by Stephen Hunt
Lana ignored his knowing leer. ‘It’s a big universe and there’s always some other honest merchant a parsec away for you to molest.’
‘Honest did you say?’ Steel-arm roared with laughter. ‘That’s a grand lie. But not the only one I’ve been fed in this camp.’ He pointed at Professor Sebba, his eyes wide and manic even as he grinned. ‘You, professor. You told me we had all the mining staff accounted for in this little chicken coop of yours?’
‘Everyone’s here,’ said the professor, coldly. ‘Except for a tanker driver who went missing in the jungle a few weeks ago. She is likely dead.’
‘There’s the thing,’ said Steel-arm. ‘She’s not the only one absent without leave. I left a team of sixteen crew and two shuttles at the mine to strip out your gear. They’ve all gone missing, including my boats. Now, you’re not telling me that a single driver managed to make sixteen heavily armed fighters and their craft disappear without them calling for help once, are you? How many survey teams do you have out in the infernal jungle? How many of your people jumped us?’
Sebba shook her head, furiously. ‘That’s nothing to do with this base. Perhaps they crashed trying to fly back to your carrier? You can’t always rely on your instruments on Abracadabra.’
Lana felt a desperate, brief burst of hope. Is this Skrat’s work? Maybe he’s found Calder and they’re working some mischief together in the shuttle? Picking off Steel-arm’s shuttles in the air.
The pirate’s artificial arm whined as he lifted his pistol into the air. ‘Here’s one instrument that rarely lets me down, lass. Now, I say this is to do with you. How many staff do you have working on the world? Even using robots, you’re not running a mine with so few people.’
Lana grimaced. No, but you can run an archaeological dig and arrange a little tomb raiding with that small a team. Sebba stood up, waving her arms at the pirate. ‘Everyone’s here! We’ve only just commenced exploratory tunnelling . . . we were planning to ship in extra hands in a month or so.’ She was still talking at the pirate as though she was a school teacher admonishing a child. Lana knew from painful experience that wasn’t how you handled Steel-arm. He’s not one of your hired goons, Sebba. He’s the feral kind. The real deal.
Steel-arm shrugged and glanced over at his crew. ‘Don’t I always know a lie when I hear it? It makes me sad. I thought we had built up an understanding here, you and I, professor. You give me what I want without trouble, and I won’t have to make things problematic for you. I dislike damaging the merchandise to make my point.’ He raised his pistol in the direction of the cage and it jolted in his hand, an explosive crack, and one of the miners collapsed into his colleagues, the rear of his head a bloody ruin where the magnetically accelerated pellet had exited. Screams of outrage and terror sounded from the miners, some of the prisoners acting on blind impulse and trying to scramble away behind their colleagues or to the sides of the brig to minimise the chances they would be the next victim. Lana noticed that Zeno had positioned himself in front of her – damn the android. Zeno might have a better chance of surviving a rail-gun shot than me, but he has no right to try – he’s the ship’s droid herder, not my personal bodyguard.
‘Tell me the truth!’ Steel-arm yelled at the mission commander. ‘Or I’ll put one in your leg on low-power and work my way up inch-by-inch to your over-educated skull. I’ll give you plenty of time to bleed-out and recover your delicate memory, lass.’
‘Don’t tell him a thing!’ demanded Kien-Yen Leong.
Steel-arm pivoted and shot the mining chief three times, starting in the chest and working his way up as the man yelled, flung back by the fierce velocity of the sudden volley. Leong was dead well before he hit the concrete floor. ‘Did I ask you to speak, did I?’
Lana wanted to be sick. The mining chief had been a good man. But that wasn’t nearly enough to protect him from a ruthless human predator like Steel-arm. The pirate woman, Cho, stared at the prisoners trembling behind the bars, a flash of malice crossing her eyes. ‘Use the speakers to tell the workers hiding in the jungle to surrender, or we’ll feed the lizards a corpse every five minutes.’ The pirate girl aimed at Lana and the professor. ‘These two next!’
Sebba clung to the bars of the cage-front, a frantic look breaking through her normal aura of haughty disdain. The academic ignored the weeping and yells behind her. ‘It’s not us! It’s your fault, you pinheads – you detonated a nuke down here.’
