CORAM
PLANET OF THE DRAGONS BOOK 3
BONNIE BURROWS
Copyright ©2018 by Bonnie Burrows
All rights reserved.
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About This Book
Introducing...
CORAM
With a strong jaw and chiseled abs, WereDragon Coram was impossibly attractive.
And he knew it.
So when he joined cute and curvy Leanna Shire on a mission to the planet of Lacerta he immediately sensed her attraction for him.
With one eye on the task at hand, Coram was never going to pass up the chance to sleep with an attractive human woman.
However, the consequences of his actions would be both a surprise and a SHOCK for the most handsome weredragon in the universe....
“CORAM” is Book 3 from the “Dragons Of The Universe” series. Each book features a new handsome dragon's quest to find his perfect mate on a planet far, far away. If you love steamy dragon romance, hot adventures and fiery thrills then you will love this!
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
“MOM! DADDY! NO…!”
The dream had come again, and it was as awful as ever. It always came at the worst times, and this was no exception.
Lieutenant Leanne Shire bolted upright on her bed, shouting and panicked. Her skin
glistened with cold perspiration, her normally perfectly groomed brown hair a tossed mess on her head. Her lovely face was taut with the terror that had come to her in her sleep, as it had done so many times since she was sixteen. Her breaths came in panting, gasping half-sobs.
Clad in a t-shirt and panties, her typical attire for when she slept alone, she sat in the dark, chasing away the feeling of being a sixteen-year-old girl on the worst day of her life, rather than a thirty-one-year old, trained professional Interstar Fleet officer.
Leanne willed her breath to slow and her galloping heartbeat to calm. She focused her eyes in her darkened quarters aboard the starship Renault. She took in the shapes of the simple but comfortable furnishings and the frames of the viewports, and the shimmers of the stars in space outside. She was not where she was in her sleep; that was fifteen years ago. This was not the planet Dorian III. She was not surrounded by architecture being choked in wildly growing alien fronds and buildings and infrastructure being torn apart by monstrous vines, with fire and upheaval and people running and shooting and shouting.
Her parents were not being dragged in one direction into the maw of something monstrous. She was not being pulled in the opposite direction, desperately reaching for her parents and gazing into the terrified expressions that would be the last looks she would ever see on their gentle faces. And she was not being suddenly cut away from the python-like fronds that had grasped her, released by the sure and sudden slash of a power blade and borne off to safety in strong, scaly arms, propelled aloft by mighty leather wings.
No, Leanne Shire was a grown woman, just out of her twenties, who had come far in her life since that awful day that kept returning in her dreams. She had come far and accomplished much, and her parents, she knew, would have been proud to know what she had made of herself.
Still and all, remembering them as they were the last time she saw them and knowing what fate had surely come to them while she was carried away from the attack had a way of reaching into that secret part of her heart that would forever be sixteen years old, bringing back the shock and horror and pain of those moments. The young girl that she’d been back then was still preserved inside her like an insect in prehistoric amber, with all the terror and grief of that day. She despaired of her uniform and her ever-changing rank. It was what had driven her to do everything she’d done since that day.
Leanne flopped backwards onto the coolness of her sweat-dampened pillow and exhaled heavily, having reassured herself that yes, it was the dream again. Just the dream, coming unbidden and unwelcome as ever, and always at the most inopportune time—as if there could be an opportune time for a nightmare.
With her breathing and pulse returning to normal, she now faced the prospect of having to get back to sleep and get enough rest to be clear of mind for her conference tomorrow. She should just put on a REM chip, she thought. That would take her directly into the optimal stage of sleep, and by putting a timer on it, she could have it gently wake her with plenty of time for a shower and breakfast before the conference with the Captain and the senior crew. She wished that she could have done the conference and briefing today, but the Renault had picked her up from the Spire Deep Space Station at the end of the senior crew’s duty shift.
They had welcomed her aboard with dinner, then everyone retired with the briefing scheduled for the morning, so there was nothing to do but settle in. She could have given her presentation upon boarding; she had gone over it so many times that she knew the information as well as she knew her own name. But fine, what greeted her was dinner and a good night’s sleep—or at least, that was what she’d expected and would have had if the damned dream had not come back tonight of all nights.
And it was somehow fitting, Leanne thought, that her rendezvous point with the Renault was the Spire Station. It was not directly affiliated with the place she was going, but it was a pleasing coincidence. When the Renault dropped her off at her destination, the Spires would be where she would go directly.
The Spires: the place where her rescuer all those years ago had been trained to protect and serve his planet and the greater galaxy. The Spires—and the planet of its location, a place that had loomed larger than any other in her imagination for half her life. Leanne had been there before, but never for a reason as critically important as why she was going there now.
