Asger glanced at his feet and immediately grasped the problem. He grabbed Leon by the arm and hoisted him over his back. He was now giving Leon a piggy back to a place he wouldn’t have wished on his worst enemy. Leon was too curious about what he’d find there to much mind the indignity of being carried like a kid.
When they got to the perimeter of the dark patch, Asger set him down, and drew his weapon—up until now, dangling from his waist.
“Whatever is killing these plants and animals, I don’t think your club is going to help,” Leon managed to say without sounding too condescending.
“I might still club you to death with it for compelling me to leave my good sense back where we landed at the foot of that cliff.”
“Fair enough.” Leon studied the edges of the darkness. He pulled his shades over his eyes again to avail himself of its telemetry. What it couldn’t handle, a wireless link to the Nautilus could, with access to the ship’s supersentience. “According to my glasses—”
“Those extra pair of eyes you put on…. You want to improve your eyes, I want to make my hearing worse. Do you have something that shuts out the sounds of the women droning on about how useless we men are?”
Leon smiled. “I believe I have just the thing, if we survive this.”
“In that case I pledge my club in your defense, and will forego taking your head off unless your deafening technology proves inadequate. Are all women from all worlds like that?”
“Yes, I say that with complete confidence having been to just two worlds.”
Asger grunted. “I like your sense of humor, though on my world it would get you killed. My people don’t accommodate well to not being taken seriously.”
“On my world, it’s the only way to stay sane.”
“We have no use for sanity; it gets in the way of the killing.”
Leon chortled. The results of the analyses the Nautilus was running were in. The ship had done more than boost the telemetry of the shades; it had aimed some of the shipboard scanners at the spot which now had both men fixated. “A ship crashed here,” Leon explained.
He wondered why the Nautilus’s equivalent of next-generation LIDAR hadn’t detected the crashed vessel from orbit. Its scanners could peel back the layers of the planet like an onion. Perhaps, like with the radiation he was detecting, the ship, even in death, was guarding its secrets. Leon had to draw the Nautilus’s attention to it to get it to hack away at the crashed ship’s safeguards. Though it was possible the planet itself, or technology from the Nouveau Viking’s long-forgotten past, was keeping many of this world’s secrets hidden.
“It is buried not too far beneath the surface,” Leon said in reference to the alien craft. “I suspect on board we’ll find the technology used to pass through the gate.”
“Is it radioactive?”
Leon did a double take in his direction. “Yes,” Asger said, “we know of radiation, or at least I do. My memories show me unpleasant things in association with it.”
“Nasty business. Radiation is most definitely the cause for this killing field. I suspect the ship emitted it as a last ditch effort to keep it safe from raiders, possibly to give anyone still living inside a chance to escape.”
“So we should make haste away from here then?”
“It’s too late. The dosage we’ve received is already quite lethal.”
Asger sighed. “You will bring us back from the dead, as you did before?”
“The Nautilus will. Though this time we will not have to die, or even get very sick, I suspect.” The Nautilus was already beaming them up.
“What is happening?”
“Our ship stationed between us and the star gate is bringing us aboard. Once it has healed us it will return us to the planet.”
“You are getting as trying as the wife.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
Asger laughed.
He turned and roared and swung his club. Leon ducked just in time, not sure how to take the gesture. Some predator had decided if they were going to stand in one place long enough, they deserved to be eaten. But Asger’s bat never connected. They were already too incorporeal. And as for the charging rhinoceros-inspired creature, its many horns ended up catching up another animal, which it tossed high into the air with a flick. The panther-like predator went from being impaled on one of its horns to incurring the sensation of being masticated alive in its mouth. Leon suspected the impalement was starting to feel good now by comparison.
SIXTEEN
THE NOUVEAU VIKING PLANET, ERESDRA
“Do you have love on your world?” Eira asked.
Ajax felt it was a loaded question, considering they were riding atop her dragon and one false word could cause her to signal her beast to throw him and forge safe passage for him to Valhalla down its gullet.
“Love is blind. Marrying a man, on the other hand, is a real eye opener.”
She thought about it, long enough for Ajax to wonder if the Nautilus’s language translation tech had let him down. But she finally burst out laughing. “I think I will keep you as a pet.”
“That’s what my last wife did. She even had me walk around on all fours with a collar and eat out of a dog bowl.” He sighed. “I thought it was a good relationship.”
“What is a dog?”
“A creature on four legs that we make pets out of.”
“So, it will try and kill you then while you sleep?”
“No, our pets are loyal.”
“What’s the point then?”
“Hmm. Maybe you aren’t so different than our women after all.”
She came in late on cue, but she howled with laughter. “You make joke. I like. Our men don’t joke. Not much capacity for conversation at all, except to grumble about their aches and pains or boast about their kills.”
Ajax grimaced. “Our men were once like that. But with time, they were trained to be more in touch with their feminine side. Now they’re very in touch with their feelings, and treat women like equals.”
“That makes no sense at all. We are nothing alike. We make children; we create history. You men make war so we have room to have more children, by eliminating the competing tribes. You help ensure our history endures and theirs does not. On our world we have no desire to be more like one another.”
