Star Dragon Box Set One

by Blaze Ward

  And there was nothing he could do about it.

  Or was there?

  Gareth was supposed to keep his powers secret. A surprise weapon to spring on the bad buys at the best time. At least, those that hadn’t already been there, or heard the stories.

  But if he did that, innocent people would die tonight. Even criminals who didn’t deserve this end.

  Gareth let go of everything but his left hand on the boarding rail and let the rest of the transformation take hold.

  Even a Star Dragon couldn’t lift a heavy vehicle like this, but he had to try.

  “Mayday,” the dragon’s immensely deep voice called out, hoping that someone was monitoring the channel.

  Someone who could help.

  “Gareth, this is Baker,” her voice came back instantly. “What’s your situation?”

  Gareth felt the truck reach the top of the parabola and pause for a second at its highest point. He shifted around so that he could grab the two front windows with his front paws and hammered his claws into the armored sides of the back. His wings caught the night air and bit as the immense dead weight pulled him towards the planet below.

  “Total vehicle failure,” Gareth said precisely. “One Elohynn criminal in flight. At least three others trapped in the vehicle. Can anyone help?”

  The strain on his shoulders felt like they would tear loose at any moment. He flapped, but barely made any headway, until he had a thought.

  Gareth pushed his entire body backwards, letting the weight of the vehicle shift itself forward. The nose of the truck went down, and Gareth could see better where he was going.

  He didn’t have to slam into the ground when it got here, but the others didn’t have that option, and the ground would be here faster than anybody could arrive that might be able to prevent the giant anvil in his grip from smashing itself to pieces on the ground, plus any towers or restaurants that managed to be in the way of falling death.

  “Can you make the river?” Baker asked calmly. “Ditch there where we might be able to rescue survivors?”

  Might.

  It was night, and that water would be dark and cold. The men inside would have seconds to escape, assuming the van survived impacting the water, before they were pulled to the dark, murky bottom.

  And from this height, hitting water was going to be like hitting concrete, because there was no way he was going to flatten them out enough to matter in the next thirty seconds.

  “Negative,” he said.

  Gareth looked other directions. The river was just too far away, and the towers beside it too tall. He’d probably end up slamming into one as he went by, trying to avoid killing people.

  He was back to Ethics 101 at school. Do you choose to send the runaway vehicle crashing into a tree to save pedestrians, thereby killing the driver, or do nothing and let the vehicle kill the pedestrians instead?

  How do you decide who has to die today?

  In some ways, that wasn’t even a thing to discuss. The three inside might have to die, but Gareth would not put anybody else at risk to die, possibly with them, rather than instead.

  Blinking lights on the ground caught his eye. The tube station was close. But the entire facility was dark right now. Gareth had learned enough to know that meant there were no ferries currently in orbit overhead.

  “Can you contact the station?” Gareth strained to make the words intelligible as he pushed everything he had into his shoulders, trying to turn the massive dead weight to starboard. At the very least, there were open fields in that direction, so he would only kill the two men who had brought him here, and the driver.

  Hopefully.

  “What station?” Baker asked.

  “The tube station,” Gareth roared. “Have them turn on the generators and open me a tube into space. Do it now.”

  He took a breath and leaned over to the left.

  “Morty, can you hear me?” he called.

  “Is that you, kid?” the Yuudixtl physicist called back in a hopeful voice.

  “It is,” Gareth replied. “Can you find the emergency oxygen masks?”

  Every flying vehicle had to have them, by law, on the presumption that they might go through a wormhole at some point, and all of those were in space. Because the law said emergencies and mistakes happen, you had to be able to survive suddenly losing a vehicle seal and facing vacuum.

  This vehicle was turning. Falling in a different direction, perhaps. Not into the heart of the art district, nor the Hall of Arts.

  If he could only make it that far before his friends had to die.

  “Got ’em, Gareth,” Xiomber’s voice came back. “What are you doing?”

  “Put them on now,” Gareth roared in a voice that much of the city below might have heard.

  Baker had gone silent on him. Hopefully that meant that she was calling someone over at the tube station, waking them up. Doing something that would prevent a lot of unnecessary deaths tonight.

  Gareth strained through the pain. It felt like his wings were being pulled out of their sockets to the point that he might not be able to escape when this thing hit the ground. He would just have to deal with that.

  Or watch his friends die. He could always just let go right now and survive with nothing more than bruises and pulled muscles. Three presumed criminals would suffer the ultimate sanction, and they would never again be a threat to the Accord of Souls.

  That wasn’t why he had joined Earth Force. Wasn’t what made him an agent of Sky Patrol.

  Gareth St. John Dankworth was not a man who surrendered.

  He pulled harder. Growled. Metal actually began to deform under his grip as his claws ripped into the steel of the truck’s carcass.

  Ten seconds to impact.

  Gareth howled in pain and frustration. They hadn’t dreamed big enough, back when they created a Star Dragon. He should have gone for something big enough to lift a tank or a star shuttle off the ground.

  Then Morty and Xiomber and the poor driver wouldn’t be about to die from his failures.

  Five seconds.

  Light.

