Red Sun Bleeding

by Hunt, Stephen

  ‘That’s not the really worrying thing. The Never Come Down was posted missing, not heard of again. This world’s name was entered in the common navigation records by the other four ships after they settled a system a few light years from here.’

  ‘Not scared of superstition again, Zeno? Isn’t that was the damned professor said?’

  ‘I’ve asked Polter to widen the satellite search… scan for the wreckage of a ship and the remains of a colony down here.’

  Lana’s eyes narrowed. It wouldn’t be the first failed colony. Calder himself had come from just such a beast… a lost technological base and humanity driven to barbarism by an unexpected ice age on Hesperus. But if the race of man were going to try to settle here, they would have either needed to turn to genetic engineering to alter their bodies, or have been planning some serious terraforming to cool the world for human-standard survival. Hardly worth doing with a short-lease sun about to burn out above. Unless the world contains something very valuable, said the voice within her. The kind of valuable that attracted pond life like Dollar-sign Dillard and his mine’s shadowy backers. ‘The Never Come Down. Maybe her crew should have taken the ship’s name a little more literally,’ mused Lana. ‘Set-up a nice safe orbital habitat to live on and kept the local ecosystem at a shuttle ride’s distance.’

  ‘Advice that perhaps we should have followed, too?’ suggested Skrat.

  ‘File it under spilt milk, Mister raz Skeratt.’

  ‘I’m hardly a mammal, dear girl,’ complained the first mate. ‘Your race’s fondness for milk, spilt or otherwise, has always left me rather nauseous.’

  Lana scratched her face. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll land the shuttle on the field, make a big show of adjusting the sensors for low-light and thermal imaging, then take off again.’

  ‘The odds of finding anything in the dark…’ said Zeno.

  ‘It’s not the jungle we’ll be searching,’ said Lana. ‘Skrat, you head on out for a wider sweep of the area. Before you go, you’ll pass low over the mine works and drop me and Zeno by the edge of the mountains. If we know what’s really going on here, we’ll have a better chance of finding Calder, even if they haven’t got him tied up in some tunnel chamber next to a pallet full of car-sized diamonds.’

  ‘Do I get any choice as to whether I play Rick Rail-gun: Interstellar Commando out there?’ said Zeno.

  ‘Same choice as always,’ said Lana.

  ‘I knew you were going to say that.’

  ‘Must be the problem of being nearly immortal,’ said Lana. ‘Give it long enough and everything starts to sound the same.’

  ‘Not nearly immortal enough for this skeg-fest,’ said Zeno. ‘Not nearly enough.’

  ‘I believe you’re confusing immortality with indestructability, old chap,’ said Skrat.

  ‘Yeah, and I knew you were going to say that too.’

  ***

  Calder stared in shock at the humanoid robot coming down the path from the lodge. It was a little higher than a man, stocky and powerful, but it had been designed to resemble a cat – not a realistic representation… an exaggerated cartoon animal that might have worked at a theme park, colourful enamelled plating with writing printed across its chest in a script he didn’t recognize. He realized the predators and their riders had vanished behind him, slipping away into the jungle. For a moment Calder had toyed with the idea that the lodge might belong to the predators – some implausibly advanced home for the simple jungle dwellers. But this was man-made, or the product of one of the other sentient races. Human probably, judging by the machine’s carbon whiskers twitching on the spherical head. He noticed cameras behind the two spacious glass eyes focusing on him, a slight whirring as the robot inspected the two newcomers.

  ‘Donata mushimanrui namuchi?’ barked the robot, the smiling steel slash in the middle of its head moving in a simulacrum of a real mouth.

  ‘We’re from the mining camp,’ said Calder. ‘Can you understand me?’

  The robot’s over-sized head wobbled from side to side then it spoke again. ‘Yes. Are you guests of the company?’

  ‘I guess that would depend on which company?’

  ‘This resort is for guests of the company,’ repeated the robot. It wasn’t anywhere near sentient, Calder realized. Nothing like Zeno. ‘Are you guests of Etruka Energy Processing?’

  ‘We are,’ lied Calder. They just had to get inside. Find whoever was in charge of the lodge. They must have a radio and some means of getting in and out of the jungle.

