PROTECTORS OF EARTH
VOID DRAGON HUNTERS
BOOK 2
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FELIX R. SAVAGE
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Copyright © 2018 by Felix R. Savage
The right to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Felix R. Savage. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author.
First published in the United States of America in 2018 by Knights Hill Publishing.
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1
“You’ve all been very patient while we go through the process of obtaining your DoD clearances, and I thank you. I’m finally at liberty to brief you on your first mission.”
The speaker is my aunt Elsa. She’s sitting in a wicker armchair with the light of Jupiter shining through the window onto her graying blonde hair, which is done up in a fancy pretzel. She’s wearing a shimmery blue pantsuit, a contrast to her usual lab coat and jeans. We are all gathered around her, sitting on the sofa and on the floor of her spacious living-room on Ceres. There’s a plate of homemade cookies on the coffee table, but for once, nobody’s eating them. I’m holding my baby Void Dragon, Tancred, on my lap. Head tucked under one wing, he’s a warm malachite lump.
Patrick leans forward, disgustingly keen. Francie sits on the windowsill, as if poised to get up and go right this very minute. A part of me notices that they’re not sitting together, and wonders if that means anything. But mostly I am eaten up by apprehension.
Where’s Elsa going to send us? Out into the Belt? To Ganymede? Europa? Callisto? Three out of four of Jupiter’s old moons are human-habitable. And they’re all pretty dangerous. Humanity’s war with the Offense spans the entire Jovian belt. I’ve felt safe here, in the dome operated by ARES, the defense research agency Elsa runs. I don’t want to go anywhere.
But we must. Elsa recruited us as Void Dragon egg hunters. So we’ve got to go hunt for eggs. And I know the others can’t wait to get back into action.
In the quiet, I hear a soft thwacking noise. I look around. Francie is tossing her Void Dragon egg from hand to hand, hand to hand.
Francie is the only other person who has a Void Dragon egg. She calls it Pinkie Pie. It hasn’t hatched, obviously, although Francie has tried various things, such as putting it under a laboratory laser, and shooting it with a .45.
“So,” Elsa smiles, “we are sending you to …”
“Callisto!” Patrick blurts.
“No, actually,” Elsa says. “Belgium.”
“Belgium?” everyone says, in tones ranging from outrage (Patrick) to hilarity (Paul) and relief (me). “That doesn’t sound very dangerous,” I say.
Elsa nods judiciously. “Our best confirmed report of a Void Dragon egg sighting comes from Brussels. Some kid found an egg and photographed herself with it. The photo has since been taken down from the internet, but—”
“Where is she now?” Huifang asks.
“Um,” Elsa says. “She was eaten by wolves.”
Uh oh. Maybe I spoke too soon.
“Wolves?” Patrick says enthusiastically. “The regular kind, or the human kind?”
Elsa opens her mouth to answer. At that moment the house jolts.
I was in an earthquake once, in Seattle. It’s my earliest memory. I remember everything shaking, and Mom dragging me under the kitchen table.
This is like that, to the power of one thousand. Unprepared, we all stagger to our feet. Frightened voices babble. WOWWW! screams a klaxon, piped through the house’s speakers.
Tancred twitches, flies off my lap, and heads for the window.
I should be taking cover. I plunge after Tancred, my hands stretched out.
He flies straight into the window. Like a bird trapped in the house, he didn’t see the glass. A sharp crack cuts through the bedlam. The window holds, with a star of cracks running across it. Tancred falls to the floor.
Panicking, I grab for him—
—and miss.
He’s up again, battering his little wings at the window.
“Tancred! Tancred!”
Elsa stands on her chair, waving her computer. “We’re not hit!” she yells. “Calm down! The dome is not damaged!”
But the klaxon keeps whooping. My friends are taking cover under furniture, in the doorways. And now Tancred breathes a thread of white fire at the window. He’s trying to burn his way out. He must be really spooked. The glass starts to melt. Big shining globs fall to the floor inside the living-room and outside on the verandah. Smoke rises where the melted glass touches wood and carpet.
