by Clay Kronke
Petra shrugged. "I wouldn't know anything about that. I'm just looking for my father," Petra added. "Which is why we're following the dragonhunters—" She stopped as a thought occurred to her. "Wait a minute," she turned to Bran. "You said you made a copy of the file you found about him back at the archive. Can you access it?"
"Oh," he said, remembering. "I've got it here." He pulled out his handheld and pulled up the file. "It's short. All it has is a list of a few statistics. Birthdate, origin, education, children – hey, you're in here—"
"Children?" Petra interrupted. "I'm not his only child?"
"You apparently have an older brother," Bran said, "Wolff."
"Really?" Petra said. "They named him Wolff?"
Bran smiled, shrugging. "Maybe it's a common Acradian name—" He stopped, realizing what he had just said and turned to Petra. Her eyes were wide, her mouth moving but no sound escaping. "Sorry," he said. "Guess I should have led with that. It didn't register at first."
Her mouth spread into a grin. "I was right?" she breathed. "I'm…"
"Yes," Bran nodded, looking back down at the entry. "You are Acradian, it would seem."
"And … I have a brother?"
Bran paused, his smile fading. "Wait, no, I'm sorry," he said. "You had a brother. It looks like he died the same time as your mother."
Petra's face fell. She took a couple of breaths, then nodded. "Guess I should have expected that," she said. "What else?"
"That's it," Bran said. "That's the end of the list. There's no death date, no other information."
"Maybe the list is incomplete," Jor put in.
Petra and Bran both looked up. Neither had realized he was still listening. "Hang on," Bran said, checking the file metadata. "When did you say your father died?" he asked Petra. "Supposedly?"
"When I was five," she said. "Thirteen years ago."
"Okay then, yes," Bran said. "The list is incomplete. This file was last updated seventeen year ago."
Petra nodded. "So we still don't know."
"Know?" Jor asked.
Petra was quiet. "Whether or not my father is still alive."
Jor's face softened. "Hold fast, my dear," he said. "You will find what you're looking for."
"I appreciate the sentiment," Petra said. "But I'm no closer now than I was when I started."
"But you are," Jor insisted. "You are Acradian, and even though your people have strayed from the path, you were once a mighty race, descended from the very dragons we seek, and I have no doubt that you, at least, will find the inspiration and direction you desire, once you are back among the ancestral home of your own people."
"What?" Bran said, his face incredulous. "Descended from dragons? What are you talking about?"
"And what do you mean me, at least?" Petra added.
"You haven't heard…?" Jor looked genuinely surprised at the two of them. "Well of course you wouldn't have known," he said to Petra. "You didn't know you were Acradian, so you're likely not familiar with the direction your people have taken over the years."
"And you are?" Bran said.
Jor looked almost insulted. "The Brotherhood is intimately familiar with the course of the Acradian people. The Great Mages, who sprung from the ancient ancestors of the dragons themselves, were among the First Peoples given life by the Mother Spirit. The Goddess Imwe created dragonkind in her image, and mankind was made to serve alongside. The two then spread outward, the ancient dragons shaping the planets themselves while the Great Mages seeded life among them."
Bran rolled his eyes. "That sounds less like history and more like a gospel," he said.
"Well," Jor chuckled, "that all depends on your faith, of course. The Great Mages are seen as the forebears of the Acradian race, while the lesser peoples – elves, dwarves, humankind – came after. The problem," his voice dropped in tone a few degrees, "is that modern Acradians don't follow the path set down by their ancestors. They were shepherds, meant to help and guide all peoples. Instead, they retreated inward, becoming isolated, leading to the same from other races. Dwarves became a nation of warring factions fighting over scraps of rock. Elves evolved, finding enlightenment in art and culture, but didn't see similar potential in other races, becoming imperious and haughty, rejecting other cultures as equal. And humans? We were never satisfied with what we had, so we left home to colonize other worlds, supplanting natural populations and ecosystems, and coming into conflict with nearly all other peoples. Dwarves actively hate everyone who aren't Dwarves and refuse to have anything to do with us, Elves seemingly tolerate our existence but treat us as children, and wizardkind … well, they're not really around anymore, are they? They rejected their calling, some even existing in direct opposition to their original purpose, and now their world is in ruins, their population dwindled and scattered."
"But you're not bitter," Bran said, his tone dry.
Jor again appeared insulted. "Of course not," he said. "That's not commentary, merely observation. Would I prefer that the descendants of the Great Mages would live up to their preordained potential? Of course. But one cannot change the course of an entire culture's evolution."
"I'm confused," Petra said. "I may be Acradian, but I'm no wizard. I can't read people's thoughts, I have no abnormal abilities whatsoever."
"Do not misunderstand," Jor clarified. "Wizards are not a subset of the Acradian population, they are the Acradian population. If they truly are your people, then you have all of the Great Mages' abilities inherent in you, you simply need to learn to use them." He smiled. "Fear not, where we are going, there will be guidance. You'll find what you seek."
"I thought we were going to a dragon planet," Bran said. "What kind of guidance are you talking about? Spiritual? Or actual, practical informative guidance?"