‘Ah, a little bit of fallout didn’t vanish my lads now, did it?’
‘You have activated the defence protocols!’
‘Your base’s systems are under my control now, lass, or have you forgotten?’
‘Not the camp, you fool . . . this was a Heezy world.’
Lana groaned inside. That’s right; give the homicidal maniac with a gun the location of a far deadlier weapon.
‘You think some nonsense fairy-tale’s going to save your life?’
‘We were beneath its notice,’ moaned Sebba as though she was conversing with a tutorial group, not an insane pirate warlord. ‘I was keeping it dormant. We hardly even registered as a threat. Until you proved we are. By awakening it with a nuclear-tipped warhead!’
Steel-arm’s comm on his ship-suit sleeve started bleeping. He passed his hand over it and a voice frothed out of the static. ‘Doubtful Quasar—we’re—being sliced. Sliced—and—losing—environmental integrity.’
‘Sliced?’ Steel-arm roared. ‘What are you talking about, damn you?’ His only answer was raw static. The other pirates’ comms started to go off too, urgent calls flooding in from across the camp, raiders reporting something weird in the sky. One of their captors sprinted to the storm shutter and raised it, slowly grinding, into the roof. Beyond was as abnormal sight as Lana had ever seen – the dark sky above the jungle criss-crossed by a lattice of glowing yellow energy lines, a firework display seemingly erupting between a couple of the moons. The kind of display a carrier might make if it was being cut into pieces while its atomic arsenal of ship-to-ship missiles detonated all at once, sections of hull sheering away as radioactive sparks, miles of hull racked by secondary explosions. Then a sudden flare as the anti-matter inside her engine’s containment area breeched, rapidly dwindling away to nothing. As the detonation died away, Lana noticed an unholy light in the sky, a huge cable of energy shifting sinuously from side to side. It seemed to stretch from the world, reaching far out to space.
‘There’s your bloody fairy-tale,’ moaned Sebba. ‘You’ve killed us all!’
CHAPTER FOUR
The settlers’ vessel.
Calder spun aimlessly in the shuttle chair as Skrat examined the boat’s instruments, the interior of their vessel lit by the glow of strange shifting energies pulsing against the sky.
‘Whatever that bally energy field across the sky is, it’s cut off contact with our satellite net. We can no longer reach the Gravity Rose,’ said Skrat. ‘I’m tracking falling debris, too. I think the pirate ship was caught up inside the field when it activated. By my sweet nest, look at my readout. There’s not a bean left of the Doubtful Quasar in orbit. We should be thankful Steel-arm showed up and scared the Rose off, or it’d be raining fragments of the chief and Polter.’
‘If that field’s not being generated by the pirates, then who . . . ?’
‘A jolly pertinent question.’ Skrat scratched his scaly green skin absentmindedly. ‘This abominable world does possess a queer atmosphere, but what’s in the sky . . . it’s not any natural phenomenon my confused noggin is familiar with. Those grid lines are too regular, and while atmospheric interaction with the system’s sun might create ionization, it’s nothing capable of frying a heavily armoured warhorse like the Doubtful Quasar. So we have a quandary. I doubt the field is being produced by the jungle creatures. There is no sign of any technological civilization on Abracadabra from orbit. You can’t cloak an active society so thoroughly, not even the energetically paranoid ones. That leaves the legacy of dead cultures, which is almost as worrying.’ He activ
ated the main control board, a field of icons and readouts flickering into life and swarming his head. ‘I’d rather devote my time to the more practical question of how we can safely fly through it. One step at a time, I suppose. Let’s retrieve the captain.’
‘You still think I’m being unreasonably superstitious about this planet?’
‘Consider that under review, dear boy.’ Skrat tugged at the control stick and a line of alarm icons began to spin around him like a swarm of angry wasps. He cursed. ‘What’s this stuff and nonsense, then?’ Skrat swatted the control board, rolling hologram information across the air. He cursed again, sounding genuinely angry. ‘Our main fuel cells have been drained. We’re running solely on emergency juice now.’
‘But they were full?’
‘Indeed. I checked them myself before I flew out of the base.’
