Trezza, Eron 13, 5531

Veshrin stepped into the Dragon’s Den’s harvest room, dragging his rickety cart of cleaning supplies and maintenance tools, humming to himself. All things considered, being tasked with cleaning and maintaining the Den on the behalf of those weirdo twins wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened when he’d been forced to beg a ruthless reptiloid like Maelise Silvane for work. Fresh off the transport, he’d quickly learned that she was the safest from potentially deadly options if one couldn’t get a job at one of the manufacturing sites through the colony. It had been enough to help keep himself and Tendakeo alive for the last six lunars after being sent to Sinner’s Landing. So far, all it had really boiled down to was keeping things straight around the decaying building masquerading as a rec hall. To that end, he’d been using the arcane knowledge he gleaned from some of the half-corroded maintenance manuals he’d discovered and obsessively checking the tubing on the harvest vat and the state of the dragon tanks.

Dragon’s blood was, perhaps unsurprisingly for anyone that was a fan of fantasy holo-vids like himself, extremely caustic before filtration and refinement. Every third lunar or so, the tubes that carried the blood from the dragons they had to the large central vat would burst, and if the leak wasn’t caught in time the dragon would die due to uncontrolled blood loss due to the anti-coagulants and plasma enhancement meds intended to increase and maintain steady flow. Then there was the loss of product in the form of wasted blood.

As far as drugs in the The Elysannah System went, dragon’s blood was the most elite of elite mind-wipers. Ambrosia, made from fruits native to Hortánna Qudsa, could make you feel like a god; Fairy-dust—the spores from a truly disgusting-smelling fungus found on Fuscān—gave you out of disorienting body experiences; but Dragon’s Blood, made from the creatures in the tanks—also Hortánnan like the aforementioned fruits—took you to an entirely new world. It showed you impossible things—living cities, dragons that soared over storm-infested plains, deep-sea creatures that had tentacles where faces should be and who hunted those foolish enough to wander near the shore.

He had never touched it himself—he took half a pharmacy to stay alive, the last thing he needed to do was add yet another chem to the mix—but he’d been told that after you come down from your first trip the world never felt as solid and real as it had before. The woman who’d shared that particular tidbit had looked like she was half-way to climax just by remembering the sensations of her last trip. To be honest, it sounded terrifying.

Tendakeo—reasonably, in Veshrin’s opinion—was of the mindset that putting a drug made from a Hortánnan organism in your body was insanity beyond any reasonable measure. Everything from the planet, from the smallest bacteria to the hill-sized titans roaming the plains, wanted to bring death to all non-native lifeforms. No matter how you filtered it, if a single intact cell ended up in your body, then you die. Not may, there wasn’t ‘a high likelihood,’ it was as certain as gravity. The Den even had a dedicated role to test how pure each batch was, but the astronomical mortality rate among the ‘Tasters’ only served to underline the risk involved.

Still, despite the inherent danger surrounding it, dragon’s blood remained not just popular, it was more sought after in the colony than hard credits were on the civilized Elysannati worlds. Because of its extremely valuable nature, any loss was a serious issue; the reason Veshrin had a job at all was because the last guy, an asshole named Alevgeni, had chosen to spend his shifts fucking the blood-addicts he’d sneak into the Den rather than actually doing his job. During one such vigorous occasion, the tubes for the dragons—they’d had five at the time, two adults and three juveniles—had burst, and the twins had only managed to save the breeding pair and their weirdly-colored runt.

Alevgeni and the girl—no one had seemed to remember her name when he’d asked—had been unfortunate enough to have been hard at work on one of the lounge tables when the twins caught them. They had been sliced, diced, and what remained had been dumped in the new arrivals areas at the center of Sinner’s Landing only a lunar before he and Tendakeo had arrived at the system’s hottest vacation destination.

