Red Sun Bleeding

by Hunt, Stephen

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Other books by the Author

  PRAISE FOR STEPHEN HUNT’S FICTION

  CHAPTER ONE Two legs bad. Six legs good.

  CHAPTER TWO The mother-lode.

  CHAPTER THREE All that you must leave behind.

  CHAPTER FOUR The settlers’ vessel.

  CHAPTER FIVE Walk the Heezy’s guts.

  CHAPTER SIX Of epilogues.

  Red Sun Bleeding

  Sliding Void [3]

  Stephen Hunt

  Green Nebula Publishing (2013)

  * * *

  RED SUN BLEEDING (Book three in the 'Sliding Void' series)

  DESCRIPTION

  It should have all been so easy for Captain Lana Fiveworlds, owner of Fiveworlds Shipping and master of the free trader starship 'Gravity Rose'. A simple supply run to a mining operation in deep space on a world called Abracadabra. Alright, so the mining operation was illegal and the world unclaimed... that's why the job paid so damn well. But now she's stuck on a hothouse jungle planet, sweltering under the light of a dying red sun with not only oddly missing miners, but vanished crewmen too.

  The exiled barbarian prince Calder Durk had disappeared, presumed dragged over the mining camp's laser fence by one of the not-so-pleasant local predators. The skipper may or may not be in love with him, but you can never leave one of your own behind. Lana's android has a bad feeling about the place, and she also has to contend with an arrogant mission leader who is part of humanity's near immortal super-rich ruling class.

  Things are looking bad, and that was before the space pirates her rivals have paid to put her out of business jumped in-system looking to hijack her ship.

  Sadly for the crew of the Gravity Rose, matters can get even worse when they discover why nobody's ever survived Abracadabra long enough to put it on the charts. For this is one world with a terrible secret. And it just might be the last one for everyone trapped down on the planet.

  FORMAT

  Novella - part 3 of a continuing, linked series.

  THE SERIES SO FAR...

  Part 1 - Sliding Void.

  Part 2 - Transference Station.

  Part 3 - Red Sun Bleeding.

  AGE ADVISORY

  Age 15+ - mild violence and language.

  READ THIS BOOK IF YOU LIKE THESE AUTHORS...

  Douglas Adams

  Neal Asher

  Iain M. Banks

  Jack Campbell

  David Drake

  Orson Scott Card

  James S.A. Corey

  Evan Currie

  Peter F. Hamilton

  Ric Locke

  Dan Simmons

  Charles Stross

  David Weber

  GENRES

  Science fiction (space opera)

  Adventure (scifi)

  RED SUN BLEEDING

  Book 3 in the Sliding Void series.

  First published in 2013 by Green Nebula Press

  Copyright © 2013 by Stephen Hunt

  Typeset and designed by Green Nebula Press

  The right of Stephen Hunt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

  To follow Stephen on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/SFcrowsnest

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  To help report any typos, errors and similar in this work, use the form at http://www.stephenhunt.net/typo/typoform.php

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  For further information on Stephen Hunt’s novels, see his web site at http://www.StephenHunt.net

  Also by Stephen Hunt

  The Jackelian series

  (HarperCollins Voyager in the UK/Macmillan Tor in the USA)

  The Court of the Air

  The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

  Rise of the Iron Moon

  Secrets of the Fire Sea

  Jack Cloudie

  From the Deep of the Dark

  The Sliding Void series

  Sliding Void

  Transference Station

  Red Sun Bleeding

  The Agatha Witchley Mysteries: as Stephen A. Hunt

  In the Company of Ghosts

  The Plato Club

  Secrets of the Moon (coming soon)

  Other works

  Six Against the Stars

  For the Crown and the Dragon

  The Fortress in the Frost

  For links to these books, visit http://www.StephenHunt.net

  PRAISE FOR STEPHEN HUNT’S FICTION

  ‘Hunt's imagination is probably visible from space. He scatters concepts that other writers would mine for a trilogy like chocolate-bar wrappers.’

  - TOM HOLT

  ‘All manner of bizarre and fantastical extravagance.’

  - DAILY MAIL

  ‘Compulsive reading for all ages.’

  - GUARDIAN

  ‘Studded with invention.’

