Copyright and Disclaimer
Copyright © 2017 by Ruth Anne Scott
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This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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Fawks
Dragons of Kratak | Book 4
Ruth Anne Scott
Copyright © 2017 by Ruth Anne Scott
Contents
Copyright and Disclaimer
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Optorio Chronicles Collection
Legends of Black Salmon Falls (Series Preview)
No Such Thing as Dragons (Series Preview)
Special Invitation
About the Author
Chapter 1
The rocket shuttle zoomed around one mountain and careened upward to stoop over the next. Sheena Lamb piloted the craft in and around the peaks and valleys of Planet Kratak toward the plain lying crisp and sunny in front of Assan Keep.
Team 2 of the research mission to study these rugged and remote people sat strapped into their seats behind the pilot's console. Commanding Officer Jasmine Forsythe, the team's biologist, snoozed with her head leaning against her shoulder strap. Dana Barr, the genealogist, read a novel on her hand screen. Anthropologist Sophia Tompkins gazed out the window. Rex Masters, the Allies' political representative to the people of Kratak, grinned at all and sundry. Nothing made him happier than barreling through space or riding at breakneck speed over the landscape.
Sitting across the shuttle from the team, strapped into seats on the opposite wall, sat the five members of the Simons family. Doctor Ron Simons brought his wife Abigail and his three teenage daughters along on the mission with him. Leona, Jane, and Charlotte stuck together, no matter what. They shared their secrets with each other, and no one else. They giggled about everything, and no one but themselves could comfort them when they cried over their mysterious tragedies.
Ron and Abigail responded to every circumstance, good or bad, by looking at each other. They sought all their answers from each other and found them written in each other's eyes.
Sheena questioned the wisdom of bringing the girls on this mission, but that didn't concern her. She would drop the whole team off in front of Assan Keep and fly away. No one from the Allies would come back to pick them up or even communicate with them until the end of one year, when they would bring their findings back to the Allies for review.
The team would leave all technology behind in the shuttle. Doctor Ron would take only ancient and rudimentary medical tools. The team even had to take their notes with pen and paper to comply with the Krataks’ strict conditions for landing.
Why anyone would want to spend a year of their lives in constant contact with this primitive race, Sheena couldn't understand. Then again, she was no scientist. She made her living piloting space craft of every size and make in every kind of conditions. She commanded a crew of pilots responsible for transporting passengers and cargo all over Allies territory. They operated on dozens of planets, and no one could move a muscle without Sheena knowing about it.
That's how she got assigned to this flight in the first place. General Duncan didn't want just anybody delivering this valuable team to their uncharted destination. No one knew anything about the planet or its climate or its people, so no one knew exactly what conditions the pilot would face flying in.
To Sheena's relief, she found the sun shining out of the clear lavender sky and the mountains and forests lying wide open below her. Not an obstacle obstructed her path from her atmospheric entry point to the Keep's coordinates. Mile upon mile of virgin black forest carpeted the planet below, outlined with savage purple mountains jutting into the sky. Wisps of cloud skated across the sky. Other than that, this could be the easiest flight Sheena took in a long time.
She lifted her finger to turn on the autopilot when a shadow flickered across the ground in front of her. She cast a quick look in that direction, but didn't see anything. She turned back to the pilot's console when something crossed her field of view, right in front of the observation window.
She couldn't ignore that. She scanned the surroundings.
Rex spoke up behind her. “What was that?”
Jasmine opened her eyes, and Dana looked up from her book. “What was what?”
Sheena didn't answer. She punched buttons on her console. The computer detected something moving in the air outside, but couldn't identify it. It started searching its database for a match. That could take forever.
Sheena leaned forward in her seat to try to catch another glimpse of the thing, but the intractable sky spread out all around her with no sign of anything out of the ordinary.
All at once, something enormous swooped across the window. It startled her and knocked her back in her seat. “Holy smokes!”
The whole passenger complement jumped against their restraints. Jasmine screwed herself around in her seat. “What's going on, Sheena?”
Sheena's fingers flew over her console. “Something's out there, but I can't get a fix on what it is. The computer doesn't recognize it.”
“Is it some kind of bird?”
Sheena smacked her lips. “I just said I don't know what it is, and the computer doesn't recognize it. It's running through the whole Allies database and finding no matches. It must be something indigenous to this planet, but whatever it is, it's big. It's bigger than any bird I ever saw. It's bigger than the shuttle.”
Everyone sat up straight and paid attention now. Rex still looked curiously amused, but Sheena never saw him looking any other way. Then again, she never dealt with any of these people in a dangerous situation before.
“What are we going to do?” Jasmine asked. “Can we shoot it down?”
