Any notion I may have had that this is a romantic move dies when Francie calls out, “Sara!”
Sara comes out of the shelter. Something gleams in her hand.
“Quick,” Francie says. “Help me hold him!”
Sara stoops over my right arm. She kneels on my outstretched hand. Her weight grinds my arthritic knuckles into the deck. I howl in agony.
Francie lets go of my left arm to clap her hand over my mouth.
Just in time.
Pinkie Pie flaps out of the darkness. Her wings rustle as she lands on my right shoulder.
Her dragon-fire lights up the night.
I have never in my life experienced such pain.
*
Tancred drifts high above Callisto. His wings are crooked electromagnetic fields, barely visible to the naked eye, invisible to the electronic eyes that ceaselessly scan orbital space. He doesn’t even show up on infrared, because nearly all of his energy is packed away in the null field. It’s like he’s lurking in an other-dimensional hole with only his eyes showing.
I fly with him. Of course, I’m actually lying on the Offense’s garbage raft, with Francie and Sara worriedly patting my forehead. Waves of agony bump at my consciousness, but the pain feels kind of distant. I think I might actually be unconscious.
Maybe that’s why Tancred’s perceptions feel so real to me, why the stars look so clear.
Before he hatched, we used to have dreams like this. We’d be floating in space, while he wept about how hungry he was. It always bugged me that in those dreams I’d be spacesuit-less in the vacuum, mysteriously not freezing and suffocating. I thought even in my dreams, I ought to be more rational. But now I get it. I was dreaming about this experience: here but not here, riding along with Tancred in spirit.
Hungry, Daddy, HUNGRY!
Instead of stressing me out, his predictability comforts me. I smile in my sleep.
Don’t want these!
He’s turned up his nose (thank God) at our satellites, and the Offense satellites as well. They only have wee chemical engines and solar panels. Not yummy. And there’s nothing else in the sky.
Just hold on, I tell him. Something good’s coming. I promise.
Come on, Patrick. Don’t make me a liar. Come on …
I’m not sure how many times Callisto turns beneath us, or how many times I half-wake up to excruciating agony, before they come.
It doesn’t matter. Here they are.
Stars shoot out of the blackness, rapidly approaching.
The God of the Gaps looks even better in real life than it did in that oil painting. Its engines blaze beneath its wings. It’s coming like a bat out of hell.
And it has five Offense ships on its tail.
This is what I was expecting.
Old Gutmangler got the word out to his buddies.
They’re planning to capture the Void Dragon eggs before the God of the Gaps can land.
Where the heck is our fleet, huh? How useless do you have to be to let five Offense ships get this near Callisto?
Never mind. Right now, I’m thankful for our crap interception skills.
Because that means Tancred gets to intercept them.
Yummy, he purrs, and accelerates into wobble mode.
Callisto wrinkles. Space shimmers.
We’ve failed at this so often before, I almost can’t look.
But this time is different. The God of the Gaps is slowing down, braking hard for insertion into Callisto orbit. So the Offense ships in pursuit have to slow down, too.
They’re shooting at the Gaps. Energy beams lance across the void and dig clouds of ablated molecules out of the Gaps’s hull. I can see the beams! Normally, in space, they’re totally invisible. But Tancred can see them, so I can, too. It’s like a cheesy sci-fi movie.
With a convulsive wobble, Tancred meets the Gaps, going in the opposite direction, and passes it. He darts his head this way and that on a neck that stretches kilometers long, snapping at the high-power beams. But these are only aperitifs. The main course is up ahead, five Pulverizers committed to an orbital insertion trajectory that cannot be altered fast enough for them to escape Tancred.
Our wings span a thousand kilometers of orbital space. They wrap around two Offense ships at once. We gather them in and slurp up their exhaust like a milkshake. Tancred sticks his head up a plasma nozzle to get to the power plant’s abundant energy output—
Leave it! We have to catch the others!
Sulky, but seeing my point, he drops the ship. The other three ships have overtaken us. They’re closing in on the defenceless Gaps.
