A Dragon at the Gate (The New Aeneid Cycle Book 3)

by Michael G. Munz

  “Bloody hell, Michael!” Caitlin fought his grip with more strength than he’d have given her credit for. He had to hang on with both hands.

  Felix clambered to his feet with a yell and pushed past them both. He’d made it halfway to the breaker before Michael even realized what was happening. Michael let go of Caitlin, who yelled after Felix but scrambled out of Michael’s way as he rushed out after his friend.

  “Jade! Cover us!”

  Michael didn’t hear her response. Felix reached the breaker, wrenched the panel door open, and yanked the switch inside to close the circuit.

  A burst of gunfire erupted across the bay, and blood bloomed from three holes now torn across Felix’s back. Caitlin screamed. Felix crumpled. Jade returned fire, and Michael hurled himself forward to shield Felix’s fallen body with his own.

  Felix wasn’t moving.

  “Michael, get out of there!” Jade yelled above the constant gunfire she was laying down from her rifle. Heedless of his lack of cover, Michael scooped Felix up and rushed him back to the dais where Jade fought to fend off RavenTech.

  Caitlin stared in shock. Her mouth hung open. Her hand seized Michael’s Panther that had lain forgotten on the floor.

  The assembly robots within the engineering bay began to move.

  XXXI

  THE MEDARS WERE MOVING.

  Pressed to the wall beside the engineering bay’s shattered observation room window, Camela Thomson watched the battle below and heard the madness on the other side of the gate. The feed from Alice had gone dead; she didn’t know why. Reports of attackers on the other side—human and otherwise—still came from the freelancers there, but the radio interference from the gate itself handicapped all efforts to coordinate.

  And now the MEDARs were moving. Heedless of all else, they gathered up the extra containers of the “bio-computational” liquid from New Eden and rushed up the dais ramp.

  “We need more help in bay two!” She shouted it over the intercom channel, unsure if she was getting through to anyone. “Anyone in the bay: Stop the MEDARs! Get to the breaker!”

  But no one seemed to hear her.

  The MEDARs stopped in front of the gate in a triangular formation with the fourth MEDAR in their center. Each ruptured their containers to spill the black liquid inside over the central MEDAR. The liquid pooled around that MEDAR’s base as the other three entered the gate one by one, trailing the liquid behind them. The liquid trails, moving of their own accord, braided themselves together to form a pulsing umbilical that linked the now completely covered MEDAR through the gate to the other three.

  * * *

  Behind the dais, Felix wasn’t moving. His blood coated the tile floor in glistening crimson.

  “If we can get him to help, he might make it!” The words rang hollow even as Michael said them.

  Caitlin ducked down from where she’d been firing over the dais. Her back now pressed to it while Jade continued to fire beside her. “We’ll have to carry him!” Caitlin shouted. “We’ll have to get out of here and—”

  Jade fired another volley at a guard who tried flanking their position. He sprang back into cover. “We can’t move fast enough carrying him!”

  “We’re not leaving Felix!”

  “He’s gone!” Jade shouted back. “I’m sorry!”

  Atop the dais, the assembly robots had gathered in front of the object.

  “No!” Caitlin shouted. “We’ll surrender! Fuck it! We give ourselves up, make them get him some medical—”

  Jade’s rifle ran dry. She ejected the magazine and slammed another one in. “As if they’ll let us live?”

  Another group of guards appeared at the hole in the wall and took up positions just outside. Even if they could carry Felix past the guards, they’d be pursued into the woods and caught.

  “Fucking hell! It’s been a real goddamn pleasure guarding your butt, ace!” Jade turned her weapon on the new arrivals. Michael added his fire to Jade’s, his Chimera-20 out and bucking in his grip. Together they forced the guards back from the hole.

  On the dais, three of the assembly robots had gone; Michael could barely make them out on the other side of the portal. He looked to Jade. “Any more of those flashbangs?”

  “Two!”

  He motioned for Jade to give him one. Michael caught the one she tossed, flicked off the safety, and pointed to the portal. “See that? We’re going through it and we’re taking Felix! Make that last grenade count!”

