The Quantum Dragonslayer Read online

  The Quantum Dragonslayer

  The Quantum Dragonslayer, Book 1

  Kevin McLaughlin

  Role of the Hero Publishing Company

  Special thanks to Norma, whose keen eye made this book so much better!

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Author’s Notes

  Other Books by Kevin McLaughlin

  Afterword

  About the Author

  One

  Scott Free stared out the window of his spaceship at the dot that was Earth — and also at the other dot that wasn’t supposed to be there.

  It wasn’t like him to worry. His approach to life was usually a carefree, “hakuna matata” style. But it was difficult not to feel a little concern when precisely nothing was going the way it was supposed to and he was fast running out of time.

  “This is Stargazer One to Earth. Anyone out there hear me?” Scott called into his radio. He flipped through various frequencies, trying one after another. “Anyone at all? What the hell, people?”

  Nobody was picking up. By itself, that was something of a concern. Scott had been away a much longer time than he’d originally intended, so long that it was possible radios had been discarded in favor of some new technology. Even if that had happened, though, he figured someone would still be listening to the airwaves somewhere on the planet.

  But he was still decelerating so hard that the doppler effect could be screwing with his signal. Someone on Earth might well be receiving his call and only hearing static. Once he was down to a more reasonable speed, perhaps they’d hear him better.

  No, the bigger concern was literally bigger. Like, planet-sized. Like, a new planet sitting there where there hadn’t been one before.

  Scott had almost thought he was off course when his ship zipped back into the solar system and saw he was making for a rendezvous with the fourth planet instead of the third. That was baffling enough. The autopilot had gone on the fritz more than once over the last two years, but it ought to at least be able to tell one planet from another!

  When he realized the fourth planet was actually Earth, Scott stopped, blinking a few times.

  “One, two, three… Three planets and then Earth. I see Mercury, Venus — and what the hell is that doing there?” he asked.

  “Ruff,” Toby replied.

  “Thanks for the sage advice,” Scott groused.

  Not like he was expecting a lot more from the robot pup. Toby was capable of some limited conversation, albeit at a level only slightly more advanced than the Siri on his iPhone. But when the robot dog didn’t have a good answer, he tended to drop into acting less like an assistive intelligence and more like a dog.

  “No need to get sarcastic,” Toby replied.

  “Yeah, there was. But never mind. I suppose we’ll see soon enough.”

  Someone on Earth would know what was going on. Scott wished he’d thought to have a telescope aimed back at Earth so that he could watch his home while he was away on the trip. The whole idea of letting the changes be a surprise present to enjoy was sounding a lot less fun now that he was finally opening the gift.

  A new planet didn’t just appear out of nowhere. It wasn’t one of the other eight planets, either. They were all more or less where they were supposed to be. Scott checked the orbits of every planet in the system by his logs. They were all slightly off. Like, Venus was a bit further out from the sun than it should have been. Earth was just a shade closer. Pluto’s orbit was way more erratic than it used to be. He’d barely been able to find the little planetoid, it had swung out so far from the sun.

  The only thing Scott could think of was that this new world was a rogue planet, picked up by the sun as it journeyed through space. The planet probably came close enough to get dragged in, jostled all the other orbits a tad on the way in, and then settled into what looked like a stable orbit.

  He almost changed course to check out the new world. What an exciting bit of exploration that would be! Scott could end up being the first human to walk on a new world. That would be one for the books for sure.

  Regretfully, he decided to pursue prudence this time. His ship wasn’t designed to go checking out new planets, and Scott wasn’t confident about his ability to get back home again if he went wandering. The ship might be able to take off again after he landed, but it might not. The idea of exploring a new planet sounded fun. The thought of being stuck there didn’t.

  Earth it would be. Scott settled in for the last leg of his journey, looking forward to being home among other people soon. Two years was a damned long time to be by himself.

  “Although you’ve been good company,” he told Toby.

  “Thank you. I wish I could say the same, but the past two years have been incredibly bad for my circuits,” the robot dog replied.

  “Are you kidding? This has been like a vacation!”

  “Oh. So getting a hole punched in the side of the ship by a meteorite is your idea of a day at the beach?” Toby asked.

  Well, no. That was besides the point, though. “OK, we have had a few rough patches—”

  “Or when you went outside to repair the radar dish, dropped a wrench, and instead of coming back inside for another,” Toby said, “you went after it and almost did a Dutchman.”

  That hadn’t been his finest moment, either. Toby had said to forget it — he could always 3D print another wrench. But Scott hated wasting anything, and besides…

  “It worked, though.”

