“Shouldn’t you be keeping an eye on our guests?” Scott asked.
“Oh, I think this is much more interesting.”
“Seriously, Toby. You’ve had it in for Gorbash from minute one. He’s cute and little. What’s your problem with him?” Scott asked.
“He’s a dragon. He might be cute right now, but what’s he going to look like when he’s full grown?” Toby asked.
“It’s not an issue. Gorbash is totally under control,” Scott said. He shoved open the hatch to his quarters.
Which looked like a tornado had swept through it.
His clothes were everywhere. Half of them were shredded. Stuffing from the bed drifted around on gentle gusts of air from the ventilation system. The place was completely trashed.
Gorbash stuck his nose out from the hole he’d tunneled into the mattress.
“Mrrp?”
“Completely under control? Whatever you say, Khaleesi,” Toby said. Then he turned around and clomped down the wall back to the cockpit, chuckling all the way.
“Gorbash, get down here right now,” Scott said.
“Mrrp!”
“Right this instant,” he repeated, pointing at the deck in front of him.
“Mrrp,” Gorbash said. Then he jumped from the mattress.
At first, Scott thought the dragon was going to fall and moved to catch him. But the thin lines of ribbing along Gorbash’s wings glowed when he was midway to the floor, and he stopped falling. He fluttered his wings, gently moving around. The hatchling skimmed past Scott, fanning him with his wings. He had to laugh. The little critter was clearly pleased with himself and his newfound ability.
“That’s right, you are a good little dragon,” Scott said. “Now how are you managing to do that?”
He watched the wings. When Gorbash wanted to go up, they grew brighter, and when he descended, they became dim. The glow was clearly related to dragonflight. He’d seen that before. But what was the underlying mechanism?
“Come here, fella,” Scott said, holding out a hot dog.
“Mrrp!”
Gorbash flew over and snapped it from his fingers, gulping the food down. Scott descended back down the ladder from his room, holding out another hot dog. The dragon followed and chomped that one down too.
“Good boy. Keep coming, now,” Scott said. He fed the dragon another chunk of meat, slowly leading it across the room.
Then he laid the entire rest of the package down inside the medical pod. Gorbash happily descended upon the food and wolfed down the hot dogs. While it was distracted by the food, Scott tapped the controls on the pod, which lowered the lid on his pet dragon.
“Mrrp?” Gorbash said, looking up as the lid sealed shut.
“Relax, little buddy. Just a quick medical exam to see what you’re all about,” Scott said. There was a hiss as the pod sealed and vented in a gas to ease the dragon into sleep.
He crossed his fingers, hoping the sleeping chemical would work on Gorbash. This was an entirely different biology. Adult dragons could fly in space. Did they even need to breathe? It might not work at all.
But the dragon sniffed the air, gave a few chirps, and sneezed. Then he curled up around itself in a small circle, laid his head down on his tail, and fell asleep.
“I don’t know whether that was the gas or the food. Either way, he’s asleep now,” Scott said.
He set the pod to do a full diagnostic on Gorbash. The more he knew about how these animals worked, the better off he was going to be. Sure, he’d beaten two of them so far, but the first was by luck, and the second was a near thing. He needed intel on this enemy.
It was hard to think about little Gorbash as an enemy, but even if he was cute and friendly, the bigger ones certainly were not. They were probably responsible for the downfall of human civilization. If Scott was going to have a chance of bringing any of it back, he needed to do something about the dragons.
Bringing it back. Wow, that was the first time he’d had that thought. Scott shook his head. He was no leader. All he wanted was to find the cure that would extend his life. Someone else could do the heavy lifting of bringing back strip malls and chain department stores.
“Time to go see our friends,” Scott said. He went to the airlock.
Thirty-Two
By the time Scott had climbed down to join the people from the Keep, the work was already in full swing. People climbed trees all around the Stargazer, looping long ropes over thick boughs, then running them through a series of complex pulley systems. He’d never seen such intricate ropework.
“This puts the Boy Scouts to shame,” he told Hector. The chief was seated in the middle of everything, directing traffic and solving problems as they came up.
“These Scouts are good with rope?” Hector asked.
“They’re some of the best where I come from,” Scott replied.
Hector canted his head at an angle. “And where precisely are you from, Scott Free? You haven’t said.”
Scott turned away and stared at the sky. Where he was from wasn’t the question. He’d been born a few hundred miles from this very spot. Hell, he’d driven through the Hero Tunnel more than once. This was his world. This was his home.
And yet it was entirely alien at the same time. How did you explain time travel to someone from a place and time like this? Sure, he hadn’t literally traveled in time, but it was close enough to count. He couldn’t imagine Hector understanding.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Scott said, the words bitter ashes. No one from this time would believe him or ever understand him. He was alone.
“Try me, my friend,” Hector said softly.
Something about his voice made Scott turn back to him. He looked into the other man’s eyes. They were stern, yes. But Scott saw kindness and compassion there as well.
“I can see you are hurting. Is it because you want to go back to this place you think I won’t believe?” Hector asked.
“No. I can’t ever go home. It’s dead and gone,” Scott said.
