It occurred to Scott that very soon those claws and teeth were going to reach something vital, and either his ship would explode, or it would vent all his air into space. Either way, he wasn’t going to survive the experience. It was time to do something about this unwelcome guest.
The whipping tail gave him an idea. A few taps on the computer let him access the settings of the ram scoop. Scott flipped off all the safeties and then opened the window that controlled the scoop’s power setting. It was only putting out a very mild charge. But that could be tweaked.
The theory was that if the ship ever needed a lot of fuel quickly, it could fly through an upper atmosphere and turn the scoop’s power up to maximum. That would yank in a ton more matter, refilling the reserve tanks quickly.
What would it do to a dragon’s tail? Scott didn’t know, but decided it was time to find out. He waited until the tail was once again vanishing into the scoop and then pressed the button.
The Stargazer shuddered. More alarms beeped. Red lights flashed all around him. Scott didn’t even know what half of the alarms signals were for. Most of them had never turned on in the two years he’d been on board.
But the dragon was definitely pissed off. It stopped chewing his ship — a plus — and ground its forelimbs into the hull even more deeply. That part wasn’t quite as reassuring. At least the tail had stopped whipping around. Scott had grown tired of worrying it would swing up just a little higher and strike his window.
“Wait, where is the tail now?” Scott asked.
“Ram scoop blocked,” Toby replied, staring at his console.
Oh, that alarm on his left was flashing those words, wasn’t it? The tail was in the scoop. The scoop was blocked. Those two things were probably not a coincidence.
“Warning, orbit decay,” Toby said.
Scott looked to his right. Another red light was showing on an indicator that read precisely that. The ship’s nose was slowly tilting back toward Earth, and the planet was rapidly growing larger in his window. He grabbed the control stick and struggled to correct his course, but although the engines screamed and put out enough thrust that they should have been flying away from the planet, it kept growing larger instead of smaller.
Somehow, the dragon was still pulling him down. Its wings were spread out; each was ribbed like the wings of a bat, and those ribs were shining, even glowing. He hadn’t noticed it before with the sunlight in the background, but as they drew closer to the planet, the sun became eclipsed and the glow much more prominent.
“Glowing space dragons,” Scott muttered. “Not how I expected to go out, but real glowing space dragons are better than imaginary rabid poodles, I suppose.”
“Ruff,” Toby agreed.
Four
Crashing was not part of the game plan. Landing the ship was going to be hard enough without a dragon attached to its nose. But despite everything he could think to try, the Stargazer was still falling toward Earth. It seemed like it was picking up speed, too.
“Toby, you got any ideas?” Scott asked. He was fresh out, or he never would have asked a glorified walking app for help.
“Playing “I Got Ideas” by Tony Martin,” Toby replied, before beginning to croon a song that sounded like it was from the middle of the last century.
“Toby, stop it,” Scott said.
The dog shut up. If he was going to have musical accompaniment for his demise, Scott thought it would be better to play something more appropriate. Something dangerous, with an edge.
“Toby, play some AC/DC,” Scott said.
The song “Highway to Hell” started pounding from the robot’s speaker system, the bass so strong it vibrated the ship. That was more like it. “Highway to Hell” felt more practical for the moment.
“OK, what have I got that I can work with?” Scott asked. “A ship, a dragon, a whole lot of junk in storage, um…”
He had a spear-gun back there, along with some other assorted stuff. Maybe he could get into a space-suit, grab the spear gun, crawl out there along the ship’s hull, and kill the dragon?
Scott glanced back outside, where a maw big enough to swallow him whole was taking another bite from his ship. Wait — was it breathing fire now, too?
Maybe discretion was the better part of valor here.
Besides, with his luck he’d just fall off the ship instead of being eaten. It was a long way down either way, but the thought of being inside his ship felt better than the idea of floating down in just a suit.
Wind was visibly whipping past the dragon now, moving its wings. It held them open as best it could, but it was having a hard time keeping them outstretched. Did it think it could keep the whole ship aloft? Scott didn’t think that was likely, given what little he knew of aerodynamics. The ship was bigger than the dragon. Not by much, but enough. It had to weigh a lot more, too.
He could see land down there. It was dark, but the moon was shining, sparkling off of the water and dimly illuminating the ground. Why wasn’t he burning up, anyway? They were definitely low enough to be in the atmosphere, but the ship didn’t even seem to be warming up. Either the dragon was acting as a heat shield, or it was slowing the Stargazer’s descent.
The ship was low enough now that Scott could make out some specific details of the land below. There was a coastline and a massive body of water. It looked like maybe it was the east coast of North America, but he wasn’t seeing the lights of any cities at all, so that couldn’t be right. New York, DC, and other big urban areas would light up the night no matter what time it was. No, it had to be some other east coast.
“Just great. I don’t speak anything but English. I hope whoever lives down there can, too. Hey, Toby, can you translate French?” Scott asked.
“Oui, je peux traduire le français,” Toby replied.
“I don’t understand a word you just said,” Scott said, staring at the dog.
“C’est parce que vous êtes stupides et que je suis intelligent,” Toby said.
