Red Sun Bleeding (3 page)

‘One thing,’ said Zeno, the android’s skin glistening orange under the auburn light. ‘We asked you to do one thing out here, and that was to keep the new guy safe.’

‘I seem to recall advising the dear boy might be better occupied in the engine room,’ said Skrat, his thick green tail swishing irritably behind him.

‘I know, I know… it’s my fault,’ said Lana. ‘I thought a bit of shore leave and seeing his first real alien world would be good for him.’ It had hardly been a bribe at all, had it? Lana was the captain. She certainly wasn’t in competition with the professor over some ill-educated exiled nobleman… a junior crewman she shouldn’t be involved with in the first place.
And this was meant to be a cake walk. A supply drop to a barely inhabited planet. How dangerous could it be?

The conceited professor who might be able to answer that last question approached the group. ‘Please tell me that at least some of the camp’s workers are still occupied in the mine?’

‘Calder has
vanished
,’ said Lana, furious at her lack of concern. Cold selfishness was a trait a lot of the life-extended members of humanity shared. Supposedly a coping mechanism to deal with the less rich members of society’s habit of dying of old age. Lana suspected the professor probably possessed it from the age of twelve, however.

‘Have you contacted your ship?’ said Sebba. ‘If Mister Durk’s really not here, then perhaps he wandered into one of your empty shuttles as its autopilot activated and lifted the boat off the field? He could have found himself locked in and unable to get about. He might be trapped in an empty cargo bay in your vessel’s hangar as we speak?’

Lana sighed. They were clutching at straws here. She unbelted her communicator and patched it through their command shuttle’s antenna to punch through this world’s god-awful radiation field. A brief bleeping as she paged the
Gravity Rose’s
bridge.  Her navigator, Polter, picked up, his voice distorted by more static than normal. ‘Revered captain?’

‘Ask the ship to scan every returned cargo lifter racked on board. Check to see Calder Durk isn’t trapped in one of the freight bays. In fact, sweep the whole ship for life signs, while you’re about it… and do the same for any birds we’ve got in the air.’

The line went silent for a minute, before the navigator returned. ‘Only myself on the bridge and the chief in the drive room. All the returning supply ships are safely docked on board and accounted for. Is Calder in trouble?’

‘I wish I knew,’ said Lana. ‘How are you doing laying down a satellite net up there?’

‘Nearly finished,’ said Polter. ‘But far too many of the satellites we have seeded are malfunctioning. It’s as though the devil himself is playing with the relays. You would think we’re trying to network this cursed system’s ebbing star.’

‘Do your best,’ said Lana. ‘It’s not just one of the locals we’re trying to track now. Calder is AWOL. Keep the ship in geostationary above this area of the continent. I want every sensor we’ve got monitoring as much of the rain forest as we can. Scan for smoke signals, rocks spelling SOS by a river-bank, night fires… anything that looks like human life down here.’

‘As you command. And I shall pray for his deliverance,’ said Polter.

‘You do that.’ At this point, nothing could hurt. She closed the line. Lana turned to the professor. ‘What aren’t you telling us?’

‘I’m not sure I know what you are talking about,’ said the professor.

‘I’ll give you a clue,’ said Zeno. Lana knew that look. The millennium-old android was about to give the academic a run for her money in the long-lived wisdom stakes. ‘This world… this operation… it doesn’t feel right. Like that truck dead out in the jungle. Its A.I erased itself. It committed suicide. Do you know how hard it is to get a machine to go against its programming like that? To
scare
it?’

Sebba pointed at the mountains behind them and indicated the staff and the base. ‘Mountains. Miners. Digging. I don’t know what else you’re expecting here? Surely you’re not frightened by the fire-side superstitions that colonists tell each other to avoid settling last-stage systems? The sun might be on its last legs, but Abracadabra’s ecosystem will survive in this state for another couple of million years at least. It will outlast us all… even you, android.’

‘That’s what I’m worried about,’ said Zeno, scratching his wiry metal afro.

‘You have one advantage the truck’s systems did not… you are
supposedly
sentient. Start thinking with your brain rather than your emotions. We are the most advanced life-form on this world – we are surrounded by a laser fence set to fry anything bigger than a virus. There is the best part of an armoured regiment’s worth of autonomous weaponry rumbling around the camp. With your supply drop, we now have enough ammunition and juice to engage a small army.’

‘Our mutual paymaster for this mission has a somewhat, shall we say,
dubious
reputation as a rather shifty fellow,’ said Skrat. ‘One we’ve been stung by before. Hence our caution, professor.’

