A woman wearing a slightly lighter vest and helmet, with a broad Japanese flag painted across her back, thumped down. “Lt. Kisogawa!” she shouted over the roar of the helicopter blades. “I’m going to have to ask you to come with us, Doctor.”
“We’ve got the two X-rays secured!” one of the men shouted.
Lt. Kisogawa looked at Sophie.
“W-Who?” Sophie asked.
Lt. Kisogawa chuckled. “Two hours ago, this would be a secret we’d kill to protect. But the Council just rescinded the omega level protocols...so...” She shrugged. “You’re looking at the second squad of the Dragon Combat Unit. Or...” She grinned. “D-Com.”
The two dragons were hoisted up onto one VTOL. The other took Dr. Sophie.
Both banked towards the east.
Chapter Nine: Roll that Craft Check
Lisa turned away from the scanning display and glared at Gunner, Quetzalcoatl and, honestly, the rest of the crew and the whole universe. “Well, fuck,” she said, her voice tight and barely controlled. Quetzalcoatl’s feathered ruff flicked back and he hissed quietly, clearly a bit upset about her tone. Before he could say anything, Gunner cracked his knuckles.
“Track that aircraft,” he barked, and the bridge crew hurried to their stations. Pyros was the first one to get on the scrying console and started to tap away with greenish fingers.
“What are we going to do?” Carlos asked. “They napped Relix and Brash and Merton! Putas .”
“We could panic,” Trevor said, his voice ever so slightly snide. Carlos glared at him – but before he could respond, Lisa held up her hand.
“You!” she pointed at Gunner. “Once we track the airplane, I want this ship up and after them. You!” She pointed at Speccy. “Take the overgrown feather duster to Atlantis.”
Speccy crossed all four of her arms over her chest and belly, her eyes narrowing as she hissed in displeasure. Quetzalcoatl looked even more mortified. Both of them opened their mouths, but before they could get in a word edgewise, Lisa snapped her fingers. She had a skill with finger snapping. It sounded a bit like a gunshot. She followed up with a voice that was as even as it was filled with a smoldering anger. A lifetime of arguing with people from pushy HOA members to racists on twitter had given Lisa a backbone – the same backbone she had shown in the Fortress of Regrets.
“Right now, a huge-ass dragon warfleet is coming to Earth. We need every fucking tool that we have. Quetzalcoatl is the only surviving dragon from that time period, and Spectral, you’re the best and most intelligent engineer we have.”
Speccy inclined her head. Quetzalcoatl flared his ruff, but didn’t do much more than that.
“Find every gun, every spell, every bit of armor, everything,” Lisa said.
“I’ve got them tracked!” Pyros exclaimed. “No, bugger, they’re gone.”
“What do you mean gone ?” Gunner snarled, his mandibles clacking. “Earth doesn’t have magic, we’re tracking them with level 5 spells!”
“I’m saying what I’m saying, and what I’m saying is they dropped off the charts, even with sympathetic magic,” Pyros said, slumping.
Lisa rubbed her chin.
“We could go to the White House,” Merton’s Dad said – his voice remarkably calm. “I know people in the Defense Department. And if anyone knows who those people were, they’d be them.” He smiled. “Hell, maybe it was D-Com.”
“D-Com?” Merton’s Mom asked, her laugh having a hysterical edge to it – she looked as if she was reaching the upper limit of the amount of weird shit she was able to put up with. Doubly so when it came to threats on her son’s life. “That urban legend?” She shook her head. “No way they ever got it off the ground.”
Lisa scowled. “What. Is. D-Com?”
Merton’s Dad sighed. “So, listen,” he said, his arms crossing over his chest. “I’m not in the loop on everything. I’m just a physicist. But there were rumors since the 1990s about some kind of extra-governmental anti-dragon task force. A Dragon Combat Force. Or…” He rolled his hand, as if gesturing to something on the horizon. “D-Com.”
“That’s the stupidest fucking name I’ve ever heard,” Trevor said.
