Exiles of the Belt (Void Dragon Hunters Book 4) Read online

  Sara pushes her straight black bangs out of her eyes. I watch the gesture in fascination, then shake my head. “So, any results from the drive signature analysis?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “They’re ours.”

  2

  “Well, that was exciting,” I say with bitter sarcasm.

  I feel like throwing something. All tooled up and nowhere to go. Eight hungry baby Void Dragons and nothing for them to eat.

  And now Bolt is coming out of the IT office, which opens off the back of the bridge. Everything opens off the back of the bridge. There is no privacy on this ship. I should be used to it by now. “Well, that didn’t work,” he says to me, ignoring Sara and Zach. “Maybe try a side-channel attack?”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I want to focus on what he’s saying, but the unknown Earth ships are still a problem, if only an administrative one. And nine-tenths of being the commander is administration. I hate paperwork—who doesn’t?—and am bad at it. I am all too aware that I rely utterly on Sara to cover my ass with BeltCOM, the regional command we answer to. “Did you file a report?” I ask her.

  “Not yet. They didn’t respond to our hail, so I was waiting to see what you wanted to do about that.”

  Turning to Patrick, who’s just come onto the bridge with Smaug under one arm, I say, “They didn’t respond to our hail.”

  “Well, that’s weird,” he says. “Did you try resending by radio?”

  We usually use laser comms out here. They’re extremely secure. The catch is you have to aim the beam very accurately. That’s not hard when you’re pointing it at something the size of Ceres or Earth. But when your target is a spaceship 6 million klicks away, which is moving at about 80 km per second, ‘accurate’ is a term of art. So it’s possible that our signal simply missed the ships by a mile, or rather several thousand miles.

  “Not yet,” Sara says. “Wanna try it?”

  If laser comms are like whispering into someone’s ear, radio comms are like shouting into the sky.

  “Sure,” Patrick says. “Let’s do it.”

  Without asking my opinion, Sara goes over to the comms station. The Ottokar’s comms officer is on his lunch break, or maybe just watching dirty movies in his berth. “Mingetty Command to unknown ships—” Sara gives their coordinates. “Please identify yourselves and advise your planned trajectory and destination. Mingetty Command out.” She hits send and straightens up. “Let’s see what they say.”

  “No freaking way should we be radioing these people,” I say.

  “Huh?” Sara’s eyebrows shoot up.

  I force a laugh. “I’m right here, you know.” Much as I rely on Sara and Patrick, and trust their judgment, it stings a bit to be completely ignored.

  Sara laughs. “Oh. Sorry, Jay.”

  “Just kidding,” I say. But the fact is I’m starting to get a bad feeling about these ships. Not responding to a hail looks very suspicious.

  To distract myself from the tension, I meander over to Zach’s station and peek at his computer. He’s so immersed in his work, he doesn’t notice me standing behind him.

  I read over his shoulder: Yet the alien monstrosities exuded an uncanny fascination, which haunted him amidst the dreary quotidian routine … Zach stares at this sentence for ten solid seconds, and then his cursor backtracks and replaces dreary with soul-destroying.

  “Not that I disagree,” I say, “but you’re technically not supposed to be working on your novel when you’re on duty.”

  He jumps a foot in the air.

  By now, the whole Dragon Unit is on the bridge. Laughter fills the room.

  “Hey, screw all y’all,” Zach says. “I’m gonna be a famous author when you guys are still earning army pay for looking after Void Dragons.”

  Tancred sticks his head up close to Zach’s computer and bares his teeth.

  “I think that means he doesn’t like being called an alien monstrosity,” I say.

  “Truth ain’t stranger than fiction anymore,” Zach says, very carefully patting Tancred on the head. “That’s the whole point.”

  I like Zach, even if he is under the odd delusion that writing novels is a good way to make money once he gets out of the army. I’ve told him several times that he should start a blog instead. It would help to get people on our side, because the existence of the Void Dragons is not as much of a secret as it used to be. He could portray how nice they are … as well as being alien monstrosities.

