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

  “When I say we have visual contact,” he says, “this doesn’t mean we can see the ships optically. The Melisende’s telescope is not big enough for that. But the ship’s computer has decided we’re close enough to render visuals of the ships based on radar data.”

  Marguerite takes her place in the co-pilot’s couch. “Luigi, we have new information about these ships. According to the news, they are a diplomatic convoy.”

  “Is that so?” Luigi says. “They don’t look like it.”

  On the biggest screen, which is where the windshield would be if the Melisende was a car, the computer’s rendering of the ships takes shape.

  One, two, three, four … balls of fuzz.

  “What the fuck?” Patrick yells.

  The tension on the bridge is as thick as pack ice, but Luigi remains imperturbable. “They are throwing chaff out of the back of their ships. Our radar is reflecting off the chaff, so we can neither image the ships nor accurately target them.”

  He stops and glances around at me as if asking for permission to continue. This unnerves me. Luigi is three times my age and never normally bothers to ask for permission from anyone, least of all me.

  “Go on,” I say.

  “This chaffing trick is a common Offense tactic.”

  “They can’t be Offense ships,” Milosz exclaims. “It’s a diplomatic mission from Earth!”

  “We don’t know that,” Patrick says, perking up once more—and Smaug has perked up, too. Fixated on the screen, he’s practically licking his chops.

  “I agree,” I say. “It makes no sense. Why would the DoD try to contact the Offense diplomatically? Why now? And why announce it after the mission left, when it’s already a long way from Earth … coincidentally at the very same time as this story about the conspiracy broke?”

  Then we have to show Luigi the Raw News story.

  He scratches his jowls. “I flew for the Directorate of Military Intelligence a long time ago,” he says. “When they were still working for humanity, before the scum rose to the top, you understand?” He points to the paragraph about the diplomatic mission. “This has disinformation written all over it.”

  On the screen, the four balls of fuzz fly onwards. Towards the void beyond the Belt. Towards Saturn.

  “They could be Offense ships, like you said to begin with, Scatter,” Patrick says.

  Marguerite projects the balls of fuzz onto a starmap. She adds the locations of all the Earth patrol units that we know about. None of them are anywhere near here. The four mystery ships have cleverly, or luckily, slipped through a gap in our coverage. Actually, it wouldn’t have required that much cleverness or luck. Earth does not have enough ships to patrol the entire Belt perimeter, by a long chalk.

  “What do you want to do?” Patrick says to me.

  The bridge is a cave encrusted with epileptically dancing LEDs and screens full of numbers. It feels cramped, especially with Tancred taking up so much of it. I wish I wasn’t doing this on no sleep.

  “Keep going,” I say. “And hail them again.”

  *

  Five hours later, I still haven’t slept. And the unknown ships still haven’t answered our hails.

  We’re coming up behind them, overhauling them at a significantly faster speed than theirs.

  If they’re Offense ships, why don’t they put on a burst of speed and outrun us?

  The Melisende is the fastest type of ship humanity possesses. But the slowest Offense ship makes it look like a clunker. Their ships are capable of greater acceleration, for longer periods, than ours are. Their power plants put out more juice. Their drives run hotter, without melting off the backs of their ships, thanks to mysterious materials used in their construction, which our scientists have never been able to reverse-engineer.

  In fact, this is the main reason we’re losing the war. Hundreds of promising technologies have been trialed, and abandoned, without altering the basic fact that they are faster. Nothing’s stood a chance of changing the equation—until now. Until I adopted a Void Dragon.

  And so I come to a decision: give Tancred a part to play in this mess of unknown unknowns. He can turn at least some of the unknown risks into known ones.

  My mind teems with doubts, but I strive not to communicate them to him as he squeezes himself into the airlock chamber. It’s made for a maximum of four humans in EVA suits. He only barely fits.

  Go get ‘em, little scaly-butt, I think, patting his rump.

  Anticipation and excitement roll off him in waves.

  I close the chamber, cycle it, and slide down to sit on the floor of the corridor. I lace my fingers together in a praying posture and push the knuckles of my thumbs into my eyes.

