“Are we training her before we sell her?” Kurzon asked.
Cold fear ran through Alora’s body as she realized how bad this was. The Grand Vizier was plotting to overthrow her father, and he was raising money by selling her as a sex slave. There was absolutely nothing she could do to stop him, no one was coming to save her, and now they were talking about training her. The last time anyone had mentioned it, Sharpe had put a single finger in her ass. Would Kurzon and Devizes be so gentle? She highly doubted it.
Grand Vizier Devizes suddenly thrust a hand through the bars and fisted Alora’s hair. She squeaked as he dragged her face forward until the hard metal bars were pressed against her with a near-bruising force.
“We could train her. Or we could let her new owner have that fun. Some people enjoy breaking slaves, and if she’s trained, she’ll be less likely to get injured if someone puts a six-inch-wide cock in her ass with no lube.”
Alora felt sick. This shouldn’t be happening. She was a princess. People were supposed to bring her gifts from afar and buy dresses because she’d worn them in public. They weren’t supposed to be contemplating whether to sell her to someone whose cock was half-a-foot wide, in the hope it damaged her irreparably.
Tears began overflowing her lash lines and tumbling down her cheeks, leaving a cold, wet trail on her face. The men laughed.
“Poor little rich girl. Being owned by one of the non-humanoid aliens is going to be such an eye-opener for you.”
“If they want extra holes to fuck, they might even blind you, first.”
Alora felt her body growing weak, a rushing sound getting louder and louder in her ears, her vision tunneled, and there wasn’t remotely enough air in the room. She fainted, and the last thing she remembered after her body went floppy was Devizes’ hand still tangled in her hair, refusing to release her as the pain seared across her scalp.
Then there was only the blissful release of nothingness.
Chapter 13:
The work on the hull seemed to take forever. Once Brynn was finished repairing the navigation array, he was tasked to assist with the hull—a job he took very reluctantly.
“This is pretty much hitting pieces of metal with a hammer, then breathing fire on them to patch them together, right?” It sounded repetitive and dull. He wished he could go inside the ship and work on the engine with Argon, but the grumpy alpha liked to follow specific processes when it came to engines; he’d never let anyone else interfere.
“Yeah, although your flame’s too hot, so you might wanna leave the welding to Canavan and me,” Sharpe replied.
Great. Two seconds into the job and I’ve already been demoted to just hitting metal with a hammer. Brynn sighed and picked up the huge mallet which looked like something a mythical god might use to rain justice down on an ancient city. His first attempt didn’t end up how he’d imagined it. Holding it up, he frowned as he tried to figure out what he’d done wrong.
“Whew! Were you repairing that panel or trying to fight it?” Sharpe asked.
“Heh, you sure showed it who’s boss,” Canavan teased. Brynn sighed.
“I’ll start over.” He flamed the cracked, bashed metal until it softened and began to liquefy. When it was glowing orange, he whacked it with the hammer, trying to impose the right shape on it. This time, however, he tried to be gentler on it.
“That’s more like it!” Canavan shouted over the sound of metal hitting metal.
Brynn watched the metal take shape and decided this was still the most boring thing he’d done in a long time.
He wondered what the princess was doing about now. Probably sipping expensive alcoholic beverages while getting a pedicure and a neck massage. In an evening gown. A red, spangly evening gown with some sort of crystals to draw the eye to her cleavage.
His dick was getting hard just thinking about her. He almost felt bad the dragons were going to give her a reason to tear herself away from her action-packed social life, but he didn’t feel too awful; after all, it was her choice if she wanted to go back to Nidia or take up with the four dragons.
“C’mon, Brynn! Focus! You keep hitting the metal for too long, and it breaks! Stay on-task!” Sharpe grumbled with a hint of despair in his voice.
“He’s probably imagining how he’s gonna hammer the princess next time he sees her!” Canavan teased.
“And you’re not?” Brynn retorted with a chuckle.
“Think she’s missing us about now?” Canavan’s voice softened.
“We’ll find out a lot sooner if we finish fixing the ship,” Sharpe replied. Brynn snorted and kept working.
***
Sharpe watched Brynn attempting to “help” fix the ship. He was actually doing more harm than good. Eventually, Sharpe asked Brynn to fly out and acquire food for the journey.
As soon as he shifted into his dragon form and flew away in the direction of deer territory, Sharpe breathed a sigh of relief.
“Too many cooks, huh?” Canavan sympathized.
“Something like that. Poor guy. He’s not gonna have his head in the game until we catch up with the princess.”
“You think Argon’s close to fixing that engine?”
“I’m not sure. S’ probably best to just let him do his thing, right?” Sharpe shrugged and turned his attention to repairing the mutilated metal panel Brynn had been attempting to shape.
For all that Sharpe was eager to find the princess, he had a deep-seated bad feeling. Somehow, he got the impression they weren’t coming back to their cave after this. He was almost tempted to tell Argon, but he knew the silver dragon would tell him there was nothing to worry about.
All the same, the lurching feeling in his stomach wasn’t going away anytime soon.
He swore loudly as he realized he’d lost concentration and messed up the same panel Brynn had been failing to fix.
