58
Orion
“Ammu?”
“Yes, Rush? Samantha? Is something wrong?” They found him inside the meeting room, chatting amiably with an attractive middle-aged woman about the military strategies of Alexander the Great.
“No! No, nothing’s wrong. We just wanted you to see the launch pad. Through the telescopes. It’s very exciting.” Rush gave Ammu a meaningful stare.
“Very exciting,” Sam echoed.
“Of course,” Ammu said.
He turned to excuse himself from the conversation, but the woman had already taken advantage of their arrival to disappear into the crowd, apparently preferring less historical chit-chat. Rush ignored Ammu’s look of disappointment, grabbing the man by the sleeve and shepherding him out to the observation deck, practically shoving him toward the nearest telescope.
“Rush? What—”
“Look,” Rush interrupted him, pointing imperiously to the device while Sam stood by his side, nodding adamantly.
Ammu looked through the viewfinder and then stood up slowly.
“I believe it is time for us to move to the seventh-floor observation deck. Help me gather the others, if you would be so kind.” He said it easily, even cheerfully, as though there were nothing whatsoever out of the ordinary about either the request or the reason behind it.
“How much time until the launch?” Rush asked.
“Thirteen minutes,” Sam replied, her voice tense, the stress of their predicament welling up within her as she fought to maintain a casual front.
Gathering the others and moving upstairs: three minutes. Performing a summoning: one minute, minimum. That leaves nine minutes to figure out what to summon and use it to get rid of that thing, if we even can.
Sam’s mind performed the time calculations as naturally as breathing, whether she wanted to or not. As it happened, she did not, in this particular case, want to know that they had nine minutes to work with before the Orion test flight—the manned Orion test flight—exploded on the launch pad, or worse. But she was right, nonetheless.
It took exactly three minutes to gather everyone back together, move up to the seventh floor, explain the situation to the others, and post Christina at the door so they wouldn’t be interrupted. The high, white terrace was the perfect size for a summoning, but that was the only thing Sam could think of that they had going in their favor, which didn’t seem like much under the circumstances.
“We’ve never summoned anything even remotely big enough to fight that thing,” Rush blurted out as soon as they were alone.
“We have one minute to summon something and another nine minutes to do something with it,” Sam said. “That’s it. So whatever we’re going to do, we have to do it fast.”
“How do you know it will wait until the launch?” Daniel demanded, his voice rising in desperation. “How do you know it’s not going to just rip the Orion to shreds like three seconds from now?”
“It won’t,” Sam declared. “Nine minutes. Trust me. We have time to fix it. I know we have time to fix it. I just don’t know how yet, but we have to figure it out. Now. Planning time counts, by the way.”
“It doesn’t matter what we decide to bring if we don’t have the pattern,” Kaitlyn protested. “It’s not like Ammu brought his book with him to this thing. The point was not to let them know what we can do!”
“I do not have the book,” Ammu confirmed.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sam almost yelled. “You’re not hearing me. I’m telling you, I know we have time to fix it—with what we have, here with us, right now—but we won’t for much longer if we don’t figure this out. Come on, people. What can we summon that has a chance against that thing?”
“This,” Sketch said bluntly, and he held out his art pad, pointing to the page he had been searching for. It was his drawing of Alexander’s tomb, but it wasn’t the tomb he was pointing at. It was the white dragon, standing on its rear legs next to the pyramid, facing down the black dragon on the other side.
“Yes!” Mackenzie shouted. “Sketch! You’re a genius!”
But Rush looked almost panic-stricken. “Guys, there’s no way I’d be able to control that thing. The pterolycos was almost enough to kill me.”
“You do not have to do this alone,” Ammu told him. Despite the urgency of the moment, his voice was serene, unflustered, as it always was, his confidence in them palpable. “I know you do not feel prepared for this, but I have seen the six of you do so much, accomplish so much, in such a short amount of time… you can do it, but you must do it together.”
“We’ll have to figure it out as we go,” Sam said. “We don’t have a choice. We have to start the summoning now. Gears, do you have it?”
“Yeah,” she confirmed, wide-eyed but trying to appear calm.
“Sketch,” Sam ordered, “give her something to draw with.”
Sketch dug a precious charcoal pencil out of his box and handed it over.
“We start here,” Mackenzie said, even as Kaitlyn was tracing out the summoning circle on the white floor with trembling hands. “Disco?”
“Ready,” he said.
Sam counted them in with no further discussion. “One… two… one, two, three, four!”
