Exiles of the Belt (Void Dragon Hunters Book 4)

by Felix R. Savage

  My exhausted Void Dragon bows his head and picks Hardy gently up in his jaws. I’m asking so much of him, it breaks my heart. He’s already saved our lives several times. But it will all be meaningless if we can’t escape, and we aren’t out of here yet.

  The drones pursue us through the tunnels. The small dragons fight a running battle with them, picking them off one by one with dragon-fire.

  I’m nearly delirious with exhaustion when I bump into someone. We’ve stopped.

  “Service hatch,” Gutmangler gurgles, stabbing with his tentacles at a console.

  It’s an airlock. The chamber’s small by jelly standards, but there are only ten of us now, plus Gutmangler and the dragons.

  The airlock cycles.

  We float out into a gargantuan geometry problem, the scaffolding of a modern architect’s wet dream, encrusted with ship-sized industrial units whose sides reflect the light of distant Jupiter.

  The truss of the Grief Merchant.

  It curves away from us, a moon-sized ring, appearing to balance like a Ferris wheel on the white plain of the hab below us.

  Just for a second it looks beautiful, a work of art.

  Then, tumbling in freefall, I get my bearings. The white plain is not below us, it’s above. Ships nuzzle inside the truss below my feet. This is the same place we started out at!

  Ships.

  We need … oh.

  Tancred has seen the ships, too. He takes off from my side. Wobble, wobble. His wings spread out for miles as he zooms towards the nearest ship, a white dolphin the size of an aircraft carrier.

  “Leave this to me,” Gutmangler booms.

  “What are you doing?” My attention’s split between him and Tancred and the ship.

  “Emergency radio protocol! Huh, huh, huh. I inform the ship we are in need of assistance.”

  The dolphin ship is turning gracefully, curving around the outside of the truss. bearing down on us.

  “Ship’s AI is stupid,” Gutmangler chortles.

  “Where’s Tancred?” I can’t see him anymore. I thought he was chasing this ship. He’s not responding to me, but I can feel his hunger burning a hole in my mind.

  “Here it comes, here it comes!” Zach yelps.

  The ship slides past us, blotting out Jupiter. We’re in its shadow. Bright whips lash out from low down on its landscape-sized side. We all scream. Then the whips wrap around us as gently as tentacles—which is to say, not very. They whisk us towards an opening in the ship’s side, and dump us into a barren airlock chamber.

  “Tancred!” I yell. “Tancred!”

  Me here, Daddy.

  Sliding down the wall of the chamber, I let myself go, let my consciousness join Tancred’s.

  He is sitting on this very ship’s engine housing, like a dog riding in a pickup. Sipping the residual heat from its last burn. Holding back his hunger. If they be mean to you, I eat ship. So you can tell them, no be mean.

  Tears spring to my eyes. Nothing can get between a Void Dragon and its food … except love.

  The inner door of the airlock scissors apart. We face a wall of armored jellies with guns.

  Gutmangler starts to hoot at them. Paul cuts him off. “We’re hijacking this ship.”

  The jellies point their guns at us with less conviction than before.

  “Do as I say, or my Void Dragon will eat your ship.” I shrug with fake nonchalance. “We’re getting in. You’re getting out.”

  “Out of the way!” Francie yells. “Patrick’s bleeding to death!”

  *

  Francie’s freak-out terrifies everyone, but it turns out that Patrick just has a flesh wound. He took a bullet through the thigh. Mercifully, it didn’t hit the artery, and his suit sealed itself, preventing him from losing too much blood.

  Badrick has a similar wound in his hand.

  Hardy has a concussion.

  Sara has a burn on one arm, from restraining Faith.

  And worst of all, we are leaving Milosz behind us, dead on the Grief Merchant.

  The cost of our escape mutes our joy at being alive, especially when every fighter in the Grief Merchant’s escort pounces on our hijacked ship, mere moments after we finish throwing the original crew out of the airlocks.

  Tancred is equal to the occasion. He eats enough of the fighters to scare the rest away, and squeezes into the airlock complaining that he’s still hungry.

