That was not all that Rawn knew. During the trip out, he had done more than study the schematics of the vessel where the Justice Claw was now moored. He had done a check of the ship’s registry, through channels available only to the Knighthood, the Corps, and the Interstar Fleet. He had learned that this craft had come from one of those shipyards in remote, out-of-the-way systems where reputable space travelers, touring vessels, and official space traffic rarely went, one of those places where older ships were salvaged and rehabbed for sale to less than
reputable clients for purposes not necessarily legal.
And Sabian had no doubt that it concealed his identity in the transaction. Of course, the
Justice Claw itself was an old ship, but it had been restored by the most expert engineers on
Lacerta, and its hull and workings had been brought up to state-of-the-art standards. The craft that Sabian was using made the perfect vehicle for his present purposes, as no one would think to look for the would-be conqueror of the galaxy at the helm of such a ship. But the fact was that this was not a new, state-of-the-art spacecraft and did not have access to the resources that a Knight of Lacerta would have. And this might work to Rawn’s advantage.
The hatch of the bridge slid open, and Rawn stepped inside. At once, he was transported fifteen years back in time. The righteous wrath of a decade and a half ago burned hot inside him again as the figure at the controls stood up from his seat and faced him. It might as well have been the moment when they’d last faced each other—except that Rawn, back then, was fixed and intent purely on duty and justice. Now, it was something more. Now, the stakes were higher. Now, it was personal.
“Welcome aboard, Sir Knight,” Sabian said mockingly. “What a moment this is. We’ve changed so little. You’re bigger now, physically, than you were then. And there’s a haunted look about you, which I’m sure is from the years that you were lost. But you’re the same upstart,
presumptuous boy who once defied the High Chimerian and me.”
“You’re still the same, yourself, Sabian,” Rawn said through clenched teeth. “That’s what alien kinking of your genes will do for you.”
“This from someone who needs a mineral bath to keep his own altered genes clean,” Sabian shot back.
“This from someone who isn’t a traitor to his species,” Rawn half-snarled.
“You understand as little now as you did then,” answered Sabian. “It’s good that I’m
going to destroy you now, boy, and put you out of the misery of your ignorance.” Straightening his coveralls in an almost ceremonial gesture, Sabian called, “Step forward, Sir Rawn Ullery, and accept the fate that you’ve earned.”
Sabian gestured to the middle of the room. The bridge of this ship was not a large, open place, but it would have just room enough, Rawn reasoned, for whatever sadistic thing that the Chimerian disciple had in mind. Rawn did as the madman demanded, then said, “Before we have done with this, Sabian, I have a last request.”
The corner of Sabian’s mouth turned up in a malevolent half-smile. “A last request for a man about to be executed? Perfect. I’m sure I can guess what it is you’d like to ask. Yes, I
anticipated that.” He called out to the ship’s computer, “Audio-visual link to the interior of
Escape Pod Beta.”
With a blossoming of light, a hologram appeared in the space between the Knight and his foe, showing the inside of the reprogrammed pod and Joanna rising to her feet in front of a
similar hologram where she was. Despair and longing and so many other feelings played across her face at the sight of her Knight.
“Rawn,” she called his name. “Rawn, don’t do this. You can’t. It’s not who you are. You don't surrender to monsters, Rawn; you fight them. You have to fight. Don’t just lay down your life to him. Resist him—please!”
“If I resist him, you know what he’ll do to you. As a Knight, I can’t let an innocent come to harm. Any innocent.”
“Rawn,” she said, “do you remember the things we talked about that day of the dragon games? Do you remember what I said about how important my principles are to me? Yours are just as important to you. Giving in to this man isn’t what you were meant to do; you know that. Fight him, Rawn. Just fight him.”
“Joanna,” he said, “I remember every word that has ever passed between us. And I hope that you remember what I’ve said to you about what you’ve meant to me, what you’ve done for me. I meant every word, my love. You are what healed me. You were my homecoming. You brought me back to myself. I sacrifice nothing but what you gave me again.”
Just one tear of all the tears she had held back now trailed down Joanna’s face. She shouted at him, “No, Rawn! NO!”
“Enough of this,” said Sabian cruelly. “Discontinue link.”
The hologram on the bridge disappeared, and Rawn felt those fading pixels take a piece of his heart with them.
“Now,” said Sabian across the few steps of space separating him and Rawn, “stand your ground and prepare yourself.”
Rawn did as he was bidden, the only concession that he would make to this creature, and watched Sewall Sabian undergo a transformation. His skin turned leathery, and its color turned to a noisome, sickly green, like the color of some foul regurgitation. His forearms and hands morphed and stretched into tentacles with barbed suckers like a terrestrial Kraken. A slit appeared on his forehead and opened into a single, glowing, red eye.
“Your death will be as quick as you let it be,” Sabian said, his voice turned to an inhuman rasp. “Offer no resistance, and you’ll be gone.”
