Star Dragon Box Set One

by Blaze Ward

  “What do you mean, made?” Morty asked. “We watched you on the screen. You did great.”

  “I don’t know how, but that cop saw through everything,” Talyarkinash said. “There should have been far more questions. Intrusions. Inspections. Annoyances. The last time the city wanted to check something, I had people in here for three days.”

  “She gave up too easily,” Gareth observed, calmly powering off the magical book and placing it on the end table. Something had not felt right, but he hadn’t been able to put a finger on it until Talyarkinash said something.

  “Yes,” the woman said. “I don’t know why.”

  “She already knows you’re guilty,” Gareth said. “She left so that she could call for reinforcements to seal off the building without you being aware that the trap was closing.”

  “How would you know that?” Xiomber asked and then stuffed the last two bites into his mouth at once.

  “That is how I would do it,” Gareth said. “And I’m a cop. We need to run. Right now. If we’re overreacting, we can come back tomorrow, but I doubt the building will still be an option in an hour. I’ve done this too many times to folks like you. I know what it feels like.”

  He rose and stretched. Action made him hungry, but there wasn’t time to make a sandwich, and instinct told him their freedom might be measured in minutes.

  “Fardel,” Morty suddenly yelled, punching his pocketcomm. “We’re screwed.”

  “What just happened? “ Xiomber mumbled around his chewing.

  “Two things,” Morty snarled, lowering his chair and leaving the pocketcomm behind on the bar. “One, I tried to call a taxi, and the map somehow shows no available vehicles anywhere, in the middle of the afternoon. Two, the credit account I had been charging everything to suddenly locked up and shut itself down.”

  “Oh, crap,” Xiomber rose.

  “Yup,” Morty agreed. “Normally, losing a credit account is nothing. We go through them all the time. Timing is exceptionally bad right now. Rather suspicious.”

  Gareth turned to see Talyarkinash pulling a duffel bag from a previously-closed cabinet.

  Good idea. Gareth raced to his bedroom and grabbed his own bag. Everything had been cleaned and folded, ready to go.

  Or run, as the case apparently was.

  Amazingly, both of the brothers had also already grabbed bags, a soft sided satchel case for Morty, and backpack for Xiomber.

  “What’s the plan?” he asked.

  Three days with these folks, and he had not really spent a lot of time on possible escape routes.

  At first, sitting in that damned dentist’s chair three more times and getting his brain psionically drilled had left him fuzzy for hours afterwards. Then watching as Talyarkinash and the brothers sketched out designs for a suit he could wear. Except it wasn’t a suit, exactly.

  Gareth hadn’t really come to terms with what they had come up with.

  But they had started designing something.

  And now the clock was about to expire.

  Its midnight, Cinderella.

  “Yuudixtl are pretty common on this planet,” Morty said. “If we split into two teams, Xiomber and I should be able to blend into a crowd well enough. Vanir and Nari tend to congress, so you two won’t raise that big of an issue together. Talyarkinash, I’m sorry that we blew your cover with this. Do you have a bolt hole we can make?”

  Gareth watched the woman pass through the stages of death in a few, quick seconds, lingering on anger for perhaps a touch too long, before she reached acceptance. She gave the brothers an address and fixed Gareth with a hard scowl.

  “You better be worth it,” she said.

  “If I don’t stop Maximus, I’m not sure anybody else can,” he replied calmly. “The only price you’re risking is jail.”

  That got through the woman’s hard façade. The ears flickered forward and her whiskers even relaxed.

  “We should go first,” Gareth continued, turning to Morty and Xiomber. “If the Constables don’t know you two, they’ll key on me and you might be able to escape in the confusion.”

  “Where are we without you, Gareth?” Xiomber asked.

  “Go back and build a new machine, Xiomber,” he replied calmly. “Any Field Agent of the Sky Patrol you kidnap will be on your side as soon as you explain the situation to them. Invoke my name when you do.”

