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

  Gutmangler rounds us up. Captives and guests are now being treated alike, with Offense bonhomie that’s all the more grotesque, considering what they just did to our people. The guards escort us onto an elevator that goes up the cliff-like wall and curls around to meet a sort of train platfom suspended from the roof. We’re so high up that the waterfall and the lake look like models in a diorama. The stony, watery landscape tapers in either direction, rising so that we’re looking uphill both ways. It must be a band running around the inside surface of the giant habitat.

  The platform we’re standing on twitches into smooth motion. It’s not a train platform, it is a train.

  We rocket along for several kilometers. Hardy’s son stares down curiously, going, “Cool!” Tancred whips his head suspiciously this way and that. The blood spatter dries on Sara’s cheeks.

  Where’s Elsa?

  That’s for me to know and you to find out.

  Was I wrong all along? Could she have nothing to do with the conspiracy? In that case, what was with the Major Scattergood business?

  Gutmangler plays tour guide. “This is the lake of the Bloody Beak Clan. Those are pens where we keep the prey species known as fattoes. They have few tentacles and meaty bodies. They are bred in the life-support band and brought here to be fattened for the hunt …” Hardy’s friends Tran, Sponaugle, and Muramoto eagerly ask questions. I understand them. They are scientists who care more about knowledge than the good of their own species. Zach joins in the impromptu seminar on Offense ecosystems, until I give him a fierce stare.

  We change trains several times. Each change takes us from one band into another. Once, in an industrial band, we pass through a hub where a zillion suspended maglev tracks clover-leaf around each other like rollercoasters. Hardy’s son yells, “Wheeee!”

  But even he has gone quiet and tired by the time our journey finally ends, a couple of hours later, on a rocky crag in a band so cold we can see our breath. Snow cakes the crevices of the fake rocks. We stumble down a trail with only a coarse rope for a handrail.

  Then there’s more walking, past trees that look like dead octopi covered with snow.

  Hardy’s wife, Cate, stops. “This is getting ridiculous,” she says angrily. I suddenly recognize the voice that told me to go to hell. It was hers. “The kids are exhausted. I’m exhausted. Where are we going? I thought we were going to see the queen?”

  Gutmangler lifts a tentacle and points up at a straggle of buildings, from which foul smoke drifts. This band of the hab must have a smaller diameter, because it looks like the town is hanging above us, ready to fall on our heads.

  Patrick sniffs. “Woodsmoke,” he says in amazement.

  “This,” says Gutmangler, “is the way we once lived. This is the nearest you, or me, will ever come to life on Thussa, fifth planet of our glorious star Habidrid.” He gestures with his tentacles at the shacks we are now approaching. Though they are the size of factory buildings, their ramshackle appearance reminds me of mountaineering base camps on Alpine peaks. Jellies amble past, their tentacles drawing commas in the snow. “This is resource-intensive lifestyle. Now only for nobility.”

  Gutmangler leads us into a smoky shack the size of an airplane hangar. A dozen jellies lounge on age-darkened leather nests. A screen babbles. A pot bubbles on a bonfire in a hearth the size of an industrial forge. An enormous jelly, wearing a bead curtain over her tentacles, half-rises from her nest, her dome rippling. “This is the queen,” Gutmangler hisses.

  “Welcome, guests,” she says, and huh-huh’s at our confusion. “Yes, I bid you welcome. I do not pull your arms and legs off. I am a traditionalist.”

  10

  Offensives never stop growing, the queen says. By her count, she is 319 Earth years old. She has had thousands of children. She is one of three queens serving under the Empress of the Offense, who lives on another of their arkships, somewhere nearer to Saturn.

  I have to assume she’s telling us all this stuff because it is a given that none of us will ever leave the Grief Merchant alive.

  While she drones on, bowls of hot stew are served to all of us. The queen promises that this is human food. It actually smells great. The jellies are eating something very different, with bits of tentacle in it. The two dishes come from different cauldrons simmering on the fire in the back of the shack. Is it safe? Paul is the first to pluck up his courage. “I’m so hungry I could eat a wolf,” he says, and tastes the stew. Waits a minute, while everyone stares at him. “Hey. I haven’t turned green and curled up yet.” He carries on eating, and one by one we all follow his example.

