Scales like Stars Pt. 01

"Oh, right. I wouldn't want to separate my husband from his family," Castrovel snarled, her voice still furious. "Grab them too and throw them in the brig and set course for the sector capital!"

Merton opened his mouth to speak – but then the purple skinned girl was flipping switches.

"Wait, wait, wait!" He cried out.

A series of crackling lightning bolts slammed into the platform behind him. When Merton spun around, he saw Trevor, Carlos, Lisa, his mom, his dad, his kid sister, a middle aged black man that he had never met in his life, and a bright orange house cat, all of them looking rather shocked. Trevor and Carlos both held huge buckets of popcorn. Mom was in her night gown and was holding a small cup of bourbon. Dad was holding a Wii remote and was in workout clothes. The middle aged black man was buck naked and holding a laptop over his junk.

The ground shuddered under Merton's feet...

And he realized they were underway.

Rocketing away from Earth and their lives.

And it was all his fault.

###

The Talon 9 emerged from subspace with a cascade of magical radiation that blew out behind the spindly engines like the bow-wave of an olden age sailing ship. The Talon 9 herself was a beauty: A twenty meter needle of hardened adamantine and bio-engineered dragonscale mixed with deep-space life forms. Void whale blubber, to soak up radiation and emit electronic shielding. The crystal foci of the great brane-brains of Thalax to provide the apertures for the magical weaponry. Mixed with the bio-engineering, though, was good old fashioned artifice. Four railguns were mounted along the entire spine in a series of canted tunnels that looked like the snout of a dragon, while nearly a hundred plasma torpedos were tucked under each atmospheric wing, with backup magazines holding the planet-scouring vortex weaponry that made the ship a true terror.

The ship, thanks to a linked demiplane, was a great deal larger inside than out. Relix took advantage of that size to stomp a great distance before arriving at the bridge. She threw herself into the command throne as several of the men-at-arms that had been hand picked by Gunner looked at her curiously. They were a motley collection of people that Gunner had snapped up from slave markets and arena halls and pain-palaces. Scarred, tough, and bizarrely loyal, they normally struck Relix as being painfully boring.

But now?

Now, she was just glad to see sub-races that did what she expected: Bow their heads and go back to their consoles.

"Forward view!" she said.

"I take it the proposal went well?" Gunner asked as he ambled up behind her. His hands were clasped behind his back, his insectoid legs thumping on the deck heavily.

"Fantastic. My husband's family is moving into their quarters..." Relix snarled as the front of the curved bridge shimmered, flowed, and became a visualization of space ahead of them. The sector capital was built atop an immense red star called the Redshaka. Old and cranky, the star produced more than enough solar energy to maintain the palace settled on its northern pole – though said palace was almost laughably tiny compared to the vastness of the star itself. It was all so showy. It infuriated Relix. Then her brow furrowed. "What are those?"

"They appear to be cutter-craft, flying House Thresh banners," the man-at-arms in the sensors seat said, turning her head to look at her. "Ma'am, they're opening lascoms."

Relix leaned her head against her knuckles, cocking her head to look at the approaching cutter-craft. Each one was basically on par with her ship, though they had less luxuries. Sub-races didn't need demiplanes and servants to man their deadly little ships. That, unfortunately, meant that if those cutters took down the Talon 9, they'd kill hundreds of her servants.

While sub-races were supposed to be expendable, Relix had been taught to not do so unless one had too. And besides...

She had just gotten all her stuff settled properly.

"Put them on," she said, sighing. "It won't come to violence. Probably."

"Thresh are reds," Gunner muttered. "And I've never met a red that doesn't make it about violence eventually."

The forward screen rippled again. The image that filled it doused Relix with cold ice.

Sitting in one of those cutter-crafts, wearing obsidian power armor crafted by dwarves and covered with the trophies of his two thousand and two hundred and twenty two kills, was Bex Thresh, the Red Baron of the Singularity Principality. He was everything a red was supposed to be: Broad shouldered and as muscled as an exceptionally deadly barn, his snout bristled with horns and smoldered with smoke. But the worst thing?

He was smiling.

Like he was happy to see her.

"Princess!" he boomed.

"Baron," she said.

"I hear that your hand remains unclaimed," Baron Bex Thresh said, leaning slowly forward, resting his muzzle on his knuckles, his elbows cocked against the skull-covered armrests of his command chair. The orcs that he used as a bridge crew stood at attention behind him. "I have come to take it."

"My hand?"

"With a sword. If I must." He grinned.

Did he think that was flirting? Wait, no. Dismemberment was how reds flirted. He wasn't joking. Shit. She beamed at him, putting a falsely sympathetic note in her voice. "Oh, no, I'm sorry. Didn't you hear? I've been swept off my feet."

Baron Bex narrowed his red eyes. "Did you?"

"By a noble from a sub-race," she said. "Yes, he's mage-blind, but he's so intelligent. So charming. So...hung." She grinned, cocking her head slightly. "Why, he and his family are moving in – the marriage is going to be held in just a week or two, once things are finalized."

