Lion felt less shocked than he would have liked.
For the past several centuries, he had been feeling as if another shoe was about to drop.
“Red alert! Bring the portal shields online! Ready weapons and fire a full spread of torpedoes at the traitors!” Lion bellowed. “Signal the fleet that Plan Gold Plated Iron has gone into effect. The chromies have stabbed us in the back!”
The flagship whirred as its reactors snapped open portals to the plane of positive energy, drawing power in nearly incalculable amounts to power the main guns and the shield arrays. Hanger bags on attack carriers opened and fighter-craft screamed into the void by the hundreds, while smaller cruisers put their burrowing spell-torpedoes into the astral plane, where they would dart towards the enemy Warsphere before returning to physical reality (hopefully inside the moon sized warship.) But even as the fleet began to react, the low whump whump whump of ships emerging from subspace hammered on Lion’s sense of soul.
An old dragon gets quite good at hearing disruptions in space time.
Comes in handy for an admiral.
And there was the third Warsphere, painted a brilliant Xosh blue. Surrounding it was the entire Xosh fleet, like a vast cloud of carrion birds. With a quick glance, Lion estimated at least three hundred ships of the line, maybe twice that in smaller frigates and destroyers, all arranged in an arrowhead attack pattern. The kind designed to rip through enemy fleets in a single, brutal pass. But rather than plunging towards the First Fleet, the Xosh fleet held back.
“Sir! They’re launching...something...” a sensors officer said, sounding confused. “It looks like...dragons?”
Lion harrumphed.
Sending your dragons out to fight was poor sportsmanship. Dragons took a long time to breed and were quite valuable. Committing them early was just...rude! To their families, if to no one else. But then the screens surrounding Lion flared with hundreds of thrust plumes. His brow furrowed and his mustache twitched. “What is this?!” His roar shook the bridge as his wings mantled.
“I don’t know!” The sensors officer shouted back.
Across hundreds of kilometers of space, the ‘dragons’ were shooting towards the First Fleet on plumes of fire that stretched across the stars like bolides cutting through the upper atmosphere of a doomed planet. They flew towards swarming formations of fighter craft. The instant they were in range, the fighter craft opened up with their PRCs. Beams of killing frost zipped through space, seeking targets. The dragons banked and twisted, evading most of the oncoming fire. Then their wings flared, bringing them to a near perfect stop in the vacuum of space.
The fighters, unable to slow, shot through the draconic formation.
And space exploded .
Plasma beamcasters scythed lines of purple fury. Spinfusor blades hummed and sliced and roared. Deathwands flared with their black-white killing radiance. Shrike catapults filled the void with flechettes that somehow managed to whine with ear-splitting fury despite the utter lack of sound in space. Bolt-guns hammered and vol-tech rays swept about in cones of pure white heat. Plasma missiles arced and captured targets in balls as hot as the surface of a sun.
Then the dragons were rushing forward, leaving behind smoldering wreckage and vented space suits and gaping, stunned faces – frozen in the embrace of space. But while the battle was quiet from a distance, the bridge of Lion’s flagship was filled with the radio broadcasts from his pilots.
“What are they?”
“This is Talon B, he dodged a point blank missile!”
“Eject!”
“Bring the AMS online!”
“They’re cutting through the-”
The first dragon smashed into the bridge of the flagship a second later. He smoldered with the waste heat of his weapon systems and his claws dug into the metal plating of the deck. He decapitated a few deckhands with the edges of his wings before six arms unfolded from his chest, each one tipped with a different killer. Lion grabbed his bed slave and crammed her into the escape pod reserved for his egress – then triggered the launch with his tail before leaping at the boader.
The boarder rolled aside with indraconic speed then fired a spread of flechettes into Lion’s side. Gold scales cracked and Lion roared in fury, then breathed six centuries worth of dragon fire straight at the pseudo-dragon. The boarder lifted an arm and extruded a shield that shimmered with a blackness deeper than space, drinking in heat. Lion, though, was old enough to know that a breath weapon was merely half the battle. He snapped his jaws shut at the same time he swung his claws, catching the boarder in the gut. Scales and scales under those scales tore and caught, the boarder went flying.
Lion caught the boarder before he could get more than a half meter – literally tossing him to his other palm like a cat.
Lion was also old enough to know that when facing something new, you made sure it was dead.
And so, he lowered his head and bit down. The creature split in half in his mouth and he spat the upper half away, before tossing the other half as far away from the torso as he could manage. Only once he was done did he pay mind to the metal darts digging into his flesh.
A metallic controlled cruiser - the Fairchaser - chose that moment to detonate spectacularly. Then a battleship, the Last Resort . Then another battleship, the Reliant Gold Pile . Then a third - and by now, Lion was unable to keep track of which ship was going up and which were merely burning. One after the other after the other, each one flaring with a pure radiance that announced the cause of death: Reactor breaches. Lion didn’t need to be told the battle was lost. He ducked his head forward, then growled.
“Signal the fleet to retreat...and set our course...” Lion snarled.
