by Lee Abrey
“No,” I said, “I mean, he’s a smart one, smarter than me, but you’ve lost me. Why is he here?”
“Well,” Fenric said, “he’s very important for all of us. Before Azrael, Theo’s line was dying. New Dragon blood means it’s now invigorated, fresh and ready to rule.”
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Chapter 26 – Some History
The weather was very hot but Virginia worked me hard. The physical therapy was painful, though necessary if I wanted to regain my former levels of speed, movement and flexibility. I might never reach them but it was worth trying.
I met Azrael’s Stefan, who looked very like him but twenty years older. Stefan and Virginia knew each other and like Azrael, I assumed Stefan was Dragon. It seemed everyone else was. I even began wondering if some peasants might be Dragon masquerading.
After all, I reasoned, if you can change shape and your eyes then why not remove the sparkle? It was what marked you. Virginia had vertical pupils but she could change the shape if she wanted to. I had the feeling she liked the effect they had on people.
Life had become something different. Suddenly having a real Dragon in front of me was like suddenly having everything I knew laid bare as nonsense. I had no more excuses. Magic was real. In When Dragon Came they explained why the planet of Lucas, where Dragon were created, needed people with thick skins, extra strength, super-fast reflexes, and claws.
True, Lucas was fertile and twinkled with easy-to-mine minerals and gems, but the planetary survey was botched. The local wildlife put new meaning into ‘wild’, being often armoured, usually venomous, carnivorous, and impervious to electric fences that would stop an elephant. Even the birds were vicious. They were also so smart that the Lucasians had to stop using air transport after the birds learned to attack and down skyships to get at the tasty people inside.
The settlers began selective breeding and genetic tweaking of their livestock, breeding tame big cats to protect the herd animals. Then they turned to themselves. Dragon was born, though first, they were made.
Dragon were created before the Great Silence began, at the same time as animal fast breeding was successfully extended to humans, in the last decade of the colonisation push. The Lucasians manipulated their genes and added draconium to the scientific lexicon. Present in the blood of Dragon, draconium was required to transform and to heal, though at first the scientists didn’t have a clue of the scope of their creation.
They simply tried to create a tougher kind of human using human genetic material as a base. The first Dragon was the geneticist who did the original gene manipulation and changed himself forever. As the induction for a living human being was rather harrowing, Dragon were then made from only the strongest and fittest of the settlers and soldiers.
I finally understood why Murray and Virginia had insisted I drink their blood. Providing the donor had the bright eyes that signalled high concentrations of draconium, a few tablespoons of blood from one of the tribe could refuel a badly injured Dragon without leaving the donor dangerously weak. The injured Dragon might be left vulnerable if they tried to heal themselves without the extra boost.
Dragon found the new traits bred into their children. Of course, they were different to humans, noticeably so.
The eyes, I discovered, were mostly for show. Yes they did see better, particularly at night, but the metallic and crystalline colouring was something the geneticists had done for fun. It was the mark of a predator said some, and it looked pretty, which was what they wanted, an exuberant sign of what they saw as the new race of super-humans.
They were officially declared a different species, Homo draconicus, a direct descendant of Homo sapiens. Almost immediately the humans began to distrust the new race. Rumours began to spread that Dragon were freaks and shouldn’t be around real people. However it wasn’t the eyes that scared the locals. That they could cope with in worlds where bioplas lenses could change the colour of anyone’s eyes.
It was the shape-changing that scared everyone, the new race included. Some members of the tribe would not attempt it for fear they might, as some had, get stuck and mark themselves more obviously not human.
The Dragon people worked their lands and hired themselves out to secure the peace, at first to farmers then to governments. They became very wealthy and bought a large property where the whole tribe could live if they wanted to be away from the human prejudices. As a black joke they called it their homeland, a word used as a term for isolated places of exile for those thought sub-human. The property had an official name, Draconis Station.
In the meantime they prepared for the future. Dragon seers predicted it and even ordinary members of that extraordinary tribe could see it was likely. Dragon began to build a starship, long before the first law was passed to enforce their status as second-class citizens. The starship was a small one, enough for the tribe. Dragon were careful. They hid the initial construction, along with supplies and weaponry, in the mountains of Draconis Station.
The purely human government quickly proposed and passed Laws to limit Dragon freedoms, as if Dragon were dangerous, aliens, and to blame for unemployment or almost anything. Didn’t they drink blood? What was that all about?
There were humans who spoke out in their defence, but Dragon were convenient scapegoats, a tiny minority at the mercy of a majority. Members of the tribe living outside the station were forced to leave their homes, first by protestors then by law. They lost the right to vote, then to work outside Draconis Station except with government permission. In practice this meant they only left the station on paramilitary operations for the government.
Meanwhile, the secret building continued. The starship could not be fully created on the planet. The pieces were moved out of the Lucasian atmosphere and into space for assembly, a fraught and carefully-concealed exercise. Dragon were now racing time in a fight for their very existence. They had shuttles they used to move around the planet as they kept the peace on behalf of the government, and those worked round the clock. Everyone in the tribe donated funds to keep the shuttles in the air.
