Tears of the Dragon

by Angelique Anjou

  Galen sent him a look of indignation. “By whom?” he growled, outraged that the man could suggest that anyone had a higher claim than he did, but then that was the trouble with these fresh faced colonist recruits! They had no respect for their superiors!

  “Her people!” Ken-so responded baldly. “Sir, what I’m trying to say is that we’ve had an analysis of those objects we couldn’t identify. They’re some sort of alien crafts—flying alien crafts. I think our colony is under attack.”

  It took Galen a few moments to absorb that. They’d considered the possibility that any world capable of supporting life would already have life. It was almost inevitable that it would and something they’d actually counted upon. Of course, they’d brought everything they expected to need to produce their own food, but they’d known their chances of success were far better if they discovered a source of food already flourishing on the world they settled on.

  They’d expected primitive life, however. Animals that might be domesticated.

  It dawned on him abruptly that adequate consideration hadn’t been given to the possibility, indeed the likelihood, of the evolution of higher order animals … because the gods damned system they’d been sent to colonize had been a very young system at the time it was observed.

  He was no scientist! He was a gods damned soldier! It hadn’t occurred to him that the gods damned men of science might have screwed up!

  He felt his belly tighten with a mixture of disappointment and frustration. After studying the pretty creature—who was still battering at the construct with her fists and screaming at it if her vibrating pink tongue was any indication—for a few more moments, he finally returned to his seat and settled in it heavily, massaging his temples and trying to rid himself of the headache forming there.

  “So … you’re suggesting that, between the time we left our system and arrived in this one, an intelligent, technologically advanced race has sprang up? Is that even possible?”

  Ken-so frowned. “Considering the speed that light travels—yes. Clearly, we were studying the distant past of this star system—which we were aware of, of course. And the distance from our system, even with our sophisticated equipment, made it impossible to study anything so minute as the flora and fauna of the worlds that were possible targets.”

  Galen drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “But … it only took us four annums—four of the most miserable fucking annums of my life—notice I’m not excluding the five fucking annums I spent in prison, Ken-so—to get here!”

  Ken-so looked uncomfortable. “Yes, Sir. I know, Sir. But … you see we were studying this system ten thousand annums ago—give or take a couple of thousand annums—when we first looked at it and it had already progressed ten thousand, give or take, so even though utilizing the worm holes allowed us to make the trip in a mere four annums ….”

  Galen’s eyes narrowed. “There was nothing mere about it! I feel confident in speaking for everyone when I say this has been the most hellish trip ever conceived! And now you’re saying we’ve arrived and it’s already taken?”

  Ken-so shrugged uncomfortably. “It’s beginning to look that way, Sir. Apparently, it was just … uh … providence that we happened to discover it just as a dominant species emerged.” Instead of trying to explain further, he turned to the vid display again and ordered the constructs to beam them a 360-degree view of the landing site. The moment the scene switched from their construct’s captive to an overview, they saw the flying machines … and far more.

  The sight was appalling, to say the very least.

  * * * *

  Bree didn’t know if her battering on the thing had finally resulted in a malfunction, or what, but she didn’t wait around to find out. The moment the thing set her on her feet and uncoiled the tentacle from around her, she leapt away, managed two churning cycles with her legs, and sprawled in the dirt since she hadn’t waited to regain her equilibrium before she tried to flee. Such was her terror, however, she didn’t even feel the impact with the ground, didn’t wait to regain her bearings. She bounded up as if the ground was a trampoline and churned up several more clods of dirt before she managed to get enough momentum and traction to shoot forward and away.

  A growing wall of police, firemen, and soldiers had sprung up since she’d been grabbed by the mechanical beast, but she headed toward them without considering the possibility that she might be mown down by the guns they were aiming. Luckily, they seemed too stunned to do anything more than level the weapons at the invaders. One of the men from fire and rescue seemed to recover sufficiently when she slammed into him to grab her and shove her behind him, and she found herself passed from one to another until she was finally expelled from the rear.

  Staggering when she suddenly found herself free of the pack, she managed to lock her watery knees to prevent herself from sprawling in the dirt again. Huffing for breath, both with terror from her narrow escape and exertion, she looked around dazedly for help. The rescuers—everyone—seemed too focused on what was going on to pay her any mind, however, and after a brief mental examination, she finally decided she wasn’t actually injured—a little bruised, still terrorized, but she thought she was alright.

  Two more troop transports arrived while she stood shakily at the rear of the force already assembled. As the soldiers boiled out of the backs of the truck and charged toward her, Bree managed to gather the presence of mind to move out of their way.

  She was still too dazed with shock, however, to bring her mind to any sort of order, to think of what to do. Her house, she discovered when she managed to work her way through the fact that she was still virtually naked, bare foot and without transportation, was not only surrounded by the ground troops that had steadily been swelling, but it appeared that the metal beasts were taking it apart!

  After bouncing up and down on her tiptoes for several moments, trying to see over the heads of the soldiers in front of her, she looked around for a vantage point to see what was going on. A row of tanks were just pulling into her yard. She gaped at them in disbelief as they crushed her pump house and flower beds and churned them into the dirt.

