Void All The Way Down: The Sliding Void Omnibus

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘There we are,’ sighed Skrat. ‘Tediously predictable.’

  ‘Sweet mother of… was that a nuclear warhead?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mister Durk. The nasty device was detonated a long way from us and the blast came from the wrong direction for the mining base. That was Steel-arm’s “suggestion” that the camp shut down its perimeter guns and allow the Doubtful Quasar’s landing craft to land unopposed inside the base to accept their surrender.’ Skrat saw the look of horror on the human crewman’s face. ‘It’s actually rather a good thing. If Steel-arm didn’t wish to plunder the base and take the staff alive, his warhead wouldn’t have been detonated out in the wilderness for show. Ground zero would have been the camp itself!’

  So, we’re dealing with someone for whom detonating a random nuke as a shot across the bows is a good thing? That told Calder pretty much everything he needed to know about what kind of adversary they faced.

  ‘What next?’

  ‘We need to time our arrival at the camp carefully. Leave too early, and we’ll be flying straight into the pirate carrier’s fighter wing. Too late, and Zeno and the skipper will be locked inside Steel-arm’s brig in orbit, beyond our assistance. Let’s tarry an hour here, and then we’ll fly back low enough to rip leaves off the rain-forest canopy. We shall launch our rescue when Steel-arm’s ripping the base apart for supplies and plunder, when he thinks he’s won and his bounders have dropped their guard a smidgen.’

  ‘If we can rendezvous with the Gravity Rose, can we outrun a pirate carrier?’

  Skrat considered his answer carefully, nictitating membranes blinking across his eyes. ‘One must hope so, dear boy. The Doubtful Quasar is ancient ex-military surplus – antiquated Edge technology rather than alliance-built. Our engines are rated for boosting serious cargo and we’ll have this planet’s pea-souper of an atmosphere as well as the system’s irregular solar activity working in our favour. As long as we can clear the range of his fast attack planes . . . yes, let’s hope we can show Steel-arm a clean pair of heels.’ Skrat stood up and pushed his seat aside. ‘Lend me a hand with the camouflage netting. Then we shall use our satellites to eavesdrop on the ruffians’ comms chatter before we depart.’

  They marched down into the cargo hold, Skrat dropping the ramp and dragging a dark ceramic crate out of a floor space. Heat poured in from outside, like water filling a submarine. Not quite as intense as it would have been during the day. Calder took the opportunity to introduce the first mate to Lento and the robot. The driver seemed as incurious about their pilot as everything else she encountered, while Momoko bowed and offered to help carry the crate of camouflage netting outside. Skrat took a pair of belts holding machetes from a locker and tossed one to Calder. The prince belted it around his hip. It feels good to have a blade hanging down from my hip again. It felt like… home. Of course, back on Hesperus’s freezing plains, most warriors would have killed for an “enchanted” blade that could vibrate at a thousand kilocycles a second and cut through rainforest canopy – or more pertinently, blood and bone – like a heated scimitar through butter. Calder accepted the robot’s proposal to assist and kept his rifle ready as he walked carefully down the ramp. Nocturnal hooting, squeaking and whistling surrounded the shuttle. The racket sounded different from the nightly jungle song that had surrounded the hunting lodge. The nuclear explosion had unsettled the local wildlife . . . something different and dangerous for them to fear. Skrat’s camouflage netting glistened gossamer thin and pale white. As soon as they had dragged the cover across the shuttle, the netting’s surface began to shimmer as though developing a photograph of the rain-forest floor – a real-time photo at that, live images of insects crawling across the fabric.

  It stuck in Calder’s craw, hiding out here, when every sinew of his body ached to charge in swinging a sword at these pirate raiders. But a part of him realized it was the right thing to do to maximize their chances for success. Maybe if Calder had been able to think more like Skrat, the prince might have implemented a strategy that wouldn’t have lost his nation’s ice fleet in a futile invasion, leaving him exiled and on the run. But in that event, he would never have met Lana Fiveworlds. Or be stuck here, you fool.

