Soldiers of Callisto (Void Dragon Hunters Book 3)

  SOLDIERS OF CALLISTO

  VOID DRAGON HUNTERS

  BOOK 3

  ––––––––

  FELIX R. SAVAGE

  ––––––––

  Copyright © 2018 by Felix R. Savage

  The right to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Felix R. Savage. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author.

  First published in the United States of America in 2018 by Knights Hill Publishing.

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  1

  “Incoming. INCOMING!”

  The alert blares from my helmet radio.

  Here we go again.

  “INCOMING!”

  An Offense supply ship has been detected approaching Callisto, where I am currently crouching in the shade of a giant kelp tree with Tancred by my side.

  “You’re up, little scaly-butt,” I murmur to him.

  My Void Dragon is not so little now. The size of a Shetland pony. But he takes off from my side without so much as stirring the blades of the kelp. He wings into the sky, taking my heart, and the hopes of humanity, with him.

  I’m still watching the dragon-shaped dot shrink into the blue when Francie drags on my arm.

  “Incoming,” she says. “Idiot.”

  We join everyone else in dashing towards the nearest trench.

  *

  Three weeks earlier, I’m sitting on a crew shuttle, wondering: How can there be trenches on a water world?

  After all, Callisto is covered with a single ocean 100 kilometers deep. There isn’t a bit of dry land in the place.

  It wasn’t always like this. Callisto used to be an iceball orbiting Jupiter. Then a Void Dragon ate our sun, and we ignited Jupiter to be its replacement. Jupiter, the star, is much less hot than poor old Sol used to be … but it’s still plenty hot enough to have melted Callisto’s ice. Clouds of water vapor thickened the wispy atmosphere, and UV radiation from Jupiter cracked the water into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen floated away. We projected an artificial gravity source into Callisto’s core so it would hold onto the oxygen, using the same gravity-casting technology that we used to move Earth into orbit around Jupiter. We repeated the trick with Ganymede and Europa. (Io was a non-starter—you try terraforming a moon while continent-sized volcanoes erupt at you.) So now Jupiter has four habitable satellites.

  Well. Actually, thousands, but the army’s definition of ‘habitable’ includes ‘tin can buried on a 1-km asteroid’. I’m only counting the ones that have air.

  My mother says that Callisto used to be the best of the bunch. It was a holiday destination for people who live on Earth, which is still 97% of humanity. She told me that she and my father went there on their honeymoon. They swam in fathomless waters, played with dolphins, and sunbathed on the deck of their cruise ship. My father discovered that he actually liked nature.

  I remember all these details because Mom very seldom talks about my father. He left when I was two.

  And when I was eight, the Offense blasted out of interstellar space and attacked humanity, aiming to take our dwarf sun for their own.

  (There aren’t any other stars left nearby. That flock of Void Dragons cleaned out the whole neighborhood.)

  That was the end of Callisto as a honeymooners’ paradise. After we repelled the Offense from Earth, they swarmed the Galilean moons. Not even they wanted to chance their arms—that is, tentacles—on Io, but they established beachheads on Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto.

  We’ve been trying to kick them out ever since.

  It is every conscript’s worst nightmare to be told they are going to Callisto.

  And now, here we are.

  “The Offense have a new battle-raft,” my aunt Elsa said. “It’s called Chester the Molester.”

  The Offense give their battle-rafts the same kind of names they give their ships: funny but nasty.

  “It’s a new model, and it’s chewing our rafts up. Your mission is to cut their supply lines, so they can’t import any more of these beasts.”

  I said, “But that means Tancred will be operating in space. What about me, Francie, and Jeremy?” Francie and Jeremy are coming because they’ve got a baby Void Dragon and a Void Dragon egg, respectively. “Where’ll we be hanging out?”

  “In the trenches,” Elsa said.

  I am still wondering if that means we’ll be safe, or not.

