Metal Dragon (Warriors of Galatea Book 2)

by Lauren Esker

  "How are you even up?" she asked as they began a wobbling, awkward sort of three-legged race back toward the ship. "How are you awake? And how the hell are you walking on a broken pelvis? You shouldn't be doing this! You shouldn't be able to do this!"

  "My nanites are holding me together," Tamir said through gritted teeth. "Can we move before we find out if that thing is going to wake up or not? What is that?"

  "Your guess is as good as mine. I've never seen one before today."

  Tamir glanced at Lyr, whose head was lolling on Meri's shoulder. "What happened to him? How badly is he hurt?"

  "They're venomous. One of them bit him."

  "Damn," Tamir muttered. "Must be a hell of a venom, to take him down like this."

  "He just collapsed. I don't know what to do for him. I'm a nurse, but there's nothing here I know how to use. We had to leave almost all our medical supplies behind on the pirate ship anyway, wherever the rest of that is."

  "I'm getting the impression I missed a lot while I was out."

  "You weren't out, you were dying," Meri panted. Focusing on Tamir was better than thinking about her desperate worry for Lyr, or the pain in her bare feet, which she kept bruising on sticks and rocks. "I still don't understand how you can be walking around like this. Back on Ear—uh—on my planet, you'd be in intensive care for weeks and in the hospital for months longer. And that's with surgery and other supportive care that we just don't have here."

  "Can we figure out the mysteries of our respective medical technology later? Ah, we're here."

  They stumbled into the ship and Tamir turned back to slam the airlock door. The cargo hold was plunged into darkness, but Tamir's cuffs lit up an instant later, illuminating the space with pale, cool light. Meri let out a breath; it was the first time she'd felt halfway safe since that pack of things showed up.

  Between them, she and Tamir lowered Lyr onto the rumpled blanket nest where Tamir had been lying. Tamir followed him down in a sort of controlled fall.

  "You really need to lie down," Meri told him. She pulled back Lyr's eyelid. His pupils were responsive, and he continued to breathe, though it was rapid and shallow.

  "I'll be fine. Just give me a minute."

  "As the closest thing we have to a doctor around here, you are not fine. Stay down." She stroked Lyr's pale face. "At least he seems to have stabilized. He's not deteriorating any further."

  "You're a doctor?"

  Meri looked at him over Lyr's unconscious body. Sitting on the edge of the blanket, he regarded her calmly in the soft moonglow of his cuff. It seemed very odd to her, suddenly, to be able to talk to him like a person, rather than having him simply as an inert patient that she was responsible for.

  Also, she'd just remembered that she had never buttoned her blouse, and her bra was still back there at the spring with her shoes. Feeling her cheeks heat, she hastily buttoned herself up.

  "I'm a nurse," she said. "Not a doctor, but someone who cares for ill patients on my world." She managed to smile, wan though it was. "We do all the work, the doctors get all the credit."

  Tamir gave a hoarse laugh. "As a field soldier, I can relate. You do all the work and take all the risk, and the brass walks in like they were the ones who won the fight."

  "Exactly like that. And I can relate; my husband—my late husband—was a soldier on my world."

  "I'm sorry," Tamir said sincerely.

  It was odd to speak of Aaron in this almost matter-of-fact way. Is this what healing feels like? "Me too," she murmured, and started to get up to get something to clean Lyr's wound, then sat down again when pain knifed through her foot. Some of the splinters that had jammed into her poor soles felt more like toothpicks. "Damn it, my shoes are still down at the spring. I'm going to need those."

  "Tell me what you need and I can get it."

  "You are staying right there," she told him. He started to get up anyway. "Did you not hear me?"

  "I was going to look for food."

  "I'll get it! Stay there."

  Limping, she brought him a ration pouch, along with a cup of water from the bathroom. He didn't even bother pulling the heat-tab, just popped out the tube and started sucking on it.

