S2X458, still in two halves, is following us right now on a sort of golf cart, the only form of transport allowed inside Ceres domes. This one has police flashers on the roof. Its wheels crunch on the pebbles.
I stumble yet again. Tiny claws dig into my shoulder. I reach up with my cuffed hands to steady the dragon. I’m sure the cops aren’t happy about letting it stay with me, but if they try to take it away from me, it spits fire at them. It burned one of them quite badly while they were arresting me.
They direct me away from the lake, up a stony hill. Scattered tufts of grass foul the golf cart’s wheels. The cops guide me with light blows to my elbows.
I wonder how they’ll kill me. Patrick and the others have told them how my dragon destroyed the Offense warship, first drinking its laser pulses, then eating its high-temperature exhaust. My dragon consumes heat energy, just like its parent consumed the sun. So they won’t use any kind of energy weapon on us. It’ll be more primitive and sure than that.
I keep picturing a pit. Stones falling on my head, until the dragon and I are covered up. I dug him out of the Kenyan soil when I was eight. Now we’ll be going back into the ground, together.
The slope flattens out into barren highlands. I snatch one look back at the lake, and then the cops are pushing me in the direction of a small concrete building. A group of people are walking towards us, also converging on the building. Four dark blue uniforms, one tall skinny guy with his arms held stiffly out in front of him. We get quite close before I realize those people are the cops and me. We’re walking towards the reflective wall of the dome, and the small building is an airlock.
The domes of Ceres are connected by underground tunnels. There’s no reason to ever use the airlocks.
Unless you are going to toss someone outside.
So that’s how I will die. Gasping in the vacuum, as if I never got away from Beachy Head at all.
The cops unlock the building. In the shadows I see a bunch of EVA suits hanging up, spare oxygen canisters and water, consoles monitoring the outside terrain. I don’t get an EVA suit, of course. A round door in the far wall stands open. They shove me into the tunnel-like airlock chamber, push S2X458’s golf cart in after me.
The teeth of the airlock door grind together and seal.
I totter over to the golf cart and sit down on it, waiting for the air to be sucked out of the chamber.
The dragon licks my ear.
I pry him off my shoulder and balance him on my cuffed hands, hold him up so we’re face to face. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I suck.”
It’s OK, Daddy. He stretches out his neck and licks my nose. A wave of fierce love fills me. And I know I just said I was sorry, but I’m not sorry. If I could travel back in time to Malindi, if I had the choice of leaving the egg buried … I wouldn’t. I’d do it all again.
It was freaking awesome the way he took out that Offense warship.
He hops down to my lap, nuzzles at my pocket. I smile weakly. “Yeah, your blankie’s in there.” He drags out that foul old gun-cleaning rag and settles down to knead it with his front claws.
Time passes.
I cry a bit, thinking about Mom. I’m not ashamed of the tears. I have been a crappy son. I wish I could tell her I’m sorry. I wonder what bullshit story they’ll tell her to explain my death …
The airlock opens.
Not at the far end. At the same end I came in by.
I jump to my feet, tipping the dragon off my lap. He flutters to my shoulder and hisses.
A woman walks into the chamber, EVA-suited, carrying her helmet in one hand and a second EVA suit in the other.
It is my aunt Elsa.
*
Elsa puts down the EVA suit and removes my handcuffs, fumbling with the key. She hugs me fiercely. When I was a kid, she towered over me. Now her head only comes up to my shoulder. I feel trembling, and I don’t know if it’s her or me or both of us.
“You don’t look too much the worse for wear,” she says, holding me off.
Nor does she. We haven’t met for years. She looks older than she does in recent photos, but just as vibrant. Her shoulder-length blonde hair is streaked with silver now. Her gray eyes glitter with emotion. Then they narrow as she studies the dragon critically.
What in creation is she doing here?
I know she works on Ceres. But I didn’t mention her name when they arrested me. Didn’t want to get her in trouble, too.