  It’s a scary trip down to the surface of Callisto, packed into the windowless crew shuttle with a hundred Marines and their false bravado. I don’t know which is worse—the fear that the Offense will blast us out of the sky, despite all the assurances that we are out of range of their ballistic missiles, or the girl next to me loudly telling her friends how she’s gonna fuck the jellies up. I’ve actually fought the jellies hand to hand, or laser to laser, which not one in a hundred Marines has done, so I know it doesn’t work like that. You do not fuck them up. They fuck you up. The only reason I’m alive today is because I implemented Plan B, the one the Department of Defense refuses to admit exists: I ran away.

  And I still would’ve died, had it not been for the ultimate fluke.

  Tancred.

  We burn straight down to Asgard, one of the navy’s island-sized staging rafts, on the other side of the world from the Offense’s staging rafts. I stroke my Void Dragon’s neck soothingly as the shuttle decelerates towards the launch pad. I know he thinks it’s whacked-out for us to be flying in a metal container, instead of on his mile-long wings (not currently visible in ordinary spacetime). He’s only six months old, and doesn’t really get that humans cannot breathe vacuum, drink radiation, or convert kinetic impacts into heat energy.

  The girl next to me says, “How come they let you bring your pet?”

  Pet. Tancred is a star-eater, a destroyer of worlds. At least he would be if he didn’t like me enough to resist temptation. But he does look kind of cute, like a waist-high gecko, with a snaky neck and big eyes the color of Granny Smith apples.

  “He’s a gene-mod,” I say. This is the cover story Elsa’s outfit, ARES, a government-funded defense research agency, has given us. I stumble over the lie. “He’s—it’s part of a new program to introduce reptilians to Callisto.”

  “Oh, I know about that program,” the girl says, straight-faced. “Genus Officerus. Specialty: ass-chewing.”

  She waits a beat for me to get it, and then laughs loudly. So do all her Marine friends.

  The shuttle touches down with a bump.

  “Where’re you posted to?” the girl asks me, heaving her rucksack out of the overhead webbing.

  “Um, Lofn.”

  “Um, Law-vuhn,” she mimics my careful attempt to pronounce it right. “Whoa man. Lofn is hell. 60% attrition rate was the last I heard.” All her friends guffaw again. Marines think that death and dismemberment are funny, or at least they pretend to think so.

  “Wh-where are you posted to?” I ask.

  “Vitr.” She has black hair. She might be Korean or Chinese. Her face looks mismatched: her nose doesn’t go with her eyebrows or her chin. “Anyway, if you’re going to Law-vuhn, I won’t be seeing you again, so I better say bye right now.” She waggles her fingers—bye! and joins the disembarking stampede.

  I get busy collecting my gear to hide my red face and suddenly galloping pulse. Elsa s
aid we’d be nowhere near the front lines. Have the front lines moved? They do that, especially on a water world where everything’s floating around all the time. Shit shit shit. I’m only a tech support guy, even if I am the adoptive daddy of a Void Dragon. I had hoped never to see the business end of an Offense weapon again.

  Francie and Jeremy join me and Tancred as the shuttle empties. Francie’s Void Dragon, Pinkie Pie, sits docilely on her shoulder. Pinkie is only the size of a kitten. Jeremy is wearing one of those fashionable cross-body fanny packs. It holds his Void Dragon egg, as yet unhatched.

  “I just heard that Lofn is hell,” I greet them, trying to sound blasé about it.

  Francie looks at me narrowly. “Who said that?”

  “A Marine.”

  “They were fucking with you.”

  Of course, Francie is right.

  A seaplane transfers us from Asgard to paradise.

  I gaze at fields of sea wheat and sea barley, broken by channels of sea water, studded with giant kelp trees, and the birds spangling the hot sky. I inhale the weirdly delicious combination of farm and sea smells. And then I connect Lofn with my mother’s story of making a port call at an experimental sea farm. This was the way Callisto was supposed to be, if the Offense hadn’t come. I’ve ended up in the same place where my parents honeymooned thirty years ago.

