The Dragon Corps

by Natalie Grey

  But they’d started the op meeting a few hours before they landed on Ymir, and that meant….

  It meant Tersi hadn’t rested in close to a full day now. The Dragon took his role as a healer seriously. He would stitch Talon up, yes, but he wouldn’t leave until his commander had had a chance to vent about the op as well. Which meant that Talon, with his mood and his snapping, was only keeping the man from a well-earned shower and some sleep.

  Fuck. He let his head drop back on the padded headrest and closed his eyes for a second. He hadn’t wanted to face into this just yet, but Tersi was right: letting it fester would do him no good.

  “We’re going back to Seneca,” he told Tersi.

  At this, the other man stopped working. He didn’t look over to Talon, but his hands paused and his eyebrows were up.

  “I’m going to talk to Soras about this.”

  Tersi gave the sort of laugh that said Talon was crazy. You would, the laugh seemed to say. But he didn’t comment on it.

  “He needs to explain to me what keeps happening there.”

  Tersi said nothing, and Talon narrowed his eyes slightly. The man’s silence was unnerving. Of course, he always did this, maintaining a professional quiet that encouraged someone to keep talking.

  He would have made an excellent therapist—or, better, a bartender.

  Tersi, his first pick for Team 9, was someone he had never regretted bringing on board. He couldn’t remember the man’s actual name. It was probably on a piece of paperwork somewhere, but Talon’s filing cabinet was a place where forms were appropriately filed and never looked at again.

  The two men got along better than Talon, a Navy veteran, had expected at first. The relationship between officers and their NCOs was famously strained in most branches of the military. NCOs were usually older than their commissioned counterparts, and more experienced. They found themselves in the unenviable place of trying to convince younger and brasher people, most of whom would not go into combat, of the best way to achieve mission goals and keep their soldiers safe.

  In the Dragons, this was somewhat better. Officers went into combat as a matter of course. It was expected; everyone went into combat. Accordingly, the Chief’s role was more that of a confidant than anything else. They would look after the soldiers, making sure that none of them were sliding into a funk and—this was Talon’s favorite part, because it meant he didn’t have to do it—arguing with the bureaucracy about things like benefits paperwork.

  Tersi had been coming through Dragon selection when Talon was given command of Team 9. It was a famously rigorous process to get selected for the months-long ordeal. Each recruit was given a battery of tests for combat skills, knowledge, intelligence, and psychological fitness for the unusual rigors of joining a Dragon crew.

  And then, for six months, the candidates trained together, undergoing a battery of scenario tests that any Dragon commander and their XO and Chief could come watch. Selection for a team was immediate, on the whim of any commander.

  As one of the newer team commanders during Tersi’s selection year, and after a particularly drawn out mission, Talon arrived back late to find most of the most sought-after recruits already selected.

  He didn’t mind once he saw the people who were still there. He’d chosen Tersi and Aegis that year, the former for his steady, methodical combat, and the latter for his gruff competence. The year after, he’d picked up Nyx, Sphinx, and Camorra and Mars, who everyone always seemed to refer to in the same breath. They had been thick as thieves from Day 1, apparently having become fast friends in Dragon Selection. They fought well as a team of two, so Talon had taken both of them. Nyx and Sphinx, meanwhile, had been like day and night. Sphinx held her own counsel, and Nyx never shied away from telling Talon when he was wrong.

  His team had been built in dribs and drabs after that, letting exceptional soldiers go to other teams, and replacing them with people the other Dragon commanders by and large saw no use for. The other commanders thought he was crazy.

  That suited Talon just fine. His results spoke for themselves. He had one of the most decorated teams in Dragon history, with the most successful missions of any commander now serving.

  And Ymir, as a glaring hole in that record.

  Tersi snapped his fingers irreverently in Talon’s direction.

  “Your leg’s finished. Get talking.”

  He’d been staring at the far wall, so lost in thought that he hadn’t even felt Tersi stitch everything up. Talon sat back on the chair and rubbed at his nose.

  “What do you think Soras is going to tell you?” Tersi began sterilizing his equipment. “It’s not like he runs the reports himself.”

  “He can’t be unaware of them,” Talon argued. “It’s Ymir.” The place was the topic of toothless debate in the Alliance Parliament every year. It was easy to gain media coverage—and polling points—by making tearful speeches about how Ymir needed to be freed, and introducing some bill with no actual binding policy recommendations.

  It was also easy to then tell one’s constituents that the matter was being considered by the Navy … and never bringing it up again.

  The Navy, meanwhile, had not recommended an attack since their first and only attempt ended in the loss of ten thousand soldiers. The carrier had gone down on approach, a total loss.

  They had not tried again.

  Which left Intelligence—namely, the Dragons. There was no way Soras hadn’t considered the same thing.

  “He’s afraid of the fallout if we all die.” Talon heaved himself up and limped over to the closet.

  The Dragons had access to the latest tech researched in the Alliance labs—not just armor, but programs, ship upgrades, and medical advances. They had any number of serums and treatments that purported to heal wounds like they’d never been, taking the area from shredded, dirty flesh to scarless skin in just days.

