by Blaze Ward
On each trip to the tiny restroom in the last three days, Gareth had measured his new, Vanir body against the door frame, until he had finally stopped growing.
Seven feet, four inches. Three hundred and forty pounds, but he would need to get back to the gym and PT soon. It had been almost two weeks since his last morning run around the gym level, back at The Arsenal. He hadn’t shaved in a week, and his hair was far too long for Sky Patrol regulations.
Eveth Baker was closer, with Grodray standing off to one side and a full stride behind her. Something about the man left Gareth concerned. The eyes were too bright, too knowing for a simple police detective.
“Some of them got away,” Baker began without preamble. “Maximus, Maiair, Yooyar, and Zorge being the most important to elude capture. We’ve caught many others. Your two helpers, Morty and Xiomber, have also vanished. For now.”
“For now,” Gareth agreed. “I only promised Maximus a one day head start, so he’s already gotten more than I bargained for.”
“You think you’ll be chasing after him, Dankworth?” she challenged.
“I am a Field Agent of the Earth Force Sky Patrol, Constable Baker,” he responded solemnly. “A cop, among other things. So yes, I’ll be going after him as soon as you let me out of this hospital bed.”
“How?” she asked.
“I can’t go back to Earth. Ever. That much is certain,” Gareth said. “I had to sacrifice everything, with Talyarkinash’s help, to do something crazy enough to defeat that man, however temporarily he escaped me afterwards. He becomes my next mission.”
“You’re not a cop here, Dankworth,” she noted angrily. “You are an illegally-enhanced, alien creature whose very existence is a crime.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “That still doesn’t change my task.”
“And if we won’t allow it?”
“You let me know when you have someone who can stop Marc Sarzynski, Constable,” Gareth retorted. “Because nothing I’ve seen, read, or heard in the Accord of Souls suggests the sort of ruthlessness to fight that man nose to nose.”
“I could,” she suggested.
Gareth studied the woman for a second. Six foot seven. Built like an East German Olympic swimmer, with a long, feminine frame covered over with muscles.
And a brain like a computer.
“You might,” Gareth made a peace offering. “But I know how that man thinks. He was my best friend for many years before he turned to evil and lost himself. And you are at the top of what a geneticist like Talyarkinash here could do to improve you. Marc’s not. Especially now that he knows what lengths I was willing to go to in order to stop him.”
“You’re it, then?” Eveth sneered.
Gareth shrugged, and addressed his next words as much to the Nari scientist next to his bed, who had become his friend, as the cop looming over him now.
“If I could deliver you his head on a platter today, I would happily walk into a cell for the rest of my life tomorrow,” Gareth said. “Or ask you how to erase enough knowledge from my brain that you could shrink me back down and send me home. Until then, I might be the only thing standing between you and the darkness.”
He expected Baker to say something more, but her partner placed a silent hand on her shoulder.
Baker nodded and stepped to one side silently.
The Vanir man, Senior Constable Jackeith Grodray stepped up now, into her place.
“You don’t know our ways, Gareth,” he explained in a calm, deep voice.
Gareth shrugged again, rather than answer. That much was a given. He had been here for all of a week.
“Back home, you were a Field Agent of Sky Patrol, correct?” he asked.
“Correct,” Gareth nodded. “Only about a month ago, I got my third ring, and was all set to propose to the woman I loved, the night this all happened.”
Grodray nodded in turn, his face turning pensive and serious. He turned to the fourth person in the room.
“Dr. Liamssen,” Grodray began in a heavy voice. “You belong in the cell next to Gareth, and normally I would be happy to put you there.”
Talyarkinash surprised both of them by standing slowly. She couldn’t look the giant man in the eyes, but that was a physical thing, not a measure of her stature. Gareth felt a surge of pride in the woman.
“And?” she asked in a hard, unforgiving voice.
From the look on Grodray’s face, she might have gotten the same response, the same look on his face, had she just slapped him. Baker shared Gareth’s grin from behind the scene.
“Under the auspices of the Official Secrets Act, I can deputize you into a posse for purposes of supporting efforts of the Constabulary to fight crime, in extreme circumstances.”
Gareth had spent enough time around the Nari woman to measure her own shock at those words, ears flat backwards, pupils slitted all the way open, jaw hanging, fur on her neck and arms standing up.
Something niggled at the back of Gareth’s mind. He had spent the last three days eating, sleeping, and reading.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a concerned voice. “But I don’t believe that a Senior Constable has that authority. I don’t have the book in front of me to quote the statute, but I have been studying your manual.”
Grodray’s eyes got big. So did Baker’s.
After a moment, the man nodded once and reached into his back pocket. He pulled out his wallet. The badge inside was the standard blue ring of The Constabulary, but then the man opened what looked like a secret compartment to reveal a second badge, smaller and made of platinum.
Eveth Baker gasped.
“You would be correct, Gareth,” Grodray conceded carefully. “However, Senior Constable is a cover. I am actually a Prime Investigator with the Constabulary, something roughly equivalent to a Senior Special Agent with Sky Patrol. And that kind of person does have the necessary authority.”
Gareth nodded, his own jaw almost on the floor next to Eveth Baker’s.
