Star Dragon Box Set One

by Blaze Ward

  “Now the fun begins,” she smiled at him.

  Gareth wondered if a shark smiled like that, right before he took a bite out of your leg.

  “What’s next?” he asked.

  “Now we put your superpower to work,” she replied.

  Gareth really didn’t like the sound of that.

  Possibilities

  She found the closed door intimidating, but Talyarkinash didn’t let that stop her. It was unlocked she found, so she pushed it in and entered the room.

  From the outside, this was just another tower in Londra, the art capital of Orgoth Vortai. And that was all the Grace really cared about. Art.

  The actual capital city, where politics got done, was Burich, but that was a sleepy, college town two hundred kilometers up the Temin River. All the action was in Londra, or possibly down in Xarxe, the port city down on the delta where so many musicians had gathered together.

  Talyarkinash preferred Londra. Living in a tower with a mix of flats and offices, depending on the floor and the lift tube you used. There was supposedly an indoor arcade filled with shops and restaurants, taking up the first two floors above ground and three below, but she had never seen it.

  She was still in police custody, even if everyone was too polite to call her a prisoner to her face. She did not leave this floor without an armed escort, so she could call it what it was.

  The room she entered was bland and meaningless. That took significant work on the homeworld of the Grace, since they saw any blank wall as an invitation and excuse to commit art. Someone had consciously undone this room. White walls greeted her, with pedestrian watercolor pictures on two walls, plus a large picture window looking out over the rest of the city. Brown carpets as bland as the walls under her feet.

  Senior Constable Jackeith Grodray was already seated across from her, with a stack of folders off to one side. The small room was dominated by a cherry-oak table, Vanir-sized, that worked as either a desk or a conference table for a small group. Another Vanir, this one a woman, was seated on Grodray’s right.

  Like him, she wore the generic uniform of the Constabulary. They didn’t wear names or ranks indicators of any kind, unlike most of the police departments she had ever known, so Talyarkinash had no way of identifying the woman’s place in things, except by age.

  She had been skinnier when she was younger, that much was obvious, but the Vanir woman was much older now. Not plump, but not the lean huntress the younger version had obviously been. More senior. Possibly into her eighth or tenth decade. Dark hair was now streaked with silver and white. The flesh of her neck was slack, and her eyes and forehead were a maze of wrinkles that Talyarkinash suspected led one to the minotaur, rather than the treasure.

  Grodray rose as Talyarkinash closed the door carefully.

  “Dr. Talyarkinash Liamssen, this is Dr. Dalton Fitzroy,” Grodray introduced the woman. “Prime Investigator with an emphasis on biology and genetics.”

  Indeed? Talyarkinash had never heard of a Constable with advanced degrees in those sorts of things, but considering the uses to which they were generally put, the woman most likely would have been undercover. Or recruited as a cop later. Or the Constabulary had a secret university where only cops were trained. She made a note to inquire at some point.

  Talyarkinash had spent the last decade in her lab ignoring the outside world, getting filthy, stinking rich. Some of it was still hidden away, in places that might not have been discovered yet. Cops like Grodray had already taken the rest of her life apart and confiscated most of her ill-gotten gains.

  Fitzroy rose and held out a hand.

  “Dr. Liamssen,” she said in a pleasant, alto voice.

  “Dr. Fitzroy,” Talyarkinash replied, shaking the hand.

  The woman was almost as tall as Grodray, standing. Talyarkinash willed herself to stillness, expecting the woman to show off her strength by squeezing, but she didn’t.

  “Please, be seated,” Grodray said, putting deed to word.

  Talyarkinash found that they had given her a seat that could telescope up enough to make the Vanir-height table comfortable, as long as she didn’t mind her feet swinging in the air.

  Fitzroy’s eyes bored into her as Talyarkinash watched.

  “I have studied your work extensively, Dr. Liamssen,” the woman cop began suddenly. “It is a pleasure to finally meet you in the flesh.”