Francie drops Pinkie Pie and dashes out of the room.
I grit my teeth and reach for Tancred again. His body is almost too hot to touch. He struggles in my hands. I think desperately at him: Calm down, little scaly-butt! It’s OK! It’s OK!
Is it OK? Outside, Jupiter continues to shine through the roof of the dome. Birds wheel over the lake in the distance.
Daddy! That’s what he calls me, although I’m not his daddy. I just made the mistake of picking up his egg when I was eight years old. Daddy, Tancred hungry! HUNGRY!
A blast of high-pressure foam hits me in the face, blinding me. I reel backwards, hit something with the backs of my legs, and sit down on the floor. I paw the foam out of my face, still holding onto Tancred with one hand, and dig frantically in my jeans pocket.
Francie looks in at the melted window, holding a fire extinguisher.
“Quick thinking, Francesca,” my aunt says approvingly. “Well done.”
There it is! Tancred’s still fighting my grip. I drag a foul old gun-cleaning rag out of my pocket and push it at him.
It’s his blankie.
His tiny, needle-like claws fasten on it. He buries his head in it, trembling. I use its edge to wipe the foam off his hot back.
It’ll be really foul after this, but what does it matter? He never lets me wash it, anyway.
Hungry, he says in a small, chastened voice.
I know, is all I can say. He’s always hungry. That’s all he ever says to me. And I don’t know what to feed him.
Food. Please, Daddy. Food!
I grit my teeth. Sarcastically, I think, Like what? A nuclear reactor garnished with batteries, with a selection of spaceships for dessert?
Elsa’s bent over her computer. “It struck near here.” I get up, holding Tancred, and join the back of the scrum around the screen. Being tall and gangly, I can see over everyone except Patrick. The screen shows a map of Ceres with ARES marked. A red star flashes near us. “Only two klicks away from the dome. That jolt was the shockwave from the impact.”
“What was it?” I say.
“An Offense missile,” Elsa says flatly.
The words send a chill through me. Ceres is supposed to be safe. This airless dwarf planet is the home base of humanity’s Outer Belt Command, or BeltCOM, and hosts a hundred different Department of Defense agencies and independent-ish research agencies like ARES. Its orbital space is closely patrolled, and there are missile defense installations on the surface.
“They could have been aiming for BeltCOM,” Milosz speculates.
“That’s a hundred klicks from here,” Francie says, still clutching her fire extinguisher like a weapon. “The Offense’s aim isn’t that bad.”
They could have been aiming for us.
“Do we know where it was launched from?” Patrick says.
&nb
sp; “It seems to have been a long-range kinetic impactor,” Elsa says, scrolling through notifications. “Dumb launch from outside the Belt. Guidance systems did not kick in until it was too close to intercept. Those things are fiendishly hard to spot. But regardless, they didn’t hit anything. Just dug a new crater in the ice.”
She closes her computer with a snap. At the same time, the klaxon falls quiet. A loud trill of music sounds from the house’s comms system. I recognize it as the all-clear, although I’ve never heard it for real before. We blink at each other as if waking up.
Elsa smooths her hair back into its shiny updo. “Well, that kind of ate up our Q&A time,” she says, all business again. “I’ve got to get to the venue to help them prepare.”
Oh, right. I’d forgotten about the reason Elsa is dressed up. They’re holding a reception for us this afternoon, in honor of our new mission.
Belgium.
“Clay’s picking me up, so I’ll leave you the car. Wear your best clothes, and I’ll expect you in one hour.” She nods at each of us. But her gaze passes over me, almost as if she’s avoiding my eyes.
I’m standing here with the tiny green elephant in the room on my shoulder.
What if the Offense has tracked us down?
What if they were aiming for Tancred?
*
I’m not the only one who has had this thought. Patrick comes up to me while I help Francie mop the floor. He lays one of his big hands briefly on my shoulder. “The jellies are gonna regret this,” he says.
