Soldiers of Callisto (Void Dragon Hunters Book 3) Read online

  We are all sick of eating caviar, sashimi, and oysters. I know, I know: REMF problems.

  If I could overlook the fact that Tancred keeps striking out, Lofn would actually be a pretty great posting. All we have to do is gather seaweed, maintain the trenches, and sunbathe. But the Marines don’t see it that way. They want action, and consider trench maintenance beneath their dignity. Sunbathing they’re good at.

  Francie, on the other hand, likes to work. Me and her and Jeremy were originally supposed to pretend we were doing research for our imaginary reptilian introduction study. The army has thousands of studies going on at any given time, so there are always random people wandering around, mangling the unspoken etiquette of the front lines and cutting in line for chow. I thought it was a pretty good gig. But after a few days of doing not much Francie said she was bored, so she volunteered to join the Marines’ work rota. Then Jeremy and I had to volunteer too. If Francie thought this would endear us to the Marines, she was mistaken. They despise anyone who actually works. It shows them up for the prima donnas they are.

  But Francie relishes their disgruntlement. She is beautiful, so she can get away with that. Humming a tune, she keeps mending the trench, and I glumly stick a few clamps in, until the all-clear sounds over our radios.

  We climb out of the trench and remove our helmets. The jarheads return to what they were doing, which is goofing off. Francie and I also return to what we were doing, which is laying out dulse to dry in the sun. There are acres of black rubber sheets spread out around that big kelp tree. It’s pretty amazing how the kelp can grow up as well as down. The blades spreading above our heads are green instead of brown, gene-modded to absorb energy via photosynthesis.

  Jeremy lies amidst the drying seaweed, shirtless and bronzed. His cyborg eye glints in the sun. It annoys the Marines, who aren’t allowed body modifications. Jeremy was in the 44th Mechanized Horse before he accidentally joined the Dragon Unit. Even former cavalrymen think their shit doesn’t stink.

  “You didn’t take cover in the ‘blast protection facility,’” Francie greets him, with air quotes.

  “I was busy,” he says, tapping his eye. It has a tiny built-in speaker. Classical music competes with the sighing of the wind. Jeremy cuddles a bundle wrapped in a towel: his Void Dragon egg.

  “Busy,” Francie echoes.

  “I’m playing Bach to her. Classical music is scientifically proven to enhance emotional intelligence.”

  “Her?” Francie says. “Why are you so sure it’s a her?”

  “I just am.”

  “Mine’s a girl, Scatter’s is a boy.” I’m back to being Scatter. “They’re always the same sex as their owners.”

  “Owners?” I murmur. I don’t think of myself as Tancred’s owner. If anything, it feels like he’s my owner. But that doesn’t accurately describe our relationship, either. He sees me as his daddy, and I am trying hard to be a good one. Jeremy will be the best Void Dragon daddy ever, if his attentiveness to his egg is anything to go by.

  “It’s definitely a boy,” Francie needles him.

  “We’ve been over this before,” Jeremy says. “Your massive sample size of two Void Dragons doesn’t prove anything.”

  He grins, to take the sting out of it, but Francie is not appeased. She plops down in the pool of water that has leaked out of a basket of fresh dulse. “How can you decide what to call it if you don’t know what sex it is?”

  “I do know,” Jeremy says with remarkable patience. “And actually I’m leaning towards Prudence.”

  “Prudence.”

  “Or Charity.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It’s not as silly as Pinkie Pie,” Jeremy says under his breath, catching my eye. I feel bad for smiling, but Francie really can be touchy, especially about her Void Dragon.

  With perfect timing, Pinkie Pie flutters out of the kelp tree. Cerise, kitten-sized, she cries, Mommy! and lands on Francie’s head. Francie winces, then lifts Pinkie Pie off and sets her down on the rim of the dulse basket. She’s not rough with the baby dragon, just … distant. I open my mouth, then shut it again. I feel like Francie is not giving Pinkie Pie enough love. That could have terrible consequences. But I don’t know how to bring it up without coming off as judgmental.

  So I say nothing. I take double handfuls of dulse and spread them out on the plastic, separating the fronds. Dulse is also known as carrageenan. It’s used in everything from yogurt to deli meats to bread. Tancred may be a failure as a secret super-weapon, but at least I’m contributing to Callisto’s food supply. Every gramme of food that doesn’t have to be imported from off-world helps.

