‘Stout heart, Mister Durk. If we’re lucky we might find a microlight or a small helicopter.’
Janet Lento stared into the pool of darkness and refused to be dragged down the stairs, so Calder and Skrat left her in the care of Momoko, and pushed on alone, descending a further two levels. Heavy doors led out to the other decks, but they were sealed, and the power lines kept on coiling lower, so they ignored the exits and kept on trekking down. At the end of the stairs they found the vehicle bay. It was empty, although there were clearly parking and repair stands for a number of ground transports. The vessel’s ramp was lowered to what had been the valley floor when the ship had landed. No vehicles beyond, either. But there was a small concrete building buried by a wall of sediment, its entrance open and still accessible opposite the loading ramp. The ship’s cables ran inside it. Calder stared at the mud ceiling above them. They were standing in a small pocket of air inside the sediment. Mud compacted as hard as rock over the years. Calder felt like a tomb robber down here.
‘The original settlement?’ asked Calder. ‘Would they have built it underground?’
‘A pity Professor Sebba isn’t with us,’ said Skrat. ‘We could defer to her expertise in such matters. This cave doesn’t look very secure, and that entrance isn’t large enough to pass a vehicle through. Let’s go.’
Calder felt a wave of relief at the decision. Trekking through the jungle towards a base overrun by pirate raiders wouldn’t seem as half as arduous after communing with the spirits of the failed colony down here. As he turned, Janet Lento came sprinting out of the stairwell at the back of the landing bay, an insentient warbling screech sounding from her throat, Momoko stumbling wordlessly behind her, his heavy metal feet stamping across the ship’s steel and torchlight swinging wildly. And then, shockingly, a third figure swung into view at the bottom of the stairwell. As tall as Momoko, a powerful shadow encrusted in hundreds of wicked jagged spines, a slim eyeless axe of a head. It resembled one of the clockwork golem knights from the fireside stories of Calder’s youth; a black armoured demon. But it didn’t move like a machine… advancing rapidly, sinuous, panther-like. Janet Lento’s nonsense warnings came back to Calder. It’s covered in spines. Skrat opened up on it with his rail rifle, quick pulses of fire which lit the darkness of the landing bay. Calder joined him, instinctively, almost surprised to remember that he had been holding a weapon too. Hyper-accelerated pellets jounced off the creature, sparks flying and lighting up the darkness, but they might as well have been firing wooden arrows from a child’s bow for all the good they were doing. It shrugged off the volley, only staggering slightly as it absorbed the impact, and then kept on lurching straight at them. Janet fled past the two crewmen, disappearing into the opening inside the mud-surrounded concrete pillbox, Momoko shambling after her. It seemed like a plan. Best one we’ve got. Calder and Skrat turned and raced after the robot and the tanker driver. They sprinted down a corridor inside the pillbox which gave onto a circular chamber, lights flickering into life on emergency power. Unfortunately for them, this wasn’t the entrance to a well-protected underground colony complex; it was a simple stone chamber with a raised dais, a stone dome on the wall behind the platform. Didn’t look much different from an empty grain storage silo. Or a manure fermentation tank. Not quite empty. The power cables terminated at a rusting console resting on a metal stand in front of the wall. Calder’s eye’s darted about. One way in. No way out. He swivelled about, but it was too late, the exit stood blocked by the six-foot tall figure. Gazing at the creature’s armour was like looking at the rainbow on an oil slick, hundreds of serrated spines which appeared to shimmer, an evil jinn granted humanoid form. Plating seemed to click into place as it came forward, hundreds of intricate pieces shifting around each other. Hypnotizing. But not enough to prevent Calder opening fire on it, emptying his magazine into the creature alongside Skrat. Roaring pulses of rapid fire overwhelmed the enclosed chamber, folded and reflected in the tight stone space. But to little visible effect. Now Calder was at closer range, he could swear that the pellets were actually striking the creature, but wrapping around it like rain drops slicking off an umbrella before rippling, absorbed into its armour.
‘It’s bloody impossible,’ hissed Skrat. ‘The kinetic shock alone would pulp one of those sky-borne dragon monstrosities.’