  Sara is seated at the comms station, typing. She looks around at us. “Well, no response to that hail, either.”

  Laughter fades as everyone takes in the implications of the unknown ships’ radio silence. And they all look at me.

  They want me to make the decision, now that there are no good decisions to make.

  I hit on a way to stall. “We need to model their trajectory.”

  “Done,” Sara says promptly. “I’ve been tracking them since we first spotted them. We’ve got enough data to model their course now. Here it is.”

  On the big screen in front of the commander, captain, and XO’s seats, a 3D map of our sector appears in the form of a sphere littered with labelled dots—asteroids, mostly too small to matter. There’s Mingetty. And there, in the shape of moving red stars, are our four unknown ships. The computer has plotted their future trajectory.

  They’re not coming here, after all. They are going to miss us by about 5 million klicks and proceed …

  … out of the Belt.

  Into Offense territory.

  “XO,” I say, “could you zoom out?”

  Sara enlarges the area covered by the map until Jupiter appears at one side of it.

  On the other side, 9 AUs away, is Saturn.

  The computer-modelled trajectory of the ships curves out to Saturn and wraps around it.

  “Why the heck would Earth ships be going to Saturn?” Paul says.

  “Yeah,” Francie murmurs. “Doesn’t make sense.”

  Saturn has been occupied by the Offense for the last 15 years. It’s a frozen gas giant with no points of interest other than the moon Titan, where it rains methane. Not really much of a loss to humanity.

  “Maybe they aren’t going that far,” Huifang says. “It could be a regular patrol into Offense space.”

  “Could be,” Patrick says. “But you would think in that case they’d have hailed us.”

  “Not if they don’t know we’re here.”

  The existence of the 1st Dragon Corps, for obvious reasons, is not public knowledge. The DoD even took Mingetty off the public starmaps. On the other hand, we’re emitting heat and radio signals. The ships could see us if they were scanning their volumes in depth, as patrol ships should be.

  “They know we’re here now,” Patrick points out.

  And everyone looks at me again.

  I take a deep breath. “What if they’re not really Earth ships?”

  Francie says skeptically, “Drive signatures don’t lie.”

  “The Offense also use hydrogen as reaction mass in their ship drives,” I say. “They just use less of it, and it’s hotter.”

  Sara says, “Jay, the analysis results did match the standard Earth drive profile, right down to the fraction of xenon in the exhaust.”

  “They could be spoofing their drive signatures.”

  I am aware of how much I want these ships to be Offense ships, for Tancred’s sake. But I also think I’m making a valid argument.

  “They could be artificially throttling down their drives to make their exhaust cooler, and injecting xenon into the combustion chambers to mimic the typical output of Earth ships.”

  “Aha,” Patrick says. And grins.

  I am the commander. I have to command. And this is a heaven-sent chance to prove that the Dragon Corps can actually contribute to the war.

  Still, my natural caution hasn’t gone away.

  “Given that this situation is one big ball of unknown unknowns, I don’t want to over-commit our resources. So let’s intercept them �
��” Cheering fills the bridge. “With the Melisende.”

  *

  The Melisende, a fast picket, is way too small to take everyone. I solve this problem by spreading five hearts and six spades face down on a table. Whoever draws a heart gets to go.

  I don’t think this is what they mean by leadership, but it works.

  The upshot is that the Melisende burns away from Mingetty with Luigi at the controls, Marguerite assisting him as co-pilot, and me, Patrick, Paul, and Milosz on board, with our dragons.

  Excitement runs high, but the distances out here are vast. It will be 38 hours until we intercept the unknown ships, if they continue on their present course.

  I set up my computer in the common room and get to work on my secret project.

  Wish Bolt could’ve come, but I couldn’t think of any excuse to include him. Anyway, we can coordinate remotely.

  We are building what will hopefully be the world’s best decryption software.

  We’re not doing this for fun. I mean, it is fun. But it’s also a matter of life and death.

