Metal Dragon (Warriors of Galatea Book 2)

by Lauren Esker

  The dragon roared forth from his deceptively human-looking skin, its serpentine mass uncoiling into the corridor as Lyr gloried in the feeling of the two halves of himself clicking into place, making him whole. There were other shifters in the galaxy, including some Galateans, but all of them were constrained by the physical mass of their human body. No others could do this. His people theorized that their dragon side represented a fourth-dimensional rotation, bringing the dragon half into the regular universe and taking everything he'd had on him, from clothes to boots to anything in his pockets, into the place it had come from. The only things that couldn't be so easily banished were metal. The implants under his skin hurt sharply and then the pain faded as his body adapted around them. His cuffs stretched to accommodate his much larger wrists, the nanite-enhanced metal designed to be one-size-fits-all. A handful of metal buttons and fasteners clattered to the floor.

  He was dimly aware of Tamir dodging backward to get out of the way. The pirates, who had expected to find two human-sized intruders, instead found themselves in a corridor full to the ceiling with a furious dragon.

  They fell back in horror as the enraged dragon fell on them, but it was too late. They didn't even have time to get a shot off. He was rage made flesh, tearing them with his claws, ignoring Tamir yelling something at him from behind.

  He felt, in some distant part of his mind not consumed with bloodlust, as the Earth woman's fear and anger sharpened to a sudden point of decisiveness. She had chosen to attack the pirates.

  ***

  Meri knew she didn't stand a chance. She also knew that nothing could make her stand here and just watch as the one alien among the captives who had been kind to her was dragged away by these awful people, probably to have something horrible done to her. Silver-Eyes had said they needed hostages, but what if the people on his ship didn't agree to the pirates' demands? Would they simply execute her? Or were they taking her somewhere else to be tortured, raped, murdered?

  She got to her feet without being noticed among the milling, anxious prisoners. Meri gripped the heavy clownfish purse by its strap, and she lunged forward, swinging it with all her might at the centaur's arm.

  It was surprise, probably, more than anything else, that made him drop his prisoner. The green lady scrambled away on hands and knees, and the centaur lashed out with a hoof, kicking Meri and knocking her to the floor.

  She hit hard and tried to roll away. On her hands and knees, she looked up to see the centaur pointing his loosely closed fist at her, with the cuff glittering on his wrist.

  This was what came before one of those green energy blasts. There was nowhere to go, Meri realized, and the centaur clearly knew it. His bearded face split in a sadistic grin.

  And then everything jerked violently sideways.

  A tremendous shockwave bucked the deck just as the entire world seemed to ripple. There was a wrenching instant when there seemed to be no up or down, and then everything snapped back like a rubber band and Meri tumbled bruisingly against the wall, just as the lights went out, plunging her into total darkness. All around her, people were screaming. The air smelled like smoke, and there was noise—a deep groaning in the ship underfoot, as if it was trying to tear itself apart.

  ***

  The entire ship jolted violently, the deck bucking under Lyr's bloody claws, just as the ship began to jump. The shockwave carried them into the disorienting ripple effect of hyperspace.

  A normal jump was a moment of mind-twisting timelessness, in which the ship hung suspended outside the regular universe. But this time, rather than the usual seamless transition, the deck heaved violently underfoot as they snapped back to normal space. A wave of disorientation and dizziness washed through him.

  "That was a direct hit right before we went into hyperspace," Tamir gasped, stumbling into the wall. The green light of the shield around him had died. He slapped one of his cuffs with his palm. "I don't think we completed the jump. Are your cuffs working? Some kind of energy pulse—"

  The lights went out, leaving them in pitch darkness filled with the hellish screaming of tortured metal. Dropping out in mid-jump was tremendously stressful on a ship. The sudden stresses were ripping the ship's frame apart.

  Lyr sank his claws into the metal of the floor. Vacuum wouldn't hurt him in his dragon form, but it would kill Tamir. He focused on his connection to the cuffs. They weren't completely dead; he could feel them trying to come back online, and focused on making a little shield-bubble to trap some air.

