His ploy was as simple as it was desperate. He would do the least expected thing, seizing the moment and the sudden element of surprise, throwing the thugs off balance and giving himself that much time to get himself and Gabrielle airborne. Flying quickly and evasively, he could have the two of them over the treetops and up the plateau to their vehicle, then get themselves on board, take off, and notify headquarters that they had been exposed.
That was Brogan’s plan. Reality had other ideas.
At once Brogan flew into a crossfire. Pulse bolts from pistols and power sticks came searing up into the air around him. He dodged a few, but for every one he evaded, two more shot up into his path or cut him off at either side, like the mythical many-headed dragon Hydra. Brogan could swear he heard Gabrielle gasp in the grip of his arm when one of the beams clipped the upper edge of his wing, and his entire body jerked in mid-air from the shock of the pain.
From that second on, the effort of flight while carrying Gabrielle made Brogan dizzy. And a dizzy dragon has the most difficult time staying airborne. Brogan swerved in the air, still headed for the plateau. But he was flying more slowly now, not as steadily. His more erratic path through the air made him an easier target in spite of the fact that he was moving. Another beam struck him halfway along his tail. His body lurched. He dropped his power stick. He held Gabrielle with both arms now, but started to swoop lower, lower…
Arcing down closer to the ground, but trying to maintain his wing beats to stay aloft, Brogan was all the easier to hit. The pulse beams kept shooting up at him. One hit him in the leg. Another struck his arm, making him roar in pain and fright. This time he definitely heard Gabrielle gasp. Then one of the bolts hit Gabrielle, right in the chest. She made a sound that was almost a scream, then went completely limp in his arms. Brogan screeched, his mind turning to a whirlpool, feeling himself go down even lower. He was below the level of the treetops now and was not going to get any higher.
Then came one last shock of painful whiteness that made Brogan feel as if it were hitting his body and enveloping his entire being. He did not know how many pulse bolts came to hit him dead-on. In less than a second, he did not know anything at all.
The unconscious dragon man lay where he dropped at the edge of the forest, near the trail up the plateau to the landing area. The woman lay less than a couple of meters from him. They were two fallen figures in the grass, with a couple of dozen pairs of footfalls coming near where they’d fallen.
Goss went to Gabrielle and picked her up from the grass. Holman went to Brogan and crouched down beside him. The dragon man lay on his side; Holman rolled him onto his back and sat by him, watching him shift and morph, his wings and tail retracting, his reptile form returning to human. He took just a moment to gaze down at the unconscious Brogan before lifting him from the ground and slinging him over one shoulder.
Addressing Goss and the other minions, Holman said, “Looks like we’ve got some other cargo besides just the water. Use a couple of collector units. Put her in one and him in the other, and seal them up. Leave a drainage slot open in each one so they don’t suffocate. They’ll be of more use to Mr. Skinner alive.”
With Brogan over Holman’s shoulder and Gabrielle in Goss’s arms, the soldiers of Drakkar Skinner walked back in the direction of the cargo ship.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Catalan star system, like the Sol System where humanity was born and like many other such systems across the galaxy that harbored life supporting planets, had an asteroid belt. In the common pattern, it lay in the outer regions of the system, past where the terrestrial planets like Lacerta spun; out in the region of the gas giants where a rocky planet might have formed if the gravity of the huge gaseous spheres had not thus caused it to break apart. As humans in their home system had colonized the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, so had the Earth-descended weredragons of Lacerta begun to establish a presence in their own band of rocky bodies in space.
The asteroids between Lacerta and the galaxy beyond the Catalan system were nowhere near as populated nor as resplendent with life as the ones back in Sol. Lacerta was a colony where stranded humans were initially cut off from the rest of human space and had to start a world from “scratch” with no assistance from home. Additionally, the weredragon mutation caused by the waters of the planet had been a social trauma on Lacerta at first, engendering years of shock and strife before the Lacertans learned to live with their new biologic state.
Lacerta’s population was only a fraction of that of Earth. They did not have anything like the same ecological impact on that planet that humans had once caused on the home world, and they had also learned the lessons of history from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries concerning how best to care for a planet.
So there was much less impetus for the Lacertans to push out into space than there had been on Earth. While Lacerta was a fully spaceworthy civilization, and Lacertans regularly traveled between their home system and other stars, the quality of life on their own planet was such that inhabiting other worlds or colonizing their asteroid belt was far less of a critical need for them.
Nevertheless, the asteroids of the Catalan system were inhabited—sparsely inhabited, but inhabited all the same. The principal activities in the Catalan asteroids were industry, trade, and tourism. These asteroids, like those in the Sol System, were rich in rare, precious, and valuable minerals, and also held vast amounts of the most precious commodity in the universe: water.
Not the mutagenic water of the planet Lacerta, but water from space itself, from which Lacerta derived a healthy profit by exporting to other worlds where it was needed. The asteroids were dotted with extraction plants from which the Lacertans drew the bounty of the universe to trade and sell.