***
Argon tried to keep his mind clear as he went methodically through the engine. Coolant system, fuel chamber, turbines, electromagnetic field generator... there was a process he had to follow for each, and he couldn’t allow his feelings to get in the way right now.
He began with the coolant system. The enthalpy stasis field had to be repaired. It had leaked quantum superfluid last time they’d flown, and if the others found out, they’d be furious. Outside a containment field, a sufficient quantity of the quantum superfluid would form vortices that were pretty much giant space tornadoes where strange things happened.
Argon didn’t think they’d lost enough fluid in one place to cause an issue, so there was no need to worry the others. Especially Sharpe. While Argon was a gifted physicist, Sharpe was a biologist and physician. Sharpe thought far too often about the effects of science on people. Argon, on the other hand, knew people had always been surrounded by terrifying and incredible scientific phenomena, they just hadn’t understood such things until the past few hundred years, and now that they saw it, they feared it. He did his best to keep a blanket of ignorance over the birdcage because worrying about the inevitable never helped anybody.
He kludged the enthalpy stasis field as best as he could, using duct tape which he melted into the cracks with his hot flame. If it leaked while they were in space... they’d just have to find a neutron star to dump the quantum superfluid into.
The fuel chamber was quick to repair with a mixture of raw egg, castor oil and a sprinkling of turmeric.
“Thought you were fixing the engine, not cooking in it.” Canavan’s unexpected voice made Argon’s shoulders tense.
“What do you want?” Argon asked. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“Sure. But everything else is done. How long before we fly?”
Argon turned to Canavan and fixed him with a stony gaze. The engine was the most complicated thing on the ship, and it couldn’t be rushed. “We fly when the job is done,” Argon replied simply, then waved Canavan away, turning back to his work.
He wanted to get to the princess as much as any of them—maybe even more
since he hadn’t had a chance to mate with her yet, and his entire anatomy was screaming at him to fuck her as though he were a rampant hornling. They were all drawn to her. He wasn’t delaying intentionally, but it made no sense to try to catch up with her in a ship whose Evanescent Modes Drive wasn’t working properly.
At least the coolant was sorted out, now. The next thing to figure out was why the electromagnetic fields generator kept cutting out whenever the turbines hit a certain speed. It took three attempts for him to find the fault, possibly because he kept zoning out and thinking about those red stripes across Alora’s ass after he’d punished her.
A tiny crack in one of the niobium-nitride turbine blades explained everything. Presumably, at some point when the coolant fluid had leaked, the niobium-nitride had overheated too quickly and become brittle.
Brittle... like the cane he wanted to crack down across her cheeks, inflexible and unyielding against her soft, lily-white skin.
He flamed the turbine blade, controlling the burn very precisely until the niobium-nitride had melted across the crack. With special tools, he reshaped the blade. Would the princess prove so malleable? Argon was big on discipline, and he wanted very much to train her, carefully, in the art of submission.
They just had to reach her first.
He put the engine back together and ran it through some safety tests. Everything looked fine, for now.
“Canavan! Tell Sharpe and Brynn, it’s all fixed!” he yelled.
They could follow the ion signature of the imperial ship and have her back by bedtime.
***
Alora glared at the bowl of food that had been unceremoniously filled from a chute. It looked like kibble. If she had a pet hopping binky, she might feed it that stuff. But only if she’d checked the ingredients first. Her stomach growled, and her abdomen ached. When did she last eat? Even pet food looked enticing about now.
“The stuck-up bitch still won’t feed!” Kurzon’s voice taunted her as it echoed around the walls.
“We’ll have to force feed her, then. Go get a camera, I think daddy dearest ought to know what we’ve reduced his precious daughter to.”
The fear and shame of this ignominious situation burned inside Alora. She felt her face getting hot from the deep humiliation, and her very bones seemed to be vibrating with a fury like nothing she’d ever experienced before. As she glared at the bowl of kibble, she was surprised her gaze didn’t burn a hole in the dish.
This wasn’t her reality. She wasn’t a slave. Submitting to Brynn, Canavan, Sharpe—even being punished by Argon—was not the same as this. Never in her life had she felt so completely outraged or so powerless to do anything to help herself.
She took a deep breath, and everything went weird. Was she getting bigger, or was everything else getting smaller? Owwwww. The metal bars of the cage were squeezing against her body painfully as she seemed to be inflating. She was still taking a breath. Had her lungs gotten bigger? Then the air seemed to get inside her much more easily as her nose elongated with an agonizing crunch.
Down below, she heard the suddenly nervous gibbering of the two foolish men. They seemed so tiny. Without thinking too hard about what was happening to her, Alora opened her mouth and screamed. Only... flames came out. Oops. So many flames. The room turned white, and it was on fire. All the air she’d sucked into her now-enormous lungs had emerged as white-hot flames. Dimly, she heard metal screaming as the heat and the strength of her still-growing body tore the cage apart, rending the thick iron bars asunder. There was no pain anymore, and at some point, the foolish humanoids had been silenced.
She was not a slave.
