Scales Like Stars (Dragons...in...SPACE! Book 1) Read online

  For in this moment…

  Merton knew that he’d never have a heart small enough for just one soul. Not after seeing Princess Relix Castrovel bare her soul before him.

  “Hi!”

  The voice jerked both their heads up.

  A small black dragon – roughly the size of a large dog, or a small pony – sat on the dresser that was perched against the wall. His tail wagged happily and his wings were folded against his sides. He was in his quadrupedal form, and his bright, golden eyes were watching the scene with clear excitement. He waved. “Hi!”

  Merton looked at Lix. Lix looked back at him.

  They both looked at the tiny dragon.

  “Hi!” he said a third time. “I’m Brash! Brash the Dragon!” He puffed up his chest. “I was in an egg, but it was boring, so I hatched! Oh!” He looked around himself. “This room is fancy! Oh! Oh!” He gasped, then spotted his tail out of the corner of his eye. “Something’s behind me!” He started to run after it. This caused his snout to bump into the wall as he spun on the top of the dresser, which tottered on its foundations, then slowly fell forward.

  “Wheeeeeee!” Brash squealed as the dresser hit the floor with a bang . The small dragon skidded along the metal floor, his paws and claws clattering like metal on metal. He bounced, jounced, then finished his skid underneath the bed. “Oh! Oh! You dropped this!” Brash came out from under the bed, one of Relix’s bras on his snout. “I found it! Brash saved the day!” He started to do a little dance.

  Merton wasn’t sure what shocked him more.

  This...dragon…

  Or the fact that Relix wore bras.

  But before he could comment on either, Talon- 9 was simultaneously hit by two dozen fifty megaton fusion warheads and almost a hundred railgun slugs going a pretty significant factor of C.

  Chapter Five: Roll that Initiative!

  There was an unfortunate (or maybe that was a fortunate) truth about nuclear weapons and their use in space warfare. Without an atmosphere to transmit the concussive force, or the intense heat, nukes had to depend entirely on radiation and the light burst of their detonation to cause actual damage.

  The two dozen fifty megaton warheads that slammed into the Talon-9 and detonated didn’t actually strike the hull of the ship. Drawing that close would have activated various defenses that would have slagged the intricate weapons before they managed to go fusion. Instead, they flew about five kilometers away from the sleek dart of a ship and went fusion with a vengeance. They bathed the ship, from draconic snout to fluted, almost whale-like fins, with enough hard radiation to fry a roc’s eggs. As the adamantine hull blazed with a blue-white heat and the armor plating shifted like tectonic plates, the Ouster pirates fired their railguns.

  Ten railguns, from ten different ships, all firing at a steady shot-per-second pace, each one launching a dart of crude iron through magnetic accelerators that ran from stem to stern of the little, arrowhead ships. Magic had been used to wring extra acceleration out of the railguns - and extra length, considering how many of the guns had been ‘doubled’ by placing flickering teleport-portals at the midway point.

  The slugs struck the adaminte hull and tore holes the size of cars through deck after deck after deck. Greedy vacuum ripped crew and passengers into the depths of space. A naked Merton struggled and flailed as he was blown outwards and saw the glorious, horrifying sight of the Talon-9 ripping to pieces as its magical reactor core went critical and ripped open a hole straight to the Plane of Positive Energy. The wave of healing energy struck him – overloading his biological functions and burning his every cell with a terrible radiance.

  He was drowning. Drowning in pure life .

  And then, like a soap bubble popping, he was standing on the bridge of the Talon-9. Next to him stood Relix, looking quite irritated.

  “Oh what now?” she asked.

  “Pirates, ma’am,” Gunner said, looking up from his console. “They’ve burned through three of our ablative wish layers.”

  “I...what!?” Merton yelped.

  “Uuuuugh!” Relix threw up her hands. “Those spells are so freaking expensive !”

  “Whaaaaaaaaat is happening?” Merton asked.

  “Hi! I’m Brash!” The small dragon hatchling that had interrupted Merton’s lovemaking leaped onto his head, sticking his nose into Merton’s face.

  The Talon-9 accelerated hard enough that it kicked Merton in the chest and sent him falling backwards into a couch that slipped smoothly out of the floor of the bridge. Merton blinked a few dozen times as he tried to grasp what had happened. He had felt the killing radiance. He had felt his eyeballs freezing. He reached out and touched Relix – feeling the strong curve of her shoulder, the softness of her scales. Brash, meanwhile, had curled up on the top of his head like the world’s second most adorable hat and gone promptly to sleep. His snores were a bit like a purr. And, like a purring cat, it set Merton at ease. Slowed his heart rate down to something close to normal.

  Relix put her hand on Merton’s hand and explained: “Well, obviously, considering how dangerous ambushes are, we have some perfect defenses.”

  “Perfect defenses?” Merton asked. “Like... perfect perfect defenses?”

  “Wish spells!” Relix said, cheerfully. “We have three layers of them weaved into the skin of the ship. It’s expensive , though. And a pain in the tail. Fifty thousand credits worth of hard diamonds, not to mention the century and a half of training for each wizard-technician to cast the bloody things.”

