RAWN

by Bonnie Burrows

  RAWN

  DRAGONS OF THE UNIVERSE BOOK 2

  BONNIE BURROWS

  Copyright ©2018 by Bonnie Burrows & SimplyShifters.com

  All rights reserved.

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  About This Book

  Introducing...

  RAWN

  Dragon Super Knight, Sir Rawn, had been genetically enhanced to make him stronger, smarter and SEXIER than any dragon that had ever walked on to the planet of Lacerta before.

  However, in all his time as the number one weredragon bachelor in the universe he never found a mate.

  And time was ticking.

  Rawn's super genes were beginning to deteriorate and the only woman that could help him to survive was Joanna Way.

  But whilst Joanna wanted to keep their relationship strictly professional, Rawn was more interested in making her the mate he had been searching for all of his life...

  “RAWN” is Book 2 from the “Dragons Of The Universe” series. Each book features a new handsome dragon's quest to find his perfect mate on a planet far, far away. If you love steamy dragon romance, hot adventures and fiery thrills then you will love this!

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  The space liner had entered the Catalan star system, and Joanna Way could see her destination from the viewports along one side of the private cabin that her press credentials had secured for her. The blue-green, cloud-streaked planet reminded her of Earth, albeit an Earth with three moons of moderate size rather than one large moon. The nova-tossed settlers who had landed there so long ago had named it Lacerta, a name synonymous with reptiles, after the planet had changed their nature and their destiny.

  What looked like a small, shining jewelry object attached to her shoulder emitted a soft, almost melodic voice: “Would you like to go over the collated data and your questions one more time as we make our final approach to the planet?”

  “No, Epaulette,” Joanna replied to her personal AI. “We’ve been over it thoroughly by now. I think I’ve got it.”

  Joanna may not have been as good at storing and processing information as an AI, but she had gotten the knack for memorizing things in school. Her original major was theatre, and she once saw herself becoming an actress. Taking up acting as a profession was no longer what it once was on Earth. People in the creative and performing arts no longer had to face the prospect of not being able to make a living in their right and proper profession.

  The abolition of poverty by making every human a part of a planetary (and later, interplanetary) commonwealth and distributing monetary units and goods equally among all people had done away with that burdensome existence. Joanna would have been more than happy in the life’s work that she had first chosen for herself—if the “reporting” bug had not bitten her while she also became a student journalist for a campus media feed.

  She had taken a sharp turn in her student days, exhilarated by the process of tracking down a story and collecting all the facts, and the satisfaction of presenting them and informing others. By the time she was three-quarters of the way through college, she had changed her mind about her career, and she had never looked back.

  The upside of her change of professional interests was that Joanna was always completely at ease in front of a camera. This served her well because her pleasant ingenue features, accented by well-coiffed chestnut-brown hair that she wore exactly to her shoulders, were very recordable, and her on-camera manner inspired trust and confidence in whatever she had to say.

  She was sure that she would have done well as an actress had she chosen to remain in theatre; she would have had a long and fruitful career playing leading ladies. But in reporting, she had found her element, and she had no regrets. She had interviewed planetary heads of state and the most famous men, women, and beings from more worlds than she could count. She’d had little trouble landing the assignment from the Terran News Service that employed her to cover Lacerta after the Scodax conflict and had thrown herself into the work with her usual relish.

  Joanna wanted to hit the ground running when she reached Lacerta--even though she would not actually reach the ground of Lacerta itself until after she was finished at her initial destination, one of the Interstar Fleet spacedocks in orbit of the planet. Her initial business would be there. The Catalan system had been put under lockdown when the crisis struck, a lockdown that had yet to be fully lifted. Consequently, many civilian vessels had been stranded either on Lacerta itself or in spacedock, and those aboard the space liner with her were mostly relief workers or other journalists.

  Virtually every ship that had entered the system since the emergency began was a Fleet vessel from one planet or another, and they had clamped down a tight security in the space surrounding Lacerta. To some extent, conditions of martial law now prevailed both on the planet itself and in the inner system. It was only to be expected when a planet faced invasion, and in the days after the invasion ended.

  The spacedock where Joanna was headed was strictly a Fleet facility, serving only armed vessels and uniformed crews of the Fleet--and the renowned Knights of the planet in whose orbit it lay. It was here that Joanna's assignment would take her first. She hardly considered it the most interesting or challenging part of her assignment, but it only made sense to head for the spacedock first before beginning the on-planet reportage that would be the majority of her work.

