“Humanity’s responsibility for this seems a foregone conclusion, Doctor Friedleiber,” the Drake said.
Friedleiber shook his head. “No. That’s just it. The viability of the species can be preserved. Breeding can take place.”
“If I am truly the last,” the Drake said, “I am not certain I understand how. Research into embryonic storage, freezing of fertilised eggs, and cloning have all proven fruitless with Dragons – even more so than with humans.”
“You’re very well informed,” Friedleiber said, eyes narrowing a little. “It’s true – for such a robust living creature, your cells and embryos and other sample matter is all extremely unstable and prone to petrification, calcification, combustion … you name it. It’s like trying to prepare microscope slides from a stick of old dynamite, using a machete. That is on fire,” he visibly stopped himself from laughing again. “But we believe we have found a method. It’s to do with your human form. The transformation you undergo to take the shape you are now. We think, if we can just study it a little more, we can unlock this whole thing. This whole thing, Katla. Now that we have a live specimen – now you are on the team with us – we have an unprecedented opportunity. Dragons simply do not – you are unique, in the way that you’ve…”
“I have allowed myself to be taken alive,” the Drake said quietly.
“You have made the rational choice,” Friedleiber stressed. That sharp, hard, metal feeling intensified. “You’ve given your species a chance. With just a little cooperation, with just a few tests, with just a couple of very simple experiments, we can answer all our questions. And save your species,” he stepped back, spreading his hands again. “What do you think of that?”
Thirty seconds, she thought blankly. Thirty seconds. It is not enough time.
Friedleiber was gazing into her face, his eyes bright, not really seeing her. Seeing the schematics, the puzzles. Puzzles he was never going to be able to solve … but to a mind like Friedleiber’s, taking a puzzle to pieces and putting it back together in the configuration he wanted was the same as solving it. In fact, it was better than solving it. Solving a puzzle meant you had to make it work on its terms, rather than your own.
Dragons simply do not–
She moved before even really planning it. She couldn’t shift forms quickly enough to prevent Friedleiber’s escape or the security measures’ implementation, but she didn’t need to. Her human guise looked frail and awkward, but her captors had overlooked a key – but very easy to neglect – fact.
She was still a Dragon, no matter what size and shape she was coiled up into. She didn’t have the mass or the strength of the enormous reptile she truly was, but the stuff under her pallid skin wasn’t primate muscle and bone. It was …
Well, she didn’t know exactly what it was, that was part of the problem. The books had all been pretty vague about it. But she had a general idea of its capabilities.
She punched Doctor Friedleiber in the throat hard enough to not only crush his windpipe, but to rupture two major arteries and send splinters of shattered vertebrae jutting from the back of his neck. He hit the corner of her little stone chair with his eye socket on the way down, which was just a bonus.
She stepped back from the crumpled body, sat on the floor, and placed her hands splayed in front of her while she waited for the door-tunnel to slide open in a rising blare of alarms and shouting. Whatever happened next, she knew, was likely to be unpleasant and rob her of still more liberty than she’d already relinquished.
But whatever happened, she also knew it would be worth it. Her life – perhaps even the extinction of her species if that turned out to be true – was a small price to pay for taking Doctor Friedleiber off the board.
THE ARK PROJECT
Things were chaotic for a few days after that, as the Drake had rather anticipated. They did not, however, become immediately and dramatically unpleasant.
Her guard increased. As well as an immediate cessation in cordial visits – which she supposed she should have expected, since Friedleiber had been her only cordial visitor – and an automation of the food and water delivery, it appeared as though the tunnel to the cell had been hastily converted into an airlock of sorts. It no longer opened to admit access to the prison, but at least one internal chamber that was still sealed off from anywhere else.
They’d increased the sedative in her meat, but after a vague period of between one and three days she regained some clarity and found they were adjusting the recipe back towards normal.
They also installed a ‘learning drone’ mounted with the large, gleaming bronze barrel of a living gun, inside the cell. They assured her – using audio communications that took place through the drone – that the machine was programmed with very tight parameters for hostile movement and that she was encouraged to remain on the far side of the cell from the installation, as well as keeping her distance from the door when it opened. She was also encouraged to remain in Dragon form, now, since the drone would learn more readily from her movements and attitudes and was programmed to read her human guise as an act of hostile camouflage. This, they said, was a temporary measure until they could be sure she was no longer a danger to other inmates.
It would not fire to kill unless severely provoked, they said, because despite the damage done to the project they still had every intention of fulfilling Doctor Friedleiber’s promise. It would, however, have an easier time deciding what severe provocation looked like – not to mention how to differentiate a lethal shot from an incapacitating one – the more peaceful interaction time it had and the less trial and error it had to perform.
This didn’t make much sense to the Drake, and she certainly had no idea why they expected her to feel guilty about Friedleiber or grateful for his final wishes. She’d reflected before that there were only two ways out of her situation. She would either be rescued or she would be disposed of. The latter had always been a certainty, really. The former had been a fool’s hope, contingent on her lingering and suffering long enough for her friends to make their move.
