Scales of Empire

by Kylie Chan

  ‘Choumali, I need your psi ability to show the dragons where to go,’ the general said. ‘The troops are waiting at the Birmingham base. Zianto, Hanako, if you wouldn’t mind transporting me and Major Choumali to the location she shows you? Let’s get this moving as fast as we can. And Marque: let Admiral Blake in when he arrives. He can help the defence effort if the cats manage to land here.’

  Marque hesitated, then said, ‘Okay.’

  At the Birmingham base, a dozen special forces soldiers were loading up with full gas-protection equipment.

  Their captain opened a locker and gestured inside. ‘Major Choumali,’ she said, her voice muffled behind her mask, ‘here’s spare equipment for you and General Maxwell. I understand you’ve used it before?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘When we tested it on Oliver.’

  ‘I need a pod to carry this many people,’ Zianto said. ‘And my ship’s been destroyed.’

  ‘Can both of you together carry fourteen of us?’ the general said, zipping up her own protective equipment.

  The dragons shared a look.

  ‘It’s pushing it, but we can manage,’ Zianto said. ‘Just make sure to stay within three metres of us.’

  The general pulled on her mask. ‘You’ll need to protect yourselves. I suggest Marque places you in an energy bubble as soon as we release the bombs.’

  ‘What’s in them?’ Hanako said, watching the bombs being placed into a locker. Each spherical bomb was twenty centimetres across, black and unremarkable. She sneezed loudly. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Chilli,’ I said, my voice muffled by my mask.

  ‘A meat dish with spices?’ Marque said.

  ‘Hot pepper, and I told you about using American dictionaries,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, it’s just a plant’s chemical defence system. I fail to see how this will work. Natural products tend to be weak and ineffective.’

  ‘Wait and see,’ I said.

  The specials put the lid on the bombs locker and moved into position around the dragons. Their captain gestured for me to join her next to Zianto. I put my hand on Zianto’s butt, and checked my wrist tablet: nine minutes since we’d left Scaleshome.

  The dragons folded us up to the bridge of the cat cruiser. I moved my head to see through my mask’s eye holes. We were in a towering control centre, at least twenty metres high. Platforms housing control stations were set at varying heights above us, all occupied by cats. They sat facing the control centre’s transparent front wall, which gave a spectacular view of Earth.

  The cats pulled weapons and leaped down off the platforms towards us. They wore jumpsuits similar to the one Oliver’s mother had worn, in different shades of grey.

  ‘Team two with Hanako to the exploratory ship,’ General Maxwell said. ‘Zianto, fold outside the ship and wait for us there.’

  ‘No, I want to stay and see,’ Zianto began, but a cat shot at her. The beam bounced off the energy wall Marque had placed in front of her.

  ‘Don’t argue, just go!’ the general shouted as the cats shot at us, the beams splashing onto the energy barrier.

  Marque placed a location marker onto my tablet, together with a schematic of the ship, and the dragons disappeared, taking three of the specials with them.

  The soldier near me tossed the first chilli bomb. It exploded with a loud poof that sprayed a fine mist of bright red chilli powder everywhere.

  The cats screamed and fell writhing on the floor. They clawed at their faces, still screaming. Those on higher platforms dropped to the ground as well, until all of them were down.

  ‘Good,’ the general said. ‘Let’s go.’

  We left the bridge and entered a narrow corridor, higher than it was wide, with platforms above us that the cats obviously walked along. Everything was covered in a dark grey, textured coating that was like rough carpet.

  A squad of cats raced down the hall towards us, and one of the specials tossed a bomb at them.

  The chilli leaked into my protective equipment and my eyes started to burn, but it wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t function. The cats, however, with their more sensitive noses and no protective equipment, were completely disabled. Three more raced towards us, and fell three metres away.

  ‘You have to wonder what full-on tear gas would do,’ one of the specials said.

  ‘It overloads their nervous system and stops their heart,’ I said. ‘My son nearly died.’

  ‘We should be using that on the bastards then,’ one of the others said as they tossed another bomb into what appeared to be a mess room to one side of the corridor.

