Soldiers of Callisto (Void Dragon Hunters Book 3)

by Felix R. Savage

  These kicks are her only acknowledgement that I still exist.

  None of us have said a word since Sara asked to use the head a couple of hours ago.

  I told them what I’d done, and now they think I betrayed humanity. Maybe they haven’t worked it out yet. Or maybe I’m not as clever as I think I am. Maybe they’re right, and I ought to just commit suicide by jelly.

  That wouldn’t be hard. One of Gutmangler’s crew-jellies occupies the top nest in the dimly lit compartment, a few feet above us. Its tentacles dangle over the edge of the nest and switch back and forth like an impatient child’s legs. It’s just waiting for us to do something strangle-worthy.

  So we lie there without talking, occasionally kicking each other, while the submarine churns on through Callisto’s deep waters.

  Offense hoots and huh, huh, huhs punctuate the steady throb of the engines.

  Somehow, I fall asleep.

  *

  Gutmangler tickles me under the chin with a tentacle. I startle awake, on the floor outside the nest.

  “Huh, huh, huh,” he rumbles. “Come with me.”

  I struggle to my feet, wondering how I ended up on the floor. Francie and Sara lie motionless, back to back, in the middle of the nest. They must have rolled me out, and I was so exhausted I didn’t even wake up. I still feel woozy, fuzzy-headed. My arm is hurting again.

  I place a hand on Tancred’s head, steadying myself.

  Gutmangler takes me forward to the conning tower. He lifts me up inside it, carrying me in his tentacles like an action figurine. Tancred flutters and scrambles up beside us, suspicious and alarmed.

  The hatch in the top of the conning tower is transparent. Outside, the submarine’s running lights dimly illuminate a few feet of sea.

  Gutmangler switches on a searchlight. It probes into the murky depths.

  “The battle for Callisto,” he rumbles, “is also biological warfare.”

  “OK,” I mumble—and freeze.

  A mass of light purple spaghetti is drifting up to the conning tower.

  “What’s that?”

  Gutmangler steadies me with his tentacles, laughing. “This is krikiolo from our home planet. We brought embryos. It is low on food chain. Eats garbage, plankton. When there are enough krikiolo, we will introduce azazat. This is like shark. Eats krikiolo. Eats anything.”

  I prod at the reinforced glass of the hatch. The purple spaghetti follows my fingers as if hoping to taste them. Depression saturates me. The Offense are way ahead of us, aren’t they? They’ve already populated Callisto with their disgusting jelly-bodied alien animals. Meanwhile, our terraforming effort stalled out at seaweed.

  “Sighting of krikiolo tells me we are near destination,” Gutmangler says. “Submarine is now ascending.”

  As he speaks, my ears pop.

  The searchlight goes off. It isn’t needed anymore, because the water is turning from black to blue to aquatic green.

  We break the surface.

  Water sluices over the hatch and drips away.

  I’m looking across the waves at—a raft?

  Well, it’s floating, anyway.

  *

  “Boy, this is gross,” Sara says.

  We’re clambering up a rusty scaffolding encrusted with pink and purple seaberries—that’s what Gutmangler called them—that pop under our fingers, covering us with sticky, putrid-smelling juice. What’s more the juice seems to be mildly toxic to humans. My hands sting. Francie has a rash of red irritation on her cheek where she wiped her face with her hand.

  A mat of seaberries comes away in my hand, and a hundred spotty brown worms swarm out from underneath it. They move much faster than worms. More like cockroaches. They flee the daylight … up my sleeves.

  Francie and Sara both laugh as I howl and let go with one arm, then the other, trying to shake the worms out. It is the first time Francie has laughed since we were captured.

  “Glad I could provide some comic relief,” I gasp. Her face instantly reverts to stoniness.

  Once we reach the surface of the raft, 30 feet above the sea, I pull off my t-shirt and shake out the rest of the worms. Sara wolf-whistles.

