Metal Dragon (Warriors of Galatea Book 2)

by Lauren Esker

  "Oh, you're not getting those off anytime soon," declared the pirate standing over him, a cruel edge to his voice.

  Lyr looked up at him with a resigned sigh. It was the centaurian Hnee. I wish I'd cut his throat while I had the chance. "You again. You're like that story about the cursed coin, always turning up in every—oof!"

  A vicious, powerful fist drove into his stomach, followed by a backhand blow to the face. "You can call me Zef," the centaur said. "Or sir, if you're so inclined." He bent the knees of his horse half so he could look Lyr in the face, while Lyr gasped for breath. "You'll pay for destroying our ship. But first you'll help us recover our cargo, before we sell you, of course."

  "You have not yet ..." Lyr panted. "... given me any reason ... to help you."

  "Oh, it's a reason you need, is it?" Zef straightened and stepped back with a quick skipping motion of his incongruously graceful horse half. "Let's see if this is motivation enough." He took a small device from a pouch at his belt.

  Despite his attempt to control his reaction, Lyr flinched violently at the sight of it, as if he was already feeling the pain it could inflict.

  Zef grinned, showing crooked teeth, some gold-capped and others broken. "Oh yes, you know what this is, don't you? I've always liked using these." And he touched a thick, dirty finger to the collar controller.

  Pain exploded in Lyr's spine, in his skull, behind his eyes. He couldn't think, couldn't breathe. The entire world was pain. He wasn't even aware of crashing to the ground until the pain stopped and he realized his face was pressed into the leaf-mold of the forest floor. There was dirt in his mouth and a taste of blood where he'd bitten his tongue.

  Cruel laughter came from the other pirates. "Is that enough of a reason for you?" Zef asked from somewhere above him.

  Lyr flexed his hands cautiously as feeling returned to his tingling limbs. He felt blood trickling down his wrists where convulsions had torn his skin against the wire, but nothing seemed to be too badly damaged.

  I am going to kill you, he thought with enforced calm. I am going to kill you, and then I am going to find whoever designed this horrible thing, and kill them too.

  But first, he had to get through the next few hours. The collar could kill, at a high enough setting. He didn't think the pirates would kill him on purpose—the price they could get for a collared dragon had to be worth their entire cargo of ordinary slaves. But killing him by accident, because they enjoyed torturing him ... he could entirely believe them capable of it.

  It startled him to find out just how much he wanted to live. He had to live; he had to get back to Meri.

  "Get him up," Zef said, but Lyr struggled to get up on his own before they could put their hands on him again, and managed to stand on legs still quivering from the aftereffects of the collar.

  Their camp was small and crude, offering no shelter and no comforts except a small campfire which one of them was even now putting out; apparently they planned to move on. He wasn't exactly sure where he was. All he could do was hope they weren't too close to the site of the camp where he'd left Meri and Tamir.

  Zef idly examined the collar controller, and Lyr's stomach turned over. "So," Zef said in a casual way, "when we last saw you, you'd just gotten away with an entire shipment of our slaves. Where are they now?"

  "Killed on landing," Lyr said. "I'm the only survivor."

  Zef tapped the button lightly. This time Lyr was braced for it, but it was also shorter duration, a single sharp burst of pain.

  "What purpose would I have in lying?" Lyr demanded. "I'm alone on this world."

  "I don't know why you're helping them, but I know you're lying. We've smelled smoke since we've been here. We're not the only people here."

  This time the shock was of longer duration. Lyr went down to his knees.

  There was no possibility of helping them find the escaped prisoners' village, no matter what they did to him. Even if he hadn't given the villagers his word, he would rather die than help these honorless bastards. He braced himself for more pain, but instead Zef said to one of the other pirates, "Can he shift while he's wearing this thing?"

  "No," Lyr answered for him. "You have to take the collar off." It wasn't the whole truth—it was possible to deactivate the function that stopped him from shifting—but since they didn't seem to know how it worked, he wasn't about to give them that much power over him.

  Zef stroked his thumb over the button that controlled the pain function, but didn't touch it. "You sure about that?"