“Elsa—” I have to clear my throat before my voice cooperates—“can you tell me what’s going on? Am I going to be executed?”
“Executed? Hell no! If those goons laid a finger on my favorite nephew, they would have to answer to ARES. Advanced Research. That’s my outfit. I’m senior management now, for my sins.”
“Then …”
“Put that on.” She points at the EVA suit. It’s not one of the ones that was hanging in the antechamber. It says ARES on the back. “You have to vanish. That was the Army’s stipulation. Officially, you didn’t escape from Beachy Head, and neither did … that.” Her eyes keep going back to the dragon. She’s staring at it. Entranced by it. “The record will show that you tragically died in action. But unofficially, we’ll find a way to let Jules know the truth.”
Jules, short for Juliette: my mom. Lightheaded with relief, I turn my back and wriggle into the EVA suit. “Thank you.”
“No, thank you,” Elsa says.
“For what?”
“One Offense ship the fewer.”
“It wasn’t me. It was him.”
“I heard.”
I turn around, fastening my chest seal. Elsa puts on her helmet, gestures for me to do the same. “We need to get out of here. He doesn’t need any protection, does he?” she asks, indicating the dragon, who has returned to his favorite perch on my shoulder.
I almost laugh. “Um, Elsa, he’s a Void Dragon. He’s OK with vacuum.”
“Right, right,” She shakes her helmet. “Sorry, this is just so … it’s all new to me. Let’s go.”
She operates the airlock cycling mechanism. We walk out onto the surface of Ceres. A grayish-brown plain. Salt deposits sparkles in Jupiter’s light. The ruins of another dome rise ahead of us. Ahuna Mons juts on the horizon.
“We’ve got a ways to go,” Elsa says. We climb onto the golf cart and ride along with the wreckage of S2X458, bumping over the lightly cratered terrain.
Elsa tells me that she’s known about my dragon egg since I was about twelve.
Oh.
Mom apparently found the egg in my trunk one time when I was home from boarding school. That’ll teach me not to do my laundry. She and Elsa discussed it and agreed not to say anything, because I hadn’t said anything to them, because they didn’t know for sure what the egg was, and because Elsa was confident that even if it was what it seemed to be, it would never hatch.
“But it did,” she finishes.
“Yeah. It did.”
“Do you know why?” she asks, with a hint of tension that suggests the answer is important.
“It was the Offense. They shot it. A high-powered laser turned out to be just what it was waiting for.”
Jolting past the ruins, I feel tension sawing at my ribcage. The joy of my reprieve from death is wearing off. I hate not understanding what’s going on.
A smaller, intact dome comes into view once we’re past the ruins. We drive past a big-bowl telescope standing on its own outside the dome, and pull into an airlock. “Well, here we are.” Elsa takes off her helmet and brushes her hair back in an uncharacteristically nervous gesture. “ARES.”
The airlock opens onto what looks like an African country road. Green trees. Yellow dirt. This is the scenery from her photos. Artificial gravity takes hold: a welcome heaviness.
A slender figure stands in the road, waiting for us.
I jump off the moving golf cart and sprawl on the dirt, having forgotten that I now weigh 80 kilos again. The dragon flutters clear, trilling laughter. Thanks for the sympathy
, little guy.
“You OK?” Francie says, approaching.
Unlike Elsa, she’s looking at me, not the dragon. She reaches out to help me up. Our fingers make brief, electric contact.
“I’m fine,” I mumble.
“Francesca works with me,” Elsa says. “She’s been part-time for the last few years, but she may have to go full-time now. We’ll see.”
“Your name’s Francesca?” I say.
“Yeah, idiot. My mom is Italian.” Now she’s looking at the dragon. He’s trying to perch on my head. I distractedly fend him off. He nips my wrist, causing me to yell in pain. “I wonder if mine will do that,” Francie says in an envious whisper.
*
They’re all here.
