Void All The Way Down: The Sliding Void Omnibus

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘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 ship implants, but Calder’s only just signed up as crew. He never had one put in! How can he have 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 can be reckless, but surely even he isn’t that stupid?

  ‘My tech’s checking the sentry guns’ logs, to see if something flew over the fence that wasn’t tagged and tracked as a threat. I don’t see how that could be, though. Our sentry tanks 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 matching 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 systems shifted from their 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. Steel-arm spat across the deck, reaching down to the side of his command chair and pulled out a hypo of oozing green pick-me-up to accelerate his body’s natural recovery processes. Ahhh, that’s better. Outside the ship, the bloody red disc of Abracadabra’s sun winked at them 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 cheap navigators – the crab-like kaggen hovering malevolently in his chair and swearing at his controls, blaming his twisting hologram warp translation controls for not jumping in closer to the destination planet. If we weren’t seventy parsecs from the nearest planet I could pick up a fresh navigator, I’d toss the incompetent dog out of our airlock. Their 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 chased turned out to be far better armed than their informant’s tip-off indicated. Keltat died in that action, as had the informant when Bowen returned to the rat-shizzle’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 transitioned into relatively trouble-free pillaging since his deal with that scumbag Pitor Skeeg. Hyperfast fed him details of where the corporation’s competitors were travelling, and the Doubtful Quasar waited in ambush 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 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 shiny medal pinned on his carapace in recognition of his virtuoso scouting skills? ‘Where’s the Gravity Rose anchored?’

  ‘She’s in orbit around that crimson-coloured world. Odd-looking astrometry on the real estate, too. Appears 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 isn’t in the miracle business,’ said Bowen. And the alliance’s corporate stooges paid a lot better than God, too. Bonus one – taking Lana’s ship. Bonus two – paid in full by Skeeg by supplying them with the co-ordinates of DSD’s secret deep space payday. “X” marks the spot, just like the pirates of yore. Bonus three – getting even with Lana. He gave his thin moustache a theatrical twirl. Who would have thought it? All that money remodelling his battle-scarred face on Errol Flynn, and still the Gravity Rose’s skipper had chosen to reject his advances. You’d think that operating as a pirate isn’t as respectable as being a smuggler? And me so handsome and dashing and all. Bowen would have to make sure Lana lived just long enough to regret such a poor 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 much 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 foolish ally had failed – he was going to get the ship and the girl. You can never have too many prize ships, or too many prize girls, for that matter.

  ‘Power up our alliance stealth technology,’ ordered Bowen. ‘Full field on electronic counter measures. I don’t want our little bird flying the nest before we make Abracadabra orbit.’

  Down on the fighter deck, Bowen’s ragtag band of pilots checked their fighters 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 the gunnery checks; rail cannons and missile pods twisting in hull mounts as she booted them up to readiness. Cho had a dangerous glint in her eye that worried Bowen. I will have to keep a close eye on my little cashiered marine after we gain 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, before the cyborg could have his fun. And who the hell would pay a good price for the Gravity Rose if the ship was offered at market with too many rail-gun 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. There aren’t any trees 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 ominous hum from the laser fence or roar of incoming shuttles or occasional burst of fire from the sentry tanks. The outpost’s sounds were replaced by alien hoots and whistles, cries that set his spine crawling. Dense, thick jungle everywhere he looked. How the hell did I get here? The last thing he remembered was waiting for diagnostics 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 lay dropped on the jungle floor a foot from where he had been stretched out. Gods, small blessings, then. He bent down to scoop up the weapon, receiving a short burst of reassurance from its heft. Calder glimpsed the strange crackling sky through the gaps in the canopy above; watery red sunlight growing fainter, though; the jungle turning a rusty brown as night began to fall. Still on Abracadabra, then. It smelled foul out here. Like dank laundry left undisturbed for a year until a blanket of mould covered it. He stood soaked in his own sweat, perspiration growing cold against his skin as his smart suit sensed him up and moving, kicking its refrigeration level up a notch. Calder’s mind raced. An engine explosion that sent me 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 accident would have killed me, anyway? Well, if something had been dragging him through the jungle towards whatever mountain cave passed for its 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, maybe I can get a bead on the base? Calder scouted for footholds in its trunk when a distant roar sounded from a playmate deeper in the
jungle. Not quite as deep as he’d like, given the ferocity of the sound. Coming back for dinner? All around Calder a panicked series of calls echoed in answer, smaller denizens of the wild warning their kind while 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.

  RED SUN BLEEDING

  Book 3 in the Sliding Void series.