  Jade only stared.

  “Trust me!” Michael armed the grenade. “Now!”

  He hurled his grenade at the hole in the wall. Jade chucked hers toward another group of guards who had just entered from a door below the observation window. Michael grabbed Felix, closed his eyes against the burst of the grenades, and surged to his feet.

  * * *

  Kotto was down, unmoving in the middle of the chamber floor where the explosion had thrown him. Moondog was a wreck that lay twitching along the wall beside the hulk of a downed security drone. One of Moondog’s mounted rifles still fired a shot every other second in some sort of robotic death-spasm. RavenTech freelancers were scattered about, some living, some dead. When they had realized Marette’s group wasn’t the threat, they had turned their weapons on Paragon’s drones to fight them together. Yet the drones had kept coming!

  The drones were somehow weaker than those encountered before; incomplete coverings and variant drone shapes made her suspect hasty construction. Only that fact had allowed her and the remaining freelancers to survive this long.

  Yet when the three new assembly robots exited the gate, each carrying New Eden canisters gushing black material everywhere, Marette had no clue what was happening. Pressed against one side of the platform ramp, with Dr. Sheridan behind her, she watched, transfixed, as the material from the canisters formed a solid cord that snaked down the ramp to fuse with the material coating the chamber wall. At once, the drones ceased fire.

  Then they all turned toward Marette’s position.

  “Back to the alcove!” Marette turned, hurrying the doctor along as they ran the few meters back to the alcove beneath the gate platform. She had no clue what she would do once they arrived, yet it offered the best cover and Marc still might be—

  Cartwright’s body lay on the ground, her helmet beside her. Yet Marc was gone. A wide door had opened in the wall at the back of the alcove, directly opposite the rear of the section that supported the ramp. Not more than three meters deep, it featured enough wall space on either side of the doorway to provide a slim space to hide behind. She and the doctor took up positions there without a word exchanged.

  “Marc!” she tried. “Report!”

  Nothing came from her comms or elsewhere.

  “Councilor Knapp! Do you read?”

  Again, nothing.

  Outside, to the right of the ramp, a man jumped from the gate platform above. His feet hit the floor and he crumpled into a roll, shielding in his arms the bloodied body of another. A woman followed after. Her long, braided hair trailed behind her in the air to slap against her back as she landed, knees bending deep. She made a grab for the man and the body he carried, trying to help the former regain himself, all the while looking wildly about at her surroundings. She locked eyes with Marette in a thousand-meter stare that seemed to burn right through Marette’s own.

  The woman shouted a warning to the man as they both pulled their bloodied charge toward the alcove. Only then did Marette recognize the man, a fellow Agent.

  Michael Flynn?

  His recognition matching Marette’s, Agent Flynn hurried toward her position. Another figure tumbled from above with a yell: a flame-haired woman clad in green leather. She slammed into the floor on her side and fired her rifle toward the front of the ramp.

  Michael yelled something back to the flame-haired woman. Feet scrambling, she rolled to her back to push herself further into the alcove, firing as she went. A blast of drone lightning incinerated the space from which sh
e had escaped.

  “Other side!” The yell came from Dr. Sheridan a moment before she fired toward the opposite side of the ramp where a drone had appeared. A hole of twisted metal already marred its side. Marette raised her rifle and fired into the hole along with Sheridan until the drone’s insides ruptured in a shower of violet electricity.

  More drones appeared behind it.

  Michael and the braided woman rushed for Marette’s position, carrying the body between them. The redhead, now on her feet, followed suit. Marette checked her rifle: five bullets left, and nothing to reload. She fired anyway, trying to cover Michael as he and his companions gained the false safety of the new section. Barring a miracle, they would probably die there with her.

  XXXII

  CARRYING FELIX between them, Michael rushed with Caitlin toward the doorway of the small room where Marette stood. Marette fired a few shots into the chamber behind them as they passed before her rifle beeped dry.

  The room was covered in the black material he’d read about in the AoA reports. Much to his dislike, Michael realized there was nowhere else to go.