  Meri sat with Lyr's head in her lap and pulled a blanket over him, then began to carefully clean around the wound on his shoulder with a wet piece of blanket. There wasn't anything else she could think to do at the moment. He was warm to the touch and restless, twitching in his sleep. She sent mental reassurance to him and wondered if he could hear it. With Lyr as settled as she could get him, she turned to picking the splinters out of her feet and cleaning the scrapes.

  Tamir had finished the ration pack and gotten himself another one. "You might want to slow down," Meri told him. "You've been sick. I wouldn't recommend anyone eat like that, especially if they just started to recover from what you've been through."

  "I need the energy," he said, but he laid the second, mostly-empty pack on his knee and took a slow breath. "Though you're right. Won't help if it makes me sick. My body's been repairing itself and the energy has to come from somewhere." He blew out another slow breath, scratched at his head, and looked ruefully at the loose fur that had come out in his hand.

  "You really shouldn't be sitting up on a broken pelvis. Actually, you shouldn't be doing any of the things you were doing out there. You shouldn't be able to."

  "My nanites—"

  "Yes, you said that, but there's no medical technology on my world that could get you up and moving this quickly, not in the shape you were in."

  "My world is more advanced than yours." He said it matter-of-factly, and scratched at his fur again, grimacing as more of it came out.

  "Yes, well, just looking at you is making my hips hurt, so do you think you could do me a favor and lay your highly-advanced self down for a while and give your little micro machines time to fix you more?"

  Tamir grinned, giving her a startling flash of fang-like canines, and settled back on the blanket with a grunt of poorly concealed pain.

  "Yeah, that's what I thought." She leaned out as far as she could without disturbing Lyr and dragged another blanket close enough to flip it over Tamir's legs. "How worried should we both be about your fur falling out like that?"

  "Not worried. It's normal when we're healing. Itchy and unpleasant, but normal." He took another sip from the half-empty ration pack. "Where are we?"

  "I don't know. I'd never even been off my home planet 'til a couple of days ago."

  "Well, the last thing I remember was shooting at pirates and then the ship falling apart, so you've got to know more than I do."

  "Oh, right." She took another look at him. "You were unconscious for all of it."

  "All of what?"

  "Hoo boy. Where to start. So we got caught by pirates—you were one of the people trying to help, right? Space marines or whatever you guys are." Tamir nodded, though she got the impression that he was encouraging her to continue more than he'd actually understood most of what she was asking. "After we got stranded in space, Lyr rescued a bunch of prisoners and he found a ship and got us to this planet. We got separated from the—uh, he called it the module? Where most of the other prisoners were. So we crashed on this planet and that was like a day or so ago, and, uh? Here we are, in the middle of nowhere," she finished, feeling somewhat as if her explanation had not been the best.

  Tamir looked amused, which made her realize that he actually reminded her of Lyr in some ways; he had the same quiet sense of humor. It was no surprise they liked each other. "Do you know the planet's name?"

  "I don't think it has one. Lyr says it's uninhabited, at least he thinks so."

  "And you said something about a module? Of the pirate ship?"

  She nodded. "We lost track of them when we crashed. We're pretty sure they survived, but they're on the other side of the mountains, so we haven't found them yet." She got a sharp twinge at that, thinking of the people she'd helped. Surely they were just on the other side of the mountain
s. When Lyr was better, he could fly and look for them.

  He was going to get better.

  "What about the pirates? Are any of them still out there?"

  "There are a few still alive on the ship, but we left them behind." She tried not to think about that, either. Stranded to die in the darkness of space ... did even pirates deserve that?

  Then she thought of the haunted looks on the prisoners' faces, the way the pirates had casually jabbed their shock-sticks into their captives and used those awful torture collars on them. Perhaps they did deserve it.

  Also, the alternative was that the pirates had managed to make it to the planet and were here with them, which wasn't a comforting thought.

  "There's no one else on this ship?" Tamir asked. "Just us?"

  "Yes, it's just us, and it's been just me and Lyr while you were unconscious. You know, it's weird that I know nothing about you," she told him. "I've been taking care of you for days. But all I know is what I've gotten from Lyr."