  “Yes. How, I have no idea. Your continued breathing defies logic and probability,” Toby said.

  On that much, they agreed. Scott frowned, wondering how much longer he had before the ticking bomb in his head exploded.

  Pretty soon he’d be able to see if this whole space gambit had been worth it or not. Scott sweated at the thought. It had to have been enough. A billion dollars spent on this mission couldn’t just be a waste of money and time. No, soon he’d be back on an Earth that was technologically advanced enough to save him.

  Two

  Scott’s thoughts drifted back to the diagnosis. FFI — fatal familial insomnia — was a rare enough disease that his father had been diagnosed far too late to do anything but wave goodbye as his brain cells turned into mush. Bjorn Free had always been a driven man, given to working long hours and not sleeping much. No one had thought it odd that he was sleeping less and less, until he started having hallucinations about rabid poodles chasing him around the office building.

  That got everyone’s attention right away. He was shipped off to Mass General in restraints, sedated, and finally got the first sleep he’d had in almost two weeks. After what seemed like six millio
n rounds of testing, the doctors had finally identified the problem. It was a little gene that was screwed up, telling his body to kick out a specific prion that wasn’t supposed to be there.

  Those prions were lodging in his brain and slowly killing neurons. The first symptoms involved sleeplessness. Then came the hallucinations. After that came memory loss, dementia, and eventually death.

  Nobody had any clue what a cure would even look like. Prions weren’t treatable, and a body producing lethal prions was a death sentence. It wasn’t a matter of if the disease would kill its victim. It was just a matter of when, and managing symptoms until it happened.

  Because it was a genetic disease, the doctors tested the rest of the family as well. Scott’s mother Olivia was fine. Her genes were excellent, apparently. But the Free couple’s son had the bad luck of inheriting his father’s crappy genetics.

  “Well, son, it seems like you take after your father! You’ve got that funny little PRPN gene, just like him,” Doctor Obelin had said.

  It was probably the nicest death sentence anyone had ever delivered.

  “But we’re catching it early, right? That means you can treat me?” Scott asked.

  He had just come to his appointment from visiting his father at Chelsea Jewish, a nice old folks’ home where he was slowly drooling and babbling himself to death. The idea of “a fate worse than death” had always seemed foolish to Scott. What could be worse than dying? Once you were dead, that was it. No more chances. No more skydiving or spearfishing off the coast of Australia. Dead was dead. Living was better.

  Then he’d seen his father turn from a powerhouse of a business investor into a mindless lunatic in less than a year, and he had elected to revise his opinion on the subject. Some things really were worse than death.

  For the first time since the whole ordeal with his father began, fear grabbed Scott by the throat. He cleared it with a cough, trying to banish the feeling without much success. Of course there would be a way to treat him.

  “Well, we will help you manage symptoms, of course. And we recommend not having children. A vasectomy might be advisable,” Obelin said. “You don’t have any children yet, correct?”

  “No, I don’t have kids,” Scott said. He was twenty-four. Plenty of time for children to slow him down when he was older. Then the implications of what the doctor was saying sank in. “Wait, are you saying you can’t fix this?”

  “Fix it?” the doctor asked, staring at Scott with a blank expression.

  “Cure me. Make me better. Make this not happen to me,” Scott explained, drawling out his words.

  “No, son. I’m sorry. We can’t cure prion diseases at all, and one where it’s a faulty gene making your body produce the prions?” Obelin shook his head. “There’s nothing we can do. In a hundred years, maybe we’ll be able to solve problems like this. But not now.”

  Scott stormed off and went to get a second opinion. When the second opinion said the same thing, he sought out a third and a fourth and a fifth. He went to darned near every doctor he could find who knew anything about Fatal Familial Insomnia. It was a rare enough disorder that few doctors had treated patients with the disease, let alone studied it in a detailed manner.

  The answer was always the same. No cure, no hope, set your affairs in order so that when the ticking time bomb inside you goes off and you turn into a demented, sleepless lunatic, you’re well prepared.

  Scott’s father died the next year. He hadn’t recognized any of his family members for months, so Scott was left wondering if he should mourn at his funeral or if he should have done so months prior.

  He wasn’t ready to walk down that road, and he wasn’t ever going to be. Everything he’d learned from the doctors kept coming back around to the same thing Obelin had said. Medicine was still too far out to solve the problem.

  That was not an insolvable problem. Scott decided he would find a way to put off the disease until medicine had caught up with his needs.

