Dark Dragons (6 page)

Darren spun around in the doorway.  “Happy hunting,
man-eater.”  He gave his mom the pistol-firing motion with his forefinger
and thumb.  “Tell Sam I said hi.”

Allison watched her son walk out the back door.  She
stood there for several seconds, staring at the footprints he left in the plush
carpet leading to the patio door.  Slowly, as the floor regained its flat
contour, Darren’s trail vanished.  Allison went back upstairs to get
herself ready for a nightly round of bar hopping with Sam, but she couldn’t get
that goddamn lump out of her throat.

*

Darren lived at 2130 Sutton Cannon Drive in La Crescenta, a
small suburb at the base of the San Gabriel Mountain foothills which formed the
northern boundary of Los Angeles.  Darren’s house was the last one on the
street, the hills rising sharply just beyond the dry ravine that separated them
from his backyard.  The peaks were a mecca for summer hikers, campers,
deer hunters, and on this night, four teenagers in search of serenity. 
The peaceful milieu of chaparral, oaks, pepper trees, and eucalyptus conflicted
noticeably with the harsh existence of smoggy L.A. just a few miles to the
south.  Darren enjoyed the transition.

Tens of vacant shacks were scattered throughout the forest,
left by those who at one time cherished the solitude of the woods but chose to
return to the hurly-burly of city living.  Darren found one of these
shacks a few weeks earlier during a bike ride and mentioned this to his
friends, which they decided would be a cool place to camp out sometime.

Allison had been left with the impression that they would be
sleeping in Darren’s tent in the backyard next to the pool.  Instead, they
set up the tent and waited for Allison to drive off in her Jaguar XK——a gift
from some past infatuated boyfriend——before sneaking off for the foothills on
their bikes.  Mt. Lukens Road lay just east of Darren’s house and went
northeast before curving around to the northwest toward the peak of Mt. Lukens
itself.

The boys were just now approaching this turn when Nate
whined, “Are we there yet?  Jesus, my asthma’s startin’.”

“We’ve got a ways to go,” Darren replied.  “We’ll get
there.”

“Let’s stop and take a rest,” Nate protested.

“For Christ’s sake,” Tony mumbled.  “Remedial Phys Ed
hasn’t helped yet, huh?”

“Gnaw on my fat one.”

They stopped to take a blow and watch the bright, shimmering
grid of L.A. lights to the south and lonely jets taking off from LAX. 
Darren always loved the Money Shot from here.

Nate was trying to catch his breath, and Darren smiled at
his effort.  Nathan Douglas was a tall, heavy-set Irish kid who must of
woke up one morning and decided he wanted to be black for the remainder of his
adolescence.  Darren neither condemned or condoned Nate’s choice of dress,
talk, and hand motions.  Close your eyes while Nate was talking “street”
and you’d think you were in Inglewood or Compton.  Open them, and you saw
a white kid from an upper-middle class family wearing baggy pants belted four
inches too low and any choice of oversized designer shirts.  Hip-hop
always played on Nate’s iPod, never rock ’n’ roll.  “Wannabe” was one name
for Nate’s social breed.  A less flattering epithet invented a long time
ago was “wigger.”

Surprisingly, he got along with the black kids at school who
either tolerated him or actually liked his company.  Other than that,
Darren didn’t know too much about him since he just started hanging out with
Darren, Tony and Jorge a few weeks ago.  Nate was a somewhat popular guy
around school, and Darren couldn’t figure out why he would hang out with losers
like them until just a couple of weeks ago.  It seemed Nate liked Jorge’s
older sister and probably thought he’d warm up to him first.  “Hey,
Mexico, you think I could come over and check out that stereo you was talkin’
about?” or something like that.  Anything to get closer to sis.

After resting for a few minutes, the boys continued up the
road, leaving the bright lights of Los Angeles behind them.  The San
Gabriel mountains lay ahead.

