by Stephen Hunt
Over on the other side of the cargo bay the professor tried to buckle herself into the seat webbing as the craft rocked and swayed, the woman moaning with each jolt of the vessel. Steel-arm roaring from the cockpit to brace for impact didn’t improve Sebba’s joyless disposition. Here we go again. Outside the clear hull Lana saw a strip of crimson jungle canopy tearing past, their shuttle bouncing like a possessed fairground ride, then the glowing lines of a laser fence sliding below. Steel-arm had timed the unpowered glide descent to perfection. A second more in the air and they would have been eating mountainside at high velocity, a second less and the mine’s perimeter fence would have sliced them into salami. Lana hadn’t noticed a landing strip on her previous visit here, only a vehicle park, and she braced for impact. Steel-arm sprinted back from the cockpit, diving to the deck as the shuttle ploughed into the mine, screaming metal from the fuselage and the explosion of detonating containers and quarrying gear meeting fifty tonnes of armoured landing boat. They slewed to the side, spinning on the ground like a vehicle hitting black ice; more explosions from equipment collisions and then the shuttle slowly groaned to a halt. The cockpit ahead lay mangled, sparks and smokes spitting out as the pirate commander picked himself up and dusted his clothes off. He’s a homicidal maniac, but he’s a psychopath with a dab hand on the stick. Steel-arm Bowen reached out and freed Sebba from the support webbing with his artificial arm. Any thought that this might be out of concern for the professor’s well-being evaporated when the man drew his pistol and pushed it against her sweating forehead. ‘How about now for activating your alien trinket . . . does now work for you?’
Sebba nodded groggily and took the broach from him when he thrust it at her, tracing a series of finger movements against its crystal surface, before proffering it back.
‘Is that all?’ growled Steel-arm. ‘The trinket’s active?’
‘Yes,’ said Sebba. ‘But we won’t have long. Probably not much longer than the last human outside the broach’s field survives. Then the defence systems’ attention will focus back on us; try to work out why rogue biologicals marked for termination are carrying a diplomatic transponder. I don’t think we’re going to like the answer.’
‘You first, lass, you first.’ Steel-arm lowered the ramp while his surviving pirates rounded up the handful of base staff who had made it alive out of the camp.
‘Ever the gentleman,’ said Lana as she passed the pirate captain.
‘I’ll hand it to you, Lana girl. With Professor Rich Bitch, you’ve found the only paying passenger in a hundred light years who’s more annoying than you. It’ll be hard to decide which one of you I break in personally and who gets sold at market.’
‘I’ll take the slave market and allow you to hang onto the professor, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘Ah, you’re only saying that so that it’s you I keep.’
‘You’ll choke on me,’ said Lana. I’ll make sure of that.
‘I’ve an awful large appetite.’ He laughed and shoved her outside, the pirates on tenterhooks as they exited the crashed shuttle, assault rifle targeting beams spinning around at the slightest noise. There were plenty of sounds to choose from. Steel-arm’s command shuttle had carved a furrow across most of the mine-head, wrecked containers and the rubble of quick-set concrete huts, crumpled diggers and mining machinery left hissing and burning in their wake. The fence was still intact, though, holding back the howling wildlife protesting the intrusion of this massive steel beast into their realm. Much good would the fence be against the Heezy sentinels when they emerged from the rock like sorcerous golems. Professor Sebba led them down the main passage into the mine, the same tunnel Lana and Zeno had snuck into. Must have taken out one of the generators with our landing; the lanterns on the rockface are no longer active. The pirates switched to torches mounted on their shoulder armour, targeting beams from their rifles making an impromptu dance floor out of the tunnel. If there’s mood lighting to go along with our dismal situation, this is surely it.
‘I didn’t know you had asked the chief to upgrade you,’ Lana said to Zeno while she edged through the gloom.
She caught a quizzical expression crossing the android’s face in the bobbing torch light. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry – I thought your body might be bulletproof now? The way you stepped in the way of Steel-arm’s pistol inside the brig.’
‘Just doing my bit. Isn’t that one of the laws of robotics – taking one for the fleshies?’
‘I’m your skipper, not your damn master. You’re self-aware.’