  The chirp of an alarm brought Scott out of his musing. He checked the pilot’s console in front of him. Earth was visible! He was almost home. Excited, he trained the ship’s telescope down on the land below, but he was coming up on the side facing away from the sun, and nothing was really visible.

  Scott frowned. Shouldn’t there be city lights down there? He was fairly sure you could see Earth’s cities from space at night. He tapped the send button on his radio and opened his mouth to speak. Now that he was close enough and moving slowly enough, surely they’d be able to pick up his transmission.

  That was when he realized the beeping alarm hadn’t been warning him that he was close to Earth. It was letting him know there was a big thing flying straight at him. Seeing the flashing words “COLLISION IMMINENT” on one’s pilot console had a way of releasing enough adrenaline to push one into solving the crisis.

  Scott flipped the telescope up in the direction of the object. Was it space junk? Maybe it was a ship, sent out to meet him?

  No guess could prepare him for what he saw when the lens finally came into focus. He was staring straight into the eyes and very large teeth of what he could only call a dragon.

  Three

  “Holy shit!”

  What else could you say when a fifty-foot-long winged lizard was flying toward your spaceship? Scott felt like it was an entirely appropriate initial reaction.

  His second thought was a healthy dose of skepticism. While a dragon wasn’t the same thing as the pack of rabid poodles his father had started seeing when he became ill, it was if anything even more far-fetched. Was he starting to come down with symptoms already? The disease could strike at any time from early adulthood onward. That same old dread gripped Scott’s heart. He was almost home. Was this the beginning of the end, when he was so close?

  “Ruff,” Toby agreed from beside him. Like Scott, the robot was staring out the big window on the front of the ship. The dragon was close enough that Scott could see it without the telescope now. It was getting bigger, too.

  “Wait — do you see it too?” Scott asked.

  “Big flying lizard?” Toby replied. Scott nodded. “Then yes.”

  Relief eased all the tension that had been building in Scott’s belly. He exhaled hard and settled back against his chair. Thank god. If Toby saw the same thing he did, it couldn’t possibly be a hallucination. He wasn’t sick yet. There was still time for him to find a cure.

  He sat bolt upright in his chair as the implications of those thoughts struck home. If the dragon wasn’t a trick his brain was playing, then that meant…

  Scott’s eyes went wide as saucers. The thing was fast! It was almost on top of him, looming huge in the window. Its wings were outstretched like it was gliding, even though there wasn’t any air. How the hell was it gliding in space? What was it breathing?

  Scott grabbed the flight controls in front of him and jerked the stick sideways, trying to steer away from the dragon. Nothing happened. It was getting closer. Another few seconds and it would be on top of him, and the damned thing was almost as big as his ship!

  He wiggled the control stick some more. Still no response.

  “Autopilot?” Toby said softly.

  “Oh,” Scott replied. Right.

  He flipped the switch, shutting down the autopilot. This time when he yanked the stick to the left, the planet whirled away beneath him. The effect made him feel dizzy.

  Then the dragon slammed into the front of his spaceship with a resounding clang.

  It clamped on with four legs, wings still spread out, tail whipping around wildly. The engines whined as Scott pushed the throttle up higher without any success. Somehow, the dragon was stopping his forward acceleration. It sank teeth into the ram scoop that made up the entire front of the Stargazer. Scott felt the crunching vibration of steel breaking apart through his seat.

  It ripped a chunk of the ship away and spat it out. Then it bit down again.

  “A dragon is eating my spaceship,” Scott said, not quite able to believ
e what he was seeing despite the evidence.

  The tail continued slashing around like a cat would while playing with prey. It sailed forward, striking the hull just below Scott’s window. Then it swung away again and vanished into the ram scoop, where it slammed against metal hard enough to rock the entire ship before whipping back out toward him again. Back and forth it went while the dragon chewed chunks out of the scoop.

  That ram scoop was what made an extended flight like his possible. It was charged with a mild current that allowed it to pick up particles as he sped through space. Those were then fed into the particle accelerator as fuel and ejected as photons to propel the ship through space. The result was a starship that refueled as it flew.

  Clang. Chomp. Crunch. Chomp. The dragon continued bashing and chewing his very expensive ship into rubble. The tail slapped the hull next to his window. It was close enough that Scott ducked instinctively to avoid the blow. He slowly lifted his head back up again, eyeing the tail warily.

  “Hey, you big lizard! Go find something else to eat! This ship cost me a lot of money!” Scott hollered at the thing.

  It didn’t act like it heard him. Which was probably a good thing, once he thought about it a little. Those teeth were very large, and Scott decided he preferred a dragon chewing on his ship to a dragon chewing on him.