  Lyr braced himself for more pain and drew his lips back in a humorless grin, tasting his own blood on his teeth. "If I could shift, don't you think I already would have?"

  "Damn," Zef muttered. "I was hoping we could use you for aerial recon."

  "Why do you need me? You have a ship, don't you?"

  A couple of the other pirates barked laughter. Zef said, "We barely made reentry in one piece. We aren't going anywhere."

  "So why are you worried about picking up slaves here? You can't get them off the planet anyway."

  Zef grinned. "Distress beacon, my lad. We have our own frequencies. If there's one of ours nearby, they'll be here soon enough."

  Wonderful. Lyr remembered Tamir talking about pirates having a fairly well-established network of communication frequencies and hideouts, but he hadn't been paying a whole lot of attention. He really hadn't cared about his officially assigned duty much at all in those days.

  Now he wished he'd paid more attention so he'd have a better idea of how big their network was and who was likely to be in the vicinity. Back then, it was just a duty, an assignment. Everything was duty. Nothing mattered.

  I'm going to get out of this, he thought as they hauled him roughly to his feet. He didn't offer resistance this time, saving that for later. Let them think he was but the docile slave they wanted; let them think they'd broken him. They would learn soon enough, to their despair, the wrath of an angered dragon.

  "You planning to cooperate now?" Zef asked him.

  Lyr smiled again, grim and sharp. "As you command."

  "Hmm." The pirate leader looked down his broken nose at Lyr. Not stupid, this one. It would've been easier if he was nothing but the hotheaded brute he appeared. "Still sticking to your story that there's no one else but you on this planet?"

  "That's all I've seen," Lyr said, and then, taking a slow breath, "But I was separated from the others in our crash landing. It's possible some of them might have lived."

  Let's see how you like wandering around on a stray asteroid chase, asshole.

  "Now we're getting somewhere, eh?" Zef fingered his controller pointedly. "See how much easier it is when you play our game?"

  And playing you is exactly what I'm doing. "I've already searched the other side of these mountains and found no one," Lyr said. He tried to orient himself along the slope of the hillside. The last thing he wanted to do was inadvertently lead them to Meri and Tamir. As he spoke, he tried reaching out very gently, very cautiously with his mind—he didn't want them to sense it—and mentally massage their credulity, make himself sound more plausible. "I was going to search along the shore. I thought I might've seen smoke when I was up there, before one of you shot me down."

  "Think he's lying, boss?" a leopard-spotted Galatean pirate asked.

  "Oh, probably," Zef said, stroking the controller lightly as he looked down at Lyr. Lyr prepared himself for an explosion of pain, but none came. "If he wants us to go down, we'll go up. Let's move."

  They marched Lyr out of the clearing, keeping hold of him by a rope tied to his wire-bound hands. Up, Lyr thought, which would slow them down and offer him more opportunities, on the high slopes, to spring an ambush on his captors.

  Once, long ago, his Galatean masters had wanted to use him as an assassin, a mind-killer. He had learned the hard way that he couldn't do it without hurting himself and potentially killing himself. But if it came down to that, it might be possible to take one or two of them with him.

&nbs
p; I've got my eye on you in particular, he mused grimly, glancing at Zef.

  On a more subtle level, he thought he might be able to use his telepathy to confuse their minds somewhat, keep them wandering in circles, as long as he could.

  At the very least it would help keep them away from Meri.

  He didn't want Meri and Tamir to know how much trouble he was in—the last thing he wanted was those two mounting a rescue—but he needed to warn them. Cautiously, hesitantly, he reached out.

  To his surprise, he found Meri almost immediately. She was reaching out for him too, and it felt like she'd been doing it for a while.

  *Lyr. Lyr. Lyr!*

  Clumsy at mental speech, unaccustomed to it, but trying her hardest.

  *Meri?*

  Her wordless delight and relief flooded over him. He had to struggle to keep it off his face. His carefully schooled calm, practiced over the years, seemed to have fallen apart.

  It helped that he tripped over a root just then, distracted by Meri in his head.