  The corridor bucked underfoot again, and then it split open, cracking like an egg and exposing them to the cold vacuum of space.

  Lyr lost his grip on the floor and tumbled out of the hole in the side of the ship along with anything that wasn't nailed down. His ears popped painfully as he fell into absolute chaos. There was no up and down in space, and the entire world, the entire universe seemed to consist of nothing but pieces of ship, battering him from all sides. He folded his wings around him. Space itself might not hurt him, but being a dragon wouldn't save him if he got himself pulped by a wayward fuel tank.

  Tamir, though—

  Lyr dived toward Tamir's tumbling ragdoll-shape and caught him in his claws. He extended the small shield-bubble to cover Tamir, who was limp in his claws. At the moment he couldn't even tell if Tamir was alive or if he'd just risked his life to rescue a corpse. Blood drifted in droplets in the vacuum inside the shield that surrounded Tamir, holding the tiny amount of air that Lyr's shields had managed to catch.

  But it wouldn't matter how much air Tamir had or how badly he was hurt if they didn't get out of here before they were crushed to pulp. Lyr kicked off a section of the ship's bulkhead, folding his wings to glide through the debris. Momentum wasn't going to get him as far as he needed, but his people had a natural adaptation for flight in deep space: gas sacs in their wings, capable of propelling them in small bursts. When he spread his wings and deployed them, slim jets trailed from his wingtips like smoky contrails as the warm vapor froze in the cold.

  He used the gas in small puffs and rebounded from one chunk of debris to the next, gliding silently through the vacuum, out of the death zone. Once he was clear of the drifting junk cloud, he steered in a circle and braked with tightly controlled bursts from his jets to look back at the damaged ship.

  From here, the damage was bad, but not quite as devastating as it had seemed from the middle of it. The ship drifted dead in space, surrounded by a floating cloud of its own debris. The outer modules had cracked off and split open, and the engines were a blackened wreck. However, most of the ship's core seemed to be intact, including the passenger module.

  He tested his connection to his cuffs. They seemed to be back online, and he used their communications function to scan the local communication frequencies. He could detect no radio chatter in the area. No stations, no ships, no cities. They'd dropped out of hyperspace in a completely uninhabited part of space. He had no idea where they were, except to guess it wasn't wherever they'd been aiming for.

  It was peaceful here, outside the debris field. Peaceful and quiet and dark. Lyr hung in the blackness of space and found himself enjoying it. Dragons were creatures of starstuff, dwellers of the void. The depths of space were the natural home of his kind. He would eventually need to seek out food, water, and air, but for now he was reasonably comfortable, the bitter cold sliding off his scales. If he needed to, he could enter the hibernation state of his people and survive out here for as long as necessary. Dragons had traveled between stars in just such a way.

  But Tamir couldn't.

  Why should I care? he thought furiously. Tamir, who had never helped him. Tamir, who had let his sept die—

  Tamir, who had taken off his collar and freed his dragon.

  And it wasn't just Tamir. He looked toward the ship again. If the ship's core modules were intact, there might be an entire ship full of prisoners in need of his help, including the human woman with the bright spark of courage that had attracted him.<
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  It was with only the greatest reluctance that he sent a cautious tendril of telepathy questing into the void, seeking the human woman. He didn't want to feel the absence where she had been. And he wasn't even sure if he wanted to feel her living presence; it meant responsibility, it meant going back, it meant thinking about people outside himself again.

  But whether he wanted it or not, he felt her immediately, a rush of her fear and elation flooding his head in an odd, confusing mix. His heart lurched and flipped over and seemed to start beating again.

  She lived. He broke the contact before trying to speak to her, but the awareness of her survival filled him with feelings he couldn't quite even name. Relief might be part of it, along with a grudging acknowledgment that he had to go back.

  And in some deep part of his soul, he admitted that he didn't really want to stay out here until he died, however appealing it might be.

  There was peace here. Endless frozen peace.

