DRAGON CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 9




At the side of the highway just beyond the city limits, Terra watched the sky, hoping that one of those ships would fly by. “It headed this way…” she said to herself, looking out the passenger side window at the sun rising behind the trees. “I just hope one shows up soon…The couple hours of sleep I got wasn’t nearly enough…” She leaned back in her seat and looked up at the roof. Just then, there was a rumble overhead and with a sudden burst of energy, she leaned her head out the driver side window just as one of the ships flew overhead. Terra dropped back into the seat and threw her car into drive.

She followed the ship as best she could before it banked hard to the right, disappearing behind the trees beside the highway. Terra groaned and pulled off at the next exit, finding herself in a more wooded area than she’d expected. She drove along the narrow winding roads, trying to find her way to where the ship had disappeared. Then she found herself driving along an open field.

Pulling over, she just watched the field. “I think this is close to where it went…” she thought. “Can’t tell though…It took too long to get here…” She put the car into park and thought for a moment, folding her arms with a sigh, before hearing the same sound overhead. Looking up through the windshield, she was surprised to see three more ships high above. “There you are.”

She followed them for another few minutes, until she came to a tall chainlink fence and gate that blocked her path. She pulled over, got out of the car, and started at the open countryside that extended as far as she could see. “They’re in there somewhere…” Terra folded her arms with a soft growl of annoyance. She slowly walked over to the gate, debating what to do at this point. She looked back at her car, then to the gate again, this time noting the razor wire that lined the top of the fence. “They really don’t want people getting in here…” she thought, giving the gate a light kick before wandering back to her car. “Screw it…” Terra opened the door and was about to climb in, but stopped and stared at the gate again. She rushed to the back, popped open the trunk, and grabbed her backpack. She went back to the fence, tossed the pack over and dragged herself through the small gap between the gate and dirt road.




In the north, deep within the mountain fortress, the black and red eyed man stared into the basin filled with black water. He could see Terra cautiously wandering down the dirt road past the metal gate. “Is this what you seek, child?” he snarled. “What truths will be revealed? What shadows will remain?” He waved his hand over the basin and the water rippled, showing a group of soldiers in white armor in a corridor with polished hall floors and white walls. “What will be your fate?” The soldiers started looking around, reacting to something the man couldn’t hear, before running down the corridor. “You’re time is running short, child.”

He waved his hand over the pool and the images changed again, this time showing Drake making adjustments to the Raptor in Terra’s garage. “The girl is nearing the truth, Dragon.” Drake suddenly reached for his phone and held it up to his ear. “Your soldiers may end her existence.” He watched as he jumped onto the bike and sped off. “So it begins.” He turned around and walked out of the room. He ventured deep into the bowels of the fortress, through the darkened tunnels and half collapsed rooms until he reached the corridor he had hidden from Drake and the others. He turned toward it with his arms folded and just stared at it, thinking. “Not yet.” he growled, glaring past the rubble. “You will remain here. This realm is not ready for your own.”




“Oh man…” groaned Terra, wiping sweat from her face. “How big is this field…” She looked ahead, seeing something that looked like a small work shed with some kind of console on the wall. “What’s that thing?” She continued forward, glancing around nervously in hopes that no one was around. “I don’t think I wanna run into these guys…Utan and the others seem alright, but those other guys…I’m not so sure about them…” Just then, she spotted something else near the structure and she dropped to the ground. “C-Crap…” She kept her eyes on the object and realized it was one of the white humvees. “At least I know they’re here.” Getting up, she inched her way closer to the structure, trying to see if there was anything beyond it other than the humvee. “But…I don’t see anything else.” She reached the structure and hid behind it. Taking a deep breath, Terra peeked around the side, shocked to see that the vehicle was gone. “W-What? How’d it-” Just then there was a sound of dirt and rocks shifting behind her. Terra swung her attention back to where she had come from and everything went black.

When she came to, Terra found herself in a small room, sitting at a metal table with several of the soldiers standing in front of her. She tried to scramble to her feet, but fell back onto the chair, finding that her wrists were shackled to the arms. One of the soldiers lifted his hand and pressed a small button on the side of his helmet just behind the right ear piece. “Sir, the girl’s awake.” he said calmly, glancing at the mirror behind him. After a second he turned back to her, sending a chill up her spine, motioning to an open folder on the table. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, kid.”

Terra looked at the folder, recognizing the papers that were spread out on top of it. “H-How did…”

“Forget how.” interrupted the soldier. “You’re digging your own grave gathering this kind of information.” Just then, the doors behind him slid open and an older man in some kind of formal uniform stepped in. The soldier turned around and stood up straight, placing his fist against his chest. “General Marshal, Sir!”

The older man looked at Terra, seeing the fear in her eyes. “Leave us. I’ll handle this myself.”

The two soldiers looked at each other, then back to the man. “Yes sir.”

