The Dragon Circle

by Irene Radford

  “Well, if it isn’t the infamous O’Hara brothers dumped right into my lap,” the familiar female voice from the comm system sneered.

  Kim looked in the direction of the voice. A tall woman, as tall as Loki, with a cap of red curls, long legs, and green eyes that spat fire, stood in the shadow of a cross corridor to their left. Her khaki uniform with emerald trim was crisp and clean and shouted authority. She leveled a needle rifle at his heart.

  Counter-grav units strapped to the soles of her boots and just above her elbows gave her the advantage of maneuverability.

  All three brothers froze.

  “Lieutenant JG Kat Talbot?” Kim asked.

  “I bet she was christened Mari Kathleen O’Hara.” Loki grinned from ear to ear.

  “And if I was, why shouldn’t I nail all three of you to the wall?”

  “Because IMPs don’t kill.”

  “I’ve cleared this corridor. Captain won’t ask questions if I dump your dead bodies out an air lock. No one with a conscience will come looking to save you.”

  “Then you will not shoot because the blood in your veins speaks to the blood in mine,” Kim said calmly. He felt the draw of kinship. Her physical resemblance to himself and his brothers said more than words.

  “If blood speaks so strongly, why didn’t you come back for me twenty years ago?” She let loose with a single blast from the stun pistol in her right hand. The bolt of energy landed at Loki’s feet. The counter-grav equipment made her body jerk with the recoil.

  All three brothers jumped away.

  Kat lifted the muzzle of the needle rifle. It rested easily in her left hand—a miniature counter-grav unit clamped to the butt negated the weapon’s weight for her. Her trigger finger twitched nervously.

  “We did not go back for you because we could not go back.” Loki took one cautious step forward, hands raised. His stunner dangled uselessly from a wrist cord. “Not then. Not with Imperial troops authorized to kill Mum.”

  “Imperial troops do not kill. All life is sacred,” she snarled and let loose another blast from her pistol. This one sent Konner scrambling to his right, farther away from her. Closer to the next cross corridor.

  Kim coughed heavily as he scrambled left. Kat sent him a scathing look. Had she seen how far away Konner had gotten?

  “Tell that to Governor Mitchell,” Loki growled back. “Dead men—or dead women—tell no tales and carry no lawsuits back to Imperial Justice on Earth. We’ve been on the run for twenty years because of that man.”

  “Mitchell is dead,” Katie said, quite calm. Her eyes looked dead. She’d lost the fire. “I watched him die.”

  She did not add that she had shared the moment of death. She did not have to. Her eyes said it all. That fact alone made her one with her brothers. They all had borne the curse of nearly following victims beyond the mortal realm.

  “Mitchell’s decrees of outlawry remain,” Loki said. Bitterness colored his words and his posture.

  “Mitchell’s falsified evidence against Mum remains.” Kim took up the recital. He forced a loving tone into his words. He tried to reach out to her with every scrap of healing empathy he could. If only he had more Tambootie! “We’ve been running away from a dead man for twenty years, Katie. But not for one moment did we forget that we left a family member behind. We’ve been trying to find you for twenty years.”

  “You didn’t try hard enough,” she spat. “And my name is Kat. Kat Talbot, I took the name of the man who adopted me. The man who loved me as a daughter. The man who was there for me when my family deserted me.” She aimed the stun pistol and blasted again.

  Kim knew she would do it. Knew precisely where she would aim and that she had as good accuracy with her right hand as with the needle rifle in her left. He did not move out of the way.

  He had to give Konner a chance to disappear.

  Pain lanced through his bare left foot. Flame shot up his leg followed by numbness. His knee was on fire.

  And then he fell. He tried to catch himself against the bulkhead. He couldn’t find it with dead hands.

  “She shot me!” he mumbled through leaden lips. “My own sister shot me.”

  Konner took off into the blind cross corridor without a backward look, as fast as the heavy gravity would allow him.

