by Alma Boykin
A Touch of Power:
A Cat Among Dragons Quintet
Text © Alma T.C. Boykin 2014
Cover art: ©IndustryandTravel/Dreamstime.com
Table of Contents
Joy Ride (late 1983).......................................................................................................... 4
Shady Grove (1984)........................................................................................................ 18
Calendar Whirl (1984)................................................................................................... 26
First Mart (1984)............................................................................................................. 30
The Laws (1984).............................................................................................................. 43
Cat Among Dragons Chronology................................................................................. 52
Joy Ride (late 1983)
Brigadier General Jonathon “Johnny” Eastman heard an unusual sound coming from the far corner of the officers’ dining room as he got breakfast. The noise reminded him of snickering, or perhaps of how a large cat might giggle, assuming that jaguars could giggle. As he got a mug of tea, the snickering turned into loud guffaws, followed by the sound of paper rustling. “Oh, please, those have to be fake,” he heard his xenologist sigh.
Eastman carried his breakfast tray over to where the one-eyed Wanderer-hybrid sat. “May I join you?” He inquired. Eastman noticed that she’d remained in her true shape, black furry ears twitching on the top of her head, black tail swishing.
Rada Ni Drako, known to the humans as Commander “Rachel Na Gael,” got to her feet, “Ah, certainly sir.” Eastman glanced over and winced as he realized she’d been reading one of the tabloid papers, the kind that were not supposed to be laying around the headquarters of the 58th Regiment of Foot, also known as the British Branch of the Global Defense Force.
“Where did you find that, Commander Na Gael? And be seated.”
“The rubbish bin.”
At least she was honest, he sighed. “Put it back. Those are a waste of time and good trees.” He poured himself tea from the pot on the table. “What were you laughing at?”
“The lead story, about some politician and his mistress.” She shook her head and scooped up a bite of scrambled egg. “The writer seemed to think that you humans invented sexual foolishness.” She chewed more egg, adding, “The female on the inside page paid too much for her, hmm, shall I say for the additions to her superstructure?” A wicked glint lit her eye.
Eastman stabbed a sausage link with his fork. “Whether she did or not, that sort of reading is not acceptable outside your personal quarters, Na Gael.” I wonder if she’s talking about that bird who won the—. He caught the thought and quashed it. Stop that.
“With all due respect, sir, it might not be. Oh, not the salacious bits, no, those are unprofessional, or at least, not part of our profession,” and the corners of her mouth twitched as if she were trying not to smile. “But this sort of thing?” She thumbed through the paper, opening it so he could see a two-page article about purported alien sightings and abductions in Cornwall. “There may just be something to this.” She folded the paper and tucked the offending item out of sight before refilling her tea mug.
Eastman used a bit of toast to mop up the last of his egg. “You are joking, I trust.” But as he spoke he realized that the idea wasn’t as daft as it seemed. This wasn’t the United States, after all. “Actually, as you say that, it raises something I’ve noticed in the daily news updates from Vienna. We do not see the number of ‘alien sightings’ that the US does or that Eastern Europe seems to, even given the population difference.”
“Eh, well, sir, ah, for one the British Isles seems to have a better quality of intoxicant than does Eastern Europe. As to the other part,” she shrugged. “Just lucky, I suppose. And to be perfectly honest, sir, if I were to invade Earth, I wouldn’t land here: too isolated, not a major center of power on the planet, not anymore. I’d go after New York, Beijing, Washington D.C., Moscow, that place in the desert with the black rock if I wanted to really wind someone up.” As she spoke a thought occurred that made her hide a wince. If someone really did try to remove that rock and the temple around it, I’d have to stop them, since that thing survived the Second Ideology War for some reason. Or did it? I’d better go back to my notes, if I can find them. After another sip of tea she thought at General Johnny from well behind her shields, And you don’t see fake aliens here because Logres does not manifest like some of the North American Powers choose to, but you don’t need to know that, sir.
“That’s interesting information, Rachel. Good point about the liquor.” He scooted his chair back. “Look into those sightings, please.”
“Very good, sir,” she agreed, rising to her feet as he did. She waited until he’d left his things at the washing-up window before collecting the tabloid paper and depositing her own tray. I wonder how that female on page three is supposed to suckle her young with all that plastic compressing her mammary glands? Humans are strange.
How to go about finding “something odd” in England, Rachel wondered. She propped her feet up on the top of her desk and leaned back in her chair, fingers laced behind her neck. Obviously she needed to see if any reports of strange lights (or bad home brew) turned up in the Cornish papers. But what else? Well, the military training reports might be of use, if there’d been flight training in that area. The Army and Royal Air Force did not always see fit to inform the 58th Regiment of their doings. Rachel decided to look into those first, since it only required walking down the hall and through the building to find the communications suite. “Might as well move while I still can,” she grumbled, leaning forward and using her hands to lift her bad leg down from the desk. Rachel pulled on her grey jacket, unhooked her walking stick from the holder clamped to the side of her desk, and departed the lab.
