“No, we are not changing the name of the ship to Dragon Nova.”

  At times, well, at all times really, Faithon was no fun.

  In fact, the lot of them had been downright miserable since we’d found the dragon. I could barely contain my excitement. It was a real and possibly even alive (that remained to be seen, though) dragon! By the Panoply of Lights. This was incredible. A real, live dragon. Yes, I know I've said that already. But. It. Was. A. Real. Live. Dragon!

  My parents had spent their lives searching for these things. Every waking moment had been dragon this or dragon that. Yeah, as a kid, you can imagine how living with obsessed parents had been. When I was six years old, I spent a whole month pretending to be a dragon. I’d made a pair of wings from discarded polyform durasteel piping and scavenged some red cloth to drape over them. At the flick of a button, they would extend and flap. Absolute realism for my juvenile self. When I unveiled them, my parents had smiled, patted me on the head and then went back to looking at their star charts.

  Everyone thought they were crazy. (Just to be clear, just because we happened to come across a real dragon doesn’t mean they weren’t crazy. They were definitely crazy. And not in the insanity is a cousin to genius way. They were simply nutbars. Just nutbars who turned out to be right in this case. Anyway, I’ve told you I don’t want to talk about them. They aren’t important right now.)

  What is important is the dragon.

  Despite my jubilation at seeing the mythical beast on the viewscreen, my feelings had not been shared on the bridge. Baltrax had been frozen, staring at the ice-blue, curled form floating out in space. Faithon was adamant that we should leave it and concentrate on the unknown riches of the destroyed fleet. Felix was muttering to himself in his own language. I never knew what the quirky rodent was thinking at the best of times. Let alone now. But he didn’t seem happy.

  I couldn’t understand it. This was our chance. Everyone knew that all the best crews had mascots. And the best mascot of all time was right there, just outside our ship. Just waiting to be brought aboard. We’d immediately be mentioned in the same breath as The Blazing Phoenixes, The Black Wraithfiends, and The Talons.

  In fact, we’d be better.

  The Phoenixes were only known for dying anyway. That was hardly impressive. They might come back, but a competent crew wouldn’t have needed all that resurrecting in the first place.

  The Wraithfields barely showed themselves. Secrecy is hardly a good fuel for creating legends.

  And the Talons, now they were cool. They knew how to evoke feeling; each of their ships was custom-built to resemble a different predator. Fleeing from a cylindrical Explendian frigate was boring when compared to when a Talon ship had you in its sights. What was a tractor beam compared to being literally clamped onto by the jaws of a battleship-sized Tranix (think Jaguar, but with a tail that can fire poisonous barbs). Those teeth could have ripped through the hull of our little vessel with ease. We would be a desert rat to them. A quick breakfast before they went to find more satisfying prey.

  It was too bad that the Talons were asshats.

  But with the Dragon at our side, we could be the light to shine against them. There was nothing clearer in my mind.

  So you can imagine my exasperation when the captain didn’t immediately follow my suggestion to bring the creature on board.

  “Leave it,” Faithon had said. “The real prize is the fleet. We could sell a core from a single ship and be set up in the Echelon district for life, with money to spare.”

  “No way!” I cried and proceeded to tell them about my plans for our domination of the cultural zeitgeist for generations to come. “We can’t just leave it there. It’s a dragon!”

  “It’s… not a dragon,” Faithon said. “Someone has engineered a wyvern with a couple of extra feet.” He shook his head. “It’s not even alive. Just some residual biological activity to distract idiots from the real prize.” I detected the shake in his voice. From the destruction around us, he knew what it was just as well as I did.

  “But–”

  “The Zalantian prophecies are not supposed to come true.” Baltrax’s voice was low, but my argument with Faithon had been silenced at her first word. “That’s the whole point.”

  Wait. What? Where did that come from? Of all the things that I expected the captain to say, talking about prophecy was not one of them. Prophecy was a thing of stories: ancient hermits on mountaintops giving sage advice to those who braved the journey to find them. But in life, no one took them seriously. And, even if they did, what is the point of a prophecy which wasn’t supposed to come true?

  “Capt–”

  Again, I was cut off, but this time the words out of Baltrax’s mouth were everything I was hoping for. “Bring it aboard.”

  Faithon cursed as I leapt into the air again. Felix dutifully worked his console, manoeuvring the ship’s docking bay to line up with the dragon. We had none of those fancy tractor beams aboard this vessel. Felix would manage this all manually.

  “Ryan,” Baltrax said. It was unusual for her to use my first name. They all took childish delight in my cursed surname. My attention was fully on her as she continued. “Prep the docking bay for cryo-stasis. We do not want that thing waking up before we get it to her.”

  “Umm…” I said, but Baltrax said no more. Her eyes were fixed on the dragon, which was disappearing off the viewscreen as Felix turned the ship. I would get nothing more from her. But Cryo-stasis? I knew the ship’s systems pretty well; I looked after them, after all. But that was new to me.