  He laid Felix’s body down along a side wall and turned to make sure Jade had followed. She’d taken position in the narrow cover beside the doorway and now fired at what Michael recognized as Paragon security drones.

  There were so many of them! Michael reached for the Chimera again. Would it do a thing against them? Lightning lanced from one drone into the floor outside and began to swing upward toward them. Michael had barely time to lean to one side in an effort to shield Caitlin before the lance arced up—

  And collided against a barrier of energy that suddenly stretched across the doorway like a pane of fogged glass. The drone’s lightning scrabbled against it like a writhing spider web. Two more drones added their own blasts before the barrier darkened completely into a solid midnight wall.

  Not a sound came from the broader chamber they’d just fled. Only the suit lights of Marette and another woman illuminated the black box that now entombed them all.

  “What is that?” Michael asked Marette. “Will it last?”

  She glanced over her shoulder at him just long enough to give what he took to be a look of recognition. “Force barrier. And I do not know.”

  “Who are you people?” Jade asked.

  Marette’s companion, a brown-skinned woman Michael didn’t recognize, trained some sort of scanner on the barrier. “It wanted us in here. It herded us in here and trapped us—”

  “It who?” Jade tried.

  Marette turned toward the scanning woman. “If that is the case, then why did the barrier appear to stop the drone attacks?”

  “We’ve got wounded!” Caitlin shouted.

  Michael nodded. Best to use the respite while they had it. “Marette, she’s right. This is Felix—a friend of the AoA. If he doesn’t get to a doctor, a medic, something—”

  “He’s not breathing,” Caitlin whispered.

  Marette’s face darkened. “We are cut off here, Ag— Mister Flynn. I am deeply sorry, but for the moment all we have to give is what you see here.”

  Caitlin choked back a sob.

  Jade groaned and slung her weapon. She hurried over to Felix with a glare at the barrier, then at Michael, before yanking open another pants pocket to pull out a micro-syringe. “He’s already gone. This won’t help. But I’ll try anyway.” She pressed the needle into a vein in Felix’s left arm, hissing at Michael, “And I can’t even tell you how much somebody needs to tell me where the goddamn fuck we are and what the goddamn fuck is going on.”

  A rippling sound came from behind him. Everyone turned to see a circular opening that grew at the center of the room’s rear wall—an iris within the black material widening to reveal . . .

  Michael gasped.

  The being that stood before them was barely taller than five feet. It was humanoid—possessing two arms, two legs, and a head of fitting proportion. Yet its skin, where not covered in a blueish raiment of a loose material between leather and cloth, had a pale gold cast. A mane of wild, pencil-length hair colored a deep crimson topped its head. Above its narrow, angular nose and robust mouth, wide eyes of completely solid green blinked one after another as it regarded them.

  Behind the being, and out of sight to either side of the small room in which Michael and the others stood, sprawled a chamber too spacious and dark for him to gauge its size. Rows of near-vertical cylinders, each six feet tall and half that wide, filled the immediate space lit by Marette and her companion’s suit lights. The space between the rows formed corridors stretching back into the darkness. The cylinders were stacked in twos and at the center of each of them glowed a handbreadth of soft yellow light. The cylinders were only visible about four deep under Marette’s light, but there must have been hundreds of yellow points shining out from the darkness beyond.

  Michael only had a moment to take in the sight. With the black material withdrawn entirely, the being took a step toward them. The impulse to renew his grip on his weapon faded as swiftly as it came. As strange as the being was, Michael couldn’t bring himself to view it as a threat.

  Jade muttered behind him, “What did you get me into?” Michael heard the click of her loading a new magazine into her rifle.

  “Jade, don’t.”

  “Lower your weapon,” Marette ordered.

  The being took another step.

  “I don’t know who you are, lady,” Jade whispered. “I don’t know what that thing—”

  The being’s hands spread, each showing three fingers bordered by two thumbs. It seemed to Michael that he could feel a fresh breeze drifting across his body, somehow bypassing his clothing. A calm he hadn’t initially noticed intensified. The organic scent of fresh soil—a characteristic of the Paragon-borne black material he had read about—bloomed into his awareness for the first time as well. Meanwhile, the being blinked emerald eyes, one after the other, as it turned its gaze across them.

