DRAGON KNIGHTS

  STAR DRAGON

  BOOK FOUR

  JAMES DAVID VICTOR

  Copyright © 2024 James David Victor

  All Rights Reserved

  Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All people, places, names, and events are products of the author’s imagination and / or used fictitiously. Any similarities to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Christian Bentulan

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1. Dragon-Trainer

  2. By Order of the Emperor

  3. Halid, Southwestern Plains

  4. Nesting Cliffs, Halid

  5. The Dragon Catchers of the Outer Systems

  6. The Sixth Shadow

  7. The Hidden Enemy

  8. Unexpected

  9. The Tagrub Cube

  10. The Trials of Orpheus

  11. Unlikely Allies

  12. The Sixth Shadow (redux)

  13. A System at War with Itself

  14. Ambush

  15. Defensive Plant 1

  16. Distract, Disrupt, Delay

  17. In the Maze

  18. The Siege

  19. The Hunt

  20. The Nest

  Thank You

  PROLOGUE

  THE SUSPICION, INNER-OUTER SYSTEMS BORDER

  “All ahead quiet,” said the words of Brigadier’s forward technician, as the commanding officer himself looked out across the bridge, and into the stellar night.

  Imperium Brigadier Kal Fortens was, by nature, a cautious man. He didn’t get to be in his position of leading the Forward Intelligence Unit by being brash, and he exhibited the same wariness now as he peered into the dark of the Outer System ahead.

  “Nothing? We’re hearing nothing at all?” the man said gruffly, his voice sounding like a bag of rocks crunching against one another. The Brigadier wasn’t just a cautious man, he was also a biological – and his entire team was, too. No Imperial Marines for him, no circuitry or servo-assisted gears. The middle-aged officer had clawed his way to his rank in his current lifetime, and he refused to have the downloaded war androids known as the Imperial Marines on his craft.

  Nothing beats instinct, as Kal Fortens always said.

  Right now, as the man leaned forward on the silver railing over the head of his forward technician on the bridge of his FIU warship, his instincts were screaming like a newborn baby.

  The FIU warship The Suspicion hung like a dart in one of the edge systems between the Imperium’s Outer Systems and the wealthy Inner. Ever since the alien Jaali attack on the safe Inner System world of Ceta had seen the destruction of the vast Cetan Orbital Platform as well as a direct attack on Emperor Mikhael XIII himself, all units had been scrambled to protect the Imperium.

  Well...not all of the Imperium, the Brigadier had to admit. The main focus of the operation was to protect the Inner Systems, as that was where all of the wealth and the vast majority of the human population was. Out here, in the poorer, barely civilized Outer Systems the habitats and colony worlds of humanity were spread thin and far between. Half of them were no better than pirates, and the other half were probably active separatists, the Brigadier thought with a slight curl of his lip.

  But still. They were still human, weren’t they? His conscience pinged at him.

  “Signals were detected heading in this area. So where are they!?” the Brigadier hissed, as his forward technician moved his hands hurriedly through a set of flickering holographic controls.

  “The surveillance drones aren’t finding anything, Brigadier sir,” the technician said, as three small glowing green vectors suddenly blipped on the screen, displaying their location far beyond what the normal human eye could see.

  Another blip, and a circle of expanding green radiated out from their locations, growing larger and larger as they pulsed their advanced sensors out into the night around them.

  The Brigadier’s eyes focused on the expanding circles and his gloved hands tightened on the railings, but the drones’ sensor fields filled almost the entire screen, before slowly fading away into nothing.

  Nothing. More nothing.

  The Brigadier hissed through his teeth loudly as he spun on his heel, unable to look at the screen for one moment longer.

  “What good is The Suspicion!? What good are the drones!?” He demanded of the bridge room of gleaming blue-steel and matte black around him, filled with the flicker and blip of holo screens.

  Some several hundred thousand credits worth of state of the art stealth technology; a craft that was virtually invisible even to an Imperium battleship unless The Suspicion hovered right in front of it. Drones that could detect tiny fluctuations in the sub-space quanta as well as electromagnetic, radionic, and gravitational waves.

  All came up with...nothing!?

  “They must have gone sir. Or never been here—” the forward technician was saying, just before there was a small alarm bleep from their control console.

  “Wait, what…?”

  Brigadier Kal Fortens heard the man’s gasp of surprise as he spun around once more to see that one of the surveillance drones had reappeared on the screen, only this time it was pulsing red, before suddenly blinking abruptly out.

  An error message. A fatal error.

  “Technician—” the Brigadier managed to say, just as the second surveillance drone reappeared in a blinking red before disappearing in an instant, just as quickly.

  “Urk!” the forward technician gasped yet again. (He was usually a cool and collected man, but everything was happening so fast.)

  The third and final surveillance drone blinked red before disappearing.

  “They’re gone sir. I can’t reach them. All connections have been severed,” the forward technician managed to say.

  The Brigadier was, by nature, a cautious man. “Field generators!” he snapped at once, knowing that The Suspicion could generate a pretty impressive force field, at a cost.

