Here Be Dragons (6 page)

He had just spent the last week on a flight from Antichthon Station to Glenn, which was enough to make any normal human being want to sleep for another week straight. But Ikenna Okoye was the first, and for the foreseeable future only, independent in the Space Agency. Elena knew what it was like to have to run faster than the pack just to keep up.

“Muy bueno. Follow me.”

Gabriel
was quite a bit longer than the average Agency vessel, and most of that excess was occupied by the ballista’s barrel and the immense magnetic coils that surrounded it. Forward control was only four compartments ahead of the bridge, instead of tucked into the bow as it would be on most ships.
Elena punched in her access code and pressed her thumb to the plate—everything from this point on was restricted. There came a chorus of metal clanks as the hatch unlocked. Okoye reached past her and held it open, and she ducked inside.

Forward control was shaped like a barrel, but much deeper than it was wide, and she swam into it headfirst like a dive into a sinkhole. On the other side of the door against the rear wall were duty stations for the tactical officer and his assistant, much like those on the bridge, and a second pair had been built into the curve of the wall to port and starboard. Elena tried to ignore these empty chairs—they were the backup communication and watch desks, and it was unlikely that she would ever live to see them manned.

The ballista’s firing chamber jutted from the bottom of the well like an enormous lug nut, circled by metal pipes, ammunition racks, and support beams. There was just enough room for the crew to snake their way around and through to the hatches which led to the barrel housing. The firing chamber was where the cradled slug would serenely wait, to be catapulted at thirty times the speed of sound.

Elena came to rest just on top of it, and wrapped a leg around one of the compressed air injectors that would give the shell the first push out of the chamber and into the barrel. The metal pipe was very cold, even through her suit. The forward compartments were kept chilled, like the cryo tanks at the rear in the engine room, and her breath steamed before her and quavered in the wind from the vents. When the alert sounded, the on duty gunners would be joined by a pair of loaders and a team of four sprinters, who would race up and down the cavernous tunnel which housed the barrel to check it for wear and tear—the magnets wrapped around the ballista tube were so powerful that they would attempt to shred themselves with every shot. The sprinters had the most dangerous job on the ship. If enemy fire punctured an energized coil, anybody within a few meters of the impact would be flash fried in an instant.

But
Gabriel
was in port right now, and forward control was empty. Elena watched Okoye’s eyes circle the chamber.

“You’re already renovating in your head, aren’t you?”

“Excuse me, Chief?”

“I’ll have you know I decorated this room myself,” Elena said.

Okoye pushed off and dropped down to join her at the bottom of the well. He ran his hand along one of the girders that ran from the firing chamber to the curve of the outer wall.

“It was your decision to rearrange the structural supports?”

“Better shock transmission this way.
Archangel
nearly shook herself to pieces the first time she test-fired.”

Okoye nodded.

“I was there.”

He made his way over to a rack of steel slugs and hefted one like an oversized shot put. The sphere was perfectly smooth and silvery in color.

“Like a cannonball,” she said from above his head. “Small enough to fit in your palm, but big enough to crack this ship in half.”

She clapped and held out her arms. Okoye tossed the slug to her lightly, and Elena snagged it in one hand. It was cold to the touch and just small enough for her to wrap her fingers around it. She pushed off the pipe and fell in beside him as he opened the chamber and peered inside.

“With the proper application of force,” Elena said. “Want to take a practice shot?”

“Now?”

“I bet you can’t hit Port Avramovich from here.”

“This is a joke?”

“If you have to ask.” She handed the round over. “How does it feel to be back?”

Okoye loaded it into the chamber, and dogged the hatch. Elena threw the switch, and the cannonball hovered in place at the exact center of the barrel, held there by magnetic lines of force.

“Like I never left.” He saluted once more. Elena began to suspect that it was a tic. “Thank you for this opportunity, Chief. You won’t regret it.”

Ikenna Okoye had fought at the Battles of the Kirkwood Gap and 7794 Sanvito, and had earned his place in this room aboard
Archangel.
But he had transferred off that ship just before she had gone outside for the first time. It had taken him two years to find his way back.

“It belonged to you first, Mr. Okoye. I’m just returning it.”

“This is quite a ship. Captain Muller would have been proud.”

Elena saluted as well.

“Of both of us.”

She leapt ten meters into the air, and opened the hatch. When it closed Okoye had already taken his seat at the gunner’s station, and taken aim at outsiders that only he could see.

Elena was on the bridge, but not in her chair. She sat at the watch station and struggled to read her screens as they flickered and filled with static. Smoke and fire licked at her skin. Ballista down, guns down, engines down. The ship shook with every hit. Elena glanced at the comm and helm stations, but there was no one there.

