Chapter 214: Dragon Rider
Van Zan had been in difficult situations before.
Two years of dragon hunting produced a specific relationship with difficult situations — the ability to assess them accurately, which was useful, combined with the understanding that accurate assessment sometimes produced conclusions you'd rather not have, which was less useful but couldn't be avoided.
The current situation assessment: the female dragons that had departed London for the western hunting range were returning. The window that Jake's timing had exploited was closing. Van Zan and Ari were on the riverbank with a helicopter and a rifle that couldn't penetrate dragon scales, and Jake had been gone for over an hour.
"If he didn't make it," Ari said, not finishing the sentence because finishing it wasn't necessary.
"Then we get in the helicopter and we go low and fast and we hope the returning females are more interested in each other than in us," Van Zan said. He was looking at the horizon where the first returning shapes were appearing. "I've done worse odds."
"When?"
"Couple of times," Van Zan said. "Didn't enjoy it."
The roar came from directly above them.
Van Zan grabbed Ari's arm and ran before his conscious mind had fully processed the sound, the two-year operational conditioning moving his feet while his brain caught up. They covered fifteen meters in four seconds and then the shadow fell across them and the downdraft hit like a wall and Van Zan understood that running hadn't been necessary because whatever was above them was faster than running could address.
He stopped.
There was no point in not looking, and he'd never been the kind of person who faced the end without looking at it.
He looked up.
The male dragon landed in front of them with the contained precision of something that had been flying for twenty years and had complete command of its own momentum. The landing was clean — no stumble, no drag, the twelve-ton body settling to the ground with more control than anything that size should have been able to manage.
It was different from the females. The scale coloration was richer, the musculature distributed differently across the frame, the horn ridges along the skull more fully developed. The apex specimen expressing its apex status in every structural detail.
It opened its mouth.
The glands in the jaw were visible — the two secretory organs that combined their output into fire when the chemistry connected. The distance between them and the mouth of the male dragon was five meters. The chemistry would connect at four.
Van Zan stood his ground because there was nowhere to go that mattered.
Ari closed her eyes. Then opened them, because she was a researcher and researchers looked at things.
"Quiet."
The voice came from above the dragon's head.
Van Zan looked up and found Jake standing on the male dragon's back with his right boot resting lightly against the base of the dragon's skull — not a kick, barely a tap — and the dragon's expression doing something that Van Zan's brain was having significant difficulty categorizing because it looked, unmistakably, like the sheepish look of something that had been caught doing something it had been told not to do.
The dragon closed its mouth.
"Lancelot," Ari said. Her voice had the specific quality of a scientist encountering a result that exceeded the theoretical maximum of her model.
Jake raised a hand in acknowledgment from the dragon's back.
The male spread its wings — the specific pre-liftoff deployment, the membrane catching the air as the leg muscles compressed for launch — and launched, the downdraft pressing Van Zan and Ari back a step despite their expectation of it.
In four seconds the male was at altitude.
In eight seconds it was a shape against the overcast sky.
Van Zan and Ari stood on the London riverbank and looked at the empty air where the largest organism alive had just been, with the man who had gone into the city to bond it standing on its back.
"He did it," Ari said.
"He did it," Van Zan confirmed.
They stood there for another five seconds.
Then the sound of returning females reached them from the west, and they got into the helicopter, and Van Zan flew it low and fast along the river toward Edinburgh.
Quinn had been watching the London direction from the castle's highest rampart since the helicopter had departed.
He'd given them roughly even odds in his private assessment, which was more optimistic than his public presentation of the situation had been. The public presentation had been designed to prepare his community for the most likely outcome, which was that the people who had gone to London weren't coming back. The private assessment acknowledged that Jake was a variable he'd never encountered before and that variables changed odds.
The convoy had returned without the helicopter team — they'd made it back from their holding position with the news that Van Zan and two others had gone in by air. That news had produced the specific quality of waiting that Quinn knew from experience, the kind where you kept doing the necessary things because the necessary things still needed doing and stopping them to wait didn't make the wait shorter.
He was doing the necessary things when the roar reached Edinburgh.
