jesus,” Lisa said.

  “Oh, that’s not regeneration,” Relix said, turning and starting down the corridor – leaving the box behind her. “I just shifted the wound somewhere else. Come on! Let’s find another way to them!”

  “Wait!” Lisa hissed. “Get the box!”

  Relix glared at her.

  “It’s an irreplaceable magical dongle that we’re going to need later. We bring the box, and I guard it when you fight-” Another rattling boom echoed out. “-whatever that is.”

  Relix snapped her teeth, but picked up the box with a grunt. She heaved it onto her shoulder and started to charge forward. Lisa sprinted after her – her heart in her throat. And despite the fact that they were probably going to die horribly, part of Lisa had to admit…

  She’d miss this adventure.

  But not nearly as much as she missed her cats. And her husband. And her comfortable apartment.

  ***

  Merton and Brash stood stock still as they looked at the thing that stood before them. It had two legs and four arms, but other than that, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to Speccy. For one thing, its body was made entirely out of midnight black obsidian. It was like someone had taken the jagged rock-flats that surrounded an active volcano and given it malignant life. Jagged blades of paper thin rock made up the shoulders and the elbows and the knees and the chest of the thing. Its eyes swirled with the blue-purple light that Brash’s HUD identified as Hawking Radiation. It was standing stock still. Not breathing. Not moving.

  “Should we say hi?” Brash whispered to Merton.

  Brash, how many weapon systems do you have online? Merton thought.

  “All of them! I grew them when I ate all those metal pieces in the engineering bay!” Brash said, cheerfully. “That’s why they’re in the numbers bar!”

  That’s where the spare metal went!? Merton asked.

  The creature cocked its head. It was a strangely insectoid motion, like a spider uncoiling a limb. It had the same terrible deliberateness of a spider too. Then, between moments, one of its arms slammed towards Merton’s chest. Merton reacted as he had to the Ouster, bringing up his forearm and the obsidian blade plunged into a glowing green replica of Captain America’s shield. Rock and magical energy made a sound like a gong played by a methhead in a death metal band, and the impact transmitted kinetic energy through Merton that sent him flying backwards. He crashed into the wall, rebounded, then landed on his feet. He skidded as Brash growled.

  “Fink!” he said, in the same way most people would say fucker. “He’s messing with time!”

  The obsidian blender proved this by appearing behind Merton – like a soap bubble popping.

  Merton ducked an arm blade and spun around to face the creature.

  “Fortunately, I’m as awesome as I am sexy,” Brash said. “Hit it!”

  The unmistakable record scratch sound, followed by driving bass themes of the song Spybreak by the Propellerheads started to play in Merton’s ears.

  “Seriously!?” Merton asked.

  “Yeahhhhhhh boooyyy!” Brash whooped as the obsidian blender started to run forward. He was moving incredibly fast – but he wasn’t moving ‘literally faster than the human brain could comprehend it.’ So, Merton lifted his arm, selected ‘spinfusor’ and watched the knuckles on his right arm unfolded and three disks of glowing, blue-white plasma appeared.

  An obliging crosshair snapped up in the center of his vision. Merton grinned, fiercely, then thought of pulling the trigger. The disks zipped out in a barrage of flashing death. The obsidian blender unfolded its upper arms, knocking two disks aside, then twisting to evade the third, which struck the wall behind it and exploded.

  The obsidian blender smashed into melee range.

  And it turned out, Brash had been a very well designed dragon.

  The monster swung two arms in a downward, chopping motion – with all the grace of an industrial logging machine – and Merton found himself stepping backwards. He willed a sword into his hand, and his magical talent was all to obliging. A sword made of the same green energy as the shield appeared and he swung at the creature’s chest. The creature parried with fingerblades, then opened its mouth. It had the same kind of horrible, chomping teeth as the animations from Freddy Frazbears, and used the same relentless desire to chomp on human faces. It stepped forward and crashed into Merton’s shield, reaching with three arms to try and sink scalpel fingers into him.

  “Fuck off!” Merton snarled, then selected something he had always wondered about.

  He felt rather than saw his ankles unfold. A pair of piton guns snapped out of the black scales where his Achilles tendon would be, then fired off a pair of red-tipped darts of silvery metal. The glowing metal sunk into the ground with a pair of hisses, and then auto-screws whirred as the pitons affixed themselves to the floor hard enough that they’d need to be cut free.

  Then Brash beat his wings of his own accord and sent Merton sailing down the corridor.

  The obsidian blender stepped after them.

  And the two spikes went off with the force of two very very very tiny nuclear bombs.

  Because that was what they were.

