Metal Dragon (Warriors of Galatea Book 2)

by Lauren Esker

  *Yes, it works like this.* Taking it back, he tore off the clear strip and wrapped it around Tamir's upper arm. There was a small snap as it locked into place. Through the translucent plastic, she could see small needles piercing Tamir's skin. *We use these in the field sometimes,* Lyr explained.

  "It's very different from the technology I'm used to. How do you get fluids into it?" She squeezed it. There was some liquid inside; she could see it squishing around. "That's not all there is, surely? He's going to need a lot."

  *There should be saline and plasma pods around here somewhere.*

  They found them in another cabinet, soft packets of fluids that each seemed to contain about a pint of liquid. Lyr showed Meri how to pull out a short tube to connect a fluid packet to a corresponding port on the plastic IV cuff.

  "I guess I'm not really impressing you with my medical skills," she commented ruefully.

  *You're doing fine, and learning fast. I can tell the difference between lack of competence and unfamiliarity with technology.*

  She tried not to be flattered by that. "What about drugs? He's going to need painkillers at the very least, and there are a lot of other things I could use, like antibiotics—"

  *The females were looking in the cabinets. I'll go find them.*

  Lyr was back in moments with a briefcase-like carrier filled with what Meri took at first glance to be guns and then realized were handheld injectors like the one they'd used to inject the translator into her neck. She picked one up and examined it. Their function looked simple, at least. There was a trigger and a place where an ampoule could be clicked into place, preloaded on some, empty on others. There was no visible needle on the business end, so unless there was a separate needle module—which she saw no sign of—it must retract. The case contained a number of refill ampoules as well.

  And every last one of them was labeled in an angular script she couldn't read.

  "Are any of these painkillers?" she asked Lyr.

  It was playing with fire. On Earth, she would never have injected a severely injured patient with an unknown painkiller. It could depress his breathing to the point where he would die, cause an allergic reaction or interact with a drug he was already taking. But if he started to regain consciousness, he'd do more damage thrashing around.

  *We use this one in the field,* Lyr said, handing her an injector.

  "Is this the right dose for a person his size?"

  *It auto-calibrates.*

  Score a point for super-advanced technology. "You do it; you know how it's done," Meri told him, pressing it into his hands. "Edrin, can you—oh, Lyr, I need you to translate again. Can you please tell her to go back to the prisoners' room and get the injured people down here? There are plenty of medical supplies. It'll be easier to treat them here than to carry it all there."

  When Edrin had gotten her orders and hurried off, Meri dispatched Preet to collect more blankets and then began laying out ampoules from the kit. "Lyr, I need you to tell me what these are, any that you know the names of. No—wait—" She rummaged in her purse for the notepad she always kept in there. Everything was topsy-turvy from all the tumbling around, but she found the notepad and a pencil, and began to draw the symbols as best she could, then scribbled notes beside them when Lyr told her what they meant.

  *This one is a painkiller, weaker than the one you gave Tamir. Better for headaches and minor muscle aches. This one is for infections.*

  It seemed that, high-tech spaceship or not, they had the same basic kinds of drugs as the hospital where she used to work. Painkillers, stimulants, antibiotics, vitamins. She wanted to give Tamir something to try to get his pulse up—it remained dangerously low, almost nonexistent—but was afraid of triggering some kind of drug interaction with the other shot. Lyr's knowledge was only the most basic, like asking an ordinary layperson to describe the contents of a pharmacy. Two-thirds of the drugs were unfamiliar to him. At least she had a basic selection she could work from.

  "Do surgical machines exist here?" she asked. "Like, automatic machines that can do surgery without needing a doctor?"

  *There's nothing like that in here.* Lyr glanced down at Tamir, immobile in his blanket cocoon, chest rising and falling almost imperceptibly. *You think he needs surgery.*

  "I know he does."

