Guardians of Jupiter Read online

  GUARDIANS OF JUPITER

  VOID DRAGON HUNTERS

  BOOK 1

  ––––––––

  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

  In 2160, a Void Dragon ate our sun.

  In 2322, I was eight. We’d just moved to Kenya, where my aunt Elsa had landed a job at the spaceport. I didn’t want to leave Seattle, but of course no one cared what I thought.

  Malindi turned out to be less horrible than I’d expected. Although I refused to admit it to my mom or Elsa, I liked being able to play outside without bundling up in a snowsuit. The temperate equatorial weather opened up a whole new world to me: a green one. We rented a sprawling house in Kilifi, embedded in two acres of palms, wild garlic, and jacaranda. I took to vanishing into the garden every day after school, at first to show them how mad I was, but soon enough because I legitimately had stuff to do out there.

  I was building a hideout. I approached the project like a coding challenge. Every broken brick and dead branch had to be the exact right one. I explored every square inch of the garden, collecting the best building materials, and that’s how I found the dragon egg.

  A recent rainstorm had tipped over a jacaranda, leaving a claggy red hole with a puddle in the bottom. Something that looked like a piece of curved green glass peeked out of the muddy water. I imagined it as a green light on the pretend console in my hideout. I splashed into the puddle and started to dig.

  Half an hour later, I’d completely forgotten about my hideout. I cleaned the egg with the tail of my t-shirt and held it up to the light of Jupiter.

  Ever so slightly translucent, the egg was the size of my two fists, mossy green, threaded with silver. A fossil, I decided—but I knew in the back of my head that it wasn’t. The damn thing was warm.

  I stashed it in my half-completed hideout, in the broken cooler I used as a toolbox, before going in to supper.

  “By the way,” I said to my mom and Elsa, “no one is allowed in my hideout. On pain of death.”

  “We know, honey,” Mom said.

  “I really mean it.”

  “Finish your green beans if you want dessert.”

  My mom meant well. My dad had deserted us when I was two, and Mom tried her best to combine the roles of nurturing parent and authority figure. But she’d have been dead in the water—and I would probably have ended up in jail, instead of graduating from the University of Nairobi with a degree in robotics—if not for Aunt Elsa. Mom’s elder sister was the real authority figure in our household. Unmarried, she appreciated having my mom around to do stuff like vacuuming the floor and stocking the fridge with vegetables, not just Pop-Tarts and margarita mix. Elsa was a laser optics engineer who now managed the ground-based laser array for the Malindi spaceport’s launch system. Whereas my mom was medium height with China-blue eyes and a soft lap, Elsa was tall, gray-eyed, and forbiddingly blonde.

  Gangly even at eight, fair and newly freckled by the African sun, I looked more like Elsa, and was secretly pleased whenever people mistook me for her kid. I craved her attention and approval.

  “Elsa,” I said after supper, “why are there no more Void Dragons?” You see, I knew exactly what I’d found in the garden. Even then, I knew.

  “There are,” she said. “Just not here.”

  “Are we really safe now? What if another Dragon comes and eats the sun again?”

  “If you’re going to stand there, pass me those plates.” Elsa was loading the dishwasher, a task that she religiously undertook—on the days she got home from work before midnight—to offset, I suppose, her sense of guilt that my mom did everything else. I passed her the plates and waited. I knew she’d answer my questions. This was the primary way we interacted: me asking, her answering.

  “Well,” Elsa said, “before 2160, we didn’t know about Void Dragons. We didn’t know much about anything beyond our solar system. But we already had gravity-casting technology. It was discovered while people were trying to develop artificial gravity for spaceships. When the sun began to dim one day, the whole world panicked … but some people came up with a way to save the Earth, and us.”

  “Move the Earth.”

  “Right. You know this stuff, don’t you, Jay?”

  “Not really,” I said, to keep her talking.

