Gun Runner

by B. V. Larson

  Our destination was an anomaly. It was a small, rocky planet with a living magnetic core that had somehow formed and survived way out here on the fringe of the fringe. The nameless planetoid was no bigger than a good-sized moon, but at a temperature of negative one hundred Celsius, it was bubbling-hot compared to the rest of the objects out here.

  “Prep to land,” I ordered.

  “Belly-deck has all green lights,” Jort said.

  “Hydraulics good, landing gear good,” Sosa chimed in.

  We came gliding down, and the landing went smoothly. Methane-based snow swirled around our landing gear. The area under the jets turned into boiling liquid then froze again immediately.

  “I thought you said this place was warm!” Jort complained.

  “Warmth is a relative thing in space, my man. The core of the world is warm, and if you just dig a few feet down you’ll find some heat. But up here, on the surface… no way.”

  We suited up and lowered a ramp. Flipping on my suit lights, I stepped out onto the crunchy surface. There was an atmosphere of sorts, but it was pretty thin. Too thin and poisonous to breathe, but enough to carry sound.

  “Come on out, the weather’s fine,” I called to the others. My voice was muffled by the respirator and mask, but they heard me and followed.

  Taking out a hand-scanner, I began trudging around the ship in circles. The others peered into the purply dark landscape with distaste. There was a whistling wind up, and the frost soon covered our landing pads.

  “If we stay here a few hours,” Sosa said, “I bet this storm will bury the ship.”

  “We won’t stay long,” Jort scoffed. “Right, Captain?”

  I pointed toward a saw-toothed ridge of black stone about a kilometer away. The peak of each jagged shard of rock was encrusted with ice. “We’re headed that way. Sosa, stay with the ship. Jort, you’re with me. Bring the two model-Ds too. They can pull that cargo sled.”

  Sosa trotted up the steps and vanished into the Royal Fortune. She sent the two androids clunking down in her place. Behind them, they dragged a floating cargo sled. The sled amounted to a flat cart with gravity-repellers glimmering underneath.

  Jort followed me reluctantly. “How far we go, Captain?”

  “Not far. Just past that ridge.”

  “Why don’t we land there?”

  “There’s no place to land. It’s full of crags and fissures that reach a kilometer deep in places. The vents fire up plumes of steam now and then from the guts of this planet.”

  “Uh…” Jort said. He didn’t sound happy. “Why the hell would anyone choose a spot like that to stash weapons?”

  I laughed. “If they’d been left out in the open, they’d be gone by now, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah… what if the stash is empty?”

  “Then we’re screwed. We’ll borrow Kersen’s ship indefinitely, and we’ll make it up to him someday.”

  “Ha. I see… What about Sosa? She belongs to Kersen. That thing in her guts… it will kill her if it knows what’s happening.”

  I hadn’t considered that angle. I frowned. “We’ll figure it out. Stop worrying.”

  We passed between two jagged peaks like shark’s teeth. On the far side, a circular region of rough but level ground spread out before us. There were scattered vents, puffing up plumes of white vapor from the ground. Blackened, broken rocks were everywhere.

  “This is an impact crater!” Jort exclaimed. “What hit this spot?”

  “Not sure. A warhead, I guess—probably fusion. It’s not big enough for an antimatter strike.”

  Jort stood stock still for a moment, taking it all in. “I can see the squared off remnants of a building. “This was some kind of base, wasn’t it? A fortress or a lab… Someone nuked it.”

  “Yes, that’s what I figured when I found it years ago. It was probably a military outpost, since it has a surprising cache of weapons underneath.”

  I led him to a winding ramp. We entered the rough mouth of a cave, which turned into a sculpted tunnel.

  “Someone drilled this!” Jort boomed. “I see marks… the shape of the walls…”

  He was right, of course. The top of this fort or missile base, or radar station—whatever it had once been—had been blown flat down to the foundations. But the tunnel that spiraled deep into the earth was still in pretty good shape.