  *Can you do it?*

  "No!" she said, shocked. "I'm not a doctor. I'm not trained for that. I could handle a basic procedure if I had to, like a tracheotomy or removing an embedded object from a non-vital area. But the kind of surgery he needs is way beyond what I can do."

  *His nanites will help repair his injuries.* Through their mental connection, Lyr sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

  "You mentioned them earlier. What are they?"

  *Tiny machines in the bloodstream. He has them as part of his people's standard modifications for soldiers. They help stop bleeding and promote healing.* He looked away from her, down at Tamir.

  Standard modifications for soldiers. Could something like that have helped Aaron—but no, she shied quickly away from that thought. "Maybe they are helping him," she said, forcing her mind onto business again. "He doesn't seem to be doing as badly as I would have expected for how bad he's hurt." She looked up at Lyr's profile in the soft light of his cuffs. "Oh. There's something on your face."

  *What?* He glanced back at her.

  She reached out and touched his face with her fingertips, beside his mouth. She hadn't seen the glistening fluid on his lips, smeared across his cheek, until the light hit it in the right way. It was silver, like mercury, with a hint of pink, and body-warm to the touch.

  He looked down at her, lips parted. There were traces of the same silver fluid on his teeth. *It's just blood.*

  "Are you hurt?"

  *Not badly.*

  In the clear white light, his eyes were molten silver, threaded with gold. She had paused with her hand on his cheek, her fingers touching the quicksilver streaks on his warm skin. There were times when he looked so cold and hard that it seemed touching him would be like touching marble, but he was warm now.

  It had been so long since she'd had her hand on a man's cheek.

  There was a clatter of footsteps in the hallway. What happened next, happened so fast that it left her breathless: Lyr slung an arm around her, swept her behind him, and brought up his hand with the cuff flaring brightly. A tingle spread over her skin, like before in the parking lot. By now she had some idea of what was happening: he'd covered her with some sort of shield.

  Edrin came in with her arm around the older woman she'd been with earlier—perhaps her mother or aunt—followed by a ragtag scattering of other prisoners. Lyr dropped his arm and stepped away from Meri, and the tingling sensation vanished.

  It had been pure instinct that had made him throw himself between her and danger just now. With no time to even think about it, he'd just done it. What kind of life made a man with a heart like that—a protector's heart, a hero's heart—learn to hide it behind this mile-thick emotional wall?

  *Stay here,* Lyr said suddenly, his gaze going distant and thoughtful. *I'm going to look for something.*

  "Wait! Where are you going?"

  *To look for stasis pods. Many ships like this have them. Stasis will keep Tamir's condition from deteriorating any further until we can get help.*

  "Where would these, uh ... pods be?"

  *In a cargo hold, if any survived.*

  She was filled with sudden fear bordering on desolation at the idea of having him leave, even for a short time. He was safety; he was the only person she could talk to. The strength of the feeling startled her, and she struggled to clamp down on it before he could sense it through their link. It wasn't fair to ask him to stay if it meant his friend would die.

  She must not have managed to close the connection in time, because his face softened. He didn't smile, but it was as if he smiled at her in his head—a sense of warmth, like the press of a loved one's hand. *I won't be gone for long. Keep the door
s shut and see if you can find something to block the door we had to cut open. That'll help keep you safer.*

  "Stay in touch," Meri told him, tapping her forehead meaningfully.

  He turned away without answering, and was gone before she could do any of the things she wanted to do—touch him, hug him ...

  Kiss him ...

  Taking a breath and pushing it away before he could sense that, she turned to help the incoming wounded.

  8

  ___

  G ETTING AWAY FROM ALL those people, with their helplessness and need, should have cleared Lyr's head. Instead he had to fight the urge to turn around and go back. He could all too easily imagine himself returning to find that the pirates had come back in his absence, leaving nothing but charred bodies—

  But someone had to reconnoiter. Leaving aside the matter of Tamir's survival, they needed resources: food, water, air. He had to find out how much of the ship was still intact and whether any of the cargo areas had survived.

  And there was no one else to do it, just a bunch of scared, unarmed refugees.

