ΔV Pt. 11

While the orbits were shifted and propellant was spent, the crew of the Enterprise worked their asses off to convert a meeting room to the size that would take the Russian officers, the representatives from Arcadia, and the adopted son of the Dragon Emperor.

"Not sure why we need an adopted son of the Dragon Emperor," Helen said to Lucas as he thumbed through the book on magic. Isabella had been teaching him and Vidya in what scant few moments they'd had free, but Lucas had yet to get more than a spark of magic from his fingers. Helen herself was dressed in her best pressed uniform, adjusting her new lieutenant pins. She shook her head, looking deeply skeptical. "And I'm not sure about bringing Fire Heart up here."

"Well, you are Lord Winsom," Lucas muttered. He paused. "D-Do you think...on Earth..."

Helen's fingers paused in their fidgeting. She turned to face him and sighed. "I don't have family I give a fuck about, really," she said, walking over and sitting down on the bed beside him. "But I think your family has to be fine. There's no way that this Dark Lord motherfucker can have taken the United States. Setting off MAD? Fine, that hosed us bad. But, ya know, the USAF is just a quarter of our military. And, like, by numbers, it's not even the biggest. The Army is still huge. And have fucking guns. This guy's from Arcadia, a planet that things pointy sticks is cutting edge." She grinned at him, her voice cocky. "We got this."

Lucas smiled at her, then leaned in and kissed her, hard. He still felt a twinge in his breast, a momentary fear, a worry that she'd draw back and snort and laugh. How many times would he have to be inside of her before he stopped worrying that this was all dream? When Helen drew back, she was grinning at him. "No fair waiting till I'm in the fuckin uniform, Lucas." She paused. "Unless..." She grinned, slowly. "Do uniforms get you hot?"

Lucas coughed. "We, uh, we should get to the meeting room, right? The Russians are docking."

Helen snorted.

When the door opened and they stepped out, Lucas found a rather strange tableaux between him and the elevator that would take them from the living quarters deck to the meeting chambers. There stood Mohammad, one of the Indian scientists that had been a part of the mission since day one. He had his back pressed to the wall and was standing up very tall, very straight, and very steadily faced. His hands were clasped behind his back. Almost on the other side of the corridor was Vidya, her finger casually pushing the elevator call button repeatedly -- filling the air with a clicking and clacking noise. Vidya, despite her dusky complexion, was nearly beat red.

Helen glanced from Vidya to Mohammad to Vidya again. Then, smirking like a cat, she headed for the elevator, timing it just as the door whirred open. She stepped on as Vidya darted in. Lucas followed after, glancing confusedly back at Mohammad. The elevator door closed and the elevator began to ascend, the seeming of gravity reducing with every foot they traveled upwards. Once they hit microgravity, a dull chime filled the air and each of them flipped over, putting their feet against the ceiling. As they did so, Helen said, so casually that it nearly slipped past Lucas' attention: "So, doc, how was he?"

Vidya glared at her. "Nothing happened. I'm married."

Helen bit her lip, her good humor evaporating. "Uh, doc..." She coughed. "Did you and...well, did...I mean, you guys were talking right."

Vidya sighed as the elevator began to whirr. From their old perspective, it was going in the same direction -- but to their feet and their bodies, it felt as if it was going down, as they approached the opposite end of the great, spinning arm that was the center of the Enterprise. "It's a...I...I never asked..." Vidya said, her voice soft. "I never thought to do it, and now he's gone again and the Earth -- I..." She put her hand over her face. Her voice had caught and Lucas could see her trying to control herself. He felt his own fears uncoiling inside of him. Helen, looking as contrite as he'd ever seen her, reached out and squeezed her shoulder.

"Listen," she said. "We've got nukes. This fucker doesn't stand a chance."

Vidya let out a sound that was halfway between a giggle, a snort, and a scream.

The meeting room, by the time, they arrived, was filling up. The Russians had sent a trio of officers -- none of them were Captain Markova. But they had also brought a rather stoic looking Chinese man. He was nut brown in complexion, hazel eyed, black haired, and remarkably tall and broad shouldered. His muscles looked as if he had been doing hard labor his whole life and he'd never quite stopped. But sitting on his shoulder, craning his head around wildly, was...

A dragon.