That fool’s hope had all but vanished now, her new circumstances making rescue all the more challenging and quiet destruction all the more expedient. But she considered it worthwhile.
In any case, the Drake had no difficulty in staying away from the gun. It made her skin crawl, in any form. She settled in a corner equidistant from the drone and the door, assumed her Dragon form, and curled up comfortably. Dragons could spend weeks in such states of near-dormancy – or so she had read. Certainly she’d spent enough days and weeks half-coiled in her trove, watching her information feeds, only eating and drinking when she remembered to.
She preferred her natural form to her human one, although she got the impression Dragons were supposed to feel a bit more strongly about it than she did. She was quite comfortable in either, but her Dragon form was larger, stronger, more heavily-armoured, and generally superior to her human guise. It wasn’t that her human guise was human – it was sturdier than that, as she’d recently demonstrated – but it felt more exposed. Curled belly-out, somehow, rather than belly-in.
And so she did as she was told, and curled, and waited for whatever was to come next. And for the most part, things quietened down. One part of what she’d learned about her revised situation stuck with her, however.
Other inmates. They’d said the added security was a temporary measure until they could be sure she was no longer a danger to other inmates, as if she had been interacting with any.
Had Friedleiber been a prisoner here too? Perhaps a mind such as his had been deemed too dangerous to allow out into the general population. Maybe if Galatine had not deserted his post, he would be down here as well. And if this was true of Friedleiber, what of his boss?
The humans were not happy with her, of course. Their precious project was in shambles after Friedleiber’s death, according to the voice from the drone. All their experiments and ideas were ‘in review’. But they didn’t do anything to her. Thi
s was mildly worrying. The care they took despite their obvious hatred. It made her begin to wonder if she really was the last.
She wondered if they knew more about Dragons than she did. Her attack could not have come as a surprise if they did. Maybe that was why they had been sending in a mad genius inmate to deal with her. A brilliant sociopath as figurehead, ultimately expendable and yet evidently important enough to leave the project in disarray with his passing. Or so they said.
The Drake suspected that this constant barrage of mixed signals, conflicting information, and hour after hour of time to second-guess and make flawed assumptions would work far more effectively on a human prisoner. That was, after all, the sort of prisoner they were probably more accustomed to having, and humans often had trouble thinking like non-humans. She did a lot of guessing and rethinking and struggled with a lot of uncertainty, but after a point she realised it was a waste of effort. At that point, even her annoyance – which had still been the only real reaction she’d felt, other than an understandable background of concern – faded to minimal levels.
Punching a bad human’s spine out of the back of his neck had also done wonders for her temper.
She couldn’t have said when it happened, but she lost track of time. Even so, it couldn’t have been more than another two or three days later that the Drake became aware she had another visitor. He looked, as she focussed on him, similar in appearance to Doctor Friedleiber. A little younger, his hair more silver than white, his smile brighter. A scientist for popular entertainment, perhaps, more than a scientist in the pure sense. But the same sense of purpose, the same dangerous drive, the same worrying absence of markers to confirm the veracity of the friendly exterior.
And something more. It was hard to tell because her brain and senses were addled, but he didn’t seem to have any familiar human scent, or pheromones, or movements. She could taste his clothes, his hair, his skin … but it was only the external particles. The material, the chemicals, the soaps. It was like someone had taken all the peripheral things that made up a human, and then rolled a solid piece of her cell wall material in it for a few days, and then stood it up and made it talk.
If the metal she’d sensed under the surface of Friedleiber could be all there was – not just a skeleton under flesh, but every fibre of his being, every nerve, every drop of blood – then it might feel a little like this human. This thing.
“We haven’t been reducing your sedative,” he told her, stepping right up to her muzzle and looking inquisitively into her eyes. “We’ve just been adjusting the formula so it’s more effective but less noticeable.”
“You,” the Drake had to take several tries. She wasn’t used to talking in her natural form, and the new visitor was clearly telling the truth about the sedative. Fortunately he was speaking Xidh, and that was a language specifically designed to be spoken by a wide range of palates. “You. You must be. Friedleiber’s. Boss.”
“Absolutely not,” he replied. “I have no connection to the Warakurna Mine facility or the Ark Project. I was just in the area, and was granted a tour.”
“Don’t. Believe you.”
“That’s fine,” the visitor replied, “but for all legal purposes it’s the truth. Absolute, rock-solid, even Dragon-certified truth.”
She looked at the human-shaped thing, knowing she should attack. Knowing she had several options at her disposal, and none of them were really hampered by her drugged state – for all that it was, she had to admit, rather more comprehensive than she’d thought. But it wasn’t the sedative that stopped her from sending Friedleiber’s not-boss to join his not-underling. It was…
What was it? It was a cold, crawling feeling that entered at her eyes and left her unwilling to move. It was like fear, but fear was at least familiar. She’d felt fear – had been feeling it, in a low-key and irritating way, since her arrest – and although for Dragons fear tended to express as anger, they still recognised it for the self-preserving instinct it was. This was fear, robbed of outlet or response. Fear without recourse. Fear without end.
It occurred to her, vaguely, that this was probably why humans were so twitchy.
