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We came across the transport on the fifth day of PreservationAux’s most recent survey mission. It was supposed to be an unoccupied planet. (I hate planets, but I do like unoccupied places. No extraneous humans to ruin my day is always a good time in my book.) It had been uneventful, up until that point, which is my favorite kind of contract, and I had just started the latest season of The Thirteen Lives of Draco Majoris, when we found it.
Since the planet in question was mostly ice, Dr Arada was having a field day with the frozen microorganisms, but it also limited our movement outside the original drop site. Our research hub had been unhitched from Eragawn and sat on a flat plateau of land between sharp cliffs and deep escarpments, descending into wind carved canyons of improbably twisted layers of ice. The inorganic sensors in my eyes registered over a hundred shades of blues and purples that would never show up on video.
All the humans had to bundle up to go outside, in low-temp exploration suits, which were like regular exploration suits but with silver thermal lining, big fluffy hoods that made it hard to see their faces (honestly, preferable), and great big wooly mittens. I wore my usual outfit. While on survey, Ratthi kept handing me things so I could push the buttons for him because I can regulate my own temperature, even though the machines weren’t designed to be used with claws.
Eragawn, my favorite of Dr Mensah’s contracted transports, had finally found a thermal updraft at cruising altitude, and was no longer landbound, which meant it would not have quite as much trouble fetching us if something truly disastrous happened. That had been the main thing keeping us in place. Unless we had an exit strategy, I wasn’t letting anyone down the cliffs. Once I had thoroughly scanned the surrounding area for traces of subterranean tremors, hostile cave worms, or toxic mud pits anywhere, off we went.
(I’m not doing anything with mud pits ever again. No, not even frozen mud pits. That stuff is sticky and awful and way too much trouble to get out of my joints. No.)
To leave the landing site and continue Dr Arada’s survey, we had to descend into the canyons, with a carefully coordinated system of pulleys and rappelling gear, hooked solidly to the icy sides of the cliffs and double checked in triplicate by yours truly, me, the only one of all of us with any sense of self-preservation.
I know.
Every time I think I’m bad, I look at Ratthi and reassess.
I was overseeing Overse get harnessed up when Arada tapped my feed, and said, “SecUnit, I think you should get down here.”
Shit.
Not everything shows up on camera.
I left Overse where she was, half-buckled into her harness, with a stern, “Don’t,” and jumped off the cliff.
Humans have to climb. I don’t. (Though I rarely get a chance to do this either, so okay, yes, I had been looking forward to getting the chance to leave the plateau too.) In the endless redundancy of human design, my suit had thin fabric inserts attached along the sides of the torso, which connected my wrists to my knees and expanded when I told it to. It was designed to mimic the patagia on a mid-sized dragon. It was redundant because I had patagia underneath my clothes as well. (But I didn’t actually mind— I sure as hell wasn't taking off my suit in these temperatures. Self-regulating or not.)
They snapped open as I fell and took a howling descent with 98% chance of pulverization at the bottom of the canyon (there’s always a chance of survival, but even I don’t like the idea of having to scrape myself up from 2%) into a smooth, twisting glide as I caught the wind and let it carry me back around to land directly at Arada’s side in the accumulated snow buildup at the base.
I could hear Ratthi slow-clapping behind me. Dr Adara didn’t even notice.
“Do you see this?” Arada asked. She and Dr Mensah were staring at a strange inert shape, lumped into the snowbank at the base of the canyon wall, hidden in the shadow. I looked, and started running a diagnostic scan to see if I could pick up anything I had missed earlier with my drones. There were no energy signatures coming from it, not even the residual ghost flickers you get from something in standby mode.
While I did that, I was also looking with my actual eyes, and what they were telling me was much more absurd.
“What are you looking at down there?” Called Overse from the top of the cliff.
“It looks like a machine,” Arada said.
It did, and that’s what was so unsettling about it.
“Here, can we clear it off?” Ratthi came up behind, unhooked from his harness at last. He tromped right past me, boots crunching through the top crusty layer of snow, but I didn’t stop him. My risk assessment module, iffy at best, didn’t even register this as a threat. (Maybe that’s a different problem though. Admittedly I was a little distracted.)