  All of us have known for a while that there’s a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Department of Defense, centered on the Directorate of Military Intelligence. They’re passing information to the Offense. Betraying humanity.

  Worse yet, I have good reason to suspect that my aunt Elsa, the head of the ARES defense research agency, is part of it.

  I haven’t told a single soul about that. All my friends see Elsa as our fairy godmother. It would break their hearts, just like it has broken mine.

  Last year, on Callisto, we met some of the conspirators in person. This asshole Hardy—not his real name—handed over 316 unhatched Void Dragon eggs to the Offense. And got away with it! While we ended up getting sidelined to an asteroid on the edge of nowhere.

  The others may think there’s nothing to do about it, but not me. I am going to get Hardy if it’s the last thing I do.

  But he works for DirMInt. I don’t even know his real name. He’s majorly protected.

  The only way I’m ever going to nail him is electronically.

  Fortunately, I was a professional coder before I became a commander. I’ve even done a bit of hacking in the past, as has Bolt.

  And yet—we have failed, and failed, and failed again, to hack into DirMInt’s internal comms. While our regular military comms security is a joke, DirMInt is better protected than the UNGov Central Bank. We ultimately had to give up on that. Instead, we decided we’d try to break into their outgoing email.

  That should be possible, because I actually have a copy of the DoD’s zero-level email encryption software. It was given to me by Elsa.

  Oh, Elsa.

  What if I do get proof of Hardy’s treachery—and she’s right in the middle of it?

  It doesn’t matter. I can’t let it matter. The truth matters. We have to nail the conspiracy before they sign humanity’s death warrant.

  So that’s where we are now. Examining the email software for vulnerabilities, using machine learning tools to attack them.

  I work and work, losing track of time. My back aches and my eyes feel like they’re full of sand. But it’s the pain in my hands that finally breaks my flow. I have idiopathic arthritis, a.k.a young person’s arthritis, a.k.a. the worst possible chronic condition for someone who spends a lot of time at a keyboard. Now my knuckles are killing me. I push my chair away from the table and lean over, resting my forehead against Tancred’s side, sliding my hands into the pocket between his foreleg and his body. The heat of his scaly-smooth skin soothes the pain.

  No good, Daddy? He can feel my frustration. He sympathizes with it. He lives with similar feelings of frustration every day.

  No goddamn good.

  Maybe Bolt is right … we should try a side channel attack … look for instances of data remanence on their servers …

  “Good morning!” It’s Milosz. Squeezing around Tancred to get into the common room, which is cramped enough without a half-grown Void Dragon in it, he looks disgustingly fresh. He’s got his little red dragon, Wiktor, on one shoulder, and a foilpack of coffee in his fist.

  “Is it morning?” I say, removing my aching hands from Tancred’s armpit.

  “For our local value of morning, yes.”

  “Gimme that coffee.”

  “Mine,” Milosz says, moving it out of reach. He takes another foilpack out of the locker built into the wall and tosses it to me. I don’t even bother to wait for it to self-heat.

  When he sits down beside me, I reflexively close my work. It’s not as if I don’t trust Milosz—but what’s the point of him knowing what Bolt and I are working on, when it seems so unlikely to ever bear fruit? That leaves my computer screen innocuously displaying my email inbox.

  Milosz rests his elbows on the table as if he’s tired, although he only just got up. His face is freshly washed, and he smells of toothpaste, but he’s got circles under his eyes. Maybe he didn’t get much sleep, either.

  “It’s good to get away,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say, although I’m hardly conscious of being on a tiny spaceship burning through the void. I’m just doing the same shit I would be doing on Mingetty, with fewer interruptions.

  “Sometimes I wish …” Milosz shakes his head.

  “You wish you could quit?” I say.

  “How did you guess?”

