Flying across the scene of battle and up into the air above, they released grey-white clouds of mist that billowed and spread all about. Two of the Fleet members flew directly for Coram, while a third soared over his head and flew past and behind him. The two Fleet members coming for the embattled Knight discharged more clouds of mist at the two dragons attacking Coram. The mist enveloped the little beasts, and the reaction came instantly. The pair of grass dragons fell in mid-flight like stricken birds and dropped unmoving onto the turf.
Coram’s two rescuers landed on the grass next to him. One of them, a tan-skinned female, reached over her shoulder to a nook between the two jets of her pack and drew out another of the silver rifle-like weapons and handed it to the Knight. “We were informed you and your liaison would be needing these,” she said.
Taking the rifle from her, Coram shut off his blade and let the skewered dragon on it fall onto the lawn. He slipped the hilt of the weapon into its holster pouch at his side and examined his new weapon. “A jet gun armed with Anti-Chimerian Retrovirus in mist form,” he acknowledged.
“This will get them,” the female soldier said.
“I’m going to enjoy this,” said Coram, looking up and over at the scene around the Ullery Tower, now clouded with pockets of mist above which the sounds of battle still carried on.
“So am I,” came a voice from behind him.
Coram spun around to find Leanne approaching him. At her side was the male Fleet member who had flown past him. She was limping but undaunted; a large patch of her uniform trousers was missing, replaced with a protein patch. Her shoulders and back were now rigged with a jet harness identical to those of her fellow officers, and in her hands, now clad in control gloves, was another of the jet guns. Coram guessed that she had taken pain inhibitors along with the protein patch; she looked determined and positively happy to be back on her feet and ready for business.
“You’re set to go, then,” said Coram.
“Absolutely,” Leanne replied. “Let’s do this.” Touching the wrist of one of her gloves, she rose quickly into the misty air without another word. In the same manner, Coram and the other officers rose after her.
Once they were aloft in the air space around the Ullery Tower, a new view of the battle presented itself. The members of the Corps fell back and continued fighting the fire breathers with laser rifles, while the Fleet went to work. Now, the air was filled with weredragon and
human figures taking the offensive.
Wherever he saw a grass dragon on the wing, Coram took aim with his jet gun and sprayed forth the bio-weapon it contained. The vapors spread out and did their work quickly, enveloping the small dragons whether they flew in for the attack or swerved and darted away in an attempt to escape. Wherever they touched one of the little fire breathers, the creature’s wings were stilled in mid-beat, and it went arcing or spiraling for the ground, not to rise again. Every one that dropped gave Coram a swelling of satisfaction inside. But even that was not as pleasing as what he felt watching Leanne from the corners of his eyes.
She was magnificent. Leanne made herself a guided human missile, shooting and looping through the flock of flying reptiles, moving right side up and upside down, discharging her clouds of weaponized retrovirus as she went. She dove fearlessly into oncoming swarms of dragons, defying their fire and smothering it in the billows of mist that she sprayed before her.
She cut through the space in which they flew, and as she passed, their little green scaly forms fluttered helplessly down in her wake. When the dragons pressed their attack by flying at her from different directions, Leanne spun around like a top, making a ring of mist around herself into which the dragons flew, and from which they dropped, their flames sputtering out.
And as Leanne engaged the enemy in the air, Coram could have sworn he saw an expression on her face that startled him. It was an expression of genuine pleasure—not exactly bloodthirsty, but thrilled at what she was doing. That was the word for it: thrilled. She seemed to be actually enjoying the act of cutting down the beasts, sending them plummeting through the mists to the ground. And it made him wonder. There was something he had begun to suspect about this Leanne Shire. Was he right? Was his suspicion true?
The tide of battle quickly turned, and the Fleet and the Corps had the grass dragons on the run. The animals that were not yet immobilized stopped breathing fire and began to fly away, back in the direction outside the city from which they had come. The tactic of the Corps and Fleet turned from engagement to pursuit. With Leanne and the other Fleet officers in the lead, the uniformed defenders of Lacerta streaked after the animals, spraying their weapons ahead of them and continuing to catch the air dragons in mid-flight and knock them from the air.
The humans flew ahead, their harnesses giving them a greater speed than the weredragons’ wings, but Coram kept his eye on the female figure that he knew was Leanne. Though he now flew behind her, he well imagined that she still wore that same look of thrill and pleasure at every dragon they dropped. In the back of his mind, he began to reach for the words of careful questions he meant to ask her when this was done. There were things he now definitely wanted to know about Leanne.
The ranks of the grass dragons which had come to attack the Ullery Tower quickly thinned until only a paltry few remained to fly away from the city, fortunate to have narrowly escaped the anti-mutagenic mists deployed against them. The pursuing humans and weredragons slowed down their chase, knowing the beasts likely would not get far, as others of the Fleet flying elsewhere in the city were liable to catch them.
