Knights of Saturn (Void Dragon Hunters Book 5)

  KNIGHTS OF SATURN

  VOID DRAGON HUNTERS

  BOOK 5

  ––––––––

  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

  The bridge of the Amadeus VII is silent.

  It’s never silent here. 37 people make noise. They type, chat, laugh, eat snacks. Their computers chime and beep alerts.

  But right now, it’s so quiet that I can hear the fans circulating air through the ship, keeping me and my 115 crew members alive, and I hear a junior NCO gasp back a sob.

  We are looking down at an asteroid where no one is alive.

  To get technical about it, we are not actually looking at an asteroid, but at the approximately one zillion pieces of an asteroid—some big, some little, some microscopic.

  This asteroid was named Elara. It was one of Jupiter’s original moons. It had a base as big as a town, which had 13,000 residents, until yesterday.

  We didn’t quite get here in time.

  It’s my job to break the agonized, outraged silence. I am a full colonel, the commander of the Amadeus VII, which is the flagship of the new, expanded Dragon Corps. I’m well aware that I suck at this. But I’m determined to do it right. We have to prove our worth to humanity.

  Even if, today, all we’ve proved is that we can’t be everywhere at once.

  “XO,” I say, turning to Sara, “initiate a full infrared scan of the debris, sensitivity level high.”

  I know this is a waste of time. There aren’t any survivors down there. But Sara nods, as if the order makes sense, and relays it to the appropriate staff officers. I catch a flash of approval in her eyes. It’s important to be seen doing something, rather than nothing.

  “Also, tell the Montferrat to scan for radioactivity,” I add. On one of my screens, I can see the other two ships of the Dragon Corps that came with us—the Montferrat, Huifang’s ship, and the Exeter, Francie’s. Huifang is maneuvering closer to the debris than I would consider safe just yet.

  “Roger,” Sara says, picking up her comms handset.

  I lean back in my couch. My consciousness slips out of the bridge, away from the ship, and merges with Tancred’s.

  My Void Dragon is a couple of thousand klicks away, winging through the loosely cohering rubble field. Dust from the catastrophic explosion that tore Elara apart makes him sneeze. I see the little puffs of fire through his own eyes. Each white-hot sneeze illuminates sheared-off rock surfaces, startlingly white in contrast to the dull, weathered gray surface that Elara used to have, like bones. Tancred finds a twisted, unidentifiable scrap of metal debris and noses around it.

  No survivors, Daddy, he observes in a melancholy tone.

  Well, there wouldn’t be. The Offense blew Elara up with deep-penetrating missiles tipped with nuclear warheads.

  They used to not do this shit. We thought that was because they wanted our stuff for themselves. That’s what they came for, after all: to take Earth, and our moon, and all our other moons and moonlets and asteroids, and Jupiter, the new dwarf star that warms them all. You can’t take something you have blown up.

  But something’s changed. Just since the New Year—about the same time the new, expanded Dragon Corps entered service—they’ve been getting really explodey. In January, they blew up Leda, where I used to work when I was in technical support.

  It feels like a lifetime ago.

  Leda was their biggest score yet. Elara is small potatoes in comparison. But that’s the point. We now consider 13,000 people a small loss. That just kills me.

  It kills me even more that the jellies who did it got away. Couldn’t they have done me the favor of hanging around, like good villains, to attack the first responders?

  They’d never have known what hit them.

  Tancred’s rage boils out in a lance of fire that chars a fragment of the Elara base. He’s as frustrated as I am.

  If I could breathe fire, there’d be nothing left but ash and fumes of the screens in front of me.

  Oh well. I’d better notify BeltCOM.

  I fold out my adjustable ergonomic keyboard. The rank of colonel does come with some perks. I also have a special memory-foam headrest and a cup holder that keeps my coffee at the perfect temperature—needed, considering how many hours I spend in this couch. None of it makes me any happier about telling BeltCOM that we’ve failed, again. I’m going to wuss out and notify them by email instead of by voice comms. Even the thought of talking to General Shockley, my superior officer, makes me feel sick.