‘I won’t argue with you on that point,’ said Sebba. ‘If Mister Durk isn’t inside the camp, he must have wandered out when the gates opened for one of the mining robots. Is it possible he wanted to impress
one
of us by rescuing Janet Lento when he heard about the missing woman’s predicament?’

Lana groaned. Calder had said something obliquely like that back on the ship. Operating on whatever cockamamie medieval honour code he had been raised with. The queen of the ship setting a series of impossible challenges to a potential suitor for him to prove his worth. But surely even Calder Durk wouldn’t be so stupid as to barrel into a dense alien forest where everything that moved wanted to kill, maim and consume him, just to rescue a damsel in distress?

‘So, the young man has gone. Did he take his rifle and communicator with him?’ asked Sebba.

Skrat nodded. ‘The dear chap certainly didn’t leave them behind in the shuttle.’

‘There we are,’ said Sebba, haughtily. ‘You can take the man out of the collapsed barbarian society, but you can’t wholly take the barbarian nature out of the man. Not so much missing, as off on a quest!’

‘This ain’t some cheap sim show,’ said Zeno. ‘The dragons outside the fence are real, there are no goblins and Calder only has one life.’

‘I find his youthful indiscretion rather charming,’ said the professor. ‘Don’t you remember when you were fresh, android?’

‘Me, lady? My early days were just ones and zeroes. Sentience was an accident... not the plan. My kind doesn’t get to believe in God, just a disappointed corporation with a rogue asset they had to write down on the balance sheet.’

And Lana, sadly, didn’t even remember that much. She gazed in fury at the academic, cold beyond even the cloying warmth of this hothouse world. Lana’s missing crewman just a bit of extra novelty for the professor’s jaded pleasure. ‘We’re going to keep on searching… for Calder and your missing driver.’

‘Of course you will. And the rest of us will get back to work.’ Sebba gazed pointedly at the miners. ‘So that we have something worth shipping out of here to justify the mine’s set-up costs.’

Lana watched the wintry woman march off to a series of low concrete buildings that formed the base complex, the miners reluctantly following behind. Their boss had tarried behind for a second.

‘We’ll do what we can to help,’ said Leong. ‘For both our people.’ Then he departed for the base too.

‘It’s never easy,’ said Lana, as much to herself as her android and first mate. ‘Working for Dollar-sign Dillard. How could I ever have forgotten?’

‘If it were easy, it wouldn’t be us,’ said Zeno.

‘We’ll take a shuttle up, all of us together, and fly in shifts,’ said Lana. ‘A proper search pattern, quarter and quarter again. You can’t beat eyes on the ground and a live hand on the stick. We’ll let the ship’s scopes and the search algorithms handle the low probability areas of the sweep… we’ll go straight for the money… everywhere between the camp’s gate and the stranded truck.’

Skrat looked at the jungle from behind the defence perimeter. He didn’t need the ship suit’s fibres set to deep freeze. For a skirl like him, this was as good as home. ‘Do you really think our man’s out there?’

‘Got to be somewhere,’ said Zeno. ‘And he sure ain’t here.’

‘Damnable fool if he is,’ said Skrat.

‘We knew that much,’ sighed Lana, ‘when we took him on.’ She stepped aside as a robot drilling unit rumbled past, clouds of dust spilling from its tank-like tracks. ‘I see the miners and I see the mining gear. So why doesn’t this feel like a mine? I don’t trust that woman. When we get a clear moment, we’re going to have good snoop around here.’

‘And when are you hoping for that?’ said Zeno.

‘As soon as.’ They were going to find Calder. They had to. Lana hadn’t lost a crewman yet, and she certainly wasn’t planning to start with Calder Durk. It was a matter of professional pride, she told herself. No more than that.

