Hubris and flame

“There weren’t always dragons in the valley.” The old man muttered to Hektor.

Hektor shrugged at him. Who cares? All that matters is that there are dragons now. Ten tons of flame breathing nightmare that can fly. The fact that humanity’s biggest problem was entirely their own fault is neither here or there. No one thinks oh, the irony, as the flesh melts off their bones, or they get thrown from ten thousand feet to the uncaring ground below, or stomped on and turned into human hamburger patty or macerated alive. Caveman nightmare 101. Imagine if you could go back in time and tell those proto-humans clustered in their caves around their fires, good news! Your descendants will have the technology to colonise other worlds, but colonising other worlds is hard. No one wants to spend years in cryostasis, then spend their life mining bauxite if they don’t die from a variety of agonising and frequently embarrassing ways. So, some billionaire had the bright idea to make attractions. Then he had the equally bright idea to make dragons. Proper dragons. That was all good, until he bought cheap real estate to build a dragon zoo and breeding laboratory. He didn’t decide to question why the land was cheap, and the people selling the land decided not to raise an objection to building a zoo on tectonically unstable land. Guess what happened, oh smelly ones. Please stop hitting me with your club.

Hektor sighed. It’s not the old man’s fault. Getting the colonists there with food and tools and what have you, is expensive but as it’s the aim of the game to get people there, and then keep them alive. Funny as it would be to get them all the way to the alien planet then have them freeze to death in a giant naked pile, the amount of money it would take to do so would cause a massive recession back on earth. Keeping people alive, fed, warm, and healthy is the aim of the game. Educated? Less so. Every day spent in a classroom is a day not spent in the soybean field, the copper mines, or maintaining the sonic fences and as such, was an economic black hole. Hektor wished fervently he could say that Humanity had some manner of futuristic post scarcity moment of coming together and realising the long-term game is providing a future for the children, and thus the species. However, in that future, he’d snuggled up warm in an observatory and charting stars and no one would have had the bright idea to make dragons, because colonising a new world was hard enough. The reality: Humanity was plagued by dragons, and had waves of uneducated colonists who knew nothing that wasn’t required; the germination cycles of neo-wheat, what the various bellows of Aurochs meant, and to call on the dragon hunters when entire fields of cattle represented the horrors of the Vietnam war.

He remembered his training as the old man wittered on about the last time there had been dragons in the valley hundreds of years ago. There were three kinds of dragons, he recalled, mostly because there wasn’t time to make more before the earthquake made the whole containment centre so much twisted rubble. Green dragons: least aggressive, had spawns of up to six and mostly lived in peace, unless you happened to go near their nests. Then they’d burn everything they saw in a blind rage. Yellow dragons were solitary beasts that would strike targets of opportunity, but always kept moving. Thin, small and wiry, (by dragon standards) they’d only go near humans when injured, and like most animals, they were most dangerous when injured. Red dragons were trouble. Big. Aggressive. Lots of flame. Only went near humans when they had gotten a taste for human meat, were hungry, or frankly who knew. You saw one of them, you were in a lot of trouble, even for dragon standards. They’re also the only dragon type to eat other dragons, most times their own spawn, but sometimes other dragons if they felt like it. Purple dragons were rare crossbreeds between a male green dragon and a red female. There were three confirmed sightings but none of them near human territory. Of course, the real danger are the hypothetical militarised variants, but so far none of them seem to have survived in the wild. Hektor prayed fervently no one had been stupid enough to try and militarise a dragon, which by itself, was already pretty bloody militarised.

