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

  The black man stood, sighing. “I gotta get this out of the way,” he said, his voice soft and slightly high pitched. Mom and Dad watched him, looking concerned, as he walked towards Merton. Merton blinked.

  “Uh, yeah, I have no idea why you’re here-” Merton started.

  “I-I’m Julia,” he said. “Er. Jules. I mean.”

  Merton blinked.

  And as his brain tried to process that – with a roaring, snarling, screaming sound in his ears, with his heart hammering a thousand miles an hour – the door to the estates opened and the bald elf walked into the room, flanked by two servants heaped with cloth and leather and strips of metal. The bald elf clapped his hands.

  “Sir Merton! Your fiancee wishes your presence and has sent me to ensure you are presentable.”

  Merton put aside the roaring in his ears and swung around to face the elf. He scowled, walking forward. “For what ?” he asked.

  The elf gulped. “A-A-A dinner party!”

  He looked nervous. Merton felt too...too...everything. It was too much. The guilt. The anger. The confusion. The shock. All of it made him snap . And so he growled. “Unless you want me to tell everyone at the dinner party that I’m some random yahoo and that this Princess is just using me to distract people from the fact her scaled butt is up for grabs, you’ll do me some favors. Got it!?” He glared at the elf, who looked stunned and deeply nervous.

  The elf gulped. “Y-You do know that admitting that will kill you-”

  “Oh yeah, but it’ll ruin her too,” Merton said, letting what he was feeling flash across his face. “So, you going to do what I ask, or are you going to have to find a new fiance?”

  The bald elf’s face was breaking out in a fierce sweat. He reached up, daubing at his forehead with a handkerchief. His blue stained lips opened, then closed, and finally, he stammered. “F-Fine! What is it?”

  “You have magic?” Merton asked.

  “Yes,” the bald elf looked confused.

  “Can you change people’s bodies?” Merton asked. “Augmentations, shapeshifting, healing?”

  “...yes?” the bald elf looked even more confused.

  “Then make that man,” Merton said, swinging his finger back to the terrified and near-to-tears black man - the man who, in truth, was his girlfriend Julia - standing in the center of the room. “Into a beautiful woman!”

  “What?” the black man asked.

  “What?” the bald elf asked.

  “Kinky!” Carlos called out from the sidelines.

  “I-I-I-” the bald elf stammered. Merton locked his eyes on his. The bald elf gulped, then asked: “W-What kind of woman?”

  “Um, tiny?” The black man – no, Merton thought, Julia, the woman you love – said. “Asian? Petite? Oh! Blue hair! And, um, can I be hairless? Like, down there?” He gestured vaguely at the floor.

  “Kiiiiiinky!” Carlos called out from the sidelines.

  “Dude!” Merton spun to face Carlos.

  “What?” Carlos asked. “Don’t kinkshame yourself!”

  Merton made a face that Carlos often provoked in him: A mixture between confused, baffled, weirded out, shocked and slightly impressed. He shook his head slowly and turned to the bald elf. “Can you handle that?”

  “It’ll be ex-” the bald elf gulped at Merton’s expression. “Yes! Easily! Come along, uh, my soon to be lady!” He gestured to Julia. Julia walked with him, looking like he – well, she – could hardly believe what was happening.

  Lisa, who had been watching all of this, looked at Merton. She smiled. “I’m proud of you, McFly.”

  “Thanks,” Merton said. His name, shortened, did not in fact sound like Marty. That didn’t stop the nickname. Lisa punched his shoulder and walked off to explore her part of the chambers. As she left, Merton took the time to walk over to his Mom and Dad. Both of them were ducking their heads together and murmuring to one another. Merton slowed and perked his ears.

  “It can’t be a starship that uses any propulsion we know,” Mom was saying, her voice hushed. “Do you feel any acceleration?”

  “No...” Dad tugged at his mustache. “But that doesn’t mean much. A single G of acceleration would be indistinguishable from natural gravity. Or artificial gravity.” He looked around. “It can’t be centrifugal, we’d have noticed some kind of Coriolis effects.”

  “Would we?” Mom asked.

  “In the inner ear, if it was a small cylinder or arm.” Dad nodded. “In liquid, if we were in a larger one.”

  “We haven’t tested that...” Mom rubbed her chin. “The most likely explanation is that it’s from acceleration. Which means either this vehicle is using non-standard methods of generating thrust, or the propellent tanks are huge . We’ve been accelerating ever since we woke up. How fast do you think that puts us?”

  Dad tugged at his mustache again. “Eh. We can round that to ten kilometers per second squared.” He cocked his head. “How long have we been here?”

  Mom put her fingers to her wrist, frowning. “Not sure...”

  Merton shook his head slowly. This was what he got for having nerdy parents. It did explain him. The nerdy apple did not fall far from the nerdy tree. Though his parents were professional nerds. They had been nerds for their country. Dad, then, said something that made Merton almost collapse.

  “I guess this means the Imperials have decided to stop keeping their hands off,” he said, sighing quietly. “I told them. I told them you can’t have a truce with dragons.

  “The fuck!?” Merton exclaimed.