  I wiped the red powder off the eye holes in my mask and saw that ten cats inside the room were down.

  ‘If we kill them, the Cat Republic will destroy Earth,’ I said, pointing down another corridor, which according to Marque’s schematic led to the living quarters. ‘This is just a warning. How many bombs left?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ the special said. ‘Twelve bombs left.’

  ‘Is that enough for the rest of the ship, Major?’ the general said.

  ‘No, but once the chilli’s in the ventilation system it will shut them down completely. It only takes a few grams to incapacitate them.’

  We arrived at a T-intersection and I checked the map. The crew quarters were small, oval-shaped caves in three tiers along the cross corridor, with two platforms above for the cats to enter, but no stairs from the ground up. It seemed that most of the ship’s volume was taken up by the warp drive and a couple of energy cannons.

  One of the specials checked her mask. ‘This stuff’s leaking inside – it must be super-fine.’

  ‘It’s so super-fine that no filter can completely remove it,’ I said.

  She looked up at the tiers of caves. ‘How do we get up there?’

  ‘We don’t need to. Follow me.’

  I led them along the corridor on the left, and we stopped at the end wall. Cats were emerging from their sleeping pods, then ducking back inside as they realised they were under attack. There was no general alarm sounding through the ship; the cats in the bridge had been disabled before they could turn it on.

  ‘Toss one up every three metres,’ I said, and the specials nodded.

  The first bomb went up and sprayed chilli everywhere.

  As we moved along the corridor, a member of the second team contacted us on comms. ‘We’re on the exploratory ship. It had a skeleton crew, which we’ve neutralised.’ His voice filled with exultation. ‘There are fifteen tiny Japanese kids on board. They must be the ones the cats kidnapped from New Nippon.’

  ‘Yes!’ one of the specials said, and they filled with jubilation.

  ‘How much time remaining on the recharge, Marque?’ I said. I was concerned that we hadn’t disabled all of the cats and they might still fire at Earth.

  ‘Three minutes,’ it said. ‘The firing controls are in the bridge, and the crew there were knocked flat. But there may be secondary controls in engineering. I suggest you go straight there.’

  ‘You should have told me that sooner!’ I shouted, and gestured for the specials to follow me.

  ‘You’re doing exceptionally well by yourselves,’ Marque said dryly. ‘I’ve never seen such an effective non-lethal disablement of any species. That chilli stuff is like magic. I cannot believe you humans actually eat it.’

  We ran down the corridor to the T-intersection, and back up towards the bridge. The walls were stained red with chilli, and the cats were still on the floor, writhing and screaming.

  Engineering was under the floor halfway back to the bridge, but when we reached the point on the map there was no visible entrance.

  ‘Marque, open the engineering hatch for us,’ I said, checking the time. The cat ship would be recharged in two minutes.

  ‘Accessing …’ Marque said, and part of the floor opened to reveal a rough-coated ramp that went down towards the aft of the ship.

  We jumped in and raced towards the engineering room. It was ferociously warm, and the warp drive
was hidden by complex magnetic containment and cooling systems that wrapped around it in a massive circular nest of pipes and wires, three metres across, set into the back wall.

  The cats were all on the floor screaming. Enough chilli had leaked from the floors above to disable them. The specials threw a couple more bombs just to make sure.

  General Maxwell and I went straight to the warp drive’s control panel and monitoring systems.

  ‘Marque, what would happen if I shot the guts out of this?’ the general said.

  ‘Without the containment and cooling systems, the drive would probably go critical and blow up the ship.’

  ‘Understood,’ Maxwell said. ‘Choumali, lead us to the extraction point. Marque, tell the dragons they can fold the ships back to the cats’ own system.’

  I checked the map on my tablet, and led the team up the ramp and back to the corridor above. The cats had stopped writhing and were lying still. I checked one and couldn’t feel a pulse.

  ‘Shit,’ the general said. ‘They’re not dead, are they?’

  ‘No, Charles,’ Marque said. ‘They’re unconscious. The chemical’s shut them down completely.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, and gestured for me to lead the way. We picked our way through the prone bodies, some still writhing, to the T-intersection where the crew quarters were. As we reached the intersection, we were all stretched impossibly thin – the dragons had folded us into cat space.