  -THE INDENDENT

  ‘To say this book is action packed is almost an understatement… a wonderful escapist yarn!’

  - INTERZONE

  ‘Hunt has packed the story full of intriguing gimmicks… affecting and original.’

  - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  ‘A rip-roaring Indiana Jones-style adventure.’

  —RT BOOK REVIEWS

  ‘A curious part-future blend.’

  - KIRKUS REVIEWS

  ‘An inventive, ambitious work, full of wonders and marvels.’

  - THE TIMES

  ‘Hunt knows what his audience like and gives it to them with a sardonic wit and carefully developed tension.’

  - TIME OUT

  ‘A ripping yarn … the story pounds along… constant inventiveness keeps the reader hooked… the finale is a cracking succession of cliffhangers and surprise comebacks. Great fun.’

  - SFX MAGAZINE

  ‘Put on your seatbelts for a frenetic cat and mouse encounter... an exciting tale.’

  - SF REVU

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 – Two legs bad. Six legs good.

  Chapter 2 – The mother-lode.

  Chapter 3 – All that you must leave behind.

  Chapter 4 – The settlers’ vessel.

  Chapter 5 – Walk the Heezy’s guts.

  Chapter 6 – Of epilogues.

  There once was a man up on high

  Who stepped off a cliff,

  And all the way down he complained

  That gravity sure is a bitch!

  - Ancient spacer’s shanty (anon).

  CHAPTER ONE

  Two legs bad. Six legs good.

  Calder Durk pulled the rifle’s stock close to his shoulder. Part of him – the barbarian part, probably – devoutly wished he carried the familiar broadsword he had trained on since a babe to face the beast about to leap out of the thick undergrowth. The more sensible part was grateful he carried a modern weapon with a si
x-hundred pellet drum, each shiny small metallic dart capable of being accelerated to bone-shattering velocities by the gun’s magnetic field. He listened to the crashing sound through the vines, growing closer every second. Snow-bears he knew how to fight. Mega-wolves he had hunted across glaciers, slain, stuffed and hung over the fireplace in his creaky old castle. But whatever was coming towards him now was going to be well out of his field of experience. That was the trouble with being reluctantly exiled from an icy cold medieval home, taken to the stars, signed up with a strange starship crew, then mysteriously and unceremoniously dumped into an alien jungle. None of this was exactly familiar. Except… the startled-looking woman who came hurtling out of the glistening wet scrub wore a green suit that Calder recognized. The same uniform as the other miners from this world’s sole human outpost. Was she the driver who had gone missing? The one the camp had spent weeks vainly searching the jungle for?

  ‘It’s alright,’ said Calder, raising his rifle barrel to show he meant no harm. ‘I’m from a ship chartered to bring supplies to the mining camp. Are you Janet Lento? My crew’s been helping the mining boss search the jungle for you.’

  The woman stopped, but didn’t say anything. What’s the matter with her? Calder might as well have been a statue she had unexpectedly stumbled across in the jungle. He saw the name tag stitched across her breast pocket, Lento. This was the missing driver, then. He realised that the look of shock on her face was a more or less permanent fixture – nothing to do with running into him out here in the middle of nowhere. Wide green eyes, glassy and wild. Taller than Calder, her frame thin from surviving a week in the wild on nothing but berries and bugs, long dark hair matted with dirt and leaves. She didn’t seem to be sweating, even with the furnace heat from the mad red sun streaming through the forest canopy.

  ‘I’m Calder Durk. My ship’s the Gravity Rose. I was on your camp’s landing field, unloading supplies. I lost consciousness, and when I woke up, I find myself out here. Damned if I know what happened or how I travelled beyond the base’s defence perimeter. Did something similar happen to you? My radio’s gone, but I’ve still got my rifle.’

  Janet unclipped a communicator from her belt and tentatively offered it to Calder, her mouth open as though she was trying to speak but couldn’t. He took it from her and tried the device, but only static came back to him. ‘It’s broken? I was warned communications on Abracadabra would be spotty. Something to do with the solar activity here?’

