Red Sun Bleeding

by Hunt, Stephen

  ‘You think I’m still wrong to mistrust the professor? This stinks,’ said Lana. ‘It stinks like only a Dollar-sign Dillard job can.’

  ‘Hey, I’m the android here,’ said Zeno. ‘If my hunches were any good you’d be working for me rather than the other way around.’

  Lana walked to the edge of the tunnel, running her finger across the rock. ‘Look at this. It’s been cut with a water-knife.’

  Zeno inspected the walls. ‘Well, we know they’ve been doing a lot of pressurized water work… Janet Lento went missing on a tanker run to the local river. But you’re right. For quick entry, you’d use shaped charges. Go in dirty and only get delicate when you’ve got a good start behind you and want to avoid tunnel collapse.’

  ‘If there are any closet environmentalists on this team, they’re still hiding deep in their closet,’ said Lana. ‘They practically carved their base site out of the jungle with low-yield nukes. This world’s on its sell-by date… nobody here’s going to be restoring the landscape and planting two trees for every one they cut down. So why choose a scalpel over a saw?’

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ sighed Zeno. Lana knew how he felt. She glanced down the tunnel. People disappearing. First the driver and now Calder. In Lana’s experience, people only vanished like that when they’d stumbled across something they shouldn’t have. And she had a feeling that the other end of this tunnel was packed with shouldn’t have. She checked her rifle and the two of them slipped down the passage. Everything about these tunnel works felt too clean to her. As though Professor Sebba’s people were laying a subway system, not ripping rare-earth minerals out of the planet for a quick offworld sale. The tunnel led them straight ahead and stayed flat, a few side chambers drilled out on the way, but only to hold mining equipment rather than a serious attempt to dig into the ground. It felt as though they were heading for the heart of the towering mountain. Too deep now for their phones to have any chance of contacting the shuttle for help. After five minutes of walking, the tunnel terminated into two antechambers. The first hollow had a circle painted on the floor like a target.

  Zeno knelt down by the circle. ‘This is where they’re planning to deploy that nanotech mining virus we brought along. Looks like they’re going to be burning out one hell of a big shaft here.’

  ‘Let’s see what the other chamber holds.’

  The answer wasn’t what she had been expecting. A narrow vertical tunnel had been drilled into the floor of the room; a dark unlit well ominously waiting for them with no hint of what lay below. A metal rack had been fixed on the rock wall with crude industrial epoxy that had run down to the floor in white rivulets. In the rack lay a series of gravity chutes, hand-held units like dark plastic knuckledusters that could lower or lift their owner as though they occupied an invisible elevator.

  Zeno whistled. ‘They’re the most expensive thing I’ve seen on this planet.’

  ‘Alliance tech,’ said Lana. Anti-gravity floats were common enough in the lawless fringes of Edge space, but only in shuttles, trucks and industrial loaders. Miniaturization to this level cost big bucks. Probably military, special forces-grade. Far too fancy for mining.

  The android found a piece of thumb-sized rubble and dropped it down the dark shaft, listening for its landing with his enhanced hearing. He shook his head. ‘Long way down. I can control my claustrophobia. How about you?’

  ‘This shaft’s been drilled slow and careful. Whatever they’re after is down there.’ A shaft this narrow was going to drop a long way down, otherwise they would have made it bigger. A rescue shaft to a deeper part of the mine? But if so, where was the mine’s entrance, because they certainly hadn’t passed it up here? A single power cable ran along the room before disappearing into the well, stapled to the sides and powering whatever need energy below. Good for some lights, maybe. Hopefully.

  Zeno took an anti-gravity float off the rack and tossed a second one to Lana. ‘The phrase like a rat down a drain-pipe comes to mind.’

  ‘Check the power cell on your float,’ said Lana, examining hers. ‘Going down is one thing. But I want this to be a return trip.’

  ‘Amen to that, sister.’ Zeno went over to the edge of the well, shrugged, and stepped into darkness. The chute instantly detected the drop and activated, the android sinking into darkness and disappearing. Lana felt like a coward for not volunteering to go down first. This side-trip had been her idea. But it made sense for him to go before her. Zeno was a lot harder to kill than she was, ten times as strong and could see in the dark to boot.

