Banshee (2 page)

Trinity Outpost, August 3, 2074

The sweat trickled mercilessly down the small of Saavin’s back as she grimaced and pulled hard at the collapsing canteen. The water tasted of tin and made her teeth squeak as she spat the grit that caught on her tongue after three long swallows. Sun punished her, even under a wide-brimmed patrol hat that held her dark red hair blissfully free of contact with a long, freckled neck. Her deep tan told a story of long days in the desert sun, and her blue eyes revealed a woman of twenty years who had spent much of that time looking into the distance, watchful and curious. She was a pretty girl, long of leg and thinly built, but not frail. Her rolling gait was that of a rider, not runner, and the lanky body underneath her riding armor was freckled and dotted with occasional scars. Her beauty could not mask the life of a tomboy who had gone on to the most unusual of occupations in the midst of a dangerous world.

The sun pulsed again, bursting free of a wispy cirrus cloud that surrendered to leave the entire sky clear once more. White sheets of light caromed off every surface, announcing that noon was near or just past, and it would be at least nine hours until there would be a hint of relief. Darkness meant cooler temperatures this far inland on the Bulwark. Usually. The night also brought visitors, but by that time, her shift would be complete and the onus of defense would be on the ground pounders. Let them deal with any raids; she’d had enough of that brutal heat to last her a lifetime.

She shifted again in the saddle and roused her mount, Banshee, who snorted with disdain at the idea of so much as moving in the heat. Her dragon, thirty meters of lethal reptile, flicked one tongue back over his eye bridge in annoyance, before laying his head flat with a whuff of dust. His gray hide was accented with patches of dusty red, fading at the edges, and his wings were charcoal, shading to midnight black at each tip. The paired rider and dragon rested on a rock outcropping that gave them some advantage, but to go any higher would expose them to the relentless hissing winds. Nothing moved in her sight, and the dragon’s eyes were capable of clear vision to a distance of three miles at minimum. A single insect buzzed to her left, oblivious to the enormous dragon, and then fell silent with a startled
click
. Perhaps something was moving after all.

The desert was a tough place to make a living. What had been a semi-arid region decades earlier, was now even less hospitable. Texas, as the Old Staters still called the area, was little more than a wasteland, and a dangerous one at that. When the Rising began in earnest, the world was agog with the majesty of dragons emerging from their earth cocoons all across the northern hemisphere.

It was a costly mistake with a butcher’s bill that numbered in the billions. Cave systems, some unknown, some thought long dead, and others under bodies of water worldwide, began to vomit forth the denizens of hell itself.
The end
screamed millions as they died, ripped apart by fang and claw, only to be choked down muzzles slick with slime and the blood of the planet.
A reckoning
blatted the next victims, unfortunate to live just long enough to see the threat from a distance as wave after wave of beasts lumbered ashore or dashed from caves. The last mass of survivors was turned into so much dung, left to dry in the sun of a world gone mad with fear and storms and fire. The start, said the thousands who had ridden dragons from their first hour of birth. They were a motley assembly of men and women, knit together by the beasts under their legs and the weapons they held. From a thousand throats, the will of dragon’s hiss declared, long and hot, that the monsters turning the world into hell would soon feel their wrath.

And the wrath of the dragon was the touch of God. The magnificent beasts fell from the skies with their jubilant riders, new to the sensation of dropping like lightning from the clouds as they raked and tore and slashed. Dragons as long as eighty meters slammed into the ranks of the invaders, sometimes at speeds too fast for the human eye to follow. These assaults took place with their riders locked into a saddle of bone as if they were bred for that very seat. The resulting impacts would spray the heavens with the color of vengeance, and in hours, and days, and the first savage year—forever known as the birth of the Bulwark—they inexorably ground the invading forces of hell to a stop. During this year of savagery, the remaining humans organized, even as the dragons continued to emerge from fields, mountainsides, and cold glacial lakes. Dragons were born with a memory accurate to the instant they first announced their presence with a high, clear roar of triumph. Their riders, still a seemingly random selection, would then be asked where the nearest fighting was, and they would hurtle into the sky with lethal intent.