The center of the mid-sized room was dominated by a vat with metal framing and a transparent panel that extended all around the vat’s cylindrical form that bathed the room with intense magenta light. It revealed the rusted, misaligned wall panels that made up the room, and the gaping holes that yawned between some of them. Beneath the vat, a thick pipe ran into the floor through a hole cut into the metal grating, pumping the collected blood to refinement on the next level below. On the wall to the left, three poly-glass tanks emitted soft blue-white light from the heat-lamp strips meant to feed the surviving dragons inside. Each one was a mitra and a half long, and half that tall and deep, with intravenous drug administration pumps affixed to the top and a single thick tube that coiled upon itself as it fed into the central vat. Hydration, antiseptic, anesthetic, and sedative fluids were pumped into the tanks by a series of tubes he knew were attached to needles plunged into the dragons themselves. They were arranged head-to-tail, with the parents on the outer tanks, and their unusual offspring between them.

Across from the entrance, a terminal and display monitor set against the wall showed various incomprehensible streams of data representing the health and status of the dragons and their harvested blood. Veshrin had never learned to read it; the Den had a blood refinery tech for that and she’d told him that it would take ten cycles of intense schooling in biochem, vet medicine, and life-support engineering to fully understand it. Seeing as Veshrin had gotten himself shipped to the prison planet on the outskirts of the system, advanced education was probably a little out of his reach, so he’d given up the effort.

Next to the terminal, forlorn in their disuse, were the darkened shapes of the tanks that had held the dragons lost to Alevgeni’s mistake. They were slightly dusty; Veshrin didn’t bother with them every time, just enough so that no one could accuse him of neglecting his work. They also had that nauseating syrup-sweet smell that came off of the dragons and their blood in its raw state, lingering long after their owners. The smell filled the room faintly at all times as a rule, but it was especially strong in these, where the tubes burst inside the poly-glass tanks, soaking into the white sand that ordinarily lined their bottoms.

Instead of wondering about things deemed above his station, he focused on the food-, energy-, and med-rations that waited for him and Tendakeo at the end of the span, and got to work. He pushed the cart to the side, and then pulled out his dyno-sweeper, a device with a handle three quarters as tall as he was, and a rotating head covered in bristles on the end. He started on the end of the room opposite the dragons, working his way back towards them—sweeping under the desk terminal, the shadowed crevices under the empty tanks, and the base of the blood vat.

All the while he cursed the refiner tech’s habit of throwing the wrappings from her rations on the floor’s series of mismatched grates and tiles. A shame, she’s so genial and enchanting otherwise. He was kneeling down, using his hands to clean out wrappers and crushed bio-plastic cups that had somehow gotten wedged too far back for the broom to reach beneath the empty dragon tanks, when a soft thud occurred behind him.

His head popped up, blinking rapidly.

He rotated on his hands and knees, eyes wide, and looked directly at the occupied dragon tanks, the only possible source of any such noise in the otherwise unoccupied room. Without even thinking to stand, Veshrin crawled closer to the tanks, trying to keep his heartbeat under control. The adult dragons had narrow, mitra long bodies of dark green scales and thick black fur that ran from around their necks, down their spines, and into their tails. As he watched the nearest, its sides expanded and contracted in the steady rhythm of sleep, as they always had. The dragon lay much as he expected, half submerged in the sand, whip-thin tail curled around itself in a spiral. She—he’d always assumed it was the female, as it was slightly larger than the other adult, and the edu-holos claimed that was typical with reptiloids—was the same as she had always been in any of the hundreds of passing glances he’d allowed himself.

In the center tank something had changed.

That one had always been different—bright blue scales with splotchy patches of silver, and thin, unhealthy looking fur the color of sandy beaches—but now the last few spans came into focus. The sour-faced refiner tech and her constant muttering to herself about how troublesome ‘that little mutant’ was. Lamenting how she’d had to work twice as hard to keep it down, and even switch to different drugs entirely. The dosage of the drugs were displayed right on the pumps, and the one above the juvenile showed they were twice as high as the other two tanks, high enough that Veshrin would have assumed it was at risk of overdosing.

Instead of slipping into a fatal coma, it had pulled its legs out of the sand and lay stretched out atop the sand, its uncoiled tail swishing back and forth, carving grooves as soft white grains flew with the movements. It looked like it was just waking up from a restorative nap instead of a drug-induced coma, and didn’t seem to have been slowed at all by the blood that had been leeched away while it slept. As he watched, the whip-thin tail bounced off the tank’s poly-glass, a flash of movement that made him jump. It was the exact same sound that had caught his attention in the first place.

