The Dragon Never Sleeps Read online

  Glen Cook

  The Dragon Never Sleeps

  The Dragon Never SleepsThe Guardships of Canon Space had conquered Man and Alien. But now an Outside Presence threatens their rule...

  The Voice Of The Dragon Echoed Across Canon Space...

  “Surrender or die!” For four thousand years the Guardships had issued that dictat. Built and armed by great mercantile houses, their computer cores alive with the engrams of great past leaders, they were feared all along the Web, the spidery network that links the far-flung worlds of Canon Space. Beholders to none, impossible to escape, the invincible warships maintained peace with an iron grip.

  Now a dark Presence believes it has found a way to wrest the Web from the invincible. The immortal Ku warrior Kez Maefele knows the ships can be conquered, but he is alone. And as the Guardship VII Gemina streaks across the Web to confront the Presence, he must begin his own battle for survival.

  He lies ever upon his hoard, his heart jealous and mean. Never believe he has nodded because his eyes have closed. The dragon never sleeps.

  — Kez Maefele,

  speaking to the Dire Radiant

  POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION

  Copyright © 1988 by Glen Cook

  Cover Illustration by Richard Courtney

  All rights reserved.

  Popular Library ®, the fanciful P design, and Questar ® are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.

  Popular Library books are published by

  Warner Books, Inc.

  666 Fifth Avenue

  New York, N.Y. 10103

  A Warner Communications Company

  Printed in the United States

  First Printing: August, 1988

  This ePub edition v1.0 by Dead^Man Jan, 2011

  ISBN: 0-445-20349-8

  — 1 —

  Guardship: VII Gemina

  On rest station in trojan L5 off P. Jaksonica 3

  11/23 shipsyear 3681; year 43 of the

  Deified Kole Marmigus

  Dictats: The Deified Ansehl Ronygos, dct 12

  WarAvocat Hanaver Strate, dct. 1

  Alert status: Green Three

  WarCrew sleeping [.03 duty section]

  Surveillance Mode: Passive

  All was quiet in Hall of the Watchers. The whisper of electronics was soporific. Watchers struggled to stay awake. Third WatchMaster roamed silently, tapping shoulders with an ivory baton.

  His admonitions were not vigorous. WarAvocat had not yet left his quarters. He might not. He was preoccupied with a new dalliance.

  None of the Deified observed from their screens.

  It had been this quiet for a shipsyear.

  A ping! wakened everyone. Third WatchMaster tried to stroll toward the sound’s source. His legs betrayed him.

  It was that kind of time. Any trivial break in routine caused quickened breathing.

  The Deified Thalygos Mundt came onscreen, his expression malign as always. Third WatchMaster asked, “What do we have, Break Detect?”

  “Traveler breaking off the Web, WatchMaster.”

  Third WatchMaster looked to the head of the Hall. The appropriate displays were up. The routine challenge had pulsed out. He glanced up. The Deified Thalygos Mundt had gone.

  What was it like, being a living part of the ship? It was a vagrant curiosity. He was young yet. Only the old entertained ambitions toward immortality.

  The backfeed from the breakaway appeared on the wall, downsped pulse content running from right to left: Glorious Spent, House Cholot, bound from V. Rothica to D. Vawnii via P. Jaksonica: general cargo and passengers. Cargo and passenger transhipments scheduled at P. Jaksonica 3B, data follows.

  Routine. A passenger list, in case one was wanted and stupid enough to travel without changing identity.

  “WatchMaster! I have an emergency signal!”

  “Bring it up audial. Alert, Yellow Three.” All over the Guardship green lights went yellow, blinking.

  The message: “... Gemina, we’ve had an unauthorized discharge of an emergency escape pod....”

  Third WatchMaster snapped, “Alert, Yellow One! Page WarAvocat. Relay the incoming to appropriate divisions.”

  “... not yet know if anyone was aboard....”

  “Search. Find that pod.”

  “We have it, WatchMaster.”

  “Lock on. Track and Probe.” Conscious of the screens overhead, he barked, “Get the data on the wall. I want everything up when WarAvocat arrives.”