  It helps that I’m so damn tired. Drowsiness washes over me the instant I shut my eyes. This makes it easer for me to immerse into my mind-meld with Tancred. My consciousness separates from flesh-and-blood me and follows Tancred out into the dark.

  I taste the vacuum—this far from Jupiter, it’s cold, insipid—and feel the weak currents of the solar wind.

  It feels so good to stretch our wings, after all this time cooped up in a metal box.

  Tancred rises over the Melisende, and I see from outside just how small and fragile our ship is. Then he gives a mighty flap, extending his wings into ghostly veils tens of klicks long, and everything—the Melisende, the stars beyond—wobbles.

  His wings are electromagnetic fields. That’s our theory. Where they intersect, they create warps that bend spacetime.

  Within a heartbeat, the Melisende shrinks to a shiny dot far behind Tancred.

  He inherited our velocity, like a running start. Now he’s flying as fast and hard as he can, racing ahead of the Melisende, towards four bright and twinkly stars that aren’t stars, that are the wakes of chaff being spat out by the mystery ships.

  We meet the chaff first. Tancred tastes it with a tongue of fire and spits it out. Yucky.

  And now the ships come into view, strung out in a diamond formation. We’re not coming up right behind them, so much as cutting a tangent through their gently curving trajectory.

  “I can see them,” I say in a voice that sounds hollow and far away.

  “Describe them, Scatter,” says Paul.

  Shock snaps me back into my body. I sit up on the floor of the corridor.

  Paul’s kneeling in front of me with a tablet computer, ready to take down whatever I say.

  “They’re not Offense ships,” I say hoarsely. “It’s two light cruisers and two couriers, all with DoD markings.”

  *

  Paul throws down his computer in disgust.

  Beelzebub rises off his shoulder, flapping, agitated.

  At the same instant, Luigi’s voice blares over the PA: “Hostile fire incoming. Point defenses engaged.”

  “They’re ours,” I shout, struggling to my feet.

  “Doesn’t change the fact they’re shooting at us,” Patrick says, lunging out of the bridge. His eyes are stars, his smile mirthless.

  He and Paul half-carry me onto the bridge and dump me in my acceleration couch. I lock my harness with shaking fingers.

  The ship judders. Patrick catches himself on the back of my couch. “Nice shooting,” he yells jubilantly.

  On the big screen, explosions flower. Marguerite, who doubles as weapons officer, is shooting down the missiles zooming towards us, triggering their detonators before they get close enough to do any damage.

  Luigi says, “I’m saving our railgun for the hostiles.”

  In the blink of an eye, these Earth ships have become hostiles.

  Using the auxiliary thrusters, Luigi yaws the ship, torquing at top speed to avoid the flak clouds left behind by the explosions. He has great reflexes. All the same, alarms shrill: microscopic pieces of shrapnel are lodging in our Whipple shields. The Melisende shudders at each impact.

  I’m here but I’m also outside, ahead, flying through the storm with Tancred.

  He flaps his wings—wobble—and la
nds with a thump on the hull of one of the larger ships.

  It’s a light cruiser, a bit smaller than our Ottokar. A ship class you often see in the inner system, escorting transports and supply ships.

  So’s the one flying 3 klicks off its port side.

  The point and rearguard ships are fast couriers. They could technically give the Melisende a run for her money, but are being forced to dawdle along at the pace of their larger, slower companions.

  That’s why they didn’t try to run away from us.

  They couldn’t.

  Tancred is still hoping against hope. He wraps his claws around the lip of the cruiser’s engine bell and sticks his head into the fiery plume of exhaust. The cruiser is burning, doing its level best to shake off the inexplicable enemy sitting on its drive housing, so the exhaust is voluminous and hot—but to Tancred, it’s luke-warm and nasty. He raises his head and bleats at the stars, crushed, Daaaaddy!

  I’m right here, little scaly-butt. Don’t eat that.

  NOTHING here I wanting!

  I know. For a moment I feel even worse about disappointing him than about the terrible, shocking fact that these human-built, human-manned ships are shooting at us, their fellow humans.

