Fire Rage

by Chris Ward

  ‘It’s easier to fly a starship than drive one of those rust bucket turkeys,’ Caladan had said, sipping on some contraband whiskey they’d stolen somewhere. ‘But if you ever need one, make sure you get a broken one so no one will notice every time you screw up.’

  Watching her progress on a view-screen, Lia followed the other droids toward the security gates. They were heading for a freighter that had just landed. It sat on a landing pad adjacent to her own shuttle’s, attached to fueling pipes and swarmed over by tiny maintenance droids repairing damage to the hull.

  A guard stood watch beside her shuttle. Lia wondered if the spaceport authorities had run its serial codes to check its origin. It was possible, but the security would be heavier if so, and Jake said he had doctored the transmissions. As she noticed the spacesuit the man was wearing, Lia was reminded of another problem.

  She took a deep breath. The droid could only get her so far.

  No one came out of the guardhouse to check the droid as she followed the others into the airlock. As the hiss of air reminded her that she was passing out of the atmospherically controlled dome which contained Hopeful, she prayed the droid was airtight.

  Otherwise, she would never even make it to her ship.

  The airlock doors opened, and the droids began to trundle forward. Lia closed her eyes, then operated the forward motors. So far, so good. As she followed the line of droids toward the freighter on the left, keeping one eye on her own shuttle to the right, what might have once been a minor problem was escalated to epic proportions.

  She had no spacesuit, and the droid had no function to operate the shuttle’s airlock. She had to leave the droid and do it herself.

  More in hope than expectation, she rummaged through the compartments inside the tiny driver’s space, looking for something that might help her. The items were so beautifully mundane—a hammer, a ball of wire-string, a broken caterpillar tread which had rusted solid to the compartment’s inside—she felt the urge to weep. She had hoped for a respirator, but the droid had probably never been manually operated and therefore its compartments never stocked.

  The string, though, might have some use. She unwound it, tying one end around her wrist and the other around a joint in the driver’s seat. If nothing better, it would allow her to find her way back to the droid if her escape attempt failed.

  A walkway seared in the rock led to the docked freighter. Lia hung back, allowing the other droids to pass her, then at the last moment jerked the droid right, following the path out to her shuttle.

  The single guard standing watch outside wore a spacesuit, the mask reflecting the night sky, hiding his species. He held a rifle across his chest, but he lowered it as she approached, and inside the compartment, a transmitter light flickered.

  ‘State your purpose.’

  ‘Malfunction,’ Lia said into the receiver, hoping her voice was disguised. ‘Request immediate attention. Tread is damaged.’

  The guard came forward. Lia took the droid as close to the shuttle as she could before having to stop. The airlock control was a mere fifteen feet ahead, a little to the right. Lia stared at the view-screen, memorizing its position.

  The guard stepped into view, covering the shuttle, and then moved around, the view clearing. The droid’s upper casing rumbled as a heavy hand fell on it.

  ‘Three… two…’

  One.

  Lia pressed the rear compartment release, kicking out at the same time. It met resistance as it struck the guard. Air hissed as it escaped the compartment, and Lia squeezed her eyes shut, clamping one hand over her mouth and nose as she burst out, moving by memory, feeling the crunch of gravel underfoot, using her other hand to guide her around the droid’s side.

  Twelve, ten, eight, six… she counted down the steps in her mind, guessing the shuttle’s location, aware that a single slip and the vacuum would rip the air from her lungs. It bit at her skin like tiny fish, the air caught under her suit fighting to escape.

  The world began to compress. The darkness was killing her, the utter silence a terror unlike any she had known before. One more step, then she reached out, stretching—

  --and felt metal under her fingers, the curves of a hand shape. Something shuddered, then she was falling forward, striking a hard floor. A hiss—a wonderful, wonderful hiss—came from behind her, and she rolled, knocking her hands free.

  For a moment there was only total panic as her lungs sought air not yet available. Then, as dizziness made her vision reel, a red light turned to green and she was gasping in beautiful, freezing air.

