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

  The difference, of course, is that these dragons belong to us, and the black belongs to Gutmangler.

  Where is Gutmangler, anyway? He should be looking after his dragon!

  Francie comes over to me, holding Pinkie Pie. “He’s been ignoring it, Jay,” she says quietly. “He carried it around for a few hours, then stuck it in an empty cabin and left it there. The fact is the Offense don’t know how to love.”

  I swallow. Everything in our experience as a species suggests this is true.

  “It’s going to go bad,” she continues. “Like … you know.”

  She is referring to the time I left Tancred on Ceres when he was just a baby. I haven’t forgiven myself for that yet. All that saved our bacon that time was Pinkie Pie. She talked Tancred into giving me a second chance.

  The Void Dragons are a species of their own. They have their own instincts, their own relationships. What’s more, all these Void Dragons are brothers and sisters. They were all begotten by the dragon that ate Sol. “Maybe we should let them work it out,” I say.

  Huifang comes over, holding Jade. “But don’t you see, Jay, that’s just going to end up with Tancred bossing all the other dragons around?” Jade is one of the smallest dragons now, because she did not get a chance to snack on Hardy’s convoy. I can see the echoes of her hunger in Huifang’s nettled gaze. “Is that fair? Just because Tancred is the biggest?”

  Milosz joins us. “I think we need to face that there is evil in them,” he says. “We have to train them to be good, not just leave them alone.”

  “No, of course I don’t mean leave them alone,” I say. “The problem is just …”

  “The problem is you’re not a soldier, Jay,” Patrick says. His smile makes the words cut even deeper. I suddenly realize just how pissed off he is. It’s not only about Gutmangler’s dragon. It’s about the fact that he would make a better commander than me. It’s about the fact that he didn’t really want to come on this mission, and he knows it, which makes him less of a soldier in his own mind. Now he’s taking it out on me. But realizing this doesn’t make his words sting any less. “Go back to coding. That’s your area of expertise. Leave this to us.”

  “Fucking A,” says Paul, because he always backs Patrick up, right or wrong.

  And while we’re not paying attention, the dragons start scuffling. Smaug and Beelzebub flutter around Tancred, spitting fire at him. The other dragons flap into the air to join the fight. It’s like one of those training exercises we used to do on Mingetty, but this time for real. I feel Tancred’s increasing panic and anger. He can’t hold them off and protect the little black dragon at the same time.

  Cool it, little scaly-butt. You’re in the right. I’m on your side. No burn. NO BURN—

  Tancred snorts angrily, controlling himself. But my words have no effect on Faith.

  She screams, rearing on her hind legs, and spits out a stream of dragon-fire that catches Fleur—Marguerite Delacroix’s little dragon—like a bird in a flamethrower.

  Fleur’s scream mingles with Faith’s, piercing the insides of our heads. Everyone pointlessly claps their hands to their ears, except Marguerite. She stumbles forwards, shrieking Fleur’s name.

  And collapses over her stiff, ashen corpse.

  Only a Void Dragon can hurt another Void Dragon.

  Faith’s killed her.

  Stupefied with shock, I become aware that an alarm of some kind is whooping. Faith’s dragon-fire crossed the entire engineering deck and melted something. Smoke issues from the wall.

  Sara tackles Faith and rolls on the floor with her in a crazy clinch, yelling at her in Korean.

  I stumble forward and pick up the little black dragon. It’s alive and well. Fleur is dead.

  Marguerite sits back on her heels. Tears streak her ash-smeared cheeks. It is terrifying to see this lovely older woman losing it. Her husband, Tim, puts his arms around her. How will she ever get over this? How would I survive if Tancred died? I can’t even begin to imagine it.

  Gutmangler rushes onto the engineering deck. I stride over to him and shove the black dragon at him. “Try, you know, looking after it?” I yell in fury.

  Gutmangler wraps the dragon in a tentacle. “Huh, huh, huh,” he laughs. “Nightmare is causing trouble?” He goes over to the control panel and turns off the alarm, carrying Nightmare casually, like an inanimate object.

  With Gutmangler for an owner, what chance does the poor little black dragon have of not going bad?

