Scales Lie Stars

Lisa turned away from the scanning display and glared at Gunner, Quetzalcoatl and, honestly, the rest of the crew and the whole universe. "Well, fuck," she said, her voice tight and barely controlled. Quetzalcoatl's feathered ruff flicked back and he hissed quietly, clearly a bit upset about her tone. Before he could say anything, Gunner cracked his knuckles.

"Track that aircraft," he barked, and the bridge crew hurried to their stations. Pyros was the first one to get on the scrying console and started to tap away with greenish fingers.

"What are we going to do?" Carlos asked. "They napped Relix and Brash and Merton!

Putas

."

"We could panic," Trevor said, his voice ever so slightly snide. Carlos glared at him - but before he could respond, Lisa held up her hand.

"You!" she pointed at Gunner. "Once we track the airplane, I want this ship up and after them. You!" She pointed at Speccy. "Take the overgrown feather duster to Atlantis."

Speccy crossed all four of her arms over her chest and belly, her eyes narrowing as she hissed in displeasure. Quetzalcoatl looked even more mortified. Both of them opened their mouths, but before they could get in a word edgewise, Lisa snapped her fingers. She had a skill with finger snapping. It sounded a bit like a gunshot. She followed up with a voice that was as even as it was filled with a smoldering anger. A lifetime of arguing with people from pushy HOA members to racists on twitter had given Lisa a backbone - the same backbone she had shown in the Fortress of Regrets.

"Right now, a huge-ass dragon warfleet is coming to Earth. We need every

fucking

tool that we have. Quetzalcoatl is the only surviving dragon from that time period, and Spectral, you're the best and most intelligent engineer we have."

Speccy inclined her head. Quetzalcoatl flared his ruff, but didn't do much more than that.

"Find every gun, every spell, every bit of armor, everything," Lisa said.

"I've got them tracked!" Pyros exclaimed. "No, bugger, they're gone."

"What do you mean

gone

?" Gunner snarled, his mandibles clacking. "Earth doesn't have magic, we're tracking them with level 5 spells!"

"I'm saying what I'm saying, and what I'm saying is they dropped off the charts, even with sympathetic magic," Pyros said, slumping.

Lisa rubbed her chin.

"We could go to the White House," Merton's Dad said - his voice remarkably calm. "I know people in the Defense Department. And if anyone knows who those people were, they'd be them." He smiled. "Hell, maybe it was D-Com."

"D-Com?" Merton's Mom asked, her laugh having a hysterical edge to it - she looked as if she was reaching the upper limit of the amount of weird shit she was able to put up with. Doubly so when it came to threats on her son's life. "That urban legend?"

***

The armored soldier knelt down above Merton and yanked the gag away from his mouth smiled slightly. "Hey," he said. Merton tongued at his gums, tasting the horrible aftershocks of having rubber jammed into his mouth. He looked around at the restraints that kept him and Brash restrained, despite Brash's incredible strength.

"Sup," Merton asked, his voice rough.

"Oh, just another glorious day in D-Com," the soldier said, shrugging.

The two - well, the three of them - were in the belly of the VTOL that had kidnapped Merton and Relix. The faint sound of air screaming past the belly of the craft was audible enough to made Merton's teeth itch. Small bumps and jostles of turbulance set him swaying and made a quiet groan escape from Brash's brain.

You okay, little buddy?

Merton thought.

The restraints are junking up my ability to compensate for inner ear woobliebooblies...

Brash mumbled.

Merton blinked.

The soldier stood up and paced away, his rifle clacking slightly as he slung it over his shoulder. His armor was unfamiliar to Merton - but it still looked to be roughly on par with human technology. So, this was just some fancy, high tech secret combat force. If Merton had to guess, D-Com stood for Dragon Combat or Dragon Control or something. He wasn't sure if they were saying

Com

or

Con

, with an N. The two sounds blurred together, at least, they did when someone was speaking over a howling set of VTOL engines and the 'screaming of the damned' sound of air rushing by the armored hull.

"Hey," Merton said. "Where's Relix?"

The soldier looked back at him. He shook his head slightly. "You think you can get her free, dragon-boy?"

"Uh, one, I'm not a dragon," Merton said. "My name is Merton Miles. I was born in California."

"Yeah. And I work for the post office," the D-Com soldier said, rolling his eyes.