  CHAPTER 25

  KONNER KNEW what he had to do. He had to abandon his brothers, much as they had all abandoned Katie twenty years ago. He hated himself for leaving Kim wounded.

  Kim must know that he had to leave. They had planned for this. At all costs Konner had to dismantle the king stone.

  None of the IMPs could be allowed to leave this planet. Ever. All communication with civilization must be severed. The king stone was the key.

  (Do not forget the other beacon,) a disembodied voice warned him. (One you should not trust has the beacon.)

  “Later. First things first.” He ran. A blast from Katie’s stunner nipped at his heels. He ran faster.

  She had the advantage of counter-grav. But her quarry had split. Which would she keep under guard?

  He heard footsteps behind him.

  His heart thudded. The heavy gravity dragged at his muscles. He kept going.

  Right ten paces, left two. He grabbed the rungs of an emergency ladder and pushed himself up to the next deck and slightly lighter gravity.

  The footsteps behind him fell away. He thought. He couldn’t be certain. His heart pounded in his ears so loudly he heard nothing else. Too fast. Gravity was too heavy. He had to slow down and think.

  This corridor ended in a blast door. Kat had said that she’d cleared the area before confronting her brothers.

  Konner spun the lock. It slid open.

  He heard voices off to his left. A cross corridor ahead. People. IMPs.

  He ducked into a storage locker. Cables and grapples and magnetic couplers filled every available inch. He pried a space for himself between two neatly stacked coils of cable. One long breath in and out. Then another and a third. His pulse calmed to a more reasonable level. He listened. A coupler pressed painfully into his back. One hundred heartbeats later the voices moved on.

  Not bothering to fully close the locker, he crept out. Now where? He had to work his way into the heart of the ship to the king stone.

  Konner drew his stunner, a toy compared to the pistol and the needle rifle his sister packed. He checked the charge and the setting. Mid range. A solid hit to the chest would render most adults of civil height and mass semiconscious. No sustainable injuries. But this crew seemed to have as many bushies as civils. Their greater height and weight might take a stronger charge.

  The vision of Lieutenant Pettigrew’s death’s head grinning at him wiggled into his mind once more. He left the setting in the middle. He’d take his chances.

  One corridor at a time he worked his way inward, toward ever decreasing gravity. The area grew more and more populous. Everyone carried a sidearm. Many packed larger weapons. He detected no more needle firearms. They were illegal after all. So why did Kat have one?

  Knots of people gathered around viewscreens peering at the planet below them. Two fistfights broke out when someone refused to give way.

  Konner gulped and pressed himself deeper into the shadows. The fight broke up. Three men drifted away directly past him. They searched the area warily, but their gazes slid right over him without a flicker of acknowledgment.

  Maybe the Tambootie continued in his system, allowing him to misdirect their attention.

  He passed crew quarters and a mess hall. The scent of textured protein and tanked greens did not entice him at all. Voices raised in disagreement sent him scuttling past the open hatchway.

  Just beyond the mess hall, he found a lift, an open affair, merely a series of platforms rising on a continuous belt. Beside that was a closed stairwell. He took that up one level. The corridor there seemed to go only north and south. He couldn’t see any cross ramps going east-west or up and away from the concentration of gravity.

&
nbsp; Up two more flights. He found it! A ramped passage going east-west. He stepped into it. On the bulkhead a terminal blinked at him. He pressed two buttons and found a map. But he did not truly need it. He could hear the crystals whispering to each other up ahead.

  Gravity eased. He moved more quickly. Each step bounced and threatened to send him in oblique directions. He could not afford the time recovering from rebounding off the bulkheads.

  Concentrate, he admonished himself. One step in front of the other. Straight lines. Straight ahead.

  The crystals came alive in his mind. One king stone and twelve drivers. Always a symmetry of twelve. But this ship had three circles of drivers, twelve each, at bow, aft, and midship. Each ring of drivers had one hundred forty-four directionals spread around the circumference of the torpedo-shaped vessel. Sirius had a more efficient design—to Konner’s mind—with a single ring of drivers around the king stone and a directional circle around a saucer.

