THRAX

by Bonnie Burrows

  “Looking for you,” she replied. “We have to get off this ship now. We started the countdown for self-destruct.”

  “So I heard,” Thrax said.

  Stepping over to them, Meline added, “And we’d all best shake a tail. That countdown is still running, and nothing will stop it.”

  Nearby, the other dragons who had come pouring into the chamber were holding the Scodax at bay with their powerblades. Thrax took note of them for a second, then asked Meline, “What about the civilians?”

  “We’ve been getting them to the escape pods,” Meline replied, “and we need to be heading there ourselves.”

  “Lead the way,” said Thrax, and he and Agena, with Meline, made for the door. He still cast a curious and bemused look at Agena carrying a Scodax weapon, and blinked and flicked his dragon tongue at the imagery that the sight conjured up. This was going to bear some discussion as soon as their lives were out of danger. The other Knights and Corps, brandishing their blades against the Scodax, began to back out of the chamber with them. In a moment, they were off.

  They all ran through the ship, passing and stepping over the fallen bodies of Scodax androids, some of which were intact but run through with smoking holes, others scattered in pieces on the ship’s deck floors. Thrax’s people had done their usual deadly-efficient job of dispatching their enemies, and he wondered how many casualties they had taken themselves. There would be time to find out as soon as those with him and any other Lacertans on board were safe. The voice of the ship’s AI called out, “Self-destruct in six alyews…”

  Quickly, they reached a room filled with circular hatches in a chamber strewn with the bodies and body parts of more androids, and littered as well with the bodies of Scodax themselves. Uniformed Lacertans were ushering and helping people into the hatches and climbing through the hatches themselves. Many of the hatchways were empty, the sign of already launched escape pods. Meline pointed to a closed hatch and said, “The three of us should fit in here—very snugly.”

  “So long as we fit,” said Thrax. Meline pounded a surface on one side of the hatch and it swung open with an ironically dragon-like hiss. Gesturing to Agena, Thrax said, “Armed or not, you’re still a civilian. You first.” Without a word, Agena climbed into the hatch. The two dragons quickly retracted their blades and morphed back to human, the better to fit inside the small enclosure, and climbed in after her. The hatch door swung shut with a metallic clack. The ship’s AI called, “Self-destruct in five alyews…”

  Inside the pod, Meline took one seat facing Thrax and Agena, who shared the other. Agena threw down the bolt rifle onto the floor of the pod, wrapped her arms around Thrax, and buried her head against his chest. Thrax rested his weapon and held Agena tight. There was a muffled explosive sound and a sudden lurch, then a feeling of acceleration.

  The escape pod shot out of the Scodax mastercraft amid a flurry of others, emerging into space like down from a dandelion. The pod had one viewport at the front, and as the tiny craft spun away from its mooring, Thrax and Meline gazed out of the port at what was happening just beyond the arc of the planet. Shapes were bursting out of the star-dappled darkness. They resolved into view and revealed their recognizable forms as spacecraft, each one as large as the ships of the Scodax armada.

  The two weredragons picked out the configuration of each incoming vessel. Some were from Lacerta, returning home; others from Earth, and among them were craft of at least four planets allied with Earth. The sector had sent some of its proudest vessels to defend the planet of the dragons. Thrax and Meline knew that each one had weapons fully charged and ready for battle.

  They would not be needing them.

  In minutes, the space around Lacerta was lit up with the fiery and luminous flashes of ships tearing themselves apart from the inside. The explosions ripped jagged and burning pieces of hull from the bodies of the vessels and flung them sparking and sizzling into the black void. Tendrils and trails of energy arced out glowing into space. Each Scodax vessel became a huge, searing yellow-white blossom of discharged power, blazing over the face of the planet.

  And on the planet, in the populated and settled places, and in the places where the resources of Lacerta were found, smaller flashes of light could be seen from space. These were where the attack craft stationed across the planet had responded to the command to erupt in the fire of self-destruction.

  Thrax and Meline looked out the viewport of the escape pod and watched the pockmarks of light break out across their world. They knew that one of them marked the place where Scodax ships hovered over the Spires and the Aerie, the places where they had met and became friends and learned to be Knights.

  A pang of sorrow clawed at the heart of each of them at the thought of the places in their past that were likely to have been destroyed, and the memories that were now likely to be blasted and burning. And Thrax held Agena all the more tightly, clinging to the new memories he had made with her and to the thoughts of the future they were still free to make.

  *

  When the Scodax Armada wiped itself from existence in one fearsome flurry of explosions, the reinforcement vessels that had come to the aid of Lacerta found themselves tasked not with battle but with emergency relief. Ships and crews were pressed into service to rescue the trapped, tend to the injured, and recover the dead. They brought and distributed food and undertook the building of shelters. And they began the process of healing one of the proudest colonies of any world in space.