  ‘Then you should enter,’ said the robot, stepping back, a whirring noise from the electric motors along its legs as it backed up. ‘Have you been hunting?’

  Calder slapped the side of his rife and checked that Lento hadn’t tried to vanish along with the predators. ‘In a manner of speaking. I’m Calder Durk and this is Janet Lento.’

  ‘I am Momoko, the official mascot of Etruka Energy,’ said the robot. ‘I am powerful but fun. And I am always reasonable.’

  It sounded like its mental state wasn’t that far off the half-insane driver’s. What was it about this jungle that seemed to send people off the deep end? The machine led the pair of visitors up the path and towards the lodge, a neatly landscaped garden of exotic plants – presumable native – on either side being watered by sprinklers in the grounds. There was no sign of other robots. Or humans. In the sky above the clearing he saw a rippling similar to a heat haze. Calder’s brain hurt like it always did when he was recalling the tape-learnt lessons from the sims, each false memory drilled into his brain like buckshot pellets. That had to be a one-way chameleon field – from the air you would see only jungle. Whoever had built this place hadn’t wanted it to be visible to the naked eye from above. Protection from the vast winged beasts that were the top of the local food chain, or from the kind of visitor that might turn up in orbit with high resolution sensors mounted on a starship’s hull?

  ‘Where are the others, Momoko? The staff and guests from the company?’

  ‘That information isn’t on the board,’ said Momoko, waddling up the path.

  ‘What board is that?’

  ‘The board with the instructions,’ said the robot. ‘I wrote them. My memory is erased every morning.’

  Calder glanced nervously around the garden. ‘And for the love of the gods, who’s erasing your memory out here?’

  ‘I am,’ said the robot. ‘Automatically. It says so on the board.’

  It led the two of them inside. An open garden viewing room with simple white walls and comfortable seating carved out of the floor, seven or eight open doors leading to other parts of the lodge. Pleasantly cold compared to the burning heat outside, Calder and Lento’s suits audibly crackling as they powered down their own cooling function.

  The board Momoko treated with such reverence was a white screen, a thin plastic-glass active matrix hanging in the air with a numbered list of instructions in the same script written on the robot’s chest. ‘Can you translate this into standard?’ asked Calder.

  ‘Guests’ comfort is paramount.’

  The screen blinked as it reflowed… rewritten in alliance script. At the top it read “Read these instructions when you wake with no memory. You are Momoko, the official mascot of Etruka Energy Company. You are powerful but fun. And you are always reasonable. You have set certain sectors of your short and long term memory to automatically erase itself every morning.” Calder traced a finger along the list. “One. Care for and maintain the lodge. Download lodge protocols for detailed instructions. Two. Care for and maintain the gardens… especially the toxin fence. Download lodge protocols for detailed instructions. Three. Honour and protect the company. Four. Honour and protect all visitors of the company. Five. Fear the night.” There was a line break and then the instructions continued. “The hunters will return one day and you will leave this place. Never attempt to reconstitute your deleted memories.”

  ‘You’re the only robot here?’ asked Calder.

&nb
sp; ‘I am not,’ said Momoko. ‘There are seven of us.’ His hand rose to indicate a passage. Calder went across and glanced inside. There were six other robots identical to Momoko standing in battery recharging ports. They had all ripped their heads off their bodies, metal hands forlornly clutching each cat-faced metal oval high in the air as though they were a line of headless ghosts, cables dangling underneath like severed veins.

  ‘They were not sufficiently loyal to the company,’ said the robot, sadly.

  ‘They killed themselves?’

  ‘Self-inflicted property damage,’ said the robot. ‘Honour the company. Destroying company property is frowned upon, don’t you think so? They left me alone. To do all the work by myself.’

  Calder suddenly looked around. Janet Lento wasn’t behind him anymore. He panicked. ‘Where’s Janet Lento?’

  ‘I see the female guest on the lodge’s cameras. She is walking inside the garden.’

