I’m startled. Does she mean it? Why would she say that? “They’re all going to get killed.”
“Sure, it’s scary. But I think we have to try.”
She’s giving me a pep talk. Humiliation lacerates me. “Honestly, I think you would have a better chance without me,” I say.
“Oh, come on, sir—”
“My head’s not in the game.” I take a big breath, like a suffocating man gasping for oxygen, and plunge on. “When it comes right down to it, I brought us out here to look for my aunt. I thought she was on Hardy’s ship. I was wrong. I got my personal shit mixed up with my duty, and four people died for it, and now more people are gonna die. So please quit calling me sir, because I’ve failed about as badly as a commander can fail. Shit, I never wanted this job, anyway!”
I stop there. I have a weird, lightheaded feeling. It’s the honesty. Have I ever told someone how I really feel before? Not since I was a kid, could be. I’m more afraid of Sara’s reaction than I am of facing the jellies.
“Well, too bad,” she says.
“Huh?”
“Too, freaking, bad. You screwed up. Now pick yourself up off the deck, sir, and try again.”
“What’s the point?” I say morosely.
“The point is staying human.”
“Death before dishonor?” I say sarcastically. “You sound like a Marine.”
“I was a Marine,” she snaps. “And maybe I liked it better than I like being a Void Dragon mama. But I don’t get to choose, and neither do you! You have a duty to humanity!”
“I know you think I’m wimping out,” I say. I shouldn’t have been honest with her. I’ve become a despicable object in her eyes.
“I don’t think you’re wimping out. I’m just wondering about your motives. Are you still trying to protect your aunt?”
Before I can say a word, the door of the shack springs open.
Tancred rears on his hind legs, poised to attack.
But only two jellies stand there, clad in the bead-curtain outfits that seem to signify noble status. Outside, it’s daylight again.
“Good morning, two-legged prey beings?” one of them says, convivially. “Time for breakfast!”
Were they eavesdropping on us all the time?
Have they heard every word we said?
The shack could well be bugged. This low-tech ambiance is just an artistic statement.
“Are they inviting us for breakfast? Or to be breakfast?” Bolt mutters, as he pushes past me.
Caught on the back foot, we all follow them docilely out into the snow-colored daylight.
The street of the village is no busier than before. A freaky animal like a walking octopus snuffles around the door of the royal shack. The snowy hills curve up calm and pristine in both directions. This Offense habitat has a timeless ambiance, and I actually can see the appeal of it, in comparison to the herky-jerky intensity of my own life.
“You will eat at the Earthling quarters,” our jelly escorts say. They lead us uphill through the village. So high above us it looks to be hanging sideways, a human-size chalet stands a little way from the Offense’s scrofulous hangars. Smoke rises from the chimney. It does look cozy.
The ones who’ve decided to stay here speed up, while the would-be escapers lag behind, so that we gradually separate into two groups.
As we near the Earthling quarters, some of the traitors come out and wave at us. There’s Beardy, gripping a staff like some kind of Old Testament prophet, and Hardy—he doesn’t wave.
Hardy.
All I’d need is five minutes alone with him. I’ll make him tell me how Elsa is involved in this. If she’s involved at all—
Wait. Something’s happening. Jellies glide out of the shacks on our left and right, joining the untidy procession of humans and dragons.
An armor-clad tentacle snakes out to grab Patrick’s arm. He jumps back. “Hey!”
One of the courtiers booms gaily, “You rejected our queen’s gracious offer of hospitality, did you not?”
Shit. They were eavedropping on us!
“Her Majesty’s orders are unchanged. Those who wish to stay, may stay. Those who do not wish to stay, will be fed to the lower classes.”
The armored jellies dart in among us, sorting us out. We were already walking in two loose groups. Now I’m looking at Sara through a palisade of armored tentacles.
I’m on the wrong side.
Patrick scuffles with a jelly, dodging its tentacles. “Smaug!” he yells. “BURN!” Dragonfire licks palely over the snow. The jellies trumpet in rage.