Sheena couldn't exactly tell the mission's Commanding Officer to sit back in her seat and shut her mouth to let the pilot concentrate on her job, so she said nothing. How could she shoot the thing down when she couldn't even see it?
She turned on the tactical display to get a bead on the object, but for some reason the computer had trouble with that, too. Something about the thing confounded the tracking lens and made the object blend into the sky all around it. The computer couldn't detect anything more than a few heat signatures and some biological activity. It couldn't outline the thing's actual shape or detect any definite characteristics.
Sheena slowed their trajectory almost to a standstill. She hovered over the forest overlooking the broad plain. The mountain whose coordinates marked Assan Keep stuck up right in front of her, but she dared not go any further until she identified the object in their path.
All of a sudden, a massive shape appeared out of nowhere. It swooped up from underneath the shuttle at lightning speed and rocked straight toward the observation window. For the first time, Sheena got a good look at it. She recognized i
t out of childhood stories and fairy tales. So that's why the computer didn't recognize it.
It was a huge dragon, pure white, coming in fast on a collision course with the shuttle. It's leather wings surrounded the shuttle, and the claws of all four feet extended toward the window to grab and tear. In front of Sheena's eyes, it gaped its jaws lined with sharp teeth and let loose a jet of fire that licked across the window.
One of the girls screamed. Abigail let out a ragged gasp, and Rex blurted out, “Cripes!”
Sheena reacted in a split second. She seized the controls and banked the shuttle hard to the right. The flames danced down the shuttle's left flank before they could do any damage, and Sheena sent the craft plummeting downward toward the forest.
The shuttle's computer had a fix on the dragon now. It still couldn't identify it, but at least Sheena knew where it was. It banked, too, and folded its wings against its back to follow her down.
Sheena's heart pounded against her chest. She piloted all kinds of space vehicles in combat zones against overpowering foes, but never in her career had she faced something like this. She couldn't think of anything to do but run from it.
She ran through every combat move she knew. She dove at breakneck speed straight into the ground. At the last second before the shuttle crashed into the trees, she slammed back the controls and raced upward again.
Screams and groans echoed from behind, but she paid no attention. Once, Jasmine cried out, “Sheena, what are you doing?”
Sheena bellowed over her shoulder, “Sit down and be quiet, if you want to survive this.”
No one said a word after that, but the girls sobbed in their harnesses. Sheena imagined Abigail with her eyes clamped shut tight and Ron gripping his shoulder straps with white knuckles. Dodging back and forth against crushing forces wiped the silly smirk off Rex Masters' face if nothing else would.
Sheena tore around a mountain as fast as the shuttle would go, but when she glanced down at the console, she saw the dragon dogging her wake at every turn. No matter what she did, it stuck to her. It copied all her moves with no effort at all. That thing sure could fly.
She rounded the mountain's flank and headed across the plain. She steered the shuttle toward another mountain, but she couldn't make the engines go any faster. She could only hope some fancy flying would shake the dragon loose.
She rumbled toward the mountain with the dragon right on her tail. She’d pulled this move dozens of times and destroyed that many enemies in fiery crashes. Just maybe her luck would hold out this time, too.
She waited until the last possible moment before she hit the brakes. At the same moment, she cut the engine and let the shuttle drop out of the sky. It careened faster than it could fly down a sheer chasm. It rolled over and over in mid-air toward the rocky floor far below.
Sheena heard mumbling behind her. She didn't bother to decipher the words, but it sounded like praying. Sobbing came from the other direction. She gritted her teeth. If these pansy scientists didn't understand the first thing about shuttle piloting, they were about to learn.
She held her finger over the engine power button, and the engines roared back to life. The shuttle plummeted toward the ground at terminal velocity, but Sheena didn't engage the engines just yet.
She cast a quick scan over the sky above her. There was the dragon. As fast as she flew toward the mountainside, it didn't crash the way her old enemies did. It reacted fast enough to fly away.
It didn't follow her down into the chasm, either, but soared back and forth overhead and watched her antics. She didn't faze it one bit. She muttered a curse under her breath. “Stinking lizard!”
At the bottom of the chasm, she fired up the engines and zoomed between vertical stone walls. A thin silver stream snaked through the canyon bottom. Sheena followed it. Maybe it would lead her out into the plain. She could make a quick landing and disappear before that monster came back.
She must have followed that stream for a hundred miles. No one moved or made a sound behind her, but tension packed that shuttle with a silence she could taste and touch. Nine pairs of eyes bored into Sheena's back and watched her every move.
Flying through that chasm calmed her nerves. She didn't see the dragon again. She started to relax when the walls hemmed in and closed to a point. She soared upward, back into the forested valleys between the mountains. She searched everywhere, but came up with no sign of the dragon. It must have given up and flown away.