  Calder rushed outside, followed by Momoko clunking fast behind. Lento wasn’t immediately in sight, so he sprinted around the corner. Behind the lodge was a landscaped garden, a neat oblong of raked rocks next to a pond with a wooden pagoda, stepping stones across the water. Lento stood there looking at a series of graves… compacted mounds with stone markers. The grim sight hadn’t made her any more loquacious. She held her peace, swaying slightly. Calder counted five mounds. Each marker stone had been carefully etched with a vertical line in the same symbol-like script printed across the robot’s chest.

  ‘How did they die?’ Calder asked the robot.

  ‘That information isn’t on the board.’

  ‘What do the gravestones read?’

  ‘Seiji Machimura. Nobutaka Aso. Taro Machimura. Katsuya Kawaguchi. Hirofumi Koumura.’

  Just names, then. No dates, No cause of death. Calder knelt by the gravestones, running a hand across the cracked, weather surface. The writing had been carved with a small handheld laser. The headstones weren’t recent. Over fifty years old at least. The part of him that had been inhabiting cop show sims for far too long wanted to disinter the bodies and check for wounds. But buried out in the jungle for this long with the local insects, there wouldn’t be much left. And he hardly had access to a local pathology lab. ‘How long have you been here, Momoko?’

  ‘That information isn’t on the board.’

  ‘Did you bury them?’

  ‘That—’

  ‘I know,’ said Calder. ‘Not on the board.’ He took Lento’s hand and led her away unprotesting from the graves. ‘We need to keep Lento here safe, Momoko. She’s had an accident in the jungle. It’s left her traumatized.’

  ‘The protocols say the lodge seals itself every night,’ said Momoko. ‘All guests should be inside after dusk for reasons of safety. Fear the night.’

  Calder didn’t need to be told twice. It was growing too dark to travel around here now. Ground lights warmed up around the garden, painting the undersides of the giant flowers with fairy colours. He looked at the protective fence. It seemed so flimsy. Diaphanous, almost, flexing in the breeze. Where it touched the ground it branched into myriad tiny roots, like a fungal growth infecting the ground. As he was gazing, he saw the shadowed silhouette of one of the elephant-trunked herbivores wander into the white barrier, squealing as it touched the fabric and millions of spiny threads injected it with a poison that burnt worse than acid. Calder grunted. The toxin fence wouldn’t protect against aerial creatures, but that was what the camouflage field was for. Fear the night. Calder wondered if he wouldn’t be safer in the rain forest with the local pack of riders and their predator steeds. The pack must have been around when this hunting lodge was set up; still remembering an age when thrill-seeking human hunters and their powerful weapons blundered through the jungle, taking pot-shots at the mega-fauna. No doubt leaving months of food behind in their heavily armed wake. And they had mistaken Calder and Lento for more of the same. Corporate hospitality at its most wild – illegal hunting in the barely explored border worlds. The ideal tonic for corporate lords bored with their affluent, extended lives. Whatever the safari guests had found here had proved a little too interesting for them.