  Throughout VII Gemina the shift prepared for whatever demands might be placed on the Guardship.

  “WatchMaster. We have Lock and Track. That pod is under control. Trajectory indicates a surface destination near Cholot Varagona.”

  Was there another city on P. Jaksonica 3? “Probe data?”

  “None yet, WatchMaster.”

  “Feed the target data to WarCentral. Pulse Canon Garrison Varagona. Prepare to intercept illegal downbound.”

  Half the overhead screens were live now but the Deified remained silent. Still, he felt compelled to demonstrate his grip. “Probe? How long is it going to take?”

  “First approximation is due up, WatchMaster.... Here it comes. One biological lifeform. Artifact or nonhuman.”

  Third WatchMaster hesitated. He did not want the disapprobation that would follow an order to waken the whole Guardship. “Alert, Red Three.” He slapped his baton into his palm, repeated it more forcefully.

  Alarms snarled. Decks and bulkheads shivered. The air whispered and murmured and became cooler as inertial sectors locking-in distressed peacetime flow patterns. Already dim lighting faded as power shunted to battle screen generators. Sound levels rose as normally silent Watchers ran verbal checks with their neighbors.

  Then came a bone-vibrating grumble as starspace drives went on line and Web tractor wells lit off.

  Third WatchMaster sighed, ran a hand through brown hair, adjusted his khaki OpsCrew uniform. He had reached the limit of his authority.

  The wall began running information from the Cholot Traveler’s report of conditions on the Web. The data proclaimed a routine passage.

  WarAvocat Hanaver Strate, Dictat, immaculate in WarCrew black and silver, entered Hall of the Watchers.

  — 2 —

  Lady Midnight drifted through the perpetual twilight of Merod Schene DownTown, tall, brittle as leaf gold beaten translucent. Her lavender eyes darted from one nest of gloom to the next. Her slim, pale, fragile face was dewed with sweat. Her thin white hands fluttered like panicky hummingbirds. She started at a rustle from a shadow’s heart, clutched her hands to her breast, wrapped her shivering wings more tightly around her. The last hints of their usual silken glimmer faded to shades of lead.

  It was hot and damp and musty down there, decayed and slimy, dark and deadly, with sudden patches of fetid air, like an old jungle battleground. Small things scuttled away.

  Midnight was afraid.

  Fear was a new feeling. Fear was not part of her design. She had been made for the salons and bedrooms of high society. Fear had had to be learned.

  Lady Midnight savored new things. But this fear she did not like. It stole the color from her wings. It gnawed her innards like cancer. It took away sleep and robbed her of appetite. It was an assassin that butchered the rhythm of her dance-in-flight. It knotted her muscles till they ached.

  “Fool,” she murmured in an angel’s voice. “You’re Immune.” She swished clothing of pastel panels as thin as imagination. “You can’t be touched.” The fear did not subside.

  Merod Schene DownTown reeked of insanity. The madness was spreading. Immunity could lose its value any minute.

  Scraping, clicking sounds came from the deeper darknesses. Things were following her. Crazy thing
s, evil things, the worst discards and mistakes, that till recently had confined their predations to the deepest hours of the night. She felt their mad eyes measuring her.

  They grew bolder all the time.

  She paused outside the breezeway leading to her destination. The silence in there was more intimidating than the clicks and slithers growing louder behind her. She did not want to go ahead. But they were working themselves up back there.

  Something moved in the breezeway.

  Terror yanked a melodic whimper from Midnight’s throat.

  Dark dread rolled over her, filled her hollow bones with liquid nitrogen. Then warmth swamped her as she recognized the shadow. “Amber Soul!”

  The shadow shifted shape, becoming something out of nightmare, rushed past. Clicks, squeaks, scrabblings, whines, the hiss of scales on decomposed pavement moved away hurriedly. Lady Midnight rushed along the dank passage, through a doorway, into a brightly lighted room, where she fell trembling into Turtle’s arms.

  Only after her heartbeat slackened and her shaking stopped was she smitten by the incongruity of being held and comforted by a creature so much shorter.

  Strange as she was, Midnight was human. Turtle was not.