  Once he was out of the room, he let the light from his cuffs die. Their charge was getting low and he needed to conserve what power they had left; he could see well enough in the dark. His cuffs would recharge from his own metabolic processes, but it was slow.

  It occurred to him that he should have borrowed one of Tamir's cuffs to augment his own. He hadn't even thought of it. For a slave like himself, wearing a citizen's gold cuffs was punishable by death. But that wouldn't matter here. He smiled grimly to himself. At the very least, a disaster like this was a great equalizer. There was no slave and citizen here, just a bunch of people in a lot of trouble.

  As he strode through the dark halls of the defunct ship, his mind generated a three-dimensional map of the space around him, adding new levels and corridors as he found them. It was something all his people could do, accustomed as they were to the labyrinthine corridors of their asteroid homes.

  Their module appeared to be largely intact, but isolated from the surrounding ship by sealed breach doors. Most of them were icy to the touch, suggesting the bitter cold of space beyond. He also couldn't help noticing the growing chill in the air. They were racing a clock here if they couldn't get the engines back online. The ship had no heat, its life support was down, and it was venting atmosphere from the damaged sections. They had, at most, a couple of days, probably a lot less.

  The warm, bright touch of Meri's thoughts tickled the back of his mind. *Lyr? You okay?*

  *Is there danger?* he asked quickly. *Do I need to come back?*

  *What? No, no. We're fine here.* Possibly without meaning to, she sent him a mental image of their makeshift infirmary. It looked like they were in the process of making it almost cozy. Someone had found some emergency lights, and their cool blue glow illuminated people bedded down with blankets and applying first aid to each other.

  *Your friend is stable,* she thought, and he got a mental image of Tamir, still and pale, wrapped in blankets.

  His distress must have communicated itself unwittingly through the link, because he felt her quick concern. *Are you all right?*

  *I'm fine.* He choked off, as best he could, the emotions she was getting through the link.

  Her curiosity was bright as a lamp inside his mind. *Who is he to you, anyway?*

  Memory assaulted him, decades of memories. He could have said: Mentor. Father figure. Older brother. The only family I have left.

  But none of that was true. It was all Galatean lies. Tamir's only purpose in training Lyr's sept was to teach them to be good battle slaves. There was no more to it than that.

  *Nothing,* he sent back. *No one. Someone I work with, that's all. Do you want to see what I've explored so far?*

  Without waiting for an answer, he let her share the mental map-picture he'd constructed of this part of the ship, as he would have done with one of his own people, or his sept-sibs.

  *Wow,* she said. *It's bigger than I thought.*

  He'd actually been thinking it was smaller than expected, as spaceships went. *There's a lot of damage. I think we've lost the entire cargo section. The crew quarters and bridge are either gone or inaccessible.* Most likely for the best, since that's where the rest of the surviving pirates were likely to be.

  *Have you found any food? Most of these people are malnourished.*

  *Not yet.* He thought about telling her that they didn't have enough air for the lack of food to become a problem, but decided it was best not to worry her. Then he stopped as his cuffs began picking up a new hazard.

  *What's wrong?* Meri asked.

  *I'm detecting radiation. Probably from the damaged engines.* He ventured a little farther in that direction, but the readings were getting stronger, fast. At the next breach door, he turned around.

  *Is it dangerous?* Meri asked.

  No point in lying. *Eventually it's going to be. Not enough to hurt us short-term, but we need to get away from it.*

  *And go where?*

  Yes, that was the question, wasn't it? Lyr called up his mental map-picture and studied it. *I think we might be able to detach this module,* he said.

