Dark Beyond the Stars

by Patrice Fitzgerald

  They’d be incinerated.

  Sweat rolled down Aja’s hairline, dripped into her collar. Her palms were slick.

  But she twisted the reins, the Carriage obeyed her command, and she felt the moment when Emalkay put all the power into the microwave engines. The entire vehicle bucked in protest.

  “Come on, girl,” she whispered.

  The engine roared. Acid clouds billowed around the Carriage.

  The dragon blazed toward them like a hawk closing in on a rabbit.

  Aja tangled the reins around one arm, steering with a single fist. She fumbled with her belt. Grabbed the plasma rifle, loosened the strap, propped it against her shoulder.

  The plasma rifle was a new invention. They had gotten a living dragon specimen, somehow procured Fog from its organs—she didn’t know the specifics—and repurposed it into a weapon that could penetrate even the thickest, scaliest of dragon hides. The raid on Drakor was the first field test, so Aja wasn’t sure the gun would work. The men in the armory had said it would, but they’d also said the fleet’s arrival would be unexpected.

  The crack on the viewport spread.

  Aja manipulated the reins as Emalkay fed every terawatt of remaining power into the engine, slowing their descent, allowing the dragon to converge on them. The Carriage cried out. The exterior panels flamed. Mountains appeared at the edges of Aja’s vision—a hostile alien terrain that made her heart beat with sheer panic.

  “What are you doing?” Em roared. “Why aren’t you evading him?”

  Aja didn’t want to evade him. She wanted to land as softly as possible.

  She wanted to get out of the Carriage alive, even if it meant being stranded on Drakor III.

  It was getting so hot inside the Carriage. Sweat drenched her uniform. But her grip on the rifle was sure, and she was as steady in aiming at the dragon’s heart as she was in steering the Carriage down to their death.

  Dragon claws glimmered, huge and sharp.

  Only meters away.

  “Aja! Aja!”

  She fired directly into the viewport twice: once to finish shattering the glass, and once to deliver a shot of plasma directly into the heart of the dragon.

  Her bolt drove into the chest of her enemy.

  She didn’t see what happened after that—because that was when they finally crashed.

  * * *

  Aja Skytoucher had a headache and Emalkay was screaming.

  Realistically speaking, both of these were good signs—indicating survival.

  Consciousness scrabbled through Aja’s skull. She was on her hands and knees before her senses returned, shoving twisted metal off her body, seeking the shape of the plasma rifle. Her fingers curved around a handle.

  She felt a trigger. Good enough.

  Angry red light bathed her as she stood, squinting across the harsh landscape.

  There was wreckage at her feet. The air smelled sulfurous and her body felt strong despite the ache. Drakor III was low-gravity with a thin atmosphere, which made it feel like she was breathing on top of Mount McKinley, but it was habitable for humans and dragons alike.

  With her eyes blurred, everything looked to be red and indistinct.

  Everything but the wrecked Carriage.

  That was never going to fly again.

  Lords, the men weren’t going to be happy when they saw what she’d done to such a recent vehicle. Yet she hoped she would have an opportunity to be punished for it. Punishment, like her headache, would mean that she hadn’t been killed yet. It would mean that the fleet had enough Carriages surviving the dogfight in orbit to retrieve her.

  It would mean Aja might see her family again.

  Emalkay was still screaming, and the shrieking made her headache pulse. She kicked wreckage around to search for him. If not to save him, then to put the whiny thing out of his misery.

  Her eyes had relearned how to focus by the time she found him crushed under the rear quarter, where he had been working when they struck. Though the blood was profuse, it seemed to originate from a single cut on his forehead. Other bruises had yet to develop. Aja had slowed their fall enough that both coachmen had survived—miraculously.

  But what of their attacker?

  “Shut up, Em,” she said, hauling him to his feet.

  “I can’t see! I’m bleeding!” He clutched his face.

