‘The cat’s scratched out all of her curiosity?’
‘This tabby’s going home,’ said Lana. ‘Sebba’s got a good few centuries’ head-start on my aching noggin understanding any of this alien magic. She can keep it. All I need is an iron-cast method of anonymously tipping off fleet intelligence about Abracadabra without them tracing the information back to the Gravity Rose. After that, I figure Dollar-sign and his grubby friends will either vanish off the grid or suddenly develop acute memory loss. And all of this—’ she waved her hand around the chamber— ‘will be some highly covert science team’s problem, not mine.’
‘S.E.P.,’ grinned Zeno. ‘Somebody else’s problem. My favourite kind. Now you’re cooking with antimatter.’
They retraced their steps, sealing the corridor that led off the access shaft, before riding their chutes all the way up to the surface chamber. Lana and Zero racked the expensive levitation devices back in position, nothing out of place, and headed down the tunnel carved below the mountain. She was half-way down the tunnel when her phone received enough signal-boost to make a connection, vibrating into life. She checked her screen. It was a high-priority call from Polter. The navigator was running the signal through their makeshift satellite net. Lana flipped it into life.
‘Tell me that you’ve found Calder?’ said Lana, hardly allowing herself to hope.
She could barely hear the reply. Their depth under the mountain or the dying world’s weird atmosphere? ‘Skrat—investigating. Withdrawing to largest—moon. Found—cavern—there—to hide.’
‘Hide? Hide the hell from what?’
‘Inbound vessel,’ squawked Polter. ‘Silhouette on—scan matches—ship—previous dealings.’
‘What ship, Polter?’
‘The Doubtful Quasar.’
Zeno groaned. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’
Pirates were always bad news. And when it was a pirate crew that Lana had tricked once before and made their rough cybernetic-armed captain look a prize fool, she just knew they weren’t cruising through the system looking for stray liners to ransom.
‘It is—confirmed, revered captain.’
The comms line was becoming slightly clearer the closer they got to the entrance. ‘That’s no coincidence. I knew we were being followed when we left Transference system.’
‘The chief has found—tracking beacon—in cargo hold,’ said Polter. ‘Unusually advanced. Must have been concealed—on station. I have welded it onto satellite—now inserted into orbit.’
A decoy signal should buy her ship time to slip away. ‘Good work,’ said Lana. ‘We’ll get back to Skrat’s shuttle and rendezvous with you on that moon. Send Zeno the coordinates for him to memorize. Stay hidden on silent running and full stealth as best you can. I don’t want Steel-arm Bowen getting his hands on the Rose. Update Skrat on the situation and send him flying back here towards the mountains, ASAP. What did you say his shuttle was investigating?’
There was no answer from the phone, just static. ‘Polter, can you read me?’
‘Maybe out of range, if he’s running for the moon?’ said Zeno. ‘This lousy damn atmospheric soup. Or the satellite might have passed over the horizon?’
‘I hope so,’ said Lana. The alternative was too painful to contemplate. Surely he’d be able to keep on broadcasting if he was being boarded. Unless the pirates have upgraded their jamming gear after last time.
‘Are you sure it’s just the Gravity Rose that Steel-arm Bowen wants?’ said Zeno. ‘You did promise the mope that you’d marry him.’
‘Only to get us out of that mess on Gliese 832,’ said Lana.
Zeno forlornly shook his head. ‘Is there anyone in this sector of void you haven’t indulged in fleshie relations with?’
‘Yeah, your dad.’
‘Probably an android designer in a Japanese Kabushiki Kaisha who died sometime in the last millennium.’
‘You know, I thought he looked a little peaky.’ And now she faced the starkest of choices. A quick exit and abandon Calder to the hostile jungle, or stay put to continue the search and put both Skrat and Zeno in danger. Maybe lose the Gravity Rose, too. No good answer either way.
Zeno knew what was whirring through her mind. ‘We can always light out to the moon in the shuttle, lie low and let Steel-arm pillage the camp. After they’ve jumped out we can come back and restart the search for Calder.’
