Dragon Wave

by Valerie Emerson

  Vaughan neared the wormhole under the cloak of Jack’s powers, invisible to mothership and pirate alike. They made a long path around the pirates to be safe, adding extra hours to the journey. Jack tried to bear up under the strain, but he wilted before the first hour was up.

  Julia organized shifts for the Mystics and trainees to support Jack. Ephraim and Nada sat with him first while she gave the students a crash course in sharing their strength. Their natural defenses would keep them from giving too much. She was grateful to have many times the usual number of Mystics to keep Jack going.

  They docked with Gemini, floating into the mothership’s great hangar bay and sealing themselves to the lock. Only then did Jack release his powers, collapsing. Julia and two of the recruits carried him to his bunk.

  Gemini’s crew was shocked by Vaughan’s sudden appearance, but it only took a moment to get sorted and they were on their way.

  Barbara was outside the door when Julia left the cabin. She had a datapad clutched in one hand as she paced. Julia paused in the doorway to watch her for a moment, noting the lines forming between Barbara’s eyebrows.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The E.F. captain spun on her heel and closed on Julia, holding out the device. Up close, the new lines around her eyes became more obvious, as did the hints of gray in her complexion. She was exhausted and looked it. Julia wondered when she’d last slept.

  “Look at this. The damned liars are at it again,” she snapped, shoving the datapad at Julia.

  Julia accepted it reflexively. That same Pirr was on the screen. Her jaw clenched at the sight of the alien. The ticker across the bottom of the screen named her Pirr spokesperson this time, instead of just ‘Commander Xoa.’ She was nothing more than a mouthpiece to Julia, one that had tried to kill her partner and best friend.

  Barbara pressed play. Julia grimaced at her friend, but the video was already playing.

  “The Pirr understand your grief, but we did not order the attack on your civilian colony. We would not stoop so low.” Xoa’s lips parted in a subtle sneer. “We have heard your demands for the return of your Mystics. I assure you, if we had innocent captives in our hands, we would return them to you unharmed. Look to the marauders in our sky, Earth Fleet. If you cannot find your people among them, then I fear it is too late. Our condolences for your loss.”

  “Our condolences,” Barbara mimicked. “Have you heard such a pile of horse pucky in all your life?”

  “Can’t say I have.” Julia replayed the message, focusing on the Pirr’s expression rather than the meaningless words spilling from her mouth. She couldn’t get a read on the alien. It wasn’t surprising, but she was still disappointed. “I’d like to give her some condolences.”

  Barbara made a disgusted noise, probably in agreement. “Give me your stealth Mystic, a fast ship, and a squad of Marines, and I’ll show her piracy.”

  “I’m there with you.” Julia locked the screen and offered the datapad back to Barbara. “Too bad we play by the rules around here.”

  Her friend’s nod was sharp. “I’m going to need this a while yet. I’ve got a few more reports to write.”

  “Take all the time you need.”

  When she was alone, Julia went to the galley with its viewscreens to watch the starfield ease past. It was a soothing sight, and it gave her something to concentrate on rather than worry and grieve. She hadn’t known the lost Mystics well, yet they were still her people. She didn’t hold much hope of rescuing them, but she’d give their memories the respect they were due. One day, when she had the chance, she’d make sure the Pirr regretted what they’d done.

  ***

  The voyage to Earth went quickly for Jack. He spent much of his time catching up with Ephraim and teaching some of the students how to game. He sold them on it by saying a sharper imagination would help them in the Astral Plane. That was true, but mostly he wanted a way to pass the time that didn’t include dwelling on their enemies.

  Earth welcomed them with open arms. New Mystics were rare, so getting as many as seven from a single colony was unheard of. Administrator Miller approached Nada and Ephraim, but the two would not be swayed to remain Mystics. Ephraim was shameless when it came to accepting gifts and dinner invitations from the administrators but, in the end, they were unswayed and left the Academy.