  A sudden cracking noise. In front of Calder, Momoko tooted in alarm as the robot fell over – dropping the empty crate – one of its metal legs disappearing down a hole, the rest of its body left above ground, arms gesturing wildly. Calder flipped his rifle up, half expecting an arachnid to erupt out of the ground, furious it only had robot steel to feast on. Tentatively, Calder and Skrat inched over. But nothing emerged. Hauling the robot up was like pulling a tank out of a ditch.

  ‘I never should have left the lodge,’ said Momoko, dejectedly, as the two crewmen yanked at its body. ‘Is this my punishment for abandoning my post?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ grunted Calder as he hefted the machine’s weight. ‘You’re not programmed to believe in gods, are you?’

  Momoko put its arms to work, found some purchase, and managed to help extradite itself. ‘The company knows everything. Sees everything. I thought leaving the lodge is within the rules, but perhaps I am wrong?’

  ‘We write our own rules, old fruit,’ said Skrat. ‘You might say that’s something of an unofficial motto among our company.’

  There were only a few hours until sunrise, before large sectors of the robot’s memories automatically dumped. And there wouldn’t be a copy of Momoko’s corporate bible on hand for the robot to refresh what it needed to know.

  Skrat bent down to examine the lair. Calder kept his gun trained down into the hole. ‘Be careful,’ warned Calder. ‘Most the things I’ve run into out here so far have wanted to add me to the menu.’

  ‘There’s something below the soil,’ said Skrat. ‘And it isn’t a warren or a lair.’ Skrat pulled the machete out of his belt, touching a button on its hilt. A sudden buzzing filled the clearing as his blade blurred; vibrating so fast it almost became invisible. The first mate cut away bricks of compacted mud topped with alien grass. It quickly became clear what the robot had tumbled through. A shattered window? Momoko walked over, halting its imposing bulk above the hole. A light in its chest sprung into life, helping illuminate the makeshift excavation. A length of heavy metal plating, rusted and red, lay under the soil.

  ‘There’s a building under the ground?’ wondered Calder.

  ‘Not a building,’ said Skrat. ‘This is standard hex-hull, old alliance design, and it has seen extensive particle damage. She’s a starship, old bean. And we’ve landed on top of her. Large enough to cover the entire valley floor . . . must be a colony vessel. Rusting away long enough to be completely covered by mud slides and sediment and have the local flora grow over her roof. I do believe this vessel is the Never Come Down… she was a colony ship, posted missing; her crew had a hand in naming the world Abracadabra.’

  Calder glanced around the trees. Any signs of a settlement had long since been reclaimed by the rainforest. I know all about failed colonies, although my own is a heck of a lot colder than this hell-world’s.

  ‘Who would want to settle here?’

  ‘Oh, we skirls wouldn’t find it too bad,’ said Skrat. ‘Rather humid, though. Given the choice we prefer our worlds dry.’

  Skrat had a point. Up on the Gravity Rose, Calder could fry an egg on the fabric of the first mate’s ship suit, the temperature he usually set it at. ‘Could that figure I glimpsed outside the lodge have been human? A descendant of the ship’s colonists?’

  ‘One suspects not,’ said Skrat. ‘Had humanity endured here, the mining team’s orbital survey would have turned up signs of deforestation, cooking fires, torches lit at night to protect village palisades from predators and the like. If any of your species survived on Abracadabra, this vessel would have long since been cannibalized into axe-heads, saws and nails.’

  Spears and swords, too, unless the branch of humanity who had landed here had been much different from Calder’s people. He felt a superstitious shiver run
down his spine. ‘Let’s get back inside the shuttle and seal the ramp.’

  ‘Nothing to fret about. Another abandoned antique, defunct and useless,’ said Skrat. ‘The galaxy is full of them. We’re not in any danger here. Although I wouldn’t recommend staying behind to try and raise a family on Abracadabra. This is no world for a chap to leave his bones on.’