The training took over — the evacuation signal, the underground protocols, the movement of people away from open spaces and toward the reinforced lower levels that the castle's modifications over twenty years had produced. Quinn directed it while moving himself, the muscle memory of two decades of dragon encounters making the sequence automatic.
He was the last one to reach cover.
He looked up.
The dragon coming over the northern horizon wasn't moving in a hunting pattern. The flight path was too deliberate, the altitude too controlled, the approach vector too consistent with a specific destination rather than the sweeping coverage pattern of a hunting animal.
He watched it circle the castle once.
Then again.
The third circle brought it low enough that Quinn could see the figure on its back clearly — the black coat, the shield, the specific posture of someone who was entirely comfortable with where they were and what they were doing.
"He tamed it," Quinn said, to the rampart stones, because there was nobody else there.
He stood on the castle's highest point and watched Jake circle Edinburgh on the back of the male dragon that Van Zan had spent two years trying to kill, and felt something he hadn't felt in a very long time — the specific sensation of a problem he'd organized his entire adult life around being definitively addressed in a way he hadn't imagined.
The sensation was disorienting.
The second dragon appeared from the south.
Larger than the male — one of the older females, the kind that had been growing for twenty years without the population control that would have existed in a healthy ecosystem. It came in fast with the direct trajectory of something that had identified a target and was committed to it.
The target was Jake.
Quinn watched the engagement from the rampart with the focused attention of someone who had seen dragon combat many times and was seeing something he hadn't seen before.
The male turned into the attack rather than away from it — the counterintuitive response of an apex specimen that didn't have an avoidance reflex for threat, only an engagement reflex. The two animals came together at altitude with the force of two large masses that had stopped caring about each other's structural integrity, and the male's advantage was the thing that made it the male — the specific capability that the breeding specimen of an apex predator species possessed that the rest of the population didn't quite match.
Jake wasn't passive on the dragon's back.
He came off it at the point of maximum engagement, the leap carrying him across the gap between the two animals, the shield already moving as he crossed the air. The vibranium edge connected with the attacking female's skull at the angle that Jake had identified through two previous engagements as the structurally significant point — the junction between the skull plate and the neck scaling, the articulation point that transmitted force rather than absorbing it.
The edge cut.
Dragon blood fell from a height that made it rain down across the castle's outer wall, the dark droplets steaming where they hit the cold stone.
The female lost structural integrity in her flight pattern — the concussive effect propagating through the neurological system, the wing coordination failing — and fell.
She hit the ground two hundred meters north of the castle with the specific sound of something very large and very heavy arriving from altitude, the impact creating a crater that the soft northern English earth received reluctantly.
Jake caught the male on the way down from the apex of the engagement, the landing on the dragon's back absorbed by the super soldier serum's structural enhancement and the specific technique of someone who had been practicing this maneuver.
The male leveled out.
Jake looked down at the castle.
He raised his hand.
Quinn raised his in return.
Then the male climbed, and the two of them disappeared into the cloud cover above Edinburgh, and the castle's population came back up from the underground levels and looked at the crater two hundred meters north and the blood on the outer wall and the dragon corpse that nobody was going to want to deal with, and Quinn stood on the rampart and laughed for the first time in longer than he could specifically recall.
"Come out," he called down. "All clear."
The Wasteland stronghold received its newest arrival with the specific reaction of people who had been prepared for unusual things by their operational history and had encountered something that exceeded their preparation.
The transit had worked — the phone's dimensional mechanics handling the mass differential with the same mechanism it handled everything, the male dragon arriving in the Wasteland's staging area with the disorientation that first-time transits produced in all organisms and the specific additional disorientation of a creature whose equilibrium system had been calibrated for Earth's atmospheric conditions and was now dealing with a slightly different set of parameters.
The male shook his head three times, blinked, and looked at Jake with the expression of something that had strong opinions about what had just happened and was working through the appropriate response.
"The movement takes adjustment," Jake said. "It gets better."
The male made a sound that the behavioral vocabulary Jake had been building suggested was the dragon equivalent of skepticism.
