by Pearl Foxx
Swanson lived in fear of his baby’s first shift. Gerrit couldn’t imagine what the young guard and his mate must be going through. But he would help them. After this trip and the medicine he’d negotiate with the Hyla for, young parents wouldn’t need to fear their child’s second form.
The machete’s thwacking ended abruptly. Gerrit looked up just as the guards before him stepped into a clearing. Thick moss covered the ground stretching out from their feet. All around them, massive trees with thick, red bark and purplish moss had trunks so wide all the guards and Gerrit put together couldn’t join hands and wrap their arms around them.
The trees stretched up into the drifting mist far above their heads. Vines and limbs tangled around each other, blocking the sun’s warmth and forming bridges for the smaller mammals to scamper across and swing about. Birds chittered, a nearly constant battering of noise that assaulted Gerrit’s keen ears.
They were deep in the jungle, with almost impenetrable foliage for miles in every direction. The Hylan base was located right at the edge, buttressing the largest ocean on Kladuu. The one with the water so dark it was nearly black because the bottom was rumored to never have been found, even by the best Hylan swimmers.
It was in those depths that the medicine Gerrit needed could be found.
“About half a click?” he called to Swanson, who stood at the far edge of the clearing.
The young guard’s head snapped up, his eyes as wide as one of the Kladian moons. “Ah,” he fumbled, thinking fast. “Yes. Yes, sir! Half a—”
He didn’t get to finish.
A screech built above their heads. It was the high, pained whine of an engine and the rushing crash of wind.
The sound grew. The guards closed ranks around Gerrit, knives drawn, their bodies partially shifting in preparation for a fight.
Through a tiny gap in the canopy, Gerrit caught a flash of silver and fire.
A crashing ship.
A crashing human ship.
A damn Falconer ship had finally made its way into their airspace. He could tell from the scent of metal and oil coming from the smoke trail. Only humans would be so arrogant as to fly in something that amounted to little more than a bomb.
A second later, the ship impacted about a mile away. The ground rumbled beneath their feet. And then, silence. Even the birds and smaller animals and fleshnibblers paused.
A beat later, the jungle’s noise resumed. But far off, deeper into the jungle and in the opposite direction of the Hylan base, he heard the mechanical whine of a running engine and smelled the smell of spilled fuel and smoke.
“Sir?” Swanson asked.
“What the hell was that?” Thompson grumbled. The others mimicked the sentiment.
Gerrit glanced back up. He only saw bright blue sky dotted with the faraway orbs of moons. His home. His planet.
His Kladuu.
And someone had just crash-landed on it.
3
Jude
Jude groaned. She hung upside down from her seat’s harness; the straps dug into her shoulders and hips. Around her, the ship’s metal casing cracked and settled, the reactors sputtering. But in front of her, through the ship’s shattered windshield, she saw lush, vibrant green. Plants. Trees. Certainly not deep space.
And she could breathe. She had made it through the crash landing alive, astonishingly enough, though she was bruised and cut. Her right ankle felt tight in her boot, her left elbow raw. Sweat rolled up her face and dripped off her forehead. She pulled off her oxygen mask and took a deep, shaky breath.
“Warren?” she called, voice cracking. She craned her stiff, sore neck as far as she could, but she couldn’t see behind her. Not in this position.
No answer came from the backseat.
She fought back a whimper. Falconers didn’t whimper. “Warren,” she snapped. “Wake up.”
When only silence filled the ship, she fumbled for her harness buckles, her fingers trembling too much to release the catches.
A loud crack came from the back of the ship.
“Warren!”
Nothing. If he was hurt, she had to get to him now.
She took a deep breath and refocused on the last buckle. Her fingernail bent back as she pried open the metal.
Her harness released suddenly, and she fell. Her head cracked off the ship’s ceiling. Stars brighter than any galaxy reached by a Falconer flashed across her vision.
She didn’t let herself think about the blood trickling down the nape of her neck as she pushed off the ceiling, curling and contorting herself into an upright position. Tendrils of sweat-coated hair escaped from her bun and plastered themselves to her temples. The ship’s top hatch burned beneath her hands. She shoved her way around her flight seat and found Warren.
His head was on the walls around her, bits of brain and bone splattered against the back of her seat. He’d been crushed like a tin soldier against the ceiling. The insignia on his flight suit was in tatters above the numerous rows of his service stars. A bit of blood was smeared across the fabric.
Jude clapped a hand over her mouth. Vomit pushed up her throat, and she gagged, turning away from the sight of her kind instructor. His head. It just wasn’t there anymore. Bits of him slickened the metal beneath her boots. Hot tears streamed down her cheeks; she trembled so hard her teeth chattered.
With a shaking hand, she leaned toward Warren’s body and wiped the blood off before ripping the insignia patch from his suit. His family would want it back.
His family. His wife and two daughters, both engineers.
“Oh God,” Jude whispered. How would she tell them? She’d killed him. She’d been distracted. She’d wrecked. She’d killed him.
With no other thought than she had to get away from him, she crawled back into the cockpit. Her optical mechanism was shattered. The dashboard of the ship was dead and smoking. When she tried to initiate a comms back to the space station, the radio sparked. It was completely fried. Useless.