  In the sudden silence, Zach’s voice comes over the PA system. He must have been talking at us all along, but we couldn’t hear him over the alarm and the dragon-noise in our heads. “Guys? Guys! Are we good to go? We’re closing with the Raimbaut in forty-five minutes!”

  8

  Offense radar does not look like our radar. It must work the same, but instead of the familiar concentric circles, there’s a 3D cone on the big screen. I can’t see how it’s supposed to cover the whole sky.

  Never mind. It holds the paper-airplane shape of the Raimbaut like a bug trapped under a cup.

  We’re a few thousand klicks behind them, and closing fast.

  “Comms, please,” I say. I’m standing beside Gutmangler, him on the floor, me on my stacked tables. Everyone is on the bridge, suited and helmeted, looking warlike—our differences set aside, for now.

  The small screen in front of Gutmangler lights up.

  “Hello, Raimbaut,” Gutmangler oozes. “This is Gatecrasher Wielding A Broken Beer Bottle. How you like Offense space?”

  Hardy’s voice emerges from the console. This time it’s definitely Hardy. I would know his voice anywhere. “It’s space,” he says. “Thank God you’re here, Gatecrasher. We are severely short on water and other consumables.”

  Helmets shake, and the survivors of Mingetty exchange shocked sighs. No human should ever greet an Offense ship with those words. Hardy is knotting the noose around his own neck.

  “We are here to help,” Gutmangler rumbles. I swear he’s enjoying this. “You have exciting journey?”

  “Exciting is one word for it. I need to speak with the queen, urgently.”

  The jellies have a queen? I never even thought to wonder about their political arrangements.

  “Can you provide assistance?”

  I elbow Gutmangler out of the way. “Sorry to hear that, Hardy,” I say. “I’ll be happy to assist you to jail!”

  There’s an instant of silence from his end. My heart starts to pound. I glance around—everyone’s grinning at my mic-drop line.

  The screen flashes, and there’s Hardy, wearing a t-shirt with a rip at one shoulder. His face is puffy, his eyes red-veined, his jaw stubbled. “You,” he states flatly.

  I enable visual transmission at my end. “Yup. And this is my new ship. Surrender or we blow you away.”

  “Yadda yadda,” Hardy says, recovering his poise. “Gutmangler captured you, huh?”

  “No!” I’m infuriated that he doesn’t believe me. “I captured him. As you recall, I have a Void Dragon.”

  “That won’t save you,” Hardy says bleakly.

  “We’ll have to agree to disagree on that. Who else is on board the Raimbaut?” I hope he can’t tell how much I care about the answer to this question.

  “Oh … my buddy Sponaugle. You know him as Strong. Muramoto, you remember her, too. Tran. A few other people. Seven all told.”

  He doesn’t want to reveal that Elsa is on board. OK. “You have five minutes to exit the ship. You’ve got a lifeboat of some kind? Get into it. Anyone left on board will be killed—” I can’t believe these words are coming out of my mouth, but I mean them. “In ten minutes precisely, I am going to feed your ship to my Void Dragons.”

  The Dragon Unit are waiting in a group by the airlock, ready to release their dragons into space. Patrick circles a hand: keep him talking, we need to get a bit closer.

  “I don’t have time for this shit,” Hardy says with an impatient glance off-camera. “I’m trying to end th
e war. All that crap they’re saying on the internet is true but wrong. Right now, I really need to speak to the queen, so ... I’ll explain to you later if I have time. Help you see it my way.”

  I completely lose it. His patronizing tone and language pushed my buttons on Callisto, and now he’s doing it again, in front of all my friends, even though he is clearly in my power, without a leg to stand on. I snarl, “We can talk when you exit that fucking ship!”

  I jump from table to table. You bet I got Gutmangler to show us where the weapons console is. One of our NCOs, a woman named Nerys Sullivan, is standing in front of it. I reach across her and mash my finger on the button that fires the charged-particle beam cannon. The Gatecrasher’s auto-targeting software does the rest.

  On the big screen, a graphic shows my beam hitting the Raimbaut amidships. Clouds of ablated shielding jet into the vacuum. It was just a warning shot, but it looks spectacular. Our people cheer.