‘Is it possible that energy field in the sky is responsible? It must take a lot of power to produce something like that?’
‘Quite an understatement. I don’t believe our little shuttle has much to contribute in the grand scheme of things. Best we undertake an exterior inspection of the engines, see if we took any damage picking you up from the hunting lodge.’
They climbed down from the cockpit and passed through the cargo hold, a look of fear crossing their female passenger’s face as she realized they were about to drop the rear ramp again. Momoko waddled over, the robot making a fuss of Janet Lento and helping keep her quiet. Calder took his rifle to cover Skrat as the skirl fished a diagnostics box out of the hold. They left the shuttle and pushed into the thick humid air outside, the clearing lit by the shuttle’s lamps and the peculiar net of energy above. Skrat unscrewed a panel below the engine and plugged his box into the exposed machinery. Calder stood guard nervously.
‘Interesting,’ announced Skrat after a couple of minutes of diagnostics testing. ‘Our engines should be working. Not so much drained, as full but completely inert. I might as well have topped up the shuttle with a couple of barrels of gin before I flew out.’
‘How the hell can our fuel cells have been tampered with like that?’ asked Calder.
‘Theoretically speaking, if your civilization was advanced enough,’ said Skrat, ‘and your planet had been subjected to a sudden nuclear assault and you wanted to shield yourself against further detonations, you could send out a pulse to transform fissile material into pure mush. Reprogramming risky matter, so to speak. Our inert fusion power cells are merely collateral damage – whoever did this was, I hypothesise, aiming to neutralize Steel-arm’s atomic warheads, not our engine’s pile. The shuttle’s emergency backup runs on old-fashioned batteries, so at least we’ll have environmental systems until we deplete its reserves.’
‘Remote reprogramming of matter? That sounds an awful lot like science fiction,’ said Calder.
Skrat pointed to the net of energy weaving across the heavens. ‘Old chap, it behoves me to point out that up until we showed up to take you into exile, this shuttle, myself and the robot in our hold were pure science fiction to your good self. Any significantly advanced technology appears like magic to those lower down the food chain.’
The lizard-like crewman had a point. But even if his theory is correct, we are still stranded hundreds of miles from the base. If we manage to survive the trek back to the mine through the jungle, who knows what might have happened to Lana by the time we arrive. And Zeno, of course. He mattered every bit as much as the captain, didn’t he? ‘We had better gear-up and light out of here, then.’
‘Not so hasty, dear fellow,’ said Skrat. ‘If I’m correct, this pulse would need to be tightly directed, otherwise it would risk damaging its maker’s own systems. In this case, directed at the pirate’s assets in orbit. We were unlucky enough to be close to ground zero of the pirate’s opening volley, thus caught in the counter-response. But—’ he pointed at the fissure in the ground—, ‘this old colony vessel is buried by sediment and shielded by the best part of a rather deep valley…’
‘The settlers would have exhausted all of their ship’s power reserves, surely, before they died?’
‘That rather depends on the manner of their passing,’ said Skrat. ‘And even if there are no operational cells underground, at this point I’d be grateful for anything that shortcuts our journey . . . a raft, a bicycle, a diesel vehicle, a bally hang glider.’
Navigating the boiling rapids of the world’s rivers, or riding thermals alongside flocks of hungry dragons? I’d almost take the dubious shelter of the rain forest. ‘Do you think the pirate’s landing craft are grounded the same as us?’
‘Sadly, one suspects not. The mining camp is a long way out and shielded by the mountain range’s mass, to boot. But let’s look on the bright side. Right now, Steel-arm and his band of cads have no way to bypass that energy field and no starship left to jump out-system even if they did. We just need to free the captain and Zeno, then avoid the pirates until the Gravity Rose finds a way to extract us.’
‘What if she can’t?’
‘That energy field in orbit will have to switch off at some point,’ said Skrat. ‘Or we won’t be the only chaps on the planet left with drained power cells.’
Just free the captain. The two of them on the ground against the gods know how many pirates in the assault force. Quite a just. But Calder would attempt it, all the same. And not only because he had no other choices left. Lana.