The woman who sat at the flight station had red hair and no eyes. As Elena stared, she opened her black mouth wide and screamed.

“Lights!”

Elena remembered her dreams every morning, but none like this one. She twisted in her hammock as the lights rose in the stateroom and banished her nightmare to the darkness. A drop of sweat had peeled from her face and glittered before her eye.

The screaming hadn’t stopped.

Elena ripped free of the hammock and snatched her bracelet from its slot on her desk. She set it in the air beside her as she pulled a jumpsuit from the locker, and stared at it as she pushed her arms through the sleeves. This was not the tolling of the ship’s bell, or even the pounding thunder of the alert klaxon. It was the keening wail a radiological alarm, and it was coming from forward weapons control.

She dove through her hatch and raced down the corridors. They were empty, as most of the crew still remained aboard Glenn Station. Even the bridge officer was off duty for the night. Elena hit the bulkhead with a thump and slammed her hand against the door control against the reader. She glanced at the control panel as the camera scanned her eyes. The glass screen next to the door was lit with an unusual symbol—an orb, surrounded by three straight blades.

Inside forward control there was only a single man, a large crate, and the gentle ticking of a Geiger counter. Pascal Arnaud waited at the bottom of the chamber next to the ammunition rack, a steel ball in one hand, his other wrist held to it. The crate was filled with many like it, replacement rounds supplied by
Dresden.
The ticking came from his bracelet, and as Elena fell to him she could hear its tempo rise and fall as his arm wavered.

The ball looked like any other, as perfectly spherical as man or machine could make it and polished to a mirror shine. Elena saw her own face in its depths as Arnaud lofted it into the air. As soon as she caught it, she knew that it could not be steel—at least, not entirely. Objects in microgravity were weightless but not massless, and after fifteen years in space she knew the difference. The ball was twice as massive as it should have been. Something else, something denser than steel, was inside.

Elena removed her glove, and laid the pad of her index finger upon the surface. The metal was warm to the touch, from the heat of the dragon which slumbered inside its egg within.

First Blood

E
lena sat as still as possible, and held her breath. She willed herself not to shut her eyes, not to show weakness.

“This won’t hurt a bit.”

A million needles sunk into the flesh of her forearm. It began to tingle immediately, and she could feel the hair stand up along its length. The air filled with a buzzing hum. Elena’s entire arm seemed to tremble, and then she could feel the fire blaze within it, bone deep. She bit down on a scream, and then went mercifully numb.

“Finished.”

Dr. Rivkah Golus flipped a switch on the control panel, and the electric hum ceased. She reached over and began to unwrap the cuff that enveloped Elena’s right arm. The feeling returned slowly, and with it the pain. Elena rubbed the top of her aching forearm through her spacesuit—had she removed it, there would have been an angry red patch where the needles had touched her. The wounds left by their tips, each a micrometer across, were too small to bleed.

“Liar,” Elena said.

“Malcontent.”

Elena was strapped into a reclined chair in the hollow of the medical office wall. The examination area, with its ring of hospital beds, was surrounded by doors—port and starboard to the rear, and top and bottom at the fore. Flat against the rear wall were the supply cabinets and Rivkah’s tiny workspace. At the other was the surgical suite, its lights darkened.

“What next? Take two leeches and call you in the morning?”

Elena undid herself the straps that had held her to the bed, still massaging the flesh beneath her sleeve. The innermost layer of her duty uniform was sealed against her skin by a thin layer of fluid—otherwise it would have ballooned in the vacuum, like the bulky spacesuits of yesteryear. But the compressive uniforms were so difficult to put on and take off that it wasn’t worth removing them for something as routine as muscular therapy. Elena hadn’t worn anything else in six months, nothing included, and her skin below the neck would be a stark white when she arrived home in half a year.

The uniform was slender and flexible, kept her body pressurized at all times, and applied constant stress upon her skeletal system, almost equal to her weight on Earth. The dense carbon fibers and dilatant fluid beneath the polymer shell were bulletproof. But a sharp enough object moving at mere human speeds, like a nanoscopic needle point, could slide right through.

Rivkah raised her old-fashioned reading glasses to her eyes to check Elena’s chart. She wore them on a chain around her neck, where they hung next to her Star of David. Her hair was dark and coarse, and her skin was pale above the collar of her white spacesuit, freckled from a childhood spent under the sun—she had been born and raised on a solar collective farm in the Negev desert.

“Your body was built by millions of years of evolution in Earth’s gravity, and out here electromyolstimulation is the only thing standing between your muscles and the dust they came from. But by all means, bitch.”

Elena stretched and flexed, and rid her limbs of the last of their numbness. The doctor was the oldest person aboard, and had been with the Agency for almost as long as Elena had been alive. Rivkah even technically outranked her captain, though she was so low on the chain of command that she could lead only when it had become no more than a link. She had served as flight surgeon on more than a dozen voyages, and spoke as she pleased.

