An awkward silence falls as we head for the jump point. It’s not a long ride, a few hours at most, but the lull in the action is finally letting us process recent events. Doesn’t feel possible. Just this morning, dragons were a myth and knights were the enemy. Now? Dragons exist, they are intelligent, and that one was looking for...

  I’m pretty sure Vince had no idea—he didn’t believe in dragons either. He isn’t one for conspiracies, but a war against dragons was a bit much for him. Organic creatures living in the void of space? The mere idea offends his scientific sensibilities to the core. Aldine? She’s got connections and she comes from money. Who knows what Aldine knows?

  “Who do you guys think is the girl?” I ask.

  Vince and Aldine exchange puzzled looks.

  “You know, the one the dragon wanted.”

  “What are you talking about?” Aldine asks.

  “Hello? The dragon? Screaming ‘Where is she?’ Ring any bells?”

  Vince looks confused as hell. His gaze goes from me to Aldine and back as if he’s missing an inside joke, but Aldine’s not laughing.

  “Did you hit your head?” She asks.

  “Wha—”

  “You were unconscious when I found you. Didn’t have time to check up on you, but maybe we need to have a look now.”

  Without giving me any time to protest, she stands up and steps behind me. I can feel her warm hands on my head as she gently pushes it forward, and runs her fingers lightly through my hair. I’d protest, but it feels good, so I let her inspect to her heart’s content—it's been a while since I've been cared for, but I still have to say something snarky. I'm dumb that way.

  “Wanna massage my shoulders next, sweetie?”

  She shrugs it off and stops looking.

  “You don’t seem injured as far as I can see. What can you remember before you passed out?”

  “Seriously? You guys didn’t hear the voice?”

  Vince shakes his head, the way he does when I try to tell him about my theories. Dragons existing is bad enough for him. Dragons talking Standard is another level of weird he's not ready for.

  “No, of course not. It’s a dragon. What have you been smoking?”

  I’m about to argue, but I hold my tongue. What am I doing? Never mind how crazy I sound, suppose I could convince them. What next? Hearing orders from the enemy of mankind isn’t exactly the safest thing, as if we weren’t in enough trouble with the rescue. “Human spy collaborating with dragons” would make one heck of a headline! Besides, Aldine’s right. I went unconscious and I don’t even know why. I could have easily been dreaming the whole thing up.

  “Probably dreamed it up,” I say. “I was the only guy still standing after the breath hit the shield. Maybe the fall knocked me out.”

  I run my hand behind my head. Feels normal. No pain, no lump. Don’t think I hit my head at all, but without a full scan, who knows?

  “Can you tell me what really happened?

  Aldine seems relieved by the explanation—just a fall and a two-bit dream. Nothing to worry about. She is all too happy to have an audience. It’s one heck of a story. Her memory of it is more or less the same as mine, minus the words and the pain. For her, those were just the roars of a ravenous beast, repelled by the weapons from our spaceships. It fired its blue flames at the station but the shields held. Vince’s story is about the same—only difference is, he was sitting in the pilot’s seat when the attack happened, he looked through the instruments, and he’s got all kinds of stats. Length of the beast, shoulder width, reach, speed, breath range... not that it’d make any difference if we were to face it again. The tug doesn’t even have shields. The beast was impossibly powerful. Its speed and agility even more ridiculous for something so large. The way it spun around and dodged shots there at the end was almost inconceivable. Toyed with our entire fleet alone. They barely managed to chase him away, and that’s only because it underestimated the knights.

  Either way, it’s clear they haven’t heard a thing. Maybe they have the right of it. What’s more likely? Me passing out and dreaming something up? Or me being some kind of chosen one who can understand draconic? The pain was no joke, I never felt anything even close to it and you can probably tell by now my life hasn't been a bed of roses. But pain is no proof of anything.

  “What did you see?” Aldine asks. She’s acting nonchalant, but I’m not fooled. If I tell her, she’ll tease the hell out of me for years to come!

  And if being the only one to hear its message wasn’t enough, the crazy beast even gave out a mission. “Find her, save her.” It spoke. And only I understood the message... does that mean a Dragon asked for MY help, specifically? I’m just a garbage man and as much as I’d like to believe I’m important, why would a dragon choose me? Well, I was the only one still standing. Every one else was down on the floor. Why wouldn’t it pick me? My ego’s on a whole different level today. Me. The one. Sure thing, buddy!

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  I describe the attack from my viewpoint on the deck. Being right in front of it from the start, I have details they didn’t pick up on, but it’s pretty much the same story.

  “Knights attaching themselves to the beast to pry out its scales? That’d explain why our weapons started to work midway through the battle. I thought we were dead when it shrugged off the first explosions like they were nothing.” Aldine says.

  “So you saw the knights, did you now? After all the shit that you gave me about my pilot implant, you got yourself bionic eyes?”

  “I’m all natural, jackass. Told you my eyesight was great, didn't I?”