“Do you recognize the model, SecUnit?” Dr Mensah asked, not looking directly at me. (She is my favorite.)
I was so distracted looking at it that my buffer supplied an automatic response instead and I jumped, having startled myself.
That earned a direct stare from Mensah, her eyebrows raised so high that they disappeared into the fluffy lining of her hood. “SecUnit?”
Ratthi finished clearing off the surface layer, and we could see the scratched and faded remains of a logo printed on the side of the thing. It looked like a transport.
“It’s a transport,” I said, helpfully. Like a human. Ugh.
Except— it wasn’t like the mid-sized interplanetary dragons that most non-corporate entities contracted with, nor was it like the Corporation Rim’s artificially engineered and augmented giant lizard rigs, or the Leviathans that can navigate the wormhole pathways like ART.
It was— a machine. Just a machine.
Forged aluminum plating, four engine blocks, reinforced glass windows with exterior shutters, and a squat, squarish frame that almost mirrored the shape of a mid-sized passenger flier, except that it didn’t look like it had a single dragon-ish aspect to it at all. Not even a tail. (Do dragons need tails to fly in zero-G? They must, right? I should look that up. Humans love to leave vestigial limbs on things just for the aesthetic factor, yes I’m talking about the patagia again. For something whose governor module would have zapped me for trying to actually fly on company time, I sure had a lot of purely aesthetic traits engineered into my organic parts. Ask me about my tail.) (Don’t.)
I’d seen things like it before— in a media series about pre-Colonized space. Before humans had discovered the wormholes, the Leviathans that roamed between them, and managed to hitch a ride out of their original failing solar system. Once upon a time, humans had no idea that dragons even existed, and had to build their own spaceships.
Allegedly. According to The Last Dragon of Helion Prime, at least. Not exactly known for its rigorous historical accuracy. Or— dragon accuracy. Good graphics, though, I liked the fight scenes.
Anyway.
This transport, that was the point. While Ratthi poked at a panel that opened with a clunk on the side of the box, I ran a search on anything like it in the feed. I did turn up some references— from another media series. (I downloaded it while I was there— WorldGate: Arc of Infinity was too good a title to pass up.) And even those were mostly machine-augmented dragons like ART, rather than… just machines.
Machines are for habitation, research— you know, anything that humans are incapable of doing without fucking up. All the boring stuff that humans don’t like doing. (Bots are everywhere for that reason alone.) The temporary research hub was a machine— nothing but wires and data inside its walls.
Dragons are for space flight. Everyone knows that.
(SecUnits are a secret third thing, but that’s neither here nor there.)
I’ve always liked bots better than humans, but it was weird to see something that should have been sentient… not be. I’m used to identifying with transports though (it’s the telepathic dragon thing) and this transport just looked like a box. With weird little flaps like underdeveloped wings— it didn’t look at all stable enough for space flight, let alone atmospheric transportation. Who could even ride that kind of thing?
Ratthi yelped, and I started moving, running back my video to actually pay attention to what stupid shit he had gotten up to. Oh, damnit, this box had better not be full of hostiles, because one of the walls had just opened up with a hiss and a great big crash and almost fell on Ratthi’s foot. Almost, because I move really fast. Like, really fast.
The air that released from the interior of the ship condensed on contact with the exterior temperatures, creating a cloud of frozen air and water particles that obscured my vision for 5.6 seconds before it dissipated. I scanned again for lifeforms, or signs of hostile activity, but there was nothing still— just the empty box, sitting cold and alone on a deserted planet.
I wanted to call down Eragawn but that was a waste of its time and my time. (Eragawn can drop dive at an incredible velocity and that’s why it’s my favorite of Dr Mensah’s contracted transports, but the effort of getting back into the stratosphere when it had worked so hard to find the current in the first place was not going to be worth it.)
So it was my job instead to look at it and be vaguely disgusted.
So this is what humans feel when they look at SecUnits.
It—
Sucked. This all sucked.
I wanted to leave.