  *Lyr! Are you hurt?*

  *No!* It was basically true ... and it had also dawned on him that she was much closer than she ought to be, even if he was lower on the mountain and closer to the camp than he thought he was. He could also tell, from the general sense of her surroundings bleeding through the connection, that she was outside the camp on the hillside somewhere. The conclusion was inescapable: they were looking for him. At least he hoped Tamir was with her. *You have to stay away. I'm not alone. The pirates are here.*

  *I know! We're going to rescue you.*

  19

  ___

  “L

  YR'S ALIVE! And I think he's close!"

  Tamir looked up at her delighted exclamation and touched a finger to his lips. Meri nodded and hushed.

  They had been climbing for a while now, making their way up the mountain following animal trails through thick, colorful brush. They'd stopped to rest in a small clearing with a staggering view down the mountainside, making her realize how high they'd already climbed, and were sharing a ration pack when Meri's attempts to contact Lyr finally paid off.

  "How close?" Tamir asked quietly.

  *Lyr, where are you?*

  She got nothing back but stubborn stonewalling.

  *Lyr! Knock it off!* She tried to wedge her mental fingertips into the cracks in his walls. *Lyr, I know you want me safe, but if the pirates are here, none of us are safe. Where are you?*

  A reluctant answer came in the form of a mental picture. She couldn't see Lyr himself, just the woods around him as she looked out through his eyes. All the forest looked pretty much the same to her, so that was no help. She could tell that he was climbing and probably had his hands tied.

  What truly alarmed her was the sight of the pirates around him. There was that centaur jerk again, and about a half-dozen rough-looking individuals, mostly Galatean, though there was also a shorter man with green skin and a hooked blade in each hand. No—the blades were part of him, like Lyr's arm blades, but thornier-looking, like the edges of a crab's claws. This guy looked almost insectile, with strangely large eyes and short, spiky hair.

  *Lyr, can you show this to Tamir too?*

  There was reluctance, but then she could feel him acquiesce. What happened next was a slightly unnerving experience. She could still feel Lyr, but now she could sense Tamir as well; it was as if Lyr was connecting them in a psychic party line. She saw the surprise on Tamir's face and felt it in his mind as well.

  *It's been a long time since we did this.* She had never heard Tamir's mental voice before, but recognized it immediately, a warm strong voice with a tiger's growl underneath. It seemed somehow deeper than Lyr's, despite the fact that neither of them was speaking out loud. *Lyr used to connect us like this when we were training his sept,* Tamir added for her benefit.

  *Can we focus?* Lyr inquired grumpily. *Show me where you two are, because I'm getting the sense you're not in camp.*

  Meri concentrated on showing him their surroundings and was aware of Tamir doing the same. *We're going to rescue you,* she told him.

  *No! Stay away.*

  *Why?* Meri asked.

  Before Lyr could answer, she felt a rush of anger from Tamir. *You're collared again, aren't you?*

  Lyr's response was a nonverbal surge of tangled emotions, mostly shame and anger and resentment. Meri felt Tamir trying to soothe him, sending out a blanket of calm that also helped damp down her own urge to spring to her feet and dash off into the woods to get him free right then and there.

  *Lyr. Easy. I can get it off you, like I did before.*

  *They can't use it to force you to do evil things, can they?* Meri asked. *Can they make you attack us?*

  *Not directly. But listen, there's more. They have reinforcements coming. They've sent out a distress call and they seem to think there are more pirates on the way.*

  Tamir cursed quietly under his breath.

  *Which is why you two need to do something more important than coming after me,* Lyr went on. *I found the rest of the escaped slaves, your green friend and the others. They're on the other side of the mountains. You need to get over there ahead of us and warn them. I'll do everything I can to slow this bunch down.*

  A mental map of the village's location followed, but Meri wasn't paying attention. She leaped to her feet, gripping her club. *We're not leaving you!*

  Tamir struggled to his feet with a wince and put a hand on her arm. *Meri, hold on. Lyr, listen. It's not an either-or situation, either you or them ... understand? It's going to take us days to get across these mountains on foot. It makes more sense for us to rescue you first and then you can fly over and warn them.*

  *You're rationalizing this.*

  *I'm making a sensible decision as your commanding officer. You're a valuable asset and we need you. And,* Tamir added, with warm affection underlying his mental voice, *you need to stop trying to throw yourself on every bomb that comes along. Think about Meri and what leaving you behind would do to her.*

  *Listen to him, Lyr! We're going to get you out.*

  Stubborn silence followed. She sensed that Lyr was done with the conversation for now.