  “All right, all right!” Hardy yells from the comms console. “We’re coming out! Jesus, are you completely nuts?”

  “Just helping you see it my way,” I say.

  On the radar plot, a minute dot moves away from the Raimbaut. I wish we had a proper visual image, but it’s all just computer-generated, anyway. “Is everyone out?!” I yell.

  “Yes,” Hardy says sulkily.

  “Glad you decided to be reasonable.”

  But I am still not feeling reasonable. I decide to put a hole in the Raimbaut, so that Hardy can’t change his mind. I fire the CP cannon again at the little courier.

  Our people, in desperate need of even a symbolic win, cheer themselves hoarse as clouds of vaporized metal fog the radar cone …

  … until the clouds take on a familiar shape.

  Long, ghostly wings.

  Flapping.

  Coming nearer.

  The truth hits me like a punch to the stomach. I crumple over the weapons console. Sullivan hauls me aside. “Cease fire, cease fire!” she screams.

  Too late.

  A newborn Void Dragon, hatched in the heat of an Offense energy weapon, closes with the Gatecrasher.

  The lights on the bridge go out. The fans whir down to silence. The screens stay lit long enough for me to see the dragon coiling its spectral form around the ship.

  Then the screens go dark, too.

  In the pitch blackness, we all charge for the airlock.

  Fortunately, these airlocks are made for Offense shock troopers. They can take ten humans at once.

  Three cycles later, we are all floating in the void, watching the newborn Void Dragon devour the Gatecrasher from the stern up. Its luminous, ghostly wings beat ecstatically as it feeds.

  Tancred sticks close to my side; he’s as stunned as I am.

  “Hardy had an egg,” Patrick says glumly over the radio.

  “Looks that way.” I double-check that we’re on a private channel. “I can’t believe how stupid I am. God, God, God.”

  The newborn dragon, having consumed the Gatecrasher, shrinks until it’s too small to see. But through Tancred’s eyes, I can see it winging back to the Raimbaut’s lifeboat, a reddish dot in the distance.

  “What’s that?” Patrick says suddenly.

  “That’s their lifeboat, I guess.” Is Elsa on board? I guess I’ll soon find out. It hardly seems to matter in the wake of my monumentally, crashingly stupid action. We are now stranded in Offense space, tens of millions of kilometers from home, with no spaceship. I have just killed everyone.

  “No, that!”

  Weightless, I struggle to orient myself with my thrusters until I face in the direction Patrick’s pointing.

  “What … is that?”

  It looks like a very strangely shaped, dim star. A group of stars. Like a bunch of pearls on a string. Or …

  “Huh, huh, huh.” Gutmangler’s laughing. “I constrained the radar angle so that you do not see it! Huh, huh! That is the Grief Merchant, one of our arkships. Do you think I have no emergency radio protocol? Of course I do! I requested Her Majesty to come and pick us up, and she has most graciously complied.”

  9

  So all of us are taken, shivering and speechless, aboard the Grief Merchant, one of the original arkships that brought the Offense to our solar system.

  The first thing the jellies do is kill four of us. Seemingly at random, they choose Nerys Sullivan and three more of Zach’s crew—Azam Said, Maggie Schmidt, and Chris Walsh. They pull their arms and legs off, followed by their heads.

  I look away. I am deeply ashamed of looking away, but I can’t help it. Something hot splatters on the side of my face. The sounds I am hearing are not sounds a human being should make.

  Tancred butts my shoulder with his head. I reach stiffly into my suit’s utility belt and take out his blankie. It’s about the size of one of his nostrils now. I hold it in my hand and let him nuzzle it.

  The Grief Merchant is the size of a small moon. This part of it is pastoral: a river runs sluggishly, in three-quarters gravity, over glistening red-tinged rocks, into a lake fringed with ice, where jellies are at play, frolicking in the water or sprawling on stepped, fake-natural outcroppings of fake rock. The smell is unspeakable. The vegetation all looks like dead bristlecone pines—stuff that belongs above the snowline.

  The jelly soldiers tip the dismembered bodies of my people into the river. They bump down over a short waterfall into the lake.

  The bathing jellies fall on them. Shortly the water is tinged red, reminding me of a documentary I once saw about sharks.