The book said some Dragon could pass completely for human, confirming my suspicions that Dragon might be right in front of me and looking like a peasant. They infiltrated human organisations on Lucas, taking the time to sabotage weapons that might bring their shuttles down.
Dragon made sure their illegal travels were likewise screened from the machines that would otherwise have shown their constant flights behind the Lucasian moon to where the Delta Queen was taking shape. Instead of a shuttle heading into local space the instruments only registered the passing of aircraft, or of a government satellite, of which there were hundreds.
The Great Silence began. Starships no longer crossed the voids between the planets. A human who sided with the tribe tipped Dragon off about the imminent confiscation of their bank accounts or they’d have lost all their saved wealth. Dragon removing their money from the banks and using it to buy gold unsettled the fragile economy of the whole fledgling planet, proving to their detractors that there should be further limits on the tribe.
The government was furious, having been sure they were about to get their hands on billions of Quadrant Dollars, but instead were left empty-handed and looking foolish. Dragon knew that if the Lucasian government found the tribe’s ship they’d take it for their own use.
Rumours flew. Dragon were vampires that drank the blood of humans and shouldn’t be allowed to keep the Dragon homeland. The tribe held a meeting. More humans were saying Dragon should be treated the same as humans, that they were people too, but still a sizeable number thought Homo draconicus should be exterminated, and they were loud in their bigotry.
Dragon sympathisers passed on the intelligence that the government was about to enact an emergency law to have Dragon officially declared ‘animal’, like the big cats and other results of genetic tampering, which would put Draconis Station, with everything and everyone in it, including the gold the Lucasian government expected to find, under go
vernment control.
Before this could happen, the tribe decided to leave, both Dragon and human, there being many mixed marriages and half-breed children. Everyone was allowed one box of a standard size, up to a standard weight. Conscious their ancestors had set out from Home in a similar desperate armada, with the same baggage limits, they filed onto the shuttles that went up to the hidden ship.
Somehow they made the journey over and over, ferrying people, boxes, animals, genetic material, and precious supplies of extracted draconium for the induction of new members of the tribe.
There was no record of what the Lucasians thought when they arrived to annex Draconis Station, only to find the gates unmanned and the station empty. Dragon were gone. The joke was that there was no gold left. Dragon had spent everything they had outfitting themselves and the Delta Queen.
The ship went from the Delta Quadrant out to the Gamma, where Dragon worked as mercenaries. They hid their wings, pretended to be from an isolated settlement, affected by radiation, not admitting they came from space or were made that way. They had to be quick, before anyone questioned their story. They earned currency, spent it on supplies and moved on.
On the one hand, Dragon supposed they could have donated their ship to the Quadrants, as it could be used to move settlers and trade goods, but on the other hand they weren’t in the mood to be gracious to humans. Somewhere, Dragon were sure there was a planet that they could live on, somewhere that wasn’t as prejudiced, but in nearly two thousand years they didn’t find one.
They found some good people who left their planets to join Dragon, and some people who looked human left the ship, tired of living in space. It was safe for you to do so if you didn't have cat’s-eyes, they wouldn’t show up suddenly in your progeny.
Some of the Dragon females had children from dalliances with good physical specimens on the various planets. Dragon men were completely forbidden to have sex with local women unless the woman was prepared to join the ship, and she had to join the ship first. Nobody wanted a Dragon child left behind.
They did find some empty colony planets, where humans had died out, and those were noted in case Dragon decided to stop trying to be a part of people. As they plied their trade between worlds these empty planets were often used for breaks.
To Dragon’s disappointment, everywhere was the same. Suspicion of strangers was the one human constant, especially if those strangers looked a bit funny. At first the people would be intensely grateful for Dragon’s professional soldiering skills and weapons but, the moment the emergency was over, some human would find out Dragon weren’t from those parts or would decide Dragon were less than human.
It was a short jump to the idea that the starship should be confiscated along with Dragon’s earnings, which by then they’d learned to always take in gold. The astonishing fact for the tribe was that these planetary rulers and civic leaders wanted the ship and any valuables while still expecting Dragon to guard them. Dragon had better things to do.
By the time they reached Galaia out in the Sigma Quadrant, their minds were made up. Dragon had to assimilate until so many of the humans were part-Dragon that it didn’t matter who had cat’s-eyes.
King Oliver was the Sendrenese king who greeted them on Citadel Hill and made assimilation easier by falling in love with a Dragon woman. Once the tribe agreed to stay, he married her and made her his queen. For their part Dragon drove the Sriamans back and set the borders of the northern kingdoms. Their presence was enough to keep Kavarlen from even trying an invasion, something they did most summers previously.
The Galaians were easygoing for the most part and Dragon were feeling peeved after two thousand years of war and space. It was decided to stay on Galaia, at least for now.
