Soldiers of Callisto (Void Dragon Hunters Book 3) Read online

  All this happens in a microsecond.

  In the next microsecond, Gutmangler roars, “BAD human!” and shoots Jeremy in the back.

  With an energy weapon.

  That’s what you use on board a ship, or a submarine, where you don’t want to risk puncturing your own hull.

  The beam is faintly visible, cherry-red. It drills a hole in Jeremy’s back and comes out of his chest. It hits the egg.

  The egg shatters.

  A periwinkle blue baby dragon flaps out into the submarine, screaming in my head. Tancred can hear her, too. Her anguish reverberates around the inside of our skulls.

  No wonder she’s upset. She hatched in the same instant her companion, who had showered her with love and round-the-clock attention, died.

  Jeremy topples to the deck. Pink steam rises from the hole in his back. His limbs jitter. Maybe he’s not dead! Heedlessly, I drop to my knees and shake him.

  Meanwhile, the baby dragon flutters at Gutmangler. The jelly keeps shooting her, and she keeps drinking the energy. Gutmangler winds up throwing the gun into the baby dragon’s face, which does not deter her one bit. The other jellies surge around us. They shoot the baby dragon, too.

  Francie, Sara, and I are on the floor, trying to revive Jeremy. It’s no good. Now I know how those Marines felt about Pvt. Henriquez. I would have thrown us out of the lifeboat, as well. I hate the fucking jellies so much—

  The baby dragon flies up higher, dodging their slapping tentacles. She’s already grown to the size of a cat on all the energy they’ve fed her, and she’s still screaming.

  Tancred! I think frantically. Can you calm her down?

  Tancred is diffident. But Pinkie Pie responds. Cooing sympathetically, she takes off from Francie’s shoulder and flies up to the baby dragon. No cry! It OK!

  Tentacles whip at them. Pinkie Pie breathes out a puff of fire. Tentacles jerk back.

  Inspired, I shout, “Leave us alone or we’ll burn your submarine! Remember what happened to Chester the Molester? Yeah, that was us! And we’ll do it again if you don’t let us go!”

  No, Daddy! Tancred thinks. No burn! Is water out there. No good for you!

  I know, little scaly-butt. I’m trying to bluff them.

  “So ask yourselves this question: do you feel lucky?” I yell. “Well, do you, goopheads?”

  Gutmangler barks at the other jellies. They rustle back, forming a circle around Pinkie Pie and the baby dragon, who is now breathing fire at the ceiling. It’s like she’s reinforcing my bluff. But I don’t think she is bluffing. She neither knows nor cares that we’re hundreds of meters below the surface of the sea. She just wants to escape, and Pinkie Pie’s entreaties aren’t working.

  “You stop that dragon, now!” Gutmangler bellows.

  But I can’t stop her. Ceiling-stuff drips onto the floor. Electrical wires, exposed, start to short out. I smell burning.

  Me kill her, Daddy? Tancred says urgently.

  What?

  Me big. She little. Kill her, stop her burning.

  You can DO that?

  Course. Am Void Dragon.

  Shit. How much do I want to live? How much do I want to live on board an Offense submarine?

  Before I can decide, Sara steps forward. She no longer looks angry and defiant. She no longer even looks like the same person. A rapt expression transforms her face. Her uniform drips. She’s beautiful. She holds up her hands to the baby Void Dragon. “C’mere,” she says.

  The baby dragon stops burning through the ceiling.

  “C’mere,” Sara repeats. “It’s OK.”

  The baby’s final, anguished scream turns into a sob. It flutters down into Sara’s hands.

  She cups it against her face, then sinks to her knees, murmuring to it.

  “You were right. It was a girl,” Francie says quietly, to Jeremy’s corpse. She sits down and strokes the hair off his dead face. She’s crying.

  Somehow, I muster a smile. “There you go,” I say to Gutmangler. “All they want is love. There’s a lesson there for you guys. If you ever feel like not being assholes, it might pay off.”

  “I am asshole!” says Gutmangler, tetchily.

  “Yes,” I sigh.

  “I am biggest asshole on Callisto!”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  There is a moment’s silence.

  “I want Void Dragons!” Gutmangler says.