Patrick. Huifang. Milosz. Paul. (The Joscelin’s medic saved his life, but he may need more surgery. He’s in a wheelchair, complaining nonstop about it.) Even Noob One—who’s now earned the right to be called by his name, Badrick—is here, wandering around the verandah of Elsa’s house, eyeing the bird feeder as if it were a bomb. There were dozens of sparrows fluttering around it when we got here. My dragon chased them away, and is now shaking the feeder, trying to turn it upside down.
The squaddies all had to vanish, for the same reason I did. Their disappearance was less of an ordeal. They were put on indefinite leave from the 6th Sappers, and Francie brought them here.
To the headquarters of ARES.
Prefab roofs poke out of the trees on the slope below Elsa’s house. A lake glimmers in the distance. The warm, still air smells of leaf mould and wild garlic. These are Earth smells, transposed to this distant dwarf planet.
Elsa points out her office, the various research facilities scattered around the lake. I sit with a glass of sweet tea in my hand, feeling overwhelmed, not really getting it.
Patrick leans on the verandah railing in front of me. His arms are folded, his jaw squared. “We can’t go back,” he says. “Six years of service, down the crapper.”
“I pay better than the infantry,” Elsa says.
Badrick lifts his glass to her in a courtly toast. “Mi deh yah. Jus mek mi know wut yu need.” I think he means Just show me where to sign.
Francie comes out of the house, carrying a wire cage. Inside the cage is a steel box with beads of condensation forming on its sides—it’s been kept somewhere cold. She sets the contraption down on the table in front of me, next to a plate of homemade cookies that we have all been working on: chocolate chip, oatmeal and raisin, rice krispie treats, all the grade-school favorites.
The cage looks wrong and ugly next to Elsa’s Willow Pattern, which is actually our Willow Pattern. I remember it from our house in Kenya. I can even see the crack where Elsa broke that plate when she was washing the dishes. She glued it together, and we never told Mom.
Francie sits beside Patrick on the rail, close enough that their thighs touch. I feel a pang of jealousy, before realizing how stupid I’m being.
“Well, this is mine,” Francie says. She spins combination locks, opens the cage and then the box inside.
A dragon egg, nestled in a baby blanket.
Pale cerise with gold threads embedded in the shell.
Francie strokes it with a finger. “I found it in a field behind my grandparents’ house in Padua. I was seventeen.”
My dragon lands on my shoulder, startling me. He’s interested in the egg. I hold him back.
“My grandfather used to be in defense intelligence,” Francie continues. “He got in touch with ARES. That’s how I met Major Scattergood. She offered to look after Pinkie Pie for me.”
My face burns. Francie is describing what any rational person would have done when they found a dragon egg. Pretty much the opposite of what I did.
No wonder mine was the one that hatched.
Patrick’s laughing. “Pinkie Pie?” He digs Francie in the ribs. “Pinkie Pie, Francie, really?”
“What’s wrong with it?” Francie says, lips twitching. The others are chortling, too. It’s great to hear Patrick’s laughter again.
“I’m just kidding,” Patrick says. “It’s a fine name for a goddamn egg. Ask him what he calls his.”
Now they are all looking at me and I have to confess, “I haven’t given him a name yet.”
For some reason that sets them off again. Paul groans, “Oh God, don’t make me laugh. My stitches are gonna come out.”
“Sweetie? Sparkles? Honeypuff?” Each of their suggestions is dumber than the last. Elsa looks on, smiling.
Do you want to be named? Do you have a name already? I think, stroking my dragon under the jaw with one finger.
What is name? he trills in my mind.
OK. I guess it’s up to me, then.
“Tancred,” I say decisively. “His name is Tancred.”
“Way better than Pinkie Pie.” Patrick reaches over and gives me a fist bump.
“Screw you, Newcombe,” Francie says, smiling. “Anyway, as I was saying, I’ve been working part-time for Major Scattergood.”
My aunt Elsa is a major? I suppose she’d have to be, to work in a place like this. Still, it’s intimidating, as if I were eight years old again.
“My job was looking for more eggs.” Francie grimaces. “But I never found any. And the one that was right under my nose? I had no freaking clue.”