A look of impatience crossed Jor's face as he seemed to recognize they did not share his convictions. "Life is not always so straightforward," he said. "There is a certain serenity in being surrounded by one's point of origin, which can inspire and fill one with a sense of history and purpose … but the truth is we don't exactly know what we'll find there."
"You've … never been there?" Petra asked, now very confused. "But members of your Brotherhood have made the pilgrimage."
"Yes, but they've chosen to stay," Jor said. "None of them have returned to the temple."
Bran looked at Petra, clear consternation forming. "Really," he said, turning back to Jor. "No one's come back? You don't think that's even a little bit concerning?"
"Why?" the brother asked. "They came for tribute and were obviously welcomed into the fold. I would expect nothing less for us."
Bran shot Petra a look, opened his mouth to retort, but thought better of it, deciding to drop the issue. "Okay," he said instead. "Can you tell us what we can expect once we get there? Will you be able to contact the Sanctuary?"
"We will of course do what we can," Jor said. "Once we're in orbit, we'll open a channel—" he was cut off as a loud alarm sounded through the corridors of the ship.
"What's going on?" Petra started.
"Proximity alert," Jor said, unbuckling his restraint and getting up.
"That's loud for a proximity alert," Bran said.
"Not gravity well proximity," Jor explained. "Object proximity. We must have exited slipstream too close to the debris field. I'll go see what's happening." He started for the door when a sudden impact vibrated through the ship, throwing him off balance. He stumbled, but recovered quickly, heading out into the corridor toward the cockpit, leaving Petra and Bran alone in the passenger alcove.
Petra looked at Bran, who shrugged. They both looked back toward the corridor, listening. They could hear several voices in a hushed panic, though what they were saying wasn't apparent. Another vibration ran through the ship, followed by a harsh metallic squeal. Another second, and the ship lurched to the side, rumbling wit
h the shriek and tremor of another impact.
Petra gripped the sides of her armrests. "Should we—?" she started but was cut off as another alarm cut through the corridor, followed by a sudden succession of impacts that shook the ship, sending it into a spin that pressed the two of them back against their seats. More sounds of squealing metal followed, joined by the hisses of escaping gas and the shrill ring of more alarms. "Bran?" she shouted over the din.
"Hang on!" he yelled, rather unnecessarily.
"This was a bad plan!" Petra shouted as the ship lurched one last time, the lights cutting out as the power failed.
descent
Vermithrax exited slipstream above what looked like an open expanse of space. Scattered across the emptiness, however, was a wide belt of debris, asteroids and other carbon matter that was all that remained of two ancient planetary bodies that had collided billions of years in the past. Much of the Andula Belt was sparse and nearly invisible, with most of the major debris collecting along a small wedge of the belt. The densest part was the Greater Voort Cluster, a thick field of large iron and cobalt chunks that was home to a group of nomadic dragons that would drift from fragment to fragment, subsisting on the mineral ore contained within. The cluster was difficult to navigate, and even more difficult to map, because of the continual drift of the fragments, and now it seemed there was an entire undiscovered planet still inside somewhere.
"Are we sure it's there?" Gareth asked. "Doesn't look like there's anything out there."
Mira started a sweep of the long-range sensors. "Something's out there," she said. "There's enough of a gravity well to trip the slipstream proximity." An indistinct image came up on her monitor. "We're not getting a very clear reading. Broadwave is getting scattered."
"We'll head for the center of the blind spot," Aris said. "Looks like sensor imaging has an easier time at shorter range, so it should clear up as we get closer." He activated the heads-up display, which shared the same scattering issue as Mira's long-range sensors, but at least recognized physical objects in space in their immediate field of view.
They flew on in silence for a while, heading for the cluster that was nearly invisible ahead, represented in the heads-up display as a steadily growing indistinct green cloud. The occasional chunk of metallic ore could be seen drifting by at odd intervals, most of them not big enough to be of any physical consequence.
Then, almost without warning, it was there.
A mass appeared beyond the green of the heads-up display, a large spherical shape swimming up out of the darkness. The edges were indistinct, like it was out of focus, but it quickly became apparent that it was simply much farther away than it initially appeared, and far larger.
Aris looked at the sensor readout. "It's somewhere in there," he said. As the image on screen coalesced, it became clearer what they were looking at. A vaguely spherical shaped cloud of debris and asteroid fragments loomed ahead, at the center of which the sensors were beginning to detect a planet-sized object. As they approached, they started passing through the outer layers of fragments, and the object proximity sensors started pinging. "Some of these are bigger than they look," Aris said, taking manual control of the piloting and shifting the heads-up display to closer range.
The fragments became steadily denser, and Aris found himself dodging around larger asteroid pieces, flying through progressively tighter spaces between increasingly more massive asteroids. He was beginning to get concerned that there wouldn't be anything to get to on the other side, when they were suddenly through, entering an expanse of what looked like empty space inside the inner layer. Aris checked his monitor, which confirmed that they were currently inside a roughly spherical bubble inside the densest layer of asteroid fragments. And visible straight ahead, at the center of the expanse, was a small planet.
"Mael?" Gareth said.