  “Believe me,” Francie snarls, tears all over her face, “you don’t.”

  One of his gun tentacles points at her. She holds up her hands and shrinks back.

  “You will give me Void Dragons, or I will kill you!” Now his other gun tentacle is pointing at me.

  “Well, uh …”

  Suddenly, one of the other jellies rushes up to Gutmangler and gargles at him. It waves a tentacle at me.

  “So!” Gutmangler booms. “You thought you could trick us!”

  “Uh?” I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  The other jelly rushes at me. Two tentacles grip my arms. A third and a four rip the blouse of my sodden BDUs off. The tentacles feel horrible on my naked skin, like that slime stuff I had when I was a kid. I once dropped it down my mom’s neck. I still remember how she screamed.

  I cringe as Gutmangler seizes my right arm and drags it up, raising me onto my tiptoes.

  “Aha!” One of Gutmangler’s tentacles prods the raised bump on my right bicep, where Hardy shot me.

  It stopped hurting the next day, and I never thought about it again. But the bump is still there.

  “A radio transmitter!”

  A what?

  “How fortunate,” Gutmangler gurgles, “that you did not try to hide it anywhere more … vital.”

  The front edge of his dome tilts up. His exoskeleton retracts from the underside of the dome. Amidst the forest of manipulator tentacles, his maw gapes open. Rows of teeth ring a purple, pulsating throat.

  He brings my arm up to his maw, and bites.

  I scream my throat raw.

  Gutmangler spits something bloody out on the floor.

  Just before I pass out, I see what it is.

  A chunk of my arm.

  *

  The pain in my arm wakes me. I push up on my elbows and stare in disgust at the blood-crusted wound on my bicep. Gutmangler literally took a chunk out of me.

  I’m lying across Tancred’s flanks, in the bottom of a shallow bowl ten feet across. It is an Offense couch / chair / bed. It takes up most of a large cubicle. Well, large for a human.

  The other occupant of the cubicle is Gutmangler, standing at one of those high consoles.

  Tancred nuzzles my shoulder. I feel his love and worry. He’s been watching over me.

  Francie and Sara? I ask, silently.

  They not hurt. I not LET goopheads hurt them.

  You rock, little scalybutt.

  But not even Tancred can get us out of here, nor ease the pain in my right arm, which seems to echo throughout my whole body every time my heart beats.

  Gutmangler hears me moving, looks around. “Feel better, two-legged prey being?”

  “No.” At least they’ve turned up the heat. It is no longer frigid, and my clothes have dried. Silver linings.

  “You take this, feel better.” Two manipulator tentacles extend a cup of water and a paper cup of pills. In disbelief I read the lettering stamped on the pills: CODEINE 60 MG. They’re ours. Of course, the jellies have had ample opportunities to capture our stuff.

  I feel so crap that I don’t hesitate to down two of the pills. Sure enough, within a few minutes the pain dulls, and I’m capable of coherent thought again.

  Gutmangler doesn’t want me to die.

  Why?

  “Now,” he rumbles, “you give me Void Dragons.”

  Oh. That’s why.

  “What did you do with the … the radio transmitter?” If I could get a look at it, I might be able to tell where it came from.

  “Huh, huh, huh,” Gutmangler burps. After an ins
tant I realize he’s laughing. “Put it into the pocket of dead human. Push him out the airlock.”

  So much for that.

  Well, I know where it came from, anyway.

  Hardy fired it into my arm, as if I was an endangered animal, so that he could keep track of me.

  “Earthlings will find it … on floating corpse!” Gutmangler laughs some more, pleased with his hilarious prank. Then he stops laughing and turns his armored dome to face me. “Now you give me Void Dragons. Or I push one more human out of airlock.”

  “No!”

  “Brown hair one? Or black hair one? You choose.”

  No. I cannot let him kill Francie or Sara. My mind is crumpling.

  Then I have a brainwave.

  “All right,” I say. Scrambling to my feet, I fold my arms and stare up at the monster. “But you’ll have to let me use your computer.”

  *

  After I explain what I’m going to do, Gutmangler sets up his computer so I can see the internet.