“Where, sir?” a stunned looking helm officer – one of the few left after the horrible violence of the boarder.
“Right. Down. Their. Throats.”
***
Emperor Dogan stood before the holographic display table. The view was horrifying – worse than the worst predictions of the dourest prognosticator. Half the First Fleet was burning wreckage. A quarter was so badly damaged that it couldn’t even try to retreat. The last quarter was retreating. But the worse news was coming from subspace listening posts. Smaller fleets were attacking metallic holdings across the FTE. Worlds were burning. People were dying. And there was almost nothing he could do about it.
“Signal the evacuation of Draconis Prime. Use every mage, witch and hedge caster we have to open portals to...to anywhere! The City of O, the Night City, Purgatory, I don’t care, get our people out of here!” he growled.
“The magical components alone are-” Secretary Rolin started – his claws tacking as he tapped them together.
“Raid every last hoard on this planet if you have too!” Emperor Dogan snarled. “I don’t care about property rights, we have three enemy Warspheres overhead and only one-”
Once more, that terrible, ruby red light spilled in through the windows of the palace.
On the holographic display table, the symbol for the last surviving defense winked out.
“I’ll begin the confiscations,” Rolin said, bowing as he backed away from the table. Dogan barely heard him. He walked slowly to the window, looking out and upwards. There, he could see the brilliant glow of the three Warspheres coming closer. The thrust plumes of their immense engines could be seen as lights smeared across heaven – intermixing with the fading throb of the burning ships and smoldering wreckage. He took hold of the sill and knew that everything he had planned was for naught. He licked his muzzle.
“At least it will be quite a show...” he whispered, softly.
“Sire?”
Looking back, he saw that only one servant was left. The rest of the council had fled with Rolin and the other servants. He wondered how many were teleporting away from Draconis Prime as quickly as they could wrangle wizards together. The servant was an older looking halfling – his face seamed with lines, his hair turned a dignified silvery gray. Dogan tried to recall his
name, but he found it escaping him.
“Do you know what the primary weapons of a Warsphere do to a planet?” Dogan asked, reaching up to take the circlet that signified his imperial status off his head. He twirled it, casually, on one finger.
The halfling shook his head.
“On their full setting, they shunt the entire planet into the lowest level of the Abyss,” Dogan said. “That’s why we call them hellwhips, you see. That’s all the primary weapon is, a hellwhip the size of a small continent. But on a half setting, they merely...are...” He trailed off. “Quite hot.”
The halfling gulped.
“Since they have three ships, I believe they won’t bother with the full power. They’ll need to use the spheres again, after all.” Dogan looked back out the window. The halfling walked over to stand beside him. He rummaged around in his vest pockets and took out a tiny cigarillo case. Tapping the bottom with one long finger, the halfling got out a slender stick of concentrated pipeweed. He stuck it into the corner of his mouth, then started to rummage around, trying to find a match.
Dogan held out his thumb. A tiny twist of magical energy caused flames to leap from the tip, lightning the cigarillo up.
The halfling grinned shakily up at his Emperor. Then he tapped out a second cigarillo and offered it.
Dogan took it, shifted away his natural resistance to such drugs, and tucked the slender tube of paper and powdered leaf into the corner of his muzzle. He set off the tip with his thumb, then shook his hand to banish the flames.
“What’s your name, anyway?” Dogan asked.
“Well, it’s kind of stupid,” the halfling said, chuckling. “I preferred being called ‘you there’ for most of my life for a reason.” He blew out a smoke ring. Dogan puffed his own smoke ring through it.
The sky started to glow ruby.
“Oh?” Dogan asked. He forced himself to look out the window, like he was just watching the sunset. The beams lanced down – painfully bright. They impacted on the edges of the coiling horizon, and the shockwaves billowed outwards. They moved slower than light. Slow enough to seem like they should take days to reach them: massive, roiling clouds of flame and smoke and fury. Chunks of earth the size of small cities, bouncing and rolling and crumbling apart before a shockwave sweeping along Draconis Prime.
The sound hadn’t reached them yet, so the view was eerily silent.
“Well,” the halfling said, chuckling. “My mother, for some harebrained reason, decided to name me Baggins.”
“Baggins?” Dogan laughed.
The halfling punched him in the hip, grinning.
The invisible curtain of pressure that was pushed ahead of the flame and smoke and debris reached the castle without warning. Bricks flew apart and metal was flayed and for a dizzying moment, the entire castle seemed to roil in the air as if the whole building had been transmuted into an air elemental. The tornado of debris writhed for a few moments before the heat arrived, and turned everything into fire and fury and ash.
And then…
Nothing at all.
***
Gimtesh blinked and shivered. Like a small dog exposed to an air raid siren, she was unable to move. Think. Breathe. She just sat there and shivered . Her eye was about two inches away from the needle sharp tip of the prow of the former flagship of the former First Navy. The ship had struck the command decks of the Xosh Warsphere and penetrated through almost two kilometers of adamantine armor before inertia and pressure forced it to stop. By the end of the progress, the flagship had been crumpled and crushed and mangled, until it was essentially turned into a scrunched up needle of mishmashed metal.
