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CHAPTER TWENTY

The Aerial

Evelyn and I got back to Build-A-Dragon in late afternoon after a supremely uncomfortable car ride.

I was sorely tempted to make a beeline for my car and go home. She wouldn’t fault me for that; she was doing the same thing. But Wong and Korrapati would probably be hanging around, waiting to hear about the results. I’d assured them that we had this field demonstration in the bag.

How in the hell am I going to tell them?

I didn’t know, and I really didn’t feel like ruining someone else’s day. Still, it was my duty to report back on how the trials had gone. How we’d underestimated Greaves and watched their dragons beat ours. So I sucked it up and walked through the hatchery to the Design lab.

Wong and Korrapati weren’t even pretending to work; they stood by her desk watching the God Machine do its thing. They looked relaxed and happy. This was going to suck.

“Hey, guys!” I forced a smile that I truly didn’t feel. “What’s printing?”

“A custom order. Nothing special.”

“Little bit special,” Wong said.

“Yeah, how so?”

“From China, special request for another imperial dragon.”

“Really?” It perked me up to hear that. Not enough to forget how my day had gone, but a little.

“We . . . found the design in DragonDraft 3D, so we printed another egg,” Korrapati said. “They wanted it to be identical.”

They found my design, which meant they’d poked around my personal workspace. It should have bothered me more, but they’d been here when I wasn’t, and they’d handled the situation. I shrugged it off. “That’s good. They must have liked it.”

“Who got the first egg?” Wong asked.

Uh-oh. It hadn’t occurred to me that Wong didn’t know what Evelyn and I had done to boost him from his unofficial exit ban. Well, there was no reason he couldn’t know about it now. “When you were stuck over there, we sent a gift to someone in the Chinese government. A little dragon diplomacy, if you will.”

“Very clever.”

“If they want another one, maybe it’s a good sign,” I said. China was a huge market, and largely untapped because of their import restrictions.

“Yes, wonderful, we sold a dragon and maybe we’ll sell more,” Korrapati said impatiently. “How were the trials?”

“The good news is that the dragons did well. They took to the training, and they reached the objective in under a minute.”

“Oh, that’s fantastic,” she said.

Wong didn’t share her enthusiasm. “What is bad news?”

“Well, Robert Greaves is running the other team, as we pretty much knew. I thought he wanted a joint demonstration in order to copy our design ideas, but he didn’t need them. Their infantry dragon was really good.”

“Better than ours?”

I sighed. “I’m afraid so. It’s not official yet, but they beat us on most performance metrics.”

“What does this mean?” Korrapati asked.

“It means they’re ahead, but they haven’t won yet.”


I turned my attention to the flying model, which I’d already started calling Air Force One in my head. The aerial trial would come quickly after the marine demonstration. Designing flying dragons was tough, and I told myself it was to get myself extra time. It definitely was not due to the concern that a third trial might not happen.

Besides, even Korrapti couldn’t argue with the idea of me taking first crack at the flying design. The live demonstration of my Condor model would live long in the institutional memory of Build-A-Dragon. That was the day I’d simultaneously showed everyone at the company the near-limitless potential of our creations and landed myself on the CEO’s private shit list.

Let no one say that Noah Parker did things half-assed.

Build-A-Dragon’s computational infrastructure archived everything. Especially the code produced in the Design department. Any code changes saved by Thursday got mirrored overnight, and then saved to a backup server over the weekend.

With that knowledge, back when I was a designer I’d taken steps to ensure that my two ignominious failures—the Condor flying model and the tiny, supersmart dragon that became Octavius—never got saved to the company backups. I’m not sure why I did it, really. Maybe I’d sensed what was coming for the Octavius design. With the Condor design I wanted to make sure that no one stumbled upon its secret purpose—a mutation in a gene only seen in one other organism: my brother, Connor. Of the human species, or so he claimed. Never mind that the hidden genetic change and the dragons that carried it were the reason Connor got into his gene therapy trial. It still could’ve gotten me into a lot of trouble.