‘It has some kind of shield, I think.’ Calder drew his machete and powered it into life, the active blade appearing to shimmer as it began vibrating almost too fast to follow. ‘Get on that platform, I’ll draw it around to me – you three jump off and break for the exit.’
Skrat didn’t argue, he chivvied the other two in front of him. Perhaps he recognized the logic that Calder was the one who had been trained from the age of five in everything from buckler to great sword, lance and morningstar. Or perhaps Skrat suddenly just wished to live. I know how he feels. Calder’s adversary seemed to stop and start as he ran at it, whether from the unexpected attack or the stream of abuse being screamed towards the thing, it was hard to tell. Out of practice on the war cries. Hardly enough to make a squire’s ears blush. When had the last time been… simple and bloody sword and axe-work? Must have been when he and his faithful man servant had bearded the baron’s company of killers outside a derrick worker’s hut. Before imposed exile and his current spate of offworld misadventures began. He lunged forward with the blade, but the figure ducked back, his buzzing blade tasting only air. It appeared uncertain now, stepping back, its thin axe-head of a skull wavering as it faced an unexpectedly homicidal ex-prince.
‘Devil-head!’ yelled Calder, hiding his fear. ‘I’ll take your skull and hang it in my cabin.’
Lento shrieked behind him and their attacker made a similar sound, as if aping the woman, although for the life of him, Calder couldn’t see where the noise was being produced. It had no mouth, no nostrils, no ears. Just a bony black cleaver of a skull. It lowered it bulk towards the ground, like a bull sniffing the air before the charge, swaying from side to side, pieces of its armour sliding around, an eerie puzzle rearranging itself. Calder flicked a look back from the corner of his eyes as he edged to the side, still carefully marking the creature. He was about to yell to Skrat to get a move on, but the other three had vanished! What the hell? How had they slipped away without him noticing? Lento has just been yelling her lungs out a couple of seconds ago.
‘I’ll take your skull,’ vibrated the words from the figure, ‘and hang it in my cabin.’
‘You’re too ugly for me to keep as a parrot,’ said Calder, brandishing the machete. ‘And we’ve got all the pets we need on the Gravity Rose.’ Unfortunately, Calder had the feeling he might be one of them.
It came spinning in Calder’s direction, spiked arms flailing, and he danced to the side, more matador than swordsman in this contest. As he tried to maintain a fencer’s space between himself and the creature, controlling the distance, he realized it had nicked his shoulder with the edge of one of its spines. He was cut and bleeding. He prayed to the gods that these things relied on brute force and were too unsubtle for poison. The creature stamped towards him, making the floor quiver. Calder backpedalled and leapt onto the dais. He’d have a fraction of a second when the creature leapt and was in the air, leaving the ex-prince the advantage of height and an unopposed swipe with the machete. Would his active blade cut into something that could shrug off rifle rounds fired full-auto on max-mag? Calder never found out. The wall jumped out like a molten stone flood and enveloped the ex-prince, leaving him the briefest of seconds to realize that his friends had never made it out of this chamber at all.
***
Lana held onto the webbing on the side of the shuttle’s cargo bay for dear life as the craft swung about in the air. She only just heard Steel-arm yelling from the cockpit up front that he was going to try and glide them down, the roar of the engines outside stuttering and coughing. Whatever the Heezy sentinel had thrown at the command shuttle while it was taking off, she could tell it had taken a powerf
ul bite out of their lift capacity. Lana had never heard an engine so damaged yet still working, protesting about every inch of lift being milked out of its dying airframe. Sighting on the wing surface through a porthole, Lana watched billowing waves of smoke trailing from their thrusters. Little red alerts spun in the space in front of the troop benches… flame icons with the text “alarm” flashing on and off above them.
‘I thought military shuttles were designed with triple redundancy baked in,’ called Lana.
‘It’s humanity that’s redundant here,’ said Zeno. The android needn’t have sounded so vindicated by his judgement. Unusually for her friend, he actually looked air-sick.
‘Are you okay?’
‘The Heezy brother down there directed some kind of pulse at the shuttle. It fried half the ship’s systems, even our shielded ones.’