‘Right about now, I’d settle for a little slave-drone action if it meant ditching my rising sense of terror and going back to just obeying orders,’ said the android.
‘I like you just the way you are,’ said Lana. Sometimes Zeno acted so recklessly, it was as though he wanted to die. ‘Although maybe bullet-proof would be better.’
‘Those Heezy machines out there, they’re not coming after us with guns. There was a lot of crushing-to-death going on. Kind of basic, but it works.’
‘They’re not so different from you,’ said Lana, trying to sound reassuring. ‘More advanced, sure. But they’re just—’
‘Girl, they’re nothing like me. A bad wish cast in rock, waiting for some dumb-ass fleshies to come along and rub the magic lamp. And then along bumbles Dollar-sign Dillard and his favourite crew of dupes . . . and you know what happens next.’
‘We drop the planet’s shield; head for the moon and the Gravity Rose, and then high-tail it out of the system, that’s what happens next.’
Zeno nodded back toward Steel-arm Bowen and the surviving pirates, following them down the tunnel while they waited for their prisoners to trigger something fatal. ‘Damned if I like the company.’
‘One problem at a time,’ said Lana. ‘Let’s stay focused on getting off this hothouse world alive first.’
Sebba turned back from the head of the line. ‘You saved my life back in the brig.’
‘I saved our best chance of getting off this world,’ said Lana, uncomfortable with the professor’s tone – a little too close to conciliation for her taste. Let’s keep this relationship based on mutual hostility, rather than head down the touchy-feely route, shall we? ‘Abracadabra isn’t exactly overrun with Heezy experts.’
‘There are no Heezy experts,’ said the professor. ‘Even now, centuries after mankind’s first find, we might as well be ants crawling over an antimatter generator, trying to understand what we’re looking at.’
‘You’re who we’ve got, lady,’ said Zeno. ‘You’re all we’ve got.’
‘I was removed from the Alliance Archaeology-Science Unit centuries ago,’ said the professor. ‘A casualty of internal politics. My original career had barely started. I’ve been waiting for this moment ever since, scratching a living lecturing in brand archaeology while supplementing my income with offworld development projects. Downgrading the ruins of dead civilizations so planets can be strip-mined without creating product boycotts against the houses responsible. Can you imagine what that feels like? Reduced to a paid shill, helping destroy what I should have been preserving. Shut out of my true vocation: making major discoveries about a part of the past so distant that protogalaxies were still cooling down after the big bang. This was my chance to show those bastards in the unit how wrong they were. To bring home a find outside of the government’s control. Rub their noses in their mistake of tossing me out.’
Despite herself, Lana almost felt a jab of sympathy for the woman. Apart from the gap in years and wealth, are the two of us really that different? Both squeezed by circumstances and a hostile universe determined to derail the women from the only path in life that seemed to make sense to them.
‘Well, they’re sure as hell going to be sorry now,’ said Zeno. ‘Especially if Steel-arm gets out of here with a ship stuffed full of Heezy booty. Probably not as sorry as us, but . . .’
‘Who was Dollar-sign planning to se
ll the Heezy artefacts to?’ asked Lana.
‘All I know is that he had held a blind auction for the rights to examine the first set of extracted material,’ said the professor. ‘Your ship was meant to rendezvous with the buyers as soon as we used the mining virus to open up a decent-sized shaft down to the Heezy core.’
And she opens her mouth and all sympathy fades. ‘No doubt a rendezvous with artefacts hidden inside ore-filled containers, so we never cottoned onto the value of what had been uncovered here,’ snarled Lana.
‘Dollar-sign’s caution was understandable. You would have asked for more money or sold the location of Abracadabra to one of his rivals.’
‘I would have jumped to the opposite end of the Edge and never looked back is what I would have done,’ said Lana. ‘Skeg this. A simple supply run? It was a suicide mission from the start. You were juggling with raw antimatter rods down here.’
‘I had matters completely under control,’ protested Sebba. ‘Until your thuggish pirate friend started slamming atomic weaponry into this planet.’
The memory of Calder’s face swum into view, missing in the vast jungle along with the camp’s tanker driver. Under control? Why did Lana think that the professor was as wrong about that as she had been about everything else? We were in deep trouble long before Steel-arm showed up. We just didn’t know it, is all.