No, what I really wanted was to talk to ART.
Which was stupid. ART was nowhere nearby, doing its own thing with its own crew as it should be, but it was the only one I’d met that understood the extremely specific intersection of dragon and machine that makes humans, bots, and dragons, behave irrationally around SecUnits.
Okay, maybe it’s not irrational, but it’s still irritating.
My organic parts were engineered out of basic strands of dragon DNA, and with that came the cool stuff of dragon augmentation, (like telepathy and great big claws, and yes, the tail,) but ART was Leviathan class, equal parts machine and membrane, the genetic memory of dragons coded into its inorganic features, all inside the framework of a living transport.
Classic dragon transports shy away from it just as much as they do from me.
ART would understand why I was so… queasy wasn’t the right word, queasy was when humans started looking green and had to expel all their gross consumed foodstuff in a corner after seeing what I've done to protect them or something. It happened more than once. I was… not queasy. It was a different feeling in my organic parts that wasn’t queasiness, but it was something like that. (I don’t even have a stomach to be upset, so it wasn’t queasy. I don’t know why this is such a sticking point. The point is, I can’t get nauseous, so I wasn’t.)
What was I talking about?
Oh right, the fucking transport.
It was inert, which was good, and abandoned, which was also good, and wholly lifeless, without even a friendly bot-pilot to operate it, which was vaguely horrifying in ways I didn’t like to think about. So I wasn’t. I wasn’t doing that.
It was weird inside. Hollow and cavernous.
Well. Okay, it wasn’t that weird, because it was very similar to the interior halls of a station or the kinds of habitats that get strapped onto dragons for interplanetary flight. It had low metal ceilings, with metal grating on the floor above piles and piles of wires running the length of the ship, and hard plastics encasing its various interfaces. It had solid state screens in what we determined to be the bridge, frozen over with a thick sheet of ice that left fractal patterns across every surface. Every room was just another box— there was a mess hall and the crew quarters, all long abandoned, and the bridge had thick reinforced windows that showed how the ship had crashed some time in the past. Honestly, why would you make a box try to fly in space when you could ride a dragon instead?
Overse had eventually made her way down the cliffs to join us. She and Mensah were in deep discussion with Dr Baradwaj over the feed regarding the implications of finding the ship on an otherwise-unoccupied planet. There should be records at least of other missions here, you’d think.
Ratthi kept hovering near me as we looked around. It was irritating.
I didn't tell him to stop.
“SecUnit?”
I wished for just a moment that I could actually talk to the ship, maybe dig up an ancient bot-pilot, see if I could hijack its cameras and use them to look at Dr Arada, but I couldn’t— there was nothing there to engage.
“I think I’ve found the power supply. We might be able to wake it up.”
Oh, okay. (Fuck.)
“It’s booting up,” Ratthi said, leaning over the console. He’d needed to take his gloves off to operate the levers and switches, trying to entice the machine into wakefulness, and his fingers had taken on a rashy purple tone already. I elbowed him out of the way.
“If you lose your fingers, I will be embarrassed for you,” I said, taking over. My claws were extra clunky on this kind of interface, where all the switches were tiny metallic knobs that needed dialing and mechanical switches, but at least they wouldn’t fall off. One of the switches brought a crackle of visual static to the main screen, and another steadied it out into an even hum.
“Power is holding steady,” said Overse, watching her tablet. She had plugged into one of the panels to the side of the main screen and was monitoring the flow of electricity in case anything malfunctioned and, I don’t know, planned to blow up or something.
“It’s on,” I said, and stepped away. Dr Mensah came up beside me, close enough to touch, but she didn’t try to, and I felt a little less jittery just knowing that she was there and she wouldn’t get weird about it. I could rely on her.
“This is some weird tech,” said Ratthi, trying to navigate through the glitching screens. Some of them were run through with lines of static, others jumped and twitched with unsteady scrolling distortion. “I can’t tell if it’s old— like really old— or something proprietary.”
“It’s old,” I said, and Overse said, “There was something like it on Worldhoppers, once.”
