Chapter Three: Council in the Clouds
Drogan startled himself upright from the dark pit of a dream. He took only one sharp glance in either direction before he remembered where he was. Three months, and he still forgot every time he fell asleep. Dreams were the only relief for him, from the great monotonous nothing his life had become. Five months of being strung up by his wrists. Of thick clouds slapping him in the sides and face when the wind whistled through countless windows in his stony new home. Drogan couldn’t decide which was worse; this, or the three months he’d spent adrift inside a shell made from DA-Vos’ glistening black nanomachines. At least he had someone to talk to then. Now it was just him. No matter how close DA-Vos might be, they couldn’t communicate openly. The shimmering Chrysum bindings that held him up in the shape of a T not only bound him in human form but blocked any communication with his partner.
Something rumbled down the hall. Drogan flattened his feet on the musty ground to stand straight. It was a sound he knew. Those…things that worked with the Dragons were somewhere nearby. Though they rarely entered his room for anything besides a prod or a slice, it was a break from the torturous boredom of hanging in a completely empty stone room. Though neither Drogan nor his jailers could understand one another, they could at least shout at one another. It was the only stimulation for his mind, besides dreams.
Drogan dreamed of his fiancée and their tiny apartment, filled with relics from his father’s time. He dreamed of glistening Chrysum mines in cosmic rings. He dreamed of neon streaks inside nanomachine tunnels through space. More than once, Drogan dreamed of the horrors of Machaeus’ true form deep in the heart of Mukurus. He saw the planet devolve into a cracked inferno as the bodies of Dragons roused from their slumber. Those same Dragons had brought him here, and Drogan suspected they remained. He couldn’t be sure anymore, though. He hadn’t been outside his room since the day he arrived.
Could Drogan have his choice of dreams, he would see that day every night. He would relive every detail, committing it to memory. After spending three months adrift in stasis that would have killed any human, however, he was far less than attentive. What Drogan recalled about his arrival were a mere few hazy frames. The memories were like a handful of photos taken by a camera in extreme motion. He spent every night reviewing them.
One photo contained tall, yellow-and-red clay pillars. They looked to have been carved with elaborate designs at some point, but the thick, cloudy winds of wherever they were had worn them down to naught. Drogan managed to remember eight columns, four on each side of a high double door.
Another of his distorted recollections was of a long, slender hallway filled with Dragons. Every one of them had stopped their seemingly urgent business to watch two of their own drag Drogan down the hallway. Exhausted as he was, he had managed to turn his head. He had gotten a glance into one particular room, which had caught his attention with the technicolor light it cast through the doorway. Inside, Drogan glimpsed what looked to him like a place of worship. The tall, red-yellow stony walls were lined with windows of colored glass. Each one let in light from outside in a different hue of a vast spectrum. The light beams criss-crossed on the floor in a gorgeous tapestry and illuminated those…things. It was the first time he’d seen them. Bowing. Kneeling. If Drogan didn’t know any better, he might have guessed they were praying. They seemed to be focused around a central podium, almost like an altar. He’d heard, on that day, the word Fader pop up several times in Dragon’s tongue. Things were hardly clear, but Drogan was fairly sure they were talking about the creatures at worship.
The Fader’s shape was almost human, if not for the two extra limbs and glaring outer shell that was more like chitin than skin. Like humans, each of them had their own eye color. The color of their hair was just as unique from one individual to another, though it was not bunched up in focused areas like a human’s. The Faders were covered from head to toe in tiny, hardly noticeable hairs, more like an insect’s. The oddest thing about them, Drogan noticed that day, was their extremities. Each of the Faders’ six limbs was equipped with something between a crab pincer and a human hand. They had five phalanges, though two of them were longer than the others, and edged. The Faders wore no protective gear and surprisingly could seem to survive the conditions of Jupiter. That left Drogan with the conclusion that they were of the same, harsh solar system as the Dragons. Another race of Antila II, for whom the conditions of the Milky Way were a vacation.
The Dragons handed Drogan off to two of these creatures, who dragged him to the room he occupied now. He hadn’t left since. He hadn’t seen any Dragons since. Only Faders, and only every few days - sometimes weeks. The place was built more like a temple than a prison, though it served as one just as well for him. He knew by sound alone to expect a visit from his wardens. He suspected the Faders feared him; they never wandered too close to his room unless they planned to enter. Drogan swung his head up to the doorway at the click of their armored footsteps.