Veshrin reared back, on his feet without being aware of standing.

Then, it moved its head.

Veshrin’s heart stuttered to a stop. The suddenly intensified ache in his knees, ankles and back were pushed out of his mind.

It was looking at him.

It didn’t have eyes or anything like a face, just a conical knob that stuck out of a short, scraggly-furred neck, but it was pointed directly at him. Veshrin could actually feel its attention, he was sure of it. Without that knob wavering, it began a much larger series of movements than thus far demonstrated. Somewhere, in another room, another world, someone began whispering the word ‘run’ over and over.

It started to twitch and move each of its six limbs individually, as if testing their strength and function. Each limb ended in a many-jointed, three-toed claw nearly half as long as his index finger. As he watched, frozen in place despite that increasingly insistent voice, it set each one on the sand and began to push itself into a standing position.

He found the voice to break the grip of fear at last. “Run, you idiot!“

He started to turn, the word ‘escape’ flashing in the forefront of his mind in big block letters, his legs finally obeying him.

Then it hit the side of the tank with its full weight, startling him and drawing his attention again, despite himself. The lights in the tank flickered but didn’t go out, the whole thing having jumped in place on the platform holding it. Time congealed, the moment stretching out impossibly. The poly-glass couldn’t possibly give way, could it? Spiderweb cracks radiated from the spot it had driven itself against, their edges highlighted by the spasming lights inside. Well, that’s certainly not my imagination, is it? Untarnished Silver, which pit in Tartajjīn did this thing crawl out of?

The thought occurred just in time for another eerily powerful slam into the poly-glass. This time, the glass didn’t merely fracture, it shattered, tiny shards spraying forth as they scattered over him and the floor around his feet. The dragon shot through the air like a bolt of lightning, hitting and clamping onto the side of Veshrin’s right leg in nearly the same moment. Eighteen points of pain burst into sharp reality in his thigh. His breath escaped in a tortured wheeze as his throat slammed shut on a scream.

He stumbled back, beating at the thing with his fists, while it made angry, rapid ticking noises as it clung on. He crashed into his cart, spilling its content across the metal tiles. Tools, bottles of solvent, towels, and cleaning devices bounced and rolled as he thrashed. A shape caught his eye as it spun, rattling as it hit the uneven parts of the metal floor tile.

A driver!

It was a cylinder half as long as his forearm, with a handgrip at one end, and a green blinking light on the end of the grip that indicated remaining power. The other end of the cylinder tapered down to a pointed tip meant to fit into the end of bolts to tighten or loosen them, but it’d do as a stake in a pinch.

He slapped at it with one outstretched arm, while trying to fend the dragon off with the other. His fingertips whispered against its nearest edge and it spun away, half a mitra further, teasing him.

Using his good leg he shoved himself backwards towards the driver. The dragon released his leg and started scrabbling up his body, blood flying everywhere as the claws glittered in the magenta light cast from the harvest-vat. The pain walking up his abdomen was filed away for the increasingly unlikely moment he escaped or killed this thing. He let loose a wheezing, thoughtless scream from lungs that had seemingly caught fire, and stretched for all his frame would allow.

The dragon leaped, and time slowed. The dragon’s arc carried it straight for his face, legs whirling and claws carving the air between them. He watched his hand rise to meet it, heading into the living grinder that intended to devour him. He caught the dragon around the throat in mid-air with his left hand just as the fingers of his right snapped shut on the cool, cylindrical shape of the driver.

Undeterred, the dragon’s claws didn’t miss a beat—they slashed at his forearm as easily as they would have his face, drawing blood and shredding the sleeve of his shirt, dingy white fabric turning crimson. The face opened, revealing long, metallic, needle-like teeth lining the insides of three fleshy petals and surrounding a toothy throat that glowed with the same magenta light that filled the vat. Thick, hideously foul saliva overflowed from the mouth, running down his wrist and forearm, intermingling with his blood as it flowed freely from the deep cuts. Immediately, an uncomfortable heat spread where it touched. Pink, frothy strings of the mixed result danced and flew in the air as he struggled with the creature.

