Red Sun Bleeding

by Hunt, Stephen

  ‘You and me both.’

  ‘Come over here and stop playing with the cargo, Cho,’ boomed Steel-arm. ‘If the base doesn’t surrender quickly, I’ll let you carve up some of the miners when we take them.’

  Lana watched the female pirate, Cho, saunter back to the heavily armed crew, maliciously fingering a dagger hanging off her belt. Lana Fiveworlds wasn’t a free trader anymore – mistress of a starship. She had been reduced to mere property.

  CHAPTER THREE

  All that you must leave behind.

  ‘I assure you,’ insisted Skrat, ‘I am not joking. My landing was thoroughly un-opposed by any of the local wildlife. The light signature of your building was picked up by the Gravity Rose from orbit. Polter sent me the coordinates and I nipped across here as soon as I had them.’

  So, Calder had made the right decision in dropping the lodge’s camouflage field, even if it had nearly ended up in the lodge’s guests becoming lizard bait. But if Skrat’s shuttle hadn’t driven away the flock of attacking creatures, then what…? Calder’s mind drifted back to the figure he thought he had glimpsed outside the building after they had sealed themselves in; but one impossibly fast humanoid native couldn’t possibly have accounted for an entire squadron of those winged giants, could it?

  ‘I’m sure the base will be happy that you discovered their missing driver,’ said Skrat, ‘but next time you decide to play the gallant, old fellow, do feel free to inform us first. You left me looking like a complete imbecile in front of the skipper. One minute you’re unloading cargo, the next, you’re away off plunging into the dark uncharted heart of the jungle.’

  ‘It wasn’t my idea,’ protested Calder. ‘I don’t even know how I got into the jungle. I was on the landing field helping you. Then I blacked out. After I woke up, I found myself inside a clearing in the rain forest. No sign of the mining camp from the tree-tops… just jungle.’

  ‘And do you know how you and your damsel-in-distress in our cargo bay travelled so far?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just jungle? The mining camp is over three-hundred miles away from our current position. You’re jolly lucky Polter picked up your building’s lights and decided to send me to investigate further. What were those ruins I plucked you out of, by the way?’

  Three-hundred miles? No wonder Calder hadn’t seen any rescue helicopters in the air. He and Lento had been well outside any sane search radius. ‘It was a hunting lodge of some sort. And it wasn’t in ruins when I arrived. The dragons demolished it tonight after I turned off its aerial camouflage field. I think it must have been sitting out there abandoned for centuries.’ Calder told the first mate about the amnesiac robot janitor and what he had discovered, including the local symbiote predators who helped him and Lento to safety from the deadly tree spiders, the dragon attack, and the strange fleeting figure he thought he’d glimpsed stalking them.

  Skrat glanced at the images from the cargo camera – Lento sitting there, still clutching her blanket around her and shivering while the robot inspected the walls of the hold; possibly its first time out of the jungle if it had been activated inside the lodge. ‘I’m no doctor, but the dear lady needs more help than her camp can give her. The robot is a kawaii… a walking logo and mascot for one of the large corporations of the Cygnus arm. Big game hunting on the border worlds is frowned upon in a lot of the alliance markets, a PR disaster in the making, for all of its popularity among the top brass. No wonder they didn’t want the lodge on the charts.’

  Calder scratched his stubble. ‘What about the biped that attacked the lodge? The dragons that were massacred?’

  ‘Always look for the simplest explanation, dear boy. The dents in the lodge were probably from the spiked balls at the business end of the creatures’ tails. The dead ones… no doubt two rival flocks arrived at once and had a set-to over which group had first dibs on the strange-looking mammals. As for the mystery biped, this whole world is barely catalogued. Possibly the local equivalent of one of your apes, or the silik from Raznor Raz I used to feed dates to outside the old home-nest, a low-level sentient come to gawk at the strangers.’

  ‘And the distance from here to the base?’

  ‘I would put money on one of those rascals with large wingspans flying through a hole in the camp’s radar and anti-air defences, dropping a stone on your head to stun you, before carrying you away to feed its young. Must have met some chap higher up the food chain and abandoned you on the jungle floor to fight its corner. Or maybe it was one of the smaller fliers and you were too heavy for it, so it decided to dump you and go after something a little more familiar.’

