RAWN

by Bonnie Burrows

  In a moment, Dame Sienna and the other Knights were at his back. Without taking his eyes from his doppelganger in stone, Rawn sensed them near him and said, “This has been here…all this time?”

  “Since the year you disappeared,” said the Dame.

  “This was not necessary,” Rawn said. “I was only a Knight doing my duty. I accepted the Formula, I accepted the responsibility. I did nothing more than any other Knight would have done.”

  “You have never been just any other Knight,” Dame Sienna replied. “Not to us.”

  At last, Rawn turned around, shaking harder now, his breathing strangely labored. “But I’m not worthy,” he insisted. “I’m only a Knight. I only protected my home, my people. I did…I did…I…”

  Dame Sienna’s face took on a look of sudden fear and concern, and a hubbub of the same feelings rose from the crowd behind them. Joanna, looking on, shared the sense of alarm now gripping the courtyard. Rawn was not just shaking now, not just breathing heavily. He began to totter, to stagger, and put a hand to his heart. His eyes fluttered. And his skin changed. His face and the exposed flesh of his arms took on first a deathly pallor, then broke out into patches and splotches of greyish-green scales. His breaths turned to gasps and chokes. His eyes shut and did not open again.

  He swayed hard to one side and crashed to the ground like a fallen oak. Shouts of fear and dismay echoed across the courtyard, while Dame Sienna quickly crouched beside Rawn. She put one hand on his brow and the other on her badge.

  “Medical emergency at the Spires,” she called urgently. “We have a Knight down at the main courtyard, showing symptoms of severe genetic collapse. Repeat, fallen Knight with severe genetic collapse. Priority Alpha One; send help immediately…”

  Joanna, paralyzed in body but not in mind at the sight of what was happening, rifled through everything she knew about the planet Lacerta and its inhabitants. She quickly realized what was happening to her rescuer, something that was a fact of life for every native of this planet. For most of them, it never became as dangerous as what now overcame Sir Rawn Ullery. Having saved Joanna’s life, Rawn was now in dire need of rescue himself.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Joanna had known Rawn for only a day, but it broke her heart to see him in his present state. The powerful, quietly proud and noble man who had rescued her was now the most sickly, stricken, and wretched creature she had ever seen. And it was the very nature of what he was that had made him so.

  A special room adjoining the infirmary of the Spires had been cleared out just to treat him. The medics had quickly set up a large, transparent cylindrical tank and had it filled with water from nearby Lake Shimmershine. Rawn was stripped naked and completely submerged in the tank, like an ancient laboratory specimen in a jar of formaldehyde, his nose and mouth covered with a respirator unit connected with a recycling oxygen tank suspended from overhead.

  And there he floated, unconscious, his proud and superbly muscled physique now so pallid that it was almost corpse-like. All up and down his body were patches and swaths of reptile skin, not the vibrant scales of a strong and healthy dragon, but the dull scalation of a dragon of advancing age, a dragon who had flown his last flight.

  This was no way for the world’s greatest hero to be, Joanna thought. He should never be seen as anything but the mighty, all-conquering champion who had left this planet fifteen years ago to lead his fellow Knights in the final battles against one of the deadliest enemies ever to come out of space. That man, that dragon, should be the only Sir Rawn Ullery that anyone ever saw.

  On a table beside a control station, his fellow Knights had laid out his armor skin and his

  Powerblade, set them there with love and reverence to wait for Rawn to awaken and don them again. Joanna looked from the empty armor on the table to the sickly man floating in the vat, and looked forward to seeing him restored to his true self and ready to wear the skin of his Knighthood again.

  While the Spires worked quickly to get Lacerta’s long-lost champion into treatment,

  Joanna had broken the story of what happened in orbit and how and by whom she had been rescued. In just a day, the story had leapt from star system to star system, like a fire breathed out by Rawn himself and igniting the countryside. Other mediates had stormed the Spires, in person and digitally, for every detail about the return of Sir Rawn Ullery, and the Spires had made

  Joanna their official liaison for all information about him, putting her in the most enviable position of any journalist in space right now.

  What she had thought would be a major assignment would now be, for Joanna, a career landmark that would seal her reputation and put her at the top of her profession. But somehow, that did not seem to mean as much to her as just seeing Rawn out of that tank, walking and talking and being strong and proud again. She stood in front of him as he floated unconscious in there, and put her hand on the glass as if she was actually touching him.

  And what a thing he must be to touch, when he was not so weakened and pale with sickness. How amazing he must feel with all the strength of his manly, dragonly Knighthood surging in those muscles. And what lay flaccid and limp but still long and thick at the junction of those powerful thighs…what a weapon of conquest that must be to use on a submitting partner. How many females had been on the receiving end of that, and how much had they gloried in having it used on them?

  If Rawn were to return to his glory, first the water in the tank must do its work on him. The waters of Lacerta were special. They contained a mineral compound called Draconite that had come from a primordial meteor bombardment. It was called Draconite because of the interaction between it and something else that the waters contained: segments of fossil DNA from the prehistoric dragons that had once inhabited the planet.