  The tone was nice enough, but Talyarkinash had a feeling that there were layers of cop ugliness concealed underneath. How long had they been trying to pin something on her and failing? How many of her former patients had they found? Or only suspected?

  So many of her files had been carefully hidden away and encrypted, but that was before she became a ward of the state and turned them and the decryption key over to Grodray.

  Which only made it funnier, since the crime that finally got her taken down might be the most honest thing she had ever done.

  “You have me at a disadvantage, then,” Talyarkinash replied. “How may I be of service?”

  “I would like to talk about Gareth Dankworth,” the older cop began. “And then the one known these days as Maximus.”

  Talyarkinash nodded. As she suspected when she opened the door. She was the expert right now, but the Accord of Souls, and very specifically the Constabulary, needed more experts on humans.

  It was entirely possible that they would never cram that djinn back into the bottle, three wishes or not.

  “You’ve reviewed my report on Gareth?” she asked carefully. “Both the baseline values and the upgrades?”

  “I have,” Fitzroy replied. “But those were written for the lay officer. The men and women who do not have a deep understanding of species genetics. Jackeith Grodray, for example.”

  Talyarkinash nodded again. Entirely accurate, as that was exactly what he had asked her to produce.

  “You wish to understand the implications of the baseline?” Talyarkinash hazarded a guess.

  “I do,” the woman said. “Unlike most of the Constabulary, I have studied humans in great detail, something that brought me out of retirement six months ago when it was feared that a human had escaped into the Accord of Souls. Before anyone knew the truth.”

  “That one Marc Sarzynski, AKA Maximus, was born a human on Earth, and illegally transported to Zathus,” Talyarkinash acknowledged. “Before being illegally upgraded by myself and the two Yuudixtl scientists known as Morty and Xiomber, no known last names. How well do you understand humans?”

  “At one point, research was done to determine if the Accord of Souls should send an agent to Earth to introduce a virus that would completely eliminate the species while not destroying other life forms,” Fitzroy answered in a calm, bland voice.

  Talyarkinash gasped and felt her blood drain to her stomach. Wipe out humans? Just like that?

  But it also made a cruel sense. They were not part of the Accord of Souls. They were not part of the psionic collective, not bound by non-violence. Such a thing was monstrous, but at the same time logical. And practical, if humans were that dangerous a species.

  “And you did the research?” Talyarkinash guessed.

  “I did,” Fitzroy smiled grimly.

  Talyarkinash turned to Grodray with an angry face.

  “I am never going to see the light of day again, am I?” she hissed. “I know too much to even see the inside of a prison cell, if you decided you no longer needed me?”

  “On the contrary, Talyarkinash Liamssen,” Grodray smiled back grimly, still nodding in acknowledgement. “While that was exactly the case five weeks ago, I have had agents paying close attention to your every word and action since then. You are never without some level of surveillance. And you never will be. Make no mistake there. Yes, you know too much. But you have also thrown yourself whole-heartedly into trying to undo the mistakes you had made. Into making Gareth into the monster he became, because you and the other two believed that it might be the only way to save the Accord from utter destruction. Y
ou have provided the records we needed to arrest more than fifty prominent criminals that you had previously modified to let them escape justice. Those factors also weigh in your favor.”

  Huh.

  “Knowledge is dangerous, Dr. Liamssen,” Fitzroy spoke up. “But heart and soul matter. Gareth Dankworth has proven himself to be even more willing than you to face whatever consequences arise, whatever sacrifices he must make. That has impressed even the most surly agents, such as myself.”

  Talyarkinash kept her eyes on Grodray, aiming her sensitive nose at the messages he was giving off, even unconsciously.

  “So I’m not to be just drained like a lemon and tossed onto the ash heap of history?” Talyarkinash snarked.

  “According to my cohort,” Grodray gestured to Fitzroy, “you might be the single most capable geneticist in the Accord of Souls right now. It would be the utter heights of folly not to take advantage of those skills. We have Gareth on our side. They have a rogue in Marc Sarzynski. Dalton Fitzroy is here because we may need more.”

