The Devil's Nebula (6 page)

“It’s not the same ship as the one we saw earlier,” Ed murmured.

Although daubed in the same black and yellow livery of the first Vetch ship, this one was smaller, chunkier, a faceted polyhedron standing on crab-like legs.

Jed said, “Back to the ship, before they find us?”

Ed said, musingly, “But why didn’t they hear our engines when we landed?”

Lania imagined the crew of the vessel on the other side of the metal wall, squatting out of sight as they were, debating how to go about attacking the humans.

The Vetch ship stood on the very edge of the jungle, and only when Lania examined its six short legs did she notice that they were enwrapped with vines and creepers.

She nudged Ed. “Look at its stanchions.”

Ed nodded. “I’ve noticed.” He stood up and peered through the gap. “It’s my guess that it’s been here for some time.” He jumped through the gap and walked across to the Vetch ship.

Jed looked alarmed. “Boss!”

Lania lay a hand on his forearm. “It’s okay, Jed. The ship’s empty. It’s been there for decades, at least.”

They jumped down and followed Ed.

Despite her words and her conviction that the craft was old and long vacated, she found her hand straying towards her laser as she stood in the shadow of the vessel and gazed up at its bulbous form.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Ed said to himself.

Seen at close quarters, the ship showed further signs of having stood
in situ
for a long time: a mantle of lichen coated the back of the vessel, and stray vines had worked their way up the stanchions and wound themselves around fins and microwave antennae.

Ed gestured up a short flight of steps to an open hatch.

“Should we take a look?”

“Be very careful, Ed,” Lania counselled.

“As if I’m ever anything but,” he said as he drew his laser and climbed cautiously up the ladder.

She looked at Jed, and the engineer followed Ed. Lania looked around, the security-conscious part of her mind suspicious of a potential trap. She dismissed the idea as paranoid and climbed in after her colleagues.

The hexagonal flight-deck was perhaps five metres across. Four big swivel couches faced a strip viewscreen and a wraparound control panel, and three of the couches were occupied. The fourth couch was empty – but its erstwhile occupant was nearby, sprawled across the deck.

Jed stepped forward and touched the back of the closest couch, turning it to face him. He stepped back with a small cry of revulsion as the corpse swung into view.

The Vetch was mummified, and if the aliens were ugly in life, then they were even more grotesque in death. Its pink wattles and flaps, the tentacular proboscis and labial flanges, had dried and darkened in the heat, tightened and shrivelled so that the blackened flesh shrink-wrapped the bulbous skull in a hideous death mask.

Lania kicked at the second couch and it swung to reveal another mummified body. She examined the third and only then noticed the scorched hole in the chest of its jet-black uniform. She returned her attention to the other corpses, which bore similar wounds.

Ed was kneeling by the prostrate Vetch. “Look at this.”

The alien lay on its side. Its blackened hand gripped a pistol, the end of which was inserted into its mouth: the top of its skull was missing, though at first glance the shredded mess blended with the rest of its alien grotesqueness.

“I’m no expert,” Ed said, “but it looks to me as if our friend here accounted for his colleagues, then turned the pistol on himself.”

Lania looked around. “Any guess how long ago this happened?”

“None whatsoever. Some time in the last fifty years, obviously.”

“Mutiny?” Jed asked.

Ed thought about it. “What I don’t understand is why the Vetch haven’t removed the ship and the bodies? They’ve been here recently, so why leave the ship?”

Lania’s imagination ran riot. She thought of the furrow and the lack of vegetation.

“Perhaps...” she began. “Perhaps they were fearful of infection? Some viral plague carried from the ship out there, which is why nothing is growing in the furrow?” She looked at the dead Vetch. “Perhaps that might explain this? They found out they were infected and...” She gestured towards the bodies.

She asked her suit to scan for signs of harmful viruses and bacteria, and received the answer she’d been expecting: her suit did not possess the requisite facilities with which to make such an assessment. She smiled to herself. She really should have taken a little more time and stolen a higher-spec smartsuit, all those years ago.

Jed said, “Or maybe they just disagreed over a card game?”

She laughed. Trust Jed to crack a joke.

