Guardians of Jupiter

by Felix R. Savage

  Yeah, my dragon egg.

  I never did get rid of it.

  The attack on Malindi Spaceport changed our lives. Elsa, as one of the few surviving senior engineers, got sucked into the reconstruction effort. She was soon working so hard we hardly ever saw her. My school got converted into an evacuation center. I knocked miserably around the house for a few months until Mom, focusing her worries about the future on me, sent me off to boarding school in Nairobi.

  I took the egg with me.

  By that time I’d had it for months. I slept with it. I couldn’t imagine giving it up.

  So I brought it with me to boarding school, and then to university, and then to basic training—encased inside a bunch of stinky socks, proof against kit inspections—and then to Leda.

  Yeah, I’m an idiot.

  *

  “You’re an idiot.”

  These words are uttered, crisply, by the hottest girl who’s ever spoken to me. Her hair, caramel streaked with blonde, is tied back in a ponytail which falls past her face as she leans over me. She’s so close that I can see the green flecks in her eyes. The beads of sweat in her eyebrows make her more human.

  Unfortunately we’re not at one of those secret parties where people (who are not me) hook up with strangers in an alcohold-fuelled frenzy. We’re at the gym at Leda Tech City. I am lying on the bench press, resting between sets. She’s standing at the head of the bench, tapping on the barbell.

  “You shouldn’t be lifting this much without a spotter.”

  She’s so beautiful I almost don’t care what she’s saying. She could call me a pencil-necked REMF and I’d ask her to repeat it. But I have to answer her. An intelligent answer would be good. “It may look like I’m lifting weights, but I’m actually meditating.”

  Answer: achieved. Intelligent: failed. I know this even before her unamused sniff drives the point home. “You could drop the bar on your face and break your nose. Or drop it on your throat, and strangle yourself. Or drop it on your chest, and crush your ribcage. We’ve got the Offense smacking the shit out of us; we don’t need guys killing themselves in the weight room.”

  I’m only lifting 70 kilos. And I’ve been doing this for eighteen months, ever since basic training, when Sergeant Grouchy McGrouch informed me that my fitness was poor even by the standards of conscripts destined for cubicles. I say, “Even if I did die in a freak weightlifting accident, the Offense wouldn’t notice.”

  “I’ll spot you,” she says, sighing. “Ready?”

  “OK. Thanks.”

  I try to concentrate on my form, not the lycra-clad goddess standing over me. When I’m done she proceeds to critique my grip and the position of my elbows. She pulls a towel back and forth behind her neck as she speaks. I’ve definitely never seen her in the gym before. There are girls in Tech City, but they either don’t lift weights, or they don’t look like this.

  “So, just bear all that in mind,” she finishes, flashing a smile, and strolls back to her friends.

  Her friends. Buzz cuts, regimental tats, biceps the size of my head. Mystery solved. For some reason a bunch of soldiers have chosen to descend upon us, instead of using the undoubtedly superior gym at their own base, a couple of klicks away across Leda’s barren surface.

  “We had an outgassing problem,” the girl tells me fifteen minutes later, falling into step as I head for the treadmills. “They sent us new equipment, which would’ve been great, except they used the wrong kind of acrylics. So the new equipment has to go back, and they already took away the old stuff. So we don’t have a gym for however long.”

  “Your gym must be cleaner than ours,” I say.

  “Huh?”

  Ours smells of sweat, mouldy carpet, uncleaned ventilation filters, and rotting jockstraps. “Never mind. It was a lame joke. This place smells so bad, we wouldn’t even notice any outgassing.”

  “Oh. Ha, ha.” She steps onto a treadmill. I hop onto the next one over, although I’m not sure why I want to continue inflicting the torture of her company on myself.

  We jog for a while.

  “So, is that your name?” she says, jerking a thumb at my torso. Like a moron, I look down at my t-shirt. On the front it says CODE-BLOODED ANIMALS, which is the excruciatingly stupid nickname of the 11th Technical Support Regiment. On the back, of course, is my last name: Scattergood.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’m Jay. Nice to meet you.”

