CHAPTER 12
Brianne had never subscribed to the idea of “guilty pleasures.” She thought it was archaic to think that pleasure, enjoying oneself, was any reason to feel guilty. It was a relic of a time when humans living on Earth were superstitious and bent on conformity, and it had no place in modern thinking.
Still and all, the Quist brothers now had her in a place where she could not help feeling at least a little bit like a “bad girl.” She spent the rest of the morning out on the terrace with them, lying in the sun and letting them hump her within a happy inch of her life. After lunch, she did manage to spend the afternoon in the lab taking her turn monitoring Damara. But after dinner, the brothers talked her—hardly needing much effort—into letting them take her out to see more of their city. This, of course, with a promise of what they would resume doing to her in bed later that night.
Greenscale at night was a truly charming place. Actually being in its streets rather than seeing it from up high on a mountainside, Brianne thought it looked more like something out of an ancient fairy tale or fantasy story than like a community on a planet colonized by space travelers. In a way, it was the perfect place for dragons to live. At night the lantern drones came out: floating robots in the shape of glowing circular orbs.
They drifted and hovered along the streets and between the buildings like dozens of full moons making graceful passage through the air. They lit up the exposed upper floors and rooftops of the structures built into the ground and cast their glow upon the places built into mighty boulders and into the hillsides. They shone up into the boughs of the trees between which bridges were built to connect arboreal dwellings. Technological as it was, it all looked so magical, and as Donar and Conran escorted her into the city, Brianne could not help but feel enchanted by it all.
The brothers took her to dinner at an outdoor cafe in front of a bistro that looked whimsically like the top of a gigantic toadstool—another thing that made Brianne feel as if she were in a fairy tale. Dinner was as delicious as the setting was charmingly whimsical. After dessert, Conran and Donar escorted her out again to see more of the local scenery.
They came to a place where a wide circular lawn was enclosed by a ring of stones, forming a kind of stage. People were sitting and standing around it, and at one arc a band was tuning up to play. A performance was about to begin, and Brianne and brothers stopped to see what kind of show it would be. Donar explained that such shows went on here every night, with no announcement of who would be playing or what they would be doing.
Each night brought some surprise. Brianne guessed that this was a place where the brothers often came when they entered the city in the evening. This was probably where they met many of the females who presently ended up in their bed. She did not bring up any of this to Donar or Conran, but as they took their place in the gathering circle of people about the performance lawn, Brianne searched the faces of all the women present to see who was looking in the direction of her escorts, and who perhaps was showing some sign of recognition of them.
Brianne thought it was a bit irrational to feel jealous or threatened by women she had not met, whose names she did not know, who might not even be present tonight. And yet, she had her suspicions, though she would keep them to herself as long as the females on the scene did not start hovering about like the lantern drones.
Soon, to the greeting of a round of applause, four graceful nude performers, two males and two females, stepped out of a nearby tent that Brianne took to be a dressing room of sorts. The four of them were partly morphed, with wings and tails having emerged from their backs. They took their place in the center of the circle of grass and took an initial bow. Brianne was curious to note that their bodies, wings and tails and all, were partially painted in swirling bands of color, and more fascinated when the painted parts of their bodies lit up with throbbing and strobing colors.
She smiled, realizing that the body paint contained the kind of luminescent glitter that would shift its colors and patterns with the way the bodies wearing them moved. Brianne understood that she was about to see one of the most popular types of performance art on Lacerta: an aurora dance.
The band struck up and the music wafted out over the scene, and the aurora dancers started to move with the flow of the notes. They spread out over the grass and each one went into his or her own routine, swaying and circling and bending, sometimes leaping, moving about in the green circle. They spread and folded their wings to keep pace with the tempo and beat of the music and did likewise with the twist and curl of their tails.
Accenting their movements, they let their horns grow and let their scales appear and recede and reappear, moving up and down their bodies and adding to the display of lights that pulsed and glowed along their flesh. It was a mesmerizing art they practiced, looking like phantoms of light somewhere on the cusp between human and dragon. Brianne watched in rapt fascination…
…until, along with the music of the performance, she heard a trilling from the sleeve of her jumpsuit top.