  Despite the negative emotions roiling me, I keep sneaking glances at Francie. Her caramel hair is in a ponytail, showing off her slight widow’s peak. Sunlight glistens on her defined arms. She’s rolled her wetsuit down to her waist, so her top half is only covered by a tank-style bathing suit. It doesn’t quite hide her …

  No. Stop it, Scattergood. Just stop it.

  I’ve never met another girl as beautiful as Francesca Collins. I know that she gets treated differently on account of her beauty, and I refuse to be that guy. (One of those 1,000 guys on Lofn alone.) But it’s getting harder to hide my enormous crush on her.

  Especially since her boyfriend, Patrick, is not here.

  He’s back on Earth, with the rest of the crew, hunting Void Dragon eggs in Europe.

  Probably half the reason Francie is so touchy is because she misses him.

  To distract myself, I squint up into the sky … and there’s Tancred, dropping towards Lofn like a green stone.

  The Marines over in the barley field yell in alarm. They know it’s just my ‘gene-modded lizard,’ but they’re so conditioned to view things falling out of the sky as mortal threats that they can’t quite take his behavior in stride. He snaps his wings out at the last second, braking, and skims above their heads.

  One of them shoots at him.

  I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t actually see the muzzle flash, and hear the report.

  The vast oceanic distances swallow the sound, and I’m off running, arms swinging, pounding through the barley. The raft does not sway or bounce underfoot: it’s just too big. But Callisto’s artificially enhanced gravity is only 65% as strong as Earth’s, so I run in great raking bounds. I reach the group of Marines at the same time as Tancred circles back, soaring lower. His direction of flight identifies the shooter.

  A wiry jarhead with zits on his cheeks, brandishing his sidearm.

  That’s all I see before Tancred engulfs him in a jet of flame.

  For a second he’s silhouetted in the fire, screaming the most awful scream I have ever heard. Then the fire steals the oxygen from his lungs. His buddies charge at him, fearlessly braving the flames. They knock him to the ground and roll him over and over, smothering the fire with their own bodies.

  Sparks smoke in the sea barley.

  One of the Marines performs CPR on the blackened corpse while another shouts the rhythm. “One two three four, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive, uh uh uh uh, stayin’ alive …”

  It is plainly futile.

  The guy is dead.

  I stand there at the edge of the chaos, my mouth hanging open.

  Before we came here, I vowed to stop being such a wuss. To act instead of just standing there while the shit hits the fan.

  Was there anything I could have done?

  If I hadn’t been mindlessly mooning over Francie …

  Tancred thumps to the ground beside me. He nuzzles my hip. My hand automatically goes out to rub his head.

  Sorry, Daddy.

  His voice is small with woe.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I mutter, although it obviously was. This is like what happened at the reception on Ceres, when Tancred got spooked and set the decorations on fire. The difference is that Tancred is bigger now. His dragon-fire doesn’t just singe. It kills.

  The other Marines round on me. “Your pet murdered him!”r />
  “I’m gonna blow it the fuck away,” snarls one, advancing on us. His big, tattooed fists grip his sidearm, levelled at my nuts, which is also the level of Tancred’s head. I know this guy. He blatantly hits on Francie. His name’s Schultz.

  I kneel and wrap my arms around Tancred. If Schultz tries to blow my dragon away, Tancred will barbecue him. I have to deter him. “Your guy shot at him first!”

  “That makes it OK to burn him to death?” Schultz gestures fiercely to his friends. They circle around and drag on my utility belt, trying to separate me from Tancred. I kick them. We’re all yelling at each other, while the dead guy lies there staring at the sky with eyes like a baked fish. Francie runs up with Pinkie Pie on her shoulder and screams at them to leave me alone.

  One of the Marines grabs Pinkie Pie.

  Tancred is very, very protective of Pinkie Pie. He rises on his hind legs, throwing me off. He lollops over to the Marine who’s got Pinkie Pie—No burn! I mentally yell—and slashes at him with a forefoot. Tancred’s claws are quite long now, and as sharp as cleavers.

