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WHY THE RED DRAGON WILL ROAR FOREVER MORE
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“Captain, we stopped, we’ve dropped, and now we are ready to roll.”
“Roll on, half speed.”
“Half speed, Sir?”
“Aye, I need some fun stress to overcome the worry stress.”
He is met with laughter coming out of the ship-wide intercom and he joins them joyfully. Even at half speed, the powdered gold and water powered craft makes the surrounding pipes rattle and creak with its passing. A wall of rusty pipes caked with you do not want to know what rushes towards them out of the dark, but the Red Dragon simply jumps over to the left and down a bit as if it were a dragonfly. The effortless move would have shocked silence into the following craft if it were close enough to see it out of their window.
“Sir, the ship seems to be keeping up, and … closing in a little!” Enigma wipes sweat away from her copper-brown forehead with her long tapered fingers. Excited by the chase, she licks her full lips with her long thin tongue as the irises of her pistachio-colored eyes widen in anticipation. She raises her chair up a bit so that she is not eating the knees of her curvaceous hurdler’s legs. Pandora bites her bottom lip and places a hand on Enigma’s mid-thigh that signaled both desire and support. Enigma never looked sexier than when her eyes lit up and her smiled curled up with a “tsk-tsk” wagging of her finger.
“What is their call-sign, Enigma?”
“It is The Nephilim, Sir. A medium-sized standard hovercraft built, let’s see, seventy-five years ago directly from the wrecks of the Tara and the Meru. Crew of five, captained by Portent and his adopted son Arc. New information coming in that their computer and ours have discussed. It will take a few more minutes.”
“Aye, alert me when you have the data.” Closing the cover of the squawk box, Captain Prometheus looks to his right towards Second Officer Key-Master. K-M’s hands move through the air in a set of beautiful complex motions that may be misconstrued by some to be sign language for the deaf. This is not too far from the truth, actually. Before K-M got his artificial ears he grew up as a deaf. So, he is the perfect Navigator. The fact is that K-M’s parents had been charged to take steps to bear a deaf child so these kinds of gesticulations would be second nature to him. Still, it always filled the Captain with awe to see how good he was at it, how natural. It reminded him of the lover lost three Matrix Missions ago.
He turned his head ahead and watched the scenery move. Seeing a complex of broken pipes up ahead, K-M effortlessly directs the ship to do a barrel roll counter-clockwise. Then, with the tight space up next, he told the ship to segment as if it were an accordion so it could smoothly make the curve down and up and down again to safely bypass the obstacle.
The Holo-display lights up in a field of complex close-knit constantly moving green dots showing the craft they are pursuing. Captain Isaiah Mathew Portent was still incredulous.
“Look, it’s just another craft.”
“It is NOT just another craft! Look at the shape of it!”
“That could be a mis-reading. These Holo-displays are not the most sophisticated things. That is, unless you f*cked with that too instead of cleaning up our living quarters liked I asked you too.”
“No, I didn’t mess with the display. I didn’t have time because I had to clean up the pig-sty you’ve turned our home into.”
“The devil you say! At least half that junk is yours, all spread over everywhere like a Sentinel that exploded in there!”
“How did you –Look! Did you see that, Da – Captain? Have you ever seen a ship move like that?”
Portent’s face drains like a goblet lifted quickly by a lush. He had just witnessed the craft seeming split into sections and make moves no craft should be able to make. “Oh my God! The Holo-display must have had a major glitch in it!”
“I don’t think so. I think we’re going to have to find another way around.”
But Captain imPortent smiles a dangerous smile. “… or through!”
Commander Arc literally shakes with excitement as his mind works feverishly to figure out how to carry out his father’s bold plan.
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