Soldiers of Callisto (Void Dragon Hunters Book 3) Page 6

  “Heck yeah! Go for it!”

  Instead of pursung the fleeing jelly boats, as I expected, he jinks in the air and breathes a long stream of fire at the side of Chester the Molester, right above the waterline.

  The metal skin of the battle-raft melts. Drips into the water. Clouds of steam rise.

  “Holy shit, scaly-butt, you’re good at this …”

  A hole gapes in the side of the raft. We fly in, through the steam. Tancred folds his wings away to nothing to get through the hole. His momentum carries us through a smoking tunnel of destruction, into a painfully bright cavern. Unarmored jellies, wearing primary-colored lampshades, work around a vast tangle of electrical equipment.

  Tancred lands on the floor.

  I fall off.

  Now burn bigly, he announces.

  And he grows. I’ve seen this only once before, when he saved our lives at Beachy Head. His body inflates and sort of thins out to a hundred-foot ghost of himself. His wings fill the cavern. The jellies scatter in panic.

  Tancred coils around the biggest piece of equipment, which looks like a high-tech soda bottle. He claws at it and nuzzles it like a cat playing with a catnip-filled toy. The jellies are going nuts, shooting at him, but their bullets go straight through his spectral form. I lie flat on the floor, praying to stay un-shot, peeking between my fingers.

  Dragon-fire snakes along the conduits and pipes of the equipment, which I now recognize as an Offense power plant. It’s the same as the one in the Terrorflop, the Pulverizer that Tancred ate on the way to Earth! And as it turns black and shrivels, I feel itchy with embarrassment and regret, because I didn’t realize that of course, they use the same type of power plants in their battle-rafts.

  Because I didn’t realize that for Tancred, burning and eating are two different slants on the same thing.

  All this time, we’ve been surrounded by a floating Void Dragon buffet.

  I didn’t realize.

  My nostrils fill with that weird incense scent I remember from the Terrorflop. The power plant caves in on itself like a black cardboard house of cards.

  All the lights go out.

  The hateful “Chester the Molester” jingle stops.

  For a second, there’s dead silence. The only visible thing in the place is Tancred, a dragon of light, his head buried in the debris of the power plant, sucking the last yummy drops of energy out.

  Then the jellies start shooting again, as he shrinks, shedding his spooky sixth-dimensional form, and returns to—

  —well. Not quite his own size. He was as big as a Shetland pony before; now he’s as big as a full-size pony.

  The lights come back up. They’ve got a reserve power source. Fuel cells, I suppose. Tancred shakes his head irritably at the bullets zinging around him.

  Daddy?

  “Right here,” I croak.

  Jellies rush towards me. They have finally noticed the unprepossessing two-legged prey being lying on the floor of their reactor room.

  Tancred blasts puffs of fire, charring the jellies to ash, and lollops over to me. He dips his head. I look into his appley eyes for an instant, trying to manage my conflicting emotions of pride and love and dread, and then I scramble onto his back.

  The raft lurches under us. A distant boom reverberates through the cavern.

  The floor tilts to a 40-degree angle. All the jellies slide down to one side of the cavern. Tancred flaps and scrambles back towards the hole we got in by, but it’s no longer there.

  In its place, a smooth green torrent of sea gushes in.

  6

  Inch by inch, blast by blast, Tancred fights his way out of Chester the Molester. I’m not doing anything except clinging onto his back. I can’t do anything else. My muscles have locked up. My head is ringing, and my throat feels like I swallowed broken glass.

  The only reason we survive is because Chester the Molester is sinking, and the jellies are less interested in killing us than in saving their own lives. We finally burn through the top of the hull as water swirls over the shoulders of the iceberg. It slides beneath the water, taking a bunch of their cigar boats down with it.

  Tancred flaps wildly into the air.

  I get a tip-tilted, nightmarish view of Vitr burning, Alfr littered with corpses, Droog closing in for the kill.

  Tancred, burn more! I command wildly. Burn that one too!

  I feel like I’m dying, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t care if I die if we can kill them all.

  Daddy said no burn, Tancred reminds me, virtuous after the fact.

  Well, I changed my mind!

  No more burn now. Maybe later.