  Watching the planet through her viewports, Joanna reflected on how serene it looked, a serenity that belied the upheaval and violence that had engulfed Lacerta so short a time ago. One would never know to look at Lacerta now, with the kind of mayhem that had lately taken place on it and around it. But the facts were the facts, and Joanna calmly and quietly related them to herself. What had happened at Lacerta was just this:

  Without warning, the armada of aliens from an unknown planet called Scodax came into the system. The Scodax had multiple goals in occupying the planet. First, they wanted Lacerta's mineral resources: specifically, its richness in the mineral compounds Draconite and Odysseum. The former was a mutagenic substance that had changed the colonists of Lacerta from common humans to something more, something that had made their Knights the most respected--and sometimes feared--warriors in space.

  The latter was a mineral treasured throughout the civilized galaxy for its property of becoming spatially and temporally unstable under particle bombardment, which made it vital for powering interstellar travel. But there was another, more dire part of the Scodax agenda, one directly related to the planet's most famous citizens. The Scodax had come to conscript the Knights of Lacerta into their service as a conquering army.

&nbs
p; Joanna wondered at the sheer audacity of the whole thing. What made the Scodax actually believe that they could impress the mighty, indomitable Knights of Lacerta into their service? What made them think the Knights would submit to being forced to battle, not for their own planet and not for Earth or any of its territories, but for a completely unknown and hostile alien power?

  The further facts of the conflict had come to light from information provided by two of the Knights, Sir Thrax Helmer and Dame Meline Gable, and a civilian, Agena Morrow, who had been drawn into the conflict by being Sir Thrax’s selected mating partner. The Scodax who had attacked Lacerta were, in fact, the last members of their dying species, and the genetic plague that was killing them had first rendered them insane.

  They had just enough of their faculties remaining to attack an Earth colony that was the home of powerful and fearsome warriors who would battle them to the death and take as many Scodax as they possibly could with them; warriors who would not be humbled, no matter what evil thing the Scodax did, and would never surrender. The fact that the Scodax were complete strangers to this part of the galaxy and to the beings they had tried to bring to heel only slightly mitigated the futility of what they had tried to do. The bottom-line fact of the whole matter was that the Scodax were out of their bloody minds and, thus, doomed to the utter defeat that made their extinction final.

  Part of Joanna’s itinerary on the planet would be to interview Sir Thrax, Dame Meline, and Agena Morrow. This latter civilian, one of the most famous champions of the Sphereball competition circuit, was an especially interesting part of the story. She had been instrumental in destroying the Scodax fleet, using data that Sir Thrax had collected from the wreckage of one of the aliens’ ships. Agena Morrow’s story had become the talk of the quadrant, and Joanna was keen to sit down with her and get from the athlete herself the story of how she had faced the alien menace with Sir Thrax, who was now her lover and the prospective father of her child.

  Joanna had met some of the Knights and Dames of Lacerta in her travels. They were strikingly beautiful and powerfully built beings with the power to morph themselves into magnificent humanoid dragons. She had also known and been friends with women who had been the lovers of Lacertan Knights. Everyone had the same estimation of the dragon warrior men: they were as ferocious in bed as they were in battle. As one of her girlfriends put it, the Knights of Lacerta were the masters of two things that began with the letter F, and one of them was fighting. Joanna had always wondered what it would be like to experience that other F with one of those mighty dragon men.

  As a well-known mediate, she could easily have arranged it; by reputation, the Knights were always ready to cast off their metallic armor that fit like skin and bring to bear the formidable weapons of their maleness. It was one of those things that a busy and ambitious woman promised herself she would do “one of these days.”

  For this day, however, Joanna had business of a very different sort with the Knights, and as the space liner drew closer to Lacerta, she began to make out glints of light reflected from metallic surfaces in space. Looking more closely, she saw where she would disembark first. The spacedock was a collection of elliptical-shaped segments bound together by scaffolding into the shape of a long tube or tunnel. The ellipse at the middle of the row of linked segments was broader than the others and contained the control and administration centers of the dock.

  Inside the hollow of the tunnel lay the individual docks and ports with ships moored at them, and heated transparent domes of artificial atmosphere on the docks themselves. The ellipses also contained interior docking bays for the ships that transported passengers and personnel between the planet and the spacedock. Here and there along the row of ellipses, a craft would emerge and make for the planet, or swoop in from the planet to enter the dock, and it all looked a bit as if the structure were being buzzed by fireflies. Eventually, Joanna would be aboard one of those fireflies which would take her down to Lacerta.