Saavin let her thoughts drift again, this time to a long drink from the cold-filtered water that had been pressed through fine sand and left in the deepest recesses of the rider’s supply cellars. It would easily be fifty degrees cooler than the air around her now, and she found herself involuntarily working her gummy cheeks in anticipation when Banshee stiffened underneath her.

“Rider. Coming fast.” The draconic whisper was a low, almost silent, growl. What dragons possessed in eyesight and combat awareness, they lacked in devotion to details. It had been six years since an overland rider made it this far, and they both felt a surge of battle readiness.

“Clarify,” Saavin’s voice snapped.

“Single rider. Human, Mounted, horseback. Approaching from Northeast. Rider is . . . injured.” Banshee hesitated and blew a short breath out hard enough to move sand several feet beneath his muzzle, which was now elevated above his forelegs in a fully-alert position. “Badly injured. Intercept?”

“Agreed. Let’s go to him, dear, and hope his horse isn’t too stupid to recognize a friend over foe. I don’t relish the idea of running down a panicked mount in this part of the day.”

With a powerful leap from his back legs, Banshee vaulted them aloft, even as he said with a touch of disdain, “They’re always stupid.”

It was nearly dark before Banshee dropped Saavin at the guard station. They were both hot and tired, and the prospect of a long debriefing left them short with everyone around them. Saavin heard the dragon angrily declare that he wanted nothing more than a barrel of water and a cool stone on which to out of range from the area where her enormous mount was housed. She nearly swayed on her feet, and a firm hand took her arm to turn her toward the Admiralty. Looking down, she saw the beatific face of Byrna, who was as much a den mother as she was Quartermaster. Soft blue eyes and graying hair greeted Saavin, and then Byrna’s sunburned complexion broke wide into a smile.

“Let’s get you cleaned up and hydrated first. Talk can wait.” The woman had an incredibly deft touch that extended to her husband, the commander of their entire sprawling township, and all of the militias as well. Over Byrna’s shoulder, Saavin saw the dark brown skin and high cheekbones of Moss Eilert. His piercing black eyes and keen intellect were chomping at the bit, held in reserve by the gentle request his wife made as she led Saavin to the kitchens. “Moss, you let this soldier get fed and watered before you begin your interminable questions.”

The Commodore straightened to his full height, well over six feet, opened his mouth, thought better of it, then kissed his wife on the cheek with a deep bass chuckle. “Agreed, dear heart. Matters of security can wait, but when she’s ready, send her to me. I’ll be in Medical with our guest.” He nodded amiably at Saavin and decamped in three long strides.

“Your
guest
has certainly caused a commotion,” Byrna quipped as she sat the bedraggled girl down gently at a rough wooden mess table. A squeaker, one of the youngest members of the Admiralty, brought a pitcher of chilled water, some precious ice, and a small plate of cut fruit. A single slice of dark yellow cheese sat on the plate as well, and Saavin felt her stomach growl in anticipation. When Byrna saw her eyes dart to the cheese, she said, “Drink first. Then eat. You need it. How many hours were you out?”

After a long, frigid drink that brought tears of joy to her eyes, Saavin did a little math and said, haltingly, “Three days in all, but ten hours over. Carrying that rider was a lot harder than we expected. His mount wasn’t the problem;
he
was. He wouldn’t cooperate, and he kept trying to head back north. Banshee finally had to carry him in his claws to stop the fool from opening his wounds again.” She grimaced at the memory of those injuries. In addition to exposure, the man had a ten-inch tooth or claw, she couldn’t be certain which, jutting from the back of his shoulder. The object had a deep, poisonous green hue, and she hadn’t dared remove it without medical staff on site.

“I heard he’d been attacked. Got a glimpse of him.” Byrna looked over her shoulder, then added, “He’s incredibly tough, that one. I saw no less than four gashes. He fought something terrible to a standstill, or killed it outright.” The wounds had been just this side of suppuration. His arrival saved his life, of that there could be no doubt.

Saavin nodded sagely, despite her drooping eyes. It had been a long, hard patrol, and she remembered to ask if the other outriders were back. “Is everyone in?”