  The jarhead stumbles back with a howl, clutching the side of his face, blood gushing through his fingers.

  Pinkie Pie flutters back to Francie.

  Didn’t burn, Daddy, Tancred says proudly. Blood glistens on his claws.

  “Attenshun!!” An officer’s voice blares through the mayhem. “Marines! What the fuck you doin’?”

  I have a fleeting memory of that girl on the crew shuttle telling me about genus Officerus, specialty ass-chewing. Now, I could weep with gratitude for the presence of this Marine captain. He stalks up to us and shoos his jarheads away from me and Tancred and Francie. His dark face is practically eggplant-colored with rage.

  The Marines erupt. “Sir, sir, sir, it killed Henriquez!”

  “Quiet!”

  Then the captain sees the body of Henriquez. His face changes, and I know that our stay on bucolic Lofn is over.

  2

  We’re told to remain in our quarters while they contact ARES.

  As ‘visiting researchers,’ we’re staying in the main building instead of in the barracks. Our rooms—three in a row—share the third-floor verandah that runs around the building. From here, we can see all Lofn spread out, shaped like two capital Es, back to back, with eight horizontals instead of three. The bottom two horizontals are plain green foam, unplanted. One of them is the pier for our support boats. They’re building some kind of new installation on the other one. Construction noise grinds away at us through the morning.

  There are a few chairs on the verandah. Francie and I sit side by side in glum silence. The construction crew has knocked off for lunch. The fourth-floor verandah shades us from the sun. Jeremy’s in his room, probably giving his egg a massage or something.

  I feel slightly seasick. I haven’t felt this way since our first day here. Lofn is actually rising and falling all the time on Callisto’s long slow swells, but you stop noticing it. I raise my eyes to the blue horizon—this is said to be a cure for seasickness. There are no other rafts or ships in sight. We might be alone on Callisto. Under other circumstances I would quite like this feeling.

  “I figure they’ll send us back to Ceres,” Francie says, breaking the silence.

  I nod.

  “Goddammit!” she exclaims. “I hate letting Elsa down like this.”

  A short laugh escapes me. She hates letting Elsa down like this? Elsa is my aunt. And I was the one who screwed up. Tancred, me; same difference.

  “What’s your problem, Scatter? You think it’s funny?”

  “No,” I fumble. A seaplane has just landed in Lofn harbor, alongside the bottom two horizontal of the righthand E. People are being ferried ashore, as we were three weeks ago. “Look: MPs.”

  Military policemen. My favorite people. Not. Maybe they’re here to take us away.

  “Oh, Pinkie,” Francie says to her dragon, curled on her lap. “Yummy yummies.”

  Pinkie Pie hatched when a bunch of MPs shot at her, back in Brussels. She now has a taste for the output of their Bulldog energy weapons, just as Tancred has a taste for Offense ship drives. We verified this experimentally before we came here. Francie now has her own Bulldog and a whole crate of rechargeable power packs. I’ve seen her feeding Pinkie Pie as if she were giving a baby its bottle, just cradling the little dragon in the crook of her elbow and shooting the gun into her mouth. It’s cute and horrifying at the same time. I wish it could be that easy for me and Tancred.

  “Maybe you and Pinkie could stay on,” I say, trying to find a silver lining. “It wasn’t your fault, after all. And we can prove Pinkie’s harmless, as long as she gets her ten kilowatts a day …”

  I’m trying to be selfless. After all, the last thing I want to do is return to Ceres while Francie stays here. So it stuns me when she turns on me, eyes bright with anger. “Yeah, rub it in, why don’t you? Your dragon eats Offense ships. Mine only drinks non-lethal energy beams. Thanks for reminding me how useless she is.”

  Pinkie Pie burrows her head into Francie’s stomach, begging to be found worthy, begging for love, but Francie just dumps her on the floor and sits back, arms folded. I see tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. I swallow. I’m such an idiot. Why didn’t I realize that this is why Francie is unhappy with Pinkie Pie? It’s not because she isn’t close to Pinkie—it’s because she’s so close to her. If Pinkie is a failure, that makes Francie herself a failure by extension.

  Now, I sense, would not be the best time to remind her that Tancred barbecued a Marine this morning, so he isn’t exactly a paragon of warlike usefulness, either.

