Dragon City

by James Axler

  GRANT’S TEAM HAD MADE their way swiftly down to a bulging wall along the main body of the dragon following the revelation that they had been walking through the vast swoop of its skeletal wings all this time. As they neared, the body seemed to swell on the horizon like a mountain, its scaled skin ragged and broken in blotches, the bones clear through the flesh. It was like a thing half grown, a thing undone somehow before it could truly be born. If this really was Tiamat, then she was sick, the ravage of her disease leaving her malformed.

  Grant eyed the ruined skin as they came closer, unable to avoid the smell of it now. It smelled rancid like rotting flesh, and there were swarms of nighttime insects feasting on the open wounds along its flank, nocturnal birds picking at its flesh.

  Keeping pace alongside them, Rosalia’s pale-eyed dog whimpered in dissatisfaction.

  “Yeah,” she told it sympathetically, “it sure is stinky. Even you wouldn’t eat that.”

  The dog barked sharply in reply before falling back to silence.

  Walking beside Grant, Kudo’s eyes widened. “I can’t see any obvious entrance,” he said. “How do you propose we get in, Grant?”

  Grant’s brows were furrowed. “I’m working on it,” he returned, his eyes searching the rotted flesh where engorged grubs blindly wormed.

  They were almost upon it now, and Rosalia’s nameless dog stood on the spot, not wanting to get any closer to the half-dead creature. She leaned down, holding its head between her hands and staring into its white eyes as she chided, “You’re a dog, not a chicken, stupid mutt.”

  The dog whimpered in response but finally assented to its mistress’s wishes. When they joined the others, Grant and Kudo were at the towering wall of flesh, testing it with their hands.

  “It’s still quite solid despite the damage,” Grant explained.

  “Feels like metal,” Kudo said with surprise when he touched the skin.

  “It’s Annunaki,” Grant announced. “Kind of bridges a halfway house between something born and something constructed.”

  “That’s impossible,” Kudo spit. “You cannot grow metal plate. It cannot be done.”

  “These people—” Grant gave a sour expression as he used the term “—have mastered genetic sequencing. Enlil turned his own son into living rock to overpower his enemies. Whatever preconceptions you have about what’s possible and what ain’t, let them go before we step inside.”

  “And how do you plan on doing that?” Rosalia asked as she eyed the great hulk of the dragon’s flank.

  “Whatever it may look like,” Grant stated, “this is ultimately a spaceship, and that means it’s hollow inside to allow for living quarters, life support, a star-drive and so on. We burrow deep enough and we’ll get past the flesh and into the ship itself.”

  “At the risk of repeating myself, Magistrate,” Rosalia said, “may I ask how?”

  Grant reached into one of the small utility pouches that ran along his belt, each one less than three inches across and about as deep as his thumb. After a moment’s fiddling, he brought out three tiny spherical globes. They were perfectly round and just an inch across with a dull metallic sheen, and they looked like ball bearings. “We’ll make us a little hole,” he explained with a grim smile. “Everybody get back behind some cover. Rosie, keep a hold on the dog.”

  Stepping back behind a riblike strut twenty feet away, Rosalia and Kudo watched as Grant ran his fingers along the rough ridges of the dragon’s flesh until he found a gap wide enough to place one of the globes. Forcefully the ex-Magistrate pushed the sphere into the gap, then placed a second across and a little lower down and then a third beneath it. Then his fingers brushed across all three, and there came the very faintest click as something within them was activated.

  Grant hurried back from the wall, ducking his head and covering his skull with his hands as he ran for the nearest cover. A moment later there was a mighty triple explosion as the globes blasted a crater into the dragon’s scaled flesh.

  Rosalia had seen the Cerberus people use something like this before, when she had first met them in the squalid surroundings of Hope. Then, their distaff member Brigid Baptiste had used a spherical explosive called a flash-bang to blind her opponents without wounding them. It appeared that Cerberus had more than one type of explosive device that utilized the same basic design. As the smoke cleared, Rosalia saw a gaping hole in the dragon’s massive flank, three feet high and shaped like a long oval. Whatever Grant had used, it certainly had more kick than the flash-bangs.

