Chapter One: Outer Rings
He knew it wasn’t really wind - there was no wind in space, even inside the SkyLine- but Drogan loved the rush of cosmic wind in his mane. He loved the graze of pressurized particles on the plate scales that covered his body. He loved the blaze of stars around him. Really, Drogan just loved being away from Mukurus. Away from his masters, both true and false. Besides, he could stretch his wings out here.
A canvas of jet black skin yawned between bony spokes that jutted from both shoulder blades. He unfurled them as wide as they would reach. Drogan’s wings tilted. He glided from one edge of the SkyLine to the other. The talons of his toes sliced the inner barrier of pressurized atmosphere and energy. Blue wisps flickered up around Drogan from the break in the jetstream. He took his time while he was out this far, while there was no threat of being seen or heard. This part of the SkyLine was still under construction. No one but Drogan could be out here, this unfinished in-between. No human ship was capable. No Dragon had come so far. But then, he was neither of these. Like this part of the SkyLine, Drogan was in-between.
“We’re coming up on the Neptune branch,” a voice murmured across his mind. It had the inflection of a man, but the speaker was no human. Whether or not he was even alive had been the pastime subject of many a flight like this. Still, the understanding remained between Drogan and DA-Vos that they were all one another had. Beneath any frustration the two sometimes exchanged, they were bound to one fate. So, too, were they often bound in physical form. This was one such time; DA-Vos’s nanomachine body formed into a solid black gauntlet around one of Drogan’s arms.
“Maybe I should slow down,” Drogan huffed, “It’s not often we get the chance to just fly.”
“Is that what you call this?” DA-Vos echoed through his mind.
“What would you call it?”
“Another mission. How many will it be, before we figure a way out of this? Another sixty years?” said DA-Vos.
“Careful, DA-Vos. Someone might think you have a mind of your own,” Drogan prodded. His scaly lips curled in a fanged grin.
“I-I-I only mean… we’re getting closer to the humans,” stammered DA-Vos.
“You think I don’t know that?” Drogan bit back. Quiet fell between them. Drogan took the opportunity to twirl into a corkscrew of wings. He spiraled all the way up to the top of the SkyLine. A focused flap of his wings sent him through the edge, out into the blackness of space. He flexed his wings, his dragonic limbs, and stopped still in the dark. Before him was the dusky vortex of stars called Antila 2. Somewhere in that beige stardust was the one who had a hold on them so tight, Drogan and DA-Vos could only speak freely here. Behind Drogan was his home galaxy. Until now, he hadn’t been to the Milky Way in years.
“Does it still entertain you to torment me with existential dilemmas? After all this time?” DA-Vos asked.
“I’ll stop as soon as you stop tormenting yourself,” Drogan sighed. He flicked around to stare into the Milky Way. A far younger galaxy than Antila 2, its colors were twice as bright. Its stars were vibrant, full of fire and resources ripe for the taking. It was lucky for Drogan that his masters hadn’t realized that yet, but they were getting an idea. Much as he hated to think about it, DA-Vos was right. Push would come to shove. When the breaking point came, the side Drogan fell on might not be the side he started from.
“Why do you think Machaeus can’t hear us out here?” said DA-Vos.
“Why do you ask so many questions?” Drogan chuckled, though his lips didn’t move. “Look who’s stalling now.” But then, he was in no rush himself. He fluttered backward through the darkness, eyes down on the SkyLine. A shimmering blue line through the black, it flowed like a river of energy. Human eyes couldn’t see the nanomachines swarming around it, pressurizing and magnetizing the artificial atmosphere inside. “I’d guess it’s because we’re between. So far from both Antila 2 and the Milky Way. There’s nothing to carry his thoughts.”
“Then you think it is the fusion minerals that allow them to project their thoughts?” said DA-Vos.
“It makes sense. That’s what you’re made of, and we speak without our mouths. The only place we cannot reach Machaeus is in the blackness between Antila 2 and the Milky Way. There’s no fusion minerals out here,” Drogan figured. And that was it. Sixty years of reconnaissance and this was what Drogan and DA-Vos had to show for it.
