‘What’s happening out there?’ bellowed Steel-arm.
‘Coming—through the—laser fence—just—walking through.’
The pirate captain’s face was turning purple. ‘What, damn you? What?’
‘Covered in—spines—they’re—’ The voice cut off in a bloodcurdling scream.
One of the pirates turned and fled, his nerves snapping. Steel-arm didn’t wait or waver. The commander’s arm snapped up and a bolt exploded inside the confines of the brig, the deserter tumbling forward into the shaped concrete wall with a smouldering hole where his spine used to be. ‘I’m still to be a-feared more than some antique robot sentry!’ yelled Steel-arm. ‘Spines or no. And if any of you dogs doubt it, just try to desert on me.’ He waved his pistol at the imprisoned miners. ‘Out, my little flock of canaries! We’re heading for the shuttle on the roof.’ He took the broach and shoved it under the professor’s nose. ‘How do I activate this?’
‘I need to trace an activation sigil on its surface. But wait until we’ve arrived at the mine. The broach’s power source only remains active for an hour now… then it takes days to self-recharge. We’ll require it far more inside the Heezy complex than here.’
Lana thought about the screams she had just heard. Their needs were a relative business, it seemed.
‘Just an hour?’ snarled Steel-arm.
Sebba shrugged without looking apologetic. ‘We can’t tamper with the broach without destroying it. Even the Heezy’s wireless recharging systems are encrypted.’
‘After a million years, my power cells should last an hour,’ muttered Zeno.
‘Let’s just try and survive the next few minutes,’ said Lana. She found herself bundled outside the cage alongside Zeno and the surviving base staff, driven like a flock of sheep through the plain concrete corridors while the armed pirates jabbed at them with rifles barrels, their captors snarling and threatening to hide their own fear. Lana felt her heart thudding like a cannon volley inside her chest, terror rising; shared with everyone stumbling, half-running, alongside her. Fear so strong she could taste it. Every second she resisted the desire to sprint as fast away from here as she could. The unknown beyond the base, seeping inside, making a mockery of humanity’s pathetic laser fences and robot guns and sensor grids. Mere savages’ trinkets fashioned from mud and sticks in the face of what they unleashed. But as fast as Lana ran, she could never outpace the coming solar storm, lashing everything inside the system with its killing fury. The monkey inside her, the barely evolved ape, hardly feared that fate – it was the Heezy’s reanimated ghosts that filled her with dread. Rising out of their underground lair to punish them for their arrogance – the professor’s arrogance - in thinking she could steal sparks from the god’s fire and live to tell the tale. They approached a cargo lift at the end of the corridor, an abandoned trolley with crates of supplies on its metal surface partially blocking their way. Steel-arm growled as he sent the trolley skidding into a side-corridor. Lana swivelled as Zeno barked a warning. Behind them, the walls bubbled as though someone burnt at them with a laser set on low-power. A shape formed in the wall and Lana suddenly remembered the Heezy’s peculiar method of transportation – motile bubbles passing through the planet’s solid bedrock. A figure stepped out of the wall’s surface, humanoid but faceless. Six foot-tall, slick ebony black and covered in evil sharp spikes, as though an armoured knight had combined with a giant porcupine. The thing’s skull resembled an eyeless hatchet. It instantly latched onto the nearest pirate and wrapped its spiked arms around the man’s chest, his body impaled and only enough breathe for a swift yell that immediately turned into a gasp. He was crushed as though caught in the jaws of a trash compactor, a sudden spray of blood as his body burst. All around them the walls bubbled and ran, sentinels born from the bare concrete, stepping out and crushing miners and pirates alike, the humans’ guns chattering to little effect beyond deafening her ears. Lana stumbled back towards the lift, half dragged by Zeno, a press of desperate, shrieking survivors trying to escape the corridor’s slaughter. Steel-arm was inside, one arm around Professor Sebba, using her as a shield as he emptied his pistol into the narrow space of the corridor. Lana hit the button for the roof. The nearest of the sentinels rocked as it advanced into the line of fire from the frantic pirates cowering inside the lift, reaching out to seize human necks and snap them as it lurched forward. It was nearly on them as the doors shut and the lift rose upwards on its antigravity field, a second before the sentinel’s hand reached the lift, a distorted screech of metal as it dug its fingers into the disappearing elevator.