  Faithon looked like he was about to argue with the captain, but his shoulders then sagged, and he turned to me. “Come on, Dribble,” he said with a slight curve of his lips. “Don’t look so confused. We’re in the middle of cold space. Cryo-stasis is easy.”

  It turned out that cryo-stasis is a clever way of saying, ‘don’t turn the heat on.’ After securing everything in the dock and adding the metallic golden multi-layer insulation to the bay walls (this is to reduce infrared emissions – something I totally knew about, not Faithon!), we vented the atmosphere into space. A thermal-resistant netting had been strung up to catch the dragon.

  The docking bay was left in a vacuum. Together this didn’t reduce the temperature of the space to near absolute zero, but it did stop any method of heat transfer to the dragon (the vacuum stopped convection and conduction, and the insulation stopped radiation). Not exactly high tech, I know, but it worked. That was the theory, anyway.

  Felix piloted the ship to pick up our new cargo, and we shut the door remotely. We were on our way back to the bridge when I had pitched my idea to rename the ship.

  “But it’s a great name! We’d be famous. We could travel from star system to star system, righting the wrongs of the galaxy. The Dragon Nova, feared by evil-doers across the sector.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  “You really do live in a fantasy world, don’t you?” Faithon said. He didn’t say it in an unkind way. He seemed bemused, if anything. There was definitely a hint of a smile. It was something I could work on.

  “No more than the Phoenixes or the Wraithfiends!” I countered.

  He stopped walking and turned to look at me. “The Phoenixes? From the cartoon? You want to emulate a cartoon?”

  “Not the cartoon!” I said. “What it's based on! Just with more winning and less dying.” I mean, that was obvious, wasn’t it?

  “You really are insane.” He shook his head and continued towards the bridge. “None of that is going to happen. I’ve only seen Baltrax react like this once before. She’s not going to make the dragon our mascot.” He sighed. “She’s going to do what she wants. Not what you, or I, would do.”

  I remembered his face as he looked at the destroyed ships. He had come to terms with accepting that we would not be scavenging them. What was the story there? I doubted I’d ever find out.

  “What is with this dragon?” I asked.

  “Didn't your parents tell you anything about dragons? I thought they–”

  “No, they didn't!” I was totally calm and didn’t raise my voice. Not at all. Shut up. “We don’t talk about my parents!”

  “Fine, fine,” he said, raising his hands.

  We walked in silence for a while, then he started to talk. “I never believed they were real, but I have heard the stories. It’s said that in ancient times, flights of dragons would traverse the stars, seeking foundling empires to burn. Any society achieving FTL was wiped from the star maps.” I didn’t know whether he was talking for my benefit or his own, but he continued. “But Explendia had been using FTL way gates for hundreds of years. And they’re not the only ones. It was just a story. Propaganda used to control the space lanes.”

  I had heard all about this, of course. But like my criminal record, it was pure fantasy. No need to get worked up about it. I shrugged and tried a different tack. “Faithon, what about Baltrax’s prophecies, though? What’s up with that?”

  Faithon stared down the corridor towards the approaching bridge door. “I don’t know, Ryan. I don’t know.” As he spoke, the ship jerked into life. “But I think we’re going to find out very soon.”

  We weren’t far from the bridge when alarms sounded. Faithon ran the rest of the way with me on his heels. As we reached the bridge, Felix was ending his report.

  “...out of nowhere. Fully armoured Explendian battleship. Heading our way.”

  The odds of randomly meeting another ship out in the depths of unknown space were, for all intents and purposes, zero. But a battle-ready warship, just as we found the greatest discovery of all time? This was not a random coincidence.

  But it made no sense. Two options sprang to mind. Either it had been cloaked, or it had sprung out of hyperspace. Neither option sounded plausible. Stealth systems were usually reserved for the small frigate-class ships. I’d heard rumours of them on destroyers, but never on a cruiser-class or higher. And this was a battleship, for the Lights.

  Which left FTL. Travelling through extra-dimensional hyperspace is possible but incredibly risky. Getting in is easy enough, but when you’re there… Well… hyperspace can only be described by mathematics. Normal spacetime can’t be experienced in any perceivable way. Up, down, left, and right all technically exist, but are useless concepts for getting to your destination. Even time goes a bit wild. Sapient species can’t even comprehend it, and your brain just sort of gives up. It makes travel seem instantaneous, or maybe like waking up from a dream. Or that’s what I’d heard. I’d never been able to afford FTL travel, so I didn’t really know.

  In any event, directing a ship through hyperspace was impossible without a beacon to lock onto at the destination. FTL way gates acted as these beacons. They were prohibitively expensive, and only the richest systems could afford them.

