Battleship Raider by Paul Tomlinson (book recommendations website .txt) 📗

I forced down the last of it, I heard a ping as one of the drones discovered something. I squinted at the virtual screen. There wasn’t a welcome mat as such, but the opening in the metal looked fairly inviting. I carefully packed the empty coffee can and wrapper away and then had to smile, thinking of the thousands of tons of scrap metal that were littering the jungle. I shouldered my pack and set off for the drone’s location. I was about to go into the rabbit-hole and forty years back in time.

Chapter Five

“Tell me about the dragons,” I said as we moved along the length of the wreckage.

“Sapphire Dragons,” Trixie said, her voice soft in my ear. “Properly called Crichtorax.”

“Named after the explorer who first tripped over one,” I muttered, “or maybe he was the first person to get eaten. Tell me that they don’t really eat people.”

“Their diet includes invertebrates, birds and mammals – mainly local deer – and some carrion.”

“Not a herbivore, then. Are they poisonous?”

“Two glands in the lower jaw secrete a form of venom which prevents blood clotting, lowers blood pressure, and causes muscle paralysis which is said to be accompanied by severe pain. The victim’s body then goes into shock and may suffer hypothermia before loss of consciousness and death.”

“Can you tell me anything good about them?” I asked.

“Please wait.” There was a brief pause. “They are edible and the flesh is said to taste like chicken.”

“How big are they?”

“Adult Crichtorax range in length from twenty to thirty-six feet with approximately fifty per cent of this being tail.”

“Show me one,” I said. I’d only ever seen the image on a fifty-cent coin. They put dragons on the local currency to try and get tourists to buy some.

Trixie projected the image into the air. The dragon was bipedal, walking on its hind legs like a tyrannosaurus rex. If half its length was tail, then the adults stood between ten and eighteen feet tall. The picture showed a large skull with a narrow snout, long neck and a short thick body. The skin was made of armoured scales and was predominantly olive-green with the female having rusty brown stripes down her back and the male sporting iridescent peacock blue stripes. I scanned through the details under the image, figuring that it is good to know as much as possible about something that is going to try and eat you. The yellow forked tongue provided both taste and sense of smell like a snake’s and its teeth were in rows like a shark. They were serrated to saw through flesh and were replaced regularly. These teeth were sought after by tourists as souvenirs.

“A cross between a snake, a shark, and an ostrich – lovely.”

The dragons have long arms which they carry close to their bodies. Each has three long clawed fingers with the middle finger being the longest. Their toes are tipped with scythe-like claws used for climbing trees and disembowelling their prey. Their eyes are a milky green with elongated cat-like pupils and they contain predominantly cones, meaning the big beasties have poor night-vision. They can see colours but have difficulty spotting things that aren’t moving. The only bit of good news I could see was that they hunt alone rather than in packs or flocks or whatever the collective noun was. A bastard of dragons maybe. With any luck, the bullets had scared my local dragon away for good.

Despite the name, the Sapphire Dragons weren’t native to Saphira. Scientists reckon they are an artificially engineered predator and as such, they are banned on all inhabited worlds. One story has it that they were introduced by the Gators as pets or their equivalent of hunting dogs. Another theory is that they were released on Saphira so that wealthy tourists from the orbiting luxury hotel could come down and hunt them for sport, but the owners of the space station strenuously deny this so obviously it can’t be true. I’d never felt the urge to go dragon hunting – even when I had my own suite up on the space station.

Old Jack had been right, there was a huge gash in the outer hull of this section of the wreckage. The outer hatch was gone and this left the inner hatch exposed. If I could open that, I would be through the inner hull and inside the ship. It was unlikely that there was any power in the ship to trigger the locking mechanism so I was going to have to open the hatch manually. There is usually a wheel or a crank under a flap beside the door for this. Ten minutes work on a good day.

As I got close I could see that it wasn’t going to be a good day. Or even an average one. The impact had distorted the outer hull causing it to collapse like a concertina. And a bent girder now blocked access to the flap beside the hatch, preventing it from opening. I was going to have to cut away a piece of the girder. I briefly considered sending the drones off to look for an alternative way in, but knew this was likely to be my best chance of getting inside before the moons rose.

I was going to have to work in a very narrow space, squeezed between two sections of the mangled hull. That meant having to shrug off my jacket and gun belt – and also that I would be uncomfortably close to the sparks from the metal cutter. Breaking and entering often involves more work than you think. I donned my eye mask and slid into the gap. Wedging myself in place as best I could, I fired up the laser cutter and got to work. Molten flecks of metal flew out like a child’s sparkler, burning pinholes in my shirt. I was so intent on the task that a first I didn’t register the alarm that the computer was sounding in my