  ‘I don’t know. Both me and Lento?’

  ‘There’re enough complications which arise in the world without looking for hidden ones, old bean,’ said Skrat. ‘You’ve seen the size of those scaly critters in the air. They have to eat their own bodyweight… which means an awful lot of snatched prey from the rain-forest. Our poor damsel down in cargo was probably conscious when one of the locals got its talons into her outside her truck’s cab and gave her an alfresco view of the continent as it attempted to fly home. That’s enough to leave anyone a little unhinged.’ Skrat’s chair had a hole in it for his thick tail to squeeze through, and his scaled green appendage swung from side to side as he tapped at the communications panel. ‘How very peculiar? The base’s radio room doesn’t seem inclined to pick up to hear the good news of your recovery. They’re broadcasting out on a loop, though.’ He waved his hands above a floating icon and a disembodied voice fizzed out of the cabin’s speakers. It sounded a lot like the camp’s stout mining chief, Kien-Yen Leong.

  ‘Mayday, mayday. This is Abracadabra station. We are being bombed by fighters from an unknown starship which has refused to identify itself. It has just issued a demand for our complete unconditional surrender. If any naval vessel from a Protocol signatory world is in range, we are a mining concern registered at Transference Station, and we are requesting urgent military assistance. Our coordinates are attached.’

  ‘Very loosely registered,’ observed Skrat. ‘An unknown starship? It would appear that Dollar-sign wasn’t being paranoid about claim-jumpers after all.’

  ‘If the base is breaking cover then it has to be pretty bad over there,’ said Calder, his mind racing. Nobody was going to admit to an illegal mining operation lightly, let alone give away their position to every competitor within a couple of light-years.

  ‘It won’t matter,’ said Skrat. ‘I doubt if their signal will even breach the atmosphere of this queer place. And if it does, it’ll be years before a civilized system picks up a general transmission from so deep in the wilds.’

  ‘What about Lana… I mean, the skipper?’

  ‘She was at the mine itself in the mountains along with Zeno.’ Skrat began to bank the shuttle, heading down towards the dark floor of jungle canopy.

  ‘Where are you flying? We’ve got to get them out of there right now.’

  Skrat pointed to a deep valley between two slopes. ‘Standard procedure, Mister Durk. We don’t go running into a fire-fight blind, and certainly not in an unarmed shuttle… you’re not riding a fighter in one of your Hell-fleet sims now. The fact we haven’t already heard from the Gravity Rose either means she’s boosting out of the system or she’s dead in space. We land, hide, and rattle the post-box.’

  ‘Post-box?’

  ‘Our satellite network, old fruit. If they had time, the skipper or our chums on the ship will have popped a hidden message into our network. Hopefully, arranging an extraction plan. We’ll drop our own message into the post-box, advising them we’re alive and giving them our co-ordinates.’ He tapped the scaly side of his snout knowingly. ‘A spoonful of stealth and subterfuge can be worth more in the Edge than a hangar deck full of fighter craft.’

  Calder scanned the ground from the cabin window and pointed to a clearing in the valley’s forest just large enough to accommodate the shuttle, the grass shimmering in the light of the th
ree moons. ‘You can put down there without burning a landing site.’

  ‘I see it.’ Skrat twisted the shuttle’s thrusters around into landing position and switched the boat into anti-gravity mode, drifting them down silently, rocking on the freight shuttle’s pneumatic landing gear before it settled down. Thick tree foliage on both sides and everything else lost to the night. Hopefully without too many spiders. They waited ten minutes for a satellite to pass overhead, and then Skrat jabbed furiously at the controls, exchanging information in a tight-beam broadcast – heavily encrypted and as untraceable as anything could be. It took another ten minutes for the shuttle’s simple computers to process the first mate’s post-box key, and then they were in possession of the Gravity Rose’s last message. They watched a clearly stressed-out Polter explaining that he was withdrawing the ship to a cavern on the world’s smallest moon, fleeing before an approaching pirate carrier; listened to the news of the tracking device the chief had found concealed on the ship before jettisoning it inside a spare satellite. General comms were now being jammed, but tight-band point-to-point communications could be exchanged through the satellites, messages rationed to every few hours to avoid detection. Polter’s final portion of the message was the news that the main mining base appeared to be under attack from an advance strike-force and he feared Lana and Zeno would shortly fall into the raider’s hands.

