Piper trailed alongside her. She exchanged a glance with the other woman. Her friend’s eyes held the same glimmer of fear mixed with excitement that Tamara’s own must have shown. That they were headed toward something momentous was undoubtable. Whatever had made all the noise had struck the ground only a few miles away. Close enough to be an easy walk. Far enough to let their trepidation rise as they journeyed forth.
Tamara heard wingbeats overhead twice on their walk. Each time, she made the signal to be still, and her friends froze in place. The dragons were growing more numerous as each year passed. How long would it be before they found her people and dug them out of the warren where they hid? Some days if felt like each dawn was a gift that might be taken away at any moment.
Kendall paused at a ridge and motioned her forward. Tamara slipped up as silently as she could, crouching close to the ground beside her friend. What she saw in the small valley below was difficult to describe.
It looked something like one of the structures from the Old World. But where those were rusted, twisted, half-burned ruins, this one looked intact. Had all the old frames once fallen from the sky? That didn’t match the stories her people told. The old ones said that once, humans had lived in the dead cities, before the dragons came.
Younger minds scoffed at the idea. There had always been dragons for as long as any living person could recall. The idea of a time before the dragons when humans wandered freely over the world was ridiculous. And yet, Tamara was a hunter, free to roam the world and explore while seeking supplies for her people. She had been to those ruined places. She’d seen the remnants of the cities. They did indeed look like they had been inhabited by humans, so there had to be something to the old tales.
Tamara tried to imagine a world where people lived above the ground in massive structures like the one before her. It was hard to picture what that might have looked like.
Piper came up beside her and leaned in, pointing below. She leaned in close to Tamara to whisper at her. “Look at that.”
It was hard to see what she was talking about at first, but then Tamara spotted the flash of iridescent green hidden amidst the brush. Was it a dragon? She tensed, ready to flee if the thing came after them.
But the dragon wasn’t moving. If it was indeed a dragon, it was either sleeping or dead.
The latter was unlikely, but incredibly dangerous. Oh, there had been a few dragons that had died, but they always came to claim their own when they fell to age or illness. Tamara knew to avoid their corpses because they were certain to draw more dragons in time.
“It’s dead, and half buried under the metal structure,” Piper said. Her eyes were the keenest of the trio. “Did the building fall on it?”
It was plausible. But if this structure had fallen from the sky and slain a dragon, could it be used to kill more? Would more buildings fall down, perhaps on top of her home? The metal tower was new and frightening to Tamara, but her people were depending on her to ferret out its secrets.
“We need to know more,” Tamara said.
“It might be dangerous,” Kendall replied. He looked nervous at the idea of going down.
“We are warriors of Hero’s Keep. We fear nothing,” Tamara said.
She felt like her words were as much to convince herself as Kendall. Tamara wanted the same thing he did — to flee this place and leave its mysteries behind her, yet a burning curiosity filled her at the same time. More than ever, she felt like the gains might well be worth the risk involved.
“Quietly, follow me,” Tamara said.
They slipped down the hillside in a single file. Tamara gripped her spear tightly, holding it at the ready as she snuck toward the tower. The dragon was more visible from this closer vantage point. It was indeed dead, only the head and a few other parts extending out from beneath the tower. She burned with the need to know how it had happened, to discover the secrets behind this place. For the first time in a long while, she felt the flickering of hope that she might be on the verge of discovering something to save her people.
They needed that more than ever. Time was running out for Hero’s Keep. Surrounded by enemies and dragons, it was only a matter of moons until a war broke out that no one was going to win.
That structure held the key to a different path. She felt sure of it. The smooth sides of the tower spoke to the power of whoever had built it. This was no crudely hacked together tool. The tower looked like the ancient buildings in the cities, but new and fresh. Who could tell what treasures it might contain?
“Be ready for anything,” she whispered to Piper, who nodded in reply.
Her hunting party closed in on the base of the tower warily. Danger was everywhere. Death came on swift wings. But with luck, she might come away from this place with tools that would turn the tide in favor of her Keep.
Seven
“You really should be getting up now,” Toby’s voice came to Scott as if from far away.
Scott groaned and opened his eyes a crack. He snapped them closed again, wanting more than anything to slip back into unconsciousness. His head was pounding, and his entire body felt like it had been beaten with a hammer. Worst, he was dangling chest-down from his harness.
Dangling hurt, but not enough to knock him out again. Just enough to be incredibly uncomfortable, damn it. He groaned again, more theatrically this time, and opened his eyes again.
The first thing he saw was the dragon’s head leering at him from the ground outside. Scott jerked completely awake, struggling at his straps. The thing hadn’t eaten him yet. Maybe he still had time to get away!
But it wasn’t moving.
Scott realized it was still. Totally, completely motionless. The dragon’s eyes were open, but they didn’t seem to be staring at anything in particular. His eyes traced the line of its neck away from those terrible teeth, down its throat toward the body…
Nope, no body. The neck ended abruptly at the edge of his ram scoop, which had driven itself a couple of feet into the ground. Red blood was splashed about on the ground from the severed neck. That dragon looked dead as a door nail.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Scott Free, dragonslayer.”
