Orange light splashes the snow outside.
A shudder jolts through the train, like an impact.
I step on people to reach the hole.
Twenty cars ahead, the locomotive is burning.
These trains are unmanned. That’s the first thing that goes through my mind. There’s no driver, so no one died in the electrical blaze engulfing the engine. But actually, that’s pretty meaningless, since everyone is going to die anyway.
Unless …
“‘Scuse me.” I zip up my parka and jump out of the train.
It’s further down than it looked. I hit gravel under the snow, stagger to one knee, then get up and stride away towards the hedge.
A jagged cleaver of shadow cuts off my view of the blazing locomotive. Then it rises. Two cleavers, end to end. I track them higher. The light of the fire gleams on the metallic underside of a wing.
“Scatter!” It’s Patrick. He’s trying to get out of the train. Hands are holding him back. “Where ya going, you lunatic? Just sit tight! It’ll be OK!”
No, it won’t. It will never be OK again. Anyway, sitting tight has not worked for me so far. It’s time to try something different.
“I’ll be fine,” I yell back. Then I add, idiotically: “Happy Christmas!”
The wings descend.
Tancred’s claws snag into the back of my stolen cavalry jacket, my feet leave the ground, and I am lifted up into the icy wind on an updraft of pure hate. Hatepower. Our pathetic horsepower doesn’t hold a candle to it.
12
Tancred is the size of a Shetland pony now. His wings easily span 20 meters. He adjusts me in his claws so that he’s gripping my upper arms, not just my coat. Dangling like that, I’m carried through the sky, through a blizzard of snow. Higher and higher. Colder and colder. I stop struggling when I realize that the fall would kill me if he let go. Then I realize that’s exactly what he’s planning.
Not yet, though.
He wants to drop me in a specific place, a place that means something to him.
I know all this without hearing it from him in so many words. He doesn’t have that great a command of language, and he isn’t talking to me now, anyway. But the connection is still there.
“Tancred,” I say, or think—it doesn’t matter which— “are you really going to destroy all humanity, just because you’re mad at me for leaving you?”
The answer is a stab of hatred which means: Yes.
“Couldn’t you just kill me, and leave everyone else alone?”
Stab, meaning: No.
Now I understand. Probably, when Tancred’s mommy ate Sol, it went down just like this. There was some one human who found her, cared for her, and then let her down. Left her behind like spare luggage. Excess to requirements. Too knobbly, too many claws, too flamey, too sulky, too too too. That one thoughtless, imperfect human being, trusting perhaps in the authorities to shoulder this burden for her, trusting too much, doomed our sun. And now Tancred and I are starring in the remake.
I cling to his forelegs with numb hands, in an effort to ease the awful strain on my shoulders. I can’t track the passage of time, as every minute feels like an hour, but I notice when the sky turns gray. Then the sun rises, bright and blinding. We’re above the clouds.
The parts of my face not covered by my parka hood are frozen solid. The wind rushes down my throat like freezing water.
The clouds below us part and I see glittering water, way way down. That’ll be the Mediterranean.
Where are you taking me, Tancred?
But I know. Our direction of flight makes it clear. He’s going to drop me in Malindi, on the coast of Kenya, where I pulled his egg out of a muddy puddle beneath a jacaranda tree.
I treasured his egg, cherished it, hatched it, allowed him to call me Daddy … and then dumped him on some nervous ARES lab technicians.
He’s told-not-told me about the ‘dragon care and containment facility’ they put him in. It was actually a kind of tomb. Stone doesn’t burn or melt, at least not at the temperatures Tancred can muster at his age. He lay on the cold floor, hour after hour, day after day. He was so hungry that he cried, the way babies cry when they have given up on anyone coming, on and on and on.
They did come to look at him, but they weren’t his daddy, so they just looked and went away again. Alone in the dark and cold, he was so lonely that he started to wonder if he even existed.
(I know that feeling.)
At last he reached some sort of breaking point. The next time they came to look at him, he spat at them. Just a weak thread of fire, but it scared them.