  “That was for my crew you kill on asteroid,” Gutmangler booms. “Only four, because we are friends!” He whacks me on the back with a tentacle, sending me staggering.

  I catch sight of Sara’s face, red-speckled to the hairline. She did not look away.

  The rest of the Dragon Unit are standing defiantly together, holding their dragons, pretending like they don’t give a shit. The way they are standing shields the other survivors.

  Cold resolve hardens in the pit of my stomach. They took us off guard when they snatched Sullivan, Said, Schmidt, and Walsh. But I won’t lose any more people. Not one.

  “Where’s the queen?” I say thickly.

  “Not so fast,” Gutmangler says. He has changed into Offense casual wear—a drapey blue lampshade, which is only held together by strings at the top, so that it doesn’t obscure his vision. The jellies guarding us, on the other hand, wear those high-end armored exoskeletons.

  As one, they turn to face the circular port in the cliff which we came in at. It’s an airlock, which opens onto the gap between two of the Grief Merchant’s gargantuan habs, an area that acts as a dock. I counted forty ships out there before I gave up. The Grief Merchant is a roving fuel depot, shipyard—and city. We humans might have built this kind of thing by now if a Void Dragon hadn’t eaten our sun, forcing us to dedicate all our efforts to gravity-casting and stellar ignition technologies.

  The airlock doors scissor apart.

  “Now,” Gutmangler says, “we welcome the other …” He is standing very close to me, and I feel as much as hear him say, “Filthy traitorous scum.” I tense. Out loud, he booms, “Two-legged prey beings! Welcome to the Grief Merchant!”

  Hardy, Strong—I mean Sponaugle—and five more humans stumble out of the airlock, removing their helmets.

  Elsa isn’t among them.

  WHAT?!?

  I recognize Muramoto, an efficient-looking woman in her forties, and Tran, an elderly professorial type.

  There’s also a statuesque, red-headed woman, who is stooping to help two midgets with their helmets.

  Midgets? Children.

  Jellies surround the newcomers in a booming, gargling welcome committee. How very different from our own reception. Of course, Hardy’s gang are not captives. They are (filthy traitorous scum) friends. Hardy gargles back to the jellies; he knows their language.

  I charge through the welcome committee, slipping and sliding on the wet rocks. Tancred lollops behind m
e. The jellies do not make way for me. They make way for Tancred.

  Hardy stands his ground. He has a tiny Void Dragon on his shoulder. It’s topaz with orange markings.

  “Where’s Elsa?” I yell at him. “What have you done with her?”

  Hardy blinks. His confusion looks genuine. “Elsa?”

  “Elsa Scattergood! Major Scattergood! She was on board your ship! Where is she?”

  Understanding flashes in his eyes. “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he taunts me.

  I stand with my gloved fists clenched, panting. Hardy stares back at me, unmoved. He is no longer the suave bureaucrat I met on Callisto. His gray hairs have multiplied, and a week’s stubble makes him look skeevy. His eyes are more red than blue.

  Belying his apparent poise, his hand rises to shield the guinea-pig sized dragon on his shoulder.

  I think I would urge Tancred to burn the horrible little runt to death, anyway, except for the fact that there are two children watching.

  One of them is a boy of five or six. The other’s a girl of maybe two, riding in her mother’s arms.

  Hardy follows my gaze. “These are my kids, Troy and Ottilie. And my wife.”

  The woman dips her head briefly to me. “Cate.”

  “You brought your kids?” I say in astonishment.

  “Sure did,” Hardy says.

  Sensing that he’s got the attention of the grownups, the little boy grabs his face dramatically and says, “This place stinks!”

  He didn’t see the carnage ten minutes ago. He has no idea. I feel an unwelcome urge to protect these children from the awful place they’ve been brought to. What a shitty father Hardy is.

  Tancred snakes his head out to sniff the dragon on Hardy’s shoulder. The baby sniffs back, unafraid. Of course, he will grow up to be like Tancred: an eater of Offense ships.

  Maybe it’s just as well I didn’t encourage Tancred to kill him.

  Anyway, if he did, I’d probably end up getting my arms and legs pulled off.

  Not even Tancred can take on the entire jelly population of the Grief Merchant.