Red Sun Bleeding

by Hunt, Stephen

  ‘I had matters completely under control,’ protested Sebba. ‘Until your thuggish pirate friend started slamming atomic weaponry into this planet.’

  The memory of Calder’s face swum into view, still missing in the vast jungle along with the camp’s tanker driver. Under control? Why did Lana think that the professor was as wrong about that as she had been about everything else? They had been in deep trouble long before Steel-arm showed up. They just didn’t know it, is all.

  ‘The wise thing to do would have been to pass this world’s coordinates over to the alliance and let their specialists handle it.’

  ‘Specialists?’ Sebba snorted. ‘That’s relative.’

  ‘The alliance discovered the cache of Heezy weapons that ended the war, didn’t they?’ said Zeno. The android didn’t add that he was old enough to have seen both the war’s start and close in person. Lana reckoned that was something he liked to forget. A very human trait.

  ‘And you know what the original science team did, after the end of the war against the Skein?’ said Sebba. ‘They surveyed what they had wrought… the cinder of countless worlds and suns left devastated by their “find”… and they mutinied and destroyed their work. The majority of the team disappeared while the ones who stayed behind wiped their minds. The alliance still knows less about handling the Heezy’s systems today than we did a thousand years ago. That’s your precious specialists for you.’

  ‘You should have taken a leaf out of their book,’ said Lana.

  ‘Maybe I should have,’ admitted Sebba. ‘But such knowledge can never truly be forgotten. Totally erased. One day we’ll have a similar level of science to the Heezy, whether naturally or as a result of reverse engineering from dig sites like this. Just knowing that it’s possible…’

  ‘If you fleshies ever last long enough to reach that point, here’s hoping you’ll be wise enough to handle it,’ said Zeno

  ‘You’re part of humanity, too,’ said Lana, touching the android’s arm. ‘The greater human story.’

  ‘Pinocchio to your Geppetto? Don’t remind me,’ said Zeno. ‘If we find God down below, ask him to reincarnate me as a toasting algorithm in a robot oven.’

  Lana gazed down the dark passage. If the Heezy really had transformed themselves into gods, they were the absent kind. But their devils, those they had left scattered behind them aplenty.

  ‘How much did you see below the surface?’ asked Sebba.

  ‘’How much – skeg it, I don’t even know what I saw?’ said Lana. ‘A deep shaft with globules of programmable matter floating around like God’s own lava lamp. An anteroom with a transport system to move through stone like those gimp Heezy killing machines that literally walked into the base.’

  ‘We’ll have to use the motile bubbles to access the core control level,’ said the professor. ‘That’s where we can disable the planetary shield.’ She didn’t seem pleased at the prospect.

  ‘You can control the transports?’ asked Lana.

  ‘It’s not safe travelling so deep,’ said Sebba. ‘I’ve lost three people who took trips down there and never showed up at the other end, including my assistant. Most of our exploration of the complex has involved accessing levels closer to the surface since then.’

  ‘The Heezy’s sentinel machines?’ probed Zeno.

  ‘No, this is the first time we’ve seen them appear. Malfunctioning transport systems would be my best guess.’

  And that was the problem, Lana reckoned. An extinct species that had lasted long enough to need to re-boot its own solar mass. Guessing only got you so far. They reached the end of the tunnel and the narrow well down into the Heezy complex.

  Steel-arm caught up with them and waved the prisoners away from the rack of anti-gravity chutes. ‘We’ll let one of ours go down first. I wouldn’t want any of my canaries to fly the coop.’

  ‘A rat down a drainpipe would be a better analogy,’ said Lana. ‘You’ve finally found your true vocation, Seth.’

  Steel-arm signalled at a pair of his pirate fighters. ‘You first, my bucks – make sure my canaries don’t try to fly away. Then you next, Lana girl. Be sure to scream loud enough to warn me if any of those faceless monsters start walking out of the walls down there.’

  Lana made a zipping gesture across her lips and caught the anti-gravity chute as the pirate commander tossed it at her. ‘You ever think that a spot of honest labour would be easier than this?’

  He laughed heartedly. ‘Labour? You mean running ration pack runs for bent brokers like Dollar-sign Dillard? Scrabbling in the dirt at Transference Station for a handful of T-dollars? I wouldn’t be caught stooping so low. And your honest career track… it never worked out for me.’