  The screen is above my eye level, and the console is out of reach, so Gutmangler makes a seat for me out of one of his walking tentacles. It’s like sitting on an armored tree branch, legs dangling. I flinch every time I involuntarily lean back against his dome. I can smell jelly—briny, organic—through the vents of his exoskeleton.

  I need to hack into DoD CalCOM’s timetables of scheduled ship departures and arrivals. I did this before, just messing around to see if it was possible. It was, but now it’s not working. I figure that’s because I am on an Offense submarine. Even the DoD has to have some access monitoring in place.

  Gutmangler slides a tentacle over my shoulder to tap the screen. I flinch violently. He laughs: huh, huh, huh. “You try to inject SQL?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are loser script kiddy. We already exploit this system. Execute arbitrary code, inject our own ghostware. I show you.”

  My mouth hangs open. I knew, I knew our military comms software has privilege escalation vulnerabilities that have never been satisfactorily patched. Hackers on Earth use this system as a chew toy. Some people say the crappiness is a result of the Offense messing with our systems. I never really believed that, but I guess it’s true, after all.

  What the heck are our cyberwarfare specialists doing? Holding jello shot competitions?

  Gutmangler demonstrates root access by replacing the CalCOM logo with a graphic of a farting Offensive. He switches it back two seconds later, but I’m shaken. These kind of random hacks happen all the time … and I thought it was human pranksters with too much time on their hands.

  “You could do anything!” I say.

  “Yes, but then they know we have access. Not worth it. Better keep tentacles curled and gather information.”

  No freaking wonder the jellies always know when our supply ships are due, and attack them—a whole lot more effectively than we attack their supply ships.

  I glance at Tancred, find his green-apple eyes watching me. Trusting me to get us out of here.

  “OK.” I swallow. “All I need to do is look at the arrival timetables.”

  I scroll the lists of ship data until I find the God of the Gaps, Jeremy’s parents’ private spaceplane.

  It’s scheduled to arrive day after tomorrow.

  They actually got permission to land on Callisto. Well, Mr. and Mrs. Delacroix run a military outsourcing company. I guess it wasn’t that hard.

  And the jellies just chucked Jeremy’s body out of the submarine, with Hardy & Strong’s radio transmitter in his pocket.

  What’s it going to be like for his parents? I imagine them flying towards Callisto right now, anxiously making arrangements to retrieve their son from Lofn, not knowing he’s dead.

  I hate the jellies so much.

  Hide it, Scattergood. Hide the hatred and the fear.

  I tend to be very secretive. I got it from my dad, who disappeared on my mom without even telling her why or where he was going. Deception is in my blood. I was trying to get over it, start being more open with people. But now I can use my own flaw.

  “This is so freaking cool,” I say admiringly.

  “Of course it is cool. We are cool,” Gutmangler rumbles contentedly.

  I click around in the data a bit. Tonnages. Thrust parameters and landing requirements. Passenger lists.

  Passenger lists.

  Wait a minute.

  An outrageous idea strikes me. What if I push my luck a bit further?

  My fingers fly over the on-screen QWERTY keyboard Gutmangler set up for me. SEARCH: Point of departure = Ceres. Date of departure … let’s see … 80 days ago, plus / minus two weeks. RESULT: five ships. I immediately eliminate the four military transports that called at Ceres before proceeding to Callisto. That leaves one ship, the Raimbaut, a fast courier.

  Heart racing, I click on the passenger list.

  Bingo.

  The data is redacted. Nothing but black bars.

  “What are you doing?” Gutmangler says with a sharp note in his electronically generated English.

  I twist on my uncomfortable tentacle-bench. Now I’m looking Gutmangler in the eyes. All 20 of them.

  The Offense captain has opened his visor, which means the pearly dome of his exoskeleton now has an oblong gap in it, framing what I suppose is his face. 20 fist-sized eyes cluster together, covered by the translucent outer membrane of his skin, unblinking. The jellies can move their organs around inside their bodies at will. Now he’s training all his eyes on me.

  “Can you decrypt this data?” I ask.

  Some of his eyes focus past me, on the screen. I hold my breath.

  “Easy peasy,” he says.

  “Will you?”

