The Dogs of War (SkyLine 3)

“Just because the roles of weapon and wielder are more interchangeable than you’d hoped, there’s no reason we can’t still save your kind,” Machaeus told him. With this, the last stress of hosting Machaeus inside him faded away. He rose to his feet. The formless darkness flowed through him now as easily as the Chrysum in his blood.

“How?”

“The first thing you need to do, to understand, is reimagine your idea of saving something. You and your people… You’ll go on, but not the way you are now.”

“Explain,” said Donellanus, as he turned toward the gray stone door.

“This Universe is hardly big enough for one species as advanced as Dragons or humans. Takers, who hunger for more than there is. Your wars and efforts to coexist, years from now, will disrupt the balance. You, the humans, all of you will eat up every last scrap, until not only your race, but all races are left to starve,” Machaeus explained, though things sounded no more clear to Donellanus.

“You speak as if you’re sure. As if you’ve seen it,” he rumbled.

“I exist outside your finite constructs of existence. For me, it has already happened, it is happening now, and it will happen. The ripples of a thousand choices have already corraled all worlds on a deathly collision course. They will crash together, no matter what we do. We cannot change it at this point, but…we can return the Universe to a state in which our actions have influence.”

“Return the Universe… Like a reset switch?” Donellanus asked. He paced slowly across the hall that led to the back staircase.

“In a sense. You will understand in time. The first step is to send a contingent to Mercury,” said Machaeus.

“We’d have to bypass Earth… The humans keep their homeworld well protected. And why go there, anyway?”

“Swing a wide arc to elude them. We go there because it is the closest feasible landmass to the humans’ sun, to establish a base,” Machaeus explained. This was around the time Donellanus scraped his talons into the bottom step of the spiral staircase.

“The sun…We could send the Faders. Caullen and the others will never agree to such an off-color plan. Even to bring it up with them would bring up questions I couldn’t answer,” he considered. The longer he engaged with Machaeus, the more comfortable it was to share a mind with it. Their understandings began to merge. Suddenly, Donellanus felt a single glimmer of trust in the depths of the suspicious pit of his stomach. Before he gave into it completely, though, he had to ask for something. The one thing he still wanted, despite all of his better judgment. “I need you to help me with something first.”

“A price? Name it,” said Machaeus. Donellanus climbed the spiral staircase, though the whipping haze of Jupiter’s thick clouds.

“You called me Prince before, but…there hasn’t been a royal line of Dragons since you entered the pact with my father. I want to restore it,” he growled.

“You understand the futility of that?” Machaeus asked, of legitimate concern.

“If we start declaring things futile in sight of the end, what’s the point of anything?” Donellanus countered.

“Fair enough. A Prince once more, is it?”

“King. The very last King of the Dragons,” said Donellanus. Then he stepped up to the back platform of the base and spoke no more of it. He thought no more of Drogan. Donellanus focused only on the will of darkness, entangled with his own.

So entrapped was he with these simple, pure thoughts, he didn’t notice the missing key from the ring he carried on his armored belt. The key to Drogan’s bindings had slid down right through a crack in the floor while he knelt, into DA-Vos’ grasp.

Chapter Thirteen: The Clear Path

Kalus rested a firm grip around the cold rails of the Cerberus. The sun glared off the orange body of his homeworld behind him. He watched blue waves pul

se along the bright streak of the SkyLine, hung there in the blackness. Sophia and Lilia were the ones behind the work, sure, but he wasn’t about to hunker down in his cabin while history wrote itself outside. He’d insisted on a role, no matter how minuscule. The first establishment of an alternative trade route in the Outerworlds. The first field implementation of the SkyLine Launcher.

Kalus could hardly keep still. He paced back and forth across the deck. He took rapid, regular glances through the binoculars Demi had lent him. He waited for the same announcement he’d anticipated since his sister slowed the Cerberus to an idle float across the abyss.

“We’re in the targeting zone.” Lilia’s voice passed through the speakers of everyone’s earpieces. Those five words were all it took to electrify all of their nerves. In a matter of minutes, exactly one-third of their mission would be accomplished or failed. The war against the Dragons could change at the pull of a trigger - the one under Sophia’s shaky finger.

“Deploying now,” she breathed.

“Remember to follow the calibration cues, like I showed you. You’ll do splendidly,” Howard assured her from just outside the open hatch to her ship. Sophia gave him a determined nod and engaged the ship’s airlock. A solid iron aperture shut tight behind her and separated her personal craft from the main body of the Cerberus. A puff of jets popped it free and propelled it out into the empty blackness.

“Eyes on,” said Kalus into the speaker on his collar. He watched Sophia’s cannon-armed ship float out past the edge of the deck. The tips of her fearsome Chrysum cannons tilted toward the tubular river of energy about a mile off from them. The SkyLine.

“Here we go…” Sophia muttered while she lined up the shot. “Trajectory set. Engaging SkyLine Launcher.” She clicked the left navigation bar of her ship down into its free-rotating setting. That configured the side and back jets of the ship to keep her right where she was. Sophia stretched her arms out to hover both newly-freed hands over the orbs that controlled the SkyLine Launcher. She wrapped five fingers around each of them, which called up the interface for the machine on her viewing screen. Through blinking, concentric scopes of light, she watched the barrel of the Launcher build itself from a hundred telescoping, hinged parts. It took about five seconds before the last segment clicked into place. Its jet black tip pointed straight for the SkyLine. “Aimed and ready.”

“No ships inbound from either side of the SkyLine. You’re clear to take the shot,” Demi told her, eyes glued to the virtual flight-plan charter in the bridge. Sophia eased up on the Launcher’s orb controls. She swallowed every last questioning thought and rolled them forward. “Firing.”

The kick of the SkyLine Launcher sent Sophia’s craft back a few hundred feet. A dense line of pure darkness jumped from its barrel. While seeming solid from a distance, it was actually comprised of millions upon billions of Chrysum-infused nanocomputers. Even while her craft adjusted itself to maintain position, Sophia’s hands never left the black orbs that controlled them.