by Dan Swanson
“BEWARE! I AM THUNDERWING SNORTFIRE!”
Although the challenge could not be comprehended as words except by another snagriff, Thunderwing Snortfire’s super-powered bellow not only knocked the Xenonian heroes from the sky, but also alerted every animal within miles that there was an angry male snagriff nearby. Most were already fleeing the devastation from the super-powered battle, and this cry lent added speed to their flight.
A nearby female snagriff, for her part, was fascinated. Shinyscale Silvertalon leaped into the air and began winging her way toward the source of that roar. Only a few days ago, her mate and calf had been swallowed by one of the pink veils from the sky.
Hunting had taken her away from their nest — a cave Shinyscale and her mate had burned and clawed into the side of a cliff — and when she returned, the entire mountain had vanished. The calf had been unable to fly, and while Shinyscale hadn’t seen her family face the end, she knew her mate had died trying to defend the younger ‘griff, roaring defiance and snorting fire at the ever-advancing curtain.
Snagriffs didn’t grieve like humans, but Shinyscale was lonely, and curious as well. She quickly reached the scene of a fascinating aerial battle. A giant male ‘griff was somehow standing on air — hovering in place, even though he was not flapping his wings — snorting small blasts of fire at a relatively tiny pest.
A shiny silvery pointed cylinder, about the size of a newborn snagriff calf, darted around the head of the big dragon. Shinyscale had seen flying metal things before, and knew that they had humans inside them. There was a nimbus of greenish energy around the blunt end of the cylinder — the residue of the K-Dondron particles decaying after being expelled from the K.D. Drive — and the flying pest kept maneuvering to sweep the green glow across the male’s head.
This seemed to annoy the big guy, and each time the green glow touched him, he grunted and whipped his head around to launch another snort of plasma. She rushed to aid this magnificent member of her own species in his battle with humans, but she had to slow to dodge the incredibly hot balls of plasma Thunderwing was firing. Though ‘griffs were normally immune to the fire of other ‘griffs, those plasma balls were hot enough to vaporize her.
***
Karys Thal was fighting desperately for her life and the lives of her friends. She had seen the dragon flying toward her unconscious friends, probably planning to eat them. The Krypturanium Explorer didn’t have any weapons, but maybe she could distract the monster until her friends regained consciousness.
She blasted forward at full power, and zoomed just by the nose of the angry ‘griff. In the rear viewscreen, she saw the monster flinch away from her exhaust aura. She instantly looped back around, got as close to the beast as she dared, and slapped the K1 into a tight turn, and again the monster flinched as the green glow swept across its head. The only question was, how long could she dodge? She had never seen any living thing so large move so fast.
***
The space dragon stopped moving and hovered in place, the unconscious foes on the ground forgotten as it focused on this new foe. Thunderwing Snortfire was not hurt by this silvery pest, but he was distracted. Once again the huge snagriff roared in anger. The green glow wasn’t causing any permanent damage, but it stung.
The exasperating little silver thing kept flitting around his head, attacking like a sparrow fighting a hawk, unable to do any real harm, but certainly troublesome and annoying. Finally, he’d had enough. Moving as fast as he could, he reached out and snatched the metallic ship from the air in one giant claw and slapped it into his mouth. With a chomp and a gulp, he disposed of the silvery pest.
***
Karys was battered against the control panels surrounding her as the ‘griff jerked the Krypturanium Explorer first one way, and then another, and before she even realized Thunderwing had grabbed her ship, she was deafened by the screech of tearing metal as the dragon’s teeth crunched away the top of her ship, missing her head by inches.
She was instantly wrapped in darkness, and battered again as the beast gulped, swallowing the ship virtually whole. She was barely conscious enough to see, by some of the lights of the controls that still worked, that the ship was filling up with fluid from the beast’s stomach.
Thankfully, she had her flight suit sealed, but she realized it probably wouldn’t protect her much longer. She had also finally figured out how to hurt this giant monster — if only one piece of the ship’s equipment was still functioning.