  He was about to pass the useless device back to her when he heard a crunching sound behind him. Calder wheeled around. A long whippet-thin creature emerged from between two of the trees, maybe a foot high, a bony nose like an elephant’s trunk reaching out to pull leaves off the bushes and shoving them into twin mouths either side of the trunk. It made contented snorts as it munched its way through the jungle, wobbling almost comically while grazing. He lowered his rifle. It was heading towards a large series of globular plants at the far side of the clearing, each sphere striped yellow and red like giant sweets and resting on a bed of vines and a single spiny cushion. As it followed the trail of leaves towards the spheres, they started to quiver, a sudden lance of heated steam bursting out of the bed of spines. The leaf eater squealed in an offended manner, leaping out of the way and bolting back the way it had came. Calder made a mental note to give any strange-looking plants a wide berth here. Of course, being an alien jungle, there weren’t many plants that were familiar to Calder.

  ‘You’ve stayed alive out here for week? Do you give survival lessons?’

  The woman just stared at Calder as though he was speaking a foreign language. He tried to offer the radio back to her but she showed no interest in receiving it. She really did appear quite insane, as though she was looking through Calder rather than at him. ‘Stay here,’ ordered Calder, gesturing pointedly at the ground as if he was speaking with a particularly dim foreigner. He approached the nearest tree, slung the rifle over his shoulder and climbed the trunk with both hands. Calder shinned up until he reached its lowest branches, large waxy shield-sized leaves an angry red… the same shade as this system’s dying sun. He used them as a ladder, easy climbing compared to the frozen forests of home, where slipping on a single icy branch would plunge you fatally to the ground. His eyes flicked down to ensure the mute woman hadn’t wandered away; but quite the opposite… she had shinned up the tree too, stopping by the lower boughs. Sensible. Staying out of the way must have been how she had survived in the jungle for so long. He reached the canopy’s top, poking his head through. Calder felt the hope drain from his heart. Just an endless crimson forest steaming from the last rain. Abracadabra’s ugly bloated sun pulsed high in the firmament, making the clouds appear to glow intermittently, filaments of red spreading out like running blood. No sign of the mining camp. No sign of the mountain even, where humanity’s only outpost on this faded world had been cut and blasted out of the thick jungle. How far have I been dragged from the base? If some predator was responsible for dragging him away from the camp, then the exiled nobleman should have been food for its larder long ago. He spotted two dragon-sized lizards wheeling over the distant forest… the same breed of beast which had circled his shuttle on the way down to the world, hungrily eyeing the new arrivals through the cockpit’s transparent ceramic. The only way things could get worse was if the dying sun finally went supernova early and killed Calder in the explosion. He ducked his head before the flying lizards noticed him, then carefully climbed back down, stopping on a branch close to Janet.

  ‘I don’t suppose you remember the way back to the mining truck you were driving?’

  Her mouth opened but she said nothing. Calder reached across and felt her arm’s sleeve. Like rubbing the surface of an iced pond. Her suit’s refrigeration fibres were still working, the same as his. Without them they would die here from dehydration and heat exhaustion all too quickly.

  ‘Well, I guess we’re both lost. Our best chance is to listen out for a helicopter from the base. If one comes close I can take a pot-shot close to it with my rifle – that should set off its defence alarm. Let them know we’re close.’

  Lento looked around twenty five, but with life extension treatments, she could have been as old as Calder’s grandmother. He really was lost – wrong planet, wrong time period, wrong situation. Janet’s mouth opened, but this time, rather than just sucking air, he heard words, so faint and rasped he couldn’t make them out. ‘What did you say?’

  Now Calder was listening, he heard her the second time.

  ‘It’s covered in spines.’

  Calder glanced around. Some of the jungle’s plants resembled giant cacti, but he couldn’t see any from where they were seated. ‘What is?’

  ‘It’s covered in spines,’ she repeated, hardly louder than a breath.

  Calder moaned in frustration. He was sitting in his tree with someone who was clearly out of hers. What had Janet Lento seen out here to send her off the deep end? ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll get out of this, Janet Lento. My crew won’t give up on me. And your people have been searching for you since you were posted missing.’

  ‘It’s covered in spines.’