  Yeah, Lana had heard the rumours that Steel-arm had once been an officer in one of the Edge systems’ local navies. Until he had been hung out to dry and left for dead during a nasty system-on-system conflict that’d escalated faster and harder than his political master had expected. But the rogue’s jump carrier hadn’t been quite as wrecked and non-operational in deep space as his superiors believed. He’d repaired her, deserted and been flying as a raider for the pirate lords at the Invisible Port ever since.

  ‘No,’ continued Steel-arm, ‘taking what I find is a far better line of work for a man of rough and ready tastes like me. And what’s under our boots for the looting had better be worth the price of my precious Quasar.’ He grabbed the professor by the throat. ‘How many weapons do they have stashed down there? They’ll be worth selling! Or maybe I’ll make a grand gift of them to the Pirate King Renan Barcellos in return for a share of the spoils.’

  ‘Let’s focus on taking down the shield and escaping from this system before its damn sun brews up,’ suggested the female pirate, Cho. She placed a hand on his arm and he dropped the professor, choking, to the floor.

  ‘Ah, that’s the reason you’re not the skipper, Cho,’ said Steel-arm. ‘Not bold enough by half. To live and step out of the front door is to take a risk. To live as a freebooter…’

  ‘No, I’m fairly sure the reason’s this.’ Cho tapped the shock collar around her neck.

  ‘The Heezy constructed tools not weapons,’ coughed Sebba, sounding affronted by the pirate commander’s naked avarice.

  ‘Tools that can snuff out suns,’ pointed out Lana. ‘And Steel-arm’s not so different from you, professor, for all your principled talk of advancing human understanding. The buyers for the artefacts in your blind auction weren’t going to be charities.’ In fact, she didn’t even want to think about who they might be.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Sebba, picking herself up from the floor. ‘Whatever you strip out of the complex will take centuries of study to understand.’

  Steel-arm watched his first two pirates begin their decent down the narrow shaft. ‘Your alliance lads reverse engineered the aliens’ arsenal just fine during the great war.’

  ‘The original science team unearthed a DNA-based Rosetta Stone during their first dig on Neptune. The Heezy controlled their systems using genetic sequencing as a master key,’ said Sebba. ‘Our team were able to adjust their own DNA to establish control over the artefacts. All that knowledge vanished with them when they disappeared.’

  ‘Buried on Neptune? That was quite a conveniently placed discovery,’ said Zeno.

  ‘There are elements in the alliance that think humanity was chosen. That the Heezy left their treasure trove in the solar system by design.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve met a few of those mopes… the universe revolves around Sol and you’re all descendants of the sun gods too,’ said Zeno.

  ‘I’m not talking about the cults that worship the Heezy.’

  ‘Enough stalling,’ said Steel-arm, impatiently. He tossed Lana a gravity chute. ‘Away with your theory and on with the practical. Down into the damn pit with you, Lana girl. We’ll be behind you. Way behind.’ He laughed loudly.

  If going down the shaft had felt claustrophobic the first time, Lana didn’t reckon her journey wa
s improved descending while terrified that any second a Heezy sentry machine might lunge out of the bare stone and pulp her like an orange husk being juiced. She sensed a thin breeze of cooler air rising up from the abyss, passing her face, holding onto the sensation with quiet desperation. Lana could see the lights of the pirates coming down above her; hear the faint crackling sound of her ship suit’s fibres adjusting to the cooler environment. If it was plunder Steel-arm was after, he should have let the base dig a main shaft before attacking. He wasn’t going to be able to haul much of value up this narrow exploratory well. She landed in the anteroom, held there by the two pirates while everyone else came down the tube and assembled in the room. Sebba entered a code in the panel on the wall and Steel-arm and his brigands stepped back in shock as the corridor fell away, appearing in the stone like she had tossed a self-tunnelling spell at the rock.

  ‘How do you know the walls won’t close around us when we enter?’ snarled Steel-arm.

  ‘You need to think like a Heezy,’ said Sebba. ‘They made use of matter; they made use of its absence. Everything under their mastery.’

  Everything under the sun, including the sun. Lana wished her predicament felt as certain as the vanished species’ control of the universe. A minute later and they reached the vast, near-bottomless shaft at the other end. The glutinous spheres of machinery floating up and down its length were fair racing now, made hyperactive by the effort of controlling the dark energy being tapped to recharge the system’s sun. A power so strange and endless that it could literally move the universe. Lana shivered. And she – they – wanted to turn this off. They were no more than specks of plankton swimming against the currents of a tsunami, dreaming their insane dreams of controlling the sea.