  The queen even produces some oranges and packets of digestive biscuits for the kids. They’ve been capturing our stuff, despite our best efforts.

  Nothing comes without a price, and I am waiting to get the bill for our meal as I chase the last chunks of my second helping of stew around the bowl.

  The shack is very dim, and warm enough for weary people to start yawning. I’m tired, too, after all I’ve been through today. But every time my eyelids sag, I can hear my people screaming as they were torn apart. We are not safe here. They’re just trying to put us off our guard.

  Jellies glide in and out all the time, getting a good look at the two-legged prey beings and the Void Dragons. The walls are decorated with elaborate mosaics formed from bits of shell and bone—including human bones, I expect. The blue glow of computer screens from behind a partition gives the lie to the low-tech ambiance.

  The queen finally addresses the big, green elephant in the room. “That Void Dragon is much bigger than the others.”

  “That’s right,” I say. “This is Tancred.”

  “Yes, we have heard of … Tancred.” The queen pauses. “We also possess Void Dragon eggs. However, we have had … difficulties … hatching them.”

  “My queen,” Gutmangler burbles, “I have succeeded where others failed.” Squatting submissively before the queen’s enormous nest, he brings little black Nightmare out from under his dome to show her, for the tenth time.

  “Yes, yes. You are too attached to that thing,” the queen says, which explains why they’ve been failing, doesn’t it? As Francie said, they don’t know how to love. Gutmangler is a bit different from most jellies—I’ll give him that. He is at least capable of liking.

  “Yet in humans,” the queen goes on, “weakness can be forgiven. It may even—” she hesitates, as if this is hard for her to get out— “be useful. Therefore, I invite all of you to join the victorious host of the Offense.”

  I look around to see how my friends react to this. We’re sitting in a semi-circle in front of the royal nest on wooden chairs. They had human-sized chairs and human-palatable food ready to go. Of course, they knew Hardy’s lot were coming …

  Sara’s face is set in a pout. Francie’s eyes are half-lidded. Patrick looks interested.

  “For your service,” the queen goes on, “I would award you free choice of nests and mates, as well as first lance privileges in our hunts.”

  All the jellies in the shack gurgle in awe at her munificence.

  Hardy butts in. Squeezing his wife’s hand, he says, “I would be honored to accept your generous offer, Your Majesty, although I already have a mate I’m partial to.”

  Patrick says, “Fuck that shit. I’ll die before I betray Earth.”

  He has said what I should have said, setting an example for our people. Francie gives him a look of pure molten love.

  “Also,” Francie says to the queen, “if you kill us, our dragons will kill you, and then they’ll eat Jupiter, and every living thing in this star system will die.” Pinkie Pie is flapping on her knee, rubbing her head against Francie’s wrist, trying to calm her down. Francie closes her lips tightly. I can see how she and Pinkie have become a working team, and it’s beautiful. She adds more restrainedly, “So that’s something for you to think about.”

  “But no one has spoken of killing,” the queen burbles.

  “But we know you’re thinking
about it,” Francie says. “Do jellies ever think about anything else?”

  “Of course,” says the queen. “Hunting, eating, mating, fighting …”

  I think the jellies are all taken aback when we start laughing.

  “… the art of life,” the queen finishes over our laughter.

  “The art of life?” Laughing has given me my voice back. I gesture at the shell and bone mosaics on the walls. “You call this art?”

  “No,” says a human male voice from behind us. I glance around. A new group of jellies has just come in, taking off mushroom-shaped umbrella-hats, shaking snow onto the floor … and among them are four humans.

  The sight jolts me like a cattle-prod. We are not the only human beings here.

  “The art of life is something we humans have forgotten,” says one of the men. Same voice. He pushes back the hood of his white leather cloak. He’s silhouetted against the doorway, so all I can really see is a bushy beard and long hair. “We used to know it, but then technology distracted us. Phones. Computers. Games. Mechas. What are we fighting for? What does UNGov stand for? No one knows.”

