“How do I face this enemy, so far beyond my means?” he asked.
“I can give you the means, but first I need more fuel,” said Machaeus.
“The… amniotic fluid?” said Chris.
“Yes. I am fading, after so many years. I am weak. For now, I can give you only a way to infiltrate the Dragons’ world,” said Machaeus.
“How?”
“I can infuse you with Chrysum. Remake you. You will be able to change your form at will, not unlike these Squires. You could appear as a Dragon yourself,” said Machaeus. The metal skin of the Squire he inhabited spiked out to scaly armor in demonstration. “But… your life as you know it would end.” Chris let out a dry laugh.
“Tell me… why don’t you just stop managing the Dragon’s life support systems?”
“Even I was endowed with certain safeguards by my creators. I cannot let them go extinct,” said Machaeus. Chris’ head drooped like a wilted plant.
“So either I die and you find someone else, or I die and become… a shapeshifter?”
“If that helps you grasp the situation, yes,” Machaeus conceded.
With a heavy heart Chris answered, “Then yes...” In an instant, the black cords of the Squire behind him retracted. His feet flattened on the floor. After hanging freely for so long, his own weight was foreign to him, and Chris stumbled.
“This will be painful, and irreversible. What I will do to you would kill a human. You will never be one again,” Machaeus issued as a final warning.
“Then quit giving me time to second guess it,” Chris demanded. He straightened up and took his last step forward as a man.
“A messenger you recognize will come for you, when you wake,” said Machaeus, “Goodbye Chris and thank you.” The entity for the first time sounded relieved; the freedom from its obligated prison had finally begun.
The red Squire’s arm sharpened to a skewer. It pierced Chris’ chest.
He clenched his fists. He ground his teeth. He screamed as nanocomputers flooded his body. They ripped each cell of his body away from the rest, to infuse it with Chrysum. Chris stayed on his feet until light swarmed his eyes, then darkness. The last thing Major General Christopher Droan saw before the nanocomputers surged from every hole in his skull, was his fiancée.
Epilogue
“Sheba?” Chris murmured. In his vision a shining halo of light surrounded her.
“Chris? Chris!” It really was her. Her light spread to the plain walls of a hospital room. In seconds, Chris had gone from swimming with nanocomputers in Shanghai to a WCC hospital in Beijing. He sat up, expecting agony. Chris found he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what pain felt like anymore. He could sense a general discomfort under every inch of skin, but he wouldn’t call it pain. Chris watched the hairs on his arms stand up. It took all the concentration he had to keep himself together, when his skin tremored apart from the muscle beneath. “Chris, please answer me.”
“Are you… alright?” he managed, though his voice had a hoarseness to it he didn’t recognize.
“Me?” Sheba cackled, while tears streamed over her cheeks. “Are you kidding me? I’m perfect… now that you’re…” Chris lifted a weightless hand to her cheek. Her skin was smooth, flawless, like a newborn’s, against his awakened fingers. “Chris, everyone else is… how did you…”
“Everyone?” Chris diverted, “What about Tim?”
“Tim?” said Sheba. Of course, Chris realized, she has no idea. “If you’re talking about the blonde kid, he’s in the next room over. A Squire carried you both in… Dorothy is on her way.”
“The Squire… did he have an unusual face? Yellow? Blue?” said Chris. Sheba’s eyes opened to the width of their sockets.
“Yes… Chris, what in the hell is going on?” she broke. The cork finally popped. Everything she’d bottled up came pouring out. “I’ve been having dreams… nightmares. It seems like the beginning of 3D, but it’s progressed so rapidly… I know I never worked the mines, but my uncle did. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s gotten worse these past couple days… since the trouble in Shanghai.”
“Sheba,” Chris hushed her with a hand on the side of her neck. He felt the prickle of her skin in his fingers. The sensation spread through him like a cool refreshing breeze. Chris pulled her to his lips. He breathed Sheba in. She filled his chest, warmer than fine scotch. It took all the worry she had to pull away from the mystical kiss.
“And these scars…” Sheba’s eyes mixed with equal parts enthrallment and terror. In them, Chris saw the brands she spoke of, while she brushed them with her thumbs. A dark line above and below each eye, like the slit of a serpent’s eye, was the only mark of the hell he’d been through.
“Don’t worry about those,” said Chris. He leaned into another kiss. Sheba’s warmth sunk into his lips, spread through his face. His hands moved down her hips. He felt her pulse hammer through him, as if her clothes weren’t even there. Holding her was all that kept him from the fear that he might dissolve any second, like a Squire with no blackbox.
“But… how can you…” said Sheba, between heightening moans when their lips collided again.
“All I need right now… is you,” said Chris. Sheba’s chest pressed on his. Chris’ heightened sense of touch danced up and down his skin. He felt her nipples harden against him. He felt excited wetness swell between her legs. Sheba could scarcely believe how quickly the passion spread over her, with how worried she was seconds ago. Chris pulsed hard against her sliding legs. With only a curtain between them and the long hall to the nurses’ station, Chris and Sheba abandoned caution for a moment that meant everything. Their clothes fell away. The sheets billowed up over their bare bodies.
Sheba’s strong legs trapped Chris’ waist. She slid down over him, then rolled her hips to massage him deeper inside. Her lips hung open, she peppered him in kisses while he throbbed to fill her. Chris’ hands were strong, gentle, tight around her ebony hips. He pulsed up, sending ripples of pleasure through Sheba’s body from thigh to breast. The heat between them swirled to an inferno of sensation. Their combined orgasm brought Sheba’s groaning lips down on him, while every atom of Chris’ being gyrated, overwhelmed.