  ‘We’re at the extraction point,’ I said to Marque. ‘I suggest you put some sort of protection around the dragons before they come inside. The chilli may have a similarly intense impact on them.’

  Zianto appeared in front of us, cried out and fell to the ground, writhing. We gathered around her and put our hands on her, ready to fold.

  ‘I told you to protect her!’ I shouted at Marque.

  ‘Fold us out!’ the general shouted at the same time.

  ‘She’s in an energy bubble. None of the chilli should have got through,’ Marque said. ‘Hanako’s okay on the exploratory ship.’

  ‘Zianto obviously is affected by the chilli!’ I said.

  Marque created a wave of water that splashed over all of us. It got into my mask and saturated the filter, making it hard to breathe. I was forced to pull the mask off, and inhaled a face full of chilli powder, but it was a mild burn, not the full-on agony the cats and Zianto were experiencing.

  The other specials removed their masks as well, and shook their heads as the chilli went into their eyes, but nobody was incapacitated by it.

  Fold us out! I shouted at Zianto.

  She screamed inside my head, radiating intense agonising pain.

  Zianto! Get us out of here!

  She folded us out, and I fell two metres onto the main square at Scaleshome.

  Marque doused us again with a torrent of water that didn’t stop. I gasped for breath, and the water changed to a white chemical slurry that had a slight neutralising effect.

  I splashed it into my eyes to clear them, and looked around. I saw with a bolt of horror that Zianto had folded inaccurately in her distress, and three of the special forces soldiers were embedded in the ground. One was dead, buried up to his shoulders. The other two were still alive – one buried from her waist down, and the other trapped up to his knees. They both writhed in agony, screaming, until I psionically knocked them out.

  ‘The mission was a success,’ General Maxwell said, running her hand over her wet blonde hair. ‘Three losses out of twelve is high, but worth it.’ She frowned at the unconscious half-submerged specials. ‘Now we have the unpleasant task of bringing these soldiers’ families here to say goodbye before we pull them out of the ground and kill them.’

  ‘No need, general,’ Marque said. ‘If the dragons fold them out, I can keep them alive and grow new body parts for them.’

  Admiral Blake ran to us. ‘Did the chilli work?’

  ‘Admirably,’ the general said. ‘Complete success. The only losses were these three. Where are the Japanese children?’

  Hanako appeared with a group of children clustered around her. She disappeared, then reappeared fifteen metres away with more children. Then she collapsed and lay twitching on the ground, making a high-pitched wailing sound.

  ‘Did you use all the bombs?’ Admiral Blake said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Dammit.’ He pulled out his tablet and checked it, then spoke to the dragons. ‘I need your help to collect another round of bombs in case more cats turn up.’

  The dragons didn’t reply; they were still gasping on the ground.

  Zianto? Hanako? I said.

  ‘Broke them,’ the general said with grim humour. ‘The chilli’s just as effective on them. Good to know.’ She turned to Admiral Blake. ‘Have the dragonscales been rounded up and locked down?’

  ‘The UN are on their way,’ Blake said. ‘Secretary Park will be here in twenty minutes. He wants to talk to you.’

  ‘What a coincidence,’ Maxwell said, pulling her tablet out of her protective gear. ‘I’d like to speak to him too. Marque, these soldiers need to be extracted from the ground before they die. Wake the goddamn dragons up and get them moving.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ Marque said. ‘They’re unresponsive.’ Its sphere moved in close to Hanako’s neck. ‘I’m tapping her scales, calling for a dragon from their homeworld to help us.’

  ‘Good.’ Maxwell checked her tablet, then turned to me. ‘Is there a meeting room we can use when the UN people get here?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you the way.’

  ‘Let’s lock this down and prepare for another cat attack while we work out what to do about the dragonscales children.’ She smiled grimly. ‘After what just happened, I have a few ideas.’

  33

  As the general and I were about to leave, Shiumo and Richard appeared in the main square.

