by Lauren Esker
Metal Dragon
Warriors of Galatea #2
Lauren Esker
Metal Dragon
Published by Icefall Press, March 2019
Copyright © 2019 Lauren Esker/Layla Lawlor
All Rights Reserved
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
Preview: Metal Pirate
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Preview: Shifter Agents Boxed Set
1
___
S O THIS WAS THE PLANET that its inhabitants called Earth.
On the ship's forward viewscreens, it looked much like other planets Lyr had seen, a marble hanging in space, swirled with white and green and blue. Beautiful in its way. But not unique, as its people believed. He'd visited many others like it, most of them populated with people and animals taken from the mysterious planet called Birthworld, the legendary birthplace of humanity.
If rumor was right, Birthworld had been found at last, right here in the vast sweep of stars that the Galatean Empire claimed for their own.
Which mattered little to him. His people, the dragons, weren't from Birthworld. He was here only because he was ordered to be, and only for the purpose his masters commanded.
And yet the planet pulled on him, in a way he couldn't quite understand.
Idly, he flexed his hands so the battle spines in his arms slid in and out. Although slaves like Lyr were not normally allowed on the bridge, no one tried to remove him, and the bridge crew avoided him nervously. Slave collar or not, no one bothered an agitated dragon.
He made a striking figure, he knew: bare to the waist so his shoulder, back, and wrist spines and the implanted blades in his forearms were not impeded. The silver cuffs he wore—energy weapon and ship link all in one—slashed across the gleaming, iridescent skin of his arms just below his wrist spines.
Compared to an average Galatean soldier, he had very few implants. The only ones visible at the moment—with his arm blades hidden—were a faint tracery of silver on his forearms to help him use the cuffs, and the glint of the translator implant just below his ear. Human soldiers for the Empire used modifications to give them strength and speed, to help them survive in deep space, and otherwise to be more dangerous and effective warriors.. But Lyr was a dragon at the height of his ability and power. What need had he for the technology of lesser species?
And this kind of thinking is why you're currently a war-slave to the Galateans, he told himself darkly.
Around him, feet whispered on polished deck plates as the furred, catlike Galatean crew went about their duties. Slaves like Lyr normally went barefoot, while Galatean citizen crew wore slippers with their dark blue and gold uniforms, except when they put on boots for planetside duty.
And there was the sound of boots now, marching toward Lyr in a brisk and uncompromising line. He knew those footsteps, and tore his gaze away from the cloud-swirls of the planet below them. "Lieutenant Tamir."
Tamir of House Kynn was a tiger-type Galatean, his thick orange-and-black hair threaded with silver. Although in late middle age, he was still heavily muscled. His blue uniform left his arms bare, the powerful shoulders and biceps covered with soft tawny fuzz, marked with darker stripes leading down to the gold citizens' cuffs at his wrists.
"Lyr," he said, not bothering with formalities. "I heard you were brooding up here."
Lyr bristled—literally, the spines sliding partway out of his arms. "Come to throw me off the bridge?"
"No. I came to tell you they're prepping the chaser ships for drop. Time to go catch some pirates." Tamir dropped his gaze to Lyr's bare feet, and raised a shaggy eyebrow. "You're supposed to be geared up."
"I'm going like this."
Tamir's look said What the hell. "No you aren't."
"I'm more comfortable this way."
Tamir dropped his voice so the conversation wasn't broadcast across the bridge. "You're punishing yourself again, and I won't allow it. Lyr—" He smiled quickly, a flash of fangs in his tiger-striped face. "Don't make me order you to put boots on."
"If it's obedience you want, you could use the collar on me."
That scored. Tamir flinched, a quick shudder twitching his fur. Lyr stared back at him impassively, and Tamir jerked his head at the door of the bridge. "Come with me," he said with a hint of impatience. "And yes, that is an order."
Lyr refused to allow his reaction to show on his face. He set his shoulders, sheathed his spines, and obediently followed the commander who had once been father and older brother and mentor, all in one.
They went down a level, through the ship's utilitarian corridors to the lockers. Tamir leaned against the wall, arms folded, while Lyr pulled on the boots that had been designed for his long, narrow feet.
"Lyr—" he began, with a gruff note of apology in his voice.
"How many pirates?" Lyr interrupted, not looking at him.
Tamir sighed and let himself be redirected to work. "It looks like a typical trafficker ship. They've dispatched a chaser-class vessel on a scouting run. We're going down after them."
A fight sounded pleasing. Lyr felt the spark in his chest growing hotter, filling the emptiness inside him as his dragon-half roused with the urge to draw blood. He'd been trapped for too long on blockade duty, hiding behind Earth's moon, able to bleed off his energy only by sparring with other soldiers. He'd bloodied a few faces, broken a nose or two, but if he allowed himself to really let go, he was going to land someone in the infirmary.
There were times when he didn't care.
It had gotten to the point where the only person on the ship willing to spar with him was Tamir, and Tamir had the scars under that buff-and-black fur to prove it.