  As he levels out and turns back towards Alfr, I feel his contentment. Well, dammit. He doesn’t want to burn anymore now because he’s full.

  We fly slowly above Alfr. It looks like everyone on deck is dead.

  Now finding Pinkie Pie, Tancred says.

  He flies straight to the superstructure of Alfr, where we find Francie crouching in someone’s office. She has a rocket grenade launcher set up on a tripod at the broken window.

  “That was a good idea,” I cough, leaning off Tancred’s back to look in the window, my face upside-down to her.

  Francie jumps, whipping out a pistol. Then she sees it’s me.

  Pinkie Pie is curled up under the rocket launcher, her head hidden beneath one wing.

  “Since my dragon is just a useless ball of cuteness,” Francie says, “I had to improvise.”

  She stuffs Pinkie Pie into a pocket and climbs onto the window-sill. Tancred sinks his foreclaws into her bulletproof vest. We take off again, into the noise of Vitr burning and things exploding on board. I can feel the heat of the blaze from here. Why doesn’t it just sink? I try the radio again, hoping to get through to Jeremy, but it doesn’t seem to be working at all now.

  Suspended from Tancred’s claws, Francie swings above the fiery chaos. “We’re losing,” she shouts up at me.

  “When did you notice?” I shout back.

  I can hardly see Lofn through the smoke.

  Tancred spirals down and lands, with a splash.

  Water surges around my ankles, slops into my boots.

  Lofn is waterlogged. The whole raft is now one giant, shallow trench in between the behemoths of Alfr and Vitr.

  Small boats nuzzle at the stern end of the raft. Marines clamber into them, overloading the already crowded craft.

  Francie and I cling to each other to keep our balance as Tancred splashes around. I remember how much he enjoyed the swimming pool at my mom’s house. He just has no idea that we’re in the middle of a freaking war, does he? He thinks this is fun! Big boom-booms, a yummy snack, and now a swimming pool. Exasperation surges up. “Tancred,” I yell, “can you stop fucking around and look for Jeremy’s egg?”

  A dripping sea monster rises up from the water a short distance away, and flounders over to us. “There you are!” It’s Sara.

  “Did you get any jellies. Sara?” Francie says. “I did. I got lots of them. I found an RPG launcher, and—”

  “Shut up! I don’t care!” Sara yells.

  Francie blinks rapidly.

  “Get in the goddamn lifeboats!”

  I hesitate, agonized.

  “We can’t leave Jeremy,” Francie yells, voicing my thoughts.

  “He’s already in that boat! I found him on the flight deck! Come on!”

  We follow her to the nearest lifeboat. It’s so packed with Marines, it doesn’t look like there’s any room for us, but Sara jumps aboard and makes room by kicking people.

  Jeremy’s hand reaches out of the scrum. I grab it. He hauls me and Francie over the gunwale.

  Water sloshes six inches deep in the bilge. Pumps squirt it back into the sea. The motor throttles up. We growl away from Lofn.

  Tancred flaps uneasily above the boat.

  We churn through the floating wreckage. We’re actually getting away! I can’t see any Offense assets in the gap between Alfr and Vitr, although I can’t ac
tually see much of anything, as I’m half-kneeling in the bilge, half-sitting on some stranger’s lap.

  “Hey, hey. Lizard boy.”

  Or, not a stranger.

  Twisting around, I find myself looking into the ugly, tattooed face of Schultz, the Marine from Lofn who threatened to shoot Tancred that time.

  I slide off his lap in a hurry. Someone else shoves me in the back.

  “You don’t deserve to be on this boat,” Schultz growls. He nods at the wreckage. Some of it is people, desperately calling out to us. “They deserve it more than you.”

  “Throw him off,” someone else grunts.

  “Damn straight.”

  “There’s another of ‘em over here.”

  “Throw ‘em all off.”

  Hands push Francie past me, into the water. “Swim, bitch.”

  “Francie!”

  “Hey, you can’t do that!” Sara is sticking up for Francie. It should be me.

  “Can’t?” Schultz sneers. “I just did.”

  “They’re with us!”

  “That what you think? Then you can fucking swim, too.”

  Sara is manhandled out of the boat. She lands with a splash. Jeremy fights to keep his place, but he goes next, yelling and cursing.

