Dragon Renegade, page 2
The general’s faceplate was a glistening bronze with shining white for eyes, but it had been modeled on what Keel presumed must have been Ahzeer’s face when he’d been alive. It was considered a privilege to be given a ‘human’ face once again, but Keel couldn’t help wondering why Ahzeer—the leader of the First Marine Army and the emperor’s closest advisor—hadn’t been given a cloned biological body for his many decades of service.
“Imperial transport? That means—” Keel began.
The holo of the general interrupted him. “Yes. We read your battle report, if that is what you are asking, corporal. For your information, the emperor was following the battle as it progressed and sent the transport out immediately.” The general’s tone was heavy.
This doesn’t bode well…
Then again, when did General Ahzeer ever not have a heavy tone?
There was something that the emperor had seen about the battle that he didn’t like, Keel figured. The fact that they had won the battle didn’t seem to have lessened the emperor’s displeasure.
“Fine—” Keel began again.
“Fine? To meet with our glorious defender of humanity is a sun-damned honor and delight, corporal! I am sure that you will agree,” the general intoned.
“Sir. Yes, sir.” Keel saluted. “Of course. Did you see in my report about the suspected Jaali mothership? We have recordings of it being sighted at the end of the battle—”
“That is all, corporal. You are to attend the emperor straight away, and you will do so without the rest of the Dragon Knights or your dragon.” The holo of Ahzeer was still, but his voice was severe. It was clear that the audience was over. A moment later, the holo clicked off completely, leaving Keel and Sula standing alone in the dark room.
“Without the others?” Keel wondered aloud. Without Darkwing?
The emperor was clearly still scared of the dragons. He had spent most of his career peddling the lie that they were the enemies of humanity, after all, before the Jaali had come along.
“What the frack. He clearly didn’t care at all about my report,” Keel hissed in annoyance. Although even this small expression of displeasure might be enough to get him a court-martial, he had gone through too much with Sula for them to be anything other than friends. She was his appointed guide, which meant that she was supposed to be the one guiding his once-dead, now-downloaded consciousness through its second existence as a war android.
“He didn’t even acknowledge that I existed at all.” Sula shrugged.
“Perhaps that was a good thing,” Keel offered.
Sula laughed and poked him in the breastplate, but then she pulled back her hand as it clunked against several layers of reinforced plate. “Ow!”
“Serves you right,” Keel said.
“Ha-ha. Anyway. It’s only an audience. What’s the worst thing that can happen?”
Keel thought about this. The emperor could order his consciousness to be put on ice in the House of Records forever or even deleted completely. The emperor could melt down his body and order his consciousness to be downloaded into a toaster.
The emperor and Corporal Keel Hennity hadn’t exactly seen eye to eye in the past, and the emperor had made it very clear that he regarded Keel, an Outer Systems Dracisian, as another example of everything that was wrong with humanity. The fact that he came from the planet of dragons, let alone had the audacity to bond with one, was beyond the pale to the arrogant man-god.
Then again, Keel was the official superior officer of the new Dragon Marine unit, the partnership between the Imperium and dragon-kind. The power of the space reptiles and the robotic Imperial Marines was contained in one unique fighting force, modeled on the bonded renegade fighters that had once been at war with the Imperium.
We are supposed to be the hope of the Imperium, aren’t we? Keel thought. The ancient enemy of the Jaali—the dragons—were being used to fight them once again. Stars knew that the Imperium needed all the help they could get at the moment.
ALERT! CORPORAL HENNITY to ready for transport and report immediately with PRIORITY ALPHA DOCK, VICTORIOUS.
Keel’s vision flashed with scrolling commands.
“It’s here. The Imperial transport is already here. The emperor must have sent it before the battle had even ended, not right after…” Keel shook his head as the pair turned and rushed through the corridors of the Victorious.