_______________
“Good morning, Lieutenant Shire,” Captain Quella Hillman greeted her from the head of the conference table. The African-descended woman with the shiny curls of black hair beckoned Leanne to take an empty place at the middle of one side of the table, and Leanna smiled and headed there.
“Good morning, Captain—everyone,” replied Leanne on her way to her seat. The seven people who had preceded her there were the same ones with whom she had dined last night. They were the typical multi-species starship crew. Leanne was in the company of humans and a few non-terrestrials: a hairless, violet-skinned, sunken-eyed Krayolite; a feather-crested and eagle-beaked Kryagian; and a similarly hairless, green-skinned Sudolian, whose fingers were like grasping roots.
Leanne chided herself for feeling so anxious in the presence of the Sudolian, who had not joined them for dinner; as a plant being, he did not eat in the same way as the rest of the crew. She had no re
ason to dislike him other than that he reminded her of the way her parents died, and that was none of his doing. Her irrational prejudice was out of line, and she buried it deep down with the nightmare and hoped his natural empathy could not sense it. If the menace that had destroyed Leanne’s family were still abroad in the quadrant, the Sudolians would have been as much under threat as everyone else. The enemy that had brought such danger and jeopardy into Commonwealth space was one that saw all life from the smallest microbe to the mightiest beast as raw material. If the enemy had had its way, all life in the galaxy would have become a part of a single mind under a single uniting, dominating, all-consuming will. Leanne Shire had pledged her own life to ensuring that no such fate or any fate like it would come to her world, her quadrant, her space. Not on her watch.
Taking her place at the table, Leanne began: “As Captain Hillman has told you all and as we were discussing in general terms over dinner last night, the reason you’re taking me to the planet Lacerta is that Lacerta is where the Commonwealth has chosen to reactivate a set of security measures that were shelved fifteen years ago: the Chimerian Protocols. These protocols have one purpose and one purpose alone: to protect any and all planets in our space and their inhabitants from a return invasion attempt by the Chimerians. Of course, you all know why these measures are being put into play now.”
Captain Hillman said to the ship’s AI, “Display Dr. Sewall Sabian and Sir Rawn Ullery of Lacerta.” A flurry of light pixels appeared over the center of the table and congealed into two holograms, one of a human male several years older than Leanna, the other of a strikingly handsome and muscled Knight of Lacerta in the multicolored metallic-foil armor skin of his uniform. Leanne almost thought she could feel a spike of emotion rising in the room at the sight of these two, and with good reason.
The Knight was among the most celebrated heroes in the history of spacefaring civilization. The other man was among the most infamous men in the history of the quadrant. The two of them were mortal foes, and both had been thought lost, dead in a final conflict not long after Leanne lost her parents. Both had turned up alive and had recently met in a final showdown which one of them, this time, did not survive.
“Dr. Sewall Sabian,” Captain Hillman reminded the group, “was the assistant of Dr. Jacques Phifer in the Mythos Project, aimed at creating fire-breathing super Knights from an elite group of weredragon Knights of Lacerta. These super Knights were meant to be the quadrant’s most powerful line of defense against the threat of the Chimerians. What no one knew was that Sabian had become the disciple of the High Chimerian and was secretly working against the Commonwealth.
The Mythos Project was successful only in mutating Sir Rawn Ullery, its first experimental subject. Before the project could go any further, Sabian assassinated his mentor and destroyed
Phifer’s research, which made Sir Ullery his deadly enemy. The two of them battled several times in different sectors of the quadrant until Sir Ullery faced Sabian at the Chimerian warp nexus, which was meant to spread the Chimerians across space. Sir Ullery destroyed the nexus, it was thought, at the cost of his own life and Sabian’s. But the two of them turned up alive in the Catalan system where the planet Lacerta is located. They battled again—and this time, Sir Ullery claimed his final victory.”
Leanne picked up from there. “Our real concern now isn’t Dr. Sabian but the plan he used to lure the Knight into his trap. Display Joanna Way.”
Another cloud of pixels appeared and became a hologram of a beautiful Earth woman, a member of the interstellar media who was well-known across the quadrant. “While covering the story of Sir Rawn’s return,” Leanne continued, “Joanna Way became the Knight’s lover. Sabian had a spy in the Lacertan Knighthood—a Chimerian spy who had passed himself off as a young, newly initiated Knight. The spy abducted Ms. Way and took her to Sabian’s ship in orbit of Catalan, where the showdown between Sabian and Sir Rawn took place. Sir Rawn rescued his lover and finally destroyed his old enemy, and the security of the Lacertan Spires discovered that the spy had committed suicide.