  A hundred meters below the surface, we found a chamber. Jort gaped at the stash of guns.

  “This isn’t a few rifles!” he declared in shock.

  He wandered among the armored suits, light artillery pieces and a thousand other weapons. I watched him closely until he reached out to pick up a helmet encrusted with sensors.

  “Don’t fondle the merchandise, Jort.”

  His hands sprang away from the helmet, and it crashed to the deck, rolling away from him.

  “Just the rifles and power packs. Load them up.”

  He looked at me with wide eyes as he followed my orders. “I wasn’t taking nothing.”

  “I know you weren’t. Maybe after this is over, we can come back here and gear up—in fact, we’ll take a few shredders, just in case.”

  Eagerly, Jort found a rack of shredders and stuffed some into a sack. He looked like a pillaging burglar, and I got the feeling if he were ever left alone in this chamber, he’d try to steal everything he could carry.

  The model-Ds went to work loading packed rifles on the cargo sled. They didn’t complain, they didn’t argue, they simply and mechanically moved huge burdens from the pallets in the armory onto the growing stack on the sled. It was a good thing the gravity here was low, or the sled might have bottomed out.

  “Okay,” I said after about twenty minutes of loading. “We’ve got about a thousand on there. Let’s take this load back to the ship.”

  We trundled the sagging cart over the landscape. The storm had quit, at least temporarily. A few times we almost slipped and tipped the whole mess into one of those bottomless pits, but we returned to the ship in the end without a full disaster.

  “That was too big of a load,” Jort said. “No point in taking such a risk again!”

  I surveyed the land with a worried eye. I pointed to the crags. “This side of the planet is rotating… slowly, I’ll admit, but we’ll be seeing dawn in another hour or two. One day on this planet takes months to pass by.”

  “So what?” Jort laughed. “There’s nothing here! Noo one here to bother us. We can take a week if we—”

  “No,” I said firmly. “We can’t. This place… it’s never been safe. It never will be safe, not until the Sardez sun goes out in another billion years or so.”

  Perplexed, Jort shook his head and stumped after me. We returned to the armory and loaded it up again. I felt a growing sense of unease. I checked my chrono constantly, and I kept telling myself there was plenty of time. Plenty.

  We walked the second load, another thousand rifles, back to the ship. Then we went immediately for the third. Jort complained he wanted a break to piss and get some food.

  “Piss in your suit,” I told him. Then I left with the model-Ds.

  He stood at the bottom of the ramp for a few moments before grumbling and following me.

  When the third load was finally brought home and stuffed into the ship’s hold, I felt a sense of relief.

  “Why you so worried?” Jort asked me.

  “This place…” I said. “Did you ever wonder why the Sardez died out? Why they made so many fine weapons—but were all killed in the end anyway?”

  “Uh… I think the Conclave bombed out their home planet, yes? They were rebels or something. Something dangerous.”

  I pointed a gloved finger at him. “That’s right. It’s dangerous. This whole system is off-limits and dangerous. Only a few archeologists and smugglers dare come out here these days.”

  “Good thing we’re almost done, then.”

  I nodded, then frowned. “Almost? We’ve got our rifles—”

  “You promised Ker
sen you’d bring him two power packs for every rifle, remember?”

  A wave of horror went through me. Jort was right. I’d been thinking about the rifles, trying to hurry—

  “Come on!” I shouted, slapping his shoulder.

  “What?”

  “We have to go back, right now!”

  “But my piss-chamber is full and I’m—”

  “Shut up! We’ve got to go now!”

  “If you’re so worried about the sun coming up, Gorman, just wait a day. We can even take off and land again.”

  I turned around and grabbed up a wad of his suit. “No, we can’t. Listen, this rock rotates very slowly. Once every four months, about. We’d have to wait for months before the sun goes down again.”

  “Huh…” he said, and followed me, cursing.