They decided they couldn’t keep him there any longer.
I’m guessing it must have been Elsa who made that call. She’s got a softer heart than people know. She made a big mistake in encouraging me to leave him behind. But at least she tried to fix it.
They put him in a travel cage, made of metal, and put him on the fastest spaceship they could scare up, in the care of Dr. Joy, who was the only person Elsa trusted enough to handle such a risky mission.
The idea was to rendezvous with us at Earth and give Tancred back to me. Elsa figured that I’d be able to control him. I’m touched that she thought so. But by that time, had she known it, it was already too late.
Tancred had already started hating me, and by extension, all humanity.
As Dr. Joy’s ship overhauled ours, an Offense ship—the Terrorflop—targeted the Bohemond. It was just a typical Offense drive-by shooting. But this time the Terrorflop had unwittingly flown into the range of something much, much worse than a military survey ship’s guns.
As the Pulverizer engaged the Bohemond and circled back to deliver a kill-shot to our reactor, it passed near Dr. Joy’s ship.
Locked away in his travel cage, Tancred smelled food.
This was what he’d been starving for all these weeks.
He melted a hole in the side of the box.
He melted a hole in the side of the ship.
He drifted in the void, his true native habitat, as the Terrorflop approached.
He pounced on the Offense ship and ate its exhaust plume.
Then he wormed inside and ate its power plant.
“You saved my life, Tancred.”
Stab, stab. Clearly he regrets it.
However, his attack completely disabled the Terrorflop. Cold and dead, invisible to EarthCOM’s scans until it was too close to deflect, it continued on its trajectory, crashed through Earth’s atmosphere, and landed in Belgium.
This was a terrifying experience for Tancred. He huddled inside the dead power plant, afraid to move, a tense little ball of dread and loathing.
And there he might have stayed forever, or at least until they dismantled the ship for research.
But Dr. Joy—putting two and two together—made it his business, as soon as he reached Earth, to recover the Terrorflop’s power management block. He knew that it would have recorded the sudden catastrophic failure of the drive, followed by the power plant … telltale signs of a Void Dragon attack. Dr. Joy needed to ensure that the DoD would never see those signs, nor realize that ARES had let their Void Dragon escape.
I don’t know why Dr. Joy didn’t tell me the whole story. For the same reasons, I guess, that Elsa kept telling me via email that everything was fine. They thought if they told me the truth I’d curl up in a fetal ball, and be no more use to anyone.
Anyway, if they had told me the truth, what would I have done?
Exactly what I did do. Blunder inside the Terrorflop, find Tancred, and restart the chain reaction that is now leading towards the destruction of Earth.
North Africa passes below us, luxuriantly green.
I can’t feel my arms at all anymore.
Tancred, I try tentatively. Would it help if I said sorry?
This time he’s so stabby it feels like an icepick through my head.
That’s a no, then.
With Void Dragons, you get no second chances.
&nb
sp; Libya.
The Sudans.
Orchards, cropland, herds of cows so big they look like brown lakes.
The Great Rift Valley unrolls below us, green and dotted with water, and I know we’re almost there.
Is it time for my life to flash in front of my eyes already?
Why is my life pink?
It’s Pinkie Pie.
She came after us!
Wings blurring like a hummingbird’s, Pinkie Pie flies upside-down and round and round Tancred’s head. She’s so small by comparison that it’s like a robin dive-bombing an airplane. Tancred sulkily breathes fire at her. Go away.
Pinkie Pie will not go away. I can overhear what she’s saying. “Big brother! Big brother why mad? Why hurt? Why burn?”
You don’t understand, Pinkie Pie. Have to mad. Have to hurt. Have to burn.
“Why leave? Me needing you! Want be with you!”
Tancred realizes that he did to Pinkie Pie, his little sister, exactly the same thing I did to him: ignored her, left her behind, because she’s just a baby. This realization agitates him. He flaps his mighty wings aggressively, powering ahead, leaving her behind again.
