Book 5: Chapter 29: Ready to Go
Howard
October 2342
Trantor
The dragon rotated in the video window. Well, the CAD image anyway. The real thing lay in a manny pod in orbit around Jabberwocky, courtesy of Mario and the autofactory he’d set up for us.
Bridget was out on some errand that demanded her physical presence, so when the job-completion auto-alert had come in, I’d jumped in to take a peek.
The dragon really defied easy categorization. It didn’t have feathers, it didn’t have fur, and whatever those were, they weren’t quite scales. I suppose a pangolin might come close, but the dragon’s scales weren’t nearly as tough as the Terran animal’s.
The scales also grew thinner and longer on the wings, acting very much like feathers, which gave the dragons flight capabilities more like those of birds than bats, including the ability to soar and glide.
I knew all this, of course, because Bridget couldn’t resist lecture mode if anyone around her held still long enough to listen. And I was always willing to listen to her.
It did kind of look like a squirrel, though. Other than the large, clawed hind feet, it didn’t have the innate menace of a dragon. Eyes too big, fangs too small, mostly. Maybe a little like Toothless—the dragon in that animated movie. Also, no fire breath. It stood perhaps a little taller than a human on average, maybe six and half feet, but rangier, as befitted an animal that had to get airborne. The abnormally large chest housed both oversize lungs and huge pectoral muscles. There was also some weirdness about the metabolism, but I hadn’t paid close enough attention. A long tail completed the ensemble, finned or feathered at the end to help control flight attitude.