  The model-Ds were registering in the orange on battery power, as was the cart, but I didn’t care. We had to get the last load done right now.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sweating and puffing so much that my faceplate was fogging up, I worked to load the power packs with Jort. He and the model-Ds worked with me.

  I’d seen things on this forgotten rock in the past. I’d never been attacked, but I’d known others who dared to come here that had been. The whispered story among smugglers was that such events only happened when the sun was out.

  How could something be alive on an almost airless rock covered in methane-snow? Something that was torpid in the cold, endless nights, but active in the light of day? I didn’t know. But I knew I didn’t want to find out.

  Another theory smugglers had was that there were guardian machines, left behind by the extinct Sardez. Maybe they’d run down their batteries and needed the sunlight to get them moving again. That was only a legend, but I didn’t want to test it.

  We had only one more run to make. Piling up the battery packs, it became a huge load, taller than the rest. Six thousand battery packs take up more room than you might think, and worse, they weigh a lot.

  We trundled the load carefully up the winding tunnel and out into the open. Already, I could see daylight had brightened the sky. Instead of a purply-black, it was a deep blue that grew brighter with every passing second.

  “Come on, push!”

  The model-Ds dragged the sled from the front. Jort and I threw our shoulders into it, pushing from the back. The anti-grav sled wobbled and scraped the surface every few meters whenever some rock stuck up higher than the rest. The sled was overloaded, and its internal power pack was in the red.

  Finally, as we approached the jagged line of saw-toothed stones—the sled sagged to the ground. The blinking battery light went out completely.

  “Shit…” I said, breathing hard and trying to think.

  “We could hook up some of the rifle batteries,” Jort suggested. “The couplings—”

  “No. They’re all dead. They’ve been sitting out here for decades.”

  “Right… what then?”

  My eyes crawled over the landscape. Overhead, the glimmering stabbing fingers of true light touched the tips of each crag, and they individually began to smoke as the ice melted into vapor. Soon the whole region would be bathed in faint light, like a full moon—that might be enough to activate something. We had very little time left.

  Thinking hard, I at last focused in on the model-Ds. They were still trying to drag the dead sled, taking slogging steps in the snow that did nothing but dig up mud and ice.

  “They’re useless without the sled,” I said aloud, getting an idea.

  Walking to the nearest one, I grabbed his power pack and tried to remove it.

  To my surprise, the bot objected. It stiffened, stopped trying to pull the sled, and turned on me. Worse, the other did the same.

  Click.

  I managed to disengage its power supply. The battery pack came free in my hand, and the devilish light behind the android’s cameras faded out.

  The second android, however, was still in a bad mood.

  “Halt!” I called out. “Pick up your friend, there, and carry him to the ship.”

  I pointed, but the bot took no notice. It marched toward me instead, grippers outstretched. It was going for the battery pack I had in my hand.

  I unslung my shredder, but before I could employ it, the bot reached me and grabbed up my suit. It twisted and pulled—I heard fabric tearing.

  Jort gave an inarticulate roar then, and he charged from the side. He tackled the android, knocking it to the ground.

  Since I was still trapped in those mercilessly strong grippers, we all tumbled down together. Upon landing on the hard ground, Jort hammered on the D’s chassis. The undamaged android turned its attention toward the annoying Jort. Those grippers came up and went for him next.

  The moment I was released, I grabbed one of the robot’s legs and stood up fast. The robot was lifted into the air. On a normal planet, I couldn’t have done it, but here on this small planetoid gravity was only a fifth of what I was used to. The robot weighed maybe fifty kilos, instead of two hundred and fifty.

  The bot went flying. He spun, flashing a reflection of sunlight down to dazzle us, before crashing down into one of the nearby pits. Tumbling, whirring, sliding—it was gone from sight in a single moment.

  Panting, Jort and I stood on the edge of the abyss looking down.

  “I don’t see it,” Jort said. “Kersen will be pissed when he finds out.”