An actual, factual, real life dragon. Lucas, who had become increasingly inured to bizarre sights and impossible images over the past few months, still took a few moments gaping at the small creature. He was small as well -- kittenish in size and attitude, with sleek black scales, a white furred ruff, and a kind of mustachio, like a Chinese dragon would have. His tail twitched from side to side and he stuck his tongue out into the air, then said -- in a clear, piping voice that was obviously being translated with magic: "I like this ship! I like spinning! Also, whoa! You didn't tell me that humans could have rainbow hair!"

He vanished and appeared, floating in the air before Helen. His wings didn't beat, and yet, he hung there, his eyes wide as he leaned his head forward, bumping his nose against Helen's nose. Helen waved her hand. "Hey!" she said. "Also, you can f-" She hastily adjusted her word. "You can talk?" she asked. In the background, Lucas could see Captain DuPont watching with a clear bit of amusement. The Captain had taken the news that he had been subtly influenced by the Dark Lord rather well, if Lucas was any judge of such things. But he had clearly relaxed considerably when the council of elven magi that Isabella had called up had then immediately purged his body of the connection.

"Well, I'd be kind of a lame dragon if I couldn't talk," the dragon said. "I couldn't say...hey there beautiful." He winked at Helen. "Wanna learn why they call me the Magnificent Dawn? It's cause I never come early, but I'm always worth it when I do."

At that moment, a hand closed around the midsection of the dragon and he made a loud squalling sound as he was dragged back and shoved into what Lucas recognized as a stretchable kitbag, the kind astros in every service used to stow their personal belongings when traveling from ship to ship. His snout stuck out of the mouth of the bag, and the hand tugged hard on the cinch, tightening the bag so that the dragon could barely squirm. "I'm betrapped!" he squeaked.

"Hua," the Chinese man said, his voice firm. "What did I tell you about flirting with women?"

"...do it often cause the last time I did it, it got you totally laid?"

The Chinese man sighed, slowly, then looked up at Helen and Lucas. "My apologies for my draconic companion," he said, his reserve nearly as intense as the dragon's bubbliness. Lucas felt like he was about to get the bends. "He's an idiot."

"If I was an idiot, would I do...this?" The dragon squirmed. "Auh! Dang it!"

"The bag has been enchanted," the Chinese man said. "Spacer First Class, Jianhong Qasim off the People's Shield."

"Holy shit, you survived that?" Helen asked, grinning. "How did you do that?"

"I didn't," Qasim said, flatly.

Before Lucas could make hide nor tails of that, the elves arrived. Fireheart was there, as was several others he didn't recognize -- and several he did, even if he didn't know their names. The elven magi, one representing each of the elemental spheres of magic, were all looking various kinds of queasy and battered. It was clear that the flight had not agreed with them in the slightest. They took their seats -- and after them came stranger creatures. A short, muscular man with a long beard. A girl who appeared to be bright orange and came up to Lucas' knee. A statue that walked and was carved with a snarling, tusked face. Two elves that had skin the color of charcoal and glowing red eyes. A burly green man with fur cloth and a sword strapped to his hip, glaring about himself.

Even with several walls knocked down and tables added, the meeting room became hot with body heat, the filter systems of the Enterprise struggling until the Magi of Air cast a spell that glowed over her head, creating cooling air that rushed outwards and caused Dr. Mann -- who Lucas saw had been in quiet conversations with the captain -- to begin walking over, clearly fascinated. Isabella came in among the last of the arrivals, which included a woman who was as blue as Helen had been before her skin dye pills had worn off, but had four arms and a dress that looked like a sari. Vidya, who had been watching with as much fascination as Lucas, choked on a drink bulb at seeing her.

"This is amazing," Isabella whispered to Lucas, beaming. "Where did you get that?" she asked, pointing at Vidya, who was still hacking and coughing, gaping at the blue skinned woman. Following the line of her gaze, Isabella frowned. "Oh, you've never seen a Vedic before?"

"This fucking planet," Vidya rasped. "And an ensign is giving them out."

Helen, in fact, had just gotten one from said ensign. The ensign saluted and Helen nodded back, severely.

"You know, she clean up nicely," Helen said. "The Enterprise, I mean. An old teakettle laser ship and she's now the next best thing to fucking Rivendell."

"What?" Vidya asked.