  The cost was that it drained the power from their main and reserve reactors. Field energy – the ability to manipulate sub-electronic particles and create solid waves, walls, or flows of plasma – took an immense amount of energy and was reserved only for the use of entire habitats and space craft.

  “Sir!” the forward technician said, his hands moving through the controls as The Suspicion juddered. A tremor ran through hell as the energy was diverted and allocated to the field generators. The Brigadier felt the back of his teeth starting to ache, just as it always did whenever he was around field energy. There was something off about it, something against the laws of the cosmos that the biological he was felt deep in his marrow…

  But before even the green energy field could flicker on across his screen, there was a different scatter of light ahead of them.

  A blur across the stars. The crackle of starlight and the flare of plasma fire.

  It was a ship falling out of near light drive...Only, the Jaali didn’t use near light drives. They had something much faster than the Imperium.

  “Ready weapons!” the Brigadier shouted.

  “Sir – the field generator is using eighty percent of available ship energy!” the technician cried out, and in just the time it took for that short interchange, the Jaali warship had already materialized.

  For a split second, the Brigadier saw the sheen of its ethereal, unearthly light and felt something akin to awe.

  The alien warship didn’t look like a spacecraft. With its long, tapered solar wings and spines that reached out above it and below it, and trailing from its back it looked more like some vast, rare deep sea creature. Its entire surface was an iridescent turquoise, its hull made up of scales rather than plates. Its solar wings appeared diaphanous as they fluttered and flexed in space, shimmering with deep reds, purples, and blues.

  And in that same instant, forward ports opened and twin purple beams of burning plasma shot forward to slam into The Suspicion.

  “BRACE!” the Brigadier called as the twin plasma cannons hit their force field, and the entire craft jolted to the right. The officer had already been clinging to the railing as he snarled and fought for his footing, but the technician below him was almost thrown from his chair.

  “Weapons, give me weapons!” the Brigadier demanded, as the burning pillars of plasma shot by the Jaali warship didn’t immediately cut out as they would do if they were fighting an Imperium ship, to conserve energy.

  No; the energy beams stayed in place, causing twin burning white orbs to grow across The Suspicion’s force fields.

  “Sir! We’d have to decrease the fields to get the weapons on line!” the forward technician was saying as The Suspicion started to tremble, and the white glow started to eclipse their screen.

  “Dammit – then reverse! Get us out of here!” the Brigadier demanded.

  But it was already too late. The game had already been played, and there was no holding back on what would happen now.

  The Suspicion’s engines flared; her thrusters swiveling in place as they burned a brilliant, accelerating orange – but the burning white glow as the Jaali plasma beams against their forward field suddenly intensified, turning incandescent.

  With a flash, the twin alien plasma beams overwhelmed The Suspicion’s force field and slammed into the metal hull of the Imperium vessel. Its super-heated atoms cut through the metals of the hull in a moment, tearing thr
ough layers of reinforced plate and wiring and intelligent circuitry, before rupturing essential components.

  The Forward Intelligence Unit, one of the Imperium’s most advanced surveillance and recon crafts exploded, without even the chance for them to fire a single shot.

  1

  DRAGON-TRAINER

  Dracis, Outer Systems

  “Your other left!”

  The words of the star dragon Darkwing rang through Corporal Keel Hennity’s mind with a sudden fire.

  Star dragons did not speak in words, it turned out. They spoke in images and instincts. Keel wasn’t entirely sure how his mind connected with the dragon, or how he understood what the dragon was saying – but he knew that he was doing it wrong.

  It wasn’t easy flying almost two hundred meters above the desert floor on the back of a giant space reptile.

  The wind was fierce up here, even though it was just a mild breeze on the ground. It pushed and tore at Keel as his mechanical arms clutched at the makeshift leather harness that ran around the black dragon’s neck, hastily created by the Imperium’s craft drones.

  The Imperium Marine rocked where he sat, his metal legs splayed on either side of the dragon’s neck, just in the crook where it met the beast’s shoulder blades. Keel was certain if he wasn’t an android, a human consciousness downloaded into an efficient metal killing machine, then he would have been plucked from the creatures back and flung to his demise.

  Keel grunted, even though he didn’t even have the lungs or the need for oxygen. Residual body habits, as his human biological guide Sula said. A common problem with the Imperium Marines, as some part of them still believed they were biological and were unaware of their vastly stronger, quicker, and tougher capabilities.

  His gauntlet hands tightened on the loops of the harness as the dragon beneath him wheeled, throwing one wing down so that they sliced through the air like a knife, turning on a pin.

  “Wooo!” Keel yelled in exhilaration as his words of his acceleration and current G-force ran across his vision. Like all Imperium Marines, his body was a fine-tuned machine, covered with sensors that warned him of every danger, and directly connected him with the nearest Marine Corps outpost.

  But his body was nothing compared to Darkwing’s, even he had to admit. Darkwing was of medium size for one of the Reptilis Draco Galactus, his form even longer than one of the Imperium’s ‘Bulldog’ dropships from barbed tail tip to the front of his long, reptilian maw. His body was clad in scales of varying sizes, each one as tough as the poly-metal defensive plate of the Imperium Marines, and it wasn’t all jet black. It shone with the luminescence of midnight blue, forest green, and royal purples as the sun caught it. Keel could feel the titanic strength of the creature all around him as giant muscles and tendons rippled under the hard exterior.