  She sat up. The airlock disengaged, the inner door opening. Lia’s thigh wound burned, reminding her she was still alive. She forced herself to her feet and staggered down the shuttle’s single corridor to the cockpit.

  The view-screens revealed the spaceport’s military had already mobilized. The shuttle had neither great speed nor weaponry, so her only ally was surprise. She fired the few defensive cannons at her disposal, scattering the guards, before setting the controls to manual and activating the lower thrusters.

  As the shuttle lurched into the air and blasted out of the spaceport, narrowly missing an incoming freighter, Lia switched off the transmitter, silencing the demands to turn back, the threat of pursuit, and the assurance that a tracker had been fitted to her shuttle.

  She didn’t have far to go. She set a course then curled up on the pilot’s chair, her hands over her face, praying to anyone who might listen to forgive her for what she had to do.

  37

  Harlan5

  Harlan5 shook off the last of the rocks and climbed out of the hole. His casing was battered and dented, and one leg had lost eighty percent of its mobility, but he’d had worse. A decent mechanic would delight in charging the captain a small fortune to fix him up.

  His internal systems smiled. The captain. She’d never believe any of this. Caladan, however, would probably enjoy a highlights reel over a glass of some human poison, and perhaps even find a new level of respect.

  Rocks rose all around him. His orientation instruments had been damaged in the fall, burial, and subsequent escape, so it took him a few minutes to set up some auxiliary systems to establish quite where he was.

  Roughly half an Earth-mile from where he had gone underground, it seemed, although the landscape had seen a little roughing up in the meantime.

  He dragged himself up to the nearest decent viewpoint to take stock of the land around him. Sinkholes had opened everywhere, many of them still pluming towers of smoke. Great rents had been torn through the forest and the topsoil beneath, and at the sight of one huge severed leg at least double the length of a fully extended Matilda, Harlan5 could establish that the queen had indeed left her nest.

  To the south lay a ruined, smoking spacecraft. Around it lay the bodies—many of them in pieces—of hundreds of Evattlans and other soldiers. It appeared he had missed quite a battle, which his programming considered a good thing for his last working shoulder cannon had been smashed to nothing. Looking around him, he found a solid sapling that had been ripped out of the ground and picked it up, swinging it around his head. It was primitive, but a weapon was a weapon.

  By some miracle, his transmitters—operated by a small external box on the back of his head unit—still worked, but when he attempted to contact Beth, Paul or Davar, he was met only with static.

  It didn’t necessarily mean they were dead. They could have lost their equipment, suffered some malfunction, or Raylan Climlee’s forces might be activating a blocker. It did mean that he had to think outside his programming in order to find them.

  The Matilda, however, was fully online. Harlan5 climbed as high as he could to get the best signal then contacted the ship’s computer.

  They had possessed the remarkable foresight to land a few miles south of the battlefield, and the Matilda still lay undiscovered, unless you counted the monkeys which had claimed the upper side of her upper hull as territory.

  To the north, three ships
hung low to the horizon. Raylan Climlee’s seek-and-destroy unit. Perhaps they were on the trail of the humans, perhaps scouting for other threats in the area. The Matilda could easily outrun them, but with Harlan5’s damaged leg it would take hours to struggle back.

  Activating the ship’s automated systems by remote required a captain’s override. Harlan5’s programming briefly agonized over the decision then surmised that in the absence of anyone obviously still alive, he could once again assume the role of captain.

  ‘Come to me,’ he said out loud. Even though a voice command was unnecessary, it would look good if Caladan ever did watch the playback.

  Somewhere far away, he thought he heard thrusters, but it might just have been the seek-and-destroy unit blasting some unsuspecting patch of earth. With nothing to do but wait, he climbed back down into the valley, checking the tracks of passing soldiers to estimate their direction and how long ago they had passed. If the humans were alive, it was likely they were now hunted.