Donar and Conran heard it as well. They looked over at her, curious. The name Burton appeared in letters of light on her cuff, and she mouthed to the brothers, I’d better take this. Excusing herself, she stepped away, out of the audience, over to a place under a tree where it was a little quieter. Then, with a tap on her sleeve, she answered the call.
Burton’s face appeared holographically in front of her. From his expression Brianne could tell that something was very, very wrong. Her colleague looked shaken—badly shaken. She had a feeling both hot and freezing in her chest as they talked.
The performance had ended, and the audience was applauding by the time Brianne returned to the brothers. Before the sound of the applause died down, the twins could see from Brianne’s expression that the call she had taken was not merely a routine check-in. Brianne looked alarmed—worse than alarmed. Her look was one of horror and near panic.
Nervously, Conran asked, “What’s happening? What’s wrong?”
Her voice cracking with pain and fear, Brianne answered in a chilling tone. “It’s terrible. I…I don’t even know what it is, except…”
Edgily, Donar pressed, “What? Tell us, what?”
“Something happened, back at the habitat and the lab. There were intruders. They…they
did…something…and…” She could hardly bring herself to finish her thought, but she forced out the most dreadful words she could possibly say or that Donar and Conran could possibly hear. “They took the cralowog. They got into the lab and knocked out Burton and Sondra. And they got into the conservatory and took Damara! She’s gone! Damara is gone!”
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At the same time as Brianne, Donar, and Conran appeared at the mansion, someone else arrived. Burton and Sondra had already called the Knights of Lacerta, and the Spires—the place in the planetary capital where the Knights were trained, from which they were all issued their orders—had sent two of Lacerta’s champions to investigate the intrusion on the Quist property and the taking of the cralowog.
Dame Meline Gable and Sir Voran Sutter, clad in red, black, and silver armor skins, accompanied Brianne and the brothers directly to the lab. Meline, a green-eyed redhead, and Voran, a virile young man with deep blue eyes and light brown hair, got directly to business.
The two other biologists, Brianne, and her two benefactors sat around a table in the lab while the two Knights stood and listened to Burton and Sondra’s account of what happened, reiterating in anxious, shaken, and somber tones what Burton told Brianne earlier.
“Everything was fine. Nothing was out of the ordinary,” said Sondra, her hands clasped on the table before her. “Damara had climbed up into the trees to rest for the night—typical cralowog behavior. We didn’t expect it to be an eventful night. Then—it started. The holographic systems connecting the lab to the habitat shut off.
We couldn’t get an image from any part of the conservatory. We couldn’t get anything back on line. We tried to call out to Brianne, but we couldn’t get a signal to transmit out of the lab. We realized then that something was very wrong. Burton decided we should go out of the lab, call Brianne, get some help. We headed for the door, and then…”
Burton picked up, “…someone was already at the door. But…not exactly someone.”
“Yes,” said Meline, remembering the report received at the Spires. “It wasn’t anyone human, or Lacertan. Or, technically, alive.”
“An android,” Burton grimly confirmed. “Grey body, no facial features except for black eyes with red electronic pupils. Had to be an android.”
A beat of tense silence took hold of the room. Androids were, so to speak, persona non grata on the planet Lacerta right now. Artificial organisms were held in profound suspicion and distrust, however irrational that might be, after the attempted invasion of the Scodax in which the aliens used automatons as soldiers. Since then, the only way anyone on Lacerta wanted to see an android was to look at the parts of deactivated Scodax androids on display in museums in the wake of the invasion crisis.
Brianne watched Meline for her reaction to this detail. Meline Gable had battled alongside Sir Thrax Helmer against the Scodax. She had helped Sir Thrax and Agena Morrow defeat the Scodax and put an end to their assault on the planet. She had personally met Scodax androids in combat. This dragon Dame had prior experience in battling artificial adversaries. Brianne found Meline’s presence at least a bit reassuring.