  Even Steel-arm stood awed by the sight, rubbing at his alien broach as though trying to summon a genie that could help them escape this trap. ‘Someone will pay for this!’ he laughed. ‘This’ll be the making of me!’

  Yeah, we’ll pay, if we don’t get off this world. Lana turned to Zeno and spoke low. ‘Keep your eyes peeled for a chance to make a break for it. Ditch Seth and his crew. They’re going to get us all killed.’

  ‘We had better escape with the Heezy broach,’ said Zeno. ‘Or we won’t need Steel-arm’s help to get killed.’

  Professor Sebba led them to the hall where the Heezy transport system was located, pointing out the metal cases stored there to her surviving base staff, giving them orders to gather up her equipment stash. ‘Nothing without my command!’ barked Steel-arm. ‘What’re you doing?’

  Sebba shot the pirate commander a withering look. ‘What do you think I’m doing? These are the tools we’ve been using to research the complex. If we’re going to interface with the Heezy systems on their control level, we’ll need every last piece of equipment. I have never attempted anything this difficult before. What were you planning to do, walk in and start shooting at Heezy instruments until the energy shield falls?’

  ‘No, witch, I was planning to stick my blade in you and your blighted underlings until one of you turned off the shield.’

  ‘Just let us get on with it, man.’

  Steel-arm spat contemptuously on the floor and stalked over to where his raiders were examining Heezy artefacts accumulated from the excavation by the base staff. His brutes tossed the objects between each other and cackled as they imagined the riches the things would be worth to collectors. Steel-arm shoved the crew aside, yelling at them to store the priceless alien gewgaws in their equipment packs. Professor Sebba motioned to Lana and Zeno as she slid open a silvered steel crate. Lana peered inside. A rack of crystals similar to the broach that Steel-arm had commandeered. Sebba activated them and passed one each to Lana and Zeno. As the surviving base crew came past hauling the professor’s equipment, she quietly slipped each member of staff a broach. Lana noted she wasn’t handing them out to the pirates still squabbling over the alien treasure. Sneaky bitch. Not that the professor would have cared, but Lana approved. Anything to even the odds. Also in the case were a series of black pebble-sized globules held in foam mesh… more Heezy artefacts.

  ‘Matter programming instructions,’ whispered Sebba. ‘Take them. If we’re attacked by the sentinels, hurl one at the things.’

  Lana surreptitiously pocketed a handful, glancing over her shoulder as Zeno and the professor did the same. The artefacts felt warm and jelly-like to the touch, yielding to her fingers when she squeezed. ‘What effect will these have?’

  ‘Not much,’ admitted Sebba. ‘But they should disrupt the sentinels for a few seconds; their matter had been programmed to perform as sentries… this will instruct the machines they should be acting as something else. It will take them a few moments to prioritise which instruction takes precedence and purge the new code set.’

  ‘What if these blobs instruct them to turn into something even worse?’ asked Zeno.

  ‘Ever the optimist,’ said Lana.

  The android indicated the Heezy chamber and Steel-arm’s pirates. ‘Hey…’

  She took the point, they were well and truly trapped underground; a crew of cutthroats on one side, with a legion of murderous automatons lurking in the bedrock on the other.

  Sebba shut the case and turned to call to the miners packing away her equipment. ‘Be careful with the interface deck. That’s a one-of-a-kind.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ said Lana. ‘Borrowed from the alliance science team before you left.’

  ‘Their redundancy package wasn’t nearly as generous as it should have been,’ said Sebba, in mock justification.

  ‘Working for Dollar-sign Dillard, I can sympathize.’

  Sebba snorted and went to oversee her precious equipment being sorted for transport. The base crew were piling gear across the dais where the Heezy version of a transport tube awaited its latest consignment of passengers. Lana had a nagging suspicion that as uncomfortable as dropping down the tight well had been, being squeezed through the depths of the underworld inside a claustrophobic alien force field – Abracadabra literally rearranging itself around her – would not be an experience tourists would pay for. She imagined her and Zeno’s presence as trespassers detected by the ancient systems, both left to rot deep in the bedrock like bugs in amber.

  Zeno sighed. ‘If we can get the shield down, between the upcoming supernova and the Heezy-built brothers out there, we’re not going to have a whole lot of time to find Skrat and Calder. You might have to choose. Crew or ship.’

  ‘That’s not a decision I’m willing to make,’ said Lana.

  ‘Not making the decision is pretty much the same as making it, skipper,’ warned Zeno.

  She knew that. Lana just wished she didn’t.

