#Freewrite: US Aliens versus Chinese Dragons
An open Nevada vista, nobody for miles and miles around. The ground is radiating its dayheat under a paintbrush sky. a bloodshot sun descends over the distant Sieras, occluded by wildfires roaming the foothills on either side of the continents ragged vertebra. There’s the sound of insects buzzing mating songs, bats chirping, coyotes surveying their options with the careful pragmatic opportunism which the dessert wears like a second atmosphere, owls and nighthawks and a few tardy ravens playing on the updrafts off the short cliff, about forty feet high, where the ground fell away on a track parallel to the interstate. no one to look in awe, only the discretion of small lifeforms in a vast wasteland when the saucer dips and hums from a fissure in the night overhead. it crosses an empty interstate where there is usually a speed trap, the cop stationed there until 3:00 or 4:30 in the morning, dozing in a kind of half-sleep, half existentially disembodied presence, passively collecting overtime pay on an outposting, the only one for 200 miles of this internal but not yet metabolized frontier. not tonight. someday solar farms or strip-mines will maybe elbow out the last patchworks of open wilderness, but for now, as the daystar retires behind the horizon and disinvests the landscape of its unforgiving radiance, the craft is alone with the earth, the wildlife, and itself.
The collision occurs without warning or sound. Only a brief shimer of daylight from where the beams are still visible a thousand feet in the air. moving like a snake, perhaps more like an eel, hunting or playing in wisp of cirrostratus, where the chemtrail of a military jet four hours prior has yet to disperse, the compounds laced into the exhaust still frozen microcrystals; it will take days before they fall to their target height, subtelly influencing civilians to make fewer clerical mistakes on their tax returns and boosting the fall quarter sales by triggering mass craving for pumpkin spice lattes.
Unlike the chemtrails, the snake-eel-shimmer falls at speeds approaching the terminal velocity of a missile. even if the cop were here and he were fooling around with his speedometer, which he does sometimes do just to grind through the boredom, and even if he were pointing it at just the right direction, it is very unlikely that the device would even register the dragon’s speed. the hide of a long rivals that of the counter-obsv. of even the most advanced spy-planes. if the laser intercepted a non-scaled part of her body, her horns or claws, he’d probably just think he’d accidentally clocked a meteorite.
a scream of tearing metal and something like bird song, slowed down and reverbed and only occasionally grazing the human range of perception in momentary adjustments of pitch. the saucer, unlike our absent police officer, did have the technology to clock the dragon, and had done so moments before the sunlight caught her as she barreled in the clouds, lighting up the lateral line along her hide where her scales were more flexible and sensitive to changes in air currents at a cost of diminished covertivity. the craft was not equipped for a confrontation of this kind and whatever mind—if there was a mind—governing the saucer’s course fully grasped this fact. the very moment the dragon’s presence was registered the orientation of the disk’s spin reversed, as did its line of flight. it snaked an irregular sine wave across the interstate, occasionally backtracking, perhaps hopeful that the dragon would be reluctant to draw close to human structure. no luck. without needing to course correct, as if she could already anticipate which evasion maneuvers would be deployed, she let her dive execute itself. a bowl of white fire sprang from below her tongue and encased her muzzle, her head, her entire body, turning her black scales a wash of white and casting an indigo shadow that could very briefly be seen from space. it was this image, caught on an intelligence satellite and leaked to the press as part of an elaborate intra-agency spy war, which would appear on the next morning’s papers.
the impact left the craft split almost cleanly down the middle, the two halves held together only by the electromagnetic circuit which also gave it lift and thrust. having passed directly through her enemy, she exited her dive and rolled up in a loop eight times, twice grazing the interstate’s asphalt and once the sandstone earth at its shoulder. the economy with which she managed her inertia was such that just three seconds after impact she had climbed again to a hundred feet high. she opened her eyes—during dives like this the pressure of the air required that her third eyelids close, her nostrils and ears seal, and her trachea lock to ensure the pressures involved did not damage her organs. This meant that at the point of impact and the recovery following immediately after she had to fly blind, though only as far as her eyes, ears, and olfactory senses were concerned. she was still able to relying on the sense organs concentrated on her lateral lines from nostrils to tail, the pads of her twenty-four feet, crook of her elbows armpits on the six foreword pairs, the long, fleshy whiskers emerging from the divots of her nostrils and above the corners of her mouth, and the the “fifth-eye” under the folds of her forehead skin, where she was most sensitive. as a result, she never lost track of where the saucer, in its damaged but not-yet compromised state, was flying. it was making for the hills.
