by Leslie Chase
Don't be so ridiculous, she told herself as she picked herself up. He's already gone.
She felt her cheeks heat. At least he hadn't seen her react like that, that was something.
I'd wondered why there weren't any stories about people meeting aliens, she thought as she picked herself up. Now I know — that's where the stories of knights fighting dragons came from.
She shivered at the thought. How brave the knights who must have been to go up against such terrifying beasts with only lance and sword. Verikan in his humanoid form was intimidating enough. In dragon form, she'd want at least a tank to face off against him. Preferably a lot of tanks. Maybe a battleship.
I wonder if the rest of the stories are true, too? The ones about dragons carrying off princesses? Josie shivered again, but she had to admit that the thought was kind of appealing. She found herself wondering what flying on dragonback felt like. Verikan had certainly been large enough to carry her, and she bit her lip at the thought.
It was only as she stood up that she realized what the intruder alarm could mean. It has to be Commander Woods and the others, she thought, her eyes going wide at the thought. If Verikan and the other dragons thought they were a threat... well, it wasn't as though the colony had any weapons worth mentioning, let alone something that could fight off a dragon. The best they'd be able to muster was the mining laser Radcliff had for taking samples. No one had anticipated any need for violence.
She picked up her helmet, hoping that she could reestablish radio contact with the others. It was a vain hope, of course. Whatever had been interfering with the communications hadn't gone away, and her suit's comms couldn't find any radio signals at all. She just had to hope that the other humans wouldn't be stupid enough to actually fight under these conditions. But if the first living thing they saw was a dragon, she didn't think that they'd react rationally.
Nothing I can do about that, she thought, taking a little comfort in the knowledge that Mike Woods was something of a coward. As much as someone who'd cross space to visit a new world could be, anyway. Maybe that would be enough to stop him picking a fight he couldn't win.
Pushing that thought aside, she tried to decide what to do next. It was tempting to throw herself down on that giant bed and cry. Here she was, encountering alien life, and all it wanted to do was kidnap her, lock her away, and invade her home planet.
Nope, not going to do that, she told herself. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to look at alien technology, and I'm not throwing it away. When I see other humans again, I am not going to tell them that I spent my time in an alien base sobbing in terror.
There were so many things to look at in the room, so many devices she didn't understand. Losing herself in the examination of an alien technology seemed like the best way to avoid thinking about the situation she was in, but she didn't know where to start.
I wonder what a 'foodmaker' is? she thought, looking over at the alcove Verikan had pointed to on his way out. She was hungry, after all, so she might as well start there. Walking over to it she looked at the recessed space and shook her head. There were no signs of any controls.
"How do you work?" she asked aloud as she fished her toolkit from her belt. To her surprise, the device hummed briefly and then growled something back at her. It sounded like the language the aliens had spoken amongst themselves before they learned English.
"That's not helpful," she said, putting her hands on her hips. "Verikan said to get food from you, but I don't understand what you're saying."
The answering growl was no more understandable, but she thought it ended with a questioning tone. Staring at it, she shook her head and tried again. Verikan had learned English almost instantly, perhaps his machines could do the same.
"I want food. Something to eat. Fruit?"
She hadn't really expected a response but something hummed inside the alcove. A hatch slid open at the back. Inside stood a huge bowl filled with slices of... something. If it was a fruit, it wasn't one she recognized, but it looked edible. Probably. The bowl was big and heavy enough that she had difficulty lifting it out of the alcove, but she managed to get it onto a table. Staring at the strange purple slices with tiny seeds through them, she realized how hungry she was.
Verikan wouldn't have suggested it if it was dangerous, she told herself as she picked up a slice. He knew about humans and their biology, and he had nothing to gain by poisoning her. Repeating that to herself she bit into the fruit and chewed. Her eyes opened wide at the delicious, unfamiliar taste. Whatever that fruit was, it was wonderful.
She looked back at the foodmaker alcove suspiciously. This couldn't have been stored for centuries, it tasted far too fresh. The machine must have been true to its name and made the food from nothing. For a moment she considered trying to work out how it worked but then decided against it. There was far too big a chance that she'd break it, and she didn't know how long she'd be locked in this room for.
Plus, it felt a little ungrateful to repay the machine for feeding her by prying it open and poking at it.
Instead, Josie settled down in front of one of the strange crystal spires. Pulling out her toolkit again, she started to examine the device, chewing on slices of alien fruit as she worked. Near the spire's base she found a panel, fitted well enough to be almost invisible, and with a bit of effort, she pried it open. What she saw inside made her gasp: whatever the device was, the circuitry was beautifully designed and she leaned in to examine it.
If nothing else this would do a good job of taking her mind off her predicament while she waited for her captor to return.
6
Verikan
Racing toward the surface, Verikan tried to calm himself. A good fight would be satisfying, yes, but he needed answers more than he needed corpses. Who was it that dared to challenge him in his home?
Ahead of him, he heard a roar followed by a scream of fear and pain. Mordrak had reached the intruders first.