  "We're not going to leave him, are we?" she demanded of Tamir, who was getting his gear together.

  "Of course not, but there's no reason we can't do both," Tamir pointed out. "If they're climbing, and Lyr wants us on the other side of the mountains as well, then our paths lie in the same direction. We'll try to get ahead of them and set up an ambush."

  "You can get that awful collar off him, right?"

  Tamir nodded. "I just have to get close enough. But in case I can't, let me show you how to use this." He took a small, square object out of his belt pouch and pressed it into her hand. It was made of rugged gray plastic, or something plastic-like. There were two buttons (one blue, one red), what looked like a weird-shaped power prong, and a colorful strip that changed from blue on one end to red on the other.

  Meri's skin crawled, looking at it. This was what had been in the hand of the pirate who had made the blue-skinned captive writhe at his feet, back on the ship.

  "You first need to sync it to Lyr's collar," Tamir explained. "It won't affect it until you do that. This—" He touched the power prong. "—needs to make physical contact with the collar. There's a small dimple at the back; you just need to tap it. This controller was synced to Lyr's old collar but it won't be on the same wavelength as his new one. Then—"

  "I don't need to know all this," Meri protested. She pushed it at him. "I don't want to know all this. You can—"

  "I can't be the only person who can take it off him. You need to know. Anyway," Tamir said, "you can use it to take the collars off the others when we find them, too. Don't you want to know how to do that?"

  Meri nodded. She swallowed her revulsion along with her desire to throw the thing to the ground and crush it. "What do the buttons do?"

  "This one turns it off." Tamir touched the blue button lightly. "But you hav
e to turn the correction level all the way down first. That's this." He stroked his thumb across the red-to-blue strip, from the red end to the blue end. Blue, Meri thought, must be like green was on Earth. "Otherwise it'll give them a surge of pain when it turns off."

  "This is horrible. Your people make these?"

  She didn't need telepathy to sense Tamir's discomfort. "Pay attention," he said gruffly. "This is the correction button." He touched the red one. "Once the controller is synced to Lyr's collar, do not press this button. It'll hurt him. At high levels, it can kill him." He used his thumb to slide a small, transparent panel across the buttons. "This locks it so they can't be pressed by accident. Got it?"

  "This thing is vile." She thrust it back at him. "Yes, I've got it. And once we take the collars off everyone, we are destroying them, and this, and everything to do with them."

  "Deal." He gave her a small smile, that she didn't return.

  ***

  Their need to get ahead of Lyr and the pirates turned the next part of the climb into an exhausting ordeal. Meri had thought she'd been pushing herself before, but now she discovered reserves of strength that she hadn't known she had.

  Tamir guided their path, finding animal trails through the brush and open spaces between the trees. In spite of her renewed dislike of the Galateans and all the misery they'd caused, Meri couldn't help being impressed by his wilderness orienteering skills. She would have been quickly lost on her own.

  But it was a miserable, exhausting trek. She was covered in sweat and harassed by bugs, which had rarely been around at the lower elevations but rose from the underbrush in choking clouds as they climbed higher. The insects didn't seem to bite, just swarmed around their heads and crawled on their skin and made an already tiring and unpleasant hike even harder to endure. Meri could tell she was rubbing blisters, and she was so tired that the muscles of her calves and thighs quivered and twitched whenever they collapsed for a rest. Her only consolation (and it wasn't much of one) was that the climb was wearing Tamir down even more severely. He looked gray under the fur, and when they stopped to rest, he sank down where he stood and had to lie there for a few minutes before gathering the strength to get out one of their makeshift canteens.