Starbound: Eleven Tales of Interstellar Adventure

by SM Reine

  Her father nodded. “I have no doubt of it. Word always gets around. And that’ll be the commission to finally do the trick.”

  Suddenly, her smile hurt her cheeks. Miala patted her father on the hand and then went to the window, making a show of closing the antiquated blinds, which were still open. Really, though, all she’d wanted was to catch a glimpse outside, to see the stars blinking down from Iradia’s perpetually clear skies the way they always did.

  One day. God, she was tired of telling herself that.

  This time, though, she could almost feel the resolve forming in her, hardening like clay baking under the midday sun. She’d shown that she could do this on her own. No, she would never abandon her father, because he’d watched over her all these years, but she could damn well pull her own weight. And his, if it came to that.

  One day, we will get out of here. One day, I’m going to leave and never look back.

  No matter what it takes.

  * * *

  You can read more of Miala’s adventures in Blood Will Tell, Book 1 of the Gaian Consortium series.

  Raising a Dragon

  Sara Reine

  Raising a Dragon

  Aja Skytoucher was good at two things: driving a Carriage and killing the bad guys. Luckily, those had been her only duties while a coachman with the Alliance, so the job had suited her skill set perfectly.

  She couldn’t number how many times she, driving a Carriage with Emalkay at her side, had engaged in battles that brought the residents of Drakor to their metaphoric knees. True, just as many as those battles had been lost as they had been won, but never because of Aja’s actions.

  She’d slaughtered at least three or four of the enemy by direct action, and that was no small feat with an enemy so large. Until recently, none of their weapons had been tough enough to penetrate such thick hides. Instead, she’d had to outsmart her foes: luring one into a solar well, allowing it to be crushed by gravity; getting into a wild game of chicken with another that had ended in the dragon smashing beak-first into a mountain at thousands of kilometers per second.

  Those two kills alone would have put her kill rate among the highest in the Alliance.

  That used to be her claim to fame—a reluctant claim that had never sat well with her values—but no more.

  Aja was not good at the killing parts anymore.

  Even so, she was still a good coachman. A great coachman.

  She didn’t belong back home on the farm on New Dakota: a strictly agrarian Colony world where there were no Carriages to drive or bad guys to kill.

  She especially didn’t belong with a tiny dragonet, hardly bigger than a cat, exploring her childhood bedroom.

  Neither of things suited her skill set. Not one bit.

  “Well,” Aja said, planting her hands on her hips. The dragonet crawled around her bed on weak legs. “Here we are.”

  It responded by sneezing. A tiny bit of Fog gusted out of its nostrils, melting a hole into her quilted bedspread.

  “Oh, Lords.” She scooped the dragonet off of her bed and tucked it under her arm. Despite having more tail than could ever be considered sensible, the dragonet was easy to lift thanks to bones she suspected to be hollow, like a bird’s. “Don’t do that!”

  It gazed up at her with eyes too large for its skull and chirruped, trilling high and then low. The sound was apologetic. Not too unlike the lowing of a baby calf, should the sound have been run through several audio distortion filters.

  With her free hand, she lifted the bedspread to inspect the damage.

  “Mama won’t believe me if I tell her that this is a cigarette burn,” Aja informed the dragonet. “And if she does, then she’ll beat my butt for smoking again.”

  The dragonet continued to gaze at her in silent contrition. Its tiny beak was scaly and looked soft aside from the pointed tip, which it would have used to break its egg open from the inside if Emalkay hadn’t cracked the egg himself.

  She had rescued the baby shortly after murdering the dragon who had been protecting its nest. It was her fault the dragonet was here, so far from home, and burning holes into her bedspread with Fog.

  “It can be your blanket,” she decided.

  Aja tugged a drawer out of her dresser and put it in the bottom of her closet. She placed the bedspread inside. Then she nestled the dragonet at the bottom. It blinked sleepily, lidded eyes sliding shut and open again slower each time. The dragonet’s hide rippled as it marched in tiny spirals within the drawer, kneading the bedspread with diamond-bright claws. It plucked many threads free, leaving holes. Aja certainly wouldn’t be able to claim that the hole was a burn anymore. Not unless her cigarette had also had daggers.