A high, warbling scream erupted from him then, all semblance of control abandoning him, and he rolled over and slammed the murderous creature against the floor plates. Seething through clenched teeth, Veshrin braced himself and brought the driver down.

Whether it was the angle, Veshrin’s flagging strength, or simple, evil luck, the driver’s tip stabbed at the fine scales of the dragon’s chest and throat, but skittered off harmlessly. It only succeeded in angering the dragon, who released a shrieking wail, and snapped the flaps of its face shut in quick succession, trying in vain to tear Veshrin’s face off. He pressed his thumb against the smooth button along one side of the grip, and the driver’s automatic function engaged, spinning the bit and turning it into a makeshift drill. With gritted teeth, he stabbed at the dragon once more, with dramatically different results.

The tip must have found a weak spot in the finely scaled armor on its short neck, because suddenly the dragon’s glowing blood was spraying in a huge gout around the driver and Veshrin’s hand. The air filled with drops of blood and the scent of rotting fruit, choking his screams even as he tried to make them, his throat convulsing as he fought with it. His hands, forearms, and even his glasses were spattered with the bioluminescent fluid.

Veshrin didn’t relent. There was no room for half-measures; if he failed to kill this creature, it was going to break free and kill him, and his strength was already flagging as it was. So he ignored the frenzied thrashing of the thing’s razor-like claws until the hisses of the creature weakened and then ultimately fell silent as it went limp beneath his hand. Silence fell, broken only by the rapidly fading blood’s sizzling reactions with the air and the metal floor plates, and Veshrin’s own ragged breathing.

He stared at the dead dragon, lying in a spreading pool of its blood and his own, clarity dawning upon him, and with it, the understanding that he was soon to be as dead as the dragon.

Shit. What did I do?

His mind grasped desperately for deflections. It was self-defense. There was no way he could have known that would or could happen when he entered the room. In fact, it would be crazy to blame him for this, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?

He laughed. ‘Crazy’ had been his first impression when he’d finally come face to face with Silvane after cycles hearing about her in Baytūs al-Luminur from the criminal circles in the city’s shadows. When she learned what had happened, he would be joining Alevgeni on the long list of ‘people who crossed Silvane but didn’t live to regret it.’

The air cooled as his future, what little remained of it, flashed before his eyes. Which was when he became aware of the heat, just as it crossed from insistent into agonizing. The heat eating its way into his hands and forearm. Across his abdomen. His thigh, where the creature had first clamped onto him, throbbed with it.

Alarm bells rang in his head and his first instinct was to get to his feet, by putting his hands down to brace himself. A mistake. Agony roared in his hands the instant he put weight on them, breathtaking in its intensity. They had been covered in the dragon’s blood, which had apparently eaten away the top layers of his skin before the reactions stopped, leaving raw patches of pale, weeping flesh standing out from his naturally dark complexion. His breath coming in short gasps, he made his way to his overturned cart and, using his elbows, managed to get to his feet.

He needed to get out, right now, before anyone saw this mess. The twins were here, somewhere. If they caught him with a dead dragon…absolutely not.

Tendakeo.

He had to get to Tendakeo, that was the first thing. Stop the bleeding, disinfect things, he would be fine. He would be fine. Just get moving before it was too late. How much time did he have? Had anyone heard him? He hadn’t exactly been thinking about stealth when he had been fighting to avoid becoming a dragon’s first proper meal. No. It was just after the start of first shift, and he’d seen Lyulian and his sister head for their room sharing a bottle of blood-spiked wine not too long ago. They would be asleep for half a solar if they finished it off. Which didn’t solve his problem but it at least gave him a window to escape through.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He stumbled over to the door, trying to ignore the coppery stink of human blood and the overpowering sweetness of raw dragon blood. Using his elbow he pressed the door release. The door slid into the wall with a hiss of pressurized gas, and the hallway came into view.

