It was all so familiar. Rows upon rows of creatures of all shapes and sizes working the various assembly lines, their vacant expressions illuminated by the blue LEDs on the duralight slave collars.
Spike never got used to it, no matter how many draconic facilities he infiltrated he was still taken aback by the sheer scale of the operation. He had little trouble sneaking past the guards and into the weapons lab, perks of being half cat. (He wasn’t sure what his hedgehog half gave him.) Even so, the building’s interior posed a bigger challenge as routine patrols sweeped the perimeter every fifteen minutes in addition to several electronic detection systems. He would have to get creative.
Carefully, he made his way past the assembly line floor and down a hallway lit by incandescent lights until he found a service closet with no clearance lock. Perfect! He waited inside until he heard far-away footsteps signaling the coming of a patrol. It sounded like just a single guard. Spike held his breath and gripped the handle of his stun-baton, his index finger hovered over the discharge trigger. Silently, he struck. Fifty thousand volts sparked from the baton’s tip as it jammed into the back of the dragon guard’s neck. Spike pulled his limp body into the closet before it could hit the floor.
The dragon was a horrible creature by most metrics, hideous jagged scales jutted out from everywhere that wasn’t covered in lightweight bullet-proof armor. That dragon, alongside his comrades, must have been responsible for the suffering of countless innocents; any fair court would sentence him to death without a second thought. Spike knocked him out for an hour, with a major headache afterwards. The draconic armor was too large for the hedgecat’s frame but it fit well enough to fool the facility’s auto-scanners. He ventured deeper into the complex.
He kept spotting groups of slaves, sometimes driven by dragons and sometimes by themselves, but all with the same vacant expression. There were children among them. Damn dragons! Spike thought back to his family, captured shortly after war broke out. They gave him the strength to infiltrate several draconic facilities over the past few months in search of a way to end the conflict. A person, a weapon, a piece of information… Anything! It had gone on for too long and its dark hand touched the lives of far too many innocents. The dragons were powerful, industrious and ruthless. When the first slaves were put to use, the world thought they were a means to an end: a source of labor to power the draconic war machine as it moved towards some yet unclear objective. They were wrong, total enslavement was the objective.
Spike peered around a corner to find a reinforced door guarded by two large dragons clutching pulse rifles. He rolled a short-range EMP emitter across the floor and counted to three. Two more zaps from his stun-baton and two more enemies fell to the floor, their weapons’ internals silently fried by the electromagnetic pulse, rendering them useless against the lightning fast infiltrator. This time Spike had nowhere to hide the bodies, meaning that he was on a timer to get out before someone found the unconscious guards and sounded the alarm…
The room was blindingly sterile and there were no windows. Unfamiliar equipment and materials lined shelves and tabletops. Strangely, there were no computers, or at least nothing that resembled one. The centerpiece of the room was a cylindrical containment chamber made of many layers of steel. Spike didn’t know exactly what he came looking for but that had to be it! He examined the cylinder for structural flaws only to find none. Its outer layers were solid, nothing like he’d ever seen before. Brute force was out of the question. As he was about to go look for a key of some sort, the cylinder let off a high pitched hiss, startling him. Layer after layer of steel retreated into the floor, one after another, until its core was left naked. Suspended in a zero-G field was a sphere of pure black, an endlessly deep motionless void that swallowed all light as if it was a hole in reality itself. Spike observed the orb warily for a moment with his stun-baton at the ready, as if expecting it to jump out at him. It looked completely alien to the hedgecat. Once he decided there was no immediate reason for concern, he approached the object. It was noiseless. Suddenly, Spike heard footsteps from the hallway. He was out of time! Without thinking, he grabbed the orb and his world went black.
He was sitting at a bus station in a dense metropolis, wearing a t-shirt and shorts. There was no one around. Feeling like it might rain soon, he glanced up to the sky to find that there wasn’t one, just endlessly reaching skyscrapers covering the world in a dome of concrete and glass panes. Spike’s mind was foggy. Was he waiting for a bus? Where to? Eventually, a long blue bus stopped by and opened its hydraulic front door to welcome him. He entered without hesitation. The city was unnatural and unsettling, the bus provided comfort. Paying no mind to the driver, he waddled through empty rows of seats to nestle himself at the back of the bus. He rested his head against the window, closing his eyes for a moment.
