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

by Dragon Cobolt

  “I-It’s okay?” he asked.

  The woman drew back, then blinked. “W-Wh...did...did you come on a mage-ship?” she looked at the prow of the ship.

  “A mage-ship !?” Relix spluttered, sounding utterly offended as she walked down the ramp, her hands on her hips. “The Five Talon Empire hasn’t used mage-ships for five thousand years! They’re utterly antiquated! This is a PER powered demiship! With a full complement! Sans, um, seventy five percent of our armsmen. Also, uh, who are you?”

  The half-elf sniffed, then blinked. “M-my name is Dart...” she said. “I’m a wizard. And I...I...” She gulped. “I did bad things.”

  Merton looked around, slowly.

  “This is... hell ? ” he whispered.

  Dart nodded, slowly. “I...I almost destroyed a whole dimension . Out of greed.” She closed her eyes. “I j-just wanted people to respect me. To be...to be…” She groped for words. “I’ve been alone for so long . D-Do you know how much it hurts? To be alone?”

  Merton nodded. The interior of the escher place felt as if it had shifted - going from surreal to eerie. He felt as if distant footsteps were beginning to echo through the corridors. He wondered if he was just imagining things.

  Relix growled, slightly. “Give us one good reason to not leave you here? The last evil wizard trapped in a pocket dimension almost killed my husband with the embodiments of her own guilt!”

  “You live odd lives...” Dart said, slowly, her voice rasping. But her eyes were filling tears. “I...I ca-can someone pinch me. If this is another dream-”

  Julia reached around and squeezed her butt.

  Dart squeaked and leaped into the air, as if she had been jabbed by a pin.

  “See?” Julia asked. “Not a dream.” She paused, watching as Dart started to sob in earnest again. Her hands went to her face and her shoulders shook as she started to sink to her knees. Merton stepped forward, sliding his arm around her back, holding her up. Julia’s voice was hard as iron. “We’re not leaving her here.”

  “Absolutely not,” Merton said.

  “But-” Relix started.

  “I don’t care what she did,” Merton said. “This punishment? It’s inhumane!”

  “It’s hell , what do you expect? ” Relix hissed. Then, sighing, she said. “F-Fine. I didn’t want to leave her anyway.” She narrowed her eyes at Dart. “But absolutely no destroying our universe. Understand?”

  Dart blinked, her eyes still brimming with tears, her cheeks blotchy. “O-Of course not...” she whispered.

  The adjoining doors were beginning to glow with reddish lights - and the sound of footsteps and laughing, jeering sounds was growing louder and louder. “Uh, do you know the way to the City of O?” Merton asked. Dart flinched, recoiling from the very idea.

  “The Judges would just send me right back here!” she hissed.

  “Okay, okay, it’s just we need to get home!” he said. “To Earth.”

  Dart looked at him. “W-Which Earth?”

  “Uh...ours?” Merton asked. He turned and then started for the boarding plank, followed by the others. The airlock started to seal behind them - and the footsteps had become a thundering, roaring sound. Shapes were beginning to pour from the doorways.

  Dart closed her eyes. She breathed in, trying to compose herself. She stood up straighter, then spoke with a firmer tone. “Does it have magic or is it magic free? Who is the President of the United States. Is it the United States, or the Confederated States, or are both there? Who won the second or third world war? Were there a second and third world war? How did the first world war go? How many zombies are there. And, uh...” she paused. “You know, stuff like that.”

  “You’ve been to that many Earths?” Julia asked, her eyes wide.

  “Of course,” Dart said, chuckling. It was a brittle sound. Like she was barely hanging on. The airlock door finished shutting behind them. She slowly looked around the bridge – and the bridge crew looked back at her, clearly curious. Dart trembled like a leaf, as if she could hardly believe where she was. The drow pilot, meanwhile, was pressing buttons. Through the forward screen, Merton could see demons - thousands of them. They charged at the nose of the Talon-9 , leaping onto it.

  The pilot yeeped and slammed down the retro-thrusters. Flames roared outwards, sending demons flying backwards as the Talon-9 skidded backwards and out of the wall of the pocket dimension within Hell, revealing that it was merely a cube floating in a vast, red space, filled with flames and mountains and bubbling lakes of lava. Floating islands filled the air, each one bearing a crucifix, each crucifix studded with writhing bodies.

  Merton jerked his eyes away from the screen, his face pale white.

  “Uh...” he coughed. “There’s the United States. There is magic, but we didn’t know there was any. Basically, dragons came from Earth, and when they left, they left behind mage-blind slaves. The President is, uh...” he coughed again, then muttered under his breath.

  “Who?” Dart asked.

  Merton adjusted the collar of his shirt.

  “We don’t like to talk about it,” Lisa said scowling.

  Dart’s brow furrowed.

  “Oh!” She said, her eyes widening. “Oh that Earth. Oh. Oh.” She blinked again. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Merton said, shrugging. “I mean, okay, technically, it’s not okay, but...”

