Martian Dragons

by Ian Woodhead

  “There's no music playing.”

  “Ryan, do you forget that I am the owner? Has this pitiful mood given you a touch of amnesia to go with the misery? Remembrance 23:4 does say that...”

  “Just stop that, right now,” he interrupted. “I know exactly what Remembrance says. Just drop the guise, Todd. You're not fooling me. You didn't believe back then, I doubt you've suddenly found your faith now.”

  He laughed softly. “Okay, so maybe I have been putting on a show for the staff and the clients. So what? It helps to bring in the custom.”

  “Oh really, so it's for the staff and the clients? Come on, Todd. What part of dropping the pretence did you not understand?”

  He sighed. “Fine. It's to keep my payments down on the lease.”

  “You are an ex-Knight's Order commander, with three distinctions. The government is obliged to give you a means of alternate accommodation as well as a start up package. You should not have to pay.”

  “Oh, you poor naïve choir boy. Were you not aware that life outside the monastery is never quite black and white?”

  Ryan downed the drink in one gulp then banged the glass on the table surface. “Quit it with the patronising chatter, Todd. This isn't boot camp and I know how life works outside. Why do you have to pay?”

  “Fine. It's because my lapse of faith is on public record. I have to attend apostate nursery twice a week for two years then go through the tedious process of re-taking my vow under truth serum before I'm cleared.”

  For the first time since entering the restaurant, Ryan felt the beginnings of a smile slip over his face. “Truth serum? You had best give up now. You are never going to blag your way through that one.”

  “I'm so glad that you find my current predicament funny.”

  “Sorry, it is just that you are the most cynical person I know. You question everything. It is why I believe that you became such an outstanding officer.”

  The bartender brought Ryan another beer. Todd waited until he had taken one sip. “Are you going to ask her to dance?”

  He shrugged. “I will give it another few minutes.”

  “Why wait?”

  “She is heading to the bathroom,” he replied, smiling.

  Todd stood up, he walked around the table, put his hands under Ryan's armpits and lifted him up.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I am positioning you in the middle of the dancefloor, under the lights, where your girlfriend will see you when she returns. You are also in between her and the bar.” Todd moved him away from the table. “Did you see the Night Lights?”

  “No, I missed them.”

  “That is a shame. I believe they were the brightest this month. It will have to be the Chinese weapon's platform destroying another one of our old satellites. A good thing too, if you ask me. Who knows how much damage all that scrap could cause if it fell to Earth in one piece.”

  “Do you still believe all that rubbish, Todd? There's no such thing as a Chinese weapon's platform. At least, not one that's still operational. Stuff like that is just centuries old propaganda. The Night Lights are nothing but a natural effect.”

  “You wonder why I used to call you a naïve choir boy. You're spouting stuff that not even any of The Dispossessed believes. You said it yourself, Ryan. Regrets 12:23 states knowledge must be earned. Remember that bit? Also, only the foolish and the weak blurt out folly.” Todd placed him in the middle of the dancefloor then walked over to the leaned against the metal bar separating the two sections. “Ryan, can you quote Regrets 13:1?”

  “Learn to filter what is the truth from the words that are suggested.”

  “Even earned knowledge is not given freely, my friend.”

  It took Ryan a few moments to untangle what his friend was trying to say to him. He put that down to the large amount of alcohol that he had already consumed. “So, let me get this in context. You are saying that because I choose not only see what flows through the crack in the wall instead of pulling that wall down, I'm as ignorant as the rest of the population?”

  Todd's face cracked open in a large smile. “You know, I think you have had a little too much to drink. A sober Ryan would not have so skilfully dissected his problem with such ease.” He chuckled. “Still, that's not a bad thing. Now, while I'm solving all your problems tonight, let us focus on the one which matters and that is how to woo back your beautiful girlfriend.” His eyes darted over to the bathroom door. “Speaking of which, your princess returns!”