  "Yes, about that ..." Tamir's curious gaze drifted to Lyr's head in her lap, where—absently, without really thinking about it—she'd been stroking his hair. "I can see that I've missed a few things."

  "It's not ... we're not ..." Her face felt hot; she was suddenly hyper-aware of the satisfied tingle between her legs, and she had to remind herself (it was surprisingly difficult to remember, after all this time alone with Lyr) that Tamir couldn't read her mind. At least, she didn't think so. She hoped not.

  Anyway, she was an adult. She could have a relationship if she wanted one; there was nothing to be ashamed of.

  "Okay, maybe we are." She dropped her eyes to Lyr's face. He hadn't precisely gone pale—with such light-colored blood, it might not be possible to get paler than he already was, under the bronze tone of his skin—but he looked grayish, washed out, as if some of the vitality had been drained out of him. "And then he got hurt protecting me. Without me, he could have gotten away easily."

  "He wouldn't have left you," Tamir said, and she looked back at him. His eyes were cat's eyes, green and gold, catching the light in reflective glimmers. "Lyr is a protector. It's what he does. I don't know if it's something inherent to his people or if it's simply him, but he's always been that way, ever since I've known him. He might try to deny it, but it's as much a part of him as his claws and wings."

  "You've known him a long time," she said. "He said you were in charge of his—sept?"

  "That's right." His face was surprisingly expressive, given the tiger-striped fur on his cheeks and jawline. But it didn't seem to conceal expression so much as it enhanced it. Right now he looked wistful and distant, as if he was looking back into the past. "I met him when he was a teenager—a very proud, very angry teenager."

  His tone was fond, but the words made her own protective instincts flare. "From what he's told me, he was a slave, so I think he had every right to be angry."

  "It's not precisely ... hmmm." Tamir looked thoughtful. "How much has he told you about his past, about how he came to be among my people?"

  "Not much." She ran her hand gently along Lyr's hairline. Even in the depths of unconsciousness, he didn't look relaxed, as if his demons had chased him down into his dreams. She hoped he wasn't in pain.

  "Sounds like him," Tamir muttered. "He's not wrong, but it's also more complicated than that. His people and mine have had an uneasy truce for a number of years. One of the conditions of the truce is an ... an exchange of hostages, I guess you'd say. Lyr is a prince among his people."

  "A prince?" She looked back at Lyr's slack face, startled.

  "From what I can tell, it sounds more impressive than it is." Tamir's tone was wry. "Much like we didn't send them anyone important, they seem to have sent us a random assortment of distant relatives of their queen, who apparently is related to half their clans through some kind of complicated alliance system you have to be a dragon to understand. Still, I gather that Lyr's family was fairly high-ranking within their local power structure. When I met him, he had never been away from his home city-ship. He was arrogant and incredibly naive, and completely convinced that his people were powerful enough to protect him from anything that my people might want to do to him. Convinced that we would see how important and powerful he was, that his queen would always protect him." The look that crossed his face was profoundly sad. "He learned differently, over time."

  Tamir might not be sending her telepathic imagery the way Lyr did, but she could picture it anyway, that slender golden-skinned teenager with his face set in sullen lines, beautiful and cool, trying to put on a brave face while surrounded by his enemies.

  "Poor boy," Tamir added softly. "Poor, lonely kid."

  Unexpectedly, this made her smile, though tears had gathered at the corners of her eyes. "I don't think he'd appreciate you calling him that."

  Tamir flashed a quick grin, showing glimpses of canine teeth pointed enough that they might be called fangs. "I know he wouldn't. But I remember that was my first thought when I saw him. You poor, poor kid. He could be an incredible pain to deal with, you know. Nobody really liked him all that much. By everyone else's standards, he was pampered. Spoiled. He didn't know how to deal with military life, let alone having to take orders from people he considered beneath him. He was used to people taking orders from him. Now he was in a place where he was at the very bottom of the social ladder, wearing a face that most of the people who met him distrusted on sight—we've been at war with his people, off and on, ever since our expanding territory butted up against theirs. And I don't think anyone else really saw him as a kid at all. He was as tall as an adult, capable of shifting into a creature who could kill a dozen of us at a go without breaking a sweat. The only thing that made them willing to deal with him at all was that he was collared."