  Shockley’s not a bad officer. He’s on the side of humanity. But he expects the Void Dragons to win the war. And what we, and they, have discovered is that they can’t. The Belt is just too big. Tancred is the only dragon who’s militarily effective against Offense ships, and he can’t be everywhere at once.

  As I rehearse my excuses, Sara touches my elbow. “Commander Collins on the radio for you, sir.”

  “Thank you, XO.”

  In the second before I pick up Francie’s call, I stare at Sara’s profile. Because we’re in an active combat theater (supposedly), she, like everyone else, is in an EVA suit. These blue and yellow color-blocked skinsuits flatter no one. Yet I’m not looking at the suit. I’m looking at the woman inside it—and not in that way. I don’t like her in that way. Not exactly. It’s hard to work out. I’m trying to see her inside the suit, Sara. Sometimes I feel like we, Jay and Sara, are vanishing into the command structure.

  I pull my headset over my ears. Francie pops up on my comms screen, her face set in a frown. She’s beautiful, and I used to have a brainless crush on her for that reason. Now I’m able to see past the beauty to the professional who commands her ship, the Exeter, with a lighter touch than I would have expected.

  “Find any survivors?” I say, hoping against hope.

  “What? No.”

  “So what’s the problem?” I put it that way because she’s scowling down at something on another screen at her end.

  “I got an email from your mom.”

  I flop back in my couch, which ergonomically reconfigures itself with my movements, depriving me of the satisfaction of banging the back of my head on my headrest. “Couldn’t it wait?”

  “Oh, you mean we’re in an active combat theater, so I shouldn’t be checking my email?”

  “Yeah,” I say, although what I mean is: I don’t want to hear about it. Don’t make me.

  “The jellies that did this are halfway back to Saturn by now,” Francie says, brutally stating what we all know.

  “Just forward it to me.”

  “You’d ignore it. I’ll read it to you.”

  I know my mother is trying to get in touch with me. She’s been emailing me every week since … since we got back from Offense territory. I wrote back once, to ask if she was in trouble. She said no, she just wanted to talk. Since then, I have been ignoring her emails.

  I’m not being thoughtlessly unkind. It’s not as if she has any reason to think I might be dead or something. The
Dragon Corps is all over the news on Earth, albeit a lot of the recent coverage has been critical of our failures. I’m just mad at her, and hurt as hell.

  I can’t believe she’s emailing my friends to put pressure on me. “Make it quick, Francie, please.”

  “Let’s see. She says it was really nice having us to stay with her last year.” Francie is referring to the weeks we all spent at my mom’s house in Kenya after our adventures in Europe. “And we’d be welcome back anytime.”

  I feel a dull pang at the thought that I may never visit my mom again. Never again see the flamingos feeding on Lake Nakuru. Never again smell the acacia trees in Mom’s garden. How can I go back there, after what she did?

  She lied to me. She’s been lying to me all my life. She told me I was an only child. It turns out I have an older brother … who’s now in jail, on charges of treason against humanity.

  “Did she say anything about … him?” I interrupt, as Francie continues to relay my mom’s polite chit-chat.

  Francie knows who I mean. My brother. James Scattergood.

  “No, but—”

  “See? She wants to pretend he doesn’t exist. She wants to pretend I still don’t know the truth.”

  On my right, Sara bends over her screens, apparently concentrating. She flicks me a look. I can’t read its significance.

  “Maybe she just thinks that isn’t a conversation to have over email,” Francie says. “Which is why she’s inviting all of us to come for Easter, and actually, I think I’ll go. I’m owed leave. And it’s not like we’re doing any good out here.”

  I grit my teeth. “What does it say at the end?”

  “‘Love, Jules.’” My mother’s name is Jules, short for Juliette.

  “Nothing else?”

  “Oh, there’s a P.S., actually. ‘Tell Jay I’m fine.’”