  “OK, well, they used gravity-casting to fool the earth that there was a large gravitiational mass nearby in the direction the Earth travelled in its orbit around the sun. The Earth fell towards this artificial gravitational mass, speeding up, which had the effect of increasing its distance from the sun. They kept moving the artificial gravitational mass away, and the Earth spiraled outwards from the sun …” Elsa demonstrated with a plate and a glass, her hands dripping on the linoleum. “It took a long time! Six or seven years, while everything slowly got colder, and the Void Dragon chomped away on the sun. But at last we arrived in orbit around Jupiter. And out here, another team had been busy. They’d used gravity-casting to fool Jupiter that there was a huge source of gravity right at its center. As Jupiter contracted, it heated up, and by the time the Earth got here, the temperature and pressure in the core had risen high enough to ignite stellar fusion. We turned Jupiter into a star, and that’s what you see in the sky today.”

  “But it’s not as warm as our old sun was.”

  “No. Jupiter is a much smaller star than poor old Sol was. It’s just a red dwarf, really. We’re a lot closer to Jupiter than we were to Sol, but all the same, yeah.” She tweaked the sleeve of my sweater, which my mom had knitted for me. “In the old days, you wouldn’t’ve been wearing that on the equator in April.”

  The truth was I did know this stuff. I paid attention in school, because I’d set my heart on getting into Soyosoyo Primary’s highly selective robotics program. I’d let Elsa tell me the old story again because I thought she was leading up to what I really wanted to know. Instead, she started scrubbing the casserole dish.

  Disappointed, I said, “But what about the Void Dragon? Why didn’t it ever come back?”

  “It died. We believe they consume stars and then die.”

  “What about a different one? Why doesn’t another Void Dragon come and eat Jupiter?”

  My aunt’s face softened. She thought I was scared. If I had any sense, I would’ve been scared, given what was in the cooler under the mango tree.

  “You don’t need to worry about that, Jay. Jupiter is too small for any Void Dragon to bother with. It wouldn’t even be a snack for them. Would you go all the way to Nairobi for one spoonful of ice cream? No. Same thing. We’re safe here, and we always will be.”

  That’s what all the smart people thought, back then.

  I persisted, “But what if the Dragon didn’t have to come all that way? What if it was here already?”

  “I promise you, Jay, there are no Void Dragons around here. We haven’t seen any stars vanish since Kepler 452, and that was 1,400 light years away. Void Dragons travel in flocks … so maybe in another thousand years we should start to worry.” Elsa wiped her hands on her jeans and switched the dishwasher on. “Now let’s go fi
nd your mom and have a game of Scrabble.”

  I usually crushed the grown-ups at Scrabble, but that night I gave away so many triple-word scores and wasted so many Xs and Js that Mom insisted on taking my temperature. My talk with Elsa had not reassured me. The opposite, if anything.

  I woke up at two in the morning with a burning resolve in my mind: I had to get rid of the dragon egg. Now.

  I sneaked out into the garden. Traffic shushed past on National Space Centre Road. The scent of jacaranda weighted the cool, moist air. Under the mango tree, I opened the cooler and stared at my treasure. My flashlight picked up the threads of silver that ran through the shell. It really was beautiful. I hated the thought of destroying it.

  I banged it with my hammer a few times, half-assedly. Didn’t even leave a scuff mark.

  Well, something that had lasted 160 years in the ground—I assumed it had been there ever since the Void Dragon ate our sun—was hardly going to break when an eight-year-old whaled on it.

  I came up with a new plan. I’d take the egg with me to school tomorrow, and secretly leave it on my coding teacher’s desk. I believed at that time that coders were the smartest people in the universe. He’d know what to do with it.

  Feeling better, I stuffed the egg into the kangaroo pocket of the sweater I had put on over my pyjamas. I headed back towards the house, intending to stash the egg in my backpack.

  That’s when it happened.

