“Do you… could you…” Drogan’s throat trembled every time the words tried to climb out. “Do you think you could tell me…” he pressed his fists into his thighs to focus a lifetime of forbidden thoughts. “What happened to her?”
“Are you sure you’re ready?” Alice’s light glowered blue.
“I need to hear it.”
“After you left, Sheba never stopped looking for what took you away. Hurt as she was, she didn’t believe you left because you wanted to. She thought you were in trouble. She couldn’t get the image of Dragons out of her head, since she picked up a flash of them from resonance with you. Sheba did everything she could and more to get to the bottom of it,” Alice’s tale cut short in a burst of yellow light when Drogan’s fist dented the wall. “Do you… want me to stop?”
“No… I have to hear it,” Drogan sniffled.
“I will deactivate the sensors inside this room,” Alice told him. Her yellow glow shifted back to violet. Drogan kept his head down to wrestle with two emotions he hadn’t allowed himself to feel in years. Rage, then shame. “Sheba went to Mars. She applied for a job with a WCC funded research lab called Wellsworth. They specialized in 3D psychology.” Drogan roared to the other side of the room. He folded a loose sheet of metal with his driving heel.
“Keep… going…” Drogan simmered. Rage leaked from his mouth as Chrysum steam. It singed his human lips.
“She wasn’t alone. Sheba worked with Tim Carver in Martian labs for the rest of her life. She analyzed 3D patients,” Drogan stomped an imprint in the floor, “She intercepted messages through the Chrysum those patients were exposed to. She traced the signal from their very minds,” Drogan grabbed a fistful of his beard and his hair. “She dedicated her life to finding out what happened to you until the condition she studied started to affect her.”
“No!” Drogan’s frame burst into Chrysum fire. His rage manifested as a shift in form. He twisted into something more than wicked, more than hate. Something caught between man and Dragon. He pulled himself back together in human form. Swirls of silver fire died around him.
“Tim foresaw something wrong with the Wellsworth lab. Some kind of WCC corruption from within. They had to terminate the facility, so they staged it as an accident… Tim stayed with Sheba until her dying breath. He managed to upload both of their minds to high-density memory drives. Tim, part of him at least, is with Howard. Sheba… is with me,” Alice explained. When all was said, Drogan stood with his head down, shoulders heaving. Tears hissed in the last silver sparks around him.
“She would have done better… to hate me,” Drogan said at last.
“Maybe… but she never did. She resented what happened between you, but she never stopped loving you.”
“I… I know you’re not Sheba. But…” Drogan slid his shoes to the side of the blackbox. He lifted a hand to its glowing warmth. “I have to say goodbye.” Alice’s glow warmed to a rosy shade of red, almost pink.
“Goodbye, Chris,” Sheba’s voice came through. She’d recorded it before the madness took her faculties. Drogan’s head thunked on the outside of the blackbox.
“I...goodbye Sheba.”
“Hey Alice,” Dawn said into her ceiling.
“Yes?” Violet glow descended through the walls.
“I’m sorry about what I did with Drogan, when I thought he was Kennedy. We had just… I shouldn’t have let her- ah, him - Drogan - get in my head,” said Dawn. To say Alice didn’t harbor bitterness about it would be a lie. But she’d heard advice about amends through the walls. Besides, after what she’d just been through with Drogan, the last thing Alice wanted was more elongated pain.
“I could have told you what I was, that I had your great-aunt’s brain implanted in mine. I didn’t. Consider us even,” said Alice.
“You really are learning,” Dawn laughed, “Even… and your feelings for me, just to be sure… it’s not some twisted perversion of a family bond?”
“Your great-aunt was gone by the time you were born. There was no family bond between you, and I’m not her,” said Alice. Her pink light warmed the room.
“I… understand,” Dawn smiled. Her eyes shut, content for the first time in days. She had to soak it in while she could. Before Mukurus. “We have a few more weeks to talk about that.” And they did, until Dawn passed out, and an extra blanket inexplicably appeared over her.
Chapter Twenty: World of Dusk
To say the trip to Mukurus dragged would be the biggest understatement in two galaxies; even with the acceleration factor compiling from Mars to Neptune. Even when the Arcadia arrowed out from the outerworlds, through a shard of unfinished SkyLine, the trip still took longer than anyone in the crew could stand. Staring out into the unabridged blackness occupied them for only so long. Alice kept the ship on course. They hurtled at a pace no one could quite fathom, maintained by sparse fusion jet spurts. There was little more to do than drink the days away on the last of Miller’s stash. Dawn and her crew’s day-long lounging session ended with the abrupt announcement,
“Last call. You all have four hours to sober up. Then we arrive on Mukurus,” from Alice. Every hand around the room had a glass of something. Every head tossed that glass back. They waited out the rest of the trip in grim silence.
Drogan had seen this before. He stood out on the deck to watch. His
human companions shook at the sight through the bridge’s viewing screen. As powerful as the Arcadia’s brake jets were, the colossal world of Mukurus still seemed to fly up at them at ludicrous speeds.
It was three times the size of Earth. There wasn’t a trace of water on the barren, mahogany rock, only Chrysum. Silver hotspots blinked alive in dimples and craters across the surface. In the light of Antila 2’s dimming sun, the world was the yellow of dusk. As the Arcadia plunged for the surface, tiny ruins jumped up, just as empty. There was nothing resembling the city of Fierghlass Drogan had described. But then, he’d also described the archway that wrapped a cloak around it.
“Everyone. Get as ready as you can get,” Dawn announced from her throne. She called up the helm, ready to take the reins should something happen to the ship. “Alice. Dive for the surface.”
“On it.” The seams in the hull of the Billionaire Boat lit crimson with the battle-fury. It’s nose turned down at Mukurus. The sun glinted off three shapes on the planet. They seemed to appear beneath a tall, splintered rocky archway.