“Are you getting anything from it? I can’t actually get access to its internal systems,” said Ratthi to me specifically, and I realized he was waiting on me to tap the feed. Should have brought Gurathin, made him do this bullshit, he could tap into an unknown feed and I could go back to my bunk and watch some media and forget any of this was happening. (I couldn’t delete my memories until the mission was over— that was always a mistake. Every time. Yes, I do know from experience.)
Technically, I was here to do a job and that job was security. I had a contract, too. (I was getting good at contracts, Pin-Lee made sure of that.)
Technically, I didn’t have to do it. That was the only reason that I actually felt okay with actually doing it. I stopped episode 223 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon that I had been playing in the background while everyone poked around this shitty weird little box, and I fished around in the feed, trying to find anything I could tap.
There was nothing.
“There’s nothing,” I said.
“I am seeing an uptick in activity though,” said Overse, squinting down at her tablet. “If there isn’t a bot-pilot or a HubSystem, is there at least a start-up module online?”
I didn’t roll my eyes, (because that’s what humans would do if they’re being irrational,) but I thought about it. I adjusted my scans to include frequencies below the average range, and sent a mental ping into the void. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Like I said. Instinctively, without considering the implications of it, I sent out a telepathic nudge too— the way I’d greet a dragon transport, rather than a bot.
And I got something back.
Dragons don’t speak in words. When a dragon communicates, it’s through images, sensations, concepts too complicated for verbal language. That’s what makes them so adaptable, because they can understand human thought beyond the constraints of human language barriers. In a way, it’s a lot like how a bot communicates, those that aren’t designed for conversation, like cargo-bots and HubSystems— binary code and data bundles. What I got from the transport wasn’t even that much. It was just a brush of awareness, like stepping through an atmospheric barrier and feeling a shift in air pressure. Or like fingers trailing over my inorganic parts— I could sense them, but mostly what I felt was unease.
Something must’ve shown on my face because now everyone was looking at me. I still forget sometimes how much my expressions show now that I don’t wear the opaque helmet of a company SecUnit anymore.
“SecUnit?” Dr Mensah was always the first one to ask, because she always knew when I actually needed to say something, even if I didn’t want anything to do with it.
“It’s—“ I didn’t know how to describe it. “It’s not on the feed. It is a dragon. I think.”
Tentatively, I sent back another mental wave, trying to find something real to latch onto. It was hard, whatever consciousness there was fragmented, broken up like the distorted, glitching static on the screens, too scrambled up to make up a real image, but the more I poked and prodded it, the more it seemed to coalesce. It followed my mental lead like it was trying to pick up the pieces of itself. When dragons are just hatched, too small to survive on the surface of a planet, they fly like this, in little circles that trail one after another, separating and bumping into each other as they get the knack for manipulating their own gravitational fields.
Ratthi had backed away from the console, hands up like he was in a hostage situation. “Oh fuck,” he said, “I didn’t hurt it, did I?”
The consciousness brushed up against me like a current flowing through my ports. “I don’t think so,” I said, and Ratthi gave me a look with his eyebrows all crinkled together. “Really. I’d be able to tell.”
The thing is, dragons are not pack animals, there’s too much aggression and dominance from that many apex predators in close confinement. All the same, every dragon feels a kin connection to every other dragon. Pain is transferred easily, so is distress. That’s why dragons, real dragons, can’t be used in space combat. (Which is, in turn, why the Corporation Rim had to engineer their own augmented transports, that can be controlled in hostile encounters with other dragons. No, much like SecUnits, Corporation Rim augmented dragons are nobody’s friends. They’re even meaner than ART.) (None of them are as smart though.)
This little spark of almost-dragon consciousness wasn’t even enough to convey a full thought, but it wasn’t in pain. That was a relief.
I nudged it again, trying to coax it into a recognizable shape. I ignored the humans as they shifted around me, moving behind my back. I trusted them enough to catch my attention if they needed me. The little scattered threads of dragon-thought were like space dust, drifting inevitably outward, nothing to hold them together, but each one that I found flared in a tiny caress of mental recognition.
