Dragon.

DRAGON.

GREG CURTIS.

COPYRIGHT 2011 BY GREG CURTIS.

SMASHWORDS EDITION.

Dedication.

This book is dedicated to my mother Ruth Curtis and my sister Lucille Curtis, my biggest supporters, harshest critics and all round cheer team, and without whom this book would not have been written. It’s also dedicated to my father Allen Curtis, gone too soon but not forgotten.

Chapter One.

Yes! Sweet fragging comets yes! It’s really here! Christian Aaron Moody the Third yelled his triumph out for the entire universe to hear as he stared at the burnt out wreck of the ancient battleship with something akin to awe. Of course there was no other human being on the bridge of his ship to hear him, let alone celebrate with him, and if there had been they would have been too busy reporting him to the authorities to join in, but that didn’t matter.

In all likelihood nobody else would have ever been so happy to see the ship. It was a five century old wreck, burnt out until almost nothing of its internal remains would have worked again even with power. But that was the minor stuff. It had suffered obvious hull damage from weapons fire, and was completely without air, gravity, light or power, and yet it was everything he’d ever dreamed of as he realized that staring him in the face was both the proof of all his research and the answer to his prayers, exactly where it was supposed to be. It was magnificent. It was an historic wonder.

Yet beyond all that it was still one thing more, it was beautiful.

Sir? Bibby, his personal android and the only creature within light years to be able to hear him celebrating, came rushing on to the bridge, immediately concerned by his outburst, and both his voice and his carefully sculptured silver and white plastic face showed it. Concern was probably the best if not the only emotion he was designed to show. The rest of the time he wore a carefully designed thoughtful if caring expression and his voice was deliberately polite and soothing. But then he was a child’s minder android, one that most people should have outgrown long before they turned thirty and replaced with an artificial assistant if they were so minded. Chris just kept his around for sentimental reasons; in the end he was the closest thing he had left to a family.

Naturally as a personal android, Bibby monitored his heartbeat, respiration, brain function and other life signs closely. Anything that interfered with any of them was a cause of concern for the android, and set his alarm bells ringing. They’d been ringing a lot of late and he was constantly asking him to visit the doctor. He had to enquire, just to make sure that everything was all right.

The android would have been more worried if he’d known that Chris, working on the principle that what Bibby didn’t know couldn’t get him hospitalised or worse, arrested, had jacked some of the android’s sensors so he couldn’t detect everything going on inside him. And he'd altered most of the rest so that what he did detect seemed mostly normal. Otherwise the android would have just made him go to the doctor on a daily basis and sooner or later when they did some tests and realised what he’d taken, they’d throw him in a hospital for maybe several months while the police started asking awkward questions and threatening lengthy stretches in the rehabilitation facilities, and he simply didn’t have the time. Especially not when victory was finally within his grasp.

I’m fine Bibby. I’m just a little excited, that’s all. Of course he had to wonder how the android could somehow miss the fact that he was already close to falling down with exhaustion just from a little celebrating. Maybe he’d jacked too many of his sensors after all. And maybe too, he’d taken too long to find the ship. Even a year before and his health would have been better. The drugs would have done less damage to him. But it had taken all that time.

It is indeed proof that your theories and calculations were correct Sir, and you have every reason to be pleased with yourself, but a little less excitement and more reflective contemplation would be in order. After all it is just an ancient ship. Which of course it was, at least to an android. But to an historian it was a treasure trove of information, a reminder of forgotten wars and battles both won and lost, and of course to an orphan with an impossible mission in front of him, it was a major weapon of war from an ancient era and the end of one quest and finally the beginning of a whole new journey. A journey he had spent a decade preparing for.

Have some respect Bibby. This is an ancient Catelli battleship Bibby, the Bathsheequa if I’m reading my phonetic script correctly, and I am, exactly as I’d hoped. This was the archetype of a whole line of Catelli battleships, a line that held back the darkness as the Catelli saw it, for more than fifty years, and finally ushered in the age of the Catelli Concern. And this ancient beauty was one of the proudest of all their ships. The first, the archetype and the greatest. This particular vessel, the Bathsheequa has participated in over fifty of the major Catelli battles, shot down over seventy enemy craft, and her captains were awarded half a dozen medals for distinguished service and outstanding bravery between them. She’s five hundred standard years old if she’s a day, and packed with history and potential.

Bathsheequa?

I know it sounds like ancient Greek and there’s no real standard translation, but to the Catelli it means a lot. An awful lot. The ship was named for some sort of tree climbing lizard, renown for its nasty burning bite and swift strike from above. In fact if you look at the emblem which you should just be able to see on the forward hull, it shows the Bathsheequa itself which looks a lot like a Komodo Dragon. In fact that would probably be a good human name for it.

The Komodo Dragon?