even as the impact occured the saucer changed directions a second time. this is why the impact, which would otherwise have left a clean hole about as wide as the dragon through the middle ring, had instead cut clean across the core, passed again through the middle rings and (very narrowly, for only her burning tail had been left to pass through at this point) out the outer rings. even as the dragon’s body plunged into the hull the systems were re-adjusting, the field reorganized to correct for compromised load-bearing rings. only meters above the ground, the saucer managed to avoid the dragon’s second attack by turning on its side like a quarter rolling down the highway at a velocity six or seven times the prescribed limit. The second attack was not a dive—she hadn’t had time to climb high enough for that—but only a glancing blow of talons and fire which fell on open air. far from compromising the craft, the impact had triggered the release of all of the stored up energy at once, energy channeled into moving as quickly as possible. she pursued her query along the interstate, both of them occasionally brushing the asphalt away and leaving burning skid marks dusted with black scales of silver-white chrome (photos of these specimens would appear on pages two in many of the stories to cover the incident).
despite her missed attempt at a finishing blow, the dragon was confident that the outcome of the skirmish was already decided. she couldn’t catch the rolling coin of concentric rings while it burned through its reserves, but she had the advantage of altitude. it wouldn’t be able to escape her. or so she may have believed. operating under the single minded focus of a predator adapted to hunting megalodons and sparing with tyrannosaurs, she failed to notice the three saucers, each larger and faster then the one she was hunting, rise from concealed crevices in the cliffs parallel to the interstate, each racing towards a convergence point that kept pace with dragon’s tail, where her feathers still glowed with the embers of dragon fire.
the original saucer sacrificed itself without time for deliberation, without time for warning. just as she began to suspect it was lagging due to its power reserves finally exhausting themselves, it switched directions again, this time directly charging her, making to bisect her serpentine body. the gambit unbalanced her, as she was forced to encircle the craft, looping it two and a half times and scraping her claws along its polished, charged surface. bailing out at this proximity would leave her too exposed to the deadly bladed surface of the rim, so she folded her sail-fins close to her body and concentrated on releasing a jet of blue-white flame into the openings her dive had cut into the rings, trying to exhaust the magnetic field which held the saucer together and protected the occupants inside, assuming there were any left alive. Thus she was unable to prevent the craft from bareling over the edge of the cliff and executing a tight u-turn into the rockface, falling away only at the last minute when she judged that the saucer was able to neither pull out of this dive nor sideswipe her. she simply let go, 11 of the 12 limbs on her right side, the side closer to the saucers blade-edge, revebrating in pain where the saucer managed a bucking swipe even as its far end split the cliff face.
her last-second bail out left her without time to redirect her inertia. instead executed a long half-loop to try to raise her altitude above the cliff face, but to her shock and horror she fell out of the sky, her injuries preventing her from keeping her right fin extended. she fell badly, barely able to glide a hundred feet to slow her fall before her wing gave out entirely. the pain was excruciating, she could tell that two of her right forearms and one one hind thigh were broken even before she made impact on the earth. trapped in the middle of a dessert in the heart of the enemy’s empire, more then three hundred miles from the ocean where she might hide and recuperate. perhaps she could find the side of a hill and use her left fore-limbs to dig a burrow, hibernate for a few days so that she could put her energy towards healing her most critical injuries, survive off coyote and jackrabbit and cactus until she could support her weight on her fins, then climb up the cliff face and get a gliding take off.
she wouldn’t have to fly all the way back to the Gobi, though she would have liked nothing more then to be back home, back in her own dessert where she could rebuild her strength on familiar prey, camels and insects mostly, and wild horses and goats and the sacrifices which certain villages still left for her and her kind. all she needed to do was get to the ocean, off the continental shelf and into the abyssal plain. there would be squid to hunt deep sea currents to carry her home, or nearly home, a hemisphere away. the thought of a long ocean journey, the salt water on her fins and the security of the perpetual mariane midnight gave her the strength to raise her head and even to ignore the sharp spasm of pain which informed her that her left limbs had not escaped damage either, including one dislocated hind-leg which would either have to be relocated or chewed off. the thought made her seven stomachs turn over—the pain would be greater then what she just suffered, but controllable, and the limb would grow back, in fifty or a hundred years at the most. much faster if she could gorge on killer whale fat or a similarly energy-dense prey. a dozen seasons of hunting in the arctic oceans and she’d be good as new. but losing a limb would greatly extend her journey to the ocean. it would certainly be necessary to lie low in a river somewhere, and that meant finding a river—why hadn’t she paid closer attention to the geography when she came scouting this plain a lunar cycle ago? she was grounded and hadn’t even managed to take any of her prey alive or dead before the saucer destroyed itself in the cliff face. Eyes rolling in pain and defeat, she bucked her head, intending to roar in frustration but only managing a wet-coughing hiss. that was when she noticed them, the three saucers descending lazily over the cliffs and rock formations like leaves falling from a tree, autumn reds, yellows, browns and purples replaced with burning chrome. with another shuddering coughing-scream, she fainted in the ditch carved by her own crash landing.