  He heard/felt the magnetic monopole drivers sharing the nitrogen that bathed them. They spat energy along fiber optics to the twelve directionals assigned to each driver. Each crystal was connected to the others. They needed no opposing pole to complete them. They had a circle of like crystals. An entire family of green drivers, red directionals and a single blue king stone that interpreted computer commands for direction and speed. Every crystal in the three arrays was grown together. The king stone maintained an invisible tether to a mother stone at the place of their birth. As long as the king stone was in communication with its mother stone, it could always find its way home. It could also communicate with every other king stone tethered to the mother faster than the speed of light.

  Crystal scientists theorized that the stones used the invisible transactional gravitons to communicate almost instantaneously anywhere in the galaxy.

  Konner had seen the local equivalent of transactional gravitons crisscrossing the planet below. He’d used the energy in those blue lines when he needed to move heavy objects with his mind. Could he use them to throw his thoughts across great distances as well?

  He sped onward toward the sealed door and the crystal he had to kill. Without the king stone, the crew would have to manually input each tiny correction into each driver and directional. The strain of the constant work allowed shifts of only two hours with the next four hours in heavy, drugged sleep.

  Konner had seen men go mad after only two days of maintaining a crystal array. They became so atuned to the crystal matrix that they could no longer communicate with humans.

  “St. Bridget and all the angels!” Loki exploded. He dove for Kat Talbot’s knees. The heavy gravity made him sluggish. She sidestepped easily, buoyed by her counter-grav units.

  Loki snagged her ankle with one fist. His palm covered the power unit of the counter-grav. He switched it off and yanked her foot out from under her. She fell atop him, unbalanced in the heavy gravity. The needle rifle skidded across the deck. She still had the stun pistol. Grasping it, she slammed both fists into his kidneys.

  Loki rolled and gasped. Fire raced up his back. Jaysus! She was strong.

  But the counter-grav units had reduced the force of her blow. He’d be bruised but would recover.

  He twisted, pinning her beneath him. She writhed like a Denobian muscle-cat, spitting and hissing curses in at least three languages.

  He had the advantage of weight and reach and a hundred barroom brawls where fair had nothing to do with winning. He made certain he switched off both of her arm counter-grav units. Her muscles grew slack beneath him.

  Kim groaned. They both stilled. Loki watched as Kim’s eyes rolled up and he passed out.

  “Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph, what did you do to my baby brother?” Loki stared into Kat’s eyes.

  “Baby brother? That’s Kim?” she breathed.

  “And you have no grudge against him. He was but a toddler when we lost you. You were barely two years older. Hate me, and Konner, we were teens and should have gone back for you. Hate Mum for failing to find you later. No way you can blame Kim.”

  “You all look so much alike . . .” she said quietly. Beneath him, her stomach muscles contracted.

  Either she prepared to deliver a massive blow to his head or she was going to vomit. He hoped the later, as he crawled over to where Kim lay.

  Kat rolled to her knees and retched. Dry heaves. They had to hurt under these g forces.

  Loki busied himself with checking Kim’s pulse. Slow and steady. His eyes dilated when Loki rolled back the eyelid. He’d live.

  Konner had taken responsibility for the king stone. Loki had to make sure they all escaped. That meant keeping Kat occupied and the corridor clear.

  “The docking bay was empty. Should have been three more landers there,” he said casually. And another five in a bay on the opposite side of the ship. Plus a number of smaller shuttles and fighters.

  “On the surface. Deployed in a broad search,” Kat replied. She seemed to have regained control of her stomach, but stayed on her knees, holding her head in both hands. She probably lied about the ships. All O’Haras inherited the ability to spin yarns at will. “I swear I only stunned him. He’s not dead, is he?”