"Don't ask," Lucas muttered, taking his drink bulb. It was, of course, water. For all the trappings of a diplomatic mission, this had nothing on a real diplomatic meeting. Properly speaking, Captain DuPont had only the most vague of authorizations -- they were still getting laser communications from the buoy at the Janus Portal. The outward fleet was still gathering near Ganymede, while the "enemy fleet" was securing itself in orbit around Earth. But the enemies clearly had some brainpower: They had launched a missile at the buoy. Half the outward fleet had trained lasers on the missile...

But Lucas had done math on this kind of scenario before. The inverse square law meant that lasers rapidly dropped off in power. Even if each ship fired their strongest shipkilling laser at the distant missile, it'd take more power than every single ship combined could put out to do more than heat the hull. And that was assuming they were keeping the laser-light trained on it with perfect precision. As it was, all the lasfire did was let the captains of those ships know they were doing something. The missile, being small and mostly made of remass, had spent about three minutes accelerating and was now purely ballistic.

But that half hour of acceleration had been at nearly ten gravitates, they were going to reach the buoy in four days. The delights of being an unmanned vehicle, Lucas supposed. And the missile didn't even need to hit the buoy. It just had to get within a few hundred kilometers, then trigger the warhead, which would launch shrapnel in a cone at the buoy. One chunk would take the entire communication array out. So, in four days, the outward fleet and the Enterprise would be entirely incommunicado.

So this had to work.

"All right, everyone, I'm not a diplomat, so I'll be brief," Captain DuPont said, seriously as he stood before the main projection screen. "The dictator known as Dalethraxius has taken control of Earth. Out orbital fleets have all been destroyed -- nearly a ninety percent casualty rate in each space born power, with the survivors falling back to the outward fleet. The outward fleet herself is falling back to Ganymede, the largest colony that we have out in the black. Stark has gone incommunicado and the orbital communication grid is down. We do not know precisely what is happening on Earth. But we know that Dalethraxius is an expert necromancer-"

Lucas shook his head slowly. How could DuPont say something like that without bursting out laughing. But...he supposed that he had the answer in the rock in his gut. He wanted to be able to laugh. He wanted to be able to take this as unseriously as if it was some shitty vidgame plot. But he couldn't. He glanced at Helen and felt her hand, squeezing his knee under the table. Even the small dragon on Qasim's shoulder was looking grim and quiet, sitting on his shoulder. Then Lucas blinked.

Qasim was petting the dragon.

"-and according to the Council of Magi, he's able to raise the souls of the unquiet dead." He frowned. "I may not need to, but I am going to spell out exactly what that means." He sighed. "Stark's been the site of countless scenes of mass death. To lay it out to our Arcadian guests, the most remarkable include the first World Wars, where forty million died, then World War two, where eighty million died. During the 21^st century, a string of ecological, military and economic crisis led to the deaths of two hundred million people."

The numbers left the Arcadians all looking shocked. The green skinned man exclaimed. "How are there any of you humans left?!"

Captain DuPont continued speaking, as if he hadn't been interrupted. "If Dalethraxius was able to raise even a fraction of the dead, then he has an army numbering in the billions, spread across the entirety of Stark. Compared to the historical records provided by the Librarian of Lord Winsom's estates..." He nodded to the tentacle faced visitor, who was being given a wide berth by everyone sitting at his table. "This gives him an army a hundred thousand times larger, equipped with modern weapons." He paused. "And he just destroyed the orbital fleets, then raised those from the dead. Giving him a space fleet that outnumbers us four to three."

Silence.

"So," Captain DuPont said, looking around. "Now we come to the question...Arcadia united against the Dark Lord once. And each of your people have a prophecy about his return. Ancient treaties exist between all of you. Treaties agreeing to destroy evil when it returns." He pursed his lips, then sighed. "Well. It's not a great sales pitch. But Stark needs us. And Arcadia needs Stark's victory here. Because...the Dark Lord isn't going to stay on that side of the portal. He's going to come here with ships and with guns and he's going to rule both worlds."

The entire room filled with tension. A thrumming tension, like a violin.

And that was when the dragon sprang forward and piped up: "The Dragon Empire and the million swords of the oni pledge themselves to this duty!"

Sitting next to Qasim was a gorgeous, Asian woman with silvery fox ears and a massive array of fox tails, which Lucas had tried to count several times and kept losing track of which was which. She, hearing the dragon, exclaimed: "We absolutely do not and T'ien Lung Hua Ling does not speak for the Dragon Empire!"

And the entire room exploded with shouting.

***

Qasim listened to the shouting for an hour.