Pinkie Pie puts on a desperate burst of speed and catches up. She’s so upset she drools fire. Tancred snakes his head around and breathes on her again. The dragonfire licks over her wings, pale in the morning sunlight. Then, still hauling me in his foreclaws, Tancred catches her in his hindclaws. She struggles madly.
Clawing, struggling, spitting fire, the two dragons roll over and over in the air, tumbling down towards the savannah. We’re not exactly falliing, nor flying. It’s sort of a controlled plunge.
My jacket catches on fire.
Through the smoke, I see the ground rising up.
Thump, I hit rough grass, and roll over and over, frantically trying to put out the flames.
When I’m pretty sure I am not on fire anymore, I sit up. This is not as easy as it usually is, as I cannot use my arms. They’re stuck straight up above my head.
Grass blows in the wind. There’s a line of trees in the distance. Pinkie Pie lies nearby, a cerise lump. Has Tancred killed her?
He stalks towards me, wings folded away to nothing, a pony-sized monster with a gait like a panther. The fangs overlapping his jaw could take my hand off. He fixes me with those appley green eyes.
“Tancred, what can I say except I’m sorry?”
He stalks closer. I can feel the heat from his jaws, and smell something like almonds.
“I shouldn’t have left you. I just … I felt so overwhelmed.” My head is swimming. “I don’t know how to be a daddy. Especially not to a Void Dragon.”
He cocks his head on one side.
“But anyway. Before you burn everything up, you might want this,” I say, jerking my chin towards the breast pocket of my stolen cavalry uniform. “To remember us by.”
Tancred rips off my pocket with his teeth, knocking me over backwards, and retrieves his blankie.
It used to be big enough to wrap him in. Now it’s a handkerchief in his claws.
Nevertheless he rubs it over his face, smells it, rolls over and over with it like a cat with catnip, somersaults in delight ... and winds up with his head sprawled across my legs.
“Will you let me try again?” I whisper.
I long to pet him, but can’t, because my arms still aren’t working. I hope he knows the intention is there. Of course he does. He knows what I am thinking, and I know what he’s thinking. What he is thinking is: Daddy, WHY leave Tancred?
“Because I’m a doofus,” I say. “And you’re a dragon doofus.”
Me dragon doofus?
“Like none other,” I affirm.
Doofus good?
“Yes. Good.”
Not hurt. Not burn. Maybe other time.
“Yep, let’s take a rain-check on that, scaly-butt,” I say.
Then I pass out, with my head on Tancred’s warm, musclebound shoulders.
*
It turns out that we landed near Lake Nakuru, in the national park. The first living being to find us was a rhinoceros. Tancred saw it off with dragon-fire. I was still out cold at the time. He told me about it later. He was about to repeat the performance that afternoon, when a white jeep bounced out of the trees. But mercifully, the first person to jump out was Francie. She sprinted across the savannah, yelling, “Pinkie! Pinkie!”
Not Jay, Jay.
Oh well.
It was nice to wake up to the sound of her voice, anyway.
Pinkie Pie is fine. Tancred said she was in a sort of stunned state for a while, but when Francie appeared she revived. Soon she was once again trying to sit on her adoptive mommy’s head.
As Dr. Joy drove back to the road that connects with the A104, he and Francie told me what had happened. The Kenyan authorities had spotted Tancred as he crossed the northern border. They mistook him for an electric glider. When the firefight between the dragons started, they freaked out and called EarthCOM. Fortunately, Dr. Joy had already alerted his EarthCOM buddies to the situation via the first responders who came to see why a freight train from Brussels to Paris had caught on fire.
EarthCOM flew him and Francie to Kenya supersonic. That’s faster than a Void Dragon can fly at two months old, especially if it is carrying an 80-kilo human being. So Francie and Dr Joy arrived at Nairobi only an hour or so after we landed in the savannah. They rented a jeep and drove up to Nakuru, zeroing in on my phone signal. There was just 4% of the battery left when they found us.
“This place is beautiful,” Francie said in wonder, as Dr. Joy navigated through the tourist vans clogging the yellow acacia woodland along the shore of the lake. Tancred was sitting up in the back seat of the jeep with his head out the window, enjoying the ride.
