Exiles of the Belt (Void Dragon Hunters Book 4) Page 4

  “We should go back and scan the debris,” Milosz says, still staring at the images of the destruction we caused. “Someone might’ve survived—”

  I cut him off. “No one survived that.”

  And in a sense, we didn’t, either.

  My faith in humanity died today.

  4

  But false hope is as pesky as the real kind. It just won’t go away.

  On our way back to Mingetty, I sit staring at a picture of Elsa.

  This is the last email I received from her, a month ago. She had been on Earth, coordinating a new Void Dragon egg hunt. At least that’s what she said she was doing. At any rate, she managed to squeeze in a week of leave, which she spent with my mom in Kenya. This picture was taken at Mom’s house in the Great Rift Valley. Adam, Mom’s boyfriend, took it; I can see his shadow on the lawn. Elsa and my mother stand side by side, holding up a sign that says HAPPY BIRTHDAY JAY! On the garden table in front of them, candles on a birthday cake flicker palely in the sunlight, arranged in the digits 26.

  My eyes prickle. My throat feels tight.

  How could she have betrayed humanity?

  How could she have betrayed me?

  I start a new email. Re: Re: Happy Birthday!!

  Dear Elsa …

  What to say? Will she ever see this email? Do they even have email on the Offense’s arkships?

  Of course they do. Captain Gutmangler, the jelly who captured us on Callisto, bragged about how the Offense has infiltrated the DoD’s IT systems. He showed me how he could break our zero-level encryption. That’s how I know it is possible. I was trying to replicate his feat. But I don’t think I’ll be doing much work on our secret project in future. There doesn’t seem to be any point anymore.

  Dear Elsa, how’s Saturn?

  “They won’t make it,” Patrick says.

  I look around. He’s standing behind me. I don’t bother minimizing the email I’m working on. I’ll never send it, anyway. “What do you mean they won’t make it?”

  “They’re in a courier. Those ships are built to go fast, not far. They don’t have the life-support capacity for long journeys.” His eyes are red-rimmed. Smaug stands beside him, looking hangdog. “Figure they were going to refuel and top up their consumables from the cruisers. Now they can’t.”

  “Oh … fuck.”

  “Yep.”

  We have killed Elsa and whoever else is on board the Raimbaut, as surely as if we put a nuke into them. Without the support of the rest of the convoy, they will die in the dark long before they reach Saturn.

  I mash my knuckles against the table, welcoming the pain.

  “You better notify BeltCOM, anyway,” Patrick says, wandering away.

  “Yeah, I’m gonna do that,” I yell after him. He seems to be laying it all on me, and anger gets the better of me. “Just as soon as I figure out how to explain that your dragon killed a hundred people.”

  He swings around. “Was seventy, eighty, tops.”

  “Christ, Patrick, I’m sorry—”

  “No, it’s OK.” Patrick’s shoulders slump. “I knew he’d do something like that, someday.”

  “It’s OK,” I say feebly.

  “No, it fucking isn’t,” he says, and leaves the common room. Smaug trots after him like a worried dog. He doesn’t know what he did wrong.

  Left alone, I make up my mind. On the spur of the moment, I write a completely fictional report for BeltCOM, denying any responsibility for the decimation of the convoy. I spin a tale about how we went to investigate, just in time to see an Offense patrol blowing the conspirators to shit. We barely escaped with our lives. Reading back over it, I’m surprised how convincing it sounds. I should be an author, not Zach.

  Anyway, it’s not like Hardy and Elsa will be coming back to prove I’m lying.

  I hit send, and then I go to sleep.

  When I wake up, it takes me a minute to figure out where I am. The world puts itself together like a puzzle around me. Tancred’s head, resting next to mine on my flat inflatable pillow. One apple-green eye, opening. I’m in my berth on the Melisende. Tancred is standing beside my bunk, has been sleeping on his feet like horses do. I’ve been hugging his neck in my sleep. One arm has gone totally dead. A smell of sour laundry: Tancred’s blankie, a disgusting old gun-cleaning rag which he will not permit me to wash, hangs from his jaws.

  Agitated voices resound through the ship.

  And Patrick’s yelling at me from the doorway.

  “Scatter! Scatter!”

  Over Tancred’s back, I can see Patrick’s head poking out of the ring collar of his EVA suit. Why’s he wearing that?

