Chapter 8

Gimtesh Thresh, of the House Thresh and current captain of the unhappy needleship Banemaw, had been sweating bullets for the past twenty eight hours. And she normally didn’t even bother with sweat glands to begin with.

“Scrying report number three six two eight nine...” A bored sounding voice burred in the background – barely heard by Gimtesh. “No change.”

Gimtesh continued her pacing, her red scaled fingers tapping her chin as her small, whippy tail snapped back and forth, back and forth. The Five Talon Empire had started a civil war that had been nearly five thousand years in coming. The chromatic dragons of the old Asemat Empire would rise up and overthrow the parody of peace that was the Prismatic Throne, using advanced genetic weapons known as D-suits.

The only problem was that while the first shots in the civil war had been fired by the chromatics, and the prismatic and neutral dragons in the rest of the empire had no idea that they were soon to be in a life or death struggle ... the second shots had been put on hold.

Postponed.

Delayed.

All because Lord Xosh – soon to be Emperor Xosh of the first Chromatic Dominion – didn’t wish to risk attacking Draconis Prime, the homeworld of dragon kind, until he knew that Princess Relix Castrovel, the true heir of the Prismatic Throne, was dead and buried. And he had set the objective in Gimtesh’s hands. If she failed, then she’d end up ... like her brother. The very thought made her want to curl up into a ball and whimper.

“Scrying report number...” the soft voice came from one of the many war-wizards that were working on the Banemaw to keep her magical systems running. But what made Gimtesh lift her head up and narrow her eyes was the hesitation. “Sire! Sire!”

Gimtesh ran over to the scrying pool that the war-wizards stood around. The one who was speaking was a burly looking elf whose body had been slabbed with an immense amount of crude magitech augmetics, all of them designed to bolster magical abilities. There were cogitation units sticking out of his forehead to assist with memorization, and arcane symbol weavers that thrust from his shoulders like the limbs of some great clockwork spider. Those were used to make somatic gestures easier, faster.

But the thing that made Gimtesh shiver were the eyes. Specifically, the eye-tubes that were wired right into the scrying pool. It had something to do with sympathetic magic. Whatever the reason, it turned her stomach to see those segmented, worm-like tubes fastened to those empty eye sockets, like the man was being continually attacked by cybernetic predators.

“What is it?” Gimtesh asked, her tail clicking against the corrugated metal of the Banemaw’s deck.

“The signature of Princess Castrovel has vanished!”

“She’s left the plane of negation?” Gimtesh asked.

“No, no, our tracking spells ... lost her.” The war-wizard cocked his head. Then he chuckled. “Sire. The feathered bitch headed for the Outlands before we lost her life signs.”

“So?” Gimtesh asked, irritably. She dug her hands into her armpits and tried to not dig her claws into the soft flesh there. But her claws refused to retract. She was that on edge.

“It means she died,” the other war-wizard said. “I knew her ship couldn’t survive in the plane of negation forever!”

“She ... died?” Gimtesh asked, blinking. “She died!”

“Well, we should-” the first war-wizard started. But Gimtesh waved her hand.

They had waited long enough.

“Send a laser com burst to Lord ... to Emperor Xosh! Tell him that the last princess of the Prismatic Throne is dead.” Gimtesh grinned, rubbing her hands together. “Just in the nick of time. Oh! And set course for Draconis Prime! I want to be in ... in at the death.”

The two war-wizards exchanged a glance.

Remarkable, considering that neither had eyes.

Draconis Prime.

Population: 1 billion.

It seemed really small for the capital planet of an empire spanning three galactic arms, the galactic core and the Magellanic Clouds. But there was a simple reason why the planetary population on all the official census hovered at the one billion mark.

Dragons counted dragons, half-dragons, quarter-dragons and sorcerers with draconic bloodlines on their census.

The fifteen billion slaves, servants, civilian bondsmen, artisans, craftsmen, magisters, wizards, clerics, zealots, mercenaries, whores, whoremongers, holo-vid personalities, reality show producers, writers, wanna-be-pro wrestlers, actual pro-wrestlers, school teachers, historians, amateur historians, wargamers and assorted low life scum were left off the census. Not that that prevented their taxation. This was an Empire after all.

The planet itself looked like a world that had been unwoven. Continents had been lifted from the mantle and suspended on vast magitech engines, while the metallic core had been tapped and spun up with solar powered thrusters the size of small cities. Planetary surfaces had been carved from molten stone and planted with new landscapes that were kept in place with artificial gravity and force fields. It had taken almost five thousand years and the life-long careers of literally millions of wizards, but the end result was a megastructure capable of giving each dragon living on what could be theoretically termed a ‘planet’ the ten thousand kilometers of distance they needed to feel comfortable leaving their hoards behind.

