Friendly Fire

by Michelle Levigne

  Thyal?

  Who else have you been mind-talking with?

  Does it hurt, sitting on your brain all the time? She didn't even flinch at the sarcasm or feel much guilt. Still, it was a thoughtless remark, since Thyal was still mostly unable to feel or move from the chest down.

  He laughed. The sound in her head brought more tears. She put down her mug before she dropped it.

  I'm sorry.

  Don't be. I startled you.

  No, I mean I'm sorry I didn't contact you the moment we came back through the Chute. Now we know there are limits to our communication.

  Now we might have more proof that Chutes go to other dimensions, rather than just far distances, beyond sensors and star charts. Don't worry, lupi.

  She snorted, glad more than she could quite understand to hear him use the teasing nickname.

  I heard you the moment you and your new friends and problems came back into our universe. It's been fascinating, listening in. I can't wait until my egg hatches. You will be here in time, to make sure I don't make any mistakes?

  They let you keep it?

  Someone did try to confiscate it, for scientific purposes. My mother has a fierce side that she shows only rarely.

  Barroo popped in. The images he passed to her showed he had been in the rec deck, overseeing the installation of a floor-to-ceiling screen around the pile of eggs.

  Did you get any of that? She raised the mug to take a sip.

  No. I know your little friend has come back to you, but his communication is completely beyond my reach.

  Barroo let out a chirp that M'kar could only interpret as curious. He flew circles around her, looking in all directions, before landing on her shoulder. Then he stuck his little muzzle into her ear. She flinched and nearly dropped her mug. Again. He chittered at her, then caught pawfuls of her hair, lifting it to look under. She snorted and put the mug down. The universe seemed to be conspiring to make sure she didn't drink it before it got cold.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I have the feeling he senses our conversation, and he's looking for you, she said.

  That's actually a fairly accurate assessment, looking for me inside your head.

  No remarks about it being hollow, thank you very much.

  Who, me? He laughed. I wonder if our dracs will be able to teleport long distances.

  What? Between Le'anka and wherever the ship goes? M'kar started to slouch, but a muzzle poked into her other ear stopped her. She reached up to pull Barroo off her shoulder. He continued looking for the source of whatever he was catching of their conversation.

  This is entirely new territory.

  And then some. What condition is your egg? Looking like one big jewel?

  Much of it is, yes. I wasn't entirely teasing, when I said I wanted you here for the hatching. It would be helpful to have some time between the generations, so to speak. So you can make all the mistakes with your child, and teach me what not to do with mine.

  Child? She laughed, and tickled Barroo under his chin. He sighed, eyelids closing, and turned over in her hands, clearly begging for his belly to be scratched. Have your parents realized they're about to become grandparents?

  That's cruel.

  You started it.

  Yes, I did. Have some pity for the physically handicapped.

  Why start now? She held back a croon as Barroo wriggled in delight under her scratching.

  Wretched creature. Shall I tell your parents that you've made them grandparents?

  Please do! They'll have something to say the next time someone from the clan contacts them about arranging a marriage for me.

  That could be dangerous.

  How?

  You're already a figure out of legend and prophecy. Now you have a dragon riding on your shoulder? Be careful they don't deify you.

