Free Dark Dragons by Kevin Leffingwell Page A

in a semi-circle around the boys.
    Darren’s stomach knotted up when a wave of emotions and
memories burst from the modified regions of his brain.  The alien fighters
triggered a response, something like the Russian dog Darren learned about in
psych class that salivated every time its master rung a dinner bell.  The
answers came to him one after another, until no questions remained.
    An invasion.  Not by Red Chinese or terrorists or
vengeful right-wing militiamen from the sticks, but extraterrestrials. 
H.G. Wells and The Twilight Zone .  Not a comic book or a
movie.  Right here in the real world.
    A brief moment of cold panic gripped Darren tight as if the
doctor had just shown him an ugly x-ray or an oncoming car had just slid into
his lane.  He faced up to it quickly, an image so clear like a desert
landscape in every direction.  They had become the blocking force, the
unwilling but eventual warriors representing the only line of defense against
alien invasion.
    “Oh my god,” he whispered.
    If one of these beasts had been hovering in the air in front
of him on a moonless night any other time, he would have shit his pants and
passed out in the mess.  The overall design and shape of the fighter gave
it the appearance of an alien dragon as opposed to an earthly medieval
one.  The wings bent downward slightly one-third away from the fuselage
and widened to the ends as if they were about to wrap a prey in a locking
embrace.  The dorsal and stabilizer wings at the rear even angled back
sharply away from the fuselage just like a tail.  A short, thick neck
curved upward slightly from the body to a large, reptilian head; canard wings
on either side of the cockpit’s head provided the horns.  Even the two
landing skids looked like talons which carefully balanced the fifty-six foot
long, 28,000 lbs. fighter.
    The designers did not seem to have logical practicality in
mind when they nightmared these beasts into reality but instead had poured a
sleek, sexy terror into the mold.  These aerial war toys were built to
either scare a smart enemy from coming out to fight or kill the foolishly bold
who did.
    Somehow Darren knew every control and function, every
maneuver and trick, something known since birth.  An instinct.  What
took an Air Force or Navy pilot five or eight years to learn, had taken no more
than ten terrifying seconds of “advanced memory alteration” to teach him the
awesome capabilities of these alien machines.
    He rose to his feet but did not approach.  Instead, he
remained in one spot and studied their new fighters from a distance, trying to
accept the sobering fact the machines now belonged to them.  They looked
fast, even sitting motionless in the sun, but the word “fast” fell considerably
short of accentuating their unnatural speeds.  Capable of vertical
take-off and landing , he told himself.  It has three different
propulsion systems, neither of which rely on an on-board fuel supply but instead
on perpetual energy tapped from an interdimensional, sub-atomic source.
    The first engine was an atmospheric drive called an
anti-graviton emitter, impractical for operation in outer space because it
needed gravity to function, but could out-fly anything that Earth’s skies were
accustomed to.  It had no visible components.  The entire emitter sat
inside the large spherical chamber at the rear of the fuselage.  Only the
top and bottom of this sphere could be seen.  The atmospheric engine was
really a force field projector that used an omnidirectional anti-graviton
emitter cooled by liquid nitrogen to produce 0-degree radius thrust-vectoring.  Gravitons were the elementary particles of gravity
which every massive body like Earth or the sun possessed.  When a graviton
met an anti-graviton, they repelled from one another in the opposite
direction.  Positive and negative.
    He slowly approached his fighter.  His fighter.  Somehow he knew this one belonged to him.  Did a
machine-to-flesh