Baron Bex's eyes narrowed further. "Is it now?"

"Yes!" Relix nodded.

"And where is this fiance?" Bex snarled.

"He's settling in!" Relix said, quickly.

"Then...I invite him. And you. To dine. With me. At our estates in the capital." Bex's eyes gleamed and he seemed to think that he had set out the perfect trap. Either Relix's husband wasn't real and she was easily claimed, or he was, and Bex could brain him.

Relix frowned, slightly.

And then beamed.

"We'll be there tonight!"

###

"Well, it could be worse."

"How?"

Lisa looked at Merton as he stood in the center of the palatial estates that the servants of Princess Castrovel had led him and his family and his friends too. Lisa was about five foot nothing of redheaded fury – her eyes crackled, her hands were clenched, and her jaw was taut enough to slice through glass. Merton couldn't blame her. Lisa was married. And after the last time he had mentioned a spouse, he didn't want to get Lisa's wife yanked into this ship too. Lisa hung her head forward.

The rest of the group was also trying to adapt. Mom and Dad were sitting with the black man, who had gotten a cloak of silky fabric to drape around his shoulders from one of the closets. Trevor and Carlos – both of them bachelors with shitty jobs and worse families meant that they were taking this better than the others. But, as Merton thought about it, he remembered that Carlos did have a favorite cousin, and Trevor loved his grandma to pieces. But neither were thinking about that now. They were just admiring the room they were in.

To be fair.

It was a really fucking nice room. It looked like a palace garden, with wide walls and a curved ceiling covered with a gleaming mural of the galaxy. Ferns in purple and green and blue grew from pots of earth, while a fountain sat plonk in the middle of the chamber, burbling and giggling happily as water splashed into the fountain. Large cushions were strewn about for place to sit, and there were several doors that led to other chambers. Investigating those had revealed palatial bedrooms and vast bathing chambers and more.

"We could be on fire!" Merton said.

The orange cat rubbed against his ankles.

The black man stood, sighing. "I gotta get this out of the way," he said, his voice soft and slightly high pitched. Mom and Dad watched him, looking concerned, as he walked towards Merton. Merton blinked.

"Uh, yeah, I have no idea why you're here-" Merton started.

"I-I'm Julia," he said.

Merton blinked.

And as his brain tried to process that – with a roaring, snarling, screaming sound in his ears, with his heart hammering a thousand miles an hour – the door to the estates opened and the bald elf walked into the room, flanked by two servants heaped with cloth and leather and strips of metal. The bald elf clapped his hands.

"Sir Merton! Your fiancee wishes your presence and has sent me to ensure you are presentable."

Merton blinked again. Then he swung around to face the elf. He scowled, walking forward. "For what?" he asked.

The elf gulped. "A-A-A dinner party!"

He looked nervous. Merton felt too...too...everything. It was too much. The guilt. The anger. The confusion. The shock. All of it made him snap. And so he growled. "Unless you want me to tell everyone at the dinner party that I'm some random yahoo and that this Princess is just using me to distract people from the fact her scaled butt is up for grabs, you'll do me some favors. Got it!?" He glared at the elf, who looked stunned and deeply nervous.

The elf gulped. "Y-You do know that that will kill you-"

"Oh yeah, but it'll ruin her too," Merton said, letting what he was feeling flash across his face. "So, you going to do what I ask, or are you going to have to find a new fiance?"

The bald elf's face was breaking out in a fierce sweat. He reached up, daubing at his forehead with a handkerchief. His blue stained lips opened, then closed, and finally, he stammered. "F-Fine! What is it?"

"You have magic?" Merton asked.

"Yes," the bald elf looked confused.

"Can you change people's bodies?" Merton asked. "Augmentations, shapeshifting, healing?"

"...yes?" the bald elf looked even more confused.

"Then make that man," Merton said, swinging his finger back to the terrified and near-to-tears black man standing in the center of the room. "Into a beautiful woman!"

"What?" the black man asked.

"What?" the bald elf asked.

"Kinky!" Carlos called out from the sidelines.

"I-I-I-" the bald elf stammered. Merton locked his eyes on his. The bald elf gulped, then asked: "W-What kind of woman?"

"Um, tiny?" The black man – no, Merton thought, Julia, the woman you love – said. "Asian? Petite? Oh! Blue hair! And, um, can I be hairless? Like, down there?" He gestured vaguely at the floor.

"Kiiiiiinky!" Carlos called out from the sidelines.

"Dude!" Merton shouted.

"What?" Carlos asked. "Don't kinkshame yourself!"

Merton made a face that Carlos often provoked in him: A mixture between confused, baffled, weirded out, shocked and slightly impressed. He shook his head slowly and turned to the bald elf. "Can you handle that?"

"It'll be exp-" the bald elf gulped at Merton's expression. "Yes! Easily! Come along, uh, my soon to be lady!" He gestured to Julia. Julia walked with him, looking like he – well, she – could hardly believe what was happening.