  “You’re nuts, kid,” Morty said.

  “I’m Earth Force Sky Patrol, Morty,” Gareth said. “That means something.”

  “Let’s go,” Talyarkinash snapped peevishly, pulling open yet another hidden door and stepping into the hallway only a few steps from the drop-tube.

  “Second floor,” she called, rather than first, and dropped from sight.

  Gareth was right behind her.

  The second floor of the building was a mezzanine that ran all the way around the outside of the building like a balcony. It was apparently made of glass, or aluminum that was functionally transparent, because for a moment Gareth thought he was floating in the air.

  Talyarkinash had slung her bag’s strap over a shoulder and added a jacket in the same rich maroon as her pants. Gareth was wearing what he thought of as his cowboy outfit: black pants, plaid shirt, blue denim jacket, no hat. The bag holding his clothes was more of a soft suitcase, so he had it by the handle, an oversized, pine-green briefcase as he walked.

  The beautiful scientist had paused long enough for Gareth to come up on her left. She held out a hand and grabbed his. Bright blue eyes with a hint of fear in them looked up at him.

  “Pretend we’re on a trip together,” she said calmly as she started to walk. “Maybe a honeymoon on a new planet. Walk like I’m your girlfriend.”

  He stared to say something, but swallowed it when he saw the abject terror in her eyes.

  Being arrested and thrown in jail forever still didn’t frighten her anywhere near as much as being this close to a human.

  What in the nine hells did people in the Accord learn about humanity? Sure, we could be a rough folk. And probably too violent, especially since all species in the Accord had an empathic bond to them, but we aren’t that bad.

  Are we?

  But he was Earth Force Sky Patrol. If nothing else, he had a duty to uphold the highest standards of conduct.

  Gareth smiled at her and set off at a normal pace. Her ear tips were about as tall as he was, and their legs were roughly the same length. Her hand was clammy in his, and he didn’t hold too tight.

  Two young lovers, just landed and walking to a hotel. He could do this. And not even blush all that hard, because his heart was still true to Pippa, no matter how beautiful or forward some of the women of this new galaxy were.

  Like he would have expected at home, there was an escalator to the ground floor. Six of them, in fact, one at each corner of the building. She led him to the one farthest from the front of the tower.

  The atrium wasn’t completely empty. It was mid-afternoon, and there were people coming and going. Tourists standing around. Messengers delivering packages.

  Cover.

  They rode the escalator down in the immediate wake of a Warreth mother and three chicks just about of an age to start school, back on Earth. They were full of questions about everything and kept their mother distracted.

  Rather than stare, Gareth leaned against the side of the escalator and looked around the interior of the building. The architecture was unlike anything back home, with soaring, curved ribs like a giant whale holding the building up, instead of the normal squat pillars a human designer would have used. Curved panes of glass all around the outside made the inside feel like an aquarium, with him a prized fish on display.

  Or a piranha.

  Something drew his eye to the northeast corner of the ground floor. A tea shop was doing a brisk business this afternoon, catching people at that point in the day when they needed a jolt to make it through the rest of the work and then get home safe.

  Someone was seated at the clos
est table to the center, sipping tea and amiably watching the crowds ebb and flow around her.

  He had never seen her in person, only through a remote camera hidden up in Talyarkinash’s lab, but he had no doubt that the figure was Constable Eveth Baker.

  Even across more than one hundred yards of space, Gareth felt her eyes lock on to him.

  Gareth turned to Talyarkinash and nodded back to indicate the Constable. His eyes turned deadly serious.

  “Run.”

  Gazelles

  Eveth was watching the drop-tube, but like a good cop, she made sure to track the rest of the space. Jackeith would be back with reinforcements in under an hour. All she had to do was bottle them up, nice and cozy on the forty-seventh floor in their cute, fake, lab.

  Until she had that Nari liar handcuffed in an interrogation room, sweating, while a heavy-armed strike team cleared the space with live weapons.