  All three of them entered the lodge. Calder left Momoko with instructions to look after Lento in the viewing room and make sure she stayed put, while he went to explore the rest of the lodge. There were seven guest rooms, all tidy and identical. Double beds with silk sheets and an ensuite bathroom. No dust. No personal possessions as clues to the previous occupants. A small oak table by either side with a single drawer containing a paper book which looked like the corporate philosophy of the company that owned the lodge. A cartoon cat that resembled Momoko on the cover, lifting up a smiling child in front of a vast orbital solar array – the kind that could reflect enough power to a ground station to power a continent. An interface on the table activated the room’s entertainment system, walls suddenly filled with live views of the jungle outside. Calder shivered and changed the display. An Asiatic-faced woman appeared in a red silk dress, her arms stretched out towards Calder, singing in the same language that Momoko had first barked at Calder. He shook his head and turned the walls off. Moving on, the young nobleman found a large stainless steel kitchen that resembled a laboratory. After checking the taps were still fed by a filtered well, Calder excitedly bypassed the ovens and checked the area’s food production unit. It was still under power and working. He could feed it with vegetation from outside – even dirt – and it would process the molecules into near-enough terrestrial food. The best news he’d experienced all day. They could hole up here and await rescue without starving or going thirsty. On the other side of the lodge was a boot room with lockers for clothes and weapons, glowing screens with pictograms to indicate what each locker should contain floating next to a silhouette of an androgynous figure. All the weapons had been taken, along with most of the ammunition. But he could charge his gun’s cell here. What was left in the way of bullets, pellets, shells, fuel and energy packs were half a century out of date for Calder’s rifle. Pity. And some of the weapons looked a lot more deadly than Calder’s rifle… bazooka-sized guns with smart ammunition, flame-throwers, pulse energy weapons. Everything you would need to bring down the massive beasts that haunted this slowly dying world. He did find a couple of spare safari suits that would fit him and Lento at a pinch. Adaptive camouflage as well as fibre cooling, the suits turning mottled grey the instant he activated them, perfectly matching the back of the locker. There was also a set of stairs that led to the roof, a hatch up above like an airlock, ready to mate with the shuttles that brought the hunters to Abracadabra. He opened the hatch but there was no craft resting above. That must be where the comms the safari relied on had been situated – for there was none inside the lodge. Someone had left here in the last vessel to land; and in too much of a hurry to take the corpses. Had the robots buried them, and then kept the lodge functioning, waiting for another batch of visitors who never came? The only other thing of note was in what passed for the lodge’s basement, steels stairs descending to a lower level filled with a thermal tap… unlimited energy supplied from deep below the world’s surface. And there were control panels for the lodge’s systems, not much different from the interfaces he had trained on in the Gravity Rose’s engine room.

  Calder jumped, reaching for his rifle as something moved in the corner of his eye. But it was the robot. Momoko wavered into view from behind the bank of an energy generator, the comical metal cat ears on his head rotating as if fixing on the new arrival.

  ‘I thought I told you to look after Lento,’ said Calder.

  ‘The honoured female guest is asleep in client quarters two,’ said Momoko. ‘I can see her now on the room’s cameras. The lodge is sealed. For your safety. All night-time defence protocols are now activating.’

  ‘There’s one that needs to be deactivated,’ said Calder, tapping experimentally at the controls. The screen blinked back at him. ‘I need to drop the lodge’s camouflage cover.’

 
; ‘The holographic chameleon field is protection against aerial carnivore species – colloquial: “Draco”. Flighted hyper-lizard. Lodge risk assessment protocols do not permit night-time hunting by honoured guests or engaging flighted lizards at any time.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve come across those monstrous dragons,’ said Calder. ‘They tried to attack my shuttle on the way down to Abracadabra. But it’s not them I’m looking to attract. My starship will be looking for me. This lodge is the only source of artificial light outside of the mining camp. If we drop the field, the Gravity Rose might pick us up on their next optical sweep. They’d send a shuttle to pick us up.’

  ‘The hunters will return one day and you will leave this place,’ said Momoko, with a trace of almost prophetic awe in its voice.

  ‘Damn straight,’ said Calder.

  ‘But, said Momoko, raising three bulbous metal fingers and a single claw like thumb, ‘the lodge’s lights will also attract hostile flighted lizards to attack the honoured guests.’

  ‘I think we’re just going to have to take that chance,’ said Calder. ‘There are at least five graves outside filled with company’s your guests who were a lot better armed than me and Lento.’ And whatever they had met on this world, their heavy weapons hadn’t been protection enough. ‘Your fence and lodge wasn’t enough to shelter them. This is the fastest way of getting rescued. Will you help me?’

  ‘I am always reasonable,’ said Momoko. It reached out and worked its way through the menus until it reached the field control display. It cut the power to the field, a blinking red alert twisting on the screen, imploring to be restored as a steady beeping sounded. As it did so, Calder heard a scream echoing from the level above. Lento! He dashed up the stairs and along the corridor towards the bedrooms, unshouldering his rifle and he ran. He found her in the bed, quivering. Her room had automatically defaulted to the exterior jungle view – the line of trees and strange plants beyond the toxin fence, high-resolution to the degree it felt as though you were standing in front of the rain forest, hidden speakers bringing distant hoots and the low vibration of insects buzzing inside the lodge. He could just see three moons visible in the dark swirling sky, evil red disks replacing the distended sun. The toxin fence quivered as if something had just touched it and then withdrawn.