  “Trouble,” he barks, and vanishes.

  I shake the sleep out of my head and reach the bridge in two seconds flat, still wearing sweatpants and nothing else. “What the hell?”

  Francie’s voice answers me, blaring from the comms station.

  “—holed up in the tunnel. I’m pretty sure we’ve lost the Ottokar. Zach took off and engaged them but—”

  “What?!” I yell. “What happened?”

  “Mingetty is under attack,” Patrick says tautly. He’s standing behind Luigi’s couch, flexing his EVA-gauntleted fists. Paul and Milosz are climbing into their own EVA suits. Luigi and Marguerite are changing seats. Bubble-headed, blue and yellow-skinned, Luigi drops into the pilot’s couch. Marguerite goes to suit up.

  “Buy a fucking clue, Scatter,” Francie yells. The speed of her response tells me we’re at effective zero latency distance from Mingetty. Almost there. “We’re under attack by the Offense. They snuck up on us in stealth mode, with their heat emissions shielded, travelling inertially until they were right on top of us.”

  I knew, I knew we shouldn’t have sent that radio comms blast.

  “Then they fired on the Ottokar. Totally destroyed the ship’s crew quarters, so we couldn’t evacuate in the ship. So Sara decided we should retreat to the tunnel, and that’s where we—uh!—are now,” she finishes at shrieking pitch, as static overwhelms her voice.

  “Is Sara OK?” I yell back.

  The Melisende accelerates so suddenly that the inertial dampeners can’t compensate in time. I’m thrown off my feet and hit my elbow on the step leading down to the crew couches.

  “Incoming,” Luigi shouts. “Attempting to evade—”

  I’m just picking myself up when the ship jolts, and I fall down again.

  The lights go off. Alarms wail. Emergency LED strip lighting throws the bridge into a spooky green twilight.

  “Solid slug,” Marguerite says. “Port shield integrity down to 10%.”

  Patrick shoves my EVA suit at me. “Helmets, everyone!” he orders. “Going to radio comms in ten, nine …”

  Lying on my back, I wriggle my legs in. The smart alloy snugs up around me. “Luigi, do we have visual contact with the hostiles?”

  “Port side sensors destroyed,” Luigi says, tinnily, from the EVA helmet lying next to me. Two-thirds of a panorama appears on the big screen.

  Mingetty. A dull gray blob. The gray part is the dayside, facing Jupiter. The other half is lit by a blue chemical flame jetting from the surface like a welding torch.

  That would be our consumables depot. The blue flame is our liquid oxygen.

  The glare lights the bellies of two ships drifting dangerously low above the asteroid, locked together: the Ottokar and an Offense ship about half its size—

  “Go, Zach!” Patrick yells. “He rammed them!”

  It takes me another instant to see what Patrick saw immediately. That Offense ship is only half a ship—the back half. The Ottokar is welded crosswise to what remains of it, embedded in the raw end of the Offense ship’s severed fuselage. Its nose is a crumpled mess. Zach must’ve rammed the Offense ship head-on, punched through its hull on sheer momentum, and let the Ottokar’s drive do the rest of the work. He’s a hero. He’s definitely dead. Is Sara dead, too?

  I fumble my helmet on. “Was that the only—”

  BAA
AAM-SCREE …. eeeeech.

  My helmet seals shut out the horrendous noise ripping through the Melisende. Just in time.

  The noise takes the front of the bridge with it.

  The big screen vanishes. In its place, I get a real-life view of Mingetty, hurtling at me like a fastball.

  The atmosphere blows out of the ship. I am swept off the floor, suddenly weightless. Together with my friends and their dragons and everything that was not riveted down on the bridge, I tumble into the void.

  5

  I’m freefalling through space. If I had eaten any breakfast, it would be on its way back up. Up is down, left is right, and right is wrong. I pulse the mobility thrusters in my spacesuit’s backpack, trying to orient myself towards the gray blob of Mingetty. But debris keeps clipping my legs, sending me tumbling in different directions.

  The blunt pearly snout of an Offense ship eclipses Mingetty. My nausea turns to cold terror.

  Obviously, the ship Zach destroyed wasn’t the only attacker, after all.