I spin to face to Tim, Marguerite, Luigi, and everyone else who decided to stay. “Run,” I tell them, pointing to the chalet. “I hope—”
I hope they’ll be all right.
I hope I’m not making another mistake.
All I know is I can’t leave my friends to die.
Tancred dips his head. I swing a leg over the base of his neck and scramble onto his back. I hang on for dear life as he leaps into the air. Swooping over the melee, he blasts dragon-fire at the jellies, boiling them alive inside their exoskeletons.
11
If the jellies smell bad alive, they smell much, much worse when their skins are smouldering and their goop is boiling. Putrid smoke billows into my eyes. Wheezing, I fumble with my wrist control pad and find the button that makes my helmet hinge out of my collar. It closes over my head, sealing me into a microcosm of clean air and radio crosstalk.
“On me. Back to the airlock we came in at,” Patrick yells.
Soaring down the street, Tancred and I have a dragon’s-eye view of the royal village.
My friends charge down the street in one of the formations we practised back on Mingetty, a moving square. Dragons on the outside, humans on the inside.
Jellies rush out of the shacks to intercept them. Some of them are armored, some not.
Playing the role of air support, like we practised all those times, Tancred scythes dragon-fire across these courtiers, or guards, or bystanders. Tentacles shrivel. Power packs explode. Unarmored jellies burst like water balloons. Tancred is kicking ass … but he’s trembling with misery under me. He hates this. He may be a Void Dragon, but killing is not his thing.
It is Smaug’s. He’s dashing ahead of the square, popping his head inside the shacks and setting fire to them, one after another. Lurid yellow and blue flames leap up to join the white candles of dragon-fire stabbing through the village.
Suddenly, someone in the front line goes down, and the whole square skids to a halt, folding up around the person on the ground. It’s Milosz. Shit! Wiktor stands over him, panting fire, but he’s not even ankle-high to the twenty-sided soldiers rushing into the street. Where did they come from? Who the heck knows? Royal bodyguards, I imagine. The beams of energy weapons lance through the smoke. Faith zooms from one soldier to the other, lapping up their power, but she can’t be everywhere at once. Meanwhile, Patrick and Huifang are struggling to get Milosz back on his feet.
From my commanding position up here, I can see a couple of things clearly. One: Our only hope is to move fast. Every nanosecond of delay improves ther chances of stopping us. Two: The others won’t be able to move fast if they’re carrying Milosz.
Tancred lands behind the assaulting jellies, immune to the energy beams that sparkle off his wings. He takes three of them out at once with a blast of dragon-fire, clearing a path for me. I scramble off his back and run through the puddles of hot goop and burning debris in the street.
“We’ll carry him,” I yell, dragging Milosz out of Huifang’s anguished grasp.
He’s a big guy. With Patrick’s help, I get him draped over Tancred’s back, and we take off again.
At first I thought Milosz was basically OK. Then I see a hole in his stomach. It was made by an energy weapon, so it’s not bleeding. It’s just smoking a bit. His spacesuit is struggling to self-seal, its material damaged by the heat. I can see into his body. I can see his organs.
“St
ay with me, Milosz!”
His lips move inside his helmet, and blood comes out of them.
“Where are you hit?” I’m an idiot. I can see where he’s hit. I can see how bad it is.
“It’s going to be all right,” he says clearly. “God is with us.” A shudder rolls through his body, and through me, as if his faith were contagious. He is clearly looking at something I cannot see.
Then he is not looking at anything.
He’s dead.
I hold onto him, anyway, until a swarm of drones zoom down from the cloud-white ceiling, shooting so fast and furiously that Tancred has to twist around like an eel in the air to burn them, which makes it impossible to stay on his back. He swoops low over the snowy track and I slide to the ground with Milosz’s corpse on top of me.
*
I’m quite a long way from the village, or rather, from the flames and smoke where the village used to be. The hilly terrain hides the track in between me and there, so I can’t see the rest of the unit.