  Wheeeeee-SPLASH!!

  Our three heads swivel to the alarming screech. A contrail stains the clear sky. A geyser is still falling back to the fields on the horizon.

  “That was one of ours,” says our Navy escort. “Sometimes the jellies hack their guidance systems.”

  Maybe that Marine girl wasn’t so far wrong, after all.

  “Are there trenches?” I ask. Hiding in a nice deep ditch suddenly doesn’t feel like such a bad idea.

  “Sure. You’re looking at them,” the Navy guy says, pointing to the nearest sea channel.

  “Ah.”

  How can there be trenches on a water world?

  Duh. They’re full of water.

  *

  And now I am finding out what the trenches are good for. We float with our heads below the surface. We’re wearing wetsuits with integrated air supplies, because we were picking dulse before the klaxon went off.

  The raft is a a slab—actually, many slabs—of high-tech foam ten feet thick. The trenches are the slits between them. Roots project out from the foam walls above and below water.

  The air crops grow up from the mat, and the water crops (nori, spirulina, wakame, dulse, and so forth) grow down from it. The trenches have mesh floors, with gates in the bottoms for divers to go out and pick the seaweed. They’re also full of fish. Baby sturgeon flit in front of my faceplate.

  I hold onto the roots that stick out from the foam, watching Francie’s legs kick lower. At the same time I’m flying through space with Tancred. Our weird telepathic bond has gotten … richer? Weirder. I can taste the vacuum. It tastes of nothing, but nothing has a taste. When I’m in a bad mood it tastes like sucking on a gun. Right now, it tastes nice. I might actually be tasting Jupiter’s heat energy. I can see it blazing there in the blackness when Tancred turns his head.

  He’s a little scared, so he’s looking all around, letting me check everything out for him.

  Jupiter looks all right, and Callisto looks all right, too, turning below us.

  A blue world, the size of Earth’s moon.

  Rafts dot the ocean. They look like pinheads but I know they’re the size of islands, the size of cities. Some of them belong to us, some to the Offense. From up here you can’t tell which are which. The rafts move constantly, jockeying for position, trying to outflank each other, in a spherical game of chess with no rules except the rule of war: might makes right.

  Tiny black dragonflies pass across the blue, between Tancred and Callisto. These are satellites and orbital gun platforms. Again, some belong to us, some belong to the Offense. If you wonder why we don’t simply blow each other’s orbital assets to smithereens, you are forgetting about space debris. A couple of fragged satellites could ruin Callisto orbital space for everyone, even if they didn’t set off a lethal Kessler cascade. And Callisto is the prize that both sides in this theater want.

  So instead, we attack each other’s stuff with cyber-torpedoes and code-bombs—a whole other war, going on at petaflop speed, 24/7/365. I’m a coder, but even I have no idea about that stuff. There’s a secret department of cyberwarfare somewhere, which accounts for a goodly portion of Earth’s pizza and amphetamines consumption. They need to get their fingers out of their asses.

  Everyone knows the only way we can take Callisto—or at least not lose it—is to cut the Offense’s supply lines.

  That’s what Tancred and I are here for.

  This ship’s coming in fast, according to the information being piped onto my faceplate. from the direction of Jupiter.

  But there’s no sign of it yet, and Tancred is getting frustrated. I can’t smell it, Daddy!

  That would be because its drive is pointing away from us. I try to explain this to him, but break off as realtime radar data plops onto my faceplate, blotting out the root wall of the trench. I wave my arms, instinctively trying to point the ship out to Tancred, and hit someone else’s helmet. “Hey!”

  “It’s over there,” I say. “There!”

  “What?”

  “I’m not talking to you!” I’m getting frantic, wishing I was really up there with Tancred, wondering if I could maybe ride on his back next time, if they could make me some kind of a harness that he would consent to wear, or if that would be a really bad idea, when the Offense ship suddenly blasts out of Jupiter’s limb.

