Fire Flare

by Chris Ward

  He stepped up onto the bottom of the tube. The Shadowmen waited behind the screen a few paces ahead, their faces now turned towards him, over-wide mouths opening in what could have been smiles or gestures of greeting.

  As the doors slid shut behind him, Caladan gave himself over to his thundering heart, hoping that it might just burst out of his chest and end his ordeal before it had begun.

  22

  Harlan5

  There was certainly a resemblance, and while he would need a full DNA analysis to be perfectly sure, from General Grogood’s words coming through his transmitter, he could tell there was a familial connection. Once the initial shock of a reunion with his long lost son had worn off, the General’s true feelings had started to emerge. Before Harlan5 relayed them to Paul, he censored them for clarity.

  ‘You’re a lowlife waste of space,’ he said, having cut perhaps fifty percent of the original, bile-filled statement. ‘I did everything for you, paying off your teachers after you flunked all your exams, putting you into flight school when all you were worth was tending a few clumon trees on some backwards, inbred farm. I got you in there, you total loser, and you threw it all away with your theatrics.’

  ‘I was the best pilot in there,’ Paul muttered, head lowered, cheeks burning with shame. ‘I beat everyone.’

  ‘And you systematically insulted the intelligence and the rule of every single one of your instructors. You embarrassed me. I’d have been an admiral by now if it weren’t for your shenanigans. You call yourself a Grogood—’

  ‘I haven’t used that name for fear of soiling it,’ Paul said.

  ‘And a good thing too. I wouldn’t allow it. You’re a disgrace, a failure, a—’ Harlan5 cocked his head. ‘I do believe the general has made his point. May I suggest switching off his transmitter for a while?’

  ‘By all celestial bodies, he hates your guts,’ Teer Flint said, unable to keep a smirk off his reptilian face. ‘How about you prop that box up by the view-screens so he can see how well you can fly?’

  Paul, his expression broken and chastised, looked up. ‘He’ll probably just slate my maneuvers for not following the textbook.’

  ‘Only if I switch the transmitter back on,’ Harlan5 said. ‘I will monitor his transmissions for any change of tone. You will be the first to know if his utter disgust reverts to a reluctant praise.’

  ‘At least the robot loves you,’ Teer Flint said. ‘Shall I blast these two thieving scumbags, make a bit of space on the flight deck?’

  Paul looked at Captain Adams, still lying on the floor, and Revel Sind, sitting nearby, his hands on his head with General Grogood’s head in the box still on his lap.

  ‘No,’ Paul said. ‘Take them down to one of the cargo bays and lock them up for a while. We’ll jettison them later if we need the space. Come on, robot. Let’s get this thing in the air. Those refugees won’t save themselves.’

  ‘Go easy on her,’ Teer Flint said, running one hand down the Matilda’s wall. ‘I’d hate to see her scratched.’

  Paul grimaced, staring straight ahead. ‘I was the best pilot in the academy,’ he said. ‘Despite what my old man claims.’

  Leaning forward, he released the security locking system and took the Matilda up into the air. Teer Flint put General Grogood’s box down on the co-pilot’s dashboard so that the disembodied head could gurn and scowl at Paul’s piloting skills, then led Captain Adams and Revel Sind off the flight deck. At the door, he glanced back at Paul and grinned. ‘Show your old man how it’s done,’ he said. ‘But do it carefully. I fixed this ship up once. I don’t want to have to do it again.’

  As the flight deck door closed behind him, Paul looked back at Harlan5. ‘His obsession with this ship is a little unhealthy,’ he said.

  ‘My programming suggests it kept both him and us alive,’ Harlan5 said.

  Paul clenched a fist. ‘Then let’s pay it forward.’

  He spun the ship around, angling it at the seek-and-destroy team’s gunship, sitting a little way off where they had left it. He reached for the weapon controls, but before he could fire, a rumble so loud it was audible on the flight deck came from outside. The ground shuddered and an immense fissure opened up in the earth, the gunship tumbling inside, bouncing off rock walls before crashing into a lake of magma far below. Paul shared a relieved glance with Harlan5, then wiped sweat off his brow and engaged the thrusters, leaving the wrecked gunship behind.