  “Did anyone else feel that?” asked Marette’s companion.

  Michael spared a glance at Jade. She’d lowered the rifle. Caitlin was kneeling at Felix’s head, one of his hands held in both of hers, but her eyes were transfixed on the being, and her mouth hung open.

  The being took a half step toward them, now just ten feet away. Its gaze swept them all, one at a time, before it beckoned, once, with its right hand. The left reached forward, palm still open, fingers spreading wider.

  It felt . . . inviting. What was this creature? From how far had it traveled? How could it even be alive after so long? Surely the creature would welcome such questions, if only they could ask them.

  “Hello?” Marette asked it. “Who are you?”

  The being blinked again in its languid way, and then tilted its head toward Marette. The brief series of syllables it spoke sounded like no word Michael had ever heard: lilting and silvery, with a low, stuttered rumble behind it. It occurred to him that the Roman alphabet lacked the vowels required to spell it.

  The being beckoned a second time, and then pointed from its outstretched hand to its head before it—gently—pressed the hand against its forehead. It reached out again.

  “Do you want us to touch your head?” Marette asked, pantomiming the same. The being matched her motions.

  “Or it wants to touch ours,” Jade whispered.

  Michael stood, slowly. “There’s one way to find out, isn’t there?” He took a step toward the being, who turned its focus on him.

  Marette touched his shoulder. “Non. Let me.” Her gaze was trained on Michael, but she gave a tiny nod to where Felix lay with Caitlin and Jade beside him. “The risk should be mine. And you have other things for which to worry.”

  “It’s not a risk,” he answered. Just a few paces away, the being waited on their decision. “At least, it doesn’t feel like it.”

  “It does not. Nevertheless.” Marette stepped in front of him and closed the distance to the being.

  XXXIII

  MARETTE TOOK A
NOTHER step forward. In the chamber outside, Cartwright lay wounded or worse amid a swarm of drones. Kotto lay further out, probably dead. She had lost track of Marc entirely. Of those who had come here under her charge, only Dr. Sheridan remained.

  The being’s pupil-less eyes seemed to fixate on Marette as she drew near. It smiled; it felt welcoming. Yet who was to say this creature’s facial expressions corresponded to anything resembling those of humans? She took a breath and then grasped its hand in hers.

  The warmth of the being’s hand radiated through the material of Marette’s suit glove. Its thumbs wrapped the back of her hand, firm but not uncomfortably so. She squeezed back with a subtle, single pump. Somewhere in the back of her mind it registered that she was now quite possibly the first human ever to shake hands with an extra-terrestrial creature.

  The pump seemed to startle the being. It tilted its head to one side, then uttered a low warble and seemed to smile again.

  Then it reached its free hand toward her face.

  Marette leaned her head back on instinct. It hesitated. Their hands remained clasped, and the being had yet to tighten its grip further. It pointed to her forehead, blinking slowly once more, and her muscles relaxed. Why did it want to touch her there?

  It could have done so before she would have been able to stop it. It wanted her consent. Despite the terrible things that had happened on Paragon—the traps, the ambushes, and the dangers—her gut told her this was safe. Yet hadn’t she felt waves of calm flowing over her since this creature appeared? Did it have the power to trick her moods or circumvent her better judgment?

  Marette nodded to the being, who spread its thumbs wide. She awaited the contact and found her eyes closing. She felt the touch at her forehead like warm leather: smooth and soft. Narrow fingers slid upward across her hair as its palm pressed against her bare skin and eyebrows.

  At once her stomach shifted, as if she had been swept off her feet into a freefall, though somehow she knew her boots remained flat on the floor. Marette gasped. And then, just as soon as the sensation had overtaken her, it ceased. She felt herself somehow wrapped in a cocoon of safety, supported as she floated in an ocean of green.