  The Offense ship is so close, I can see the bouquet of guns beneath its forward sensor blister swivelling in every direction, targeting me and the other spacesuits plummetting towards the asteroid.

  Tancred flies up beneath me. Daddy! he cries, and collides with me from underneath. I end up winded, splayed across his back. I have just enough strength to wrap my arms around his neck as he flaps straight at the Offense ship.

  He is not dismayed by the loss of the Melisende. He doesn’t even really understand what just happened. As far as he’s concerned, it’s breakfast time.

  The Offense ship flinches, pulling in its guns. It dodges away from us, down towards Mingetty.

  They know what they’re facing! Tancred’s fame must have spread far and wide among the jellies.

  “Fuck you, goopheads!” I croak.

  It was a trap, wasn’t it? They were waiting for us to get back. Their plan was to let the Melisende land, and then destroy both ships on the ground. Sara said that Zach took off in the Ottokar to engage them. His brave action forced their hand.

  Giving us a chance to save whoever is still alive.

  I urge Tancred on, not that he needs urging. He swoops after the ship. It’s heading for the entangled Ottokar and the Offense frigate—

  —and past them. It’s going to land on the surface.

  I hear Patrick and the others, still stranded in Mingetty’s orbital space, cheering over the radio as Tancred picks up speed, stooping on the Offense ship like a falcon on its prey.

  Mingetty fills my field of vision. It has turned, carrying the former location of our base back to the dayside. The oxygen fire has gone out. There’s nothing left of our surface depot except a few V-frames that used to hold tanks, and scorch marks on the regolith. I can see the stark edge of the big crater, the black mouth of our tunnel, and armored jellies clustered around it.

  The Offense ship throws up a linear plume of asteroid dust and surface rubble. It’s landed on the crater floor, right outside the tunnel.

  Tancred thumps onto its engine housing, and—

  “Wait a minute! Please!”

  That is not a human voice. It’s speaking English over my suit radio, but it’s electronically generated.

  It is the voice of—

  “Gutmangler! I am your friend! We met on Callisto!”

  I’m startled enough to hold Tancred back for a moment. Wait, little scaly-butt—

  Tancred vibrates with impatient hunger. He can smell the ship’s drive, just a tantalizing hull-thickness away. He’s desperate to feed.

  Hold off, little scaly-butt. Let me do my human thing. Then you can do your Void Dragon thing.

  “Gutmangler!” I yell. I know this jelly. He took me, Francie, and Sara captive on Callisto. He threatened to pull our arms and legs off. I wonder if it really is him. “Stand your troops down, NOW! Tell them to come out with their hands, I mean their tentacles in the air!”

  Put me down on the ground, I tell Tancred.

  I’m not at all sure he will listen to me. He didn’t on Callisto. Nothing gets between a Void Dragon and its food.

  If they don’t do what I say, burn ‘em. ‘Kay?

  To my surprise and relief, Tancred snakes his head back and fastens his jaws gently around my arm. Scooting around on top of the Offense ship, lowering his top half so he’s clinging to the side engine nacelle with his foreclaws, he lowers me by one arm to the ground. This might be sore if the gravity on Mingetty were not 0.016% of Earth’s. When my boots hit the ground, I remind myself not to push off from the surface, to move in low strides, with my body angled so far forward I’d be falling on my face, if this were Earth.

  “Do it!” I yell at Gutmangler. “NOW!”

  I stride into the entrance of the tunnel complex. A shallow ramp rakes downwards into darkness. I kick something, lose my balance and stride forward uncontrollably, hands out in an automatic reflex to break my fall. But I don’t fall, because this is not Earth. I look back and see an EVA suit drifting across the bright exit of the tunnel, limp in silhouette. I can read death in the curled, empty fingers of its gloves. Which of my crew was that? God, I hate the jellies so much—

  And here’s one of them gliding towards me, a ten-foot flying saucer standing on an inverted cone—a cold gas thruster. If I had a weapon I’d blow it away. Luckily, I don’t. Its guns, mounted on the top and edges of its dome, point upwards, in lieu of raising its tentacles.

  I grit my teeth and give it a kick in the cone to help it on its way out of the tunnel.

  Striding deeper into the tunnel, I meet jelly after jelly, withdrawing from the fight on Gutmangler’s orders. My orders. Some of them salute me with their guns.