“Destroyed? Even with your weapons and powers?”
“Hector, you said to try you. I’ll be clear. I’m from here. I was born not too far from this place. I remember this world when the roads were full of cars, the skies full of airplanes, and everyone had a pocket computer,” Scott said. “I’m from here. Here, but four hundred years ago.”
“Ah, I had a feeling it might be something like that,” Hector said.
“You did?” Scott asked, astonished.
“Yes. You couldn’t be from this world. Technology like yours? We would have heard about it before now, would be not?” Hector asked.
“Yes, probably,” Scott said.
Which was part of his worry. After all, if any tech sufficient to cure him existed on Earth, the people with that power would surely have been out fighting dragons and trying to restore the world. That nobody was actively out there in fighter planes shooting down dragons meant there probably wasn’t anyone capable of doing so.
It made the odds of finding a cure for his condition slim.
“In the past you came from, this was before the dragons came?” Hector asked.
“Yeah. Dragons were just a bedtime story for us,” Scott said.
“Why leave all that and come here, then?” Hector asked. “You left behind your family, friends, everyone you knew? For what?”
Scott laughed bitterly. “Because I needed something I thought I could only get in the future.”
Somehow, coming clean about everything felt right. Hector was helping him without knowing about his disease. Scott didn’t have to worry the man would assist him out of pity. He’d earned the chief’s trust and admiration. Time to return it with a little trust of his own. He tapped his skull.
“I have a disease. Inherited from my father,” Scott said. “I don’t know when it will start affecting me, but when it does, I will gradually lose the ability to sleep. Then my brain will degenerate. I’ll go mad. See things. Eventually die as
a drooling idiot.”
Hector was silent for a long moment. “You watched your own father die this way?” he asked softly.
“Yes.”
“That is a hard thing to bear,” Hector said, reaching out a hand to touch Scott’s shoulder. “My own father died in battle with Yaven’s clan. Quick and clean. A good death. I can see why you would fear the fate which befell your father. How can I help?”
Scott thought about the question a moment. At first he wanted to shout at Hector, to tell the man there was nothing he could do to help. That the cure he’d sacrificed everything to find was likely lost along with the rest of human civilization. But Hector wasn’t asking to be hurtful. He honestly wanted to give whatever aid he could.
“You already are helping,” Scott said. “The last word I had was that a cure for my condition was available in California. On the far coast from here. About three thousand miles away.”
“A long walk,” Hector said. “But with your ship?”
“A few hours flight time.”
“It goes so fast?” Hector asked. Scott nodded. “Perhaps you’ll take me up in it sometime.”
“If we get it flying again, I absolutely will,” Scott said.
He felt his mood lifting. It had been too big a secret to keep to himself. Sharing felt right. Hector might only understand part of what he’d said, but the man understood the human part of Scott’s problems, and… that was enough.
Work continued through the morning. By noon, a team was hauling the dragon carcass down from the top of the ship. Scott noticed another crew digging at the earth under the ship, cutting the dragon out from beneath it.
“Why worry about the bodies?” Scott asked Tamara.
“Dragon carcasses attract dragons. We don’t know why, but they’re pretty consistent about it,” she replied. “We’re lucky that body up there hasn’t already brought more.”
“What do you plan to do with the bodies?” Scott asked. He eyed the wings thoughtfully as her people lowered the body down using the rope and pulley system.
“Use most of it. The meat isn’t edible, but we don’t waste anything we can use. Teeth, horns, claws, scales, all of it has value for us,” Tamara said.
“Can I take the wings?” Scott asked. He still didn’t know what the material inside them was, but he was curious to know more. It had to be related to the dragons’ flight in some way.
She looked at him oddly but nodded. Scott ended up with the ribs from all four wings stowed away aboard the ship by the time he was done. He’d also ruined another set of clothing chopping the ribs out of the wings.
This reminded him that most of his clothes were shredded. He tossed the messed up ones — along with all the clothes Gorbash had ruined — into the recycler, and he programmed the printer to make him a few new sets of clothes. He was down to his last clean outfit when he checked on Gorbash, who was still sleeping it off in the pod. The medical computer was still collating data about the dragon, but it had already run a ton of scans. Scott started looking over the information. Damned if the dragons weren’t pretty similar to life forms from Earth. Was it a quirk of evolution, or something else entirely?
Screams from outside startled him from his work. He dashed to the airlock and opened it, peering out. At first Scott wasn’t sure what was going on. People dashed every which way. Then he caught the whiff of smoke and turned to face the north.
Smoke was rising from the trees in that direction. The forest was on fire.
Thirty-Three
Scott slid down the ladder and hit the ground running. Tamara had already rejoined her father at his command post. He was shouting orders, and Scott didn’t think it wise to disturb him. Hector knew better than he did how to combat the threat they were facing.
“He’s sent half our guard force north to see how bad the fire is,” Tamara said.
“What can we do if it’s bad?” Scott asked.
“From here? Not much. The nearest river is a mile away. We have enough drinking water but nowhere near enough to put out a fire. Will your ship survive if the flames reach it?” she asked.
“I wish I knew,” Scott said.