Steel-arm reloaded his magazine, Lana imagining every shudder of the cargo lift as a Heezy sentinel trying to latch onto the elevator. There were five pirates left, with the same amount of mining staff, as well as Lana, Zeno and the professor on top of those numbers. Not many survivors. Steel-arm shook Sebba with his cybernetic limb. ‘Activate the broach!’
‘Not yet.’ The professor was stubborn, Lana gave her that. Let’s hope she’s right, too.
‘I’ll put a bullet in your damn thick head and see if it improves your thinking.’
‘Then none of you will reach the mine alive,’ said Sebba, her voice pure ice. ‘My mind is fine. And I’m the only one in your circus of losers with a hope of deactivating this world’s energy shield.’
‘I’ll make sure you do survive,’ snapped Steel-arm. ‘I’ll take you for my cabin slave and whittle away a little of your skegging arrogance every day. I’ll enjoy that!’
‘At least one of us will,’ retorted Sebba.
The lift’s doors opened onto the top of the roof, the thick heat of the jungle air pouring in. Lana heard the distant whine and chatter of gunfire echoing from around the compound, pirates mounting their last stand against forces they could barely comprehend. Twenty feet away lay Steel-arm’s command shuttle, dwarfing the camp’s choppers on their helipads, a steel ramp already extended from the vessel’s rear. Unlike Lana’s boxy workaday shuttles, this craft was obviously ex-military surplus, weapons pods and gun turrets dotting its surface, the bulbous back designed to land a couple of tanks and company of soldiers onto a world in the face of enemy fire. All of the survivors sprinted for the dubious safety of the ship. Lana tried not to look at the burning web of fire in the sky, trapping them down here, the vast snake of energy undulating between Abracadabra and the sun, filling it full to bursting point with every minute that passed. It was too much of a reminder that spiked hands could rise from the roof any second, grasping their way to her ankles before she reached the shuttle. Then they were on board, panting and sweating. It seemed an age before the craft rose into the air, twisting and turning for the mine-head and the distant mountain range. Explosions and flashes of fire dropped away behind them as the ramp started to seal and the shuttle powered forward. Zeno reached out to steady her. A wave of relief nearly overwhelmed Lana. We’ve survived. Before the ramp fully closed she saw a dark figure standing on the roof, watching them spiral away into the sky. It raised an arm and there was a volley of crackling explosions all around the shuttle, as though the febrile air was being sucked into a vacuum. Steel-arm’s shuttle violently lurched to the side, and then the craft pitched towards the crimson jungle canopy below.
***
Calder spun in the air as the winch lowered him through the derelict colony ship’s jagged, broken hull. He could see the torchlight from Momoko at the bottom of the dark cathedral-size space, the robot looking after Janet Lento. Calder wasn’t sure if he was doing the pair a favour by bringing them along rather than locking them inside their grounded shuttle; but the shell-shocked driver had become increasingly agitated when her rescuers had left the shuttle, and Momoko was going to lose its memory soon, forgetting most of what it was, let alone who the rest of them were. Skrat followed last, controlling the winch with a mobile handset which he left hanging on a belt hook after he unclipped himself and stared around the chamber. They had come down in what looked like a cargo space, but on
e bare of equipment and transport containers. No ground vehicles or other form of transport to get them back to the base down here. Creepers had grown in through the breach and tried to colonise the walls, but it was too dark for them to prosper down here. Dark and hot, despite the sun not having risen outside yet. If the rest of the ship was similarly empty, Calder trusted they could retrace their way back to the winching gear before the shuttle’s emergency battery reserves dwindled to zero.
‘A rather useful unit to have around,’ hummed Skrat, patching the robot into a panel he had exposed next to a large door. A vibration trembled across the deck as he used Momoko’s fuel cell to jumpstart the doors. They fair screeched as they opened, not having seen a maintenance team for centuries. ‘Good thing your body is too small for a fusion pile or you would be as grounded as the shuttle.’