He appreciated the hospitality of the village right enough though. A chance to dry his socks by a fire instead of the usual mixture of suffering, bowel opening terror and nights spent in the open fields chasing ghosts or crashed satellites. He kept a diary on how many missed calls they’d had, but it was irregular given that he personally thought it would only come to attention by whoever found his burnt corpse, or was going through a colossal poo and found his miraculously unburnt, undigested diary, and was able to read it. Then they’d have to give it to someone who wouldn’t use it to wipe their bottom with it, or as a firelighter. Or one then the other. He hated to imagine the last act that he’d perform on this galaxy would be being pouring his thoughts out into a treatise on dragonhunting, only for them to crinkle up on some shepherd’s firepit or rot in the bottom of the outhouse…

As the smoke idly billowed up, he wondered what those back on earth, safe in their hive-blocks or rad-reclamation tents, would think about all of the poo. In a frontier world, it was everywhere. And the smell. Occasionally, you get somewhere where it doesn’t smell like poo, and you breathe it in for just long enough, enjoying the fact that faecal micro-particles aren’t flooding your nose and mouth, and get used to it. Then, you go back to what was called civilisation out here on the frontier and yep: poo. Poo in your mouth and nose. On your shoes, your trousers. Fermenting in your gut. Nothing but poo. You know what they use for soap here? Out on the frontier they were right back to lathering with soap made from rendered animal fat, or if you were like Hektor and cared about personal hygiene, soap made primarily from olive oil. It’s the space age, and my toothbrush is made from horse bristles, he thought idly. I use charcoal and ground up mint for toothpaste, and my soap comes from a small farm out near Agricola, the capital. They mix rose-water in with it sometimes, at a price that damn near no one can afford and I pray for the day that there’s a dragon attack near the capital, purely so that I can ask for some as a favour. What’s a ‘can I smell nice’ when I bring down a mountain of angry flesh? He sighed and tried to get back on track with whatever the old man was talking about.

Some question about the dragon hunter’s armour. Hektor started the usual spiel. “One thing is immune to dragon fire and that’s dragon-skin, which is what gives it its value.” He started.

“The result being, we both look beautiful and expensive. Dragon-scale lamellar with a ballistic kevlar underweave. Kevlar is good for stopping bullets and fire in equal measure. It really is the miracle plastic. Can only be made on Earth truth be told.” He stopped talking, the old man was clearly confused.

The clothes on our back, from the bottom of our cat-grip boots, to our hardtop helmets, all the way down to our all-terrain cloaks, are worth more than this village will see in a generation, Hektor reminded himself. We’re a volunteer army of overly-educated professors, researchers, wanderers, dreamers. When we woke up, blinking on the new world, the new dawn, we got told that our places of work were ash, and that the tame pets of our forebears were out. No one needs an art professor when the rice fields are all that stand between life and death. The monsters were loose. The enemy was at the gate. The armour might seem to be something out of the medieval age in technological terms, but the weaponry was cutting edge space tech. It needed to be. Dragons are not invincible, but damn if they aren’t close. So yes, Hektor hated the dragons. But he hated more what they represented more: the selfishness and needless decadence of a capitalistic society that was perpetually coming close to exterminating humanity.

Like clockwork, the headman asked about weaponry. Hektor rolled his eyes mentally and started that spiel. “Mag-rifles are the mainstay. Twenty-nine in the clip and one in the spout. Sends a magnetic stud at mach-one through whatever you damn well want, unless it’s covered in proper dragon scale. They won’t do much but annoy a dragon unless it’s in the eye or the underbelly, but to be honest, that’s the purpose.”

Silence from his audience. He decided to simplify things.

“One of them is like a fly against a knight in full plate armour. Three or four of them, meanwhile, present a more credible threat. Dragons can only defend themselves from two places, their front and their back. Teamwork was the order of the day. Beyond a lucky shot from a mag-rifle, which is rare but not unknown, the main way to kill them is twofold: the first is a shot from a hand-held laser-cannon.” That got a rumble of conversation going. Everyone loved the laser cannons.