  “I’m pissed right now,” I said, and turned back to the sled. We plugged in the power pack I’d taken from the second model-D into the sled. It lifted off the ground again.

  Using muscle power instead of the bots, we dragged the sliding, scudding sled over the ridge and back to the ship.

  Sosa met us at the bottom of the ramp. “Where are the bots?”

  “Back there. They ran out of power.”

  Jort glanced at me, but he didn’t say anything.

  Sosa looked oddly panicked. “That’s not supposed to happen. Go back and get them.”

  I glanced up at the dawning sky. “Forget it. We’re leaving this rock.”

  Sosa watched us drag the sled up the ramp. After a few moments, she rushed past us into the ship.

  As we were stowing the cargo for lift off, she raced back down. She was carrying two fresh power packs.

  “I’ll get them going again,” she said.

  I reached out a hand and stopped her, touching her shoulder. “Don’t do it. I… I haven’t been entirely honest about this place. It’s not safe here now that the sun is coming up.”

  Sosa shook her head. “I have to. My… my rider won’t let me leave without them.”

  She pulled away and trotted out into the snow.

  “But they’re just a couple of model-Ds!” I called after her. “We’ll tell Kersen to add them to my tab on the next run.”

  Sosa didn’t answer. She was gone.

  “Frigging hell,” I mumbled. “Stay here, get the ship ready to lift off, and batten down this load.”

  Jort nodded, and he watched me run after Sosa shaking his head. I knew he figured we should just wait to see if she made it back—but I couldn’t. I only had a crew of three, after all, and I didn’t want lose a third of my people today.

  Reaching the crater, I found one of the model-Ds standing up again. Sosa must have told it to find its brother, because it was marching toward the abyss.

  “Hold it!” I called out. “That’s a big bottomless pit, you idiot!”

  Sosa spoke to the robot, and it halted. It gazed down into the pit uncomprehendingly. I realized that Sosa could get it to do things that I couldn’t.

  She ran to me. There were tears in her eyes. “The other one is lost?”

  “Yeah… I’m afraid so.”

  She shivered then, rippling pain running through her features. It was awful to watch. One eye spilled tears, the other rolled up into her skull, showing only the white.

  I put my hands gently on her shoulders, trying to comfort her. I knew she was going throu
gh exquisite pain.

  “Hold on, hold on,” I whispered. “It will stop in a minute… probably.”

  Turning away from the pit at last, the second model-D focused on me and began marching in my direction. Was it coming at me for round two in our wrestling match? If so, I planned to put it at the bottom of that trench with its brother.

  It came closer. Sosa was still in the grip of agonizing punishment from her alien rider. I let go of her and stepped back. My shredder came up, the stubby muzzle glowing bright as I switched it on.

  My finger almost squeezed the trigger. It was a close thing. But the moment I let go of Sosa, the robot halted dead in its tracks.

  “So…” I said. “You’re protecting the girl? Kersen is a special kind of guy—putting one servant on my ship to torture her and another to protect her.”

  The model-D halted in place, having nothing else to do according to its programming.

  Sosa slid to the ground. She was barely conscious. The punishment had been severe.

  “Pick her up,” I ordered the model-D. “Bring her back to the ship—careful, now!”

  I kicked the machine in the ass as it walked by. It stumbled, but caught itself then lifted Sosa in its arms.

  Walking after them, I slung my shredder and took one final glance around the crater, which had brightened further. With my night vision at its best by this time, I could see pretty easily in the bluish gloom.

  There. Across the crater, beyond the crevasse and the tunnel in the center—I saw something move. It wasn’t the android I’d thrown in the pit, either.

  It was a long, dark shape. Low to the ground, it sort of humped along, like a giant caterpillar.

  Unslinging my shredder, I turned toward my ship and began to run.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Scrambling, I reached the ship before the model-D did. I thought about plucking Sosa from its grippers and running with her—but I already knew the thing was programmed to kill me if I tried. I yelled for it to hurry the hell up.