  “Um, well, Pinkie can kill ‘em with sheer cuteness,” I say, bending down and holding out my fingers to the poor little non-lethal dragon. She creeps across the verandah to Tancred and clambers behind his foreleg to hide.

  “Do you actually realize,” Francie says furiously, “how sick I am of hearing that kind of thing? ‘Oh, you’re too cute to be in the army,’” she imitates a jarhead’s drawl. “Yeah, fuck you very much.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I say. “You’re not cute, you’re beautiful. There’s a big difference.”

  Francie springs out of her seat. Too late, I realize I’ve once again said the worst possible thing I could say. I think for a split second she might actually hit me, but she just scoops Pinkie Pie up and stalks away towards her own room.

  To get there, she has to pass Jeremy’s door. He calls to her from inside. She ignores him.

  A moment later he emerges, raises his eyebrows at me, and heads into Francie’s room without knocking.

  I slump in my chair and watch the MPs escort two men along the dock. These are the ones who just arrived on the seaplane. Prisoners or VIPs? VIPs, I think. Nothing to do with us. One’s tall and skinny, the other’s short and fat. They walk between the harbor buildings towards the main facility. Short & Fat is carrying a briefcase, Tall & Skinny is empty-handed.

  I listlessly rub Tancred’s neck. I feel more seasick than ever.

  In Francie’s room, she and Jeremy are talking. I can’t make out what they’re saying, but I hear Francie laugh. Jeremy has a gift for cheering people up, something I didn’t realize when I first met him. I thought he was just an asshole.

  They both come out of Francie’s room. She’s carrying her computer. “I forgot about this,” she says to me. “I got it this morning. I was gonna show you.”

  She no longer sounds furious at me. I can’t believe I’m forgiven, but I’ll take what I can get.

  Which turns out to be a video from Patrick.

  We cluster on the verandah to watch it. The video opens with a long-distance shot of reindeer grazing on a snow-covered slope. There are approximately ten thousand of the magnificent beasts. The camera pans, taking in a hilly white landscape. “Schleswig-Holstein,” Patrick intones in voiceover. “Once the breadbasket of Germany. Now the lichen-basket of Germany.”

  Two riders canter into the frame. They are not riding horses.
Well, they are, but the horses are mechas. I feel a pang of envy. Patrick and I rode horse mechas in the Netherlands. It was harder than I expected, but pretty fun. At least, it would have been fun if the 44th Cavalry, Jeremy’s former outfit, had not been chasing us.

  These riders are not being chased. They’re not trespassing in a military exclusion zone. They’re following the reindeer, making sure the herd stays together. “They need to work on their seats,” Jeremy says with a professional’s critical eye. But the riders in the video are clearly having a grand old time, making their horses rear, snow flying from their hooves.

  “There are wolves around here,” Patrick’s voiceover says. “The regular kind, and the human kind. Reindeer is a preferred food for both kinds. Good thing there are professional cowboys on the job—as well as us!”

  The camera zooms right in on the riders, and one of them’s Patrick. He must have gotten someone else to film this. The other one is Badrick, or so I assume based on the strip of ebony skin visible between his ski mask and snow goggles. Patrick hasn’t bothered with either. His cheeks are red, his eyelashes are frozen, and he’s grinning hugely.

  “Hi, Francie.”

  I shoot a glance at Francie. Staring at the screen, her face is soft. I suddenly feel like a turd for deluging her with longing looks, and for saying she was beautiful. She is, but she’s also dating Patrick. And I wouldn’t get between them for the world. I actually convinced her to give him another chance, back in Brussels. He deserves it. He deserves her. He’s one of the best friends I have made since I joined the army …

  … and I’m jealous as hell that he’s getting to play cowboy in Germany, while I sit on a raft on Callisto, waiting to find out if I will be put in jail or just packed off to Ceres in disgrace.

  “So has Pinkie chomped on any MPs yet?”

  Francie chuckles when Patrick says this. She bit my head off for saying basically the same thing.

  “What about Tancred? Bet the jellies are trying to figure out what the heck is snacking on their supply ships.”

  If only.

  “You guys just wait. We’re gonna show you how it’s done.”