Chris and Sheba reclothed just enough to deceive the nurses, if they ever decided to check in. It felt like hours that he lay there, awake with his fiancée’s head on his chest. Sheba’s shallow breath told him she was almost asleep. Chris wanted more than anything to join her, but every time he shut his eyes, he saw the scales, talons, and eyes through Sheba, like they were right there in the room. Besides, he didn’t want to miss a second of what time he had left. A tear ran from each eye while he counted the seconds until his first visitor came. It was no nurse, but the black form of a Squire. Its yellow face peeked through the curtain at him and Sheba.
“She cannot follow,” he heard DA-Vos’ voice in his mind, the first of countless side-effects from the Chrysum laced through his being. DA-Vos’ face shimmered blue. Chris sucked down a shaking breath that stirred his lover. He would rather have relived the Shanghai mission a hundred times over.
“Sheba,” Chris whimpered, “I have to go.”
“Hm?” Sheba murmured. She stared up at him, longingly. Chris brushed his tears away, and forced a cold mask over his face.
“You…” he choked down the last of his hesitation. “You heard me.”
“Go where, Chris? Dorothy said she was on her way,” said Sheba, some awareness returning to her. “Besides, you’re in no shape to…” her eyes wandered to the Squire in the door. Chris shrugged her head away, and sat up on the side of the bed. He hid the pain with his face turned for the wall.
“There was a change in plans. Dorothy just called, got me cleared.” said Chris to the wall. He searched for anything to close in on, to use as a shield against her hands at his back. “You’re a doctor of the mind, not the body. I’m in fine shape. It’s you you should worry about, with your dream paranoia.”
“What? Chris…” Sheba propped up.
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“Before we can get married… you need to take care of you. I can’t have you panicking every time you have a nightmare and calling me,” said Chris. He bit his lip to keep himself from melting while he lost grip on himself. “Or trying to keep me from a mission.” He stood and slipped his arms into his jacket.
“Ready to go, Major General?” said DA-Vos, in the doorway. Chris moved towards him, though he was Major General no longer. He wasn’t human, or Dragon, or a machine either. He didn’t know what he was, anymore.
“What… you’re that Squire!” Sheba flung a finger at the robot. “Chris, what is this?”
“Nothing, Sheba!” Chris stomped back at her. For just a second, yellow light jumped through his eyes. His pupils sharpened to a black slit, then returned, fast enough to have been a trick. “You’d see that, if you weren’t delusional.” Numb as she was, Sheba moved for him, when he moved for the door.
“I don’t believe this… I don’t believe you!” she screamed.
“I don’t want to be another way for you to run from yourself… I won’t become part of your problem,” Chris shook his head, “Maybe we can be what I thought we were, someday. When you’re better. Good luck Sheba.” He stepped out into the hallway. Chris cringed when he heard Sheba’s steps behind him.
“I’m sorry, Chris. You’ve got to do better,” DA-Vos’ voice rang through his mind. Chris sniffled down the tears about to burst through.
“I’m glad you came though. It was a tough mission, and I needed to get off,” he said to her, “Maybe I’ll swing by the apartment after the next one.” That stopped Sheba dead in her tracks.
“You… you’re not yourself,” she whimpered.
“No, I’m not,” said Chris. When he and DA-Vos left through the side door, past Tim’s room, Sheba didn’t follow.
“Ready to save the world?” said DA-Vos, under the night sky outside. In the cosmic darkness, Chris watched the radiance of the SkyLine. He wiped his eyes one last time before he gave up on stopping the flood.
“Consider yourself lucky if I can save you from me,” growled Chris.
When he wanted nothing more than to turn back and find Sheba, he boarded the magnetrain. Chris felt the burden of the Skyline, of Mars, and all the lives caught between on his shoulders. All of it amounted to dust, compared to the weight of Sheba’s words. You’re not yourself.
She was still screaming into Chris’ pillow, clinging to his scent, when a set of high heels clacked in the doorway. Sheba glanced up at a woman she’d met a handful of times, when she lived in the WCC barracks. The two never shared as much in common as they did the instant they connected eyes- shock.
“Where’s Chris?” said Dorothy.
Over the next weeks into months, it was a question that became more and more difficult to answer.
In the watchless silver moonlight, with only a machine for company, Chris let himself go. He gave into the instinct stabbing at his new Chrysum-brain since he awoke, and transformed. Every border of his body loosened. His very atoms shook apart, creating a sort of Chris-shaped haze. Starting with his feet, that haze began to shift. When his particles realigned, it was not in the shape of feet, but scaly claws. His legs became two muscular trunks of armor. His fingers sharpened to silvery talons. His skull elongated. His teeth extended, sharpened. Chris’ hair receded to shiny plates of scale. New bones burst from his back and swung open at a joint for the canvas of wings to grow. When Chris’ form solidified, the only feature unchanged were the scars over his eyes- two yellow gemstones. He was Sheba’s nightmare brought to life.
Even DA-Vos was paralyzed at the sight. He considered melting into the grass, to escape this beast. Then Chris held an arm out to him, expectant.
“You’re not getting out of this now,” Chris’ dragonic voice hissed through DA-Vos’ language processor. His face lit yellow, he saw what Chris wanted to do as clear as if it was his own idea. DA-Vos’ body dissolved to coat Chris’ scaly arm in a jet-black gauntlet.
His wings snapped open, filling the moon with the shape of a demon. Residents of the Lunar Station had no idea what was headed their way, nor did any in Chris’ path to the Dragon’s nest.
A Word from the Author
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