  And all the time I’m kneeling there frozen.

  Schultz looks down at me with contempt. “Got nothing to say, lizard boy?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Fuck sorry.” He backhands me, knocking me over the gunwale. “That’s for Henriquez.” The water swallows me.

  *

  I surface, spitting. The water tastes of oil. For a horrible moment I think I’m alone, then I see Francie and Jeremy treading water nearby.

  Sara kicks towards us, clinging to a piece of the green foam from Lofn’s torn-off stern.

  We all join her, too shocked and stunned to do anything except follow Sara’s instructions. Take your boots off. Dump your weapons. That’ll make it easier to stay afloat.

  The last lifeboats power away, leaving us stranded in the steel canyon between Alfr and burning Vitr. We’re hardly alone—there are hundreds of people in the water—but most of the others are dead.

  Tancred perches on another piece of foam, looking like a giant shipwrecked cat.

  Francie and I exchange a quick look. This look says: Tancred can’t carry four people.

  Even three would be a struggle, actually. I felt it while he was carrying Francie and me. He was straining.

  And we cannot leave Sara at this point. Not after she stood up for us and got thrown out of a lifeboat for our sakes.

  We’re screwed.

  “We should climb back aboard Alfr,” Jeremy gasps hoarsely. “Might be able to hide from the jellies. Wait it out.”

  None of us can think of a better plan. We all arrange ourselves on the same side of our improvised float and start to wearily kick towards Alfr.

  And then things get worse.

  The light, already dim, fades further. Something is blocking out the other end of the canyon we’re in.

  It is the nose of a gigantic, city-sized torpedo.

  Engines roar.

  The near end of Lofn thrusts into the air.

  Beyond it, the giant torpedo moves closer, grinding between Alfr and Vitr, slowly driving them apart. It booms: “I’m the School Shooter, and I don’t give a shit. Shoot ‘em all, kill ‘em all, blow ‘em to bits! I’m the School Shooter …”

  “Oh, no,” I breathe.

  I know what is going to happen.

  Lofn is still moored to Alfr on one side and Vitr on the other.

  School Shooter is forcing the two battle-rafts apart.

  Even faster than I expect, it happens.

  Lofn rips up the middle like wet cardboard, and the two halves fall back into the sea with an almighty splash.

  Waves crash over us. The float is torn from my grasp. I go under with my anguished, rheumatic fingers wrapped into Francie’s hair.

  Tancred’s teeth fasten on my wetsuit, and on my shoulder inside it. He drags me to the surface, with the others clinging to me.

  “I’m the School Shooter, and I don’t give a …”

  A new noise drowns out the jingle: the thwocka thwocka of a helicopter.

  No sooner have we heard it than we see it, buzzing bravely into the canyon, searchlight raking the water. It’s one of ours, painted in our familiar yellow and blue colors. Arms flail at it. A surprising number of the floaters are not dead after all.

  “Jay Scattergood!”

  An amplified voice from the helicopter calls me.

  “Here! Here I am!” I yell, as if they had any chance of hearing me. But they’ll see Tancred, they’ll know I must be nearby—

  “Jay Scatter—"

  School Shooter interrupts with a burst of gunfire. The helicopter dodges lower. Unable to face the battle-raft’s guns, it roars above the water in a tight curve, out of the canyon and away. Our hopeless cries follow it.

  School Shooter continues its slow, grinding advance, looking down at us with the wide black eyes of open gun ports. We tread water. I know the end is near now. School Shooter is just going to grind us down, like a semi running down a bunch of pedestrians. It’s a hundred meters off. Fifty.

  Suddenly a sleek dark hull breaks the surface a stone’s throw away.

  “Yesss!” Sara shouts deliriously. “A submarine!”

  Oh. Wow. A submarine.

  This is a war on a water world. Of course we have submarines. They just tend to be out of sight, out of mind, like the cyberwarfare department.

  The bad news is that—like cyberwarfare specialists—the Offense has them too.

  A hatch in the submarine’s conning tower pops open. An armored tentacle snakes out.

  It straightens, pointing at me and Tancred.

  It might as well be saying in English, “There. Those ones.”