  With the rain and wind buffeting them, flying the ship was difficult. Paul struggled with the controls, Harlan5 adjusting the ship’s motion sensors from his own maintenance and support berth at the flight deck’s rear. With many of his own systems damaged or close to shutdown, his programming wondered if he finally understood the frustration of humanity’s organic weakness. It certainly felt like it, when he had to send the same command three times, or twist his one remaining but partially melted thumb sideways in order to depress a button he had once pressed with ease.

  ‘There!’ Paul shouted, pointing at the ruins of a city appearing out of the sleet, lit by rising towers of magma piercing the gloom behind it. ‘Hot damn, that mega-volcano is set to blow.’

  Does that useless fool even know what a mega-volcano is? came General Grogood’s voice inside Harlan5’s head. Does he think it’ll be like a little fireworks display, like he’d even know it before it blew him into the stratosphere? If those people die it’ll be his stupid fault for blasting that ship, not ours. We might have exploited them a little, but we gave them a couple of old shuttles they only had to fix up. How could something so worthless have come from my heralded loins? If his mother hadn’t been such a beauty I could have assumed that in a drunken moment I had mated with an Earth-cow.

  Harlan5’s programming was glad he had disconnected General Grogood’s transmitter. The rather bitter disembodied head had kept up a constant stream of bile and vitriol, as though having nothing else to do. Harlan5’s programming hoped that at some point the general would calm down enough for them to tap his extensive space knowledge. With the sensors picking up several Shadowman battleships in low orbit, if they had any chance at all of escape they were going to need all the help they could get.

  One lucky bonus was that a massive Shadowman lander was just taking off, disappearing back into the clouds, creating a sudden updraft strong enough to momentarily deflect the local weather systems. For a few seconds the air outside was clear, giving them a view of Vintol City and the destroyed Shadowman battleship behind it, the ground below glowing as it liquefied beneath.

  ‘How long do we have, robot?’

  ‘A couple of minutes at best.’

  ‘Let’s take her down, get those guys on board.’ Paul stared at the disturbance in the clouds where the lander had just gone. ‘Then we’ll go after Beth.’

  Harlan5 didn’t feel the need to point out the futility of such an action. It was driving Paul forward; it was best not to derail him while he was in full flow. Even General Grogood’s head had briefly gone quiet, as though aware they were reaching a critical moment.

  Paul put the buffeted, shuddering Matilda down just outside Vintol City. Harlan5 lumbered after him as he headed down to the main hatch. Teer Flint was already there, waiting as the hatch opened. Paul, a blaster in one hand, ran blindly out into the rain, immediately staggering as the gravity dragged him to his knees. Holding his blaster aloft, he hollered, ‘Quickly! On to the ship! It’s your last chance!’

  Harlan5 and Teer Flint waved the people through the open doors of the cargo bays, their terrified faces relieved even at the sight of a battered robot and an off-worlder who looked like the bastard child of a lizard and a spider. Paul was still out in the rain, screaming at some refugees huddling around a damaged shuttle that had now fallen off its makeshift landing gear and lay with its nose buried in the ground.

  ‘We’re on your side!’ Paul shouted. ‘Leave no one behind. We can’t come back for you.’

  Pushing himself up as though urged by his father’s vitriol,
Paul staggered forward a few more steps before collapsing again. On his knees, he waved at a woman holding a child who was reluctant to leave the shelter of the ruined shuttle.

  ‘Come on!’ Paul shouted, trying to drag himself forward.

  ‘Go after him,’ Teer Flint said to Harlan5. ‘The fool’s lost his mind. I’ll get them loaded. Be quick now. I don’t think we have much time—’

  A shuddering rumble knocked them both off their feet. Outside, the shuttle listed, about to tumble sideways. The woman tried to move but her shawl had caught in a crush of metal. She tugged on it, then looked desperately at Paul.

  ‘Go, Harlan,’ Teer Flint said.

  Harlan5 lumbered out into the rain, the wind so strong it almost knocked him off his feet. He limped to Paul and scooped him up, throwing him up on to his shoulders. ‘Hold on,’ he said.

  ‘You have to save them,’ Paul said. ‘I can’t … I have no strength….’

  ‘You’re doing fine,’ Harlan5 said. ‘We’ll get them. Don’t—’

  The ground, warm beneath Harlan5’s sensors, shuddered again. Behind the shuttle, the air had taken on an eerie orange glow, and what had once been sleet now fell as driving, stinging rain.