  A rustling in the trees to his left caused Harlan to turn. He lifted the sapling ready to fight, but it was only a group of the monkeys, racing through the trees. He turned to watch them go, and saw them, one after the other, disappear into a small tunnel entrance near the base of a larger tree.

  He looked up. The sky had begun to darken. The long night was approaching. His temperature gauge had also been damaged, but while the humans might evade the soldiers, there would be no escape from the cold.

  ‘Where are you?’

  As if in answer a whirring sound came from through the trees. The leaves rustled, then over the top of the branches rose a sight his programming told him was most welcome: the hovering, spinning Matilda, bristling with weaponry, in full defensive mode. She set down with the grace of a falling flower on a patch of earth nearby, and Harlan clambered over the rocks to reach her. He lifted a hand to touch her hull, muttered, ‘I’m happy to see you, old friend,’ then wondered if he wasn’t overdoing the voiceovers a bit.

  Adjusting the autopilot to keep the Matilda flying low to the ground, Harlan5 took the old ship back around the ridgeline, cutting through the valley in which they had landed. Raylan Climlee’s army had decimated what remained of the Evattlan hive, slaughtering the insects with senseless abandon while simultaneously suffering heavy losses of their own. The Evattlans, dead anyway without their queen, had inflicted a surprising level of damage, as though the threat had pulled forth an evolutionary savagery. Harlan5 only hoped his three human friends had managed to avoid it.

  He was nearly back at the landing site when the radar transmitter began to bleep.

  The seek-and-destroy team had detected their presence. Harlan5 activated the gun towers but taking on the three ships was foolhardy unless he located the humans. It would be better to run, then send out a further distress signal in the hope that the captain was listening somewhere.

  He turned the ship around for one last pass. The nearest line of soldiers was just a mile away, clambering over rocks and between the trees. Harlan5 opened fire, the Matilda’s cannons strafing the soldiers through the undergrowth, inflicting heavy losses, then brought the ship around, homing in on their landing site. If there were anywhere the humans had gone, it would be here.

  The scorched patch of earth was still there, as was damage to the remaining moss where the ship had broken free.

  But no humans.

  Harlan5’s programming told him he ought to feel disappointed. He instructed the autopilot to prime the rear thrusters, ready to exit the atmosphere. Almost as an afterthought, he switched on the surround view-screens and took a last look at the mountainside.

  Something flashed from among the rocks. Harlan5 expanded the view, zooming in. A small figure of a human woman, holding up a chrome-shiny piece of exoskeleton, waving it about to catch the rays of haphazard light held inside Vattla’s atmosphere.

  Beth.

  Harlan5 brought the ship in close, cut off power to the main lower thruster, and opened a hatch. Leaving the autopilot to look after the ship, he stumbled down through the shuddering levels, leaned out of the hatch, and dropped a rope ladder down.

  ‘Harlan!’ Beth screamed, throwing the piece of exoskeleton aside and waving her arms.

  I hope you’re watching this, Caladan, he thought. Then, lifting his least damaged hand in greeting, he said, ‘Consider this a rescue.’

  It felt artificially good to be of help, sometimes.

  38

  Caladan

  There were few times when Caladan felt thankful for the lack of an arm, but in the tight confines of the Raging Fire’s pod-shuttle the extra space was welcome. Now, as he flew the tiny craft into the facility’s entrance, that extra jostling room gave him the movement he required to negotiate the tight turns and narrow corridors.

  With no other choice but to use a shuttle designed for outer maintenance while in deep-space, he used the tiny cannons to blast open the next doors he reached then turned the spotlights to full, looking for any sign of Jake.

  He had passed the shuttle Jake had taken, still docked on the landing pad outside the entrance, but the facility was in full shutdown. Glancing up once before he entered the labyrinth of corridors, he saw the Raging Fire’s huge scoop loading the radiation core into the protective chamber in the specially designed cargo hold on the ship’s underside.

  At least one job was done. He could only hope Lump decided not to make mischief of himself and fly off with their precious cargo.