"They're getting bolder about the raids," Tamir added, as Lyr laid his wrists in a charging station to top off the energy cuffs that were both gun and shield. "Word's getting out on the galactic black market about Birthworld, I think. We're going to have our hands full if this sector gets really busy."
Human DNA from Earth/Birthworld was a hot commodity in a galaxy where most intelligent races—aside from a few who had evolved independently, like Lyr's people—were descended from a relatively small stock of humans who had been taken from Earth a very long time ago and genetically modified by the long-vanished aliens dubbed the Founders. Birthworld was an untapped wellspring of vast genetic diversity, a source of salvation for people like the Galateans who struggled with birth defects and low fertility—and all of it controlled by primitives who didn't know the first thing about the galactic battles taking place above their heads.
"I'm surprised you people haven't just swept in and taken over," Lyr remarked.
"Above my pay grade. Come on, you don't want to miss the fighting, do you?"
"You know what I like," Lyr said as they left the locker room, and Tamir actually laughed. Lyr hadn't meant it as a joke, but he was taken off guard by the twitch of his mouth upward before he caught himself and forced his face back to impassivity.
Tamir grinne
d at him, and Lyr resented it. You have no right. You are not my friend, even if you pretend it.
You could not save Rei and Rook when they died.
"Is this a redemption for you, Lieutenant Tamir?" he asked softly. "You've spent your life helping the Empire take and train slaves, so you think you can make up for it by saving a few?"
The smile fell away, and Tamir gave him a steady look from his calm gold-green eyes with their cat-slitted pupils. "Someone has to," he said quietly. "You're right, it won't change anything. The Empire I serve will still take children from our subject worlds and turn them into slave-warriors, like they did with you and your friends. But I'm going to do what I can to help the rest."
Lyr's lips curled back from his teeth. For an instant he was tempted to lash out with his mind—I could show you all the anger inside me, Tamir; I could show you what it is to truly "serve" this Empire. But he hadn't used his telepathy in the better part of a year, not since Rei and Rook, the last two surviving members of his training sept, had died in battle. Broken and bleeding from the psychic backlash of their deaths, he had locked down the telepathic part of himself to survive. He would never reach out for another person's mind for the rest of his life; he had sworn it.
"Help," he spat. "You could have helped years ago, but you didn't." There was always something about dealing with Tamir, the only person still living who had watched him grow up, that seemed to turn him back into a petty teenager instead of a grown warrior. "Rationalize all you want. You're as guilty as the rest of them."
Tamir had always let Lyr's anger roll off him, back when Lyr and the rest of his sept were children and Tamir was the adult Galatean charged with training them. A lot had changed since then, but that was still the same. He didn't bristle, just looked at Lyr with eyes that were sympathetic and tired.
"What's happened to you, Lyr? I asked for you specifically for this duty; I thought it might help you to move past ..." Tamir paused before going on. "You used to be gentle and kind—proud, yes, but ... you weren't like this."
"Your Empire made me like this," Lyr snarled. "What did you expect?"
Just outside the hangar bay, Tamir stopped abruptly and caught Lyr by the arm. In his surprise, Lyr nearly drove his spines straight through Tamir's thick palm. He wasn't used to being touched, not anymore. Everyone on the ship was afraid of him, and he'd done his best to keep it that way.
"Lyr, listen." Tamir's voice was quiet; his calm gaze searched Lyr's face. "With your sept ... gone, things are different now. You could contact your people and see if you can get your indenture lifted. I could help you do that. You can go home—"
"You think my people would take me back?" Lyr laughed then, for the first time in months, a bitter laugh with no trace of amusement. "I can see you never listened to a single thing I told you, in all these years."
With exquisite control, he extended his spines just far enough to prick Tamir's palm, and also allowed the tip of the knife-sharp metal blade to tear its way out of his forearm, a thin line of pinkish-silver blood tracing its way down his skin. Tamir might not be able to take a hint, but he could read a threat; he let go, and Lyr pulled away and strode into the hangar bay, wiping away the trickle of blood with a swipe of his thumb.
Even after spending his entire adult life among the Galateans, he still found their ships harsh and unwelcoming. The sharp right angles, gray metal with stripes of vivid paint, and too-bright lights were nothing like dragon city-ships with their gracefully curving interiors and gentle mother-of-pearl colors. The hangar bay echoed with loud voices, the clank of metal on metal, the clashing of equipment as gear was loaded onto the ship—all of it an assault on his sharp ears.
He hung back as Tamir greeted his crew, staying apart from the shared camaraderie of the Galatean marines, and they made no move to welcome him. They didn't like him any more than he liked them. Normally slave-soldiers would be required to ride out a short hop such as the flight to the planet on fold-down seats with locking restraints in the cargo hold, but Lyr, without speaking, took a seat in the back of the crew compartment, what might be termed the bridge on a larger ship. If Tamir didn't want him here, he was going to have to throw him off.