  For now, her interest was in what lay near the farthest end of the spacedock from where she was approaching. Nestled among the ships, there was a large receiving bay that had just been installed. Inside this container, which was the size of a starship, were the parts of Scodax spaceships that had blown themselves to pieces in orbit and had been painstakingly collected by ships of the Fleet for disposal.

  Part of the relief effort was to remove the Scodax debris from the orbit of Lacerta to prevent it from becoming a hazard to navigation and a danger to satellites and space stations over the planet. This project had begun almost as soon as the planet itself was secured and the wounded were brought to treatment and the casualties began to be rounded up. The Interstar Fleet was nothing if not efficient.

  Joanna guessed that, even now, there were ships outside her field of view and round the other side of the planet still rounding up the parts of Scodax craft to be taken to spacedocks like this for disposal. On the surface of it, Joanna found this the least interesting part of her assignment. She would have to find an angle on it, or some particular spin on it, to bring it to life for the people across space who would be watching her reports.

  Settling back into her seat and focusing her attention for now on the planet, Joanna sighed softly. No doubt when she got to the spacedock, she would come up with what she needed. She always thought of something.

  _______________

  Joanna and the other mediates from other news services, some belonging to extraterrestrial species, disembarked from the ship once it moored itself inside the spacedock. They walked quickly down an enclosed tunnel connecting the ship to a platform on the dock. The dock was a spacious and brightly-lit area of columns and statues that looked like marble, where a tall and powerful-looking bearded older man stood with arms folded, waiting for them. The multicolored armor skin that he wore and the hilt of the power blade attached at his waist indicated that he was a knight.

  The four colors of his armor skin—black, red, silver, and gold—were the tokens of his position as a Mentor. He was one of those who trained initiates to the Knighthood and gave the lower-ranking Knights their marching—or flying—orders. He smiled cordially at the approaching members of the media as they stepped forward.

  “Welcome to Fleet Spacedock Lacerta Five,” said the Mentor. “I am Sir Dartan Embry. You’ll be interviewing me. I’ll be your guide aboard the Spacedock and down the far end where the laser disposal of the Sacrox debris will be taking place. I’m sure you’ll have some initial questions, so please put them to me now.”

  By this time Epaulette had detached itself from Joanna’s shoulder and was hovering near her, recording everything she saw and ready to capture everything that was said. Joanna spoke up first. “Sir Dartan, what can you tell us about the Scodax armada having a self-destruct program that would destroy every ship if even one was captured? Isn’t it true that no Scodax ships were captured at all, and that the armada was destroyed from inside with captured information?”

  “I’m sure, by now, that everyone has seen those reports,” answered Sir Dartan. “Those accounts are accurate, yes; the Scodax had a self-destruct code that triggered the destruction of their entire armada in the event that one ship was captured, and this was the code that our Knights and one civilian woman, Agena Morrow, used against them.”

  A brown-skinned man to Joanna’s left asked, “But Sir, isn’t that a highly extreme measure? Didn’t the Scodax actually defeat themselves that way?”

  “In normal military thinking,” said the Mentor, “that’s exactly what they did. They forfeited any chance at victory by thinking and planning so absolutely. But everything we’ve learned about the Scodax suggests there was nothing ‘normal’ about them in a military frame of mind or any other. They were a suspicious and paranoid people, xenophobic even among their own species. They were unable to live together and accept the differences among their own kind, which left them scattered into isolated tribes across space and vulnerable to the genetic plague that drove them mad and took th
eir lives.

  It’s very tragic on the face of it, but in a way, they were already defeated, doomed before they even arrived. If they’d been saner, we might have been able to help them. But they attacked in lieu of asking for help, and so they ensured their doom.”

  A woman behind Joanna chimed in: “Mentor, how much of the wreckage of the Scodax vessels has been collected so far?”

  “We’re making excellent progress on that, thanks to assistance from the Interstar Fleet,” said Sir Dartan. “The debris on the planet is being quickly rounded up and collected into central locations outside the settlements and cities. From there, it will be loaded onto freighter ships and carried up to spacedocks like Lacerta Five for disposal. Here in orbit, I’d say we’ve collected about one-third of the Scodax wreckage, and we’re working round the clock to gather up the rest of it. Collecting the parts in space has been a priority, since the longer the space around the planet is littered with alien debris, the more hazardous it will be to visit or leave Lacerta.”

  A being with blue and black skin and a fin-like crest on his head spoke next. Joanna recognized this mediate as a Murylian. “Sir Mentor, what of the bodies of the Scodax themselves and their android soldiers? What is being done with them?”