Ajax was starting to look for a way out of this conversation. He was hardly the one to be giving lectures on sexism, or anti-sexism for that matter. “Let’s get this ride started, huh?”
She smiled. “You asked for it.”
Eira proceeded to ride that dragon the way World War II Kamikaze pilots rode their planes. Every time Ajax was certain they were about to crash, she’d pull up at the last second. Her dragon could dive bomb with the best of them. It ejected unfertilized eggs that acted very much like incendiary bombs.
Ajax gazed down at the camouflaged Alpha Unit compound below. “Very nice of your people to come out and play with us,” she said.
Beholding the devastation below, Ajax frowned. “Isn’t it though?”
***
Ariel gazed up at the lightshow in the night sky, supplied by the dive-bombing dragon and its incendiary, infertile eggs. “You say they’re just playing?”
Patent smiled and took the cigar out of his mouth. “My God, these people have spirit. If we had a race of folks like them back home, we wouldn’t need special ops forces.”
“You don’t mind if I give them a piece of my mind, do you?”
Patent let his mischievous smile speak for him, keeping an eye on the antics of the dragon above. The dragon was invisible in the pitch black sky until it was virtually upon them, illuminated only by the light of the fire spewing out of its mouth, or the exploding eggs. It reminded him of the haunted house tours he took as a kid with his girlfriend what seemed like a lifetime ago. He was as happy as a pig in shit right now. If he could just get the rest of Alpha Unit to share his sentiment. They seemed to be running around with their heads cut off. Patent sighed watchi
ng his young men and women ducking for cover, shivering, vomiting, reaching for weapons their hands were too shaky to hold steady. He shook his head in dismay.
“So much work to be done, so much work.” He sighed. “Suppose I should thank that wench in the sky for exposing the shortcomings of my training for me. She’s rewriting my entire playbook on the fly.”
He dropped the cigar, squished it beneath his boot, and stomped over in the direction of the panicked teens. “Why aren’t you enjoying yourselves?” he barked. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I guess Pavlov was wrong, sir. You know, ring the bell and we salivate. Drop the bomb and we go, yay!” Skyhawk pumped his shotgun. From the way his face was twisted up, Patent didn’t get the sense he was enjoying his own sarcasm. A damn shame, being as it was damn fine sarcasm. He might get through this yet.
“Well?” Patent glared at him. “Are you going to fire that thing or keep playing with it? It is not the phallic substitute you think it is.”
“Speak for yourself. After my dick gets shot off, I’ll be using it to send my little soldiers into battle up the nearest tunnel of love for me.”
Patent grimaced. “Crass, disgusting… Now if I can just get you to fire that gun properly, my work will be done.”
The kid rolled, and fired the shotgun while lying on his back straight up at the dragon overhead. He rolled back under cover nearly as quickly.
Patent studied the outcome of the discharged arsenal for himself. The slug had penetrated the energy shield protecting the camp effortlessly, as it had been designed to do. They could fire out, but the dragons couldn’t fire in—not past that energy shield—not so far.
The slug lodged in the dragon’s underbelly, in the softer tissue, relative to the armored back and shoulders. From there, the EMP discharge was just enough to screw with the dragon’s own electrical signaling. Instead of dropping its eggs, efficiently, one at a time, its vagina spasmed just as the electrical current headed for her brain went back the same way it came and ignited the egg—still too close to all the other eggs. The colossal explosion inside her belly had the animal shrieking and falling to the ground. But outwardly it was still intact. All the same, Patent doubted it would be alive much longer.
“Well, go over and finish it off,” Patent said. “Cruel to let it lie about like that.”
“Did I mention I was an animal lover? I didn’t think the shotgun would actually hurt her. I just wanted to scare her off.”
“Best laid plans… It’s a fact of war, son. The sooner you learn that the better. Now, get going. You can grieve later, you can drown in emotions later; I find it quite cathartic to schedule my emotional breakdowns in tandem with a full moon. All that extra fluid collecting in our brains at those times; it’s a period of collective madness for the entire species no matter how you look at it. So you can grieve with impunity.”
“I swear I can never decide if you’re the most profound human to ever walk the earth, or just the most crazed.”
“I’ll get back to you when I have an answer to that one myself. Now get going,” Patent barked.
The young lad, Skyhawk, managed to run in the direction of the felled dragon while tripping every few yards or so. In an effort to bolster his confidence, Patent shouted after him, “Nice ducking and rolling to frustrate enemy fire there, young man!”
God, that kid was hopeless. But he was good with computers and virtual reality and who could ever have enough of those guys? Most of the tech toys that made up their armaments these days were computerized; so you wanted a gun to fire, you pretty much needed someone like Skyhawk around if something went wrong. No matter how much Patent bitched to keep computers far away from assault rifles of all varieties, the pluses kept outweighing the minuses in the minds of the engineers. And as for Skyhawk’s VR aptitudes; well, even if he never made a decent soldier, he might well help with the VR-training of countless others that were.
***
Skyhawk crawled beyond the perimeter of the energy shield protecting Alpha Unit’s encampment, en route to the dragon he’d wounded. He was supposed to put the beast out of its misery, but the closer he got, and the louder the pained outcries, the more he wanted to save it.