  “This is better than flying!” Keel shouted, meaning the thruster rockets that every Marine had in place along their back, using their hands to manipulate their flight.

  ‘What you do. Not flying. Throwing. More like falling,’ the psychic words of the beast flooded through his mind with a sensation of cinder and fire, and his usual acerbic wit. Ever since they had bonded when Keel rescued him on board a mercenary base, Darkwing had always maintained a righteous sense of his own individuality and power, at the same time as accepting Keel as his ‘dragon kin.’

  Keel had to admit that yes, compared to what they were doing now...then his paltry rocket thrusters were nothing like what the dragons did as they swirled and flew with grace and power over the skies of Dracis.

  All around them, Keel could see hundreds of kilometers in all directions. The far southern and eastern horizons were an orange haze under the deep blues of his home world’s skies. Far beneath him he could see Dragon Rock, a collection of standing outcrops at the edge of a darker, rockier massif to the north, and far, far to the west there sparkled the distant silver of the Imperium Governate of Dracis; it’s distant habitat domes designed to house humans, not dragons…

  Home? Keel briefly thought about the place that he grew up. The gladiatorial arena that he had fought in. His father, the governor’s palace…

  Strange how it didn’t feel like home anymore. Not those human spaces⁠—

  “Watch out!”

  His thoughts were suddenly cut through by the annoyed shout of one of the other Imperium Marines, the recently drafted in Corporal Vars Lembik.

  Keel spun his head just in time to see the sinuous, thinner blue dragon that Corporal Lembik rode attempting to do the same knife-turn move that Darkwing had just done, only this time Lembik either wasn’t paying attention or wasn’t prepared, as he suddenly swung off the back of the dragon, hanging on with just one gauntlet as he slammed onto the back of the dragon and rebounded.

  The blue dragon jackknifed in mid-flight, pulled by its harness and its out of control rider. It was obvious that the dragon didn’t know what action it was being asked to take as Corporal Lembik seized onto the harness with both hands now and pulled, while his back metal legs scrabbled and kicked at the side of the beast as he sought to regain his seat once more.

  “Calm down!” Keel shouted, knowing that his message would be beamed directly to Lembik’s suit.

  But it was no good. Even though Lembik was one of twelve such expert, top-flight Imperium Marines who had been sent through by the Imperial Marine Corps to create the first ever Imperium Dragon Knights, there was something wrong with the way he flew.

  ‘Not kin,’ Darkwing hissed into his mind.

  “Of course!” Keel exclaimed as they swerved around the blue, with Darkwing calling in rasping chirrups to encourage them to land safely, and immediately.

  They weren’t bonded. None of the new Dragon Knights were, not in the same way that Keel was…

  Keel relaxed in his seat, letting Darkwing make the decisions and do most of the flying. There was a part of his mind that could feel what Darkwing intended to do, Keel realized. This was what made their flight so effortless as Darkwing descended alongside the blue dragon, turning in giant, lazy circles until the blue and it’s struggling rider were jumping lightly across the brown rocky surface of the ground.

  “All down!” Keel shouted, raising his hand in the air to signal to the other dragons and their knights, seeing that at least some of them had managed to maintain their flight, but none of them were flying in formation yet.

  “Dear stars,” he muttered to himself. This was going to be far more difficult than he thought it was.

  “Keel!? Keel – you need to get down here!” The words of Sula flashed across his vision and in his sensors as he turned to see that all was not over with Corporal Lembik and his blue dragon. Peering down, he could see the blonde bob of Sula hurrying across the desert towards where Lembik had leapt from his seat to the ground. Lembik was turning from his crouch to yell abuse at the dragon that had been his steed.

  “You great damn idiot! What the hell was that!?” the Imperium Marine bellowed.

  Keel saw the dragon recoil, its neck curving as it drew its head back and hissed in frustration at the small metal man in front of it.

  “Corporal! In line!” Keel shouted as Darkwing growled, flaring his wings as he reached out with giant paws to catch the earth. Keel felt the powerful shake surge up through his body as the dragon lightly jumped forward, and Keel was swinging himself from the dragon’s neck, landing lightly on the balls of his metal shod feet and instantly rising to march towards the shouting Marine.

  “It was her! She didn’t warn me she was turning – how am I expected to fly like that!?” Lembik was hollering as he bustled with anger, gesturing to the blue with disdain.

  Around them, other dragons were starting to land with giant thumps and thuds onto the earth, most of them quickly pacing forward behind the blue to stand at their sister’s side. But a few of the dragons were landing awkwardly, hopping and prancing to one side, their scales flashing in the super-heated Dracisian sun as they fought with their own Marines.

  “Assemble!” another of the Imperium Marines shouted, jumping off the back of a green dragon as his hissed and spat at him like a cat. The Marine backed warily away from it, one hand moving to the heavy plasma rifle on his back.