  On the first morning back on Earth, Jack walked Ingram to the research facility at the Academy and brought him to Isabel’s lab. She was bent over an electronic board with a soldering iron. The board was wired to a dark monitor. Every few seconds Isabel glanced up at the screen, cursed under her breath, then went back to work.

  Jack cleared his throat. “Hey, Izzy.”

  She jumped, and the tip of her iron scored a burnt path over the surface of the green board. She pushed her safety goggles on top of her head as she turned around. Her frown transformed into a brilliant smile the moment she saw Jack.

  “You’re home! I heard about the pirates. I was so worried. How do you feel? Does extending yourself like that feel any different than using your abilities normally? Tell me everything!” She seized his sleeve to pull him toward his usual seat, then stopped when she noticed his companion.

  Ingram smiled. “You must be Isabel. I’m Ingram.”

  “Hello.” Isabel blinked and looked Ingram over, taking note of his lack of uniform or even an ID badge. She looked at Jack. “I’m sorry, but this is a secure area, Jack.”

  “Don’t worry. I have clearance from the Secret Council. Ingram here is from Geneva, and we think the ancient tech they found there might be linked to the doodad from Amadeus.” Jack glanced at Ingram. “He’s figured out how a few of them work.”

  “They thought I might be of help with the other artifact you found. I agreed to take a look,” Ingram said modestly. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Why would I mind?” Isabel smiled, but her voice was half an octave higher and her smile a little harder. “I guess the secret is out, we’ve hit a wall. I’m out of options unless we just try to turn the thing on from a minimum safe distance. If there is a minimum safe distance.”

  She shook Ingram’s hand, then spun around to open her wall safe. A moment later, she had the alien artifact held by the tips of her fingers. Her skin didn’t so much as brush any of the parts that moved, and she held it so delicately Jack wondered if she thought it was a bomb.

  Ingram whistled low and stepped in with his hands linked behind his back. He leaned in close enough to kiss it, moving his head from one end to the other. He straightened after a minute or so and, when he sucked in a breath, Jack realized the man had been holding it.

  Isabel’s smile had warmed, but she only had eyes for the artifact and Ingram. “What do you think?” She rotated it in her hands, showing him more of the rings that segmented the rod. “Did you find anything like this on Geneva?”

  “Not remotely. I mean, the iconography is identical. The matter they used to craft it…let me guess, it looks like ivory but isn’t remotely organic? It isn’t stone, plastic, or any other synthetic we know of.” He spoke quickly as he went, rattling off observations. He brushed Isabel’s hands with his fingertips, and she rotated the device another quarter-turn.

  “The iconography? Do you agree this is a language?” she asked.

  “Without question. Unfortunately, I have no idea what it says. The boss is taking a big sample of the written language to the linguists at Earth Fleet HQ.”

  “Nice! All Jack could get was a few snapshots.”

  “In my defense, I was being chased by a psychotic alien,” he countered, but the pair were going over the artifact again and speaking in awed murmurs. Technobabble dominated their conversation such that Jack understood one word in three. He gathered they were talking about scanning it without triggering whatever it had been built for.

  At first, he simply leaned against the wall and listened, pretending he could follow their conversation. When it became clear that they were neck deep in their geeky pursuits, he sat
in his usual chair with his feet propped up on Izzy’s worktable. While she’d normally rip him a new one for even looking at her stuff cross-eyed, much less touching it with his dirty shoes, this time she just rolled her eyes before returning to her conversation.

  He ignored it and pulled out his datapad. He had work to do, but it wasn’t going to get done in Isabel’s lab. He began to read instead, just skimming the surface of the words as he listened to them theorize and propose new ways to test the device. He got to his feet and said goodbye.

  Isabel waved absently, but Ingram didn’t hear him at all. Jack chuckled as he let himself out. If their enthusiasm was matched by their skill, they’d have the thing cracked before the end of the week.

  ***

  After a long day of submitting reports on Geneva, Jack caught up to his friends at Coraolis and Julia’s apartment. Nada and Ephraim were there, along with Ingram and Carter. Everyone but Ingram was sitting at the table, playing a game with spaceships on a board covered in stars.