  “More?”

  “How much more capability could we engineer into Gareth?” Fitzroy asked in a serious, scholarly voice. “Should we consider recruiting a second Sky Force officer?”

  Talyarkinash laughed before she could smother it or cover her mouth.

  “If you have studied baseline humans, how would you rank Gareth Dankworth on their scale?” Talyarkinash asked the older woman.

  “In the top one percent physically.” Fitzroy replied. “In the top four percent mentally. I’ve actually been able to study his records from Earth Force, to compare them to his current form.”

  “How?” Talyarkinash gasped. “No. Don’t tell me. It’s obvious you must have spies and systems in place, if you need to keep this close of a track on them. Gareth was using fourteen percent of his genetic capabilities as a human, the moment before I hit him with the six transformation virus injections. Marc Sarzynski, according to Gareth, was so close to him in all ways as to be identical, save for hair color and ethical standards.”

  “Fourteen?” It was Grodray’s turn to gasp. “Where did you take him to?”

  “Roughly thirty-one percent,” Talyarkinash replied. “I haven’t been given access to the quality of lab I had at home, or my full notes, to nail it down closer than that. Gareth is now the strongest, fastest, and toughest Vanir you will probably ever meet, excepting only Sarzynski. Both are in the top one hundred for intelligence, but Maximus has an edge there because I purposefully kept Gareth on this side of a line that frequently risks significant mental instability in humans.”

  “What about the dragon?” Fitzroy asked, leaning forward and staring intently.

  “Gareth’s idea,” she admitted. “He wanted something that apparently instills fear in humans, and would probably do the same in the Accord of Souls. He wanted a symbol. So the transformation makes him hexapodal and grants him scales as a layer of dermal armor. The costume I built for him uses his own DNA as a signature, so that it will become part of the transformation and undo later.”

  “He can fly and breath fire,” Fitzroy noted. “What are the limitations there?”

  “I don’t know,” Talyarkinash admitted with an honest shrug.

  “Why not?” Grodray leaned into the conversation. “How is that possible?”

  “Gareth’s abilities tap into a vast, unconscious pool of human psionic energy,” Talyarkinash said. “I gave him the power to reshape himself as he needed, but I can no more explain how it works than you could describe blue to a man born blind, Constable. She might be a better expert there.”

  “Fitzroy?”

  It was Talyarkinash’s turn to sit back and watch. And it was fascinating, watching the woman pick and choose her words carefully.

  “I suspect Liamssen speaks the bald truth, Jack,” she said.

  Talyarkinash had never heard the man called by the diminutive of his first name, which told her how close these two must have worked in the past. Teacher and pupil?

  “Gareth once told me his limitations might be his imagination,” Talyarkinash offered. It was like tossing gasoline onto a fire, to watch the two of them flinch.

  “And Maximus?” Grodray asked.

  “The same,” she concluded. “Except that all I did was modify him into a top of the line Vanir physically. Morty and Xiomber did the mental work, so you’ll have to ask, if you can locate them. I went well beyond the basics with Gareth. There’s no reason another geneticist worth her egg couldn’t do the same.”

  Grodray reached out a hand and opened the forgotten files, flipping through it until he found the page he wanted.

  “Both you and Gareth have referred to the form as a Star Dragon,” Grodray asked carefully. “What does that mean?”

  “I used his terminology, Grodray,” Talyarkinash replied. “But the basic form of the dragon could survive in space, at least as long as he could hold his breath, which we have not tested extensively. And fly there, if I understand things correctly. We haven’t yet tested that either.”

  “Fly? In space?” Fitzroy asked. “How?”

  “Again, the power is psionic, and not physical,” Talyarkinash said. “Those wings could not lift his mass, nor carry it to those speeds, using simply physics. He does it, himself.”

  “And we have not tested it?” Grodray probed.

  “We have not,” she smiled. “He and I have been in custody since the moment his powers manifested.”

  “Huh,” was all the man said.