‘The pirates won’t jump out. Not without looking real hard for us first. And what the hell would we do if Steel-arm blunders into what we just came across? Having a bunch of working Heezy tech fall into Dollar-sign’s dirty hands is bad enough. Can you imagine the fun that Steel-arm and his goons would have with it?’
‘Yeah,’ said Zeno. ‘Rumours were that the fleet were busting worlds like soap bubbles at the end of the alliance-skein war. If that kind of heat reaches a pirate port, the only job offers the Gravity Rose will be getting is as an evacuation barge for anyone who can afford to run for deep space. That would be a shitty way to be remembered, wouldn’t it? The barbarians at the gate, and we’re the ones who supplied them the battering ram to break through and usher in a new dark age.’
‘Almost as bad as some of your last movies.’
Zeno snorted. She had a point. Only a few media geeks remembered the ancient films a long bankrupt media corporation had built him to star in.
So, this wasn’t somebody else’s problem anymore. It was back to being Lana’s. Just the way the damn universe liked it. They reached the entrance and the universe sealed its contempt for Lana. A ring of high power rifles pointed at her from behind a make-shift barricade surrounding the tunnel, her and Zeno’s chests a sudden haze of red targeting dots.
***
Calder was thrown to the floor again as he tried to stand up. The whole structure of the hunting lodge felt as though the dragons attacking outside were trying to uproot it from its foundations and hurl it into the air. Probably thought it was a nice hard egg filled with supper for the flight of massive winged lizards. The last surviving robot caretaker wouldn’t be good for much apart from as an aid to digestion. That left Calder and Janet Lento to satisfy them. There was a horrendous metallic ripping noise as something was torn from the side. The reinforced storm shutters shook manically as something huge clawed and furiously vibrated them.
‘I shall forget soon,’ warbled Momoko.
‘Unless you want to find yourself waking up every morning inside one of those monster’s stomachs with no memory of who you are and how you got there, do something useful.’
‘Hunting of flighted hyper-lizard is not permitted,’ cried the robot. ‘Health and safety guidance…’
‘You think?’ Calder grabbed Janet and lifted her up to her feet. ‘Run for the basement. The energy tap in the ground: it’s the deepest part of the lodge.’ Maybe the dragons would be electrocuted when they tried to peck out the inhabitants sheltering amongst the heavy generator gear. Not much of a hope, but…
The lodge tilted to the side and Janet yelped as she tumbled down the sloping floor, Calder spilling after her. A fierce ripping noise as part of their grounds supports were ripped away. These creatures were experts at treating the rainforest as their food basket, dipping in and ripping out trees to get to the good stuff. Sadly for the exiled nobleman, he was the good stuff. Only Momoko managed to stay upright, some trick of his automatic stabilization system. If there was any upside to this situation, the shadowy figure he thought he had glimpsed – the thing punching dents into the lodge – appeared to have given up its assault and left the job to the dragons.
There was a faint vibration against Calder’s back. He rolled over and the vibration followed him. It was the communication device that Janet had offered him back in the jungle! He pulled it off his belt with one hand, raising the other to protect himself from a shower of debris spilling out of the room’s wall’s built-in shelves. It sprung into life as soon as he pulled the heavy duty flip-lid back.
‘—down there? This is a
landing boat of the—’
Gravity Rose! It was Skrat! Calder had never been so glad to hear the sound of the first mate’s voice fizzing over the comm. ‘It’s me, Skrat! Calder. I’m here with Janet Lento and a robot caretaker.’
‘I see your lights, I’m coming down.’
‘There’s a shuttle pad on top of the building,’ said Calder. ‘At least, there was.’ The angle the building was listing at, there was no way Skrat could land a shuttle and dock with the building now. ‘I’ll pop the hatch up there – you hover and drop the rear cargo access.’
Skrat’s voice fizzed back at him. ‘Good egg. Catch you on the flip-flop.’