The Dragon.

Yes Sir. No doubt Bibby wanted to make some sort of sarcastic comment, he was good at that, and under other circumstances he would have. But he was still more concerned for his master’s well-being, especially given what he already knew of his plans and he didn’t want to upset him any further. Things would only get worse when he found out the rest.

This ship and others like it ruled the galaxy in their day. They were the most powerful, awe inspiring vessels in space, surpassing even the great torpedo dreadnoughts of the Dryga in fire-power. Sixty high energy laser cannon for close in defence, a dozen massive rail cannon, two dozen torpedo launchers, as many fighter bays, a hull more than a meter thick and composed of duralloy titanium alloy. Frag it, even today if it wasn’t for the discoveries of the hyperspace laminar tubes, shields and shatter cannons, it could go toe to toe with a modern battleship.

But those things were discovered and it can’t. The shatter cannon allowed much smaller ships to punch holes straight through these ancient ship’s hulls, and the tubes allowed other war vessels to travel far faster without needing to waste half their internal space and two thirds of their energy on a portable hyperdrive, and get entire fleets into strategic positions before their enemies. The ship is an interesting historical find Sir, but it is still only a relic.

Not for long. Finally Chris found the will to turn away from the image hovering in front of him in the holo, and back to his android as he made his promise. But was he making it to the android, or to himself?

Then if it was so powerful, how was it destroyed Sir? There it was again, logic. The damned android was using logic on him. Anything to win his argument. Bibby did not want him to rebuild the ship. It was a crime, and perhaps, just perhaps, it was beginning to understand that the rebuild was only the beginning of Chris’ highly illegal plans.

It didn’t have a chance. In one of the most unfortunate accidents of that or any war, the Bathsheequa came out of hyperdrive, right in the middle of an enemy fleet in an insurgency they didn’t even know existed. It was holed three times before it could even bring its weapons on line, and the resultant explosive decompression wiped out the entire crew, leaving it a drifting wreck in the first few seconds of the battle. All they managed to do was get a single warning off to their comrades.

My point exactly Sir, battles are dangerous, even in a battleship.

Then let’s not get involved in any. But I’d rather be in a battleship than a freighter if we do end up in one. A fully armed and operational, thirtieth century one. Are the mechs ready to go? Of course they were, and both he and Bibby knew it, but he had to ask.

Sir, you surely aren’t planning on going through with this madness, of repairing this rusting heap? It's dangerous, it's illegal, and it could place you in terrible danger. The android hadn’t been happy about the idea since he’d found out, barely a week before and well after the Goose had left the orbit of Kathsgate IV, of his plan to restore the ship to its former glory and then to update it to the pinnacle of thirtieth century military technology. But by then it was far too late. When he found out the rest he’d be even more upset.

You know I’m going through with it. I didn’t do all that research, purchase and build all the equipment, tools and materials I’d need, design and prefabricate all those parts and the hyperdrive and bring them all out with me to the middle of nowhere, just to turn around. Now are the mechs ready?

Yes Sir. Could an android truly be resigned to its fate? Chris wasn’t sure, but they were making the things more lifelike and more capable of learning every year, and he had owned Bibby for most of his life. He knew him, and he knew what he would let it get away with, and what he wouldn’t, and he had just enough sense to pick his battles. Maybe he knew he couldn’t win this one.

Good. Let’s get a little closer, within two hundred meters or so, and then send the first group of mechs across. They can enter through the blast holes along the ship’s port side and start the survey.

Yes Sir. There it was again, that tone of disappointment and wounded feelings as the android prepared to obey his orders, illegal and dangerous though they might be. He had no choice at the moment, but if he ever returned to Federation space Chris knew Bibby would probably have contacted the authorities, believing his master was having a nervous breakdown. He would have thought it for the best and he didn’t even know all the details yet. Chris had often wondered what the android would do if his plan’s did eventually all turn to comet dust, if he ended up wounded or imprisoned or worse. Would he, could he even say ‘I told you so?’ He’d have every reason to, though Chris doubted it was in his programming.

Slowly the Goose locked vectors with the ancient battle ship, and then started matching it for the slight end over end tumble it had been doing for five long centuries, until the image in the screen was no longer moving. There was still a slight lateral rotation which they couldn’t have matched anyway, but since it wouldn’t have helped and it was less than a degree per second and well within the capabilities of the mechs to deal with, he didn’t worry about it. Besides, it gave him a chance to study his new found treasure from every angle, and savour his triumph.

Two hundred and sixty meters of space going monster, a large battleship even by modern standards, though there were bigger. Eight full decks, two hundred and fifty cabins and enough fire-power to level a small moon even as it stood. It even looked like a warship should, a brutal and intimidating and yet somehow beautiful and graceful at the same time, a true predator of the stars.