The young dragon — who had made the transit in the coat's compression space and had been released into the staging area ahead of the male — was already investigating the Wasteland stronghold's exterior with the comprehensive curiosity of something in the developmental phase that found everything interesting and hadn't yet established the categories of things that weren't worth investigating.
The Knights on perimeter duty had handled the female dragon's previous arrival with professional composure.
The male was a different scale of encounter, and professional composure was operating under some strain.
Furiosa came through the staging area gate with the assessment of a commander evaluating a new operational variable. She looked at the male dragon, looked at Jake, looked at the young dragon currently trying to fit its head through a gap in the outer wall that was not sized for dragon heads, and returned her gaze to Jake.
"How many?" she said.
"Two here," Jake said. "A female at the Edinburgh castle in the Reign of Fire world. Three eggs in the coat." He paused. "Ari is coming through separately once she's wrapped up her work in London."
Furiosa processed this. "Ari."
"Researcher. Dragon biology. She's good." He looked at the male, who was conducting a methodical inspection of the staging area's stone walls with the territorial assessment behavior of something establishing whether a space was adequate. "Get Birkin out here. I need a full biological workup on both of them — genetics, physiology, the fire production chemistry, the neurological architecture."
"Birkin is going to have opinions about this," Furiosa said.
"Birkin always has opinions," Jake said. "That's why he's useful."
The young dragon pulled its head free from the gap in the wall, turned, and immediately oriented to Jake's position with the imprinted precision of something that had decided where its anchor point was.
Several Knights took a collective step backward.
"They're not a threat," Jake said, to the assembled Knights generally. "The bonding is stable. Treat them the way you'd treat any large operational asset — with appropriate respect for what they can do, and without unnecessary provocation." He paused. "Don't make loud noises near the young one. It's still in the reactive phase."
The Knights who had been considering whether to draw weapons put the consideration aside.
The Red Queen's avatar appeared on the nearest display surface — the young girl projection, looking at the male dragon with the specific expression of something that found this development genuinely interesting.
"I've prepared a research protocol," she said. "Physical measurements, genetic sampling, behavioral baseline documentation. I'll need Dr. Birkin and Dr. Ashford both for the genetic component." She looked at Jake. "The eggs?"
Jake reached into the coat and produced all three, the compression space releasing them into the staging area with the careful temperature maintenance intact. He set them on the stone floor with the same care one used for things that were going to hatch and didn't want to be damaged before they did.
The Red Queen looked at the eggs. Then at the young dragon. Then at the male. Then at Jake.
"You've been busy," she said.
"I have," Jake said.
He reached into his coat's inner pocket and produced his phone — the dimensional transit device, the system that organized access to every world he'd visited. He looked at the screen.
The fifth folder indicator had changed. The threshold had been met — one more film world accessed, the collection crossing the threshold that opened the next tier of the dimensional library.
A new folder was available.
He looked at it for a moment.
"Later," he said to the phone, and put it back in his pocket.
The male dragon had finished his inspection of the staging area and had settled in the center of it with the authoritative ease of something that had decided the space was adequate and was now prepared to receive whatever came next.
The young dragon was sitting three feet from Jake with the patient attention of something waiting for the next thing to happen.
Jake looked at both of them.
He looked at the stronghold around him — the research complex, the training facility, the technology wing where Zola was building things, the residential quarters where the Knights lived, the central chamber where the Red Queen operated.
He looked at the three eggs on the stone floor.
He thought about Birkin's genetic integration problem, and the Wasteland's expanding infrastructure, and the film in pre-production at Sandbox Pictures, and the portal project Zola was developing, and Katniss in District 12, and Mia in the Princess Diaries world, and Kira's concert on Thursday, and Matilda outside the stronghold entrance with Princess and the specific expression she wore when she'd been patient longer than she thought was reasonable.
He thought about how many things were in motion simultaneously and how many more there were to set in motion, and how the doing of it was, in itself, interesting.
He took his coat off and handed it to the nearest researcher for maintenance.
Straightened his tie.
Looked at the phone one more time.
The fifth folder was open.
He picked up the phone and looked at what was inside it.
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