Dark Beyond the Stars Read online

  It was heavy in her arms, though not as heavy as she would have expected. The scales had yet to take on the ridged edges of an adult dragon. Its soft body smelled almost sweet, as though coated in maple syrup.

  Lords, the eyes weren’t even open yet.

  It didn’t look like a potential mass murderer now that she was holding it.

  Emalkay destroyed another cluster of eggs. He was on the far end of the crater, having destroyed more than half of its inhabitants, and there was still no sign of defense from the dragons.

  “Aja! Look!” he shouted.

  His finger thrust toward the sky.

  She followed it up to see gold sparkling in high orbit. Those were the telltale glimmers of Carriages on the approach, accelerating retrograde in order to drop toward the atmosphere.

  If they were moving in, then they must have killed most of the enemy dragons.

  The Allied fleet had realized what deadly weapons the plasma rifles were.

  Humans were winning, at long last.

  Aja caught herself stroking the dragonet’s pebbled flank. It was a glorious shade of dark blue, like the sky in paintings of the First Earth.

  It stirred at the touch, and she couldn’t help but think that this touch should have come from the hand of the dragon she had killed. It would have murdered her, yes, but this dragonet was harmless, innocent. Its future wasn’t written yet. Maybe it would have been the creature who convinced its brethren to end the war. They would never know. Emalkay was bent on killing them all.

  One of those slitted eyes opened. The dragon’s long neck draped over her arm as it focused on her face, stretching its beak toward her chin.

  Instinctively, Aja ducked her head to greet it. Emalkay fired yet again a few hundred feet away.

  “Hello,” she said. Her voice hitched on the second syllable of the word.

  The dragonet brushed its forehead against hers.

  Electricity jolted through Aja.

  For an instant, she had no thoughts, no sense of her body, no sense of time. The crater vanished around her.

  She could only feel the dragonet.

  It was such a powerful sensation that she almost thought she had made a mistake picking up this little newborn to cradle it as she had cradled calves while bottle-feeding them. It certainly felt like her skull was folding inside out. Like her brain was going to spill onto the ground.

  Memories of her entire life flashed through her.

  Aja’s childhood at the Skytoucher farm. Her rejection from the Academy. Enlistment with the Allied military when she’d been only fifteen years old. Boot camp, followed by cross-training in driving Carriages. And then the war.

  Then she regained all her senses, and she was still holding that dragonet, neither of them injured. Its faceted silver eyes gazed at her.

  Help us, it said.

  The words entered her mind directly.

  Aja was certain it was the dragonet speaking to her. She had never heard of dragons speaking before—there was no way to communicate with them. But she knew the plea had come from the dragonet, and she somehow knew it could understand her as well.

  She set the dragonet on the dusty ground a safe distance from the Fog still devouring its nestmates. She turned to look for Emalkay, who roved at the far end of the crater.

  “We’re enemies,” Aja whispered to the dragonet.

  It only looked at her. There were no more words. Their moment of connection had passed.

  Maybe such a little thing simply couldn’t speak more than once.

  Emalkay was about to shoot the last cluster of eggs. Aja leaped smoothly through the air, heart pounding, and landed beside him.

  There was a lot of debris on that side of the crater; the resonating gunshots had shaken rocks loose from the surrounding walls. Aja found one the size of her fist and picked it up.

  “Want to shoot this last one?” Emalkay asked without turning.

  Aja smashed the rock against the back of his skull.

  Emalkay was probably still hurting from the crash. It didn’t take much force to knock him out. His slow collapse was graceful, and there was plenty of time for Aja to scoop the plasma rifle out of the air before it struck the ground, risking an accidental discharge. The plasma rifle was warm from being fired, taking so many dragonets’ lives.

  Em stirred when he landed, so she kicked him again, just to make sure he would stay down.

  “Thal forgive me,” Aja said.

  The fleet was landing nearby, lighting up the sky with the blaze of their propulsion. She hastened to return to the surviving dragonet.

  It was barely alive, struggling to breathe. Its skin was cold when she picked it up again.

  This little killer, this larva that could become a mass murderer, wouldn’t survive once the fleet landed. If premature hatching didn’t kill it, then other coachmen who shared Emalkay’s sentiments would. Aja could already hear them approaching. Their distant voices echoed over the barren mountains.

  Help us, it had said.

  Now it said nothing. It was sleeping, curled against her for warmth.

  There was nothing Aja could do about the other eggs. They were at the mercy of the Allies.

  But she knew what she needed to do about this lone dragonet.

  * * *

  Nobody seemed to understand why Aja Skytoucher, highly decorated survivor of the Battle at Drakor III, resigned from service the instant she returned to the Station. The coachmen who had been at Drakor III were guaranteed promotions for each dragon they had killed. Since she and Emalkay had effectively doomed the enemy to lose the war—if not sentenced them to extinction—they would probably get to pick their next deployment.

  They never needed to see battle again. They would have more money than any coachman knew what to do with.

  Yet resign she did, and she returned to New Dakota a hero.

  She watched the parting message Emalkay sent to her on the mochila while riding the space elevator to the surface. It was lengthy. The man didn’t know when to shut up.