  There couldn’t be one all the way out here. It was why deep space exploration was left to regular (and disposable) crews travelling at sub-light speeds. No one had set up a way gate, because no one had explored out here before.

  Except there was a destroyed fleet here that proved that wasn’t true.

  That wasn’t the only problem, though. Even if they could have travelled out here via FTL. How did they even know to come now? We were the only functioning ship out here, and we certainly had no FTL communication systems on board. There was no way they could have known what we had found.

  But at that moment, all my musings on the impossibility of the situation were irrelevant. There was an Explendian craft bearing down on us, with enough guns to blow us to smithereens a thousand times over. It hardly mattered how it got there. The only question was: do we flee or surrender? (I suppose we technically had the option of fighting? But no, I might be almost 200 years old by some measurements, but I am still far too young to die.)

  Baltrax was shouting orders to Felix. It looked like we were taking the fleeing option. I wasn’t sure why. It was already heading our way, so it had seen us. There was no way we could outrun it. But try telling that to our possessed captain.

  Faithon accepted that unsaid challenge.

  “What are you doing?” He yelled at Baltrax. He was braver than I thought, if in a contradictorily cowardly way. “It will blow us out of the sky!”

  “Go further in amongst the fleet,” Baltrax said to Felix, ignoring Faithon. “Use the ships as cover. They are bigger than us. Try to lose them.”

  There were hundreds of ships to use for cover, and, as I might have mentioned, they were huge. But they were scattered over hundreds of millions of cubic miles. With shields allowing them to ignore the smaller debris, the battleship would barely have to steer to follow us. It was a fool’s errand.

  “That’s insane.” Faithon ran to Felix’s station. “Power down. If we give them the dragon, they might let us live.”

  Baltrax was faster, her arm shooting out and her fingers curled around Faithon’s neck. “We are not giving the dragon to them,” Baltrax said, voice so calm it was scary. “We will die before that happens.”

  She dropped Faithon back at his console and said no more. At that display of strength, the fight had gone out of him, and he slumped in his chair, looking morosely out of the viewscreen. He muttered something about dying. But I couldn’t make it out.

  “The Explendian battleship will have a direct line of sight on us in ten seconds,” Felix said.

  It would take too long to reach the cover of another ship. In moments, the battleship would have more than enough time to blow us to atoms.

  Another alarm sounded over the first, the wailings empowering each other and hurting my ears. I barely heard Felix’s report.

  “Activity in the docking bay. The dragon is…”

  Faithon was unmoving; he was not going to do anything to help. The show of force from Baltrax had been enough for him to give up. He was resigned to his fate. Baltrax was going to get us all killed. Faithon was the only one who could have changed her mind, and it was clear that would not happen.

  The only benefit of being me on this ship was that no one really paid much attention. Baltrax had probably forgotten I was even on the bridge, so she hadn’t noticed me sidling back towards the exit. My self-protection instincts were strong, so if Faithon wasn’t going to do anything, then it was down to me.

  I didn’t wait for Felix to finish. I stepped backwards out of the bridge. No one turned, and as soon as I was clear, I flew down the corridor towards the dragon. As I neared the docking bay, the ship juddered, and I almost lost my footing. But at least they hadn’t blown us out of the sky. There was nothing I could have done if that had been their plan. But instead, they had caught us in a tractor beam. They were pulling us in to board.

  Fighting a squadron of Marines was not on my to-do list today. If we didn’t get a miracle, then I had only one plan.

  At the docking bay, the dragon looked as we had left it. I stood at the entrance, watching for signs of life through the window. I was sure that was what Felix was about to say. But there weren’t any. It just hung there, tail and legs hanging down towards the floor.

  No salvation there. But there was a big red button to the side of the door.

  My plan was simple. To vent the dragon out into space manually. The mascot was not worth my life. It was a stupid, hopeful plan. We were already in the tractor beam. They were not likely to let us go once they saw the dragon in space. But I was desperate, and a slight hope, however tiny, is better than no hope at all. And no hope was what we had if we allowed them to board.

  The docking bay where the dragon hung had no atmosphere, so I needed to open the adjoining rooms first. As the gases swirled in around the dragon, my hand hovered over the button. Sacrifice the dragon for a shot at life. It was a no-brainer.

  But I didn’t press it. I couldn’t. Whether it was still my dream of riding the space lanes, dragon in tow, like my cartoon heroes. Or maybe it was the link to my damn parents. But my hand dropped away from the button as I stared at the small creature, strung up only a few meters from me. I couldn’t do it. And thus, like Faithon, I accepted my fate.

  Then the dragon’s tail twitched. The whole ship shuddered around me as the Explendian battleship clamped onto us. The vibrations reaching the dragon, even through the netting.

  Or did they?

  Its tail twitched again, and an eye shot open. An eye that burned with cold blue light and an eye that focused directly on me.

  Then me, the dragon and the entire ship around us… shifted.