When Dragons Lead

A boring flight is interrupted by a most unusual creature.

Looking down, all she could see was an entirely unbroken carpet of green.
A dark green with a few patches of vivid yellow, for miles around her.
She pressed her face against the oval porthole again, out of sheer boredom, and stared at one of the yellow patches receding as the transport droned south.
As she did so, she saw herself reflected in the armor-glass, face and chest.
Her eyes dipped slightly to the name tag just above the right pocket. Despite the reversed image, she read it easily. Sgt Amelia Rodgiez.

"Amelia, get up here now!"
An annunciator somewhere overhead sputtered to life as the pilot called her by name.
"Get up here stat!"
The speaker squealed as the caller clicked off.

Amelia pulled back from the portal and, bracing against the piles of equipment tied down in the cargo bay, headed up to the cockpit.

Hurrying up the short stairs just past the tracked armor parked right up against the forward bulkhead, she arrived at the cockpit door.
She pulled it open and leaned in to address the pilot.
"Reporting sir."

The pilot, oversized body squeezed into the captain's seat, turned his head to stare at Amelia.
The shock of white hair atop his head floated briefly before settling as he turned.
He'd set his striped red and blue helmet on the console before him, in the space just before the glass of the forward screens.
The back of it had his name stenciled in economical black.
"Lieutenant Colonel Jeral Fors".

"I'm getting something on the scope. It's big and moving parallel, fast. Mach numbers are crazy."
"Blip it and find out what it's doing out here."
Jeral nodded his head at the bank of analog equipment behind him.

Amelia nodded and began to squat down to look into the scope, hands already reaching for the control dials.

It was just at that moment that the whole ship suddenly made an impossible tearing sound as something massive and fast tore right through the airframe. Splitting it in two.

As the halves of the transport slowly began to separate, the thin caustic atmosphere of Sinclaire Six stormed into the disintegrating cockpit, choking Amelia.

Jeral, for his part, had slumped against the controls, his body leaking fluids. His spine was clearly visible.
Just ahead a massive feral shape hove into view. Burning eyes staring straight at Amelia, boring into her head.
Wings moved slowly to either side of the thing, enormous, scaled and tipped with hooked utterly inhuman hands.

"By Toutatis... A Kraken!"
Amelia's mind tumbled out the words into her mouth, forcing speech over the howl of toxic air.

A Kraken attacking at this altitude was unheard of. A Kraken that had that kind of malignant look of intelligence? Impossible.

All that went through Amelia's mind, as she threw herself backwards to land on the assault vehicle.
Her hands latched onto the grab handles atop the flat planes of its roof, and she dragged herself forward to its open hatch.

She dropped in, and the thing's AI recognizing her presence, spooled up and began system boot up.
Its boot sequence included warming the seats and control surfaces.
The smell of heating plastic, ceramics and metal filled her nose.

"Welcome Sergeant. Booting in four seconds. Systems nominal. What is our mission?"

"To get me the frag out of here!"
Amelia began combat gesturing, and the AI picked up.

"Switching to emergency combat mode. Level 0."
The lights turned red and the hatch she had dropped through closed smoothly. Dogging shut with a thunk.

"Engage traction, full acceleration."
Amelia's only chance was to ram through the loading bay doors and let the tank drop to the jungle floor.

"Go go go!!"
She screamed at the AI as her fingers fumbled the combat harness latches.
Despite the situation, she spent the extra moment and slammed the helmet down onto her head.

By that time, the tank had powered to full, and the unit was already in motion. Fast, massive, it hit the bay doors and simply tore through them exactly like they were mere paper.
Which, against a moving three-hundred-ton assault rig, they were.

The tank smashed through the transport's hull and hung in space for a microsecond, then tipped forward and began to fall.
The AI swung the turret around as the tank fell and targeted the Kraken, which had noticed the tank's escape and was stooping towards it.

The almighty crack of the main gun firing reminded Amelia to plug the helmet in and engage audio dampeners.
Even through the massive hull, that Vulcan cannon was easily able to deafen anything within a twenty-meter radius.

The cannon's round slammed into the diving Kraken and blasted a hole right through it.
Tumbling the creature, forcing it into a broken spastic flight.

Ignoring the catastrophic injury, the thing still managed a defiant scream. An impossibly loud calliope cry that slammed into and through the tank like an aural attack.
At that point, Amelia had managed to plug her helmet in.
She did not hear the scream, but she did see the thing somehow still angling towards the tank.

"The frag with this!"
She gestured for the cannon's controls and brought her hand up snapping the reticle onto the falling Kraken's head.
"Fire!"

The Vulcan erupted once more, a dragon's breath of flame. The round impacted the creature's head, obliterating it completely.