  ‘Marque says you need our help, and I need yours. The Nimestas –’ Shiumo sneezed loudly and took a few deep breaths. ‘What the hell is that?’

  ‘Damn,’ Marque said. ‘Even after I’ve rinsed it off, Shiumo’s still reacting to the chilli. That stuff is potent.’

  Shiumo sneezed again and shook her head. ‘It really hurts!’

  ‘We were attacked by cats and we pepper-sprayed them,’ I said. ‘It has the same effect on dragons.’

  ‘You pepper-sprayed the dragons?’ Richard said, aghast. ‘Why? What the hell’s going on, Jian?’

  Shiumo rounded on us. ‘If you’ve hurt my sisters …’

  ‘They’re not injured. They just received a full dose of that pepper stuff right in the face,’ Marque said. ‘I think they’ll be out of commission for a while. And the cats destroyed their ships too. A couple of cat ships attacked Earth, and the pepper-spray disabled the cats long enough for us to fold them home.’

  Shiumo’s head shot up. ‘This is a way to disable the cats and stop them attacking?’

  ‘Yes, but we need you to help our soldiers first,’ Maxwell said. ‘They’re stuck in the ground.’

  ‘You can help me then!’ Shiumo said. She went to the unconscious special who was buried up to her waist. ‘Ouch. This pepper stuff must be awful for my sister to mess up like that. Ready, Marque?’

  ‘Ready.’

  Shiumo folded the soldier away, leaving the distressing image of half her body still in the ground. She returned and went to the second soldier. ‘We need to hurry,’ she said, and folded him away too.

  ‘Where do you want me to put the poor dead one?’ she asked when she returned, then she raised her head. ‘I’ll have to do it later. The cats found the planet we took the Nimestas to, and they’ve attacked. They’re killing the Nimestas to harvest their saliva.’

  ‘Their saliva?’ I said.

  ‘Apparently its scent is divine,’ Richard said.

  ‘The Nimestas refused to allow themselves to be farmed, so the cats are just killing them to take it,’ Shiumo said.

  ‘Good,’ General Maxwell said. �
�Here’s our chance to make it absolutely clear to the cats that what we just did wasn’t a one-off.’

  I turned to the leader of the special forces team. ‘Captain, you said all the pepper bombs were gone?’

  ‘We have plenty more back in Birmingham, ma’am.’

  ‘Go and collect the bombs, Choumali, then come back here,’ the general said.

  I moved closer to Shiumo and showed her the location on my tablet. ‘Can you take us here?’ Then I looked up at Marque. ‘Can you shield her from the chilli? How about putting her in a spacesuit?’

  ‘No dragon has ever needed a spacesuit,’ Shiumo said, indignant.

  ‘This time you do,’ Marque said, and a glowing aura of energy appeared around her. ‘I’ve put positive pressure in this one. Here’s hoping it keeps the pepper out, otherwise it may be a short trip.’

  Shiumo folded the captain and me to Birmingham, where we filled a transportable storage locker with a larger number of bombs.

  When we returned to Scaleshome, the general already had her mask on. She stood next to Richard, whose emotions were a violent mixture of anger and betrayal. He hadn’t known about the dragons’ reproductive bullshit.

  ‘Take us to these Nimestas,’ the general said to Shiumo, and put her hand on Shiumo’s shoulder. Five of the specials gathered around Shiumo too. The general nodded to Richard, and he nodded back.

  ‘Will this pepper stuff work underwater?’ Marque asked me.

  ‘It will be even more effective in water.’

  ‘Okay,’ it said. ‘I don’t have time to fabricate full underwater suits for you, so I’ll give you pressure suits over your protective gear. You’ll have a limited supply of air, but after what happened on the cat ship I don’t think you’ll need more than a couple of minutes.’

  The air around me grew pearlescent, with a rainbow shimmering at the edge of my vision. A heads-up display appeared in front of me, showing my remaining air and the status of the suit.

  ‘Everybody green?’ Marque said.

  ‘Yes,’ we all said, and Shiumo folded us to her ship.

  We stood in the gallery of her ship looking down on the Nimestas’ sanctuary. Three big cat cruisers floated above the water planet.