Void All The Way Down: The Sliding Void Omnibus

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘I wish I knew,’ said Lana. ‘How are you doing laying down our satellite net up there?’

  ‘Nearly finished,’ said Polter. ‘But far too many of the seeded satellites are malfunctioning. It’s as though the devil himself is playing with the relays. You would think we’re trying to network this cursed system’s ebbing star.’

  ‘Do your best,’ said Lana. ‘It’s not just one of the locals we’re trying to track now. Calder is AWOL. Keep the ship in geostationary above our area of the continent. I want every sensor we’ve got monitoring as much of the rain forest as it can. Scan for smoke signals, rocks spelling SOS by river-banks, night fires . . . anything that looks like human life down here.’

  ‘As you command. And I shall pray for his deliverance,’ said Polter.

  ‘You do that.’ At this point, nothing can hurt. Lana closed the line. She turned to the professor. ‘What aren’t you telling us?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about?’ said the professor.

  ‘I’ll give you a clue,’ interjected Zeno. Lana knew that look. The millennia-old android was about to give the academic a run for her money in the long-lived wisdom stakes. ‘This world . . . this operation . . . it doesn’t feel right. Like that truck dead out in the jungle with an erased A.I. It committed suicide. Do you know how hard it is to get a machine to go against its programming like that? To scare it?’

  Sebba pointed at the mountains behind them and indicated the staff and the base. ‘Mountains. Miners. Digging. I don’t know what else you’re expecting here? Surely you’re not frightened by the fire-side superstitions that colonists tell each other about avoiding settling on last-stage systems? The sun might be on its last legs, but Abracadabra’s ecosystem will survive in this state for another two million years at least. It will outlast us all . . . even you, android.’

  ‘That’s what I’m worried about,’ said Zeno, scratching his wiry metal Afro.

  ‘You have one advantage the truck’s systems do not . . . you are supposedly sentient. Start thinking with your brain rather than your emotions. We are the most advanced life-forms on this world – we are surrounded by a laser fence designed to fry anything bigger than a virus. There is the best part of an armoured regiment’s worth of autonomous weaponry rumbling around the camp. Following your supply drop, we now have enough ammunition and fuel to engage a small army.’

  ‘Our mutual paymaster for this mission has a somewhat, shall we say, dubious reputation as a rather shifty fellow,’ said Skrat. ‘One we’ve been stung by before. Hence our caution, professor.’

  ‘I won’t argue with you on that point,’ said Sebba. ‘If Mister Durk isn’t inside the camp, he must have wandered out when the gates opened for one of the mining robots. Is it possible he wanted to impress one of us by rescuing Janet Lento when he heard about the missing woman’s predicament?’

  Lana groaned. Calder had said something obliquely like that back on the ship. Still operating on whatever cockamamie medieval honour code he’d been raised with. Thinking like a medieval warrior knight rather than crew. The queen of the ship setting a series of impossible challenges for a potential suitor like Calder to prove his worth. But surely even Durk wouldn’t be so stupid as to barrel into a dense alien forest where everything that moves wanted to kill, maim and consume him, just to rescue a damsel in distress?

  ‘So, the young man has gone. Did he take his rifle and communicator with him?’ asked Sebba.

  Skrat nodded. ‘The dear chap certainly didn’t leave them behind in the shuttle.’

  ‘There we are,’ said Sebba, haughtily. ‘You can take the man out of the collapsed barbarian society, but you can’t wholly take the barbarian out of the man. Not so much missing, as off on a quest!’

  ‘This ain’t some cheap sim show,’ said Zeno. ‘The dragons outside the fence are real, there are no goblins and Calder only has one life.’

  ‘I find his youthful indiscretion rather charming,’ said the professor. ‘Don’t you remember when you were fresh, android?’

  ‘Me, lady? My early days were just ones and zeroes. Sentience was an accident, not the plan. My kind doesn’t get to believe in God. My creator was just a disappointed corporation with a rogue asset they had to write off their balance sheet.’

  And I, sadly, don’t even remember that much. Lana gazed in fury at the academic, chilled beyond even the cloying warmth of this hothouse world. Their missing crewman merely extra novelty for the professor’s jaded pleasures. ‘We’re going to keep on searching . . . for Calder and your missing driver.’