  ‘You’re a strange sort,’ said Calder. He stepped aside for the robot to clang up the ramp before following inside with Skrat. He was happy to seal out the alien rainforest; a hum of air conditioning as the cargo hold struggled to return to a reasonable temperature. ‘The chief told me you’re reckless – a gambler. But you’re willing to wait it out here, as cool as the ice sheets around Heldheim.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s because I’ve lost so very much,’ said Skrat. ‘I’m no different from you in that regard, old bean. We’re both exiles, in our own way. I may be willing to gamble, but only when the odds are on my side. There’s a universe of void between a risk and a calculated risk.’

  ‘The chief mentioned the skipper found you close to death in some kind of gladiator arena on the skirl homeworld.’

  ‘The chief should learn to keep his mouth shut,’ said Skrat. The lizard looked as if he wasn’t going to say anymore, before changing his mind. ‘I lost my position in my nest on Raznor Raz after the corporation I ran was absorbed by a rival in a hostile takeover. You might say I was disgraced. I was endeavouring to earn money to pay my creditors back. Fighting in the arena was the only way open to me. I was considered unlucky, and few skirls will do business with someone who is luckless. If I had won enough combats, society would have considered my bad providence purged.’

  ‘You were willing to fight to pay debtors back?’

  ‘The layers of Skirl society are multifarious,’ said Skrat. ‘When you lose your position, your family becomes the responsibility of the victors. My children, my wife . . . they belong to another skirl lordling now; they are bound to a competing nest. Even contacting my children would be considered a pollution of their chances of success – not to be permitted. When I earn enough money to recover my position, they will be returned to me.’

  ‘How much money do you need?’

  ‘A very large sum, dear boy,’ said Skrat, sadly, climbing back into the shuttle’s cockpit. ‘The higher you climb, the further the distance you have to fall. But in the universe anything is possible. With luck, skill and good judgement.’

  Calder grunted in sympathy as he settled to wait in the co-pilot seat, his feet nervously tapping at the deck. All of my immediate family were dead long before I fled into exile. All I ran away from were regrets, countless responsibilities and a fatally failed military campaign. Is that better or worse than poor old Skrat? Tormented by everything he had abandoned when he departed for the stars. ‘With luck.’

  ‘Water under the bridge, old fruit. What’s left of my destiny is bound up with the Gravity Rose. If she sinks, I sink. I’m certainly not going to surrender her or any of our people over to a gang of thieving rogues led by a psychopathic cyborg scallywag of Steel-arm Bowen’s notoriety.’

  They waited for the best part of an hour, listening into the open comms chat of the carrier’s attack planes. Pilots boasting how easy their victory had been, complaining about navigational instruments going haywire in the planet’s unusual atmosphere, some of the planes getting lost and having to return to the carrier by line-of-sight. Time for the rescue, yet? Calder was about to check with Skrat when the words choked in his throat. The prince glanced up through the clearing and noticed how the night-time sky had changed – and it was like nothing he had ever seen before.

  ***

  Being locked inside the mining camp’s small concrete brig with Zeno wasn’t too much of a burden for Lana. It was the survivors from the rest of the operation she could have done without, and, at the very top of the list, their supercilious mission commander, Professor Alison Sebba. Over twenty people crammed in a jail meant for a couple of drunken workers at most. Close quarters really didn’t make the professor any more bearable.

  ‘This is your fault,’ said Sebba glaring through the miners at Lana, her posterior selfishly settled across a bunk she had commandeered for her sole use. ‘The rogue commanding these pirates clearly has a personal grudge against you. And in his settling of that vendetta, you have condemned my whole operation to, at best, months of captivity until a ransom is paid.’

  ‘If you think Dollar-sign’s paying a ransom after this debacle, you really haven’t worked with him for long enough,’ said Lana. Little eddies of concrete dust drifted down from the ceiling every time the gun turrets on the pirate’s command shuttle rotated, tracking aerial hyper-lizards. The base’s helicopter pads hadn’t been designed for a shuttle’s weight. Lana brushed the falling dust out of her hair. ‘Your “at best” is going to be a kindly disposed owner at a pirate slave market . . . and here’s a top tip, you won’t find too many of those with fat wallets at any slave market I’m acquainted with.’

  ‘I’m certain you are more acquainted,’ said Sebba. ‘It’s your damnable spotty past that has dragged the rest of us down alongside you.’