  He spun around, desperately trying to clear his head. Todd was right, He needed to find some way to woo her back. Ryan cleared away enough of the fluff to compose a poem that he was quite proud of but the words turned into gasps of shock and panic when the lights all went out.

  “That isn't supposed to happen,” said Todd. “Davis, grab the flashlight from the shelf under the bar and see if you can...”

  Ryan's world detonated into a jumbled fury of white light, deafening thunder and flesh-searing flame.

  He tried to scream, only for a blast of searing air to pull the breath from his body. Ryan felt his whole body lifted up and fly backwards. He felt like he'd just been swatted by a giant hand. A solid surface stopped his trajectory and Ryan slid down to land in an untidy mess of limbs.

  Several seconds past in which Ryan tried and partially succeeded in getting some much-needed oxygen back into his bruised and battered body. As he struggled to breathe, his hearing began to function again and a barrage of screams assaulted his ears.

  He took in huge gasps of smoke filled air while fighting down the panic which threatened to send his already battered psyche into a total meltdown. The extra oxygen flooding his system pulled Ryan back from the brink, bringing his senses up from where they had sank.

  The realisation that he'd survived some kind of explosion smashed into him at the same time as his vision finally cleared enough for Ryan to discover that the force had thrown him out of the restaurant. It then dawned on him that the blast hadn't thrown him out at all. The restaurant no longer existed.

  He tried to stand up, only to fall back onto the rubble. Where the hell was his girlfriend? Ryan pulled himself up onto his knees, frantically looking around for her. “Bernice!” he croaked. Ryan tried to shout her name again only to collapse in a fit of coughing.

  The restaurant as well as half the street no longer existed. Ryan managed to get back on his feet without falling over. What he saw made him wish that he had stayed on the ground. A crater now occupied the space where the building once stood, and he realised that Bernice could not have survived whatever had hit them. Ryan screwed up his eyes and angrily told his subconscious to leave him alone. He had made it out more or less intact and just before this catastrophe occurred there were just a couple of metres between him and Bernice.

  He then spun around, remembering he hadn't been alone. Where was Todd, or that bartender? “Please,” he sobbed. “Don't let me be the only survivor.”

  Ryan stumbled over to the crater lip, vaguely aware that the blast had damaged some part of his lower anatomy. He hadn't escaped unhurt after all. Ryan dare not look down to inspect the wound, fearing that he'd fall over and not get up again. He had to find Bernice, nothing could get in the way of that!

  Something moved. He caught sight of vivid colour contrasting against the blandness of the grey landscape. He stopped and turned his head a little too fast. A sudden wave of dizziness nearly took him down again.

  “Bernice?” Ryan shook away the dizziness and stumbled over to the new addition of colour as he neared. The identity soon became apparent and it wasn't his girlfriend. A dust covered figure emerged from under the rubble, crawled closer to Ryan, expelled a long-drawn-out groan before collapsing by his feet.

  Todd lifted his head, looked into Ryan's eyes and coughed harshly. “What just happened?” he whispered.

  Ryan crouched and gently took hold of his friend's hand. “Are you hurt anywhere, Todd?” He waited until the man shook his head before dro
pping to his knees. He lifted away the debris from the man's body and visually gave him the once over, looking for any irregularities. “You look fine.” This gave him even more hope that his girlfriend might have made it through this as well.

  “Bernice is still missing,” he said, trying to keep himself from breaking down. “She must be around here somewhere.” Ryan turned back towards the crater. “Can you help me find her?” Ryan started to walk over when Todd's hand grabbed his wrist. “What are you doing, man?”

  “You can't go that way!”

  “What are you talking about?” He tried to shake the grip loose only for his friend to wrap his other hand around his ankle. Ryan could not take this anymore and got ready to rip his fingers away when Ryan heard the sound of a small rock avalanche. “Bernice!” he shouted, turning around, expecting to see her crawling out of that crater. Something had climbed over the crater lip but it wasn't his girlfriend.