  Aja yanked a rag out of the wreckage, pressed it to the wound, guided his hand to hold it in place. “You’ll survive if the dragons don’t get us.”

  The reality of the situation settled over Emalkay. He paled under all the blood.

  “We’re on Drakor,” he said. “We’re on Drakor!” He spun to look wildly around the harsh landscape, became dizzy, grabbed Aja to steady himself. “Where’s the beast that tried to eat us?”

  “I was wondering that myself.” She found Emalkay’s plasma rifle among the wreckage, tucked it into his free arm. He remained standing when she released him. That was good: she needed to be able to use both hands when the dragon attack came.

  And the dragon attack would surely come soon.

  Now that Aja could see, it was possible to estimate the length of the crater the landing had carved into Drakor’s surface. It must have been at least a mile. The smoke was impressive. It would act as a beacon for rescuers as well as the enemy.

  A second crater lay alongside theirs. A trail of Fog and blood led away from it, toward the mountains in the distance.

  That was where the dragon landed.

  How long had Aja been unconscious in the wreckage of the Carriage? Could the dragon have gotten far enough to notify reinforcements of their landing?

  One thing was certain: she needed to find the dragon and terminate it before it could bring all kinds of chaos down on her head.

  It was her only chance of survival now.

  “Move,” Aja said.

  She leaped lightly across the surface. She had enough low-gravity experience to quickly adjust to the movement; it couldn’t have been significantly lower than the Station’s 0.5g. A single push of her legs vaulted her over the Carriage to the dragon’s trail.

  “Wait for me!”

  Emalkay was clumsy behind her. She decided to be generous and attribute that to his head trauma.

  Though movement should have been effortless, Aja’s breathing quickly grew thready, her chest laboring to inhale. It was impossible to tell if her dizziness was from injury or because of the strange atmosphere. Her eyes burned in it.

  She squinted to keep the blood in her sights, plasma rifle lifted, avoiding the Fog with her boots. She’d seen that stuff melt through Carriages as though it were candle wax. If it contacted her body, she might as well resign herself to an amputation.

  As the trail continued, the blood grew in quantity. It tinted the iron-rich dirt brown.

  That, and the fact that the trail continued on the ground at all, suggested to Aja that the plasma rifle had done its job against the dragon.

  They moved into the foothills without finding a body. Aja must have been unconscious longer than she realized for the beast to have traveled so far, even with the minimal gravity on Drakor III. And Aja was not moving quickly now, either. Emalkay held her back, slow and cautious from fear.

  She grew increasingly fatigued as she hunted.

  Just when Aja felt like she might collapse, she saw it.

  The dragon that had attacked them loomed out of the crimson darkness, sprawled between two jagged rocks overlooking a crater. It seemed even larger now that she didn’t have the Carriage as a protective shell. The arch of its spine was three times her height. The feet were long enough that they could have gripped her with toes overlapping.

  Her heart leaped into her throat. She gestured to stop Emalkay halfway down the slope and prepared to fire.

  But the dragon didn’t move.

  Aja held her position halfway behind a rock. She watched for any signs of breathing, for the faintest glimmer of active Fog.

  Nothing.

 
She proceeded forward slowly, muzzle trained on the center mass of the body.

  Still it didn’t move. Not even when the rubber treads of her soles ground against gravel and her uniform’s straps scraped against the metal of the rifle. Aja was too exhausted to be silent, yet the dragon didn’t react in the slightest.

  She rounded the body.

  Her enemy was dead.

  The monster had collapsed in a puddle of its own fluids, its massive head resting on one arm, the other hand stretched toward the top of the crater. The eyes were shut. A black tongue lolled from its open beak.

  Now that Aja got a good look at the wound she’d inflicted, she was impressed by how far the dragon had traveled on the surface. The hole was large enough that Aja could see all the way through—from underneath its breastplate she could see the world on the other side, framed by fragments of its spinal cord.

  She never would have expected their modified version of Fog to be so deadly against dragons, but she thanked the lords that it was.