  The roar of hot air was like a physical wall, and it sent Brash and Merton tumbling down the corridor, into a more literal wall, through another equally literal wall, and finally, through the air. He smashed into the ground on his back and skidded to a stop next to Gunner. Gunner looked down at him. Merton groaned, and didn’t even try to figure out the geometry of this place.

  “So, I take it, the place ain’t secure?” he growled.

  Merton hopped to his feet, shaking his head as he looked at the smoking hole that he had been flung from. He looked back and saw no Relix. No Lisa. No Julia. His eyes widened. “Where the fuck-”

  “Fire in the hole!”

  Julia’s voice dragged his eyes to a doorway that looked as if it had been replaced with a brick wall. Julia was standing next to it, guarded by one of the armsmen. She had just finished inscribing a rune on the wall – a series of runes actually. Brash’s HUD helpfully translated it to: I prepared explosive runes to-

  And then Merton flung himself flat to the ground.

  The wall exploded inwards with a roar and Julia whooped, thrusting her fist into the air.

  Merton saw the Hawking Radiation before anyone else did.

  “Julia!” he shouted.

  The second – or maybe the first – obsidian blender emerged. It casually swung its arm out.

  If Merton’s life had been Game of Thrones, Julia would have been decapitated.

  But Julia had clearly been studying. And, as her scribing of magical runes proved, she had been studying very hard . Because that bladed arm smashed into a magical force field, which shattered into a thousand pieces and sent her tumbling back and away from the obsidian thing . It stepped fully into the room, eyes aglow, arms spread.

  Merton selected close ranged weapons, then the hellwhip. His wrist unfolded and then shot out a small, lightsaber like hilt. He grabbed it, using the enhanced reflexes that Brash gave him, then flicked
on the tiny switch at the base of the hilt. A crackling roar exploded from the hilt as a shimmering loop of coherent fire slid out, skittering along the obsidian ground with a spray of sparks.

  “Ah,” Merton whispered. “It’s literally a whip made of hell . Got it.”

  He lifted the whip, then cracked it hard. The hissing, spitting end of the whip wrapped around the obsidian blender’s malformed head, releasing a series of whirrs and hisses as it completed its wrap. Merton snarled, fiercely, as he dragged his arm to the side as hard as he could. The motion translated to flinging the obsidian monstrosity off its feet and smashing it into the wall with an explosion of stone and metal and chips of obsidian.

  Julia sat up, looking shocked. “Did you just Ghost Rider whip an off brand Shrike to death!?” She paused. “I almost died, holy shit.” Her hand went to her chest, as if she was checking to make sure her heart was still beating.

  “Get back here!” Merton shouted.

  Other doors were opening. And he was realizing that that was the second obsidian blender. Because almost three dozen of the things were emerging from every doorway, every shadow, every corner of the room, their eyes swirling with emotionless focus. Their blade fingers snicked to the ready.

  Merton gulped.

  “Well,” Brash said. “Um. Pants to be darkened, I suppose.”

  Merton had already selected the anti-matter darts.

  ***

  The castle shook. Shuddered. It pitched and yawned, as if it was a ship under a terrifying storm. Or, to Lisa’s mind, like California during an earthquake. Relix drove forward with remarkable dexterity, her feet skidding only slightly under herself as she kept the box on her shoulder. As she ran, Lisa held out one hand to try and keep herself upright. But it was hard. Every shake and shudder made her legs want to drop out from under her. She gritted her teeth against the faint sea sickness that threatened to overwhelm her.

  The two of them came to the end of a corridor – the doorway opened into a circular room that, unlike every other room they had rushed through, was actually bright . This was enough to make Relix and Lisa slow down and look around, their eyes wide. The chamber was illuminated by a pool in the center, which frothed and bubbled with pure white energy, the water arching upwards almost three meters before falling back into the pool. Standing before it, Lisa felt her aches and her pains – most of them the minor aches and pains that anyone who had hit the big three oh got used to feeling – fade away.

  “It’s...it’s some of the plane of positive energy,” Relix said.

  Lisa was about to respond – but then she saw a rectangle of cardboard flip through the air from behind the frothing fountain. It landed in a rumpled hat that had been set out on the ground.

  Another card flew out a second later, landing in the hat again.

  A third card followed – this one skittered along the ground.

  A female sigh came from behind the fountain. “I’m still absolute trash at this...”

  Lisa lifted up her laser rifle, glancing at Relix. She went left. Relix went right. The two of them converged on the far side of the fountain – flanking the woman who sat there. She was…

  Human.

  A human who had aged and aged and aged some more. She had aged to the point where her age had gone around the other side of age and become a strange, exotic youth. Her hair was pure silver and hung down to her shoulders, while her face was a near uniform brown and the wrinkles were so fine that they became invisible. Her skull pressed to every thin part of skin, giving her the facial features of a cheap alien from one of the shitty episodes of Voyager, while her body was rail thin and clad in only a simple loincloth and breast band. There, the ravages of age were easier to see, writ large on her body and her legs. She showed no shame of her sagging breasts, her strangely folded belly, her pruned thighs.