By the time he arrived on the scene, the fight was over. It hadn't been much of a battle, by the look of things. Four humans huddled against the wall of the entry chamber wearing spacesuits that matched Josie's. One of them clutched his arm to his body, and some kind of weapon lay broken on the ground.
Mordrak stood before them in his warform, teeth bared and wings spread wide. The humans shrank back as far as they could from the dragon, and Verikan didn't need to see their faces to know that they were terrified. There was a scorch mark on Mordrak's scales, but no other sign that the humans had managed any resistance at all
Verikan thought that he could see disappointment in the Captain's body language. He must have been itching for a fight as much as I was. It's for the best that the humans didn't offer one.
As Verikan arrived, Mordrak shifted out of his warform and turned to greet the prince. Crystal armor grew around him, encasing him — the Guard Captain had dressed for battle before charging into the fray.
"What happened here?" Verikan asked as he approached, shifting back to speak.
"These intruders refused my order to surrender," Mordrak said, not sounding at all unhappy about that. "I had to restrain them. One tried to harm me, but their weapons are quite pathetic."
Verikan lifted the discarded weapon, looking it over. The design was alien to him but it looked like a primitive laser. He shook his head at the idea that someone would try to use it to shoot through a warrior's scales. If that was the best weapon the humans could bring to bear, they were helpless against a dragon.
He turned to the prisoners. All but one of them were males, he could see that at a glance, and none of them were particularly impressive specimens. The humans he remembered from his visits to Earth had been primitive, but there had been mighty warriors amongst them.
Maybe those ones stayed home. Verikan shrugged. It hardly mattered. There were too many things to think about right now, and he didn't know where to start.
"What should we do with them?" Mordrak asked. "We must learn about their sponsors,
who has recruited human servants and why they sent them here alone."
"No one sent them," Verikan said. Mordrak was making the same mistake he had, and there wasn't time for that. "They've developed their own space drive and come here themselves, Mordrak."
"Impossible, Your Highness," Mordrak said with a calm certainty. "If that is what the female told you, she is lying. Don't worry, I will get the truth from them."
His grin bared sharp teeth and Verikan knew that he didn't mean to get it through friendly means. Putting a hand on Mordrak's shoulder he shook his head and spoke quietly but firmly.
"Listen to me, Captain. We slept for centuries after the attack. We have to presume that the Empire is gone."
Those last words made Mordrak jerk back as though Verikan had slapped him. He spun to look at his prince, the prisoners forgotten for a moment.
"No," he said, eyes wide. "No, that isn't true. It can't be."
"There's no other explanation, Captain. Look at this place, look at how the systems have run down. No one came for us, not for centuries, and that means there's no one left to come. We have to face that if we're going to achieve anything."
Mordrak's jaw worked silently, and his hands flexed into claws. His eyes narrowed, breathing slowed, and wings unfurled as though he was about to take flight. Verikan saw the battle-rage rising in his companion's eyes, the fury of the woken dragon. It was a dangerous thing, not always possible to control — one of the reasons his kind needed a lot of space to themselves.
I can't let it happen here. Not when there are so few of us left — I can't risk having to fight him. It doesn't matter which of us wins, the loss of a dragon would be a catastrophe.
"Mordrak," he said, pitching his voice low and calm. "Anger will not help. We must face this together, or it will be the end of us all. Come, we have to find Askelon and tell him what we've learned."
He spread his arms wide, welcoming and unthreatening, and waited for the rage to leave Mordrak's eyes. At last, the other dragon growled and relaxed a little, and they both turned away from each other.
The human prisoners watched them warily, and Verikan realized how lucky they'd been that the humans hadn't tried something while the two of them were distracted. He wasn't worried that they would have been able to hurt Mordrak or himself. None of them seemed to be armed now, and the element of surprise would only carry them a little way in a fight. But they would have pushed Mordrak over the edge into a killing rage, and he doubted that would have left any of the humans alive.
"Which of you is in charge here?" he asked, switching to the human language he'd learned from Josie.
"I am Commander Woods," one of the males said, straightening up and trying to hide his fear. He didn't do a very good job of it.
"There will be much to discuss, but I don't have time to have that conversation now," he told the human. "Rest assured that you are in no danger as long as you do as you're told. You will be well treated. Make no attempt to escape."
"So we are prisoners?" Commander Woods swallowed nervously, and Verikan wondered how this man came to be in charge of a mission of exploration. He didn't seem to have the confidence of a leader.
"For the time being, yes. You have trespassed in my home, and I must decide what will be done with you."
"I will secure them in one of the storage areas for the time being," Mordrak said. The humans exchanged glances but didn't resist as Mordrak herded them into the small chamber at the side of the entrance hall. It would have been too cramped for more than one dragon, but the humans didn't seem to mind. Perhaps, Verikan thought, they were less territorial than dragons. Or, perhaps it was just that without wings they didn't need as much space.
He wished that he could leave a guard behind to watch them, but there was no one to spare. They shouldn't be able to override the lock, he told himself as the door slid shut behind them. Not quickly, anyway.
Finding Askelon didn't take long. As Verikan had expected he was in his laboratory deep under the palace, working on his machines. They walked in on him talking to himself, or perhaps to a computer. With Askelon it was always unclear.