But the fact of the spy, the fact that there was a Chimerian lurking on Lacerta, waiting to strike, has alarmed the governments of Lacerta, Earth, and the entire Commonwealth. The fear, and I think it’s a real one, is that if there could be one spy, there could be others, likely many others, hiding in plain sight, waiting to commit who knows what acts of terror and murder. And with Sabian gone, they’ve lost their leader. Who is their leader now, and what are they planning next? To stop any paranoia and panic and to protect all our worlds before something unthinkable happens, Earth has called for the reactivation of the Chimerian Protocols, a technology created specifically to deal with this threat.”
Commander Ergal, the Krayolite, spoke up. “The Chimerian Protocols are a technology that was put aside and never used at the end of the Chimerian conflict.”
“Yes, Commander,” replied Leanne. “Ironically, the reason the project was shelved and the reason why it’s being reactivated are one and the same: to control fear and paranoia. Back then, Earth was afraid of the Protocols being used indiscriminately against anyone suspected of being a Chimerian and citizens turning on each other because of it. Now, the Protocols are being brought back because if the Chimerians have been lurking around our space for the last fifteen years, there’s no telling who and where they are and what plans they have in place. The last decade and a half will have given them a dangerous head start on whatever they’re going to do.”
Ergal said, “And the Protocols are designed, then, to find Chimerians wherever they are—and neutralize them.”
“That’s exactly right,” answered Leanne with a nod of certainty.
Captain Hillman asked, “Can you show us exactly what the Protocol technology will do once it’s brought on line?”
“I can,” Leanne said. “Run Chimerian Protocol proposal animation.”
The conference hologram transformed into a 3D image of the planet Earth. “The engineers who created the technology,” Leanne explained, “used Earth for a simulated demonstration. They chose the area of New York City as the setting of the simulation. Watch.” The officers looked on as the hologram zoomed in to a 3D satellite view of the island of Manhattan. In another second, the hologram was filled with as many moving pinpoints of light as one might see in space if the angle of the satellite’s camera were reversed.
“The lights, as you’ll guess, represent individuals, human and otherwise, living in Manhattan, each one scanned and pinpointed by the Protocol sensors. The sensors are as powerful as the ones this Starship uses, but they’re specifically targeted to look for any being or any organism with the markers of Chimerian DNA. That by itself isn’t so remarkable, but what comes next is.” One of the myriad pinpoints of light in the display suddenly changed
colors from gold to red and began to strobe on and off. Leanne explained, “We’re now seeing a simulation of a Chimerian being detected.”
The simulation changed again. All the indicators of people disappeared except for the flashing red light. The view zoomed in, the details of the buildings quickly resolving themselves, and then dove through the roof of the building in which the target had been located. It came to rest inside a typical New York City apartment where a nondescript man sat at a desk looking at a holographic display, unsuspecting the scrutiny that had fallen upon him—until suddenly, he looked up in a simulation of alarm and pushed himself away from his desk.
Leanne said, “Once the targeted sensor has found its mark, it can follow the target no matter what form he takes or how he tries to escape.” Frantically, the simulated Chimerian, feeling the penetration of scanning beams through his body, bounded across the apartment to the living room window, hit the power surface to make it slide open, and flung himself out over the rooftops of the city. This was not to commit suicide upon detection but to change his shape.
In mid-air, he morphed into an Oniasian air manta. The creature, its wing span equal to the height of tw
o adult human males, took off into what it intended to be a glide to safety. “Once the scanning beams have been locked on,” said Leanne, “their frequency can be changed. They can enclose the target in a force field, they can stun the target or they can be set to kill.” The simulation showed the air manta attempting to swoop around a tall building and disappear—only to erupt in mid-flight into a blazing, careening mass of red light and fire that shriveled in a matter of seconds into a blackened husk, then turned to a dust that floated down toward the street.
The animation ended and the holographic display over the desk disappeared. Leanne folded her hands over the table and said, “The Chimerian Protocol technology is versatile. We can use it for more than search-and-capture or search-and-destroy. Once it’s pinpointed a target, it can affect the Chimerian’s nervous system or, with a more powerful scan, even the way its genes work.
It can remove a Chimerian’s ability to use its shape-changing powers. We can even block a Chimerian’s ability to mutate and control other life forms. It’s the best defense against them that we have.” She turned more thoughtful now. “Back when the Protocols were developed, there were some people who were against discontinuing the project. Some people argued that the threat was still real even if the war was over. I was one of them. But I was a cadet in the Fleet Academy back then; I didn’t have much of a voice.
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