  Instead, she looked at Lisa, then back at Relix, then snorted. “Figures.”

  “Who...the flying fuck are you?” Lisa asked.

  “What she said,” Relix said, imperiously.

  “Quiet, scaly,” the woman said. “The adults are talking.”

  Relix spluttered like a teapot. Lisa decided that she liked this old lady.

  “You can’t speak to me like that!” Relix snarled. “I am Princess Relix Castrovel of-”

  “Blah blah blah!” The woman said. “Why do you think I trapped your hand. I wanted you out of this conversation, because you’d distract me with irrelevancies. A stolen throne only matters to carrion birds.”

  The castle shuddered - but the distant explosions seemed extremely muted in this room. The water did slosh and splash over the lip of the fountain, soaking some of the cards. The woman pursed her lips in irritation.

  Lisa blinked. “ You blocked off the passageway?”

  The old woman inclined her head, spreading her arms wide. “That’s me.”

  “Did you attack my husband? My people ?” Relix snarled, her hands clenching as she took a step forward. Cold energy crackled around her mouth and she actually looked as if she was becoming larger with every moment, her muscles hardening. This made the woman blink. Slowly, she looked back at Relix.

  “You care ?” she asked.

  “I...what?” Relix spluttered. “Of course I-”

  The old woman stood so fast that Lisa could hear her knees popping. “You don’t merely care! You’re worried !”

  “I heard spinfusors! Of course I’m worried!” Relix snarled, her claws flexing, her wings flaring out. “My husband is out there with a hatchling to-”

  “Oh praise the gods!” the woman laughed, then flumped backwards onto the side of the pool. Her head rolled backwards and she closed her eyes, grinning. “I won. I told you I’d win, you cynical bastard .” She snapped her fingers with a lazy, languid motion. The whle room shivered for a moment, then was still.

  Lisa looked at Relix, then at the woman. “Okay. Um, maybe you should explain, and fast, because-” she paused. She realized she couldn’t hear, nor feel, the combat going on in the rest of the castle. “I really hope that means they won.”

  “Oh, that battle is on hold for now,” the woman said. “I tucked us into our own little demiplane a few seconds ago.” She waved her hands. “Come, sit, my children. And let...” She chuckled. “Let Granny Goodness tell you a story .”

  It was a good thing Lisa was not Merton.

  Merton would have shot the woman right then and there.

  Lisa was more of a Marvel girl, after all.

  Sitting down before the old woman, Lisa set the rifle next to her. Bathing in the radiance of the pool felt astoundingly restful. ‘Granny Goodness’ cracked her knuckles with a series of bangs and pops nearly as intense as the spinfusor fire from earlier, then started to speak. “In a time before the fall of Atlantis. Before the rise of the sons of Ares and the spread of the Hellenic Way. In a time before the Ming domesticated the great wyrms of old, and the Great Count was new, and the fourth world was young...” She sighed. “It was a time of magic and wonder and terror the likes of which you could not imagine.”

  “Where?” Relix asked. “I’ve never heard of-”

  “On Earth ,” Granny said, reaching out to rap on Relix’s head. “It’s bloody obvious , innit?”

  “What!?” Relix asked.

  “B-But we’re-” Lisa looked at Relix. “Mage blind!”

  “Says the woman with the eyes plucked from her head,” Granny said. “A great wealth of magic flowed through Earth, like a river. A feature of the mantle and the moon was the theory. A large moon. An active mantle. All developing when the early buzz of the Big One kept roaring.” She shrugged. “Who knows. Maybe that’s the case. Maybe not. What matters is Earth had a glut of wonder.”

  “What happened to it?” Relix asked.

  Granny slowly turned her gaze on Relix.

  Relix didn’t get it for about thirty seconds. Then every single feather on her head drooped.

  “Oh...” she whispered.

  “Oh. Indeed.” Grann
y frowned. “The dragons were the first of our inventions. We took the best here, the best there, of all our favorite animals. The wings of the bat. The splendor of the great lizards. The intellect of the parrot...” She grinned, wickedly. “The fuckability of the ewe.”

  “Ugh!” Lisa made a face.

  Relix started spluttering like a teapot again.

  “And things were good,” Granny said, quietly. “But do you know who fucked it up?”

  “Men?” Lisa asked.

  “Of course humanity would force our hand!” Relix said, sounding defensively.

  “No, not man. Men.” Lisa shrugged. “For the past three thousand years, men have been responsible for the massive share of humanity’s incredibly piss poor decisions. Nearly every war, genocide, spree shooting-”