  The dragonet seemed satisfied with its bed. It hunkered down to sleep with its nose tucked under its tail and wings enfolding its body. It retained its maple syrup like smell from being hatched days earlier, and when it sighed, that aroma wafted through the room.

  Aja tapped her foot, arms folded, and watched its sapphire-blue flank rise and fall with sleepy breath.

  It was not the first time she’d seen the small beast sleep. It had done little else on the journey to New Dakota. It was also not the first time she’d thought how cute it looked.

  This dragonet. The baby of the enemy that had slaughtered thousands—perhaps millions—of humans throughout the Expanse.

  Perhaps the last survivor of its species, if she didn’t learn to communicate with it quickly enough to initiate negotiations with the few lingering residents of Drakor III.

  “Thal be blessed,” she muttered.

  Aja hadn’t smoked ever since the last time her mother had smacked her for it, but she was tempted to take it up again.

  * * *

  Aja’s mother, Haliene, was waiting in the kitchen with a hearty bowl of bone broth. “Drink, drink,” she encouraged, shoving the bowl into Aja’s empty hands.

  Knowing better than to argue, Aja sipped the steaming fluid. She wondered if Haliene would be able to smell the maple syrup on her skin. Hopefully the broth would be pungent enough to conceal it.

  “It’s good,” Aja lied. In truth, the chunks of marrow floating on its surface were repulsive, but she daren’t say that aloud any more than she dared to refuse to drink in the first place.

  “Of course it is,” Haliene said, bustling away to wash dishes.

  Aja glanced toward her bedroom door. Her name was written on it in crayon, which she had done twenty years earlier. A dragonet lay on the other side. She wondered if it would like bone broth. Then she wondered if it would be able to drink at all.

  Did dragons nurse their young, like mammals? Masticate and regurgitate, like birds? Devour the souls of ignorant coachmen who had taken them home to mother?

  Well, she wasn’t willing to surrender her soul or perform any regurgitation. That left one option to attempt.

  “How’s the herd been doing, Ma?” she asked, sitting at the table with her broth. She took another token sip when Haliene glanced at her from the sink.

  “Oh, as good as can be expected. Blasted summer’s been going on too long. All the grass has gone dead and the Alliance has been putting ridiculous limits on irrigation, so there’s little to be done about that. Fortunately, so much dead corn means plenty of feed for the less picky members of the herd.”

  New Dakota wasn’t exactly a fertile world. Never had been. Its solar rotation took ages longer than a standard Sol, and it was nearly always summer in the northern hemisphere, where the Skytoucher farm was located. But it was spacious and geologically stable, so the Alliance had colonized it anyway and built several water synthesizing plants. What water they couldn’t gather from their short rainy seasons and the synthesizing plant, they imported. It was expensive. And that meant the Skytoucher family, along with every other family on New Dakota, never quite did better than scraping along.

  It was the exact reason Aja had run away to the Alliance military when she hadn’t been accepted to the Academy.

  But now
she was back, preparing to sleep in her girlhood bedroom and sipping her mother’s atrocious bone broth like she’d never left.

  “Lots of calves this year?” Aja asked, turning her mind from the cramped sleeping arrangements she’d enjoy that night.

  “Enough,” Haliene said.

  “How are they nursing with such a drought? The cows can’t be any better hydrated than the grass.”

  “I’m supplementing.”

  That was what Aja had been hoping to hear. While water was expensive to import, milk was relatively easy to synthesize, given all the corn they grew. They often fed calves by bottle.

  The bottles were big, with sturdy rubber nipples.

  Perhaps perfect for a dragonet.

  “What’s with the interest in the herd?” Haliene asked, drying her hands on her apron. The brassy sunlight reflecting off the grass outside cast her gnarly curls with a golden halo. “You never had a taste for the work here.”