Tancred pivots 180 degrees in space. A spaceship cannot do that. Once you’re moving, you can either go faster or slower. When you’re in orbit, you can either rise or fall. That’s it. You cannot spin on a dime. But Void Dragons don’t play that boring orbital mechanics stuff.
We pounce on the three remaining Offense ships from behind.
This is where I could make a war-winning choice, if I were a stone-cold gambler like Bolt Galloway.
I could let one ship survive long enough to destroy the Gaps.
Thus hatching the dragon eggs on board.
But they might not hatch, anyway, and more importantly, I can’t risk my friends’ lives.
So I don’t try to hold Tancred back. I let him play with the three ships, sucking out every erg of energy, transforming these marvels of Offense engineering into dead hulks.
Eventually he lets the last ship go. He makes a noise that sounds a lot like a burp.
That was dee-LIC-ious. He pronounces the big word with pride.
Good. I’m so glad. Despite everything, it feels great to feed him properly.
While Tancred was eating, the Gaps whizzed away in orbit. By now it’s almost vanished around the curve of Callisto. I imagine the mood on board—astounded, relieved. Patrick and the others will have thought they were done for. They’ll know who came to their rescue. But they’ll still be worried about us. They will be zeroing in on the coordinates I emailed to Patrick, the coordinates Gutmangler gave me. They’ll be preparing to land that beautiful spaceplane on our floating rubbish dump.
We have to catch up with them, I tell Tancred.
I can’t let them land.
The Offense’s missile defences would 100% get them on the way down.
What I need them to do is drop survival gear to us. We can make it back to human territory with the dragons, if only we have food and water and some other kit—ropes, lifejackets, radio beacons. The stuff we need to not die.
I don’t know if Tancred will be able to make them understand. What exactly are we gonna do? Tap on the portholes? Scratch a message on the hull? But I have to try.
He catches my urgency and flies after the Gaps. Wobble, wobble.
In the middle of a wobble, a spaceship burns past us. Really close, by orbital standards. It didn’t come from space, it rose up from Callisto’s surface. In the split second of its proximity, I register the angular gray fuselage of an Earth frigate, the yellow tint of hydrolox rocket exhaust. Here’s the fleet, at last. Woot.
Maybe I won’t have to attempt to communicate with the Gaps. Maybe Patrick and the flyboys can work out between them what needs to be done, and what must not be risked.
That is what I’m thinking when our frigate fires on the Gaps.
Tancred recoils in the void, startled.
I’m so stunned, I nearly wake up. Pain rolls through me. I have to fight to stay with Tancred.
For real? Did one of our own frigates really just fire on a defenceless, privately owned human ship?
The frigate resolves my confusion by shooting at the Gaps again. No energy beams for us, as we can’t build useful energy weapons to save our lives. The frigate is firing plain old steel slugs accelerated to about Mach 9. All I see is a muzzle flash, and another, duller flash when the slug strikes the Gaps, tearing its tail off.
The reactor cooks off in an angry fireball. Debris arcs away from the s
hip in all directions. The frigate whizzes past at don’t-give-a-shit speed.
I shake with rage and shock. Let’s get them, Tancred! I storm, forgetting that he would not touch an Earth spaceship if you offered it to him on a silver platter.
Look, Daddy.
I stare at the swiftly receding frigate that just killed my friends.
That’s funny. Some of the debris from the Gaps is chasing it.
The debris has wings.
Rapt with curiosity, Tancred flaps at wobble speed to catch up.
By the time we get there, there are baby dragons crawling all over the frigate. They cling to it, converging on its engines. They’re going for the reactor. They grow to ghostly size as they suck down its yummy, yummy heat energy.
Tancred obligingly breathes fire on the frigate to stop it from using its point defense guns on the babies, not that projectiles would hurt them anyway. Tiny voices peep thanks.
More Earth ships roar up from Callisto. CalCOM is responding to the crisis in orbit in the prescribed manner, by scrambling everything they’ve got.
Thus dooming our space fleet.
The baby dragons greet the new arrivals with cries of joy, and make short work of them. Tancred looks on fondly.
I can’t bear to watch.