“Ah, Susan and…Geoffrey, right?” Drogan welcomed them. He had names for all of the Faders that paid him the occasional visit. These two, in particular, were easy for him to recognize. Susan was on the shorter side of his watchers. Drogan knew Geoffrey by the orange fuzz up and down his body- a rare color amongst Faders he knew.
“Grrsh harch. Murk mahptitana,” Susan scolded. Most things sounded like scolding in the harsh tongue of the Faders. How the Dragons understood them, Drogan had yet to figure out. He guessed the tiny circuited nodes in the sides of their heads might have something to do with it.
“Well, I did try something new with my hair. Flipped it to one side with my sweat right before you came in,” Drogan told Susan - who was a her only because that was what he picked from a hat. He had no actual way to distinguish one gender of Fader from the other.
“Reckel mel nak do bat,” Geoffrey hissed.
“No, Geoffrey, I would never! How could you even imply…” Drogan trailed off, true to the theme of his theater for the day. These little shows were the only thing between him and a long overdue breakdown. Drogan leaned forward to whisper, exclusively to Geoffrey. “I know you and Susan have been having trouble lately, but you’ve been together for eight years and- agh!” Drogan clenched the rest between his teeth when Susan thrust a knee in his gut.
“Kred mo tak!” she roared.
“Now there’s the fire that’s missing from the bedroom! See, this is why you two should seek counseling-”
“Raketah metah!” Geoffrey threw in for good measure, a second before the jab of his Chrysum rod. The spark jumped through Drogan’s veins. It rattled his body from head to toe. Geoffrey withdrew it only to screech, “Reekah metah? Reekah metah?”
“One more time, Geoffrey. I didn’t hear,” Drogan grumbled. Chrysum aftershocks jumped through his limbs. They twitched in anticipation of another jab. Geoffrey moved in, close enough for the fuzz on his glossy humanoid face to prickle Drogan’s.
“Reekah metah?” In just that instant, he could see a pulse of Chrysum dance through the node on the side of Geoffrey’s head.
“Reekah metah,” Drogan imitated, slow, without an inkling of what it meant. So they do understand, he realized, the node is a translator. At once, he also understood just why the Dragons hadn’t fitted him with one. “They send you…so I don’t go poking aroun
d behind the red tape? Is that it?” He asked. Drogan knew he wouldn’t understand the answer - not verbally. He hardly saw Geoffrey’s Chrysum rod fly up at his face. There it was - bingo.
The next thing Drogan knew, he was opening his eyes again. He didn’t know exactly when the world had gone black, or how long it stayed that way. He blinked a total of eight times before the world refocused around him. Susan and Geoffrey were on their way through the door.
“Reekah metah…” Drogan mumbled to himself, “It was a question… The hell are they asking me?” He tucked the question in the idea bank to occupy himself later. For now, for once, Drogan actually had something else to do. Listen.
It had taken weeks, but he had finally worn down a Chrysum vessel in the side of his bindings. He had discovered that, if he leaned far to one side, he could stiffen the chains holding up his opposite arm enough to flick a tube. It was something like hard plastic, and let through a flow of silver-blue fluid - Chrysum. Drogan could stand to flick it, hard, four times an hour without injuring himself. He did this for hours - all day, every day. Just yesterday, he found he’d disrupted the flow enough to tune into the Dragon’s unspoken communication network. It came through as whispers, and only with extreme focus, but Drogan could hear them.
He closed his eyes. He let every muscle in his body relax. He only needed the one in his skull just then. Drogan tracked every one of Susan and Geoffrey’s footsteps. They paced over what he estimated to be three rooms. He couldn’t hear them anymore, only the responses of who they were reporting to.
“Rootem vetra. Lodeh doola rotemahk,” the voice of a Dragon echoed through Drogan’s mind.
“What the hell are they saying, Donellanus? Did they get something out of him? New weapons, bases, the Slayer Program? Anything?” another Dragon grumbled, frustrated. “You know what happened with the Arcadia was only the beginning.”
“Not yet. They don’t seem to understand that he doesn’t speak Fader. I’ve been trying to train them in our tongue, but it’s a struggle for their…vocal equipment,” answered the first Dragon, Donellanus.
“I don’t understand why you humor these creatures! Why not delegate two of us to interrogate him?” demanded the second Dragon.
“Caullen,” said Donellanus, his tone a warning. “First, mind your tongue before Dormis. He has graciously offered the help of his people to fill a gap we could not hope to, not without the Faders. There aren’t enough of us. We need Dragons out in the SkyLine. In the Outerworlds. Besides, these headpieces are a closed network. It helps to have interrogators he can’t get inside the heads of. Drogan knows what we want to know. The Faders will get something out of him. Just give them time.”