Free In Space No One Can Hear You Scream by Hank Davis Page A

inðtelligence in the remainder of his body.”
    There is something I wish I could forget. I can’t explain why it should upset me so much. But I always stop the tape before it reaches the point where the voice of the stranger rises in pitch, going higher and higher until it cuts out.
    There’s a quality about that noise that makes me tremble and think of rust.

Dragons

    Sarah A. Hoyt

    Being afraid of the dark is common among children, and would probably be considered more common among adults, if they weren’t embarrassed to admit it. Once, there actually were dangerous things out there, circling the fire (better not let it go out), looking in to the cave mouth with eyes reflecting that firelight, but now things are different. The night can be banished with a flip of an electric switch, and the deadliest predators are either extinct or kept in zoo cages. But suppose there were other, even deadlier creatures who moved away from the realm of machines and lights. Suppose they now lurk in the dark of space . . . waiting for an opportunity to show their power again.
    Sarah A. Hoyt won the Prometheus Award for her novel Darkship Thieves , published by Baen, and has authored Darkship Renegades and A Few Good Men , two more novels set in the same universe, as was “Angel in Flight,” a story in the first installment of A Cosmic Christmas . Darkship Renegades is presently a Prometheus Award nominee. She has written numerous short stories and novels in a number of genres, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, historical novels and historical mysteries, much under a number of pseudonyms, and has been published—among other places—in Analog , Asimov’s and Amazing .  For Baen, she has also written three books in her popular shape-shifter fantasy series, Draw One in the Dark , Gentleman Takes a Chance , and Noah’s Boy . Her According to Hoyt is one of the most interesting blogs on the internet. Originally from Portugal, she lives in Colorado with her husband, two sons and the surfeit of cats necessary to a die-hard Heinlein fan.

DRAGONS

    Sarah A. Hoyt

    “What if they were really there,” Jack said. He came out of the engine room, looking like something dredged up from a dark sea—all flying white hair, and wide blue eyes that looked like they should be blind. Spacer’s eyes they call them. “What if they were really there?” he asked. “Those monsters, those dragons, those creatures ready to swallow ships, ready to render humans mad, ready to tear apart the faint shell of reason we use to paint over what we don’t know?”
    He’d been enlarging on this theme for the last three hours: the monsters who’d once threatened seafarers. He’d read to me from an account in the ship’s database—not standard issue I was sure—of a dragon-like creature flying round and round a ship’s sails and finally making them burn, and all the sailors lost, which made me wonder who’d written the account and known how many times the monster went around the mast and how his wings sounded like moth’s wings in the wind, and how he obscured the sun.
    He’d been talking about it, all the while he was in the engine room, working on the faltering engine of this fifty year old mining ship. And from outside, now and then, as I listened to the tinker and swish of tools, to the idiot beeping of the machine as it tried to establish normal function, I’d shouted, “Then they weren’t. If they existed where did they go? Where did they hide?” Now I said it again, quietly, and I added, “Because we’ve crisscrossed the Earth with ships, and we’ve gridded her with communications satellites, and these monsters don’t exist.”
    Jack gave me a slitty-eyed look, and a corner of his mouth twitched up. He was wiping his hands to a huge, oil-stained rag. It was as if the ship’s engine had bled all over them.
    A two-man ship, is all this was. A two-man asteroid miner ship, one step up from a robot one, in that we could avoid collisions