Hektor knew that the cannons were carcinogenic, unreliable, fiddly weapons whose one redeeming feature was that they were fully capable of killing a dragon. It would punch through a dragon’s breast-plate, and the breastbone underneath, all the way into the vitals, no problem. The only other way is to kill them whilst they’re sleeping and put a nano-tech blade into its throat, behind an ear, or into its eye. Both ways have problems. The laser-cannons fire one shot. Cripple a dragon without getting a kill shot, it will let you know about it: killing you in a violent but at least usually mercifully quick way. The screams of comrades he’d heard as they were torn in two or swallowed alive, burnt to a crisp in an agonisingly slow way – armour gives you a chance and protects you from glancing blows only. Nothing on god’s green earth protects you from a full on hit of dragonfire. Its why some of his comrades went into battle dressed in nothing but shorts and a t-shirt.

One of his best friends survived twenty-three years in a favela back on earth, four years as a hunter of dragons, only to die in agony from an infected cut from a rose bush. Soap, people, soap.

He held up his hands for silence, far away from that unmarked grave.

“Now imagine you’ve snuck into a dragon’s nest. Forget the smell of poo, dragons line their nest not with gold but the bones and meat of their former prey. Even an Auroch bull will do little to satiate a hungry dragon. Us humans are merely an annoyance, until they get a taste for us, which they surely do. Or, some of the oldest dragons remember the indignities we put them under when they were but juveniles. They hate us. Imagine sneaking past the bodies of hundreds of cattle, tens of human skeletons, all mashed together and chewed, the charcoal and burnt dirt crunching under foot, knife in your hand and prayer on your lips as you sneak towards the dragon, covered head to toe in dragon pheromones. You stink, the place stinks, the dragon’s breath smells of death, fire, and blood. It sniffs, nostrils widening. You stand perfectly still, praying to whatever god you believe in, to keep those eyelids, each easily the size of an industrial dinner plate, not to open. They do, the lizard pupil dilating then narrowing as it looks at you first with surprise, then hatred. You can run, and die. Close your eyes, and die. Pray, and die. Run at it and die like a hero, but still die. All you’ve done is given the dragon a free meal. THAT, my friends is why you call us to do this job.” He gave a grin to the audience. Shocked silence. In the background, a child started to cry. Hektor sat down awkwardly.

“There weren’t always dragons in the valley.” The old man muttered to him, again. The headman of the village. This remote village, this lone bastion of humanity on an anaemic valley up near the volcano fields, had been missed by the dragons sometimes. Great. Good for them.

Hektor nodded and looked around. He was sitting in the low long table with all the head of households of the village in their Sunday best. ‘Table.’ A lump of wood that had been mistreated by some particularly drunk carpenters. The fare was served on plastic plates that had been washed so many times they’d lost all colour and were different shades of beige. The cutlery in question were crude metal affairs. Apparently, the originals were stolen years back.

Hektor hated dragons, but they were symbolic of a far wider problem. The rich idiots who made them, the dumbos who sold them cheap land, the fact that an off-world colony needed attractions beyond the thrill of the frontier, the just… everything. Everything about this situation that he had been in when he was dragged from the landing pad and given a rifle instead of a pen and paper. He couldn’t blame the idea of attractions, given what happened to those poor bastards in the first lunar colony, or the lawless territories of the free states of neo-feudal Mars, colony ship Chrysanthemum disappearing without a trace and the notorious panic that those drunk students had caused on Alpha Centauri, building a temple in the north pole of the planet, ‘discovering’ it, and claiming it was a sacred site of an alien species. He wasn’t saying they deserved to be executed, but he had to admit that nothing of that ilk had happened since. He remembered one of his geography lectures. Life is all about what you can do, and how it will affect the surrounding environment. As a species, nation, person. He could talk to people, despite how bad they smell, how inedible their food is, and how far they’ve regressed from their highly educated astronaut ancestors in five or six generations. This affects the surrounding environment because they grow to like him and his comrades, who are as bitter about their fate as he was, but did a far worse job of hiding it, and because they like us, they don’t try to kill us in our sleep for our boots, our clothes, our weapons, our food, or because someone looked at a woman, temple, or local knickknack the wrong way. Watching a world renowned xeno-biologist bleed to death because he’d slept with a farmer’s daughter and died in a field with a knife in his belly had caused Hektor to use this skill and thus change the environment. Where once dragon hunters were seldom trusted outlaws, far too fancy for the villages, far too educated and anti-social to fit in with good tax-paying country dwellers, now, by accepting hospitality, and talking to filthy illiterates who sprayed him with breath that reeks of locally brewed beer, the environment changed.

