Polity Agent

As a precaution, when the two dragon spheres came together, Mika had again donned her spacesuit. Good thing, too. She grabbed up her pack and quickly stuffed into it anything immediately to hand that might increase her chances of survival: food, drink, energy canisters and medical supplies. Closing up her helmet and visor, she headed for the shimmer-shield, pushed through, then opened the airlock beyond. Stepping outside she looked up to a view not cleaned up by computer like the view from inside. Bright actinic sunlight cut through from one side, between a curved ceiling and curved floor composed of draconic flesh. Masses of pseudopods were sliding down beside her—a massive but eerily silent avalanche. Scales slowly tumbled through vacuum around her, and nearby they dropped sharply on the gravplated walkway. She kicked them aside as she strode towards her craft. She noted, as the gull-door rose at her approach, the docking clamps folding into the metal of the manacle below.

‘Can you hear me, Dragon?’ she asked, halting for a moment.

Nothing.

What was happening? The two spheres were breaking their connection, and thus far she saw no sign of hostility between them. But would she recognize that anyway? Perhaps right now they were fighting some battle on a virtual level, or perhaps they adhered to certain rules of conduct for something like this? They were alien, and despite lengthy investigation remained alien still, so who was to know? However, as Mika ducked into the little craft, the dragon spheres seemed to her like two card-sharps standing up from the table, about to put some distance between each other, making room to manoeuvre before going for their weapons, each hoping to get the drop on his opponent.

The gull door closed and Mika stared at the controls for a moment before taking hold of the joystick. With no AI available to fly the craft for her this time, she must now do so herself. A finger brushed against a touch-plate gave her ‘systems enabled’, then engines droned as she raised the joystick. The craft rose smoothly until it fell outside the influence of the manacle gravplates, then it jerked through vacuum as if a tether had been cut, but with no real loss of control. Mika aimed for the sunlight between the two curved draconic surfaces, the screen before her polarizing on the glare.

Dragon scales hailed against the hull, some of them hitting it quite hard before spinning away, so Mika kept the speed to a minimum. She swung the craft to one side to avoid a dead and discarded pseudopod, but clipped it all the same. Desiccated by vacuum, it shattered into red glittery fragments and black vertebrae.

The previous connection between these portions of Dragon entire now broke apart completely, the two pseudopod trees sinking away. Now Mika saw that the two spheres were visibly drawing apart, microgravity creating whirlpools in the fog of shed scales, and space opening wide before her. She accelerated as blue-green light seemed to fill the intervening space. Some kind of weapon? No, just a storm of ionization. More acceleration, since at any moment she might be caught up in some energy strike many orders of magnitude above this current jungle glow. From the beginning, the dragon spheres had utilized full-spectrum lasers as weapons. She knew the sphere she had recently occupied now contained gravtech weapons, and it struck her as likely that whatever weapons the Polity possessed, these giant spheres either already possessed or could create them within themselves, and they probably owned even more drastic ones than that.

Clear space now in the full glare of the sun. Mika turned the craft about, shut down the engines, and enabled available automatics to keep it from colliding with anything else that might be tumbling about out here. Slowly drawing away, she felt like a mouse scuttling from between two bull elephants beginning to face off.

Then it started.

Almost as one, ripples began to cross the surface of each sphere. They revolved once around each other, while still drawing apart, then accelerated away together. Perhaps ten miles away from her, a laser flashed between them, blackening an area of Mika’s reactive screen. As the screen cleared she saw a mist of plasma and glittering scales rise from the surface of each Dragon sphere, and in one sphere a glowing canyon became visible to her. She realized then that from her present position she did not know which sphere was which, because she could not see the manacle. But, then, how would knowing that help her?