‘Oh, we skirls wouldn’t find it too bad,’ said Skrat. ‘Rather humid, though. Given the choice we prefer our worlds dry.’
Skrat had a point. Up on the Gravity Rose, Calder could fry an egg on the fabric of the first mate’s ship suit, the temperature he usually set it at. ‘Could that figure I glimpsed outside the lodge have been human? A descendant of the ship’s colonists?’
‘One suspects not,’ said Skrat. ‘If humanity endured here, the professor’s original survey would have turned up signs of deforestation, cooking fires, torches lit at night to protect village palisades from predators and the like. Plus, if any of your people survived on Abracadabra, this vessel would have long since been cannibalized into axe-heads, saws and nails.’
Spears and swords, too, unless the branch of humanity that had landed here had been a lot different from Calder’s people. He felt a superstitious shiver run down his spine. ‘Let’s get back inside the shuttle and seal the ramp.’
‘Nothing to fret about. Another abandoned antique, defunct and useless,’ said Skrat. ‘The galaxy is full of them. We’re not in any danger here. Although I wouldn’t recommend staying to try and raise a family in the jungle. This is no world for a chap to leave his bones on.’
‘You’re an odd sort,’ said Calder. He stepped aside for the heavy robot to clang up the ramp and then followed inside with Skrat. He was happy to seal out the alien rainforest, a hum of air conditioning as the cargo hold struggled to return to a reasonable temperature. ‘The chief always told me you were reckless – a gambler. But you’re willing to wait it out here, as cool as the ice sheets around Heldheim.’
‘Perhaps it’s because I’ve lost so very much,’ said Skrat. ‘I’m no different from you in that regard, old bean. We’re both exiles, in our way. I may be willing to gamble, but only when the odds are on my side. There’s a universe of void between a risk and a calculated risk.’
‘The chief said that the skipper found you close to death in some kind of gladiator arena on the skirl homeworld.’
‘The chief should learn to keep his mouth shut,’ said Skrat. He looked as if he wasn’t going to say anymore, but then he changed his mind. ‘I lost my position in my nest on Raznor Raz after the corporation I ran was absorbed by a rival after a hostile takeover. You might say I was disgraced. I was endeavouring to earn money to pay my creditors back. Fighting in the arena was the only way open to me. I was considered unlucky, and few skirls will do business with someone who is luckless. If I had won enough combats, society would have considered my bad providence purged.’
‘You were willing to fight to pay debtors back?’
‘The layers of Skirl society are multifarious,’ said Skrat. ‘When you lose your position, your family becomes the responsibility of the victors. My children, my wife… they belong to another skirl lord now; they are bound to a competing nest. Even contacting my children would be considered a pollution of their chances of success – not to be permitted. When I earn enough money to recover my position, they will be returned to me.’
‘How much money do you need?’
‘A very large sum, dear boy,’ said Skrat, sadly, climbing back into the shuttle’s cockpit. ‘The higher you climb, the further the distance you have to fall. But in the universe anything is possible. With luck, skill and good judgement.’
Calder grunted in sympathy as he settled to wait in the co-pilot seat, his leg nervously bouncing on the decking. All of the ex-prince’s immediate family had been killed or died long before he had fled into exile. All he had run away from were regrets, countless responsibilities and a fatally failed military campaign. Was that better or worse than poor old Skrat? Tormented by all that he had abandoned when he departed for the stars. ‘With luck.’
‘Water under the bridge, old fruit. What’s left of my destiny is bound with the Gravity Rose. If she sinks, I sink. I’m certainly not going to surrender her or any of our people over to a gang of thieving rogues led by a psychopathic cyborg scallywag of Steel-arm Bowen’s notoriety.’
They waited for the best part of an hour, listening in on the idle open comms chat of the carrier’s attack planes. Pilots boasting how easy their victory had been, complaining about how their navigation instruments were going haywire in the planet’s unusual atmosphere, some of them getting lost and having to return to the carrier by line of sight. Time for the rescue, yet? Calder was about to ask Skrat when the words choked in his throat. He had just glanced up through the clearing and seen how the night-time sky had changed – and it was like nothing he had ever seen before.