It was vast.

And it was deeply fragile. A statement, really, about the unassailable nature of the Five Talon Empire.

Because of this structural fragility, it was fended by, at any one time, four War Spheres from four of the different draconic houses. Those War Spheres were matched by the First Imperial Fleet – almost five hundred ships, suspended above the spiraling beauty of Draconis Prime. And watching over this entire majestic display was Admiral Lionteshkar Throakhawn. Sitting on his command throne, surrounded by holographic displays and the warm chatter of his bridge crew, Lion considered the bowl of tea he had been brought by an elven woman dressed in gold paint and carefully placed holograms.

“Is this really tanna leaf?” he asked, looking down at the woman.

“Yes, Lord Admiral! Conqueror of pirates, master of the spectral frequency, dominator of nanocytes, castigator of cybernetic consciousness-” the elf said, beaming as she recited the litany of sobriquets.

“Oh, stop it, Fiona,” Lion said, his tail cracking out, smacking her rump with exactly enough pressure to cause her butt to start jiggling. The elf giggled and rubbed at her backside.

“Admiral!” she gasped.

Lion chuckled, deep in his golden breast.

“Admiral!”

This voice was less playful and flirtatious. More confused.

Lion looked over and saw one of his underofficers. The half-dragon was dressed in the green-gold of the sensor service, with a complex code of button pins that indicated that he was a subspace scanning specialist. He looked as if he had sprinted from the far end of the six hundred meter wide bridge, holding a crystal sheaf in one hand. Lion’s brow furrowed and his long mustachios twitched as he leaned his large head down to eye the officer.

“Yes, Tasmin?” he asked.

“I-” Subspace Scanning Specialist Third Class Tasmin Yorle looked a bit taken aback to be addressed by his first name. He shook his head. “I, uh, I’ve been doing signal intercepts, Admiral. And we’ve stopped getting any data from, uh, the outmost holding of House Yeltanzo.”

“Which holding is that?” Lion asked.

“A, uh, minor planet. Population two dragons, three billion menials,” Tasmin said, looking down at his scanner. “But here’s the weird thing. The last data signal we got was a House Xosh merchant freighter arriving.”

Lion rubbed his chin. “Xosh and Yeltanzo are in a trade war...” he paused. “This doesn’t smell right...”

“Should we dispatch scoutships?” Fiona asked, cocking her head. Despite the fact that she was just a concubine, Lion spent a few moments considering her words. Slowly, he shook his head.

“No. Scanning branch!” he shouted. “I want a broad spectrum scrying spell – tell me if there are any Xosh ships approaching Draconis Prime.”

This set a few dozen people across the bridge into new flurries of motion. Lion felt the same crawling, creeping nerves that he had felt when, as a young hatchling, he had first led a squadron of fighters against a Hawking Pirate raid-wing that had turned out to merely mask a Mumbler deathsphere. The hideous black hole monster had ripped through half his wing before he had put it down with a gravitic grenade right down the throat. He started to look at the space around him, thinking. If he was going to do something sneaky, what would it be...

He rubbed his muzzle.

And there, in the foreground, he saw what every Lord Admiral of the First Fleet had seen for the past five thousand years: The four Warspheres that protected Draconis Prime. Each one was the size of a small moon and bristled with weaponry. Each was shaded in the colors of a different house. None was House Xosh. But, by long tradition, two were metallic, and two were chromatic. He leaned back. “Fiona ... which metallic whelp was it who was badgering the daughter of the fifth wife of the Emperor?”

“Uh...” Fiona looked a bit confused. “Why? She doesn’t matter.”

Ah, yes, Lion thought. The misdirection did work quite well, didn’t it?

But then Fiona snapped her fingers. “Oh! Wait! I remember, it was Bex Thresh of-”

The bridge turned to ruby red as the main weapon of the red painted Warsphere of House Thresh activated its primary weapon and fired it into the silver and copper Warsphere of House Tranyo. For a single, horrifying moment, all was still. Everyone looked up from their consoles and away from their work and merely gaped at the sight. The flagship was positioned perfectly to see the effect. The beam of pure redness, belching from a divot on the Warsphere’s equator, smashing into the skin of the other ‘sphere. There was a few moments of boiling as adamantine plates ablated under the hellfury of that immense energy weapon ... and then it punched through and scythed through the Warsphere, cutting and cleaving until the moon-sized weapons platform was uncoiling like a peeling onion.

Lion felt less shocked than he would have liked.

For the past several centuries, he had been feeling as if another shoe was about to drop.

“Red alert! Bring the portal shields online! Ready weapons and fire a full spread of torpedoes at the traitors!” Lion bellowed. “Signal the fleet that Plan Gold Plated Iron has gone into effect. The chromies have stabbed us in the back!”