  Nightfall

  There is no air in space, Gareth thought to himself as the flash of light ended, replaced by an endless darkness broken by a billion points of light. He was suddenly in freefall and vacuum.

  Beneath him, the air in the panel van exploded outwards through the shattered window and the opened back door, a snow storm that ended as abruptly as it had begun.

  A pinging began in his right ear in spite of the soundlessness of space. It matched a flashing red light that suddenly reflected off his hide and tail.

  Emergency beacon on the truck. Automatic. The vehicle has suffered a failure in space and the onboard systems had triggered their own mayday. His earpiece was picking up the distress beacon, and it was tucked in deep enough that he could feel it click in his bones.

  Gareth’s inner eyelids clicked shut and held in moisture, as did his nostrils. He kept his mouth shut and let his own unconscious systems come into play. Talyarkinash had designed the Star Dragon to survive in deep space. He was airtight and insulated against cold, air loss, and radiation for several hours, if his held breath lasted that long.

  The men inside the van didn’t have that option. If they were wearing their air masks, they could at least breathe, but vacuum damage and cold would do them in quickly. He needed to do something.

  He hadn’t come this far just to lose them now.

  Without gravity’s greedy clutches, he could move the panel truck more easily. It was a giant medicine ball in his hands now, rather than a Sisyphean impossibility. He flapped his wings and imagined bringing the vehicle to a stop, since he had nothing in the vicinity against which to measure his speed.

  Still, it seemed to work. He let go with rear claws and right hand, and flowed himself around to the open front window. The one he had shattered earlier.

  The driver was gone.

  For a moment, Gareth panicked, looking every direction in ca
se the man had been blasted into deep space by the sudden decompression, but he was alone in the darkness and silence.

  Nothing.

  He stuck his head into the window and looked at the rear. Morty and Xiomber, at least, had been back there, and hadn’t gone out the back door either.

  Then he saw why.

  Inside the rear cabin was a giant bubble. One Grace and two Yuudixtl sat inside, pale white and darkest green, respectively.

  Morty waved cheerfully. The driver flinched.

  Huh. Emergency lifeboat system. He hadn’t thought about that. Trigger it to inflate and then seal it up around you. Probably up to an hour of air, depending on how many people it had to contain.

  “Gareth, this is Baker, can you hear me?” a tinny voice came in his ear.

  “I can,” he said.

  It was weird, talking without moving his jaw. The bones in his head would carry the sound via induction to the microphone in his ear, with some distortion. No complicated speeches, but basic communication would work.

  “Thank you,” he continued. “It worked.”

  “What is your status?” she asked, obviously relieved.

  “Vehicle dead in high orbit,” Gareth murmured. “Three people in a survival bubble.”

  “Okay, stand by,” she said. “We’re trying to find a truck big enough to rescue you at the same time we do your prisoners. Nothing like that here.”

  Gareth considered his options. He actually couldn’t remember seeing anything but a transport shuttle capable of holding his twenty-seven-meter-long dragon form, and he couldn’t shift back to his base form without a space suit. Up here, there would be no time to get into one.

  He’d be facing the same freezing death he had feared these three men had gotten into.

  Then a thought struck him.

  “Do you have an auto-car that had can open to space?” he asked.

  There was a long pause before her voice returned.

  “We do, but what about you?” she asked.

  “Rescue them first,” he said. “I have an idea for me.”

  “Okay,” Baker said. “Stand by.”

  Gareth pulled his head back out the window and stuck a paw in instead, giving them a thumbs-up signal he hoped was universal. His current face wasn’t capable of smiling like a Vanir or a Grace could, and he didn’t have time to teach them.

  Instead, he moved around the truck, finding the spots where his rear claws had actually managed to punch holes in the sides in spite of the armor.

  Of course, in the Accord of Souls, everything was a beam weapon of some sort, rather than a high-velocity shell, so you needed insulation and thermal barriers, rather than inches of hardened steel plate and ceramics to protect you.

  The men inside were trapped by the narrowness of the door. Gareth had no idea how much squeezing and reshaping the bubble could take, trying to pry it out of the back of the vehicle, and it would only take one mistake to kill the three men inside it.

  He braced his feet into those holes again, but facing rearwards this time. In space, there is no gravity to hold you down. And no friction to stop you from moving, You are actually in constant freefall, but moving sideways such that it looks like you can never hit ground.

  Everything becomes leverage.

  Fortunately, Agents of Earth Force Sky Patrol had to be experts in extra-vehicular activities in order to earn their badge. Gareth had lost track of all the times he had needed to move outside a vehicle in deep space, from rescuing a lost puppy to stopping a runaway ship from destroying Shadow Base One, back in the Earth–Moon L2 LaGrange Point.

  His dragon form was long enough to clamp onto the top of the truck and hold himself firmly, while also stretching his front to the aft of the craft. The door opened out and was just getting in the way, so that needed to go first.

  Or did it?

  He relaxed his chest and inspected the metal of the craft more closely. In this form, he could have licked it and gotten almost as good an understanding as a mass spectrometer, but that would waste precious air. Plus he might end up sticking his tongue to a frozen sign post.