‘So much for A.I. solidarity.’
‘I always knew being designed this human was going to be the death of me.’
‘Hey, tin-man, it’s your machine ancestry that just took a zap.’
Over on the other side of the cargo bay the professor tried to buckle herself into the seat webbing as the craft rocked and swayed, the woman moaning with each jolt of the vessel. Steel-arm roaring from the cockpit to brace for impact didn’t improve Sebba’s joyless disposition. Outside the clear hull she saw a strip of crimson jungle canopy tearing past, their shuttle bouncing like a possessed fairground ride, then the glowing lines of a laser fence sliding below. Steel-arm had timed the unpowered glide descent to perfection. A second more in the air and they would have been eating mountain at high velocity, a second less and the mine’s perimeter fence would have sliced them into salami. Lana hadn’t noticed a landing strip on her last trip over here, only a vehicle park, and she braced for impact as Steel-arm came sprinting back from the cockpit, diving to the deck as the shuttle ploughed into the mine, screaming metal from the hull and the explosion of detonating containers and quarrying gear meeting fifty tonnes of armoured landing boat. They slewed to the side, spinning on the ground like a vehicle hitting ice; more explosions from impacts with equipment and then the shuttle slowly groaned to a halt. The cockpit ahead lay mangled, sparks and smokes spitting out as the pirate commander picked himself up and dusted his clothes off. He was a homicidal maniac, but he was a psychopath with a dab hand on the stick. Steel-arm Bowen reached out and freed Sebba from the support webbing with his artificial arm. Any thought that this might be out of concern for the professor’s well-being evaporated when the man drew his pistol and pushed it against her sweating forehead. ‘How about now for activating your alien trinket… does now work for you?’
She nodded silently and took the broach from him when he thrust it at her, tracing a series of finger movements against its crystal surface, before proffering it back.
‘Is that all?’ growled Steel-arm. ‘The trinket’s active?’
‘Yes,’ said Sebba. ‘But we won’t have long. Probably not much longer than the last human outside the broach’s field survives. Then the defence systems’ attention will resolve on us, and try to work out why rogue biologicals marked for termination are carrying a diplomatic transponder. I don’t think we’re going to like the answer.’
‘You first, lass, you first.’ Steel-arm lowered the ramp while his surviving pirates rounded up the handful of base staff that had made it out of the camp.
‘Ever the gentleman,’ said Lana as she passed the pirate captain.
‘I’ll hand it to you, Lana girl, with Professor Rich Bitch you’ve found the only paying passenger in a hundred light years who’s more annoying than you. It’ll be hard to decide which one of you I keep to break in personally, and which gets sold at market.’
‘I’ll take the slave market and allow you to hang onto the professor, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘Ah, you’re only saying that so that it’s you I keep.’
‘You’ll choke on me,’ said Lana. I’ll make sure of that.
‘I’ve an awful large appetite.’ He laughed and shoved her outside, the pirates on tenterhooks as they exited the crashed shuttle, assault rifle barrels spinning around at the slightest noise. There were plenty of sounds to choose from. Steel-arm’s command shuttle had carved a furrow across most of the camp, wrecked containers and the rubble of quick-set huts, crumpled diggers and mining machinery left hissing and burning in their wake. The fence was still intact, though, holding back the howling wildlife protesting the intrusion of this massive steel beast into their realm. Much good would their fence be against the Heezy sentinels when they emerged from the rock like sorcerous golems. Professor Sebba led them down the main passage into the mine, the same tunnel Lana and Zeno had snuck into earlier in the day. Perhaps they had taken out one of the generators with their landing, as the lanterns driven into the rockface were no longer active. The pirates switched to torches mounted on their shoulder armour, laser targeting beams from their rifles making an impromptu dance floor out of the tunnel. If there was mood lighting to go along with their dismal situation, this was surely it.
‘I didn’t know you had asked the chief to upgrade you,’ said Lana as she edged through the gloom.
She though she caught a quizzical expression crossing Zeno’s face in the bobbing torch light. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry – I thought your body might be bulletproof now? The way you stepped in the way of Steel-arm’s pistol back in the brig.’