  When human colonists, knocked off their course through space by a nova explosion, found a lucky refuge on this planet, they all consumed and were exposed to the waters of the planet and the mutagenic effects of the mineral and the DNA fragments that they contained. From a lost human colony was born a new race of weredragons, who now ruled the planet like the true dragons before them.

  But in their new condition, they found a pitfall. Every Lacertan was subject to a dangerous genetic deterioration whose only cure was the waters that had first mutated their ancestors. For their health, and indeed their lives, they must all take a prolonged bath or swim at regular periods in the lakes containing the highest concentrations of Draconite, like Lake Shimmershine, which would restore their genes and save them from the very fate that had now overtaken Rawn.

  Pure humans visiting or living on Lacerta, such as Joanna, had to take special mutation inhibitor drugs to prevent the water on the planet mutating them. Weredragon Knights were admired across the galaxy, but people’s identities were precious to them after all, and most people who were not born Lacertan did not want to become one just by exposure. To become a Lacertan was a common fantasy for humans, but practically no one acted on it. Even now, watching Rawn floating in the waters that gradually restored his life, Joanna entertained the fantasy. But it was hardly the greatest fantasy that she held at the moment.

  She barely heard the footsteps of Dame Sienna entering the room. “He’s about halfway through his restorative cycle now,” the female Mentor said. “Another twenty-four hours or so, and he’ll be in fit condition again. We’ll have him back. He’ll be fully returned to us.”

  Joanna glanced at the Dame to acknowledge her, then returned her attention to Rawn as if pulled by gravity itself. “Everyone keeps talking about how remarkable it is that he’s been away for so long and held up so well against the ‘gene blight,’ as it’s called. But he’s always been remarkable.”

  “He has,” Sienna agreed. “You’ve seen the logs we took from the Justice Claw, of course.”

  “Yes, his logs about how he kept the blight from killing him all those years. As a Knight, he was trained to be resourceful, of course. But what Sir Rawn had to do to stay alive… The medic
al stores of the Justice Claw had a store of Draconite in case he happened to be stranded in some remote place for a long period. But when he used that up, he had to use the molecular structure of Draconite in the ship’s memory and samples of his own blood to create a synthetic version of it from materials he found on other planets.”

  “It was a weaker version of Draconite, of course, much less potent than actual Draconite,” said Sienna, “but just strong enough to keep him alive in the time it took to get himself home. It says everything about how strong he is—his body, his will, his training—that he was able to make it through that ordeal and come home to us.”

  Joanna kept her hand on the glass as if she could somehow will him back to health that way. “But he was so vulnerable in that time. And that must have been the hardest part for him. He’s always been used to being strong, being the strongest. But while he was going through that, he said in the logs that there were times when he’d be so weak, barely able to stay conscious while his body fought to keep itself from falling apart.

  And he’d have to hide during those times, in asteroid belts, in remote parts of inhabited planets, on dead worlds, any place where no one could find him. And he was alone. All alone, cut off from everyone, with no one to help him.” She watched him intently through the glass of the tank, and her journalistic objectivity broke down almost as much as the condition of his body. “All by himself, all alone…” Her heart ached to think of it.

  “He is strong,” said Sienna. “Strong in and of himself, and strong from the Mythos treatment. He was the perfect candidate for it, after all. And the treatment, and just being the kind of man and dragon he is, helped him through it. He is the greatest Knight we’ve ever had.”

  “The greatest,” echoed Joanna, wanting to stroke the glass as if stroking Rawn himself. “Did you know he was actually upset when he rescued me—upset, guilty, that I was the only one he could save? He tried not to show it, but it actually hurt him that he couldn’t get anyone else out of there. It was like he took on the deaths of all those other people.”

  “Wanting to help everyone, save everyone, was his nature,” Sienna said. “Sir Rawn is everything a Knight aspires to be—but even more so. There was never a Knight who took our ideals more to heart than he did.”

  “I still can’t get over what he was saving me from,” said Joanna. “Everyone is still talking about the Scodax ‘booby trap,’ as people are calling it.”

  “It’s a fitting name,” replied Sienna. “A final strike against an enemy. The hulls of the Scodax ships were seeded with nodes of a molecular explosive designed to detonate on contact with certain forms of energy. It was their way of ensuring that, if an enemy penetrated their defenses, the Scodax wouldn’t be taken alive—and they’d take some of the enemy with them.”

  Joanna shook her head at this, bewildered at the thought. “They were incredibly

  paranoid. How did they ever make it to space at all?”

  Thoughtfully, Sienna said, “What little we know of them suggests an aggressively

  segregated people who couldn’t bear differences, even amongst themselves. They broke down and scattered into different groups, all strictly made up of one type or one background. They must have been an extremely authoritarian society, almost blindly obedient to leaders and traditions.”

