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

  I take a deep breath. Am I doing the human thing? Or am I being a wimp? I don’t know. All I know is I have to do this, or more people will die.

  “Gutmangler, you are also very sticky and viscous.” These are Offense terms of praise. “But we have kicked your ass this time.” A piece of the other Offense ship’s hull crashes to the ground behind us, both underscoring my point and undermining it. We did not kick the Offense’s ass. Tancred did. “We will let you live—”

  Mutters from our side. I raise my voice.

  “I said, we will let you live! But only if you give us your ship!”

  More protests.

  Can’t they see? Don’t they realize how desperate our situation is? The Ottokar is a wreck, the Melisende is trashed, and our supply depot is a memory. The only way we are going to live past the expiration of our personal air supplies is if we get aboard Gutmangler’s ship. That’s why I didn’t let Tancred eat it. It is our only chance of survival.

  Gutmangler isn’t stupid. He sees it. The same considerations, of course, apply to the jellies.

  He tilts his dome. “I have no choice, do I?”

  “Not if you want to live,” I say.

  And it seems that Gutmangler does want to live, more than he wants to die for his cause. He raises a tentacle and points at his own ship.

  “This is the Gatecrasher Wielding A Broken Beer Bottle. It is yours.”

  I stare up at the gargantuan teardrop. “Maybe I’ll rename it,” I mutter.

  A startled cry from Tancred interrupts me. I crane up.

  The other Offense ship is now a black husk, coming apart.

  Tancred pops out of its side.

  Something wriggles in his claws.

  Daddy! Look what I finding!

  All the other dragons take off and flap up to meet Tancred. They escort him back to the surface. Jellies and humans scatter to make room for him to land. He is now the size of a young elephant.

  He lifts one foreclaw to reveal a black lump the size of a mouse.

  It raises its head and peeps.

  Gutmangler gargles joyfully. He rushes forward. Tancred breathes fire, keeping him at bay.

  “My Void Dragon!” Gutmangler burbles, stretching out his manipulator tentacles. “Huh, huh, huh.” He coughs out an Offensive laugh. “It worked!”

  6

  Last year, when the conspiracy shot down the Delacroixes’ private spaceplane, 316 Void Dragon eggs fell into the oceans of Callisto.

  In regions held by the Offense.

  Since then, the jellies have been scooping them out of the sea by the bucket-load, according to Gutmangler.

  They know what a threat Tancred is to their ships, and they hope to hatch an equivalent threat to our ships.

  There’s just one catch.

  Our energy weapons are crappy, compared to the Offense’s. We pretty much never use them in battle. So to hatch a dragon that eats Earth ships, the Offense would need to either capture one of our ships and blow it up with an egg inside—not easy, given that our entire war effort is organized around not letting the Offense capture our stuff—or engineer the one-in-a-million scenario where a human commander, believing he is doomed, rams an enemy with his ship.

  Which is exactly what Zach did.

  He survived, by the way. Being on the side of the ship, not at the front, the Ottokar’s bridge didn’t get crumpled. We retrieved him, Bolt, and a few other people from the wreck with nothing worse than bruises.

  That brings the total number of Mingetty survivors to 22.

  We buried our dead in Francie’s tunnel. Now it’s a tomb where they will rest for all eternity. Paul played Taps on his violin. Everyone cried.

  Except me. I feel like crying all the time, but I can’t. I’m still in command, even if the Dragon Corps has been reduced to a third of its strength. And I have a new mission.

  22 people eat less than 65.

  We salvaged some of our supplies from the wreck of the Ottokar, as well as Paul’s violin. But the food isn’t going to last long, so I have another decision to make.

  Right now I’m putting it off, eating rehydrated mashed potatoes and chicken Kiev with my fingers, aboard the Gatecrasher Wielding a Broken Beer Bottle.

  Our unlikely refuge is a Demolisher-class corvette. Gutmangler’s flagship was the other one—this is just the scout ship, what the Melisende was to the Ottokar.

  However, it seems plenty big to us. The Offense are ten feet tall and nearly as wide at the circumference of their domes, so corridors feel like two-lane highways, and the bridge ceiling soars like the nave of a cathedral.