Scott narrowed his eyes and glared at the robot. He might not know French, but the words vous êtes stupides had a familiar ring to them.
“Unless you want to become spare parts, watch the smart mouth,” Scott said.
“Recommend taking crash precautions,” Toby said.
Scott looked back out the window. The ground was significantly closer. Why, he could almost make out individual trees down there! Scale was difficult to tell from up that high, but they looked like really big trees.
Those trees were coming up fast. Oh, so fast.
Scott swallowed hard. Crash precautions, right. What were they again? His safety harness was already hooked up. The buckles were set. Scott checked each in turn to make sure. Fear was making his thoughts feel like molasses. What else did he have to do?
“Helmet,” Toby said. The dog was sitting next to him on the floor.
“Right! Thanks,” Scott said.
He snatched it up and set it atop his head. It locked down with the rest of his suit with an audible click. The hissing sound meant air was flowing properly, which would have been useful a little while ago when he was worried about the tail breaking his window.
“What about you?” Scott asked the dog.
“I’m clamped to the floor with magnets and made of metal. Worry about yourself, please,” Toby replied.
“Being made of metal must be awfully nice at times like this.”
“Oh, it is.”
The altimeter said he was at a thousand feet. That meant the ground should be less than ten seconds away. Just a few breaths and he’d learn whether he was going to survive this wreck or not. Scott closed his eyes and started counting. He didn’t need to see the ground rushing up to meet him. Bad enough to hear the steady rending noises the dragon was making as it continued tearing up his ship.
He’d reached twelve when the dragon let out an ear-piercing roar that made him open his eyes back up. It was still out there on the nose of his ship, wings furled out as far as they could go — but i
t was upside down, belly in toward the Stargazer, so Scott wasn’t sure how much good the wings were doing, even if they were glowing twice as brightly as before.
The ship should’ve already crashed. The altimeter said four hundred feet, though. That was odd. It was still dropping, but nowhere near as fast as Scott thought it should have been. The fall was more like a slow drift downward. He could see the treetops beneath him clearly now in the reflected moonlight. They were so close it almost looked like he could jump out and land on them.
Only a few heartbeats later, the ship was close enough that he really could’ve reached out to touch the tree limbs. They, in turn, reached out and touched his ship. A lot. The Stargazer tore through the upper canopy, shattering limbs and smashing entire trunks of a few unfortunate trees. The foliage was slowing his descent even more. Maybe he was going to survive this after all!
It was dark under the canopy. Still falling, Scott could barely see anything now, just the occasional flicker of wing-light glinting off leaves or branches as the ship continued smashing its way toward the ground.
Then it slammed to a stop with an earth-shuddering crash. Scott snapped forward against his restraints, which held him in place just fine. Unfortunately, the laptop he’d been working with earlier in the day was only secured by velcro on the counter behind him. The impact sent it flying forward. It cracked against the back of Scott’s helmet.
He saw a brief flash of light, and then nothing.
Five
Dragoncon was a good time, and Scott attended every year he could. The year his father died, he almost skipped. The depression over losing his dad, coupled with the knowledge of his own impending horrible demise, was enough to leave Scott wanting to live the rest of his days as a couch potato re-watching episodes of ‘Game of Thrones’ on a big screen TV.
But he’d mustered up the energy to go, anyway. Luckily for him, too, because that event changed the entire course of his life.
Getting drunk seemed like the logical thing to do at a convention. Why not? His liver was going to outlast his brain no matter what he did to it. Plus, there was a cute girl hanging out at the bar whose eye he wanted to catch. Maybe she’d sit on the stool next to him? There were only a few empty ones left.
Instead, a big guy with a scruffy-looking face, jeans, and a t-shirt took the seat. Scott gave a deep sigh and rolled his eyes. His luck just wasn’t ever going to change, was it?
The stranger leaned in and waved the bartender over. “Sam Adams, please.”
The guy behind the bar nodded, grabbed a bottle, popped the top off, and plunked it in front of him. Then he glanced at Scott. “You need anything?”
“Yeah, I’ll have the same,” Scott said. Didn’t really matter what he drank. He was three beers in, so they all tasted about the same.
“Having fun at the con?” the guy next to him asked.
The bartender came back with another beer and plopped it on a cardboard coaster in front of Scott. He took a sip. Cold, just a little bitter, and a decent flavor — turned out you could taste the fourth beer after all.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Scott replied.
“You guess so? Or you are?”
“Not super much,” Scott replied. It was Friday, he’d just arrived, and the place was hopping. Tons of people in awesome costumes and more things to do or see than you could shake a stick at. But he just wasn’t feeling it this year. He figured he could be excused for being a bit melancholy. At least he’d gotten off the sofa and shown up.
“What’s bugging you?” the stranger asked.
Scott eyeballed him. “How do you know something’s bugging me?”
“Because you’re at one of the most fun events in the world and you look like someone ran over your dog.”
“My dad just died,” Scott admitted.
“Oh. Man, that sucks. I’m sorry,” the guy replied. “Hey, I’m Michael Anderle.”
Scott stared at him blankly.
“Michael Anderle. I write books. Um, Kurtherian… You know what? Never mind,” Michael said, smiling broadly. “It doesn’t really matter.”