  Hardy brushes past me, going to the man. He hugs him. His wife is right behind her. The man kisses her on the cheek— “Cate, so good to meet you—” and picks up each child in turn, juggling them while he warmly shakes hands with Tran, Sponaugle, and Muramoto. His three friends also greet the Raimbaut gang with affection.

  Of course we aren’t the only humans here. Hardy was not the first person to defect to the Offense.

  He was just the first to fuck it up.

  “You’ll like it here,” Beardy tells us.

  “Excuse me,” Patrick says, standing. “I’ve been here.” Smaug coils around his legs. “I grew up off the grid. No phones, no computers, no games, no mechas. We hunted deer, trapped rabbits, planted cabbages, dug potatoes. Got our electricity from solar and a genny. Winter nights, we read books, sang songs, told stories … living the dream, right? Now one of my brothers is dead on Callisto, and I’m here. Because of you! So take your bullshit and shove it.” Patrick pauses, mutters “Damn,” in the dead silence of the shack, and then modulates his voice. “You’ve gone over to the enemy. Own that shit. Don’t try and justify it. Because however you spin it, you’ve betrayed humanity, and there will be no mercy for you when we win.”

  Another second of silence. Then Francie starts clapping. Everyone in our group joins in. Sara does that wolf-whistling thing of hers with two fingers in her mouth. I clap, too, carried away by Patrick’s full-throated defense of humanity.

  The queen’s eyes, all fifty or so of them, cluster like grenades at the front of her dome.

  Smaug rears on his hindlegs, flapping his wings, belching dragon-fire at the roof. Fortunately the roof is too damn far away to catch alight.

  The traitors recoil in fear.

  I’m thinking, Go on, Smaug, burn this shit down—

  But Tancred is wiser than I am. He realizes that if the baby dragons start burning, we will all end up dead. He stretches out a foreleg and cuffs Smaug. The smaller dragon rolls head over heels twice and ends up sitting by the fire with all his limbs splayed out.

  NO burn! Tancred orders.

  Smaug crawls sulkily into the fire—yes, into the fire—and curls up among the embers.

  “Impressive,” the queen gurgles at last. Surging forward to the edge of her nest, bulging over it, she points a tentacle at the group of traitors by the door. “You may leave us. Show them where the Earthling quarters are. I wish to speak to these humans alone.”

  When the traitors are gone, the queen stretches out several tentacles towards us. Her voice is a liquid hum.

  “You have seen how content our friends are to live with us. They have found more freedom here than they ever had on Earth. Sample our art of life—that is all I ask of you. Give us a chance.”

  We’re all blinking at her like morons.

  I have to get us out of this somehow, but how? Maybe we should pretend to accept, for the time being. “Your Majesty,” I say, “thank you for your generous offer. Could we have some time to think about it? We’ve all been through a lot today.”

  “Of course, of course,” the queen says. “You shall taste our hospitality, and I give my word that you shall be unharmed until such time as you make up your minds.”

  *

  “It’s obvious what the alternative is,” Patrick says, later. “Getting our arms and legs pulled off.”

  We are in another shack, in the middle of the royal village. If this is Offense hospitality, I still don’t think much of it. We’re lying on a circular bed heaped with sticky, hairless hides that come from alien prey animals. One Offense bed is big enough for 18 humans, which is all that’s left of the 1st Dragon Corps now. They are keeping us away from the traitors, no doubt to prevent us from comparing notes.

  The smell is nauseating. Nevertheless, there’s a fire in the hearth, and many of the survivors have gone to sleep.

  I was asleep, too, until Patrick started muttering in my ear.

  “We gotta make a break for it.”

  At this point I have zero confidence in my own judgment. I got us into this. I got four people killed. I have no credibility left with the unit. Yet I can’t see how Patrick’s way doesn’t end up getting all of us killed. “Even if we could break out, then what?” I whisper. “We don’t have a ship.”

  “Ahem,” Bolt whispers, from my other side. “We skinned their GUI in English, remember?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I’ve got a copy in my suit’s memory.”

  “So do I. So what? We still don’t have a ship.”

  “So we capture one,” Patrick says, as if that would be the easy part.

  And maybe it would be. What do I know? Nothing. I thought Elsa would be here. She isn’t. I know nothing.