  Lana started warily into the circle of darkness. She really didn’t want to go down there, but what choice did she have now? Second rat coming. Lana lifted the float over her head as though it was the handle of an umbrella and stepped into the void. For a terrible second she thought she was going to plummet to her death, the grab of gravity around her ankles, but then she felt the device vibrate into life and the chamber slide out of view, replaced by darkness. The only illumination she could see was a tiny green light blinking on the side of the chute. She could feel the warmth below, the air coming up from somewhere deep and hot. She resisted the urge to test the float’s ability at rising as well arresting her fall, allowing herself to drift ever down. The shaft’s side gently banged into her at times, and she had to use her boots to push herself away. Not wide enough to permit two people to fall side by side, that was for sure. No wonder they needed a modern mining virus to open up a second shaft. Nobody was bringing minerals up this pipe. She tried shutting her eyes but it made no difference. As dark with her eyelids open as closed. Her descent lasted half an hour. She was used to enclosed suits in vacuum, walking the Gravity Rose’s hull on magnetized boots, the endless void of deep space. She had never thought of herself as a claustrophobic. This shaft was almost enough to change that. At first she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her. But no, the sides of the tunnel were definitely shifting from inky black to dark grey. Illumination below, somewhere, and growing lighter with every foot she descended. Her float had detected a surface below, as it began slowing, and then suddenly the shaft’s walls passed out of sight and she was in a chamber deep underground. Zeno was waiting for her, standing by a rack similar to the one they had left behind, a selection of gravity chutes.

  Her legs trembled on contact with the hard rock floor. Fear or relief, she wasn’t sure which. Lana counted four chutes on the wall rack. Zeno had wisely attached his to his equipment belt, leaving nothing about his exit to chance. Lana did the same and looked around. A landing chamber the same size as the one above, a single passage leading out.

  ‘Are those chutes spares, do you think? Or do we have company down here?’ asked Lana.

  ‘Nobody else walking or talking that I can hear,’ said Zeno. ‘Let’s hope they’re in case of equipment failure.’

  ‘If the missing driver is down here, it would explain why nobody’s found her in the jungle yet.’

  ‘Hell of a lot effort to water-knife a shaft this deep just to dig a cell,’ said Zeno. ‘Kick her out beyond the base or the mine’s fence and she would be lunch for the local mega-fauna soon enough.’

  Lana grimaced. Her hopes of finding Calder tied up down here had almost vanished too. Pity, it would have been good to have her prejudices against the professor confirmed. ‘If this is a working mine, I’m a carrier commander.’

  They took the single exit, a tunnel little bigger than a corridor on Lana’s ship, bare walls and simple electric lighting. It stretched out for a minute or two’s walk, before terminating in a rough rock wall, bare except for a single instrument panel. Zeno inspected the panel. ‘I think this is a power interface.’

  ‘This doesn’t make sense,’ said Lana. ‘All this way down here, only to lead us to a dead end? The money they’ve spent getting this far? Why plan opening a second bigger shaft down here? This is like the dictionary definition of “money pit”. Is there a concealed entrance?’

  Zeno opened his mouth but said nothing – at lea
st, nothing within Lana’s range of hearing. He was ultrasounding their surroundings. ‘Solid rock all around us for hundreds of feet. No openings or concealed doors.’ He turned his attention back to the panel. ‘So, what does this do?’

  ‘As long as it isn’t drown us in sand or start the walls moving towards us, I’ll be happy.’

  ‘Sure isn’t an intercom to above ground,’ said Zeno. ‘There’s no wireless connection available.’ His little finger broke open and a cable snaked out, interfacing with a port at the bottom of the metal. As soon as the connection was made a screen in its centre started rapidly scrolling with moving numbers, blinking green against black. ‘I think this is a lock.’

  What to? ‘Can you break it?’

  ‘Not as such. But give me a second and I can trick its memory into playing back the last code entered. From the time stamp it would have been a couple of hours ago. You might want to get ready to tear back to the shaft, you know, in case a large granite sphere starts rolling down the corridor.’