‘I am always glad to be of service to my honoured guests,’ said Momoko.
Calder wondered how glad the robot would feel if it found itself blundering around down here in the dark with its memory dumped. He helped Momoko lead Janet Lento out of the hold. A corridor lay beyond the open portal, no different in its bare, functional design from the miles of passages Calder had strode inside the Gravity Rose. It was deadly silent, the chorus of the rain forest muffled by the hull. Cooler too, insulated, no hull breach here to spill in life from outside. Far too much like a tomb for Calder’s tastes. Skrat went up to a plaque on the wall, wiping a layer of dust and grime off it. A ship-board map with assembly points and safe rooms marked in case of fires or micrometeorite impacts, and there was the name of the vessel, too. As Skrat has speculated when he first discovered the wreck… she was the Never Come Down. Maybe the settlers should have heeded the ironic advice in their ship’s name and stayed on whatever crowded, industrial hellhole they had hailed from, without embarking on their new and all-too brief life.
‘Where shall we start looking for power sources?’ asked the barbarian prince.
Skrat tapped the plaque. ‘Let’s begin with the life boats on this level. Their power cells are self-contained and built to trickle-feed for centuries if needed.’
‘What if we come across a colonist in hibernation sleep inside?’
‘We’ll wake them up and ask the fellow what the devil happened on this blasted world,’ said Skrat. ‘It’ll be good to hear someone serve up a tale of woe even worse than ours.’
‘I am always happy to serve,’ noted Momoko.
‘Good egg. I’ll be sure to introduce you to Zeno,’ said Skrat. ‘He could do with a few lessons in co-worker co-operation to jolly him along with the crew.’
Their passage through the ship was slowed by the need to bypass a series of locked doors, using the robot to power up and then open each portal. Calder was surprised by the number of sealed bulkheads they encountered compared to the Gravity Rose. It was as though someone had tried to lock themselves in here, or lock something else out. But there were no mummified bodies or bones to indicate settlers had died on board. They passed settler cabins which, when entered, proved to be largely bare, cleared of personal possessions. Empty lockers. Faded, dirty rugs with a few discarded packing crates on the floor. Wherever the settlers had gone, they had taken their clothes, photographs and keepsakes with them. Calder’s explorations took him through a mess-hall which contained a curious sight. All the tables and benches had been dragged to the sides of the dark room, making room for piles of equipment – damaged computers and sim consoles and data slates, shattered pyramids of the devices, along with mounds of broken robots. Not humanoid models like Momoko, but variants of the service drones on board the Rose: tracked and uni-ball drones, others with dwarf-sized rubberized legs, the same short, waddling machines he had helped the chief run back in the engine room.
Momoko seemed to take fright at the scene, as though the sight of this vista of destruction might incite its human company to vandalize its own body. ‘This is terrible, terrible!’
‘Quite curious, I would say,’ whispered Skrat, prodding the nearest pile of scrap with his rifle barrel. ‘Anything with a computer or A.I. in it seems to have been junked? Robots are invaluable in protecting a new settlement. They are the last thing you would want to destroy.’
‘I’ll protect you,’ pleaded Momoko.
Lento was looking anxious again, maintaining her dumb silence as she scratched at her matted hair, her wide eyes flickering nervously around the dark beyond their torchlight. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Calder, reaching out to her. ‘This happened a long time ago.’
‘I wonder if we’d find the computers on the bridge similarly wrecked,’ pondered Skrat.
‘At this point, I don’t care. Let’s just see if we can find any active cells down here,’ said Calder, ‘then head back to the surface.’ He could feel the weight of this strange, dead vessel seeping through his flesh. Once so full of life, now only filled with mysteries and the heavy absence of its owners. The musty smell put him in mind of the cold family vaults beneath his old fortress. The sarcophaguses of his relatives and forefathers, cold marble draped with spider webs and the dust of ages. He’d always hated that place, the thought that he would end up entombed there one day with only the ghosts of his ancestors to care that here lay Calder Durk… prince of a cold, cold world. Right now, I’d take it over this broken ship.