  “What the hell is that?” cried Ryan, jumping back. Todd had not let go of his ankle, meaning he fell straight onto the other man. He rolled off and lifted his head, only for Todd to push him back down.

  “I need you to keep quiet and don't move! Don't even try to breathe, Ryan” ordered Todd. “Movement and sound gets them all excited.”

  His emotions were all over the place, and he knew that if he didn't find Bernice, he'd lose most of his mind. He blinked several times while his body obeyed the commands of his old quarter-master sergeant not particularity caring whether he wanted to or not. Ryan stayed motionless, freezing every muscle apart from his eyes. With those, he watched the new arrivals like a hawk. They reminded him of spiders, but these things did not look alive, but, not in the traditional sense of the word. Their body comprised of two, identical sized silver globes. From the globe at the rear, three flexible legs, each one as smooth as the body, propelled the metal spider across the broken landscape with considerable ease. Every so often, the spider would stop and three tiny holes would open in the front sphere and another set of smooth tendril-like legs would emerge and shift around through the rubble before retreated back inside the shell. The metal spider would then move to another location and repeat the process.

  Ryan swallowed hard and fought the urge to run over there when the metal spider uncovered something very wet and very red. “Oh no,” he hissed. “It's her, it's Bernice. They've found her!”

  “Shut up! You idiot,” said Todd. “You can't let...” He tensed up. “Too late, they're coming!” Todd jumped to his feet and pulled up Ryan. “We need to get out of here, right now.”

  “What are they?” he cried, as Todd dragged him away from them. Ryan twisted his body and slapped off his friend's hand. “Okay, I get it, we need to move,” he growled while following Todd through the remains of the destroyed buildings. He turned around to find another four spider machines had crawled out of that crater as well as something altogether more human-like.

  Todd saw it too and pulled Ryan back. “This is bad. This is real bad,” he muttered. “Keep quiet, Ryan, and this time, please do as I ask?”

  “One last time, Todd,” he growled. “Tell me what is happening.”

  “I can't, I'm sorry, I really can't.”

  “Thought you'd say that.” Ryan rabbit punched his friend then savagely pushed him back before dodging the other man's outstretched arms and running back the way he came. As Ryan neared the spider-machines, the new arrival's movements changed. Ryan find himself staring at something out of a video-game. It stood over two and half metres tall and clad in a grey, organic-looking armour, approximately a similar shape to a human but the proportions were all wrong. The arms were so much thicker and longer than any human he knew and the legs were half the length. The disparity in shape did not hamper the creature's movement at all. As soon as it saw Ryan it threw itself out of the crater, raced over to the remains of a ground car and leaped onto the roof. It twisted its body and crouched before it lifted its left arm. Several thin tubes extruded from around the wrist. It took Ryan exactly three seconds to understand that this thing had just armed itself, and he was the intended target.

  “No you don't, freak. Nobody and nothing is going to shoot me today!” Ryan dived forward. He scrambled across the loose rubble, listening to a high-pitched whine coming from the large creature. He hoped it didn't have any body-heat targeting system built into whatever was to come out of those tubes. Ryan suddenly found himself just inches away from one of the spider-machines. He reached for it and grabbed hold of one of its legs. It too released a noise but this one sounded more like an electronic scream. Ryan swung it around his head the released it in the direction of the creature.

  He then picked up a lump of concrete and threw that towards it as well. The creature dodged both improvised missiles then jumped off the roof of the ground car and landed against an undamaged wall, clinging to the red bricks like some huge, grey, bipedal insect. It raised its arms once more, pointing it straight at Ryan.

  “Get down, you idiot!” shouted Todd.

  He threw himself down, just as the creature fired. Half a dozen micro-missiles flew harmlessly over Ryan's head and detonated against a parked up hover-carrier, turning the two-decker passenger vehicle into molten slag. The creature ran up the building and reached the roof, then clambered onto the angled slates, knocking most of them into the street as the heavy creature clambered towards them.

