Soldiers of Callisto (Void Dragon Hunters Book 3)

by Felix R. Savage

  But he has brought bad news.

  Is enemy near! I see in air, on sea.

  “I can hear him talking!” Patrick exclaims.

  “Uh, yeah, Patrick,” Francie says, knuckling his head affectionately. “But did you hear what he said?”

  Not so big. Not yummy.

  “Offense aircraft and ships,” I guess, my heart sinking.

  I am counting— Tancred looks at his claws and folds them over to count— one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight ... He runs out of claws on his front feet, lifts up a back foot. Nine, ten …

  “Many,” I summarize. “Many, many enemies.”

  Everyone gets up and scans the horizon. On cue, we hear the faint drone of jet engines.

  “This is our fault, isn’t it?” Marguerite Delacroix says. “We should not have triggered those beacons.”

  “I don’t think it made any difference,” I say. “They’d have seen you guys fall out of the sky, anyway. On really weird trajectories.” The passengers of the Gaps only fell straight down for a little way. Then their dragons caught them and pulled them onto differently angled trajectories, so that they’d land near us. “They know where we are.”

  Francie adds, “Gutmangler probably told them, anyway. He’s bound to have a radio.” She casts a sour glance towards the seaberry jungle. “Unless he’s dried up in this heat. We can only hope.”

  The noise of engines gets louder. We all cringe as the first Offense plane flies into view.

  It is a small craft, no larger than a jet fighter. It’s flying straight towards us, low over the sea.

  “Take cover,” Patrick yells. Everyone stands up, responsive to his leadership—even me, though I immediately get dizzy and have to lean on Tancred.

  But before we can hide amidst the junk, the plane banks and flies off at nine o’clock to us.

  “Huh?” Patrick says.

  “They definitely saw us,” Francie says. “What gives?”

  Another plane flies towards us from the other direction. It almost overflies the raft before banking and flying in the opposite direction from the first one.

  Luigi Peverelli, former pilot for the Directorate of Military Intelligence, puts his finger on it first.

  “They are not looking for us,” he says. “They are flying boxes. That is a search pattern.”

  “Oh, no,” Huifang murmurs.

  “They’re looking for the eggs,” Patrick says heavily.

  “Do they float?” Milosz says.

  Ridiculous as it seems, no one can answer this suddenly crucial question. Do Void Dragon eggs float? Of all the tests that were done at ARES, they never to my knowledge did the simple one of dropping an egg into a bowl of water.

  I think back over my years of minding Tancred’s egg. I gave it a bath once or twice. I clearly remember being about eleven, sitting in a bubblebath up to my chest, rubbing the egg with a soapy washcloth. I remember my mother’s step in the hall— “Jay, are you still in the bath?” I remember how the egg slipped from my fingers. I had to fish around in the bubbles for it. I think … I think … it wasn’t on the bottom of the bath. It may have been floating under the surface, as if it were very slightly more dense than water. But I can’t be sure, and the oceans of Callisto are more buoyant than a bubble bath, and the memory is too embarrassing to share, anyway. So I don’t say anything.

  The Offense search plane flies away.

  “They will search for floating debris from the Gaps,” Luigi says. “That’s where they will hunt for the eggs.”

  “They’ll be looking a while,” Patrick says, gamely. “The debris is probably spread out over half of Utgard.”

  After a few minutes, a ship steams into view. It is, of course, an Offense ship, a floating meringue like the top half of a baked Alaska. It does not approach the raft, but cruises along the horizon, assisting in the search.

  We’re suddenly in the middle of a busy intersection on the seas. But no one pays the least attention to us, even when Gutmangler and crew rashly emerge from their hiding-place at the far end of the raft and hoot at the ship.

  Tancred leaps into the air and zooms off to spit at the jellies. Patrick and Paul climb onto the rubbish to watch the brief exchange of fire. It is inconclusive, as the jellies retreat underwater. Tancred returns to me and lands with a cross thump, shaking the raft.

  “Wish you would do that, Smaug,” Patrick says, tickling his little orangey-yellow dragon.