With all the concentration remaining to her, Karys focused on flipping a single switch on the maintenance control panel. Somewhere in her mind, she was thanking the universe for the long, boring hours she’d spent cramped in the ship, with nothing more to do than memorize the layout of the controls.
She flipped that switch, and in the engine compartment, a maintenance panel on the fuel chamber slid open. No longer shielded behind a wall of lead, green kryptonite radiation blasted forth, passing easily through the hull of the ship and causing Thunderwing severe heartburn.
The pain caused the giant dragon to have convulsions, and when he coughed with agony, the battered Krypturanium Explorer was violently ejected from Thunderwing’s mouth. Unfortunately for the nearby female snagriff, the K1 slammed into her head like a giant cannonball, partially rupturing her skull and knocking her unconscious.
The smaller snagriff fell heavily from the sky and landed in one of the craters created during the earlier battle. The K1 also fell, bounced once, and shuddered to a halt close to the unconscious bodies of Xenon’s Boldest Family. It was impossible to tell that the pile of crushed and twisted debris had ever been a sleek, powerful spaceship.
The tiny spaceship spun through the air, spewing dragon stomach acid in a whirlpool of caustic mist. Within the ship, Karys was battered against the control panels in the tight confines of the cockpit. When the Krypturanium Explorer smashed into the unfortunate female snagriff, it was crushed.
For an instant, the interior of the cabin was filled with a brilliant green glow. Karys’ helmet shattered, and she was drenched in the dragon’s fluids. An awful stench assaulted her nose. She was being crushed and lacerated, her flesh torn and her bones broken by the collapsing cabin when there was a brilliant white flash, and her head collided savagely with a panel. She was slammed into unconsciousness.
***
Thunderwing Snortfire had not seen a female snagriff since before he was captured on Krypton over thirty years ago. It was unendurable to witness the first female he had seen in that time die instantly after he encountered her, even if she was rather small in comparison. He landed by her side, wailing plaintively. His head swept back and forth over her, and he realized that she was still alive.
The snagriff was the most dangerous land-based predator on both Krypton and Xenon, and Jor-L’s serum had mutated Thunderwing into his larger and even more fearsome form. However, the grief-filled beast was nothing but gentle now. Slowly and carefully, keeping his awesome strength under strict control, the grieving dragon straightened the body of the wounded female.
Though Shinyscale Silvertalon was unconscious, the shifting of broken bones and torn tissues caused her to moan in pain, and Thunderwing Snortfire wailed pitifully along with her. When she was fully laid out in as normal a position as he could manage, he began licking her wounds, gently, both to clean them and to give her what comfort he could.
Almost instantly, her moaning lessened, and her breathing improved. Open wounds stopped bleeding and then seemed to repair themselves as if through magic. As traces of Thunderwing’s saliva diffused into her blood and were carried throughout her body, her internal wounds began to heal, and her broken bones started to knit.
When he realized that his new friend was healing, Thunderwing turned his attention to his enemies. However, the exposed kryptonite made it painful to approach them, and he quickly decided he would rather get acquainted with the female ‘griff.
As he turned back to her, she leaped into the air and fled, instinctively anxious to get away from the battlefield where she had almost died. He overtook her almost instantly, and continued to slowly climb higher into the sky, determined to leave this place and find somewhere with an abundant supply of metal and no humans to hound him.
Wanting to spend more time with this giant male, Shinyscale determinedly flew alongside him, even when the air grew too thin to support the flight of a normal snagriff, and then too thin for a ‘griff to breathe. Unknowingly using his telescopic vision again, Thunderwing spotted a swarm of metallic asteroids in deep space, far outside the orbit of Nadron. The two ‘griffs dwindled into pinpoints and then vanished into the sky.