The warship was vast, with wide corridors made of hammered blue steel and LED light strips running along the walls. They passed teams of biological guards in blue-gray fatigues rushing toward alarms, given that the ship was still recovering from the battle. Keel knew they were taking on many of those saved from the Fury and the Righteousness, leaving only a skeleton of drones and repair crew behind.
The pair turned a corner and crossed an audience chamber whose entire wall had been given over to viewing glass, which allowed Keel to see the extent of the damage to the Imperial fleet.
The two giant disks of the Fury and the Righteousness had been damaged so badly that they were still venting gases at timed intervals. Keel guessed the crews were fighting a major decompression and implosion event.
Drone craft barely bigger than Keel whipped and fired around them, using articulated grabbers to capture any piece of floating space junk. Shuttles moved from the battleships back to the Victorious or the smaller Imperial warships that hung back from the line, far enough away to not take the brunt of the damage of the giant war disks should they fail to be saved.
“It’ll take days to clear the area,” Sula pointed out as they paused for a moment. It was a surreal vision. The backdrop to the wreckage was half a sky of stars side by side with the complete darkness of the Long Night.
“It’s a major shipping route. They have to clear it before they can run transport back and forth between the Outer and Inner Systems again,” Keel said.
“You think they can get away with that? Now that the Agonos Reactor is down?” Sula asked as they came to a lift whose red lights flashed an accepting green as they approached.
“I don’t know, but they can’t just abandon the Outer Systems!” Keel replied. Now that the Agonos Reactor was down, there was no flow of new mdenium back to the Inner Systems. Without the precious mdenium, the Imperium couldn’t afford to fling every ship they had back and forth across the Long Night.
It was clear that Keel’s priority summons extended to the Victorious lifts as they stepped in to find that they shared the large box with none other than Keel’s cradle. The contraption looked a little like a large step-in loom—a rectangle of a metal frame with ankle, waist, and wrist bracelets that would lock in place as soon as Keel was inside. The cradle would recharge his suit and accelerate the auto-repair services. It was the essential component for any Imperial Marine and was the only way that they could survive longer than their suit’s battery life.
“He wasn’t joking when he said he wanted you right away.” Sula frowned.
The lift jerked, moving sideways and down through the Victorious as it navigated the complicated inner structure of the vast battleship. When the door finally blinked green once more, it opened out onto a small docking port. He saw a large, flat, deep-blue mirrored floor with only one set of launch doors at the far end. Already seated in the middle of the floor was a tubular-shaped craft painted a vivid gold and imperial purple, with short, stubby wings on either side.
PREPARE TO EMBARK. TRANSPORT FOR ONE ONLY…
The entire port blared the automated command voice as Sula and Keel stepped out of the lift. His cradle trundled along beside him of its own accord.
“Only room for one. No pastoral or philosophical advice needed, I guess,” Keel said, feeling apprehensive about this. Like everything and everyone was being stripped from him before he met the emperor. Did the man want him alone, at his most vulnerable?
“I’m House of Records. I can charter a priority flight. Do you know your destination?” Sula asked.
Keel checked the holo-commands scrolling down his vision. What he saw made him pause. He wasn’t going to meet the emperor in any one of his many warships. It was going to be at the emperor’s fortified home itself.
“Sola…” Keel said.
‘Brother?’ Darkwing whispered in his mind. Keel could feel the dragon’s worry as the dragon sensed the shape of Keel’s thoughts.
I have to go for just a little while, somewhere you cannot follow, my brother, Keel thought, knowing that the dragon would hear him.
‘What!?’ Darkwing was shocked, and Keel felt a rush of soot and plasma flame in his head. ‘Foolish. I will follow. I know the taste of your mind, and I will follow along with the nest.’
“No! Please, no, Darkwing. Do not bring the nest. It will be…unsafe for them,” Keel said out loud. Sula looked up at him doubtfully.
The dragon must have sensed Keel’s seriousness. Even though Keel could sense his frustration and anger at their sudden separation, the dragon assented.