  Turtle stood 1.75 meters tall and 1 meter wide. He massed 125 kilos, not a gram of it fat. He had skin the color and texture of a snake’s belly. His features vaguely resembled a turtle’s. But there was nothing slow or lumbering about him. He moved like a cat.

  Amber Soul drifted inside, now wearing human form, draped in apparent golden brocade. Half a meter taller than Midnight, she seemed regal. Her psionic menace had gone silent. They grow bolder.

  “It’s the madness,” Midnight piped. “It’s spreading. It’s into UpTown and even the High City feels its breath.” Turtle had said that last time. She did not think of things like that herself.

  “They got their messenger out?” Turtle asked.

  “Yes. Aboard a Cholot Traveler. Disguised as the child of a High City lord from F. M’Cartica 5.”

  “So the infection bounds from world to world. They are fools. Where was the Traveler bound?”

  “P. Jaksonica.”

  Turtle settled into a chair, for all his lethal mass a weary little creature. He picked at a button on his homemade shirt. “Yes. The thing will be fool enough to try it. P. Jaksonica 3. Still under the Ban.”

  Turtle always knew so much. He amazed everyone. How could he know, trapped here in Merod Schene DownTown?

  He looked Midnight in the eye. “The cure will not be long coming if it tries to reach Cholot Varagona.” He closed his reptilian eyes briefly, which was no closing at all, for he had only nictating membranes. “Bless the Concord. There is no saving fools. Ladies, it is time we saw to our own welfare.”

  Is there no chance for the Concord? Amber Soul asked. Just the edge of that thought was enough to make Midnight’s head buzz. Amber Soul almost never communicated with anyone. When she did she knocked you down.

  “None,” Turtle said. “The thing is one of those jackstraw rebellions that come along every human generation. I have seen a hundred. They don’t last. The Enherrenraat did not last a year and it was five hundred in the shaping.” He paused, then asked rhetorically, “How old are the Guardships? They were old when I was young. Sometimes it seems the stars themselves are younger and the Guardships were created old and wily and deadly and there was never a moment when they were not invincible.”

  No one knew Turtle’s true age. Turtle would not say. They joked that DownTown had been built around him.

  Turtle seldom talked about Turtle. Whence had he come? What was he? The last indigene of V. Rothica 4? There were ruins in the deserts. Unlikely that he was of the precursor race, though. Nobody was that old.

  An artifact, then? Like Lady Midnight? Created in a laboratory for some inscrutable purpose even he had forgotten? The warrens of DownTown festered with artifacts who had outlived the usefulness of their designs. And it was thick with mistakes. The hobby life designers seldom destroyed their mistakes. They just turned them out. And some were terrible. And some bred true.

  If not an artifact, might Turtle be an alien, lost, stranded, planetbound far from home?

  That was the popular theory.

  Turtle told nothing about himself directly, but Turtle told stories, only to the very young, on the streets of DownTown. He mirrored childhood dreams, singing interstellar songs, spinning epics of great ships clambering the Web. He told tales of warmer worlds and far suns, of races no DownTowner would ever see, of great fires searing the deep between the stars as warships met in battles of unimaginable fury. Perhaps he spoke of the destruction of the Enherrenraat. Or perhaps he spoke of another struggle more remote in space and time. He sang his songs of far wars in shades of emotion that said he had seen them himself, that he might have been among those who had gained only shattered dreams.

  Turtle broke a long silence. “If it does try to carry its message to Cholot Varagona it will be taken. Canon garrison will pulse P. Jaksonica station. Every Traveler out will carry a call for the Guardships. The first to arrive will pick the thing’s brain to the last synapse. Then it will come sniffing up the creature’s backtrail. First stop: Merod Schene.”

  Lady Midnight trilled, “Will they be that terrible?”

  “Huh! Worse than you imagine. A Cholot Traveler picks up a shapeshifting illegal of a race supposedly eradicated from a Merod world and delivers it to a Cholot world under the Ban. They will be thorough. We must assure our own safety. Precautions never taken are the only sort that leave one with regrets.”

  Amber Soul paced. She radiated a harsh, almost angry concurrence backed by emotions dark and deep and so powerful Lady Midnight cringed away from her.