She turned back, but when she checked her position, she cursed again. She was nowhere near the Keep and not even pointing in the right direction. The chasm disoriented her so she lost her position.
She banked the shuttle all the way around to head back in the opposite direction, over the forests to the plain when an all-too-familiar blip appeared on her sensors. She didn't have to look to see what it was.
She hit the throttle and floored it for all she was worth. No more fancy air work for her. She would outrun that thing if it was the last thing she did. She dusted the treetops on her hair-raising flight to her destination. How fast could the dragon really go? How could an enormous serpent with wings outfly the most up-to-date technology in the galaxy?
The dragon dropped out of the sky, but it didn't fall in on her tail. It didn't even try to match her speed. Ha! Stupid animal! She would never let it beat her. Maybe it wanted something to eat. It would lose interest soon and leave her alone.
Sure enough, the dragon broke off its pursuit and rose into the clear sky. It circled a few times, but made no move to come after them again. Sheena caught sight of the plain in the distance and Assan Keep sticking its crooked nose into the air. Just a few dozen kilometers to go, if she could judge by her proximity chart.
No one breathed or cried or prayed now. The passengers trained all their attention on the windows to catch any sight of that dragon. Sheena scanned, but couldn't see it. It was long gone.
Her spirits soared, and she turned her attention to finding a landing place when the computer beeped. She caught one fleeting glimpse of that amorphous shape on her scanner screen. The computer wasn't fast enough to pick it up before it crashed into the shuttle going a million miles an hour.
Not Sheena nor anyone else on the shuttle saw it coming. It plowed into them from somewhere above their starboard wing going so fast it tore the wing right off the craft. The port engine coughed in its effort to compensate for the loss of its stabilizing counterpart.
Sheena fought the controls with all her might, but they wouldn't respond. She banked heavily to starboard. The port engine screamed and spluttered, but it couldn't make up for the absence of one whole wing. The shuttle went into a death spiral.
In between punching buttons as fast as her fingers could fly and searching the forest floor for any open place to set the lame craft down, Sheena caught sight of the dragon on her sensor. It circled directly over them. Its head arched around sideways to watch them. They would crash in a blazing inferno on the forest floor, and it would go back to whatever it was doing when it first spotted them coming in to land.
The controls wouldn't do what she ordered them to. She pushed the port engine into overdrive, but she couldn't stop the craft spiraling out of control. The noise from the port engine whined to a deafening roar and then, with one last cough, died completely.
Ron Simons called out once, “Sheena!”
Sheena didn't dignify that with a response. The shuttle broke through the trees, and a jagged branch punched through the observation window right into Sheena's face. She closed her eyes against the stabbing needles and made one last jab at the console.
She jerked the shuttle's nose up, and at the last second, blasted the hull thrusters toward the ground. The thrusters scorched holes through tree limbs and set dry leaves on fire before they caught hold of the ground and reversed the shuttle's deadly descent.
Sheena slammed hard against her shoulder restraints, and people screamed and cried in the back. At the last possible second before the shuttle
blew up into smithereens, the thrusters slowed the craft just enough to land with a bump on the forest floor.
Chapter 2
Sheena rested her chin on her chest. Her weight hung against her safety harness. Fresh forest air wafted through the hole in the observation window to prick her nose. Animal noises sounded through the forest outside, and tree branches waved against the sky.
When she dared to peek, she saw the console lying cold and dark under her hands. That shuttle wasn't going anywhere for a long, long time.
She let out a shaky breath and called without turning around. “Everyone all right in the back?”
Ron Simons answered her. “Everyone's all right.”
Only then did Sheena dare to turn around and look. She'd lost enough passengers in her career to know she didn't want to see any missing heads or smashed limbs if she didn't have to. Nine lives resting on her shoulders was enough.
To her relief, everyone sat safe and sound in their seats. Charlotte Simons sobbed, but made no sound. Abigail stared at her daughters with a glassy expression. That stupid grin returned to Rex's face the moment Sheena turned around. “That was some kind of flying, Sheena. Whippers, I wish I had that on video.”
For perhaps the thousandth time since she met him, Sheena silently willed Rex Masters to shut up, but he never would. He always managed to say the most nerve-racking thing possible at the worst possible moment.
Jasmine unbuckled her harness first. “Thank you for saving us, Sheena. That was incredible.”
Sheena struggled out of her harness to stand up and face her passengers. “Don't thank me yet. That thing could come back at any moment. Let's get out of this shuttle and get to the Keep as fast as we can.”
The others freed themselves, too. Abigail helped her daughters. “Everybody gather up your gear to head to the Keep.”
Rex came over and glanced down at the dead console. “Can you send a signal to the Allies where we are?”
Sheena didn't bother to check the console. “It's dead.”
Fawks (Dragons of Kratak Book 4) Page 1