  “I’m just trying to get my bearings, Ma. Is that trouble?”

  Haliene’s lips pinched. “S’pose not, since your Pa…” She sighed. Tucked a few curls behind her ear. Untied the apron and hung it on the same hook she’d used since Aja was a baby. “We can go out and look at the herd when you’re done eating.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself,” Aja said. Her heart was heavy with the mention of her father. Her appetite, already minimal, had turned nonexistent. “I’ll show myself around. I could use some fresh air after dealing with all the recycled O2 I’ve been inhaling.”

  Haliene watched from the back door of the farm as Aja trudged into the pasture, still cupping the bowl of bone broth she’d barely sipped.

  Aja wondered if Haliene suspected anything.

  She doubted it. Haliene hadn’t been her sharp self in years.

  Not since they’d lost Pa.

  * * *

  Much like Aja, the dragonet wasn’t interested in the bone broth.

  “Please?” Aja pleaded, teasing its beak with the bottle’s nipple as she might with a calf. “I promise you, the broth is good and fatty. You need some weight on that tummy of yours.”

  The dragonet gave her a mistrustful look. It seemed perfectly happy to be nestled in her lap, head against her shoulder, tail curled around her legs. The two of them were very cozy in Aja’s tiny girlhood bed.

  But it wouldn’t open its beak. Not a centimeter.

  The bottle was a no-go.

  “I’m going to let you know right now,” Aja said, “if you expect me to regurgitate anything for you, then you’ll simply have to starve.”

  She felt guilty when the dragonet trilled sweetly at her again.

  Lords, but a baby dragon was precious. Hard to imagine the warm weight on her lap would someday be larger than the average space-faring vehicle and capable of spewing enough Fog to murder hundreds in a single breath.

  Aja bent down to touch her nose to the dragonet’s beak, and she tried thinking at it instead.

  How do I feed you?

  The dragonet trilled a third time.

  She must have been imagining that the dragonet had communicated with her mentally when she’d scooped it from the wreckage of its nest. Aja had been under a lot of stress: recently crash-landed on Drakor III, stranded on an alien planet under a hostile red sun, watching Emalkay destroy the nest in the name of self-preservation. It would have been no surprise if she had snapped from those conditions.

  If communicating mentally was a no go, Aja needed another way to talk to this dragonet. Mostly because she needed to know how to feed it. She’d never seen a dragonet before, but she suspected that the frailty of its limbs was unnatural—a result of its premature hatching. It wasn’t even a proper baby yet. The thing shouldn’t have come out of its egg.

  If Aja and Emalkay hadn’t crashed so close to its nest, it would not have yet emerged.

  Of course, then the war wouldn’t be over.

  Aja sighed, shifting the dragonet’s weigh to one hip so she could stand. A glance through her window showed all of Ma’s equipment resting in the storage sheds. A few Tractors darted through the nighttime sky, moving from one farm to another, on their way to repairmen or storage. The vast expanse of the Skytoucher fields were dark, though. Nights were incredibly dark on New Dakota without a moon.

  Nobody would see if Aja took the dragonet outside with her.

  She still tucked as much of the beast within her jacket as possible before heading out. She didn’t encounter Haliene on the way, so there was no need to hide the dragonet for long.

  The herd was slumbering in the pasture, but cows stirred when they smelled the dragonet’s passing. Or perhaps they were hoping Aja had arrived to feed them. She gathered a following as she headed toward the barn where they kept veterinary implements.

  “No food until morning, you tubs of lard,” she said with no small amount of affection, rubbing the spotted hip of one cow. Though Aja hadn’t raised these particular cows, she had helped nurture enough of them in years past that she was deeply fond of the species as a whole.

  Cows had a reputation for being stupid, slow animals, but they were quite smart in truth. Often playful, too. Not entirely unlike very big cats without the attitude. Aja had spent many an afternoon nap curled up among the herd, breathing deep their earthy scent and dreaming of driving through the stars.