***
Being locked inside the mining camp’s small concrete brig with Zeno wasn’t too much of a burden to Lana. It was the survivors from the rest of the operation she could have done without, and, at the top of the list, their supercilious mission commander, Professor Alison Sebba. Over twenty people crammed in a jail meant for a couple of drunken workers at most. Close quarters really didn’t make the professor any more bearable.
‘This is your fault,’ said Sebba glaring through the miners at Lana, her posterior selfishly occupying the bunk she had commandeered for her sole use. ‘The rogue commanding these pirates clearly has a personal grudge against you. And in his settling of it, you have condemned my whole operation to, at best, months of captivity until a ransom is paid.’
‘If you think Dollar-sign’s paying a ransom after this debacle, you really haven’t worked with him for long enough,’ said Lana. Little eddies of concrete dust came down from the ceiling every time the gun turrets on the pirate’s command shuttle rotated, tracking aerial hyper-lizards. The base’s helicopter pads hadn’t been designed for a shuttle’s weight. She brushed the falling dust out of her hair. ‘Your “at best” is a kindly disposed new owner at a pirate slave market… and here’s a top tip, you don’t find too many of those with fat wallets at any slave market I’ve been acquainted with.’
‘I’m certain you are more acquainted,’ said Sebba. ‘It’s your damnable spotty past that has dragged the rest of us down alongside you.’
‘You want to talk about spotty operations…’ Lana felt Zeno’s hand on her shoulder, the android nodding subtly in the direction of the cameras outside the cell’s caged front. Yeah, he was right as always. They didn’t want to discuss the business of what was really happening here without knowing who was listening in. The professor was still unaware Lana had uncovered the camp’s hidden operations below the planet’s surface. And as far as Steel-arm Bowen was concerned, this was still just a standard illegal mining venture out prospecting in the wild.
‘Let’s prepare for the worst and hope for the best,’ said Kien-Yen Leong, the mining camp chief’s voice heavy with the weight of responsibility.
‘We wouldn’t have to “hope” if you hadn’t surrendered so readily,’ accused the professor.
‘I will not order my people to commit suicide,’ said Leong. ‘And that’s what it would have been to keep on fighting. Our defences are rated to hold off the local wildlife, not squadrons of fighter-bombers.’
‘They were just to intimidate you,’ said Lana. ‘The Doubtful Quasar carries heavy rail cannons and ship-to-ship nukes. She could have sat in orbit and reduced this whole continent into smoking cinders within an hour. You did the right thing.’
‘People who hope to plunder you don’t tend to render you radioactive first,’ hissed the professor.
‘Yeah, well, reason and Steel-arm Bowen are only nodding acquaintances,’ said Lana. She looked forlornly beyond the thick bars at the front of the concrete cell. A single desk and chair, currently unmanned, with a door leading to the rest of the base. There was a single window at the side, but it was sealed by a heavy steel storm shutter, leaving their only natural light the narrow barred slit of window inside their cell – the dim lunar glow of the distant moons, a spattering of stars distorted by the planet’s gaseous veil. ‘A slaughter every now and then only enhances his reputation… it means the next vessel or settlement is more likely to fly the white flag
as soon as he jumps in-system.’
‘Ah, you know me so well, Lana girl,’ announced the pirate commander, stepping into the brig with his entourage of killers dogging his footsteps. He went up to the cage and strutted its length, tapping his pistol barrel along each bar. ‘Well enough to weld my tracking device to a satellite, eh? You can imagine my boys’ disappointment, chasing through this dirt-ball’s magnetic murk, thinking they’d hunted down the Gravity Rose, only to find our own tracer hanging in orbit. You’re a canny one and no mistake.’
‘I’m sure they’ll recover,’ said Lana. ‘We clocked your carrier in hyperspace at the margins of our sensor range, so we left a sensor line at the jump point, just in case we weren’t seeing scanner ghosts. I sent the Gravity Rose away as soon as your tracer was found concealed in the cargo hold. Me and Zeno would have got away too, if we hadn’t missed the rendezvous point after our shuttle malfunctioned on this cursed world.’ Lana wasn’t sure if Steel-arm had bought her lie, but the professor had… hook, line and sinker.
‘You knew they were coming and you didn’t try to evacuate us!’ she squealed in indignation.