I say, “Ceres hasn’t taken a hit in ten years.”
“Yeah. It’s too much of a coincidence.”
“But how would they have known we were here?” That’s the part I can’t puzzle out. Tancred destroyed that Offense ship with no survivors. They couldn’t have seen us being rescued by the Joscelin, the patrol boat that picked us up and brought us to Ceres.
“Maybe someone told them,” Patrick says.
“Like who?” I say uneasily. Is he suggesting there are traitors on our side? I heard rumors about that back on Leda. Real tinfoil-hat stuff.
“I wouldn’t know,” Patrick says. “But the point is, if they were aiming for Tancred, it means they see him as a major threat. So that makes it even more important to find more eggs.” He looks around at everyone else and pitches his voice slightly louder. He’s giving a pep talk, so I decide not to voice my doubts about his holey logic. “Even if we have to go to Belgium to find them.”
“Europe,” says Badrick glumly. “It’s cold dere.”
“A little snow never hurt anybody,” Patrick says. “But we are gonna hurt the Offense good. We just have to find more eggs … and figure out how to hatch them.”
Everyone looks at Francie. She has stopped mopping. She is holding Pinkie Pie in one hand and the fire extinguisher in the other, gazing thoughtfully at the household implement and the Void Dragon egg. She is so beautiful when she looks like this, as if some thought has momentarily given her peace. She has a blob of foam in her caramel-colored hair. The knees of her sweats are wet. She’s heartstoppingly gorgeous … and I need to stop noticing that, because she’s Patrick’s.
They were obviously into each other before, but they never did anything about it, because Patrick was the squad’s sergeant and Francie was under his command. Now that we’re not in the army anymore, they are free to be together.
“Spit it out,” he says, smiling.
“The laser didn’t work …” she says.
“Maybe an even stronger laser would do it,” says Huifang, who is Francie’s partner in crime.
“Like a weapons-grade laser, yeah,” Patrick says. “Maybe Elsa can hook us up.” He takes my mop and uses it on the parquet with military efficiency—his way of thinking hard.
I look around at the damage. The sofa is ruined. The window will have to be replaced. And we have to get dressed for the reception.
“Guys, let’s just leave this,” I say. “We can tidy up later.” Story of my life.
2
The reception is held in one of the workshops that dot the shore of the lake. We park Elsa’s people-mover on the grassy bit in front of the building. The still water of the lake reflects the trees. Ducks break up the reflections with arrowheads of ripples. The sun is halfway down the sky. The roof of the ARES dome looks opaque from inside, but it allows Jupiter’s light to shine through during Ceres’s day, which is an hour longer than Earth’s. There’s a smell of mint from the herbs someone has planted in pots around the door of the ECAPP building.
It is a far cry from the grungy cubicle farm on Leda where I used to work, that’s for sure. More than anything, it reminds me of Kenya, where I spent most of my childhood. I haven’t been home in ages. ARES felt like a substitute home, all the more so because Elsa was here. But I no longer feel safe here. I realize I’m unconsciously hunching my shoulders as if expecting that pellucid sky to fall.
Or maybe just because I hate crowds, and am dreading this shindig.
I rearrange Tancred on the shoulder of my borrowed blazer. He’s still in sulk mode. His claws are latched inextricably into the fabric of the blazer, although I managed to get him to release his blankie so I could put it away safely.
The sound of wheels on gravel pulls my head around. Elsa’s people-mover is reversing out, with Francie at the wheel and Huifang beside her.
“Where are they going?”
“Francie forgot something,” Patrick says. “Let’s go in. I smell burgers.”
Inside, it’s like someone went crazy with toilet paper all over the workshop, except the toilet paper is white packing material. They’ve strung up a hundred miles of it to hide the dreary concrete walls and the lab equipment pushed to the sides of the hangar-sized room. The stuff diffuses the glare from the megawatt strip lighting. Scientists, engineers, lab assistants, military liaison officers, and their families circulate while juggling drinks and plates of buffet food.