The flagship whirred as its reactors snapped open portals to the plane of positive energy, drawing power in nearly incalculable amounts to power the main guns and the shield arrays. Hanger bags on attack carriers opened and fighter-craft screamed into the void by the hundreds, while smaller cruisers put their burrowing spell-torpedoes into the astral plane, where they would dart towards the enemy Warsphere before returning to physical reality (hopefully inside the moon sized warship.) But even as the fleet began to react, the low whump whump whump of ships emerging from subspace hammered on Lion’s sense of soul.

An old dragon gets quite good at hearing disruptions in space time.

Comes in handy for an admiral.

And there was the third Warsphere, painted a brilliant Xosh blue. And surrounding it was the entire Xosh fleet. But rather than plunging towards the First Fleet, the Xosh fleet held back.

“Sir! They’re launching ... something...” a sensors officer said, sounding confused. “It looks like ... dragons?”

Lion harrumphed.

Sending your dragons out to fight was poor sportsmanship. Dragons took a long time to breed and were quite valuable. Committing them early was ... just ... rude! To their families, if to no one else. But then the screens surrounding Lion flared with hundreds of thrust plumes. His brow furrowed and his mustache twitched. “What is this!?” He bellowed.

“I don’t know!” The sensors officer shouted.

Across hundreds of kilometers of space, the ‘dragons’ were shooting towards the First Fleet on plumes of fire that stretched across the stars like bolides, cutting through the upper atmosphere of a doomed planet. They flew towards swarming formations of fighter craft. The instant they were in range, the fighter craft opened up with their PRCs. Beams of killing frost zipped through space, seeking targes. The dragons banked and twisted, evading most of the oncoming fire. Then their wings flared, bringing them to a near perfect stop in the vacuum of space.

The fighters, unable to slow, shot through the draconic formation.

And space exploded.

Plasma beamcasters scythed lines of purple fury. Spinfusor blades hummed and sliced and exploded. Deathwands flared with their black-white killing radiance. Shrike catapults filled the void with flechettes that somehow managed to whine with ear-splitting fury despite the utter lack of sound in space. Bolt-guns hammered and vol-tech rays swept about in cones of pure white heat. Plasma missiles arced and captured targets in balls as hot as the surface of a sun.

Then the dragons were rushing forward, leaving behind smoldering wreckage and vented space suits and gaping, stunned faces – frozen in the embrace of space.

“What are they?”

“This is Talon B, he dodged a point blank missile!”

“Eject!”

“Bring the AMS online!”

“They’re cutting through the-”

The first dragon smashed into the bridge of the flagship a second later. He smoldered with the waste heat of his weapon systems and his claws dug into the metal plating of the deck. He decapitated a few deckhands with the edges of his wings, even as six arms unfolded from his chest, each one tipped with a different killer. Lion grabbed his bed slave and crammed her into the escape pod reserved for his egress – then triggered the launch with his tail before leaping at the boader.

The boarder rolled aside with indraconic speed then fired a spread of flechettes into Lion’s side. Gold scales cracked and Lion roared in fury, then breathed six centuries worth of dragon fire straight at the pseudo-dragon. The boarder lifted an arm and extruded a shield that shimmered with a blackness deeper than space, drinking in heat. Lion, though, was old enough to know that a breath weapon was merely half the battle. He snapped his jaws shut at the same time he swung his claws, catching the boarder in the gut. Scales and scales under those scales tore and caught, the boarder went flying.

Lion caught the boarder before he could get more than a half meter – literally tossing him to his other palm like a cat.

Lion was also old enough to know that when facing something new, you made sure it was dead.

And so, he lowered his head and bit down. The creature split in half in his mouth and he spat the upper half away, before tossing the other half as far away from the torso as he could manage. Only once he was done did he pay mind to the metal darts digging into his flesh.

A cruiser chose that moment to detonate spectacularly. Then a battleship. Then another battleship. Then a third. One after the other after the other, each one flaring with a pure radiance that announced the cause of death: Reactor breaches. Lion didn’t need to be told the battle was lost. He ducked his head forward, then growled.

“Signal the fleet to retreat ... and set our course...” Lion snarled.

“Where, sir?” a stunned looking helm officer – one of the few left after the horrible violence of the boarder.

“Right. Down. Their. Throats.”

Emperor Dogan stood before the holographic display table. The view was horrifying – worse than the worst predictions of the dourest prognosticator. Half the First Fleet was burning wreckage. A quarter was so badly damaged that it couldn’t even try to rereat. The last quarter was retreating. But the worse news was coming from subspace listening posts. Smaller fleets were attacking metallic holdings across the FTE. Worlds were burning. People were dying. And there was almost nothing he could do about it.