‘The hunters will return one day and you will leave this place,’ said Momoko, his servos whirring and straining against the incline of the floor as he followed after Calder, now desperately trying to shepherd Lento towards the corridor that led to the stairs topside. He could hear a strange sound outside the lodge – a desperate bird-like squawking, but much amplified. The very sound of it was enough to set his nerves on edge, vibrating down his spine. Had the dragons sensed they were in danger of losing their supper? Momoko caught up with the pair of guests and helped push them both towards the roof exit. Well, Zeno always had room for another robot among the hundreds he managed for Lana on board the ship. Have to do something about that flaky memory, though. Wouldn’t be much fun trying to teach Momoko basic vessel maintenance every day, for either ‘bot or android. Gods, let that be a problem I live to face. They reached the stairs, climbing towards the hatch. The lodge had stopped shifting under their boots. Had the dragons spotted Skrat’s shuttle, rising to defend their meal against the strange metal newcomer? Calder’s hands were shaking. He pulled the rifle off his shoulder, switched it back to full-auto fire but left it on max-mag field. They had a couple of second to cross the roof to the shuttle alive. An empty magazine or drained power cell wasn’t going to matter if it helped them escape. And if they didn’t make it, it would matter even less. Above the hatch he could hear the roar of the shuttle’s thrusters, dropping like a stone at speed, then the tell-tale whine of the anti-gravity chute kicking in as the engines died to ensure that the boat didn’t fry the people it had arrived to rescue.
Calder glanced at woman and robot; both rendered slightly less than sane by their experiences. He felt like the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind here. ‘When I pop the hatch, you run to the ramp at the back of the boat. Don’t stop. Whatever happens. Whatever you see. Just race to the shuttle as fast as you can. Don’t step in front of my rifle.’
Calder counted to three, threw the hatch up and mounted the roof, swinging his rifle barrel to either side. Gods, but it was dark outside, the lights surrounding the saucer-shaped lodge ripped off – a pall of inappropriately colourful illumination from the garden lights that hadn’t been ripped up by the angry dragons – leaving Calder to focus on the beautiful oblong of orange light from the shuttle’s rear cargo hold, ramp down, beckoning, as it hovered at the end of the lodge. No sign of what he had expected to find. Monstrous leathery wings beating in the air as the shuttle held the aerial carnivores off. Nothing for him to unload on. His sweaty finger trembled nervously against the trigger. Lento sprinted past like a wild animal, the sight of the shuttle’s relative safety overloading what little remained of the woman’s mind, the roof clanging as Momoko’s heavy weight followed her. Calder was fast after them, retreating with his rifle ready. At the last second he leapt the foot’s difference between roof and ramp. Skrat must have been watching on the cargo cameras as no sooner had his boot’s touched the shuttle, the boat began to rise, the whining increasing, then its thrusters kicked in, torching the remains of the lodge’s garden. And Calder saw it. Among the burning landscaped garden and wreckage of the pulled-apart hunting lodge. The corpses of dozens of dragons, the vast creatures’ long necks sliced apart like eels by a sushi chef, some of them lying mangled across the toxin fence, nocturnal scavengers already arriving, not quite believing their luck at the rich feast laid out across the hunting lodge’s remains. Fires and devastation were both covered up as the ramp back sealed into place.
Calder pushed past Lento and the robot, heading for the cabin above, and Skrat seated in the pilot’s seat. He looked a little like a miniature green dragon – albeit bipedal – and the irony of a sentient human-sized lizard having rescued him from a flight of far larger more savage cousins wasn’t lost on Calder. ‘Lords of Ice, Skrat, but am I glad to see you! I’m surprised you’ve even got the power left to lift-off after you took your laser cannons to those dragons.’
Skrat gazed quizzically around. ‘This is a freight shuttle, old bean. It doesn’t carry weaponry.’
***
‘Ah, my favourite girl,’ called Seth “Steel-arm” Bowen from behind the barricade. His cybernetic arm buzzed as it raised towards her in a mocking greeting.
Lana kept her hands conspicuously away from the rifle on her back, her chest practically cooking under the heat of the targeting dots flitting around her ship suit. ‘I wish I could say the feeling was mutual.’
‘This is probably the time for a little diplomacy,’ advised Zeno, standing by her side.
‘The tin man always did have a wise head on him,’ said the pirate captain. ‘But it’s a little late for that.’
‘You’re early,’ said Lana.
