Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (34 page)

‘We’re heading out first as lead scout,’ said Owen. ‘And you remember this: what we’re doing, we’re doing for every Weylander here, not for the imperium. You think the rations shipped in by the Vandians have been bad so far? You see how hungry our people will get if we fail to come home with a stake. Princess Helrena doesn’t see much margin in greasing the cogs on her mining machine if it isn’t running, you understand?’

Grunts of assent rose from the sky miners on the transporter’s benches. Only Carter maintained a sullen silence. That fool would probably eat rock if he thought it would piss off the Vandians.
That’s the fool you owe your life to
, a nagging voice reminded Duncan.
Yeah, well, that was only to piss me off too.
Showing courage when matters turned difficult was no substitute for a pinch of caution and common sense. A bit of yield, given their current miserable circumstances.
That’s as maybe, but a life saved is still a heavy debt.

‘The way you talk,’ said Carter to Owen, ‘people’d think you were responsible for feeding the whole station.’

Owen turned around, a look of seriousness visible behind his mask’s visor. ‘The person behind you, the person in front, that’s all you have to count on in the sky mines.’

‘I
am
the person behind him,’ said Duncan.

Carter nervously swapped his pickaxe handle between his hands. ‘And that about sums up my situation.’

Owen shrugged at the pair of them. ‘You’ll learn to work together, or you’ll die out here. One of the two.’

Shouts echoed down the hangar, orders passed from slave to slave. ‘Tails up,’ called Anna, banging the side of the transporter.

‘If we make it back, try aiming for the hangar this time,’ said Owen.

‘Hell,’ laughed Anna, adjusting her mask and pulling a poncho-style cape over her body as protection. ‘I crash another transporter, my next assignment’s going to involve a blunt shovel and a real narrow shaft.’

A warbling drone rose up around Duncan, then the rotors’ updraft as they lifted off. They flew out of the station, the loud clatter of rocks falling on their newly installed roof.

Owen jabbed a finger towards the ceiling. ‘More rocks coming down than going up. This is early ejecta mass. Same stuff that we were pushing through to get back to the station. Just coming down, rather than going up.’ He indicated a clip on his leather tool belt; identical to the belt Duncan had been issued with, and then pulled out a line from under the bench. ‘Tether up like this. We’re hunting high, and I don’t want any of you Weylanders floating away on me.’

Duncan did as he was ordered, connecting his line to his belt. Owen and Kerge squatted at the back of the transport, hunched over a nest of unfamiliar-looking machinery bolted into the survey craft’s floor, all pertinent to the business of finding and evaluating a new stake. Racks filled with surveying gear. A steel console with buttons and levers and dials; telescope-shaped tubes on tripods surrounded by thick, coiling cables. Evil-looking needles protruded from saucers that hummed with electrical power. Half of their crew were hitters. The remainder were older hands with experience in the evaluation of stakes, the slaves that Duncan and Carter were along to protect. A squadron of transporters followed Anna as she climbed for altitude, other formations banking away to sweep adjacent sectors for claims. Also pulling away from the station was one of the vast metal craft that belonged to Princess Helrena.

‘That monster’s following us?’ asked Duncan.

‘Only to ensure no rivals stray into the princess’s territory. We bring a rock back; the princess’s enemies will get real motivated to snatch it out from underneath us. Her ship can’t venture out into the free sky to support us. We’re on our own until we return. The emperor might be playing a game of divide and rule, but he doesn’t want the fruits of his noble loins openly shooting it out up here.’

‘So we do the dying for them,’ observed Duncan.

‘Slaves to do the digging, slaves to catch the blunt end of a pickaxe handle. Rich people back home keep staff on retainer to do the fetching and carrying for them. Except for our lack of choice in the matter, it’s not that different here.’

