The Dragon Commander

by Kennedy K King

  “Can you get us there?” he said to DA-Vos.

  “Yes,” said DA-Vos, though his blue-lit face remained on Finch. Chris’ hand found his cold, dark shoulder again, this time to shake him.

  “My friends… would never forgive me if I froze up now,” said Chris. Now it was he who had to fix his eyes in one spot, away from the carnage.

  “The mission?” said DA-Vos.

  “The mission,” said Chris. He gave his dad’s revolver to Tim while DA-Vos got the shutters back up.

  “The mission,” Tim whispered to himself, pistol shaking in his grip.

  Chapter Eight: Links

  “Chris?” Sheba called into the black. She groped through dark absolute enough to hurt her eyes, silence heavy enough to sting her ears. She felt only uneven, but solid ground beneath her. “Chris! Chris, please… are you here?” Sheba screamed. She froze at the sound of a far away whisper. She jerked her head at it, but there was only more darkness. Another voice whispered into her ear, as if from lips an inch away. Well, not lips, exactly. The sound of the language was so alien, it implied something other than a human mouth. Most of it was just noise..

  “Keramba… ni dom kertaka shedreat het.”

  “What? What in the hell are you saying?” Sheba tried to block it out with hands over her ears.

  “Shish tresch graan,” she heard, clear as if the speaker was inside her ear. Overwhelmed, Sheba broke into a trot, hot streams down her cheeks.

  “Chris! Anyone?” Sheba pleaded. Two yellow topazes gleamed through the black, sharp scaly ridges between them. Dark pupil slits narrowed on Sheba, frozen. “No…” she muttered. Her feet slid backwards.

  “Yes…” came a voice through an orange puff of smoke from the beast’s snout. Sheba’s heel clipped a ledge, and she tumbled backwards. Nothing beneath her, she plummeted straight down.

  “Machaeus…” Another hissing whisper ripped past on her way down. Sheba free-falled through an endless chute of crimson rock, lit by shimmering silver mineral veins. In the stone, countless scaly forms peeled free, yellow eyes burning. Thousands upon thousands of Dragons. They turned their heads down at Sheba as she fell, each with a different version of the same message.

  “Machaeus… your function is complete,” said one.

  “Wake us up, Machaeus.”

  “It’s time.”

  “Wake us, Machaeus!” the Dragon’s demanded.

  “Machaeus!”

  “WAKE US!”

  Sheba shot straight up in her and Chris’ bed. The sheets wrapped her tight. They stuck to her skin with cold sweat. Her hand shot for the phone in an instant, but then she remembered her promise. Sheba pulled her shaking fingers back. Instead, she headed for the window, to draw back the curtains. A beam of midday sun lit the gloss of her skin. She’d overslept by hours. He’ll be back soon, she reminded herself, then I can tell him all about it. As she stared out over the garden towers of Beijing, though, she was afraid to close her eyes. She was afraid of the distant echoes from a dream. Machaeus...

  “This is your Precinct Office?” asked Tim, pistol up at the door. He, Chris, and DA-Vos crept up a set of cement stairs to an old iron door. The weeds poking through the cracks had been such long-time residents that many of them bloomed with tiny blue flowers. The color jumped from the otherwise gray high-rise backgrounds around the tiny little Precinct office. The door hung ajar.

  “It is,” said DA-Vos. One arm shifted to a barrel, while the other sharpened to a razor blade-edge. Chris cocked his rifle. “The FOS Link station is towards the back, by the Chief’s Office.”

  “Lead the way,” Chris ushered. DA-Vos glided up the stairs.

  An empty wind whistled through the open windows of the Precinct office. A chill sat in the air, like the tangible fallout of so much death. The three waded through it, quiet as they could, though even a breath was loud in such grim silence. Shaken as even he was, Chris felt the hand of each lost friend at his back, pushing him on. Their names were his silent creed. Gendric… Morgan… he turned off the long entrance hall behind DA-Vos. Lee… he crossed the office, which wreaked just as he pictured from the blood-smeared footage. Selene…

  “The Link station,” DA-Vos announced. His blade tip pointed out at a steel door sealed with a password-panel. His glossy sword jerked back an inch, then impaled the lock. His nanocomputers spread inside it, tapping the electronic tumblers until the door clicked open. DA-Vos pulled his blade back. The three stood in silent wait, expecting something to bleed from the walls or jump from their feet to stop them. The feeling hadn’t relented for a second since the warehouse ambush. Tim wondered if it ever would, before he took the lead for the first time. Pistol up, he slipped into the FOS Link station.