Through an awkward evening of crude sexual advances, and offers of payment in livestock, he began to get a picture of events. The local doctor, who was the only person in the village to have any sort of education before she was sent here from the planetary hospital in Agricola, mans a radio for the unreliable weather report, news, and dragon report. She was making her rounds on an elderly couple who worked a particularly squalid strip of land, right near the sonic fence when she found that all wasn’t well. Their sheep, for what else could you grow up near the border, were fine. The elderly couple were charcoaled skeletons, and judging from the boards over their windows, had known they were in trouble before they actually were killed. Credit where credit was due, she’d raised the alarm, and the villagers had utilised their crude knowledge to check the sonic fence.

Hektor stopped her there. A village with a population this small, this far removed from the towns, shouldn’t have a sonic fence. She shrugged her shoulders. Hektor asked the headman when this village had been built. He shrugged too and said his great grandfather had said it had been old, but he didn’t know anything more than that. Hektor jumped up, all excited. This rustic longhouse that he was in, was actually an ancient drop-ship, that had once been filled with the best of humanity, and advanced scientific and medical equipment. This longhouse had fallen from the sky, and the colonists had stepped onto a new world. No cryo-sleep for them, no support network. It was live or die. He looked up at what he had thought had been a painted ceiling but now he could see where the resource pods had disconnected, where the laboratories had been. Any detail was lost from decades of smoke from cooking fires.

Everyone was looking at him out of surprise, and the headman asked out of fear if he’d done something wrong, if they weren’t meant to have a fence. His moment of jubilation was lost and he sat down, trying not to show his depression. He probably did a miserable job of it. Desperate to save the mood souring, he told the headman what this place had once been. The doctor got the gist of his mood: would those original colonists have come if they could see that this is what it would devolve to?

The next day, after a fitful night’s sleep in a dilapidated pre-fab barn, Hektor and his comrades went dragon-hunting. He reflected briefly that not a one of them didn’t have at least a degree and the most educated has two PHDs. The fact they were all so educated meant that they eschewed typical military discipline and replaced it with trust. They trusted each other to not get them all killed. They trusted each other to bury their shattered or immolated remains into the deep soil so that they could perform a last act of colonisation: giving the soil our nutrients, instead of ripening under the baking sun or freezing snow. Dragon Company north numbered fifteen and three companies that Hektor knew of. Five of them in this village, the others elsewhere. Hektor was officially first officer, which wasn’t worth much as titles went. Captain Laghari swore in Hindi when she looks at the crude map that he had drawn. She should have been an import/export officer. Of a planet. She hated the countryside; she hated talking to people but she did enjoy finding new and exotic uses for a kirpan. Damn near every colonist carries a knife these days. It’s a million in one tool. Full marks to the Gurus of medieval India, you saw ahead, Hektor thought wryly. She and John McDougal talk about the differences between a Sgian-Dubh and a Kirpan. New frontier: old rules. Carry steel.

He pondered that cultural quagmire until they found what they were looking for. Leading a village posse, most of them armed with crude breach loading rifles or pastoral shotguns. Hektor had Mike and Luigi bury their charcoaled skeletons. The bodies were in the usual posture: curled up in fear. It looked like the man had a domestically produced shotgun and had tried to go out unquietly. The doorway, where the door had been wrenched off the hinges and flung to the floor, the wooden boards burnt through, was spattered with buckshot all over the place. It seemed he’d had an effect too. Hektor saw blood spatter in the dirt outside his doorstep. He’d died defending his home. Good on him. His wife had hidden in the storage cellar and died nevertheless. Hektor had them buried together, then wished he knew something to say. What was it that made intelligent people eschew religion? Religion didn’t care where you were or how you died. Intelligence did.