“If you say so,” Scott replied, liking the guy’s easy manner despite the rough introduction. “I’m Scott. Scott Free.”
Michael’s eyebrows shot up. “Really?”
Scott leaned back and gave an exaggerated sigh. “Yes, really. My parents were suckers for a pun. So were my paternal grandparents. My dad’s name was Bjorn.”
It took a moment, but then Michael got it. He chuckled.
“My mom was just as bad, although that was really more luck than anything else,” Scott said. “Her name was Olivia.”
It was Michael’s turn to give Scott a blank look.
“Olivia Free,” Scott said. “Her nickname was Liv.”
This time Michael laughed, a big rolling sound that was infectious enough to bring a smile to Scott’s lips. He found himself laughing as well. Maybe it was the beer, or maybe this guy was just good company, but he felt better than he had in a long time.
“That isn’t my only problem, though,” Scott said, the words spilling out before he had time to think them over.
“No?”
Scott suddenly realized he was on the verge of giving away much more personal information than he’d been planning to share. Did he really want a random stranger knowing about the time bomb ticking away inside his brain? Maybe he could couch the problem in a way that sounded generic?
“Suppose a guy had an illness that science couldn’t cure. The doctors said it would be a hundred years or more before they could fix it, and he was going to die a horrible death. What do you think he should do?” Scott asked.
“This is for a book?” Michael asked. “You’re a writer?”
Aha! Yes, that would do as an alibi. “It’s a story idea that I’m thinking of, yeah.”
“Well, for science fiction, the guy could just freeze himself, maybe. He could go into suspended animation, or stasis, then wake up a century later to be cured,” Michael said.
“Can we do that right now? I didn’t think that sort of tech existed.”
Michael’s face fell, his brows knitted together. “No, we don’t. The story is near-future, then?”
“Yeah.”
“What about time dilation?” a voice over Scott’s other shoulder asked. Another man was standing there. He flashed a smile. “Sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear the conversation, and it sounded interesting. I’m—”
“What’s time dilation?” Scott asked.
“Relativity. When something goes fast, it basically slows down in relation to the rest of the universe,” Michael said. “Yeah, that might work for your story.”
“So if someone just got into a fast jet, more time would pass for the rest of the world than did for them?” Scott asked. That didn’t sound right to him at all. He’d been on plenty of planes, and didn’t feel a day younger than he should be.
“No!” Michael laughed. “We’re talking about really fast speeds, if you want to see a visible difference.”
“Yeah,” the other man said. “Like, a significant percentage of the speed of light. Over 99 percent to see really serious changes. You can have hundreds of years pass for each year of the traveler, then. By the way, great to meet you, Michael! I’m David Alastair Hayden.”
“Nice to meet you, too,” Michael said.
The two men shook hands across the bar in front of Scott, who was leaning back in his chair, deep in thought. It didn’t sound like either of those ideas were incredibly practical, but the high-speed one sounded more interesting than the idea of becoming a popsicle.
“How would one get to 99 percent of the speed of light?” Scott asked.
“Right now? You can’t,” Michael said.
“Oh, I don’t know about that. There’s some interesting research being done on photon rockets right now,” David said.
“What’s that?” Scott asked, jumping on any thread of hope in the conversation.
“It’s a rocket
that uses a particle accelerator to smash atoms into photons, and then drive the ship forward using the photons,” David said. “In theory, we might be able to reach 99.9999 percent of light speed using that sort of drive.”
“Wow, that’s pretty interesting,” Michael said.
“Yeah, saw the article in Acta Astronautica. It’s still early stages of looking into this sort of thing, but it sounds like it might have serious promise down the road,” David replied.
The two continued their conversation around Scott, almost oblivious to him now that he’d stopped speaking. He was more interested in planning. Photon rockets could boost him to enough speed that he could live on a ship for a year or two and then return to an Earth where hundreds of years had gone by. It was the answer to all of his problems.
So what if the technology didn’t exist yet? Bjorn Free had died an exceptionally wealthy man and left everything to his wife and son. Scott had more money than he knew what to do with — until that moment, anyway. Now he knew precisely what he would do with his father’s billions.
Scott was going to use the money his father left him to save himself from his father’s disease.
Six
Thunder had rocked the sky during the dark hours of the morning just before the sun rose. Tamara had remained in her people’s shelter, huddled there with the rest, wondering if the world was truly coming to an end.
It hadn’t, of course. Dawn broke over the land like it did every other day. Whatever the noise, light, and thunder had been, it went away. But it left her curious. What had it been? What did it mean for her people? Was it a danger or an opportunity?
She took two of her friends out to seek answers at first light. They walked alongside her, silent and lost in their own thoughts. It was risky to be out and about during the day, but the forest was thick enough that they were mostly invisible from the air. There would be plenty of time to spot an incoming dragon and shelter themselves out of view.
Tamara motioned for Kendall to take point. They used wordless hand motions to pass messages back and forth. Better to be unheard as well as unseen as they slipped quietly through the brush. If they were lucky, they might stumble across a deer during the journey. Food for the hearth was always a welcome thing.
The Quantum Dragonslayer Page 2