  Merton blinked at her. “Why. Don’t. I...wishes!?” He shook his head. “Why don’t you use them for more than a fancy Omega-13!?”

  “Uh, because it’s against the law ?” Relix asked, her brow furrowing.

  “That hasn’t stopped anyone in the history of ever ,” Merton said, putting his hands on his head as he squeezed his hair. Brash nosed at his fingers curiously. Merton didn’t have the heart to remove him.

  “Merton. There are laws. And then there are laws . There are only three laws that have ever seen an entire household eradicated to the last cell .” Relix put her finger on his chest, teasing one of Merton’s short chest hairs. It was then that Merton realized that he was completely naked. His hand reached out and he found one of the cushions on the curved couch, then placed it above his crotch, his cheeks flushing dark red. “The law against genetic engineering dragons. The law against contacting the Night City. And, finally, the law against the use of wish spells in anything but stabilization and approved terraforming.”

  Merton gulped, slowly. “Okay...so...wishes can be used for defenses. And terraforming?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I mean, we dragons live forever, but we’re not that patient . ”

  “And whole houses have been eradicated over this?” he asked.

  “Why do you think there aren’t any Radium, Tungsten, Teal or Zebra dragons anymore?” Relix asked, with the air of someone who couldn’t believe someone could be so dense. Merton nodded, slowly, then looked out at the rest of the bridge. He had kind of expected more to have happened . But as he took in what was happening on the bridge, he realized that space battle seemed to be that kind of battle that went very very slowly, until it went very very quickly. He had time enough to take in the bridge. It was roughly triangular in shape, with consoles along two of the edges and doors along the back. The center of the bridge was dominated by the incredibly comfy command couch. Or at least, the ‘lounge around and watch Gunner do the actual work’ couch.

  Speaking of Gunner, he was standing beside several of the consoles – which were worked by a motley collection: A dark skinned, one eared elf who was currently tapping on controls that translated to faint shudders and pulses of acceleration. There was a dwarf without a beard, who was currently listing off targeting solutions with a stutter so intense that it made every sentence take twice as long as it should have. Finally, there was a gobliness, who was dressed in a spacesuit as designed by a fetish catalog, who kept breaking into the firing
solutions with the same question.

  “T-Th...The Ou...Ousters are c-coming in at v-v-v-v-vhu- vector -”

  “Can I use the flamers!?”

  “For the last time,” Gunner said, his voice calm and casual. “No. You cannot use the flamers, Pyria.”

  “But they’re flame throwers!” Pyria groaned.

  The door to the bridge opened and in came the four armed purple skinned chick. She looked pissed .

  “Why was I not informed of incoming ordinance?” she asked. “I could have activated the PRCs!”

  “Because we didn’t know they were coming, Specy.” Gunner said and, at last, at long last, Merton had a name to hang on the four armed purple skinned chick. She crossed two of said arms over her chest, frowning.

  “Well, the PRCs are up now,” she said. “We’ve got some planar whipple shields up.”

  “We’ve noticed,” Gunner said, frowning. “How’s the power leads?”

  “Four of the five portals are up. If you play up our energy requirements anymore, we’ll be tapped out-” Specy said, frowning as she cocked her head.

  “We’re just dodging ,” Gunner said, shaking his head. His mandibles clacked together audibly. “We have to keep this up until they run out of-” A series of bright flashes filled the forward view-screen, making Merton wince. Beside him, Relix had dozed off. What was with dragons and taking naps during space battles?

  “Uh, question,” Merton said. “What the hell is going on?”

  Gunner and Specy looked at him. Gunner looked faintly amused. Specy looked like she was trying to evaluate how well he had put his newly enhanced dong to use. Merton felt a flush crawl up his cheeks as he coughed and said: “I think, as Relix’s husband, I should know how to fight a space battle. Just in case.”

  Gunner pursed his mandibles, then nodded. “Fine. The Talon-9 is a top of the line draconic demiship. It’s about twenty meters long, but the interior is expanded via the use of demiplanes. Her reactor is a direct portal-feed to the Plane of Positive Energy – essentially limitless, save that we can only pop five portals at once to run energy out. For passive defenses, we have a layer of adamantine with a sublayer of bio-engineered dragon scales for flexible kinetic dispersal, followed up by three level 9 spell slots preloaded with class two wish spells, which are triggered on catastrophic drive failure to return the ship to normal, to return the crew to normal, and to put us a standard DU away from the enemy.”

  “A dragon unit?” Merton asked.

  “Yeah. It’s the distance that a dragon needs between another dragon before it feels comfortable leaving its hoard unguarded,” Gunner said. “It’s roughly ten thousand kilometers of hard vacuum.”

  Merton slowly looked at his wife, who had started to wake up. She blinked, yawned, then said: “What? He said un guarded. With proper guards, I can leave my hoard much earlier than that.” She rubbed at her muzzle. “Have the enemies been destroyed yet, Gunner? I was in the middle of sex.”

  “No, m’lady,” Gunner said – shooting a look at Merton. Merton felt his magically enhanced dong shrivel under that glower.

