Aurora Rising: The Complete Collection (99 page)

Gripping the wide spine using only his thighs, he seized the furthest scale he could reach and yanked it up and out of the way. He brought the sword up high and thrust it down into the now exposed hide.

A scream such as he had never heard burst forth from the dragon’s mouth. The shrill, flanging cry vibrated so forcefully against his eardrums he worried they may burst.

The beast thrashed and bucked beneath him in pain, anger and desperation, coming within a sliver of tossing him off and against the mountainside. Trees some fifty meters downhill now burned, set afire by the wild flames erupting out of the gnashing jaws.

With a fierce wrench he twisted the sword until it was vertical alongside the spine and dragged it toward him. Anything less than nanoscale-forged metamat and the hide wouldn’t have sliced apart, so tough and leathery was the keratinous tissue. He jerked the sword around the edges of overlapping scales.

Centimeter by centimeter he flayed the dragon while it writhed in agony and rage beneath him.

A thud tremored through the ground as its legs at last collapsed and it dropped onto its belly. He kept pulling the sword toward him, moving carefully backwards until he risked death by flame. It would have to be enough.

He leaned in, forcing it down all the way to the hilt, and twisted it around to shred what he hoped was one of the beast’s vital organs.

The dragon’s long neck bucked to the sky in a final wail, then crashed to the ground. He felt the body sag in the relaxation of death beneath him. But he wasn’t taking any chances. He withdrew the sword, now dripping blood and viscera, crawled up to the neck and thrust it into the more flexible skin there.

The stab evoked no response and the blood flowing out lacked the force of a heartbeat.

Satisfied, he sank down to rest his cheek at the juncture of the spine and neck, exhausted and a little delirious with relief and adrenaline. Also pain.

Both his palms were cut open in several places, his chest burned from abrasions and the muscles of his arms, shoulders and upper legs throbbed in protest against what had been asked of them. He suspected he had earned a ligament tear or two at a minimum.

“Well,” he muttered into the dragon’s neck, “one more thing to add to my obituary.”

Caleb Andreas Marano:  Killer. Lover. Dragonslayer.

A ragged laugh escaped his throat as he pushed himself up and climbed off the beast and onto the now-scorched plateau. He’d brought emergency medical supplies and could treat his palms, but he’d worry about it later.

For sheared into the mountainside behind him stood not a cave, but rather an artificial structure.

Crafted of a material he’d call frosted glass were he on a human planet and some ten meters in height, its design was minimalist in the extreme, with a long, flat roof and a single front wall stretching the width of the gouge into the terrain. He discerned no entrance.

As he advanced toward it, though, swarming pinpoints of light began to coalesce in front of the wall. Icy blue in color, the swarm thickened into the roughest outline of a bipedal humanoid form.

The alien watched him silently while he approached.

When he was four meters away, Caleb stopped, shifted his grip on the sword at his side, and stared at the alien.

“You are going to let me pass. And if she’s dead, I don’t give a goddamn how many dragons you throw at me—I will come for you.”

The alien motioned to the wall, then dissipated into points of light which glided above the structure and off into the mountains.

He stepped up before the alien changed its mind. There was still no evidence of an entrance, but he placed his palm on the wall. The opaqueness vanished, followed by a wide section of material.

He had found his door.

28

MESSIUM

E
ARTH
A
LLIANCE
C
OLONY

“
W
ELL
OF COURSE
THEY’RE ALIENS.
No human group has ships like those. Who knows where they came from though—”

“We do know. They came through some sort of portal in the Metis Nebula.”

Noah gave Kennedy a dubious look.

They had been in the basement for hours upon hours. The muffled racket from above continued unabated, though the time between the thunderous crashes marking the collapse of the more substantial buildings had gradually lengthened. The power had gone out two hours after they arrived at the basement.

They couldn’t go anywhere or do anything until her leg healed up more. But as to where to go or what to do? The best he could offer was he was ‘working on it.’

Messium was supposed to be an escape for him, a chance to lie low and elude those trying to kill him. But he had hardly gotten settled in when he became the target of an alien invasion. Well, not him specifically. Messium, the planet. All the people on it. As luck would have it the population included him, so the result was the same.

And now he was trapped in a basement in a crumbling downtown under assault by alien ships with the heir to the Rossi fortune. A woman who had clear ideas on just about
everything
. Encompassed in ‘everything,’ it appeared, was the origins of their foe.

“I’ll bite. How do you know they came through a portal in the Metis Nebula?”

She regarded him as if the answer was juvenile in its obviousness. Didn’t seem so obvious to him. “Because my friend discovered them exiting the portal several weeks ago. The governments know—I mean, the Alliance and Federation leaders do. Didn’t help, apparently.”

He groaned. Of course they had known, and of course they hadn’t warned the public. It figured. “Has anyone asked these aliens what they want?”

“I don’t believe the opportunity has presented itself. Want to go outside and ask them yourself?”

He wanted to be angry at her for being such an over-entitled smart-ass, but her captivating green eyes twinkled with mirth even now, silently telling him she had meant it in teasing. She’d done little else other than tease him in the hours they had been together in fact.

It shouldn’t bother him. He was the guy who kept everything lighthearted, right? The guy to whom life was one long party, right? So why was it so important she take him seriously?

He had gotten so wound around his own thoughts he missed her struggling to a standing position. On realizing it he leapt up and hurried to her side. “Hey, take it easy there, Blondie.”

Her head shook as she tested placing weight on her left leg. “We can’t sit here and wait to die. I need to get to the lab.”

“The lab? Do they have a nuclear-powered BFG which can take these monsters out?”