When the flames and smoke cleared, Alora looked around the wreckage of the cargo bay. There was a hole blasted in the side, and stars were showing through. The two men had been sucked out, and so had a few other things. The wreckage of the cage she’d been in was still bolted to the floor. Inside, the water bottle distended as the liquid still boiled, making the partially melted glass shake.
In another direction she saw the metal wall between the cargo bay and the cockpit had melted into a puddle of steel, the white glow and the occasional plink, plink of molten metal dripping from the ceiling suggesting it was still quite hot.
Gazing through, she saw there was no one flying the ship. The opening wasn’t big enough for her to get through, and even if she could, she didn’t know how to fly a spaceship.
But, hey, you’re not a slave. The overly critical and deeply sarcastic part of her brain that watched everything she did and hated on it all was doing a slow-clap.
Alone on a ship drifting aimlessly through space, Alora suddenly felt exhausted. She had no idea how to change back into herself. Wait, surely this was her true form, just as much as her humanoid body? There were too many thoughts in her head, too many emotions in her heart, everything ached, and she just wanted to rest for a moment.
She curled up on the floor which was wet with melted metal and closed her eyes.
She wasn’t a slave.
But—holy macaroni—it appeared she was most definitely a dragon.
Chapter 14:
Brynn picked up the trail of the imperial ship pretty quickly.
“Engaging EMD,” Argon said, and the viewscreen turned mostly white with streaks of black. The ship was going faster than light, and Brynn kept their course steady as they went after Alora.
“Full stop!” Brynn screamed suddenly.
Argon cut the engine.
“What gives? We shouldn’t have reached her yet.”
“Look.”
As space reverted to mostly black, studded with white stars, Brynn pointed out of the viewscreen. They were almost on top of a trail of debris, and further ahead, he saw a ship floating.
“Whoa, we almost hit straight into it!” Canavan remarked.
“Nah, we wouldn’t have. When we’re using the Evanescent Modes Drive, we’re subject to quantum effects that basically mean we can pass through the spaces between molecules of solid bodies like ships and planets. Really old ships have to fly around things, but we don’t.” Sharpe’s explanation made Argon sigh and put his head in his hands.
“You know, Sharpe, I hate when you try to simplify the science of space travel.”
“Yeah, but no one else here speaks science, Arg, so suck it.” Sharpe stuck up his little pinky finger, and Brynn snorted with laughter. It was so funny watching Sharpe and Argon duke it out over the geekier things in life.
“More to the point,” Argon butted in through the guffaws, “Brynn, why did we stop?”
“This is the ion trail we were following. That ship? Alora’s.”
The cockpit fell silent for a moment as they all digested the full significance of that.
“We’d better get over there.”
When Canavan spoke, the spell was broken, and they all headed straight for their cargo bay. Brynn hit the switch to open the loading door, and he hurried to where the others were already shifting into their dragon forms.
One by one, they leaped into space from where they were perched at the edge of the ship. Flapping their wings and holding their breath, they moved through the empty space like jellyfish swimming through an ocean. The perfect silence was unbroken as they shaped their bodies in a practiced manner, elongated from nose to tail, to move forward easily, bringing their wings up close to their abdomens, curving their wings outward, then opening them fully to push against the sparse particles flying through the almost-empty reaches of space.
The phrase “space is a vacuum” never really accounted for all the dust from the Big Bang, the stray oxygen and other gaseous molecules that are released every time a spaceship explodes, or a helium balloon is lost, all the particle/waves of light and, of course, the amount of farts the average space dragon has filled the outer limits with. Dragons use these tiny particles to travel, wherever possible.
As they moved through the near-vacuum, Brynn stared at the charred bodies of two creatures. The best that could be sa
id about them was they were probably humanoid at one point. They had been burned with such heat, there wasn’t even the usual black-over-red effect of fire victims. Argon and Sharpe exchanged a glance.
There was a trail of debris leading to the ship. Something had clearly gone badly wrong, and Brynn hoped the princess was still safe in there.
When they arrived at the other ship, the four dragons breathed out little jets of flame in front of themselves to slow their bodies down. Eight tons of fast-moving dragon slamming into the side of the battered ship wasn’t exactly going to improve things.
Brynn noted the hole torn into the side of the ship, the metal curling outwards. This had been an inside job. Whatever had caused it was clearly huge.
He squished through the hole and managed to get into the ship, followed by Argon, Canavan, and Sharpe who quickly set up a containment field over the hole. Canavan got the atmospherics working almost immediately.
“Should we shift back into our humanoid forms to find her?” Brynn wondered.
“No need.” Argon pointed ahead of them. In the dim light of the damaged cargo bay, Brynn’s eyes focused on the biggest dragon he’d ever seen. Clearly female.
“Fuck.” Brynn didn’t think the word quite summed up how he felt. Her scales were a beautiful iridescent white, reflecting greenish purple hues even in this light. They were the exact same color as Alora’s hair.
“Alora?” Canavan hazarded.
The enormous dragon’s eyes opened, and she gazed up at him with dark purple amethyst eyes.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to,” she said mournfully, then began to cry. Brynn wanted to comfort her, and sensed the other dragons did, too, but they really needed to get her off this ship first.
“Can you change into your humanoid form?” Brynn asked.
Flame Daddies Page 10