  But the ship offered a chance to live, and people who needed him, including Tamir's only chance to survive, if he was even still alive. There couldn't possibly be much oxygen left in the small amount of atmosphere trapped within the shield.

  Fine, he thought grimly. It seemed that life wasn't done with him yet. Nor he with it.

  Not while people still needed his help.

  6

  ___

  F OR THE FIRST MOMENT after the lights went out, Meri could only cling to the metal decking in the grip of the most profound disorientation she'd ever felt in her life. She had never known darkness like this. It seemed to press on her eyes. It had weight and heft.

  And then the lights came back, not bright like before, but dim and reddish; she knew emergency lighting when she saw it, even on a spaceship.

  In that first instant, pirates and prisoners seemed equally shocked. The centaur struggled back to his hooves and turned Meri's way, pointed his arm at her face—but nothing happened.

  There was a startled moment of hesitation as the implications sank in, on both sides, and then the prisoners surged forward.

  Meri huddled against the wall and tried to stay out of the way. The centaur lashed out with his hooves and the shock-stick, and used his greater size and mass to struggle to the door, out of the mob, to flee. The other pirate wasn't so lucky. He went down under a wave of attackers. Meri didn't see what happened to him exactly, and she was glad for that. The tormented prisoners had no hesitation about taking revenge for the abuse they'd suffered.

  By the time Meri managed to struggle to her shaking legs, it was all over. The pirate was dead and the prisoners were now quarreling over his bracelets and shock-stick. The mood in the room vibrated with tension. Meri wondered despairingly if they'd gone from one powder-keg situation to another. There was no telling where most of these people had come from or how long they'd been prisoners. Some of them looked as hardened and dangerous as the pirates.

  But there were also people like the delicate green lady, who was now sitting on the floor with her thin arms wrapped around herself. Darker green bruises blotched her smooth skin. Meri crouched to touch her shoulder. "Are you all right?"

  The woman flinched away. "I won't hurt you," Meri told her, wishing desperately she could make herself understood. "I'm a nurse. Nurse. Do you need help?" She touched her chest. "I'm Meri. Meri."

  Her calming voice managed, eventually, to penetrate the green woman's panic. "Preet," the woman said, touching her own chest.

  "I'm going to touch you now. Is that all right?" She touched Preet's shoulder, waited to give the woman a chance to move away if she wanted to. When Preet offered no objection this time, Meri's well-practiced hands went into the familiar motions of checking for broken bones and gently testing the arm's rotation. It's just another ER shift. You know how to do this.

  The woman watched her nervously, but didn't try to resist as Meri gently but firmly manipulated her arm. "You're going to be okay," Meri told her, hoping that her smile and confident tone would reassure in the absence of a common language. "Can you help me with the others, please?"

  She helped Preet get up and took her over to the little group of Earth refugees, who had stayed out of the mob violence in fear and bafflement. One of the formerly unconscious women was now awake and quietly crying, which meant Frank had two semi-hysterical companions on his hands and looked like he was halfway to turning into a sobbing mess himself.

  "What's happening?" he asked Meri anxiously. "Are we being rescued?"

  Why the heck do people keep thinking I know what's going on? "I'm not sure," she said, and guided the green woman's hand to the shoulder of one of the unconscious women. "Keep an eye on her. Keep her from being trampled. Do you understand me?"

  Keep them busy. Give them something to do.

  "Should we leave?" Frank was asking. "Should we stay in here? Is someone coming to—"

  "I don't know!" It came out sharper than she'd meant it to. The woman weeping on Frank's shoulder collapsed in a fresh round of sobbing. Meri tried not to sigh, got a grip on herself, and put a hand on the woman's shoulder. "I'm sorry. I'm just as much in the dark as the rest of you. Miss, are you hurt? Do you need help?"

  "I want to go home!" the girl wailed piteously.

  Me too, honey. Me too. Meri's throat ached.