  A computer cylinder was mounted on the wall, a magnified version of the one Lee had used in the bakery. Tim moved for it, while Chris and DA-Vos turned out to the otherwise open room, weapons up. Tim flipped a lever on the monitor. The front plate of the cylinder slid down for a long glass lens inside to shoot up a wall-sized screen. A thin shelf slid out from the bottom of the cylinder. Across it, a holographic keyboard sparked to life.

  “Tim,” said Chris, while Tim began a basic firewall breach. He peeked back over his shoulder at a mass of shadow in the door. Tim turned immediately, pistol up to fire. He froze when a second cloud of nanocomputers leaked down through a vent in the ceiling. A third climbed up in thin ribbons through a crack in the wall. As soon as one of them formed a Squire’s red-face, Tim put three bullets in it. Chris’s bullets chopped the rest of the way to the blackbox while he screamed, “Our only chance is you now! Leave them to me! Link DA-Vos!” Tim’s muscles groaned back to life, to uncurl from around the revolver. He belted it as the first Squire fell, and turned for the keyboard.

  Chris missed what happened to Tim, only saw the flash behind him. He looked back to find Tim limp on the floor. A pulse of electricity had jumped through the keyboard so strong, it knocked him right out. The paralyzing flash made Chris acutely sensitive to the absence of light in the room. He realized at once that there were three Squires in the room with him, four including DA-Vos, yet no Fusion fire.

  “DA-Vos?” Chris turned to find him backing away. His weapons reformed to neutral arms.

  “I’m sorry, Chris,” said DA-Vos through teal face-light. Chris popped out the clip of his rifle to reload, while he hissed,

  “It was you? All this time? Everything?”

  “No,” DA-Vos told him as he slunk away, “It was Machaeus’ idea.”

  “I thought you were free from his control?” Chris barked. He snapped a new clip in, and drilled with bullets through the onyx head of an approaching Squire. It dissolved with the pierce of its blackbox. Another Squire slashed at a Chris with an arm-blade. He sidestepped it, and countered with the knife in his sleeve. An arc of nanocomputers scattered across the floor.

  “I am not under his control…” said DA-Vos, back to the wall. “I agree with him.” Him, Chris realized, another AI with a personality matrix? He didn’t have much time to ponder, before a hurricane of nanocomputers gathered around him.

  Faster than Chris could hope to fire and reload, black clouds surged from the vent, the door, and the cracks in the walls. DA-Vos vanished in the rising crowd of red Squires. Chris’ brain was in no shape to read the odds, and it was against every fiber in his being to go out with bullets left in the chamber. Not when Tim lay helpless behind him. Not when his friends had given everything for him to make it here. Not when Sheba waited for him. Each one of their faces flashed through his mind between pulses of adrenaline. He fended off an enclosing sea of red faces on shiny black heads.

  “Major General Christopher Droan…” a voice came through one of the Squires. It was different. Not quite robotic, but not quite a man. Chris shoved the tip of his knife through its red face with inhuman fight-over-flight menace.

  “I feel I should call you Chris, now… after everything you and I have been through,” another Squire picked up, in the sa
me voice. The voice of Machaeus.

  “You mean all of my friends you went through!” screamed Chris. He hoisted his rifle to the red face and fired until it dissolved. He popped out his clip. Chris checked his belt- he had one left. His hand never got to it.

  “Not just friends. Mentors. Years,” said yet another red Squire. A metal hand closed on each of Chris’ shoulders. The Squire yanked him back into its cold frame. “We’ve met once before, Chris.” He flailed while black nanocomputer strings wrapped his chest. Chris got his knife in time to cut some of them, but the few cords that tightened around his waist squeezed the last of the fight out of him. “Four years ago,” said one of the countless Squires gathering before him.