  * * *

  DOMI WAS STILL CHECKING the cell when the lights behind her abruptly shut down without warning. Hassood yelped with surprise as the whole cell went pitch-black.

  “Miss Domi?” he asked, voice echoing along the darkened chamber. “Miss Domi, are you still there?”

  “I’m here, Hassood,” Domi confirmed, searching all around her in the sudden darkness, letting her well-honed natural senses reach out and feed her information while her eyes adjusted. She confirmed to herself that nothing appeared to have entered the chamber; there was no noise and she could sense no new presence.

  Domi waited, listening to the sounds of silence, the only noises the chuntering nervous breathing of Hassood thirty feet away from her. After a few moments of adjustment, she noticed the patch of light high on one wall. It was the square screen via which she had viewed Enlil and that terrible transformation he had triggered in Kishiro and the others. The square of the screen was faint in the dark, almost like something imagined, and Domi realized that the lights had failed wherever Enlil was, as well.

  Slowly, warily, Domi padded back toward the screen, stopping in front of it and staring at its picture. Enlil was nowhere to be seen, and the area beyond the room was lit only poorly by what appeared to be emergency lighting. The altered figures of Kishiro and the others had been plunged into darkness, their silhouettes just about visible if Domi looked for their edges. She doubted she would have noticed them had she not known just where to look.

  Hassood was beside her now, finding his way in the darkness with all the deliberation of a man walking across a frozen stream. “What has happened?” he whispered.

  Domi stepped back from the screen, conscious that they were likely standing right next to any microphone pickup. “Some kind of power failure, by the looks of it,” she told Hassood. “Might be our chance.”

  “Chance for what?” Hassood urged, the strain in even his whispered voice obvious. “There are no doors, just the crazy whirlpool that washed your ally away.”

  Domi bit her lip in thought. Hassood was right. But there had to be some other way out of here, a locked room was never what it seemed, was it?

  * * *

  ROLLING THREE MORE OF the phosphorous explosive pellets in his hand, Grant examined the hole and decided where to place his second wave of charges.

  “Animal, vegetable, mineral?” he muttered under his breath as he worked another explosive charge into the gap.

  The first explosion had cut a three-foot-wide hole in the metal-plate skin of the dragon, exposing a clutch of thick cables that reminded Grant more of creepers surrounding a tree trunk than of something animal. The bark itself seemed scraped away from that trunk, leaving a creamy yellow that could just as easily have been wood as bone. Grant tried to put the thought to the back of his mind as he primed the charges and backed swiftly away.

  Grant and the others covered their ears and, after a slow five-count, the explosives went off, sending a cacophonous burst of flame through the skin of the grounded dragon. Despite the power of the miniature explosives, the body of the dragon itself did not move; it remained stoically in place as the explosion cut into it like a scalpel.

  “It’ll take one more at least,” Grant stated as he looked at the newly deepened trench in the dragon’s unliving flesh.

>   While Rosalia hushed her dog, Grant went through his utility pouches for his last remaining charges and hoped they would be enough. After that, all he had was acid—and while that might eat away at the hull eventually, it would take a lot more time than he felt they had.

  * * *

  DOMI NARROWED HER EYES as she brought the serrated edge of her combat blade up against the screen. Either it was a window, in which case it would grant them access to the next room if she could break it, or it hid the monitoring equipment that was used to spy on them, in which case disabling it would be a step in getting them their freedom, albeit less directly.

  Domi told Hassood to step well back, then with a grunt of expelled breath, she pushed the tip of the blade into the very edge of the screen, holding it at arm’s length in case the screen itself exploded. For a moment nothing happened, and Domi stood there with the blade pressed into the lowermost edge of the square, not daring to take a breath. Then the blade slipped and Domi’s hand was drawn with it off to the side, away from the screen.

  There had been no reaction. No explosion, no change in the picture projected on the screen’s surface, no alteration even at the edge where Domi’s blade had pressed as would be the way with an LCD screen.

