Red Sun Bleeding

by Hunt, Stephen

  ‘Keep away!’ shouted Calder. ‘This tree is part of my kingdom now.’ So, this is what his realm had shrunk to, the measure of his reduced circumstances. The first time he actually shot a modern weapon, too. Any guns in the sim entertainment shows that the ship’s android, Zeno, had used to bring him up to speed on modern existence probably didn’t count, as real as they had seemed at the time. It seemed shockingly easy compared to the many tedious years of real training with sword, shield, crossbow, longbow and armour he’d endured in his youth. His father and his man-at-arms permanently disappointed in Calder’s martial progress. If he had only possessed a couple of crates of these rifles back on Hesperus, he could have armed the based peasant farmers with the guns and routed every nation on the world – crowned himself emperor of the planet. He wouldn’t have been beaten on the battlefield, betrayed by his treacherous fiancée and then forced to ignobly flee his world into exile. Part of him was glad he had never been offered the temptation by the wizard who had turned out to be merely a rogue crew member. This rifle was a coward’s weapon, a knave’s weapon. No skill required. Neither strength nor patience. No need to put yourself in risk. Just sit back and slay at a distance like an indestructible god casting lightning bolts. Janet Lento’s wide eyes settled on the blood-mangled bodies quivering at the foot of the tree, seeming to find the carnage as much to her amazement as everything else she’d mutely observed. She shifted her gaze accusingly to Calder.

  ‘Better them than us,’ said Calder. ‘I know it isn’t exactly glory, but we’re about two hundred light years away from all that… and I’m not a prince anymore, so there’s not a lot left I can bring disgrace to, is there?’ Least of all the House of Durk.

  He checked the ammunition counter on the drum-like magazine. Two hundred pellets left. He had managed to fire off two thirds of his ammunition in one brief engagement. Great. Calder Durk. King of the Tree. He moved the fire selector to its sniper setting, single fire and maximum acceleration, to make his magazine last. An optical sight rose from the centre of the gun as he flipped the switch, an integral field projector to paint a target with a laser. Quite unnecessary. At this range a six year-old goat herder would be hard pressed to miss. Down in the jungle clearing the remaining spiders retreated into the neighbouring trees, foliage shaking as the creatures passed through the leaves. What are they up to now? Are they going to wait until we come down and see us off their domain? This part of the jungle was obviously serious spider territory. ‘I don’t suppose you know how these hairy monsters hunt… their pack behaviour… intelligence? Any nests near the mining camp…?’

  She said nothing. Something moved below in the clearing, and for a second Calder thought he caught sight of a little child moving through the brush. But then it was gone. I must be going mad out here. He wondered how long it would take in the alien jungle until he ended up like the truck driver. Two blades short of a castle armoury.

  ‘Gods, I wish we had some of the camp’s big robot tanks to protect us.’ And sitting behind a laser fence topped with automatic guns would have been nice right now. Except they obviously hadn’t proved up to the task of keeping Calder on the right side of the defensive perimeter. And tanks wouldn’t have been able to fit in the clearing and stop the spiders… swinging across between the trees on sticky white webbing! Calder swore and moved his rifle up, but the spiders were too dispersed in the surrounding trees, arcing across at random… ones, twos, three at once, a dozen different directions. Too many to sight. He fired off shots as they swung over like great hairy pendulums – all quivering legs, victoriously whistling and clattering their fangs like sharpening knives for a roast, his bullets cracking wide as the creatures slammed into the tree’s high foliage. His tree. Foliage trembled above them. How would such a creature hunt? The answer came to him. Dropping out of the tree like an assassin on whatever unfortunate passed below seemed a more than effective method. He tried to hold down his rising tide of terror. Losing it out here, up here, would be the very last thing he did.

  ‘Get down!’ Calder cried at Lento. His shout was unnecessary. She was already shinning her way towards the clearing’s grass. He swung off the branch and grabbed the wood, finding handholds to desperately jab his fingers into. It had seemed a lot less demanding to get into the tree. Then Calder found an easier way… it started raining spiders and he lost his grip, plummeting towards the jungle’s floor without the benefit of a spider’s webbing rope to control his fall. The ground slammed into him sideways – or maybe he was sideways, knocking the life out of him for a couple of seconds. His rifle securely slung around his back as two aggrieved wolf-sized arachnids landed close enough to reach out and touch.

  ***

  Captain Lana Fiveworlds ducked under the helicopter’s slowing rotor and ran towards the waiting miners and her lizard-like first mate, Skrat. Her android, Zeno, was off the helicopter and by her side.

  ‘What’s the situation?’ demanded Lana.