  The comment falls into an awkward silence. Smaug is very cute, but he will never do that. Nor will any of the other new dragons, unless the jellies suddenly abandon their own advanced technology and adopt human-style fusion reactors. These dragons only eat Earth stuff. They are worse than militarily useless: they’re loaded guns pointed at our own heads.

  Whine, goes another jet engine, approaching.

  Sara, who has been silent, suddenly looks up.

  “That’s one of ours,” she says, instants before it drops out of the sky.

  She’s right. It is a spaceplane on a sub-orbital ballistic trajectory, with its conventional jet engines engaged.

  It flies right over the Offense ship a few miles away, without shooting at it. Neither does the Offense ship shoot at it.

  That’s the first inkling I have that something is very wrong here, and although I would like to share in the sudden flowering of hope, the cheers and cries of “Down here! Helloooo!” I cannot. I just lean against Tancred, staring up at the spaceplane and cradling my right arm.

  The spaceplane glides to a slow stall in the air above the raft, flaps fully engaged. It swivels its engines downwards and descends to a noisy vertical landing on the launch pad. The whole raft shakes.

  The flowy writing on the spaceplane’s nose says Raimbaut.

  The others do not get the significance of this. I never said anything about the Raimbaut to Francie, never told her and Sara about the information that Gutmangler decrypted for me.

  They all run and clamber towards the plane, yelling for help.

  Naturally, the jellies are not idle. As soon as the Raimbaut switches off its engines, they start shooting at it from the water.

  A gun turret rises from its fuselage, swivels, and shoots back, blowing off a corner of the raft.

  The jellies think better of it.

  So it is in the silence of wind and sea that steps hinge down from the spaceplane’s belly, and Hardy lopes down them.

  He’s bulked out with a bulletproof vest, and a flak helmet shadows his face, but I can tell it’s him.

  Strong trots down the steps behind him, almost circular in his Kevlar.

  None of the others, of course, have ever seen Hardy and Strong before. Even Francie didn’t actually meet them when they were on Lofn. They have no idea that these seemingly heaven-sent rescuers are not on our side.

  Hardy shades his eyes, turning to search for—

  Me.

  I have been wondering if I should just not say anything. Now I realize I’m falling back into my old pattern of secretiveness and silence. It’s a reflex, not a choice.

  “I’m feeling kind of crap,” I say to Tancred. “Can you carry me?”

  He floods me with love and joy in response. It brings a prickle to my eyes. At least I can always count on Tancred. I swing a leg over his dipped neck, and he sits back on his haunches, kind of shaking me down onto his back.

  He flies across the seaberry jungle to the launch pad: one flap, two flaps, bump and hop and scrabble.

  I slide off his back in the shadow of a delta wing.

  “Wasn’t that dragon a whole lot smaller last time?” Hardy asks.

  Francie pulls on Patrick’s arm and starts whispering in his ear. Looks like she’s figured out who Hardy is.

  “Yeah,” I say, leaning against Tancred’s side in what I hope looks like a casual pose. In reality, I’m too weak to stand up straight. “He grew some.”

  “Where are the rest of the eggs?” Hardy says, getting straight to the point.

 
I gesture at the sea. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Ah.” Hardy shows no sign of disappointment or surprise. He squints out to sea. “Do they float?”

  “Dunno,” I say.

  “Way to go, ARES,” Strong grunts.

  “Don’t blame this on ARES,” I say.

  On the horizon, the search ship sits still. Clanking noises carry across the water. If I had to guess, their sonar has found something that looks like an egg, conveniently floating at a neutral buoyancy point not far below the surface, and they’re lowering a mini-sub.

  Francie says hesitantly, “So you came to rescue us, because …?”

  “Because I’m a good guy,” Hardy says.

  “Heads up,” Strong says, suddenly reaching for his rifle.

  We all spin around.

  Gutmangler and his crew are flowing over the rubbish towards the launch pad, walking on four or five tentacles each, brandishing their weapons in the other tentacles. They shoot at the Raimbaut. All of us go prone. I am close enough to Hardy to hear the turret gunner saying in his headset, “Blow ‘em away?”

  “Just a warning shot,” Hardy grunts.