‘The wise thing to do would have been to pass this world’s coordinates over to the Alliance and let their specialists handle it.’
‘Specialists?’ Sebba snorted. ‘A relative distinction.’
‘The Alliance discovered the cache of Heezy weapons which ended the Skein War, didn’t they?’ said Zeno. The android didn’t add that he was old enough to have seen both the war’s opening and finishing salvo in person. Lana reckoned that was something he liked to forget. A very human trait.
‘And do you know what the original science team did, after the end of the war against the Skein?’ said Sebba. ‘They surveyed what they had wrought . . . the cinders of countless worlds and suns left devastated by their “find” . . . and they mutinied and destroyed their work. The majority of the team disappeared, while the ones who chose to stay arranged to wipe their own minds. The alliance still knows less about handling the Heezy’s systems today than we did a thousand years ago. That’s your precious specialists for you.’
‘You should have taken a leaf out of their book,’ said Lana.
‘Maybe I should have,’ admitted Sebba. ‘But such knowledge can never truly be forgotten. Totally erased. One day we’ll have a similar level of science to the Heezy, whether naturally or as a result of reverse engineering from dig sites like this. Just knowing that it’s possible . . .’
‘If you fleshies ever last long enough to reach that point, here’s hoping you’ll be wise enough to handle it,’ said Zeno
‘You’re part of humanity, too,’ said Lana, touching the android’s arm. ‘The greater human story.’
‘Pinocchio to your Geppetto? Don’t remind me,’ said Zeno. ‘If we discover God down below, ask him to reincarnate me as a robot oven’s toasting algorithm.’
Lana gazed down the dark passage. If the Heezy really had transformed themselves into gods, they were the absent kind. But their devils, those they left behind aplenty.
‘How much did you see below the surface?’ asked Sebba.
‘’How much? Skeg it, I don’t even know what I saw,’ said Lana. ‘A deep shaft with globules of programmable matter floating around like Hade’s lava lamp. An anteroom with a transport system to move through stone like those gimp Heezy killing machines that literally walked into our base.’
‘We’ll need to use the motile bubbles to access the core control level,’ said the professor. ‘That’s where we can disable the planetary shield.’ Sebba didn’t seem pleased at the prospect.
‘You can control the transports?’ asked Lana.
‘It’s not safe travelling so deep,’ said Sebba. ‘I lost three people who took trips down there and never showed up at the other end, including my assistant. Since then, most of our exploration of the complex involved accessing levels closer to the surface.’
‘The Heezy’s sentinel machines?’ probed Zeno.
‘No, this is the first time we’ve seen them appear. Malfunctioning transport systems would be my best guess.’
And that’s the problem, Lana reckoned. An extinct species that had lasted long enough to need to re-boot their home’s own solar mass. Guessing only gets you so far. They reached the end of the tunnel and the narrow vertical well bored into the Heezy complex.
Steel-arm caught up with them and waved the prisoners away from the rack of anti-gravity chutes. ‘One of ours will go down first. I wouldn’t want any of my canaries flying the coop.’
‘A rat down a drainpipe would be a better description,’ said Lana. ‘You’ve finally found your true vocation, Seth.’
Steel-arm signalled a pair of his pirates. ‘You first, my bucks – make sure everyone stays together. Then you, Lana girl. Be sure to scream loud enough to warn us should our faceless monstrous friends start walking out of the walls down below.’
Lana made a zipping gesture across her lips. She caught the anti-gravity chute as the pirate commander tossed it across to her. ‘You ever think that a spot of honest labour would be easier than this?’
He laughed heartedly. ‘Labour? You mean running ration pack runs for bent brokers like Dollar-sign Dillard? Scrabbling for a handful of T-dollars in Transference Station’s dirt? I wouldn’t be caught stooping so low. And an honest career track . . . it never quite worked out for me.’