***
‘My ship!’ roared Steel-arm, watching the last sparks of his vessel dwindle away in the night sky. ‘My magnificent Doubtful Quasar.’ The officer was close to apoplexy as he thrust his pistol in the direction of the brig, provoking cries of terror from the caged workers. ‘You witch, Sebba – you mined the orbit of your stake and destroyed my ship! Drag her carcass out here!’
Steel-arm’s pirates sprung the cage door and hauled the professor in front of him, the others’ rifles aiming straight for the prisoners. Lana winced. It won’t take much for the excitable madman to order all of us executed now.
‘That wasn’t me,’ pleaded Sebba, all traces of her arrogance evaporated. ‘I told you, it’s the Heezy.’
‘There’s nothing on this bloody planet but rainforest,’ yelled Steel-arm. He drew his dagger and touched its activator, the blade buzzing into life, vibrating so fast it was nearly invisible. ‘I’m going to take each of your fingers, one at a time, until you tell me where the rest of your miners are hiding out. Then I’ll have your lying tongue to feed the lizards out there.’
‘Please . . . ’
‘I loathe your stinking, privileged breed – as good as immortal, looking down on the rest of us like rats to be dissected for your profit; more money than God accreting in your bank account over all the centuries. Now it’s my turn for a little scientific experimentation . . . a dissection . . . I’m going to cut the truth out of you!’ His men pinned the professor, forcing her arm out straight. Sebba desperately tried to pull away as the pirate commander reached out with his metal fist, cybernetics tightening around her hand like a vice.
‘Don’t!’ shouted Lana, almost as shocked by the sound of her voice breaking the tension as the other prisoners appeared to be. She gripped the bars of the cage. ‘She’s telling the truth. This was a Heezy world. The alien settlement is deep under the surface. I’ve explored there with Zeno, below the mine.’
Sebba stared across in shock. Whether over Lana’s unexpected intervention or the fact the starship skipper had uncovered what the base was really doing on Abracadabra, she would be hard pushed to say. Of all my many mistakes, I’m sure this is the worst of them. I’ve really outdone myself this time.
‘So you have been off with the Heezy, have you?’ leered Steel-arm. ‘You’re not exactly top of my expert witness list, Lana girl, the stack of yarns you’ve spun me in the past.’
The female pirate Cho stepped forward. ‘Don’t trust a word she says, captain. She’ll say anything to keep her friends safe for another hour. Her security people are holed up out there in
the jungle right now, trying to work out how to retake the base. I guarantee it.’
‘You know me well enough to know I wouldn’t put myself up for finger carving lightly,’ said Lana, ignoring the pirate woman. What’s she got against me, anyway? ‘And take a look at that glowing energy net in the sky. That’s like no mine field I’ve ever flown into before.’
‘What do you say it is, then?’
‘The professor here’s the expert, I reckon. But she’s only any good to you with her tongue attached inside her mouth, not flapping in the dust.’
‘It’ll be a pair of tongues if you play me false, Lana girl,’ spat Steel-arm. He slowly deactivated his dagger and slid it back into his belt. ‘Tell me how you came across this place, professor. Make it convincing, or I’ll be taking my fun with you.’
‘Dollar-sign Dillard’s people discovered the Heezy’s presence here,’ spluttered the professor. ‘The world’s location was in the logs of a derelict vessel discovered adrift in space . . . a packet ship used to bring in big game hunters to Abracadabra. All her crew and passengers died of starvation or cold after her systems failed. They’d stumbled across the ruins of a failed human colony while hunting on the planet, the settlers presumed exterminated by the Heezy’s automated defences. The hunters nearly met the same fate, but a handful of them managed to escape off-world in their ship, though obviously not intact enough to reach home.’
‘And you thought you’d play with the same fire?’ said Zeno. The android really didn’t sound pleased to be involved in such foolishness without being consulted. I know how he feels.
‘The previous explorers didn’t know what they were doing,’ whined the professor. ‘I’ve had experience of Alliance-sanctioned Heezy digs. I have been trained in how to keep Heezy defences from going live while a team strips out what it can.’
Steel-arm waved at the lattice of glowing yellow behind the odd shifting cable of raw energy. ‘You’ve failed, you witch! Let’s be having the rest from you . . . !’