Jorge Lopez brought up the rear of the group.  He had
successfully “hopped the fence” west of Yuma, Arizona, with his parents, two
brothers and four sisters in April of last year, and Marcus Lutze had wasted no
time in initiating his own brand of immigration reform on Jorge.  Darren
first met him in algebra class and remembered that he was always smiling. 
Maybe his mother told him that if he smiled a lot in America, he would make
more friends.  However, as the days wore on and Marcus played his usual
part, Darren noticed Jorge smiled less and less when he came to class until his
face was as still as stone.

Jorge was the first person that Darren befriended on his
first day at school last semester and the most quiet of their group——he used to
torture the English language helplessly which always aroused a few snickers
from kids at school including some of his fellow Latinos.  However, Jorge
had a fire inside him that fiercely spurred a determination to talk more
clearly, and after months of intense self-instruction, finally gained the
ability to speak fluent English.  During homework, Darren would find that
he had to often consult Jorge on the proper placement of punctuation or the
eternally hopeless attempt to understand the correct usage of “lie,” “lay,” and
“lain.”  Despite this, Jorge was still a rather quiet guy unless someone
really pissed him off, and then an amazing mixture of brand new English
profanity and machine-gun Spanish would roar out of his mouth, much to the
delight of Tony, the usual instigator of Jorge’s outbursts.

After another fifteen minutes of uphill bicycling, 
Darren led them off the dirt road into a field that once had been covered with
tall grass and bushes only to be scorched by a brush fire stoked by the Santa
Ana winds the previous month.  They were now going downhill on the north
side of Mt. Lukens towards a large swath of pine and oak in the distance.

The shack lay on the edge of a secluded clearing in the
trees.  Hunters had built it many years ago with loose boards and other
fittings.  It was empty except for some trash can rubbish, a few old
broken stools, and a rusty lantern with a little kerosene left at the
bottom.  The windows had been replaced by mosquito netting which allowed a
cool Pacific breeze to swirl in and ruffle some old newspapers in the corner.

The roaring campfire they had built outside the shanty a few
hours ago now barely held enough light for them to see, just red embers cooling
in the night air.  The blabber of usual topics important to teenage
boys——dirty jokes, what athlete had more skills than the other, the endless
diversity of female body parts——eventually faded away when they grew tired in
their sleeping bags.

The moon glided on silver clouds, its light filtering
through the canopy of leaves and pine cones from where squeaking bats darted at
flying insects that dared to take flight.  The forest was alive with the
nocturnal prattle of crickets and distant coyotes.  A few miles away
droned late night traffic on Interstate 210.

Darren squirmed to get comfortable in his bag, trying to
ignore the snoring induced by Nate’s sleep apnea.  Eventually, however,
his own slumber found him.

*

It had not moved in three thousand years.

Asteroid bombardments throughout the eons had covered it
with a blanket of moon dust and meteorite powder, providing a natural
camouflage.  Over the great expanse of time, the ship had shut down the
most meaningless functions to conserve energy until only a handful of
operations remained.  However, three thousand years of cold sleep was a
long time even for Xrel technology, and it would be a divine miracle of their
gods if the ship could fly again.

The AI computer pilot still had life, and one of its sensors
had picked up something quite alarming.  A mass-displacement analysis of
the solar system’s curved space-time field indicated that a sharp increase in
additional gravitational flux was being added to the surrounding
continuum.  Sensors quickly studied the quantum spray of natural radiation
coming from the universe and discovered a moving source highlighted against the
background field which could only mean artificial fusion reaction.  The
mammoth Vorvon sector ship, which appeared over Xrelmara centuries ago and
brought total genocide to that planet, had finally arrived from deep space . .
. exact position unknown but likely prowling somewhere among the solar system’s
gas giant planets.

This was not one of the few Vorvon scouting missions to the
surface the AI had observed over the past one hundred years.  There had
been three visitations that it had recorded.  No, with the Vorvon sector
ship now present somewhere nearby, this was the main force.  Earth would
face the wrath of invasion, possibly within days.

The AI acted immediately.  The recharging unit jumped
to life, and the cold molecular generators began to feel the first twitches of
energy.  Ceiling lights flickered on, though no living creature walked the
corridors.  Navigation computers and telemetry functions came to life, yet
no pilots existed to study the data.