  We accomplish a handshake across the gap between the moving treadmills.

  “Jay Scattergood?” Like she’s double-checking.

  “Yeah.”

  “Any relation to Elsa?”

  I blink. How in the world would this beautiful soldier know my aunt? Granted, Scattergood isn’t the most common name. But Elsa isn’t famous or anything. After her stint at Malindi, she moved on to Ceres, which now orbits Jupiter at the outer edge of the Jovian Belt. We captured it into Jupiter orbit to use it as a colony world, and kept it after the war started as a defense outpost. Everyone who still lives there is employed by the Defense Corps. Obvious inference: my aunt is now doing something weapons-related, although she isn’t allowed to tell us what.

  Maybe she is famous among the people who actually get on ships and go out patrolling the Belt, and sometimes come home in body bags, and sometimes don’t come home at all.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Elsa is my aunt. Um. My mother’s sister. I use my mother’s last name, because my father wasn’t around, so …”

  Shut up, Scattergood, just shut up. She isn’t interested in your biography.

  Too late. Her face goes blank like a computer shutting down. I must have said something wrong, but I don’t know what it was. She stabs the off switch on her treadmill, steps to the floor. “Well, it was nice chatting with you.”

  “Hey, Francie, who’s your new buddy?” One of the watermelon-biceps guys saunters up to us, smiling. I feel like I know him already. He’s my age, but in his life, nothing is complicated. Work out, eat, sleep, kill aliens, repeat, and so it will continue until the aliens kill him.

  A guy like this doesn’t have a Void Dragon egg in his laundry bag. He doesn’t have weird dreams.

  “He’s just some coder,” the girl—Francie—says, her whole body turned away from me now, that towel working back and forth across the nape of her neck.

  “A coder? Hey.” He crushes my hand in his capable paw, practically yanking me off the treadmill. “I’m Newcombe, but those knuckleheads—” the rest of the watermelon-biceps crew, now standing around and watching— “call me Patrick.”

  “Patrick, nice to meet you. Jay Scattergood.” Flustered, I climb off the treadmill.

  He doesn’t react to my last name. Maybe his warm brown eyes crinkle a tiny bit more, but if so, the micro-expression is gone in a flash. “So you’re a coder. Do you know anything about mechas?”

  “Dude! I built mechas. OK, they were just student projects, but if you’ve ever heard of the St. Bernard …”

  The St. Bernard is one of the most famous defense R&D flops of the last five years. It was an autonomous offensive / defensive mecha, designed to retrieve soldiers from hostile environments, like a lethal little rescue dog. It never made it into active service. Everyone’s heard of it.

  “You built the St. Bernard?” Patrick bellows with laughter, but I don’t get the impression he’s laughing at me. It’s more like an invitation to laugh with him at life’s absurdities.

  “I didn’t build it. I was still in university at the time. But some of my code was in there.” It was the St. Bernard’s hardware platform that failed, not the code. There’s just no way you can squeeze that much instrumentation onto a compact mecha without either shortchanging the power requirements of the weapons systems or overheating the electronics. While they were tweaking the thing, I won a student competition for insect mechas. The Defense people noticed, and asked if they could use my code in the St. Bernard. Of course I said yes.

  It would have worked, if the performance board hadn’t fuse
d into a lump of carbon every time they tried to operate the sensor suite and the beam cannon at the same time.

  I don’t bother to tell Patrick all this. I just say, “The St. Bernard was a classic example of overpromising and under-delivering.”

  “Tell me about it. We use the Alsatian mecha, you heard of that one?”

  “Sure. Autonomous explosive detection and neutralization system.”

  “That goddamn thing …” Patrick shakes his head, and all his friends shake their heads, like bison responding to danger. “It worked fine until the Offense switched to using these new ultra-sensitive detonators. Now we’re screwed. Two times out of three, the Alsatian fucks up, gets itself blown to shit, and then we have to go out there and we get blown to shit by the secondary devices.”