  That's too cruel. M'kar laughed anyway.

  ~~~~~~

  The dracs didn't like going through jump gates, even though traveling through the Chute didn't seem to bother them. M'kar couldn’t get any clear answers from Granny, or coherent images from Barroo. Maybe it had something to do with the jump gates being mechanically generated, whereas the Chute was a natural spatial-temporal phenomenon. For the second and third jump gates on the way to Le'anka, Tahl and M'kar and the biologists experimented with mild tranquilizers for Granny and the adult dracs who were tending the eggs. Neither of the two formulas made them happy. Starship travel might be limited for dracs, and the idea of having dracs on every starship to help deter Hiver attack.

  The Defender reached Le'anka four days later and immediately settled into orbit around the medical station. Tahl and her team of medics and biologists, who had been studying the eggs and working with the guardian dracs, were ready to transport the shuttle load immediately.

  M'kar and Genys went to the station on the next shuttle. Logic said they would be helpful, as they had the most experience with dracs of anyone on the station, other than Dulit and Flinders. Poki heralded the presence of M'kar's classmate before he came around the bend in the corridor. He walked slowly and still looked pale, thinner, his cheekbones more pronounced. Poki trilled to the two younger dracs, catching the attention of the medical staff in the corridor. Only a few people stopped to watch as Barroo and Battleaxe flew circles with the larger white drac. That told M’kar something about how restless Dulit had been, once he woke from the healing trance. Everyone on the station was used to the drac’s presence now.

  "They keep finding new tests for me," Dulit said, when the three had settled in a room overlooking one of the long "greenhouses," the controlled-environment rooms holding the cocoons. "They can't figure out how Poki pulled me out of the trance before the process had completed, and how I wasn't harmed by the interruption. Other than feeling like a dishrag that didn't get rinsed out completely before hanging up to dry in a sandstorm." He chuckled softly when Poki let out a croon and hopped over from the table where she and the other two dracs had settled. "Not mad at you at all. Always hated knowing I was under. Like being locked in a box, waiting for someone to bury me." He shuddered.

  "From what our chief medic deduced, the bond goes both ways, positively and negatively," Genys said. "Maybe the healing trance, since it was focused on you, didn't enclose your drac thoroughly enough, so she was able to pull out of it. I've already had enough experience with mine to know that once they're awake in the morning, forget any plans you had for sleeping in."

  The three of them laughed about that. When M'kar asked about the progress of waking people from the cocooned state, Dulit insisted on hearing about their side of the story first. He was pleased that Jasper had improved on the Hiver repellent, to keep ships from going down the Chute. He laughed with them and apologized for Granny ransacking their minds and personalities to determine who would be a good adopted parent for a hatchling. The crew of the Corona had made the mistake of teaching the dracs how to latch onto people's minds, to help them navigate long distances when they teleported. All their experiments and testing and playing games with the dracs, seeing how much contact they could make with Humans they weren't bonded with, had taught the wiley creatures how to get what they wanted no matter how much Humans resisted them. He was saddened to learn that nearly a quarter of the eggs Granny had teleported to the ship seemed to have been damaged in the process. Poki left her chirping conversation with Barroo and Battleaxe, clung to his chest and rubbed his cheek with her head, and crooned until M'kar thought she might cry.

  "We're responsible for the possible extinction of an entire species," Dulit said. "We messed up so many ways. We broke rules and regulations. We were having so much fun with our babies, the overwhelming wonder of touching their minds and …" He sighed and cuddled Poki. "We messed up. Bad. If we had been willing to make the sacrifices, we would have left our bonded people there, and gone to report the existence of the Chute and the planet and the dracs with half our crew missing. The Hivers never would have discovered the threat the dracs pose to them, never would
have chased us and followed us back there and gone on their genocidal rampage. So what if the dracs managed to liquefy the big ugly bugs?"

  "Liquefy?" M'kar nearly choked on the bottle of cold black-tonic she had been sipping.

  "Near as we can tell, the drac cries turn on that lovely little self-destruct organ we ran into, when we fought the dymcrait." He shuddered.

  "Liquefy dymcraits. Lovely. But that only half-explains the craziness we saw. If all the legends are true, how dymcraits control the minds of their victims, then when the hive mind is gone, the Hivers are what? Insane? Suicidal? They're unpredictable, once the controls are turned off. Does that mean permanent brain damage? What does that do about the cocoons and releasing people from them after all this time?"

  "It's going to take years to figure it out." Dulit shrugged and gave Poki a tossing shove, to get her to go back to Barroo and Battleaxe. "I'm only included as a test subject or case study or whatever. What I've overheard, though, is that brainwaves are registering in every cocoon where a drac takes up a … I don't know. Listening post? Perch? Here's the thing: the older dracs, old enough to be teachers, who aren't needed to control the babies, they went nuts as soon as they woke up. It was like they sensed the cocoons. They went popping in and out, looking, and once they found the greenhouses and all those rows of cocoons, they went and got all the others who weren't attached to people inside cocoons. We don't have near enough dracs, but so far, every cocoon that has a drac sitting on it is producing brainwaves. Small at first, but the longer the dracs perch there, like they're trying to hatch one ginormous egg, the stronger and bigger the brainwaves."