He liked the sound of that. Although he hoped it wasn’t some sort of protected species or someone’s escaped pet. He was hundreds of years in the future. Who knew what sort of things the people of this time did? The dragon had to have been engineered in a lab. Some sort of Jurassic Park type thing, maybe. Scott was pretty sure that self-defense was a legitimate reason for killing a dragon. Hopefully, whatever legal system this new world used would agree.
The Stargazer was pretty beaten up. Dragon chomps aside, crashing through the trees hadn’t been good for the ship, and if the impact with the ground wasn’t as hard as he’d been expecting, he’d still struck hard enough to sever a dragon’s head from its body. That couldn’t have been good for the ship, either.
Scott unbuckled his straps carefully. The window was about six feet below him, cracks running all through it. If he tumbled forward out of his chair and smacked into the window, he wasn’t sure it would hold. The ground was a long way down out there.
Amazingly, the ship still had power. Scott flipped on a few switches. The radio still worked, the lighting was still active, and he even had power for the hatches and ventilation. The advantages of having a fusion reactor in the core of the vessel. He could run that thing for a long time on low power.
Once the straps of his harness were undone, Scott swung over to rest his feet on the side of the pilot’s console. He stretched, feeling every bruise the fall had left on his body. His headache didn’t seem to be fading, either.
“Toby, what are we going to do now?”
“Primary mission imperative: find a cure for Fatal Familial Insomnia. We are currently 3,033 miles from your destination,” Toby replied. “Recommend finding transportation.”
The destination was how far away? U Cal Berkeley was where they had developed the cure for his illness,
or so the last radio message he’d received had said. That was over a year ago. It had taken Scott a long time to get the ship back home, even moving at almost the speed of light.
Scott tried the radio again. “Stargazer One to anyone out there. Mayday. Crash landed. Need assistance. Anyone?”
There wasn’t any reply. Scott waited a little while and then tried again with the same results. Was there no one listening to radio broadcasts anymore? Scott supposed that was possible, but it felt weird. That was one tech he’d figured would last pretty much forever.
“Well, I guess we ought to go see if we can find some people. Get some help,” Scott said.
“Woof,” Toby replied, nodding his head vigorously.
The climb up to the hatch was a pain, literally. Scott’s chest was a web-work of bruises. The harness had saved his life, but everything they said about falls was true. It really was the sudden stop at the end that hurt the most.
He considered climbing back into the hold to grab some gear. There was still plenty of food on board the ship. He had water and a bunch of other supplies. The Stargazer was well-stocked. Scott had even thought to pack a bunch of interesting curios, things he thought might sell for something once he was in the future. Just in case the extensive investment portfolio he’d left behind was lost. He had a small stash of gold as well, which would likely still be transferrable into currency even in the far future. One could never be too careful, and gold had been a staple for a long time.
But it was a long climb up into the crew area and the hold. They were in the middle section of the ship, which was now up from where he was, thanks to the nose stabbing into the ground. He decided he was too tired and hurt too much to bother. Coming back for the rest of his supplies later made more sense.
Scott laid his hand against the panel beside the hatch. It bleeped, and then flashed red. He stared at the device, wondering why it wasn’t working. He placed his palm against the reader again, and got the same result. It took a third failure before Scott realized he was still wearing the gloves for his suit.
“Of course that’s not going to work,” he said, and slid the gloves off one at a time. He dropped them down toward the seat, where they clattered into place next to his discarded helmet. The rest of the suit really ought to go as well, but it could wait until he was outside.
This time the palm reader flashed green. The hatch growled at him and then rolled open. Scott pulled himself up into the airlock. A second panel rested on the wall a few feet away. When he pressed his hand to that, the door behind him slid shut. There was the briefest of pauses as air hissed into the chamber, but it didn’t take the airlock long to figure out there was atmosphere outside. The outer door opened up.
Scott’s first impression was to gag. He almost put his hand on the panel again to shut the door, the smell was so bad. It was like old meat and rotting vegetables stirred together. The heat that rolled in with the air was intense enough that he broke immediately into a sweat.
“Holy shit, it’s hot out there.” He wondered again just where he’d landed. The whole crashing-with-a-dragon-eating-his-ship thing had distracted him from being able to take proper coordinate readings on his way in, and the ship’s GPS was totally borked. It wasn’t giving him any location at all.
He wasn’t going to figure it out by sitting in his ship, though. Scott crawled out through the hatch and grabbed a handhold on the outer hull. A ladder ran down the entire length of the ship, from the tip of the scoop to the tail of the engine. Being careful not to slip — the ground was a long way down, and his fingers were already greasy with sweat — Scott began lowering himself hand over hand toward the ground.
Toby’s head popped out of the hatch. “Do you require assistance?”
“No, I’ve got this,” Scott replied. But how was Toby going to get down? He didn’t have hands to grab the rungs. While he was trying to think of a solution for this problem, the robot took a step out onto the hull, then another.