It was lit by a series of yellowish light strips built into the walls near where they met the ceiling. Through the residue on his glasses and their partially melted surfaces, the light took on a visceral blood-orange tint. Across from him were two doors, to the right lay the room used by the ‘security team’ as a lounge—also where they took the tasters while they tripped on their samples of blood, supposedly for monitoring purposes. Continuing down the hall past the lounge took you to the twin’s office and the bedroom attached to it. To the left, the bathroom, and further down the hall in that direction the room that served as the repository for everyone’s thermal gear when they came in from the frozen Lustrathīr air. He didn’t see or hear anyone, not even downstairs where at least three guards must be standing around looking bored.

“To whoever in the universe is listening, thank you.” He ducked into the hallway and moved straight to the bathroom door. He opened the door and slipped inside. He stepped to the sink, waving his hands at the motion detection sensors that controlled the flow of water. In Baytūs they’d had the heat-sensing sink models, and he was still getting used to the unreliability of motion detection, which he’d always found infuriating, but never so much as in that moment, covered in his own blood and the fluids of an alien creature, trying to ignore the fiery agony that was climbing up both of his arms. After a handful of increasingly frustrated seconds, he forced himself to move slowly and deliberately, at which point the steaming water began pouring into the scuffed metal basin of the sink.

He gritted his teeth, and forced both hands under the water. He squeezed his eyes shut and held the scream that wanted to burst free until the urge passed. When he opened his eyes, blood had splattered on the sink, but his hands were looking much cleaner. Beneath the harsh white lights of the bathroom, the damage was not as bad as he’d thought, the blood hadn’t eaten all the way through to his muscles, but the pink exposed flesh almost glowed next to the rich dark brown of the rest of his skin. He couldn’t see his reflection clearly in the mirror above the sink, but he didn’t feel any painful heat there or see any pink spots in the blurry image his face had been transformed into. He didn’t bother taking his glasses off to check; even in their current state they were more helpful than his eyes would be on their own.

When he’d gotten as much of the blood off of his hands and forearms as he could, and rinsed the sink to minimize the evidence left behind, he left the room and headed straight for his thermal gear. His right foot made an uncomfortably loud scraping sound against the floor as he drug it behind him, not trusting it to carry any weight.

Competing sources of pain fought valiantly to overwhelm his mind. His thigh twitched with every move, is arms and hands roared at him, and every jolt of pain caused his vision to dim at the edges. Everything begged him to stop, to lay down and rest, just for a little while, just until things stopped screaming so loudly.

No. You listen to me, he thought at his body. I’ve been fighting you all my life, and you should have learned by now, I hate being told what I can and can’t do. Pushing ahead, he stumbled into the doorway to the thermal gear room, the door itself tucked into its socket in the wall.

The plain room was on the smaller side, with a uselessly small closet, bare metal walls, a floor that had rusted through in spots, and a series of mostly occupied hooks set into the walls to his left and right. Thermal coats, each a uniform dark blue designed to stand out against the snow, hung on them, reaching nearly to the floor in most cases. His coat was the last of the four hooks on that side of the room, near the back-left corner, and he hobbled towards it with as much urgency as his leg would allow.

He shrugged into the coat, sealing it with shaking, tender fingers, whimpering as he ran his fingertips along the front seam to close it. He pulled a pair of thermal gloves from the pocket of the coat and stared at them, a little embarrassed to realize there were tears in his eyes. He and Tendakeo didn’t live far from the Den, a quarter of the the way along the outer ring that made up the colony’s outskirts. It was around a ten minute walk on a good solar, but it was not a good solar. There had been many cases of frostbite in as little as ten minutes, Tendakeo had told him while researching the medical history of the colony. People assumed distances were shorter, or that they were faster, than they really were, and paid dearly for it. He was looking at twenty, maybe more, which made the gloves non-negotiable, no matter how much it would hurt getting into them.