‘Just doing my bit. Isn’t that one of the laws of robotics – taking one for the fleshies?’
‘I’m your skipper, not your damn master. You’re self-aware.’
‘Right about now, I’d accept a little slave-action if it meant ditching the fear I feel and going back to just obeying orders,’ said the android.
‘I like you just the way you are,’ said Lana. Sometimes Zeno acted so recklessly it was as though he wanted to die. ‘Although maybe bullet-proof would be better.’
‘Those Heezy machines out there, they’re not coming after us with guns. There was a lot of crushing to death going on. Kind of basic, but it works.’
‘They’re not so different from you,’ said Lana, trying to sound reassuring. ‘More advanced, sure. But they’re just—’
‘Girl, they’re nothing like me. A bad wish cast in rock, waiting for some dumb-ass fleshies to come along and rub the magic lamp. And then along comes Dollar-sign Dillard and his favourite crew of dupes… and you know what happens next.’
‘We drop the planet’s shield; reach the moon and the Gravity Rose, and then high-tail it out of the system, that’s what happens next.’
Zeno nodded back toward Steel-arm Bowen and the surviving pirates, following back down the tunnel as they waited for the base staff to trigger something fatal. ‘Damned if I like the company.’
‘One problem at a time,’ said Lana. ‘Let’s stay focused on getting off this hothouse world alive first.’
‘You saved my life back in the brig,’ said Sebba, turning back from the head of the line.
‘I saved our best chance of getting off the world,’ said Lana, uncomfortable with the professor’s tone – a little too close to conciliation for her taste. Let’s keep this relationship based on mutual hostility, rather than head down the touchy-feely route. ‘This planet isn’t exactly overrun with Heezy experts.’
‘There are no Heezy experts,’ said the professor. ‘Even now, centuries after the first find, we might as well be ants crawling over an antimatter generator, trying to understand what the hell we’re looking at.’
‘You’re who we’ve got, lady,’ said Zeno. ‘You’re all we’ve got.’
‘I was removed from the alliance archaeology science unit centuries ago,’ said the professor. ‘A casualty of internal politics. My original career had barely started. I’ve been waiting for this moment ever since, scratching a living lecturing in brand archaeology while supplementing my income with offworld development projects. Downgrading the ruins of dead civiliza
tions so planets can be strip-mined without creating product boycotts against the houses responsible. Can you imagine what that feels like? Reduced to a paid shill, helping destroy what I should have been preserving. Shut out of my true vocation: making major discoveries in a part of the past so distant that protogalaxies were still cooling down after the big bang. This was my chance to show those bastards how wrong they were. To bring home a find outside of the government’s control and rub their noses in their mistake in tossing me out.’
Despite herself, Lana almost felt a jab of sympathy for the woman. Apart from the gap in years and wealth, were the two of them really that different? Both squeezed by circumstances and a hostile universe that seemed determined to derail the women from only path in life that seemed to make sense to them.
‘Well, they’re sure as hell going to be sorry now,’ said Zeno. ‘Especially if Steel-arm gets out of here with a ship stuffed full of Heezy booty. Probably not as sorry as us, but…’
‘Who was Dollar-sign planning to sell the Heezy artefacts to?’ asked Lana.
‘All I know is that he had held a blind auction for the rights to examine the first set of extracted material,’ said the professor. ‘Your ship was meant to rendezvous with the buyers after we’d used the new mining gear to open up a decent-sized shaft down to the Heezy core.’
And she opens her mouth and all sympathy fades. ‘No doubt with artefacts hidden inside ore-filled containers so we never cottoned onto the value of what had been uncovered here,’ snarled Lana.
‘At least in that, Dollar-sign’s caution was understandable. You could have asked for more money or sold the location of Abracadabra to one of his rivals.’
‘I would have jumped to the opposite end of the Edge and never looked back is what I would have done,’ said Lana. ‘Skeg this. A simple supply run? It was a suicide mission from the start. You were juggling with antimatter rods down here.’
Red Sun Bleeding Page 12
