Weird Space 2: Satan's Reach (15 page)

“It’s a beautiful world, by all accounts,” Di Mannetti said. “I’ve only seen 3Vs of it, but it looks idyllic.”

“Just the place for a relaxing holiday, Den,” Zeela said.

Harper nodded. “Ideal for a convalescent, I’d say.”

Miro heard them, turned and shuffled forward. “Don’t worry, folks, I’ve dosed myself up to the gills. I should be fine for the next thirty minutes.”

As Harper made the introductions, Zeela smiled at the hunched, pustular shell that was Miro Tesnolidek. “Den has told me all about you,” she said.

Miro growled a laugh. “You shouldn’t go frightening a beautiful woman with horror stories, Den.”

Harper indicated the ramp and said to DiMannetti,“
Judi
will see you to your berth.”

“I’ll go with you, Gina,” Zeela said. “Nice to meet you, Mr Tesnolidek.”

As the women strode up the ramp, Miro said, “Glad to see she’s pulled through, Den.”

Harper almost said something about the wonders of modern medicine, but stopped himself just in time. Instead he said, “How did the work go?”

Miro waved a claw at the ship. “Without a hitch, both the engineering and the programming. We slaved the operating system into the ship’s core. All you have to do is give the command when you want to blast your enemies out of the sky. Come on, I’ll show you the missiles.”

Harper looked at his friend. Normally the only confined space where Miro allowed himself to entertain others was his office, where the restraining cage ensured he couldn’t run amok.

Miro picked up on Harper’s hesitation. “It’ll be fine. I started a new course of drugs yesterday. They keep me relatively sane for stretches of thirty minutes. And I’d say I had another twenty to go before I lose it again.” He indicated the ramp with a scabrous claw. “Anyway, there’s something else I want to show you.”

“‘Something else’?”

He followed Miro into the ship and they took the chute to the engine-room. “We’ll get to it,” Miro said. “First, the hardware...” He crossed the engine-room and paused. “Well, what do you think?”

They stood in the shadow of a big silver breech cradle, a mechanism so ugly it possessed its own odd beauty. Nestled in the cradle was a stubby red missile. Miro tapped it with a claw.

“There’s another housed on the port side, and two more at the prow. When you give the command, they externalise through the ship’s carapace for all round targeting. But remember, you only have four of the beauties, so go easy.”

“Range?”

“The manufacturer claims a million kilometres. If I were you, I would play safe and wouldn’t fire until the target was under half that distance.”

Harper nodded. “I’ll remember that.”

“I programmed
Judi
with the firing codes. She’ll give you them once you’re under way.”

“I appreciate this, Miro.”

“Anything for a friend,” he said. “I hope you don’t need to use them, but if you do, then I’m confident they’ll do the job.”

They made to leave the engine-room. “And the other thing?”

Miro lifted a claw and indicated the chute. They climbed aboard and dropped to the under deck. “Down here,” his friend said, leading the way along the narrow corridor, his shell scraping the walls.

Harper knew where they were going, and what Miro had found. The Enigma of Hold Number Two, he called it.

As expected, Miro stopped before the arched hatch that gave access to the second hold – or, technically speaking, would have given access to the chamber had entry been permissible. He tapped the metal hatch with a claw and said, “The hold would have been the obvious place to house the first stern missile, Den. But, try as we might, we couldn’t get into it.”

Harper nodded. “As if I didn’t know.”

“So what gives?”

“I wish I knew. I’ve had the ship five years and the hold’s been locked all that time. Ship’s smartware core can’t command it to open, and in the early days I tried opening it with a cutting tool.”

“And?”

“I spent three back-breaking days at it and made a cut about a millimetre deep, then gave up.”

“Might be treasure in there, Den. Who owned the ship before you?”

He was pretty certain he’d told Miro about the ship, back in the days before the accident, along with the enigma of the hold. “I stole it from an Expansion Commander,” he said.

“I wonder what he hid in there...?” Miro mused.

They moved back through the ship and stopped at the top of the ramp. “Been a pleasure doing business with you, Den.”

“As always,” Harper replied. “And thanks.”

“Shake?”

Harper smiled and slapped Miro’s waving claw.

