“On it!” Kalus affirmed. From his hip, he snapped up a pistol that shone with the same Cold Fusion light. He launched a shining shell straight through the open jaw of their scaled foe. The Dragon’s Chrysum breath betrayed it, leaking through and spreading blue flame to its chest. The next second, a massive scaling white cannonball flung from the main cannon of the Cerberus. The uninjured Dragon flapped just to the side of it, before both dove to the deck.
“Here they come,” Demi growled. Kalus belted his pistol for two blade handles similar to the one he’d given his Captain. He snapped fearsome blades from each of them. The one in his left hand surged with emerald energy, the other yellow. Demi hardly had time to wonder how they differed besides color before the Dragons swooped down.
The one with a hole in its jaw came down just a hair too low. Demi shoved his Chrysum sword straight through its chest. The beast wailed and screeched, then tumbled across the deck in a bloody heap of scales. Kalus swung for the other, but missed by a hair’s breadth. Instead, the Dragon tilted to let something slide from its back, then flapped its way up and away from the ship. Kalus and Demi turned together to the shadow the beast had dropped, which rose in the Chrysum fire of its own will. It was alive.
“What in the hell is that?” Kalus cried as the thing continued to grow before them. It was a question neither of them could answer. It stood on two legs, not unlike a human. Its silhouette, however, unfolded with four arms, two at each side. It had no wings, and was somewhere between human and Dragon in stature. Before Demi could answer, a sound behind him stood the hairs on his neck upright. He spun to face a second of the six-limbed creatures, rising from the corpse of the Dragon he’d split.
“An even fight, it looks like,” Demi said. He crossed his body to grasp his Chrysum sword in both hands.
“Faders. They work for the Dragons,” Howard’s voice rose through the cracks in the deck boards, “And ride them, apparently. I’ve come across them in recent research. Dispatch them quickly, and I can emit a frequency that disrupts the Dragons’ focus. It will also affect your weapons.”
“Dispatch them quickly,” Kalus mocked. Over his shoulder, he smiled to Demi, “Sounds like you had your eyes in the wrong spot for a mutiny, Cap’.”
“Shut it and do your job. Aren’t boardings pretty much your whole wheelhouse?” Demi grinned back. The Faders lumbered closer, closing a pincer in on the two.
“Aw, there’s more to me than just that, Cap’! Let’s roll.” Kalus lunged first. He put his uniform’s shock absorption to the test with a block from his arm. The Fader’s claw struck it and stopped dead, stuck against the combined might of Kalus and his suit. Kalus feigned a strike, which his foe tried to counter with a swing of his long, clawed arm. Kalus easily stepped back, and clove the appendage from the Fader’s body. Its guttural screech chilled his bones while Kalus lunged again. Behind him, Demi backpedaled away from an onslaught of four lashing claws. The Faders were pushing them too close.
“Let’s switch!” Kalus called back.
Demi turned into a swing of trust. His Arms Master easily sidestepped him, so Demi could cleave a second limb from the wounded Fader. Kalus crouched beneath the four-armed assault of the other with both blades wound back across his waist. Three gashes opened down his back. Kalus cringed through the spurts across the deck, and whipped his blades straight out. He and the Fader fell at once. Kalus took a knee. The beast’s torso slid back, right off its midsection.
“Kalus!” Demi screamed when he saw the trickle of ruby across the deck. The Captain sidestepped wild swings and flung his own back. The Fader, however, learned quickly from pain. Kalus tried to stand, but only stumbled away. Then a whoosh of wings called his eyes up. One of the Dragons stopped to point its fire-filled jaw right at him. Kalus grabbed his pistol, just a second too late.
A Chrysum ray from Sophia’s zipping ship seared a hole in the beast’s chest, but not before it unleashed the flame from within. Kalus fell sideways, away from the burst of white flame that separated him from his Captain. He landed on his back again, which gave him a horrifying view of six more Dragons, closing in from above. He watched searing cannonballs from the Cerberus’ main cannon take out two of them, and two more take their pl
aces.
“Howard! Activate the frequency!” Kalus heard Demi’s voice from somewhere nearby.
“The Faders are taken care of?” Howard countered.
“Do it!”
The sound was the faintest ring to the Dogs of War. Almost like a distant, high note on a flute. The effect on the Dragons, however, was dramatically and instantly more severe. Those inside the acclimation shield of the Cerberus screeched and shrieked. Those outside arched their necks back, to gasp a deathly silence. Every one of them flailed their wings, so uncontrolled as to crash right into one another. Kalus watched with morbid fascination, as the lights of his Chrysum swords flickered out. Then something thunked against the deck beside him.
Kalus turned his head and found himself suddenly inspired to move, despite the volume of blood leaching into the deck below him. The remaining Fader thrashed for its life in a raging pillar of Chrysum fire. Captain Demi knelt on its chest, pinning its shoulder with a dark blade plunged through. He held the Fader down, despite the constant lash of its remaining four limbs and fire flicking his own sleeves. He pressed hard on the handle of his blade until his foe screeched its last. Its limbs flattened. Demi almost deflated right on top of it. His suit kept him mostly unburned, but he might eventually have burned to ash with his foe, if not for his Arms Master’s last burst of adrenaline.
Kalus yanked his Captain from the plated skin of the Fader to the deck beside him. The next second, the back of his own head plunked on the deck. Surrounded by the corpses of aliens and blood pools lit by a white inferno, Kalus and Demi passed out cold.
Chapter Ten: Will of the Council
Donellanus sat with his claws folded together at the head of the long, stone-carved council table. It still amazed him, all these months later, what the Faders could do with their hands. A team of eight of them had taken a rough, raw lump of the particles in Jupiter’s deep cloud layer, and turned it to a polished table. Beneath the glares of Chrysum lamps off its smooth surface, nebulas of orange, red and yellows tangled in a gorgeous tapestry. They’d built the rest of the base beneath the clouds with similar techniques. They had, after all, been building shrines to ancient Dragon visitors, bringers of Chrysum technology, for generations. Part of Donellanus felt guilty about using them this way. Hands so adept to creation, forced to destroy. Dormis and several of his underlings lined the walls to remind him, four arms crossed in solemn respect.
That was the extent of free thought the Chairman of the Higher Order was allowed for the day. The last member of the council broke the meditative silence with his late arrival. The double doors to the conference room scraped open to let Caullen in. All eyes on the council swayed to find him, none with more grave surprise than Chairman Donellanus.
“It is unlike you to be late,” he growled, instantly suspicious.
“I apologize. I was in a meeting when one of our marauder groups returned; I took their report. They arrived back with their numbers more than halved,” Caullen told the Chairman. The spite in his voice was as clear and blatant as a bolt of white fire.
“What happened?” Donellanus asked, concern prodding through his feelings toward the ever-skeptical Caullen. The late arrival stepped aside to let in three Dragons of dark scale, which marked their status under the Higher Order.
“Go on,” Caullen encouraged them. Each of the three was plainly shaken, though by what was unclear: standing in the presence of the Higher Order or whatever had happened to the rest of them. “Deliver your report, just as you did to me.”
“We…were scanning supply routes between Neptune and Saturn. We spotted a ship, bigger than any of the others we’d seen. I thought...thought maybe it was some sort of bulk delivery from the WCC,” a Dragon of deep emerald scale explained, “but they were no suppliers. Too well trained. They overwhelmed us.”
“How many did you leave the base with?” Donellanus asked. He smoldered, not without a hint of sympathy.
“Eight,” said the green Dragon, “Twelve, including Faders.”