“It has to be like this, brother. Solas is the heart of the Imperium. It’s impregnable. If they saw the horde approaching them, then the emperor would panic. All the good work that we’ve done for our species would be over. Please understand, my brother,” Keel murmured.
Darkwing clearly didn’t understand, but he wasn’t about to argue. Instead, he abruptly pulled himself back from Keel’s mind until there was a puzzling quiet space there instead.
“Damn it. I’ve hurt Darkwing’s feelings,” Keel admitted as he turned to Sula.
She nodded up at him and tentatively placed a hand on the Marine’s bulky armor. “I’ll see you at Solas. The House of Records has access. Don’t worry. Remember that the emperor needs you,” she said.
“Sure thing. Whatever you say.” Keel stepped into his cradle and felt the ankle locks click in place, and then the waist, wrists, and finally his neck.
Everything went dark as his mind was instantly turned off.
3
OF FISHES AND DRAGONS
Sol, Inner Systems Heartland
Priority One: DESTINATION REACHED
‘Where are you? My family! My brother!’
Keel’s consciousness turned on like the flick of a switch, dragging the Imperial Marine from Darkwing’s cascading anger.
“My brother?” Keel murmured in the dark, his sensors activating to reveal that he was still held in his cradle, which was being kept in a dim holding bay with muted blue lights slowly starting to flare into existence.
Keel figured this was the holding bay of that Imperial transport. The room was big enough for another two Marine cradles, but instead of any comrades, Keel saw a few stacked crates and nothing else. These transports were designed only for expedited movement from one side of the Imperium to the other. They were basically tubes on vastly overpowered thrusters.
‘Nest!’
Keel was certain that he heard the long, mournful call of his dragon somewhere far off in the back of his mind. With it came the feeling of loss and betrayal. Dragons, it seemed, did not understand about bureaucracy or the affairs of state. To them, there was only the hierarchy of the den-mother and the bond between all dragon-kind.
How simpler things are. Keel sighed. He felt his cradle unlock, and he stepped out just as he felt the transport decelerate. Across his inner vision, his metal body’s sensors recorded the speed they were traveling and the rough coordinates.
Solas. The sacred heart of the Imperium. The home of the emperor.
As if bidden by his attention, the lights on the craft were slowly waking up. Keel had no idea how long he had been asleep—if that was even the right word for the standby his mind was put into.
Maybe the renegade Orpheus was right. So long as his mind was connected to the Imperial House of Records, they would have this ability to turn him on and off at will. What sort of existence was that?
The blue lights inside the craft grew brighter, revealing a small porthole that Keel walked toward. For the first time, he saw the home of the emperor. Hanging against the stellar night was no mere space station or habitat. Keel saw an entire artificial moonlet before him.
A thousand lights wreathed Solas in a golden glow. It was an orb of bronze and brass formed into a lattice around clear crystal plate. Even from this distance, Keel could see hints of green through the plate, indicating entire garden zones, trees, parks.
Wherever the gold lattice of the orb joined, they created rounded defense hubs. Keel saw sensor turrets and observation towers, as well as roundels of weapons ports. The entire moonlet station was festooned with weaponry, enough to repel entire enemy fleets should the need ever arise.
The only time that Solas had been attacked in the last three hundred years of the orb’s existence had been the doomed Pirate Uprising, where nearly two hundred pirate and seditionist vehicles had been summarily blasted from the void before they had ever breached Solas’ walls.
There was a sea of vessels winging to and from the emperor’s residence. Keel saw small zipping shapes emerge with puffs of gas from various points in the lattice as the ships docked and spun away.
Keel recognized them as drone craft. It was true, then, that the emperor only allowed automated ships to dock at his hub. The biologicals that actually lived and worked there had been selected especially and were doomed never to leave the orb once they had arrived.
Does the same apply to Imperial Marines? Keel wondered as his own drone transport slid effortlessly towards its docking station. Keel saw the orb grow larger and larger in view until it entirely covered his vision. This close and he could make out distant woodlands through the crystal glass.