  He brings up a manipulator tentacle and pokes me in the nose. It hurts. “No. I let you live. You give me Void Dragons. Classified information not included in deal.”

  “I just changed the deal.”

  “You are my prisoner,” he reminds me.

  Like I could forget that. “You let all three of us live, and decrypt this data for me. And in return, you get …” I motion with my head towards Tancred. “Void Dragons.”

  “I get Void Dragons anyway.”

  “No,” I say, “you don’t. Not unless you decrypt this passenger list.”

  “I kill you,” Gutmangler threatens.

  “Then you definitely don’t get Void Dragons. Plus, my Void Dragon burns the crap out of your submarine and you all die.”

  A manipulator tentacle wraps around my neck, firmly but not roughly. It forces my chin up. The huge eyes roll, looking me over, up and down. They come back to focus on my face. It’s like having 20 wet black guns trained on me. “You are interesting human,” Gutmangler rumbles softly.

  I shrug, as best I can with a tentacle wrapped around my neck. “I never thought I would end up talking to a jelly,” I say, honestly. “I mean, an Offensive. I never thought it was even possible to talk to you.”

  Gutmangler’s dome bulges slightly out of his visor. That might be a nod. “Mostly humans do not talk. Mostly they just scream and say ‘Fuck.’ Even before we pull their arms and legs off.”

  “I understand that reaction,” I say, with a tentacle wrapped around my neck. “But now I think there’s a better way.”

  “Me, too.” Another tentacle wraps round my right thigh. “Maybe I pull one of your legs off.”

  Tancred raises his head and breathes out a pale gust of fire. It comes near enough to Gutmangler’s walking tentacles to make him jump. I cough in pain as his tentacle tightens on my throat.

  “Or maybe,” I wheeze breathlessly, “you just decrypt that data, huh?”

  Grumbling and tapping his manipulator tentacles on the console, he whizzes through some arcane decryption routine. If I survive this I will have to find some way to let the DoD know that even our zero-level encryption is not safe from the Offense. After a few minutes, he reloads the ship data and shows me the Raimbaut’s passenger list in clear.

  “Howe,”
I read aloud. “Samuels. Sponaugle.” Only last names. None of them mean anything to me. But they wouldn’t. According to Elsa and Dr. Joy, most of the traitors are DirMInt insiders who stay out of the public eye. I inscribe them in my memory, making up a mnemonic on the fly to help me remember them. “Muramoto. Hoefler. Ilyukhin. Yu.” His Sticky Sweets Made Holes In Your … “Tran.” Teeth. “Scattergood.”

  That last one comes out as a squeak.

  Gutmangler thinks it’s because he’s strangling me. He releases his tentacle-grip around my neck.

  The words on the screen blur in my vision, but don’t change.

  Scattergood.

  8

  Later, I sit on the edge of a different Offense nest in a different compartment, my arms around Tancred’s neck, thinking up excuses for my aunt.

  She’s trying to infiltrate the conspiracy.

  But she doesn’t work for DirMInt.

  Gutmangler’s decryption program is crap.

  But why would it come up, randomly, with a name that happens to be mine and Elsa’s?

  Gutmangler deliberately inserted my own name into the passenger list as a joke.

  But he doesn’t know my name. And I saw him reload the page. And anyway, why would he bother? He didn’t know why I was interested in the Raimbaut. Besides, he thinks, sure as shooting, that he’s going to cleverly kill us all once he’s got his Void Dragons. He’d never have said a word to me otherwise.

  It’s a different Scattergood.

  But Scattergood is a really rare name. I’ve never met another one. What are the odds there’d be two unrelated Scattergoods working on Ceres?

  Or, OK. Elsa was on the Raimbaut, for reasons unrelated to the conspiracy … and she didn’t come to see us, or even tell me she was coming, because … because …

  I mash the heels of my hands into my eyes.

  I cannot believe my aunt would betray humanity.

  I can’t believe she would betray me.

  This nest is a flabby, shallow cup ten feet across. Francie and Sara lie side by side with their heads at one edge, and Tancred and I are curled up with our heads at the other edge. Since the nest is concave, we keep slipping down towards each other. Whenever my foot accidentally touches Francie’s foot, she kicks me to make me move.