Merton frowned. Then he felt a faint quiver in Brash's body. It pressed against his skin and made me gulp down his own sense of nausea. He shook his head - then grinned. "Hey, fuckface. If I was a dragon, how would I know that DC movies kick Marvel movie's ass hands down?"

The soldier swung around, his eyes wide with shock. He took a step forward. "What did you-"

I'm gonna be sick,

Brash gurgled.

And he threw up.

Which meant Merton went flying out of Brash's mouth, buck naked and slick with juice that he'd really rather not identify. He focused as he flew, lifting his arm as if he was a D&D fighter in the middle of a bull rush. His psi-shield crackled to life as his mage awakened talent roused, now that he was no longer restrained by the strange webbing that Brash had been wrapped in. The shield met the guard's face and the two hit the ground with a groan. Merton skidded along a deck so cold that he felt as if his dong might freeze and snap off. But he had no time to think. He grabbed onto the rifle as the soldier clutched at a broken nose. He yanked the strap off from around the man's neck.

He fired a single shot at the restraints that still wrapped around the undifferentiated mass that was Brash's groaning body. A spark flew from the net and the blue glow they emitted faded. Brash sprang free a moment later, landing on Merton's shoulder with a cheerful cry of: "Hup!"

Merton swung his rifle around and fired off a spray of bullets at the stairs leading into the cargo hold - causing the soldiers who had started to come down to investigate the noise to jerk backwards with cries of alarm. Merton stood, his knees shaking, his feet skidding thanks to the Brash-slime that slicked against his soles.

"Everyone up there!" he shouted. "I'm willing to fucking talk! But if you say no, I have a tiny dragon with tac-nukes and I'm not afraid to use him!"

"Yeah!" Brash said, then whispered. "We're not actually going to use tactical nuclear weapons right? We're over an ocean!"

And, quite suddenly, the floor became the wall and gravity vanished. The VTOL was arcing downwards - in a howling, screaming arc through the air. Brash giggled cheerfully, flipping around as Merton tried to keep a hold on the rifle as he bounced up towards the ceiling. Through the narrow windows on the wall, he could see the ocean rushing up to meet them.

Well,

he thought.

Balls

.

***

It took five minutes after the

Talon-9

shot off into the distance before Quetzalcoatl finally opened his mouth to say: "Well, that wasn't how I expected that to go. At all."

Spectral Time - or, as people kept referring to her as, Speccy - did not sigh. She had a long lifetime of learning to not sigh. Her people were known as technicians and sorcerers both, and she was considered quite skilled among her people. As a skilled tech-priest from a planetary population of tech-priests, she had been a valuable commodity. And at times like this, Speccy remembered all her previous masters and her previous exposure to other dragons and took heart from knowing that no matter how bad it was...

She could still be working for House Bryaugh.

And so, she turned to see that Quetzalcoatl was sitting with his large, feathered head resting on his chin, glaring at a pile of frost dusted debris. The lost city of Atlantis - or at least the part of Atlantis that they had discovered - stretched out before Speccy, visible under the magical spectra that her eyes had been enchanted to perceive. In natural light, only a tiny circle of the city was struck by the natural sunlight shining through the hole the

Talon-9

had punched through stone and ice. As a scientist, the indications of techno-sorcerey that she had seen thus far was...breathtakingly mundane.

She knelt down and picked up a piece of a street mage-light that had fallen down thousands of years before and frozen solid. She used her upper right hand and opened it up, pursing her lips ever so slightly as she shifted her vision through the arcanic spectrum - working her way through divinatory lenses. Once she was done, she shook her head and made a quiet

tchss

sound under her breath.

"I spent thousands of years watching the slaves, seeing them...a...a race that could really claim the title of what the ancient magi stood for. They did so much. But they'd never manage anything, not with dragons sitting on the great wheel..." Quetzalcoatl muttered. "And I finally find a dragon that could see it, and..."

"Are you quite done?" Speccy asked, turning to face Quetzalcoatl, her lower hands on her hips, her upper arms crossed over her breasts. She frowned down at Quetzalcoatl, who looked up at her, his head drawing back, his ruff settling down against his scales.

"Oh, I'm sorry," he said, his voice venomous. "I-"

"Shut up," Speccy said, frowning. "Life is filled with failed incidents. You could have spent thousands of years

acting

rather than watching. Instead, you waited for the right moment and it failed. If you had a thousand other failures under your belt preparing you for this, maybe you would have a contingency plan. As it is, transform yourself into a carrying device or leave, because you're currently being as much use as a wet fart in a space suit."

