Weird Space 2: Satan's Reach (18 page)

They picked their way through the remains of the ship, moving carefully down twisted corridors and across buckled decks. It was hard to credit that, more than a hundred years ago, some alien race unknown to humanity had navigated the vessel across space and fetched up here.

They arrived at the foot of the vast fin, canted at an angle and towering above them. “Observe the engraved patterning.”

Harper reached out and traced a series of whorls and curlicues decorating the fin.

“Eerily beautiful,” Di Mannetti said.

“Do you know when it came here?” Zeela asked. “How long ago?”

Xian Ti said, “My team has worked it out, approximately – we reckon it arrived about a hundred years ago.”

“A little before the colonists left,” Di Mannetti said.

“Did it crash,” Harper wanted to know, “or did it land?”

Xian Ti shrugged. “We don’t know. We think it came down with some impact, hence the damage to its superstructure.”

“Do you know if it was a void-ship?”

“Again, no, we don’t.”

“But... its crew, passengers,” Di Mannetti said. “They must have survived. Or, if not, then be buried somewhere.”

“There are not the slightest signs of any alien remains,” Xian Ti said. “Nor of any stores or possessions aboard the ship. And we haven’t located where any aliens might be buried. We’ve found a cemetery the colonists used, but all the graves are human.”

“So,” Zeela said, “what happened to the crew?”

“Another mystery to add to all the others,” Xian Ti said. “Where did the ship originate? Who did it belong to? Why did it come here, if this
was
its intended destination?”

“And did its arrival,” Di Mannetti said, “have any bearing on the colonists’ exodus?”

“Exactly, doctor – that’s the important question.”

Harper moved off by himself towards the stern of the ship, picking his way cautiously through eroded girders and fallen panels. Judging by the size of the door-frames, and the width of the corridors, the ship had belonged to beings slightly taller, and broader, than the average human – which wasn’t much help in working out which race that might be.

He came to the end of the ship and stood beneath the flaring cone of one of four great engines; even these had an ineluctably alien design, a baroque line that made the cones resemble ancient church bells. He turned and looked back along the length of the ruined ship: the human figures appeared tiny amidst the skeletal superstructure. Zeela saw him and waved. She picked her way towards him with a comical high-stepping gait.

“What do you think?”

“I think the universe is full of mysteries, Zeela, some of which we will work out in time, and others we won’t. This is why I couldn’t live a safe life on one planet, and never travel among the stars. And to think,” he went on, “the mystery of this ship will be multiplied a thousand times across the face of the galaxy.”

She looked around her in wonder, and smiled at him.

He took in the ship and the humans swarming over it; their small party had been joined now by the rest of the scientific team, scouting among the wreckage with monitoring instruments and cameras. The supergiant sun was going down over the far horizon, illuminating cloud layers of gold and silver. The light around the alien ship was golden, magical.

Something struck him as odd, then, but for the life of him he couldn’t work out what. There was something not
right
about the scene – which struck him as strange because he’d never seen anything like this with which to compare it. His inability to nail what was bothering him was irritating, as if it were an optical illusion which refused to resolve itself.

“What’s wrong, Den?”

“I don’t know... I have the strange feeling that there’s something not right about this.”

She laughed. “Not right? What do you mean?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know.” He laughed with her.

She looked around, then out across the rolling plain, and back again. “I know...” she said slowly. “It’s the grass. Or rather the lack of it. Look, nothing’s growing within the ship, or for metres around it.”

As soon as she said this, he knew she was right. “You genius! Why couldn’t I see that?”

She cocked her head and looked at him. “You did
see
it, Den, but you just didn’t make the comparison.”

“Well done. Come on, let’s see if Xian Ti knows what’s happening here.”

They rejoined the main group as they were making their way back up the slope towards the encampment. At the top Xian Ti and Di Mannetti paused, allowing Harper and Zeela to catch up.

“We’ve just noticed,” he panted, “that there’s nothing growing in or around the ship. Radiation?”

Xian Ti shook her head. “We’ve ruled that out. The area is clean. I have a couple of people working on the problem as we speak. We suspect some xeno-microbial infection, but won’t be sure for a while yet.”

“Perhaps the infection that might have driven the colonists away from here?” Zeela said.