  It was painfully bright when we came aboard, with the temperature in the range of 5° C. The jellies’ home planet orbited HD 181433, a subgiant star which was much brighter than Sol, far enough away from it to be freezing cold. I made Gutmangler turn down the light and turn up the heat. This has the added benefit of forcing the jellies to stay in their exoskeletons, so we don’t have to look at their internal organs pulsating inside their translucent domes.

  There’s nothing to be done about the smell. I remember it from the submarine that Gutmangler used to command. Briny, putrid, sick-making.

  “How come you were a submarine captain, and now you’re flying a spaceship?” I ask Gutmangler suspiciously, chewing my cold, rubbery chicken.

  “Aha,” Gutmangler rumbles. “I was rewarded for my part in the capture of the Void Dragon eggs.”

  “But we shot that ship down.” Actually, it was the conspiracy who did, but he doesn’t need to know that. “It was nothing to do with you.”

  “Do not tell the Empress that.”

  Patrick laughs. I am afraid he’s starting to think Gutmangler is funny. That’s partly because Patrick’s default setting is to get along with everybody, and partly because Gutmangler—with his jokes and his air of not taking the war too seriously—does come off as the kind of alien you could have a beer with. It was a surprise to me at first, too. But I have not forgotten, will never forget his threat to murder Francie and Sara in cold blood to make me do what he wanted, much less the way he shot Jeremy for daring to stand up to him. BAD human …

  Now he’s holding his newborn baby Void Dragon, stroking its head with a manipulator tentacle as thin as a grass snake. The others think he’s fallen for his dragon the same way we all fell for ours. I’m not buying it. To Gutmangler, I am certain, that dragon means only one thing: more dead two-legged prey beings in the future.

  “How’d you find me?” I say.

  “I read your email, of course. Your family wishes you a happy birthday. May I add my felicitations?”

  Bolt says to him, “You got some pretty good decryption software, huh?”

  “Better than anything you have,” Gutmangler says smugly.

  “Yeah, I heard about that.” Bolt shoots me a significant glance.

  I just chew. Our secret project is the last thing on my mind now.

  We are all sitting around the bridge, some in the crew nests (shallow, circular couches ten feet across) and some on the floor (bare metal, covered with wavy ridges like a beach). Some of the survivors are still wearing their EVA suits on account of the lingering cold. Gutmangler and his crew-jellies squat on bowed tentacles outside our circle, grumbling about the heat. All of my people have their weapons to hand as they eat, and they flick their eyes continually at the jellies. They are battle-weary, but can’t relax. They’re victors, but they feel like prisoners. After all, this is an Offense ship.

  And that’s exactly the point.

  My mouth is dry, my heart fluttering. I put down the empty container of my MRE, drink a mouthful of water, and lean back against Tancred’s side. He radiates well-fed calm. I stretch my legs out across the ripply deck and steeple my hands in front of my mouth.

  “So, guys,” I say through my hands. “I think we have a good chance of intercepting the Raimbaut.”

  There’s a moment’s silence. Then Francie says, “Well …”

  And Patrick says, “Ma
ybe, but …”

  A chill comes over me. Maybe I underestimated what a crazy idea this actually is.

  “We’re the only ship that has any chance of catching them at all,” I plead.

  For we are not an Earth ship, which would be jumped by Offense patrols as soon as it ventured into trans-Jovian space.

  We are a Demolisher-class corvette, which looks as if it were still manned by the Offense.

  “Yeah, but …” Sara says, her dark eyes full of anxiety.

  What did I expect? Enthusiasm? They’ve just lived through a horrifying battle. We’re down to one-third strength. And now I’m asking them to venture into Offense space. Actually, I’m lucky they aren’t flat-out mutinying.

  “We haven’t received orders to pursue the Raimbaut,” Sara points out, and everyone else murmurs in agreement.

  “We haven’t received any orders at all,” I say, “because our ships were blown up, so we have no long-range comms. And even if we establish contact with BeltCOM, what do you think they’re going to say?”

  “They’d order us home,” someone says, hopefully.