  Upon their return to Lacerta, Thrax and Agena had stories to tell and statements to make, both to the Mentors and to the members of the Ruling Aerie. The training annexes of the Knights, as planned when the Scodax attack first happened, were now the temporary headquarters of both bodies until their proper places in Silverwing could be rebuilt.

  Agena testified the harrowing story of how she and Meline had left the courageous Commander Venar and sped back to the cell from which they had been taken, where they had released the rest of the prisoners with whom they had been kept. They had all quickly found the other cells and released everyone else who had been taken, and then had come the dread battle with the Scodax androids who had come out after them.

  The leaders of the Lacertan government and armored forces listened in amazement to the tale of how the Knights and Corps protecting civilians aboard the Scodax mastercraft had battled advancing squadrons of androids; of how only Agena and Meline had been armed at first, until the Lacertans had begun to overpower the androids with the might of sinew and reflexes and tails, had seized their weapons, and had begun to blast their way through the automatons.

  They were amazed in particular at the way Agena, not even a dragon warrior but only a human athlete, had stayed at Meline’s side and fought her own terror as much as she fought their foes. She had missed or grazed her android targets as much as she’d hit them, but she had never faltered, ignoring her instinct to run and hide.

  She had stayed with Meline as they’d reached the weapons room and recovered the captured powerblades. And it was Agena herself, in the midst of a hail of enemy fire, who had lunged and ducked, rolled and leaped her way down a Scodax passageway to reach one of the androids’ optical ports, into which she had personally fed from her data collector the command for the armada to destroy itself.

  All this, from an Earth woman whose most formidable training was in the playing of a game. The Alpha Dragon of Lacerta himself issued a proclamation that from this time forward, the name of Agena Morrow would be entered into the planetary annals as an honorary Knight. Thrax, attending the hearings and giving his own testimony, watched this honor conferred upon the woman who had come to Lacerta as his aspirant and prospective mother of his child, and his heart swelled with a dragon’s pride.

  For her own part in repelling the invasion of the Scodax, Meline was awarded another color of armor. Now wearing three colors, she would be a leader among Knights and Dames.

  There was much discussion, in official hearings and elsewhere across t
he planet, of why the Scodax had programmed a command for all their ships to destroy themselves, dooming their cause, in the event of the capture of one single ship. Why would they do such a thing when it would be simpler and far less costly for the rest of the armada to turn on a single captured craft and destroy it?

  Lacerta and the other worlds aligned with Earth could only speculate. Perhaps it was only that the inability of the Scodax to trust other tribes among their own people extended to a general suspicion of all other intelligent life. Perhaps they feared that from one captured vessel, data about Scodax strengths and weaknesses could be transmitted before there was ever a chance to destroy it.

  Experts from across space weighed in on the issue and concluded that the Scodax were a uniquely paranoid species, given to thinking in rigid absolutes and black-and-whites with very few ambiguities. This was likely what made the very idea of their ships or technology in hands other than their own a repugnant thought. It was agreed in the end that the unyielding, all-consuming pride of the Scodax was what had truly doomed them.

  All that aside, Agena’s part in resolving the Lacerta-Scodax crisis was immediately the talk of the entire quadrant of the galaxy. The already celebrated Sphereball champion was now doubly famous, praised on hundreds of planets as the woman who had saved Lacerta. Agena tried to dismiss the praise by arguing that the Knights and Corps of Lacerta would surely have found a way to save their world for themselves, regardless of what an untrained and frightened human woman did, but no one was having it. Agena would be hailed as a heroine, whether she wanted the distinction or not.

  In truth, there was only one thing Agena wanted. He was tall and smoldering-dark, handsome and muscular, and decked in an armor skin of three colors, and the desire in his eyes whenever he looked at her was almost all the reward she could ever ask for. The most treasured reward was what happened when he peeled that shiny second skin from his wondrous body like a shedding snake and put the dragon at his loins to work on her.

  Agena happily accepted one honor from the people of Lacerta. With the destruction of the Chateau where she and Thrax had first consummated their pairing, the Knights reassigned the two of them to a Mentor’s quarters at one of the training annexes. They settled into these rooms in a gleaming dome structure sitting atop a plateau surrounded by forests and mountains with a waterfall so huge and mighty that it almost made Earth’s Niagara Falls seem like a garden fountain by comparison. Their bed looked out on a spectacular view of the falls, which they saw only when cuddling in bed between times resuming the joyous and ecstatic sexual unions of their Courtship.

  It was during one sensuous and sex-drenched afternoon, when they lay propped up against the headboard and looking out at the waterfall, that Thrax, having sexed a thoroughly gratified Agena until every cell in both their bodies seemed to hum, took on a serious and thoughtful mood.

  She rested her head on his hard, hairy chest and drifted with her hand down his abs to the large, moistened, and for now flaccid thing that always brought her such joy. He put an arm around her and teased her nipple with his other hand. And he said, “Agena…there is something I must say to you. Or something I must ask.”

  “What?”