  "So they're pulling the people back into consciousness," Genys mused. "What do we do if a bond forms from all that effort?"

  "Deal with it when we need to," M'kar offered. "I've read some reports on people who were rescued in the middle of being cocooned. Whether it's the mind-control drugs the bugs inject in them, or something they inflict on themselves, knowing they're being cocooned, there's a big mental problem. No one knows if it started physical and turned psychological, or if physical symptoms developed from the mental anguish. Every single person who comes out of those cocoons, if we do manage to bring anyone out alive, is going to have mental problems because they know, one way or another, they were cocooned. They might need the dracs for mental stability, if nothing else."

  "The question is if that's going to be even more damaging to the species than what we've done already," Dulit said. "Are we creating a slave race?"

  "You'll excuse me if I back out of the whole discussion. I'm a little biased, considering what kind of help that drac will be for Thyal, when it hatches."

  Genys sympathized. She had been gnawing on all the questions of ethics and fractured regulations during the voyage to Anwesta. Everything her crew had done, the choices they made, the actions forced on them by circumstances, and most important of all, the security sensor records proved the Defender had done everything as much "by the book" as they could manage. Fate, and Granny, had intervened to put them on a different path. She could almost sympathize with Captain Shryne of the Inquest, who seemed to be constantly breaking regulations and coming out on top. Usually with something scraped raw or half burned off, and sometimes pulling victory from the teeth of tragedy. Genys never wanted to have the reputation that Shryne did, because someday it was going to come back to bite her, at the worst possible moment.

  Before they could continue the discussion, station Security paged them. Granny had taken an egg that looked enough like a faceted and polished gemstone to be on the verge of hatching. That was twenty minutes ago. She had just popped back in and picked up another egg, also on the verge of hatching, and teleported out. Genys nearly demanded to know why Security hadn’t called before now. They wanted the resident experts on dracs to be there to stop Granny when she popped back in for the third egg.

  "Oh, yeah, right, easy," Genys muttered as the three hurried down through the station to the level where the eggs had been unloaded for observation and study.

  "You realize right now, somewhere on this station, two people are getting their brains and hearts hijacked?" Dulit said.

  "Ah, no." M'kar stopped short, her eyes widening with dread. "On the Defender." She made an about-face and ran the other way.

  Genys ran after her. Battleaxe came in for a landing, missed, and dug in with all four paws to keep from falling down her back. She nearly twisted herself off her feet, reaching behind herself to catch the little black drac and keep following M'kar.

  "What? That doesn't -- how do you know?" Dulit demanded, already breathless after only a dozen steps.

  "Granny spent an entire night studying everybody on the ship for adoptions," Genys said. “She doesn’t know anyone here.” Ahead of her, M'kar skidded around the corner, heading for the shuttle they had arrived on. She prayed no one was being super-efficient and had docked it elsewhere until it was needed.

  For security purposes, and because quarantine was easier to implement if no one connected their ships to the station, there were no docking arms, no umbilicals, no airlocks to worry about engaging or security fields to pass through. There was, however, the long delay getting into a shuttle and flying around the vast bulk of the station to get to the ships in parking orbit half an hour of flight out. Fortunately, the shuttle was still where they left it. By the time Genys and Dulit caught up with M'kar, the shuttle's engines were awake and the course had been programmed in. Genys stood in the cockpit and opened communications with their ship. Dulit used his link with the drac team and informed them that the emergency wasn't in the egg room, but on the Defender.

  Genys got through to the ship. Hurree, Treinna's assistant, answered the hail, babbled something unintelligible, and the next moment Decker was on the line.

  "We just got the intruder alert," he barked. "Old biddy is getting sneaky, but we tracked her down. Popped in and out twice. Should we expect a third time?"

  "Unfortunately." Genys thought her Security chief sounded impressed. "Any clue where she went, specifically?"

  "Generalized, it's the residential sections. I'm hoping I'm wrong, though."

  "Why?" She flinched, hearing her own voice take up the same barking tone Decker used.

  "Family areas. Thought the little menaces stayed away from kids."

  "Yeah, well, we've been wrong before."

  "She just returned," Dulit reported. He pressed one hand to the side of his head, holding his communication earpiece in place. "And … gone."

  "That was fast," M'kar said.

  "What did you -- Aw, no." Decker's voice took on a strange tone Genys had never heard. If she wasn't mistaken, he sounded embarrassed. "No, you can't be serious …"

  "Decker?" She gripped the back of the pilot’s seat. "Can't you get this thing to go any faster?"

  "Umm, Captain?" Decker's voice had an odd ripple. In anyone else, it could have been described as giddy. "I'm gonna have to take a break …" The sound of a big, muscle-bound body sliding down to the floor ended with a thud.

  "Decker?"

  M'kar grinned as she turned around and her gaze met Genys'. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

  "All I'm thinking is he better not name his Battleaxe." Genys didn't care anymore. The day had just been shoved over the line of "enough." She shifted her Battleaxe up onto her shoulder, then she burst out laughing.