“Hi there, young man,” spoke a voice from the seat next to him. It was an old racoon lady in a cheap floral dress. “You look lost.”
“Something doesn’t feel right,” answered Spike, shakily. His head hurt.
“Is it because of all those people?”
“…People? There’s no one here. Just you and me.”
“I mean the ones from back at the weapons lab,” she had a look of concern as she spoke, now. “The ones the dragons enslaved.”
“I– I don’t know what you mean,” stammered Spike as his headache swelled and thumped in rhythm with his quickening heartbeats. ”Gah, my head is killing me!”
“The lucky ones get to sweep floors, or do factory work. If you mess up once you get a beating. Mess up again and they cut something off,” she held up her sagging hand, two fingers were missing. Spike felt as if white-hot knives were piercing his temples. “No one knows what they do to the unlucky ones, but they all end up here. And they never speak a word.”
Before he succumbed to the pain, Spike saw the bus full of people quiet like statues.
He was at the bus station again. Same t-shirt, same shorts, same concrete sky. The bus stopped by again and again he made his way to the back row. He shut his eyes and took a deep breath, and then the old lady was there.
“Where am I?” He asked, calmly.
“Beats me,” shrugged the old lady.
“Who are you?”
“I don’t remember.”
He looked around. The bus was full again, full of creatures of all shapes and sizes, unmoving. There were mice, wolves, birds, hippos, lizards, cats, horses… but no dragons.
“Are these all slaves?” He asked the old lady. She nodded in response. “…What is this? I mean all of this?”
“This is where they keep us. The true ‘us’,” she pointed to her forehead. “After all, why shackle the limbs when you can ensnare the mind?” she laughed dryly.
“Ensnare the mind? Then if I’m here too, does that mean?…”
“I’m afraid so, dear,” she frowned. “They got you too.”
Somehow, Spike already knew that. Or at least hearing it didn’t feel like he’d learned anything new. He rested his head against the window and watched the buildings go by. He thought about his family and was alarmed to find that he could scarcely make out their faces in his thoughts. He turned back to the old lady.
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t remember,” she promptly answered.
“Does this bus go on forever?”
“I don’t know.”
He sprang from his seat.
“What the fuck is going on!?” Spike shouted with tears in his eyes. He rushed past the seats and to the front of the bus. “Stop! Stop the fucking bus!” he screamed. And then he saw the driver. He saw himself.
“We go where you take us,” it was the old lady again. Now she sat at the front of the bus, next to a middle-aged male cheetah with a blank expression. “You have something that none of us do: a choice.”
Suddenly, it all made sense. That’s what the black orb back at the lab was: a choice. Spike knew what to do. The bus stopped and the doors opened. One by one, the passengers left. All but the old lady.
“Aren’t you leaving?” he asked her.
“No. I belong here.”
Spike didn’t argue, somehow he knew not to. He stepped outside the bus and felt the sun on his face.
He was still in the sterile room, dressed in oversized draconic armor, clutching the black orb. Except it wasn’t black anymore, it was a gentle blue, clear and shimmering in the fluorescent lights. Spike could feel it. He could feel her inside the gem. He remembered the guards, and not a second too soon as they entered the room and aimed their weapons at him.
“Stop.”
The word left his lips quietly. The gem radiated an intense blue aura and transformed it into an unbreakable imperative that seared itself deep within the dragons’ psyches, ingraining itself as a basic fact in their subconsciousness. They froze, index fingers half a millimeter from pressing the triggers of their weapons. Spike glanced at the gem. She was there, that old raccoon lady giving him her wry smile.
“Drop your weapons.”
And they were on the floor not two seconds after. This was it, this was the key to ending the war. Spike had done it. He could picture himself happy with his family in a world free from dragon tyranny.
Yet his work had only just begun.
“Free them. Free them all.”