  ‘It’s terribly perplexing,’ said Skrat. ‘Calder appears to have disappeared from the camp. We were working together unloading the supplies. He went to check on a malfunctioning loading ramp. Calder seemed to be gone an inordinately long time, so I went over to see how he was doing. There was simply no sign of the fellow. We have searched the base and the landing field and every shuttle, but he’s completely vanished.’

  The camp’s manager, Kien-Yen Leong, appeared behind them, coming from the second copter. He addressed his own staff. ‘You’ve checked the fence’s sensor logs and all the automated guns?’

  ‘Of course we have,’ said one of the miners. ‘There’s no record of anything leaping the fence or flying through our air-space’ He pointed to one of the sentry guns on a tower, rotating with elephant-like radar manifolds sticking out of its turret, tracking a dragon-sized beast in the sky above.

  ‘Could you have had a power outage on your guns or the senor line?’ asked Lana.

  ‘’There’s no hole in the logs to match that,’ said the miner, looking up at the bloated blood-red sun. ‘Before you ask, all your crew are listed in the camp system as friendlies. None of our guns glitched and blew him to pieces... and even a mortar round leaves some remains. And these systems are hardened against solar activity. They’re rated for badly nuked battlefield environments. Background radiation here can be erratic, but it’s never approached anything close to that.’

  Lana held back from retorting that it was a pity the base hadn’t taken the same trouble with the truck that the missing miner had been driving. Maybe she and Zeno wouldn’t have been wasting their time searching for a probably long-dead worker when her crewman disappeared. Just like Calder Durk. Green as a meadow – at least, the ones on most worlds, if not Abracadabra - and trouble through and through. She gazed back to her helicopter… Professor Alison Sebba dismounting with a dainty disdain for the landing field’s mud. If the academic they’d transported to this world hadn’t been flying with Lana during the search for the missing miner, she would have suspected the life extended harpy had finally gotten her claws into Calder. Lana would have asked them to search the base again, checking under bunks for the pair.

  ‘One thing,’ said Zeno, the android’s skin glistening orange under the auburn light. ‘We asked you to do one thing out here, and that was to keep the new guy safe.’

  ‘I seem to recall advising the dear boy might be better occupied in the engine room,’ said Skrat, his thick green tail swishing irritably behind him.

  ‘I know, I know… it’s my fault,’ said Lana. ‘I thought a bit of shore leave and seeing his first real alien world would be good for him.’ It had hardly been a bribe at all, had it? Lana was the captain. She certainly wasn’t in competition with the professor over some ill-educated exiled nobleman… a junior crewman she shouldn’t be involved with in the first place. And this was meant to be a cake walk. A supply drop to a barely inhabited planet. How dangerous could it be?

  The conceited professor who might be able to answer that last quest
ion approached the group. ‘Please tell me that at least some of the camp’s workers are still occupied in the mine?’

  ‘Calder has vanished,’ said Lana, furious at her lack of concern. Cold selfishness was a trait a lot of the life-extended members of humanity shared. Supposedly a coping mechanism to deal with the less rich members of society’s habit of dying of old age. Lana suspected the professor probably possessed it from the age of twelve, however.

  ‘Have you contacted your ship?’ said Sebba. ‘If Mister Durk’s really not here, then perhaps he wandered into one of your empty shuttles as its autopilot activated and lifted the boat off the field? He could have found himself locked in and unable to get about. He might be trapped in an empty cargo bay in your vessel’s hangar as we speak?’

  Lana sighed. They were clutching at straws here. She unbelted her communicator and patched it through their command shuttle’s antenna to punch through this world’s god-awful radiation field. A brief bleeping as she paged the Gravity Rose’s bridge. Her navigator, Polter, picked up, his voice distorted by more static than normal. ‘Revered captain?’

  ‘Ask the ship to scan every returned cargo lifter racked on board. Check to see Calder Durk isn’t trapped in one of the freight bays. In fact, sweep the whole ship for life signs, while you’re about it… and do the same for any birds we’ve got in the air.’

  The line went silent for a minute, before the navigator returned. ‘Only myself on the bridge and the chief in the drive room. All the returning supply ships are safely docked on board and accounted for. Is Calder in trouble?’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ said Lana. ‘How are you doing laying down a satellite net up there?’

  ‘Nearly finished,’ said Polter. ‘But far too many of the satellites we have seeded are malfunctioning. It’s as though the devil himself is playing with the relays. You would think we’re trying to network this cursed system’s ebbing star.’

  ‘Do your best,’ said Lana. ‘It’s not just one of the locals we’re trying to track now. Calder is AWOL. Keep the ship in geostationary above this area of the continent. I want every sensor we’ve got monitoring as much of the rain forest as we can. Scan for smoke signals, rocks spelling SOS by a river-bank, night fires… anything that looks like human life down here.’