In other parts of the belt, some of the larger rocky and metallic bodies had been hollowed out and converted for other purposes. They were frequented by travelers passing by or through the Catalan system on their way to Lacerta or other planets, or often by people from Lacerta itself wanting an off-world holiday. These then were the resort asteroids, with hotels and shops, casinos, stadiums, and entertainment theaters of every sort. They were one of Catalan’s great attractions.
One of these resort asteroids was named Lernaea. It was at Lernaea that the space yacht of Drakkar Skinner, a traveling mansion in space, was now docked.
With his vast wealth, ill-gotten as it was, and the proper incentives to the proper administrators of Lernaea to look the other way, Skinner had booked the entire asteroid for a private party where he and his “guests” would be assured of being the only ones present, and any service, maintenance, and security staff on duty would be Skinner’s own hand-picked personnel.
That was the kind of power that Skinner’s criminal empire had bought him. He was practically on the doorstep of one of the most respected colonies in space, with the most formidable defenses, and he was free to do exactly as he pleased and precisely as he planned without interference. For what he planned to do here at Lernaea, Skinner would brook no interference whatsoever.
While his people took their places and carried out their assigned roles in the rented Lernaea resort, Skinner availed himself of the opportunity to work off some of his excitement and anticipation for what he was soon to accomplish. In one of the gym spaces, he was clad only in workout shorts and boxing gauntlets in an octagon-type sparring area. Across the octagon from him stood his sparring partner, a massively built Lacertan in bipedal dragon form, clad in nothing but gauntlets similar to those that Skinner wore.
Skinner sized up his reptilian opponent, who towered over him, ready to begin. “Soon, my friend,” he said with an almost carnal delight, “I’ll be a dragon—just like you.”
His opponent gave no response but a long hiss and a flexing of his green, scale-jacketed muscles, as if to say, Have at me, then. Show me what a dragon you’ll be.
On one side of the gym, in a comfortable chair with a medical kit resting against the wall, sat a woman in her thirt
ies. A blonde in white trousers and jacket with a grey top, she had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Dr. Samantha Harkins sat and watched, waiting for Skinner’s workout to begin.
This was his second workout since earlier this morning, when he had been in the simulation room with a computer-generated opponent. In the short time that she had been with Skinner, one of the first things that Dr. Harkins had quickly learned about him was that he was an intensely physical man with intense physical appetites. He was as aggressive and competitive as he was shrewd and audacious, qualities that had made him arguably the greatest criminal leader in known space.
Skinner was resolved and set upon making his position more than “arguable.” By the time he was done in the Catalan system, he was determined to be on a path to make it undisputed. He had a prodigious appetite for food and drink, for challenge, for competition—and for other things for which Dr. Harkins was grateful that he relied mainly on an entourage of female Lacertans.
The man had a positive fetish about weredragons, an obsession that some might call less than healthy. Nevertheless, he was paying her twice the amount of her Commonwealth physician’s stipend to be his personal physician at this most critical time. Though she was human, she kept a practice on Lacerta and had an expertise with Lacertan medicine and physiology that had brought her to Skinner’s attention. He had done his homework about the best doctors on Lacerta, and she was his first choice to assist him in his plans.
Skinner called over to her, “I’m ready to begin, Doctor. Are you ready?”
Dr. Harkins calmly said, “Of course, Mr. Skinner. Start when you like; I’m right here.”
“Good,” he said to the doctor. Then he raised his gauntleted fists and addressed the dragon across the octagon. “Come!” he cried sharply. And at his command, the naked dragon man moved.
Their sparring hinged on one essential fact. A Lacertan in dragon form was measurably stronger than a human, in fact considerably so. Drakkar Skinner, in his vulnerable human body, was testing his mettle against a more powerful opponent, one who could take him apart with relatively little effort; in short, the kind of creature that Skinner had yearned to be all his life. In sparring with a dragon, Skinner was in a way testing his own readiness for the destiny that he had set himself. He was ready for the test. He welcomed the test. But he had Dr. Harkins on the job now, as she would be later at the most fateful time, just in case.
The dragon man threw the first punch, a mighty jab to Skinner’s jaw. The gangster, in years of bouts with opponents human, android, and alien, including a few other Lacertans, had trained his reflexes well and knew how to take a punch from a creature who was not human. He reacted to the blow by rolling with it.
The gauntleted fist of the dragon connected, but Skinner feinted away from the hit and let the impact carry him back. The force of it was glorious. Skinner rebounded from the dragon’s punch and raised his fists again. He charged and lunged. His blows struck the plates of the reptile being’s chest. He hit hard and fast, enough to stagger the Lacertan slightly.
When the Lacertan lowered his head enough for him to reach, Skinner delivered a hard right cross right to the dragon’s snout. The Lacertan staggered a little more. When Skinner thrust out at him again, the dragon man brought up one arm to block him, and with the other arm swung out. His fist landed on Skinner’s cheek, battering him to one side and knocking him down to the matted floor of the octagon.