He watched as they stepped out of the room and the doors slid shut behind them. Once they were alone, the man sat down in the chair across from Terra. He gathered up the papers and folder and leaned back in the chair, resting his left leg across his right knee before setting the folder on his lap. “Hm. Well.” he mumbled, slowly flipping through the papers. “This is a lot of information, Ms Aikawa.”

Her heart sank in fear. “How…How do you know-”

“Let’s not worry about that right now.” he responded, continuing through the papers before settling on the information about the fortress in the mountains. “I see. You’ve been following Drake and my men.” Terra looked at the floor. “You understand that you’ve gotten yourself involved in some highly classified activity, right?”

“I guess so…” Terra mumbled, slowly looking across the table at the man. “Please. I didn’t mean anything by it…Drake just wasn’t telling me anything about what he’s doing…I just wanted to know who he is…I figured looking into all this would get me that info…”

The man nodded. “And what did you find out?”

“Not a lot that makes sense…”

“And from the flash drive?” Terra’s eyes widened in shock. “We know that Private Utan gave it to you. And that you used it.”

“B-But how? I didn’t tell-”

“Our systems detected it’s use.” He explained. “I’m sure you were shocked by the data being imported when you activated it.”

“Well, yeah…”

The doors slid open again and another one of the soldiers walked in holding a tablet-like device. “Sir. The information you requested.” he said, giving the same salute as the others had.

The older man took it and looked at the screen as the soldier left the room. “Hm. I see.” Terra looked at the floor again. “Until you met Drake, your life had been fairly normal. With the exception of a few events.”

Terra looked across the table in confusion. “A few events?”

“Your current home situation.” he answered, swiping his index finger across the screen. “Living alone at sixteen while you parents are away on business. And your teacher assisting you monetarily. It’s unusual.”

“H-How do you…”

The man held up the device with the screen facing her. “I ordered my men to gather some information.” He then set the device on the table and leaned forward with a sigh. “Now.” he said, pausing for a moment. “Why track us?”

She looked away again. “It’s just…where the info led me…It was the only clue I had…I didn’t think it’d get me into trouble with the military…” The man raised an eyebrow. “I’m not trying to spy on any top secret missions…”

“The military?” laughed the man. “Miss, we-” Just then an alarm went off and the soldiers outside the door could be heard running away. The man seemed unaffected and just hung his head with another sigh. He stood up and walked over to Terra when they suddenly heard yelling. “Alright…” He unshackled her from the chair and motioned to the back wall of the room. “Just stay near the wall.”

“Um…Okay…” She inched backwards, until her back hit the wall. Then, without warning, one of the soldiers flew through the mirror that had been behind the older man. He hit the table with a loud clang, revealing the mirror to be a window. She recoiled in shock, covering her ears with a yelp. “Oh my god!!!”

Outside the room, she suddenly heard people trying to stop someone from walking any further. “Then where the fuck is she?!” yelled a familiar voice. “I’ll tear this fuckin’ place apart if I have to!!!”

The older man shook his head again, then motioned to Terra. “Follow me.” He walked into the hall with Terra close behind as the soldier picked himself up off the floor. Terra looked around, surprised by the polished black floors and white walls that surrounded them. Like the soldiers, they looked like they belonged in a science fiction movie. She turned her attention to an intersection at the end of the corridor and saw another soldier go flying and tumble across the floor. The man started walking in that direction and Terra followed closely, fearing that, if she didn’t stay close to him, she might have another encounter with the soldiers.

Reaching the intersection, the man pulled the soldier to his feet, then turned to see Drake beating his way through several other soldiers. “Alright, Drake.” he called, arms folded. “I don’t need more of my men ending up in our medical bay.”

Drake looked at him over his shoulder and noticed Terra. He sighed, then turned and walked over to them. “Why the hell did you drag her in here?” he snarled, before noticing some bruising around her left eye. “And who the fuck did that?”

Terra scratched the back of her head. “She turned around when my men were about to subdue  and bring her in. The black eye was completely unintentional.” Drake tilted Terra’s head slightly to get a better look at the bruise. “There’s nothing serious.” He released her and started walking back down the hall past the interrogation room  Terra had been held in. “As for why she’s in here.” he continued. “She entered a restricted area.”

Drake stopped with a growl and turned to face the man. “So you knock out a sixteen year old girl and interrogate her like a fuckin’ criminal?”

“I’ll admit my men were a little harsh. Not to mention, I never gave the order to restrain her. They were on patrol and acted on their own, when they saw her.”

“Then the Veralus has a serious problem when their soldiers pull shit like that.” Drake started walking again.

“The Veralus is a galaxy-wide organization. And the 327th is only one legion of nearly a thousand. Our men-”

Just then Terra ran up alongside the man. “W-Wait…What the heck is the Veralus?! I thought you guys were part of the army or something!!”

Drake laughed. “They wish the Veralus was part of them.”

“What Drake’s means is, The Veralus isn’t affiliated with any country’s government.”