  Curious, Jack helped himself to a plate of nachos and leaned against the counter next to the engineer. Julia whispered with Ephraim, clearly plotting something, while Coraolis and Isabel did the same. Jack cleared his throat, and Nada looked up with a smile.

  “We’ll be done in a round or so. The bad guys are winning,” she said with a wicked smile.

  “I told you, we’re not evil. We’re just more organized than you,” Dante claimed, and was met by laughter all around the table.

  “Take your time. I’ll just eat all the nachos while you strategize.” Jack grinned and nudged Ingram. “How did it go today?”

  The engineer brightened. “Very well. The linguists are puzzling out the language. They think it may not be a true language in itself. They think it might be more conceptual than that.” He pulled out a datapad and pulled up an image.

  Jack bent his head to look at the picture. Ingram had zoomed in on two arches. Their lines crossed at one extreme, with another line slashing between them. It could have been anything, especially with the squiggly lines radiating from the half-circles.

  “This could be a sun here and another there. But only one is radiant, see? So perhaps the other is the moon.” Ingram shrugged and scrolled to the next image. “This is a dragon, of course.”

  “Yeah, they had these everywhere on Amadeus.” Jack only glanced at the screen, then looked again when something caught his eye. “Any idea what any of it means?”

  Ingram shook his head and swiped to another picture. “Doctor Nielsen—he is one of our linguists—thinks that this first line is religious in nature. You see that every block of glyphs begins with the same line, exactly. Something so ingrained must have spiritual significance, or so he says.”

  “What do you think?” Jack accepted the datapad when Ingram handed it over and zoomed in to look at the glyphs more carefully.

  “I’m withholding judgment, but it’s interesting. It could also be a statement that such-and-such is a law. It could also be the name of an ancient king. Who knows? We may never translate this fully.”

  “I do love a mystery,” Jack mused. “Dragons must have been part of their culture from early on, don’t you think? If humans had encountered dragons from the beginning of our civilization, maybe we’d have dragons all over our buildings too.”

  Ingram chuckled. “That could be. I will keep you updated as we learn more. I may be staying on Earth longer than I thought.”

  “Any progress with the artifact?” Jack glanced over at the table where Nada was now whispering with Coraolis.

  “None. We are trying to borrow some instruments from Yale, but they want to know what we are doing that we need their most delicate instruments. We are negotiating payment that doesn’t involve letting them look at the toy.”

  “What if they don’t let you have it? Will you call Harvard?”

  Ingram chuckled. “Perhaps. I wish to take it apart, to be honest. That is the best way to know what a thing does, but Isabel won’t allow it.”

  “I’m not sure I’m wild about the idea either.” Jack’s eyes slid over to Isabel. She was covering her mouth with her hands, as if to hide a smile—or a frown.

  “I’m not pushing for it. Maybe when all our other options are exhausted, she’ll reconsider.”

  Dante whooped suddenly, and Coraolis groaned, while Julia and Ephraim broke into laughter.

  “Sounds like the game is over.” Ingram stowed his device. “I will send you copies of the pictures later, if you like. For now, let’s have some fun, eh?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  One week after he came back to Earth, Jack returned to the Vaughan. He shared a bunk with Dante, while Coraolis and Julia took the one next door. Their friends from Geneva continued their work on Earth while the Evolved prepared for a fight.

  Jack played the latest newscast on his datapad. He left the sound off this time; the haunted look on the boy’s face was bad enough. The ticker at the bottom of the screen summed up what Jack already knew.

  Five days before, a squad of pirates had descended on more innocents. The remote and defenseless Iris Colony were mostly farmers. There was no strategic value or an abundancy of resources there, yet the pirates had swooped in, using heavy cannons to destroy the farms and take pot-shots at fleeing colonists. The fields caught fire and, with no one to protect the farmsteads, everything turned to ash in a matter of hours.