  Dart squeezed his shoulder, gently, then smiled. Like her chuckle, it was brittle. “I know the way. It’ll take three portals, but they’re all in the Outlands. We’ll pop through a portal near the Skull of Ru, then have to dip through Eberron. Eberron will take us to Highpoint, and there’s a portal built into the back of the city-mech of Ultarmort. We fly through that and you’ll appear on the south pole of your Earth.”

  “There’s a dimensional portal over Antarctica?” Trevor asked.

  “Well, yeah,” Dart said, nodding as she drew her robes around herself. “It’s right over Atlantis.”

  Chapter Eight: Roll that Will Save!

  Gimtesh Thresh, of the House Thresh and current captain of the unhappy needleship Banemaw, had been sweating bullets for the past twenty eight hours. As she normally didn’t even bother with sweat glands to begin with, this was a pretty stark stress reaction.

  “Scrying report number three six two eight nine...” A bored sounding voice burred in the background – barely heard by Gimtesh. “No change.”

  Gimtesh continued her pacing, her red scaled fingers tapping her chin as her small, whippy tail snapped back and forth, back and forth. The Five Talon Empire had started a civil war that had been nearly five thousand years in coming. The chromatic dragons of the old Asemat Empire would rise up and overthrow the parody of peace that was the Prismatic Throne, using advanced genetic weapons known as D-suits.

  The only problem was that while the first shots in the civil war had been fired by the chromatics, and the prismatic and neutral dragons in the rest of the empire had no idea that they were soon to be in a life or death struggle...the second shots had been put on hold.

  Postponed.

  Delayed .

  All because Lord Xosh – soon to be Emperor Xosh of the first Chromatic Dominion – didn’t wish to risk attacking Draconis Prime, the homeworld of dragon kind, until he knew that Princess Relix Castrovel, the true heir of the Prismatic Throne, was dead and buried. And he had set the objective in Gimtesh’s hands. If she failed, then she’d end up like her brother. The very thought made her want to curl up into a ball and whimper.

  “Scrying report number...” the soft voice came from one of the many war-wizards that were working on the Banemaw to keep her magical systems running. But what made Gimtesh lift her head up and narrow her eyes was the hesitation. “Sire! Sire!”

  Gimtesh ran over to the scrying pool that the war-wizards stood around. The one who was speaking was a burly looking elf whose body had been slabbed with an immense amount of crude magitech augmetics, all of them designed to bolster magical abilities. Th
ere were cogitation units sticking out of his forehead to assist with memorization, and arcane symbol weavers that thrust from his shoulders like the limbs of some great clockwork spider. Those were used to make somatic gestures easier, faster.

  But the thing that made Gimtesh shiver were the eyes. Specifically, the eye-tubes that were wired right into the scrying pool. It had something to do with sympathetic magic. Whatever the reason, it turned her stomach to see those segmented, worm-like tubes fastened to those empty eye sockets, like the man was being continually attacked by cybernetic predators.

  “What is it?” Gimtesh asked, her tail clicking against the corrugated metal of the Banemaw’s deck.

  “The signature of Princess Castrovel has vanished!”

  “She’s left the plane of negation?” Gimtesh asked.

  “No, no, our tracking spells...lost her.” The war-wizard cocked his head. Then he chuckled. “Sire. The feathered bitch headed for the Outlands before we lost her life signs.”

  “So?” Gimtesh asked, irritably. She dug her hands into her armpits and tried to not dig her claws into the soft flesh there. But her claws refused to retract. She was that on edge.

  “It means she died,” the other war-wizard said. “I knew her ship couldn’t survive in the plane of negation forever!”

  “She...died?” Gimtesh asked, blinking. “She died!”

  “Well, we should-” the first war-wizard started. But Gimtesh waved her hand.

  They had waited long enough.

  “Send a laser com burst to Lor-” She caught herself, shaking her head. “To Emperor Xosh! Tell him that the last princess of the Prismatic Throne is dead.” Gimtesh grinned, rubbing her hands together. “Just in the nick of time. Oh! And set course for Draconis Prime! I want to be in...in at the death .”

  The two war-wizards exchanged a glance.

  Remarkable, considering that neither had eyes.

  ***

  Draconis Prime.

  Population: 1 billion citizens.

  It seemed really small for the capital planet of an empire spanning three galactic arms, the galactic core and the Magellanic Clouds. But there was a simple reason why the planetary population on all the official census hovered at the one billion mark.

  Dragons counted dragons, half-dragons, quarter-dragons and sorcerers with draconic bloodlines on their census. The fifteen billion slaves, servants, civilian bondsmen, artisans, craftsmen, magisters, wizards, clerics, zealots, mercenaries, whores, whoremongers, holo-vid personalities, reality show producers, writers, wanna-be-pro wrestlers, actual pro-wrestlers, school teachers, historians, amateur historians, wargamers and assorted low life scum were listed as civilians . Or as servants . Or as chattle. Not that that prevented their taxation.

  This was an Empire after all.