  ~~~~~~

  Treinna Lore named her ivory-colored, misty green-streaked drac female Moonrise.

  Brea named her lemon-yellow male Boomer.

  Decker dithered for two days over what to name his delicate little pink female. The betting pool expanded to almost mythic proportions, when people added all sorts of side bets such as the reason why he delayed, if he would try to give her back, and if he would try some sort of cosmetic treatment to darken her hide to a more appropriate bloody shade. M'kar was required to keep a log, as the official trainer of all drac parents. She noted that the little pink drac noticeably sweetened Decker's d
isposition. However, it soon became apparent that improvement was because the little drac had absorbed his more crusty personality traits. When a medic from the starbase made the mistake of making "goo-goo" noises and called her Pinky, she leaped up from Decker's cupped palm, where she fit quite comfortably, and dug her newborn-sharp talons into the man's nose.

  "That's Daddy's little girl," Decker chortled. "Come on, leave the big dummy alone. You're too good for him," he cooed. That got a hiss from his "little girl." He grinned even wider, removed her from the medic before he shifted from stunned to screaming, and dubbed her Spitfire.

  ~~~~~~

  No response was expected for some time to the thousands of pages of reports sent from the Defender and from the officers and ships and zoological and biological personnel who encountered the crew, the dracs, and dealt with guarding the Chute entrance. Genys oversaw all the reports and read all the theories, the piles of data generated as the cocoons with drac guardians showed microscopic increases in brainwave activity. She knew progress was being made. Still, she chafed for some sort of decision, some sort of order, some reason to get away from the medical starbase. Those four dozen-plus unhatched eggs made her itchy. Nothing yet had been developed that could keep dracs from popping in and out of anywhere they wanted to be or didn't want to be. Which meant that the next time three eggs were ready to hatch, three more people in the Defender's crew might find themselves adopted.

  Genys delayed making the formal request to release the Defender back to active duty for several reasons. First was dread of learning that her ship and crew had been assigned permanently to Anwesta. The second reason: learning her crew was in the process of being re-assigned. Likely candidates for drac parenting would be assigned to Anwesta, with her, M'kar and Tahl as the leaders or teachers, only a few steps ahead of their students. Someone new would captain the Defender.