Sitting on his haunches with his foe bracing for another attack or defense, Skinner looked up at the formidable flexing of the reptile being’s wings and the aggressive twitch of his tail—and laughed.
“Brilliant!” Skinner almost cackled. “Perfect!” And then, unfazed at being knocked to the mat by the punishing power of a two-legged dragon, he leapt back to his feet.
Skinner came back with fists raised and delivered them hard to the plates of the dragon man’s stomach. The Lacertan buckled only slightly, his stomach plates being a form of armor, and responded with blows to Skinner’s shoulders and cheeks. When Skinner pulled back from this retaliation, he was just dazed enough for the reptile man to land a fist across his jaw. Skinner toppled back again and hit the floor, his butt and elbows striking the mats. He stayed that way, half-sitting and half-sprawled, and shook the stars and fog from his head. Undaunted, he looked back up at the scaly, winged, tailed figure presenting his fists across the octagon. His head cleared and his bruised face blossomed into a smile of adrenaline and aggression, and with a grunt he got himself back to his feet.
Moving with a speed and surety that belied his having been struck down twice by a stronger opponent, the crime boss made a two-fisted missile of himself, bringing his gloved fists to bear once again on the Lacertan’s stomach plates, and this time striking at his sides and his scaly-armored ribs, letting loose a flurry of punches. The Lacertan answered this assault with his own blows to Skinner’s back and ribs, and once again Skinner feinted back.
But this time, when the dragon man swung for his face, Skinner dodged and swung out and upward, connecting hard with his opponent’s lower jaw. The startled dragon man staggered just slightly to one side, and Skinner continued to press his attack. He hammered his fists along the Lacertan’s snout and collar, continuing his barrage until the weredragon’s initial stagger became a stumble—and then, incredibly, the scaly one actually dropped to his knees.
Gritting his teeth maniacly,, Skinner moved in with both fists, targeting the bluntness of the end of the dragon man’s snout. He came forward fast—but the Lacertan was faster. He raised one arm to block Skinner’s punch, and the other to smash across the human’s face. Across the room, Dr. Harkins almost flinched herself from this impact.
She sat up straighter in her seat, ready to lunge into the octagon and render first aid if needed, and watched Drakkar Skinner spin back and away from his dragon opponent, this time hitting the mat with his whole body and lying still. The Lacertan stood tall, his fists at the ready, awaiting the human’s next rise and continued assault. When it did not come, Samantha Harkins grabbed her medical kit and bounded quickly to Skinner’s side in the octagon.
The doctor put her hand on Skinner’s shoulder and turned him over to lie on his back. At the moment she got him properly prone and was ready to open her kit, she was startled to find him staring up at her with eyes wide open and a crazed smile on his face. With bruises on his cheeks and chin, a shiner on one eye, and rivulets of blood trickling from his nose and lips, he looked up at the physician—and laughed.
The Lacertan lowered his fists and twitched his tail. Drakkar Skinner just kept laughing and brought himself up on his elbows. He called over to the dragon man, “That was excellent! Excellent, my friend! Well fought, indeed! Human as I am, I can take what a dragon dishes out, eh? Well done!”
Dr. Harkins again placed a hand on Skinner’s shoulder in a gesture of caution. “Sir, you shouldn’t get up yet. If you don’t want to lie down, at least just sit and let me examine you, make sure you don’t have a concussion or…”
His husky laugh lingering on, Skinner said, “Fine, fine, fine. Examine all you like. Make sure I’m in the best possible shape for later. We want me fit and ready for my drink and my bath, after all.” To the Lacertan, he said, “Once I’ve had the treatment, we’re going to have at it again.” And he shook his finger hard at the weredragon: “But next time—next time we’ll see how you can take me when I’m one of you!”
By this time Dr. Harkins had gotten her cardiopulmonary monitor from her kit and was holding Skinner’s arm, touching the device to it and reading the holographic indicators that it fed into the air. “Just relax, Mr. Skinner,” she cautioned him, “and let me get some readings. I want to check your blood pressure, then your skull and neurological…”
“Yes, yes, check everything you need, do everything you have to do,” said Skinner, almost sounding annoyed. “Just make sure I’m ready and there’s no need for delay. I want no delays when my water supply is brought up here.”
Letting the doctor touch her device to his chest and continue her readings, Skinner responded, “Let’s hear it.”
“Sir, the cargo ship from Lacerta is on its way, on schedule. And, sir…there’s been a development.”
The crime boss straightened up on the mat and brushed the doctor away, his attention fully focused on what his pilot had to tell him. “A development? What development? Did they get my water? Did something go wrong?”
“They successfully obtained your water supply and they’ll be here in a couple of hours, sir…but Holman and Goss report that they made a discovery in the recruited work team. It seems a couple of them weren’t what they presented themselves as being.”
“Meaning what? They came from a rival gang? Or they were with the Knighthood, or the Corps, or agents from…”
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