  The planet itself looked like a world that had been unwoven. Continents had been lifted from the mantle and suspended on vast magitech engines, while the metallic core had been tapped and spun up with solar powered thrusters the size of small cities. Planetary surfaces had been carved from molten stone and planted with new landscapes that were kept in place with artificial gravity and force fields. It had taken almost five thousand years and the life-long careers of literally millions of wizards, but the end result was a megastructure capable of giving each dragon living on what could be theoretically termed a ‘planet’ the ten thousand kilometers of distance between other draconic holdings which they needed to feel comfortable leaving their hoards behind.

  It was vast.

  And it was deeply fragile. A statement, really, about the unassailable nature of the Five Talon Empire.

  Because of this structural fragility, it was defended by, at any one time, four War Spheres from four of the different draconic houses. Those War Spheres were matched by the First Imperial Fleet – almost five hundred ships, suspended above the spiraling beauty of Draconis Prime. And watching over this entire majestic display was Admiral Lionteshkar Throakhawn. Sitting on his command throne, surrounded by holographic displays and the warm chatter of his bridge crew, Lion considered the bowl of tea he had been brought by an elven woman dressed in gold paint and carefully placed holograms.

  “Is this really tanna leaf?” he asked, looking down at the woman.

  “Yes, Lord Admiral! Conqueror of pirates, master of the spectral frequency, dominator of nanocytes, castigator of cybernetic consciousness-” the elf said, beaming as she recited the litany of sobriquets.

  “Oh, stop it, Fiona,” Lion said, his tail cracking out, smacking her rump with exactly enough pressure to cause her butt to start jiggling. The elf giggled and rubbed at her backside.

  “Admiral!” she gasped.

  Lion chuckled, deep in his golden breast.

  “Admiral!” This voice was less playful and flirtatious. More confused .

  Lion looked over and saw one of his underofficers. The half-dragon was dressed in the green-gold of the sensor service, with a complex code of button pins that indicated that he was a subspace scanning specialist. He looked as if he had sprinted from the far end of the six hundred meter wide bridge, holding a crystal sheaf in one hand. Lion’s brow furrowed and his long mustachios twitched as he leaned his large head down to eye the officer.

  “Yes, Tasmin?” he asked.

  “I-” Subspace Scanning Specialist Third Class Tasmin Yorle looked a bit taken aback to be addressed by his first name. He shook his head. “I, uh, I’ve been doing signal intercepts, Admiral. And we’ve stopped getting any data from, uh, the outmost holding of House Yeltanzo.”

  “Which holding is that?” Lion asked.

  “A, uh, minor planet. Population two dragons, three billion menials,” Tasmin said, looking down at his scanner. “But here’s the weird thing. The last data signal we got was a House Xosh merchant freighter arriving.”

  Lion rubbed his chin. “Xosh and Yeltanzo are in a trade war. Why would any Xosh freighter be arriving openly? Unless Xosh has decided to captiulate in the marketplace.” He paused, one long claw stroking one of his equally long mustaches. Slowly, the gold dragon shook his head. “This doesn’t smell right...”

  “Should we dispatch scoutships?” Fiona asked, cocking her head. Despite the fact that she was just a concubine, Lion spent a few moments considering her words. He shook his head firmly.

  “No. Scanning branch!” he shouted. “I want a broad spectrum scrying spell – tell me if there are any Xosh ships approaching Draconis Prime.”

  This set a few dozen people across the bridge into new flurries of motion. Lion felt the same crawling, creeping nerves that he had felt when, as a young hatchling, he had first led a squadron of fighters against a Hawking Pirate raid-wing that had turned out to merely mask a Mumbler deathsphere. The hideous black hole monster had ripped through half his wing before he had put it down with a gravitic grenade right down the throat. He started to look at the space around him, thinking. If he was going to do something sneaky , what would it be…

  He rubbed his muzzle.

  And there, in the foreground, he saw what every Lord Admiral of the First Fleet had seen for the past five thousand years: The four Warspheres that protected Draconis Prime. Each one was the size of a small moon and bristled with weaponry. Each was shaded in the colors of a different house. None was House Xosh. But, by long tradition, two were metallic, and two were chromatic. He leaned back. “Fiona...which metallic whelp was it who was badgering the daughter of the fifth wife of the Emperor?”

  “Uh…” Fiona looked a bit confused. “Why? She doesn’t matter.”

  Ah, yes, Lion thought. The misdirection did work quite well, didn’t it?

  But then Fiona snapped her fingers. “Oh! Wait! I remember, it was Bex Thresh of-”

  The bridge turned to ruby red as the main weapon of the red painted Warsphere of House Thresh activated its primary weapon and fired it into the silver and copper Warsphere of House Tranyo. For a single, horrifying moment, all was still. Everyone looked up from their consoles and away from thei
r work and merely gaped at the sight. The flagship was positioned perfectly to see the effect. The beam of pure redness, belching from a divot on the Warsphere’s equator, smashing into the skin of the other ‘sphere. There was a few moments of boiling as adamantine plates ablated under the hellfury of that immense energy weapon...and then it punched through and scythed through the Warsphere, cutting and cleaving until the moon-sized weapons platform was uncoiling like a peeling onion.