  This raft is a seaberry jungle. All around us are random items of Offense scrap, completely or partially shrouded with seaberries, depending on how long they’ve been here. Little legs scurry in the shade of the root mats that hang from the junk like curtains. Gutmangler said this raft is unmanned. It’s a floating rubbish dump, deep within Offense territory, in the region of Callisto known as Utgard—on the other side of the moon from our Asgard base.

  Our lives, for Void Dragons. That was my deal with Gutmangler, and the Offense captain proposes to keep his end of it by dumping us here.

  But I still have a trick up my sleeve. I know more about Void Dragons than he does.

  “Stay there,” bellows Gutmangler’s hated voice.

  He’s bulging out of the conning tower of his sub, which idles beyond the raft’s outrigger floats.

  “Do not fear, I will be here. Huh, huh, huh.” Laughing, he drops back into the conning tower.

  The sound of the hatch slamming carries across the water.

  Now, Tancred! I think.

  Tancred needs no urging. Almost before I complete the thought, he’s off, winging across the water.

  As the submarine begins to sink beneath the slow-rolling swells, Tancred lands on the conning tower. A flap and a scrabble, a blast of dragonfire—and he’s in, vanishing like a rat into a hole.

  Sara claps.

  Francie just stares.

  “Down,” I yell.

  We dive into the seaberry jungle on top of the raft, concealing ourselves beneath hanging mats of the disgusting berries. More of those nasty little worms drop down on my head, but now I scarcely notice, staring at the partially submerged submarine.

  For a long moment, nothing happens.

  Then an underwater explosion geysers into the air.

  The spray has scarcely fallen back to the surface when Tancred shoots out of the water. The sun turns his wings to sheets of emerald. He’s crowing victoriously, a sharp kind of barking noise I have never heard from him before.

  “He did it!” I yell. “He ate Gutmangler’s power plant!”

  The submarine rolls on its side and goes down in a vortex and a swirl of bubbles.

  Tancred flaps back towards me and lands on his hind legs, still doing his victory crow. We all crowd around him, hugging and petting him.

  “Well done, Tancred!”

  “Rock on!”

  “Oorah!”

  Pride in my Void Dragon almost makes me forget how much my arm hurts.

  Then some subconscious instinct tells me to scan the water.

  Several Vs of ripples move away from the place where the submarine sank, towards the opposite end of the raft.

  “Shit! Some of them got away!”

  The sub had an airlock. And the Offensives, of course, have exoskeletons that enable them to swim underwater.

  “Tancred, go get ‘em! Burn!”

  Tancred flies in a circle over the water, but by the time he reaches the jellies, they have dived out of sight. He comes back to me, disappointed. I hug him and tell him it’s OK.

  “Hmph,” Francie says. “So now we’re stuck on an Offense garbage raft with a bunch of homicidal jellies. This just gets better and better.”

  “Oh, give it a rest,” Sara says. “Would you rather still be on the submarine?”

  “And they’re armed, and we aren’t.”

  “But we have Tancred,” Sara says, with a smile for him. She caresses the dragon that used to be Jeremy’s, and is now hers, who is clinging to the collar of her shirt, curled into a sapphire lump. It makes me nostalgic for the days when Tancred was small enough to do that.

  We explore our end of the raft, keeping an ear out for any hint of Gutmangler and company’s whereabouts. Somehow I just know Gutmangler was one of the survivors. I figure they will stay submerged beneath the raft f
or now, however. They won’t want to jeopardize their chances of grabbing their prize.

  In the middle of the raft, there’s a raised platform. It is the only thing not covered with seaberries. Gutmangler said it was solid steel, and located at the raft’s center of balance. It is in fact a launch pad.

  That is where the God of the Gaps, with its cargo of Void Dragon eggs, will land—if they got the email that I sent Patrick from Gutmangler’s computer—at 16:00 on Friday, which is in sixteen hours’ time.

  Sara finds a cracked Offense nest and asks Francie to help her free it from the seaberries. They balance it on top of some other junk as a canopy to keep off the sun.

  Guessing that I am not welcome in their shelter, I go and sit down on the edge of the raft. I stare out to sea, left hand cupping the crusty wound on my right arm.