  ‘Of course you will. And the rest of us will get back to work.’ Sebba gazed pointedly at the miners. ‘So that we have something worth shipping out of here to justify the mine’s set-up costs.’

  Lana watched the wintry woman march off towards the series of low concrete buildings that formed the mission complex, the miners reluctantly following behind.

  The mine boss tarried behind for a second. ‘We’ll do what we can to help,’ said Leong. ‘For both our people.’ Then he departed for the base too.

  ‘It’s never easy,’ said Lana, as much to herself as her android and first mate. ‘Working for Dollar-sign Dillard. How could I ever have forgotten?’

  ‘If it were easy, it wouldn’t be us,’ said Zeno.

  ‘We’ll take a shuttle up, all of us together, and fly in shifts,’ said Lana. ‘A proper search pattern, quarter and quarter again. You can’t beat eyes on the ground and a live hand on the stick. We’ll let the ship’s scopes and the search algorithms handle the low probability areas of the sweep while we go straight for the money . . . everywhere between the camp’s gate and the stranded truck.’

  Skrat looked at the jungle beyond the defence perimeter. He didn’t need the ship suit’s fibres set to deep freeze. For a skirl like him, this was as good as home. ‘Do you really think our man’s out there?’

  ‘Got to be somewhere,’ said Zeno. ‘And he sure ain’t here.’

  ‘Damnable fool then if he is,’ said Skrat.

  ‘We knew that much,’ sighed Lana, ‘when we took him on.’ She stepped aside as a robot drilling unit rumbled past, clouds of dust spilling from its tank-like tracks. ‘I see the miners and I see the mining gear. So why doesn’t this feel like a mine? I don’t trust that woman. When we get a clear moment, we’re going to have good snoop around here.’

  ‘When are you hoping to do that?’ said Zeno.

  ‘As soon as.’ We’re going to find Calder. We have to. Lana hadn’t lost a crewman yet, and she certainly wasn’t planning to start with Calder Durk. It was a matter of professional pride, she told herself. No more than that.

  ***

  Calder struggled with his rifle’s strap, fumbling to drag the weapon closer even as the nearest spider leapt at him, its jaw parts open, mouth hissing and whistling victoriously. He wasn’t even close to getting the weapon aimed when the spider flipped over in the air, something wet, green and muscled barrelling into it mid-air. All flailing legs and ripping flesh. None of it mine! He desperately rolled over and knelt up to see what was happening. A pack of green six-legged panther-sized creatures had entered the clearing, the closest of them feeding on the blood-stained spider corpses his rifle had left on the jungle floor. The interlopers carried some kind of symbiotic biped riding the six-legged beasts like mounted knights, clutching curled horns on their mount’s head. The riders bounded off their scaled steeds and streamed past Calder, ignoring him. The symbiotes were naked, smooth-skinned and no higher than his knee. One scampered past and leapt up into the tree, easily climbing it with sucker-tipped fingers. Another came sprinting past only to halt by Calder. It sported a long serrated beak resembling the sharp visor of a knight’s helm; but when it opened the beak, gawping at him, Calder saw a wide perpetually grinning mouth below, interlocking white teeth as sharp as needles. It almost shook its head in disbelief, wide oval eyes blinking in surprise, before climbing up the tree after its comrade. That’s the child I thought
I saw in the undergrowth! It must have been scouting for food. Probably thought it was a festival day when it came across the feast I’d laid out under the trees. A splintering noise sounded from above. Calder could just see the riders cutting through branches with their beaks, using them like organic chainsaws and then it was raining spiders . . . these ones involuntarily dislodged rather than ambushing their prey. The knights are quite literally shaking the trees for their dinner. The green scaled predators below hurled themselves onto each spider as it landed. Transformed from hunters to hunted, the arachnids seemed to know how combat against these ferocious six-legged carnivores usually ended for them . . . the spiders didn’t even try to put up a fight, just scurried back into the jungle, pursued by the long, loping predators. Calder found Janet Lento on the other side of the clearing, backed up against a series of giant orange ferns. The newly arrived predators appeared to be ignoring Calder and the lost driver for the best part. Too strange to be considered part of the food chain? Or were the predators intelligent enough to appreciate that any animal that could lay down a carpet of free food with a rail-gun was worth preserving for a while? I hope so. Calder watched surviving spiders in the high branches exit from his tree exactly as they had arrived, swinging on web ropes to the neighbouring trees – like pirates fleeing a burning galleon. There was a rustling from all around him as the large arachnids abandoned this corner of the rain forest. Calder stood up, his rifle in his hands. He tentatively eased himself between the spiders’ remains and the feasting predators, moving towards Lento. You just keep on eating. As long as I’m not on the menu. The predators were all muscle, scaled green hides rippling as they nudged and snuffled at the spider corpses’ entrails. Four long legs for balance at the front of a body that might have been an alligator interbred with a hunting hound, two powerful muscled limbs bent at the back. Legs that looked like powerful enough to vault across a canyon ravine. Curled horns on their heads whipped from side to side as they tore into the dead spiders. A wave of riders flowed down the tree trunk. The knights assembled around the corpses, sitting down as though this was a picnic laid on for their benefit, branch-breaking beaks snapping open, little green hands gathering up pieces of arachnid meat and stuffing it into their rictus-grin mouths. These riders are obviously welcome guests at the feast. The six-legged predators pushed torn bodies towards their symbiotic partners, rolling arachnid corpses with snout and forelegs, some of the spider bodies’ hairy legs still quivering and sending a wave of primeval fear down Calder’s spine. But he didn’t have to fear the spiders around here anymore. Only what has driven them away. Calder reached Lento and raised his finger to his mouth, when he remembered that she hadn’t exactly been loquacious before. He took her hand in his and turned, only to find himself staring directly at one of the predator’s eyes, its head lowered in a menacing manner, a cluster of nostrils snorting as it tried to identify this unlikely pair. Other predators emerged from the undergrowth, returning from their spirited jungle pursuit of the spiders. They advanced slowly on Calder and the woman, pushing them back towards the knights’ strange picnic. For a terrible moment Calder thought that the two of them were about to be offered as food to the riders in the same manner as the spider corpses, but then one of the predators advanced, rolling a dead spider across the ground. It halted in front of the two humans.