The danger was passing. In the four corners of the city, the same thing that had taken place at the city center was surely playing itself out, sending other masses of fire breathers to ground or retreat. Slowly and surely, the city of Silverwing was being made safe again. Leanne led the group back in the direction of the tower. Standing down their weapons, they flew back in silent triumph.
Leanne, Coram, and their compatriots regrouped back on the Ullery Tower lawn, where medical units had arrived to tend to the injured, and members of the Corps were collecting the unconscious and dead bodies of fallen grass dragons. The Lacertan and human personnel let the emergency personnel go about their work. One of the first responders checked and examined the protein seal that Leanne had applied to herself, while Coram stood nearby, back in human form, watching her intently.
Her expression was calmer now as she communicated with Headquarters and with the other teams at other positions around the city. Coram was pleased to learn that Kesta, Willem, and Tarik had come through the attack as unharmed as he was. But even more than this, he was interested in watching Leanne’s reaction to this whole ordeal that they had just faced. More and more, he thought there was a spirit about this human female, a spirit that he recognized.
A kindred spirit.
Coram nodded suddenly as he quietly watched her congratulate her fellow members of the Fleet and compliment them on a job well done. Without question, this was a human female, trained and skilled and competent, well versed in her job and well able to carry it out. But there was something else about her, something subtle but unmistakable.
It was a look he had seen so many times on the faces of his fellow Knights in training and after the successful completion of a mission. It was a look he had seen on his own face in the mirror when coming back victorious from battle. He compared the memory of that look to the expression that Leanne Shire now wore. It was something in the eyes, a special gleam, a particular glint.
It was a look that he had seldom seen—on a human. But it was real, and it was there in the eyes of Leanne Shire even now. And Coram wanted very much to know what it was that had put that look there.
CHAPTER SIX
The stone walls rose up all around him inside the vast cavern. It would have been pitch dark in there if not for the torches that he had placed all around—and the immense luminous jewel that stood in the center of this place somewhere deep underground. The gem was twi
ce as tall and half as wide as a man. Attached to it were long, tentacle-like rock formations that penetrated the faceted surface and extended downward into a pit several meters away. The pit, a geothermal vent, issued a nimbus of steam that heated the cave. The energy from inside the vent radiated up through the weird boughs of rock and into the jewel.
There, inside the crystal, stood a figure, immobile, obscured to a silhouette by the radiance emanating from the jewel and the translucency of the crystal itself. The figure in the jewel had been at rest these many weeks inside its glowing mineral cocoon, as it had been from the time it first formed. The jewel was its womb, in which it waited to be born.
The being in the cavern had waited patiently for the day when the being in the crystal would emerge. He had tended both the crystal and the one inside it, awaiting those moments when the figure would enter a waking state, and the two of them would commune together. At those fateful moments, the being who tended the jewel would express his thoughts to his charge and tell him of the progress he had made on their plan, and how close they were to the glorious day before them, the day when the crystal womb would yield up the one inside, who would be ready at last for the future promised so long ago.
The caretaker of the jewel was a tall, slender being, his moist and slippery skin mottled in shades of brown, with a hard and ridged shell partially enclosing the skull. His yellow eyes were twice the size of those of a man. He had nostrils but not a nose, and a mouth without lips. His hands had only four fingers each, with a sucker at the end of each digit. This member of a species of sentient mollusks had hardly minded taking up residence in a cave.
It was quiet, and outside of this chamber, it was cool, the kind of place where he would have lived on his home planet, had he not taken leave of the distant world of Visan for a higher calling, something that he held to be the greatest of all possible destinies. There could be no more monumental purpose for the life of any being than the purpose to which Cadoq had committed himself: for it would be Cadoq who would restore and fulfill the greatest dream that anyone had ever dreamed in all the galaxy. Safe inside the jewel, under Cadoq’s careful watch, lay the dreamer.
A sound of fluttering came from the mouth of the cavern, a small sound at first, but it grew quickly louder until it poured into the space where Cadoq stood with his precious dreamer and became a rising din. Right behind the sound of hundreds of beating wings came its flapping and flurrying source. The grass dragons came flying in, a cloud of winged and tailed green bodies filling the cavern space above Cadoq and the jewel.
Cadoq raised his shelled head and quietly watched the dragons fly in circles over him. He extended his arms and offered his hands, and two dragons came down from the circling and fluttering mass, one of them landing on each hand. Cadoq drew them closer, and the dragons settled down, eyeing the mollusk being, tilting their heads at him. Curls of smoke wafted from the little reptiles’ nostrils.
Raising his head again, Cadoq called, “Enough! Time to rest!” The thought behind the spoken words rippled out across the space of the cavern, and the grass dragons responded as it passed over them. They dispersed and flew to the walls, coming to rest in crevices, on outcroppings and ledges. And as they settled themselves down, the sounds of their flapping ebbed, and silence slowly descended on the cave.