There are burgers.
And hors d’oeuvres, and a salad bar, and fruit baskets.
The squaddies fall reverently silent at the sight of a life-size duck made of chocolate ice cream in a transparent chiller box, surrounded by blueberry ice cream flowers.
“I got a problem with this,” Paul says. His face is so solemn that I figure he’s going to say something about the injustice of a spread like this being provided for scientists, while the troops on the front lines are fighting and dying on crummy MREs. He says: “What do I eat first?”
Patrick is already constructing himself a triple-decker burger. “How about everything?”
This seems like sound advice. I load my plate. I just wish there was something here Tancred could eat. I cram a whole miniature bagel into my mouth, while aware that people are staring-not staring at him and whispering behind my back. What living person, after all, has ever seen a Void Dragon? We have been at ARES for weeks, but Elsa has kept us away from the rest of her team, pending our DoD clearance, so most of these people are seeing Tancred for the first time.
Embarrassed by the attention, I’m glad there isn’t much for them to stare at. When he’s balled up like this, it just looks like I’ve got a bizarre green scaly lump attached to my clavicle.
Elsa grabs us and introduces us to Dr. Clay Joy, who is apparently the head of ECAPP, the most important of ARES’s research projects. “What does ECAPP stand for?” I ask. Behind me, Milosz and Paul are having fun with Dr. Joy’s name in too-loud whispers.
“Energy CAPture Program,” Dr. Joy says. “We’re trying to devise better methods of energy storage.” He smiles benignly. He is a hefty guy in his forties with a little square beard that he has dyed the colors of the United Earth flag: a yellow dot on a field of blue. It makes him look like he has food on his chin.
“Better batteries?” I ask, as if I were the idiot he seems to take me for.
“That would be one application, yes. Battery performance is a major constraint on Fleet operability.”
Unlike most people at t
he reception, Dr. Joy is openly staring at Tancred. In fact, it’s almost like he’s talking to the dragon, rather than to me.
“I used to troubleshoot autonomous mining systems,” I tell him, trying to draw his attention back to myself. “Most of what looked like battery performance issues were actually software problems. I think that’s probably true for larger systems, as well.”
Patrick, standing next to me, interjects, “Yeah, but we’re talking about weapons systems, aren’t we?” Dr. Joy stalls. Patrick presses him harder. “The field performance of our energy weapons is shit. Even the ship-mounted systems can hardly toast a marshmallow, let alone an Offense ship. Is that what you’re working on?”
Dr. Joy haw-haws without answering. Patrick’s cheeks turn pink. Elsa smoothly takes over. “Everything we do here is tied into planned improvements in Earth’s warfighting capability. And that includes what you will be doing—Patrick, Jay, and all of you.”
Speaking of which, I wonder where Francie and Huifang are. Did they ever come back? It’s not like them to blow off a party.
“Humanity faces two existential threats,” Elsa says, “which are separate but related. These are the Void Dragons and the Offense. There are no Void Dragons around at the moment …” She smiles wryly at the Tancred-lump on my shoulder. “No adult ones, anyway. But the Offense are actively assaulting Earth’s defenses.” It’s funny, but when my aunt does it I don’t feel as if I’m being talked down to. As long as I’ve been alive she has been telling me things I thought I knew, and making me realize I didn’t know-know them. “The Offense lack our gravity-casting and strong compactor technology, but they have better drive technology than we do. So we’re more or less evenly matched.”
Yeah. I used to think the Offense had massively superior technology. Then I spent a couple of months on the front lines, and found out they can be beaten. But that engagement cost us a ship and four lives, and actually, we’d all have died if it weren’t for Tancred. I would never say this out loud, but I’m really glad we’re going to Belgium this time, even if it does have a wolf problem. I’d rather face wolves than the Offense any day.
Protectors of Earth Page 1