by Stephen Hunt
Maybe the only good move. ‘As long as it’s been, Pitor still knows how to get to me.’
Lana felt a chill as she emerged from the truck to climb down towards the waiting helicopter, blades beginning to rotate back into life, and it wasn’t just her suit’s thermostat reacting to the wall of heat outside. She’d brought the crew here, against all her best instincts. They were counting on her to keep Fiveworlds Shipping flying, and she’d made her usual level of good decision-making. Trusting Dollar-sign Dillard was never a smart move. If this had been any kind of cakewalk, the devious broker would’ve chartered his own vessel to fly in, rather than offering Lana a slice of the action.
Zeno swung out of the doorway, mounting the side of the truck. ‘You remember after you inherited the Gravity Rose and I agreed to crew for you, what I told you when we first walked onto the bridge?’
‘Act like the skipper, act as though you know what you’re doing,’ said Lana, ignoring the burning heat, ‘and everyone will work to make your commands come good.’
‘Damn straight. This is no time to start second-guessing your decisions. There’s a universe full of might-have-been out there; the Rose’s holds can only store a small percentage of it.’
Lana sighed as she made her way to the waiting helicopter. Zeno was right. But then, the android had a couple of millennia of right trailing behind him. Maybe if I live as long, I’d be as wise – before the event as well as after. ‘Okay, here’s how it is. We’ll unload, hunker down behind the laser fence, wait for that old crone to dig out her first load, and then we’re sliding void away from this damn rock just as fast as Polter can plot a jump.’
‘Now that sounds like a plan.’
Lana stared back at the tanker, imagining the terror she would be feeling if she was posted missing, lying in the jungle, wounded and lost. What the hell is so bad that it could scare a low-level truck A.I into erasing itself? Yeah, another full shitty day of business as usual.
She followed Zeno towards the helicopter, Leong dismounting from the cockpit; his face perplexed and even more worried than before. He was talking quickly into the helmet’s communicator, his hands gesturing urgently but superfluously at the person at the other end.
‘Mining chief?’ said Lana.
‘Another problem,’ said Leong. ‘The crewman you left behind at the camp to help supervise the shuttle landing…’
‘Calder Durk,’ said Lana, allowing a dagger of fear from the look on Leong’s face to stab at her.
‘He’s disappeared from inside the base.’
‘Disappeared? What the hell are you talking about?’ Zeno pulled out his phone, but the communicator just returned a long fizz of static. Polter’s satellite network obviously wasn’t in place yet.
‘I mean, he’s totally disappeared,’ said Leong. ‘Your skirl friend, he sent Mister Durk to check on a jammed cargo door on one of your shuttles. After a couple of minutes with no word of a fix, the lizard followed him over, but your man had vanished into thin air. We’ve searched every inch of the landing field and the base, but there’s no sign of him. None of the gates have been opened, plus, all your shuttles are still on the field. What’s the frequency of his transponder?’
‘He doesn’t have a transponder yet,’ said Lana, reeling in shock at the news and trying to fight down a rising sense of panic. ‘We use our ship implants, but Calder’s only just signed up as crew. He never had one put in! How the fuck can he have just vanished?’ Had Calder found some way to slip out of the base in search of the missing driver, despite all protestations to the contrary? He could be reckless, but surely even he wasn’t that stupid?
‘My tech’s checking the sentry guns’ logs, to see if something flew in and out over the fence that wasn’t tagged and tracked as a threat. I don’t see how that could be, though. Our sentries are trigger-happy at the best of times, they’d light up a flying squirrel if one tried to jump the perimeter.’
Lana was damned if she could see how that could be, either. Just like the mystery of a dead truck and its missing driver. She looked at Zeno, but for once the android’s normally expressive face was a mask that matched his artificial origins. He shook his head gently and patted the rifle slung across his shoulder.
‘Fly me back to the base. Now!’
***
Lights flickered back on across the ship’s bridge as the vessel’s systems shifted from its hyperspace setting and returned to normal space operating mode. The captain of the Doubtful Quasar, who went by the nickname of Steel-arm Bowen, looked down at his cyborg arm – fidgeting with a mechanical life of its own as his all-too human flesh adjusted to a new set of physics – and spat on the deck as he reached down to the side of the command chair and pulled out a hypo of oozing green pick-me-up to accelerate his body’s natural recovery processes. Outside the ship, the bloody red disc of Abracadabra’s sun winked at him through transparent armour, the world they were meant to be arriving at a small black disk silhouetted against the star’s light.
