Aurora Rising: The Complete Collection (81 page)

“Sounds like this place isn’t half bad. We should retire here.”

“The lack of stars is a serious negative. Maybe we should keep looking.”

His eyes rose to meet hers.

She spun away, hastily covering any discomfort provoked by the not-at-all-laden statement by taking their plates to the sink. “We’ll do a brief scout around the ship first, no more than fifty meters out or so. If we decide we should trek further we can duck back in for a pack and some supplies.”

“It’s a plan.” He came up behind her carrying the rest of the dishes. One arm curled around her waist and a kiss alighted upon her ear to brush away any residual tension. “I’m taking a Daemon though. This place feels prehistoric. There could be dinosaurs.”

“Well yeah, me too.” She removed the band from her wrist and twisted her hair up as she went to the storage cabinet. He caught the Daemon she tossed to him and latched it to his work pants. She did the same with the second weapon, then gazed around the deck.

“All right. Let’s do this.”

The outer airlock hissed as it opened to let in air the sensors insisted was utterly normal, and she headed down the ramp into the morning light.

It felt like stepping foot on Earth; there was no other way to describe it. The sensation of the pleasant breeze ruffling the fine hairs on her forearm was familiar to the point of intimacy.

She had visited a fair number of planets over the years. While all the settled worlds were of necessity compatible with human life (terraforming being for now an extremely lengthy, costly and difficult process), in a myriad of ways none of them felt like Earth. This one did—which considering where they were, was just wrong.

“We took a graze of plasma fire, so I want to check underneath. The integrity tests checked out, but I still….” Her voice drifted off as she ran fingertips along the lower hull.

The silver discoloration had spread out far beyond where the rupture had been repaired. It had also darkened, almost as if it was curing. The entire belly of the ship now gleamed a deep tungsten silver in color. Thick tendrils of brighter silver snaked out from the belly to follow the curve of the hull, streaks of light cutting through the blackness.

The chemical reactions begun by the fusing of the carbon and amodiamond metamaterials were evidently continuing. Taking over her ship. She wasn’t sure what she thought about this; she had
liked
the way her ship looked, all dark and sinister and dangerous. Yet she couldn’t deny this new hue held a certain beauty as well.

“Wow.”

“I know. Kennedy said it was making the hull stronger, so I guess it’s not a problem.” She discerned no trace of scarring from weapons fire. The hull appeared unblemished. “Weird, though…and now my ship kind of resembles a zebra.”

“A ‘zebra’?” His eyes unfocused, and she imagined he was querying his internal data store. Two seconds later he regarded her in amusement. “Okay, maybe a
little
. But I doubt it will stay this way. And it’s intriguing.”

She let her hand drop from the hull and wandered out to stare at the grasslands stretching to the horizon. Behind her lay rolling hills broken up by the rocky crevasse which had provided a measure of shelter for them overnight.

“I expect to see a herd of some sort of wildlife frolicking across the plain any second now.”

“Would be the least astounding scene so far.”

She glanced over her shoulder to smile at him—

—and that was when the dragon attacked.

A faint
whoosh
of air behind him was the sole warning Caleb had before he was catapulted thirty meters through the air. He caught a vague impression of reflected light off burnished scales attached to a massive wing—then his head slammed to the dirt with a sharp crack.

He was out for mere seconds—four, five at most—because when he opened his eyes the dragon had barely left the ground, its wings mid-flap as they propelled it up and over the
Siyane
to soar into the sky.

Yes, a
dragon
. The lustrous crimson scales covered an enormous body dwarfed only by its wingspan; the striking thickness of the torso contrasted with almost delicate skin pulled taut between lightweight bones comprising the wings. Distinctive horns curled back over its bony skull.

He vaulted to his feet and swung the Daemon up, ignoring the multiple jarring pains of varying severity. His vision contracted to encompass a single image: Alex flailing in the grasp of the dragon’s front right claw as it flew away.

She was visibly struggling; that meant she wasn’t dead. The claws gripping her hadn’t ripped open her lovely skin and shredded the fragile human organs which gave her life. Not yet.

He could shoot a hole in the wing. The laser would shred the thin membrane. The dragon would plummet from the sky and plunge to the ground a hundred meters below. And Alex would die.

“Fuck!”

In a flash he was sprinting for the airlock, skipping through a stumble or two on the way. He recognized he was hurt but it hardly mattered.

He slammed a palm on the airlock panel, fed it the secondary key and fell through the hatch as it opened. Then he half-crawled, half-scrambled to the cockpit and up into her chair. His fingers raced over the blank ledge until by dumb luck he found the trigger to activate the HUD. Unlike Alex, he wasn’t wired into the ship, and thus it did not respond to his thoughts.

Thank you, Mia.

Once the HUD came to life the controls and screens were easily identifiable. He fired up the pulse detonation engines and rose off the ground as the dragon shrank in the sky. The unparalleled smoothness of the ship’s motion beneath his fingertips shocked him. It responded to the slightest adjustment with incredible fluidity, like a sky glider instead of a machine constructed of hard, cold metal.

He banked forty degrees starboard and climbed, the entirety of his attention focused on the tiny red dot against the pale blue sky.

It had nearly disappeared when he started to gain on it. Bit by bit, meter by meter he closed the gap. He didn’t think about
what
he was gaining on, or what in the bloody hell a bloody dragon was doing on an impossible planet in an impossible place on the other side of an impossible portal. Instead he concentrated on catching it.