“And under the Official Secrets Act, any disclosure of that information will result in a jail sentence of not less than ten years, so you have been warned.”
“How can I help?” Gareth asked. Then he turned to Talyarkinash to include her in the conversation. “How can we help?”
“My superiors have come to the same conclusions you have, Field Agent Dankworth,” Prime Investigator Grodray intoned seriously. “Your help will be necessary to stop Maximus and his gang, and to return some level of honest government to the systems of the Accord of Souls, where too many of them have become infected with corruption. We’re not sure how we’ll use you, yet, but you represent an entirely new option in our fight against crime.”
Gareth nodded.
The underworld had an overlord who had once been one of the most dangerous criminals in the Solar System in Marc Sarzynski.
The Constabulary would need a Star Dragon.
Flight of the Star Dragon
An Earth Force Sky Patrol File: Solar Year 2387
Vanir
It had been a month since Gareth’s transformation. A month of looking at a new face in the mirror in the morning.
Talyarkinash had printed a picture for him, a photo taken back when he was still human. He had grown into his Vanir face, but it was still damnably odd, comparing the man he had become with the man he had been as recently as six weeks ago.
The ears were probably the hardest part to adjust to. On a human, they were rounder, both on the top and the bottom. His new Vanir ears were almost pointed at the top, like cartoon depictions of elves. Sleeker. Taller too, by maybe a whole inch.
Gareth couldn’t tell if it was new ears that had made his hearing any sharper, or all the other modifications that had come with what Talyarkinash had done to him, with the help of the two Yuudixtl scientists: Morty and Xiomber.
Similarly, his eyes were ever-so-much bigger as a fraction of his face. And wider, coming out to sharper corners that almost made him feel half-Japanese, if there was such a thing. Ch
eekbones had grown more angular, sharper planes than his more-rounded face and head had been.
At least the soft, blond beard covered part of his face, and blurred some of the changes. It had finally grown in enough that it stopped itching, but it still threw him off when he saw that person in the mirror.
It was Gareth St. John Dankworth. Field Agent of Earth Force Sky Patrol, Missile Division, 6th Cavalry Troop. Except it wasn’t, anymore.
Probably never would be again, unless something magical happened.
More magical.
More bizarre than all the things that he had seen since Morty and Xiomber pulled him through an illegal wormhole from Earth Force’s base in the Earth/Moon L2, The Arsenal. Dragged him into the wider galaxy. To the Accord of Souls, which humans could also never become members of.
But he was still a cop. A protector of the innocent. He would do that here, as long and as well as they allowed him.
Gareth wiped both hands down his face, watching the stranger in the mirror do the same. He ran his hands back though blond hair that should have been cut six weeks ago. At this point, he was likely to turn into a bohemian, a surfer pretty soon, with long, curly locks already touching his collar and perhaps down to his shoulder blades in another year.
A Field Agent would never be that far outside of regulations, unless he was a Secret Agent operating under cover. But Gareth wasn’t a Field Agent these days. Might never be again.
Would most likely never see Earth again. Or his friends. His family.
Or Pippa.
Gareth reached into a pocket of his pants and pulled out the tiny, leather pouch his still kept with him at all times. From inside, he pulled out the gold ring with the single, white diamond in the middle, surrounded by ruby and gold stones representing Sky Patrol.
Today, they represented Loss. The life he could never go back to. The sacrifices he had been called upon to make, in the name of duty.
He had considered asking Talyarkinash to find a way to clone his body and turn it back into the human he had been, so that they could return it to Earth and he could be declared formally dead. Pippa might wait the rest of her life for a man who could never return. And even if he did, she was still human, so they could never have children. Never be a family.
He tucked the ring and the pouch back into his pocket and sighed heavily.
Never be.
Gareth emerged from the small bathroom into his suite. It was as identical to his cabin, back at the Arsenal, as he had been able to make it, both in layout and content. A single bed, or whatever the equivalent was when he was seven-feet-four-inches tall and had a seventy-inch chest. The chester had been scaled up as well, but still had four drawers, white paint, and a flat top. A reading chair by the bathroom, warm and comfortable. A table and two chairs by the door.
Home. Or a reasonable imitation thereof.
He grabbed his tunic from where he had dropped it on the bed and pulled it on. Constabulary Blue, like his pants. Almost the color of his blue-gray eyes. So tight as to be a second skin, but somehow woven with a layer of triangular scales covering much of the exterior and providing protection against blunt and edged weapons.
The uniform of a Constable. Or whatever Gareth was. He hadn’t been to their police school, but had come back to his cabin after dinner every night and studied and read everything he was allowed access to. Back home, he had been a Field Agent of Sky Patrol, so he knew how to be a cop.
Here, he was introduced to anyone who visited this facility as an Explorer, roughly equivalent to a Patrolman, or a Deputy Agent back home. It was a good enough cover story. The fewer people that knew the truth, the safer everyone would be.
He had no idea what the actual truth was either.
Gareth turned and found the digital clock sitting on the chester, counting slowly. Getting used to a twenty-eight-hour day had been possibly the smallest thing, as well as the weirdest, in a month of complete nonsense.