***
The armored soldier knelt down above Merton and yanked the gag away from his mouth smiled slightly. “Hey,” he said. Merton tongued at his gums, tasting the horrible aftershocks of having rubber jammed into his mouth. He looked around at the restraints that kept him and Brash restrained, despite Brash’s incredible strength.
“Sup,” Merton asked, his voice rough.
“Oh, just another glorious day in D-Com,” the soldier said, shrugging.
The two – well, the three of them – were in the belly of the VTOL that had kidnapped Merton and Relix. The faint sound of air screaming past the belly of the craft was audible enough to made Merton’s teeth itch. Small bumps and jostles of turbulence set him swaying and made a quiet groan escape from Brash’s brain.
You okay, little buddy? Merton thought.
The restraints are junking up my ability to compensate for inner ear woobliebooblies… Brash mumbled.
Merton winced, his mind already imagining just how unpleasant that had to feel.
The soldier stood up and paced away, his rifle clacking slightly as he slung it over his shoulder. His armor was unfamiliar to Merton – but it still looked to be roughly on par with human technology. So, this was just some fancy, high tech secret combat force. If Merton had to guess, D-Com stood for Dragon Combat or Dragon Control or something. He wasn’t sure if they were saying Com or Con , with an N. The two sounds blurred together, at least, they did when someone was speaking over a howling set of VTOL engines and the ‘screaming of the damned’ sound of air rushing by the armored hull.
“Hey,” Merton said. “Where’s Relix?”
The soldier looked back at him. He shook his head slightly. “You think you can get her free, dragon-boy?”
“Uh, one, I’m not a dragon,” Merton said. “My name is Merton Miles. I was born in California.”
“Yeah. And I work for the post office,” the D-Com soldier said, rolling his eyes.
Merton frowned. Then he felt a faint quiver in Brash’s body. It pressed against his skin and made me gulp down his own sense of nausea. He shook his head – then grinned. He could feel what was about to happen, and knew exactly how he’d use it. He just needed to prep the situation. He lifted his head, pitching his voice louder: “Hey, fuckface. If I was a dragon, how would I know that DC movies kick Marvel movie’s ass hands down?”
The soldier swung around, his eyes wide with shock. He took a step forward. “What did you-”
I’m gonna be sick, Brash gurgled.
And he threw up.
Which meant Merton went flying out of Brash’s mouth, buck naked and slick with juice that he’d really rather not identify. He focused as he flew, lifting his arm as if he was a D&D fighter in the middle of a bull rush. His psi-shield crackled to life as his mage awakened talent roused, now that he was no longer restrained by the strange webbing that Brash had been wrapped in. The shield met the guard’s face and the two hit the ground with a groan. Merton skidded along a deck so cold that he felt as if his dong might freeze and snap off. But he had no time to think. He grabbed onto the rifle as the soldier clutched at a broken nose. He yanked the strap off from around the man’s neck.
He fired a single shot at the restraints that still wrapped around the undifferentiated mass that was Brash’s groaning body. A spark flew from the net and the blue glow they emitted faded. Brash sprang free a moment later, landing on Merton’s shoulder with a cheerful cry of: “Yay!”
Merton swung his rifle around and fired off a spray of bullets at the stairs leading into the cargo hold – causing the soldiers who had started to come down to investigate the noise to jerk backwards with cries of alarm. Merton stood, his knees shaking, his feet skidding thanks to the Brash-slime that slicked against his soles.
“Everyone up there!” he shout
ed. “I’m willing to fucking talk! But if you say no, I have a tiny dragon with tac-nukes and I’m not afraid to use him!”
“Yeah!” Brash said, then whispered. “We’re not actually going to use tactical nuclear weapons right? We’re over an ocean!”