  He’s talking about mine clearance, one of the most important and dreadful duties of the infantry. The Offense, from their opportunistic roosts in the Jovian Belt and beyond, have seeded our territory with mines. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of the damn things. They’re small, self-propelled, and programmed to emulate ordinary Jovian orbits, so even if you see them, they just look like tiny space rocks. But they pack yields of 1 kiloton and up. Worse yet, these are nuclear payloads, deliberately dirtied up, so even targets that are not destroyed become unusable.

  They attach themselves to cargo ships. Bury themselves in asteroids. Sidle into orbit around our bases. You never know what’s going to explode next. From the Offense’s point of view, it’s terror for pennies.

  I now know that Patrick, Francie, and their friends are part of a mine clearance squad, and I feel like I should say something to acknowledge their courage.

  All I can come up with is, “Have you tried Technical Support?”

  “Have we! We’ve been round the goddamn mulberry bush with them twenty times.” Patrick puts on a whiny nerd’s voice, and I don’t take offense, maybe because I’m still picturing him crawling across the surface of a booby-trapped asteroid, sweating through his suit liner as he searches for the near-invisible traces of a self-burying mine. “‘Um, that can’t be happening.’ Well, it is happening. ‘It doesn’t happen when we run our tests.’ Well, it is fucking happening in space, OK? You wanna go out there and run a field test, shithead?”

  “Cool it,” Francie says, softly.

  Patrick shrugs. “Sorry. I get kinda steamed up.”

  I say, “I’d be happy to have a look at the code for you, if you like.”

  Did I just say that? That could get me dishonorably discharged. It could land me in jail. I am not cleared to work on the Alsatian mecha. I am not cleared to work on mechas at all.

  But I offered, and now Patrick is grinning. He bro-punches me on the shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise. “That would be awesome. Maybe you can spot what they’re missing.”

  “I worked on the St. Bernard,” I intone, mocking myself. “I know failure modes when I see them.”

  All the soldiers laugh. “Fan-fucking-tastic. Someone’ll bring it over later,” Patrick says. “What’s your room number?”

  *

  As if my life wasn’t complicated enough.

  I spend the first hour of my free time that evening lying on my bunk, staring at the ceiling, praying that Patrick forgot about my stupid offer as soon as I moved out of his line of sight. I’m near-catatonic with dread of the grim future that awaits if the information security department should find out what I said to him.

  I can feel my dragon egg calling to me, but I don’t get it out of its hiding place.

  At 21:05, with 55 minutes to go until curfew, a soft knock comes at my door.

  I leap up, while my heart plummets. It rebounds partway when I open the door and see Francie. She’s wearing a tank top with sweats and fleece-topped slipper boots, a look that mysteriously manages to be sexier than lycra.

  “Nice place,” she says, coming in without being asked, looking around at the scabby gray walls, the rickety computer desk and chair, the bunk with a modular storage unit underneath.

  I assume her praise is sarcastic. “Tech support doesn’t qualify for the best views. If I ever make corporal I’ll be eligible for a carpet.”

  “Have you ever been over to Gruntsville?”

  I admit I haven’t.

  “We don’t even get single rooms. If I live long enough to make sergeant, I’ll get to share with three other women instead of seven. And no one, not even our officers, has their own shower.”

  I follow her glance to the door of the bathroom that opens off my room. “Oh, that’s not mine,” I say. “I mean, I share it with another guy.” Bolt Galloway will be in the rec room, fleecing our fellow Code-Blooded Animals at Texas Hold’em, until 30 seconds before curfew. I hope.

  Francie shrugs. “It’s OK for me to be here, right?”

  “Um. Sure.” There’s no rule against visitors, and in fact Bolt often holds poker parties in his room. He’s never had a girl over, though.

  Part of me is ecstatic just to have Francie pacing the 2-meter space between my desk and the wall, flipping her caramel hair and cracking her knuckles. Another part wants to beg her to go away, right this second, before we both wind up in handcuffs.

  “Well, I brought the code,” she says, extracting a portable drive from the pocket of her sweats.

  I can practically hear the bars of my future cell rattling. “Great. Shall I have a look at it now?”

  She glares as if to say: that’s why I’m here, idiot.