Quetzalcoatl spluttered, his head rearing back even further. "A...a...a

carrying

device!?"

Speccy picked up the mage light and held it up. "What is this?"

"A mage light," Quetzalcoatl said, his voice smug. "It uses the light spell, augmented by electrostatic generator to prevent mana-burn."

The mage-light bounced off his nose.

"Inefficient!" Speccy said, an anger she hadn't realized she could feel actually beginning to grow and build inside of her. "Do you think modern mage lights are kindled by first year apprentices recasting the same cantrip again and again?" She scoffed. "We have mage lights linked to a central power system, usually powered via arcano-gravitic fusion or by straight line connections to the plane of positive energy."

Quetzalcoatl blinked.

"You do?" he asked.

Speccy frowned. She thrust her upper left hand at a building that looked as if it had once contained a maunfactory center, from the draconic runes she recognized underneath a few millennia of decay and frost. "Knock that wall over."

Quetzalcoatl frowned, then reached out with his foreclaw. He smashed into the brick and metal wall, sending up a cloud of dust and spray of debris. Before it had even cleared up, Speccy stepped over the wreckage, picking her way along carefully. Not for the first time, she thanked the gods of fashion that her garb was tight and form fitting. Not for any prurient reason - she had yet to meet a male that she'd lay with for any reason beyond abject pity or a direct order from Princess Relix.

What about Merton?

A teeny, tiny part of her brain whispered.

She waved her hand, and instead, focused on the interior of the former factory. And, like dumping a bunch of petrochemicals onto a burning fire, she felt her anger intensify. "Look at

this

nonsense! You have old orchialicum pools right in the open, without any bleed-off vanes or magic captors above the pools! And...artificial sunlight focusing lamps?" She gestured at an ancient, shattered hunk of glass and plastic. "

Tchss!

This isn't fit to work on a backwoods pirate den!"

"It's top of the line!" Quetzalcoatl exclaimed.

"It

was

top of the line ten thousand years ago!" Speccy said, turning to face him. "Now. Become a wheelbarrow." She looked over at the ruins, her eyes narrowing. "I have a way to salvage something from this terrible idea."

Her tone added the subtext so plainly that it might as well have been uttered aloud:

As per usual.

***

The

Talon-9

kicked on its retro-engines after blazing past several layers of top of the line human air defenses. Several SAM sites, each one scrambled to activity by frantic screaming from radar detection grids and satellite surveillance systems, fired their missiles into the air the

Talon-9

had been in mere seconds before. The missiles arced around and were intercepted by polar-rays fired en mass from the PRC grid along the

Talon-9

's spine. The sudden, killing cold of the PRCs did not actually take the missiles down instantly, but the sheer weight of polar rays did manage to blow missile after missile out of the sky.

Then the

Talon-9

dropped down and landed on the broad lawn of the White House's front porch, the howling gale of wind kicked up by the landing thrusters knocking over a vast, bright orange inflatable chicken that had been set up on the outskirts of the lawn. AS the chicken tumbled away, it bowled over a few dozen news cameras and sent a team from CNN scrambling for cover. The secret service were scrambling as well - weapons were being readied, phone calls were being made, and the President was being forced away from his cellphone by two retainers.

The front of the

Talon-9

opened and Lisa came walking out, flanked by Gunner in his best power armor and Julia dressed in a wizard hat, a thong, a bra and nothing else. Since, after all, armor restrained arcane magic. Honest.

Several secret service agents were already in cover.

"Sleep!" Julia shouted, then thrust her finger at the lot of them. A ball of glowing energy flicked from her fingertip, struck the air above the knot of men in hastily donned flack jackets. To the last, each of them slumped to the ground. Julia breathed a sigh of relief as Gunner started forward. "Okay, good. Secret servicemen are 1 HD creatures. I was worried."

Lisa looked like she was having the time of her life.

Gunner reached the closed and barricaded front door shoulder first. The door splintered inwards and the trio headed inside. From the bridge of the

Talon-9

, Merton's Mom bit the back of her knuckles. "Do...do you think this was the right tactic to be taking? I mean, this may, ah, sour opinions, right?"

Dad shrugged. "I don't know. I'm having fun."