But someone would know she was missing. The station’s tower would clock her lack of return. They would be on the search. After activating her ship’s locator, they’d follow her path and see the glimmer too. Like her, they’d spot the planet on the other side. If she could send a beacon or some sort of signal, she could guide them straight to her location in case the planet’s atmosphere interfered with her locator’s signal.
She might make it home.
She could get Warren home.
But first, she had to get out of the ship. Typically, the ceiling lifted, and pilots climbed in and out through that hatch, but that wasn’t an option anymore, given she was sitting on her escape door.
The side door was past Warren, past his dangling body and crushed skull. Even thinking about trying to maneuver around his body and all that blood lodged a whimper in her throat. It felt wrong to just push him out of the way, to shove past him to her own freedom. Instead, she’d have to kick out the cracked windshield; perhaps the break was deep enough that she could get through the usually impenetrable plasteel.
She leaned against the console and aimed her boot. She kicked as hard as she could, but the windshield barely groaned. She struck again and again with no lengthening of the crack. Her foot hurt, and she was sure something was wrong with her ankle. She’d started to consider forcing herself by Warren when the windshield popped. It fell outward in one cracked, but still intact piece.
She climbed out onto the floor of the jungle and looked around.
The foliage around her was damp and dripping. Sprawling plants showed a burnt path where they had been broken from her crash, their limbs snapped in half, sap oozing from their wounds. Beyond the low-lying plants, massive trees with trunks wider than the length of her plane swept up into the canopy far above her head, lost in a misty layer of fog.
But there were no sounds. No animals. Nothing.
The silence sent a shiver spider-walking down her spine, and she held her breath. Something wasn’t right. A jungle like this
should be deafening.
The leaves in front of her rustled. It could have been the breeze, if not for the scrape of scales and the hiss of a slithering tongue slurping at the air.
A red eye stared through the foliage—right at her.
Jude scrambled back into the ship, her lips clamped together to hold in her scream.
A snout pushed through the leaves, nostrils flaring, and a long tongue slithered out and tasted the air. Its head was half the size of her entire body and twice as thick. A long white scar zig-zagged over its right eye, turning the pupil and iris a murky white. The scales were iridescent but glinted a deep green to match the surrounding dense jungle her as if it was camouflaging itself.
It stepped farther into the clearing Jude’s crashed ship had created. The creature moved on four legs, its body undulating like a snake across the floor, and a long tail whipped back and forth behind it. Talons, long and jagged, dug deep into the torn earth as it advanced. It was larger than her ship, its haunches corded with muscles, and most importantly, it had wings.
The powerful set of wings folded along its back. They were black and bat-like, a gossamer material so thin Jude could almost see through them.
Dragon, she thought. Like one from her childhood fairy tales.
Her eyes flicked behind her to the side of her pilot’s seat where her military issue LiteBlaster 200 gun was strapped. All the Falconer ships were equipped with one in case pirates or flesh traders tried to take the ship during a mission.
Ever so carefully, she inched her hand along the seat while she kept her eyes trained on the reptile thing as it advanced farther into the clearing. The smell of the ship’s fuel must have masked her scent, because it circled around to the back of the ship without spotting her through the broken windshield. Its tail slunk past before it disappeared completely.
Jude inched her hand closer, her fingers straining toward the holster. She could barely brush it with her fingertips. Not close enough. She would have to move.
She tracked the creature’s progress around the back of her ship, though all she could see was twisted metal. Outside, she heard the crack of fallen tree limbs and those awful claws scratching over loose bits of metal.
As carefully as possible, she shifted her weight and lifted her foot, still crouching beside her seat. She leaned forward and set her foot down.
Plasteel crunched beneath her foot.
She froze.
Outside, the scratching and slithering paused.
The ship lurched to the side with a shriek of metal. Jude crashed into her seat, her hand locking around the gun and ripping it from the holster. The reptile stampeded around the ship, butting the side and sending Jude banging into the floor, the shards of the broken dashboard slicing along her skin.
The ship rolled completely. Jude slammed her head against the metal casing, her legs tangling into the seat’s harness. She kicked and struggled. If she could get to the side door—
Warm breath rushed across her back, the scent a sharp and coppery, before she realized what was happening. She barely had time to glance back and see a scarred, murky eye behind her before pain seared through her shoulder, blinding white. She screamed.
The reptile bit deeper into the flesh between her neck and shoulder, its front claw latched deep beneath the hollow of her collarbone. It whipped its head, lashing her back against the side of the ship before it dragged her backward.
Still screaming, she bashed her gun against its snout, its hot breath burning her ear, thick saliva running in rivers down her side. It jerked her through the windshield, dragging her along the ship’s metal nose as she kicked and thrashed.
Its teeth gnashed deeper into her shoulder, and for a second, her vision blurred black along the edges. But she would be damned if she was going to be eaten alive by some reptile thing on a foreign, unknown planet.
She screwed her eyes shut and fired her gun over her shoulder.