The burnt carcasses of drones plummet to the ground around me.
I lay Milosz straight in the snow and fold his hands on his chest. Then I stumble uphill, back towards the others. I almost step on a dog-sized Void Dragon corpse. There’s still a hint of red on his tail.
I kill Wiktor, Tancred says remotely, still fighting the drones.
I inhale and exhale, feeling sick on Tancred’s behalf. I know he had to do that. Milosz’s death would have sent Wiktor into hate mode. Mad with bereavement, he would have ended up eating Jupiter.
Can you see the others? I say, dreading Tancred’s reply.
Yes. They coming. They fighting.
Go and help them.
No leave Daddy, Tancred says obstinately.
Go! I’ll be fine!
Shocked by my mental yell, Tancred flaps heavily away.
And then I am alone.
I stand staring uphill, catching my breath.
Suddenly, from the unseen roof, snow falls in targeted mini-avalanches on the village. It douses the fires and covers the burnt shacks with a blanket of white.
Wonder what happened to the queen? She probably fled as soon as it kicked off. She’ll have had a secret elevator or something. After all, the Grief Merchant, so huge that for chrissakes it’s got weather inside, is, at the end of the day, just a spaceship. The rocky track under my feet isn’t real. It’s just a decorated deck.
Without warning, Hardy lunges out from around a snowy hillock, gripping a gun.
He’s lucky I don’t have a gun. I’d have shot him before I noticed he’s holding the gun the other way round.
Offering it to me.
He’s carrying a satchel and wearing one of their white cloaks. In the shadow of his hood, his mouth moves. I open my visor so I can hear what he’s saying.
“You haven’t got a fart’s chance in a hurricane. But this might help.”
I numbly take the gun. Hasn’t it occurred to him that I might shoot him with it? If I can figure out how to work it, that is. It’s an Offense gun, a black rectangle that weighs about ten kilos, with no visible trigger.
“That button there,” Hardy says. “You gotta hold it in both hands. It’s one of the ones they use for hunting.” He drops his satchel with a thump. “Couple more weapons, plus power packs.”
“Why … are you helping me?”
“Because I don’t want you to die, obviously.”
“Did the others … my people? Did they make it?”
“Yeah, they’re in the chalet.” Hardy straightens up, obviously eager to return to the chalet himself. We can hear the noise of fighting from up the track. “This is nothing,” Hardy says. “You should see their festivals.” His little dragon huddles inside the hood of his cloak, not as sanguine as Hardy is, or pretends to be.
I stride after him. “Where’s Elsa?”
“Oh, not this again.”
“Major Scattergood was on your ship!”
“You really don’t know anything, do you?” Hardy swings to face me again.
His eyes widen as he sees the gun he just gave me in his fist.
He gets out half of a yell before I bring the butt end of the weapon down hard, overhand, in a crashing axe blow on his skull.
He topples face first into the snow.
*
I bend over Hardy, turn his head to the side, and make sure he’s breathing—then fling myself flat in the snow beside him as a rocket screams overhead.
Poking my head up, I follow the rocket’s contrail out of sight. CRUMP, it explodes on the other side of the nearest hill.
A second later, Smaug flies over the hill towards me, black with ash, his body encrusted with carbonized goop.
The entire Dragon Unit follows him, pounding down the track.
Over their heads, Tancred is a blur of green wings and dragon-fire, singlehandedly keeping off the drones.
I drag Hardy and his bag of guns back onto the track. My friends are covered with ash, giving a camouflage effect on their asteroid-gray spacesuits. Patrick says that they just fought their way through the entire royal bodyguard. He and Paul pick up the other two guns Hardy brought.
Just as more twenty-sided jelly commandos pour down the hill, from the direction of the airlock.
Francie stands with her hands on her hips. “We’re not gonna make it.”
“Sorry, guys,” Patrick says. “I thought we had a chance. Sorry.”
“No,” I say. “We aren’t done yet.”
I stamp on the track. It isn’t rock. It’s just a decorated deck. We’re actually only a hull’s thickness from freedom.