“Signal the evacuation of Draconis Prime. Use every mage, witch and hedge caster we have to open portals to ... to anywhere! Sigil, the Night City, Purgatory, I don’t care, get our people out of here!” he growled.

“The magical components alone are-” Secretary Rolin started – his claws tacking as he tapped them together.

“Raid every last hoard on this planet if you have too!” Emperor Dogan snarled. “I don’t care about property rights, we have three enemy Warspheres overhead and only one-”

Once more, that terrible, ruby red light spilled in through the windows of the palace.

On the holographic display table, the symbol for the last surviving defense winked out.

“I’ll begin the confiscations,” Rolin said, bowing as he backed away from the table. Dogan barely heard him. He walked slowly to the window, looking out and upwards. There, he could see the brilliant glow of the three Warspheres coming closer. The thrust plumes of their immense engines could be seen as lights smeared across heaven – intermixing with the fading throb of the burning ships and smoldering wreckage. He took hold of the sill and knew that everything he had planned was for naught. He licked his muzzle.

“At least it will be quite a show...” he whispered, softly.

“Sire?”

Looking back, he saw that only one servant was left. The rest of the council had fled with Rolin and the other servants. He wondered how many were teleporting away from Draconis Prime as quickly as they could wrangle wizards together. The servant was an older looking halfling – his face seamed with lines, his hair turned a dignified silvery gray. Dogan tried to recall his name, but he found it escaping him.

“Do you know what the primary weapons of a Warsphere do to a planet?” Dogan asked, reaching up to take the circlet that signified his imperial status off his head. He twirled it, casually, on one finger.

The halfling shook his head.

“On their full setting, they shunt the entire planet into the lowest level of the Abyss,” Dogan said. “That’s why we call them hellwhips, you see. That’s all the primary weapon is, a hellwhip the size of a small continent. But on a half setting, they merely ... are...” He trailed off. “Quite hot.”

The halfling gulped.

“Since they have three ships, I believe they won’t bother with the full power. They’ll need to use the spheres again, after all.” Dogan looked back out the window. The halfling walked over to stand beside him. He rummaged around in his vest pockets and took out a tiny cigarillo case. Tapping the bottom with one long finger, the halfling got out a slender stick of concentrated pipeweed. He stuck it into the corner of his mouth, then started to rummage around, trying to find a match.

Dogan held out his thumb. A tiny twist of magical energy caused flames to leap from the tip, lightning the cigarillo up.

The halfling grinned shakily up at his Emperor. Then he tapped out a second cigarillo and offered it.

Dogan took it, shifted away his natural resistance to such drugs, and tucked the slender tube of paper and powdered leaf into the corner of his muzzle. He set off the tip with his thumb, then shook his hand to banish the flames.

“What’s your name, anyway?” Dogan asked.

“Well, it’s kind of stupid,” the halfling said, chuckling. “I preferred being called ‘you there’ for most of my life for a reason.” He blew out a smoke ring. Dogan puffed his own smoke ring through it.

The sky started to glow ruby.

“Oh?” Dogan asked. He forced himself to look out the window, like he was just watching the sunset. The beams lanced down – painfully bright. They impacted on the edges of the coiling horizon, and the shockwaves billowed outwards. They moved slower than light. Slow enough to seem like they should take days to reach them: massive, roiling clouds of flame and smoke and fury. Chunks of earth the size of small cities, bouncing and rolling and crumbling apart before a shockwave sweeping along Draconis Prime.

The sound hadn’t reached them yet, so the view was eerily silent.

“Well,” the halfling said, chuckling. “My mother, for some harebrained reason, decided to name me Baggins.”

“Baggins?” Dogan laughed.

The halfling punched him in the hip, grinning.

The invisible curtain of pressure that was pushed ahead of the flame and smoke and debris reached the castle without warning. Bricks flew apart and metal was flayed and for a dizzying moment, the entire castle seemed to roil in the air as if the whole building had been transmuted into an air elemental. The tornado of debris writhed for a few moments before the heat arrived, and turned everything into fire and fury and ash.

And then...

Nothing at all.

Gimtesh blinked and shivered. Like a small dog exposed to an air raid siren, she was unable to move. Think. Breathe. She just sat there and shivered. Her eye was about two inches away from the needle sharp tip of the prow of the former flagship of the former First Navy. The ship had struck the command decks of the Xosh Warsphere and penetrated through almost two kilometers of adamantine armor before inertia and pressure forced it to stop. By the end of the progress, the flagship had been crumpled and crushed and mangled, until it was essentially turned into a scrunched up needle of mishmashed metal.