“This android doesn’t answer the same description as the ones the Scodax used,” Meline noted. “So, we can assume, at least until we know better, that this doesn’t have anything to do with them. The Scodax aren’t the only beings in the galaxy who use androids. Other planets use them for soldiers or laborers or any number of other purposes. In some parts of space, they’re illegal and traded on the Black Market. Considering the circumstances, we could be dealing with Black Market automatons. But go on, go over the rest.”
“The rest,” continued Burton, “was I saw a flash of light and felt something like a fist slamming into my stomach. I was shot with some kind of force beam and I blacked out.”
“The android did the same thing to me,” Sondra added. “We were out for a little while, maybe half hour or a little more. And when we came to, the android was gone, and all systems were back up again, as if nothing happened. Except outside…something had happened.”
Sir Voran called, “Computer, display present status of the conservatory habitat.”
A series of holograms glittered to life over the table. They showed the place in the dome where the entrance portal and a large section of the transparent enclosure were gone, simply sliced away, leaving the huge dome wide open for anything to enter or exit. They showed the place among the trees near the lake where large limbs and whole branches lay broken, shattered, and strewn on the ground. It was a heart-sinking sight.
“From the looks of things,” said Voran, “there must have been more than one intruder, a group of them, likely all androids. They disintegrated the entrance to the dome, entered the habitat, found where the cralowog was sleeping in the trees, and brought it down—apparently after a struggle, judging from the condition of those tree limbs. They captured the cralowog and took it away.”
Brianne’s voice was laden with anguish. “But where? Where could they have taken her, and why? What do they want with Damara? Who could have done this?” She looked down helplessly at her own hands on the table. Donar and Conran were deeply stung to see her in such a state of fear and dread; stung and angry at whoever had done this to her. The intrusion onto their property and the theft of the animal made them feel violated enough. But to see what this was doing to Brianne was almost more than either of the twins could bear.
Conran was the first to speak up, putting out one word, one name. “Xorian.”
All eyes turned to Conran. Donar nodded while Meline repeated, “Xorian?”
Donar said, “Our uncle, Xorian Quist. When you received the report from Dr. Hawkes and Dr. Kimura, you might have seen reports from a couple of Mentors who were here at a reception for Brianne…”
“Yes,” Meline remembered, “we did see a notation about that. It seems your Uncle Xorian was here and there was an altercation with you, and the Mentors escorted him off the premises. No charges were filed…”
“We didn’t want to file any charges,” Conran said bitterly, “because we were tired of the bad press about Uncle Xorian from before. I spent a good part of that night personally doing damage control with the media about his interruption of our reception.”
“From before,” said Meline. “The charges of illegal hunting on other planets, of interplanetary poaching of wildlife, against him and his sons.”
“Right,” Conran frowned. “Those charges, which cast a shadow over our entire nest. We disowned Xorian and our cousins over that. They are not welcome on any of the family properties. They have no further shares of the Quist fortune but what they personally earned—or what the Commonwealth didn’t confiscate after they were brought up on charges. We have nothing to do with them anymore.”
“Except,” Donar added, “it looks like they still wanted something to do with us.”
Barely containing her growing horror, Brianne asked the twins, “You think your uncle had something to do with taking Damara?”
“It’s the obvious first place to look,” replied Conran.
“I agree,” said Meline. “Wherever the trail leads, I think it starts with him. To get some answers, that’s the first place we need to go.”
Brianne bolted up from her seat. “Then we need to go to Xorian. Now. We need to confront your uncle and get the answers we need out of him. I want to know who took Damara and I want her returned, safe and unharmed. Immediately.” The tension in the room went up several notches as everyone watched Brianne shaking with fury and fear. Donar reached out and touched her on the arm, to calm her. It did not help. Brianne was looking right at the Knights, demanding action.
“We can get Xorian Quist’s address right now,” said Meline. “We’ll go and question him immediately.”
Donar gave Brianne’s arm a squeeze, trying to reassure her. She looked down at him and Conran, and a knot of sympathetic anger twisted in both of them to see her, angry and heartsick, her lip quivering—with tears of mixed fear and fury welling up in her eyes.