  Tersi, however, refused to use those. He insisted on cleaning and dressing wounds, and allowing a couple of days’ worth of healing, before he would speed anything along.

  Your body isn’t a machine, he told Talon, when the man asked. Let it figure out the best way to do things, after the shock wears off—then hurry it all up.

  It seemed to work, so Talon took his advice—it was just annoying in the short run.

  Talon yanked a new ship uniform out of the closet and pulled off the old one.

  “He isn’t wrong to worry.” Tersi looked up as he finished packing away his tools. “You could stand to a bit more."

  Talon gave him a look. “You think I don’t care if we all die?”

  “No. I wouldn’t serve on this team if I thought that. But I think you’re losing sight of the odds.” Tersi settled back in his chair and began to roll his neck with a wince, easing some unseen knot. “I’d follow you into hell if there was a good chance of saving all of Ymir. We all would. Hell, Mars and Camorra are getting the fever something bad. It just does no one any good if we all die, not accomplishing anything, not even having had the chance of accomplishing anything.”

  “Then we need better intel,” Talon said flatly. “There’s a way. There’s always a way. If you’re willing to bear the cost, there’s always a way.”

  There was a silence, and Talon knew exactly what Tersi was thinking of—the mission that had come close to getting Talon hauled up in front of a tribunal, and had lost them one of their best crew mates. Two years earlier, on the bridge of a carrier converted to a slavers’ ship, Talon and a young recruit named Cade Williams had overridden the controls to vent the entire ship, killing the entire leadership of a legendary slaving syndicate…

  And every one of the 7,000 slaves they were carrying.

  Cade had left Team 9 after that, unable to face making another choice like that—and Talon had been summoned back to Seneca to explain why he had done what he had done.

  His explanation was simple: miss his shot, and those 7,000 slaves got sold, every one of them living in agony and dying not long after, while the
slavers continued to prey on the citizens of the outer planets. Take his shot, and those 7,000 died earlier … but no one else ever saw that carrier appear in the sky, and knew they and their children were going to die in chains.

  He didn’t regret what he’d done. He didn’t see any other choice. But when Tersi looked up, his expression asked if Talon would be willing to do the same again on Ymir—and Talon had no answer.

  He looked away as he pulled on the uniform.

  “What’s this about Camorra and Mars?”

  “Never seen them so excited for an op before.” Tersi took the conversational diversion without comment. “They must be losing their patience right along with you. Don’t worry—Aegis makes a nice counterbalance. I don’t think the man’s ever been excited for anything in his life. He must have been born sixty and grumpy.”

  Talon snorted, then blew his breath out in a long sigh. “How’s he doing?”

  “Fine. I believe his exact words were, ‘it’ll take a lot more than a few suicidal idiots to do me any damage.’ He then suggested I spend my time on the rest of the ‘delicate flowers’—or, failing that, just get the fuck out of his face and stop bothering him.”

  Talon laughed. Something unwound in his chest and he leaned back against the wall. He’d needed that. Coiled in the pit of his stomach, there was a low twist of guilt that Aegis had been injured at all.

  It was no use saying that he hadn’t realized the Warlord’s people would be loyal enough to try suicide attacks. It didn’t make sense, but it had to. Talon had to be able to predict these things, or his team would suffer.

  “Where should I tell the crew we’re headed?” Tersi hauled himself to his feet, med kit in hand.

  “I told you. We’re going to Seneca.”

  “Wasn’t sure if that was an actual plan, or just the op talking.”

  Any semblance of a good mood vanished. Talon stared down his Chief.

  “Boss. It’s the Warlord of Ymir. Intelligence is on it.”

  “We’re Intelligence,” Talon ground out. “The rest of them had their chance. Hell, they’ve had, what—8 chances? They keep sending us into the districts and it keeps not working. They need to find another way, or I’m going to find one, myself. I’d prefer to do it with Soras’s blessing—and his help—but I’ll settle for him staying out of my goddamned way.”

  Tersi considered this. He nodded a moment later. He knew when Talon had made up his mind, and his lack of dissent meant that, as with Nyx, he didn’t have any new objections. They wouldn’t have hesitated to let him know if they did.

  “The next time I go to Ymir,” Talon said quietly, “I’m killing the fucking Warlord with my bare hands if necessary. Because the next time I leave, they’re going to be free. I promise you that.”

  4

  Tera flexed her fingers and toes, and wiggled them. Other than the surgical incisions, already faint and fading quickly, she sensed no difference at all between her hands and feet as they had been, and as they were now.

  “It will take some time for you to become used to the implants.” Dr. Alexei Browman looked at Tera’s hands and feet for a moment more before turning back to his computer, and Tera saw the distaste that flitted across his face.

  Do I frighten you? She resisted the urge to ask. Asking would unnerve him, and anyway, it didn’t matter. Formerly one of the top rated surgeons at Horizons Medical Center on Seneca, Browman was the pioneer of a great many surgeries he had done frequently for the public, and a great many more that he now only did for the elite soldiers of the Alliance military.

  And Tera. Whom he clearly disliked, every time he saw her.