***

Calder struggled with his rifle’s strap, fumbling for the weapon even as the closest spider leapt at him, its jaw parts open, mouth hissing and whistling victoriously. He wasn’t even close to getting the weapon clear when the spider flipped over in the air, something wet, green and muscled barrelling into it mid-air. Flailing legs and ripping flesh. None of it Calder’s! He desperately rolled over and knelt up to see what was happening. A pack of green six-legged panther-sized creatures had entered the clearing, many of them feeding on the blood-stained mess of spiders his rifle had left on the jungle floor. They carried some kind of symbiotic biped riding them like mounted knights, holding horn bones curling from each mount’s head; riders leaping off their scaled steeds. The symbiotes were naked, smooth-skinned and no higher than his knee. One scampered past Calder, ignoring him, leaping up into the tree and climbing it with sucker-tipped fingers. Another came sprinting past. Halting by Calder. It had a long serrated beak resembling the sharp visor of a knight’s helm, but when it opened the beak, gawping at him, he saw a wide perpetually grinning mouth below, interlocking white teeth as sharp as needles. It almost shook its head in disbelief, wide oval eyes blinking in surprise, then ran up the tree after its comrade.
That’s the child I thought I saw in the undergrowth
! It must have been out scouting for food.
Probably thought it was a festival day when it came across the feast I’d left laid out under the trees
. There was a splintering noise from above. Calder could just see the riders cutting through branches with their beaks, using them like organic anvil loppers, then it was raining spiders… these ones involuntarily dislodged rather than ambushing their prey. The knights were quite literally shaking the tree for their dinner. The green scaled predators below leapt at each spider as it landed. Transformed from hunters to hunted, the arachnids obviously knew how combat against these ferocious six-legged carnivores usually ended for them… they didn’t try to put up a fight, just scurried back into the jungle, pursued by the long, loping predators. Calder found Janet Lento on the other side of the clearing, backed up against a series of giant orange ferns. The newly arrived predators appeared to be ignoring her and Calder for the best part. Too strange to be considered part of the food chain? Or were the predators intelligent enough to appreciate that any animal that could lay down a carpet of free food with a rail-gun was worth preserving for a while? Calder watched surviving spiders in the high branches exit from his tree exactly as they had arrived, swinging on web ropes to the neighbouring trees – like pirates fleeing a burning galleon. There was a rustling from the other trees as large arachnids abandoned this corner of the rain forest. Calder stood up, his rifle in his hands. He tentatively eased himself between the spiders’ remains and the feasting predators, moving towards Lento. Eager not to disrupt the scene. The predators were all muscle, scaled green hides rippling as they nudged and snuffled at the corpses’ entrails. Four long legs for balance at the front of a body that might have been an alligator bred with a hunting hound, two powerful muscled limbs bent at the back. Legs that looked like they could leap across quite a distance. The curled horns on their heads whipped from side to side as they tore into the dead spiders. A wave of riders flowed down the tree trunk. They assembled around the corpses, sitting down as though this was a picnic laid on for their benefit, branch-breaking beaks snapping open into a locked position, little green hands gathering up pieces of arachnid meat and stuffing it into their rictus-grin mouths. They were obviously welcome guests at the feast. The predators pushed torn bodies towards their symbiotic partners, rolling arachnid corpses with snout and forelegs, some of the bodies’ hairy legs still quivering and sending a wave of primeval fear down Calder’s spine. But he didn’t have to fear the spiders around here anymore. Only what had driven them away. Calder reached Lento and raised his finger to his mouth, when he remembered that she hadn’t exactly been loquacious before. He took her hand in his and turned, only to find himself staring at one of the predators, its head lowered in a menacing manner, a cluster of nostrils snorting as it tried to identify this unlikely pair. Other predators emerged from the undergrowth, returned from their spirited jungle pursuit of the spiders. They advanced slowly on Calder and the woman, pushing them back towards the knights’ strange picnic. For a moment Calder thought that they were being offered as food to the riders in the same manner as the spiders’ corpses, but then one of the predators appeared rolling a dead spider across the ground, halting its progress in front of the two humans.

              ‘Are you inviting us to the party?’ said Calder.

              The circle of riders had shuffled to either side, leaving a space the right size for Calder and Lento to join their ranks. It was as bizarre an offer as he was likely to receive today, but he’d rather humour the pack than waste the dwindling reserve of pellets in his rifle’s drum. Janet Lento sat down, as if breaking bread with these strange natives was an everyday occurrence. She reached into the spider’s body, barely recognizable after being shredded by his rail-gun, scooping out the pink meat as though this was a crab delicacy, stuffing it into her face until her cheeks were puffed out, strange juices running down her throat. Calder tried to stop himself from retching. It was as if the jungle had claimed her soul. Regressed her to some more basic, primeval state. Maybe this is how humanity would end up if they stayed on a world long enough for a sun to reach its nadir and start to die? Beside Calder, one of the knights nudged him with its sucker-tipped hand, indicating the spider’s corpse. A tentative bird-like noise – somewhere between tweeting and whistling – escaped its mouth.