  A chorus of squeals, beeps, and buzzes filtered out from the house. Second by second it got louder. I stood frozen for a minute, then ran for the back door. I was afraid Mom and Elsa would wake up and find out I wasn’t in bed. Sure enough, I met them staggering downstairs, sleep-dazed. But neither of them said a word about where I’d been, or noticed the bulge in my sweater. Every networked device in the house was going off at once.

  We didn’t know it, but every device on Earth was doing the same thing at the same time. Passengers in cars and trains, farmers in their heated caves under the European permafrost, fishermen in their icebreakers, and even high-tech workers in their fabs in low Earth orbit, were all hearing the same noise, and seeing the same message that flashed on the screen of Elsa’s computer, filling our living-room with aquarium light:

  PLANET-WIDE ALERT LEVEL RED

  CREDIBLE THREAT DETECTED

  CLICK HERE FOR DIRECTIONS TO YOUR NEAREST SHELTER

  We didn’t click. Screw “nearest shelter.” We all thought we’d be safe at Elsa’s workplace: Malindi Spaceport. In retrospect, this was as dumb as me thinking my coding teacher was the smartest person in the universe. But it was a reasonable decision based on the information we had at the time, which was zero. Thanks, UNgov, for the openness and transparency.

  We jumped in Elsa’s beat-up Tesla and merged into stop-and-go traffic. Africans drove with their windows down. When the traffic stalled, they shouted back and forth, exchanging dark jokes about Void Dragons.

  That was what everyone thought it was, of course. What else could trigger a planet-wide red alert?

  You might think I’d have been racked with guilt about my dragon egg, imagining some connection. In fact, it didn’t even occur to me. I’d dropped the egg into my backpack and forgotten its existence. I chewed on the straw of a juice-box and hung by my elbows on the backs of Mom and Elsa’s seats, revelling in the excitement of 3 a.m. gridlock on the National Space Centre Road. Some people were just giving up and parking on the shoulder. Starting impromptu tailgate parties. Figuring they might as well grab a good seat for the apocalypse. But that left the other 900,000 inhabitants of Malindi on the road, trying to reach their nearest shelters.

  “Damn this fucking traffic,” Mom howled. “What’s wrong with the fucking traffic AI?”

  “Its resources have probably been retasked to help deal with the threat,” Elsa said.

  “Why don’t they tell us what the fucking threat is?” Mom was so upset, she didn’t even apologize for using the F-word.

  “They may not know,” Elsa said. “OK, I’ll call Zack.” Her boss at the laser array. “If anyone knows anything, he will.” She reached over and tapped her phone.

  The sky brightened. The taillights ahead of us dimmed to embers. Color returned to the fronds of the palm trees and the pastel garden walls. I thought for a confused second that morning had come.

  People jumped out of their cars. I craned out of the window. Mom twisted around and tried to haul me back inside.

  A fiery meteor streaked across the sky, trailing white smoke.

  Elsa jammed on the brakes.

  The car behind rear-ended us, fortunately at only about 10 miles an hour. The edge of the window collided painfully with my ribs.

  The meteor fell behind the trees and vanished.

  I felt the impact of the meteor’s fall physically. It travelled through my body like an electric shock.

  “Fuuuuck!” my mom screamed. That made four F-words in five minutes. This was definitely a night to remember.

  A fireball mushroomed from the place the meteor had fallen. Horrible orange light drenched the traffic jam.

  In its holder on the dashboard, Elsa’s phone rang and rang. Zack was never going to answer, because he was dead.

  *

  The “meteor” was a titanium-alloy kinetic impactor launched from the Jovian Belt, targeting the spaceport. If Mom, Elsa, and I hadn’t gotten stuck in traffic, we would have died along with the other 11,203 people who lost their lives at Malindi.

  Simultaneously, identical missiles had targeted Earth’s other spaceports, killing another 100,000 or so. Fatalities at our orbital fabs added to the death toll. The aggressor had aimed to destroy our spaceflight capability, and almost succeeded.

  It wasn’t a Void Dragon.