“That would be awesome, wouldn’t it? Sadly, no. We need to figure out how they’re blocking communications. We’re never going to be able to fight them if we can’t talk to each other.” She grabbed her bag off the floor and began hobbling out of the room.

“Wait—let me carry that!”

She glanced over her shoulder at him and tossed the bag into his chest. “I thought you’d never ask. Come on, the lab is at the end of this hall.”

Rows of servers lined the back wall of the lab. The long wall opposite the door contained standard testing benches and the near wall cabinets flush with tools and equipment. It reminded Noah of his own office, if ten times larger. But the organization was efficient, and he instantly felt at home.

By the time he had tossed her bag in the corner Kennedy was rummaging through one of the cabinets. Grunts of frustration soon bubbled forth.

“What are you hunting for?”

“A quantum coherence analyzer. It measures the—”

“I know what it does. But I bet it will be down here next to the….” He crossed the lab to the row of testing benches and scanned the shelf above the barrier cage. “Found one.”

She stared at him curiously. He might venture a guess she looked impressed, but the room was dark and he was probably projecting.

She hopped up on one of the work tables scattered down the middle of the wide room and waved him closer, only to shift back to the edge of the table. “Oh, my bag—”

“I got it. Chill out. You’re injured.” Her lips smacked in annoyance while she waited for him to bring it to her, legs swinging beneath the table as if she were an impatient little girl. Damn, she was cute. And trouble he so did
not
need.

As soon as he dropped the bag on the table she started rummaging through it—the woman could rummage like a champ—and in seconds pulled out a slender box bearing a translucent glass cover.

He arched an eyebrow. “A mobile QEC? Nice.”

“You recognize this, too? What is it you said you did for a living?”

“I didn’t.” At her questioning gaze he shrugged. “Whatever I want. Are you going to turn it on or not?”

“Yes.” She eyed him queerly in the breath before she focused on the box. Two fingers of her left hand input commands on the glass surface. “One this size is merely for basic data and signal transmission, but it should suffice. I realize we can’t contact anyone, but I’ll pretend I’m sending a data packet to the office.”

She set the QEC on the table surface and carefully drew the analyzer along it, then studied the results. “I was afraid of this. The coherence breaks down upon transmission.”

Her face screwed up, triggering a debris-darkened curl to fall out of her messy ponytail across her forehead. She blew it out the way; it promptly tumbled down once more. “What does that?”

Without thinking about it, he reached over and tucked the wayward curl behind her ear. “Nothing I’ve ever heard of.”

At the flare in her eyes his hand fell away. He directed his attention to the bag beside her. “What else you got in your bag?”

“Nothing to re-cohere qubits, I’m afraid. Though….” Her arms propelled her off the table and back into the cabinets. Her voice came out muffled from deep inside the storage. “Look around and see if you can find a wide-band receiver anywhere.”

“Right.” At least she didn’t ask if he knew what one of those was.

“Never mind, found one.” He turned around in time to see her hop back on the work table. She really needed to stop being…well, how she was being.

She slid the small tower to the center of the table. When she rolled onto her stomach to face the tower he decided his best option was to do the same.

A screen flickered to life beside the tower when she connected it to a tiny power generator. He watched her through the translucence. “What do you expect to find? Nothing’s getting out.”

“No idea. I’ll let you know when I find it.”

“What did you say
you
do again?”

Her mouth quirked. “I didn’t. But I’m a ship designer. Materials, components, shields, power, you name it.”

“In between black-tie parties and charity auctions, I imagine.”

“I’m not a gilded princess, Noah. I do work for a living.”

Her scowl, accompanied by the disappointed tone in her voice, cut too hard for his taste. “Sure, but you don’t have to.”

She shifted her attention to the receiver controls and fiddled with them. “I didn’t disown my family like you, if that’s what you mean.”

“Don’t think you—wait.” The jumble of static on the screen had almost resolved into a fan-like shape. “It’s a diffraction pattern of some kind.”

Her head tilted to the side to take in a new angle. “Antiparticles? No, we’d be dead from the gamma rays by now.”

“Maybe not. They could be a kind of, I don’t know, anti-qubits?”

Her expression was distorted by the prismatic pattern on the screen separating them. “
What
did you say you do again?”

“I told you—whatever I want. So an anti-qubit wouldn’t technically be an ‘opposite,’ right?”

She absently reached down to scratch at the cut on her leg. “While theoretically possible, the odds of two identically-opposite qubits encountering one another is infinitesimally small.”

“I didn’t mean—stop doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Scratching your wound. How is the gel going to grow new skin if you keep displacing it?”

“Fine, fine. So you mean if there were qubits which represented the superposition of values between -1 and 0? Or even 1 and 2? Any range would be possible.”

“But this isn’t any range. It has to include 0 or 1, or it wouldn’t be interfering with our communications.”

Her eyes lit up in the luminescence provided by the screen.
Damn.
“Right. I can’t believe I forgot! So what are we talking about here? These aliens use a shifted quantum field, but to communicate similar to how we do, or solely to interfere with our communications? No, it has to be the latter, because by definition the interference would be in both directions. Seems like a lot of effort on their part, but we don’t understand their technology.”

“Was there a question for me in there?”

“What? Oh. No. I mean…no. Do you agree?”

“That it’s for interference, or communication?”

“Yes.” She burst out laughing. The rich, luscious tenor filled the lab. She sucked in air, laughed some more, then abruptly moaned. “I am so hungry.” Back into the bag, and after a few seconds she tossed him an energy bar before tearing one open herself.