Yeah, I heard the rumours that you were an officer in one of the Edge systems’ local navies. Until Steel-arm had been hung out to dry and left for dead during some nasty system-on-system conflict that had escalated faster and harder than his political masters had expected. But the rogue’s jump carrier, supposedly abandoned in deep space, hadn’t been quite as wrecked and non-operational as his superiors were led to believe. And Lana had heard the other rumours during her scam of the pirate port. How Steel-arm had been drifting in the void in an environment suit until he was taken for a slave by scavengers. Long months floating inside a debris field, wounded, slowly going insane. Steel-arm had murdered the scavengers, deserted, arranged for the Doubtful Quasar to be salvaged, and been flying as a raider for the pirate combines of the Invisible Port ever since. You lost your arm in that war, and you want everyone to know it, Seth. That ridiculously flashy amped-up cybernetic limb of yours. You could have had a biological replacement cloned from your DNA. But you need to wear your damn loss like the shiny campaign medal you never won in that war.
‘No,’ continued Steel-arm, ‘taking what I want is a far better line of work for a man of rough and ready tastes like me. And what’s here for the looting had better be worth the price of my precious Quasar.’ He grabbed the professor by the throat. ‘How many alien weapons do you have stashed down there? They’ll be worth selling! Or maybe I’ll make a grand gift of them to the King of the Invisible Port, Renan Barcellos, in return for a share of the spoils.’
‘Let’s focus on lowering the shield and escaping from the system before its damn sun brews up,’ suggested the pirate woman Cho. She placed her hand on his arm and he dropped the professor, choking, to the floor.
‘Ah, that’s the reason you’re not the skipper, Cho,’ said Steel-arm. ‘Not bold enough by half. Sailing out of the dock is to take a risk. To live as a freebooter . . .’
‘No, I’m fairly sure the reason I’m not the skipper is this.’ Cho tapped the shock collar around her neck.
‘The Heezy constructed tools not weapons,’ coughed Sebba from the tunnel floor. She sounded affronted by the pirate commander’s naked avarice.
‘Tools that can snuff out suns,’ pointed out Lana. ‘And Steel-arm’s not so different from you, professor, for all of your principled chatter about advancing human understanding. The buyers for the artefacts in your blind auction weren’t
going to be charities.’ In fact, I don’t even want to think about who they might be.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Sebba, picking herself up. ‘Whatever we strip out of the complex will take centuries of study to understand.’
Steel-arm watched his first two pirates begin their decent down the narrow shaft. ‘Your Alliance friends reverse-engineered the aliens’ arsenal just fine during the great war.’
‘The original science team unearthed a DNA-based Rosetta Stone during their initial dig on Neptune. The Heezy controlled their systems using genetic sequencing as a master key,’ said Sebba. ‘Our team was able to adjust their own DNA to establish control over the artefacts. All that knowledge vanished with them when they disappeared.’
‘Buried under Neptune? That’s a conveniently placed discovery,’ said Zeno.
‘There are elements in the Alliance that think humanity was chosen. That the Heezy left their treasure trove in the solar system by design.’
‘Yeah, I’ve met a few of those mopes . . . the universe revolves around Sol and you’re all descendants of the Sun Gods too,’ said Zeno.
‘I’m not talking about the cults that worship the Heezy.’
‘Enough stalling,’ said Steel-arm, impatiently. ‘Away with your theories and on with the practical. Down into the damn pit with you, Lana girl. We’ll be behind you. Way behind.’ He laughed loudly.
If going down the shaft had been claustrophobic the first time, Lana didn’t reckon her second journey was much improved. Descending terrified that any second a Heezy sentry machine would lunge out of the bare stone and pulp her like an orange husk being juiced. She felt a thin breeze of cooler air rising up from the abyss, passing her face, holding onto the sensation with quiet desperation. Lana could see the lights of the pirates coming down above her; hear the faint crackling sound of her ship suit’s fibres adjusting to the cooler environment. If its plunder Steel-arm is after, he should have let the base dig their main shaft before attacking. The raider wasn’t going to be able to haul much of value up this narrow exploratory well. Lana landed in the anteroom, held there at gunpoint by the two pirates while everyone else dropped down the tube and assembled inside the chamber. Sebba arrived and entered a code in the panel on the wall. Steel-arm and his brigands stepped back in shock as the corridor fell away; appearing in the stone as though she had tossed a tunnelling spell at the rock.