  “Is that in all caps, by any chance?”

  “Yeah. F, I, N, E. Why? Does that mean something?”

  “Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional.” I stare sightlessly at the consoles wrapping the arms of my couch, and the staff officers wandering around consoling each other, like victims in the aftermath of a disaster, while a completely different disaster unspools in my head: the disaster of my family, splashed across the stars. I used to think we were fine. Ha. F.I.N.E.

  “Well, there you go,” Francie says. “If you don’t get in touch with her, you’re a total douche.” She starts to type on the other screen at her end. “I’m going to tell her I’m coming for Easter, anyway. I bet Patrick will, too.”

  “Sir,” Sara suddenly interrupts. “We have a possible contact. Francie, it’s in Huifang’s sector. Notifying her now.”

  “Shit, I see it,” Francie says, and vanishes off my screen.

  “Gimme radar imaging.” I sit bolt upright. “Tancred!” I shout my Void Dragon’s name out loud. Heads turn all over the bridge. God, they must think I’m weird. I overheard a group of privates recently speculating about the rumor that the CO talks to his dragon with his mind. Well, yes, I do, when I remember to, when I’m not distracted by thoughts of my family. Tancred!

  Where is it, Daddy? Where?

  The sensors officer throws a radar plot up on my main screen. It shows something that looks more and more like an Offense ship every second, as the Amadeus VII’s imaging sensors flesh it out. It’s on the far side of the 1000-km heart of the rubble cloud. I concentrate so hard on the image that it starts to swim before my eyes. Tancred picks it up from me, like satellite guidance. We’ve been working on this.

  The Offense ship stealthed itself by hiding next to a warmish piece of debris, but now it’s moving away from the debris.

  Tancred flaps towards it.

  Wobble, goes the rubble cloud as his wings fold spacetime in their warp vortices. No human scientist has ever come close to figuring out how the Void Dragons do this. I don’t care. I only care about catching these jellies and barbecuing them.

  Tancred covers the 800-km distance to the Offense ship in about one minute, while it edges away, as if hoping to slip between the Exeter and the Montferrat.

  A tiny part of my mind wonders why a single ship stayed behind. It’s a big one, but it couldn’t hope to take us all on, even if we were just a regular quick response unit and not the Dragon Corps.

  Tancred does not pick up on my dubiety. He is thinking about one thing only, and that is FOOD.

  Burning and eating are separate but intimately related activities for a Void Dragon, but they like it best when they can burn and eat at the same time. That’s when they are most fully expressing their magnificent, deadly nature. And the luck of the draw made Tancred a Void Dragon who likes to chow down on Offense spaceships.

  Now his hunger merges with his rage at the enemy.

  The Offense ship lurches out of the blackness, a white whale. It’s a big one. A destroyer, at least. Without a second’s hesitation, Tancred blasts dragon-fire at it.

  Cheers ring through the bridge of the Amadeus VII.

  But wait.

  The ship is cracking open. Its whole forward bulge is coming off. It’s just a wreck!

  Tancred flies closer, lands on the larger part of the dismembered ship, and begins to crawl inside it, like a monstrous bee, lighting the hulk up with fire.

  On my screen, the detached forward bulge breaks apart into an empty hull fragment … and a Pulverizer, the Offense’s smallest and fastest ship class, a teardrop that’s mostly engine.

  Numb with astonishment, I put the picture together. The larger ship is just a hulk. The Pulverizer was hiding inside it. But why? Why go to the trouble of actually hollowing out a wreck and leaving it here?

  Halfway inside the hulk, Tancred reacts to my warning. He wriggles out again and twists to face the Pulverizer.

  Turning his back on the hulk.

  So he’s not looking at it anymore … and I can’t see it up close, either.

  But I feel it, both of us feel it, when something spears into the back of his neck.

  Ow! Ow ow ow ow! DADDY!

  Tancred forgets the Pulverizer. He flaps as hard as he can for the safety of the Amadeus VII, wobbling like never before. Spacetime crumples around us.