  “Don’t BS me. The dragon was 23.45 miles from the station, and the knights are 5 meters tall at best." He's pounding at his console for a few seconds and faces me. "There! At that distance, the human eye can barely notice anything. If you have really really good eyesight, with an angular resolution of 0.5 arcminute—That’s 1/60 of a degree.... Anyway, you might be able to recognize that they are knights. I'll buy that. But to see the details, you’d need at least a 5x zoom. I used 10x and didn’t even catch half of what you saw.”

  “It’s just the dream. He was out already, remember?”

  “Maybe I passed out later.”

  “No. You said this happened after you heard the dragon. If you passed out later, then you didn’t dream the voice. And anyway, what kind of dream comes with real details?”

  Vince is inspecting me with a brand-new interest. He believes me now. Not sure I like that better. I feel like a slab of meat waiting to be dissected. His obsession with science scares me sometimes.

  “She’s right. You shouldn’t have been awake at this point, much less seeing things I could barely see on the ship’s cameras. And yet, what you’re describing's perfect match. Better yet, I couldn’t actually see the cables but I could see something was holding them in place. It’s too good a fit for a coincidence. Tell me the truth, do you have bionic eyes?”

  “Of course not! Where would I get the credits for that?”

  “Then how—”

  “Knock it off. There are only two possibilities: either he didn’t pass out and he has amazing eyesight—”

  “Beyond amazing. There’s no one—”

  “Don’t interrupt me. The other option is that he dreamed it all up and the dream was accurate. In both cases, that would mean the dragon really spoke to him. What did it say, exactly?”

  Trust Aldine to put her finger in it.

  “It said ‘Where is she? Give her back!’ Exactly those words.”

  “Who is ‘she’? How are we supposed to know?”

  “Maybe the fleet kidnapped another dragon. Who knows, they’re stupid enough for that.”

  “You’re getting ahead of yourselves. Maybe it’s just a dream. A dream can have elements of truth, but there’s no way it can be completely accurate. Perhaps he heard about knights battle tactics somewhere and his subconscious filled in the blanks. That’s still more likely than a magical dream with a speaking dragon that no one else heard, don’t you think?”

  He’s got a point, with the subconscious thing. I’m not aware of any such knowledge of course, but who can say what I heard as a child? The subconscious is a mystery our scientists still can't explain, so...

  “Is there a way to verify it? Think hard. Any detail we can check to confirm your story?”

  “What about the cables?” Aldine asks.

  “No, we need better than that. I couldn’t see the cables, but I knew they had to be there, the way the knights moved.” Vince replies. “But you have something else, don’t you?”

  He knows me too well, and I’m a lousy poker player. I look at their faces. Neither of them is going to let this go. Why would they? It’s far too juicy a story for Aldine, and Vince won’t abide by anything supernatural until he's got it narrowed down and sorted neatly with a scientific label of some kind. I have to tell them something.

  More than that, I need to know the truth and without their cooperation, there isn’t much I can do. If I’m going to tell someone, it might as well be them. Vince wouldn’t sell me out. Aldine—I don’t know her as well, but if she wanted to ruin me, she’d only need to say a word and I’d be out on the streets or worse. Anyway, she is with us now, she is in trouble by association and I don’t think even her dad is rich enough to get her out of it. Besides, maybe it’s just my ego, but the way she’s been acting today, it looks like she has a soft spot for me, if you can believe that!

  “You have to promise you’ll not speak of this to anyone.” I say, “I’m serious, we could all get killed.”

  They nod and I tell them everything, including the final battle near the jump point. Well, not everything. I don’t mention I’m seeing the battle from inside the beast, nor that it told me to “save her”, whoever “she” is.

  “THAT’s why you wanted us to backtrack from the jump point, right? It’s 8,567 miles from the station. There was no way you could have seen that battle, not without a freaking telescope!”

  Vince sounds offended. He is. Dragons existing is one thing. We have records. Superhuman powers, or worse. Magic? It’s like science stopped being real.

  “We’ll know soon enough. If those battleships are out there, we can check the damage. The way you describe it, there should be giant slashes through the bottom of each ship. There’s no way we can mistake that damage for anything else!”

  Finding the cruisers doesn’t take long indeed. The tug’s instruments pick them out without any issue. Two Myriad battle cruisers, the final ambush laid by our forces to cut off the dragon’s escape. It was a good plan. If the dragon had been a bit weaker, they might have held it long enough for the rest of the fleet to strike from behind and finish the job. Only it didn’t work out and now they are all dead instead. Two battle cruisers, that’s a fifty thousand men crew between the two ships. Killed in seconds. I don’t know how to process that. Seeing a few corpses is bad enough, but when it gets to that scale....

  We stare in silence as photos of the damage appear on screen. It’s exactly as I thought, they are neatly cleaved through the bottom, from head to stern with giant slashes. I don’t need to speak, we all understand the implications.

  If it’s all real... I have been given a mission by a dragon. Find her. Save her. The order still bounces around inside my head like a mantra.

  Her who? Why me? And what kind of help can a garbage man provide to a dragon? Do I even want to help that monstrous killing machine?

  This “chosen one” BS sucks.