She looked at Ed. “What now?”

“Now,” he said, “we say a fond farewell to Hesperides.”

They left the Vetch vessel and emerged into the full glare of the noon-time sun. She looked around, at the aluminium white-hot sky, half expecting to see a swooping Vetch ship. They climbed up and crossed the wreck, then jumped down and walked in its shadow along the furrow towards the
Poet
. Its squat bulk had never seemed so welcoming.

Lania slipped into her sling, and five minutes later they were rising slowly from the surface of the planet. She watched the furrow recede, becoming a brown brushstroke in the vastness of the jungle. Valderido came into view, a dead city choked by rampant vegetation.

As they climbed, the continent resolved itself beneath them, a great curving landmass hard up against the lapis lazuli of the sparkling ocean. Then the planet fell away, became a sphere corded with cloud, brilliant against the sable backdrop of deep space. Lania never left a planet without feeling an involuntary surge of nostalgia; she was fourteen again and leaving Xaria.

She glanced at Ed, ensconced in his couch. “Captain?”

“I have an engagement with a certain dealer on Egremont,” he said. “Jed, lay in co-ordinates for Duba IX.”

“And then?” Lania asked.

Ed considered, then said, “I’m going back to talk to the old Hesperidian politician and then I intend to investigate the alien ship a little further, if that will be at all possible.”

Lania stared at him. “You’re not coming back here, though?”

“Of course not. I’ll do my research from a distance, Lania.”

She nodded. “Egremont it is, then.” They’d been to the planet a month ago, when Ed had met the dealer. A world famed for its patronage of the arts, a centre for artists and artisans, it was liberal and bohemian, and Lania thought a week or two in its mountain-top capital city, spending just a little of the thirty thousand she was due, might be pleasant.

She melded her smartsuit with the ship’s core and was about to initiate the phase into void-space when her suit signalled an alert. “We’re being followed, Lania,” it trilled dispassionately in her earpiece.

She felt her pulse quicken and accessed the data. A vast ship was one astronomical unit away and closing.

“Ah,” she said. “I don’t want to alarm you, gentlemen, but we have company.”

Ed sat forward. “Put it on the screen, Lania,” he said calmly.

Beside her, Jed swore.

She instructed the smartcore to patch the image to the screen and a second later a great sprawling starship resolved before them.

“It’s an Expansion patrol vessel,” Ed said.

Lania said, “A Mantis. That’s the Judiciary.” Her stomach tightened sickeningly. Their only hope was to phase into the void, and trust in her skills as a pilot, and the
Poet
’
s
speed, to escape the pursuit of the patrol ship.

“I’m phasing, Ed,” she said.

“Do it,” he snapped.

She complied gladly: contravening Expansion law and landing on an evacuated planet was bad enough, but they had all accrued sufficient misdemeanours over the years to warrant a protracted term in a high-security penitentiary.

She steeled herself for the chase.

A second before they gained the refuge of the void, a jarring shudder shook the
Poet
. Ed spilled from his couch and Lania and Jed rocked violently in their slings.

The smartcore reported that it was aborting the phase manoeuvre.

“Explanation?” Lania snapped.

“We’re inoperable, Lania, immobilised in traction stasis.”

She glanced across at Ed, whose usual pallor had taken on a deathly shade. Beside her, Jed was chewing his knuckles.

Within a few seconds, a communication channel opened between the ships and the smartcore relayed a smug communiqué from the captain of the judiciary vessel.

“You are in the custody of Expansion Security. Once in the holding compound of
Macready’s Revenge
, come out unarmed with your hands in the air.”

The lights on the flight-deck stuttered and the overridden main drive powered down. On the screen, the hapless crew of the
Poet
watched the Expansion vessel grow ever larger as they were drawn inexorably into its cavernous maw.

The last thing Lania saw, before the viewscreen flickered and died, was a platoon of heavily-armed combat drones moving into position on the open deck.

CHAPTER FOUR

M
AATJA CAME AWAKE
with the big red sun driving dazzling spikes of light through the weave of the hut. Her mother, father and sister were still asleep, so she rose quietly and eased herself through the door.