  Still unable to conceive of such a thing, Joanna said, “And they thought they could make the Knights of Lacerta serve them, which is just insane on the face of it—the last members of a race of madmen with nothing but androids to enforce their will. How could they have thought they could do that? And what would it have been like for the Knights even if it were possible for the Scodax to bring them in line?”

  The Dame guessed, “Judging by what we’ve learned, the Knights would have been both a warrior class and an underclass of untouchables, segregated from their masters who were

  segregated themselves. Segregation was what the Scodax were all about. The Knights would have been kept as living weapons, battling when commanded but kept apart from the ones they served. It simply would never have worked. The Scodax were doomed as quickly as they

  started. By all estimations, they were a mad race.”

  “They were in a mad race,” Joanna frowned. “A mad race to their own destruction.”

  “A race that they finally won,” the Dame agreed.

  “So, what happens to the wreckage of the Scodax ships now?” Joanna asked.

  “Obviously, it can’t be disposed of in the way it was first planned,” observed Sienna. “The Ruling Aerie is in talks to have it all collected onto freighters and launched into the corona of Catalan where it can’t harm anyone ever again.”

  Joanna pictured it, fragments and shards and pieces of the spaceships of mad, doomed beings, spinning and hurtling their way into the immolating embrace of a star, never to be seen again. “Thrown into the sun… And that will really be the end of the Scodax.”

  “For good and all,” said Sienna.

  “If Sir Rawn had been here, he would have shown them who they were really up against. He would have made them sorry they ever came anywhere near this system.”

  “I’m sure he would have,” the Dame agreed. “He was the best of us back then. I expect he will be the best of us again.” She watched Joanna watching the unconscious Rawn and thought she detected something more than a mere journalistic interest, but she kept her

  observation to herself. She merely asked, “As our media liaison, are you finding your accommodations to your liking?”

  Joanna was lost in thought for a moment and almost did not hear the question at first. Realizing the break in her concentration, she jerked her head a bit and faced the lady Mentor. “Excuse me, yes, everything is fine. Even under the circumstances, you’ve made me very

  comfortable; I have everything I need. I’ll be wanting to talk to you later, on the record, about what you just told me about the Scodax and what’s being done to get rid of all that debris once and for all. And I’ll have to set up something with the Aerie. I’ll need a meeting with the Alpha Dragon later.”

  “Of course,” replied Sienna. “Whatever you need, come to any of us.”

  “I’ll want to start putting together a preliminary report for today right now. Is it all right if I stay here? It’s quiet here. Not that it’s really an uproar anywhere else in the Spires, but…”

  Sienna understood. “But you’ll want privacy for this, yes. Stay as long as you like. We do still ask that you take no scans of Sir Rawn in his present state. We accept that there’s a huge amount of interest in his return, but we’d rather the greater galaxy did not see him…this way. At least, not now.”

  “No, no, I’ll be discreet,” said Joanna. “Thanks for your consideration.”

  “Then I’ll leave you to your work,” the Dame said. And she turned to exit, but as she went, she cast a final glance over her shoulder at Joanna, who, in a heartbeat’s time, had once again grown mesmerized at the unconscious and submerged warrior in the tank. Quietly, Sienna took her leave.

  It would be another whole day before Sir Rawn was removed from the tank and revived from sedation. Even after that, the physicians had said he would be weakened and would

  require repeated baths in heavy Draconite water to return to his full Knightly vigor.

  Joanna thought about that. It was a weakened Sir Rawn who had left his ship and entered the crumbling spacedock in the midst of failing gravity, dwindling life support, and fluctuating force fields that were barely holding the structure together, and flown out to rescue her. It was a weakened Sir Rawn who had flown through the conflagration with her in his arms, blasting out his fiery breath to melt the obstacles in their path. That was what he did while weakened and on the brink of bodily collapse. What would he be capable of doing at full strength?

  One thing was certain: as the Spires’ selected media liaison, Joanna would be on the front lines of the Lacertan recovery effort. That would, at all times, give her first media access t
o Sir Rawn Ullery and everything about him. When he revived, the first person, outside of the Mentors of the Knights and the leaders of the planet, to whom Rawn would speak would be

  Joanna Way. She could not help but think that she now held a position most unique in all the galaxy. It would be upon her to tell the story of a legend—the most beautiful, powerful, and masculine legend in all of space.

  _______________

  Where the Spires had enjoined her not to transmit any scans of Rawn in the restorative tank while suffering from gene blight, twenty-four hours later, they encouraged Joanna otherwise.

  There was a small and very select crowd in the room where Rawn’s vat had been installed. A number of other mediates from other news services across the quadrant had been admitted, as well as political dignitaries of Lacerta and Mentors, including Dame Sienna. The Alpha Dragon himself, leader of the Ruling Aerie, was present, along with his mate.

  Except for the Alpha and the First Dragon, the physicians, and Dame Sienna, everyone in the room was required to stand in a special roped-off area and watch as the mighty Knight of yore was revived for his official welcome home. Owing to her position, Joanna stood at the front of the group, immediately behind the ropes, the better to catch the event with Epaulette recording away above her shoulder.