Drogan spun and dove straight down into the SkyLine. A few pulses of his wings launched him to speeds surpassing most ships. With the added atmospheric acceleration inside the SkyLine, he would be inside the border of his home solar system in a day. By the time he passed the outerworld station on Neptune, Drogan and DA-Vos were a blur of color. From beyond the SkyLine, he tore by too fast for a bystander to tell he wasn’t another small cruiser. Even those who caught a glimpse would never have guessed what the winged terror really was. Not in their wildest dreams.
“Watch it, Carl.”
“Yeah,” Carl huffed back. He had had about enough of being pushed around for one day. Jensen might be junior site manager, but Carl hadn’t
come all the way to the outerworlds to oil crane arms. An hour of it was usually more than he could take. He’d been floating through the rings for triple that time now. He never thought the ripples through Saturn’s gaseous surface or the ice caught in its orbits would cease to amaze him. He never pictured himself being bored, or frustrated. Not working the steel net of mines through the rings of Saturn. But then, Carl never pictured oiling crane collection arms for three hours. He had sweated through the clothes under his mining suit long ago. Now he was practically swimming.
“Carl!” Jensen’s voice jumped through his earpiece.
“What?” Carl finally snapped.
“There a problem, son?” the junior site manager dug in.
“I’ve been out here long enough. The crane’s oiled. I’m heading back in,” Carl lowered to a simmer. He gripped the outside of the mining pod to throw himself back to the station hatch.
“Think you may have gotten our roles mixed, Carl. I tell you when the crane’s oiled,” rumbled Jensen, “If the crane arms don’t work correctly, we can’t mine the ice fields. If we can’t mine the ice fields, we don’t get the fusion minerals. If we don’t get those, you can forget about your paycheck and go back to flipping burgers on the big blue mar-
“Jensen,” Carl squeezed in.
“Now you’re interrupting me, boy?” Jensen barked. He couldn’t have known what Carl saw behind him. His mining cart faced the surface of the planet. Carl climbed up in front of its viewing window to point Jensen’s eyes to the stations behind him.
“Look,” he pointed. The mortal terror in Carl’s eyes was enough to make him actually turn the wheel. Jensen’s pod rotated around to find a tail of flame flick across one of the stations. It spread to one of the massive steel threads that comprised the net of mining stations.
“What in the hell…” Jensen muttered. Then he saw just what the hell it was: a flash of searing luminance jumped through a second station. It left a molten hole in its wake. Another plume of flame puffed from it, fed by the leak of oxygen within.
“Fly us back!” Carl shouted. He gripped the outside of the mining pod in a two-handed vice grip. Jensen’s stunned eyes swallowed the fire. He could do nothing but watch. A figure about twice the size of a man zipped through the mining net. It halted a hundred feet from them with the snap of its massive wings. Carl and Jensen hardly had time to take it in - scales, yellow jewels for eyes, razor bladed hands and feet - before it raised its arm to them. A glossy black piece of armor on its hand morphed into a cannon barrel before them. A spark pulsed to life inside it. “Jensen!”
“A-a-alright!” Even Carl giving him orders was no match for the threat of that creature. Jensen jerked the helm of the pod to the side. The bolt of white that jumped from the creature’s weapon missed them by inches. Carl felt the heat of it even through his suit. He heard the mighty flap of the beast’s wings even in the emptiness of space. In a second, it perched atop the mining pod. The grasp of its talons crunched its outer sheathing.
“Storeroom?” a demonic voice snarled in the creature’s throat, inches from Carl’s face.
“Wha-wha-what?” Carl sputtered. He shrunk behind the frame of the mining pod.
“Storeroom?” it repeated. The claws of its hand etched five lines up the mining pod window.
“It wants to know where the damn storeroom is, Carl! Show it!” Jensen screamed. The beast’s gemstone eyes flickered to the shouting site manager, and back to the suited miner. The glint of intelligence in its gaze haunted Carl for weeks to come. He lifted a shaky finger to a particular building in the mining net.