Two hundred huts lined the deserted clearing. Halfway down the row was the long-house where her people held many of their gatherings. At the far western end was the second long-house, where the Harvester dwelled.

Across from the dwellings was the edge of the fissure and the long, long drop to the river.

Quickly she left the hut, hurried across the clearing to the fissure, and peered down. The sides fell away steeply, cloaked in jungle vegetation. The sun had not yet risen high enough to illuminate very far into the chasm, and the lower reaches were swathed in darkness.

A little way down the incline, beside the broad flight of steps which her people used on ceremonial occasions, Maatja had a favourite tree where she liked to sit and watch the stars come out. Many years ago her father’s father and thousands of other humans had ventured across space in a vast starship and settled on World, and she still found the idea amazing.

When Maatja had asked why her people had come here, her father merely smiled and said, “We were called, Maatja. We were called.”

She had asked who had done the calling and he had replied, “Who do you think, Maatja? Who gives us life? Who sustains us? Who do were serve?”

She peered into the fissure, wanting to climb down to her tree and rest in its shade. But she knew that, if she did this now, her mother and father would be angry. Today was phar day and the ceremony was due to start an hour after dawn.

Across the clearing, she heard the door of a hut scrape open. She looked back to see the small shape of her sister, Hahta, squeeze through the gap and hurry across to her.

“Phar day!” Hahta cried with excitement.

Maatja smiled with feigned pleasure: it would not do to let anyone, not even her trusted little sister, know that she was not as overjoyed at the prospect of phar day as were the rest of her people.

They sat side by side, cross-legged, in the warming light of the sun.

“Are you hungry, Maatja?”

“Of course,” she lied.

Yesterday her people had run out of dried phar, so today the Harvester excreted fresh phar – a thick, milky fluid that, over the course of a few hours, would set solid in the heat of the day. This was what her people ate, the staple that sustained their life in the jungle here on World.

All the people, that was, with the exception of Maatja.

“I can’t wait!” Hahta was excited. “Isn’t phar day the best of all?”

Maatja smiled. “It is.”

Over the years she had worked hard at concealing the fact that she did not eat the phar – or, more correctly, that she ate the phar and then later, in the jungle, vomited it back up.

Thanks to the Outcast she had met, many years ago, she was unlike the other people of the fissure.

Hahta said, “I heard mummy and daddy talking, last night.”

Maatja looked across at her sister, a smaller, thinner version of herself; brown limbs, a small, pointed face and, long sun-bleached hair. “Talking about what?”

Hahta beamed. “Daddy might be going away,” she said.

Maatja’s heart leapt with alarm. “What exactly did they say?”

Hahta shrugged. “Just that mummy must prepare herself and that daddy was doing his duty.”

“But was daddy a Chosen?” Maatja asked, desperate to know.

From time to time, adults left the fissure people. They left the huts and trekked into the jungle, looking further afield for berry bushes and fruit trees. Always these people returned, after days or weeks. However, the Chosen made their way down river and never returned.

Maatja felt sickness grip her stomach as Hahta replied with a shrug, “I don’t know.”

“But what did they say!”

“I didn’t hear everything, Maatja! Just that daddy was going away and that mummy had to prepare herself. Then I was so tired I went to sleep.”

Anger or fear must have shown on Maatja’s face, as Hahta peered at her and said, “But wouldn’t you be happy, Maatja, if father was one of the Chosen?”

She fashioned a smile. “Of course. It’s just that... I would have liked them to tell me, that’s all.”

Hahta beamed. “They will tell us, if he is a Chosen! Oh...” she clapped her hands together in delight, “oh, wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

It was at times like this that Maatja felt very much apart from all the other fissure people.

“Wonderful,” she echoed, without enthusiasm.

Sometimes the Weird came to the clearing and pronounced: they would be taking this man or that woman – and these people would be the Chosen and, on the appointed day, they would descend into the fissure and take the raft downriver to join the Weird in their lair.

And they would never be seen again.

To her people, this was a thing to be celebrated.

Maatja appeared to be alone in thinking that it was a thing of horror which, soon, might be happening to her own father.