  Domi held her empty hand out protectively, instructing Hassood to stay where he was. “Keep back,” she said.

  Domi stepped closer to the dully lit screen, examining the place where her knife point had struck. There was a scrape there, a thin white line along the surface with a trace of white dust along its edge. It took Domi a moment to recognize it, racking her brain to recall where she knew that familiar sight from.

  Ice, she realized. The whole screen was made of ice, a great, clear block of it inserted in the wall like a window.

  Domi turned the knife in her hand and aimed it, point first, at the very center of the square screen. In a few seconds she had hacked out a small cross there, barely an inch across. Then, pressing a little more firmly on the blade’s handle, Domi deepened each groove and added a box that connected the lines of the cross, placing the X in an inch-wide square. Swiftly she worked the knife over and over those lines, creating a deeper gash while keeping one eye on the room beyond in case Enlil should return. If she was right about this, she could split the ice and thus break the window, granting her and Hassood access into the room beyond. Of course, that all depended on Enlil not returning anytime soon.

  * * *

  ENLIL WAS MARCHING THROUGH the winding, arterial corridors of the reborn Tiamat wombship, his clawed feet clacking against the metal-plate floor with a sound like a sword being sharpened. His scarlet cloak billowed around him as he walked, and he checked a palm-size terminal link that he carried with him, the unit resting in his hand and granting diagnostic access to Tiamat herself.

  Something had breached the ship’s surface, causing a power drop that demanded his attention. Tiamat was still in a delicate state, her growth cycle not yet completed, the hardened flesh of her skin not yet ready for space travel. For someone to damage that skin now, after the months he had waited for the ship to regrow, was insufferable. People had mistaken the ship’s strange growth cycle for a rogue ville springing up. As such, most had been curious but had ultimately steered clear of the rapidly expanding settlement that seemed to be appearing on the river’s bank. Later, those who did venture in became fodder for Enlil’s latest experiment, the creation of new bodies that could house the memory downloads of the extended family of the Annunaki. Utilizing water as a means to interphase people from point to point was a glorious inversion of his long-favored weapon, and it held a certain exquisite irony given the physical makeup of the human body itself. The water-based units were limited in scope, however, unable to teleport people more than a few miles and unconnected to the network of parallax points that dotted the globe, but they could be used to shunt matériel short distances, and that was all he needed if the apekin kept approaching. Humans were naturally curious, so let their own curiosity draw them to him. Let that be the end of them.

  But of course that had been before the arrival of the Cerberus team. Accursed Cerberus exiles, jumped-up apekin that they were, with not even the basic decency to know their place and to stay in it. If he had tired of them once, it had been so long ago that he could scarcely remember now. He merely knew that no matter what form he had taken, and no matter how their paths had intersected, the Cerberus exiles had always proved a nuisance he underestimated at his peril.

  Well, then, Enlil told himself, let them come. For this time, they came to meet evolution, an evolution that would spell their doom and the doom of humankind.

  With that, he touched the palm link, willing a command through thought alone. Somewhere deep in the storage banks of Tiamat, the waters began to whirl and flow, building to a crescendo of humanoid-shaped waves. The transporters were alive.

  Chapter 20

  With a decidedly unfeminine grunt, Domi carved another slice of ice from the windowlike screen. There was a deep rent in the panel now, almost an inch into the body of the ice yet showing no sign of penetrating through to the other side. Domi glared at it.

  “Just how thick is this thing?” she murmured, shaking her head.

  Hassood looked concerned as he saw Domi working harder and harder with little to show for it other than a smattering of ice chippings powdering the floor. The surface of the window he had taken for a screen was marred with a gash of scored ice that resembled a sunburst, but that mark was still only a matter of a couple of inches across. “Is there perhaps some way I can help?” Hassood pleaded.

  Domi sneered, eyeing the marred screen the way she would an enemy. Without answering Hassood, she took her blade to the ice once more, scoring lines right across the surface of the viewport, going over them again and again and bringing each line right out to the screen’s edge. “If we had a heat source we could probably melt this,” she grumbled. But they didn’t have one, so that was that.