“O-o-over there. Station B-19,” Carl told him. He flinched away from the slam of the beast’s claw beside his head. Carl kept his pale face forward until the beast’s fanged snout puffed fog across the side of his helmet. The slightest turn and it could tear his skull clean off.
“This guy bothering you?” asked the monstrous voice. Carl’s head turned on a trembling axis. He took as good a look as he could get of the beast, without dying of sheer terror. He saw his own face in the mirror of its dark scales. The only things blacker than the beast was the space beyond Saturn and the gauntlet on its arm. “Is he?” The gravity of its voice demanded an answer. Carl gulped.
“Always,” Carl whispered. The next he knew, he was hurtling through space, straight for the open hatch of a mining station. He hardly had time to feel the claw around the width of his chest. Carl didn’t breathe until his boots touched down in the artificial gravity of the station. He felt around his suit for tears, for waterfalls of blood. Carl believed it even less than everything else he’d just seen, but he was unharmed. Whether or not Jensen would be able to say the same remained to be seen. He was busy screaming for his life while his mining pod hurtled through space, where the beast had thrown it. It cleared the outside of the mining net and kept going.
From the open station hatch, Carl had a perfect view of an event that would be etched in the annals of history, once the WCC tired of covering it up. The destruction of an eighth of Saturn’s ring mines. The yellow-eyed fiend ripped from one station to the next, a dark streak against the light of the planet. Whatever crossed its path, it went straight through. Hunks of orbiting ice shattered against his dark armor. From within them, busts of Chrysum, the precious heart of all human fusion tech, stained the blackness of space silver. The creature kicked off from mining drones to keep path for B-19. They shot off into steel ropes of the mining net, breaking them apart. Fire and havoc followed in the wake of every raucous wing flap.
Sentry drones deployed from the security station. The yellow-eyed beast’s gauntlet shifted back to a cannon. Blazing stripes of white jumped from its arm, straight through every machine. They floated away as useless, holey husks of steel. It was only so long before the human security team trotted out on the edge of the mining net, suited with resistance gear and armed with fusion rifles. Twenty of them took aim at the yellow-eyed demon through the icy storm. None of them got a shot off. The beast’s cannon let out a sustained beam of pure white that swept along the mining net. The second its light retracted was the second flame exploded down the line it traced. Twenty men scorched in a second, two of them too horribly to mend. The beast’s wings pulsed it straight towards B-19, and out of Carl’s bewildered sight.
He never saw the beast again. He saw only more beams of blazing light from its cannon. He heard only the blast of combusting stations throughout the net. The beast vanished with the distant, sonic flap of wings and an entire month’s stock of fusion mineral. Carl had no idea just then that he had survived an encounter with the outlaw of the outerworlds, Drogan himself.
Chapter Two: Echoing
“Howard?” A few twists to the right. “Howard?” He flipped the interlocked, cube-shaped knots over. “Howard Carver!” His mother rampaged across the second story of their house. Even the thunder of her stomps and bellows couldn’t break her boy’s trance, though. When Howard was so deep in a puzzle, nothing could.
He was close now, but then close could mean three more hours. Howard was hooked, infected. He had already skipped breakfast, and nothing lunch could offer matched the nourishment for his mind that came with completing this puzzle. The objective was to separate two interlocked cubes. The shapes were hardly solid, though, which was the challenge. There were so many interlocked twists and angles that, when Howard began, the shapes hardly moved. So, too, were they both riddled with pegs and holes. Howard had found, throughout the morning, that the only way to free the cubes of one another, was to fit the pegs of one in the holes of another. Only then could he rotate the cubes ever so slightly.
“Howard!” his mother cried when her stiletto heels clicked into the garage. Amidst mounds of old fusion equipment, her son sat on the edge of a rickety workbench.
“Mother,” he said, eyes fixated on the cubes.
“I’ve been looking for you for hours! Did you hear me calling you?” she stomped.
“I think so,” said Howard. His mother