Saying nothing, Rawn simply stood with legs apart and hands clenched into fists,
prepared to take the unholy punishment that the morphed creature before him would now
dispense. It came in an instant. Sabian lashed out with one monster tentacle. The leathery,
rubbery limb wrapped itself around one of Rawn’s arms. Unable to penetrate the armband around Rawn’s bicep, the vicious barbs dug themselves into Rawn’s exposed lower arm.
Rawn clenched his teeth and hissed as if he were in dragon form, suppressing a shout of pain. The other tendril came for him, twirling about and grasping Rawn’s other arm, digging in just the same. Rawn parted his teeth and let out only the smallest groan of the excruciating pain that was now doubled for him. His legs buckled only slightly. He had known pain in battle before and never faltered. He would not falter in the face of death now.
The red glow in Sabian’s third eye brightened, and from it leapt a scarlet beam of
radiance that seared through the air right past Rawn’s face and struck the bridge hatch behind him, making a crackling noise. Rawn struggled in Sabian’s grasp, hissing against the sharp pain from the barbs on the tentacles, and craned his neck backward to look at the smoking hole that the beam from Sabian’s eye had burned in the hatch. He then turned back to look at the sick,
perverse leer on his foe’s mutated face, and knew what would happen next.
“I put a good deal of thought into how I would destroy you, dragon,” Sabian said. “Be grateful that I chose the most satisfying but efficient method. Even so, I plan to enjoy it.”
The pain in his arms made his vision lose focus, but Rawn held firm in Sabian’s grasp, preparing himself. It shouldn't be long now.
Another scarlet beam flashed forth from Sabian’s third eye. It connected with Rawn's left shoulder and burned its way clean through. Now, Rawn could not suppress his reaction. He tossed back his head and bellowed out his pain. The damned sadist, how many times would he fire just to hurt him before finishing him off? A third beam pierced the air, then Rawn’s right shoulder, again lancing all the way through.
This time, the combined pain of being shot through with lasers and constricted with barbed
tentacles nearly overcame Rawn. His entire body lurched and spasmed. His legs buckled, and he roared out his agony. The tentacles held him upright, inflicting a further, deeper pain. The
torment was now making Rawn dizzy. The bridge and the mutated features of Sabian spun in front of him.
“Now,” said the madman, “where to put the next shot? Through your skull? Your chest? Your stomach? I want your death to linger just a little but not too long.”
Held in Sabian’s monster grasp, Rawn gulped a breath of air, and through his mind crawled the thought, It must be now. Let it be now…
And on cue, the ship gave a sudden, jolting lurch, as if it were a building struck by an earthquake, and the lights on the bridge flickered out and then back on. Shocked, Sabian relaxed the grip of his tendrils on Rawn’s arms and let the wounded knight spill to the deck. Sabian looked to and fro on the bridge, uncomprehending what had just happened. Then, the lights flickered and the ship lurched again, making Sabian stagger to one side. He regained his footing and gazed down evilly at Rawn, who lay on the deck. “What is this? What’s happening? What have you done?”
Forcing himself up on one knee, ignoring the pain in his arms and shoulders and the blood trickling from the punctures on his skin, Rawn half-gasped, “You forbade me to fight back and attack you personally, but you said nothing about this old ship of yours. When I docked the Justice Claw, there was a code embedded in the communication from my ship’s computer to yours, a code that your ship’s systems are too old to recognize, and disguised and piggybacked to look like a part of the main transmission.
The code instructed your ship to set back Joanna’s escape pod to its default setting, to look for the nearest habitable planet in the system and take her back to Lacerta. Your ship has only just now recognized what’s been done to it, and your computer is fighting back, trying to overwrite the code. That code and your ship’s systems will keep trying to overwrite each other, but your ship’s systems will fail, and Joanna will get away. And now, there’s nothing to stop me from finishing you forever.”
“DAMN YOU!” Sabian bellowed, raising his tentacles and intensifying the glow in his third eye. “You WILL die!”
Rawn stood up with only a slight stagger. He released his human form and shifted to dragon, his wings and tail unfurling even as the transformation began to knit the wounds that
Sabian had inflicted. He drew forth his powerblade and let it extend its sword of energy, readying the weapon for battle. Rawn and Sabian circled each other while the lights on the bridge control panel flashed and fluctuated wildly from the battle raging inside the ship’s systems. His warrior discipline began to clear Rawn’s mind as the pain subsided. He felt as if his entire life was the preamble to these next few moments.
_______________
Picking herself up from the floor of the escape pod, Joanna wondered what was going on. What had rocked the ship and flickered the lights that way? The only answer was that something happening on the bridge had caused it. Rawn must have done something to Sabian’s ship. But what? And what would it mean to her?
No sooner had the question crossed her mind, than the hatch of the escape pod slid open. Joanna gasped. All she had to do was step through the open hatch and out into the corridor of the vessel, and she could find Rawn, perhaps even help him against Sabian before it was too late. She started for the hatch—and the moment she took a step forward, it slid shut again and she stopped in her tracks.