  It whooshes towards us, inflating from the size of a seed pearl to the size of a cannonball, sparkling all over where our pursuing patrol boats are hitting it with their completely useless energy weapons. A fiery sleet of projectiles streaks after it. The reason the projectiles look fiery is because the Offense ship is vaporizing or exploding them with pinpoint accuracy before they can get anywhere near it.

  Tancred takes off on an intercept course, flapping as hard as he can. I feel spacetime itself sort of wobbling. Callisto appears to wrinkle like a rubber sheet, and then flattens out again. When a Void Dragon flies in space, it’s not what we think of as flying. There’s no air up here for his wings to push against. He’s doing something else with them. Elsa thinks his wings are actually wing shaped electromagnetic vortices that produce two complementary fields which create warps where the fields intersect. They refocus mass and energy to “wrinkle” spacetime. It feels like we’re hanging in the void while Callisto whirls beneath us.

  But Tancred is still considerably slower than an Offense ship.

  Ahead of us, the enemy ship rips through the top of Callisto’s atmosphere, tearing out threads of lightning. It drops its payload, like a fish laying thousands of eggs. For a tantalizing second I can taste the spicy tang of its drive plume, and then it roars silently away.

  Tancred lets out a wail of disappointment. He powers after it, but it’s too fast for him. It shrinks and vanishes into the interplanetary blackness. Our patrol ships will pursue it, and fail to catch it, as usual.

  Come back! I shout at Tancred. You’ll get lost! Come BACK!

  He gives up and drifts in the void, his wings rippling limply.

  I feel terrible for him. He tried so hard. He tries so hard every time, but they’re just too fast for him. I’m reminded of the dog we had when I was a kid. She’d rush out of the gate to chase passing cars, but she had no chance of catching them, none at all.

  As Tancred flaps lethargically back towards Callisto, I try to cheer him up by telling him he will catch the next one. But even I don’t really believe it anymore.

  “Struck out again?” Francie says in my helmet.

  “How did you guess?”

  “Um, because you strike out every time?” She’s working as she speaks, while the Marines bob around blowing bubbles. She’s knitting together the sides
of a hole in the bottom of the trench, using special little clamps.

  I join her at the bottom of the trench. We’re looking down through the mesh of the exit gate, through waving fronds of dulse, between weighted ropes encrusted with oysters, at a bluey-green world 130 km deep. It looks so peaceful down there. The sea is a balm after the violence and frustration I just vicariously experienced. I try to share this soothing sight with Tancred, but he bats my thoughts away. He’s sulking.

  “It’s just not working, is it?” Francie says in my helmet.

  Her sympathy brings me to the edge of tears, even though I know she’s self-interested. Whatever is not working for me and Tancred will not work for her and Pinkie Pie, either. Tancred and I are the guinea pigs for this whole experimental project. This is his audition as a secret super-weapon. What will happen if he can’t kill a single enemy ship? Elsa was so sure this would pan out. She thought we would be able to solve the problem of how to feed a Void Dragon, and win the war, in one fell swoop.

  Because the other problem here is that Tancred is picky as hell. All he will eat is Offense spaceships. He can go a long time in between feeds, but what if he never catches one again?

  “We’re asking him to do something a Void Dragon doesn’t normally do,” Francie says. “They don’t normally chase spaceships.”

  “Right,” I say. “Normally they eat stars.”

  “Which stand still.”

  “Relatively speaking. What’s your point?” The light of our little, friendly star shines down through the water. I try not to imagine what would happen if I can’t figure out how to feed Tancred, and he gets so hungry he can’t hold back.

  “Jeez, Jay,” Francie says. “I’m just trying to be supportive.”

  Before I can take this in, or dwell on the fact that she used my first name instead of the more typical Scatter, I hear a click. She’s switched back to the public channel.

  “This trench is a disaster,” she says for the benefit of the Marines. “Look at all those holes. We’re probably losing hundreds of fish every day.”

  “Finally, some good news,” a Marine says.