The design showed the Catelli’s love of proportion and balance in everything they did, and she was a work of art as much as a weapon of war, though he doubted her enemies would have noticed that as they fled her guns. A single flattened cylinder, running two hundred and sixty meters in length, tapering ever so slightly at the nose, with two stubby but massive wings starting in the tail section of the ship and raking forward almost to the front like an eagle’s outstretched wings, or the two side tines on a trident.

Of course its shape was completely functional. It was determined by the fact that as large as it was the battle ship had had some basic atmospheric capability. It could fly, more like a guided missile than a bird, but it could still fly where most battleships of its time and the modern era too couldn’t. This bird’s prey would not be able to get away from it by dodging into an atmosphere. And when it caught it, the prey would not last long. Not when it’d come within range of the Bathsheequa’s extremely sharp teeth. Teeth he was going to sharpen some more.

The high energy laser cannon for close in tactical defence were dotted all around the hull like little bubbles in the dark metal. Each was already as powerful as those on many small fighters of the current century, and they would quickly and easily be upgraded to current battleship specifications. A laser cannon was a laser cannon after all. New energy banks, enlarged coils, tighter focusing rings, high speed servos, a decent targeting array and most important of all, an updated battle programme and computer system to run it all, and they would be a major asset in any battle.

The twelve rail cannon were antiques, powerful in their day, but nowhere near state of the art. Six of them he had plans to upgrade with enhanced magnetic drivers, extra long magnetic energy rails and new stronger arc resistant alloys until they could punch out eight times the mass at eighty percent of light speed instead of ten. Though they would still have a relatively slow re-fire rate and only a moderate aiming capability, against that sort of fire power no modern ship could survive, shields or no shields, and for that reason he’d decided to keep them. The other six would be replaced with the very best designed shatter cannon he could fit. He already had all the components for them in his ship's holds, copied from a wrecked Liannon battle cruiser he’d obtained the permits to salvage, fabricated in his warehouses and redesigned to fit perfectly in the Dragon’s other six rail cannon bays.

More truly a fragmentation energy beam than anything more advanced, the shatter cannon would quickly devastate shields and electrical systems, and then punch through the toughest hull, and the six he was installing were more than ten times as powerful as those on any current cruiser, though he like any civilian, wasn’t supposed to know that. Then again, he wasn’t supposed to know a lot of things, and one day when all this was over and he had his answers, and maybe was enjoying a lengthy stretch in a rehabilitation facility, the authorities would start asking those questions about how he knew what he did. They wouldn’t like the answers.

The torpedoes had also been easy enough to update. He’d simply wandered in to the weapons control room of a police cruiser as it had demanded a complete inspection of his cargo, as they were occasionally want to do with an active portable scanner in his pocket disguised as a holo phone, and recorded everything. It was so ridiculously easy. The police had never imagined that as they went through his entirely legitimate cargo holds and manifests with their beady little eyes, hunting for minor infractions of the law, that he might be committing a major one in front of their very eyes, studying them even more closely than they were studying him. In their naivety they’d even given him a guided tour through their patrol craft, and now over a thousand homemade state of the art torpedoes were stacked up like sardines in the secondary hold of the Goose. All he had to do was modify the launchers on board the ship to fire them, a matter of a few hours’ work.

Once that was done the battleship would at least have the fire power to match anything in space. But then came the hard parts. First the hull. It had to be patched, and even with just his eyes he could see the three huge rents where primitive shatter cannon had simply punched right through it exactly as the records had said. The patching though would be easy enough, and he had over ten thousand cubic meters of energy absorbing alloys to recoat the ship after with, which would deflect up to ninety eight percent of any energy beam that struck the ship. With that coat alone, even without shields, the ship would have survived its final battle. But that was only the start. He had much more in mind for it.

The recoating was relatively straight forward, just slow and tedious. But installing the shields, which this ancient battleship had never been equipped with or designed for, would be much more challenging. He’d already prefabricated the units a year earlier at his family’s home base, though he’d have to cut holes all over the ship to install them, and then lay down an entire network of power cabling and control mesh to run them, not to mention develop a new battle programme. That would be tricky. But worse still was the power requirement to run them and the new weapons. For that he needed a whole new antimatter generator plant. Actually two. One for the weapons, one for the drive.

Naturally he had them with him, and each had over a hundred times the output of the old fusion chamber generator currently installed on the ship, and as they would take up only a couple or three cabin’s worth of space instead of a whole deck, it would free up a lot of room. But installing such a plant was a major undertaking, and while the mechs he had with him were the best that he could get and had been updated with the most advanced programmes he could beg, steal or borrow, he had never tried such an operation before. Normally such things, if they were done at all, would be done in a fully certified space dock with hundreds of qualified engineers, and technicians to oversee every stage in the operation. And he had two of them to install. The second unit of course would be to run the drive unit, and therein lay a whole new level of problems as he had to update the drive as well.