  Boom. A fountain of rubbish and seaberry juice sprays up just ahead of the jellies.

  Hardy raises his head and lets out a gargling hoot.

  I stare. Did he …?

  From across the raft, Gutmangler hoots back.

  Hardy stands up, gargling at the top of his lungs.

  “Mercy,” yells Gutmangler in English. “Stop murdering our beautiful language, and we will surrender.”

  Hardy hoots again.

  “OK, OK, we will not really surrender. But we will stop shooting.”

  “We mean you no harm,” Hardy yells. “Leave us alone, and we’ll leave you in peace.”

  Raising up on my left elbow, I see suspicion crystallizing on my friends’ faces. Hardy speaks the Offensive language. He just offered Gutmangler a free pass. This is a good guy?

  “How did you get here without being pulverized?” Gutmangler demands. He undulates warily closer.

  “I have an agreement with your Callisto command,” Hardy says.

  Case, fucking, closed. Realization dawns on my friends’ faces …

  “They consented to let us come and retrieve these people, in exchange for the eggs.”

  … and they crumple into expressions of guilt and shame. That’s some high-level verbal ninjutsu Hardy’s got there. With a few words, he’s managed to give my friends the impression that this is all our fault.

  “What about us?” Gutmangler demands.

  Hardy shrugs. “You can swim, can’t you?”

  Gutmangler’s dome bulges out of his visor and retracts. “Thank you.” He pauses. “May I speak briefly to that human?” A tentacle points at me.

  I move cautiously to the edge of the launch pad. Gutmangler is so big he can reach up to it. A tentacle tip wavers in the region of my shins.

  “What do you want?” I say, stumbling back.

  “To shake hands,” Gutmangler says. “That is what humans do, no?”

  “Nuh uh,” I say, taking out my anger on him. “You killed my friend. Those are his parents, by the way. Hell if I’m shaking hands … tentacles … with you.”

  Gutmangler bulges at the Delacroixes. To my surprise, he booms, “Your offspring was valiant. He died in action, fighting for his cause. My highest regards to your clan.”

  The Delacroixes’ eyes well up. I think this actually means something to them.

  “I too fight for my cause,” Gutmangler says to me. “I fight long and stickily. But I rarely meet such a viscous opponent as you. I hope we will meet again in battle. Then I will pulverize you.”

  Viscous? That doesn’t sound like a compliment. All the same, I suddenly realize that I respect Gutmangler, an honest enemy, more than I respect Hardy, a dishonest ally.

  I stoop down and shake his armored tentacle, very briefly. “Same to you.”

  “Goodbye, two-legged prey beings.”

  The jellies undulate to the edge of the raft and belly-flop into the water.

  “Well,” Hardy says, “we should be going, too.”

  Everyone looks at me.

  They’ve heard enough to know that Hardy is not the good guy he’s pretending to be.

  But saying nothing is a choice, even if it doesn’t feel like one. And I’ve already made it. The plain fact is the Raimbaut is our only way out of here.

  11

  I thought that Elsa might be on board the Raimbaut. But she isn’t. Three other people are.

  His Sticky Sweets Made Holes In Your Teeth, I recall the dumb mnemonic I made up. I’m guessing these are Muramoto, Yu, and one of the other Westerners.

  Maybe-Muramoto looks at my arm and tells me I’m a few hours from having to have it amputated at the shoulder. Then she gives me enough drugs to knock out an elephant.

  When I wake up from that, I have a clean bandage on my arm, and it doesn’t throb as much. My head feels clearer, too.

  I’m no longer on the Raimbaut. I’m in a hospital room much nicer than any REMF has a right to expect. I suppose they had to give me this one because Tancred would not have fit into a normal-size cubicle.

  I fling my arm weakly over his neck, and push buttons to make the bed angle up until I can see out of the window. I could sit up on my own, but c’mon. Who can resist a hospital bed?

  I’m looking down from a high floor at a barracks raft. Beyond that, a sea channel sparkles in the sunlight. Beyond that is a flotilla of launch rafts. The soundproof windows of the hospital buzz faintly in their frames as a ship lands on a pillar of fire. Surprise: the war is still going on.