They moved around the circle efficiently, but the summoning had an inner rhythm to it that could not be hurried. The dance Mackenzie performed was the most beautiful yet, and Daniel sang as he had never sung before, his clarion tones ringing out into the morning air. As Kaitlyn approached the last rune, Sam called to Mackenzie.
“Just in front of the terrace, on my mark! Five… four… three… two… one… NOW!”
Sam threw her hands toward the empty air in front of the building, and a portal began to open before their eyes, suspended seven stories up in the sky, just beyond the edge of the terrace.
“Sketch?” she asked.
“Bring it,” he acknowledged.
The portal expanded to herculean proportions, and a tremendous white dragon emerged from it, turning to bow in the air before them, bellowing gloriously into the sky and glittering in the sun, its scales catching every ray of light as though they were covered in an impossibly fine mist.
“Oh!” Kaitlyn exclaimed, gasping in delight.
“Eight minutes,” Sam called out.
“We need to get it into fighting mode,” Mackenzie said, realizing immediately that the dragon had no idea there was an enemy waiting for it several miles away. “Daniel, can you do it?”
“But what about what happened last time?” Daniel protested. “There’s like a ton of people on the deck just three floors down.”
“It was a mistake last time,” Mackenzie reassured him. “We got it all riled up when there wasn’t anything for it to fight. This time, I know where to send it, and Sketch knows how to protect the people below us, just like he protected Miller. Right, Sketch?”
“Yeah,” Sketch agreed. He was already imagining a golden dome extending over the deck below them, and he sent the image from his mind to the dragon, just as he had with the pterolycos. Sketch knew for a fact that some of the people milling about on the fourth-floor observation deck were less than innocent, but he would protect them all, nonetheless.
“We’re ready,” Mackenzie told Daniel. “Do it.”
“OK. Here goes nothing…”
Daniel reached out with his mind for the dragon’s summoning song and then imagined what it would feel like when it was energized. He heard the change in the melody immediately, heard the faster rhythm, heard the way the notes surged in power. He thought the music toward the dragon, and it screamed and rippled in the daylight, every one of its glittering scales igniting before their eyes into a brilliant, fiery gold, blazing like the sun.
Immediately, Mackenzie heard the dragon’s request in her mind, coming through almost as clearly as though it had spoken. Where? She sent back the image of the launch pad, including both distance and direction, and the dragon turned a graceful somersault in the air, forming a momentary ring of fire as its body circled around on itself and sped away.
They rushed to the telescopes along the deck to see what was happening. Precious moments ticked by as the blazing dragon sped across the miles and finally found its prey, trumpeting its challenge at the black. Moving slowly, almost casually, the black dragon shimmered, covering itself in brutal, black armor with wicked spikes running all along its great length, from its head to its tail.
The snake-like creature unraveled its front quarters from the Orion craft, leaving its legs and tail wrapped around the larger rocket, unfurling its tremendous, bat-like wings, and screaming at their champion—a sickening screech that trailed out into a hiss. In return, they all felt the fiery dragon’s intention to slice the dark monster in half right where it sat.
“The astronauts!” Rush gasped. “It’s going to rip the Orion apart! I can’t stop it! It’s too powerful!”
“You do not have to command it,” Ammu said, grabbing Rush’s shoulders and turning the young man to face him squarely. “The six of you must be in partnership with the dragon. Not to control, but to advise. Do you think you just heard that scream with your ears from all those miles away? You heard it with your unconscious mind. We can communicate with it instantly, across any distance—we need only connect to it. Reach out to it, Rush. Help it. Give it the guidance it seeks. It must be calling out to you.”
In fact, Rush had felt it seeking out his will, his knowledge, from the moment it had started coming through the portal. He had been resisting the link, remembering what controlling the pterolycos had cost him, but now, trusting Ammu, he let down his defenses and opened his mind.
There are innocents here, Rush thought to it. They need your protection. You must be careful, or you will cause the very destruction we are trying to stop. He felt the dragon trying to understand him, realizing that Rush was requesting caution but not yet comprehending why. Braking hard on fiery wings, it pulled back from its dive, holding its position.
“It knows I’m worried about what it’s doing, but it doesn’t understand my words,” Rush told Ammu.
“But you did it!” Ammu exclaimed. “Your conscious minds do not speak the same language, but the unconscious mind can communicate feelings, intentions, images. Do you see? You have stopped it, without having to control it!”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t really help if we can’t tell it what it needs to know,” Rush protested. “It’s just sitting there while the clock ticks down!”
“Six and a half minutes,” Sam warned them.
“Wait,” Kaitlyn interjected. “You said we can communicate images, right?”
“Yeah,” Sketch answered her. “We can. Definitely.”