  ‘So, you know this Steel-arm Bowen?’ asked Calder, when the message finished playing.

  ‘Some of us a little better than others,’ said Skrat, cryptically. ‘On our previous acquaintance, the captain may have given him the impression she was a fellow pirate commander from a rival clan amiable to an alliance. Steel-arm was, shall we say, a little disappointed when the truth came out. He lost a considerable amount of face among those who ply their rather disreputable trade stealing cargoes and ransoming hostages. Reputation is practically everything when you’re a pirate.’

  ‘Will he shoot the skipper?’

  ‘No,’ sighed Skrat. ‘Too fast and far too easy. He’ll demand a rather long and tedious humiliation before he gets around to anything as pedestrian as an execution. He knows that taking the Gravity Rose will hurt the captain as much as any physical torture. Steel-arm will wish to torment her with our ship firmly in his possession.’

  Calder was about to ask the first mate to elaborate, then thought better of it and bit his tongue. Just as he did, a blinding flash exploded outside, the night sky spreading into sudden fierce clarity before the cabin’s smart screens blanked out the exterior view for a couple of seconds, returning to transparency with a bizarre orange afterglow lingering around the leaves. The wind built up outside, a sudden gale sweeping across the jungle canopy and rocking the shuttle on its landing gear. The gale died away after a few seconds, almost as suddenly as it had appeared.

  ‘There we are,’ sighed Skrat. ‘Tediously predictable.’

  ‘Sweet mother of… was that a nuclear warhead?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mister Durk. It was detonated a long way from us and the blast came from the wrong direction for the mining base. That was Steel-arm’s “suggestion” that the camp shut down its perimeter fence guns and allow the Doubtful Quasar’s landing craft to land unopposed inside the base to accept their surrender.’ He saw the look of horror on the human crewman’s face. ‘It’s actually rather a good thing. If Steel-arm didn’t wish to plunder the base and take the staff alive, the warhead wouldn’t have been detonated out in the wilderness for show. Ground zero would have been the camp itself!’

  So, they were dealing with someone with whom detonating a random nuke as a shot across the bows was a good thing? That told Calder pretty much everything he needed to know about the kind of adversary they faced here.

  ‘So what next?’

  ‘We need to time our arrival carefully. Leave too early, and we’ll be flying into the carrier’s fighter wing. Too late, and Zeno and the skipper will be sitting in Steel-arm’s brig in orbit, beyond our assistance. Give it an hour here, and then we’ll fly back low. We need to attempt a rescue when Steel-arm’s ripping the base apart for supplies to plunder, when he thinks he’s won and his bounders have dropped their guard a smidgen.’

  ‘If we can rendezvous with the Gravity Rose, can we outrun a pirate carrier?’

  Skrat considered his answer carefully, his nictitating membranes blinking across his eyes. ‘One must hope so, dear boy. The Doubtful Quasar is ancient ex-military surplus – antiquated Edge technology rather than alliance-built. Our engines are rated for boosting serious cargo and we’ll have this pea-souper around the planet as well as the system’s irregular solar activity working in our favour. As long as we can clear the range of his fast attack planes… yes, let’s hope we can show Steel-arm a clean pair of heels.’ He stood up and rotated his seat to the side. ‘Lend me a hand with the camouflage netting. Then we shall use our satellites to listen in to the ruffian’s comms chatter before we depart.’