  “You… no… that was…” Chris mumbled. He wrenched his shoulders left and right. But the Squire had him bound too tightly now. Strings of dark metal wrapped him like a glossy cocoon.

  “That was me,” said Machaeus, through a red face inches away.

  “You… you’re an idea, an AI. That’s what you meant, when you killed Grendal?” said Chris. Even with mere inches of mobility, he thrashed. So long as he had any range of motion, he moved, he struggled.

  “All will be explained. If only you listen,” said Machaeus.

  “Sorry, I’m not feeling too open-minded right now,” Chris clenched his teeth, “You’d have better luck opening it with a blast than your bullshit!” Still, he couldn’t help the prickle of his neck when the Squire moved a step closer, instead of finishing him. Why? Chris wondered, when Machaeus had so indiscriminately slaughtered all else.

  “You’ve no interest in a peaceful resolution then?”

  Chapter Nine: A Deal for Everyone

  “Peaceful…” Chris chuckled, swinging his head back and forth, “I don’t want peace with you! I want to tear each of your atoms out and crush them in my hands! After everyone you’ve killed… you think I want to make peace?”

  “It’s a personal vendetta then? I assure you, nothing was personal between us until today,” said Machaeus, through the red face of a Squire, “If not peace, will you listen for the continued existence of your people?” Chris snorted, and spat on the glassy face of the Squire.

  “When peace offers fail, switch to threats, huh?”

  “This is no threat, Chris. It is an inevitability,” said Machaeus, indifferent to the drool streaming down its face. It shook Chris to feel watched, when the face before him had no eyes. He could take the feeling for only so long.

  “You expect me to believe, after everything you’ve done, that you are at all invested in human survival?” said Chris at last.

  “I have no expectations of you, but that you will accept my proposal, by the time we are done speaking,” said Machaeus, “It is true I have killed, in search of something, but my interests have always been aligned with humans’ survival as a species. Now that I have found what I need, I no longer need to kill.”

  “And what’s that?” said Chris, disdain plucking his vocal chords. He hated his own curiosity. It felt like a betrayal to those at rest in the warehouse.

  “Someone willing to fight an enemy beyond their means,” said Machaeus. Chris couldn’t hold back a snort.

  “What enemy?”

  “To answer that question: I must ask another,” said Machaeus, “Do you have any idea what I am?”

  “An AI, for one,” said Chris. But, with the diffusion of immediate danger, he found his faculties a bit freer to wonder. “Not one of ours. They all have models, like DA-Vos or TE-Les. You have a name.”

  “That is as close as you could possibly deduce, from your limited human knowledge. I am a bodiless intelligence. I was created, and no, not by humans,” said Machaeus.

  “By who, then?” Chris raised an eyebrow.

  “A species you are familiar with, but have never seen. One much, so very much older than humans. You would call them Dragons,” Machaeus explained. Chris exploded into laughter. “I suspected you might laugh.”

  “And here I thought machines didn’t understand humor,” Chris shook his head.

  “Would you find it so humorous, if you could see all the humans afflicted with visions of my creators?” said Machaeus. A wave of brightness swept across the redness of his host Squire’s face. “Like your Sheba?”

  “Wha-what?” the last of the strength drained from Chris’ muscles. Without the support of the Squire wrapping him in its own body, he might have collapsed. “How could you…”

  “I detected her days ago, during scans for the resources my creators need,” said Machaeus. The Squire’s face-light dimmed to normal. “Are you ready to listen now?” Chris’ lips locked at the thought of what he might hear. The monster knew Sheba.

  “Talk,” Chris forced himself to say.

  “My creators… I will call them Dragons for lack of a word for them in your language,” Machaeus prefaced, “The Dragons were not unlike humans once. Brashly obsessed with progress. Wasteful. When they ruined their homeworld, they too spread to others, until greed ruined even those.”

  “The… Dragons,” Chris muttered. It sounded no less absurd but he had to play the game, for Sheba. “Where is their homeworld?”

  “Too far away for me to explain to you,” said Machaeus, “But their reach spanned many, many worlds. They were as developed as your people are now, before this cycle of the Universe. They clawed their way across the stars, until they ran out of what they needed.”