"Presumably," Aris said, focusing the sensors. It looked unremarkable, a nearly barren rock with scattered mountainous regions, almost no discernable water despite a visible cloud cover, and its own system of planetary fragments forming a loose layer almost completely surrounding the planet.
"We're close enough for thermals," Mira said, bringing up the thermal imaging display on her monitor. Red blips indicating heat signatures started appearing on the green overlay image.
"Oh," Gareth said. "Um…"
Mira looked up. There was a large concentration of red close to the equator near the side of the planet they were already angling toward, but the closer they got, a number of smaller red blips started popping up in the outer periphery, among the debris layer surrounding the planet. As they watched, more and more appeared, until it became apparent that there was a rather large population of dragons spread out across nearly the entire debris layer. "That might be a problem," Gareth finished.
Aris slowed down, running a more refined sensor sweep. "It will be," he said, frowning. "Only about half of them are hibernating."
"Oh," Mira said.
"Well," Gareth started. "Maybe if we can find the largest gap between them, we can get through before they converge on us."
Aris shook his head. "They'll be able to sense the heat radiation off our engines as we get close," he said. "The problem is, if we increase speed to get through them quicker, that will only attract more of them."
"Is it just the heat that does it?" Mira asked. "What if we cut the engines and drift in on inertia?"
"We'd still be a moving target," Aris said. "That's part of the reason why the Block position is the first step in our operation. Our ship's armor protects us from dragonfire, but it also means we somewhat resemble another dragon from a distance. That plus the heat and the movement sets off all their territorial instincts. We are, unfortunately, designed to provoke them into chasing us."
"But it's the heat that's the catalyst, right?" Gareth added. "They shouldn't pay attention to us if we don't smell like hot metal."
"Maybe…" Aris sounded skeptical.
"So if we drift in cold, we should just look like a lump of rock floating through space."
"They might not pay as much attention to us," Aris pointed. "They'll still probably be curious about what we are. And the second we fire a thruster to move out of the way, it'll be over."
"You don't have to fire any thrusters," Mira said. "Use the coolant vents. They'll function just as well this far out of atmo."
Aris thought about it. He had used coolant venting before as a kind of distraction, but inside an atmosphere, it didn't provide any amount of thrust. In the vacuum of space, however… "It might work," he said, aiming at the center of one of the larger gaps, then shutting down the engines to let the ship drift. "If we can get far enough inside to where they're no longer surrounding us, we'll be able to outrun them."
"We'll find out in a few minutes," Gareth said.
They sat in silence, watching as the planet grew steadily larger in the viewport, centering on a less dense scatter of asteroid fragments spread across the light side of the upper hemisphere. Behind that lied a jagged mountain range jutting out of the surface like a dark scar across the landscape. Most of the red on the display was clustered along a center stretch of this ridge. "For being the dragon planet of origin, they sure are heavily localized," Gareth said. "Maybe there aren't that many left?"
"The outer atmospheric layer would suggest otherwise," Aris said.
"It's possible," Mira said. "They've been around for eons. But there isn't much information. Even what's recorded in the journals is incredibly vague." She gestured to the patch of red in the overlay. "That could be all that's left, or simply what our sensors are able to detect. There could be more farther underground."
"No way to tell if one of them is a queen, I guess," Gareth said.
Mira shook her head. "That would be a no."
They got closer, and Aris's hands hovered over the vent release controls. So far, they had gone unn
oticed, but the asteroid fragments in the debris layer could hide any number of things, and he didn't want to assume they were in the clear until they were on the surface.
"We've been spotted," Gareth said. Aris looked up as red blips on the overlay started moving. Two dragons that had been burrowed into crevices on one of the larger asteroid fragments had detached themselves and were drifting toward an intercept with Vermithrax's flight path. They were moving slowly, however, appearing to be more curious than adversarial.
At least, that was what Aris hoped. He opened the topside vent for a second, nosing the ship downward to put a little more space between themselves and the creatures.
This did not go unnoticed, and Aris watched as the dragons almost immediately adjusted their own flight paths, the quick bursts of flame from their heat vents briefly visible against their sides. Aris sighed, taking one hand from the vent controls and moving it over to the engine standby release. "I really hope they're just taking a look," he said, his voice tense. "I don't need any more dragons trying to take a bite out of my ship."
An indicator flashed on Mira's comm console, and she brought it up on screen. "We're getting a distress signal," she said, sounding confused.
Aris looked over, surprised. "Out here?" he asked. "Who is it?"
Mira shook her head, running a sweep of her broad-spectrum array. "There's no identifiers in the signal," she said. "Just a general alert." Her eyes widened as her sweep located the source of the signal. "It's coming from the planet's surface." She tapped her screen and a new yellow blip appeared on the overlay – right in the center of the swath of red.
"That's not good." Aris watched the pair of dragons drift steadily closer. "Let's hope there's something left by the time we get there," he said, realizing he could be referring to themselves as much as the downed ship. The creatures had adjusted their flight path, and no longer seemed to be converging on Vermithrax's trajectory. Instead, they had brought themselves around to a nearly parallel course and were now staying just ahead of them.