  I watch landings and lift-offs while I eat some of the grapes on the nightstand. A nurse comes in, changes the bandage on my arm, and takes my blood pressure. She tells me that I am on Asgard, and that’s it’s been two days since my friends brought me in. I just nod. I feel like I don’t really care about anything.

  She goes away. A moment later, I realize I could have asked her for a computer. I press the nurse call button.

  This time, instead of a nurse, Hardy comes in.

  I wish I wasn’t lying in a hospital bed, wearing a hospital gown.

  Like I could have intimidated him, anyway. But I’m at about as much of a disadvantage as it’s possible to be.

  Of course, that’s how he planned it.

  “Hey,” he says. He’s wearing jeans and a leather jacket, and looks younger and cooler than he did when he was in uniform.

  He sits down on the edge of my bed, across from Tancred.

  “How’s your arm?”

  I shrug. The fact that I can shrug without pain proves it’s better.

  Tancred raises his head, stretches his neck across the bed, and bares his teeth at Hardy. He doesn’t breathe out fire. Just a zephyr of dry heat. Yet Hardy recoils, paling under his suntan.

  And I remember that actually, I have all the power here. Because I have a Void Dragon.

  I eat a grape. “Thanks for chipping me, by the way,” I say. “I really appreciate being treated like a pet.”

  “I was just trying to keep track of you,” Hardy says. “That was Strong in the helicopter, by the way.”

  “The jellies found the transmitter straight off. They bit it out of my arm. That’s how come I almost died of blood poisoning.”

  “I was trying to save your life!” Hardy says.

  I didn’t expect him to sound so defensive.

  “So why’d you shoot down my friends?”

  He’s silent. I think that means I’m doing this right.

  “Where are they now, anyway?”

  “Enjoying themselves,” he says. “Relaxing. Shopping. This is the officers’ wing of the hospital, you know. It’s got a spa, a tennis court, two restaurants.”

  I speak over him. “You blew their ship to shit. It was unarmed! Defenceless! They thought you were friendly!”

  “Wasn’t me,” Hardy says.

  “Wh
o was it, then?”

  “A pilot named Jane Nagumo and her co-pilot Nate Thompson, who scrambled in response to my order to destroy the God of the Gaps, because they were on call. And now they’re dead.”

  I’m astonished. I had expected him to deny it. But maybe he realizes there’s no point anymore. What I know I know—and maybe he thinks I know more than I actually do know.

  “Reason I gave that order,” he says. “I believed you and your friends had betrayed humanity. Gone over to the jellies.”

  “Wow,” is all I can say, but I’m thinking: Projecting, much?

  “That ship was about to land in Offense territory with a cargo of several hundred Void Dragon eggs. What did you expect us to do? Let it?”

  “Maybe give me credit for not being a complete moron?” I yell. “Yes, it was a risk! I know it was a risk! But as you may have noticed, when Void Dragon eggs get shot at, they hatch!”

  “Nope, did not know that,” Hardy says.

  I’m still raging at him. “Knowing my friends, I was one hundred percent certain they’d come out fighting, so there was a better than even chance the Offense would have ended up shooting the eggs. Presto, lots more Void Dragons that eat Offense armaments! Instead of which, we’ve got eight Void Dragons that want to eat our ships. Thanks to you.” My voice drops. I mentally replay what Hardy said a minute ago. “You didn’t know that they hatch when you shoot them with energy weapons? Or, like, explode a reactor at them?” Although actually, I did not know that last bit myself until two days ago.

  Hardy shakes his head.

  I cannot tell if he’s lying or not. I just … cannot … tell.

  “Didn’t Elsa explain that to you?”

  A change comes over Hardy’s face. He recognizes Elsa’s name. My heart sinks. The evidence against my aunt is piling up.

  Of course, there could be innocent reasons he recognizes her name. For instance, he knows we work for ARES—

  “I only found out about your project when you landed on Callisto,” he says. Liar, liar, pants on fire, I think. “Of course I contacted ARES for information regarding the Void Dragons. They didn’t give me anything. If they had, this wouldn’t have happened.”