  Eveth was looking forward to that part. This had been a hard week.

  She saw the Warreth and chicks descend from the mezzanine. Probably taking pictures of the river before heading home for dinner. Two other tourists followed, quietly enjoying their trip.

  Something about the male caught her eye. Vanir male. Nari female. The light was bad at this distance, odd afternoon shadows distorting things, but something wasn’t right. Something about the image of the male.

  He wasn’t anything special from this distance. Casually dressed in a style she didn’t recognize. Blond hair. Broad shoulders. A little short.

  Short.

  Nari females tended to run about five and a half feet tall. The Warreth woman in front of them looked about the same, so the man was a little over six feet tall. Short for a Vanir.

  Tall for a human.

  The man turned and made eye contact with her like he was seated across the table, rather than nearly one hundred twenty yards away.

  Recognition, like an electric shock running through both of them, apparently.

  He turned to say something to his companion, nudging her forward as the Warreth mother gathered up her brood and started across the tile plaza.

  Eveth was already out of her chair and moving.

  The human had the woman by the hand and was tugging her along now. She resisted at first, until she saw Eveth moving, and then those long, Nari legs started to churn.

  Eveth didn’t bother to yell. The distance was too great, and those two weren’t about to listen to her.

  And the last thing Eveth needed to do today was to start a panic about a human loose in Olehmmishqu.

  Civilian clothes drove her almost to distraction as she picked up speed. In her bodysuit, there was a pouch on her right thigh, opposite her holster, for a pocketcomm. In mufti, she had been forced to stuff in into an interior breast pocket of the blazer.

  The two fugitives had made it to the exterior door now. Hopefully, they would try to call for an auto-taxi, gambling that the vehicle would arrive before she did, except that Grodray’s contacts had already set up a hard lock on all calls, two blocks in every direction.

  She pushed harder, closing the space to the door as they turned right and began to move.

  All the two fugitives would get was an angry cop closing as fast as her Vanir legs could carry her.

  She was at the door, jammed it open with her immense mass moving at high speed, and took off after them.

  Eveth was confident she could run down any human.

  Still, she needed backup. And help cornering them.

  She pulled out the pocketcomm and triggered a call to her partner.

  It rang twice before he picked it up.

  “Talk to me, Eve,” he said urgently.

  “I’ve got two runners, Grodray,” she said.

  Any other words were lost as she plowed squarely into a pedestrian coming around a corner from the alley, one of the Tree People, built about as sturdy as an oak.

  All the breath whooshed out of her and Eveth felt her skull crack hard on the man’s trunk. Fortunately, she had a really hard head.

  But her pocketcomm slid away, still moving when she stopped.

  The Tree Person looked down at her in surprise and offered a hand up, along with an apology.

  Eveth took it, but couldn’t see her pocketcomm through the wobbly stars dancing circles around her head. Down at the far end of the block, the human and his accomplice had already crossed a street and were threatening to melt into the afternoon rush hour mobs that were just starting to emerge from buildings.

  She had a choice, but it was never really in doubt.

  Eveth could always track down her pocketcomm later. It would lock up in ten seconds, and Grodray could send a pulse to make it scream fit to wake the dead, once he realized she had lost it.

  But in the meantime, the human would vanish into the underworld, and Eveth was pretty sure they would never get another chance like this to capture him. He had a top geneticist helping him to escape. In three days, he might look like anything at all.

  Eveth growled out her rage and began to run. Since she couldn’t call for backup, she would just have to do this on her own.

  She reached inside the jacket and pulled out her stun pistol. The range was too great now, but that was just a matter of anger and patience.

  Right up her alley.

  Hunted

  Gareth could have easily outrun Constable Baker on a track. One of the horror elements of the species descriptions in the book he had been reading spelled out the immense endurance and stamina of humans compared to every other species in known space, including the presumably-horrifying little fact that some human societies had been known to chase their pray to death, jogging lightly along for hours until the creature simply collapsed of exhaustion and died.