He could see the sunlight from the nonexistent sun reflecting off the scales and the beat of its wings driving it toward the mountains now looming large in the distance. The mountains represented a problem; he risked losing the dragon in a crevasse or a shadowy valley. He’d need to draw close. Perhaps it might skim close enough to the mountainous terrain for him to risk a shot. He should—

—the world spiraled out of control, as for the second time in as many days ‘down’ and ‘up’ lost all meaning. His head spun wildly, and he pressed a palm to his forehead in an effort to impose stability. Yet the images his eyes showed him refused to comport with reality, with what he knew to be true.

Grassy plains spread placidly beneath him. No mountains were visible, even on the far horizon. Ahead and to the left rolled gentle hills, much like those they had camped at the night before.
Exactly
like the hills they had camped at the night before. The ship decelerated to a crawl as his hands dropped from the controls and he gazed out the viewport, confusion giving way to disbelief.

He hovered in sight of where he had been twenty minutes earlier.

Fuck it. He’d think about it on the way back. He promptly accelerated and headed in the direction of the mountains.

So there existed a barrier of some kind, one which repelled in dramatic fashion any intruders. Obviously the dragon was not an intruder.

Fine.

He knew where it was now, more or less. He’d slow when he neared and find a way past it. Somehow.

And he might have, too, if not for the two new dragons which stormed him as he neared the mountains. He cracked his neck and adjusted his posture in the chair.

Okay then. Starship vs. dragons.

He strafed to avoid the dual streams of flame shooting out of the approaching dragons’ jaws. It was going to take more than fire to damage this ship, and he was certain its weapons possessed a longer reach as well.

He flipped the ship around and accelerated in reverse to keep a distance. In the two seconds he had to observe them, he noted they appeared identical to the one that had grabbed Alex, and to each other. Clones, then? Yet another incongruity on this strange planet. He targeted the pulse laser at the dragon on the left.

It contorted in an attempt to avoid the beam, but the laser tracked it and cut a deep gash through the scales then the leathery skin beneath them and opened up its innards. The beast shrieked a roar of pain and spewed flame raggedly from its jaws. He was almost surprised to see blood and organs spill out into the air; part of him had suspected they were machines, or possibly some sort of materialized holo projection.

The first dragon tumbled flailing to crash to the ground below, but the second one used the chaos to dive and sweep under the ship. An outstretched claw nearly grabbed the nose of the
Siyane
as he yanked hard to port and swung up in an arc.

As soon as he had a decent vantage he fired. This one seemed to have learned from the mistakes of its companion and started moving before the laser exited the weapon casing.

Nevertheless, a dragon was simply no match for 24
^th
century laser weaponry. The laser sliced apart the thin membrane of its left wing. The beast fell into a tailspin, and he was forced to rapidly maneuver to get clear of it—

—the world twisted inside out once more, his head following suit. He blinked roughly, choked back the acid rising in his throat and stared at the grasslands outside. In avoiding the falling dragon, he had hit the barrier again.

In a burst of frustration he slammed a fist into the dash. It being composed of a rhu/platinum nanoalloy, the dash was not impressed.

He massaged the busted knuckles and forcefully shoved aside the anger and despair which threatened to drag him down and away from his goal. He did not have time to wallow, to give a moment’s thought to what may have happened to her or whether she was alive.

Turn into the punch, grab hold of the gun, leap into the arena. Attack.
He had to move.
Now.

He gunned the engine.

9

SENECA

C
AVARE

J
ARON
N
YTHAL THREW A STACK
of clothes in the bag, not bothering to achieve any semblance of order or neatness. Drawers hung open behind him; more clothes lay strewn across the floor. He scrambled into the bathroom to grab the necessities and stubbed his toe on the door frame.

“Ah!” He hobbled back to the bed while grabbing his throbbing toe. He had to
hurry
.

His wife and kids were on the way to her parents’ house. If nothing else they should be safe, right?

He had thought he was in the clear. He’d picked out his private downtown flat and planned to make an offer in the morning. With Volosk taken care of he should have been in the clear. How was he supposed to know Volosk’s boss was that cocksucker Delavasi? The man had been gunning for him ever since the favor-buying scandal four years earlier.

Only by a sheer stroke of luck did Jaron receive any warning at all. His ten o’clock meeting canceled at the last minute, and on a lark he had ducked out of the office to grab some expensive liquor for later tonight. When he returned to the office one of his coworkers had stopped him in the hallway.

“Hey, there was a man here looking for you. He refused to give the receptionist his name, but I recognized him from a meeting Kouris held a few weeks ago. He’s the Director of Intelligence…Delavasi’s his name I think.”

Jaron had spent thirty minutes meandering in circles in a service hallway trying to convince himself it didn’t mean anything, that the man was simply following up on Volosk’s open files. But it wasn’t true. Volosk had been suspicious of him when he showed up at his office last week and now Volosk was dead, and Delavasi knew he was behind it and knew he’d set up the assassination on Atlantis.

It didn’t matter how the man knew; in his gut Jaron was convinced he surely must.

Forty-years-to-life in prison at best. Permanent disappearance into the black hole of a covert detention facility at worst. And worst was starting to look a hell of a lot more likely.

He had to vanish.

With a brief scan around the bedroom he lugged the bag onto his shoulder and headed to the kitchen, where he quickly tossed in some drinks and snacks and closed the bag up. He forced himself to pause. He was forgetting something…possibly a lot of things. But he needed to hurry.

He jogged through the living room and foyer of the new house to the door. They had barely begun moving in, and boxes sat stacked along the walls between furniture haphazardly scattered around the floor.