Cadoq looked again at the two reptiles on his hands. “You’ve done your work, then, little ones,” he said. “You and all the others, your task is done. We’ve lost many, but our cause has gone forward, and the sacrifices will be rewarded. The chaos just past has been among the last chaos that the galaxy will ever know. Very soon, there will be order. There will be no chaos ever again.
The galaxy will come to everlasting calm and peace. No strife, no conflict—only peace.” He held up the dragons to the jewel, and as if bidden to do so, the little reptiles stared into the glow issuing from it. “When he is reborn,” said Cadoq, “his promise for all life will be fulfilled. Go now. Rest. You’ve done well.”
Lifting his hands, Cadoq let the last two dragons take off into the ledges of the cavern. Alone now with only the crystal and its dormant occupant for company, he gazed at the opaqued figure inside it. “I await your next awakening,” said the Visanian to the one in the jewel. “I await the chance to tell you of the success we had today. The mammals and the dragon people think they’ve won, and we will allow them to believe so. But this has only been a preamble,
only a prologue. Your day is coming. The day for which we’ve both been waiting.”
And Cadoq stood still and quiet, watching over the entity in the glowing prism, and saw the promised day unfolding in his imagination. Soon, everything that he imagined would come to reality.
_______________
In the aftermath of the dragon fight, the Fleet, the Corps, and the Knighthood moved quickly, tending to their injured personnel and giving assistance to the city of Silverwing in helping to repair damages and give aid to wounded civilians. Fleet scientists rounded up specimens of the mutated reptiles at the Ullery Tower and elsewhere, taking care to give more anesthesia to the ones that were still alive but unconscious to keep them manageable after their exposure to the anti-Chimerian mist weapon.
The specimens were quickly taken to the research labs at the Fleet Headquarters in Silverwing for study, and the scientists went directly to work examining the genome of the fallen beasts. By the following morning, they were to coordinate and collate their findings and transmit them to Leanne for presentation to Fleet Command. A hyperspace communications relay had been cleared between Lacerta and Earth for rapid communication with Command at any time, day or night, in the event that she needed to do more than record and file a report. Leanne expected that tomorrow morning would be one of those times.
But first, in accordance with regulations, Leanne was required to report to Fleet Medical for an examination. She had treated her wound well enough for the field, but she had also gone back into battle with it, and under regulations, she needed to be examined prior to resuming duty. Coram went to the Fleet Infirmary with her and stayed in the waiting area during her exam.
Of course, Coram knew there was no cause for alarm. He had seen how expertly she had applied the protein seal to her injury. And he had certainly seen that in the aerial strike against the dragons, she had handled herself as if there had been no injury at all. In the maneuvers following the battle, Leanne had taken charge of the scene around the Ullery Tower, giving precise orders to the personnel, organizing the entire effort, and making sure the area was secured. She could not have done a better job of it if she had been a dragon Knight herself.
And that latter comparison was what now caught in Coram’s mind. He kept returning to the spirit that she had shown throughout the entire crisis and after. He kept replaying in his mind the way Leanne had handled herself. Human as she was, Leanne might as well have had scales, horns, wings, and a tail of her own. And that was what he could not help but go over and over.
He kept hearing the conversation they’d had during the flight from the Spires to the
Tower. Or to be exact, the last part of the conversation, when he’d said, Sometimes, a human comes to us wanting to be one of us. In those last moments before their approach to the tower, a tension had risen between them in the transport, as if he had touched on something that she had not wanted to talk about, as if he had gone to a place where she was not prepared to go.
Or perhaps, he had opened a door that Leanne had only been waiting to have opened. The more he thought about it, the more he suspected it was a possibility. Leanne Shire, he guessed, might be the kind of human with a calling and an ambition beyond just humanity. There could be a motive underlying her lifelong interest in Lacerta and its people that surpassed her girlhood
admiration of—and likely her girlhood crush on—the Knight who had rescued her on Dorian III.
How could he broach the subject again? How could he encourage her to talk about what was
really on her mind, perhap
s what she had never before discussed with anyone, not even her
counselors all those years ago? How…?
“I said, are you ready to go?”
Suddenly, Coram realized he had been standing at the wall of windows in the waiting
area, staring out into the city and the thinning clouds of smoke from extinguished fires that hung over and between the buildings, but not really seeing them because in his mind he was back in the transport with Leanne. He whipped himself around and saw her standing there, looking
curiously at him and walking with a polished metal cane.
“Oh, of course,” Coram half-sputtered, a little surprised to see her again because he had so lost track of time. “I gather your examination went well.”
“It went fine,” Leanne replied. “I’ll have to walk with this,” she said, tilting the cane, “for maybe a day, maybe less.” She rolled her eyes, looking inconvenienced. “I’m going for less.” And she made a little half-grin at that.
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