  He’s now the size of an African bull elephant. My heart sinks a bit. I can’t wrap my arms around his neck anymore, even when I stand on tiptoe. He lowers his huge head down to me and nuzzles my shoulder, almost knocking me over by accident. His skin is searing hot, although he purposely spent some time outside to cool down after eating the fighters.

  Tancred too big? he says anxiously.

  He isn’t even two years old yet. Where is this going to stop? It’s my fault for making him fight so much. For training him to be a living super-weapon.

  However big you get, you’ll still be my little scaly-butt, I say, swallowing my misgivings. I embrace as much of him as I can reach. We owe you our lives.

  I’m just glad Offense ships are so damn big. If this were a human ship, he wouldn’t even be able to fit through the doors anymore.

  I lead him along the highway, I mean corridor, to the bridge. It’s another cavernous, cold, too-bright alien cathedral. Crew nests make beds for the casualties. Zach is in command, using our English-language GUI to control the ship. Incidentally, this ship glories in the name of Tears of the Horror Squish. I don’t think I’ll bother renaming it. Gutmangler says it’s a destroyer, one of the most advanced battleships the Offense has.

  Not having suffered enough yet, the Grief Merchant’s fighters continue to shadow us as we burn across the empty void. There’s a bit of conventional give-and-take with railguns. Patrick—wounded or not—challenges Francie to a target shooting competition. They’re so cute.

  Hardy wakes up.

  “Fuck,” he says. The first thing he sees is his baby dragon, sitting on his chest. “Hello, you,” he says, and cups his hands over it.

  I sit on the floor to talk to him. My heart’s in my mouth. “Well?”

  “Where am I?”

  “Somewhere in trans-Jovian space. You’re my prisoner.”

  “Oh yeah?” Hardy grins dopily.

  I turn to Sara, who’s acting as medic, despite her own burn injury. “What’d you give him?”

  “Just painkillers,” she says with a shrug. Her eyes are empty, flat. This expression is what I think of as her resting-Marine face.

  I want the old Sara back. I want to see her smile. I want to joke around with her again.

  But that’s no longer possible. I think—I’m not sure, but I think I burnt her trust in me by voicing my honest doubts, back on the Grief Merchant.

  If I can get Hardy to talk, her doubts will be resolved. And so will mine … one way or the other.

  We all need the truth.

  “You,” I say, levelling my index finger at Hardy. “Talk.”

  He yawns. “How are you gonna make me?”

  “I …”

  “Gonna torture me? Or throw me out of the airlock?”

  “Maybe just stick you in a cabin with no food or water,” I say, watching his eyes.

  Sara says, “No need. We don’t have any consumables for ourselves, either. Oh, correction: water, we got. But food? It’s gonna be a hungry journey.”

  “Bolt went to look for food,” I say. “He might find something we can safely eat.” He went with Gutmangler, whose conversion seems to be genuine this time. It’s all due to Nightmare. I think Gutmangler has finally got it: the connection to a Void Dragon that ends up mattering more than anything else, more than honor or family or home.

  Hardy caresses his baby dragon, murmuring to it under his breath.

  I slap him in the face. “Talk to me!”

  Color rushes into the handprint I left on his cheek. “My wife and kids are on the Grief Merchant,” he says. “I don’t
know what’s happening to them, what’s gonna happen. Their lives are in jeopardy. Because of you. So why don’t you just shut up and go away, you little punk?”

  “Listen, I’m sorry about your family–”

  “Save it.” His gray-blue eyes are hard and cold. Nothing’s getting out from behind them.

  I get up, dizzy with anger and frustration. I don’t have the stomach to torture anyone, even if it were morally acceptable. I weave across the bridge and clamber onto the table that Patrick is standing on to reach the weapons console.

  “Just a minute, Scatter.” He’s got one knee up on the edge of the console, peering through a jelly targeting optic. “And … bam.”

  “Are they still chasing us?”

  “They’re dropping back. This baby can go.”

  “Stop worrying, Scatter,” Francie says, from the next console over. “We got this.”

  I rub my hands over my face. “At this speed, we should make it back the Belt in a day or so. If they quit harassing us.”