Miro lurched forward, brought the claw up above Harper’s head – then laughed as Harper flinched.

“Got you that time!”

“You ugly bastard, Miro!” Harper cried. “Now get off my ship and clear the deck – before I give the command to phase out and fry you.”

“Till next time, Den.”

He watched Miro shuffle off down the ramp and cross the hangar to his office, then made his way to the flight-deck.

Zeela was waiting for him in the co-pilot’s sling. “Hey, shouldn’t you be getting some rest?” he said as he laid himself out beside her.

“I was bored, and anyway I haven’t seen you for ages and I wanted to talk. Thank you for the clothes, Den.” She smoothed her hands down the front of the one-piece he’d bought, along with a variety of dresses and suits, to celebrate her recovery.

“You like them? I wasn’t sure...”

“They’re great.”

He smiled to himself. “Strap yourself in, then we’ll phase out.”

“And thank you for everything else, Den. I appreciate it.”

He smiled at her. “Shut up while I get this thing up and running, will you?”

He gave ship the command to phase out and stared through the viewscreen at the empty hangar. Behind the far safety screens, he made out the faces of mechanics and engineers staring out at the ship as the clearance klaxon blared.

Judi
said, “The Ajantan ship is on the far side of the station, Den.”

Harper nodded. “Which suits me just fine.”

“Hey!” Zeela said. “You told me there was no sign of the Ajantans!”

The scene flickered, and seconds later the scene of the hangar was replaced by the depthless grey of void-space.

Harper shrugged, affecting nonchalance. “There wasn’t, when you asked. They turned up earlier today.”

She ran a hand through her luxuriant hair. “And there I was, thinking it’d all be plain sailing from now on.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve made certain adjustments to the ship.”

She was sarcastic. “Like another engine?”

“Like a weapons system that will blow the Ajantans to bits if they try to get too close.”

Zeela sniffed. “Will serve them right for trying to kill us in their lair. Spoken like a true pacifist! My mother and father would disown me.”

The phase out completed, he climbed from the sling. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m famished.”

They ate on the flight-deck, enjoying an Amethyst Station speciality which Harper had stocked up with that morning: flatbreads stuffed with curried spinach, said to be the staple diet of the spacers who’d first worked on the Station after its removal to the Reach.

“So...” Zeela said, “you said you’d tell me about your friend, Miro. What happened to him?”

He thought back three years, to the time they’d ventured across the Reach to Stanislav on what he’d assumed was going to be just another routine trading trip.

“Back then Miro was a trader,” he told her, “and we often worked together. There was a small scientific colony on Stanislav, studying the locals – the shilth, they called themselves, swamp-dwelling coelacanths. Anyway, we went in with provisions, cut a deal and were about to light out when Miro was attacked as he left the camp for his ship. I heard his screams as I was boarding ship, grabbed a weapon...” He shrugged, reliving those frantic, fear-filled few minutes. “I ran back to where I’d left him, just in time to see something dragging him off towards a swamp. I gave chase and followed Miro and whatever it was that’d grabbed him. The long and the short of it was, I fried the crab-thing and dragged Miro to safety, but...”

Zeela stared at him. “But...?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes I think it might have been better if Miro had died. I hauled him aboard ship and slammed him in the med-pod. The crab had cut him up pretty bad, and I had get him to a Grade A facility, fast.”

“Where have I heard this story before?” she murmured. “Hope these things don’t happen in threes...”

“To cut a long story short, there was little the medics could do for him, short of patching up the lacerations. He’d been infected, invaded by some xeno-parasite, and he’d already begun to metamorphosise. You’ve seen the result, three years on.”

“And there’s no cure?”

He told her that there was, at a cost of two million units or more.

“But it won’t get any worse, will it? I mean, the alien won’t take over entirely?”

“There’s been no change in three years,” Harper said. “So I suppose we should be thankful for small mercies. He takes drugs to ease the pain and keep the alien at bay. He has his good days, and his bad. Today happened to be a good one, I’d say.”

She shook her head. “Wouldn’t the Reach be a great place without aliens, Den?”