  Tancred tries to take off from the water with four humans hanging onto him. It’s a doomed effort.

  With a whirr of drone rotors, a net flies out from the Offense submarine and lands softly on top of us. It wraps around us like sticky spaghetti, carries us to the submarine, and drops us into the waiting hatch.

  7

  We fall into the hatch in the conning tower. Trapped inside the net, we bump against each other and the instruments on the walls all the way down.

  We land on a hard cold deck in bluish light so bright it hurts my eyes.

  Tancred might be able to burn through the net, but he’s too scared to try. He knows now that I can be hurt. I could be killed. His love for me has taught him the meaning of fear. The glorious destroying angel that sank Chester the Molester is gone. Now he’s just a pony-sized lump, his foreclaws possessively wrapped around my leg. My sadness for him forms a dreary backdrop to my own terror.

  Above us, the hatch slams. I’m on my back looking up, so I see an armored Offensive dropping down after us, now upside-down, now right side up, wrapping its tentacles around this hold and that, like a gibbon swinging around on its tail.

  It lands next to the net. Its exoskeleton reflects rainbows from the painfully bright light. The exoskeleton encases all umpteen of its outer tentacles separately. Four of them hold four guns, which are pointing at our four heads.

  “I am Captain Gutmangler,” it rumbles from a speaker on its exoskeleton. “I have captured you.”

  “He should call himself Captain Obvious,” Sara mutters, underneath me. appreciate her attempt to keep our spirits up, but I do not feel like laughing at the giant alien. Not even a little bit.

  Shadows fall across us: more jellies, gawking at the prisoners. Captain Gutmangler booms something, which I suppose means Get back to work, you maggots. They rush away on their tentacle-tips, except for one, which frisks us with its tentacles through the mesh of the net. It takes away our radio headsets, as well as two pistols, a boot knife, three grenades, and a Void Dragon egg. All that stuff belonged to Sara except for one of the pistols—Francie’s—and the egg.
That was Jeremy’s, of course.

  The net retracts.

  “Stand up!”

  Weaponless, soaking wet, we stand up. I can feel Tancred wrapping around my legs, but I can’t see him because I have my hands over my eyes. It’s unbearably bright. It is also very cold.

  “Hmm,” Captain Gutmangler says.

  The lights dim to a more tolerable brilliance. I lower my hands.

  We are in a steel tunnel broken up with partitions that form compartments. Consoles fill the nearest compartments at about my head height. Jellies jab delicately at screens with the tips of their smaller tentacles. These ones are dressed in primary-colored lampshades with holes for their inner tentacles, like the jellies I saw in Chester the Molester’s reactor room. I guess this is Offense battle-dress, when they’re not in exoskeletons.

  The jellies can brush the ceiling with their tentacles: for them, this is a typically cramped submarine. For us, it’s cavernous.

  I feel pressure in my ears.

  The submarine is diving.

  Captain Gutmangler yanks my attention back. “You are my prisoners,” he bellows, twirling his blasters at us.

  “Yeah, you already said that,” Sara grunts.

  “That is a Void Dragon.” He’s pointing a tentacle at Tancred.

  “You got it,” I say. I’m surprised how normally my voice comes out. I’m croaky and hoarse, but I don’t sound the way I feel, which is about to pass out from fear.

  “That is another Void Dragon.” Gutmangler points his tentacle at Pinkie Pie, clinging to the front of Francie’s wet t-shirt, her weight dragging it off Francie’s left shoulder.

  “Yup,” Francie agrees.

  “This is a Void Dragon egg.” Gutmangler displays the egg he took off Jeremy, holding it in two tentacles at our eye level.

  They know all about Void Dragons and their eggs. Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. A Void Dragon ate their sun, too. That’s why they’re here

  “Yeah,” Jeremy says. His voice sounds normal, too. But in the brilliant light, his eyes hold a wild determination I have never before seen. “And it’s MINE YOU FUCKER!”

  With the last words, he leaps at Gutmangler, reaching for the egg.

  The move is so sudden and unexpected that he actually gets his hands around the egg. He drags it towards himself with Gutmangler’s tentacles still wrapped around it. Turning his back on the jelly, he throws his weight forwards to wrench the egg out of Gutmangler’s grasp.