No one said anything about it. But of course Lyr was not, had never been, a typical slave. The Galatean Empire collected slaves from their subject peoples to use as cannon fodder in their wars, but the arrangement they had with the dragons was something different. It was draconic honor, more than the collar, that had kept him tame and chained for all these years. He was vow-bound to his Queen to serve the Galateans as part of the treaty that kept them away from dragon space.
Lyr was legally a slave, but in reality, he was a hostage, a high-ranking dragon prince from one of the ruling families of the Well of Stars.
For the good of his people, he could never go home again. They would not welcome him if he did.
He noticed a couple of Tamir's men glance nervously at the collar that kept him from shifting and could bring him to his knees at the touch of a button. As a dragon, uncollared and free, he could have destroyed this ship easily, and they all knew it. Lyr smiled at them darkly as he pulled down the seat harness.
You have nothing to fear from me, he could have told them. The only thing he hoped for now was a swift and honorable death.
Perhaps this battle would provide one.
2
___
“I
'M SO GLAD YOU'RE MOVING to Kansas City, Mer. It'll be great having you close again. I've missed you so much since college."
Meri Rowland turned away from her own reflection in the dark window to smile at her best friend in the driver's seat. If she kept smiling, maybe she'd eventually be as happy about it as Cora was. It would be good to live somewhere she had a close friend. She wouldn't miss Columbus; she hadn't been that attached to it. Cora and Dave had a pretty little house in the suburbs, and they'd set up the guest bedroom for her. Only temporary, of course—as a nurse, finding a job shouldn't be that hard, and then she could get a place of her own.
A new start. A new life.
Shouldn't she be looking forward to it?
"It's a good thing we finally convinced you to move down," Cora went on, chattering to fill the silence as the radio station they'd passed awhile back faded to static. Had her best friend always talked this much? Meri wondered. Back in the old days, when they were young college girls in love with their boyfriends and inseparable from each other, the two of them used to chat about everything and nothing; there were no awkward silences. Now Cora had been doing most of the talking since they left Ohio.
"It's not good for you, Meri, rattling around alone up there. You can get to know the kids, and Dave'll be thrilled to see you. It'll be just like old times, back when it was just the four of us—I mean, the three—oh—"
Cora broke off, and even in the glow of the dash lights, Meri could see guilt written clearly across her friend's face.
Sometimes it felt that the grief of losing Aaron was compounded a hundredfold by other people's inability to deal with Meri's widowhood. All too often, it seemed, she ended up soothing their feelings instead of being comforted herself. And it wasn't like it was new, this well-worn sorrow. Aaron had died almost ten years ago, which made her realize—not for the first time—how little she'd seen of Cora since college, and how much they were strangers to each other now.
"It's all right," she made herself say. "Don't worry about it."
What was I thinking? she thought to herself, looking out the window at the pitch-dark rural countryside. Her face floated ghostlike across the blackness of the night and the lights of distant towns, dark skin and the glimmer of the lighter tips of her bleached and dyed twists. Seeing herself like that made her feel even more insubstantial, like she wasn't really here at all.
This was going to be a disaster. She didn't even know Cora and Dave anymore. She wasn't sure if they had pets, she couldn't remember where Dave worked, and she'd embarrassingly misspelled the name of their el
dest daughter, who she'd never even met, in her last email. She tried to keep up with Cora on Facebook, but it was a completely different matter to insert herself into their lives, moving into a spare bedroom and becoming a guest in someone else's life instead of wandering like a ghost through her own.
Kansas City is going to be just like Columbus, and just like Atlanta before that. I'll get a job, and I'll do all the things you're supposed to do, and Cora will probably talk me into trying to date again and I'll hate every minute of it ... and I'll think of Aaron every time it rains or whenever a song comes on the radio that he used to like ...
To her dismay, and even a little anger, she found herself blinking back tears. Wasn't this supposed to stop? How much time to grieve was too much time? Wasn't there going to be a time in her life when she stopped feeling as if the biggest and best part of herself had been buried along with Aaron all those years ago?
"—Mer? Did you hear me?"
"Yes," she said quickly, blinking fiercely until the stinging in her eyes went away. "I'm listening. Uh ..." She cast her mind back, trying to remember what they'd been talking about.
"Mer, are you okay?"
"I'm fine." She took a deep breath, scrambling for another conversational topic. "How are you feeling? Do you need another allergy pill?"
Cora rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. "That obvious, huh? I was trying not to sneeze. I can't believe I forgot my meds back home. It's not so bad in KC, but as soon as I hit the Illinois border, it was like the waterworks turned on. You said you still had some allergy medicine in your purse, right?"
"I'll get you another pill." Meri twisted around into the backseat to get her purse. It was jammed between a suitcase and the purple flowered car seat where Cora's baby daughter Toni slept, her head tilted alarmingly to the side in the way of sleeping babies and her dark hair twisted up in little pink butterfly-shaped clips.
"Don't wake up the baby, Mer. It's not that important."
"I did two years in the neonatal ward. I have a lot of experience at not waking up babies." Meri wriggled the purse free of its prison and pulled it into the front seat with her.