“We can’t rule anything out at this early stage,” Xian Ti said. She indicated the line of blister domes far below. “Shall we eat?”

As the twilight deepened and a bright swathe of stars came out overhead, they sat around a light-wand and ate a surprisingly good vegetable stew from pre-heated trays. Xian Ti broke out a canister of passable red wine. Conversation, predictably, centred on the wreck and its link, if any, to the leave-taking of the colonists. A couple of outspoken anthropologists mooted the possibility that the aliens and the humans had fought or, if not, that at any rate there had been some conflict between the two camps which had necessitated the colonists leaving the planet. Xian Ti countered this with the observation that there was no sign, in the township or elsewhere, of conflict. She favoured the theory that the aliens had brought some form of virus inimical to the human population. “Conflict, if you like, but not intentional,” was how she phrased it.

“That’s what I hope to investigate over the course of the next month,” Di Mannetti said.

Harper asked, “I take it that there’s nothing back at the township, no records, memoirs or whatever, that refer to the colonists’ plans to leave?”

A woman shook her head. “I’ve been through the com-archives and found nothing relating to their decision. The odd thing is, though, that I have found a lot of discs, pins, and cores wiped or just empty. It’s as if... and I’m sticking my neck out here... the colonists went through the records and cleared them before leaving.”

“As if they didn’t want anyone to know why they were going,” Di Mannetti said.

“We don’t know that for certain,” the woman said. “But it’s a working hypothesis.”

“When we discovered the alien vessel,” Xian Ti said, “I sent someone back to Amethyst to check the records.”

“Hoping to find...?” Harper asked.

Xian Ti sipped her wine and said, “I’m not from the Reach, Mr Harper. I was born on a world in the Expansion. I didn’t come here until I was twenty...” She made a waving gesture with her free hand. “It’s a long story, which has no place here. Anyway, I recall reading reports, stories, about mysterious crash-landed starships – of unknown alien origin – fetching up on half a dozen or so worlds of the Expansion many years ago. So when we made the discovery, I recalled these stories and sent someone to see if they could work out if there might be a link.”

“It would be intriguing if the other ships were of the same origin,” Di Mannetti mused, “and what their effect was on the worlds where they landed.”

“That’s what I hope to find out.” Xian Ti looked across at Harper. “If you don’t mind my saying, I take it you’re not from the Reach?”

Harper felt immediately defensive. “Is it that obvious?”

“You speak Anglais with a familiar accent. Are you from the world of Denby, by any chance?”

He smiled. “Your ear is excellent. Yes, I am.”

“I visited the planet a few times in my teens,” she said. “I can’t say I was impressed.”

“Oh, I don’t know... For a grim, sunless, impoverished industrial world, it wasn’t that bad. All things considered, though, I’d rather move from world to world across the Reach.”

“You’re a star trader,” Xian Ti said, leaning forward. “How romantic! Why did you leave the Expansion, Mr Harper?”

He shifted, uncomfortable now that the conversation had veered to his past. “For the reasons most sane people leave the Expansion,” he said. “Probably for the same reason you left.”

She nodded. “I found I couldn’t practise my science without some government officer continually questioning not only my findings, but my theories and working methods. I had to toe the party line... so, when the opportunity to work on a planet in the Reach presented itself, I took it. Then I sought political asylum, and as I was a high-ranking scientist I was granted citizenship on Henderson, and never looked back. I have absolutely no desire to return, have you?”

Harper shook his head. “Only to spit in the eye of the bastards who...” He stopped himself from completing the sentence, and for a few seconds an uneasy silence reigned.

Talk returned to the work being conducted here, and Harper sat back and drank his wine. He considered the bounty hunter out there who, if she didn’t want to shoot him dead, would attempt to return him to the Expansion authorities so that they could do the dirty work.

He sensed Zeela watching him, but didn’t acknowledge her.

They turned in a little later, as two moons rose over the starship earthworks. Harper lay on his bedroll under the moon-silvered dome, considering whether to take his leave of Teplican tomorrow or the following day. They could always explore the township, which might prove interesting in itself, and have the benefit of taking them away from the scientists. Xian Ti’s probings had unsettled him; he was sure they were innocent enough, but he was unused to speaking of his past to anyone.