And, quite suddenly, the floor became the wall. Then, just as quickly, gravity vanished entirely, sending Merton and the goon floating up into the air. The VTOL was arcing downwards – in a howling, screaming arc through the air. Brash giggled cheerfully, flipping around as Merton tried to keep a hold on the rifle as he bounced up towards the ceiling. Through the narrow windows on the wall, he could see the ocean rushing up to meet them.
Well, he thought. Balls .
***
It took five minutes after the Talon-9 shot off into the distance before Quetzalcoatl finally opened his mouth to say: “Well, that wasn’t how I expected that to go. At all.”
Spectral Time – or, as people kept referring to her as, Speccy – did not sigh. She had a long lifetime of learning to not sigh. Her people were known as technicians and sorcerers both, and she was considered quite skilled among her people. As a skilled tech-priest from a planetary population of tech-priests, she had been a valuable commodity. And at times like this, Speccy remembered all her previous masters and her previous exposure to other dragons and took heart from knowing that no matter how bad it was…
She could still be working for House Bryaugh.
And so, she turned to see that Quetzalcoatl was sitting with his large, feathered head resting on his chin, glaring at a pile of frost dusted debris. The lost city of Atlantis – or at least the part of Atlantis that they had discovered – stretched out before Speccy, visible under the magical spectra that her eyes had been enchanted to perceive. In natural light, only a tiny circle of the city was struck by the natural sunlight shining through the hole the Talon-9 had punched through stone and ice. As a scientist, the indications of techno-sorcery that she had seen thus far was...breathtakingly mundane.
She knelt down and picked up a piece of a street mage-light that had fallen down thousands of years before and frozen solid. She used her upper right hand and opened it up, pursing her lips ever so slightly as she shifted her vision through the arcanic spectrum – working her way through divinatory lenses. Once she was done, she shook her head and made a quiet tchss sound under her breath.
“I spent thousands of years watching the slaves, seeing them...a...a race that could really claim the title of what the ancient magi stood for. They did so much without magic, without gods, without knowledge of anything but what you can see. They built machines that let them see deeper and darker than any dragon ever has, even with magic. But all that amazing progress was built on sand . They’d never be able to reach their true heights with dragons sprawled across the stars like some fat beast.” Quetzalcoatl muttered. “And I finally find a dragon that could see that dragonkind is rotten to the core, and...”
“Are you quite done?” Speccy asked, turning to face Quetzalcoatl, her lower hands on her hips, her upper arms crossed over her breasts. She frowned down at Quetzalcoatl, who looked up at her, his head drawing back, his ruff settling down against his scales.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, his voice venomous. “I-”
“Shut up,” Speccy said, frowning. “Life is filled with failed incidents. You could have spent thousands of years acting rather than watching. Instead, you waited for the right moment and it failed. If you had a thousand other failures under your belt preparing you for this, maybe you would have a contingency plan. As it is, transform yourself into a carrying device or leave, because you’re currently being as much use as a wet fart in a space suit.”
Quetzalcoatl spluttered, his head rearing back even further. “A...a...a carrying device!?”
Speccy picked up the mage light and held it up. “What is this?”
“A mage light,” Quetzalcoatl said, his voice smug. “It uses the light spell, augmented by electrostatic generator to prevent mana-burn.”
The mage-light bounced off his nose.
“Inefficient!” Speccy said, an anger she hadn’t realized she could feel actually beginning to grow and build inside of her. “Do you think modern mage lights are kindled by first year apprentices recasting the same cantrip again and again?” She scoffed. “We have mage lights linked to a central power system, usually powered via arcano-gravitic fusion or by straight line connections to the plane of positive energy.”
Quetzalcoatl blinked.
“You do?” he asked.
Speccy frowned. She thrust her upper left hand at a building that looked as if it had once contained a maunfactory center, from the draconic runes she recognized underneath a few millennia of decay and frost. “Knock that wall over.”
Quetzalcoatl frowned, then reached out with his foreclaw. He smashed into the brick and metal wall, sending up a cloud of dust and spray of debris. Before it had even cleared up, Speccy stepped over the wreckage, picking her way along carefully. Not for the first time, she thanked the gods of fashion that her garb was tight and form fitting. Not for any prurient reason – she had yet to meet a male that she’d lay with for any reason beyond abject pity or a direct order from Princess Relix.