Most modern ships used the hyperspace laminar tubes which ran between all the important star systems. As such all they needed were assistant jump engines and stasis rails to launch them in and out of the tubes and keep them on course through them. In short they had only half a hyperdrive, because that was all they required. It saved enormously on both space and cost. But that limited them to those systems where the tubes had been established, the Federation worlds and a few others. He intended to leave the established system worlds.

The Catelli battleship being designed and built before the discovery of the tubes, had a full hyperdrive with a full jump engine, stasis rails, portable hyper field generator and of course a major fusion generator to power it all. That was one of the reasons he’d been so determined to find one of these ancient behemoths. The only ships currently that had such drives, or at least that were admitted to by the navy, were the explorers, which could visit distant systems, explore them, and if they found anything of interest, set up one end of the tube there.

It was a sensible strategy for the navy. The ships could still travel anywhere within the Federation quickly and easily, and the space savings alone allowed them to run bigger and better weapons systems and whatever else they needed. And if they had to go further afield, an explorer could always create a new tube for them.

Yet there were always rumours that the navy had some major hyperdriven battleships as well, just in case, and of course some small long range scouts. Rumours that were routinely scoffed at, though most people accepted that they had to deny them. The military was by nature secretive.

Explorers were very rare ships, and because of their invaluable service to the Federation, they were never scrapped, just endlessly upgraded. Thus there had been no chance of purchasing a second hand drive. Not a full sized one anyway, and the various official hyperdrives that were used to run the certified private miners and so forth were toys that couldn’t run anything larger than a small yacht, or run further than fifty light years. That left only a very few private hyperdrives, mostly cobbled together by enthusiastic amateurs who wanted to do much as his family had and explore uncharted space, and such units couldn’t be relied upon. Not even the one that had been in the Gooney.

Thus he’d known from the beginning that he had to build a true full sized hyperdrive from scratch, and planned accordingly. And he had to begin with a craft that was actually designed from the outset to use a hyperdrive, with the requisite space for the drive in the ship’s heart, and for the powerful antimatter generators, and the massive energy conduits already structured into the hull. The alternative was to design and build an entire ship from the ground up, and that would take years and given that he’d have had to build it in his family’s warehouses, it would have been monitored. Adding weapons, shields and a cloak would buy him some serious charges. So building the parts and finding a ship to fit them in had been his best option, and it seemed to be working.

The problem was that while he liked his handiwork, and he had used the stolen specs and theory from the latest explorers to be rolled off the line as his starting point, it had never been fully bench tested. Not as a whole unit. That could only be done in space. The drive’s first true bench test would be when he activated it the first time and left Federation space to begin his search. If it failed, that could very well be the end of his expedition and maybe his life.

Once all of that was done, or at least installed, he could begin work on the other systems. The new flight control and navigation systems. The updated computer network. The stealth field which would theoretically make the ship nearly impossible to target or lock. The cloak, which was his own variation on his family’s unique design and never tested even in practice. The thruster and pulse drive upgrades to make the ship quicker and more nimble in combat. The new sensor array and so forth.

And then there were things he would never be able to rebuild. The Bathsheequa had two dozen fighter craft, all presumably still in perfect condition as they’d never had the chance to fly in that final battle. But even if he upgraded their avionics and weaponry, there were no pilots for them. No more could he redo the mine laying capabilities of the ship. He had no mines, and the Bathsheequa’s were five centuries old. Explosives that age were likely to be unstable. He’d actually have to ditch them, rather than risk keeping them on board.

Bringing the battleship into the thirtieth century would be a major undertaking by anyone’s standards, and it would take anywhere up to a year normally. But he didn’t have a year. At best he had two months. The first month while he was, according to his pre-recorded flight plan, simply exploring the nearby system of K972B for valuable minerals. Add a week or two after that when first, after he didn’t return at the appointed time, the navy started to worry and called out a search party, and then a second couple of weeks when they started sniffing out the Goose’s pulse drive trail from K972B, and tracked him out here. Two months max. He had to be gone well before that.

The first of the mechs are on board Sir, and they’ve found some bodies. Bibby dragged him back to the moment as he informed him of their progress. For some reason he seemed surprised by the initial discovery.

Of course they’ve found bodies. This ship had a crew of over three hundred, and they were triple holed by Bengali insurgents before they could either fight or fly. I expect most of the crew will still be on board.

Yes, but what do we do with the bodies Sir? There it was, that one first question that showed he hadn’t truly thought everything out, and Chris couldn’t help but know a moment of doubt. He’d expected to find bodies, but never troubled himself with the question of what to do about them. He just hoped it wasn’t a sign of things to come. Fortunately, this time at least the answer was obvious.