The Vedics refused to leave the sacred valley of a thousand rivers, which was where they drew their strength. They found the human technology of just spraying water into space, as if it had no value, to be deeply offensive. The orcs of the Sur refused to do a damn thing if they were going to simply be used cannon fodder. They threw a chair at an elven lord who scoffed at the idea of orcs 'deciding' to do anything. The dwarves demanded to see fission reactors and nuclear weapons, to see if they could figure out how they worked before they trusted their lives to them. The gnomes remained silent and simply enjoyed the treats given them by the ensigns who had been pressed to service for the meeting.

And Qasim had had enough.

He carefully rolled the magical spheres in his head together, choosing air, and then void, and then slammed down his palm. All sound in the room ceased at the same moment. Lips moved and fingers pointed. Arms waved and the orc stood. But the sound remained as still as space. Hua, his eyes wide, swung his head around as Qasim stood. His voice rang out, clear and firm. "The Dark Lord is an eminent threat to both of our worlds. I'm the one who has been chosen to slay him. We're not fighting a traditional army, with traditional logistic trains, with command structures. The mission is as simple as finding Dalethraxis and killing him..." He nodded. "That's all. I've been taught about how necromancy works, and without the central control foci, the dead remain dead. We do not need to fight every single soldier that he has. That means all we really need to do is take out that fleet-" He thrust his finger at the screen, which displayed the orbital position of the Stark system, including the ghostly fleet in orbit around the homeworld of humanity. "-get into orbit, and nuke whatever city he's in until it glows in the dark."

He glared around himself. "Arcadia need not give us its armies. It merely needs to give us its magic."

The envoys from across Arcadia blinked at him. Captain DuPont blinked at him.

Qasim nodded. "So...shall I release the spell?"

Nods filled the room. Some quite angry. Qasim made the gesture of negation he had been taught and Hua did a little dance on the table, prancing around and thrusting out his chest, as if he had invented Qasim himself. Qasim ignored him as the sound returned. The Vedic representative nodded. "He speaks truth -- and the use of our magics...it is a dear cost, but it is more affordable than putting blade to a billion walking dead."

The orc grumbled and sat back. "Our shamans can be found..." he said.

The elven magi of fire smirked. "We can lend our aid."

Captain DuPont nodded. "Very well. We'll send the message to the Outward Fleet. We'll be there by the end of the week."

After the meeting broke, Qasim was escorted through the ship by an ensign while Hua crawled into his pocket and fell rapidly asleep -- and he was brought to the captain's cabin. There, the Captain took his hand and shook it. "Thank you, Prince Qasim," DuPont said, his lips quirking in the smallest of smiles. "I was worried we were going to have to find some way to close the portal and..." He shook his head. "No, no matter, it's not worth talking about the worst possible outcomes."

Qasim nodded, curtly.

DuPont sighed. "According to Huxian, the Imperial armory has several weapons of legend that they've been keeping. The prophecy is unclear which it is will actually kill the Dark Lord...and considering your nuke it till they glow plan, they might all be useless. But it seems like a good idea to collect them."

Qasim nodded. "Yes," he said, frowning. His training had told him, in great detail, how to respond to the commanders and officers of the other astroforces of Stark. But all of those details had been in how to properly repeat his name, serial number and rank. He frowned. "I don't...know exactly how...kind the Party is going to be to me, when I return." He frowned even more. "I am...Uyghur. Do you know what that means, DuPont?"

DuPont pursed his lips. "I read about the genocide."

"They call them security sweeps in school, sir. And blame any excesses on antirevolutionary government action," Qasim said. "But it is one thing to be a Uyghur and a muslim. It is another to be a Uyghur, a muslim, and the slayer of the Dark Lord Dalethraxius, dragon companion to..." He tapped his pocket and Hua stuck his head out, blinking sleepily.

"Where are we?" the tiny dragon asked.

DuPont managed to conceal his surprise with some skill. "I understand. I'm fully prepared to offer amnesty in the United States or one of our allies. And if the Chinese want to make a stink..." He shook his head. "Of course, we could both be talking nonsense. The Chinese government might not even exist by the time we're done. The United States government too." He sighed, slowly. "You know, I trained for this day my whole life. Captains in the USAF have to -- it's called the Galactica protocol. The idea of trying to scrape by on a Mars colony or Ganymede, building a future in space while the Earth glows in the dark...it..." He trailed off. "It never felt real."