The tired fusion drives ignited, and the vessel began to
vibrate as the engines gained power.  Stray static electricity flowed
across the hull, repelling millennial layers of moon dust.  The engines
reached their charge limit and roared to life.  The ship rose, blasting
dust and rock from underneath it, and climbed higher still, searching for
escape velocity.

With a final push, it screamed away from the moon’s gravity
and turned its bow toward Earth.  Trajectory vectors were plotted, and the
ship selected the shortest route in.  It detected thousands of artificial
objects in orbit around the blue and white orb, but none appeared to be
planetary defenses——at least highly advanced ones.

The AI pilot opened a topside airlock, and two early-warning
surveillance drones shot out.  Both machines fired their actuator rockets
and peeled away, each heading for the Lagrangian points known as L1 and L2
where the gravity of the sun and earth canceled one another and an object could
maintain a stationary position in space relative to Earth.  The drones’
surfaces bristled with instrumentation which used a variety of sensor technology
long forgotten, all able to spot moving objects hundreds of millions of miles
away, natural or artificial.

The ship shut down its fusion drives and ignited the orbital
boosters along its hull, then pitched to starboard to insert itself into an
equatorial orbit.  Its destination was a structure it had identified on
one continent where dignitaries from various societies of the planet gathered
to negotiate worldly affairs.  Once there, it would select four
individuals it considered capable of accomplishing the objectives.  Surely
humanity would then have a chance against the advancing invaders.

A large section of the port-side hull suddenly
exploded.  Chunks of metal and tongues of white flame spewed from the
breach.  The mighty Xrel freighter pitched sluggishly to starboard and
gunned its fusion drives to evade, throwing itself out of its insertion window
into a course intended to push it away from whatever had attacked it. 
Sensors had not detected any incoming asteroids or human-made debris as the
likely culprit.  No Vorvon spacecraft either.  The ship sustained
another strike, this one a high-angle shot that grazed the bow but forceful
enough to take out the entire communications array.

There!  In a low orbit.  The computer spotted not
just a single satellite but an entire net of
human
-made weapons burping
high-velocity rounds in its direction——weapons using electromagnetically-fired
iron slugs.

Coolant and deuterium fuel burst from conduit lines, and
internal fires began to spread amidships.  A klaxon blasted through the
corridors, and automatic fire suppressors activated to extinguish the
flames.  The ship was far off its intended course and dropping
quickly.  The AI pilot attempted to realign along its previous trajectory,
but navigation controls began to fail one after another.  The ship was
dying.

*

Twenty-two thousand miles above the Pacific, a 23-telescope
surveillance satellite code named Medusa Stare continued to track the ship
since acquiring it the moment it left the lunar surface.  The
early-warning satellite transmitted a signal to a ground station in Maui,
Hawaii, which immediately relayed the broadcast to the Near-Earth Space
Surveillance and Tracking Center buried in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Standing in the back of the Combat Operations Center,
Colonel Martin Towsley, elated that his group had
finally
pulled their
trigger finger, watched the radar image of their “duck” falling to Earth on the
hi-def projection screen.  Delta-v and other telemetry readings indicated
that the object was descending quickly but erratically, meaning that it wasn’t
quite dead yet.

“Captain Connors, tell NORAD to stand down,” Towsley told
the chief communications officer.  “We got this one.”  Time to set
the “dogs” loose.

*

Darren quickly sat up in his sleeping bag.  Something
wasn’t right.  He had been on the fringes of sleep, the area between
consciousness and dreamland where the brain could not discriminate between the
two worlds.  In that spiraling funnel, Darren noticed something strange
just outside his body, and a reflex made him sit up.  He sat there for a
moment, trying to collect his bearings, and finally took a look around. 
He couldn’t figure it out.  Something seemed out of place.  It was
still early morning, probably about three or four o’clock.  The animals
were unusually quiet.

That’s it.
  The entire forest around him sounded
dead.  No hooting owls or chirping insects.  Nothing.  It was
weird.  Birds, bats, even the baying coyotes in the distance had succumb
to silence as if some godly hand had grasped the entire area and suppressed the
forest with a divine spell.  Not even the slightest of breezes moved the
leaves.