  On cue, Badrick shouts over from the navigation console, “De lass of de jellies ave turned back.”

  “Yeah man,” Patrick yells. Badrick runs lightly along the consoles to us and exchanges a fist-bump with him.

  “The thing is, Scatter,” Francie says. She’s still hunched over her optic, and I suddenly realize she’s avoiding my gaze. “We don’t think going back to the Belt is such a good idea.”

  “Huh? Why not?”

  “Duh, we’re in an Offense battleship.”

  Patrick takes a painkiller with a swallow of water. His spacesuit has a shiny band around one thigh, like scar tissue, where it’s holding his blood in. He’s probably in a lot of pain. “Mars,” he says, wiping his lips.

  “What about Mars?”

  “We’ve got a base there.”

  “I know.”

  Mars is still orbiting the cold remnant of Sol. It is itself a cold rock, scarcely better than a large asteroid with a bit of water. We’ve hung on to it, ostensibly for strategic purposes, but truthfully just because humanity always was emotionally invested in the place. The Offense don’t want it, anyway. It’s too far from their territory to be any threat to them. And almost equally far from the Belt.

  “Why would we want to go there?”

  Badrick spits on the floor. “Mi am sick of dis,” he says with raw eloquence.

  “We’re all sick of this, Scatter,” Francie says.

  Paul ambles over to the table we’re standing on. “The DoD is rotten to the core, man. If we go back to Ceres, what’ll happen? They’ll take this ship off us … and park it somewhere, and we’ll never see it again. Same way they parked us on Mingetty. You know it.”

  He probably is right about that, realistically.

  “We need to put distance between ourselves and them,” Patrick says. “Regroup. Assess our position. Have a real discussion about our strategy going forward.”

  They’re talking about taking the war into their own hands. Disillusioned as I am, I recoil.

  “Plus,” Francie says softly, “the dragons need to be fed.”

  I look from one face to another. “But what about the people at our Mars base?”

  Francie shrugs. “There’s only about a thousand personnel out there.”

  “And how’re they gonna react when an Offense battleship turns up? They have ships …”

  I trail off. Francie’s words echo in my ears. The dragons need to be fed.

  They’re planning to feed their dragons on the ships attached to our Mars base.

  I can actually see the logic of it. They think it would be better to remove their dragons from temptation by separating them from our main force concentrations in the Jovian Belt.

  We’d also be putting ourselves out of reach of reprisals from the conspiracy … or from the DoD itself.

  For at least a while, we’d be safe.

  But we would be crossing a bright line. We’d be deliberately attacking our own side.

  I shake my head. “Patrick, remember what you said to the queen? You said you would die before you betrayed humanity—”

  “What are you accusing me of?” His face is blotchy. He’s in pain, doped up, emotional. He’s in no fit state to make decisions. Neither am I, probably. But I know I’m right this time.

  “I’m not accusing you, I’m reminding you. Look at Huifang.” She’s a balled-up spacesuit on the other side of the bridge, about a mile away. Jade nuzzles her face. Is a Void Dragon’s love going to be enough to get her through this? She’s often spoken about her family in Hong Kong. Looking at her now, what I see is a girl who needs a hug from her mother. “She needs to go home,” I say. “We all need to—”

  “Yeah, and Milosz is never going to go home!” Patrick says. “I’ve known that guy since basic. I loved that guy.” His mouth twists upside-down like a little boy’s.

  “We’ll get them, Patrick,” Francie says in her most cold and unfeeling voice. When things are at their worst, she and Patrick feed off each other, and not always in a good way. Francie left her grandfather on the Grief Merchant, too.

  “Shit, I don’t like it either,” I say, pleading with them. “But we have to go back and make things right. We can’t just turn our backs on the DoD, not least because they’d definitely find a way to get at us. For example, through our families.”

  I don’t think they had thought of that. Even Paul, who has no family that I know of, looks thoughtful.

  I plunge on, voice cracking with sincerity. “We can take them on head to head, because we have the truth on our side!”