  “We may be in for interesting times,” Turtle observed. “I suppose it had to happen.”

  — 3 —

  WarAvocat was a lean old man whose dark uniform accentuated the pallor of his face. Deathshead. Crawling with colors and shadows from the displays. Hard, dark eyes. Thin, tight lips that had forgotten how to smile a thousand years ago. Sound seemed to fade as he approached, the air to grow more chill.

  WarAvocat took in the wall display in one devouring glance. “Satisfactory, WatchMaster.”

  “Grace, WarAvocat.”

  “Most satisfactory.” Hanaver Strate moved toward the Probe team.

  A Probe spokeswoman said, “The second approximation is up, WatchMaster. The lifeform in that pod is both alien and engineered.”

  Third WatchMaster’s dispassion cracked. He did not need Gemina’s ID. “A krekelen! No known alien could have gotten near a Traveler’s escape pods. The ship’s own programmes would have prevented it.”

  “Gemina concurs, sir.”

  WarAvocat almost smiled. It had been a long time without action. “Access, all crews.” A shimmer hovering behind him leapt his shoulder. “Alert, Red One.” Alarms screamed. “All ready batteries commence firing. Intercept and Pursuit, commence launch. ConCom. Assemble an I and I team for transfer to P. Jaksonica station.”

  Third WatchMaster observed, “The pod is in the outer atmosphere already, WarAvocat.”

  Meaning the batteries’ beams would lose coherency, that projectiles would be inaccurate, that the fighters would be wasted because they could not go down into atmosphere.

  “Missiles? No. Too late.” They accelerated so swiftly they would hit atmosphere like hitting a wall. “Perfectly timed. The thing is crafty.”

  “Hellspinners?”

  “Probably too late for those, too. But they’ll make an exemplary display.” WarAvocat spoke to the shimmer. “Access, Weapons. Hellspinners, loose. Access, Hall of the Soldiers. Soldiers, warm one battalion of heavy infantry data-prepped for a search-and-kill in Cholot Varagona.”

  The air murmured, “Have you a unit preference, WarAvocat?”

  “Whichever is up.” WarAvocat’s busy eye noted those from the off shifts who were tardy reaching stations. Second WatchMaster was among the late
st. He wilted under WarAvocat’s glare. “Access, Communications. Pulse to Station P. Jaksonica 3B. Total quarantine incoming Cholot Traveler Glorious Spent. Responsibility: STASIS. WarAvocat, Guardship VII Gemina.”

  WarAvocat recalled his interceptors and sent his pursuit fighters to escort the Traveler to dock. “WatchMaster. Efficiency deserves opportunity. I’m sending you to station as prize officer. Empowered to direct and employ I and I and STASIS.”

  Third WatchMaster flushed. Such an opportunity, unplanned, unscheduled, could make his career. Could get him nominated to WarCrew. Could get him elected if he did his job well. Or could shatter his chances forever if he fouled up. “Grace, WarAvocat.”

  “The I and I team will leave soon. You’ll have to hurry. Second WatchMaster!”

  Second arrived briskly, face red. “WarAvocat?”

  “Relieve Third. You’ll stand his shifts in addition to your own.”

  Second WatchMaster swallowed. “Grace, WarAvocat.”

  “Get going,” WarAvocat told Third. “Don’t embarrass me.”

  The Twist Masters loosed their unpredictable vortices. The furies ripped across space and clawed at the atmosphere of P. Jaksonica 3, scrawling fire upon the skies of that world, birthing auroras that would persist for days.

  They rattled and scaled and scarred the falling pod but they did not stop it. At three thousand meters the krekelen bailed out. At twenty-five hundred, Canon garrison took the pod under fire.

  They reported the illegal destroyed.

  In Hall of the Watchers they knew better. Track followed the krekelen to the surface and into the city.

  — 4 —

  Gloom was a fourth presence there with the three Immunes. Midnight said, “I don’t want to go out there now. The Darkness has become the tyrant of the night.”

  Turtle replied, “Then don’t go. Unless you have to dance tonight? Amber Soul and I could see you to the lift.”