"I take it the emergency is under control?" the scientist asked as the two of them entered. "There is something deeply wrong here, and I don't need to be disturbed by intruders while I'm dealing with it."
"There's more wrong than you know." Verikan quickly outlined what he'd learned from Josie, feeling it become more real each time he told the story. Mordrak paced behind him, his anger filling the room, but Askelon kept his calm, listening carefully before responding.
"I see," he said. "When I saw that the airmakers had repaired themselves, I suspected as much. By my projections that must have taken at least three hundred years, more likely five."
He sounded almost pleased to have worked it out for himself, and Verikan glowered. "This isn't just an interesting puzzle, Askelon! Everyone we know is dead."
"Not quite, sir. No, not quite." The scientist flexed his fingers. "Before I joined you in sleep, I did my best to secure the rest of the dragons. I regret that I could not save many, but your royal guard are below in the deep chambers."
Mordrak stopped his pacing, turning on his heel to stare at the scientist. "You mean there are hundreds more of us?"
"Exactly. Though I couldn't secure them as well as ourselves, alas. There were no more pods, and I had little time to work with." Askelon shook his head sadly. "Waking them will be more difficult."
There was a hint of doubt in his voice, unusual for him. Verikan narrowed his eyes.
"What does that mean?"
Askelon didn't answer. Walking over to the opening at one end of the laboratory, he gestured for the others to follow him. The balcony he led them to looked out over a large storage area carved from the rock below. Curious, Verikan looked over the edge and gasped at what he saw.
A thick mist filled the space, reaching almost up to the balcony. Beneath it, he could just make out the forms of his royal guard lying on the floor in heaps. Some were in their humanoid forms, some were in full dragon form ready for war. All were perfectly still, as though dead.
"I had to store them all together, sir," Askelon said. "And the system is... improvised. I shall need time to wake them safely, and even then I think it's unlikely that they all survived the centuries. My aim was only to keep us all alive for a few years at most."
Mordrak growled. For all that they were sworn to Verikan's service, the guard were his men, and he'd always been justifiably proud of them. The younger sons of Imperial nobility didn't cooperate easily, and Verikan had always been impressed with how well the Captain got them to work as a team.
Holding up a warning hand to Mordrak, he nodded to Askelon. "Your technology worked far better than we could have hoped, and I am glad to hear that the rest of them may have survived. That is a lot better than I feared. I thought that the three of us were alone."
"We must revive them quickly," Mordrak insisted, quivering with suppressed rage. "That has to be our first priority. With those forces at our command, we can strike at the human homeworld."
"Wait," Verikan said, shaking his head. "What are you suggesting, Captain?"
"We may be the last outpost of the Dragon Empire, sir. Perhaps even the last of our kind. We cannot allow this to be the end of us — and that means that we cannot allow a threat to our kind to exist. Capture this 'Earth' and put the humans to work, and we can rebuild the Empire of your ancestors."
Verikan blinked, mouth dry as he contemplated it. Mordrak was proposing a war with a few hundred dragons against an entire planet of humans — win or lose, he couldn't doubt that the casualties would be horrific. The humans were weak compared to them, of course. Fragile things. But even centuries ago, they had been brave enough to face a dragon with sword and shield. They wouldn't surrender easily, he was certain.
"We cannot risk a war, not when we are all that's left of our kind," he said. "And there would be no honor in it, not when we owe one of them our lives. If the h
uman female hadn't found us and awakened us, we would have slept until the suspension pods failed and we all died."
Mordrak and Askelon exchanged a glance, and Verikan knew that he was missing something.
"Sir, we may have no choice," Askelon said after a pause. His respectful tone sounded forced, and Verikan bristled but listened anyway. He couldn't afford to let his anger make him miss something, not when the weight of the Empire rested on his shoulders.
The scientist turned to the wall and gestured, calling up a holographic display of the guard forces. "These are the survivors, if all has gone well. They are brave soldiers, eager warriors of the best imperial bloodlines, and that will make them aggressive and ambitious as well. They share certain traits, sir: every one of them is young, strong, and bold."
Verikan nodded, frowning. None of that was news, though it did serve as a reminder that keeping them together would be difficult, perhaps impossible. Each of them served for the glory of their noble house, and that wasn't going to work well when their houses were gone and forgotten. Then something clicked in his mind, and he realized what Askelon was getting at.
"They're all males, aren't they?"
"Yes, sir." Askelon looked relieved that he'd worked it out for himself, though Mordrak growled with irritation. "There's not one female amongst them. And they are all of breeding age. They will be looking for mates."
Usually, service in the royal guard would ensure an excellent match — it had been one of the draws of the imperial service for the younger nobility. Now, though, each of them would be desperate.
"Fortunately for us, the humans are a species we can mate with," Mordrak said. "We must capture as many of their females as we can to continue the species. If we don't, we risk losing control of the guard as soon as they find out our predicament. They will seek mates."
A roaring sound filled Verikan's ears as he thought through the implications. On the one hand, he could not be the leader who presided over the end of his species. On the other, simply seizing human females by conquest was a crime he didn't relish being responsible for.