Bowen checked the distance of the world – at least five day’s travel on a sub-light drive burn. That was what you got from shipping with a cheap navigator – the crab-like kaggen hovering malevolently in his chair and swearing at his controls, as if blaming his twisting hologram controls for not jumping in closer to the destination planet. This kag was a half-mad heretic, thrown out of the church for various unpalatable beliefs. Bowen’s last kaggen had been much more effective at his job, but then poor old Keltat had died when a freighter the Doubtful Quasar had gone after turned out to be far better armed than their informant’s tip-off indicated. Keltat had died in that action, as had the informant when Bowen returned to the rat-shit’s system. Still, nobody said the life of a pirate was an easy one. Although it had to be said, Bowen’s career choice had metamorphosised into relatively trouble-free pillaging since his deal with that scumbag Pitor Skeeg. Hyperfast feeding him details of where the corporation’s competitors were travelling, and the Doubtful Quasar waiting for a sure thing to fly into range of her guns. Damn, but how Bowen loved a sure thing.
‘Tell me we’ve at least kept our lock on the Gravity Rose?’ barked Bowen.
‘We have her,’ said the navigator, sounding irritated at being questioned. ‘I told you I had located their hyperspace ejection point. It was exactly where the tracking signal disappeared.’
Bowen grunted. The kag had got that much right at least, but what did he want, a fucking medal pinned on his carapace in recognition of his virtuoso scouting skills? ‘Where’s the Gravity Rose anchored?’
‘She’s in orbit around that world over there. Odd-looking astrometry on the real estate, too. Looks like a gas giant, but scans like a rock. Never heard of a transponder able to broadcast hidden from that far out before… finding the ship at this range, it’s a miracle.’
‘The alliance aren’t in the miracle business,’ said Bowen. And the alliance’s corporate cat’s-paws paid a lot better than God, too. Bonus one – taking Lana’s ship. Bonus two – paid in full by Skeeg after Bowen supplied him with the co-ordinates of DSD’s hidden deep space payday. “X” marks the spot, just like the pirates of yore. Bonus three – getting even with Lana and making the woman a pliant captive at the mercy of his whims. He gave his thin moustache a theatrical twirl. Who would have thought it? All that money to remodel his battle-scarred face on Errol Flynn’s, and still the Gravity Rose’s skipper had chosen to reject his advances. You would almost have thought that operating as a pirate wasn’t as respectable a line of work as being a smuggler? And him so handsome and dashing and all. Bowen would have to make sure Lana lived long enough to fully regret that decision. Yes, Pitor Skeeg had known what he was doing when he had selected the Doubtful Quasar for this venture. Steel-arm Bowen and that dog Skeeg shared a lot in common when it came to their private lives, as well as a flair for ruthlessness in their respective trades. Now Bowen was going to succeed where his fool of an ally had failed – he was going to get the ship and the girl. You could never h
ave too many prize ships, or too many prize girls, for that matter.
‘Power up that expensive hangar’s worth of alliance stealth technology,’ ordered Bowen. ‘Full field on the electronic counter measures. I wouldn’t want my little bird flying the nest before we arrive in Abracadabra orbit.’
Down on the fighter deck, Bowen’s ragtag band of pilots were checking their own ships and launch tubes, readiness reports blinking in from the squadron on his command display. Over on the weapons desk, Melinda ‘two-guns’ Cho, was conscious again and working her comprehensive way through her gunnery checks; rail cannons and missile pods visible twisting in mounts along the hull as she booted them up to readiness. Cho had a dangerous glint in her eye that worried Bowen. The pirate captain realised he would have to keep a close eye on his little cashiered marine after they gained orbit. Cho knew all about Bowen and Lana’s prior history, and the jealous minx might just be angling to make sure the Gravity Rose’s skipper became history herself, before the cyborg could have his fun. And who the hell was going to pay a good price for the Gravity Rose if the ship was offered with too many holes in her?