  ‘Are you inviting us to the party?’ asked Calder.

  The circle of riders shuffled to either side, leaving a space the right size for Calder and Lento to join their ranks. It was as bizarre an offer as he was likely to receive today. I’d sooner humour the pack than waste the dwindling reserve of pellets in my rifle’s drum. Janet Lento sat down, as if breaking bread with these strange natives was an everyday occurrence. She reached into the spider’s body, barely recognizable after being shredded by Calder’s rail-gun, scooping out the pink meat as though this was a crab delicacy, stuffing it into her face until her cheeks were puffed out, strange juices running down her throat. Calder tried to stop himself from retching. It as if the jungle has claimed her soul. Regressing her to some more basic, primeval state. Maybe this is how humanity would end up if it stayed on a world long enough for a sun to reach its nadir and start to die? Beside Calder, one of the knights nudged him with its sucker-tipped hand, indicating the spider’s corpse. A tentative bird-like noise – somewhere between tweeting and whistling – escaped its mouth.

  ‘I understand,’ said Calder. ‘I helped you kill it. Now I have to eat it.’ He scooped out a large chunk of entrails from the spider – a cake of flesh that would have kept a peasant family in sausages for a week. He was queasier than he should be. Whale meat was a delicacy on Hesperus . . . and the massive creatures that hunted under the sea ice were called whales only because his distant descendants had been offworld Nordic settlers. I’ve gotten too used to ship rations. Chief Paopao’s expertly rolled sushi. A wide variety of frozen ration-packs from a hundred worlds. Damned if I’m going to eat raw arachnid. He stood up and recovered a couple of fallen branches sawed by the knights. He drove a long thin branch through the spider meat like a stake; the thick log he tucked under his arm. He walked to the other side of the clearing, pinning the meat with the wood into the ground. Then he took seven steps back and heaved the sawn-off log at the cluster of striped plants, the wood tumbling through the air before smacking into one of the huge bulbs and falling across its bed of vines. A furious wave of steam jetted out from the spines, trying to cook the creature foolish enough to blunder into the murderous vegetable plot. Steam enveloped the spider guts, rocking the meat on his makeshift stake. He gave it a couple of seconds after the jet finished, ensuring the plants had exhausted their reservoir of solar-heated rainwater. Then he retrieved his share of the slaughter and happily went back to re-join the bizarre picnic.