  But now they have to stop shooting, because Luigi has punched the Melisende into the gap between the first courier and the other cruiser. They must cease fire or risk hitting their friends. Our little picket is burning her heart out, engine roaring, so it sounds like we’re aboard an express train. Adding to the decibel level, the railgun emits a high-pitched, ear-splitting whine.

  Marguerite unleashes a broadside at the other cruiser.

  We flash out of the gap and away.

  Behind us, the other cruiser lights up from inside like a Halloween jack-o’-lantern, and then blows apart.

  “Nuclear rounds,” Marguerite says crisply.

  The fireball expands very rapidly in a perfect sphere. That’s how explosions work in space. Bits of the cruiser hurtle out of it in all directions. Tancred regards it with unexpected emotions: a tinge of envy, and pride.

  That is when I notice Smaug is not on the bridge.

  Neither are Wiktor, Beelzebub, or Jinks. Marguerite’s Fleur is still here.

  Tancred lets out a high, wordless cry.

  A dragon flies out of the fireball, spreading his wings. The fire reflects redly on their metallic yellow undersides—for just a second, and then the explodey gases are all burnt up, and the heat goes out.

  Smaug was born in the explosion of a reactor just like this one. For him, this fireball was claw-lickin’ good.

  As Smaug flaps away from the destruction, the surviving cruiser shudders beneath Tancred’s haunches. The light of its engine dies. A second later, tortured hull plates gape apart. Tancred widens the gap with his claws. Air rushes out, and so do Wiktor, Beelzebub, and Jinks. Bigger than they used to be, they flutter around Tancred, rubbing affectionately against him. They’re sorry that he didn’t get anything to eat, whereas they did.

  The whole aft end of the ship just sort of breaks up under us. We tumble behind it, amidst a high-velocity hail of equipment and deck segments … and people. They’re here one instant, distant debris the next.

  Meanwhile, Smaug is flapping madly towards the third ship in the erstwhile formation, the rearguard courier. He latches onto its hull—and grows to ghostly size. This is what they do when they’re going to eat bigly, as Tancred puts it. I’ve never seen one of the babies do it before. Now the same size as the courier, Smaug wraps around its drive like a python with legs, and worms his head into the engine bell.

  Again, there are no fireworks. The courier just crumples. Its tailfins break off, flavoring the vacuum with ash.

  That leaves only one ship: the lead courier. It’s burning for dear life. No longer forced to match the pace of the cruisers, it accelerates away from the Melisende.

  We can’t chase it. We have to wait for the babies. They can’t go that fast yet.

  Tancred! I yell mentally. I feel so sorry for him, and yet now I have to ask him to do one more thing. Can you catch up with that ship?

  Easy, Tancred says stoically. He shepherds the babies towards the Melisende ... and wobbles.

  As he overhauls the fleeing courier, I imagine the terror of its crew. They have just watched Void Dragons devour all three of their companions.

  Meanwhile, on the Melisende’s bridge, Patrick is trying to contact the courier. He’s sounding panicky as what we just did sinks in. Spots of red grace his white cheeks. “Come in, unidentified courier. Come in, come in!”

  Tancred overtakes the courier, and soars alongside it for a moment, scanning its length.

  Spaceplane configuration. Room for maybe fifteen people in there.

  By the light of distant Jupiter, I read the name inscribed on its nose in flowy script: Raimbaut.

  I crash back into my body, into my acceleration couch.

  “It’s them. Guys, it’s them.”

  As I speak, I’m staggering to my feet. I lurch to the comms station and grab the handset from Patrick.

  “Hardy!” I yell. “I scarcely recognize my own voice. “Hardy, IS THAT YOU?!”

  Silence fills the bridge, so thick and heavy it’s hard to breathe.

  “HARDY!”

  Finally, a male voice snarls from the radio. It could be Hardy. I don’t think so. Grief and rage distort it. “Who’s this?”

  For some dumb reason, I don’t want to implicate the Dragon Corps, even though the people on the Raimbaut just saw Void Dragons destroy three-quarters of their convoy. “This is Jay—”

  “You wanna speak to Major Scattergood?”