It was a dragon. This weird, empty hollow box— somehow it was still a dragon, somewhere deep inside. That was reassuring, and deeply upsetting at the same time. I wondered if it had started out as a dragon, or as an empty box. Or an engineered mix of both, like me. Maybe it had never had its own organic body, or knew what it was like to fly with its own wings, even if all it got was the joy of a high-velocity fall with pseudo-patagia.
I wondered if I asked it that, whether or not it would be able to answer me.
The fledgling consciousness fluttered against my question like the beat of tiny wings against my claws. It didn’t have enough of itself to be able to hear me properly, all it knew was that I was there.
“We have to bring it back with us. We can’t just leave it here, not now that we woke it up, that’s inhumane,” Dr Arada was saying when I checked back in. I reviewed my recordings to see what they had talked about while I had given the dragon ship my full attention, and she was arguing for no reason. Everyone else was already on board.
“What we need to do,” Dr Mensah said calmly, and assuredly, “is to figure out how to retrieve the pilot from the ship without damaging it or losing any of its information.”
Oh, it was the pilot. That made sense, actually. I hadn’t realized how it all fit together, having been so unsettled to see it in the first place. Dragons can’t get lost in space. (That’s kind of the point of them.) That’s why dragons became the basis of operational matrices in SecUnits, too. Inorganic parts can malfunction, and organic parts can be damaged and leak out all over the place in a gross mess, but they always know where they’re going, and nothing can take them off task. (The Corporation Rim delighted in using dragon DNA in its constructs for just that reason.)
Actually, once I thought about it, maybe the radiating sense of wrongness that I felt about the whole ship was related to the fact that there was a lost dragon-consciousness haunting the damn ship. It had only come online with the mechanical parts, but it was definitely my dragon-senses that were tingling.
“We need to take it to ART,” I said. Dr Mensah turned to me. Her dark brown eyes were full of concern. I looked at the cracked window screen instead of at her, and added “This isn’t old tech, I don’t think. Or if it is, it’s been updated. ART should see this.”
Also, ART would know way better than I did about what to do with a baby dragon brain floating loose in the feed.
“I had to plug directly into the wires to even know if it was running electricity,” said Overse, pointing out a slight flaw in that plan. “If there’s a place to plug into this and download something off its central system, I can’t find it. There are no compatible ports for an interface transfer.”
I tried to put together a query that the fledgling dragon could understand, something about home and safety and how-do-we-fetch-it, but it didn’t go anywhere useful. We couldn’t take the whole transport with us, Eragawn would never be able to carry it— oh, duh. Eragawn might not be able to carry a transport the size of itself, as well as the habitat on top of the canyon cliffs, but it could potentially sniff out the source of the dragon DNA in the code.
Hell, maybe I could.
I didn’t do this often. I didn’t really have a module on dragon-ing, it wasn’t part of the standard company update packet. The company had done its best to keep SecUnits from really associating with each other or other dragons in the first place. Any inherited dragon-sniffing senses were something I only saw in the good kind of unrealistic media, really.
Well, it wouldn’t hurt. (It might.)
I chased the sensation of the mental link, trying to herd the fledgling towards some kind of home base like I’d herd human clients out of a hostile encounter. It wasn’t quite the sensation of chasing down a rogue code bundle, but it wasn’t not like that either. As I followed it, the little scraps of dragon-thought caught on the others, tangling together and almost— no, it was, it was getting a little larger with each new addition. It was putting itself back together. I picked up the phantom sensation of a group of humans— beacons of warmth that flared in my-its senses, each one uniquely distinct from the others, and the dragon-thought gave me an impression of mine. I know that feeling, I told it, and it did a little mental loop around me.
It was guiding me by that point, not me chasing shadows, but following in its wake as it lead me through its mental pathways to the center of its fragile, fragmented awareness.
“Here,” I said, stepping up to the console. Nobody blinked. The moment inside the consciousness of the ship had taken 2.4 seconds, and Ratthi was still wringing his hands over the idea of having to leave it behind. I found the mechanism with my claws and managed to engage three tiny switch clips that held an old-fashioned computer card in place.
