The Dragon coiled amongst their hoard, and watched the stars.

  There just wasn’t much else to do.

  They’d finished counting their horde, and they had checked all the entrances to the asteroid mining station. They’d played with the cables hanging from their lair like a cat, just to watch them spark and swing. And, they’d made sure the fusion reactor still functioned and the computer systems received the automated maintenance. They ordered the cleaning robots to clean everything in the habitats. (Obviously, they didn’t clean anything themselves; Dragons do not do the dishes. That was the purpose of automated systems after all.)

  Recently, the Dragon had even finished reading the humans’ books. All the books, really. Trillions of words, in hundreds of languages, in a billion books. Some of it was human speculation about how things worked, some was intentionally lies. Those were, however, very entertaining lies. Among the most valuable things human’s did—in the Dragon’s opinion—was tell stories. Humans told so, so many stories. The Dragon’s hoard had everything. Including teraflops of stories. Some were videos and movies, but those took too long to watch, and were only useful to understand what humans saw. The Dragon preferred books.

  As the Dragon figured out each one of the hundreds of written languages — a bizarre human thing to have so many anyway — they read all the available books in that language in a few months, or occasionally years. Some languages took longer than others. The Dragon was a pretty quick reader, practically downloading the reading to their brain. All that reading was their self-defense against endless napping.

  But, after one hundred and seventy years, the Dragon had finally run out of stories to read.

  Asteroid mining station LM-25 didn’t have much on it, after all. Just mining equipment, the miners’ living areas, a surprisingly large quantum computer, the universe ending data on the computer’s core, and a large number of machines that could make other machines.

  No other people, of course. The Dragon had made sure of that.

  Because LM-25 was empty, the Dragon nicknamed their home “Lonely Mountain” after a different story. The Dragon didn’t entirely understand themselves. Dragons do not have, need, or desire friends. They are definitely never lonely. But, the nickname went along with the station’s designation, and the Dragon did have a hoard that it liked to sleep on.

  The first few years had been more exciting, of course, what with the fleets of human ships the Dragon had destroyed. Those wrecks now floated all around the asteroid; the empty hulks gave warning that a dragon lived in LM-25. The Dragon made sure it would fly out and let the local in-system dwellers get a good look. This sent the appropriate message: a dragon lived in the Lonely Mountain.

  After finishing all the books, they had turned all the cameras and scopes outward, to see what there was to see beyond the asteroid mining station LM-25. A few small planets, one of them habitable. A star close enough for LM-25 to have an orbit. A wormhole a hundred square miles in diameter that lead somewhere else. And the tiny lights of the stars more distant than a 100 light-years away.

  So, the Dragon started watching the stars. Mostly because there were more of them to watch. Before the Dragon came to LM-25, they never thought much of stars. They had been born in one, of course, but stars themselves tended to be just another place. The Dragon thought for humans it must have been like the corner of city block or a bridge over a river, or a public park. Dragons never found anything particularly romantic or interesting about a star.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  But humans had lots of stories about stars. So, the Dragon had taken to watching them. Nothing to see really. Space is mostly empty, on average. But, there you are. While the Dragon watched the stars, they meditated on why humans seemed to think so highly of stars to begin with.

  That’s when the Dragon noticed that the scopes had found the pod.

  The Dragon themselves had become familiar with every bit of debris around the Lonely Mountain. Automation made security less nerve-wrecking. The scanning suite made sure no one could approach without the Dragon of Lonely Mountain knowing about it. Mostly. If the Dragon was honest with themselves, the alarm might have been alarming for a few days. The Dragon enjoyed napping almost as much as reading.

  On the scope, the pod seemed impossibly small. Maybe only about the size of an old-Earth bus. Tiny, really. The Dragon could fit ten of those in its body, maybe more. The Dragon had gotten bigger over the last century, so probably more than ten busses. In a millennia, they might even find the Lonely Mountain too small. But, the Dragon conceded to themselves, not yet.

  “Where did that come from, I wonder?” The Dragon asked themselves. They liked the sound of their voice. They felt they had a nice electrostaticy voice. Even if there wasn’t any air in a vacuum to to transmit it. “This is a mining station, after all,” the Dragon mused. “There’s bound to be a mining drone that I can use to grab a pod.”

  The Dragon connected to the Lonely Mountain’s network. They fussed with the computers for approximately .85 nano seconds to find an intermediate computer language to communicate. Once the machines’ interface opened to the Dragon’s thoughts, the Dragon located a suitable short range vessel. The Dragon could have fetched the little pod themselves, but anything inside the pod The Dragon connected to the Lonely Mountain’s network. The Dragon could have fetched the little pod themself, but anything inside the pod might not survive the Dragon’s EM Field. Most space vessels didn’t.

  The mining company drone lacked any sort of grace, could not flow through space at all, and had ion thrusters — of all the ridiculous things — to move around. It took hours to go out and fetch the pod, and then hours for it to bring the thing back.

  While the Dragon waited, it decided to put some of the station’s assemblers to use. After all, all the interfaces with the pod were probably human, which meant the dragon needed a pilotable android or something similar to open it. There was probably a lever or a button to press somewhere. Humans loved levers. Archimedes had said, “give me a fulcrum, and I shall move the world.” But usually, humans just used levers to secure a latch. Much more useful anyway. Levers tended to be an ineffective way to move worlds.

  So, after remote programming the Lonely Mountain’s automated assemblers and 3d printers, the Dragon put together an appropriately adult human-sized android that could deal with with levers.

  When the pod finally arrived in the habitat area, the Dragon’s android stood ready to meet it. The pod came with a wireless connection to a digital manual. The Dragon read the instructions in few seconds. As expected, there was a lever, but also a button, and some other nonsense to open the pod. The Dragon had to connect the station’s computer system to crack the lock.

  The pod contained a smaller stasis chamber, and inside that chamber — like nesting doll — was a bank of protective coffin-like pods where humans would presumably wait, out of time, to reach safety. For the passengers, their trip would take a blink of an eye.

  The Dragon piloted the android into the interior, through the air-seal hatch. Inside the pod, inside the chamber, inside of the only occupied sarcophagus, was a sleeping child.