  Todd reached Ryan and jumped into the shallow. “You sure know how to make everything complicated, don't you!” he yelled. His former NCO, reached behind him and pulled out a short range blaster of a type that Ryan had never seen before.

  “Look, I really am sorry about Bernice.” Todd handed Ryan the pistol. “You need to leave. You need to leave right now before...”

  “Before what?”

  Todd pushed him to the ground and fell on him. “It's too late.”

  “I will shoot you in the guts with with thing if you don't start making sense.”

  Todd grabbed Ryan's head and forcibly turned it to face the night sky. The Night Lights were in full force tonight but one of them outshone them all, and it gained in intensity, until it Ryan had to look away for fear it would burn out his retinas. It's only when the light blinked out and two bright streams of green energy blasted out from the light's location, vaporising the other humanoid creature and the side of the building when he understood exactly what now hovered a few metres above their head.

  “No, I refuse to accept this. This has got to be a dream or some kind of drugged hallucination.” Todd climbed off Ryan and stood up then moved away from him. Ryan looked at the weapon, turning it over and over, while feeling for some kind of switch which, when pushed, would open up a small compartment where the batteries were stored. As he watched the man whom he thought he knew walk towards the descending spaceship, it became crucial to Ryan to prove to himself that this device was just a simple toy. If he could prove that then perhaps this whole façade would unravel. The spaceship would vanish, so would Todd and the burning buildings. That heavy dread which pressed on his guts, knowing that his beautiful girlfriend had most likely been incinerated in the initial explosion would never exist and he could go back to the point where the most important thing in his life was whether to have fish for dinner or beef.

  It did not shock him in the slightest when the spaceship landed next to Todd and a hatchway slid back to reveal a perfectly normal looking human who climbed down and shook Todd's hand. Humans in outer space, why not? If this was a drug-fuelled delusion then of course their species should have conquered the stars.

  Ryan could not find anything on the gun which resembled a catch or button or anything similar. He so wanted to fling the device at the two approaching men but the best he was able to achieve was to drop in in between his legs.

  “Who is he?”

  Todd picked up the gun. “An old friend.” He placed the pistol back into it holster. “We have to take him with us.”

  The stranger shook his head. “You know the rules. “We ca
n't allow it.”

  “Don't give me that. We both know the situation.”

  Ryan's heavy dread refused to leave his body, as the truth of the situation began to eat away any lingering doubts that what he was witnessing right now was no illusion. The man, standing next to Todd was not truly human. A relation of his species perhaps, related to us like a wolf is related to a dog. His eyes were a little too far apart and like the other humanoid, his body proportions were not quite right, not as distorted as the other guy but it was still apparent.

  “This isn't a dream, is it.”

  Todd turned his head, gave him a slight shake of the head then turned back to the other figure. “We can't leave him here, you heartless Danu bastard. He's not collateral, he's my friend and he's lost everything dear to him. We really don't have a choice.”

  Ryan didn't understand the creature's reply, He spoke no language that Ryan understood.

  Todd left him by that spaceship and came back to Ryan, he crouched by his side. “You have to come with us.”

  “Wait, what? No. I'm not going anywhere until I find my girlfriend. He tried to sit up, only for Todd to push him back down. When he tried again, Ryan found the muzzle of that gun pressed into his chest. Something told him that the device really was no toy.”

  “Don't make this any harder than it already is. I am serious about you not staying here. You are a witness to this. The clean up crew will delete your presence when they arrive to put everything back as it was.” Todd sighed heavily then reached for Ryan's hand. “Please come with us, Ryan.” Todd pointed at the three spider machine who were still examining the surroundings. “Don't you want to avenge the people who killed your girlfriend? Come with us and that could be a possibility.”

  Ryan looked at the spider machines, then at Todd before he stared at the other man. “Where are we going?”