CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Demo
We met in the coliseum-style arena outside the building for the first trials of the AF-1 dragons. The waiting was tough. Day after day I made small tweaks to my design and ran them through the simulator, all while knowing I’d have to revert to the original printed egg if we needed significant changes.
There was a good turnout on demonstration day. Obviously, Evelyn and the Design team were all there, but we also drew some of the support staff. Tom Johnson also showed up in a broad-brimmed hat with several of his dragon wranglers in tow. They settled down a little way away from us, but Tom wandered over a minute later.
He greeted Evelyn with a friendly nod and sprawled down next to me. “Good hatching weather.”
“Good flying weather,” I said.
“That, too.”
Jim and Allie, the most recognizable of our hatchery staffers, arrived on the scene, each pushing a cart with an egg and a bowl of raw meat. They team-lifted each egg into the nest-like enclosures in the center of the arena. They left the bowls and carts and retreated back inside without so much as a backward glance. It surprised me a little that they didn’t want to stay for the hatching, but I tried not to take it personally.
“Want to help with the hatching?” I asked Tom.
He chuckled. “Try and stop me.”
“Heh. I should have known.” I checked my watch. “Should be any minute now.”
It came to my attention that Evelyn, Wong, and Korrapati were all staring at us with a mixture of envy and admiration.
“Let’s have a look,” Tom said.
We walked over together. He moved with his usual swagger, the very image of confidence. I felt like a nervous intern beside him, conscious of all the eyes on me. By the time we reached the eggs, one was already trembling.
“Oh, yeah. These are ready,” Tom said.
The left egg shook and crackled. A minute later, the other one did the same. The noise of the cracking eggshell seemed to echo in the coliseum. Tom scooped up a fistful of meat and handed it to me, then took one of his own. He moved up next to the left-side egg as a snout broke through. The egg split down the middle and fell open, revealing a perfect dragon with wings and tail coiled around itself. It was the color of pale sand, speckled with darker brown.
“You’re an eager fellow,” Tom said, offering it a piece of meat. The dragonet ate right out of his hand.
Tom snapped his fingers and pointed at the other egg right before it, too, split down the middle.
I shook my head and took up position beside it. “How do you do that?”
“Years of practice, kiddo.”
My dragon emerged in the same way. Even sticky and shell-covered, it looked more impressive than most of my previous designs. Maybe all of them. The body was slender, almost to the point of snakelike. It unfurled and turned toward me, slit-like eyes narrowing. I offered a piece of the raw meat. The pink tongue flicked out; it had the scent. I tossed it gently and the dragon snapped it from the air like a robin catching a worm. Then it flipped the meat up and caught it again in a better grip. It watched me as it chewed.
Tom’s dragonet had eaten three handfuls of meat but refused the fourth. Instead it stood and stretched out its wings to dry them. They were elegant, sweeping things. Quite unlike anything I’d designed before.
“Not our usual dragon designs,” Tom said.
“No, they’re not.”
“Did you design these?”
“It’s a team effort.” I felt odd about taking more credit than that, even though I could have. “I did the wings, though.”
Tom gently took hold of the tip of his dragonet’s wing. I gasped softly. Hatchlings didn’t usually like to be touched. Especially on their wings, which came out wet and fragile. For a flier to allow this was extraordinary. The chatter in the viewing gallery died down. I could feel the sudden attention, even though it wasn’t on me. I stared so hard that my own dragonet almost took off my hand.
“Whoa, easy, little guy.” I fed it a big clump of meat and looked back at Tom.
“Almost looks like a swift wing,” he said.
“You’ve got a good eye.”
“So that was an intentional choice, then?”
I shrugged, suppressing a tinge of nerves at his attention. “Fastest bird in the world.”
He harrumphed. “For horizontal flight.”
Damn, he knew his birds. “We put in the wing joints, too. I hope they’ll know how to use them.”
My dragonet stood and stretched out its wings. Tom gave it a once-over, then an encouraging nod. “Can’t wait to see what it can do.” He sauntered back toward the dragon wranglers.
I could feel the eyes on me again; for once, I was savoring it. Of course, this could all crash and burn around my ears. If the dragons failed to fly, or the new wing design proved disastrous, this would be a fairly epic embarrassment. Then again, last time I’d come to this arena, my flying dragons had dazzled everyone.
Both dragons now crouched in the sunlight with their wings outstretched. In this heat and sunlight it wouldn’t take long. I hurried out of the field and back to where Evelyn, Wong, and Korrapati waited.
“What did Tom think?” Evelyn asked.