The interior of the White House was a lot smaller than Lisa expected. She looked around as bullets

pinged

and sparked off Gunner's body. Julia, crouching behind the huge armored bug-man, shouted out the magical word again. Once again, people went sprawling as they were knocked out cold. Gunner's head was scanning around. Then he nodded. "There!" he pointed to a wall, then rushed forward. His shoulder struck wood, which splintered, then rebounded off thick steel. With the bunker revealed, he lifted his right arm. A searing beam of laser light struck the steel as Julia kept her eyes open for any more Secret Servicemen.

Gunner kicked the circle he had cut into and the metal fell inwards with a

clang

, revealing a bunker that had been designed to keep the President safe in the advent of thermonuclear war. Several aides, officials, and the Vice President, were all crowded inside, with the President himself nowhere to be seen. A secret serviceman stepped up, firing his 9mm pistol into Gunner's chest. The bullets

pinged

and sparked and Julia yelped, lifting up her palms to create a magical force field that hummed to life, catching the ricochets before they could harm anyone.

The gun

clicked

repeatedly for a few seconds before the flack jacketed, sunglass equipped, brave as balls man realized he was empty. He blinked - and then Gunner yanked the pistol from his grip. He chuckled. "Nice grouping," he said, in English, as Lisa ducked past him. She reached under the table and dragged a whimpering President out.

"Hey," she said, cheerfully. "We're here to talk about an alliance."

***

The impact of VTOL to ocean sent Merton slamming back into the deck. His jaw hit metal and his teeth clacked together and his head started to

ring

as he sprawled there. For a few eternities, he didn't think about anything. Instead, he simply sprawled there and wondered what else would go wrong today. When his head cleared and the pain subsided, he saw that Brash was once more restrained by a tube of metal, and that Merton's hands had been ziptied behind his back. He was dragged to his feet and the soldier yanking him up growled in his ear.

"That was a dumbshit move you pulled, kid."

"Fuck you," Merton whispered.

The next few minutes were a confused stumbling up stairs, down a narrow corridor of chairs, then out into something dark and narrow and metal. The flickering lights overhead made Merton think 'underwater base.' But the room he was finally escorted to made him think 'evil underwater base', because it contained nothing but a pair of chairs, a few bright lights, restraints, his wife, and an unsmiling Asian woman in body armor. Merton was jammed into the chair and his restraints were upgraded from zip-ties to fuckoff huge zip-ties. Brash was set down on his lap. Brash, with only his head and tail free, craned his head around, snapping at the men who had roughed them into the room.

"Relix?" Merton hissed. "You okay?"

"I mean..." Relix groaned. "I've been electrocuted, de-powered, restrained, questioned, and bumped around. So, yes, I'm just

peachy

, husband."

Merton glared at the Asian woman. "You fucking assholes! We came here to help!"

"You're dragons," the woman said. "Or at least, two thirds of you are. And we here at the Dragon Combat Unit are dedicated to one thing: Keeping dragons from conquering the Earth. The Dragon Empire has better tech and more planets. But we have the advantage of being off the beaten path and very...very...

very

good at learning what we need to learn." She walked forward, her hands resting on her thighs as she leaned forward and looked at Merton. "But you are a mystery."

Merton snorted. "Merton Miles. Interplanetary man of mystery, that's me."

"How did the dragons brainwash you?" She asked, frowning.

Merton, still feeling a bit loopy from the knock to the head, said the first thing that popped into his head: "Have you

seen

Relix's titties?"

"Merton!" Relix hissed. "Don't forget my rump."

"Right, ass that won't quit," Merton said, grinning at the Asian woman. She looked less than amused. Her arms crossed over her armored chest piece.

"Uh-huh. So, a bit of T&A was all it took for you to forget your loyalty to your species?" She asked.

Merton closed his eyes. "Okay. Here's what I would have said if you people had started off by

talking

, rather than fucking

shooting

. We came here to

warn

you. The Five...the Dragon Empire has just gone into a civil war. Do you know the difference between a chromatic and a metallic dragon?"

"Chromatic dragons are honest when they fuck you over?" The woman asked, arching an eyebrow.

Relix bristled behind Merton - he could feel her tension from the contact points between their bodies on the chair. Merton sighed and wished he could squeeze her hands. To comfort her. Instead, he just said: "A Chromatic House has genetically engineered superweapons on their hands and have already attacked Draconis Prime. Princess Relix here is the only surviving Castrovel left. That means that they will want her dead. She's a threat to their power." He shook his head. "And humans are a threat all by themselves."