‘A cautious girl like you, I figured the Gravity Rose would seed a few trip-wires around the system on the way in – spot the Doubtful Quasar early… and then I wouldn’t be seeing you and your pals for comet dust. So me and the gang—’ he indicated the motley assortment of armoured toughs, mostly the three species of the triple alliance with a few races she didn’t recognise thrown into the heavily-armed mix,—‘we took a lander ahead of the old girl and flew in on the QT to have a nosey around and make sure your cargo shuttles stayed on the ground.’
‘You’ve come a long way for nothing,’ lied Lana. She glanced over to the guardhouse in the defence perimeter. It was on fire, the people inside on the nightshift either dead or captured. ‘We’re running set-up supplies to a mine that hasn’t even got going yet. Nothing for you to steal except a few drilling rigs and some granite from an initial exploratory tunnel.’
‘You’re too modest, lass,’ laughed Steel-arm. The pirate commander hadn’t changed a bit. Always merry, a quaking pile of false bonhomie, right up until the moment he ordered you to be pushed out of the airlock sans a vacuum suit. A tall, muscular, grinning homicidal maniac. ‘Besides, we’ve already been well-paid for this jaunt. To make sure that you and the local crew down here are never heard from again. There are interests back on Transference Station that want to send the message that hiring independents is a loser’s game. Sadly, for that message to get across, your client’s actually got to lose something. I don’t think Dollar-sign Dillard will really miss you that much. But the investment he’s sunk into this illegal mining camp? A nuke or two down here and he’ll get the message, do you not think so?’
Damn! Why did all her problems stem from the men in her life? First Steel-arm, and now Pitor back on Transference, her ex-fiancée removing the competition for his new corporate masters. The treacherous, conniving slime-worm. ‘You’re not planning on tying me to a ticking warhead, are you?’
‘Perish the thought,’ grinned the pirate skipper. ‘The Invisible Port’s got a very healthy slave market, and a skipper’s got to make a profit. What do you say, Mister Morales?’
A human pirate by his side tapped at the screen of his phone. He was wearing a metal collar, just like all the other pirates. A high-power battery to fry his head if the crewman ever went against Steel-arm. The device to transmit the encrypted murder code hanging from the pirate commander’s belt and never far from his fingers. If wearing the suicide necklace bothered Steel-arm’s minion, the man disguised it well. ‘The miners over in the main camp will all have received specialist training – they should be worth ten thousand T-dollars apiece at least. Ship crew will be worth double th
at in the port’s market. A little less if they’re uncooperative and we have to scrub their minds and give them a more obliging personality.’
‘Call our fighters,’ ordered Steel-arm. ‘Tell them to lay off bombing the base too heavily. We’ll “encourage” the camp commander to surrender and take as many alive as possible.’
Ending up on a radiation-leaking pirate hulk – a short, dangerous life with even fewer memories that she already had, helping scum like this seize free traders and liners? Lana would almost prefer it if they shot her right here, rather than hauling her back to the pirates’ hole of an asteroid hideaway permanently anchored in hyperspace. ‘Screw you, Seth.’
Steel-arm lifted his head back and roared with laughter, a cruel unamused sound. ‘You’ll get your chance, Lana. Who knows, if you please me enough on the jump back to the Invisible Port, I might even offer you the chance to sign up with me.’
‘Now you’re really playing dirty.’
‘So, you do remember. We’ll head back to the main base, accept their surrender, collect our trading flesh, wire the place for some fireworks, and let’s see if the lass can’t talk the Gravity Rose into surrendering without us having to damage her too much. She’ll be worth a lot more on the open market without missile burns.’
‘You’re the one who is going to get damaged,’ snarled Lana.
‘You always did love that ship a little too much, Lana girl,’ said Steel-arm. ‘But isn’t that you all over, always picking the wrong thing to love.’
Pirates stepped forward, guns at the ready, locking an electric collar around both Lana and Zeno’s neck. The female pirate who had put the collar on Lana, an Asian-looking woman, checked her handiwork with satisfaction. ‘Try and run, now. You’ll fry.’
‘I won’t be worth much then,’ said Lana.
‘You’re too much trouble,’ she snarled. ‘All this way for you? I don’t see why.’
Red Sun Bleeding Page 7