“Tancred! Burn down!”
The other dragons take over from Tancred, fighting the drones in the sky, apart from Jade and Rude Boy, who zip away to harass the commandos.
Tancred lands heavily on the track in our midst. Crouching, he breathes fire on the snow.
First it melts.
Then the fake rocks underneath it melt.
Then the circuitry inside them melts.
Alarms go wild, screaming so loudly I can hear them through my helmet.
Badrick shouts, “Heads up! Hostiles high on mi two!”
Bullets skip through the snowmelt flowing around our ankles. I catch sight of new, bigger drones zooming overhead. The jellies have wised up. They’re using solid ammo now.
Tancred burns through insulation, a mere shadow inside a cloud of toxic smoke.
The smoke hides the jelly commandos rushing up the track towards us—and hides us from them.
I go to look for Hardy, find him groaning in the snow, drag him back to the others.
Tancred hits a conduit.
A powerful arc of water sprays into the air, scattering the drones that are still diving at us.
But water does not stop Tancred’s fire. He keeps burning through the water, like a spear of molten thermite, flashing the water into steam.
Patrick and Paul sprint back to us. “Didn’t even slow them down,” Patrick grunts. “We got about half a minute before they’re here.”
Tancred’s burning through solid steel now, while steam envelops us in foggy clouds. He’s getting tired. The other dragons gather around him, adding their fire to his. They’re comparatively small and weak, but maybe it’s the thought that counts.
They break through the hull. Depressurization starts to suck the steam and smoke away.
The jelly commandos burst into view, guns levelled. Bullets crunch into the melting snow around us. Francie screams.
I kneel and fire Hardy’s gun into the armored phalanx.
Faith slinks around me, seizes the weapon in her teeth, and eats it. So much for that.
I sag on all fours, empty-handed. The sheer faces of the jellies’ exoskeletons loom like the grilles of twenty-ton trucks, barrelling up the path at me. Their faceted domes tear through the steam like the battleships of hell. I remember what Milosz said: God is with us.
A short stone’s throw away, the commandos suddenly p
itch forward into the snow.
All except one of them, who lowers his gun.
Actually, all ten of so of his guns.
With which he just shot his buddies in the back.
Nightmare flutters off the top of his exoskeleton and scribbles a thread of dragon-fire across the fallen jellies, for good measure.
“As they say, fuck this,” Gutmangler booms. “I will not stay where I am not wanted.”
Before the words are out of his mouth, Tancred breaks through the hull. Parts of the ground crack away and fall into the void below. Dizziness seizes me. I snatch at Hardy’s cloak—
—and someone shoves me in the back. Still holding onto Hardy, I fall into the dark.
12
I fall about ten feet.
And land on a metal deck.
Not outside. Oh, hell. This is some kind of inter-hull space. I can’t find the toggle for my helmet lamp. People are falling on top of me. I drag Hardy aside, and then a baby dragon lights up the darkness with fire. I glimpse a dark tunnel with conduits snaking along the ceiling.
“Run!” Patrick’s shout cuts through the radio crosstalk.
I don’t run. I wait, amidst the blizzard of snow that’s being sucked into the hole in the ceiling. This tunnel is in vacuum. Was in vacuum.
I wait for Tancred.
He squeezes through the hole last of all, twisting in mid-air to direct a last jet of fire at the pursuing drones. Lands at my side with a thump. He’s really tired now.
I panic, suddenly remembering that Hardy isn’t in a spacesuit. Then I see he is in a spacesuit. His white cloak has moulded itself to his body, turning into a skinsuit. His hood has turned into a transparent bubble over his head. Offense technology for the win. Hardy’s little runt of a dragon is stuck inside the bubble, too, crawling over his master’s unconscious face in a panic.
And now I have to ask one more thing of Tanced. Can you carry this asshole? The headlamps of the others are shrinking into the distance. We’re getting left behind.
Exiles of the Belt (Void Dragon Hunters Book 4) Page 8