  When it came to actually taking the alien transport system, the journey proved every bit as claustrophobic and terrifying as Lana anticipated. Almost as soon as she stood on the platform, the wall lunged out at her encasing her within rock. She caught a momentary glimpse of Zeno coming up onto the platform, but for whatever reason, he wasn’t included in her little bubble of mobile rock. Lana was pulled alone through the underworld. She got the impression that she was traveling at an incredible velocity, although she had no way to gauge the speed she was actually traveling at. The spherical field she was encased in held her tight, as though she were embedded in invisible foam. Her stomach did somersaults that left her feeling queasy as she plunged deeper and deeper into the heart of the world – was the bubble rotating with her inside? Lana had lost track of time as she was regurgitated at velocity into a new chamber, tumbling over its transport platform and narrowly avoiding colliding with Professor Sebba who must have arrived moments before her. She picked herself up, and quickly moved out of the way as the android and other members of the base staff vomited out of the hard-face of the chamber.

  ‘That ain’t never going to take off,’ said Zeno as he brushed himself down. ‘Give me an old-fashioned elevator anytime.’

  The android stepped to the side as Steel-arm arrived, the female pi
rate Cho holding onto him in a very un-pirate-ish pose. Bowen glanced around the arrival chamber, identical to the one they had departed from. ‘Where’s the rest of my crew?’ he bellowed towards the professor.

  ‘I only programmed one set of destination coordinates,’ said Sebba. ‘You watched me do it.’

  ‘Then where are my men at, witch?’

  ‘They were carrying weapons,’ said Sebba, wearily, by way of explanation. ‘But without the protection of your brooch.’ She wisely didn’t mention that all of her survivors now had alien ambassadorial credentials secreted about their person. Had the professor known that traveling down here without a friendly Heezy transponder code would be a one-way trip?

  ‘You didn’t warn me that bringing guns down here would be a problem,’ growled the Pirate captain.

  ‘How was I to know for sure? Besides, would you have left them behind if I had asked you?’

  Steel-arm raised his pistol at the mission commander. ‘If I didn’t need you so much...’

  ‘But you do,’ said Lana.

  ‘Maybe we should kill you instead?’ said Cho, pointing at the Gravity Rose’s captain. ‘Just to make ourselves feel better.’

  Steel-arm placed his cybernetic hand on the barrel of her rifle, lowering it towards the floor. ‘Don’t spoil the goods, Cho. Getting off this miserable rock with enough profit to buy a new ship is what I need to make me feel better.’

  If looks could have killed, the alien chamber would have been in the middle of a firefight. It was a lot hotter in this chamber than their last; nearer the heart of the core, probably. Lana wiped the sweat dripping off her forehead. ‘Which way now, professor?’

  Sebba indicated a panel in the wall behind them, another one of the team’s makeshift interfaces. ‘That way, I think. We have only been this deep a couple of times; and as I said, we abandoned exploring the control levels after my assistant was lost in a transport glitch.’

  ‘If it was a glitch,’ said Zeno.

  ‘We weren’t carrying weapons.’ Sebba motioned to her people to carry the equipment crates with them. Steel-arm and Cho stood behind, covering the prisoners with the guns. Lana didn’t know what the pirate captain hoped to achieve by threatening his human hostages. She had a sneaking suspicion that shooting a weapon down here would trigger the Heezy defence systems quicker than bad chilli through a hound dog. Another instant corridor fell away in front of the survivors, which they explored carefully, Lana and Zeno helping carry the heavy steel cases with the professor’s scientific gear. As the passage opened out, Lana found herself standing by the doorway into a truly vast space; an alien cathedral, the roof above so distant that it seemed to be cloaked in mist. Massive columns broke up miles of cavern floor, but they weren’t fixed, more like tower-sized candles composed of glutinous programmable matter, shifting and flexing as she gawked at the vista. She had spotted crescent-shaped hills shaped from smart matter, and these, she realized, must be the alien analogue of control panels, attended by groups of bizarre creatures that bore little relation to any organic life form Lana knew of. The most normal of these machine attendants were zeppelin-sized aerial workers that drifted across the open space like ebony jellyfish, clusters of tentacles hanging from their belly picking up smaller machines and carrying them away to be dropped off at alternative mounds. Occasionally, dark creepers extended out of the cave’s columns and merged with the zeppelins, pulsing spheres of matter passing between them as though one side or the other was either feeding or being fed. Lana wasn’t quite sure if she was looking at what passed for a bridge or the station’s intestines.