The dragon, lying on the ground on its side, its head at an angle, kept a wary eye on him. It expelled a couple fiery bursts his way, which Skyhawk didn’t appreciate, but he soon realized the snorts weren’t directed at him; they were meant to repel the invaders trying to crawl up its nostrils. Whatever lay dying or dead on this world, clearly didn’t stay that way for long. The small scavengers were only temporarily dazed by the dragon’s blasts, but not ultimately deterred. Seconds later they were headed back to the dragon’s nasal cavities, determined to use them as fast-lanes to its brain. Perhaps they were brain-feeders; their niche in the biosphere.
Skyhawk pulled a device out of his cargo pants pocket and adjusted the dial until he found the frequency that drove away the wingless vultures. The dragon sighed relief. Its expression and attitude changed toward him.
He was close enough now to pet the beast soothingly on the snout, probably not the smartest thing he ever did. “Where’s your rider, buddy?”
“I lost him many eons ago,” the female voice said in his head.
“Whoa! You understand me? How is that even possible? Forget about the whole telepathy thing! Tell you what, we’ll just queue those questions up in a long line of what the fucks.”
“Your mind is easy to read, and your language simple. And now that I’ve chosen you as my rider and we are bonded, I can read your thoughts no matter how far apart we are.”
“Ah, I’m definitely not dragon-rider material, sweetheart. Have a distinct fear of heights. Speed, too, for that matter. I get on the slow train to visit my grandmother, and even then, I have to pull the blinds down.”
The dragon laughed, her voice even in laughter sounding like a Siren calling him. He ignored the summons; he was more married to his fears. His attention shifted to her wound. He pulled a scanning device out of another cargo pants pocket, ran it over her abdomen. “Hmm, you appear to be healing yourself.”
“In the presence of my rider, I am becoming fertile again. It changes the acid mixture of the eggs, makes them less toxic to me.”
Skyhawk nodded. “Cool, I guess, being as I feel like shit for shooting you. But apparently soldiers are supposed to shoot back when attacked. I read that in a manual somewhere.”
The dragon sat up, looking more alive.
“Well, my work is done. I better get back to the other side of the energy shield. It’s way too noisy out here for me, you know, with all the explosions and weapons fire, to say nothing of the dragons squawking. Bye, then.”
Skyhawk crawled his way back toward the shield.
He didn’t get very far. He was sliding backwards, reeled in as if by some tractor beam. “Okay, lady, I really meant it when I said this relationship just wasn’t meant to be. I like my women with both feet on the ground, even when I’m mating with them, that way there’s no chance of falling off the bed.”
“You’ll get used to flying with me. You’ll enjoy it in time.”
Skyhawk, pulled by the “tractor beam”, slid up the dragon’s side—backwards, until he was on her back, when he was suddenly sitting upright. “Just to be clear, this is already too high off the ground for me. If you could exhale deeply, that’ll get me another couple feet closer to the forest floor, which I would deeply appreciate. It’ll still feel like suicide throwing a rope over to slide back down, but they’ve been trying to get me to rappel down a line for months. I suddenly feel entirely motivated to perfect the art.”
The dragon took to the air.
“Oh, dear God.” Starhawk reached into another pocket, pulled out a blindfold and wrapped it around his eyes. “Well, that definitely helps.”
Suddenly he was able to see through the blindfold and into the darkness better than if he’d had his eyes opened and unobstructed. “Stop mind-linking with me! You’re def
eating the whole purpose of the blindfold!” Skyhawk took a look at the battle taking place in the air. “Shit, if I knew all this was going on, I’d have hacked the Nautilus and teleported myself to hell out of here. Come to think of it…” He rolled up his sleeve on the left arm with the wrap-around keyboard, and started keying.
Skyhawk found the dragon’s scales at his knees jutted out well enough for him to hook his legs around and the ones further down made it easy to catch his feet under. All in all, the dragon seemed to come with its own saddle by how its scales grew. The “horn” of the saddle, was proving a good handhold as well, or rather, a good security blanket.
“The least you can do is fly me away from this madness.”
His dragon didn’t listen. None of the women in his life listened. Why should she be any different?
She climbed skyward at an astonishing rate, which did nothing for his already seasick sensations. Then she dive-bombed another of the dragons below. The ride down was even worse than the ride up! It took Skyhawk a while to realize he was screaming the whole while. His dragon caught up Cronos in its beak, nipping him right off the seat of his dragon. Cronos was one of the Omega Force guys. Great! Just great, Skyhawk. Bad enough you can’t fight worth a damn; now you’re taking out Omega Force guys. This dragon’s back may be the only safe place ever from now on, providing it never lands.
“Ah, just for the record,” Skyhawk shouted, holding out his one hand at Cronos placatingly, “This is not my idea. I’m a pacifist, not that anyone cares.”
Skyhawk’s dragon didn’t wait for him to finish his apologies. She snipped Cronos in two. His flexible body armor, by the way, stitched into his fatigues, was supposed to prevent that; it could stop a bullet, but apparently not Skyhawk’s dragon’s jaw-crushing abilities.
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