How much space did the emperor need!?
Suddenly, Keel’s vision glitched. When it came back, he saw blue energy evaporating across the port window.
A field? The entirety of Solas was protected by field energy, he realized. A plasma field that size was more than most planets had the ability to generate, and Keel wondered at the amount of rare mdenium—mined from planets like his own home world of Dracis—it cost to keep the emperor safe.
They were approaching their dock, and the porthole went dark, replaced with the flash of internal lights and inner, pressurized workings of the airlocks. Keel turned to stand in front of the door, waiting patiently—he was a robot, after all—until he felt the reverberation and clunk of the transport itself, then the thud as it was held.
// Priority One: DISEMBARK.
His sensors updated with his new mission agreement, and the lights over the door blinked from warning amber to green before hissing open.
Keel stepped out into a wide, steel corridor whose roof was arched all along its length. He turned to see that the transport had married easily with the walls of the corridor, docking inside the very infrastructure of the Solas orb itself.
“Corporal Hennity?”
Keel turned back to see the three figures waiting for him. Two of them were larger even than he was and looked like bipedal tanks.
Infantry war bot, Keel thought. He hadn’t known that they were still in service, given that the Imperium now favored the Imperial Marines.
The war bots had skeletal metal legs and large box torsos that were heavy with plating and weaponry. Keel saw the stylized sun and swords of the Imperium depicted in sculpted bronze. The war bot had no head at all, but it did have four mechanical arms located on a ring at the ‘top’ of its form. Two of the arms ended in guns, one ended in a lump of metal larger than a sledgehammer, and the last in a cruel, curving blade. Keel had seen footage of them fighting, with this arm ring spinning around as they fired and struck enemies all around them.
“You take defense seriously here, then?” Keel said to the third figure standing here, seeing that it was a biological human wearing a long, white robe. They looked ridiculously small compared to the infantry war bots and the Imperial Marine standing there.
An Imperial Scribe, Keel recognized. He had only ever seen pictures of them, since they never left Solas.
The scribe was ridiculously small, with a shaved head and eyes that had been replaced with golden mechanical ones. He frowned for a moment as they regarded him.
“You will come with me. You have the honor of meeting His Eminence.” The scribe gave Keel one cursory look up and down before turning on his heels and striding down the corridor.
Keel eyed the bots for a moment and saw that they did absolutely nothing. Keel wondered what sort of trouble the emperor had been expecting Keel alone could bring.
“You…work here long?” Keel attempted to make small talk as he followed the scribe up the corridor. For a moment, Keel was sure that he wasn’t even going to answer him until the scribe turned down another corridor, which looked exactly the same as the last, and his nasal, high-pitch voice sounded.
“It has been an honor to serve His Highness all my life. I was selected for this role from one of the oldest scribing lineages,” the man said, bowing his head reverentially whenever he mentioned the emperor.
“Scribing lineages?” Keel echoed. “You mean that you were born here? That you have never left Solas?”
The scribe shot him a sharp, disgusted look as if his question was the most ridiculous one in the entire world.
“We who live in the light never wish to walk in the shadow,” he intoned, which Keel thought must be some kind of mantra. He got the sense that the scribe was a fanatic, one of those who believed that the emperor wasn't some very lucky biological that had managed to rise to the top and extend his life with vast amounts of wealth and technology, but that he was in fact some kind of god.
Alright then, Keel thought as they took another turn, and then another, and then they were walking toward some sort of atrium or glass house. There was a door in a crystal-glass wall, and Keel could see fabulously flowering trees and shrubs on the other side.
The scribe stopped at the entrance and waved a hand for Keel to see another flicker of blue field energy. The archway door slowly opened.
Fields, apart from being notoriously expensive, were also notoriously difficult to breach. They were manipulated wavelengths and polarized molecules that could be directed to form impenetrable walls or ephemeral shadows or surfaces strong enough to hold your weight.