  “Yeah, I expect they would.” I’m lacing my fingers together now, squeezing tight to contain my emotions. “They’d send us back to Ceres, so that we can’t pursue the Raimbaut.” I might be right about this, I might be wrong, but I trust no one at the DoD anymore. “Do you really think that was the whole conspiracy on board the convoy? I don’t. You think they all ran, and didn’t leave any buddies in place? Yeah, right.”

  There is a brief silence. I don’t let it last long.

  “But if we catch the Raimbaut, we’ll have the ringleaders. We’ll make them tell us everything. We’ll nail the whole conspiracy!”

  Glaring around the circle, I accidentally meet Francie’s gaze. Her eyes reflect my urgency. She, too, knows that Elsa is probably—almost certainly—on board the Raimbaut. She says, “I think we should go for it.”

  Suddenly, Gutmangler booms, “And so do I. These conspirators dishonor the Offense, as well as humanity! Hard and rough backstabbery! What happen to noble cause of pulverizing the enemy? This is shit! Must pursue, catch, mutilate, torture, and MANGLE them!”

  “I was actually thinking of capturing them so they can stand trial before a jury of their peers,” I say. “But, details.”

  I get a bit of weak laughter for that.

  “Is not moment to lose!” Gutmangler hoots. “Engage sensor array! Plot course! Initiate burn!” This is followed by a string of deafening gargles to his crew-jellies.

  “Hold up,” Patrick says, standing. “We’ll do this. OK? We’ll do it.” I don’t miss the irony: he’s doing it so that he won’t look less competitive and aggressive than Gutmangler. “But we’ll fly the ship. We’ll do the engaging, plotting, burning and all the rest of it. You just show us how to work the controls.”

  Luigi rubs Jinks’s head. He looks older than he did this morning. “To think I could have been relaxing on my farm in Italy …”

  “It’ll be worth it, Nonno,” Francie says. “This is our chance to save humanity.”

  Within the hour we are accelerating away from Mingetty so fast that I can see Jupiter, Earth, and all the other familiar Jovian system objects visibly shrinking on the big screen. This is spaceflight on fast forward. We aren’t even feeling the thrust gees—Offense in-hull inertial dampeners are as good as their engines.

  At this rate, we’ll overtake the Raimbaut in— “Forty-seven hours,” reports Zach. “We got ‘em.”

  7

  But forty-seven hours can seem like a long time when you’re cooped up on board an Offense ship. I brainstorm with Sara and Patrick, organizing tasks for the crew. We sort out the life-support and ration our limited food supplies. Knowing that our scientists have been jonesing for ages for the chance to get a look at a functioning Offense drive, I send several people to the engineering deck to crawl all over it, taking pictures of everything with their helmet cams and trying to make the crew jellies explain how it all works in English.

  Meanwhile, Bolt and I get to work learning the Gatecrasher’s computer system.

  Our first and biggest obstacle is the fact that the Offense script looks like Arabic on LSD. We can’t read a word of it. But the Offense have an AI translation program. It’s a bit sketchy, giving the impression that the jellies’ English fluency fluctuates from moment to moment, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing. So Bolt and I decide to start by translating the entire Offense GUI.

  It’s a huge job, even though we can partially automate it. While that’s running, we modify the translation program and integrate it with our own suit-mounted comms software, so we’ll be able to understand the jellies when they talk amongst themselves.

  It’s a nice, clearly defined task, in which I successfully lose myself for a while.

  But reality is never more than a click away, and when Sara approaches my terminal on the bridge, I’m not working. I’m sitting with my sore hands squeezed between my knees, occasionally lifting one of them to click over to a different article about the conspiracy.

  Of course the first thing Bolt and I got Gutmangler to tell us was how to access Earth’s internet.

  “Whatcha doing?” Sara says, climbing up beside me. I’m sitting on an Offense table balanced on top of another table, as is Bolt, ten yards away at his own console.

  Sara has managed to have a shower, or at least a wash. She smells fresh. Her short black ponytail bounces, glossy. Sometimes I fantasize about taking her hair out of that ponytail and running my fingers through it. She has a mismatched sort of face, with a little flat nose and a square chin. I can’t believe I once thought she was plain. She’s extraordinarily beautiful, in a way you have to be looking to see ...