I urge Tancred to return to the God of the Gaps, now a mangled wreck drifting in low orbit. Maybe it’s not as total a loss as it looks.
Halfway there, I notice that the baby dragons are streaming after us.
There aren’t as many of them as I thought. Only eight.
Only eight.
Despair settles in. The Gaps is an even worse mess than I thought. It’s half a ship, the aft end sheared off, the front end hollowed out. Bits of junk drift past Tancred, falling slowly down towards Callisto. I look down. Little fireworks go off as the larger debris burns up in the atmosphere.
The baby dragons are heading for that burning debris cloud.
Sick, passive, I let Tancred chase them.
We descend in the midst of a flaming hail of meteors.
Some of the meteors are the shape of spacesuits.
Hey!
They are spacesuits.
The babies catch up with them and latch on with their claws, flapping hard, desperately braking their fall.
*
I sit up on the raft. My head spins. Francie and Sara stare at me as if I’ve just risen from the dead.
My mouth is so dry it takes me three tries to speak.
“Look!” I manage to croak, superfluously, as Patrick and the others, with their newborn dragons, plop into the ocean around us.
10
The three of us crowd to the edge of the raft, calling out as loudly as we can, wild with hope. It seems to take forever before the helmets resurface.
One, two, three … eight.
They swim towards the raft, each with a Void Dragon in tow, except that’s not really accurate—the Void Dragons are towing them.
Are they alive? Or dead inside their suits?
Pinkie Pie and Sara’s dragon fly out to meet them. The dragons nuzzle and squeak at each other, but the newborns aren’t really talking yet. So we’re kept in suspense until the spacesuits reach the raft … and haul themselves wearily between the outrigger floats, and climb the scaffolding.
Patrick reaches us first. I look away as he rips off his helmet and greets Francie with a passionate kiss. The tears in my eyes are tears of joy. Honest.
“Scatter,” he says next, dragging me into a hug powered by the servomotors in his spacesuit. “My man.”
“OW!” I howl. He’s squeezing the burn wound in my upper arm. He grabs my other arm to hold me upright as my knees buckle.
“Holy shit, that’s nasty. What happened?”
“Actually, it was Pinkie Pie,” Francie says.
“Huh? He pissed you off that much?” Patrick grins. I catch Francie’s eye and we silently exchange a vow that Patrick will never know about that kiss. It happened; it’s over.
“These guys from DirMInt put a tracking beacon in my arm,” I gasp through the agony. “One of the jellies bit it out. The bite went septic.”
“It was swollen up like a freaking football,” Francie says. “So I got Pinkie to sterilize the wound with her dragon-fire. I think it helped. He’s still alive, anyway.”
“Where are the jellies now?” Patrick says, uneasily scanning the empty horizon.
“Somewhere over there,” says Sara, pointing to the other end of the raft.
“Hi,” Patrick says. “I’m Patrick. Sorry for arriving out of the blue. Heh heh. Pun intended.”
“Sara Moon, 190th Marine Company. This is … my dragon, I guess.”
“Nice to meet you. This is mine,” Patrick says. He reaches up to pet the orangey-yellow dragon sitting on his shoulder, his face softening into that look of dazed amazement I know so well by now … the look of a person who does not yet quite realize that their life has just changed forever. “Hey, where’d you get a dragon? And where’s …”
Then we have to explain what happened to Jeremy.
As Patrick is swearing to slag every jelly on Callisto, Paul, Huifang, Milosz, and Badrick clamber onto the raft, helping the other three survivors up. These are a stunned-looking couple with gray hair—oh my God, they’re Jeremy’s parents—and the old man from the video, whom Francie greets with a hug. “Nonno!”
It is her grandfather, Luigi Peverelli. The Delacroixes’ usual pilot refused to fly to Callisto, so Luigi volunteered to fill in. He may be 74 but he still knows his stuff, as he demonstrated by outrunning those Pulverizers.
Unfortunately he could not outrun our frigate. “I didn’t even try,” he says gruffly. “I thought it was friendly.”
“It should have been,” I say. “I still don’t get it.” That is, I think I do get it. But I don’t want to think about it, so I change the subject. “And I really don’t get why you aren’t all dead.”