  So I slot the portable drive into my personal computer, which probably looks like another unearned REMF luxury to her, although the reason we are allowed computers in our rooms is so that we can continue to work during our legally mandated free time, and very soon I forget about the information security department and I even forget about Francie herself as the code sucks me into my usual flow state.

  She taps me on the elbow, breaking my trance. “I have to be out of here in ten minutes.”

  “Oh.” I check the computer clock. Half an hour has passed. “OK, well, I think I’ve found the problem, but—”

  “You have?”

  “Whoa, whoa. I’ve found the part of the code that needs to be updated. That wasn’t hard, because I can see where they updated it. But every time they updated it, they’ve broken more stuff, because code is … it isn’t … it doesn’t just do one thing. The programming languages we use today are really high-level. Every command has a whole hidden world of assumptions and conditions built into it, so it has to all fit together on multiple levels …” I jam my fingers together like the interlocking teeth of an airlock. I suck at explaining things.

  “Can you fix it?” she says impatiently. She’s perched on the edge of my cot, and I notice that my photo album is lying on the ratty brown blanket, displaying a picture of my mom in Sri Lanka 30 years ago.

  While I was in my coding trance, Francie took the album out of its drawer and flipped through my old photos without asking. That’s not really legit. But I wouldn’t dream of saying anything about it.

  “I’d have to start by finding a restore point and undoing these crappy patch jobs. Then, yeah, I can see which parameters to adjust for greater sensitivity, but it would be a trial and error thing. I’d have to run simulations—”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Yeah, I can do it, but not tonight. I would need a simulation environment, too.”

  I’m about to add that I’m not sure that I have the capacity to run a high-fidelity sim in the sandbox I set up on my machine to examine the Alsatian code, but she doesn’t give me any more wiggle room. She springs up, and her green-flecked eyes brim with the joy of a woman on death row who’s just been pardoned. I realize that if I can repair this piece-of-shit code, it might actually, literally, save her life, and I don’t try again to wiggle out of it.

  “Fucking ace,” she says. “Scattergood, you rock. I bet Patrick can get a copy of the sim environment they were using. Now, I have to get back to base. Can I just use the head before I go?” />
  She bops into the bathroom.

  Shaking my head at myself, I return my photo album to its drawer, and then, because I’m paranoid, I start peeking into the other drawers of the modular storage unit to see if anything else is out of place. I didn’t notice at all what she was doing while I had my head in the code clouds.

  My dragon egg is in the bottom of my dirty laundry bag, where I usually hide it. I’ve just worked my hand past the sedimentary layers of underwear and socks to touch its smooth, warm surface, when a crash shudders the partition wall between my room and Bolt’s.

  Crap.

  Bolt is home.

  He’ll strip nude and shamble into the bathroom to shower before bed, because that’s what he always does, and either he’ll walk in on Francie, or he won’t be able to get into the cubicle because she’s locked it on his side.

  Either way, he’ll know I had a visitor, and he’ll ask around and figure out who it was. And then I’ll really be screwed.

  I kick the storage unit drawers shut and fly into the corridor, along to Bolt’s room. He’s already down to his Y-fronts. He looks confused to see me, as well he might. We’re not friends, just next-door neighbors. “Yo. What’s the problem?”

  I lean casually on the door of the bathroom, blocking him from entering. “Did you lose tonight?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “Way you slammed the door.”

  “There’s no such thing as losing, there’s only working the system,” he claims, unconvincingly.

  “Too bad the Offense don’t play poker, huh?”

  Bolt scratches his balls through his underwear. He’s a husky guy with pimples on his shoulders. A mediocre coder. Could be good if he didn’t devote 90 percent of his mental resources to his poker system, and to assorted other schemes for feathering his nest. He’s got a screen the size of the wall, a gaming setup; there’s a faint smell of apples from the e-hookah he keeps in his storage unit. He’s not meant to have any of this stuff, but our warrant officer turns a blind eye. In short, Bolt is a fixer. I don’t know any of the murky details, but I know he’d make a good friend and a bad enemy. Unsurprisingly, he’s always blown off my halfhearted attempts to befriend him.