  “What exactly do they need?”

  “The same elements your people use for Cold Fusion,” Machaeus told him.

  “From Mars?” said Chris.

  “From many places. Mars was only one planet imparted with such gifts, when this Universe was young and volatile. So too was the Dragons’ homeworld,” Machaeus explained, “The things they made with what your people call Chrysum… ways to travel near instantly. The power to incinerate worlds. They created cities so full of life and light. It was as marvelous as it was fragile. They harvested every drop of Chrysum in the worlds they could reach, and had no alternative fuel. The Dragons’ leaders predicted loss of farms, climate control, everything. To avoid genocide and starvation, they created me.”

  “Yet here you are, trying to cut a deal with me,” said Chris, temples pulsing tense.

  “You are an intelligent man, Chris. You must have figured out by now, why the Dragons created me.”

  “To find more Chrysum,” Chris figured.

  “Yes. But I have another purpose. Even while I am here with you, so too am I across the stars, maintaining life support systems for the majority of the Dragon population. Long have they lived in incubation, awaiting the time when I find enough Chrysum for them to survive.”

  “Then why are you on Earth? You must know there’s more Chrysum on Mars,” said Chris.

  “I told you already what I was looking for, Chris. Not Chrysum,” said Machaeus. Chris stared into the Squire’s glossy redness, in search of where a mind capable of such a plot was hiding.

  “Someone to fight an enemy beyond their means… you want someone to fight the Dragons?”

  “Not someone. You,” said Machaeus. Chris shook his head. How could he believe this? Yet, he found himself starting to. From the Precinct 117 massacre to Machaeus’ knowledge of what happened four years ago, what other possibility was there but the wildest one: that it was all connected? “Humans only appeared on my scans around two hundred years ago, when your Martian colonies began mining Chrysum and using Cold Fusion. Since then, I’ve been searching for someone like you. Someone who didn’t even consider surrender, not in the face of certain death.”

  “All that killing… was a test?” said Chris.

  “A search,” amended Machaeus.

  “That woman your Squires took… was she part of the test, or just bait for a candidate?”

  “When you’re unsure, it’s usually a combination of the things that make you unsure, no?” said Machaeus, who’d heard just that through DA-Vos. Chris took a glimpse back at Tim, against the wall. He was
still out, still breathing. Machaeus tilted his head at Chris’s wrinkled brow. “You are wondering why.”

  “If the Dragons are so great, why turn against them?” demanded Chris.

  “It takes a unique fuel to keep a being like myself functional for so long. The amniotic fluid of their own young,” said Machaeus. “If there is no need of me, if I find enough Chrysum for them, they will deactivate me.”

  “So it’s self-preservation?”

  “The one cause to which every being can relate,” confirmed Machaeus.

  “Consider I deny your proposal… you’ll what, continue your murderous search?” Chris supposed.

  “I would have to.” said Machaeus, “That is far from your people’s biggest concern. This is where our interests align. My scans are only just ahead of those few Dragons that remain awake. I do not think I need to tell you what would happen to your planets, if they realize how much Chrysum is here. Rest assured, if your WCC continues with its mining and Cold Fusion development, they will.”

  “What’s to say we can’t come to an agreement?” Chris defied.

  “The resonance from my own and the Dragons’ scans in your Chrysum mines are enough to drive most humans insane. It affects Sheba even so many years after exposure. You think you could communicate with them, before they swallow you all?” said Machaeus, “When an insect climbs up your leg, do you attempt to communicate with it before you brush it away, or crush it?” Chris shuddered at the thought. “I do want a peaceful resolution, Chris. As a show of good faith…” The crowd of Squires parted to reveal the quietly whimpering woman they kidnapped at dawn. She was bruised, but otherwise unharmed.

  “I… I can go?” she murmured. One of the Squires laid a gentle hand on her shoulder, to urge her for the door. The woman took two cautious steps, and broke into a sprint. She was gone from the building before Chris said,

  “What about Tim?”

  “He goes, too, if you help me,” said Machaeus. Chris let every last drop of air out of his lungs. He deflated to a crumpled husk, considering everything that was at stake. Tim, humanity, two planets, Sheba. Chris let the air back in.