Red Sun Bleeding (11 page)

It stuck in Calder’s craw, hiding out here, when every sinew of his body wanted to charge in and swing a sword at these pirate raiders. But there was a part of him that realized it was the right thing to do to maximize their chances for success. Maybe if Calder had been able to think more like Skrat, he’d have been able to come up with a strategy that wouldn’t have ended up with Calder losing most of his nation’s ice fleet in a futile invasion, ending up exiled and on the run. But then, he wouldn’t have met Lana Fiveworlds.
Or be stuck here, you fool
.

A sudden cracking noise. In front of Calder, Momoko tooted in alarm as it fell over – dropping the empty crate – one of its heavy metal legs disappearing down a hole, the rest of its body left above ground, arms gesturing wildly. Calder flipped his rifle up, half expecting one of the local arachnids to erupt out of the ground, furious that it only had robot steel to feast on. But nothing emerged. Tentatively, Calder and Skrat moved over. Hauling the robot up was like pulling a tank out of a ditch.

‘I never should have left the lodge,’ said Momoko, dejectedly, while the two crewmen pulled at its body. ‘Is this my punishment for abandoning my post?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Calder, grunting as he hefted the machine’s weight. ‘You’re not programmed to believe in gods, are you?’

Momoko put its remaining limbs to work, found some purchase, and managed to help its two companions extradite itself. ‘The company knows everything.
Sees
everything. I thought this was within the rules, but perhaps I was wrong?’

‘We write our own rules, old fruit,’ said Skrat. ‘You might say it’s something of an unofficial motto among
our
company.’

There were only a few hours until sunrise and large sectors of the robot’s memories automatically dumped. And there wouldn’t be a local copy of its corporate bible on hand for it to refresh what it needed to know. Skrat bent down to examine the lair. Calder kept his gun trained down into the hole. ‘Be careful,’ warned Calder. ‘Most the things I’ve run into out here so far have wanted to add me to the menu.’

‘There’s something below the mud,’ said Skrat. ‘And it isn’t a warren or a lair.’ He pulled a knife out of his belt, touching a button on its hilt. A sudden buzzing filled the clearing as his blade blurred; vibrating so fast it almost became invisible. The first mate cut away bricks of compacted mud topped with alien grass. It quickly became clear what the robot had tumbled through. A shattered window. Momoko walked back, halting its imposing bulk above the hole. A light in its chest sprung into life, helping illuminate the makeshift excavation. A length of heavy metal plating, rusted and red, lay under the soil.

‘A building under here?’ wondered Calder.

‘Not a building,’ said Skrat. ‘This is standard hex-hull, old alliance design, and it has seen extensive particle damage. This is a starship, old bean. And we’ve landed on top of her. Large enough to cover the entire valley floor… must be a colony vessel. Rusting away long enough to be completely covered by mud slides and sediment and have the local flora grow over her roof. I believe she must be the
Never Come Down
… she was a colony ship, later posted missing, that had a hand in naming this world Abracadabra.’

Calder glanced around the trees. Any signs of a settlement had long since been reclaimed by the rainforest. He knew all about failed colonies, although his own was a heck of a lot colder than this hell-world’s.

‘Who would want to settle here?’

‘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?’