Lisa, who had been watching all of this, looked at Merton. She smiled. "I'm proud of you, McFly."

"Thanks," Merton said. His name, shortened, did not in fact sound like Marty. That didn't stop the nickname. Lisa punched his shoulder and walked off to explore her part of the chambers. As she left, Merton took the time to walk over to his mom and dad. Both of them were ducking their heads together and murmuring to one another. Merton slowed and perked his ears.

"It can't be a starship that uses any propulsion we know," Mom was saying, her voice hushed. "Do you feel any acceleration?"

"No..." Dad tugged at his mustache. "But that doesn't mean much. A single G of acceleration would be indistinguishable from natural gravity. Or artificial gravity." He looked around. "It can't be centrifugal, we'd have noticed some kind of Coriolis effects."

"Would we?" Mom asked.

"In the inner ear, if it was a small cylinder or arm." Dad nodded. "In liquid, if we were in a larger one."

"We haven't tested that..." Mom rubbed her chin. "The most likely explanation is that it's from acceleration. Which means either this vehicle is using non-standard methods of generating thrust, or the propellent tanks are huge. We've been accelerating ever since we woke up. How fast do you think that puts us?"

Dad tugged at his mustache again. "Eh. We can round that to ten kilometers per second squared." He cocked his head. "How long have we been here?"

Mom put her fingers to her wrist, frowning. "Not sure..."

Merton shook his head slowly. This was what he got for having nerdy parents. Though his parents were professional nerds. They had been nerds for their country. Dad, then, said something that made Merton almost collapse.

"I guess this means the dickheads have decided to stop keeping their hands off," he said, sighing quietly. "I told them. I told them you can't have a truce with dragons.

"The fuck!?" Merton exclaimed.

"Merton!" Mom said, looking at him. "Language!"

"Sorry, Mom," Merton said, glaring at her father. "The fucking fuck!? You fucking knew about fucking space fucking dragons?"

Dad chuckled, even as Mom looked more and more sour at every single F-bomb. "Yeah, sorry kid. I told you that if I told you what I did for a day job, I'd have to kill you," he said, his voice cheery. "Now, though, you should get ready for that dinner."

"I thought you were kidding!" Merton put his hands over his face.

Dad stood up, his hands sliding into his pockets. "All right. A full explanation can come after we're not all at risk of being killed. But the short story is Earth's been visited by dragon scout ships twice. The first in the 40s led to the dragons nabbing heavily wounded veterans from hospitals across the world for surgical research. We're mage blind – meaning we can't cast magic – so that means we don't get a bunch of... uh, rights in the dragon empire."

"Uh-huh," Merton whispered. And he was going to get married to that? He was starting to think being on fire was an improvement.

"But during the 50s, the Soviets were testing tactical thermonuclear weapons," Dad said, like that was a thing that people just talked about every day as if it was utterly normal. "To fry NATO armies. And they tested their tactical nuke anti-air missile during the next dragon scout ship run and managed to tag the bugger."

"The Russians shot down a dragon with a nuke?"

"Yeah," Dad said, laughing. "Sucks, doesn't it? Almost started an interplanetary war."

Merton put his hands over his face and tried to stop hyperventilating.

"Fortunately for all of us, the dragon ship took its time crashing, with its stealth systems online for most of the way and it landed in Roswell, New Mexico," he said. "Cause I doubt Stalin would have been particularly nice to a dragon crew, half dead from radiation burns and out of mana, you can believe me."

"And here I thought the Cuban missile crisis was the worst thing from the Cold War," Merton whispered.

Dad pffft'd through his mustache. "Please! It was the Norwegian Rocket Incident."

"Honey," Mom broke in. "That was in the 90s, after the Cold War."

Dad, as befitting his years in the defense department and military space programs, snorted loudly.

Merton dragged his hands along his face, tugging his cheeks back into a long, almost exaggerated expression. "Let me get this straight," he whispered. "There are space dragons, who run a space dragon empire, and one of their scout ships were shot down by a soviet tactical nuclear weapon in 1947, and that scout ship crashed in Roswell, and we used that to basically tell the dragons to fuck off?"

"Basically," Dad said. "But the problem is, that hostage exchange deal was struck with the Prismatic Emperor, Dogan. And Dogan, like most Emperors, would hate to admit that he gave away anything to anyone. So, Earth got quietly yanked from their history files, but every fleet nearby was given orders to not bother us. And that, son..." He clapped his hand to Merton's shoulder. "Is why you do not fuck with Harry Truman."

The door opened.

The bald elf had returned.

"Sir," he said, his voice severe. "Your, ah, prime concubine is in the transformation chambers and shall be transformed within the hour. Please. Come with me."

Merton sighed, nodded, and turned to go with the bald elf.

It was time to get ready for a dinner date. A banquet with a dragon.

He was halfway down the corridor before he did a perfect double take and said: "My prime what!?"

TO BE CONTINUED