What about Merton? A teeny, tiny part of her brain whispered.
She waved her hand, and instead, focused on the interior of the former factory. And, like dumping a bunch of petrochemicals onto a burning fire, she felt her anger intensify. “Look at this nonsense! You have old orchialicum pools right in the open, without any bleed-off vanes or magic captors above the pools! And...artificial sunlight focusing lamps?” She gestured at an ancient, shattered hunk of glass and plastic. “ Tchss! This isn’t fit to work on a backwoods pirate den!”
“It’s top of the line!” Quetzalcoatl exclaimed.
“It was top of the line ten thousand years ago!” Speccy said, turning to face him. “Now. Become a wheelbarrow.” She looked over at the ruins, her eyes narrowing. “I have a way to salvage something from this terrible idea.”
Her tone added the subtext so plainly that it might as well have been uttered aloud: As per usual.
***
The Talon-9 kicked on its retro-engines after blazing past several layers of top of the line human air defenses. Several SAM sites, each one scrambled to activity by frantic screaming from radar detection grids and satellite surveillance systems, fired their missiles into the air the Talon-9 had been in mere seconds before. The missiles veered desperately, trying to slam into the draconic demiship. Instead of hitting, they were intercepted by polar-rays fired en mass from the PRC grid along the Talon-9 ’s spine. The sudden, killing cold of the PRCs did not actually take the missiles down instantly. However, metal couldn’t be snap frozen without some damage creeping through. And as beams focused, dropping temperature lower and lower, missile after missile hit the point where their machinery and their electronics failed and they spun wildly out of the air, exploded in the air, or simply dropped .
Then the Talon-9 dropped down and landed on the broad lawn of the White House’s front porch, the howling gale of wind kicked up by the landing thrusters knocking over a vast, bright orange inflatable chicken that had been set up on the outskirts of the lawn. As the chicken tumbled away, it bowled over a few dozen news cameras and sent a team from CNN scrambling for cover. The secret service were scrambling as well – weapons were being readied, phone calls were being made, and the President was being forced away from his cell phone by two retainers.
The front of the Talon-9 opened and Lisa came walking out, flanked by Gunner in his best power armor and Julia dressed in a wizard hat, a thong, a bra and nothing else. Since, after all, armor restrained arcane magic. That was the only reason she had picked this outfit.
Honest.
Several secret service agents were already in cover.
“Sleep!” Julia shouted, then thrust her finger at the lot of them. A ball of glowing energy flicked from her fingertip, struck the air above the
knot of men in hastily donned flack jackets. To the last, each of them slumped to the ground. Julia breathed a sigh of relief as Gunner started forward. “Okay, good. Secret servicemen are 1 HD creatures. I was worried.”
Lisa looked like she was having the time of her life.
Gunner reached the closed and barricaded front door shoulder first. The door splintered inwards and the trio headed inside. From the bridge of the Talon-9 , Merton’s Mom bit the back of her knuckles. “Do...do you think this was the right tactic to be taking? I mean, this may, ah, sour opinions, right?”
Dad shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m having fun.”
The interior of the White House was a lot smaller than Lisa expected. She looked around as bullets pinged and sparked off Gunner’s body. Julia, crouching behind the huge armored bug-man, shouted out the magical word again. Once again, people went sprawling as they were knocked out cold. Gunner’s head was scanning around. Then he nodded. “There!” he pointed to a wall, then rushed forward. His shoulder struck wood, which splintered, then rebounded off thick steel. With the bunker revealed, he lifted his right arm. A small prong emerged from his wrist with a whirr -click! A searing beam of laser light struck the steel as Julia kept her eyes open for any more Secret Servicemen.
Scales Like Stars (Dragons...in...SPACE! Book 1) Page 24