Starship Armstrong - Season 1

Part 53 - Dragon Slayers (II)

Sensor emissions detected.

Heat venting procedure terminated.

Source identified.

Searching for valid friend/foe codes...

No codes identified.

Retrying...

No codes identified.

Target acquired.

* * *

It was unlikely the dragon would stay in one place for too long, Littlecrow reasoned. Luckily the heat signature the Armstrong had detected was suspiciously close to the planet Sagan Major. It was possible that the dragon had some interest in that world, so it seemed like the place to start looking.

In a best-case-scenario they would detect it before it detected them.

"Do we have visual yet for Sagan Major?" asked the Captain.

"We should be in range," replied Marceaux.

"Let's have it," said the Captain.

The main viewing screen flipped to an image of Sagan Major. The entire bridge crew was awe-struck by the terrible, monstrous beauty of it.

The world, a blue-green marble quite similar to Earth, was surrounded by the wreckage of four orbital colonies. They hung in the sky shedding debris like great rotting corpses. The entire orbit of Sagan Major had become a thick with this space junk, swirling in patterns like clouds.

Each of those colonies would have had a population of at least ten million, maybe more.

Up until this moment the hunt for the dragon had been purely intellectual, even fun. The sight of Sagan Major had made it visceral. Littlecrow could feel it in her guts now. She was going to be the one to destroy this thing.

"I suppose that's why they quarantined this sector," said Gibson, finally breaking the silence.

"Can our sensors penetrate all that debris?" asked the Captain.

"Not any of our wide-spectrum short ranged sensors," said Marceaux "Some of our long ranged sensors should be unaffected. It won't be the most robust data but-"

"We need those for the dragon. We'll have to forget Sagan Major for now. One thing at a time. Once we've destroyed that weapon, however, I'm going to want to a full spectrum analysis of that planet."

"Aye, Captain," said Marceaux.

"What now, Captain?" asked Gibson.

"I'm not feeling very friendly at the moment," said the Captain "Let's make my displeasure known. Lieutenant-Commander Mitzner, target the dragon's likely location based on the heat signature we detected and fire ion cannons."

"Um, Captain, there's no way the dragon is still there," said Mitzner.

"I know. I just want it to know that it's been spotted. Hopefully that will entice it to come to us."

Mitzner lazily hit the coordinates, hitting a stationary target was a trivial matter, and the Armstrong fired both ion cannons into empty space approximately 20 million kilometers away.

"Nothing. If we'd hit something I'd have noticed," said Mitzner.

"Now we just have to wait," said the Captain "And hope we get lucky."

"'Lucky'," Gibson repeated sarcastically.

On the view screen Sagan Major still hung in space, surrounded by the crumbling remains of it's colonies.