Ironically, the rest of the Condor design—the super flying machine sans the urge of progressive muscular atrophy—offered the perfect starting point for the AF-1. So I smuggled in my biometric-encrypted thumb drive and uploaded the model into DragonDraft 3D. Then I couldn’t resist the urge to pull it up in the three-dimensional simulator, if only to remind myself of what I could do when I designed outside the box.

The simulator’s rendering of my Condor bloomed into life in midair above my desk. It was lean and lithe in this prediction, the wings generous, the legs and tail hinting at the strength. Its scales were the color of weathered sandstone. The simulation didn’t really capture the eyes, though. When I’d seen those dragons in person, there was a depth to their gaze that made my breath catch just remembering. Maybe it was intelligence, or understanding, or something even deeper. The Condor had looked at me and just known me, inside and out.

I hadn’t seen them since the day they’d turned up unannounced in my mom’s backyard, drawn to the person with whom they had something in common. Connor and I still talked about it sometimes. Neither of us could figure out how they’d found him, or more importantly, why they’d decided to come.

Beneath the simulated dragon, various performance stats scrolled up in orderly fashion on a projection monitor. My simulator quantified everything. It scored the dragon high across the board: strength, intelligence, agility, flight time. Even the metabolism performed above average, though their caloric intake was necessarily high. Build-A-Dragon sold high-energy foods specifically designed for our flying models, but the stuff was expensive. A lot of customers quit buying it after the novelty of a flying dragon wore off. Then they called us to complain when the dragon started preying on songbirds or neighborhood pets.

Yes, the Condor model was a thing of beauty, but it would still need a lot of work to meet the DOD specs. Aerial combat was no joke. These dragons would have to fly in the worst conditions—gale-force winds, torrential rain, heavy snow—when ordinary drones couldn’t function. Agility would be key, too. So would speed. The DOD wanted a horizontal flight speed of sixty miles per hour, and diving speed of twice that. Only swifts, golden eagles, and some falcons could match that in the natural world.

Diving speed wouldn’t be a problem. Dragons were heavy as flying creatures went, and their scaly bodies had some key advantages when it came to aerodynamics. The real challenge would be to optimize this dragon for horizontal speed. It would need strength, which meant muscle. But muscle was heavy. There were metabolic issues, too. Few forms of physical movement bring a higher energy demand than flying. An extremely efficient metabolism would be required, but this also meant that the dragon’s diet must be strictly managed. I’m sure the military was going to love that.

Those were complicated issues and would require complex answers, probably with input from others. So instead I started with the fun part: wing design. Although most people think of the peregrine falcon as the fastest bird in the world, a lot of them don’t realize that the falcon’s top speed is maximized by plummeting toward the earth from high altitude. Peregrine falcons preyed mainly on other birds, caught in flight, so a high diving speed was necessary. The AF-1 had different needs entirely. It would have to fly fast without the aid of gravity as well as in a dive, while still maintaining the agility to do what it needed to do.

The best model for that was a different type of bird, the swift. There were over a hundred different species of swifts. The family is aptly named, as many swifts have been clocked at over a hundred miles per hour. In horizontal flight. That’s because swifts, unlike falcons, generally prey on flying insects. Swifts also spend most of their lives in flight; in essence, they’re evolution’s best solution for an agile flying bird.

The wings of a swift have two special features. The first is the long, curved, elegant shape that most people associate with swifts (or swallows, a distant relative that achieved similar looks through convergent evolution). DragonDraft 3D had built-in sliders for wings, but these only adjusted the size. The shape was pretty much the same. To alter the fundamental shape of a dragon’s wing, I had to take a deep dive into the genetic code itself.