  Rage abruptly suffused her, ousting the remains of her shock. “Hey! What the hell are you doing?”

  A couple of the soldiers near the back glanced in her direction absently, but almost immediately returned their attention to the activity everyone was watching. The tanks advanced until they had formed a perimeter and finally stopped. Bree glared at the tracks through her front yard and finally stalked toward the nearest. Planting her balled fists on her hips, she glared up at the men on the top that had popped out of the ironclad beast like gophers to stare at the alien craft in her peach orchard. “Hey you! This is my damned yard! What the hell do you mean by tearing up my damned yard!”

  The soldier glanced at her and did a double take. A scowl contorted his young features. “Get out of here, woman! What the hell are you thinking? We’re about to have a battle here!”

  Bree gaped at him. “I live here, damn it! You are not going to have a battle in my damned peach orchard! We’re right in the middle of harvest!”

  “You’re in the middle of a damned war, idiot woman! Get your ass back or I’ll have you arrested!” another soldier bellowed at her.

  She glared at the man furiously and finally turned away, trying to spot a man wearing an officer’s uniform. Unfortunately, she didn’t know dick about military men. She couldn’t see anyone that looked like they might be in charge.

  Before she could decide whether to try to bulldoze her way through the men gathered at the front or try to find a phone, a soldier grabbed her, hauled her toward the dirt road that led up to her house and plunked her on her feet. “Town’s three miles that way! I suggest you start jogging! We’re liable to start trading lead any minute, lady!”

  Bree gaped at the man in disbelief. “But … I didn’t see a thing but robots! You’re going to shoot the robots?”

  “Leave this to us, ma’am. It’s our
job!” he said shortly, turning and marching away from her.

  “But it’s my damned yard! My house! And my damned peach orchard!” she yelled at his retreating back.

  He either ignored her or he didn’t hear her—no surprise considering the racket the continuously arriving trucks, jeeps, and tanks were making and the helicopters and jets as they crisscrossed the sky above them.

  Unnerved by the massing military despite her anxiety about her property, Bree began to jog along the edge of the road, leaving the road to the military convoy streaming down it.

  When she’d reached the edge of her orchard, she stopped to rest, leaning against one of the trees and staring with a mixture of alarm and anger at the steady stream of military vehicles as they went by. The soldiers stared back at her when they caught a glimpse of her although mostly they seemed too preoccupied to notice her. A few even had the audacity to offer up wolf whistles as they went by. She glared at them, resisting the impulse to shoot birds at them.

  When she’d caught her breath, she pushed away from the tree, but then glanced up at it. It was too scrubby, really, to be much of a tree. She doubted it was much more than fifteen feet high to the very tips of its uppermost branches. It was one of the older peach trees, though, and the branches were fairly stout. Without stopping to consider it, she placed a foot in the crotch of a limb and the trunk and hoisted herself up, climbing carefully until she’d reached the highest branches that seemed likely to hold her.

  The land had risen slightly—which accounted for some of her breathlessness—as she’d jogged away from her house. With the added height of the tree, she could just see the peak of the remains of her roof.

  Dismay filled her. As she’d suspected, the damned robots were systematically dismantling her house—not simply demolishing it—taking it apart! As if there weren’t soldiers and war machines surrounding almost the entire perimeter of the space ship—and it was a space ship, unlike anything she’d ever seen before—the robots were as busy as they could be. They’d cleared about an acre—possibly more—of her prized peach orchard. They hadn’t simply leveled it, however. They were excavating!

  As chaotic as her mind still was with shock, it settled in her firmly that they were constructing … something.

  * * * *

  “I hesitate to point this out, Sir, but it occurs to me that we might have created an intergalactic incident.”

  Galen slid a sardonic look at his first officer. “You think?”

  Tale reddened. “Should I contact high command, Sir?”

  Galen drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, thinking. Aside from the fact that he didn’t particularly want high command to know they’d fucked up and landed their gods damned scout ship on a planet already taken by beings obviously extremely territorial, what would be the point? It wasn’t likely they’d send out re-enforcements to take the planet—aside from the fact that it would take them annums to make the trip.

  He needed time to consider the situation, he finally decided. From what he could see, the aliens seemed content, for the moment at least, to simply watch.

  “Order the constructs to set up a perimeter shield to protect our property, Ken-so,” he said abruptly.

  Ken-so looked like he wanted to question the order, but he merely nodded and relayed the order to the techs that were monitoring the constructs.

  Galen pushed himself from his command chair and strode toward the lift. “I’ll be in my quarters. Inform me if anything happens that I should know about.”

  “Yes, Sir!”

  He glanced toward the vid screen while he waited for the lift to arrive, scanning the crowd for any sign of the female he’d claimed earlier. He wasn’t surprised when he didn’t see her, but he was vastly disappointed. He glanced at the tech at the console nearest him. “Did the construct tag the biological entity he examined?” he asked as casually as he could.

  “It’s standard procedure, Sir!” the tech responded.