‘You wouldn’t have come if I had asked, you and your precious skegging mine,’ said Lana. ‘And I didn’t have time to argue with you. And like you said, old metal-fingers here has personal business with me. I would have flared our engines on the jump-out and his carrier would have chased straight after us without raiding your camp.’
‘You hoped. That’s badly done,’ said Kien-Yen Leong. ‘You were hired to help us, not run for home.’
‘I was hired to ship supplies in and ore out,’ said Lana. ‘Nobody’s paying me to get my crew killed in the wilds. Certainly not her or Dollar-sign Dillard.’
Steel-arm seemed amused. No, he wouldn’t have any problem in believing that Lana Fiveworlds could be so cold. Bowen would have done exactly the same if their positions had been reversed, except he probably wouldn’t have tried to draw an enemy ship away. He’d have left everyone in the camp to die to buy extra time. ‘There is the spirited lass I remember. Now, how am I ever going to get over the disappointment of losing the Gravity Rose?’
Lana ignored his knowing leer. ‘It’s a big universe and there’s always some other honest merchant a parsec away for you to molest.’
‘Honest did you say?’ Steel-arm roared with laughter. ‘That’s a grand lie. But not the only one I’ve been fed in this camp.’ He pointed at Professor Sebba, his eyes wide and manic even as he grinned. ‘You, professor, you told me we had all the mining staff accounted for in this little chicken coop of yours?’
‘Everyone’s here,’ said the professor, coldly. ‘Except for a tanker driver who went missing in the jungle a few weeks ago. She has to be dead.’
‘There’s the thing,’ said Steel-arm. ‘She’s not the only one who is absent without leave. I left a team of sixteen crew and two shuttles at the mine to strip out your gear. They’ve all gone missing, including my boats. Now, you’re not telling me that a single driver managed to disappear sixteen heavily armed fighters and their craft without them calling for help once, are you? How many survey teams do you have out in the cursed jungle? How many of your people jumped us?’
Sebba shook her head, furiously. ‘That’s nothing to do with me. Maybe they crashed trying to fly back to your carrier? You can’t always rely on your instruments on Abracadabra.’
Lana felt a desperate, brief burst of hope. Was this Skrat’s work? Maybe he had found Calder and they were working some mischief together in the shuttle?
The pirate’s artificial arm whined as he lifted his pistol into the air. ‘Here’s one tool that rarely lets me down, lass. Now, I say this is to do with you. How many staff do you have working on the world? Even with robots, you’re not planning to run a mine with so few people.’
Lana grimaced. No, but you could run an archaeological dig and arrange a little tomb raiding with that small a team. Sebba stood up, waving her arms at the pirate. She was still talking at the pirate as though she was a school teacher admonishing a child. Lana knew from painful experience that wasn’t how you handled Steel-arm. ‘Everyone’s here! We’ve only just started exploratory tunnelling… we were planning to ship in extra hands in a month or so.’
Steel-arm shrugged and looked at his crew. ‘Don’t I always know a lie when I hear it? It makes me sad. I thought we had built up an understanding here, you and I, professor. You give me what I want without trouble, and I won’t have to make things problematic for you. I dislike damaging the merchandise to make my point.’ He raised his pistol in the direction of the cage and it jolted in his hand, an explosive crack, and one of the miners collapsed into his colleagues, the rear of his head a bloody ruin where the magnetically accelerated pellet had exited. Screams of outrage and terror came from the miners, some of the prisoners acting on blind impulse and trying to scramble away behind their colleagues or to the sides of the brig to minimise the chances they’d be the next target. Lana noticed that Zeno had positioned himself in front of her – damn the android. Zeno might have a better chance of surviving a rail-gun shot than her, but he had no right to try – he was the ship’s droid herder, not her private bodyguard.
‘Tell me the truth!’ Steel-arm yelled at the mission head. ‘Or I’ll put one in your leg on low-power and work my way inch-by-inch up to your skull. I’ll give you plenty of time to bleed-out and recover your delicate memory, lass.’
‘Don’t tell him a thing!’ demanded Kien-Yen Leong.
Steel-arm pivoted and shot the mining chief three times, starting in the chest and working his way up as the man yelled, flung back the fierce velocity of the sudden volley. Leong was dead well before he hit the concrete floor. ‘Did I ask you to speak, did I?’