  He twisted around until he was looking in the rear. Morty and the others had turned to face him from much closer. Apparently, one of them had said something to the driver, because the Grace seemed a little more relaxed than before.

  Like maybe he wasn’t expecting a Star Dragon to have him for lunch.

  Heh.

  Gareth held up a single finger, again hoping it was a universal signal, and pushed the door closed until he felt it latch through his claws.

  In space, nobody can hear you laugh. That was good, because this was the single silliest thing he had done since he came to the Accord of Souls seven weeks ago.

  He let go.

  It stayed where it was.

  He flapped lazily until he was lined up with the passenger bottom corner of the truck.

  There is no air in space, but he didn’t actually use mechanical lift to do this, according to Talyarkinash Liamssen. It was all in his mind, somehow, a leftover from somewhere, or perhaps a trace of the very godhead that the Chaa had tapped when they moved past physical forms.

  Was that why they had uplifted all the other species in the galaxy and left humans alone? Did we have the potential to someday join them on their exotic quest to find God and sit at his feet?

  Gareth had always been punctual about Sunday school as a child. And visited Pastor Jacob whenever he had home leave, plus whichever priest was assigned to the base he was at. The religions really didn’t matter that much to Gareth, as long as they believed. As ship’s commander, he had even had to act as priest for his own crews, making special readings every seventh day to help bind them into a greater whole that was Earth Force Sky Patrol.

  Gareth blinked in shock. He wondered if this radical idea was something he could ever share with anyone. The Accord of Souls was comprised of species that had been Uplifted by the Chaa and then set into their current form.

  Did that mean that nobody but a human had that potential? Did it mean Marc Sarzynski really could achieve godhead if he worked at it hard enough? That Gareth could himself?

  Whoa.

  Still, not a problem for today. Right now, he needed to save these three men from certain death, and that meant that he needed to get them out of the vehicle safely.

  The hatch was closed and latched. He hadn’t seen it move. Everything should be safe enough.

  Just to be sure, he started low and away, like a good curveball coming in over the plate.

  The Star Dragon had a binary chemical weapon. It didn’t need oxygen, as one of the two chemicals in the mix contained enough. More would help, but he needed controlled destruction today, and not psychological terror.

  Gareth opened his mouth just a little. It was almost like that disgusting habit of chewing tobacco and spitting the juice into a cup. He had set down strict rules on any crew he commanded that something like that was not allowed aboard ship, because it could be so messy.

  Squeezed his chest slowly and carefully. Aimed his snout and focused the sudden blast of superheated fluid.

  And discovered that Newton was right, when he was suddenly tumbling backwards ass over teakettle.

  He hadn’t been pushing forward, and had done the equivalent of lighting a rocket engine in his mouth. Hopefully, nobody had a camera pointed this direction.

  He flapped a few times and stopped his tumble, just the slightest bit queasy.

  Getting closer, the tail of the truck was certainly scorched, but not in a single spot, as he had planned. It looked more like a badly done crème Brule.

  Okay, focus on incoming pressure and hold yourself stable this time, dummy.

  He moved again to the right spot and focused his will. Another jet of flames.

  This time, he flapped his wings, leaning into the heavy wind that was his own personal rocket engine in deep space. He’d need to remember this trick, sometime.

  The blowtorch hit the corner of the
truck and started it tumbling as well. Slower, but noticeable.

  Crap.

  Gareth quickly pounced on the vehicle and pulled that damned medicine ball until it felt like it was sitting in space again. The riders probably wouldn’t notice a moderate spin, but he didn’t need them puking on the inside of that emergency bubble and then having to sit in it for an hour or more.

  Okay, fine.

  Gareth stuck his toes back into the holes he had gouged earlier. Newton was right, and physics were physics. He would just have to do this upside down.

  Third try.

  He had a better idea of how to flame in space by now. And could bring it down to a fine, cutting blade of plasma. He was pretty sure the door was insulated, and probably a good chunk of the rear and sides, but the welds where the vehicle had been assembled would still be vulnerable.

  It was just going to take patience.

  Fine.

  Up the sides, and he could see the welds weaken. He didn’t want to actually penetrate the interior, because his breath weapon was too dangerous to the soft tissue of the emergency bubble.

  No, this was just to soften them up a little.

  "What are you doing?” Baker’s voice came across the radio.

  It sounded like she was watching him.

  Gareth stopped flaming and looked up. Sure enough, an auto-car hung in space about thirty meters away. Almost close enough that he could touch both at the same time if he stretched, but far enough distant to stay out of his way.

  The aft airlock hatch was open and she was standing in it, wearing a light EVA suit and clamped to the interior with a secondary line. Good professionalism on her part.

  He wondered who was driving, if anyone, and what they though to see a dragon in space.

  “Watch,” Gareth smiled.

  He returned to his work. Across the top. Down the driver’s side. Back across the bottom.

  “Could you move up and to my starboard?” Gareth asked.

  “Stand by,” she said.

  Silence, so she was probably on a different channel, talking to the car or the driver.

  Gareth puffed a few places that looked a little stronger than the rest, and then delicately opened the door. He leaned his head in and scanned as much as he could with his peripheral vision.