Joanna did not know what to do next. She pondered her next move, or pondered whether she even had one. That was when the lights flickered again and another hard, rude lurch of the pod and the ship enclosing it threw her back to the floor. She landed with a thump and looked up, frustrated and bewildered, into the flickering lights. Then, she looked at the hatch again. If he guessed right, by the time she got her feet under her again, it would slide back open. She scrambled upright, and sure enough, the hatch opened once more and sat that way, as if taunting her. She made another move for the hatch, and as she could have predicted, it quickly slammed shut yet again. She scowled at it, feeling toyed with and not liking the feeling.
Again, she wondered what to do. Would the ship just keep bucking and jolting and throwing her down, and would the hatch continue spontaneously opening and closing? What in the world had Rawn done?
She braced herself against the wall of the pod, and watched and waited. No further jolt and lurch came, no further tremor of the vessel to knock her down. But the lights continued their pattern of staying bright and constant, then going into a flicker. And each time they did, the yawning, taunting hatch of the escape pod drew itself back open and hammered itself back shut.
Joanna knew she was being faced with an opportunity—and a risk. An opportunity to get herself out of that pod, and a risk of what could happen if she did not get herself through the hatch quickly enough in her formal ball gown. Nothing much would happen, really. The hatch would close on her and either cut her in half or cut off her legs. Not too much to worry about, after all.
Accepting that there were worse things than taking a risk, especially now of all times, Joanna kept a determined eye on that hatch—and began to tear at the fabric of her gown halfway down her thighs.
_______________
On the bridge, the battle was joined. Rawn and Sabian were no longer circling one another. They were having at it.
Sabian lashed out at Rawn with his arm tentacles again. A serpentine tendril tried to clutch the wrist that held Rawn’s powerblade. With a slash, Rawn sent the blade slicing hotly through both the air and the appendage, sending a writhing length of Sabian’s tentacle to twitch at Rawn’s feet on the deck.
Sabian drew back his half-severed tendril while lunging out with the other, grabbing Rawn’s
other arm. The barbs on the suckers could not pierce the scaly flesh of Rawn’s dragon form as easily as his human skin. They grabbed but did not puncture, and Rawn made short work of that tendril as well, neatly cleaving it in two. While its severed part flailed on the deck, Sabian drew back both limbs, and Rawn saw that their sliced ends had already healed over and were starting to regenerate. He guessed that they would quickly return to their full, deadly length. But Sabian was not about to wait. The red flow of his third eye grew stronger, and Rawn changed his grip on the hilt of his weapon, anticipating his foe’s next attack and bringing the full speed of his trained warrior reflexes to bear.
At the same time, as the beam of glowing red deadliness stabbed out from Sabian’s eye, Rawn was ready. The energy blade of his weapon met the beam before it could strike Rawn, deflecting it in a burst of sparks. Sabian pressed his attack, firing off a shot from his eye every second, and never connected once with the dragon man. The glowing blade was everywhere, up and down, side to side, catching the rays before they could hit the Knight’s arms, head, torso, or wings. The speed and skill that had made Rawn Ullery the most renowned combatant in the Knighthood came fully into play, just as they had done all those years ago.
The disciple of the Chimerians quickly knew that battling Rawn this way was futile. The standoff could go on forever—or long enough for the damned Knight to get the upper hand. He opted to attack in a way that Rawn could not anticipate. With a regrown tentacle, he reached out, not for Rawn but for the chair at his control console. Using an inhuman strength, the tentacle pulled at the chair, and with a harsh sound of tearing metal, pulled it out of the floor. Rawn stopped swinging his blade long enough to look and react to what Sabian had done, and that gave his foe the opening he needed.
He flung the chair across the bridge and struck Rawn squarely in the chest, sending him flying and sprawling—and sending the powerblade whirling from his hand and onto the deck, where the energy sword retracted back into the hilt. Tentacles extended, Sabian lunged forward, and the first thing Rawn saw when he gazed up from the deck was the mutated man looming over him for the kill.
_______________
With the tatters of half her gown lying on the floor behind her and her high-heeled shoes in her hands, Joanna licked her lips, held her breath, and stood just a step away from the hatch. Why bother charging across the interior space of the
pod and trying to leap through the hatch when she could just stand near enough to cross the threshold with one step? All she had to do was wait for the next flicker of lights and the next opening. There would be another opening, certainly. There had to be another opening.
Please, she begged the universe, let there be another opening.
It happened. The lights flickered, the hatch slid and hissed open, and Joanna moved. In a second, she bounded through the open hatch, and a second later, it slammed shut behind her. Out in the open corridor of the spacecraft, Joanna gave herself just a moment to let out a long,
relieved sigh. At least the immediate danger of being hurled into Catalan and being vaporized in its corona was over.
But there was no telling what danger yet awaited her when she found Rawn. Looking down at her hands clutching her shoes, she gave another sound that was almost a snort, and dropped them onto the deck of the ship, leaving them behind her as she sped off in her stocking feet.
_______________
One mutant tentacle closed itself around Rawn’s dragon neck. Its barbs still could not penetrate his scales, but its coils could still choke the life from him. The other tentacle snaked around his waist, holding him in another terrible and vicious squeeze. Rawn gasped for breath, and sparks of flame leapt from his fanged jaws.
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