  Void Dragons, according to historical observations, are gigantic beasts with filmy wingspans of several thousand kilometers. They look like dragons, which is where the name came from, but instead of breathing fire, they consume fire—or rather energy. Their metabolisms are based on direct energy-mass conversion, which is another way of saying we don’t know how the hell their bodies work. They eat stars.

  They do not throw kinetic missiles at unsuspecting planets.

  Those missiles came from a warship rejoicing in the name of Blood-Drinking Yobbo. This is the kind of name the Offense give their ships. Other Offense ships that have troubled Earth since then: Planet Crusher, Kiddie Fiddler, and my personal favorite, Beware My Tentacles Of Doom, or Beware for short. All these translations are courtesy of the Offense’s own propaganda department. Opinion is divided on whether it’s a reverse-psychology gambit to make the Offense seem cute and harmless, or a sign that they completely lack any sense of humor.

  The Offense are not cute and harmless. They are three-meter air-breathing jellyfish with a habit of fatally poisoning each other, never mind any soft-skinned prey beings they happen to meet. Their homeworld—we think—is a super-Earth that formerly orbited HD 181433, a subgiant star 87 light years from here. It doesn’t anymore, because HD 181433 got eaten by the same flock of Void Dragons that chomped our sun. The Offense didn’t have a handy gas giant to set alight, or they didn’t think of it at the time. So now their planet is wandering through space, sunless, crusted over with the frozen remnant of its atmosphere. I wouldn’t want to live there. And I guess they don’t either, because they want Earth, and our cozy little pocket-sized sun.

  That volley of missiles on the night of April 6, 2322, was their way of saying, “Hey, two-legged prey beings, this is your eviction notice.”

  We managed to chase the Blood-Drinking Yobbo away, but far from giving up, they’ve been throwing missiles, rocks, and bombs at us ever since.

  It’s war.

  And that is how I wound up troubleshooting mining droids in the Jovian Belt.

  2

  When I was a kid, I wanted to build robots when I grew up. Animal mecha were really popular back then. I used to drool over videos of cowboys riding robotic horses on the North American tund
ra. I wasn’t interested in the woolly mammoths they were herding, even though those are pretty cool, too—they’re elephants with actual mammoth DNA spliced into their genome, so they can deal with the sub-zero temps in the Midwest. I guess you could genetically engineer horses for cold weather, as well. But robots are cheaper, and to my pre-teen mind, they were way cooler. I had this dream of building a robot sabertooth tiger and riding it through the snow.

  Of course, I’m hardly the first guy who ever had to stash his childhood dreams in the embarrassing-memory drawer. (Although I still think a sabretooth tiger mecha would be the coolest thing ever.) And I had a good excuse for abandoning my aspirations: humanity’s existential war for survival.

  But man, I hung onto that dream as long as possible, all the way through undergrad at the University of Nairobi, until the government came calling.

  Hey, STEM grad. We want you.

  Not to build autonomous drones to seek out and destroy Offense ships.

  (That would’ve been fun.)

  Not even to work on designing better mechas for our troops in space.

  (I have some awesome ideas for semi-autonomous combat systems.)

  Not, in fact, to do robotics at all.

  They issued me a uniform and an ID and told me to improve the MTBF averages of the mining droids that chew rare elements out of the asteroids ringing Jupiter.

  So now what I do all day is I stare at error reports, figure out what tripped the automatic debug software, and go into the code to fix it.

  Thousands of lines of code.

  Every day.

  In a cubicle barely big enough for my desk and chair, in the new industrial cluster on Leda, which used to be Jupiter’s 13th satellite until we moved it further out to make room for Earth.

  Six days a week.

  52 weeks a year.

  Oh, I understand. I do understand. The Defense Corps already has the world’s top robotics guys working on the fun, cutting-edge projects. Someone has to do the other stuff.

  But man, oh man, my eyes get tired, and my mind gets tireder, and my heart gets tiredest of all, and after twelve hours in front of the screen all I want to do is shuffle back to my room and curl up with my face to the wall, hugging my dragon egg like a teddy bear.