“Can’t I just rub my feet on the carpet?”

“I see no reason why not, but it won’t keep you out of a wheelchair. Taking your supplements?”

“Every day.”

Rivkah jabbed her in the bicep with a hypodermic gun, and Elena swore. When the doctor pulled her hand away, the tiny plastic vial attached to the gun had turned red. The reader tested Elena’s blood, and Rivkah glanced at the results.

“Liar,” the doctor said.

“Sadist.”

“Your calcium levels are low.”

“I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, Doctor, and I can still walk on Earth without a cane.”

“And I’ve been doing this for thirty. It would be one hell of a homecoming if you fractured a tibia the second your foot hit the ground. Take the damn pills, Captain.”

Elena obligingly tossed a handful of capsules from the offered bottle into her mouth, and dry swallowed them.

“Thirty years wasn’t enough time to practice your bedside manner?”

“No, but I’ve become quite good at setting bones. We could have the whole crew sign your cast.”

Elena laughed, and slid from the chair as Rivkah unscrewed the vial from the hypodermic gun and tossed it into a disposal chute.

“Let’s hope that’s the most blood you ever see this cruise.”

“Yes, be ezrat hashem,” Rivkah said as she sterilized her hands. “But I don’t think you had me assigned to your ship so that I could tell you to take your medicine.”

“No, I didn’t,” Elena said. “You have combat experience. And you’re going to get a lot of practice.”

“Then it’s a good thing you asked for me.”

“It’s even better you said yes,” Elena said. “A year is a long time to be away from home, I know. Thank you.”

“Home.” Rivkah dried her hands with an absorbent towel. “You say you can walk on Earth without a cane. When did you walk there last?”

“Six months,” Elena said. “Right before we departed. Why?”

“I haven’t set foot on Earth in thirty years,” Rivkah said. “I’ve done my best, kept up with my calcium, my therapy. But my bones would snap like dry twigs if I ever returned.”

Elena had rarely spoken to the doctor outside this office. She had never seen Rivkah enter the officers’ wardroom, or talk to any member of the crew regarding anything other than official business. Her eyes briefly touched the golden star that hung on Rivkah’s chest. Moishe Avramovich, the father of colonization, had been Jewish also. But he was long dead, and so were most of his people. Rivkah’s Star of David was the first that Elena had seen on any Space Agency officer, ever.

“Why are you telling me this, Doctor?”

“I am already home, Captain.” Rivkah said. “But I am happy to help those who are just passing through.”

She turned and sat at her desk, as if Elena were no longer there.

“Well,” Elena said. “I’ll be in my stateroom, if you need me.”

Rivkah did not turn.

“And I’ll be here, when you need me.”

Gabriel
, like most ships, had two dining halls
.
There was the senior officers’ wardroom in the habitat module behind the medical office, and the crew mess just aft of it. By tradition the captain ate in neither, but took her meals privately, at her desk in her crowded little cabin.

Elena had put up only two decorations in her entire time with
Gabriel,
two prints fixed to the wall over her desk. One was a star chart, a 16th century diagram of the celestial sphere. The other was a world map from the same era. Both were remarkably detailed, and surprisingly accurate. But both had a touch of the fantastic as well. At each of the four compass points of the solar system hovered a human figure—Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, and Christ, his arms spread wide at true north. And ringing Europe, Asia, and Africa was a great roiling sea, infested with scaly serpents and giant whales. Southernmost, where Antarctica lay undiscovered, was a legend—HC SVNT DRACONES.

The two skilled and educated men who had created these maps had come face to face with the limits of their knowledge. One had chosen to bestow the unknown with divine grace, and the other had filled it with monsters. She sympathized with the first and agreed with the second.

Her doorbell buzzed.
Gabriel
had left Earth exactly one hundred and eighty days before, and she had not had a single uninterrupted meal on any of them. Today would not be the day.

“Second Officer Okoye requesting permission to enter.”

Elena set her tray of chicken masala back into the slot built into her desk.

“Granted.”

Okoye entered and dropped down to the rear bulkhead before her desk. His eyes faced the wall behind her head.

“Captain, I have prepared the duty roster.”

He unrolled his bracelet from his wrist, straightened it, and handed it to her. She took it with a silent sigh. Elena was an expert in orbital mechanics and black-body radiation, but the complicated watchkeeping system employed by the Agency gave her a migraine. Most personnel matters were handled by the executive officer, but Elena had a policy of rotating tasks among the ship’s officers to encourage cross-training. Even now Vijay was taking her place at the flight station, with Hassoun as his officer of the watch. This week the watchbill had fallen to the tactical officer.