So that’s that cleared up. She never saw my egg. She was just interested in me because I’m related to Elsa.
“Any more secrets you’re hiding from us, Scatter?” Francie’s green-flecked eyes challenge me. The blonde streaks in her hair sparkle in the Jupiter light that falls through the dome.
“Nope,” I say. “That’s it.”
“Sorry, Francesca,” Elsa says. “Maybe I should have told you about Jay’s egg. But I took the liberty of running a little live test of my own. I have a theory that you were unconsciously drawn to Jay because of the egg …”
“I only noticed him because of his last name.”
“Maybe that’s what it felt like. But our experiments suggest that dragon owners have a special sensitivity to the presence of eggs, or anyone who’s been in contact with an egg.”
“Dragon owners?” Patrick says, in the same tone of voice in which he said “Pinkie Pie”?
Elsa shrugs. “That’s just what we’re calling people like Jay and Francesca … and the rest of you, too, perhaps, one day.”
“Us?”
“We believe there are hundreds of eggs out there. On Earth, on the moon, maybe even on asteroids. They’re buried, like mines. Waiting to be found. Waiting to hatch.” My aunt’s eyes bore into each of us in turn. “We have to find them … before the Offense does.”
I clear my throat. I’m still a timid coder. But maybe I can be more than that, too. “Sounds like more fun than troubleshooting mining droids. I’m in.”
Elsa shoots me the same smile of approval I used to crave when I was a kid. “I knew you’d be on board. The rest of you, take your time. Think about it.”
Patrick shakes his head. “I don’t need to think about it. I’m good at digging things up. It’s my specialty. I’d like to try digging up eggs, not dirty bombs, for a change.”
“Excellent! I hope the rest of you will join us, too,” Elsa says. She gestures at the plate of delicious morsels on the table. “We have got cookies.”
THE STORY CONTINUES IN PROTECTORS OF EARTH, BOOK 2 OF THE VOID DRAGON HUNTERS SERIES.
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An exuberant storyteller with a demented imagination, Felix R. Savage specializes in creating worlds so exciting, you’ll never want to leave.
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/> VOID DRAGON HUNTERS
Military Sci-Fi with Space Dragons
In 2160, a Void Dragon ate the sun.
In 2322, eight-year-old Jay Scattergood found a Void Dragon egg in his garden.
Humanity survived the death of the sun, but now we're under attack by the Offense. These intelligent, aggressive aliens also lost their sun to a Void Dragon. They lost their home planet, too. Earth, now orbiting Jupiter, is still habitable - though much colder than it once was. The Offense will do whatever it takes to destroy humanity and take Earth for themselves.
Our last hope against the alien aggressors is Jay Scattergood ... and his baby Void Dragon, Tancred.
Guardians of Jupiter
Protectors of Earth
Soldiers of Callisto
Exiles of the Belt
Warriors of Saturn
EARTH’S LAST GAMBIT
A Quartet of Present-Day Science Fiction Technothrillers
Ripped from the headlines: an alien spaceship is orbiting Europa. Relying only on existing technology, a handful of elite astronauts must confront the threat to Earth’s future, on their own, millions of miles from home.
Can the chosen few overcome technological limitations and their own weaknesses and flaws? Will Earth’s Last Gambit win survival for the human race?
The Signal And The Boys (prequel story, subscriber exclusive)
Freefall
Lifeboat
Shiplord
Killshot
EXTINCTION PROTOCOL
Hard Science Fiction With a Chilling Twist
Humanity has reached out into the stars - and found a ruthless enemy.
It took us two hundred years to establish fifteen colonies on the closest habitable planets to Earth. It took the Ghosts only 20 years to destroy them. Navy pilot Colm Mackenzie is no stranger to the Ghosts. He has witnessed first-hand the mayhem and tragedy they leave in their wake. No one knows where they came from, or how they travel, or what they want. They know only one thing for sure:
Guardians of Jupiter Page 6