A scrunched up needle that had almost impaled her through the head.
“Oh, get up, you’re fine,” Emperor Xosh growled.
Gimtesh sprang to her feet, gasping.
The rest of the bridge showed just as much disarray as one might expect. But the crew – mostly bond slaves and kobolds – were already working to clear out the debris the impact had created. The few other dragons – representatives of house Bryaugh – remained poised in their lounging pits. But Gimtesh could see that the big black dragons were all quite agitated what with their near death via ship smashing into the bridge.
“Lion was quite an admiral,” Xosh said, his voice dropping the furious growl that it had held. Gimtesh swung her head around – and saw that Xosh was standing, brushing his hands along his broad crest. “But, well, you know what they say. A traitor’s blow is legion...” He chuckled.
“Sire,” a kobold with a tall shako stepped up, doffing his cap. “Draconis Prime is destroyed. We detected several portals, but none in the Imperial Palace. S-Save for a minor teleportative disturbance. B-but!” he added, quickly. “It wasn’t large enough for a dragon!”
Xosh inclined his head, then threw it back. He laughed. Long and loud and proud . “The Prismatic Throne is dead ! The Five Talon Empire -” he spat the word as if it was a curse. “-is dead . The Chromatic Dominion is ascendant!” He spread his arms wide. “The Emperor is dead, long live the Emperor!”
“Long live the Emperor!” the dragons, kobolds, and bond slaves shouted.
They had to shout.
Xosh, after all, was clad in a B-suit. He had shifted it to match his coloration, but Gimtesh couldn’t forget the number of hyper-tech weapons worked into his new skin. Xosh walked forward, putting his hand on the needle of the former flagship. He opened his mouth.
And a low bleep deep rang out.
It was the sound of a signal being received.
Slowly, Xosh turned to face a kobold who was quickly trying to turn off the bleeper.
“What is that?” Xosh growled.
“U-Uh, uh, uh, uh...” the kobold stammered.
Xosh glared at him.
The kobolds gulped, then stammered. “W-We’ve detected the Prismatic Throne.”
The entire bridge turned to frost. At least that was how Gimtesh felt. She felt like it was time to maybe start thinking about running away, and she wasn’t entirely sure why. She had no idea why the Prismatic Throne was important. It was just a thing someone sat on, wasn’t it?
Xosh’s tongue flicked along his muzzle. “Where?” his voice was deadly cold.
“Um, on a, uh, planet...” the kobold stammered. “Called...Ea-Arth?”
“Earth,” Xosh said, slowly.
“Yes. It teleported there before the castle was...destroyed...” The kobold quailed underneath Xosh’s glare. But that glare didn’t rest there for long. It swung around and transfixed Gimtesh. Gimtesh gulped, loudly.
“The Prismatic Throne teleported to Earth .” The Emperor walked towards her. He moved slowly. His feet thumped on the deck like mini-earthquakes. Gimtesh wanted to move. But she couldn’t. “How could that have happened, my dear Gimtesh?”
“I-I-urk!” Gimtesh grabbed onto Xosh’s wrist as the Emperor lifted her from the ground and smashed her into the wall. Deck plating buckled and her back cracked as he snarled into her face.
“It’s keyed , you ignorant bitch, to the fucking genecode of the true heir!” Xosh roared. “The heir you told me was dead !” He drew Gimtesh back, then smashed her into the divot her body had left. Gimtesh saw black spots in her eyes as her head rang.
She managed to choke out. “J-Just...throne!”
“It’s not just a throne !”
Xosh turned.
Threw.
And Gimtesh grunted. Something huge and thick pierced her belly. She put her claws around it – and saw that it was the nose of the flagship. The long, needle thin spur that had been a forward antenna was now slick with her blood. She gasped, then coughed. Xosh turned his back to her.
“How long until we can send the fleet to Earth?”
The kobold navigation officer gaped at the still writhing Gimtesh.
“How long !?” Xosh roared, lightning crackling around his muzzle.
“T-Two weeks!” The kobold stammered. “Firing the hellwhips at even seventy five percent-”
/>
“Begin the process! Now!”
Gimtesh closed her eyes, gritting her teeth against the pain.
She wondered how long it’d take before Xosh finished her off.
She wondered in vain.
***
The air above Antarctica was crisp and clear at this time of year. The sun hung at a perpetual twilight, painting the skyline in a pastel of purples and pinks and blues. There was not a cloud in sight. For Dr. Tobias Finley, it was the best kind of day. The helicopter that perched in the center of Dallman Base was being fueled by a pair of technicians while a third one was scraping some of the frost from the window with a thick metal scrapper. The quiet chuff chuff chuff of ice scraping suited Finley’s mood. He sipped from his thermos of hot chocolate.
Scales Like Stars (Dragons...in...SPACE! Book 1) Page 22