  First published in 2013 by Green Nebula Press

  Copyright © 2013 by Stephen Hunt

  Typeset and designed by Green Nebula Press

  The right of Stephen Hunt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  Also by Stephen Hunt

  The Far-called series

  (Gollancz)

  In Dark Service

  The Jackelian series

  (HarperCollins Voyager in the UK/Macmillan Tor in the USA)

  The Court of the Air

  The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

  Rise of the Iron Moon

  Secrets of the Fire Sea

  Jack Cloudie

  From the Deep of the Dark

  The Sliding Void series

  Sliding Void

  Transference Station

  Red Sun Bleeding

  The Agatha Witchley Mysteries: as Stephen A. Hunt

  In the Company of Ghosts

  The Plato Club

  Secrets of the Moon (coming soon)

  Other works

  Six Against the Stars

  For the Crown and the Dragon

  The Fortress in the Frost

  For links to these books, visit http://www.StephenHunt.net

  PRAISE FOR STEPHEN HUNT’S FICTION

  ‘Hunt's imagination is probably visible from space. He scatters concepts that other writers would mine for a trilogy like chocolate-bar wrappers.’

  - TOM HOLT

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  -THE INDENDENT

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  - SF REVU

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 – Two legs bad. Six legs good.

  Chapter 2 – The mother-lode.

  Chapter 3 – All that must be left behind.

  Chapter 4 – The settlers’ vessel.

  Chapter 5 – Walk the Heezy’s guts.

  Chapter 6 – Of epilogues.

  There once was a man up on high

  Who stepped off a cliff,

  And all the way down he complained

  That gravity sure is a bitch!

  - Ancient spacer’s shanty (anon).

  CHAPTER ONE

  Two legs bad. Six legs good.

  Calder Durk pulled the rifle stock close to his shoulder. Part of him – the barbarian part, probably – devoutly wished he carried one of the familiar broadswords he had trained on since a babe to face the beast about to leap out of the thick undergrowth. The more sensible part was grateful he carried a modern weapon with a six-hundred pellet drum, each shiny small metallic dart capable of being accelerated to bone-shattering velocities by the gun’s magnetic field. He listened to the crashing sound through the vines, growing closer every second. Snow-bears he knew how to fight. Mega-wolves he had hunted across glaciers, slain, stuffed and hung over the fireplace in his creaky old castle. But whatever was coming towards him now was going to be well out of his field of experience. That was the trouble with being reluctantly exiled from an icy-cold medieval homeworld, taken to the stars, signing up with a strange starship crew, then finding himself mysteriously and unceremoniously dumped into an alien jungle. None of this was exactly familiar. Except . . . the startled-looking woman who came hurtling out of the glistening wet scrub. She wore a green suit that Calder recognized. The same uniform as the other miners from this world’s lonely human outpost. Is she the missing driver? The one the camp had already spent weeks vainly searching the jungle for?

  ‘It’s alright,’ said Calder, lowering his rifle to show he intended no harm. ‘I’m from a ship chartered to bring supplies to the mining camp. Are you Janet Lento? My crew’s been helping your boss search the jungle for you.’

  The woman stopped, but said nothing. What’s the matter with her? Calder might as well have been some statue she’d unexpectedly stumbled across in the jungle. He noticed the name tag stitched across her breast pocket, “Lento”. This is the missing driver, then. Still no reaction. The look of shock on the driver’s face appeared to be a more or less permanent fixture – nothing to do with her running into another human out in the middle of nowhere. Wide green eyes, glassy and wild. Taller than Calder, her frame starvation-thin from surviving weeks in the wild on nothing but berries and bugs, long dark hair matted with dirt and leaves. She didn’t seem to be sweating, even with the furnace heat from the mad red sun squatting high above the forest canopy. At least her suit’s cooling systems are intact and powered. If they’d failed, heat stroke would have claimed the lost miner within the hour.

  ‘I’m Calder Durk. My ship’s the Gravity Rose. I was working out on your camp’s landing field, unloading supplies. I lost consciousness, and when I woke up, I discovered myself here. Damned if I know what happened or how I travelled beyond the base’s defence perimeter. Did something similar happen to you? My radio’s vanished, but I’ve still got my rifle.’

  Janet unclipped a communicator from her belt and tentatively offered it to Calder, her mouth open as though she was trying to speak but couldn’t. He took it from her and tried the device, but only static came back at him. ‘It’s broken? I was warned communications on Abracadabra would be spotty. Something to do
with the solar activity from that pig-ugly sun in the sky?’

  He was about to pass the useless device back to her when he heard a crunching sound behind him. Calder wheeled around. A long whippet-thin creature emerged from between two of the trees, maybe a foot high, a bony nose like an elephant’s trunk reaching out to pull leaves off the bushes and shove them into twin mouths either side of the trunk. It made contented snorts as it munched its way through the jungle, wobbling almost comically while grazing. Calder lowered his rifle. It headed towards a large series of globular plants at the far side of the clearing, each sphere striped yellow and red like giant sweets and resting on a bed of vines and spiny cushions. As the creature followed the leaves towards the spheres they started to quiver. A sudden lance of heated steam burst out of the bed of spines. The leaf eater squealed in an offended manner, leapt out of the way and bolted back the way it had came. Calder made a mental note to give any strange-looking plants a wide berth. Of course, being an alien jungle, there weren’t any plants here that were familiar to Calder.