  … and I should not be having these thoughts, because I am her commanding officer.

  “Um, what am I doing?” I say, idiotically. “Taking a break. My hands …” I trail off. I’ve never told anyone about my idiopathic arthritis. At first I didn’t want it to look like I was trying to use this totally manageable condition to get out of military service. Now, I guess I don’t want to show any weakness. So why was I about to mention it to Sara? Oh God, Scattergood, just shut up.

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed you have trouble with your hands,” she says.

  I flinch and reflexively change the subject. “Look at this. It’s eaten the internet.”

  “Loss of Diplomatic Mission Fuels Questions About DoD Secrecy,” Sara reads aloud.

  “This is one of the mainstream news channels. You ought to see the fringier ones.”

  “Mission accomplished?”

  “Not really. Everyone’s got questions, no one’s got answers. The DoD is stonewalling. UnGov is running interference for them. So there’s just this tornado of paranoia and accusations without proof. We might have actually made things worse.”

  “Like I said, mission accomplished,” Sara says, straight-faced. “I can now reveal that I’m in the pay of the Offense. Bwahahahaha!”

  I probably turn white. I definitely flinch. I stare at her, mouth working in shock.

  “Jeez, Jay. I’m just kidding!” Her eyes open wide. “Just trying to make you smile, you big goof. You actually thought—”

  “No, no, I didn’t—”

  “Yes, you did.”

  I rub my forehead with the back of one wrist, because my hands hurt too much at the moment. “I’m going through a lot, Sara.”

  An awkward pause follows. I want so badly to open my heart to her. I want to tell her how broken up I am about Elsa, and how scared I am that I may be doing the wrong thing. But I’m her damn commanding officer. And ironically, that means that if anyone’s going to let their emotions show, she has to go first. She has to give me permission.

  “I was actually looking for Faith,” she says.

  “Where is she?” I mumble.

  “I don’t know. This ship is so darn big, there’s a million places for her to hide. And sometimes she doesn’t talk to me.”
<
br />   I look around the bridge. No one’s here except Bolt, working on the computer, and Zach, who’s either flying the ship or mentally working on his novel.

  What I notice is that Tancred isn’t here, either.

  Zach catches my eye and calls out, “Contact with the Raimbaut in two hours. Better start getting ready.”

  I nod, but now I’m worried about Tancred. I can’t feel him in my mind the way I usually can. He’s hiding. “Let’s go,” I say to Sara. “We’d better track them down.”

  Together, but apart, we roam the ship.

  “Tancred!”

  “Faith!”

  Not only do we not find our dragons, we can’t find the rest of the Dragon Unit, either. Where have they gone? Have the jellies rebelled and tossed them out the airlock?

  I’m about to melt down with worry when we find them at last, on the engineering deck.

  All of them, humans and dragons, are standing in a loose circle around Tancred and Faith.

  My first thought is a horrible one. Tancred must have tried to eat the Gatecrasher’s drive, after I explained how important it was for him not to …

  But a second later, I feel bad for doubting my Void Dragon. He and Faith are standing back to back with Gutmangler’s little black dragon between them. It cowers on the floor, chirping in fear.

  “Um, did something happen that I should know about, guys?”

  Patrick jerks a shoulder. He’s red with anger. “Your Void Dragon is trying to protect a clear and present threat to humanity, that’s all.”

  Now I can hear the other dragons twittering. They sound like a flock of enraged budgies. Smaug is the loudest. Yah! Me burn you! he threatens the tiny black dragon. My fire big and much! Biggest fire EVER!

  The little black dragon peeps in terror and tries to squeeze underneath Tancred’s foot.

  Pick on dragon your own size! Tancred says, puffing himself up and rustling his wings.

  I feel incredibly proud of Tancred, but also conflicted. It is true, the little black is a threat to humanity. It will grow up into an eater of Earth ships … just like Smaug, Jinks, Wiktor, Jade, Rude Boy, Beelzebub, Fleur, and Buster.