Biting his lip hard enough to distract himself, he began pulling them on, starting with his left hand, whose palm was merely felt scalded. When he was finished with that hand, he gathered a fold of the coat, and jammed it between his teeth. Taking deep breaths through his nose, ignoring the smell of stale sweat from the unwashed coats, he forced his right hand into the glove. He howled into the fabric of the coat, his vision going white with stars, but he didn’t stop until he felt it slide on the rest of the way, knowing he wouldn’t be able to force himself to make a second attempt. He leaned against the wall, his face pressing against the cold metal, as he waited for the wave to pass.

Movement from the hallway. His eyes snapped open and he spun around, hopping over to the doorway just in time to see the edge of a gray, loose-fitting shirt, a long pair of pale slender legs and an untamed mass of blonde hair disappear into the bathroom, the door sliding shut behind her with a hiss. Taelina. Why hadn’t he hit the close button? She hadn’t seen him, had she? Would she have said anything? He thought of the blood. Would she notice? Enough. Go. Now!

He pulled his hood up, grateful that the gloves at least made the gesture less painful, and stepped out of the coat room, heading left towards the stairs at the back of the Den that led to the ground floor. He ducked through the door to the stair well just as a disgusted shout of confusion bounced down the hall. Holding onto the railings, his jaw aching from how tightly he clenched it, he made slow progress down two flights of stairs, arriving at a landing with two doors, one leading deeper into the building, and the other, to the outside. From the interior door, he could hear the dull thump of music played through salvaged speakers. From the exterior, the wind, a near constant companion on Lustrathīr, continued to whistle past.

He pushed through the exit, and almost had a heart attack as the shrouded form of a man in his thermal gear leaped back out of the way of the door. It took a moment until Veshrin recognized him. One of the guards, a pale-skinned and dark-eyed man whose name Veshrin couldn’t recall in the moment.

Though he had also been startled, the guard quickly composed himself and offered a cruel grin up at Veshrin.

“Eh, Vessie boy,” he said, in a thick Nordique accent. “You lost?”

“Just finished early,” Veshrin managed, feeling the sweat on his face freeze. “Heading home.”

“Since when do the twins allow you to get off ‘early’?” He peered at Veshrin through the gloom of the night, squinting, his face barely visible from the depths of his own hood. Veshrin was still getting used to the idea of nights as something that actually existed outside of a holo-text, but was grateful for the added protection just then.

“Since they decided to kill a bottle of spiked wine together. They’ll be too wrapped up to worry about what I’m doing.” Though it was just a rumor as far as he knew, it was largely suspected what Taelina and Lyulian got up to when no one was around.

The guard leaned forward. “You seem off, Vessie. You nervous about something?” His accept turned ‘Something’ into ‘Sum’ting’.

Veshrin took a step to the side, further from the door, and forcing the guard to shift slightly to keep an eye on him. He raised his hands. “I wouldn’t get too close. I’ve been feeling sort of shaky, lately, I guess.”

The guard leaned back at this, but didn’t retreat. “Fine, you keep that over there, eh? But why shouldn’t I report this?”

The guard watched Veshrin from the shadows drowning his hooded face. The moment stretched on to the point that Veshrin felt himself shifting weight to avoid putting too much on his worsening leg. Finally, exasperation forced his hand.

“Listen. Do you really want to go up and interrupt them to bother them about it? I don’t know about you, but I think I prefer breathing, and the wrong knowledge can prove fatal.”

The guard’s lip curled, flashing poorly maintained teeth. He waved a hand in Veshrin’s direction. “Dégoutine. Feh. Fine. But if I am asked, I will happily inform them, yes? You understand. You do look like shit, though. Hope whatever you got ain’t catching. If I have to spend med-rations over you, you’ll hope the things in the forest get to you before I do.”

Veshrin nodded and stepped aside as the guard pulled the door open and slipped inside, grumbling to himself in Nordique. When he was sure that the guard wasn’t going to pop back out, Veshrin oriented himself towards the quarters he and Tendakeo shared.

“I’ll be fine,” he said through gritted teeth, taking a step. He repeated it to himself as he took another, and another. “I just need to get home, and everything will be alright.”

The night’s answer was a long mournful howl that stalked out of the moonless dark and chased him through the night.