  “Merton!” Mom said, looking at him. “Language!”

  “Sorry, Mom,” Merton said, glaring at her father. “The fucking fuck!? You fucking knew about fucking space fucking dragons?”

  Dad chuckled, even as Mom looked more and more sour at every single F-bomb. “Yeah, sorry kid. I told you that if I told you what I did for a day job, I’d have to kill you,” he said, his voice cheery. “Now, though, you should get ready for that dinner.”

  “I thought you were kidding !” Merton put his hands over his face.

  Dad stood up, his hands sliding into his pockets. “All right. A full explanation can come after we’re not all at risk of being killed. But the short story is Earth’s been visited by dragon scout ships twice. The first in the 40s led to the dragons nabbing heavily wounded veterans from hospitals across the world for surgical research. We’re mage blind – meaning we can’t cast magic – so that means we don’t get a bunch of… uh, rights in the Five Talon Empire.”

  “Uh-huh,” Merton whispered. And he was going to get married to that ? He was starting to think being on fire was an improvement.

  “But during the 50s, the Soviets were testing tactical thermonuclear weapons,” Dad said, like that was a thing that people just talked about every day as if it was utterly normal. “To fry NATO armies. And they tested their tactical nuke anti-air missile during the next dragon scout ship run and managed to tag the bugger.”

  “The Russians shot down a dragon with a nuke ?”

  “Yeah,” Dad said, laughing. “Sucks, doesn’t it? Almost started an interplanetary war.”

  Merton put his hands over his face and tried to stop hyperventilating.

  “Fortunately for all of us, the dragon ship took its time crashing, with its stealth systems online for most of the way and it landed in Roswell, New Mexico,” he said. “Cause I doubt Stalin would have been particularly nice to a dragon crew, half dead from radiation burns and out of mana, you can believe me.”

  “And here I thought the Cuban missile crisis was the worst thing from the Cold War,” Merton whispered.

  Dad pffft’d through his mustache. “Please! It was the Norwegian Rocket Incident.”

  “Honey,” Mom broke in. “That was in the 90s, after the Cold War.”

  Dad, as befitting his years in the defense department and military space programs, snorted loudly.

  Merton dragged his hands along his face, tugging his cheeks back into a long, almost exagger
ated expression. “Let me get this straight,” he whispered. “There are space dragons, who run a space dragon empire, and one of their scout ships were shot down by a soviet tactical nuclear weapon in 1947, and that scout ship crashed in Roswell, and we used that to basically tell the dragons to fuck off?”

  “Basically,” Dad said. “But the problem is, that hostage exchange deal was struck with the Prismatic Emperor, Dogan Castrovel. And Dogan, like most Emperors, would hate to admit that he gave away anything to anyone. So, Earth got quietly yanked from their history files, but every fleet nearby was given orders to not bother us. And that, son...” He clapped his hand to Merton’s shoulder. “Is why you do not fuck with Harry Truman.”

  The door opened.

  The bald elf had returned.

  “Sir,” he said, his voice severe. “Your, ah, prime concubine is in the transformation chambers and shall be transformed within the hour. Please. Come with me. We must get you dressed . ”

  Merton sighed, nodded, and turned to go with the bald elf.

  It was time to get ready for a dinner date. A banquet with a dragon.

  He was halfway down the corridor before he did a perfect double take and said: “My prime what !?”

  Chapter Two: Roll that Performance Check

  Merton felt like he was wearing the most heavily armed wedding cake in the universe. His arms were thrust outwards and his legs were spread, and he simply stood perfectly still as intersecting layers of highly complex nanomachines and magical circuitry flowed around his limbs like thick, taffy esque water. He looked down at the billowy, white material, then over at the bald elf and the four armed scantily clad purple dominatrix slash science person who seemed to handle all the fancy gizmos on this spaceship.

  To think today had started off so normal . He had been going about his business, firmly sure that dragons and space empires were the realm of fiction. Now, he was on a draconic spaceship, betrothed to a woman he had met twice, and being dressed for a banquet to snub one of her former suitors.

  And, from the specifications he had heard, for potential battle .

  Also said suitor was also a dragon.

  Also, so was his betrothed.

  “The smart clothing is tasting your soul,” the purple woman said. “Hold still, we don’t want it to get confused. Calibrating for a mage-blind is like calibrating for someone without skin. Or bones.”

  “How comforting,” Merton said, his voice tight. The orange tabby cat - seeming to care as much for draconic security as it did for human whims - pawed around near Merton’s feet. Merton would have petted it, but he dared not move. The cat seemed to recognize he was helpless and began to knead at his shin, the tiny prick prick prick of its claws sending shooting pain through Merton’s body.

  “Before the dinner begins,” the bald elf said.

  “Wait,” Merton said, his voice vice tight as he tried to distract himself. “What’s your name?”

  “Thuwit,” he said, lifting his chin and puffing up his somewhat flabby chest as if he was on parade. “Seneschal of House Castrovel, tutor to the Princess Relix, Master of Assassins.” He pulled some glowing blue liquid to his lips via a clear plastic vial and sucked it all down with clear relish. He shuddered, licked his lips, then continued: “Slave-trained and chem-gelded on the pits of Torel, I survived ten years in the Blood Pits, five years in the Red Scholarium, and two at court as adjunct to Lord Dagon of the Fifth Circle of the Obsidian Eye, who himself served the Prismatic Emperor himself.”