Patrick and Paul explain, interrupting each other every two seconds.
“When your spaceship takes a point-blank hit, and the reactor cooks off, you die.”
“End of.”
“But not when the ship is stuffed with Void Dragon eggs.”
“Booyah.”
“Know how many we had?”
“Three hundred and sixteen.”
“Your mecha is the business, Scatter.”
“I guess you won’t be getting her back. Sorry.”
Poor Aardie. That hurts more than I would have expected. “It’s OK,” I tell them, and myself. “It was only a mecha.”
“So where are all these eggs?” Francie says. We’re sitting in a circle outside our shelter. Everyone has a dragon. Even Grandpa Luigi. Even Tim and Marguerite Delacroix, who are cuddling theirs tightly as they hold each other. I hope the dragons can comfort them in some small way for their loss. But that still only adds up to eight new dragons, not three hundred and sixteen.
“I guess they fell into the sea,” Huifang says with a shrug.
“But eight hatched, and that was enough,” Patrick says. “The cargo hold was aft of us, between the reactor and the passenger cabin, OK? The cabin didn’t get torn apart, hardly got damaged. These guys absorbed the explosion!”
“They drank it,” I mutter.
“Wiktor came flying out of the cargo hold onto my lap,” Milosz says. He has a bright red dragon. “I know this is the one I picked. There was only one red one.”
“And this is definitely my one,” Huifang says. She has a green dragon, so pale it’s almost white. She is calling her Jade.
Patrick has called his Smaug, for reasons unknown. “I guess they only hatch if they’ve got people,” he says. “It must be, like, a feature of Void Dragon evolution.”
“That makes sense,” Tim Delacroix says. “I believe the Void Dragons must choose stars with intelligent species nearby. They become our … children.”
The Delacroixes have lost their own child, and instead they have Void Dragons on their l
aps. It’s so tragic no one knows what to say.
Luigi clears his throat. “At any rate, it was chaos. Ship shot in half. Depressurizing. Void Dragons fluttering everywhere. So I triggered the emergency ejection protocol.” He winks. “I always like to do things by the book.” Laughter lightens the dark mood. Luigi is clearly not a by-the-book kind of gentleman.
“So we all went flying into space,” Paul says. “Next thing I know, I’m crashing into the bloody sea. Shot down by our own side and rescued by Void Dragons! What a life.” Paul’s new dragon is magenta, and has little stubby horns, reminiscent of Paul’s own afro when he doesn’t have helmet hair. He’s calling it Beelzebub.
“At least wi a alive,” says Badrick, who is calling his baby-blue dragon Rude Boy.
This is true. We’re alive.
But we’re still sitting on a garbage raft in the middle of Offense territory.
*
The new arrivals have radios, with which they attempt to tune into our navy frequencies. All we get is static, and the occasional panicky-sounding blurt of acronyms. I suspect the feeding frenzy in orbit damaged quite a lot of the sats up there, as well as cluttering orbital space with dead ships. Everyone must be freaking out.
Meanwhile, down here, nothing happens.
We share the hydration fluids from the new arrivals’ spacesuits. I get two swallows of a grapefruit-flavored electrolyte drink from Patrick’s helmet nozzle, and one swallow of an orange-flavored one from Milosz’s. The grapefruit is better. The overall effect leaves me even thirstier.
And nothing happens.
The Delacroixes have special, expensive emergency beacons. Against our advice, they trigger them.
And nothing happens.
Until Tancred comes winging out of the heat-hazed distance like some kind of prehistoric monster. He lands behind us in the seaberry jungle. Crash, clatter, splash, he wades towards us, kicking Offense rubbish into the sea as he goes, with seaberry vines tangled around his legs.
He is now the size of a dray horse. No one, but no one is going to take him for a gene-modded lizard ever again.
I’m so happy to see him, I fling my arms around his neck and yell at him for taking so long to get back. His arrival raises spirits that have sunk very low during our long, hot wait.
Soldiers of Callisto (Void Dragon Hunters Book 3) Page 9