Byrna nodded with relief. “All accounted for. And other than you, no injuries or dehydration.” That in itself was a rarity, given that they were at the absolute scorching peak of the summer. Even the fingers of saltwater that filled the chasms splitting the former United States failed to moderate the heat. If anything, the long, blazing stretches of the shallow sea made life even less hospitable, although the desalinization plants were much more effective, due to the proximity of their sources. The engineers wasted far less effort bringing precious water to the farms than if they had run pipelines over miles of a merciless desert once known as Texas. The remnants of the Daniel Boone Forest were cold comfort to hungry people. They knew, based on the log litter alone, a magnificent place that could have given shelter, fuel, and food, was now little more than bleached jackstraws. The bones of what had once been, acted ever to remind the survivors that here there was once life in abundance. Here was the world you will never know.

After her third mug of water and clearing the plate of food, Saavin nodded toward Byrna decisively. “I’m ready to see the Commodore, and find out a little more about our mystery man.”

Byrna smiled. “So am I, on both accounts.”

Dragons

“Everyone on the planet thought the Progeny were the luckiest humans that had ever walked. Who wouldn’t? They had
dragons
. Not some imaginary, bullshit lizard, but an honest to God monster that talked the rider like it had known them all their lives. In a way, it had. It wasn’t like there was some mystery to how or why the dragons woke up and clawed their way out of wherever they’d been hiding. Once they got here, they all started talking from the moment they spread their wings to dry in the sun. Hell, we couldn’t get some of them to shut up, but it wasn’t as if we wanted them to be silent. The stories they told us filled in every blank spot in our history. Who built Stonehenge? What about the pyramids? Was Atlantis real? They answered it all.

“It turned out that, even though the dragons had been sleeping, sort of, they’d still been
listening
. That was why they picked their own names. It depended on where they emerged during The Rising. Ilmatar, the first dragon to emerge in North America? She took her name from the Finnish goddess of the wind. When we asked her why, the explanation was simple: she wished to be familiar, not menacing, and it would have been vanity to select a name that was disrespectful to her new people. Since there were a lot of Scandinavians who settled in that area, her name made sense. We heard the same story over and over; as when Alignak rose among the Inuit, Revere in Massachusetts, and Metacomet, who rose dripping from the waters of the Potomac River. Some were cultural heroes, some were legends.There were plenty we’d never heard of until their namesakes explained, quite thoroughly, that history was positively crowded with heroes whose names had been lost to the ravages of time. Once the initial panic of The Rising wore off, people started asking some mundane questions, which the dragons answered primarily through action. They liked fish.
Big
fish, and they were experts at skimming the waters and plucking thousand-pound tuna like grapes. They were all manner of colors and sizes, regardless of their gender. Some dragons were as small—and that’s a relative term only—as thirty meters long, with a weight of eight tons. They were muscular, tough, and their forelegs were long enough to do a lot of damage in a fight. Their hindquarters were powerful, and their wings long and incredibly flexible. They had mouths full of long teeth, with six bicuspids to the side that could shear steel like paper. Their sight was better than their sense of smell, which was still excellent, and they had the ability, like any soldier, to fall asleep at any time, regardless of surrounding noise levels. For the first year, the dragons that had risen were smallish, up to thirty meters, but that trend ended in the first autumn after The Rising.

“Gaspar burst from the waters of Tampa Bay on Halloween night. Even though—well, the world wasn’t really
over
a dragon rising, but he got everyone’s attention. Immediately. At first, the boats that saw him unfurling his wings near the Gandy Bridge began to run for their figurative lives. His emergence caused a swell nearly eight feet high and swamped several small craft that were fishing in the area. When he began to laugh in his booming voice, most of the boaters turned around to go meet the newest dragon on the continent. That is one magnificent beast. He’s
still
unique, what with those obsidian scales and oxblood highlights. When the press gathered to meet him in the morning, he was sprawled in the sun at Fort Desoto, dead asleep and apparently carefree. Upon waking to find nearly a thousand observers staring at him, he yawned hugely and inquired if anyone could direct him to the nearest school of fish. Gaspar was sixty meters of muscle and fang; he was like another
species
compared to the Firsters. I still remember that reporter with the big hair asking him if he was the biggest dragon ever. That was the first time anyone had seen a dragon become truly morose. He lowered his enormous head to within inches of her face and told the world that bigger dragons were coming.
Much
bigger. The sad part is, no one even thought to ask him why.” —Captain Richard Diamond

—
Bulwark Archival Materials, Access Date 96 A.R.