  I fold over my consoles, rubbing vainly at the phantom pain in the back of my neck. Sara shakes me, asking what’s wrong.

  “Not me,” I choke. “Him.”

  Ow ow ow, Tancred wails, fleeing back to me.

  When we were stationed on Mingetty, we used to do training exercises where all the other Void Dragons would pile onto Tancred. They’d blast dragon-fire at him. It stung, but never really hurt him. Imagine a gang of toddlers whaling on a teenager. No damage done.

  This felt like that … but it hurt.

  It burns like fire.

  *

  Huifang is the closest of us to the Pulverizer. The Montferrat arrows at the Offense ship, spitting slugs from its railgun. The rubble cloud foils Huifang’s attack. Shards of rock break into smaller shards of rock, a lethal threat to both ships.

  And still the Pulverizer doesn’t flee. It cozies up to the hulk of the larger ship where it was hiding, and waits.

  I fight to detach my consciousness from Tancred’s pain, trying to concentrate on my screens. Our optical instruments have great resolution. At this distance, I can even see the psychedelic Offense script on the Pulverizer’s nose. My AI translation program renders it as Designation: Up Yours.

  A rock drifts across my field of vision, blocking my view of the ship, and I grit my teeth in frustration.

  “Sir, we are obstructing the Montferrat’s field of fire,” my chief NCO says to me. “We need to clear the area!”

  “We need to wait for Tancred,” I snap.

  Huifang, clearly aware that I’m in her field of fire, should her rounds make it all the way through the rubble cloud, keeps her powder dry. In a virtuoso display of flying by her pilot, the Montferrat twists through the rubble, corkscrewing down into can’t-miss range.

  That rock drifts away a
nd I can see the Designation: Up Yours again.

  Its bridge airlock opens like an eye.

  Something very small and fast flies inside.

  The airlock closes.

  The Designation: Up Yours suddenly goes into a deliberate tumble, using off-axis thrust to impart spin to itself. Now it’s a much harder target.

  “Permission to engage?” Huifang yells.

  “Go for it, Captain,” I yell back.

  The Montferrat scuds past the tumbling Designation: Up Yours, haircut-close, and scores a hit. The Pulverizer’s pearly hull absorbs the rounds—it’s actually a stand-off shield, like the ones we use. But it can’t take much more of that kind of abuse. “Gonna get this fucker!” Huifang exults, giving commands to turn the ship. I have her on split screen now. Her face is as hard as a diamond behind her faceplate. When Milosz, her boyfriend, died on the Grief Merchant, it seemed to age her overnight. She’s been waiting for a chance like this. Her dragon, Jade, perches on the arm of her couch, stretching her neck forward, mirroring Huifang’s intent posture.

  The Designation: Up Yours sprays slugs that sparkle off the Montferrat’s shields. Huifang’s eyelids flutter rapidly. “Now I’m really mad.”

  The two ships are so close together the imaging software can hardly pick them apart. They spin through the rubble cloud, trading positions like dance partners. Each of them is trying to execute the time-honored tactic of soaking the other guy with superheated plasma exhaust. Everyone on the bridge of the Amadeus VII watches open-mouthed—it’s like watching a pair of champion ice-skaters or ballet dancers.

  And then I remember.

  I blurt out, “Captain Lin, I believe there is a Void Dragon aboard that ship!”

  “What?” Huifang’s gaze jerks to me in astonishment.

  The Designation: Up Yours shrugs sideways, turning tail-on to the Montferrat. Its plasma exhaust fries the Montferrat’s sensors. My split screen goes black.

  On the other half of the screen, electrical currents arc over the Montferrat’s steel-gray hull.

  The Designation: Up Yours keeps turning a full 360°, and rakes its charged-particle cannon across the Montferrat. The front half of Huifang’s ship explodes in a cloud of vapor and metal dust. The back half explodes in a white fireball as the reactor’s containment is breached.