  ‘As you command. And I shall pray for his deliverance,’ said Polter.

  ‘You do that.’ At this point, nothing could hurt. She closed the line. Lana turned to the professor. ‘What aren’t you telling us?’

  ‘I’m not sure I know what you are talking about,’ said the professor.

  ‘I’ll give you a clue,’ said Zeno. Lana knew that look. The millennium-old android was about to give the academic a run for her money in the long-lived wisdom stakes. ‘This world… this operation… it doesn’t feel right. Like that truck dead out in the jungle. Its A.I erased itself. It committed suicide. Do you know how hard it is to get a machine to go against its programming like that? To scare it?’

  Sebba pointed at the mountains behind them and indicated the staff and the base. ‘Mountains. Miners. Digging. I don’t know what else you’re expecting here? Surely you’re not frightened by the fire-side superstitions that colonists tell each other to avoid settling last-stage systems? The sun might be on its last legs, but Abracadabra’s ecosystem will survive in this state for another couple of million years at least. It will outlast us all… even you, android.’

  ‘That’s what I’m worried about,’ said Zeno, scratching his wiry metal afro.

  ‘You have one advantage the truck’s systems did not… you are supposedly sentient. Start thinking with your brain rather than your emotions. We are the most advanced life-form on this world – we are surrounded by a laser fence set to fry anything bigger than a virus. There is the best part of an armoured regiment’s worth of autonomous weaponry rumbling around the camp. With your supply drop, we now have enough ammunition and juice to engage a small army.’

  ‘Our mutual paymaster for this mission has a somewhat, shall we say, dubious reputation as a rather shifty fellow,’ said Skrat. ‘One we’ve been stung by before. Hence our caution, professor.’

  ‘I won’t argue with you on that point,’ said Sebba. ‘If Mister Durk isn’t inside the camp, he must have wandered out when the gates opened for one of the mining robots. Is it possible he wanted to impress one of us by rescuing Janet Lento when he heard about the missing woman’s predicament?’

  Lana groaned. Calder had said something obliquely like that back on the ship. Operating on whatever cockamamie medieval honour code he had been raised with. The queen of the ship setting a series of impossible challenges to a potential suitor for him to prove his worth. But surely even Calder Durk wouldn’t be so stupid as to barrel into a dense alien forest where everything that moved wanted to kill, maim and consume him, just to rescue a damsel in distress?

  ‘So, the young man has gone. Did he take his rifle and communicator with him?’ asked Sebba.

  Skrat nodded. ‘The dear chap certainly didn’t leave them behind in the shuttle.’

  ‘There we are,’ said Sebba, haughtily. ‘You can take the man out of the collapsed barbarian society, but you can’t wholly take the barbarian nature out of the man. Not so much missing, as off on a quest!’

  ‘This ain’t some cheap sim show,’ said Zeno. ‘The dragons outside the fence are real, there are no goblins and Calder only has one life.’

  ‘I find his youthful indiscretion rather charming,’ said the professor. ‘Don’t you remember when you were fresh, android?’

  ‘Me, lady? My early days were just ones and zeroes. Sentience was an accident... not the plan. My kind doesn’t get to believe in God, just a disappointed corporation with a rogue asset they had to write down on the balance sheet.’

  And Lana, sadly, didn’t even remember that much. She gazed in fury at the academic, cold beyond even the cloying warmth of this hothouse world. Lana’s missing crewman just a bit of extra novelty for the professor’s jaded pleasure. ‘We’re going to keep on searching… for Calder and your missing driver.’

  ‘Of course you will. And the rest of us will get back to work.’ Sebba gazed pointedly at the miners. ‘So that we have something worth shipping out of here to justify the mine’s set-up costs.’

  Lana watched the wintry woman march off to a series of low concrete buildings that formed the base complex, the miners reluctantly following behind. Their boss had tarried behind for a second.

  ‘We’ll do what we can to help,’ said Leong. ‘For both our people.’ Then he departed for the base too.

  ‘It’s never easy,’ said Lana, as much to herself as her android and first mate. ‘Working for Dollar-sign Dillard. How could I ever have forgotten?’

  ‘If it were easy, it wouldn’t be us,’ said Zeno.

  ‘We’ll take a shuttle up, all of us together, and fly in shifts,’ said Lana. ‘A proper search pattern, quarter and quarter again. You can’t beat eyes on the ground and a live hand on the stick. We’ll let the ship’s scopes and the search algorithms handle the low probability areas of the sweep… we’ll go straight for the money… everywhere between the camp’s gate and the stranded truck.’

  Skrat looked at the jungle from behind the defence perimeter. He didn’t need the ship suit’s fibres set to deep freeze. For a skirl like him, this was as good as home. ‘Do you really think our man’s out there?’