When Dragon Came was interesting, if a little out of date. Some of the background was new to me but it didn’t go into detail about extra-senses or transformation, just that they existed. I was also curious about the special weapons Dragon had, which I’d never heard mentioned before. I noted that Azrael might be right. As far as the writer of was concerned, the starship was still up there.
Despite their Galaian assimilation, some three centuries after they arrived, and some seven before my time, Dragon declared they would no longer fight in the wars of men. They withdrew to Redoubt, a large kingdom of their own in the Southern Mountains.
A section of the same range overlooked Sendren’s southern border, the Little Dragon River, a handy waterway either to the east coast or into the heart of the south.
The other book, A History of Galaia, was at least as interesting. I always thought Home terraformed Galaia and the other ‘manmade’ planets like Paradise, but apparently not. They didn’t have the technology. Much of what we thought of as Home science was that of an unknown race who left their knowledge behind, along with strings of uninhabited planets. That was so shocking I had to stop for breath.
Home was doing what the unknown race would have considered primitive space exploration when they found a planet they called Plenty. The original inhabitants left traces of themselves, including that they looked humanoid in their scientific texts, and though men were different, and split into two sexes, not one, the women were internally almost the same as people.
What the Home explorers found on Plenty opened the Quadrants to them, with new ways of driving ships, maps of habitable planets, and the technology to seed terraformed planets with plants and animals that would thrive and form new ecosystems, including how to induce accelerated multiple births.
Back then it was hushed up that the knowledge was alien, as much as it was hushed up now. The explorers did what explorers had done throughout human history, and pretended the knowledge and the land were theirs.
The Yusaf weren’t a people, the book said, but a military force that gave its name to a tribe. There was some confusion over Galaia’s original colonists. Early histories and Dragon’s records said the first settlers, though part of an official shipload of colonists, were unauthorised, and rebels against Yusaf control of the settlements.
Nobody was even sure how they got to Galaia, which wasn’t on the original starmaps. The Galaians said a seer persuaded them to leave the Yusaf starship and settle on Galaia but couldn’t explain how they did so. A Yusaf enquiry had assumed they were under some group delusion but came to no conclusions other than positing a mystery starship somehow stolen without anyone noticing, used to transport people, animals, and supplies, then returned before it was missed.
Whatever the answer was, Peterhaven had an advantage as a colony, being founded a decade before the first settlers arrived on Plenty and founded New Rome, which was supposed to be the first permanent settlement in the Quadrants, though there were already scientific and military bases there, on the other planets in the Inner Quadrants.
The Galaians encouraged settlers from within the Quadrants, and they brought the name Yusaf with them. It was considered likely that Quadrant settlers arrived inside the first fifty years of Galaian settlement, but many failed to bond with the earlier arrivals. This was mostly because the Quadrant colonists tried to take over the lands of the original settlers, nearly causing the first war on a Quadrant planet. After a decade or more of independence, Galaia then had over a century as a dependent Yusaf colony before the Great Silence began.
The peoples I knew as the peasants of the old dragon kingdoms, the Anglic-speakers in the south and central areas of our continent, my father’s people, were descendants of the first settlers, the supposed rebels. The book noted the Kavar, Sriamans and several others I’d never heard of were descendants of later groups of settlers sent from Plenty, which was the clearinghouse for all the emigration from Home.
Despite the peoples of Galaia ostensibly not mixing, everyone had traces of everyone else, at least up to a thousand years ago when Dragon arrived and did the last genetic testing. All those women passed around as breeding slaves had ensured genetic intermingling.
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Chapter 27 - Usurper
Azrael and I stuck close together in the bright swirling crowds, both banned from alcohol. Still on antibiotics, we were also still drugged. I was on mindweed tincture. Azrael was still on that and poppy as well, as he was in worse pain. With almost everyone drunk, I felt dislocated from the partying.
It’s a salutary lesson for anyone, even when high, to stay sober at a party where most are drinking heavily. I was subject to several slurred lectures on how they could hold their liquor. That’s what alcohol does to a person. One becomes a delusional, possibly-violent buffoon, lacking the sense one was born with.
We were at the king’s table trying not to rub at our healing wounds. People kept saying I was a hero, which mystified me. I was an idiot in my own eyes. Trying to pick up a dragon? What had I been thinking? We managed to stay awake until midnight then we gratefully left as everyone began to go mad.
Fenric and some others walked with us through the warm night, across the back of the citadel to the infirmary. Azrael had his guards now at all times, though he had become very fatalistic. Haka would take him or not, he said, no matter how many men were around him.
I had never recognised my mortality before, despite those lists of why I wouldn’t join the army including not wanting to die young, but nearly dying woke me. Life never tasted quite so sweet.
Beside me, Azrael’s left arm was in a sling. On his right cheek the dragon’s claw-mark stood out, still livid. He looked so thin, but then so did I. I was hurting and pretending not to, with a walking stick to ease my leg, luckily able to use it with my good hand. There was the added problem that limping threw the rest of my body out. My wounds were throbbing all the way to the bone.