  The nerve of the whining . . . ‘You want to talk about spotty operations . . .’ Lana felt Zeno’s hand on her shoulder, the android’s neck craned subtly in the direction of the security camera hanging in front of the cell. Yeah, he’s right as always. We don’t want to discuss what is really happening here without knowing who is listening in. The professor didn’t know Lana had discovered the hidden operations below the planet’s surface. And as far as Steel-arm Bowen is concerned, this is just a standard illegal mining venture out prospecting in the wild. God, let it stay that way.

  ‘Let’s prepare for the worst and hope for the best,’ said Kien-Yen Leong, the mining camp chief’s voice heavy with the weight of responsibility.

  ‘We wouldn’t have to “hope” if you hadn’t surrendered so readily!’ accused the professor.

  ‘I will not order my people to commit suicide,’ said Leong. ‘And that’s what it would have been for us to keep on fighting. Our defences were designed to hold off the local wildlife, not squadrons of fighter-bombers.’

  ‘The planes were just to intimidate you,’ said Lana. ‘The Doubtful Quasar carries heavy rail cannons and ship-to-ship nukes. She could have sat in orbit and reduced this whole continent into smoking cinders inside an hour. You did the right thing, chief.’

  ‘People who hope to plunder you don’t tend to render you radioactive first,’ hissed the professor.

  ‘Yeah, well, rational thought and Steel-arm Bowen are only nodding acquaintances,’ said Lana. She looked forlornly beyond the thick bars at the front of the concrete cell. A single desk and chair, currently unmanned; a door leading to the rest of the base. There was a single window at the side, but it was sealed by a heavy steel storm shutter, leaving their only natural light from the narrow barred window slits inside their cell – the dim lunar glow of the distant moons, a spattering of stars distorted by the cursed planet’s gaseous veil. ‘A slaughter every now and then only enhances his reputation . . . it means the next vessel or settlement he raids flies the white flag as soon as the Doubtful Quasar jumps in-system.’

  ‘Ah, you know me so well, Lana girl,’ announced the pirate commander, stepping into the brig with his entourage of killers dogging his footsteps. He walked up to the cage and strutted its length, tapping his pistol barrel along each bar. ‘Well enough to glue my tracking device to a satellite, eh? You can imagine the lads’ disappointment, chasing through this dirt-ball’s magnetic murk, thinking they’d hunted down the Gravity Rose, only to find our own tracer hanging in orbit. You’re a canny one and no mistake.’

  ‘I’m sure your thugs will manage to drown their sorrows,’ said Lana. ‘We clocked your carrier inside hyperspace at the margins of our sensor range, so I set a sensor line at the jump point, just in case I wasn’t seeing scanner ghosts. I ordered the Gravity Rose to jump out as soon as your tra
cer was found concealed in our cargo hold. Me and Zeno would have got away too, if we hadn’t missed the rendezvous point when our shuttle malfunctioned on this ill-starred world.’ Lana wasn’t sure if Steel-arm had bought her lie, but the professor did . . . hook, line and sinker.

  ‘You knew they were coming and you didn’t try to evacuate us!’ she squealed in indignation.

  ‘You wouldn’t have left with me if I had asked, you and your precious skegging mine,’ said Lana. ‘I didn’t have time to argue with you. And like you said, old metal-fingers here has personal business with me. I’d have flared our engines on the jump-out; hoped his carrier burn straight after me without bothering to raid your camp.’

  ‘You hoped. That’s badly done,’ said Kien-Yen Leong. ‘You were hired to help us, not run for home at the first sign of trouble.’

  ‘I was hired to ship supplies in and ore out,’ said Lana. ‘Nobody’s paying me to get my crew killed in the wilds. Certainly not her or Dollar-sign Dillard.’

  Steel-arm seemed amused. No, he wouldn’t have any problem in believing that Lana Fiveworlds could be so cold. Bowen would have done exactly the same if their positions had been reversed, except he probably wouldn’t have tried to draw an enemy ship away. You’d have left everyone in the camp to die to buy extra time.

  ‘There be the spirited lass I remember. Now, how am I ever going to get over the disappointment of losing the Gravity Rose?’