  Emalkay said she was nuts for leaving the service. He said he never wanted to be deployed with any other coachman. Aja had saved him twice, after all: once from crashing on Drakor III, and once when a rock had broken free of the crater and nearly killed him. He was still in the hospital recovering from his concussion.

  But even though he claimed he wouldn’t work with anyone else, he hadn’t resigned. He was staying in the service to enjoy the salary.

  Aja turned off her mochila. She had no interest in what he had to say.

  The elevator landed smoothly. Aja was greeted by the yellow plains of New Dakota, the colony covered in swaying grass and rimmed by jagged mountains not unlike those on Drakor III. She lifted her duffel bag carefully and went to the transport.

  “Aja!” her mother greeted her, wrapping her in a tight hug. “You look so thin! I’m glad I made bone broth for you. I expect you to drink a liter of it as soon as we get home.”

  Aja gave a shaky laugh, drawing back so that her mother’s embrace wouldn’t crush the duffel bag. “I have been craving your broth.”

  “Of course you have! I still make the best broth in all the Colonies.” Her mother was convinced of this even though she’d never been off of New Dakota. Aja didn’t correct her.

  It was nice to be home after so many years, watching the farms rush past their speeder. Little had changed since she’d left. But everything looked so small now.

  The Skytoucher farm had been repainted recently, and its blue paneling gleamed in the sunlight. The corn stood as tall as Aja. The cattle grazing in the pasture were fat. The farm was clearly doing well, which her mother was eager to reinforce as she babbled on about how many new clients they’d gotten. They were going to be rich, she said. And richer still now that they would enjoy all of Aja’s retirement bonuses.

  “Not that I’m unhappy to have you, but I am a little surprised you’d want to come back to this,” her mother said, watching from the doorway as Aja se
t the duffel bag on her bed. It was the same tiny mattress she had slept on as a girl. The sheets were patterned with pink flowers. “You must be used to so many more glamorous places after your deployments!”

  Aja forced a smile. “Yeah, but there’s no place like home.”

  Her mother planted a kiss on her forehead. “I’ll let you unpack.”

  She left. Aja shut the door behind her.

  In truth, no matter how beautiful it was, the farm did seem terribly small. But in reality, it was several hundred acres. Their property extended beyond the land where they could plant crops; it continued on into the inhospitable, cruel mountains. It was quite spacious, really.

  And very much like Drakor III.

  Drakor III was now inhabited by human forces. They had wiped out most of the population in the weeks since Aja’s battle there, and they would spend years hunting the surviving dragons throughout their various outposts. It might be generations before humans managed to kill them all. The battles would be messy. Countless families would suffer for it—both human and dragon.

  The violence might never end.

  Unless someone figured out how to communicate with the dragons.

  Aja unzipped her duffel bag. A head the size of a terrier’s popped out from among the folds of her uniform, blinking sleepily at her.

  The dragonet reached its beak up to touch Aja’s forehead.

  Welcome home, Aja thought to it.

  Q&A with Sara Reine

  1. Where did this story come from?

  My fingertips applied repeatedly to keyboard.

  2. How does it relate to other books you’ve written?

  I’m developing a book series called Drakor’s Return with my husband, Edwin Reine. This short story is exploring the concepts we’ve discussed over many long nights, because the baby keeps waking up at two a.m. The series itself will take place a couple of generations after the Allied invasion of Drakor.

  3. Tell us something we might not know about you.

  This is my first trip into publishing science fiction. I’m typically a fantasy author.

  4. How can readers find you?

  With binoculars, on Google maps, and by visiting www.edwinreine.com. That’s my husband’s website, because mine is for my legions of fantasy novels, but I promise my husband and I are seldom far apart. It’s almost as though we like each other or something.

  5. Works in progress?

  I’m working on the first Drakor’s Return novel with my husband right now. I’m also attempting to grow two young boys into adult men who don’t suck. That’s the important one.

  Lulu Ad Infinitum

  by Ann Christy

  Ship Designation/Name: Generation 9 (11-12-11-22-11-11-11-23-11)/Triumph

  System Designation: HR4922

  Planet Name: Undesignated

  Mission Year: 18,332

  Chapter One

  When the crashing, cracking, and splintering sounds finally stopped, Lulu thought she might have gone deaf. The silence was too complete, too profound. She opened her eyes and found nothing save total darkness, the kind of darkness that creates instant vertigo. Maybe she was blind as well. Probably not, though.

  This is space, she reminded herself. Deep space. And there are no windows in an emergency capsule. But there should be lights in the capsule, so clearly there was a problem even in this tiny safe haven.

  Lulu knew about this sort of blackness. It wasn’t the first time she’d experienced it. Or rather, it would be more correct to say it wasn’t the first time she remembered experiencing it, though it was certainly not this body that had been there for the event.

  That had been on Earth, before the scans that would finalize who the project specialists would be had been taken, before they became the official Loaded Strands that would bear all the responsibility for the human race in space. Unlike a standard Strand—a simple DNA imprint that could be rebuilt as a new human infant, but without the memories of the original person—Loaded Strands had the addition of neural imprints, and thus could be rebuilt as fully grown adults with all their memories intact. Well, the memories up until the moment the scan started anyway.