  Thinking about the monstrosity that claimed to be his son helped take his mind off the futility of Jake’s situation. Yes, he could have listened. Yes, he felt a little guilty, but no, he felt no parenting responsibilities for a monster supposedly born of his DNA.

  They would find a spaceport somewhere on the way. Caladan would contact a maintenance yard—one run perhaps by one of the ugly off-worlder species where Lump would fit right in—and get his supposed son a job. Then, they would go their separate ways. Lump could make his own path in the galaxy, and Caladan would feel no more guilt.

  The pod bumped against a coolant pipe that had fallen from the ceiling, bringing Caladan back to reality. The corridor up ahead was empty, so he steered the pod around a corner into another, using an onboard scanner which could supposedly detect life forms, but had so far come up with nothing.

  ‘Jake, where are you?’ he muttered.

  Around a corner he saw a wall that had begun to buckle, closing off the corridor. Caladan used a robotic arm to force a way through, but on the rear-view monitor he saw the wall collapse inward again.

  According to his map, he was near the main radiation chamber. He jumped, nearly steering into a wall as the life-form detector gave a sudden beep. There was someone up ahead.

  ‘Jake…?’ He broke through a pair of doors and scanned the room. Nothing. The scanner was adamant, though, so Caladan slowed, switching on all the external views, looking into every dark corner.

  In one, something moved.

  Jake.

  Caladan turned the lights and saw the journalist’s body lying flat on the floor, spread-eagled as though thrown there and now held down.

  He pulled a flexi-helmet from a fitting on the roof and slipped it over his face. With the press of a button, a seal expanded around his neck and a film bulged over his features, a small generator giving him an hour or so of oxygen.

  Dust spread out around the pod’s lower thruster as Caladan touched down. He decompressed the chamber then opened the roof. The shock of the natural gravity was sudden and unexpected, dragging him down, smashing his face against the pod’s upper surface. The temporary helmet flexed, and for a terrible moment he thought it would break. Then it settled again, now flecked with spots of his blood.

  It wasn’t easy to clamber out with one hand, but Caladan struggled over, dropped down into the dust beside Jake.

  The journalist lay inert and unmoving, his body cold to the touch. Caladan jammed a finger into Jake’s neck, depressing the flexi-suit into the skin.
He felt a slight pulse, enough to give Jake a chance.

  ‘Come on,’ he muttered, his voice echoey inside the flexi-helmet. ‘Let’s get you out of here.’

  Jake didn’t move. Caladan reached around his chest, dragging him backward, gritting his teeth against the weight. ‘Come on!’

  He hauled with all his might, and Jake slid a few centimeters back toward the pod-shuttle. Caladan jerked again, but his strength was fading, and with one arm, it was impossible to grip.

  He let go of Jake and crawled back to the shuttle. Climbing inside, he activated the rear thruster, but this time angled the tiny craft sideways, turning it over so it lowered down over Jake from above. Pushing with the gravity, the pod came down, trapping Caladan and Jake inside.

  ‘Don’t get too comfortable,’ Caladan said, his face pressed against Jake’s unconscious one, as he activated the upper door control. It scraped along the ground, scooping Jake up and inside. Caladan felt a surge of euphoria as it looked like his plan would work, but then the doors jammed, catching on something protruding from the floor.

  Caladan wanted to laugh. Jake’s beloved flask of Stillwater. Even unconscious, Jake still clung to it, but it was keeping the door from closing. Caladan tried to reach around to grab it, but he was reaching around Jake on his wrong side. The flask was just out of reach.

  An alarm sounded in his flexi-helmet, signaling just fifteen minutes of oxygen. He had used more than he thought and risked running out. He looked at the flask then gave Jake’s unconscious face an apologetic look.

  ‘Sorry, my friend,’ he said. ‘Sometimes we all have to make sacrifices.’

  He leaned against the pod-shuttle’s controls, activating a side thruster. The pod immediately rolled, the flask falling loose as the doors snapped shut.