  Abruptly, he folded up his notes, gathered the folders in his hand, and stood.

  “I will leave you two to talk, then,” he said. “You’ll both nerd out so quickly that I would become lost, but I look forward to talking to both of you tomorrow and learning your conclusions.”

  He left with a nod and Talyarkinash found herself alone with the older cop. This woman was still at least as dangerous right now as Eveth Baker had ever been on her best day, even as old as she was.

  But Talyarkinash was here to save the galaxy, as weird as that would have seemed to her six months ago.

  “What would you like to know?” she asked the woman.

  Haberdasher

  Gareth recognized the type of room, but this wasn’t the same one he had visited with Morty and Xiomber. That had been a tower on the other side of town, if he remembered the layout of the streets correctly. It had all been culture shock at the time, and then meeting Keelee and getting tasted by a Grace for the first time.

  He still shivered at that memory. Grace were weird, with tentacles instead of hair and vertically-slitted eyes, like a Nari, but otherwise could pass as a human, if they wore a hood.

  But those tentacles…

  What must it be like to be able to smell, taste, and touch with dozens of acutely-sensitive fingers at the same time? No wonder they all seemed to grow up to be artists, to live in a world that rich with sensory input.

  Gareth had followed Baker into the room. It was big. Twenty meters on a side, with five meter ceilings, which was rare, even for Vanir offices. Two sofas on one side. A triple-mirror on the other.

  This only differed from Jorghen’s shop in that there was an desk with a computer console making the third point of a triangle. And a young Grace officer operating it. He looked up with a smile as they entered.

  “Constable Baker,” he nodded. “What can I do for you today?”

  “Explorer Dankworth needs to go undercover, here in Londra,” she said, gesturing for Gareth to walk closer to the man. “I need him to look like a mid-range punk, capable of fitting in with a party crowd while still looking like a tough guy. He’ll be armed, so put an ankle holster into the mix.”

  “Fop or grinder?” the man asked, losing Gareth in the process. “Londra’s nightlife is running down those two paths, this year. By next year, historical reenactments will be the rage, according to the fashion designers I’m in touch with.”

  Baker surprised Gareth by turning to study him, green eyes squinted in app
raisal.

  “Let’s go grinder, right now,” she replied. “But keep his measurements in the system in case we need to kick him out a second outfit on the fly.”

  “Will do,” the Grace officer said. “Explorer, if you could move to the scanners?”

  Gareth complied. Unlike Joghen’s system, this one didn’t have the light at the top that apparently looked inside his brain.

  Gareth stopped and turned to the officer.

  “Last time, there was a light,” he said, rapping on the top of the center mirror. “Right here.”

  “You’ve done this before?” Baker was suddenly standing right there. “Been hard scanned for a new outfit? Where?”

  “Here in Londra,” Gareth said. “When we passed through Orgoth Vortai on the way to Hurquar. I thought I included that in my report?”

  “You did,” she nodded. “But I didn’t realize that it had brain-scanned you fully.”

  “Is that a problem?” Gareth asked. “He pulled the outfit I wanted out of my subconscious.”

  “Do you remember the name of the place?” she pressed. “The name of the tailor?”

  “Jorghen,” Gareth said. “Last name unknown. Never saw him, as his console was in a different room and we talked over the house comm. Tower somewhere on the south side of town.”

  “Interesting,” she said, reaching for her comm. “You get done and I’ll talk to Grodray. Somebody might need to have a chat with this tailor.”

  Gareth nodded, a little lost, and turned back to the mirrors. He stood perfectly still as the other agent worked his controls, until there was an image of Gareth in all three screens. Instead of steel-blue, he was wearing mostly black, highlighted with emerald green.

  Black, shiny, leather boots came up almost to his knees, done with green laces. Knickerbocker shorts met them in the middle over black socks, the pants baggy but not jodhpurs in cut. These used a black and green tartan pattern with a little gold thrown in. Looking close, the fabric appeared to be a really nice wool, like a Scottish Laird might have worn.