Dragon Star Battleship

Chapter 10

Noel had a choice to make and he knew he needed to make it soon.

He had spent the last few hours seated on the floor of his shuttle with Arya, Jim and Lorin while Morrigan, Eilor and Akasha got comfortable in their seats.

Eilor was diligently and silently piloting the ship, Akasha was drinking from a bottle of something she had found somewhere and Morrigan kept looking pointedly between Noel and the pile of dolphin people in chem bags they had left by the shuttle entrance.

Back on Planet 4578 they had run out of room in the storage lockers so they had left some of the dolphin people out in the open. It had seemed like a logical, benign choice at the time but now seemed like the kind of thing destined to be remembered with regret.

Morrigan was leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, the muscles across her shoulders and arms visibly tense. She had her gun out and she was tapping the barrel against her calf rhythmically. She looked at the dolphin people then back at Noel and this time her gaze stayed on him with a level of intensity that suggested she was either trying to read his mind or was moments away from murdering him.

"We," Noel cleared his throat, finally deciding that now was as good a time as any. "We've met before," he said.

Morrigan's eyebrows snapped together and for a moment Noel doubted he was looking at the same person he had met ten years ago. The woman he had met had had the easy, infectious laugh of someone without a care in the world and the eyes of a genuinely happy soul whereas the woman across from him now was full of crackling, restless anger. Her face had also changed, all the gentle curves he remembered hardened to edges.

"Oh yeah?" Morrigan said and there was something vaguely threatening about how she said it. "How's that?"

"Do you think it's sad?" Akasha blurted, interrupting. She hiccupped and then looked at the bottle in her hand despondently. Reddish purple liquid sloshed around, barely visible past dirty, clouded glass. "This is the worst drink I've ever had."

"That must be saying something," Morrigan muttered.

Lorin chuckled. "You know I'm not supposed to say this but I kind of like her," Lorin said, pointing her chin in Akasha's direction. "She's like really, actually funny."

"I'm not funny," Akasha warbled. "I"m sad. It's so big."

Morrigan squeezed the bridge of her nose with her fingers, visibly annoyed. Akasha did not continue and Morrigan turned back to Noel.

"You're lying to me," she said. "And you shouldn't, because right now you and your whole crew are just extra weight. Tell me the truth or I'll feed you all to that giant snake on Leolt."

"M'am?"

Noel turned to see Arya holding up her hand. She caught his gaze and a shiver of apology crossed her face as she looked from him to her hand but the hand stayed up.

"What the fuck?" Morrigan snorted. "Did you just call me ma'am? And are you in fucking grade school. Speak or shut the fuck up."

Arya dropped her hand like it had been shot but maintained eye contact with Morrigan. Morrigan waved her gun at her. "Go on, say something. Quick."

"It's not a giant snake. Technically it's a zooped which is a kind of space lizard. And for the record it keeps a vegan diet which means the rumours about it eating people are very much unfounded."

"You have got to be kidding me." Morrigan laughed. At first the laugh was sharp and dry, like she couldn't quite believe she was laughing but it ripened into a darker version of the laugh Noel remembered and filled the whole shuttle. When she was done she dabbed at the corner of her eyes. "Who are you?" She addressed all of them, waving her gun around with the kind of carelessness that made Noel's stomach tighten.

"You claim to be bio-investigators but you're in a ship that wouldn't take you half as far as you need to go. And you've got these..." She frowned at the dolphin people. "Samples of a species I've never seen before in chem bags. And none of you seem scared of pirates. It's really fucking weird and kind of annoying."

"Maybe we're just like you," Noel ventured.

"Go on."

"Defectors," Noel said. Morrigan didn't say anything but her eyes were blazing. Noel went on. "Ten years ago you came to the Olympian University on Mars and you gave a talk about what it was like to be a bio-investigator. You were an example of everything they said we could dream of becoming: climbing through the ranks, ensuring we got a universe full of magic that wasn't destroyed by corporate greed." He paused. Her jaw was clenched and her temples were pulsing but there was no turning back now. "And because of you I joined but then a year after I joined you disappeared. They said they fired you but there were other rumors. That you left because you found something you didn't like."

Morrigan held his gaze a second longer, her dark eyes burning hot with rage but then, to his surprise and relief, she looked away, her shoulders sagging. She put her gun away and let out a long sigh.

"Oh," Akasha said, strangely softly. "It's not sad anymore."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Morrigan snapped.

Akasha looked at all of them, her green eyes swimming in tears. "You're the same," She gestured between Noel and Morrigan, an unstable smile pulling at her lips. "So similar."

Morrigan starred at Akasha as though she couldn't quite make sense of what she was seeing then turned back to Noel. "Did they try to kill you when you told them you found intelligent life?" she asked. "Is that what happened to your ship?"

"I think it got away." His heart felt heavy, just saying that. He thought about his crew, the ship, his captain's room. "But I don't know."

"Blackmatter?"

Noel nodded again and she cursed under her breath.

"Smart thinking though, getting some samples of the species. I wasn't able to. Didn't have any proof when it happened to me. All happened too fast." Morrigan shrugged. She tried to do it casually, like she didn't really care, but the movement of her shoulders was too robotic and she turned her face away from him like she didn't really want him to see her expression. "And afterward I was like, fuck it, fuck all of it. Everything I believed in was a lie."

"So then you became a pirate." Noel nodded to himself.

"Seemed like a good idea at the time. Got me a sexy ship," Morrigan said, her gaze a little dreamy.

"Captain," Eilor said.

Noel and Morrigan turned their attention to one of the displays and Noel felt a strange and unhappy combination of emotions that came on so intensely he almost vomited. This had to be both the most exciting and worst day of his life.

They were passing Vega 5, a space station that advertised itself to the universe's richest and most morally compromised individuals as being outside the jurisdiction of any planetary or space faring laws. It was also shaped like a giant purple dildo and was potentially one of the weirder things Noel had ever seen in his life but that wasn't what had elicited his reaction.

There was a familiar ship docked at Vega 5.

It was obnoxiously oversized, easily 3 or 4 times bigger than the most absurd flagship he had ever seen anywhere else and it had been designed to look exactly like a medieval dragon in flight. The first time Noel had been in awe of it, at least until he had gone inside and realized that it was full of velvet furniture and far too many disco balls.

"Is that a dragon?" Jim asked, looking for the first time since Noel had met him, truly excited by something that wasn't a woman. His mouth was hanging slightly agape. "That's just so badass. I wonder whose it is."

"Nero," Morrigan growled. "It's Nero's. That's his personal party ship, the Explorer. It cost more than the GDP of most planets and, this is the craziest part, there's an Explorer II and it's bigger."

"Is it also a dragon?" Jim asked.

"You bet it is. But cool design aside they're the two fastest ships in the whole galaxy." Morrigan had started smiling and it was a crazy, wild kind of smile. "Could get us anywhere we need to go in half the time."