“He liked the wings.” I tried to keep my face neutral, as if it were totally normal to be chatting with one of my childhood idols. “Knew where I got the idea, too. Man, that guy knows everything about the natural world, doesn’t he?” I had the vague sense that I was talking a bit fast. My nerves were getting to me.
“What is Noah saying?” Wong quietly asked Korrapati.
She shrugged. “Something-something, he loves Tom Johnson.”
“I do not.” I could feel my cheeks heating, though. “I think he’s really impressive.”
“We should get this moving, Noah.” Evelyn handed me a tablet.
“Right.” I brought up the command module for the release cages. These were strategically positioned in a grid facing the hatching area. The wranglers had stocked them for us. First up was one of the most popular game birds in the world, a bird whose pear-shaped body and explosive flight patterns triggered a predatory response. The birds’ cooing from their cages had already caught the two dragons’ attention as they dried their wings. It was now or never. I hit the release button for the first cage.
The mourning dove shot out of it in a flurry of gray, white, and black. Its flight path took it right over the dragons in their nests. If it spotted them and recognized the threat, it made no change to its trajectory. The dragons both crouched. Here we go.
The dove flew right over them. The dragons stayed on the ground.
“Shit.” I glanced over at Evelyn. “Sorry.”
“Try another one,” she said.
I hit the button to open another cage. The dove flew out on a similar trajectory, and why not? The first one had escaped unscathed. The dragons watched its approach, their heads tracking its movement. Come on, go for it.
But it was déjà vu. The dragons stayed on the ground, and a second dove found its freedom. Damn it to hell.
“Why aren’t they flying?” Korrapati asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe we fed them too much.” I’d already wasted a third of our mourning dove inventory and neither dragon had so much as blinked. With a rising desperation, I looked around at everyone who’d come to watch. The sales and marketing folks were fanning themselves in a disgruntled sort of way. They didn’t handle the heat well on a good day. I bit my lip and looked at the wranglers, who seemed comfortable and patient by comparison. Then again, they understood dragons better than most.
Tom waved to get my attention. When I looked at him, he held up two fingers. What the hell does that mean? Two strikes? It dawned on me then that he was talking about the doves. Two at once. It was half of what we had left, but I figured, why the hell not.
I chose two dove pens and jabbed the open command before I could think about it too much. The birds shot out in tandem, wings flapping madly. It was only two doves, but together they seemed like three or four. They’d not yet reached the center of the field when suddenly both dragons launched themselves into the air. I only saw it out of the corner of my eye; I was watching the birds. The doves sensed the looming danger and scattered. One dragon took off in pursuit of each.
I’d like to say it was a close contest. That one-on-one, the birds had a reasonable chance of escape. Yet there were several reasons we chose mourning doves for these exercises. They couldn’t fly particularly fast, and when they did it tended to be in a straight line. In about twenty seconds, each dragon had caught its quarry. By then I was already hitting the release on the last two dove cages. The birds flew out, but were no fools. They made a hard left out of the gate and fled for the desert.
The dragons, though, had banked their wings at the sound of the cages opening. Sharp, controlled turns with good speed. It gave me a boost of confidence in the wing design, because the dragons seemed quite agile. As they bore down on the hapless doves from opposite sides of the arena, I could appreciate their speed as well.
“How fast, Wong?” I asked.
He was clocking them with a small portable radar gun that he’d acquired from one of his many nameless friends in the Phoenix area. Strictly speaking, civilians weren’t supposed to have speed guns like that, so Evelyn and I both pretended not to notice.
“Forty-five,” he said. “Very fast dragon.”
So far, so good. We’d met the performance minimum for flying speed and turn radius. No one could argue with agility, either. Once they caught these last two doves, we might even have a successful demo, just the boost of confidence we needed going into the last trials.
The dragons closed fast, coming at the doves from opposite sides. The birds flew for all they were worth, but their fate had been sealed the moment their cage doors opened. I almost felt bad that we had to sacrifice them in the name of a preliminary test.
The doves never made it to the desert. The two dragons intercepted them at high speed, catching and killing them in a flash. I started to raise my hands to celebrate when it happened. The two beasts collided in midair, right after catching the doves. The thwap of the impact echoed in the coliseum grounds. A hard, gut-wrenching sound. It thundered inside of me. Oh, no. All I could do was watch as both dragons fell together in a tangle.
The wranglers were on their feet almost the moment it happened. They ran to where the dragons had fallen, with Tom out in front. I should have gone, too, but I couldn’t move.
It was like the air had turned solid around me. The wranglers reached the dragons and knelt. Gently disentangled them from each other. But the dragons didn’t move, and in the resigned droop of Tom’s shoulders, I could read the truth.
They were gone.