  It wasn’t a guess. “Pacific islands.” It’s an ongoing topic of conversation between him and Huifang, who are an unofficial couple, like Francie and Patrick are. They can’t be official as long as they are in the military, but it’s hardly a secret how fond they are of each other. Nor is it a secret that the boredom and stress of life on Mingetty has drained their enthusiasm for the 1st Dragon Corps. Time and again I have heard them building their castle in the air: a remote Pacific island, equipped with a nuclear fusion reactor which they could use to feed their baby dragons, although it seems to me like they would have to get a new one every six months or so, and do they know what nuclear reactors cost? Of course they do. It’s never gonna happen. But sometimes Tim and Marguerite join them in their fantasizing, which makes more sense as the Delacroixes are in their fifties, independently rich, and never expected to end up somewhere like Mingetty. They have jointly outfitted this imaginary Pacific island down to the last solar panel and hydrangea.

  “It’s a pipe dream,” Milosz says, surprising me. “It might work for a while, but what about when the dragons get big?” He shakes his head. “Anyway, the army wouldn’t let us go.”

  “You got that right,” I say bitterly.

  “This is a crusade. Crusaders don’t get to quit.”

  “A crusade?”

  “Yeah, a holy war. You know all our ships are named after crusaders, right?”

  I did not know that. There’s a database of approved ship names, but I never knew where they came from. “Wow. So who was Melisende?”

  “Queen of Jerusalem in the twelfth century,” Milosz says, his eyes lighting up. He’s big on history.

  So he tells me the story of Queen Melisende, and we drink our coffee, and the others filter into the common room with their dragons, and I get up to sit on Tancred’s back so someone else can have my chair. That someone is Marguerite, a trim Frenchwoman with gray hair who reminds all of us a bit of Elsa. And it is she who says, “Jay, have you read this email yet?”

  She is sitting in front of my computer, which displays my inbox.

  I slide off Tancred’s back and peer at the screen.

  Marguerite points at the top email. It only arrived a few seconds ago, so no, I haven’t read it yet.

  It’s from Zach.

  Fwd: Explosive Allegations of Treachery Roil DoD, Could Bring Down Government, Sources Allege

  Patrick, looking over my shoulder, says, “Oh my freaking God.”

  I click, convulsively.

  Interesting? says Zach’s attached note. He, of course, does not know that there really is a conspiracy. Much less that we have
personally met one of its ringleaders. Or a nothing-burger?

  People are crowding behind me, trying to see the screen.

  “Chill, guys,” I say in a strange, choked voice. “It’s only Raw News.”

  I was excited for a minute there, too. But Raw News is … Raw News. An internet channel that specializes in non-news, fake news, and very occasionally news that should be but isn’t.

  Paul says, “Could be they’re the only ones who would touch it.”

  We all read the article.

  It leads off with a summary of everything we already know about the conspiracy, naming no names. Every sentence is lawsuit-proofed with “allegedly” and and “according to sources”—and these sources themselves are not named. Looks like Zach was right: it’s a nothing-burger.

  Then I scroll down to the last paragraph.

  These allegations come as the DoD itself disclosed that it had approved a diplomatic mission into Offense territory, scheduled to exit the Belt at 9 A.M. on January 19th. The mission is unprecedented, as previous attempts to make diplomatic contact with the Offense have been uniformly rejected. Experts questioned the purpose of the mission, especially since the DoD refused to name any individuals involved.

  Holy shit.

  I look up. My eyes meet Patrick’s.

  “Nine o’clock on January nineteeth,” I say. “That’s … fifteen minutes from now.”

  “These ships we’re chasing …” Paul says slowly, “are a diplomatic mission to the Offense?”

  “I guess that’s why they didn’t respond to our hails,” Patrick says, sagging. “Security and everything.”

  I shake my head. “No, it makes no sense—”

  Luigi interrupts us. Over the PA, he says, “Good morning, guys. Just thought you’d like to know we have visual contact.”

  3

  Still struggling to digest the Raw News story, we all crowd onto the bridge. Luigi sits in the pilot’s couch with his baby dragon, Jinks, in his lap. I’m a little in awe of Luigi, even though he’s too modest to wear all his medals. He’s Francie’s grandfather, and shares with her the general attitude that life is an opponent to be wrestled into submission.