By the end of the day her research turned up zero verifiable reports of unidentified flying objects. She also failed to find any evidence of military activity that might have been mistaken for alien spaceships, unless one counted the Americans’ black airplanes that launched from Scotland. Logres seemed not to be moving any energy into or out of Cornwall or otherwise doing things there. Having exhausted the easiest and most likely sources for the strange lights and noises, Rachel flopped into her chair. “Oh pot and pother.” She stared up at the ceiling for a minute. “I’ve done what I needed to.” She reached for one of the archaeology journals that had arrived in the day’s post. Occasionally the archaeologists stumbled onto something that came under the regiment’s field of interest.
She’d flipped past an advert for metal detectors and one for kite-born radar when a story caught her eye. “Magdalenian Cave Art in Cornwell,” the headline blared. Rachel skimmed the article, then stopped and re-read it with great care, opening her personal computer and calling up a map of the area and the cave system in question. She swirled her left hand in negation as she looked at the illustration. The pictographs in that cavern, a sea cave not far from Lizard Head, had been well documented over the years because the landowner allowed the university professors to teach archaeology students mapping techniques in the cave. Yet the most recent survey revealed several new images, including one of a bear that appeared to be under two previously reported animals. The very presence of a painting of a bear sent the author of the article in to what passed for hyperventilating and purple prose, and Rachel shook her head. “Art under the old stuff,” she thought aloud. “I wonder . . .”
She got up and opened the paneling that hid the Dark Hart from view just enough to slip in, then closed the concealed door behind her. She settled into the pilot’s seat and linked minds with the symbiote. Together they reviewed the local temporal fields, looking for other time ships or developing anomalies. As she “watched,” a series of markers appeared: a Rowfow vessel had made several visits to Britain. The arrivals and departures concentrated in southwest Britain, within the past few weeks and months in Earth’s timestream. The symbiotic creature within the ‘Hart sent Rachel a sense of irritation from the proximity of one of the vessel’s stops and the desire that she make them go away, but nothing more specific. Rachel agreed to look into the matter, fed the creature some treat flakes, and returned to the lab. The finding explained why she’d been out-of-sorts the past few days: she’d been picking up the symbiote’s feelings through their subconscious connection. That’s not supposed to happen, I don’t think. Or is it? Her teachers had never told her.
A week later, during one of the cold, wet, days known as “typical English weather,” a call came in to the Regiment about a reported alien encounter in Cornwall. A caver swore that while exploring a new chamber in the St. Pancras cavern complex, not far from the site of the miraculously appearing cave art, he’d been stopped and harassed by creatures wearing black and gray spacesuits. At the same time, more or less, a Rowfow ship had laid-over in that same area for several hours, making Rada twitchy and annoyed. She and the Dark Hart sensed something else as well, something that did not enter Earth’s atmosphere directly, but loitered behind the moon. “Ugh, this is worse than working a Trader resupply ship,” she grumbled into her tea that afternoon, reaching back to smooth the ruffled fur on her neck. All these unshielded comings and goings are making me tetchy.
The next day Rachel, General Johnny, and a quarter of the regiment drove to Cornwall to investigate. The location of interest sat on a moor, one undercut by caverns and not far from the sea, even by Cornish standards. “And the trampers found this, and we decided to call someone about it,” the local police officer reported as he gave directions to the location in question. “This” proved to be flattened and scorched grass and gorse forming a distinctive lozenge-shaped mark roughly ten meters by five meters mashed into the damp ground. Whatever had landed there had compressed the gorse so much that the wind made no impression on the smashed stems and twigs. Rachel waded through the brush around the mark, stopping every few paces to crouch, pick up a sample of the flattened foliage, and sniff the scorched bits.
“And your conclusion is?” Eastman stood, arms folded, watching her from atop a small rock outcrop.
“They were lucky it’s been wet or they’d have toasted themselves. Amateurs.” She clambered up to stand beside him, pointing with her stick. “Should have let the hull cool from atmospheric entry before landing.”
“Ah, you mean that this really is the mark of a spaceship?” Captain Elizabeth FitzWarren looked from the xenologist to the landing spot and back.
“Yes, a small personnel transport. As common as crows are in England. The main vessel probably stayed out of your sensor range,” and Rachel plucked a bit of gorse and picked her teeth with the stem.
Eastman’s thick black eyebrows drew together and his forehead wrinkled. “And we didn’t detect them.” He studied the scorch mark. “Are they still here? And what did or do they want?”
Rachel shrugged. “And are they related to the sudden appearance of new ancient cave paintings?” She’d mentioned the art in the last staff briefing. The wind whistled and rustled through the brush around them, and she noted the stack of rocks on the flank of a hill not far from the soldiers. Ancient stone pile, good sniper cover, or an observation blind? She gave the rocks a sideways look and reached back under her coat, discreetly opening the safety strap on her pistol and confirming the power setting. As Eastman ordered his troops to begin looking for other traces of aliens, Rachel eased off in the general direction of the rocks.
Sergeant Will McMillan joined her and they circled around the isolated hillock, Rachel doing her best to act completely uninterested in the rock pile facing the landing site. And in truth, she studied the ground with great care and attention, sniffing and poking, moving some bushes aside with her walking stick so she could see the soil below. McMillan asked under his breath, “Are we looking for anything special, Ma’am?”