  “Does it seem to you, in the weeks we have been intimate together, that we have actually lived years and not just weeks?”

  She looked up curiously into his eyes. “I don’t understand what you mean. What are you asking?”

  “I mean only that when we were first selected to be together, you were an athlete looking to her future, and I was a Knight wanting only to be a Knight. We were very much at odds with each other. Had we met any other way, I would have taken you to bed and been inside you in as little time as it takes to say it. Since then, we have come through my reluctance to sex you to make a child, through misunderstanding and uncertainty, to sex and passion and danger and jeopardy, and now back to this: the two of us never wanting to leave this bed. It has been only weeks, but it seems a good part of a lifetime.”

  The look in his eyes made Agena feel as if he were penetrating her even now. Her heart ran over with bliss. “When you put it that way, I guess you have a point. I think the things we’ve done together, and the things we’ve been through—they’ve changed us. I guess they couldn’t help but change us.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I think they’ve changed me the most of all.”

  “You?”

  “I’ve changed, Agena. I changed when we first went to bed. I let go of my image of myself, of what I wanted my life to be, as only a Knight. To share a bed with you, to commit myself to my duty to make you pregnant, I had to see something more in myself. When we were both in danger from the Scodax, along with my world, I saw how much I’ve changed.”

  “How?”

  “Lying with you, I’ve become more than I was. Agena, you know that I have lived for two things: the pride of my duty and what happens in bed with a woman. When I saw you enter the chamber where I battled Amlax, I saw something that I’ve never seen before. I saw you in a way that I have never seen any other female I’ve pleasured, not even when I have bedded other members of the Knighthood.

  I had seen you as the woman who sat on the terrace at the Chateau and dined with me, who was the most wonderfully feminine thing I’d ever laid eyes upon. And I had seen you as the athlete playing your sport and besting one opponent after another, being a champion, being as proud as any Knight or Dame. But on the Scodax ship, you were something new. To me, you were a dragon in everything but scales and wings and horns. And…I was proud. I was proud of the woman with whom I had shared a bed, and proud to be the man giving of myself to a woman. For the first time, I saw a woman that I could never leave. And for the first time, I saw something—and someone—for which I could put away my armor and lay down my blade.”

  When Agena opened her mouth to reply, at first no words came out. She truly felt her whole life dancing on the edge of something. It was a revelation and a wonder. “Thrax, you’re not saying…what I think you’re saying, are you?”

  He stroked her breast and passed his fingers over her nipple, making it ever harder. “I’m saying that I want more than the child we’re trying to make together. I want my child’s mother. I want the woman that I love. And if you will have me…I want to be your mate and your husband.”

  A beaming smile of amazement as much as of desire blossomed on Agena’s face. “Thrax…really?”

  “Do you love me, Agena?” he asked.

  “More than anything,” she said.

  “And I truly love you.”

  The feeling that passed between them was like gravity. It pulled them together with an irresistible force. The kiss was like two celestial bodies colliding and igniting together. It lasted a long time before they tenderly pulled their lips apart, and even then, their hands traveled up and down and over each other’s bodies, claiming each other, and saying with touches and caresses that they would always keep one another. At heart, they were already married.

  Finally, Agena asked, “But Thrax…can you really do this? I mean, giving up going across the galaxy, protecting and serving, the whole way you’ve always lived?”

  “Where there is love, it’s not a sacrifice. It’s another adventure. Perhaps my greatest adventure. And yours.”

  They kissed again, sealing once more the love they had declared.

  At the parting of this kiss, Thrax added, “And perhaps there is another way for me to serve. Though I may not be a Knight on duty, I may yet be a Knight of the Spires. As we rebuild Lacerta, there will be a need to train new young Knights, our next generation. As I will raise a new young dragon, I feel something very right about training other young dragons. While our son or daughter grows, perhaps my place truly is here, not only as a Knight…but as a Mentor.”

  Agena smiled proudly at him. “The next generation of Knights could never have a better Mentor than you.”

  “Even so,” he said, “I repeat one other thing that I have said before.”

  �
��What’s that?”

  “I truly hope we are a long time conceiving.” He kissed her, a hot peck on her lips. “With you, for the first time in my life, I know what it is not just to have sex, but to make love. There is so very much love I want to make with you.”

  Agena sighed and smiled, a smile of anticipated joy. “Show me,” she said.

  He took her by the hand and moved it down between his legs to the hardened, lengthened, throbbing gift that he wanted to spend his life giving her. “Put me inside you again and I will.”

  Agena shifted onto her back, tugging at his gift and beckoning him to top her. Thrax answered her call with his body on top of hers, and let her move his gift to her soft slickness where she most wanted it and into her deepest reaches.

  The dragon moved atop and inside his mate, propelling them both into delight beyond expression, and their future began.

  {{**}}

  Dear dragon lover,

  Thanks so much for reading this novel and I really hope you are enjoying this series.