Limb formation is a tightly controlled process in animals, and it happens much earlier in development than you might think. Many of the genes for development processes have a common sequence called the homeobox. It’s just 180 base pairs long. The encoded protein, which is sixty amino acids long, forms a triple helix that bound DNA. This allows homeobox genes, or HOX genes, to control the activity of other genes in the genome.

For a genetic engineer like myself, the homeobox was useful because it told us which genes play key roles in forming a dragon embryo. I isolated the genes that were most active where the dragon’s wing began to form, and I began tinkering. With each step, I ran the code through my simulator to visualize the effect on the resulting dragon. It was trial-and-error stuff, really, because the effects of even a single homeobox gene can be wide reaching. Some of my early efforts produced square wings, or eight wings, or wings that grew inward instead of out. Eventually, though, I found the right HOX genes that guided the shape of the wing itself. Like a conductor guides a symphony, I eased them into a crescendo. The wings grew longer and more slender, almost like those of a hummingbird.

And speaking of hummingbirds, the second feature of the swift wing had to do with the joints. Swifts could rotate them, enabling them to change the angle of their wings during upstrokes and downstrokes to maximize efficiency. Supposedly it increased efficiency by something like sixty percent, and this dragon would need every edge it could get.

With the wing design done, I focused next on musculature. Unlike the infantry model, we didn’t have the luxury of not caring about weight. This was all about balancing different types of muscle fiber. Animals basically have two kinds: fast-twitch fibers, which are best for quick movement at a high energy cost, and slow-twitch fibers, which have better efficiency and endurance. The balance between them, in humans at least, is what separates world-class sprinters from marathon runners.

It was hard to know what the right answer should be for the AF-1. Flight required some fast-twitch response, no debate there. Especially takeoff. Yet the DOD wanted endurance, too. Otherwise they wouldn’t tell us that the flight duration was a performance metric. I waffled back and forth but couldn’t reach a decision on my own. So, I went in search of my favorite sounding board.

Wong wasn’t in his cubicle, though—I spotted him next door, in my old workstation. Korrapati’s, I mean. They laughed at something on her projection monitor, then continued on in pleasant conversational tones. The sight caused a weird twist in my stomach. Not sure what it was. Envy, perhaps, though I really had no reason to be envious. Except that being a designer—at least when you weren’t secretly trying to help cure your brother’s disease—meant all of the scientific fun without the stresses of leadership. I missed it a little. Seeing them carefree, in the thick of it, I didn’t want to interrupt.

But Korrapati glanced over her shoulder at the sound of my footfalls. “Hello, Noah.”

“Hey, guys. How’s the design looking?”

“Very good. Good design,” Wong said, with his usual easy confidence.

“It’s . . . progressing,” Korrapati said. “The performance requirements are—”

“Ridiculous, I know.” I waved off her obvious concern. “How close are you?”

“We have the swimming speed achieved, the diving depth, and all of the payload minimums.”

“Also have name,” Wong interjected.

“We do not have a name,” Korrapati said.

I looked at Wong. “All right, what do you want to call it?”

“Think of this,” Wong said. “Team in trouble. Hard underwater operation. What do you need?” He swept his hand across in an arc between us, as if painting a sign. “AquaWong.”

Korrapati shook her head in a way that said she’d heard this before.

I laughed. “You don’t lack for creativity.”

“Now all we need to do is meet the specifications,” Korrapati said.

“You’ll get there.”

Wong grunted in agreement.

“I hope so,” Korrapati said.

“You’re already much further along than I was.”

“Have you been able to work on the flying model at all?”

Am I that predictable? “How did you know?”

“Noah Parker loves flying dragons,” Wong offered.

Korrapati nodded. “Besides that, you and Greaves have history. It’s fitting somehow.”

“I hope you’re right.”

I left the Design lab with just a hint more optimism. The Wong-Korrapati dynamic seemed to be working, and if Wong was ready to name the model, it meant they were close. Which is a lot more than I could say for my own model. Then again, it might not matter. If Greaves beat us at the second field trials, we might not have a chance to compete with the flying models.


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