Hektor gave them the age-old Dylan Thomas line: “Rage, Rage against the dying of the light.”

The others had clustered around, local doctor included. It had started to rain. No one said anything for quite some time. Then Hektor said what needed saying.

“What dragon kills the farmers, doesn’t eat them and leaves the livestock alone?”

Silence. Five experienced dragon hunters. Not a damn one of them had seen something like this. Captain Laghari shot him a warning look.

Luigi Ricci, who should have been researching colonist philosophy and then sending his findings back to Earth suddenly decided to chip in: “Greener who had its nest threatened.”

He snorted and rolled his eyes in a theatrical fashion. The farmers all grinned along and nudged each other, like Hektor was the dimmest pupil who’d forgotten a particularly simple fact. Or soiled himself. Except as Hektor made eye contact with Captain Laghari, she knew as damn well as Hektor did that this was uncharted territory. And anyone on a frontier knows damn well that the uncharted territory is where a lot of people die.

The sonic fence was five metres tall, each pylon able to shrink thanks to a control box in the base, and the transducer, that is to say, converter, switches off automatically for maintenance reasons. If you can hear about eighteen thousand hertz, and no human can, boy would you not want to be around here. Most settlements this size, they should have a generator somewhere around here for the fence. These things are effective but they suck up juice like an alcoholic before the holidays. Most towns will have wind generators built into these things, but they’ll have a hydro-plant or a solar farm to rely on for their mainstay energy. This fence, Hektor believed, ran on the original micro-fission generator that would have powered the drop-ship.

It wasn’t difficult to find it. It had been buried at the top of the hill. Away, outside of the terraforming zone, nothing but bleak ash covered hills and, in the distance, more active volcanoes. In the far distance, something flew around. A red dragon probably, hunting titanic lava worms. Sorry, lava worms, Hektor thought, but thanks for existing outside of humanity’s influence, or else we’d likely be dead, as would all of the dragons, too. The world would return to its natural state, aside from the odd ruin giving light to the fact that once, there had been a species blessed in intelligence but sorely lacking wisdom.

The generator must once have been a beautiful testament to humanity’s ability to make any tool to solve any problem. Now it was a hole in the ground. Someone had found the overgrown maintenance panel and dug it up. Or something. The dragon. The dragon dug it up. There were claw marks everywhere. Except there wasn’t a trace of the generator.

The dragon hunters, Hektor, Luigi, Michael, John and Captain Laghari formed a huddle around that hole, deeper than any grave.

“There’s two options that I can see.” Laghari began. “The first is that someone has domesticated a dragon.” Everyone gave wry grins. No one domesticated a dragon.

“The other is that there’s an intelligent beasty out there. An anomaly class, with a sizeable grudge against humans. Frankly, who can blame it. All bets are off. We need to get everyone the hell out of here.” The others nodded, vigorously.

Hektor hated himself for what he said next. But it needed saying and he couldn’t stop himself. “Captain, if there’s nothing powering the fence… what’s keeping the dragon out of the valley?”

The nearest hillock let out a whump. Pebbles cascaded downwards, clack, clack, clacking in their thousands like the piano from hell. Then nothing happened at all, despite the rapt attention of the dragon hunters, and beyond them, the peasant posse. Minutes passed. Nothing. Just a quirk of the planet’s unstable geography. Hektor wept for the data that event must have generated going unrecorded.

Laghari turned to them all, kirpan in one hand, bullpup mag-rifle in the other. “John, get the laser cannon set up in the generator’s hole. Luigi, get the other on the crest of the hill over there. Hektor, get the farmers spread out in a firing line, best you can. Behind the crest of the hill, that’ll give them some cover. Mike, you’re with me. I’ll go right, you go left. We are receiving visitors.”

“Captain!” Hektor began. Words weren’t necessary here.