  My heart almost stops.

  Something clatters to the deck—I dropped the handset.

  Milosz picks it up, fumbling. Everyone else sits frozen in nerveless shock.

  Before I can think of what to say, a female voice takes over the courier’s comms. “Go to hell!” it screams. “Just go to hell! And take your monsters with you, before they destroy humanity!”

  Click.

  After about a million years, Patrick croaks, “Was that Elsa?”

  “I don’t think so,” I mutter. t didn’t sound like her voice. And I can’t imagine her screaming Go to hell! or calling the Void Dragons monsters.

  On the other hand, they did act like monsters just now. They ate three human ships.

  And I guess I never knew Elsa as well as I thought I did.

  Milosz says in a hoarse whisper, “It has to be her. Major Scattergood. Elsa’s a major.”

  I nod. Brokenly, I say, “Guys, I—I suspected she was part of the conspiracy. But I didn’t say anything … I didn’t say anything.”

  I’m literally about to break down in tears. This cannot be happening.

  The baby dragons save me by scrabbling at the outside of the airlock. Patrick goes to let them aboard. They crowd into the bridge. Every one of them is bigger than they were before, a living testament to the atrocities they just committed. Smaug, having eaten two ships, is biggest of all, the size of a German Shepherd or a wolfhound, the kind of dog that can knock you down. Patrick slaps his side and rubs his head, calling him a good dragon. His voice lacks all life.

  Dim spots of infrared dot the blackness on the big screen. Some of those spots will be human bodies, slowly cooling.

  Tancred’s back. I go to let him in. As he squeezes into the passage, I bury my face in his mighty side. His hide—not scales, but some warm, dry material beyond the understanding of human or Offense science—smells like gunpowder. A minute ago I thought I was going to bust out crying, but now my eyes are dry.

  Marguerite’s voice pulls me back to the bridge. “Commander, I have a call from XO Moon for you.”

  Sara. They’ll have seen the fight from Mingetty. Well, they won’t really have seen it. They’ll have seen that there were four mystery ships, then stuff exploded, and now there’s only one.

  I take the handset. “Hey, Sara.”

  “What the h
eck just happened?”

  The sound of her voice rocks me. Emotions threaten to return. I push them away. In a wooden tone, I fill her in on the fight.

  “So it was a diplomatic mission?” she says in horror.

  “No.” I’m not explaining properly. Too broken up. Too confused. “There never was a diplomatic mission. That was just the DoD trying not to faceplant in public. This was the conspiracy. They didn’t ask permission to go, much less get approval. They just ran. Of course, as insiders, they knew where our patrols were going to be, and they slipped between them. The DoD announced this diplomatic mission after they left, to make it look less like they were played for fools.”

  “But why’d they run?” Sara says. She’s a former Marine. For her, it’s difficult to conceive of running for any reason.

  “Because their cover was about to be blown, I think. You saw Raw News, right?”

  There’s a light-speed lag of about 1.5 seconds between our exchanges, which makes the conversation feel stilted and unnatural.

  “Yeah,” Sara says. “Zach was showing that to everyone, going, ‘This is huge, this is huge.’”

  “I think it is kind of huge,” I say. “The conspirators must’ve found out about these unnamed sources going to the media. Maybe the sources were even part of the conspiracy themselves … whistleblowers. Anyway, they knew the shit was about to hit the fan, so they got out before they could be arrested.”

  “Well, the traitorous little bitches,” Sara says. She goes on to unleash her considerable Marine vocabulary of swear words upon the conspirators. She’s trying to make me feel better about having destroyed three Earth ships and killed God knows how many people. I appreciate it, but it doesn’t help.

  Patrick breaks in. “Sara, one of the ones that got away was Elsa Scattergood.”

  “Jay’s aunt?”

  “Yup.”

  “She’s … what? They’re holding her hostage?”

  For an instant, my brain latches onto this seductive explanation. Then discards it as false hope. “No,” I say tonelessly. “She’s one of them. She’s part of the conspiracy.”

  “Shit,” Sara says after a moment. “I’m sorry.”