***
Calder groaned. His head ached, as did every muscle in his body. The exiled nobleman felt as though he had been electrocuted. He was lying on the ground, his body covered by a blanket of crimson leaves. What are they doing on the landing field? As he pulled himself up, he saw the answer all around him. He wasn’t on the landing field any longer. No sign of the base, the fence or the shuttles. No sound of the laser fence’s dangerous humming or the roar of the incoming shuttles and the occasional burst of fire from the sentry tanks. The outpost’s sounds had been replaced by alien hoots and whistles, cries that set his spine crawling. Just dense jungle everywhere he looked. How the hell did I get here? The last thing he remembered was waiting for a diagnostic from the malfunctioning cargo hatch… then a brief flash of pain before waking up with a mouth full of vegetation. Calder checked his belt – his ship’s communicator was gone. But his rail rifle had been dropped on the jungle floor a foot from where he had just been stretched out. He bent down to scoop up the weapon, feeling a brief flash of reassurance from its heft. Calder could just see the strange crackling sky through the gaps in the canopy above; bloody red sunlight growing fainter, though, the jungle turning a rusty brown as night began to fall. Still on Abracadabra, then. He was soaked in his own sweat, the perspiration growing cold against his skin as his smart suit sensed him up and moving, raising its refrigeration setting up a notch. Calder’s mind raced. Has there been some engine explosion that had sent him flying into the jungle? Maybe dragged out of sight of the base by one of the local creatures, wanting to preserve him for a meal later. He touched his body. No burns on the clothes, or bruises that he could feel. Surely such a catastrophic event would have killed him, anyway? Well, if something had been dragging him through the jungle towards some mountain cave that passed for a larder, then the foolish predator should have chewed up his rifle rather than eating his phone. He gazed up the length of the nearest massive tree. If I can climb that, then maybe I can get a bead on the base? Calder was scouting for footholds in its trunk when there was a roar from something deeper in the jungle. Not quite as deep as he’d like, given the ferocity of the sound. Coming back for dinner? From all around Calder a panicked series of calls echoed in answer, smaller denizens of the wild warning members of their species before they fled. Calder dialled up the assault rifle to its maximum power setting. In front of him, the dense bush began to shake as something came pushing through.
>>>
And the story continues…
… in the next in Stephen Hunt’s Sliding Void series, Book 3: Red Sun Bleeding. Due to be released in 2012. To receive an automatic notification by e-mail when this book is available for download, use the free sign-up form at http://www.StephenHunt.net/alerts.php
>>>
Other books for the Kindle by Stephen Hunt…
Six Against the Stars
DESCRIPTION
As the self-proclaimed biggest coward in the galaxy, Horatio has it easy on what passes for 40th century America. A much-favoured sycophant in the court of the King of Earth, Horatio lives in a genetically engineered paradise where there's a vat-grown slave waiting around every marble column with a bunch of grapes to drop into his oh-so perfectly designed mouth.
Unfortunately for Horatio, the artificial intelligence that rules the great mass of humanity spread across the stars has other plans for this feckless seducer. So, if you ever wonder how the galaxy's biggest coward finds himself actually trying to save it, you're not alone... but then, unfortunately, neither is our hero!
His misadventures are abetted by a psychotic Martian warrior, a robot who thinks it's related to Sherlock Holmes, a beautiful genetically enhanced assassin, a scientist with a computer for a brain, and a millennia-old clone who was alive when the last U.S. President was executed by a firing squad.
It's six against the galaxy. Six against the stars. They'll save the universe... but they might damage it first.
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Sliding Void (Book 1 of the Sliding Void science fiction series)
DESCRIPTION
Captain Lana Fiveworlds has a hell of a lot of problems.
She's sliding void in an ageing seven-hundred-year-old space ship, scrabbling around the edges of civilised space trying to find a cargo lucrative enough to pay her bills without proving so risky that it'll kill her. She's got an alien religious freak for a navigator, an untrustworthy android for a first mate, a disgraced lizard for a trade negotiator and a deserter from the fleet acting as her chief engineer.
And that was well before an ex-crewman turns up wanting Lana to rescue a barbarian prince from a long-failed colony world.
Unfortunately for Lana, the problems she doesn't know about are even more dangerous. In fact, they just might be enough to destroy Lana's rickety but much-loved vessel, the Gravity Rose, and jettison her and her crew into the void without a spacesuit.
But there's one thing you can never tell an independent space trader. That's the odds...
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In The Company of Ghosts
Book 1 of the In The Company of Ghosts series (The Agatha Witchley Mysteries)
Because sometimes, insanity and genius are indistinguishable...
Agatha Witchley used to be a spy in the Cold War, but now she's locked up in the UK's premier maximum-security mental institution. She believes that the ghosts of the celebrity dead visit her padded cell and whisper the world's secrets in her ears. Which is a big problem for the British government, because she's the only one who can help them when an American billionaire is murdered in London in one of the strangest killings yet.
The Home Secretary needs the case locked down and solved before the entrepreneur’s death becomes public knowledge and economic chaos ensures.
The woman he has in mind for the job might be paranoid, she might be lethal, she might half-insane and drawing a pen
sion, but it's amazing how you can forgive that in a genius when it's a genius's help you need.
Yes, the security forces need Agatha Witchley again. It's just the ghosts of Churchill, Elvis and Groucho Marx they could do without.
For Amazon.com
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