At first Scott thought Toby was going to tumble all the way to the bottom, and he opened his mouth to protest. The dog was annoying, but he’d grown on him over the years. Toby looked at his open mouth.
“You’ll catch flies,” Toby said, then began walking down the side of the ship, carefully placing one leg after another.
“I will not,” Scott replied, moments before a fly zipped inside his mouth. He gagged and spat it back out. “Gross!”
He’d forgotten the robot’s magnetic feet. The same magnets which let him walk around the ship in zero gravity and held him in place during the crash now let him walk slowly and carefully down the side of the Stargazer. Toby reached the ground before Scott did.
The source of the stink was evident immediately. The dragon reeked. Scott wasn’t sure how long ago it had died — how long had he been out? But flies and other bugs had already begun working their magic on the neck and head. He didn’t want to think about what the rest of the body looked like, buried inside the cone of the ram scoop. Well, mostly buried. As he circled the ship, Scott discovered a claw and a wing that were also exposed.
“What a mess,” he said, looking around.
“Ruff,” Toby agreed.
The trees were every bit as tall as they’d looked, towering a hundred feet or so above the ground. The tip of the Stargazer’s engine stood barely above their tops. Sunlight blasted through the hole his ship had made, but everywhere else the forest floor was gloomy. And wet. It wasn’t a swamp, precisely, but Scott could see pools of water scattered about between the trees.
“I think we have company,” Toby observed, looking out into the woods.
“Oh, good — rescue at last?” Scott replied, turning around.
A trio of people stood in front of him. They were dressed in clothing that looked like something out of a Tarzan flick. All three of them held long spears, each with a very sharp looking point.
All three of those points were aimed directly at Scott’s chest.
Eight
“We come in peace?” Scott said, raising his hands above his head.
This wasn’t the welcome he was expecting. No, the humans of the future might not hail him as a heroic figure, but he thought at least he’d be something of a celebrity for a little while. It was like having Magellan show up in the twenty-first century. Or it should have been, anyway.
“Hi?” Scott asked. “Um. Friends? Maybe don’t point those things at me? Please?”
His mind raced, trying to figure out what was going on. Some parts of the world had still used spears when he had left Earth, but he’d assumed things would advance enough over the course of a couple hundred years that the practice would have died out. Apparently it was still alive and well, at least where he had the misfortune to land.
These people were Caucasian. They looked to be of European descent, which didn’t match up with his memory of any cultures that used spears. Two of the spear-holders were women, one blond and one with red hair. The third was a man whose head was shaved so close you couldn’t determine the color. That one pointed past Scott’s head, eyes wide.
“Look!” the strange man said.
Well, thank god they spoke English, at least. That would make life a little easier.
“Listen, if you can get me to a phone, or whatever sort of thing you all use to communicate, I can call someone and be on my way. I didn’t mean to bother you,” Scott said.
The blond woman jabbed at him with her spear, silencing him. The point had barely touched his chest, but it was warning enough. She held her ground, glaring at Scott, and gestured with her head to her companions to go check out whatever the man had seen.
Scott glanced over his shoulder to watch them. They walked over to stand next to the dragon’s head. The man jabbed it a couple of times with his spear until the woman with him shoved him, hard. He stumbled, and she laughed, then turned back to face Scott’s captor.
“It’s a dragon, and it’s very dead,” the red-haired woman said.
The blond woman
with the spear nodded to her and then looked back at Scott. “What happened here?”
“The dragon attacked my ship while I was trying to land. But my ship killed it when I crashed,” Scott said. Honesty seemed like the best policy when one had a spear tickling his ribs.
“You killed it?” she asked, in a tone that sounded like she wasn’t sure she believed him.
“Well, yes,” he replied.
The man pulled a big knife loose from a sheath on his belt and began hacking at the dragon’s neck. Scott wasn’t sure what he was doing at first, but then the head rolled free from the other ten feet of neck. The man grabbed it by a horn and tried dragging it. The redhead took hold of the other horn. It took both of them to haul the thing even a few feet.
“We’ll have to bring back help if we want to haul that to the Keep,” the blond woman said. “For now, hack off a horn as proof. We’ll bring it along — and him.”
Toby chose that moment to step out of the brush, clanking with each step. All three spears shifted direction to aim at him. This was a relief for Scott, who no longer had a pointy thing poking him, but he was worried how the robot might respond to such overt aggression.
He shouldn’t have. Toby stopped in place, sat down, dilated his eyes so they were extremely wide, then rolled over on his back, waving his feet in the air and panting.
“Woof!” Toby said.
“It’s a dog?” the blond woman asked, glancing back at Scott.
“Yes. My dog. Sorry, I’m sure he didn’t mean to startle you,” Scott replied.
He wasn’t sure how they could take Toby for an ordinary dog. While he was shaped roughly like one, and certainly could sound like one when he wanted to, he didn’t have fur. Toby’s ‘skin’ was metal.
The Quantum Dragonslayer Page 3