The Stargazer was a tough piece of engineering. She was designed to handle massive stress, as evidenced by the way she’d weathered the crash landing. Would the ship be flightworthy after the trees heated up the air around it? He had a feeling that even if the ship’s structure survived, most of the systems and components would be shot.
Smoke filled the air as the breeze carried it through the camp around his ship. It was thick, but he didn’t feel a lot of heat in the air. Maybe the fire was still a ways out and they had time to divert it?
He reached up and activated his radio.
“Toby, you seeing this?” Scott asked.
“The fog rolling in? Sure. Hard to miss.”
“It’s not fog, Toby.”
“I know that. It’s… never mind. What can I do for you?” Toby asked. Scott heard the dog sigh.
“Can you get me eyes on those flames?” Scott asked.
“A drone? Can do,” Toby said.
“Make it so,” Scott said with a grin. Then he turned to Tamara. “Now you get to see something cool.”
A moment later, something shot away from the side of the ship, making a buzzing noise as it flew by. Scott pulled out his pocket tablet and called up the drone’s camera feed. It zipped between the trees, streaking past the scout party Hector sent north. Moments later it was closing on the flames.
“That’s amazing!” Tamara said.
“Are fires like this common around here?” Scott asked. It seemed strange to him. The whole place was incredibly boggy. Everything ought to be too wet to burn easily.
“Rare, but they have happened,” she said.
“What do you do about them?”
“We gather inside the Keep and stay there until the fires go out.”
Scott had to remind himself that these people didn’t have twenty-first century firefighting technology. The best they could do would be chop down trees and throw buckets of water on a flame. It would be like peeing on a campfire.
The drone came up on the flames, but they were nowhere near as large as Scott expected. The trees themselves weren’t ablaze at all. Instead, it looked like a brush fire on the ground, more of a smoldering mess of branches than a real forest fire. The wet branches were producing far more smoke than the small fire around them would normally have done.
“It’s a tiny fire,” Scott said. “We’re OK.”
Then he had the drone zoom in closer to the piles of branches. The piles were in a straight line. That didn’t look anything like a natural occurence. He tapped a key to zoom in on a branch.
The end was clean cut.
“We’ve got trouble,” Scott said, already putting away the tablet and running for the ship. “Warn your father. The smoke isn’t a real fire. It’s a ruse to draw people away from the camp.”
“What? Why?” she asked.
“Why would you want to draw defenders away from a place?” Scott asked. “To make an attack easier.”
He saw understanding in her eyes a she turned and darted toward her father. Scott climbed the ladder back up to the ship, considering what he had for defenses available. It wasn’t much. When all this was over, he was going to have the printer make him some damned armor. It would have been nice if the Stargazer had side-mounted turrets, too.
“Might as well ask for a platoon of Marines,” he muttered. That would be even nicer than the turrets, to be honest.
“Boss. What do you want me to do?” Toby asked, meeting him just inside the airlock.
He looked over the dog. Toby wasn’t built for fighting, but he was made of metal. The robot could take a pounding and come through OK. Scott hated the idea of even risking the loss of his oldest friend, but this was all-or-nothing time. If the enemy force he knew had to be coming won this fight, the ship and everything on it would be lost.
“We’re going to have to fi
ght them off,” Scott said. “You up for that?”
“Activating combat protocols,” Toby said in a voice that sounded remarkably like Scott’s mother.
“Combat protocols? What combat protocols?” Scott asked. She’d never told him the robot had combat protocols. He watched as Toby stepped through the airlock and begin walking down the side of the ship.
“Damn. Going to need to have a chat with my dog,” Scott said.
He opened the weapons locker and examined what he had left in there. The massive fifty caliber rifle was probably overkill for this. Besides, he only had so many bullets for that gun, and he wanted to save them for dealing with dragons.
That left the .44 pistol Scott was already carrying everywhere he went, an AR-15 rifle, and a magazine-fed shotgun. He eyeballed the latter two. Much as he thought the shotgun had more ‘shock and awe’ value, there was also a good chance he’d nail friends in the melee along with enemies.
“The AR it is, then,” he said. He grabbed the weapon and loaded a combat vest with magazines, feeling wildly out of place the whole time.
This wasn’t a movie. This was the real world. He wasn’t some damned action hero. Once spears and whatever else started flying, any of them could take him out as easily as the snap of a finger.
Something else was bothering Scott, much as he was trying to put it from his mind. He’d never killed a person. He’d slain the dragon to save Tamara, but people were different. Could he do it? He eyed the rifle cradled in his arms. Could he pull the trigger and take a human life?
Damn these people for fighting each other when there were so many better things the remnants of humanity could be doing. But then, humans had always been stupid that way. Was there ever a time when people weren’t fighting each other?
Scott slung the rifle across his back and ran to the airlock, sealing the inner door behind him. He’d be back soon enough — he hoped.
Thirty-Four
Hector stood in the middle of a swarming ball of frenzied activity as Scott approached. Tamara had clearly reached him with a warning. He was surrounded with a small troop of armed warriors, all watchful. Three of them were eyeing Toby, spears aimed in his direction.
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