  Francie kicks me in the back. I throw my weight sideways and back to avoid falling straight down into the water. Seaberries pop under my shoulders. I lie there in the rancid juice, looking up at her. Her head precisely covers the sun. Her hair is a blazing corona. “I can explain,” I say.

  “Just so you know,” she says, “the only reason I’m not kicking you into the sea is because Tancred would toast me.”

  “I couldn’t explain while the jellies were listening.”

  “They’re not listening now.”

  The only sounds are the soft slop of the water against the outrigger floats, and the voice of Sara, in the shelter, murmuring to her dragon.

  She leaves off and comes out to join us as I explain why I told Gutmangler about the God of the Gaps.

  “They were going to kill us. If they killed me, Tancred would probably go on a rampage that would end with him eating Jupiter.”

  Yes, Tancred says contentedly. Anyone hurt Jay, I burn bigly and muchly.

  Sara gives a squeak. Francie says, “It’s so nice that you’ve still got one friend, Jay.”

  “So I figured, what’s less bad than that? The Offense getting Void Dragon eggs is less bad.”

  “That’s still pretty bad,” Sara says.

  “But it might not come to that,” I say. “There are two ways this could play out. The God of the Gaps lands here. Patrick won’t give up the eggs. There’s a big fight, and we win.” I stroke Tancred’s back. I have total confidence that he could win this theoretical fight on his own, if it came to that. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure it won’t.

  “And the other possibility,” Francie says flatly, “is that Patrick does give up the eggs. Congratulations, we just lost the war.”

  “Do you think he would?” I say, honestly surprised that she would even consider this a possibility.

  She twists her head, lips sealed flat. Oh. I see. She thinks he might sacrifice the eggs for her.

  “The other possibility I was thinking of is that they land, Patrick won’t give up the eggs, there’s a big fight, and we lose.” I hesitate. “But even if we lose … especially if we lose … you have to figure a bunch of the eggs would get shot.”

  Sara completes my thought. “They would hatch, like mine did! Buh-bye, jellies!”

  Francie says furiously, “Yours? Sara, that egg wasn’t yours! It was Jeremy’s. Respect, if you don’t mind.”

  Without giving Sara a chance to answer, she stands up and goes into the shelter.

  “What’s with her?” Sara mutters.

  “I guess she didn’t mention … Her boyfriend’s on that ship. Patrick. The one whose brother died here last year.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s my friend, too. They’re all on board. All Francie’s old squadmates. My friends.”

  “Oh,” Sara says again. “That makes it tough.”

  I nod. All of a sudden I’m horrified by the risk I have taken with their lives. And I can’t take it back. It’s too late. The email has gone. Either Patrick’s read it or he hasn’t.

  The sun slides quickly down the sky.

  My arm hurts worse with every passing hour.

  9

  Night on the raft.

  The jellies gave us some water before we left the submarine, but they didn’t give us any food. And they didn’t give me any more codeine.

  Sara is in the shelter, sleeping.

  Francie is somewhere nearby, keeping lookout. She’s concerned that the jellies at the other end of the raft might try to sneak up on us now that it’s dark.

  Theoretically, I’m concerned about that, too. But on a minute-to-minute level, I’m only concerned about how much my arm hurts.

  It’s now swollen and hot to the touch. I think maybe Gutmangler’s bite was poisonous.

  Tancred radiates worry, but he can’t do anything about it. He and I are lying outside the shelter, in the area we cleared of seaberries earlier, on sticky rusty metal that still radiates the day’s heat.

  If the God of the Gaps arrives on schedule, it will be here in two hours’ time.

  Go, I tell Tancred.

  He doesn’t want to leave me. He’s afraid I won’t be here when he gets back.

  Little scaly-butt, I will always be with you. Until the end of time.

  He nuzzles at my pocket. I take out his blankie and let him snuggle with it for a minute. He holds the dirty—and now salt-stained—rag in two claws and rubs it against his face. He doesn’t need it as much as he once did, but it’s still a comfort in times of fear and uncertainty.

  Daddy keep blankie for Tancred? he demands.

  Yup. promise.

