Distance in Etherspace does not work like our own. Entering and exiting this strange other realm costs both time and energy, while the time taken for the trip itself also varies depending upon both distance and the amount of mana in the regions passed through. This means that a series of short hops to reach a destination takes far more fuel and time than a single jump, making attempts to baffle any pursuit following the same entry vector extremely expensive.

  – Vice Admiral Leon Brittsin, Academy Lecturer

  Despite the initial plan to just swoop in and destroy the refinery, Apex had been forced to wait silently for three full days.

  Sliding into the system undetected had been part of the problem. Without a full and complete picture of the traffic and sensor capabilities of the system, Sallus had suggested he play it safe. Apex agreed, even though he was getting impatient with all of this.

  He shouldn’t be. Dragons live long enough that he had plenty of patience normally, but he was not used to the kind of caution needed. Flying in with a roar and a demand just didn’t work in this modern era, and he’d have to remember that.

  At least until he reminded all these Lesser Folk what dragons truly were.

  Plans for the future, though, that’s all those were. Apex had agreed to the current idea knowing that going into something unprepared was foolish. He’d been unprepared against the thirteen heroes, and it had gotten him killed. How could he call himself a creature above all others if he did not learn from that mistake?

  Into the system he jumped, but the coordinates had been adjusted to bring him in much farther out. He’d strained his newly-devised stealth magic to its limits as he initiated a lengthy burn to get up to speed, then lowered it to something more manageable and easier to hide. Even under constant thrust, it had taken the better part of a day before he’d done turnaround and slowed the approach.

  Working with the speeds needed to get anywhere was complicated, he was starting to realize. Getting up to speed was the easy part. Slowing down enough to reach a point at a gentler pace was the hard part. It redefined everything he knew about travel, but he was pretty sure he had gotten the basics down.

  The next step would be to figure out how to use it more to his advantage.

  But that would have to wait.

  His magic was still fragile enough that even with practice, masking the deceleration burn had been difficult. He’d landed on the far side of the moon, after passing far too close to a local patrol, and then had half-buried himself in the dust of the barren lunar surface near some sort of mining operation. The heat and mana leakage from the machines had served well to mask his own signature with much less effort on his part.

  The rest of the time had been spent just waiting. Apex could easily tune out and avoid boredom, but he spent the time watching his crew. The cultists had far more variety in their personalities than he’d realized at first, though most of them were somewhat simple-minded. He wasn’t even judging by the standards of dragons – Lesser Folk like Naven Moongale had earned a smidgen of respect, even if that one was more like a pet than a peer. A few of the crew had a modicum of capability, and he made note of these in the long stretches between ships arriving or leaving the system.

  Not that he could see every ship. His vantage point on the moon did not give full coverage, and he couldn’t even see the planet below that was accepting the shipments. He could at best see the angle at which they approached the planet – but that was enough. He knew the rotation of the planet thanks to the long glide in letting him observe it, so while he didn’t know what was there, he knew the location of where they were going.

  The plan was to use the coordinates as a starting point and narrow down the strike area, as that would almost certainly be a spaceport, and any refineries should be nearby. Hopefully there would not be too many, but there would be a very narrow window of time to identify them before reinforcements arrived. Fortunately their plan did not require destroying all of them, just enough to cause problems.

  Apex had other plans. He knew there was only one major refinery. Perhaps some smaller ones were elsewhere on the planet, but he knew that there was one larger than the others. He also knew which ships were bringing in fresh product for refinement. He was not sure why, but he could feel the shipments of the refined base product, if only faintly. Nothing showed up on his sensors, it was only a tiny glimmer of intuition he’d normally dismiss, if it were not so very consistent.

  He did not tell the others.

  The rest of the time had been spent just watching the incoming ships. Etherspace jumps both in and out could have their vector traced. It was easier for ships coming in, since the disturbance in real space appeared several moments before the ship itself arrived. This could be locked onto with sensors and analyzed. To do the same for a ship making a jump to Etherspace required the target lock to be maintained during the entire jump. This was difficult to do without either tracking a single ship obsessively – which was difficult for a normal sensor crew – or predicting exactly when the ship would jump.

  He supposed this explained why Sallus wasn’t worried about the cruiser following their vector and just checking every system in that line. The forces during his initial escape had not been given time to fully lock on and determine his vector.

  Apex had the advantage of being the ship, so had no layer between himself and the sensors. Keeping track of a ship was a matter of concentration for him, no more. This made it a much simpler matter to collect the entry and exit vectors of various ships, and while some might do multiple jumps to confuse anyone watching, the data was still of interest to Sallus and Naven. Sallus had agreed to share any findings with the military man, so that in the event that the group failed, and Naven later returned to Coalition space, he would have something to bring to his superiors.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Okay, if the patrols line up like they have been, then when this ship leaves the only resistance will be that cutter nearby. You can probably take that out quickly and we can try to find the target before either of the corvettes on the other side of the planet can reach us.”

  Sallus gave him the all clear, and Apex rumbled an affirmative. It was a sound plan… for the information she had. Apex would be adjusting the plan to his own goals.

  Crippling the refinery wasn’t enough. He wanted these people to know the fear of a dragon once again. Surgical ship to ship combat could only show that so much. He could become an unknown danger, and that would be pleasant, but…

  He could also show them that a dragon, in air or in space, remains the scourge of the heavens.