  "Collared," she repeated.

  "I took it off," Tamir said simply.

  He leaned over—Meri had to suppress an instinctive urge to cover Lyr with her body, to protect him, though she knew Tamir meant no harm—and brushed the vulnerable skin of Lyr's exposed throat with his fingertips. Meri looked where he indicated.

  There were scars on Lyr's throat, tiny round ones, and a faint ridge of scar tissue that girdled his neck. It was very slight. She had never noticed it before. And now that she thought about it ... she did remember the silver slash across his throat, the first time she'd met him. Everything about him had been so alien, then. She hadn't even realized what it meant.

  It took Meri a moment to notice that her hands were shaking from anger. She had to wait out a surge of rage so powerful that her ears rang with it, her vision darkened with it.

  Oh yes, she remembered the collars on the prisoners on the pirate ship, the way the blue-skinned man had collapsed and writhed on the ground at the touch of a button.

  "You put a collar on him, like a dog, and you wonder why he's angry at you."

  "I never had to wonder," Tamir said, a trace of a wry smile touching his mouth.

  She wasn't about to soften toward him, not an inch. "I don't care if you had second thoughts. I don't care if you didn't like it. That makes it even worse, in a way, if you knew it was wrong and went along with it anyway. Look at this." Her hand quivered above the marks on Lyr's neck. Marks of abuse; she hadn't been a nurse for all those years without knowing what she was looking at. "Your people took a prince of a proud warrior people and did this."

  She expected Tamir to avoid her gaze in shame. Instead he raised his green-gold eyes to meet hers, facing her anger head-on. The shame was still there, and something else as well, something she hadn't expected: an anger that nearly matched her own.

  "I know," Tamir said. "I'm not going to excuse it. I could even tell you, if I wanted to, that there was nothing I could have done, and it wouldn't even be untrue ... not entirely. His people can't be free in the Empire, they're not allowed to be, because none of us trust them within a dozen light years of us without some kind of power limiter. And he couldn't go home because his people wouldn't take him
back. He is here to ensure peace and cooperation between our peoples. If he ran from that responsibility, they would consider him without honor and cast him out."

  "He was a child." Her voice trembled. "He was a child. No one gave him a choice. They sent him to live in a foreign land and made a slave out of him and no one ever gave him a choice."

  "Some would say," Tamir murmured, in a voice that hitched slightly in the middle, "that it was for the good of both our peoples."

  Meri looked down at Lyr's face, and now the tears came, blurring her vision until all she could see was a rainbow web of light and dark. "If that's how it is, I think both your peoples should wipe each other out. The galaxy would be a better place for it."

  Tamir didn't answer. After a moment, he touched one of his cuffs, took it off, and laid it on the floor, leaving it glowing, illuminating the cargo bay. Then he got up stiffly and carefully with the aid of his walking stick, and went outside.

  ***

  He didn't come back.

  Meri wet a scrap of blanket and bathed Lyr's forehead and wrists. The wound on his shoulder was hot and puffy, livid with oddly pale bruises, but it seemed to her that it had healed noticeably since she'd been sitting with him; the torn edges of flesh were knit together, the pinkish-silver blood no longer seeping.

  "You'd want me to go after him, I expect," she said, tracing his closed eyelids, the bruiselike shadows under his eyes, with the gentlest brush of her hand. She missed the touch of his mind already; it was like a mental coldness, that dark place she'd so quickly learned to expect him to fill with light and warmth.

  She kissed his cheek and rolled him very carefully into the recovery position on his side, then picked up the glowing cuff and two more ration packs. Gathering the blanket around herself, she went to the airlock door.