  Laughter interrupts me. My head snaps around. It’s Hardy, laughing out loud at what I said. “Oh man. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

  Goaded by his contempt, I forget caution. “I didn’t want to say anything about this yet, because I don’t know for sure if it’s going to work or not. But I guess I might as well tell you what I’m planning. Uh … where’s Bolt?”

  Any delay and I’d risk losing them forever. By a miracle, Bolt chooses this moment to stroll onto the bridge with Gutmangler.

  “Where’s the food?” Patrick snaps, seeing that Bolt is empty-handed.

  Bolt ignores him. The truth is, he wasn’t searching for food. I asked him to do something different. And now there’s a grin on his face that tells me he may have succeeded.

  “I’m all up in their inboxes, Scattergood,” he exults. “It’s all over except the data analysis.”

  I jump off the table and give him a high five. “Thank God,” I say quietly.

  “Your aunt’s in there,” he says under his breath. “I did a quick search for Major Scattergood, got a hundred instances, easy. You sure you want to take this public?”

  I hesitate. Then I hear Sara’s voice in my head. Is this still about your aunt?

  No. I will not let it be about my aunt anymore. This is about my duty to humanity.

  I raise my voice for the others to hear. “Lemme tell you what this is about. Back on Mingetty, Bolt and I were working on cracking DirMInt’s comms platform. If we could see their private emails, we’d know exactly who was involved in the conspiracy. Well, we never really got anywhere. But I knew it was possible because I’d seen Gutmangler break our zero-level encryption before. So I asked Bolt to see if this ship has the same decryption software on board.”

  “Turns out it’s a standard part of the Offense operating system,” Bolt says.

  “So basically, we’ve got the DoD by the balls.” I can’t resist rubbing it into Hardy’s face. “Didn’t need you, after all.”

  His supercilious poker face crumples into shock. I savor the sight. Escaping from the Grief Merchant didn’t feel like a victory, but this does.

  Is it enough of a victory for Patrick and Francie?

  Patrick shakes his head slowly.

  Behind me, Sara says, “Hey, Patrick. Remember when you told the CO he should stick to coding? Guess you were right, huh?”

  Patrick scowls for a second. Then he breaks into laughter.
It’s the big old Patrick laugh, an unforced appreciation of the absurdity of life. This is what makes Patrick such an awesome leader (and still, actually, a better leader than I’ll ever be). He can laugh at himself. “Screw Mars, anyway,” he says.

  “But–” Francie says.

  “Fuck it. My leg hurts.” Patrick sits down, leaning against the giant-sized consoles.

  Francie sits down beside him and holds his hand.

  And I compose a transmission to BeltCOM.

  13

  As we make our final approach to Ceres, curving through the fringe of the Belt, human battleships swarm us. I have to let some officers come aboard, to prove that we really are who we say we are.

  Of course the first thing they want to do is interview Zach. Raw News snapped up his debut non-fiction article, and it’s been reposted about 1,000,000 times in the last twenty-four hours.

  “I see this as a crucially important service to humanity,” he says. “Truth is everything. Military effectiveness, unity, and truth, but of these the greatest is truth.”

  Zach really is wasted on the army. He doesn’t even have to rehearse this stuff. It just rolls off his tongue.

  “Little to the right,” says the military cameraman.

  Zach obligingly moves a little to the right, so they can get the navigation console of the Tears of the Horror Squish in shot. It’s the coolest-looking, with all those alien graphs and screens, and the radar now shows a full 360°. It looks like Zach is sprouting a joystick out of his head, but never mind.

  “So this idea basically came from my commanding officer, Jay Scattergood,” he says. I fidget as the cameraman pans to me, standing with the colonel in command of the boarding party. It doesn’t stay on me for long. I have a big nose, freckles, and sticky-out ears. Dark and dashing Zach is more photogenic. “Lieutenant Colonel Scattergood said we should use the Squish’s decryption tools to find out the truth about the Ceres Conspiracy.”

  That’s what the media is calling it now. Snappy.

  “Our friend Gutmangler helped with that …”

  The camera pans left and up, up, up. That’s going to give the viewers at home a shiver. Gutmangler waggles a tentacle at them. “I deem it my duty to expose these filthy, traitorous conspirators,” he booms.