Fourteen meant local zenith. Back home, time for lunch. Here, breakfast was at six, lunch was at eleven, dinner was at sixteen, and supper was at twenty-one. Four meals, instead of the three he grew up with, but Gareth just pretended that third meal was the equivalent of English High Tea and that all sort of made it all work in his head.
Dr. Royston Loughty, PhD, FRS, CBE, CStJ, and Pippa’s father, would have called it a serious case of culture shock, and he would have been correct. But there wasn’t anything Gareth could do but roll forward and figure it all out as he went.
That was all any of them could do, but their lives hadn’t been nearly as upended as his.
Gareth held his elbows out and flexed, making sure his tunic stretched right. According to Talyarkinash, it would move with him when he changed forms, becoming somehow absorbed into his flesh when he did, and adding an extra layer of dermal armor when…
How did you explain it to a complete stranger that had never seen it happen? That Gareth St. John Dankworth, as a human, did not have any of the limitations to his genetics that the Chaa, the Elders who had uplifted all of the species of the Accord of Souls and then bound them into a psionic unity, had put on all the others.
What vocabulary did you use to explain that you could turn into a thing he called a Star Dragon?
Gareth shrugged and headed towards the door of his cabin. He didn’t want to be late to his meeting. Constable Baker and Senior Constable Grodray would be there.
Gareth hoped that meant that there would be action soon.
Constable
Eveth Baker considered the view as the vehicle cruised through the late-morning sky of Irron. It wasn’t an auto-taxi, but a similar vehicle, privately owned by the Constabulary to transport officers around. The craft was low and sleek, done in the Constabulary’s traditional steel blue inside and out, with a comfortable cabin that would seat eight Vanir or a dozen Grace on the two benches running parallel to the sides. She and Grodray had the plush, warm seats to themselves.
According to her partner, Jackeith Grodray, the blue overhead was among the closest to the planet Earth where Dankworth had been born and lived his whole life. Hopefully, that had helped with his acclimation.
She didn’t like it, any of it, but they were going to need his help.
The sky was clear and a blue that just seemed artificial to her eyes, but she was used to more urban places like Orgoth Vortai or Hurquar. Irron was almost a nature preserve, by comparison, with few cities of any note and vast wilderness areas covering much of the planet still.
The Constabulary maintained one of their largest training facilities out here, away from civilian eyes that might not react well to loud noises and activities of the men and women training to protect the many worlds of the Accord of Souls.
Below, a plateau stretched out, overlooking a gorge that seemed bottomless in the fog and spray of a tremendous river waterfalling over one thousand meters into a lake so blue it might have been tanzanite.
“Kopek for your thoughts, Eve?” her partner asked, looking up from his digital book as the cruiser banked and started its descent to the base revealed below them in the trees.
“You’d get overcharged, Jack,” she said. “Still not sure what we’re doing here. What I’m doing here. What the hell happens next. You know?”
“You’re here because you impressed the hell out of my bosses and helped break open a major smuggling and genetics operation, Baker,” the man turned serious. “Lot of sunlight suddenly shining in on places where it never should have left. We’ll be years cleaning up all the corruption revealed. This might be one of the biggest cases in our lifetimes.”
Eveth shrugged. She was a cop. That was why she had joined in the first place. Stopping bad guys.
“And Dankworth?” she turned to face him. The ground was rushing up to meet them, but she had been here before, and this runway wasn’t all the impressive, once you had already flown next to the waterfall overlooking a kilometer drop.
“He’s here because he has nowhere else to go,” Gro
dray nodded once. Sharp. Fierce. Decisive. “He’s a cop, like us, trying to save the galaxy. And everybody is still trying to identify a way we can stop Maximus without him, but nobody’s come up with anything better.”
“He’s a monster, Grodray,” she snapped.
“We’re all monsters, Baker,” he replied in that cold, flat voice he got when he was past teasing. “Sane people do not take up arms and put on a badge. They become musicians. Or shopkeepers. Something predictable. That’s why Kathra divorced me and remarried. Too many nights alone when the kids were young. It’s why she found a second husband who’s a sales manager. Safe. Quiet. Comfortable. But someone has to do this job. Someone has to hold the line against all the people trying to cheat the system and make an unfair profit. Without the Accord, you have chaos.”
“Or Maximus,” she mused, mostly to herself, but apparently loud enough for him to hear.
“Or something worse, yes,” Grodray acknowledged. “I remember Maximus telling Gareth about his plan to become Emperor Marc the First, an immortal human who was planning to take over the entire Accord with the help of more humans, and rule forever.”
“So we have to trust another human to save us?” she sneered. It wasn’t meant to come out that bitter, but even she heard the tones in her voice.
So did Grodray. His eyes got hard.
“That man has sacrificed everything, Eve,” Jackeith’s voice dropped to a murmur. “Everything. And I’ve not heard any reports of him complaining about it afterwards. He’s lost his past, his present, and his future. All his friends and family. The woman he loved. And he would do it again tomorrow, if we asked. Keep that in mind.”
“I know, Grodray,” her own voice dropped as the cruiser landed lightly. “Will it be enough?”