  My headlamp picks out more bodies—human and Offense. In several places the roof has collapsed, testifying to a fierce firefight. All our hard work, wasted. I climb and jump over piles of rubble, calling out for Sara.

  At last, far down at the end of the tunnel, I meet the survivors of Mingetty Base. They walk out of the half-constructed cavern where we were going to put our habs. My heart constricts. Eleven … twelve … thirteen? That’s all? They are carrying dead and wounded comrades in their arms.

  “Sara?” I blurt desperately. “Sara?”

  One of the dusty EVA-suited personnel steps out ahead of the group. She’s holding a jackhammer like a weapon. It’s Francie. “What took you so freaking long?”

  I can’t get a word out. Sara’s dead. She must be, or Francie wouldn’t have taken command.

  “I’ll tell you why any of us survived at all,” Francie says. “Apart from my tunnel. Hey guys, you’re not sorry I made you work so hard on it now, right?” Weak laughter crackles from the survivors. “That’s why.” Francie jerks a thumb behind her.

  Faith prowls out of the cavern. I don’t recognize her for a second, because she is now as big as the new-look Smaug. She slinks low to the ground, panting little wisps of fire—and Sara crawls beside her, on hands and knees, one arm wrapped tightly around Faith’s neck. She’s down there because she is managing Faith. The blue dragon has always been a bit … different. She needs careful handling.

  “Faith ate their energy weapons,” Francie says. “Soaked ‘em up and asked for more. It was awesome.”

  Sara stands up. “Welcome back, sir,” she says formally. “Mingetty Base is yours.”

  “Sara—” My voice breaks. Emotions surge, firewalled by the vacuum between us.

  “Are the jellies all dead?” she asks.

  “Unfortunately not,” I say.

  We climb back out of the tunnel. Our mood turns somber as we pass the human corpses along the way, and reaches a cold boiing point as we emerge onto the crater floor.

  Patrick and the others from the Melisende have reached the surface. with the help of their dragons. Now they’re facing off with a crowd of jellies. Gutmangler’s ship towers over the confrontation, a mother-of-pearl teardrop balanced on stick-legs.

  Tancred stands between the two sides, re
aring imperiously, the smaller dragons flapping around him. He is keeping the two sides apart.

  And he still hasn’t eaten Gutmangler’s ship. He kept his promise, trusting me to keep mine.

  So now I must.

  Searching the sky, I point up at the Ottokar and the other Offense ship—they’ve drifted closer to Mingetty; they’re going to crash-land in a few minutes. “That one,” I say to Tancred. Mercifully, the Offense ship’s aft half is intact. The reactor’s still in there. “It’s all yours.”

  Tancred takes off in a swirl of emerald wings. The next thing we see is a fiery explosion of hull plates as he burns and tears through the Offense ship’s hull to get at its drive. He was really hungry.

  That leaves us and the jellies yelling and hooting at each other. Flying saucers and twenty-sided shock troopers surround the small crowd of two-legged spacesuits.

  Francie pushes through the jellies to Patrick.

  I step into the rapidly narrowing space between the two sides which Tancred vacated.

  “Out of the way, Scatter,” Patrick says calmly. Him and Francie are two of a kind. They want to slaughter every jelly they can reach.

  Maybe they could. But we’re outnumbered pretty badly. And the horrible fact is, we need the jellies’ help.

  “Gutmangler!” I yell.

  One of the jellies shoves forward. “My little two-legged friend!” Gutmangler booms. He wears a state-of-the-art Offense EVA suit, with each tentacle individually encased in armor. He walks on the tips of his outer tentacles, each of which is as thick as my thigh at its base. “You are stickier than ever!”

  Before he can get any further, the jeering from our side crescendos. Someone throws a rock at Gutmangler. His jellies surge around him protectively. A laser beam lances towards the rock-thrower.

  Faith pounces over our heads. She latches onto the energy weapon, drags it out of the jelly’s tentacle, and drinks its power source dry. Black cardboard drifts down.

  Sara grabs her dragon around the neck. Pulling Faith along with her, she boldly turns her back on the jellies and faces our people. “Shut the fuck up, all of you! We know this guy!” She jerks a thumb at Gutmangler, now looming over me. “He’s OK!” Click. She mutters privately to me, “He better be OK, Jay—”