She glanced briefly at the document, and because she knew that he expected it, scrolled through a few pages.

“I see you’re working on your birthday.”

Ikenna’s face remained smooth.

“Yes, Captain.”

He gave no sign that he was surprised she knew. Ikenna never showed the slightest interest in the details of anyone else’s personal life, and probably imagined that no one cared about his either.

Elena stopped and frowned.

“Dr. Golus requested a day off? That’s unusual.”

“She said that it was a religious observance.”

“Es asi? No importa.”

Elena laid her thumb flat on the pad, then signed her name at the bottom of the order before handing it back to Ikenna. He rolled it back around his wrist and tightened it into place, and remained at attention before her.

Instead of asking the question he wanted to hear, she rose and floated past him to the miniature galley in the far corner from her desk. It held her pride and joy, a zero gravity coffeemaker. Headquarters had fought like hell to keep it off
Gabriel
by conjuring, not unreasonably, the image of scalding hot globules of coffee careening throughout the ship, burning all in their path. Elena had won that battle, but it had been a close thing. She made herself a cup, studiously keeping her back turned to Ikenna as she worked the press.

Ikenna remained silent as the vacuum pump whirred. It sucked the liquid out of the grind chamber and forced it into a plastic squeeze pouch. Two centuries of space travel later, and no one had yet invented a dignified way to have a drink. Elena returned to her desk, hooked her legs under her chair, sipped her coffee, and waited. Ikenna cleared his throat.

“I’m having a problem with Chief Officer Nishtha.”

“This should be good.”

“I’ve been developing new tactics,” Ikenna said. “I wish to research equipping missiles with variable payloads.”

“EMP?”

“Or search radar,” Ikenna said.

“You want to turn our missiles into baby drones,” Elena said.

It was creative, aggressive, and just like him. Ikenna had been among the first to notice that, while Phobos Academy limited admission to Global citizens, any
person
with at least four years experience as a licensed astronaut could apply for a commission with the Space Agency—and the Astronautical Union, like the International Olympic Committee, the Society of the Red Cross, and the Alliance for Sovereignty, was open to all people of the world. One favorable World Court ruling later, and Ikenna had been the first and only independent to take advantage of the loophole before it had been closed by the Global Assembly.

“
Cherub
and
Seraph
inspired the idea. And the missile bodies are built to be easily disassembled and the warheads removed.”

“Bueno, what’s the problem?”

“I requested permission to take one missile offline and open it up it to study the matter further, but the executive officer has refused me access to the port pod.”

Her chest began to burn, and not from the coffee.

“Did Chief Nishtha give you a specific reason?”

“He believes that we should remain focused on our current mission profile while on the outside, and that I wait to implement my plan upon our return.”

“And you disagree?”

“No, Captain, I agree that we are in great danger here. That is all the more reason to use every tactic at our disposal.”

“We have eight missiles on this ship,” Elena said, “and if we go down to seven it’s going to be because we blew someone up with the other one. You and I will go down to the missile pod together. You may visually inspect one while it remains on the rails, and when you are finished we will go from there. How about it?”

“Thank you, Captain.”

They exited into the port corridor together and headed aft—the missile pod was one compartment back.

“I apologize in advance if this matter brings you difficulty with Chief Nishtha, ma’am.”

“Just know that if something blows up while we’re in there, I’m blaming you.”

Elena felt it before she heard it. The outer walls vibrated, and the hairs on her neck tingled. She turned just in time to see a column of black smoke shoot up the corridor. The shock and the noise hit her at the same time, and a wall of hot air wrapped itself around her body and threw her, choking, through the hatch.

She tumbled along the corridor and struck a wall, and careened into the deck. Elena reached out blindly and caught a pipe. She held tight. Her eyes and throat burned, and her head ached from whatever it had struck. The exposed skin of her face and neck felt singed. Smoke swirled before her eyes, and Elena could barely see the pipe she was holding onto, but she knew exactly where she was—halfway down compartment P-12, along the inner bulkhead, her head pointed topside. The emergency helmets were two meters to her left.

Elena shut her eyes tightly and held her breath, and pulled herself along the pipe to grab one. She put it on, and the magnetic latches tugged at her uniform collar as it automatically sealed and locked itself. Cool oxygen flooded her nose and mouth, and she pulled the second helmet from its hook before she turned to search for Ikenna.

The corridor around her was a tunnel of oily black smoke. It had spread free of gravity to every corner of the compartment, and the light panels had been enveloped in darkness. Elena squinted in the dusk, and tears squirted from beneath her eyelids and spilled into the helmet. She waved her hands in front of her face, and the smoke coiled around them and flowed back and forth across her vision. Her right hand struck a tiny shard of twisted black metal. It was hot beneath her glove.