“Tracks, Sergeant, and traces of occupation,” she kept her voice down.
They continued for a few meters more before Rachel heard a metallic, “clink-clunk.” “Ah, Ma’am, I think I found something.” McMillan crouched down and shoved some of the brush around. “Several things.”
Rachel peered at what he’d found, pulled safety gloves out of her satchel, and picked up one of the items. It looked suspiciously like an empty container and Rachel used one hand to fan over the open end, sniffing. “Well done, Sergeant. We’ve found their empties.”
“Ma’am? As in empty bottles?” He picked one up and examined the metal closely. The wiry Scottish NCO hunted around in a pocket and pulled out a little bit of black, which he held next to the cylindrical metal thing. “Not steel or iron, then.” He put his magnet back in his pocket.
“No, it’s probably an aluminum or something similar over or in a composite, which suggests it holds something under pressure, or is from a place with lower gravity or atmospheric pressure.” Rachel shook her head. Just how stupid do you have to be to leave your empties laying around for anyone to find? Not military then, unless we are supposed to find them and get trapped. She braced her stick and got up from her crouch. Someone yelped and Rachel froze, waiting until the corporal identified her and McMillan before moving again. “Right, sergeant, let’s have a look at those rocks, shall we?” Rachel kept one hand near her pistol as they approached the rocks and found . . . nothing but flattened grass and gorse, and what looked suspiciously like a form of food wrapper. She put the wrappers into small glassine bags, in case any microbes survived.
They returned to Eastman and the command vehicle and reported their findings. “Will the,” he thought for a moment. “The visitors, be back?”
“Keine ahnung.”
“Excuse me? In English.”
She rubbed under her blind eye. “Sorry. No idea, sir.” She turned slightly so she could see the rock outcrop again. Although . . . rock art and someone lurking in the caves. Their ship lands in the open and they leave empties laying around for anyone to find. That makes no sense. Or are we looking at two groups, the ones with the Rowfow and this batch? “Something’s odd.”
That evening Eastman decided to leave observers out, in case the earlier visitors came back. He noticed Commander Na Gael growing uncomfortable as evening turned into a cold, drizzly night. “What is bothering you, Cat One?” She’d moved so she sat on the wide step just outside the command vehicle’s door.
She shifted so she could see him. “There’s a timeship nearby.”
He sat bolt upright in his seat. “What? Can you locate it?”
“Yes, sir. Just a moment,” and she pulled a hand-sized box with a glass screen on it out of a pocket. She pulled a stylus out of the thing’s case and began tapping the screen, then stood up. “Two kilometers that way,” she pointed with the stylus.
Capt. FitzWarren opened a map sheet and they located the best route, tracing a road. FitzWarren tapped the map. “That’s a mine near a cave.”
“I’d wager on the cave,” Rachel told them. “And what’s this?”
“A footpath, part of the Moor Walks route. Probably includes an old track way, possibly prehistoric or Roman-era.”
Rachel nodded, putting up her data-link and finding a seat in the command vehicle as the soldiers started moving out to the new location. A prehistoric path and prehistoric cave art, hmmm? I wonder . . . She hunted around in her satchel until she found the fat little case with her various forms of identification in it, and after leafing through the collection decided on two. She tucked them int
o the inner pocket of her jacket, under her topcoat. Then she sat back, watching the dark landscape rolling past.
The timeship remained stationary, giving her a good location. “It’s in the cave.”
The small convoy rolled to a halt in the parking area outside the cave entrance. Eastman pointed. “Captain, Sergeant, secure the outside of the cave. Cat One, any idea as to what we are facing?”
“Something small, so I’d suspect only a few individuals without any bulky equipment or weapons.”
Eastman looked at the cave mouth and then at his xenologist. She’d shifted, not shape but in posture and expression. Her eye gleamed with excitement and intense focus. The edges of her mouth had curved into something between a smile and snarl. He turned back to the cave, noting the absolute darkness. He hated fighting in confined spaces. The defender had all the advantages. And he needed a map of the caves. “Cat One, will your device show us the cavern interior?”
“Negative, sir. But I suspect there’s a signboard just inside that gate,” and she pointed to the heavy steel plates and bars blocking the mouth of the cavern, just past where he’d been looking. “This is part of that archaeology research site; the public access section.”
They walked up to the entrance and he studied the heavy padlock and chain, noticing a second lock on the gates themselves. Rachel excused herself for a moment, returning with one of the NCOs. She took up a position between Eastman and the sergeant. What are you . . . oh. He turned around and beckoned for FitzWarren so he wouldn’t see the locks being picked. We need to add bolt cutters to the field inventory, along with explosives for blowing locks. “Four to go in,” and he pointed to the gate. An ear-piercing screech cut the night and he winced as Na Gael pulled the gate open a touch.
Four troopers joined Na Gael and the sergeant at the gate, and before he could give an order, she’d popped into the darkness of the cave mouth, the soldiers close behind. He toggled his radio. “Cat One Command One.”