  He takes off and wings into the night, satisfied now, believing my promise will magically keep me alive until he gets back.

  When he’s out of sight, I lie down again.

  Goddammit, my arm hurts.

  In my head, I hear the voice of someone I haven’t thought about in ages: Bolt Galloway, my former roommate on Leda. Bolt was a poker player. He had his own system, which worked about half the time. Never stopped him bending my ear about his principles of poker, which he also applied to life in general. What I hear him saying now is: Scattergood, don’t tilt.

  Bolt was very big on not tilting. By this he meant: Don’t make risky decisions when your head is in a bad place.

  Too late for that, Bolt old buddy.

  Look at all those stars.

  After some time, I don’t know how long, a dark shape blots them out. Francie’s voice says, “Can’t sleep?”

  “No,” I confess.

  “Me neither. Sara’s taken over as lookout. Honestly though, I think the jellies are going to keep their heads down until morning. They don’t want to risk not getting the eggs.” Francie sits down beside me.

  “I know it’s going to work, Francie.” I know no such thing. “Patrick would go to the ends of the universe for you.” I start to sit up, but she pushes me down again with light fingertips on my chest.

  “I’m not worried about Patrick, you idiot,” she says. “I’m worried about you.”

  She lies down with her head on my shoulder. My left shoulder, thank goodness.

  “Can I lie here?”

  “Uh, y-y-yes.”

  Her hair tickles my nose, stiff with salt. I can feel her breath on my neck. Of its own accord, my arm rises to fold over her back, holding her closer.

  “I was a total bitch to you, Scatter,” she says. “I apologize. We’re in the worst situation imaginable, and you were just trying to play it smart. You did play it smart.”

  Pinch self to make sure this is real. Francie has her head on my shoulder. Her body is pressing against my side. It no longer matters how much pain I’m in. “It’s OK,” is all I can manage.

  “No. No, it’s not OK. You can’t die. You’re not allowed!” She props herself on one elbow, staring fiercely down at me. This causes her breasts to brush my chest. “I already have one wannabe hero in my life. I don’t need another one.”

  “I’m not planning on dying. I’m just …” Trying to think about troubleshooting algos, poker hands, mean time before failure averages. Anything to stop my body responding to her. In the condi
tion I’m in, I wouldn’t have thought I had it in me. Turns out I was wrong about that, too.

  “You’re just hiding how much pain you’re in,” she finishes for me. “It takes one to know one. Oh, I mean, I’m fine now, but I do that too.”

  “I know.”

  “Bullshit, Jay. That arm looks really bad. How does it feel? Honestly.”

  “Fine” I say, because right now I honestly do feel fine, just because she’s here.

  “You sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “OK, have it your way.” She sighs, dipping her head. “I just want you to know you can talk to me. Tell me the truth. You know.”

  Her lips brush my cheek, a dry caress.

  Without thinking, without planning it, I catch the back of her head and pull her down for a proper kiss.

  Her lips are so soft, chapped or not. Her tongue silky. Then she starts to pull away.

  I sense it in time to pull away first. “Sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it. You’re a guy, you can’t help it.” Her voice is matter-of-fact, but not harsh. I remember, ashamedly, that she has to deal with guys hitting on her all the time. She drops another quick kiss on my cheek. “It was my fault. Shouldn’t have done that. I just wanted you to know you’re not alone.”

  “Thanks.”

  I sound so woebegone that even I laugh. Francie laughs, too. “I really like you, Jay.”

  “As a friend.”

  “As a friend,” she confirms. “And there is no freaking way I’m letting you die.”

  “I’m happy about that,” I say, and add with daring honesty, “although right now I’d be happy to die if you would only kiss me one more time.”

  “Uh uh. Anyway, if you die, Tancred would wig out.” She looks around. “Actually, where is he?”

  “I sent him to scout out the area.” On the heels of being schooled about telling the truth, I’m bending the truth again. But it’s only a little white lie.

  “Good,” she says. “Because he might not like this.”

  She suddenly flings a leg over my torso and sits on my chest, pinning my upper arms with her hands.