  “You’d know if he was. You’d share the passing with him, maybe even let yourself pass beyond the barrier with him.” Loki grabbed a pair of force bracelets out of Kat’s uniform pocket. Before she could recover, he slapped them around her wrists. Two thin strands of plastic, linked by an electrode. Every movement of the wrists and hands sent jolts of electricity through the special conductivity of the bracelets. Loki had endured incarceration with bracelets before. They were no fun.

  Kat would have to have more endurance and will-power than he had to do more than sit quietly and answer his questions.

  “How long will your captain keep this corridor free?” Loki grabbed her stun pistol and slid it through his belt. It rested neatly, as if it belonged there. The rifle he kicked farther down the corridor, never wanting to touch such a weapon again.

  Kat stared mutely at the force bracelets.

  “I asked you a question.” He grabbed the bracelets by the electrode.

  Kat gasped and paled. Her lips remained sealed.

  “You’re tougher than I thought. But then you are an O’Hara.” Loki stepped back and thought a moment.

  “Help me get Kim back to the lander.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no?’ ”

  “I am a prisoner of war. I do not have to aid and abet the enemy.”

  “We aren’t your enemies. We’re family.”

  Again she remained silent. But this time her venomous green eyes were riveted on him.

  Loki squirmed. She looked very like Mum in that moment. He’d never been able to withstand Mum’s stare. He always succumbed and told her everything when she fixed her gaze upon him like that.

  “Very shortly, all hell is going to break loose and you will want to be in the docking bay.” Loki looked around for an easy way to get them back into the rabbit hole without impaling Kim on a directional crystal. Or better yet, convince Kat to escort them through the corridors.

  The heavy gravity of this deck was wearing on his thought processes. Or maybe the Tambootie he had ingested earlier had worn off.

  “What can you three do to bring down an IMP cruiser alone?” she scoffed.

  “Never underestimate the ingenuity of your brothers,” Loki returned. He knelt and checked Kim again. His eyes opened and closed fitfully as he fought back to consciousness. Having him awake would help, but the numbness in his legs would take too long to wear off for him to handle the rabbit hole by himself let alone be of much use out here.

  “Where is Konner?” Kat sat up straighter and looked around. “He disappeared halfway down that corridor.” She jerked her head in the direction she had chased the middle brother.

  Loki smiled and held her gaze. He could be enigmatic, too, when he wanted to.

  “If I remember correctly, and I remember everyt
hing in precise detail, Konner is the engineer in the family. He was always dismantling things and rebuilding them better,” Kat mused.

  She sat in silent thought for a moment. “Oh, my God!” She struggled to stand. She winced several times as the force bracelets shot jolt after jolt of electricity through her.

  Loki did not offer to help her.

  “He’s going to destroy the king stone. Why?”

  “If you’d paid attention to the surveys of the planet below, you’d know,” Loki replied.

  “Every crewman and officer not assigned otherwise has their noses glued to portholes and surveys. This is an uncharted system with a habitable planet. They are all excited.”

  “And getting greedy. Big bonuses for discovering habitable planets. Bigger bonuses for discovering lost colonies,” Loki said.

  Kim stirred and moaned. But his eyes opened and stayed that way. He moved his head cautiously, checking his surroundings. Then he opened his eyes wide and moaned.

  “She shot me. My own sister shot me.”

  “Yep. And she’ll do it again if we give her half a chance.” Loki handed the stun pistol to Kim. “Use it if she tries to escape.”

  Kat snorted.

  Loki helped Kim to sit up, bracing his back against the bulkhead. His long legs straddled the hatch to the rabbit hole.

  “You getting any feeling back?” Loki ran his hands down Kim’s legs, looking sharply for any muscle reaction at all.

  “Flashes and tingles,” Kim replied.

  Loki could not read his reaction as his youngest brother eyed their sister.

  Come to think of it, she was mighty quiet, concentrating on the electrode of the force bracelets.

  “Try to move your legs, Kim. You’ve got to be up and running by the time Konner finishes.”

  Kim’s knee twitched under slight pressure. “Breathe deep and even. Concentrate.”

  Kim flashed him a grin as if he knew more than Loki about the subject of breathing.