They continued down the countless halls as the older man explained what the Veralus was, though avoiding anything that might help Terra find out who the man Drake fought was. “S-So…” she started, trying to wrap her mind around what he told her. “You’re…like…some kind of intergalactic military…that started operating on earth in the in the nineteen-forties and kept yourselves completely secret the entire time, but now are working with Drake to hunt down some psycho with weird eyes and a sword…” She scratched her head with a groan. “You realize how insane that sounds, right?”

They stopped at a pair of large blast-poof doors and the man walked over to a control panel on the wall beside them. “To someone who’s never heard of us it’s understandable. But it doesn’t make it any less true.” He pulled a pen-like object from his pocket and placed the end of it into a hole on the panel. There was a loud clang from the door as it unlocked and began to slowly rise as alarms blared over the sound of engines, shouting, and running on the other side. “There’s a lot of things in this world you’re better off not knowing.” Terra was momentarily blinded by the lights in the next room, but, as her eyes adjusted, she was shocked to see a hangar filled with rows of the ships from before and, what looked to be, some kind of jets. All around them were hundreds of soldiers in white armor. “Other times, however.” the man walked through the door. “Satisfying someone’s curiosity is worthwhile.”

Terra watched Drake as he walked into the hangar, dumbstruck by what was before her. She then heard the door starting to close and quickly rushed through to join them. “But where exactly are we? None of this was behind that fence.”

“We’re only a few miles from where you entered.” answered the man. “This hangar’s built into the hillside in a no-fly zone.”

“But not everyone obeys those boundaries.”

They stopped at the back of one of the ships and Terra took a look inside, noticing that the interior looked like the inside of a high-tech subway car with a plane’s cockpit attached to the front. “That’s true. And we do get the occasional conspiracy theorist trying to sneak in.” he said, nodding his head slightly at her. “Yourself included.”

One of the soldiers walked over to them. “General Marshal?” he asked, placing his fist over his heart in the same salute from the interrogation room. “Here are the readouts you requested.” he handed him a tablet with a series of graphs on it’s screen before leaving.

He looked at the graphs. “Looks like it’ll be awhile before we understand our friend.” he sighed, looking at Drake. He then turned to Terra who had since inched her way up the ramp on the back of the ship. “You like it?” Terra yelped and jumped back, nearly falling when she misjudged her footing. “You can enter, just don’t touch the controls.”

She looked inside again, then slowly stepped inside with the General right behind. Leaning into the cockpit, she looked around, surprised to see that the controls were nearly identical to those of a commercial jet. “So what exactly is this thing?” She leaned in for a closer look at the controls.

“The KXZ-117 Dropship, better known as the Condor.”

“So this is for…”

“Troop and supply transport.”

Terra looked into the back of the ship again. “But it’s so small in here. Even for a military vehicle.” she said, making her way out of the ship.

“Our teams don’t often exceed six men and the smallest are four man teams.”

“Only four?”

Our troops are exceptionally trained and put even the best trained militaries to shame. Our four man units are our top tier units and are reserved for extreme situations.” He followed her around to the front of the ship. “In fact, you’ve already met one of those teams.”

Terra looked over her shoulder at him. “Wait…what? You’re saying those guys that’ve been hanging out with Drake are your top tier soldiers? They’re not exactly disciplined.”

He looked at the graphs again. “They’re casual, yes. But when the time comes they snap into mindset we need.”

She then looked over at Drake as he stood at the back of the ship. “And what about Drake? Where’s he fit into all this?”

“We started working with him before the Union City incident. In fact, we were there when it happened.”

She suddenly turned back to the General. “That’s another thing I wanted to ask.” she said, with a high level of excitement in her voice. “I saw the pictures of what was left, news reports, and even a video clip from a helmet cam. What happened? How did an entire city just get destroyed?”

“I’m afraid most of that information is classified.” he answered. “But the man we’ve been hunting was at it’s center. And until we eliminate him, all you know and love’s at risk.” Just then, the General’s attention turned to something behind her. “Private Utan!”

Terra turned around and saw someone in a full set of the white armor and wearing a helmet like the soldiers from the videos and near the park. She raised an eyebrow, unsure how he knew it was Utan since his face was completely hidden by the helmet and the only thing that seemed to narrow down who it was even slightly was a yellow and black hazard pattern on his shoulders, forearms, and the top of his helmet that also had an unusual raised section down it’s center.

She turned back to the General. “How do you know that’s Utan?”

There was a sigh behind Terra. “You called?” When she suddenly felt an arm on her head, she looked to her left to find Utan there with the helmet under his other arm. “I see you finally figured it out.”

The General folded his arms. “She got put into cell block A because of your stunt.”

Utan stood there for a second, just staring at him before rubbing the back of his head with a laugh. “I didn’t think she’d try to get into one of our outposts. I figured she’d just corner one of us and demand some answers.” The General groaned and just glared at him. “C’mon, say something Sig.”

“Right…” General Sig turned and looked back at Drake as he crushed a cigarette out on the side of the Condor. “Drake, you’re with me.”

Drake sighed with a laugh and flicked the cigarette into a stack of metal crates. “Right behind you, Sig.”