  She tolerated it for two reasons. First, Browman was a genius, and a surgeon without match. There was no one else who had the instincts and the steadiness to make the upgrades she wanted. Second, his natural desire to see how far his genius could go needed a subject like Tera.

  While the politicians, physicians, and psychologists of the human diaspora debated where the line lay between human enhancement—which was permissible, even encouraged—and cyborg—which everyone agreed was illegal, immoral, and dangerous—there were always those who were willing to push the limits. How much enhancement could a body bear? Which changes could be absorbed and adapted to, and which could not?

  While the criminal syndicates on Osiris and New Arizona forged their own answers to the question of what was, philosophically speaking, still human—or ignored the debate entirely—Alliance Intelligence had Tera.

  Whether most of them knew it or not. She wondered if Browman knew who she was. He never said her name.

  She wondered if he’d gone out of his way not to learn it.

  It might be the sort of thing one tried not to know. Tera had never been on the Alliance payroll. She had never run any official mission that was on the books. If there were agents who knew about her, it was because they divined her presence as a flicker in the data—the sudden absence of targets who troubled the Alliance, the swirl and eddy in the forces that never stopped troubling the alliance.

  Which, Tera reasoned now, made her the immovable object.

  She was going to have to come up with a better analogy. Perhaps during the next interminable surgery. Right now, she had experiments to carry out.

  She looked around herself for something that was the correct combination of durable and superfluous, and settled on the metal tray that held the surgical implements. Her hand shot out, fingers snapping around the metal at the last second. The implements clattered to the floor, and she dimly heard the faint sound of Browman’s surprise.

  And fear. He was afraid of her.

  Of course he was. Tera felt the familiar wave of contempt run through her.

  Of everyone she knew, only her father had never feared her—or the man she called her father, anyway. He had rescued her from the slums of Osiris and he had let her forge her own path.

  This was the one she had chosen. Tera ignored the surgeon standing frozen in the corner of the room, and slowly crumpled the metal into a ball. She could feel the weak points in the metal, hold her grip with some fingers and adjust the pressure with others, to make the material do whatever she wished.

  Several years ago now, she had been given upgrades that heightened her speed and precision, as well as her muscle strength. Until now, however, she had remained limited by the the frailties of her underlying structure.

  You’re human, Browman had told her when she told him the problem. That’s what it means to be human.

  Tera hadn’t bothered answering. He knew what she wanted, and that was to go beyond—always faster, stronger, surer. Moreover, he wanted it, too. He wanted to make something greater than a human, even if he was afraid to be that thing, himself.

  His loss, her gain—especially now, when he’d made a framework for her hands that was one part scaffolding, protecting the bones and ligaments, and one part chemical, shoring up the complex, delicate structure. Standard implants had worked for the longer bones, but the hands and feet especially were too dangerous to operate on … or so they said.

  Browman had done it.

  “Give the chemicals time to work,” he advised. “And, with your permission, I will inform your father of the results.”

  So he did know who she was. There was one question answered.

  “Don’t bother.” Tera didn’t trouble herself to hide the contempt in her tone. She swung herself off the table and put her coat around her shoulders, noting with enhanced eyes the way his pulse sped at his throat when she stood, and with enhanced smell, the way his sweat had taken on the acrid scent of a prey animal under stress. “I’ll tell him myself.”

  “Indeed. Good day, Ms. Soras.”

  Tera paused in the doorway. “My name’s not Soras.”

  He looked up, and debated whether to ask or not. He knew it might be a trap, and she watched him come to the conclusion that, as with many things regarding Tera, he might not want to know the answer.

  But he was curious. That was the
one thing that defined him. It was why he still operated on her, and why he was skilled enough for her to permit him to do so.

  “What is your surname?”

  “I don’t have one,” Tera told him. She smiled at the look on his face. “You really don’t need to worry about finding out too much about me, doctor. You’ll find I don’t exist. No one saw me come here today, and you wouldn’t be able to convince anyone that you had a surgery today.”

  His eyes went to the cameras in the corner. It was an involuntary reaction, like the bobbing of his throat.

  “Yes,” Tera suggested in amusement. “Try the cameras. See how that works for you.”

  And she was gone, neither a smile or a frown on her features. For just a moment, she had the thought that it was lonely to have only one other person in the world whose closeness she tolerated.

  The thought was gone a moment later. Tera had made herself exactly who she wanted to be. She would rather that, than the hollow companionship of those who neither understood nor appreciated what that was.

  She was a weapon. She turned one shoulder forward to slip through the crowd easily, unnoticed amongst the throng of people. They wouldn’t recognize it on first sight. They would never know her name, and most of them would never even know the names of those she killed.

  But they would be safer. They would all be safer.

  An unusually cold wind whistled down the street and the people around her hunched their shoulders. Tera strode on, her brow furrowed. She hadn’t even noticed the cold. No, her mind was focused on a rather more confusing question. She hadn’t been given any jobs lately.

  Why not? Was her father gathering intel for a larger target than usual?

  If so … who?

  The photos from the street in Io District flashed across the screen, and the Warlord smiled.