‘Did the masters in this vessel arrive as guests to hunt?’ said Momoko.
‘Indeed they didn’t,’ said Skrat. ‘Although I dare say a few of them arrived to hunt for the adventure of the new.’
‘That worked out for them,’ muttered Calder.
They finally reached a section of the ship where ten lifeboat pod locks ran along the corridor. Calder realized that someone else had once had the same idea as Skrat. The entrance to each pod lay open, heavy cables stretched out from the interior of the lifeboats, a mess of cabling running down the corridor. Skrat ducked inside each boat, inspecting the power cell connections and the instrument panels inside. After he had inspected the final pod, he pulled himself out of the lock and banged his heavy green tail against the deck in irritation. ‘Not enough juice left to power our shuttle engines. We could use them to extend the time our environmental systems last, though.’
‘Camping in the jungle, waiting for a pirate shuttle to fly over and spot us?’
‘Enough to fuel a ground vehicle, perhaps, if the ship’s holds contain a working jalopy,’ said Skrat.
The four of them followed the cables, Calder hoping to find that big if at the other end. A jeep, tank, electric bike… anything. The power lines ran into a room, and there was enough energy left inside for the lights’ auto-sensors to detect their presence and flicker hesitantly into life. No ground vehicles being charged. The room looked more like a laboratory. A line of transparent tubes filled with liquid, stagnant and still under the blinking blue lights. Each tube contained a creature. Like an evolutionary progression in reverse. Twisted bodies starting with human cadavers and ending up in a series of small twisted forms that were undoubtedly the cowboys who had rescued Calder from the jungle and guided him to the hunting lodge. Off to the side were larger tanks containing the symbiotic mounts the cowboys rode, a few adult-sized, others floating as tiny foals.
‘Now that is interesting,’ said Skrat. ‘A science centre.’
‘Were they doing medical experiments on the wildlife?’ asked Calder.
‘Only tangentially.’ Skrat tapped the nearest tube with no result. Trapped inside for hundreds of years, Skrat was unlikely to elicit any movement from the test subjects. ‘No navels on the humans inside the suspension fluid. These were clones; testing bodies without sentience. The settlers were undertaking a DNA-hack. Researching a way to transform themselves from human into these local creatures.’
‘The cowboys? Why in the name of the gods would anyone want to become a cowboy?’
‘It’s the opposite of terraforming, dear boy. You change the pattern of your body to adapt to the local world, rather than modify the planet into your preferred
habitat. Just select a successful local species and reverse-engineer its DNA, then redesign your own body on it. A curious decision for Abracadabra, though, unless the settlers belonged to some extreme environmentalist sect. Such practices are normally reserved for worlds with acute deviations from the norm – toxic atmospheres, high gravity, gas giants and the like. It’s a tad hot for humans outside, but nothing that a little air conditioning and a decent ship suit can’t cope with. They really did go native.’
Calder was stunned by the implications. He probably had met the settlers’ descendants. He just hadn’t realized it at the time. ‘And abandon tool use, technology, shelter and fire? Just return to the wild to live like an animal?’
‘No accounting for taste,’ said Skrat. ‘But it was obviously the last roll of the dice for the colony; otherwise they wouldn’t have been powering their laboratory with lifeboat cells. Likely it was far from their preferred option.’
Calder followed the cables. Not all of the lines were plugged into the banks of laboratory machinery. A flex of thick red power lines led out through a side exit. He held up his torch and walked over to inspect where it ran, Momoko and Janet Lento moving out of his way. Lento stood by one of the tubes containing a suspended cowboy and laid her hand on the transparent material, as if greeting the creature whose species had saved them back in the jungle. She groaned sadly. Calder pointed his torch through the exit. A stairwell, the cables following the treads and vanishing into a pit of inky darkness.
Skrat came over to stand by his side. ‘The garage bay and landing ramps should be at the keel of the ship.’
Calder had a feeling that when the settlers had left, they were riding symbiotic steeds, not mechanised ground crawlers. ‘You know, hiking back to the base through the jungle doesn’t seem so bad…’
Red Sun Bleeding Page 11