And I was one of them,
Duncan thought. It was a measure of guilt made worse by the longing for his old, comfortable life.
I just want to be home with Willow
and Adella
. Carter’s very presence was a reproach to him.
You want to be home, but you’re not willing to risk anything to do it. Damn you for a coward, Duncan Landor
. They climbed higher and higher, running into banks of thick rolling clouds. Anna navigated solely using her instruments, now; only brief glimpses of the squadron following through the fog bank. Duncan felt the increasing lightness of gravity’s embrace. The mask he wore sensed the thinness of the atmosphere, its canisters releasing squirts of air into his leather mouthpiece. The transporter bounced in the currents. Duncan jolted up from the seat and came down so slow he swore there was a layer of invisible cushioning between him and the bench’s surface. His gut filled with queasiness, riding this high, freed from gravity’s tyranny. The sound of rotors died away, and the transporter’s movements became gentler, gliding. The pelting of ejecta mass on the roof fell away too as their transporter moved with the whistling wind, buffeting fingers reaching out for the fuselage and toying with their aircraft.

A large rock suddenly peeled out of the cloud cover, coming straight for them, and Anna threw the transporter up, barely clearing stone by ten feet; a complaining roar from their engines at being overtaxed. With a shock, Duncan realised this find wasn’t from the eruption – it was a mining station, sides embedded with antigravity stones to give it additional lift, the roof pockmarked with rusty air vents and a top-side landing hangar, its doors half open.

‘What the hell’s that doing floating out here?’ yelled Duncan. ‘In unclaimed sky? We could have flown straight into it!’

‘Station sixteen,’ said Owen, pointing to white rubble piled across the rocky landscape below. ‘The ghost station. There was a slave revolt there, long before our time. The Vandians left it anchored here as a warning to the rest of us. Position must have shifted with the push of the ejecta mass; our charts show it to the south of here.’

With horror Duncan realised the white debris was bones. Hundreds of dead slaves littering the station’s roof. ‘The Vandians assaulted the station?’

‘Just cut off water deliveries and blockaded it,’ said Owen. ‘Why waste bullets and blood on slaves when you don’t have to? Legends say the Vandians’ patrol ships kept on dropping cans of food for the slaves, though. Real good stuff, the kind of rations we never ever see up here. Salted beef, salted fish. Alcohol too. Anything that would make them thirstier than they already were.’

‘Bastards!’

‘If you look real hard among the bones, you’ll see the remains of the transporter fuel drums they were drinking from by the end. If it had been me, I would have jumped before it came to that. But I guess everyone’s different when you’re choosing how to die.’

‘I can hear something,’ said Carter, gripping the transporter’s cage sides opposite Duncan. ‘Whistling?’

‘Air vents left locked in open position,’ explained Owen. ‘Funnelling the wind. Just a bit of theatre for the rest of us rubes in the sky. You don’t really believe in ghosts do you, Northhaven?’

‘I believe that Vandians make them out of their prisoners.’

Owen nodded grimly. ‘That, at least, is no camp-fire tale.’

Duncan watched the ghost station pass behind them, claimed by the clouds. Maybe that was the true purpose of the mines – a mill to process the Vandians’ slaves into the shades of the dead. Even after death the unfortunate slaves still served their masters, like corpses swinging inside a crossroads gibbet.

Anna called something out from the cockpit. Kerge and Owen started to rotate a tripod-mounted piece of surveying gear. Duncan realised the team had come across their first potential sky mine: a large grey slab tracking upward through the almost non-existent gravity. Their transporter slowly circled the rock while the rest of the squadron took up a holding pattern behind them. The stake appeared little different from their home station, although the rock’s surface was still boiling hot – surrounded by a trail of steaming moisture as it rotated its way through the thick clouds. After a minute attending the survey equipment, Owen turned round and attracted Anna’s attention, making a cutting gesture across his throat. ‘Nothing to justify a ground survey. Next…’

They banked away, leaving the mass to waste a rival crew’s time. Similar results were discovered from a smaller rock, a real smoker moving fast as it scratched skyward. Owen and Kerge located signs of iron ore inside, but at that size, the strike wouldn’t last long enough to keep the princess happy, so they cut it loose too. Anna shrugged and banked away in search of another strike. Their third find, though, that was the charm. A rock so hefty that the cloud cover was left clinging to its margins, concealing its true width.

Owen punched the air, whooping. ‘This is the one! Copper, iron, silver, gold, platinum. It’d be easier listing all the metals she doesn’t contain.’

‘You getting paid commission?’ asked Carter.

