Thrax

“We’ve been getting them to the escape pods,” Meline replied, “and we need to be heading there ourselves.”

“Lead the way,” said Thrax, and he and Agena, with Meline, made for the door.  He still cast a curious and bemused look at Agena carrying a Scodax weapon, and blinked and flicked his dragon tongue at the imagery that the sight conjured up.  This was going to bear some discussion as soon as their lives were out of danger.  The other Knights and Corps, brandishing their blades against the Scodax, began to back out of the chamber with them.  In a moment, they were off. 

They all ran through the ship, passing and stepping over the fallen bodies of Scodax androids, some of which were intact but run through with smoking holes, others scattered in pieces on the ship’s deck floors.  Thrax’s people had done their usual deadly-efficient job of dispatching their enemies, and he wondered how many casualties they had taken themselves.  There would be time to find out as soon as those with him and any other Lacertans on board were safe.  The voice of the ship’s AI called out, “Self-destruct in six alyews…”

Quickly, they reached a room filled with circular hatches in a chamber strewn with the bodies and body parts of more androids, and littered as well with the bodies of Scodax themselves.  Uniformed Lacertans were ushering and helping people into the hatches and climbing through the hatches themselves.  Many of the hatchways were empty, the sign of already launched escape pods.  Meline pointed to a closed hatch and said, “The three of us should fit in here—very snugly.”

“So long as we fit,” said Thrax.  Meline pounded a surface on one side of the hatch and it swung open with an ironically dragon-like hiss.  Gesturing to Agena, Thrax said, “Armed or not, you’re still a civilian.  You first.”  Without a word, Agena climbed into the hatch.  The two dragons quickly retracted their blades and morphed back to human, the better to fit inside the small enclosure, and climbed in after her.  The hatch door swung shut with a metallic clack.  The ship’s AI called, “Self-destruct in five alyews…”

Inside the pod, Meline took one seat facing Thrax and Agena, who shared the other.  Agena threw down the bolt rifle onto the floor of the pod, wrapped her arms around Thrax, and buried her head against his chest.  Thrax rested his weapon and held Agena tight.  There was a muffled explosive sound and a sudden lurch, then a feeling of acceleration.

The escape pod shot out of the Scodax mastercraft amid a flurry of others, emerging into space like down from a dandelion.  The pod had one viewport at the front, and as the tiny craft spun away from its mooring, Thrax and Meline gazed out of the port at what was happening just beyond the arc of the planet.  Shapes were bursting out of the star-dappled darkness.  They resolved into view and revealed their recognizable forms as spacecraft, each one as large as the ships of the Scodax armada.

 The two weredragons picked out the configuration of each incoming vessel.  Some were from Lacerta, returning home; others from Earth, and among them were craft of at least four planets allied with Earth.  The sector had sent some of its proudest vessels to defend the planet of the dragons.  Thrax and Meline knew that each one had weapons fully charged and ready for battle.

They would not be needing them.

In minutes, the space around Lacerta was lit up with the fiery and luminous flashes of ships tearing themselves apart from the inside.  The explosions ripped jagged and burning pieces of hull from the bodies of the vessels and flung them sparking and sizzling into the black void.  Tendrils and trails of energy arced out glowing into space.  Each Scodax vessel became a huge, searing yellow-white blossom of discharged power, blazing over the face of the planet.

 And on the planet, in the populated and settled places, and in the places where the resources of Lacerta were found, smaller flashes of light could be seen from space.  These were where the attack craft stationed across the planet had responded to the command to erupt in the fire of self-destruction.

Thrax and Meline looked out the viewport of the escape pod and watched the pockmarks of light break out across their world.  They knew that one of them marked the place where Scodax ships hovered over the Spires and the Aerie, the places where they had met and became friends and learned to be Knights. 

A pang of sorrow clawed at the heart of each of them at the thought of the places in their past that were likely to have been destroyed, and the memories that were now likely to be blasted and burning.  And Thrax held Agena all the more tightly, clinging to the new memories he had made with her and to the thoughts of the future they were still free to make.

*

When the Scodax Armada wiped itself from existence in one fearsome flurry of explosions, the reinforcement vessels that had come to the aid of Lacerta found themselves tasked not with battle but with emergency relief.  Ships and crews were pressed into service to rescue the trapped, tend to the injured, and recover the dead.  They brought and distributed food and undertook the building of shelters.  And they began the process of healing one of the proudest colonies of any world in space.

Upon their return to Lacerta, Thrax and Agena had stories to tell and statements to make, both to the Mentors and to the members of the Ruling Aerie.  The training annexes of the Knights, as planned when the Scodax attack first happened, were now the temporary headquarters of both bodies until their proper places in Silverwing could be rebuilt.

Agena testified the harrowing story of how she and Meline had left the courageous Commander Venar and sped back to the cell from which they had been taken, where they had released the rest of the prisoners with whom they had been kept.  They had all quickly found the other cells and released everyone else who had been taken, and then had come the dread battle with the Scodax androids who had come out after them.

The leaders of the Lacertan government and armored forces listened in amazement to the tale of how the Knights and Corps protecting civilians aboard the Scodax mastercraft had battled advancing squadrons of androids; of how only Agena and Meline had been armed at first, until the Lacertans had begun to overpower the androids with the might of sinew and reflexes and tails, had seized their weapons, and had begun to blast their way through the automatons.