The hill exploded. Well, it simply… ceased existing. A dragon, black as the coals of hell, save for two yellowed eyes, and big. Big as the fear of a man trapped at the top of a burning house trying not to feel the inevitable creeping flames. Its wings flapped out wide, maybe a hundred feet, maybe more. Rocks went everywhere. A farmer went down, his brainpan scattered all over his comrades from a rock that had been going at a hundred miles an hour. Hektor felt pebbles bounce off his armour and almost everyone was knocked from their feet. He saw the dragon looking at them with its giant inhuman eyes and that look clearly conveyed one emotion: hate. Dragons didn’t hate. It leapt from the crater it had created and flew straight towards them.

The dragon hunters were all in full armour, helmets included. They had trained for this. They were able to get to their feet and take up the positions the captain had ordered. Hektor ran towards the farmers, trying to ready his weapon.

The farmers were unarmoured, untrained and unprotected. Hektor saw a man spitting out shattered teeth from an equally shattered jaw, a man lying dead because his comrade had pulled the trigger of his shotgun as he’d gone over, a woman lying in a foetal position, trying to shut out that was going on around her.

He bellowed at them to follow him. Some looked at him. A few turned and ran, dropping their weapons. He saw a tall woman blow her own foot off as she dropped her loaded rifle. He shook his head and roared at them to follow him.

Dragons could never speak. They were dumb, albeit lethal, beasts. So, when this dragon screamed “Die!” at the top of its considerable lungs, the effect was manifested on the peasant farmers. Those that could ran. Those that couldn’t, huddled or in more than a few cases were trampled.

He turned to look at this anomalous, intelligent beasty. He had seconds before it closed the distance. He remembered how the old folks had looked, curled up in their house. Afraid. He prided himself in being intelligent. All dragon hunters did.

He remembered what he’d said over that old couple’s grave. “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

Pointlessly, he sighted the dragon – how could he miss? – and opened fire. Captain Laghari and Mike had already been doing so. None of it had the slightest effect. The beast was so black, so dark, it seemed to block out the sun. the dark was coming and death came with it. A laser burst narrowly missed its left wing. Incensed, the beast howled and shot purple fire at Luigi. The screams indicated the dragon hadn’t missed.

His magazine out, Hektor knelt and began to reload. The dragon landed maybe thirty feet in front of him, right in front of John who still hadn’t fired. Hektor slammed the clip in with a grunt of satisfaction, raised his rifle and watched as John popped out of the hole and pointed the laser cannon.

“Pull the trigger, damn you.” Hektor begged him.

John did. The shot turning the black heart-plate of the dragon the deepest purple instead of all consuming black. Not that he lived long enough to enjoy hitting his target. The dragon ripped his head and shoulders off, arms trailing feebly as the dragon ate it whole. The brief sight of human flesh macerated… Hektor almost vomited. He looked at his gun, then at the monster. There was no way he could kill this thing. He fell onto his back, eyes wide.

Someone kicked him in the side of the head. He saw Mike and the captain. The dragon was busy eating what was rest of John, dragonscale armour or no.

Laghari and Mike got him to his feet. The dragon looked up.

“Get out of here, gentlemen. Tell them what you saw. Tell them what this thing is.” Laghari seemed quite calm as she stripped of all gear bar her armour and her kirpan. “Tell them it is weak by the heart.” Mike nodded and ran.

“Captain, I can’t.” Hektor said. “I can’t leave you!”

Laghari slapped him. Hard. “Obey your damn order and run!”

The dragon belched flame their way and began to crawl, horribly fast in their direction. “Run, damn you!” Laghari pushed him.

Hektor ran. He heard the dragon scream, defiance tinged with pain, and then he heard it take off above him. He saw Mike die, that slow agonising death of being a human candle as he burned inside his armour, the smell of good pork. He saw the river ahead and jumped into it, regardless of how fast it flowed or how deep it was. As he fell, he saw the dragon retreat, a handle, glittering, stuck right above the heart.

Then the shockingly cold water had him, and he was lost.