***
Karre Orr’s mind had been battered along with her body, and desperately needed some time to rest, to drift away into darkness for just a short time. But a nearby mind was screaming in agony, and the screams cut through the darkness like lightning. The bigger shock was that Skyfire recognized the mind doing the screaming.
“Karys!” Karre hollered, adrenaline jolting her back to consciousness. She struggled to her feet. A quick examination of her father and brother, aided by her telekinesis, showed that they were battered but hadn’t sustained any deadly injuries. However, she couldn’t say the same for Karys Thal — Karre could tell that her friend had broken bones and mangled flesh, and some kind of fluid was bubbling in her lungs.
Skyfire tried to tear apart the pile of scrap metal herself, but quickly realized she needed help. So she did something she would never do under normal circumstances — she blasted energy into the minds of her father and brother to awaken them, and instantly gave them a mental update on the situation.
“Karys — it’s Karre!” she sent her thoughts to her friend’s frantic mind. “We’re here, and we’ll help!” When Karys didn’t respond, the heroine realized that it was her friend’s unconscious mind that was screaming so loudly in agony. Skyfire touched a spot in Karys’ pain center, and the mental screaming faded until she could just barely detect it.
Fource took a page from the pink veils of the Crisis to free Karys from the wreckage. He used his powers to neutralize the molecular bonds in the metal shards in the pile, and piece by piece, the wreckage disintegrated into monatomic dust. Within minutes, Kell Orr was flying Karys to a hospital.
***
Karys Thal awakened and stretched, and started to sit up. She realized instantly that she weighed a lot more than she expected; she was back on Xenon rather than Ulaine. Her eyes snapped open, and she saw that she was in the bedroom of her small apartment in Xenonopolis. I shouldn’t be here! she thought in a sudden panic, and that realization caused her recent memories to snap to the fore.
I shouldn’t even be alive! she thought frantically. I must have smashed my head open when my helmet was shattered, and my head must have been covered in dragon spit. Yuck!
So, could it be transplants, or an android body, or what? As she checked herself out, the door slid open, and a doctor entered. She was wearing a Science Patrol uniform, but Karys didn’t recognize her.
“Good to see you up and around, Lt. Thal,” the doctor said, smiling. “You’ve certainly confounded a lot of doctors in the last few days, including me. You’ve nothing to worry about, though. You are as healthy as any person I’ve ever had in my care.”
“Thanks, Major Doun,” Karys replied a little nervously, as she read the woman’s nametag. Why did she rate a doctor with the rank of major? “You guys must have performed some real miracles. I would have guessed, crippled for life at best.”
“‘Us guys’ had nothing to do with it, actually,” Major Doun explained. “By the time your friends pulled you from the wreckage, you were well on the way to being healed, and by the time they got you to a hospital, there was no trace that you had received even the smallest injury! In fact, all traces of that compound fracture you sustained at eight — the bump in the tibia of your right leg, and the wound scar — are gone as well.”
***
Back in the present, Karre Orr continued telling her side of the story to the crew of the Tiak Avenger. “Since then, Karys has discovered that she has some super-powers of her own. Somehow, her body has become a storage cell for a type of energy previously unknown to the science of Xenon, and she can manifest that energy in a number of ways.”
“I’m still learning to use that energy,” Karys Thal added proudly. “I can fly, and when I choose to be, I’m invulnerable. Pretty neat stuff!”
“Kell Orr searched for the dragons with his super-vision about a week later,” Karre said, seemingly changing the subject. “He spotted them flying through space towards a nearby star. The female was much bigger by then; she’s somehow mutated to match the male. Nobody lives in the system they are headed for, and it will take them years to get there, so we figure they can live happily ever after. And that’s the story of the Kryptonian space dragon.”
Karre’s voice changed timbre a bit as she slipped into her Science Patrol persona again. “Sorry to be all official on you, but why are you guys here? I need to know before I can certify you to come any farther into the system. And–” she added with a smile, “–we’d like to invite you all to dinner on board our cruiser. We don’t get many guests, as you can imagine.”