  Aja had never seen a dragon so close, dead or alive. Now that her adrenaline was dropping off, she could admire the bulk of its form, huge yet graceful, almost more feline than serpentine. It was as elegant as the surroundings were harsh.

  “It’s safe,” Aja called.

  Only then did Emalkay proceed.

  He startled at the sight of the creature’s head, mouth open to expose fangs. His forefinger twitched. The plasma rifle in his hands clicked without firing.

  Yes, Emalkay had forgotten to charge his sidearm.

  “What are you doing?” She ripped the rifle out of his hands. “These things make noise like thunder. Do you want to draw every dragon within a hundred miles on us?”

  “It didn’t fire,” he said.

  Only because you’re stupid. She still discarded his gun. Her superior officer would be angry that she’d lost such a valuable new weapon, but she was so angry at Emalkay that it didn’t seem to matter.

  More than anger churned within Aja. She felt no satisfaction at the sight of one of these great beasts killed. They were frightening, yes, and if all the propaganda was to be believed, then they would happily have murdered the entire human race. But they were still majestic. And Aja’s mother had taught her to honor all lives; when they’d hunted deer in New Alaska, they had prayed over the carcasses of their victims before cleaning them.

  Was it possible she regretted killing the dragon?

  It would have killed her if she hadn’t.

  “The good news is, we might just win the fight in orbit,” Emalkay said. He was bolder now that he realized the dragon was dead. He walked up to the hole in its chest and stuck his whole fist in. “Every Carriage up there has one or two of these plasma rifles. If folks suit up, open the sash, and start firing, we’ll be able to rip them apart!”

  Aja’s mouth tipped into a frown. “Don’t touch the body.”

  “I won’t get any Fog on me.” He pulled a fragment of rib out. “I’m gonna show this to my girl. She’ll be so impressed, her panties will vanish.”

  “If we ever get home,” Aja said.

  His confident smile faded.

  “I’m gonna get up high,” he said. “See if I can spot any of the fleet. If they’ve started using the rifles instead of the cannons, it wouldn’t take them long to beat back the dragons.”

  “Emalkay…”

  He ignored her.

  Emalkay scrambled up the slope to peer over the edge of the crater.

  Aja set her hand on the dragon’s beak. It was leathery, pebbled, and still warm.

  “Oh my—Aja! You have to see this!” Emalkay shouted.

  She followed him up.

  At first she thought the volcanic crater was filled with some kind of strange mushrooms. It was peppered with clusters of swollen white spheres, too organic to be rock. Many of them were covered with dust the color of paprika. Those that were clean glistened.

  But the longer she looked at it, the more she realized that there was deliberation to the placement. They were grouped in handfuls all throughout the crater. There were footprints leading from cluster to cluster as though dragons had been patrolling them.

  This crater was a nesting ground.

  “Thal be blessed,” Aja hissed.

  There was clicking inside the nearest eggs. It was easy to imagine the tiny beaks and claws that were bumping against the inner surface, attempting to tear away the membranes, devour the yolk, break free of their warm home.

  Hundreds of dragonets.

  How many human lives could the inhabitant of a single egg terminate?

  “Lords,” Em said. “Give me your rifle.”

  She was so stunned that she handed it to him automatically. Only when he began clambering down the slope did she think to ask, “Why?”

  “You saw the fleet,” he called back to her. “We’re losing the fight up there. We’ve got to keep them from making reinforcements.”

  He was going to destroy the eggs.

  Aja understood little about dragon biology. To be fair, nobody understood a thing about them aside from the fact that they wanted to kill all humans, probably to seize the Allied Colonial States for resources.

  It had been assumed that dragons would nest like many lizards did.

  But nobody really knew.

  Now Aja knew. And her mind spun at the sight of the nests, which Emalkay approached with at a rapid clip, dust trailing in his wake.

  They had expected the dragons to be attending to the outpost raids, but instead, they had caught them by surprise on their home world.