  Once, during the years-long selection process, the candidates had gone into a mountain laboratory, the kind of place where passing particles could be measured because of a total lack of light. At the time, Lulu thought the exercise was pointless. After all, they were only supposed to be simulating the roles of colonists so the computer that would control the ships could learn from them. What she didn’t know then was that she was being tested to become a Loaded Strand. No one did. Their foray into the dark mountain made sense only in retrospect.

  Fifty team members at a time had been arranged around the lab floor, surrounded by vast vats of water and mysterious harnesses of thick wires for the experiments. Then the lights went off. Puking was one side effect, of course, but within moments she—and many of the others— also lost their sense of spatial awareness. Where were her arms? Her legs? Was she standing? The weight of the mountain above them made the sensation even more unsettling.

  This moment felt exactly the same as that long-ago one. Yes, that test made perfect sense now.

  She swallowed back her nausea and called out, “Hello!” Her voice was hoarse and scratchy, her throat feeling almost burned. But she could hear her own words, so at least she wasn’t deaf. That was something.

  “Stand by. Remain in the capsule,” came the immediate response. It was the computer, but without the normal inflections and social niceties that made dealing with a computer easier. That those niceties were absent told her more than the computer’s words did. It told her that the emergency that had put her inside this dark capsule was still ongoing, still using all the computer’s resources.

  But although she understood that, standing by wasn’t something Lulu could really bear to do at the moment. Her nausea was rising, and it was going to get very messy in this tiny, dark capsule if she waited too long without light. The weightlessness was only adding to her sense of vertigo.

  She stretched her limbs out, her own version of the Vitruvian Man, but there was no touch of matter to validate her location or confirm that she wasn’t floating in space. At least there was no pain to indicate that she’d broken a bone or damaged her body in any significant way. She jerked her limbs forward, then back to the side, trying to create a little current and move even a smidge toward something solid. The capsule was small enough that this inefficient manner of movement could actually produce results if she kept at it. Maybe.

  It was enough. The toe of her boot scraped metal, the sound of it faint through the thin air, but the feeling unmistakable. The rush of relief inside Lulu was profound and immediate, an almost physical sensation like a hug or a slap on the back. Her head cleared a little, the sense of vertigo shifting back as her body embraced the concept of a solid surface nearby.

  Plus, now she had a goal. Lulu positively lived for goals, and this time the right goal might save her life. Standing by while the computer did whatever it needed to do? Maybe not so much. She’d rather try and fail than simply wait to live or die as circumstances would have it.

  Waving her arms in ridiculous and awkward sweeps, she managed to get enough contact with the capsule bulkhead to use the friction of her boot against the rough surface. It was amazing how much force the barest edge of a boot could exert in zero gravity. A few more rubs of her foot and a timely push, and her arms slammed into the bulkhead—with a little more force than she had intended.

  She clung to a strap attached to the bulkhead and rested her head against the padded surface to catch her breath. Now that she was breathing harder, she could also hear properly again. The squishy thudding of her heart in her ears, the raspy sound of her breaths passing through her burned throat, the rubbing of her coveralls against the bulkhead, the scrape of her boot. All these sounds brought with them some normalcy, easing her nausea just a little more.

  The other noises that bled through the bulkheads wer
e far less comforting. Little pings and crashes peppering the outside of her capsule came in waves, telling her that the ship that had made up her entire world was still breaking apart. Each ping carried the potential to be the final nail in her coffin. This was an emergency capsule, meant to survive an impact that would shatter the entire ship, but how often could it take such impacts? For how long? Eventually, anything that could be built could also be un-built.

  Fumbling along the curved surface of the capsule, she finally touched something that felt familiar. From there, it was the work of a few moments to pull herself around and locate the emergency box. Touching its cool, slightly curved sides felt unreasonably good. It wasn’t like there was anything inside that could save her from a capsule failure, but it was something—and at the moment, anything was better than nothing.

  Lulu ripped the hand-light out of the thin, metal clips that held it fast. She slammed her palm on it, and white light flared to life, the brilliance painful and glorious.

  The first things she saw were her suit and helmet, still wadded up in a ball and pressed to the outer wall of the capsule, just out of her former reach. For a fraction of a second, she thought someone else was in the capsule with her, but then the flattened sleeve undulated in the slight air currents, advertising its empty status. Lulu felt disappointment and even more alone.

  She shook it off. To hold back her emotions, she mentally ran through the emergency checklists in her head. Feelings wouldn’t help; actions would.

  She scrambled into the suit, more focused now with some light to keep herself oriented in the micro-gravity. It was almost comforting to work through something simple, something familiar and specifically meant to enhance her survival.

  As she clicked the helmet closed, denser air poured into her lungs and immediately revived her. It was amazing really, how a few percentage points of oxygen in the air could change how a person functioned. Tweak that number a tiny bit in either direction and everything went haywire. But this lovely, cool air, saturated to mimic what she might breathe at sea level, felt almost decadently rich. After a few deep breaths, she could feel her mind sharpening, her logic improving. Her limbs responded more readily to the dictates of her mind.