Are you sure, I sent the spark of dragon-thought, feeling a wave of something uncomfortable that I couldn’t name— oh it was anxiety, no I knew what that was— at the thought of losing this little glimpse of consciousness.
It brushed against me, and then vanished, so… I’d just have to chance it.
ART was waiting for us once we finally left the survey site, eight cycles later, riding Eragawn up out of the atmosphere to return to Preservation space. I’d gotten a message out to it via the feed, but it was there telepathically too, hovering over my shoulder as Eragawn approached.
It poked me. This is the juvenile?
“I don’t think it’s actually a baby,” I said, looking at the computer chip between my claws. “I think it’s just a fragment.”
We were going to have to figure out how to read it, if we wanted to transfer the code onto something more permanent. Maybe build something up around the computer chip that could support a dragon’s thought process? Make it its own little robotic shell.
I had my own schematics, but that wasn’t the same thing as a wholly synthetic carapace for a dragon mind.
Well, whatever, that’s what ART was for anyway. I watched it approach from the bridge, the enormous bulk of its wings moving it inevitably toward us. Eragawn chirruped a greeting, and ART nudged it back, almost fondly, which is usually as good as it gets with ART. Dr Mensah hailed Seth, and Iris gave me a wave over the video link. I waved back, awkwardly.
I transfered over to ART with Ratthi, who was excited to see Matteo again, and I even conceded to give ART’s interior walls a friendly scratch with my claws as we passed through the airlock. ART rumbled in my mind, enveloping me briefly in its gargantuan consciousness like a nesting dragon with its egg. Ugh, I hate it when it does that. Brain hugs are not better than physical hugs, I don’t care what it thinks.
It took less time than I had anticipated for ART to build something that could house the computer chip. (I don’t know why I was surprised.) It was pretty basic, actually, even for ART— just a power source with an interface, so that the dragon code could run as it had on the abandoned transport. It might even be able to interact with us this way.
I felt it come online, partly in the feed, partly in my dragon-senses, and I felt ART perk up too, a great deal of its attention focused on this tiny shred of almost-dragon.
You’re right, it said, it’s not a juvenile. I see why you call it ‘fledgling’ though. The damage is extensive.
“Damage?” Fuck. “I didn’t realize it was hurt.”
Not hurt, said ART, contemplating it. I could sense it prodding the fledgling, poking at its trailing thought-impressions and fragmented senses. Not whole, either.
“Is this anything like how you were engineered?” I asked. ART had been grown in a lab, that much I knew, and had been raised alongside some of its human crew, but the Leviathans were such a strange and unique class of dragon that I didn’t really know much about. Not a lot of dragons you can just walk inside and set up shop.
It’s not dissimilar, said ART, still playing— playing?— with the fledgling, leading it down different mental pathways to more and more complex concepts like who-are-you and what-is-home. Mine was a non-linear development, more so than a traditional dragon clutch. The fledgling still didn’t seem to know what to do with these concept-questions, but it lingered longer, not falling apart quite so easily. I could almost imagine it having a whole personality, something bright and inquisitive and eager to learn. It would fit in pretty well here, I thought. ART loves adolescent humans and their endless questions— how could it not love baby dragons gnawing at its intercostal bracings?
I settled back, letting ART take point on analyzing and determining the fledgling’s limitations, and started up the next episode of The Thirteen Lives of Draco Majoris. ART diverted some of its awareness to lean its mental elbows on my feed, while it kept everything else running in the background.
Eventually I felt another weight. Small, barely there, like the warm press of a human hand against my scales. The fledgling had followed ART’s divided attention and figured out how to traverse the distance from dragon-thought to the feed, and was metaphorically leaning on my other shoulder, watching along with us.
The episode ended on a cliffhanger— the crisis on Icefyre Base looked like it was going to destroy the whole facility and the Celestial Dragon all at once, but I had seen enough of these kinds of serials to know that at least the Celestial Dragon and the plucky young hero would survive to save the day in the season finale— a whisper of a thought came to me via the mental feed, and the little fledgling dragon-mind spoke up.
More?