  The dragon Aja killed had obviously been struggling to return here.

  “Oh no,” she said.

  The fleet had caught the dragons when they returned home for the breeding season. All those enemies fiercely defending their world—they were also trying to defend their young. It must have hurt for them to abandon their nests.

  Aja’s heart hurt at the sight of the dead dragon lower on the slope.

  “Stop, Em,” she said.

  He rapped his knuckles against one of the eggs, then stooped to listen for a response. “Stop what? Do you think they’re going to hatch and eat me?”

  “They might. We don’t know. Be careful.”

  “I’ll be careful all right,” he said, swinging the rifle to aim. “I’ll be so careful, they won’t even see me coming.”

  Aja was only a few steps into the crater when he fired.

  The modified Fog emerged in a plug the size of her arm. It consumed the entire cluster of eggs with shocking speed.

  She had been unconscious an instant after firing upon the first dragon. She hadn’t seen the damage wrought by the plasma rifle. Now she had the luxury of watching the eggshells melt, the fluids sizzling, the small bodies within devoured as though dropped into acid.

  It struck Aja that the dragonets were roughly the size of her childhood dog, Beetle.

  “Stop it,” she said again.

  Emalkay didn’t hear her. He was shooting another cluster of eggs.

  They really did sound like thunder.

  Aja stood over the first nest that Em had destroyed. Only moments had passed since he’d fired, but there was already no more motion within the wreckage of eggshells and leathery bodies. They had been making such a lively clicking when she’d approached. They must have been near to hatching.

  Emalkay sprinted to a third nest.

  Aja reached it first. She put a hand on his shoulder. “What are you doing?”

  “There are hundreds of these things here,” he said. He fired again. Aja flinched as more eggs melted away. “It only took ten dragons to wipe out all of York Prime! This many of them could kill us all!”

  That was probably true, and Aja had been thinking something similar.

  She hadn’t grown up anywhere near York Prime. Emalkay had. Perhaps she’d be the one firing on all the nests if she’d had to attend a school in the shadow of skyscrapers wrecked by dragons. If her family’s water supply had been poi
soned by Fog, then her rage could have been equally fierce.

  It was easy to think that he was doing the wrong thing when she had grown up out on a farm untouched by the war.

  But watching Emalkay move to the next group of eggs sickened her.

  Another gunshot. She shut her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see.

  Each discharge of the plasma rifle shook the crater. The untouched eggs shivered with inner motion, as though the dragonets within could hear what was happening and grew afraid. The walls of the crater looked like they were threatening to break as well, and rocks were sliding down the surface.

  Surely dragons would hear them and come save their nests.

  They couldn’t be that distracted by the fight in orbit.

  Emalkay destroyed another, and another, and nobody came to defend against him.

  “I think I missed one of the dragonets back there,” he said, jerking his thumb at a cluster he’d already passed. His cheeks were flushed red with excitement. He must have been imagining how many panties he could drop once he told stories of his heroism against defenseless eggs. “Want to go stomp the survivor for me? Bet it’ll go down easy! You could take some claws home!”

  Aja reached the broken eggs with a single leap. She felt strange descending upon them now, her motions slowed by the weak gravity, as though she were an angel of death.

  He was right. There was movement within that cluster, writhing under the shattered shells that were slowly dissolving.

  She kneeled, flicking aside a few pieces of eggshell. Despite their large size, they were very light, almost paper-thin.

  The dragonet she exposed was not quite the size of her childhood foxhound—maybe half that. It was more immature than the others. The size had probably been what saved it, since there had been more amniotic fluid to provide cushioning, and the modified Fog had burned out before melting all the way to the hatchling within. Lucky dragonet. Unluckily, such a small thing seemed to have no chance of survival after such a premature birth.

  Stomp it, Emalkay had said.

  What little Fog remained stung Aja’s hands as she reached in to scoop the dragonet out.