“Then let me try something.”
Closing her eyes, Kaitlyn saw in her mind an exploded-view drawing of the Orion craft, including the cockpit and its human occupants.
“Make the people gold,” Sketch advised her, guessing at her intention.
“Sorry?”
“The people in the rocket, that we’re warning it about. Make them gold. So it knows they’re on our team.”
“Oh!” Kaitlyn exclaimed. “Got it!”
She sent the image to the dragon, complete with golden astronauts, and the giant creature responded immediately, moving again, circling the Orion and its launch rocket warily, seeking a way to attack the beast without harming the craft.
“It understands!” Kaitlyn called out.
“Yeah, but it can’t find a way in,” Mackenzie said.
They watched as the blazing creature flitted in and out of range, swiping with a claw here, snapping at a wing there, slicing away at its enemy’s armor bit by bit. Its progress was painfully slow, but as the seconds dragged on, more and more thin lines of angry red light appeared on the black dragon’s hide, until it finally uncoiled itself from the Orion, screaming in rage.
Rush and the others cheered, but their celebration was short-lived. Once the black was no longer encumbered by its position, it began striking back, and gashes of brilliant white light began to stream through the golden dragon’s burning hide, showing where it, too, had been injured.
It took a nasty swipe to the side, and then another to one of its back legs. The champion fought bravely, its attacks precise, its defense calculated, ensuring that the battle did not surge back toward the Orion, but the fact that it was sacrificing itself to protect the spacecraft was taking its toll, costing it too heavily.
“Four minutes,” Sam called out, but they could all see for themselves that the noble creature wasn’t going to last that long.
Mackenzie watched as the burning dragon began to falter. She had been studying the black intensely, learning how it moved, how its momentum traveled through its body, and she sent that knowledge to the golden dragon’s awareness, showing it where each strike would land. But if dodging a blow would lead them back toward the launch pad, the blazing creature took the hit instead.
Taking the hits it wants to take, Mackenzie realized bitterly. The thought reminded her of the conversation she had had with her father, in what seemed like a lifetime ago, but she heard his words again now, echoing in her mind.
Sometimes, Mac, running away is the best long-term strategy.
“Three minutes to launch,” Sam announced.
Suddenly, she knew what they had to do. She tried to convey the plan to the majestic beast that fought so bravely for them, but she was already feeling drained, and the great dragon was fading. For several agonizing moments, she wasn’t sure it had understood her, but then she saw a new pattern beginning to emerge. Their champion was choosing its hits differently now, moving the battle back toward the summoners themselves.
And then it happened. The black dragon saw their portal, a swirling black disc against the bright blue sky, suspended seven stories up, above the observation deck of the Exploration Tower. Abandoning the Orion, the black dragon streaked toward the platform where they all stood, intent on destroying the humans who dared to challenge it.
The golden dragon, its scales blazing in the sun, continued to battle against the black, but now it heeded Mackenzie’s every warning, dodging every attack, using every opportunity in between to weaken its enemy by striking another angry red gash into its jet-black hide.
Their objectives had shifted. Now it was the black dragon that had an ultimate goal—a purpose that began to take its toll on the malevolent creature as it, in turn, was willing to absorb its opponent’s fiery attacks, trying to reach the observation deck that much sooner, while it still knew where its true enemy stood.
Their hero fought valiantly, refusing to succumb to its wounds, while brilliant white light spilled from more gashes than they could count. Its attacks finally began to slow, its energy failing, as the grappling behemoths neared the observation tower—the humans on the seventh-floor deck watching helplessly, knowing there was nowhere to run. When the blazing dragon fell, their lives would be forfeit, one way or another, even if the black had to bring down the entire building to ensure it.
The black dragon was close enough now that they could see every wicked spike along its back, every armor-clad scale along its hide, every onyx tooth in its gaping maw. So this is what death looks like, Rush thought, as the black dragon, sensing victory, surged toward the gold, catching the majestic creature in its claws and raking a terrible gouge into its belly, splitting it open right before their eyes, from the middle of its chest to the base of its tail, a torrent of white light bursting forth from its dying body.
“No!” Sketch screamed, his lone voice crying out to it for them all.
But in that moment, the golden dragon, with a last heroic effort, wrenched itself farther into the black dragon’s death grip and clasped the monster’s back, digging its claws into its enemy with all its might. The black, realizing its mistake too late, roared in defiance, struggling to break free, but the portal was already too close.
As a final burst of light exploded from the raging inferno that their shining, white defender had become, it passed into the portal, clutching the black dragon to its heart and dragging the furious beast with it, back into the realm from which it came.