  Merton nodded. “Right, got it, Thufir.”

  “Thuwit!” Thuwit snapped.

  “That’s what I said. Thufir.” Merton grinned, his knees nearly collapsing with relief. The cat had gotten bored and fucked off.

  “Maybe I did pick an imbecile after all,” Thuwit muttered to the purple skinned woman.

  “You haven’t read Dune ?” Merton asked.

  A red warning light flashed on behind the purple skinned woman. She turned to face it, her lower arms tapping at control crystals. She looked back at Merton, her voice severe. “Please,” she said. “Refrain from humor.”

  “Does it screw with the smart clothes?” Merton asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Due to being mage-blind, it may misconstrue humor as a request for immediate exsanguinatative relocation.” She looked severe.

  Merton coughed. “R-Right. So. Thuwit. My name is Merton Miles.”

  Thuwit waited a few beats. “And?”

  “That’s it,” Merton said. “Merton Miles. Oh! Sorry, Merton Briggs Miles. My middle name was chosen by rolling on a random name table in an old edition of the FASA Mechwarrior game.”

  “I said refrain from humor!” the purple skinned woman said, her voice shifting from serious to utterly dire.

  “I am!” Merton exclaimed.

  Thuwit rubbed a finger along his temple. He licked his silvered lips and started to pace backwards and forwards, turning on his heel every time he reached one of the curved walls of the room. Merton’s arms were starting to ache. The idea of lowering them felt decidedly suicidal. He gritted his teeth.

  “We need something more,” he said. “What accomplishments have you completed in your short, pitiful, mage blind life?”

  Merton racked his brain.

  Once more, his girlfriend came to his rescue. Even if she was currently in a transformation chamber, completing what had been a long, long, long time coming. He smiled at Thuwit.

  “Okay...” he said. “Where to start ... ”

  ***

  The doors to the banquet hall on The Rad Baron’s solar palace opened with a blare of fanfare, played with traditional red dragon pigheadedness. It was brash and overpowering and hammered into the ears like the lance of a lightspeed charger. Relix bore it with stoic disdain and wished she could get away with a bit of shape-shifting. But shifting your form, even minutely, was a great way to begin a quiet war of subtle murder attempts. In fact, it’d be less provoking to be super obvious in your shifting. A subtle shift could add some tiny poison glands to your fingertip, or a biological flechette channel into your arm. Big shifts, like from humanoid to fully draconic forms, were less quietly dangerous.

  But...still dangerous. Since in her full dragon form she was thirty feet long from nose to tail and breathed plasma hotter than the surface of the sun that filled the windows.

  Despite that the temptation to make her ears vanish was overpowering.

  At last, though, the trumpets faded and the hundred and twenty one banner bearers who held aloft the plumes and flags of the Singularity Principality – with its swirling accretion disk done in red dyed fabric and the blaze of hawking radiation done in colors most races couldn’t see, forming an eye slit like a dragon’s pupil in the heart of the symbolic black hole – stepped back with a rattle and crash of boots and smashing onyxwood flagpoles.

  This formed a straight avenue to The Red Baron’s table. He was seated there – as big as he could be while still remaining vaguely humanoid – and to his left sat his fifty six concubines, each one a different race, each one wearing a collar and absolutely nothing else. To his right were the few members of the House Thresh that lived on this backwater. There was Gimtesh Thresh, a half-dragon, half-elf who looked as if she ritually starved herself (in truth, her pinched expression was just a feature of a personality that could shatter entire planets.) And next to her was a large black egg with a bow-tie affixed gently onto the top.

  Ugh.

  She hated dining with babies . They were always so messy .

  Next to her, Merton had actually done a halfway respectable job in fancying himself up. He was dressed in proper smart clothes, which had been reformatted into a suit and tie that struck her as understated, but fashionable. The multicolored gemstones in the tie, the golden color of the smart-fibers, the rainbow cufflinks. All quite demure. She nodded subtly to herself, even as Merton adjusted his collar and muttered under his breath.

  “When do we enter?”

  “Once we’re announced
, fiancee .” Relix slipped her arm through the crook of his arm and nestled close to him. He drew himself up and pressed against her and Relix found another thing to appreciate: He was warm . Humans were delightfully exothermic! Who knew? Well, humans must have, but who cared what they thought? They were mage-blind.

  “Announcing the glorious Princess Relix Castrovel of the Third Talon of the Spinward Front of the Chromatic Arm of the Galaxy, Mistress of Fifty Thousand Worlds, Protector of the Dragon Maw Nebula, and Scourge of Pirates,” a humanoid man with pale green skin, of a race Relix didn’t care to recall the name of, boomed out. He was reading from a gilded scroll, and looked rather at ease and then his brow furrowed as he found the scroll unfurled, and unfurled more, and finally, touched the ground at his feet. His reading went slower as he leaned his head forward. “And her husband to be...”