  *Module?*

  For answer, he sent her a mental image of a ship breaking up into detachable parts. *This is a stolen Galatean ship, and every Galatean ship this size is built of smaller modules that detach from each other. The bridge is a module. The cargo bays are modules. We're in a general-purpose module right now; those can be used for living quarters or labs or whatever. The modular nature of the ship is probably what saved us when everything came apart. As long as our module is intact, we still have air, even if we don't have power.*

  *Like the crumple zones in a car?*

  *I'm not sure what that means, but what I'm thinking is, if we can separate this module from the rest of the ship, it'll drift free and we'll be away from the radiation source and also away from any surviving pirates who might have holed up elsewhere on the ship.*

  *What about other prisoners?*

  *I haven't found any. There might be, but there's nothing we can do for them. We have to save the people we're responsible for.*

  Fierce anger came through the connection. *We can't just leave them!*

  *You're a ... 'nurse,' right? You know that you can't heal every patient. If you try to help everyone, you will help no one. You help as many as you can—*

  *And leave the rest to die?*

  Her anger cut him to the bone. For a moment he was back in deep space, in the middle of battle, feeling his connection to Rook and Rei go suddenly dark.

  There hadn't been anything he could do. They had been vastly outnumbered. He'd chosen to help Rook, because Rook was the less-skilled pilot of the two. It was a rational decision, a decision Rei would have supported. But it also meant they were separated, in different units in a vicious deep-space battle. And then Rook's pod had been blown apart, and while he was still reeling from that, he'd lost the connection to Rei too—

  He had chosen which brother to help, and in doing so, lost both of them.

  *Lyr?*

  Her alarmed voice brought him back to himself. He was shaking like a ship on atmospheric entry as he leaned on the bulkhead. His battle spines were fully extended and his teeth beginning to lengthen as his body prepared itself for a shift. Reacting as if he was under attack, it was defending him the only way it knew how—and he was under attack, but from his own mind.

  *I am fine,* he told her, fighting down the emotional reaction until he managed to shove it back into its box.

  *I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound like I was accusing you of anything. You're right, we have to help the people we can help.*

  Her apology shamed him. *No. You weren't wrong. I have made too many cold, hard bargains in my life. We cannot abandon people we can save. I may be able to find more survivors.*

  *Be careful!* she answered back immediately. *If it's too dangerous to search—*

  *No, I think I can find them by lo
oking for their minds.*

  Surprise and awe came down the link. *You can do that?*

  He could have, once. He wasn't sure if he could anymore. He clamped down on that thought fiercely before she could sense how deathly terrified he was. *I'll let you know,* he told her, and closed the link, leaving only the tiny tickle in the back of his mind that would enable him to easily find her again.

  The idea of using his powers this way sent him into a cold panic. He'd worked so hard to shut himself down, feeling nothing, sensing nothing. The deaths of those around him couldn't hurt him if he didn't open himself up to them and acknowledge they were people just like himself, each one a unique spark of mind that could be extinguished like a candle flame.

  So you will let others die because you are afraid? You are truly no better than your Galatean masters, then. You are a prince of the Well of Stars. Act like it!

  He concentrated and, very cautiously, opened a crack in his mental shields.

  The first thing a dragon child learned to do was shield themselves from the psychic presence of people around them. It was part instinct and part training, like learning to walk or talk, a perfectly normal aspect of growing from toddlerhood into early childhood. By the time they reached adulthood, dragons could easily and effortlessly block out the unwanted stray thoughts of other people, and similarly control their own thoughts, letting slip only what they wanted.

  He had not realized until coming to live among the Galateans that non-telepaths couldn't do that. His early attempts to mindspeak the people around him had been painful, for him and for them. Their thoughts and emotions were uncontrolled and wild, and he had to struggle to learn how to focus his own mental sending to lightly brush their minds rather than thought-dumping at them as he would have with one of his own kind. It was like playfully wrestling with a child, holding your strength in check so as not to hurt them.

  He'd also realized something else, and realized it quickly.

  The Galateans had no idea what dragon telepaths were truly capable of—or how vulnerable they were. In his early days with them, they'd tried to use him to interrogate captives. The prisoners' pain and fear had given him incapacitating migraines, and he'd pretended that he could read nothing useful from their minds to make his masters stop using him that way.