‘We bring this stake home; there’ll be well-fed Weylanders in the station for a year. That’s as much a pay packet as we ever get to see.’

That probably didn’t cut much ice with a bull-headed fool like Carter Carnehan
. Brave, bull-headed fool
, a voice noted inside Duncan.
Shut up. What one man calls bravery, a wiser man would label as recklessness
.

Owen rummaged under the bench and withdrew a flare, pulling its firing pin, billowing green smoke left trailing in the transporter’s wake. Shortly after his signal, the rest of the squadron went into action, not landing – just hovering above the rock’s surface as teams of men dropped out of the transporters’ rear, lugging the anti­gravity stones they’d need to stabilise the stake against gravity’s eventual summons. At the same time, other men leapt from the platforms with spear-long rods of steel topped with thick hoops. These were driven into the rock with hammers, cables unwound from the mining crafts’ fuselage and clipped into place. Anchors to turn the squadron into a flight of tugs. It was amidst this flurry of activity that Anna’s transporter set down, settling on the rock’s surface just long enough for Kerge and Owen to offload their survey equipment. As soon as Duncan, Carter and the others had helped drag the gear out, Anna lifted off in a cloud of dust, heading for the rock’s edge where towing cables were being secured. Heat seeped through the thick soles of Duncan’s survival suit, making his feet itch. It was hellish hot at this altitude. Like standing above a spit roast and volunteering to be steak for dinner.

Duncan and Carter rested against their wooden clubs, looking to Owen for what was to come next.

‘We’ve got to secure this claim fast,’ Owen told Kerge and the two men. ‘Help me shift the gear. No need to watch the skies yet. Anybody planning to jump our claim will let us do the hard work of fixing antigravity stones and anchoring it before they move in and try and snatch it.’

Duncan lifted up one of the cases. Not heavy at all in the light gravity. He followed after Owen, every step given an extra spring by their altitude. The wind had picked up by the time he got to Owen’s camp location. Eddies of burning dust carried around Duncan, whipping his tunic and making him glad of the mask’s protection. ‘Quite a gust.’

Owen pointed to the clouds above. ‘That’s where we’re heading. High altitude trade winds all the way to heaven, from here on in. We need to get this rock stabilised and heading down again real quick.’

Duncan didn’t last long before he had to raise his mask and spit out the grime seeping through its seals.
Sure would be good to take a swig from my canteen about now
. Instead, he helped Owen, Kerge and Carter drill holes large enough to accommodate survey sensors. Owen appeared satisfied that the ground equipment backed up his preliminary findings. That was of less concern to Duncan than the tornado-strong gusts he had to fasten his feet against. But the sound and fury of the winds they were rising into gradually abated as more and more transporters leashed to the rock, beginning to drag the stake back down. Finally, a tipping point was reached when gravity’s natural course worked for them rather than against them. Cries echoed around the rock, and the sky miners’ antigravity stones activated at the buoyancy point. The rock’s passage through the volcanic storm had become a simple matter of being hauled by their transporters.

Duncan spotted a transporter dipping above them, marking its passage with red flare smoke. One of their own craft spotted the intruder and peeled away to chase it off. ‘Why do I think that’s not Princess Helrena signalling there’ll be a red carpet laid out for us when we get back to the station?’

‘Birds in the air without a nest, Northhaven. They’ve spotted us and they’re going to try to take ours.’

‘I don’t want to do this,’ said Duncan.

Owen laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘I feel exactly the same. Everyone here does. But what we want, well, that doesn’t count for a whole lot. The princess’s enemies will try to land near the anchors, cast off our cables and then attach their own tugs.’

Carter made a noise in the back of his throat that mirrored what Duncan felt.

‘Kerge and I will remain here and protect the survey equipment,’ said Owen. ‘If it’s any consolation, you’ll find it easier to defend your rock after the hostiles have landed and are trying to add a few busted ribs to the injuries you received on your last outing. Until then, just think about your sister and girl and everyone else back at the station. Stay alive for them.’

Shouts echoed from all over the rock, Weylanders congregating at the rim, bunching around anchor points. There was a bounce in Duncan’s step that didn’t reflect the way he felt. His heart as heavy as lead he walked towards the edge.

‘This is wrong, Carter.’