  The dragonet squirmed free of Aja’s arms to stand under a confused cow. It touched its beak lightly to the other animal’s snout. Aja wondered, with some amusement, and equal frustration, if the dragonet was speaking mentally to the cow.

  A nose nudged her elbow. She looked down to see a calf head butting her. Aja had forgotten she was still holding the bottle.

  “Might as well,” she muttered, offering the nipple to the calf. It slurped eagerly and then gave her a loathing look when it realized it wasn’t milk on the inside.

  The dragonet watched the interaction, eyes sparkling with intelligence.

  “Don’t change your mind now,” Aja said. “I’ll think that I might have a chance of keeping you alive.”

  But the dragonet didn’t seem to have changed its mind. Aja wished it would have.

  Aja rubbed the calf under the chin as it licked at the bottle with a long tongue, unwilling to drink but hopeful enough to keep probing it, as though corn milk might appear.

  “Sorry, no luck here,” she said, tossing the bottle into a bin outside the barn.

  She popped inside to grab a medical bag, such as the kind they used to give checkups to grazing cows.

  When she returned, the dragonet was gone.

  “Oh, Thal,” she swore.

  She pushed through the herd, bag slung over her shoulder, to search for a glimmer of soft scales.

  A pained squeak caught her attention.

  Aja changed directions, heart thudding as she raced to the edge of the pasture.

  There she found the dragonet: not injured by some kind of predator, as she’d feared, but crouched over a patch of grass.

  “You can’t run off like that, little dragonet!” Aja kneeled beside it, more admonishments on her lips. Words failed when she saw what the dragonet was doing.

  It had caught a fat mouse, such as those that raided the grain silos, and was shredding it to pieces with its beak. The dragonet’s babyish face was covered in mouse guts.

  A dozen horrible memories of the war washed over her: photos of dragons crouched over human bodies, just like this mouse, awash in their blood. The dragon she had killed on Drakor III. The aftermath of battle.

  The dragonet chirruped excitedly and snapped the remainder of the mouse’s carcass into its gullet, swallowing it whole.

  “Well,” Aja said.

  At least she didn’t have to worry about feeding it now.

  * * *

  Aja awoke at dawn two days later to find the dragonet had doubled in size.

  “Thal be blessed!” she exclaimed, leaping backwards from her closet door.

  The dragonet, formerly the size of Aja’s chi
ldhood dog, was now the size of a calf. It didn’t fit in the drawer. Its limbs and tail spilled over the sides. This fact didn’t seem to bother the dragonet; it was snoozing happily, Fog curling from its nostrils on every exhale.

  It had literally grown overnight.

  “Lords above.” Aja had to grip the closet door for balance.

  The dragonet had spent most of its waking moments in the past two days chowing down on every mouse it could find in the barn. Haliene had made an offhand remark about how the ratting cats were doing better than usual for the season, and Aja had suspected that the dragonet would likely wipe out the population if given free rein.

  She hadn’t suspected…this.

  What had she been thinking, bringing such a creature to her home? To the place her mother lived? She knew nothing about it. Truly nothing, aside from the fact that its species would have likely wiped out humanity across the Colonies if they hadn’t developed plasma rifles when they had.

  There were no books to tell her that dragonets would have such growth spurts. She didn’t even know how long they lived. She’d assumed she had weeks—hopefully months—before it got too big for her closet.

  Yet there it was. She would no longer have been able to conceal it within her duffel bag.

  Aja didn’t awaken the dragonet. She closed the door slowly, leaving it propped open an inch, as she had for the last few nights.

  Then she sank to her knees and let her face fall into her hands.

  What have I done?

  “Aja!”

  Her mother was calling from the kitchen.

  Aja straightened instantly, jerking the hem of her shirt to ensure that she was covered properly, though her civilian clothes didn’t get rucked up the way that her Alliance uniform had. Aja made sure her bedroom door was closed firmly behind her before joining her mother for breakfast.