  ‘I was joking about drowning in sand.’

  ‘Let’s hope whoever installed this panel feels the same,’ said Zeno. ‘Three, two, one…’

  Lana leap back as the wall started to shimmer. It disappeared, revealing a long horizontal tunnel stretching ahead. This tunnel was different, though. Its walls seemed to be made of a shiny black substance, slightly wet, and the ceiling was glowing green as though the rock had just been nuked. ‘Hey, I thought you said that wall was solid rock, not a hologram?’

  ‘It was solid rock,’ said Zeno. ‘Jeez. Abracadabra… now you see it, now you don’t.

  Lana ran her hand where the wall had been. ‘It had to be a hologram!’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Zeno. ‘The operations I sensed within the panel were too complex for that. I think they were activating a smart matter sequence.’

  ‘Programmable matter?’ laughed Lana. ‘That’s science fiction. Doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Zeno. ‘There’s one species that’s believed to have made extensive use of smart matter. The Heezy.’

  Lana’s eyes narrowed. ‘They’ve been extinct for billions of years.’

  Zeno pointed to the passage behind them. ‘Careful tunnelling with water-knives and no explosives. That’s not mining. That’s archaeology.’

  Lana’s heart sank. Nobody knew much about the Heezy. But that was only because every time one of their artefacts, fossilized ships or long-abandoned settlements was discovered, the alliance moved in shut everything down and classified every rumour and report about the find within a light year exclusion zone. The one thing Lana did know was the same history that every spacer had on file. How the Triple Alliance had been fighting the Skein in a war seven-hundred years ago, and humanity and its two allied species had been badly losing against their nearly indestructible virtual enemy. Until a human colony dome had found something – a very nasty Heezy something – buried under the ice of Neptune. And whatever it was had given the alliance the capability to turn Skein systems into smouldering ruins, one by one, until the Skeins had finally had to acknowledge defeat. An uneasy peace that had lasted to the current day.

  ‘Every time,’ snarled Lana. ‘Every time we have anything to do with Dollar-sign Dillard…’

  Zeno shut his eyes, the same way he always did when consulting the compressed copy of the ship’s database he carried around in his head. ‘And Professor Sebba’s original PhD on Mars? The one area of study you’re almost guaranteed not to find practical work in unless you’re on a highly classified government secondment.’

  ‘Let me guess… the Heezy.’

  ‘Give the starship captain a cigar.’

  ‘It’s not too late,’ said Zeno. ‘We can turn back now. We don’t have to see what’s down there. The best thing that’s going to happen is the alliance fleet catches us and wipes our memories. The worse is that they stick everyone on the Gravity Rose in orange jump-suits and lock us up on asteroid-max in some system that doesn’t officially exist on any star chart.’

  ‘I haven’t got enough memories left I can afford to lose any more,’ sighed Lana. Not after the cursed cold-sleep accident had left her as a perpetual amnesiac when it came to her past. ‘But I’m damned if I’m heading back to the surface without knowing what Dollar-sign’s got his tame academic tunnelling into this dying world for.’

  ‘We’re playing with fire, Lana. I was around during the original alliance-skein war… making my last will and testament, given how the skein are not big on any machine life except their own existing in that perfect little post-singularity future they’ve got planned for everyone. This is universe-changing doodie they’ve drilled into this time.’

  ‘And the professor and Dollar-sign were planning to have us acting as the mules transporting it out to their buyers,’ said Lana. ‘No doubt well concealed under a couple of hundred tonnes of minerals.’

  ‘Yeah, they were,’ said Zeno.

  Lana felt like kicking the wall in rage. And the worse part of it all was how badly they were being short-changed. She’d thought that Dollar-sign was being generous with the amount he had paid them to make this run. But the kind of material you could drag out of a Heezy settlement – even half-fossilized and unoperational – you could trade for a small stellar empire in the Edge and think yourself hard done in that deal. And how the hell were they going to get out of this one? ‘Walking away would be the sensible thing to do, wouldn’t it? Find Calder. Get back to the ship. Jump out as fast as possible and let Dollar-sign find some other sap to run his interdicted antiques across the Edge.’