The blast of concentrated light, stronger than any bullet, connected straight with the reptile’s face. It released her with an ear-piercing roar. She fell back against the ship’s metal hood and scrambled off it, sliding until her boots hit the ground. Her shoulder pulsed in time with her heartbeat, and her blood was already congealing against a thick, clear fluid—saliva from the reptile’s mouth.
Venomous, she had time to think before her vision slanted, and she stumbled, falling onto the wet jungle floor.
Behind her, the reptile slung about, clawing at its face, black blood streaming from its good eye—now, not so good—as it emitted that horrible shrieking battle cry. Blindly, it charged after her, banging into the side of the ship. Jude fired again, but the shot went wide, only serving to show the reptile exactly where she lay.
She ducked beneath the ship’s mangled tail, avoiding the protruding, sharp metal as the lizard crashed toward her. Turning partially, she fired again, aiming for its chest. The blast rocked it back and cracked the scales apart, exposing thick green meat. Tar-like blood oozed from the burning hole in its chest, but the shot barely slowed the creature.
If she couldn’t find its heart, then she would have to aim for its head again.
Before she could shimmy underneath the ship and get off another shot, it rammed the ship and tossed it into the air, exposing Jude. She fired and took off again, scrambling for cover along the bent and broken trees.
The reptile bore down on her, so close she could smell its horrible breath again. It lashed out and its claws connected with her lower back, knocking her forward onto the ground. She rolled over and fired two more shots, one to its neck, another going wide.
She scrambled back, flipping onto her knees as the reptile screamed and lunged for her. Her eyes locked on her ship where the tail’s bent metal was exposed. A piece of the fin jabbed straight into the dim sunlight filtering down through the mist.
With her last shot, she fired straight at the creature’s face. It recoiled, roaring.
She dodged around it and raced back to the ship.
Every step she took was echoed behind her as the reptile gave chase. It blindly thrashed behind her, only tracking her by her raucous breathing and pounding boot steps as she ran. Its breath was hot against her neck again when she dove for the sliver of space beneath the ship’s tail, right underneath the shard of metal.
Above her, the ship groaned and shook. The craft rocked forward heavily, nearly crushing her. She slid through to the other side of the tail, wet dirt clinging to her flight suit and setting into her pulsing wound.
The jungle’s silence once again filled the air, and when she stood, swaying and dizzy, she saw the creature.
The tail’s metal shard had impaled its chest and pointed out its back, dissecting its spine. Black blood coated her ship and the lizard’s belly. The scarred eye slowly blinked at her once. A clawed hand twitched atop the ship. It stilled, its last breath wheezing out through slitted nostrils.
Jude released a long breath.
The reptile shuddered once again.
She yelped, jumping back and drawing her gun upward, ready to fire even though she knew it was empty.
Its scales rippled, flashing one color after another. Its body twitched, and that long, clawed hand turned to skin and fingernails. Jude’s eyes followed up its arm, which became a rippled forearm that connected to a bloody bare chest, massive with bulging muscles. Her eyes landed on a man’s head, slumped forward, white hair like snowfall covering his face.
Her mouth gaped open, and her gun fell from her hand.
4
Gerrit
Gerrit caught the faint scent of something unique, completely unlike anything he’d encountered before. Once he had it in his nose, it dug in deep, notching itself into his mind. He couldn’t shake it, and as he and his guards circled closer to the wreckage, it grew stronger.
“Sir,” Swanson said, putting out a hand to stop Gerrit, “let us clear the site first.”
“Do you smell that?” Gerrit growled.
Then
someone spoke from the other side of the brush in front of Gerrit’s group. He heard their voice like a bright flash of color in his mind. White. Vivid white. Pure and tasting like the scent on his tongue.
Something in his gut didn’t want his men anywhere near that scent, and not because he thought it was dangerous. He pushed past Swanson’s arm and through the foliage without checking his flanks, without looping around to make sure it wasn’t a Draqon trap. He moved on instinct. His body was reacting to something on the other side of those leaves, and he was helpless to stop it.
The large, dew-drenched leaf slapped back behind him, and he searched the burning wreckage. There was too much going on to take in.
A carcass hung from a piece of shining metal protruding from the mangled ship. The body and the ship burned, but Gerrit knew the scent of a shifter when he smelled one—and this one was a Draqon. The shifter’s eyes were hollowed out and black, his skin a smoking husk.
If the Draqon had been out here alone, he must have been an outcast, and judging by his size, he had been one of their younger ones.
Gerrit sucked in a breath. This Draqon was a trapped shifter. He’d likely never shifted back into his human form, his body incapable of the change. It had been happening more often in Gerrit’s own clan, and to see it occurring in the other clans as well terrified him.
He had to get to the Hylas for that medicine before the other clans also realized the solution and there was nothing left for his people.
From the back of the wreckage, something moved. Gerrit squinted and stepped forward, closer to the wreck, even as he scented his guards circling and checking the perimeter. Behind him, Swanson followed into the clearing.
The wind shifted and lifted the smoke. He looked through the curling tendrils and saw her. The source of that scent. The one that tugged on something deep in Gerrit’s gut and wouldn’t let go.