  Domi’s blade had been with her a long time, dating back to her days as a sex slave for Guana Teague. She trusted it the way one might trust an old friend, treated it with the same respect she would a person. Right then, she placed the point of the knife into the middle of the cross she had carved, the square of cut ice becoming a frame around it, the score marks running from it like light from a star. Domi held the blade rigid, assuring herself it was straight on, bringing the cup of her other hand against its pommel. Then she pulled her free hand back and drove it forward again in a hard shunt, shoving the knife point deeper into the ice.

  It took five attempts, and each time Domi’s hand met the pommel of the knife with a loud clap. The last two times she shrieked with the effort, the coldness of the ice conducting through the knife and making it cold from tip to handle. With the fifth shunt, one of the lines she had scored in the icy pane split with a loud cracking sound like splintering wood.

  Domi huffed a breath through her nostrils, staring at the icy window. The line leading from the center to the top had split, the two halves of the clear pane rent by a half-inch gap.

  As Domi watched, a trickle of dark liquid ebbed down from the top of the frame, drawing a dark line down the crack. Domi touched a finger against it, wondering what it was. A sealant perhaps?

  It felt viscous and slightly tacky on her fingertips. Domi pulled her hand away and sniffed the liquid. Though faint, it had that rusty metal tang that she associated with blood.

  Domi wiped her finger against her pant leg and got back to widening the hole with the edge of her knife, using the blade as a lever to wedge the two halves farther apart.

  Domi worked at it swiftly, driving her blade deeper between the two halves, twisting it in place until finally there came a sudden crack like a gunshot, this one even louder than the first. Domi leaped back as the right-hand side of the split ice tumbled into the room, crashing into the floor in a sol
id hunk like a dropped brick, its edges skittering off in sharp shards of ice that slid across the cell.

  Domi turned to Hassood who looked stunned at this turn of events. “Come on,” she told him.

  Hassood followed Domi as she went back to the window and pushed out the remaining parts of ice, rocking it several times until it toppled out of the frame and into the next room. Then she lifted herself up by both hands, the knife clenched between her teeth as she squirmed through the now-open window.

  “Watch your step,” she told Hassood.

  Hassood followed Domi through the gap in the wall.

  They found themselves in a vast chamber with minimal lighting. It was the chamber that Domi had seen Enlil in, confirming if there had been any doubt that the ice screen had been a window rather than a remote viewer. The thickness of the ice had created the optical illusion of magnification, Domi realized as she looked around her, bringing everything much closer than it really was. Quite probably that was intentional, not for the benefit of the cell’s occupants but for Enlil’s, so that he could watch the cell’s inhabitants the way a scientist might use a microscope to scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. That thought reminded Domi of how alien Enlil truly was, and also how human.

  The console arrangement that Domi had seen Enlil working at, where he had seemed to stand directly in front of her on the ice screen, was actually set six feet from the portal and formed just one part of a semicircular desk that enveloped its user. Beyond that, Domi saw the organ-pipe-like arrangement of cylinders that held Kishiro and the others she had seen, each of them now transformed into something from a nightmare.

  Domi moved farther into the darkened chamber, carefully stepping over the broken ice that had spilled from the windowlike frame. Hassood was just lowering himself down to follow her, grumbling under his breath about how cold the frame was to the touch.

  As Domi walked toward the lifeless form that had once been Kishiro, something whirred beneath her feet, and the amber bands that held him and the others in place flashed on in a streak across their chests. Domi stopped in place, her knife clenched and ready as a sloshing sound rushed through the room and the cylinders began to vibrate. Then, as she watched, each of the six tubular mechanisms began to move, twirling in place as if on a child’s merry-go-round before lining up like a conveyor belt. Domi watched as all six tubes shuddered across the floor of the room and moved behind the staircase and into the deeper darkness, their amber bands flashing occasionally like orange lightning.