I wanted to say something cheesy like “Life is beautiful.” But I held off. If they don’t know how close a call we had, it’s just as well.
So I only said, “Yeah, I always used to like coming up here. By the way, my mother lives on the other side of the lake.”
“I know,” Dr. Joy said. “That’s where we’re going now.”
So here I am, sitting on a rickety lawn chair in my mom’s garden, watching two Void Dragons play. Pinkie Pie loves the swimming pool. Adam cleaned out the algae for her.
Adam is my mom’s boyfriend.
My mom has a boyfriend.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. She might have told me. On the other hand, I never quite worked out how to tell her that I had become the adoptive father of a Void Dragon. When I finally did tell her, she said, “He calls you Daddy?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you … OK with that?” Her eyes were glimmering.
“I guess I’m OK with it,” I said. “Anyway, I’m going to try.”
Adam was not there for that conversation. He’s a conservationist. Locally born, he works at the national park, protecting what remains of the wildlife against intense pressure from UNGov to give up more land to crops and livestock. He tells me that Tancred is the most unusual animal he’s ever seen. “I’d love to see his genetic profile.”
He thinks the Void Dragons are gene-modded lizards.
That … actually works.
Dr. Joy agrees: Tancred is too big to hide anymore, so we will use the cover story Adam inadvertently gave us. That makes me the kind of doofus who walks around with a unique gene-modded pet. But never mind. Tancred and I know the truth: we’re both doofuses, and we do better together than apart.
Playing tag with Pinkie Pie, my ‘gene-modded lizard’ snorts out a wisp of fire in his enthusiasm.
Tancred! I think sternly at him. No burn! That’d blow our cover story to hell.
Sorry, Daddy.
I glance nervously around to see if Adam noticed. Whew. He’s on the far side of the garden, chatting with Paul, Huifang, Milosz, and Badrick, who are showing him their flamingo photos from their two-day camping trip around the lake. They all arrived the day after we did.
Patrick was the last to arrive, this morning. He had to be treated for his shrapnel wounds in some secret EarthCOM clinic, as it would have raised too many questions if he walked into the emergency room with pieces of pink metal eggshell stuck in his hands.
He and Francie are indoors. I can guess what they’re doing.
I’m happy for them.
I really am …
OK, I’m not. I’m so jealous and lonely I don’t know what to do with myself.
Tancred, sensing my dark thoughts, lopes over to rub his head against my leg. That helps with the loneliness, but it doesn’t take the jealousy away, and when Pinkie Pie chases up to Tancred and he nuzzles her with his mouth, as if kissing her, I blush. He’s way too sweet on her. Someone’s bound to notice.
My hopeless crush on Francie may have saved humanity, but it isn’t doing a thing for me.
I eye Jeremy, our new teammate. He is walking around the garden with his egg in a sort of sling he has devised, showing it the flowers. He has some hard lessons awaiting him.
Life in the Dragon Unit isn’t all safari holidays and home cooking.
Dr. Joy has said we’ll probably be going back to Belgium. He wants us to check out that potential positive in the park at Albert. With all due respect to Maxime, I can’t think of anything I’d like to do less. But what choice have I got?
My mom comes out of the house. She’s carrying a tray of freshly baked cinnamon rolls, which she distributes to the group at the other end of the garden. By the time they’ve ravaged the tray, there are only a few rolls left, which she brings over to me. The smell is wonderful. She sits down beside me. “How’re you doing, Jaybird?”
My mom, Juliette Scattergood, is short and rounded, with a quick smile and a graying chestnut bob. She doesn’t look much like her sister, Elsa, but they share some traits: a will of steel, and the ability to see straight through me.
“Fine,” I say.
“Ah, yes. Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional,” says my sweet-faced mother.
“Mom!”
“I got that from your dad, you know,” she says, surprisingly. She never mentions him.
“What? Was he F.I.N.E. too?” I know next to nothing about him.
Protectors of Earth Page 11