  But they were here, and there was no going back. She wished she knew how her friend with the silver eyes was doing; she could really use him here to help. *Are you there?* she thought as hard as she could, feeling a little silly, but she wasn't sure how else to get in touch with him. *Hi? Can you hear me? Are you okay?*

  The response was ... strange. It was him but not-him, a sense of power and heat, the smell of a burning candle and the ghost of something huge and golden just at the edge of her consciousness. But she also picked up some sense of a comprehensible answer. *Here. Okay. Busy.*

  ***

  Lyr didn't realize until after the contact was broken that it was the first time the human woman had intentionally reached out with her own mind and contacted him, and that she'd done it successfully. He was too busy trying to get back into the ship.

  Like most spaceships of its size, the pirate ship was composed of a number of separate modules docked together: passenger compartments, cargo bay, engines, etc. In a disaster like this, the modular design of the ship had worked as it was meant to, distributing stress and sealing off damaged areas, allowing the more protected modules to survive intact.

  But it had also turned the ship into a twisted maze of off-kilter modules, damaged compartments, and broken seals, surrounded by a minefield of floating debris that included radioactive matter from the engines, the drifting contents of spilled fuel tanks, and other hazards. Finding an open bay wasn't hard; the tricky part was finding somewhere he could get into that would allow him access to the sealed and pressurized modules.

  And the clock was running out for Tamir.

  Lyr managed, finally, to get into a cargo bay that had what appeared to be a functional airlock. He fought his way through floating crates and barrels, kicking them aside with Tamir held against his chest with one clawed forepaw. The airlock's automatic controls didn't work without power, but Lyr pried open a panel with a claw-tip and started the emergency cycling procedure. The airlock was too small to fit him as a dragon, so he took a breath and shifted, wrapping his arms around Tamir and extending the shield to cover both of them as he did so.

  After once again enjoying the power and strength of his dragon body, he felt all too keenly the shock of the cold and the fragility of this tiny form. Dragging Tamir, he kicked his way into the airlock and hauled the door shut. The airlock cycled; his ears popped, the inner door opened, and the artificial gravity kicked in. Lyr slammed bruisingly to the deck, with Tamir's limp weight on top of him.

  He picked himself up and checked the ambient air with his cuffs, then let the shield drop. The air was adequate, though stale, and the corridor was lit with dim emergency lighting. The ship was on backup power. The artificial g
ravity still worked because it took a while for the grav field to collapse without power, but in a day or two, everything inside would be floating as well as outside.

  If they all lived that long.

  Lyr checked Tamir's pulse. It was present, though fast and thready, and Tamir was breathing faintly. He looked awful. Even in the dim light, Lyr could tell he'd had a few collisions with floating debris before Lyr got to him, not to mention the vacuum exposure.

  "C'mon," Lyr muttered, and hauled Tamir unceremoniously over his shoulder. He missed the weightlessness of space for this. Not that he wasn't strong enough to easily carry him, but Tamir's bulk would put him at a disadvantage if he ran into any pirates.

  Which he did, a few minutes later, as he was trying to navigate the section-seal between this module and the one he was pretty sure the human woman and the other prisoners were in. The seal cycled and opened, and there on the other side, looking as startled as Lyr himself probably looked, was—

  "Oh, it's you," the centaurian Hnee snapped, clattering quickly backward on swift-moving hooves as his shields went up. Lyr raised his own at the same time.

  There was no human woman to stop him from killing the bastard this time. But there were two issues. Problem one: Tamir. Problem two: the corridor was too narrow to shift here without tearing it open and decompressing this section.

  Dammit.

  The centaur started to aim at Lyr, then raised his arm at the last minute and fired above his head. Lyr realized what he was planning too late to stop it. The shot tore through the ship's metal skin, and there was a sudden rush of wind as the corridor began to decompress.

  "Oh, so that's how we're going to play it," Lyr growled.

  Switching his grip on Tamir, he shifted. His body bulked huge in the corridor, back spikes pressing agonizingly against the ceiling before the weakened metal split along the crack opened by the pirate's weapons. Lyr caught Tamir in his claws and extended the shield forward, covering Tamir and his own forequarters.