Thrax

They were amazed in particular at the way Agena, not even a dragon warrior but only a human athlete, had stayed at Meline’s side and fought her own terror as much as she fought their foes.  She had missed or grazed her android targets as much as she’d hit them, but she had never faltered, ignoring her instinct to run and hide.

 She had stayed with Meline as they’d reached the weapons room and recovered the captured powerblades.  And it was Agena herself, in the midst of a hail of enemy fire, who had lunged and ducked, rolled and leaped her way down a Scodax passageway to reach one of the androids’ optical ports, into which she had personally fed from her data collector the command for the armada to destroy itself.

All this, from an Earth woman whose most formidable training was in the playing of a game.  The Alpha Dragon of Lacerta himself issued a proclamation that from this time forward, the name of Agena Morrow would be entered into the planetary annals as an honorary Knight.  Thrax, attending the hearings and giving his own testimony, watched this honor conferred upon the woman who had come to Lacerta as his aspirant and prospective mother of his child, and his heart swelled with a dragon’s pride.

For her own part in repelling the invasion of the Scodax, Meline was awarded another color of armor.  Now wearing three colors, she would be a leader among Knights and Dames. 

There was much discussion, in official hearings and elsewhere across the planet, of why the Scodax had programmed a command for all their ships to destroy themselves, dooming their cause, in the event of the capture of one single ship.  Why would they do such a thing when it would be simpler and far less costly for the rest of the armada to turn on a single captured craft and destroy it? 

Lacerta and the other worlds aligned with Earth could only speculate.  Perhaps it was only that the inability of the Scodax to trust other tribes among their own people extended to a general suspicion of all other intelligent life.  Perhaps they feared that from one captured vessel, data about Scodax strengths and weaknesses could be transmitted before there was ever a chance to destroy it. 

Experts from across space weighed in on the issue and concluded that the Scodax were a uniquely paranoid species, given to thinking in rigid absolutes and black-and-whites with very few ambiguities.  This was likely what made the very idea of their ships or technology in hands other than their own a repugnant thought.  It was agreed in the end that the unyielding, all-consuming pride of the Scodax was what had truly doomed them. 

All that aside, Agena’s part in resolving the Lacerta-Scodax crisis was immediately the talk of the entire quadrant of the galaxy.  The already celebrated Sphereball champion was now doubly famous, praised on hundreds of planets as the woman who had saved Lacerta.  Agena tried to dismiss the praise by arguing that the Knights and Corps of Lacerta would surely have found a way to save their world for themselves, regardless of what an untrained and frightened human woman did, but no one was having it.  Agena would be hailed as a heroine, whether she wanted the distinction or not.

In truth, there was only one thing Agena wanted.  He was tall and smoldering-dark, handsome and muscular, and decked in an armor skin of three colors, and the desire in his eyes whenever he looked at her was almost all the reward she could ever ask for.  The most treasured reward was what happened when he peeled that shiny second skin from his wondrous body like a shedding snake and put the dragon at his loins to work on her.

Agena happily accepted one honor from the people of Lacerta.  With the destruction of the Chateau where she and Thrax had first consummated their pairing, the Knights reassigned the two of them to a Mentor’s quarters at one of the training annexes.  They settled into these rooms in a gleaming dome structure sitting atop a plateau surrounded by forests and mountains with a waterfall so huge and mighty that it almost made Earth’s Niagara Falls seem like a garden fountain by comparison. Their bed looked out on a spectacular view of the falls.

The look in his eyes made Agena feel as if he were penetrating her even now.  Her heart ran over with bliss.  “When you put it that way, I guess you have a point.  I think the things we’ve done together, and the things we’ve been through—they’ve changed us.  I guess they couldn’t help but change us.”