He looked at her, and shook his head. “No, Zeela, it wouldn’t. It’d be impoverished. For every race like the Stanislav crabs, or the Ajantans, there are a hundred good, altruistic ee-tees. It’s the diversity that makes the Reach what it is. In my experience, there are more bad humans than there are aliens. Believe me.”

She smiled at him and stroked his hand. “You’re probably right, Den,” she said.

A little later she yawned and said she was going to turn in. “When are we due to arrive at Teplican?”

“In a little over thirty hours. Go and get some sleep.”

He watched her move from the flight-deck and remained in his sling, staring out into the void. He felt relaxed, content for the first time in days. He was about to experience a new world – which was always a pleasure – and Zeela was on the mend.

An hour later
Judi
said, “Den, I’m picking up pursuers.”

He sat up. “Pursuers? Plural?”

“Affirmative. One is the Ajantan ship.”

“And the other?”

“I suspect that it’s the vessel belonging to the bounty hunters, but that is to be confirmed.”

Harper swore. “Great. How far away are they?”

“A million kilometres and half as far again, respectively.”

“Very well. Warn me if they approach any closer – but not while Zeela is on the flight-deck, understood? I don’t want her getting alarmed.”

“Understood, Den.”

Harper settled back into the sling and stared into the void.

CHAPTER SEVEN

J
ANAKER HAD SEEN
many star stations before – all of them in the Expansion, of course – but none like Amethyst.

“Would you look at that,” she said.

“It’s the ugliest example of human spatial architecture I’ve ever seen,” the Vetch said. “And that’s saying something.”

“I can just detect an Expansion station somewhere in there,” Janaker said, “but it’s been built on and added to over the years. It looks lopsided, as if it shouldn’t work.”

“Asymmetry doesn’t matter in space,” Kreller reminded her. “Function is all.”

“I know that,” she snapped.

She thought the station looked like a spinning top to which a child had glued an assortment of mismatched oddments, blocks and cylinders, without the slightest aesthetic consideration. She wondered how safe it might be. According to the information cached in her ship’s core, Amethyst was home to more than a million citizens. It looked like an accident waiting to happen.

She watched a variety of ships, big and small and every size in between, come and go from the station’s docks, a façade of dull metal marked with a dozen entrance bays.

“So... you know where Harper is?” she asked.

“I traced his ion signature to the station, then lost it among thirty others. They approached the docks, then their trail became tangled.”

“How long ago did they arrive?

“Going by the degradation of the signature,” the Vetch said, “around forty-eight hours ago.”

“And they haven’t been and gone in that time?”

“I have scanned no ion signatures leaving the station in the direction of the Rim.”

She stared at the ugly agglomeration of the station. “So they could be anywhere in there now?”

“They might have docked in one of the dozen hangars you see before you.”

“Well, that narrows it down a little,” she said, doubting that the alien would pick up on her sarcasm. “We sit here until they emerge, right?”

He turned and stared at her. “I want to go in there and find them, now.”

She nodded, giving the impression that she was considering his proposal. “And why is that, when we can just sit out here and wait for them to emerge? We know where they’re going, after all.”

“Time is important. We are facing a remorseless foe in the Weird, and we need every weapon in our armoury, sooner rather than later.”

“One single telepath,” she pointed out, “will hardly make that much difference.”

“You forget that our remit was to return with the telepath
and
the ship.”

She looked at him. “The ship?” She tried to recall if Gorley had said anything about the telepath’s ship. “Why’s the ship so important?”

The Vetch hesitated, and in that second Janaker knew that the alien was holding something back. “Every ship, every armament, in the fight against the Weird is important.”

That was screwy. “Not
that
important, surely? One ship? It isn’t as if it’s that big or powerful.”

He stared at the screen. “I am merely obeying orders, Janaker.”

She stared out at the racked letter-box openings to the hangars, docks and repair shops in the face of the station. “Okay, so we go in there blind and just hope to stumble across Harper and the girl or their ship?”

Kreller tapped his head. “You forget my ability, Janaker. We dock at the lowest level and work our way up. It shouldn’t take me long to read something about Harper and the girl in the minds of the workers and engineers. With luck we might even find their ship, if Harper hasn’t taken the precaution of berthing it in a secure, enclosed area.” He snorted. “If they have such on
this
kind of set up.”