  Jack’s grip tightened on his datapad. It was senseless. People had died, and all he could see was cruelty for its own sake. It had taken two days for the colonists to send a call for help. The rescue ships came, but that wasn’t all Earth Fleet was going to do.

  The Pirr had to be behind the attack. No one else had the motivation. Few others had the means.

  They had no proof, but Earth wasn’t taking it on the chin anymore. They were going on the offensive with the four most powerful Mystics in Earth Fleet’s arsenal.

  He stopped the video and set the datapad on his bunk. He’d watched it enough times; it would only sour his mood to do it again. He left the device behind and set out to find Julia.

  He found her in the commune chamber, lying on her back and staring at the ceiling. Jack tapped on the door frame. She welcomed him with a smile and a wave, so he entered and sat on the floor facing her.

  “Don’t get up for my sake,” he said when she sat up. “You look comfortable down there.”

  “No, if I lay down any longer, I’ll fall asleep.” She tucked her legs beneath her, then looked into his face, her eyes sharpening. “You watched it again, didn’t you? Give yourself a break, Jack.”

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Those people…they didn’t deserve that. I can’t imagine it benefited anyone.” Jack rubbed his face, trying to banish the pictures of the burned-out farm. It was about as effective as the last time he’d tried, which was to say not at all.

  “I know. They did it to put us off-balance. They wanted to upset us so we’d do something stupid, and it worked.”

  “What do you mean ‘stupid?’ We need to defend our people and get justice for the ones it’s too late to defend. What’s stupid about it?”

  Julia’s head jerked back; not much, but he knew he’d surprised her.

  “As soon as we open fire on a Pirr vessel, it’s full-on war. We become the galactic bully. There are other ways to handle this.”

  “What, for instance? Do nothing and lose a war of attrition?” He was on the edge of shouting, his temper unraveling more with each word. “Let innocent people get hurt?”

  “No.” She squared her jaw but spoke quietly, making him strain to hear. “We go after the pirates, we get proof of who they’re working for. Then our cause becomes legitimate. Then we go after the Pirr.”

  “If they don’t believe they’re the aggressors already, they won’t believe any proof we show either. People see what they want. If they need us to be the villains, then we will be.”

  “I know.”

  “You know?” he asked, incredu
lous.

  “Yes. Strategically, this is a bad idea, but I was the first one to sign up for the mission. I know there will be consequences for this, and we’re not going to like them. We could lose allies. Neutral governments might side with the Pirr just to turn a profit.”

  “We aren’t going to lose the Yeti to a bribe,” Jack objected.

  “Not the Yeti tribes that made the pact with us, no, but there are plenty of tribes that have nothing to do with us, and others that dislike humans on principle.”

  He shook his head. That didn’t feel right; the Pirr had been picking at Earth Fleet for a long time. They’d taken lives and destroyed ships, sometimes for fun. No intelligent being would think Earth was the villain. Would they?

  “I think it’s obvious who started this.”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “I know. And it is. The problem is that this is an official military action. Win or lose, we’re attacking based on the blockade, and that the Pirr opened fire on the Vaughan. Will a court recognize those as acts of war?”

  “Don’t let Captain Crabapple hear you talk like that,” he huffed.

  “Cranston knows this the same as I do. He’s no fool. But don’t worry about me. I came in here to blow off steam and complaining about this is part of that steam. We’re doing our best, you know? Earth, I mean. I just think this is the wrong move.”

  “We’re taking the chaotic path instead of the lawful one. That doesn’t make us wrong,” he replied.

  “I didn’t say we were wrong. Earth Fleet would have held out if the government weren’t so desperate to do something decisive.”

  He sighed dramatically. “God save us from election years.”

  She was surprised into a laugh, and he joined her. The sound of shared humor ate some holes in his bad mood and let some sunlight in. It didn’t matter how good an idea the offensive was, anyway. They were going, and the four of them were masters of the Astral Plane. They’d win their battles. They hoped their Earth Fleet counterparts could do the same.