  It just required him to put a little of a personal touch on the space combat tactics he’d been learning.

  “Prepare for takeoff. Combat stations.” Apex was the one to give that order. He’d considered handing it off to Sallus or Naven, but the former already had too much control, and the latter was still technically a prisoner. Best to keep handling it himself. Besides, he might be an ancient dragon, but it was fun saying that sort of thing and watching the crew scurry about in response.

  The shipment had already vanished into Etherspace, but Apex waited a few more minutes after that. The single patrol craft covering this part of space around the planet would rendezvous with more powerful ships shortly, giving only a brief window of time when it was alone. Any disturbance would call the others in, and they were close enough to respond quickly, in stellar terms. Sallus expected a few ground-to-space defenses as well, so she was relying on Apex’s stealth.

  “Gunnery, target engines only. Disable, not destroy.” Apex gave that order as he launched himself up from the moon’s surface, dust lifting into space in a spray and settling rapidly. Without atmosphere, it did not hang in the air like he’d first expected, though the low gravity meant it settled in a gentle rain. Even with the low gravity, his legs were not built to jump, only to hold him upward or grasp, so he had to fire his thrusters right away. He did a ‘smear’ with magic to mask the heat, but didn’t put a lot of effort into it.

  No matter what he did, the ship would very quickly detect something large and hot hurtling toward it at high speed. Known threat model or not, he doubted the cutter would ignore something like that rising from the moon’s surface.

  The patrol craft wasn’t far away, and just as he predicted it was already rolling to present the cannons toward him. He switched the shields on just moments before the light cannons peppered him with a few bolts, but these were lighter than what he’d encountered before. None got through, and he just saw a brief spike in power usage as the shields compensated.

  Then he was upon it.

  He missed the craft with his head and body, doing a small course correction so his claws could clamp on and puncture the hull firmly enough to drag the ship with him. Their engines fought this, and he internally growled as he struggled to correct his course while his mana cannons did… nothing.

  He should have handled that part himself, no matter how it split his attention.

  Finally, three blasts shot out from his starboard cannon, the first one wide, the second one nearly missing. The third impacted on the engines and they blew out with a fantastic plume of waste heat, but more importantly the crazy wrestling of the ship below halted. Its light cannon fired a few more times, but he was outside its arc, thanks to where he’d grabbed the ship.

  “Apex, stop toying with it and destroy it, we need to find the refineries!”

  Sallus barked that command sharply, but Apex ignored it. He pitched around the moon, letting the gravity turn him toward the planet, and looked right at the source of that tickling feeling he kept getting.

  “Is one that direction?”

  Apex wasn’t sure what method Sallus was using to figure it out. Some kind of analysis of emissions? Layout of the buildings around it? He’d think it over later. He was already headed toward the planet at high speed, engines burning hot. He could feel the ship in his grasp shuddering and starting to break up, small pieces shearing off. He gripped firmly, providing some support to the keel.

  “If they got a message off, we’ll see the defenders in about thirty to forty minutes.” Naven announced.

  “I only need twenty.” Apex growled that softly. “Confirm that is a refinery?”

  “It does look like it.” Sallus got back to him after about five minutes. “I’m getting a lot of indications that it’s a major refinery. The population is pretty spread out, too. Naven shouldn’t have a problem if your cannons do some collateral damage, but you’re going a little fast. You need to avoid the corvettes and come in shallow and slower.”

  The dragon grunted back, “No need. I’m doing this as the crow flies.”

  “What?”

  Apex continued to accelerate, ignoring the increasingly worried complaints of his crew. The ship in his claws shuddered, and he could feel the hull start to fragment under the constant acceleration without any compensators active. Was the crew even still alive?

  For once, Apex hoped not. He didn’t care much about Lesser Folk, but he was not innately cruel. What was coming next would be very unpleasant for anyone still inside.

  After the allotted twenty minutes, the dragon twisted his claws, snapping the ship in two. He released the scattering wreckage and immediately fired thrusters to change his angle, diverting it to a more shallow approach. It took nearly ten minutes to get the change settled in, and he’d be skirting the edge of the atmosphere, using the planet’s gravity to whip about and toward deep space.

  Only then did he cut his engines and all other unnecessary power, cloaking himself once more.

  In another five minutes, he whipped past the corvette approaching around the curve of the planet, passing it by before it could detect the anomaly.

  “Did you just drop the ship on the refinery?” Sallus had been doing the calculations, her voice carrying a note of worry. Apex internally chastised himself for revealing he could work those calculations in his head quickly, if they dealt with angles and gravity and atmospheric friction. He hadn’t figured out Etherspace coordinates yet, but the rest had been easy. A decaying orbit that brought it down eventually would have been even easier, but give too much time for the defenders to intercept.

  “You wanted attention,” Apex pointed out. “You wanted them to see this as a threat.”

  “This isn’t how battles are fought.” Naven interjected.

  “No, this isn’t how you fight battles. Between ships, between devices.” Apex growled deeply. “I am a dragon. I hunt my prey, I kill it with my own claws and teeth, and then I consume it. In this case, I used it as a weapon. You will get your destruction, your terror in the trade lanes.”

  He did a slight adjustment to his course, heading far enough from the gravity well to engage the Etherspace Drive.

  “This is how a dragon rules the skies.”

  Objects in Space