In the darkness, Zeela moved closer to him and reached out. She found his chest and pulled herself closer, so that her lips touched his shoulder. Harper lay still, unwilling to reciprocate. He stared at the smeared highlights of the moons on the curve of the dome, and was relieved fifteen minutes later when he heard the soft sound of Zeela’s breathing in sleep.

Perhaps an hour later, unable to sleep, he eased himself from the bedroll, found his boots, and crossed the dome to the hatch. It slid open silently at his approach and he walked out into the warm, moonlit night.

He stood beneath the massed stars, taking deep breaths. The earthworks rose before him, the soil dark in the light of the moons and the stars. He paced towards the slope and climbed, and at the top turned and stared down at the line of domes and the calm surface of the bay glittering to his left.

He sat down, staring out over the scaled water – and minutes later the call he’d been fearing ever since leaving the ship came through. His wrist-com buzzed and he gave a start, cursing.

“
Judi
?” He took a breath. “They’ve found us, haven’t they?”

“Affirmative, Den,”
Judi
said. “The Ajantan ship appeared in orbit one minute ago.”

“And the bounty hunters?”

“No sign of them, yet. But the Ajantans must have phased in hours ago on the blindside of the planet–”

His stomach tightened. “How do you know?”

“Because they sent down a shuttle, and I estimate that it will arrive within fifteen minutes. I was unsure whether you’d want me to expend a missile on a shuttle.”

“Good question. Let me think.” He was standing up now, staring into the heavens above the far township, as if he might be able to see the descent of the Ajantan shuttle.

If he blasted the shuttle out of the sky, then who knew how the Ajantans aboard the mothership in orbit might react. If they had missile capabilities, then they might retaliate by firing on
Judi
.

Fifteen minutes... Even if he ordered
Judi
to power up immediately, fetched Zeela and raced to the township, he wouldn’t make it inside fifteen minutes.

“Do you have any idea where the shuttle might come down?”

“Plotting from its entry trajectory, I surmise it will make landfall in the forest behind the township.”

“Right.” He hurried down the mound towards his ground-effect vehicle. “Don’t fire on the shuttle, okay? It’d be a waste, and there’s no telling how the remaining Ajantans up there might react. I have a laser with me, so I’m coming back to the township. One thing – how long does night last on Teplican?”

Judi
replied, “Eight hours.”

He reached his car and slipped into the driving seat. “So it’ll be light in another...”

“Sunrise in four hours.”

He started the engine and steered away from the domes. He found the overgrown track and accelerated around the bay towards the township.

He would have the benefit – or the hindrance – of darkness. It all depended on the Ajantans’ night vision. For his part, he would activate his ferronnière and hopefully pick up the aliens’ cerebral signatures at a range of two hundred metres or more.

“Alert me when the Ajantans land,” he said, cut the connection and concentrated on the moonlit track.

He had considered instructing
Judi
to phase out and make herself scarce, but decided against the order. The ship, in situ in the square, would act as a draw for the Ajantans – and he would be ready for them.

Five minutes later the township came into view. In the moonlight, it might have been a sleeping settlement on any backwater colony world. He pulled off the road before he came to the square and slipped his car in between two timber buildings. When he cut the engine, the silence was absolute.

He was about to climb from the vehicle when he heard a distant, muted roar. “
Judi
?” he whispered into his wrist-com.

“The shuttle has landed approximately one point five kilometres inland.”

“Right... If you detect any Ajantan individuals, keep me informed. Text only from now on.”

“Understood.”

He unclipped his laser from the rack in the rear of the car, then hurried through the silent, moonlit town towards the square. Seconds later he passed between two leaning buildings and made out the welcome sight of his ship, squatting in the moonlight. He looked around, searching for a suitable vantage point. He felt energised, alert. He thought back four years to when the bounty hunter had been on his trail, and how that had ended. He recalled feeling hyper-aware back then, adrenalised by the chase. He’d wasted no time considering the morality of what he was planning to do. As he’d told Zeela – it had been a case of kill or be killed. The same was true now: what the Ajantans had planned to do to him and Zeela on Ajanta disqualified them from any consideration of compassion or mercy. It was kill or be killed, and this time he had the added incentive that he was fighting for Zeela’s life, too.