  Nodding, Galen entered the lift as the opening materialized and assumed a wide legged stance and an expression of unconcern. He was fuming, however, as he stepped off of the lift on his own level and strode briskly to his quarters. He halted once he’d stepped inside and his door had closed behind him, staring at nothing in particular while he tried to sort through the tangled mess of the problem he was facing. After a few minutes, when he realized he was still too tense to make any headway, he turned to the com unit. “Send Onyx to my quarters.”

  There was a brief pause. “Onyx has been checked out, Sir. Should I recall her?”

  Galen frowned. “No. Just send me Jaide.”

  Instead of the response he’d expected, there was another, longer pause. “Jaide’s in the repair lab.”

  “Just send me a gods damned companion droid!” Galen snarled.

  “Yes, Sir!” the man on the other end of the com unit responded.

  Sprawling on his bunk, Galen stared at the ceiling, trying to untangle the mayhem in his mind. From the massing military presence beyond the perimeter of their colony construct ship, he was reasonably certain they’d stumbled upon a fairly sophisticated race of beings—clearly aggressive.

  It seemed to also follow that they couldn’t have the capability for space travel, or much in the way of space travel, or they would’ve encountered them before.

  Of course they were from a different galaxy altogether than he was so it was possible they had space travel capabilities. They just hadn’t devised, or discovered, any method of making the great leaps necessary for intergalactic travel as his own people had.

  Getting up abruptly, he moved to the com unit. “Ken-so!”

  “Yes, Sir!”

  “See if you can put a report together for me from the scout ships indicating whether or not these people have intergalactic, or inner solar system, flight capabilities. If there hasn’t been enough data collected yet, then have the scout ship on the fourth planet launch some drones to survey for any sign of them.”

  There was a slight hesitation in Ken-so’s response, enough to alert him to the fact that Ken-so was struggling to contain his curiosity about the request. Finally, he merely affirmed the order, however, and said the report would be sent to him as soon as possible. “Anything else, Sir?”

  Galen hesitated, wrestling with the impulse to ask where their biological subject was at the moment. He finally tamped it with the reflection that the military was likely to interpret the launch of scout drones as an act of war, as tempted as he was to order a search for her. “That will be all for now …. Contact me at once if there is any significant change in the situation with the forward scout ship.”

  “Admiral?” Ken-so asked hesitantly.

  “What?”

  “Should I order the constructs to cease preparations?”

  A jolt went through Galen. “You mean to say that hasn’t been done yet?” he growled.

  “N-no, Sir,” Ken-so stammered.

  Galen ground his teeth. He was surrounded by idiots! “Then I think it might be wise to do so, don’t you Ken-so? Or hasn’t it occurred to anyone yet that we already have an incident on our hands?”

  “Yes, Sir! I’ll see to it at once, Sir!”

  Releasing an irritated huff of breath, Galen scrubbed a hand over the whiskers on his jaw and then raked his hair from his face with his fingers, creating more havoc with his hair as he tugged on the locks. Frowning at the evidence of his unkempt appearance, he moved from the com unit to his shaving mirror and peered at himself. The face looking back at him came as something of a jolt.

  He was a disgrace to his uniform, he thought in disgust—several days growth of beard—or maybe weeks—he couldn’t recall the last time he’d shaved—and his hair was even worse. The neat military cut he generally wore—or had when he was actually a standing officer of the Royal Confederation of Star Systems—had completely vanished. There was no sign, now, that he’d ever shorn it. He distinctly recalled, though, that he had carefully shaved the hair from either side o
f his scalp and trimmed the black hair in the center to the required maximum length of three inches so that it formed a bristling cockade from his forehead to the hairline before he’d presented himself to the review board.

  Of course, that was when he’d discovered the conditions of his re-instatement.

  He had to suppose he hadn’t cut it since, though he discovered he couldn’t actually recall.

  He’d spent the first week out ‘celebrating’ his release from prison by getting roaring drunk and lying in his cabin in a drunken stupor—at least a week.

  Maybe a little more than that?

  Shaking his thoughts, he studied the parts of his face that he could see for several moments—his forehead and eyes—and finally moved back to his bunk and sprawled on it again. He didn’t just look like hell. He looked old! When the hell had that happened? While he was recovering from his wounds in the med center? During his hellish incarceration in the prison?

  During the trip out to the ass end of the universe where he realized he had been banished for life?

  He frowned, trying to calculate his age.

  He wasn’t old enough to look old, he finally concluded—nearly twelve annums older than he’d been when he’d first risen to the rank of admiral, but he’d been young then—no older than Ken-so was now.

  A buzz at the door of his quarters finally distracted him from his unpleasant thoughts and he rolled up to a sitting position. “Permission to enter!” he barked at the door.

  The panel vanished, revealing a trio of companion droids.

  Galen stared at them blankly for a moment, having been so caught up in his thoughts he’d forgotten he’d summoned them. As he surveyed them, however, anger replaced his surprise.

  The one in the forefront was smiling at him seductively—but her head was definitely listing to one side at an awkward angle. The one directly behind her seemed to be missing an arm. He scowled at them but lifted his hand and beckoned them inside. “Turn.”

  Obedient as ever, the three companion droids pirouetted for him and finally faced him again, their expressions expectant.