  “Ah well,” Relix said, leaning back as she started to close her eyes again.

  Merton shook his head, trying to get the conversation back on track. “What are the active defenses?”

  Gunner pointed to one of the consoles – where Pyria was sitting, with her green feet up on the console, a small hand-held flamer in her hands. She was firing it into the air, looking transfixed by the flickering orange streamer. “That console controls the planar whipple shields. If the ship detects incoming kinetic or directed energy ordinance, it’ll pop a portal to the Elemental Plane of Water. Anything that gets past that gets hit by the PRCs – the Polar Ray Casters. They’re a series of two hundred wands enchanted with frost beam cantrips, with meta-magic augmentation worked into the focusing apertures to maximize damage. Via focusing, the rays can knock most missiles out of the air, as well as small fighters, assuming their planar shields are down.”

  Merton was starting to come to grips with just how vast the difference between humanity’s technology and draconic magitechnology was and it was making him feel very...very small.

  “Now, for weapons!” Gunner said, his voice casual. Like he’d belted this out before. A lot. “Four railguns along the spine, and five LRPTs under each wings, capable of ripple firing ten plasma torpedoes each. We’ve got five magazines, each one holding a hundred torpedoes. Then we have a backup cache of vortex weapons, in case we really need to get serious.”

  “How much ammo for the railguns do we have?” Merton asked, rubbing his palms against his face.

  Gunner looked at him oddly. “They...they’re fed directly by portals to the Elemental Plane of Earth. Technically, their firing starts about ten clicks back in the EPE, with only the last twenty meters of the gun coming out on this ship. Ammo’s not a concern.”

  “ Jesus ,” Merton whispered.

  “Now,” Gunner said. “Our enemy are ten different Ouster pirate ships – their clan markings are obscured, but they’re running on black market antimatter reactors. Hot, efficient, dangerous. Their railguns are all shorter lengths than ours, but they have more of them, and their nukes are a serious pain in the ass .” He waved Merton over. Merton, feeling distinctly underdressed, stood and kept his crotch covering pillow against his junk. Brash, who had remained on the top of his head, snored even louder.

  The screen that Gunner showed Merton was instantly recognizable to Merton, because he was the kind of nerd who knew how to recognize orbital and space combat maneuvers. The ten Ouster ships were basically on the Talon-9’s tail, firing a constant stream of railgun fire, which was portaled away into the plane of water. Nukes swept outwards in jinking patterns, zig zagging towards the ship before being struck down by the PRCs. Some of the nukes did get through and detonated close enough to the ship to leave the hull glowing a cherry red. But Merton was pretty sure there weren’t enough of them to really cause them problems. However, Merton could see that the only reason the Ouster ships couldn’t get closer was because the Talon-9 was burning as hard as she could go.

  “We can’t go faster without shutting down some of the portal defenses,” Gunner said.

  “And if they get closer, they can saturate our defenses with close range fire. I bet they have knife fight weapons. Lasers or something.” Merton rubbed his chin, thinking.

  “Telescope them,” Gunner said. “Check.”

  “Aye, sir!” The one eared dark skinned elf said. A moment later, she said. “Yup, they have a few dozen industrial lasers each. They’re made for mining ore, but they’re dwarven make. They’ll cut adamantine, given enough time.”

  “How long?” Merton asked. Gunner looked amused.

  “Thirty six seconds,” the dark elf said.

  “Well,” Specy said, stepping up slightly. “Less, if we’re still red hot. More, if we can cool down before we get to them.”

  “Can we make our defensive portals bigger?” Merton asked.

  “Yes, if we want to suck up all our energy...” Specy said, frowning.

  “Okay,” Merton said. “Okay.” He thought. He thought of every sneaky, stupid, bullshit trick that his players had thrown at him. He played through the possibilities in his head, trying to get a feeling for what was plausible. It was just like gamemastering. Just higher stakes. Slowly, the ideas sifted in his head. Just as slowly, Merton began to smile. “Okay. Gunner, I’m going to tell you my plan. And you are going to tell me, on a scale from one to ten, how good it is.”

  They listened.

  Slowly, Gunner started to grin.

  “That’ll be a ten, sir.”

  And Merton heard real loyalty in that voice.

  ***

  Pirate-Lord Kursk tapped three of his five fingers on his thigh as he leaned back in the acceleration creche of the Ouster ship Fuck You I Got Mine. The steady wham wham wham of the railgun going off had gone from a comforting pattern to an aching hammering against his alread
y aching exterior ear-sacks. Kursk was a trullup, one of the sentient arboreal squirrels that had evolved on the elven garden world of Gladefellow.

  He had hated it.

  He had hated every last second of the saccharine sweetness. He had hated the midnight dancing parties around the fairy circles. He had hated the twee elven princesses, so innocent in their sheer robes, giving roses and flowers to everyone who came to visit. He had despised the cities, where elven councils had genteelly given over every last scrap of dignity and magical resources to the Five Talon Empire.

  Now, here he was, about to nukefuck a princess of that empire into radioactive slag. He could feel the closeness of his victory, like the closeness of a woman in heat.