  ‘You read my mind, sister.’

  Hell. ‘Let’s go and see what’s down here, then.’

  They advanced down the newly formed passage, Lana trying to get a grip on her trepidation. A species that set-up shop deep under the world and only called corridors into being when they required them. That was a hell of a keep-out sign. Did she really want to go poking around their legacy? Except that Dollar-sign had got here before them and made the decision for her. She found herself on the ledge of a cavern when the corridor ended, no barriers to protect mere mortals tumbling into the colossal space which lay beyond. Lana and the android carefully advanced, glancing over the edge. It was a circular shaft the width of a small inland sea narrowing to a distant vanishing point, maybe to the centre of the very world, no end in sight. But the chute wasn’t empty. Giant amorphous shapes moved up and down the shaft, changing shape as they drifted, sometimes merging with each other before breaking apart into squadrons of smaller objects. It was as though she was watching the universe’s biggest lava lamp. One of the shapes drifted past and she watched intently, both shocked and fascinated. Bright orange, the blob was covered in a circuit-like tracery of glowing yellow lines. Machines seemed to form around its skin, existing for brief seconds before being absorbed back into the surface. This one globule must have been as big as a zeppelin. What purpose it served, she didn’t know. More programmable matter, that was for sure. This was far from being a fossilised archaeology dig.

  ‘We’re really in trouble,’ said Lana.

  ‘This is the kind of swag that species go to war over,’ said Zeno.

  The narrow ledge they stood on ran to corridors at either end. Passages left in their open position, both with the miner’s interface panels riveted crudely into each wall. The professor had been busy down here, getting to grips with the mother lode.

  ‘How did they know this was down here?’ Lana mused aloud. ‘It’s not like there’s any sign of the Heezy above ground?’

  ‘I figure that missing colony ship,’ said Zeno. ‘Maybe not everyone was quite as missing as the records suggest. Dollar-sign’s an expert at ferreting out obscure reports that might lead to a quick buck. He practically lives in the data-sphere.’

  ‘I feel like an ant that’s accidently crawled into the chief’s anti-matter drive,’ said Lana. ‘Looking around in astonishment and whispering “Well, this ain’t no ant hill” to myself.
’

  ‘And that ant better be on the lookout for the chief’s size ten boots landing on it,’ muttered Zeno.

  With that cheery thought, Lana and her robot gang-boss crept through the passage to the left, more cold inky black walls, glistening like the veins of an unpleasant beast. A hangar-sized chamber at the end. This one contained a collection of holding equipment – obviously human – pitted ceramic tubes standing on tripods, transparent panels revealing globules of the Heezy’s programmable matter captured inside, tiny balls of it drifting around the tubes. Might be weapons. Might be computers. Might be data-nodes containing the extinct alien’s music collection. Nothing larger than the size the humans could comfortably squeeze through the narrow access shaft. Yet, Lana reminded herself. When the base drilled the main shaft using the tech she had helpfully shipped to the mine, the looting would really begin apace.

  Zeno crossed to an active screen the miners had unrolled and left standing in the middle of the chamber, marking the details of their explorations to date. ‘The professor’s people have covered hundreds of miles of this complex.’

  So, how were they getting about? Lana walked towards the one object in the room that was definitely not of human origin. Built into the wall at the far end sat a dark egg-shaped object the size of a small house. It was hollow with a raised dais built inside, like a throne for a mountain giant. The outside of the egg had another human interface panel drilled into it, which meant whatever this was, the professor had hacked into it. Lana lifted a silver tool case from the floor and flung it inside the monster egg. As soon as the case touched the ground, the floor seemed to rise up like an angry sea, enveloping the container, and then the object was absorbed into the back wall and vanished.

  ‘That’s how they’re moving around on this map,’ said Zeno. ‘Transport bubbles flowing through the rock, travelling between levels and chambers.’

  And she had thought that dropping down the access shaft was claustrophobic. ‘I’ll leave the pleasures of the Heezy subway system to the professor and her people. Let’s jump out of here.’