  They marched down into the cargo hold, Skrat dropping the ramp and dragging a dark ceramic crate out from a floor space. Heat poured in from outside, like water filling a submarine. Not quite as intense as it would have been during the day. Calder took the opportunity to introduce the first mate to Lento and the robot. The driver was as incurious about their pilot as everything else she encountered, while Momoko bowed and then offered to help carry the crate of camouflage netting outside. Skrat took a pair of belts holding sheaved machetes from a locker and tossed one to Calder. He belted it around his hip. It felt good to have a blade hanging down from his hip again. It felt like… home. Of course, back on Hesperus’s freezing plains, any warrior would have killed for an “enchanted” blade that could be set to vibrate at a thousand kilocycles a second and cut through rainforest canopy – or more pertinently, blood and bone - like a laser bolt through butter. Calder accepted the robot’s proposal to assist and kept his rifle ready as he walked carefully down the ramp. Nocturnal hooting, squeaking and whistling surrounded the shuttle. It sounded different from the nightly jungle song that had surrounded the hunting lodge. The nuclear explosion had unsettled the local wildlife… something new and dangerous for them to fear. Skrat’s camouflage netting glistened gossamer thin and pale white, but as soon as they had dragged the cover across the shuttle its surface began to shimmer, as though developing a photograph of the rain-forest floor – a real-time photo at that, images of beetle-like insects crawling across the fabric.

  It stuck in Calder’s craw, hiding out here, when every sinew of his body wanted to charge in and swing a sword at these pirate raiders. But there was a part of him that realized it was the right thing to do to maximize their chances for success. Maybe if Calder had been able to think more like Skrat, he’d have been able to come up with a strategy that wouldn’t have ended up with Calder losing most of his nation’s ice fleet in a futile invasion, ending up exiled and on the run. But then, he wouldn’t have met Lana Fiveworlds. Or be stuck here, you fool.

  A sudden cracking noise. In front of Calder, Momoko tooted in alarm as it fell over – dropping the empty crate – one of its heavy metal legs disappearing down a hole, the rest of its body left above ground, arms gesturing wildly. Calder flipped his rifle up, half expecting one of the local arachnids to erupt out of the ground, furious that it only had robot steel to feast on. But nothing emerged. Tentatively, Calder and Skrat moved over. Hauling the robot up was like pulling a tank out of a ditch.

  ‘I never should have left the lodge,’ said Momoko, dejectedly, while the two crewmen pulled at its body. ‘Is this my punishment for abandoning my post?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Calder, grunting as he hefted the machine’s weight. ‘You’re not programmed to believe in gods, are you?’

  Momoko put its remaining limbs to work, found some purchase, and managed to help its two companions extradite itself. ‘The company knows everything. Sees everything. I thought this was within the rules, but perhaps I was wrong?’

  ‘We write our own rules, old
fruit,’ said Skrat. ‘You might say it’s something of an unofficial motto among our company.’

  There were only a few hours until sunrise and large sectors of the robot’s memories automatically dumped. And there wouldn’t be a local copy of its corporate bible on hand for it to refresh what it needed to know. Skrat bent down to examine the lair. Calder kept his gun trained down into the hole. ‘Be careful,’ warned Calder. ‘Most the things I’ve run into out here so far have wanted to add me to the menu.’

  ‘There’s something below the mud,’ said Skrat. ‘And it isn’t a warren or a lair.’ He pulled a knife out of his belt, touching a button on its hilt. A sudden buzzing filled the clearing as his blade blurred; vibrating so fast it almost became invisible. The first mate cut away bricks of compacted mud topped with alien grass. It quickly became clear what the robot had tumbled through. A shattered window. Momoko walked back, halting its imposing bulk above the hole. A light in its chest sprung into life, helping illuminate the makeshift excavation. A length of heavy metal plating, rusted and red, lay under the soil.

  ‘A building under here?’ wondered Calder.

  ‘Not a building,’ said Skrat. ‘This is standard hex-hull, old alliance design, and it has seen extensive particle damage. This is a starship, old bean. And we’ve landed on top of her. Large enough to cover the entire valley floor… must be a colony vessel. Rusting away long enough to be completely covered by mud slides and sediment and have the local flora grow over her roof. I believe she must be the Never Come Down… she was a colony ship, later posted missing, that had a hand in naming this world Abracadabra.’

  Calder glanced around the trees. Any signs of a settlement had long since been reclaimed by the rainforest. He knew all about failed colonies, although his own was a heck of a lot colder than this hell-world’s.

  ‘Who would want to settle here?’