  “Tancred doesn’t want to do it,” I say.

  “Smaug does,” Patrick says.

  “If I had a Void Dragon, it would want to,” Bolt says, and Patrick buries a snort of laughter in his elbow. My old roommate and my best friend are teaming up against me. Great.

  I wriggle off the bed, trying not to disturb anyone else, and go to stand by the fire. The weight of responsibility for all of our lives feels like a barbell too heavy to lift, that’s pinioning my chest, constraining my breath. I hunker down and hold my hands out to the banked embers.

  “Incidentally,” Tim Delacroix says, “Marguerite and I have decided to stay.”

  Tim’s head pokes off the end of the bed nearest to me. I can see Marguerite’s gray head beside his shoulder. She’s curled up, maybe asleep or maybe pretending. She’s hardly said a word to anyone since Fleur was killed.

  “You’re … staying?” I say to Tim.

  “Sorry, Jay, but we’re too old for this. We’re packing it in.”

  Marguerite raises her head. Not asleep, then. “Tim and I ran a military outsourcing company on Earth,” she says in her crisp, French-accented English. She sounds surprisingly … together. Normal, even if it’s only a façade. “To put it bluntly, we rented out mercenaries to UNGov. We were neck deep in this war. We enabled it and profited from it. Now the war has taken our son and it has also taken Fleur.”

  Sara’s voice comes quietly from the corner of the bed. “That was me, Marguerite.”

  Marguerite ignores her. “We have nothing left to lose. So—yes. We are staying here.”

  I say, “You know they only want you because Buster eats Earth ships, right?”

  Tim shrugs. “We never could’ve gone back to Earth, anyway.”

  “Same for me,” says Luigi out of the darkness.

  Francie pipes up, “Nonno! No!”

  Is no one asleep?

  “Sorry, Francesca,” Luigi says. “Tim is right. They will never let us go back to Earth. And for me and Jinks, we’d rather live on an Offense arkship than an asteroid. New worlds to explore, eh? I leave the farm to you and your mamma.”

  Someone mutters in the dark: �
��No loss to our side, anyway.”

  I think that was Paul. He’s right, of course. Jinks and Buster both eat Earth ships. Here among the Offense, they will presumably be well fed.

  “Fine,” Patrick says. I can hear him struggling to be fair. “You’ve all got the right to make your own decisions. But—”

  “I’m staying, too,” says someone else.

  “Me, too—” and the floodgates open. Inspired by the Delacroixes’ and Luigi’s example, more than half the survivors declare that they’re staying.

  Patrick sits up, white-faced in the darkness. “Hands up who’s with me, then,” he says.

  I am supposed to be in command of this Corps. It’s increasingly clear that I am no longer in command of anything, and what’s more, there’s no Corps left, just a mess of scared and angry human beings.

  “Got your back, bruv,” Paul says.

  “Your problems are my problems, Newcombe,” Francie says, squeezing Patrick’s arm.

  “Anyone who stays here is getting into bed with the Devil,” Milosz says.

  “And the Devil’s bed smells like shit,” Bolt says.

  “I’m still holding out for my Pacific island,” Huifang says.

  “Mi seh wi should steal an Offense ship an trade it to de DoD for a Pacific island,” Badrick says.

  “I like the way you think, bro,” Patrick says, like he’s ready to go and steal an Offense ship right now.

  With God knows how many miles of the Grief Merchant in between us and anything resembling freedom.

  “Fucked if I’m staying here,” Zach says. His NCOs and surviving crew mumble in embarrassment, but do not change their minds. He has lost command, too.

  “Sara?” Patrick raises his eyebrows towards the corner where her voice came from before.

  She stands up—or rather, Faith stands up, and I see Sara an instant later, hunched around Faith, gripping her neck in that way she does. “I need to speak to the CO for a minute,” she says.

  I guess that would still be me.

  “Are you gonna go with Patrick?” she whispers, standing with me near the door. Tancred screens the door itself with his bulk. Outside it, I am sure, is at least one armed jelly. At the other end of the shack, Patrick is huddling with the others, planning their escape. “Because if you’re not going, I’m not, either.”