  For a moment he wondered if she was talking about what passed for grass underfoot. Thick orange blades that bristled like walking on an old man’s chin. But then, this whole world was old. Just waiting to die. Hopefully, not like him and the mine’s missing driver. ‘Well, I’ll be sure to wear gloves if I have to pick it up.’ Humouring her seemed to have the desired effect. She fell silent. ‘We could try and light a fire and attract attention. But everything in this land is too damn damp, I’m not sure how well it’d burn. And with the steam from the rivers and rain, distinguishing the smoke from the general boil-off isn’t going to be easy.’ It might be worth a try, though. The Gravity Rose’s crab-like navigator, Polter, was still in orbit with the head of the drive room, Chief Paopao. They had been seeding orbital satellite coverage around the world when Calder’s shuttle launched down to the
ancient world. Could such technology resolve the difference between a rescue beacon’s smoke and the natural steam from rainfall? Satellites still seemed like magic to him. The wizard’s all-seeing eye. Science or sorcery, he would take whatever help he could get right now.

  Calder heard a scratching noise at the end of the branch. He peered through the bloody leaves. There was a spider the size of a rat shaking the tree’s vegetation, a peacock-like fan of multi-coloured fur at its rear, bristling as it drummed its fore-legs against the wood. Disgusted, Calder reversed his rifle and swiped the thing away with the gun’s collapsible metal butt. ‘Off you hop! This tree isn’t big enough for everyone. Guests get priority.’

  As the spider fell it made a keening whistling noise, an angry kettle brought to the boil. Its cry answered in the jungle, echoes distant and muted by the thick undergrowth. ‘That’s not good.’ The creature he had dislodged had fallen to the ground in the shade of the tree, whipping around in circles like a puppy chasing its tail.

  Janet Lento shinned higher up the tree as the faraway whistling grew closer, ferns rustling as more spiders appeared. And Calder realized that what he had ejected from the tree wasn’t exactly a spider... at least, not an adult one. The mature hunters weren’t rat-sized. In fact, the mastiff hunting hounds in the exiled prince’s palace kennels would have given the fully grown spiders a respectfully wide berth. They had a series of legs down either side; large and small limbs interweaved like a dancing tank, with at least four feelers up front for carrying and hacking with sharp, poisoned bristles. Dagger-sized fangs angrily clattered around their mouths, clusters of eyes at the top of the central body bulb focusing on Calder. They didn’t appear happy in the slightest to find uninvited visitors in their tree, mistreating their hatchlings. For Calder, the feeling was mutual. There was a long, low sound like creaking wood. He realised that while Janet Lento wasn’t speaking, she could still make some noises and was at least aware enough of her surroundings not to appreciate having dozens of nightmare-sized spiders scampering towards their perch above the jungle. Calder unslung the rifle and pointed it towards the ground. He squeezed the trigger but nothing happened. Cursing, he pressed the safety selector to semiautomatic and let have at the creatures below. His rifle was recoilless… the same magnetic field that accelerated the darts to hypersonic velocities catching the back burst and absorbing the energy, using it to help power the gun. Only a slight quivering with each hail of pellets triggered. Every short burst made a zup-zup sound as the gauss field flexed, followed by an angry explosive cracking as his ammunition broke the sound barrier. A swine-like squealing came from the spiders below as they were literally blown apart by each volley. They didn’t sound much like spiders… the arachnids back on Calder’s freezing home world, Hesperus, had been coin-sized, silent and shy. Shrewd enough to avoid humanity for the most part. These ones kept coming, leaping up at the lower trunk until Calder sighted on them. Not much more to it than pointing and squeezing. Colourful bodies bursting with the impact. The nobleman heard a scampering noise from the back of the tree, and he stood up, leaning against a branch to hose a wave of spiders climbing up the rear with bullets. He changed position, the assault on the front renewed with fresh vigour. They drummed against the wood as they climbed. Calling their pack, or maybe communicating with each other. Calder resisted the impulse to check his ammunition count. He sweated, shooting furiously into their ranks for maybe five minutes, beating back one attack from all sides simultaneously. The spiders finally started acting intelligently too, backing away from the tree, whistling angrily and impotently against the intruders, shaking their colourful fur fans as they attempted to intimidate the two newcomers. What was it the mining camp manager had said back on the landing field, describing the base fence’s murderous automated weapons? We’re not in the food chain and they’ve learnt it the hard way. Too damn right. This was probably the first time these things had run into humanity. Their fate was about the same as most non-sentient predators introduced to mankind across so many worlds.