  Calder waved the cooked hunk of meat at the riders. ‘I prefer spit-roasted, but steamed is as good as it’s going to get in this place, I reckon.’ He tore off a strip and offered it to Lento, but she stared at him with the same wide-eyed expression as always, as though the exiled nobleman was the true oddity in this gathering. He tried the nearest rider, which sniffed at the boiled meat, little nostril strips along the top of its beak opening and closing. It nibbled at the strip, made an almost human sound of disgust, tossed the cooked meat over its shoulder and reached into the burst spider to get a fresh handful of the good red-raw flesh.

  ‘I’m among the heathen, here,’ said Calder. He bit into the hot meat. Slightly crunchy, as though the flesh was mixed with flecks of grit, not much flavour – and what there was almost tasted curiously as if it had been marinated in vinegar. I’ve eaten worse. Hell, when Calder had been retreating across the frozen sea on his sole remaining ice schooner, pursued by half the enemy’s navy, he and his desperate crew had boiled shoe leather and mixed it with moss, so close to starvation had they fallen. Calder lifted up the steamed entrails. ‘Better than my boots, I have to give you that.’

  Calder ate his fill. He could tell the impromptu picnic was drawing to a close when the six-legged predators finished feasting. Some of them began play-chasing each other around the clearing, while one of the pack’s larger members with the grandest set of horns reared up in front of the tree where Calder had found shelter, scratching bark off with its sharp points. Marking its territory, or showing the tree is clear of spiders and not worth revisiting for a while? Calder couldn’t make his mind up about these creatures. No clothes. No tools. No real attempt at speech or communication, even among each other – unless they chatted by covertly exchanging odours or whistles outside his pitch of hearing. But they clearly acted towards the two humans with a measure of basic intelligence. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. You could live and die by that on Hesperus. In fact, Calder nearly had, before he’d had his eyes opened to the rest of the universe’s existence. The reports on this world said it was empty of sentient life. Of course, the reports had been self-serving mineral surveys for the large part. Calder had done enough cop show sims in
his brief tenure as crew to understand the motives of an offworld mining operation like this. As soon as local sentience was declared and its news spread, you risked having your supply runs boycotted by environmentalists and do-gooders. Starships dropping automated camera drones to record every felled tree and every cute herbivore running into your laser fence. The label ‘blood’ tagged in front of all resources you attempted to extract and sell. Their meal over, the knights mounted their steeds, doll-sized digits clutching a curled horn apiece. Lento stood up, still holding a broken spider leg with a chunk of gore on the far end of the limb, as if this was the last food she expected to eat for quite a while. Calder joined her. The answer to what would happen next came when one of the predators and its rider stalked up behind Calder, nosing him forward to join the chain of departing riders. Janet Lento seemed as unconcerned by her elevation to pack member as by everything else. Perhaps a pair of strange over-sized visitors that could lay out a carpet of spider corpses – and knew the secret of fire . . . or at least, steam – were too valuable to be left here as bait for one of those giant winged lizards whose shadows floated over, throwing the jungle floor into darkness. They moved through the rainforest for hours, an unhurried pace, nothing to do but trudge and listen to the unfamiliar sounds hooting, honking, chirping and roaring from the undergrowth. It was ironic. This was meant to be a world in its twilight age . . . a dying sun throbbing above them. But the jungle had never seemed so alive, literally shaking and shrieking with life. Nothing like the silent snow-bound cathedrals of the forests Calder had grown up with. Trees so hard the human settlers lacked tools sharp enough to fell them. Whether it was the knights’ knowledge of the jungle, or the rest of the eco-system’s knowledge of how dangerous this pack was, the hike proved uneventful. Nothing else appeared to try to attack them – a situation which Calder suspected wouldn’t have been the case if he and Lento had been blundering through the undergrowth on their own. Lento was little company, and the pack moved silently, halting occasionally for the six-legged predators to scratch at trees and sniff the ferns . . . for what, Calder was hard pushed to say.