  Only Terran dogs, Humanity’s secret weapon, could match humans for endurance.

  He would have liked to tell the writers of such lurid squamph that the average human worked in a factory or at a desk, and was about as dangerous as the average citizen here, but they wouldn’t listen. He was a human, after all.

  And it wasn’t Gareth against a single Constable. He had Talyarkinash to protect, and a strange and wondrous city into which he could easily become so disoriented that he became an easy target for some innocent beat cop.

  Gareth would not kill an authorized law enforcement agent doing their job. He wouldn’t even hurt one any more than necessary to escape.

  He had to represent all humans to the Accord of Souls. On his life would be their eventual welcome into broader galactic society.

  Fortunately, rush hour was apparently the same, the galaxy over. Happy hour had dawned and people were starting to sneak out of offices a little early to get a head start on family life, or extra time down at the corner bar.

  Just in the few seconds since they had emerged from the building and gone a block, the number of people on the sidewalk had practically doubled. Gareth was hard pressed not to run into people hard enough to knock them down, especially while also not losing Talyarkinash’s hand.

  She was his lifeline right now, and he needed her like a lifesuit in a hull breach. Fortunately, she needed him just as much. Without Gareth and the brothers, she would have nowhere to go when the police did come back and started going through her files.

  He tried not to shout out his internal joy that another criminal ring would be broken, because that meant he was about to go down with them. A cop like Eveth Baker would shoot first and he would wake up behind bars for the rest of his life, while they tried to figure out a way to completely wipe his memory without taking the rest of his mind with it.

  That woman had the look about her.

  And she was chasing them, gun in hand and down by her side like a well-trained operative. Gareth understood instinctively how dangerous she would be.

  At the corner, the light held them for a second. Gareth glanced back and picked her up through the mass of bodies as she came after them. He watched Baker run into a walking tree (A WALKING TREE?) and lose her communi
cations device, the handheld sliding under a car parked at the curb.

  It gave him an idea as the light turned to walk.

  “Talyarkinash, I need you to trust me,” he said as they pressed their way forward through the growing mob of strangely-smelling folks.

  He felt her dig her heels in hard, because she stopped moving and he nearly pulled her over accidentally.

  “Trust you?” she snarled quietly. “You?”

  “I think I can get us away from her, but I need your help,” Gareth said. “Your trust. I swear that I will do everything I can to protect you, on my honor as a Field Agent of the Earth Force Sky Patrol.”

  “Are you insane, Gareth?” she hissed.

  Gareth decided that they were losing ground to Constable Baker while arguing. He pulled the Nari scientist along by sheer strength.

  “Maybe,” he admitted as she allowed herself to fall into stride again.

  It was like pushing against ocean waves to get to the calmer, open water, getting through the press of bodies.

  There. An alley way between two buildings, possibly allowing industrial vehicles access to interior loading bays. The asphalt was worn and dirty, and no plants lined the walls.

  He looked back and Baker had chosen pursuit over assistance. She was holding her gun and had foregone her radio for backup.

  Gareth pulled Talyarkinash into the alleyway, like two young lovers sneaking off for a quick smooch out of the flow of traffic. Nothing could be further from his mind, but anything to confuse people worked in his favor.

  Like New Metropolis back home, the streets were movie set facades, pretty on the street, but unwashed, ugly, and industrial in the alleys. Gareth counted dumpsters, trashcans, a parked delivery truck, and several overhead balconies, possibly good, old-fashioned fire steel escapes. None of the latter provided him the cover he needed, but the rest of the space would do.

  Gareth measured off the strides he needed, pulling Talyarkinash along with him.

  “She’ll be here in seconds,” he said urgently. “I need you stretched out on the asphalt here, like you’ve tripped and twisted your ankle, and I didn’t stop. She’ll see you, and come to arrest you. I’m hiding close by. I will jump her when she gets here. Can you do that?”