Lana wanted to be sick. The base chief had been a good man. But that wasn’t nearly enough to protect him from a ruthless human predator like Steel-arm. The pirate woman, Cho, stared at the prisoners trembling behind the bars, a flash of malice crossing her eyes. ‘Use the speakers to tell the workers hiding in the jungle to surrender, or we’ll feed the lizards a corpse every five minutes.’ The pirate girl pointed at Lana and the professor. ‘Them next!’
Sebba clung to the bars of the cage-front, a frantic look breaking through her normal aura of haughty disdain, ignoring the weeping and yells behind her. ‘It’s not us! It’s your fault, you pinhead – you detonated a nuke down here.’
‘Ah, a little bit of fallout didn’t vanish my lads now, did it?’
‘You have activated the defence protocols!’
‘Your base’s systems are under my control now, lass, or have you forgotten?’
‘Not the camp, you fool… this was a Heezy world.’
Lana groaned inside. That’s right; give the homicidal maniac with a gun the map for a far deadlier weapon.
‘You think some nonsense fairy-tale’s going to save your life?’
‘We’re beneath its notice,’ moaned Sebba as though she was conversing with a tutorial group, not an insane pirate lord. ‘I was keeping it dormant. We hardly even registered as a threat. Until you proved we are. By awakening it with a nuclear-tipped warhead!’
Steel-arm’s comm on his ship-suit sleeve started bleeping. He passed his hand over it and a voice frothed out over the static. ‘Doubtful Quasar—we’re—being sliced. Sliced—and—losing—environmental integrity.’
‘Sliced?’ Steel-arm roared. ‘What are you talking about, damn you?’ His only answer was raw static. The other pirates’ comms started to go off too, urgent calls flooding in from throughout the camp, reporting something weird in the sky. One of the raiders sprinted to the storm shutter and raised it, slowly grinding, into the roof. Beyond was an abnormal sight – the dark sky above the jungle criss-crossed by a lattice of glowing yellow energy lines, a firework display seemingly erupting between a couple of the moons. The kind of display a carrier might make if it was being cut into pieces with its atomic arsenal of ship-to-ship missiles detonating all at once, sections
of hull fleeting away as radioactive sparks, miles of hull racked by secondary explosions. Then a sudden flare as the anti-matter in her engine containment area breeched, rapidly dwindling away to nothing. As it died away, Lana noticed an unholy light in the sky, a huge cable of energy shifting sinuously from side to side – it seemed to be stretching from the world far out to space.
‘There’s your bloody fairy-tale,’ moaned Sebba. ‘You’ve killed us all!’
CHAPTER FOUR
The settlers’ vessel.
Calder spun aimlessly in the shuttle chair as Skrat examined the boat’s instruments, the interior of the vessel lit by the glow of the strange shifting energies pulsing across the sky.
‘Whatever that bally energy field in the sky is, it’s cut off contact with our satellite net. We can no longer reach the Gravity Rose,’ said Skrat. ‘I’m tracking falling debris, too. I think the pirate ship was caught up inside the field when it activated. By my sweet nest, there’s not a bean left of the Doubtful Quasar in orbit. Let’s just be thankful Steel-arm showed up and scared the Rose off, or it’d be raining fragments of the chief and Polter.’
‘If the field’s not being projected by the pirates, then who…?’
‘A rather pertinent question.’ Skrat scratched his scaly green skin absentmindedly. ‘Damned world always did have a curious-looking atmosphere, but it’s certainly no natural phenomena I’m familiar with. The grid lines are too regular, and while atmospheric interaction with the system’s sun might create ionization, it wouldn’t be enough to fry a heavily armoured warhorse like the Doubtful Quasar. So we have a quandary. I doubt the field is being produced by the jungle’s locals. There was no sign of any technological civilization on Abracadabra from orbit. You can’t cloak an active society so thoroughly, even an energetically paranoid one. That leaves the legacy of dead cultures, which is almost as worrying.’ He activated the main control board, a field of icons and readouts flicking into life and orbiting his head. ‘I’d rather devote my noggin to the more practical question of how we can safely fly through it. One step at a time, I suppose. Let’s retrieve the captain.’
Red Sun Bleeding Page 9
