Gareth emerged from the bottom of the tower and sniffed the air around him. Nobody. It was odd, being able to smell like a hunting dog when he concentrated.
The base had been occupied until recently, but everyone had left at least a day ago. All this, just for him.
“Checking in,” he said, assuming that the earpiece would pick it up.
“Go ahead, Gareth,” Grodray said.
Deep breath. Reach down and grasp hold of the power that Talyarkinash had placed inside his soul when she given him the ability to transform. It no longer hurt as much to turn. Instead, it was a friendly heat that wrapped around him like hands, rather than scorching them. Even the pain of transformation was manageable.
Gareth paused, and took a second breath. The fire seemed to engulf him physically, although he had seen videos where he transformed, and everything was internal.
Just his imagination that he was burning.
And his perception changed as well. Eyes moved outward as his skull reshaped, granting him peripheral vision almost good enough to see all directions at once. Chitin formed from his blood and bone created a ridge of dragon plates that ran back his skull and all the way down to the new tail that was extending outward.
Fortunately, the uniform really did subsume itself into his flesh. The first attempt Talyarkinash had given him had shredded under the stress, coming apart and leaving him naked when he shifted back.
Dragons could blush, but right now nobody could see it under the bronze scales covering his face. He smiled, as much as he could with the new form of his jaw, too much like the Yuudixtl who had been his inspiration.
Crocodile smile.
“Can you still read me, Constable Grodray?” Gareth asked, his voice rumbling a rich bass in his own ears.
“Affirmative, Dankworth,” the man replied. “Go ahead.”
Gareth took several running steps and threw himself at the sky. He could fly from a standstill, pumping heavily to gain altitude, but this was much more efficient, using the tiny amount of breeze to gain a little lift.
Quickly, he was twenty meters in the air, racing along at sixty kilometers per hour as he rose higher. Grodray had given him no directions, other than to show off, so Gareth decided to stretch his abilities today.
Up and up, slowly orbiting the tower as a central beacon for his column, until he was nearly a thousand meters in the air. He rolled over and aimed himself to glide a little, back along the runway back to where their transport was parked.
There were a few birds up this high, but most had fled at the sight of the monstrous, strange beast breaking up the afternoon sky. A few predators continued to circle at what they thought might be a safe distance, but even they kept their orbits far wider than his, reacting like scalded cats when he turned one way or the other.
Finally, he turned, finding the line of the runway and pulling his wings in until just the tips stuck out, like tiny ailerons providing him control as he nosed over into freefall. Below, the equivalents of eagles and hawks scattered to the four winds with surprised cries.
Gareth rumbled a laugh, forgetting for a moment that the microphone was live.
“Everything okay?” Grodray asked, but it sounded more like a formality than anything.
“Speed drop,” Gareth replied. “Locals are a little nervous.”
“Roger that.”
His draco-form was streamlined. The final size he had reached when he had stopped growing as a Vanir was twenty-seven meters from sleek snout to spiky tail. Pulled in tight, he quickly reached a terminal velocity far greater than a human skydiver ever could.
And he had learned early on how much torque his wings could take before they buckled under the stress, so he slowly stretched his wings out, forcing his flight flatter and flatter as he went, transforming into the horizontal from the vertical that he had started.
He didn’t have an airspeed indicator gauge to track his speed, but his inner eyelid had dropped down, making everything just the slightest bit fuzzy while still letting him track large targets. Still, Talyarkinash had built him a communicator.
What else might it do?
“Can you track my airspeed?” Gareth asked as he flattened out and pumped his wings to keep him level and running, about twenty meters above the concrete apron below.
He would pass below his audience, if he was careful.
“Two hundred and eighty kph, Gareth,” Talyarkinash replied after a few seconds. “Peak during your dive was three hundred and fifteen.”
Wow. Faster than anything on the ground, and fast enough to catch most flying vehicles under computer control.
For fun, Gareth pulled back a little and shifted into an Immelmann maneuver, holding his wings still as he went straight up and stalled. An aircraft losing forward momentum like this would have to flip over and undo a stall, falling initially onto its tail.
Here, Gareth started his stall like normal, and then folded himself in two, pulling his wings in, reversing course like a diver coming off the high board. After a moment, he extended his wings again and flapping hard enough to hover in place fifty meters in the air.
For fun, he slowly pivoted on his tail at the same time, until he was facing the threesome in the tower from around seventy-five meters away, like the galaxy’s biggest hummingbird.
Not the meanest. Hummingbirds back home had attitudes like tiny T-Rexes, all bluster and fury, while still small enough to fit in your hand. He could gulp one down in a single bite if they decided to get feisty with him today.
Let’s see, speed, maneuverability, and hover displayed.
Gareth winged over and landed, more or less below the control tower window. Glancing up, he could see three faces leaned out and looking down, so he reared back and triggered the two glands in his upper chest, pressing out paired streams of liquid that ran up into his mouth.
One turned into a spray, and then the second mixed with it and ignited, reacting to the oxygen in the air and the misty spray to turn into a column of fire nearly thirty meters long for a second. There was nothing to burn, but he knew he would leave a scorch mark on the concrete that newcomers couldn’t explain.
Folks who had been there to watch him before would know. He was sure rumors were already floating about the Accord of Souls.
Fire-breathing-dragon. Gareth was pretty sure that both Grace and Nari would react with the same awe and trepidation as humans did.
“Did you need a strength demonstration?” Gareth rumbled. “I could lift one end of the transport, but I don’t think I could get the whole thing off of the ground.”
“That’s okay, Gareth,” Grodray was back on line. “Go ahead and return to normal for now. I want to talk about next steps.”
Gareth had landed on all fours for stability. He reared up now and let go of the terrible fire in his soul, feeling the energy collapse back down inside somewhere.
Talyarkinash had said that the ability was psionic, whatever that meant. Except that he didn’t have any biology or physics that could explain what he did. Neither did she.
Magic was as good a description an anything, he supposed. He wondered if Dr. Loughty would be able to do any better, but he doubted it, as far beyond Terran culture and technology as he found himself these days.
Still, he was happy when he looked down and his skin was covered in a blue scaled jumpsuit. He had believed the Nari scientist and her equipment, but there was always that least bit of doubt in the back of his mind.
Grodray emerged first, with Baker close on his heels. Talyarkinash was several seconds behind, but she probably went down every step, when the taller twosome didn’t have to. Not necessarily fair, but not a lot he could do about it.
“I had to see it with my own eyes,” Grodray said by way of apology. He held out a hand for Gareth to shake.
“Understood, sir,” Gareth replied. “I still don’t always believe it myself. What’s next?”
Something in the man’s face was off, the way Grodray’s eyes found Talyarkinash and he lost all emotion.
“Field work,” he said.
Gareth was confused. Doubly so when Talyarkinash smiled.