“You’re,” she said. “Not inmate?”
“Oh, no,” he replied. “No, like I said, I’m a visitor here. I can come and go as I please. But you’re right, of course. The staff here are all … trustees. They administrate themselves, and impose their own separation from the outside world, with only occasional direction from concerned representatives. It’s safer for everyone if their minds and capabilities are kept locked up. And – at least for the moment – you need to be one of them.”
For a Dragon in possession of an information network as extensive as the Drake’s, this was a troubling revelation. There was a whole world underneath the Earth she’d thought she’d known. And this human could come and go freely from one to the other.
No. Not human. She knew this much at least. “Mercibald. Fagin.”
“The temptation to say ‘you guessed my name’ is overwhelming,” Fagin said with a smile. Something happened to his face then, something like a shadow crossed over it, but the Drake forgot what it had been because it had been awful. “But you didn’t guess, did you? You knew.”
“Demon.”
“Yes. You know a lot. We’re going to get to the bottom of everything you know, Katla.”
“No.”
“Yes. And after we’ve gotten to the bottom of everything you know, can you guess what we’re going to do next? We’re going to get to the bottom of everything you are. And after that, Katla, after that we are going to dig.”
PAIN
She felt like she was awake after that, felt like she was lucid and the hours were passing in a normal fashion. But somehow, instinctively, she knew they weren’t. Hours were ticking by while she performed a single slow blink of her eyes, days as she bit listlessly at her blocks of reconstituted vitamin-flesh.
And she hurt. Her body, her eyes, between her scales, inside her mouth. Needles of ice, scrapings of glass, things churning through the furnace that was her circulatory system. Something was happening to her, and her brain kept on editing it away. Making her forget, so she would go on living.
She was fairly sure she said nothing to the human whose voice came from the gun-drone. She was convinced that she spoke no more coherent words. But it was possible she was no longer in possession of all the facts.
There were humans in her cell sometimes. They did things but she didn’t remember what. That was fine. She remembered the tunnel block sliding in and out. Presumably people came and went.
Mercibald was standing in front of her again, his grin bright and ferocious.
“Do you see this?” he held up a small, shiny object. It was pale-amber, softly glowing. “Do you know what it is?” he didn’t wait for her to answer. He may have known by this stage that she had nothing to say, even if she’d had a clue what the little shiny thing was. “This,” he went on, “is a DNA sample. An intact, living sample from a Dragon, stabilised and viable. That, on its own, is already a world first. But there’s more,” he wiggled the object – a vial, she thought – and then juggled it to his other hand with a wince. “Hotter than Hell,” he said, “and I should know … no, you know the most amazing thing about this sample?” again he waited, but again it wasn’t for long. “It is folded into human form. Just like you do, Katla. But on a molecular, on an atomic level. And it’s stable. It isn’t combinable with human DNA or anything so ludicrous – if nothing else it’s simply far too hot for that, it would just burn the monkey gunk right out of the equation. But it’s a start. And we’ve barely been working for two months,” his grin widened and he stepped back, juggling the vial to his other hand again. “We don’t just hold the key to the survival of the Dragon species. We hold the shovel we’re going to use to do our digging.”
He left again after this little performance, and the Drake settled back to her rest, and her pain. More time went past.
“Wake up. She
’s zonked. Magna, bring the harpoon.”
The Drake looked around the rubble-strewn room. Heavy grey chunks, some almost square and others no larger than a human’s fist, lay in a fan around the dark doorway. The tunnel’s normally-sharp edges were roughened with cracks. The Drake realised she’d been bruised by several fast-moving projectiles, and a little human female – Paraludi, it was Paraludi – was standing in front of her, reaching up, picking pieces from her muzzle and the corners of her eyes. The pain was a mild echo of the things she had experienced, but no longer remembered.
“The gun doesn’t have a cartridge,” another human – Cara-Magna – said, trotting across the rock-strewn plain of the cell floor and swimming into focus, “we’ll have to leave it. At least it’s not going to fire again after what Frog did to the barrel,” Cara-Magna stopped in front of the Drake, and narrowed her eyes. “What have they done to her?”
“I don’t know,” Paraludi said. “Ah God, look at her, why didn’t we move on this place weeks ago–”
“Don’t do that, Ludi. We had to wait for Galatine’s nolo-thing to cycle up,” Cara-Magna said calmly. “You know that. Even with Frog, we wouldn’t have gotten in here without the shutdowns.”
“Look at her,” Paraludi said angrily. “Look, all her scales on that side…”
“If I jab her with this, she will definitely eat me,” Cara-Magna mused, and hefted a large iron-grey spike. The Drake tasted something on the air, wild and frothy, something inside the metal tube. An artificial stimulant of some sort.
“Maybe Frog can do it for us,” Paraludi suggested. “Where did she–?”
There was a whump, and another human shape was standing in front of her, between Paraludi and Cara-Magna. Human shape, except for the wings … but no more human than the Demon had been. She was just different in another way, somehow. She gave off the same warm rays of reassuring power that Gabriel did, although perhaps not quite so intense. She looked–
Greyblade Page 44