  Stumbling forward a few steps, they reached the shadow of the damaged shuttle. Paul climbed down, leaning against Harlan5 for support, then pulled the cloak away from his back and handed it to the wide-eyed woman.

  ‘Wrap your little one in this,’ he said as she stared at him, face chapped from the rain, eyes wild.

  ‘There’s another,’ she gasped, pointing at a rock stack to their left. ‘She’s alive. I saw her move.’

  ‘We don’t have time—’ Paul began, then his mouth fell open. He dropped his arms and would have fallen to his knees had Harlan5 not wrapped his remaining arm around Paul’s waist.

  ‘Harlan,’ Paul gasped. ‘Is that really her?’

  Despite the mud that covered her from head to foot, the long, braided hair and slender shoulders were unmistakable. She lay on her side in the dirt, sheltered from the wind by the looming rock stack. As Harlan5 watched, the girl briefly lifted her head, revealing a familiar oval face and eyes his sensors identified as chestnut brown, before dropping it again.

  ‘I do believe it is,’ he said.

  ‘Beth.’

  Paul turned to Harlan5, his face lit with a level of determination that had Harlan5’s programming wondering if Paul wasn’t really some kind of theatrical droid. ‘Get this poor woman and her child safe,’ he said, his voice a growl beneath the wailing wind. ‘I’ll go to her.’

  Before Harlan5 could respond, Paul had pushed away from him. Harlan5 watched his young companion stagger out into the elements, staying on his feet by sheer willpower alone, every step in the heavy gravity siphoning off his strength. Halfway to Beth, Paul raised a fist to the sky and roared loud enough that Harlan5 could hear him over the wind. Were it not for the direness of their situation, Harlan5’s programming might have suggested a smile.

  Cutting the woman’s trapped shawl free, Harlan5 lifted her in his arms, keeping the child nestled between them. Then, angling her away from the worst of the storm, he carried her back to the Matilda.

  Teer Flint was waiting inside the hatch.

  ‘Good work, Harlan. Where’s the fool gone now?’

  ‘Miss Beth. She must have escaped her captors. He’s gone for her.’

  He looked back. Paul had reached her now, slumping down beside her, then pulling her up against him. With Beth in his arms, he leaned back against the rock stack, stroking Beth’s face. The ground rumbled again. Behind the remains of Vintol City, plumes of spraying lava came more frequently.

  ‘Do you think he’s reciting poetry?’ Teer Flint asked.

  ‘Most likely. Or some heroic speech. I’ll let him have his moment.’

  ‘They’ll never make it back in time, not with that gravity. He barely made it to her.’

  ‘They don’t need to,’ Harlan5 said, his remaining eye light twinkling. His programming rather enjoyed the thought of being a hero, even if Paul’s dramatic sacrificial ending might have made a good story. With the security systems back online, it was a simple measure to connect with the ship’s computer, lift her off the ground a little way, then glide her over to where Paul and Beth were huddled beneath the rock stack.

  The incredulous look on Paul’s face as the Matilda hovered overhead was worth a photograph, Harlan5’s programming thought. Paul stood up almost reluctantly, helping a groggy Beth to her feet.

  ‘We couldn’t leave you,’ Harlan5 said. ‘Your flying style is so much more interesting than mine.’

  ‘Well met, robot,’ Paul gasped, helping Beth into Teer Flint’s arms a moment before he collapsed at Harlan5’s feet. On hands and knees, he vomited onto the hangar floor. Harlan5 made a note to activate a cleaning droid.

  ‘Take us up,’ he said aloud, commanding the ship’s computer, as the lower hatch slid shut. On a wall-screen, he watched Dynis Moon’s surface drop away below them. The ruined shuttle, the destroyed city, and the wreckage of the Shadowman battleship first became the size of toys, then of insects, then finally mere specks on the moon’s surface, set against the background of a dark red glow as the ground below them bulged, the pressure of billions of tons of compressed gas and molten rock building up beneath.

  The Matilda was fifteen miles up into the lower atmosphere when the mega-volcano blew, instantly liquefying an area of Dynis Moon’s surface eighty miles across. The shockwave knocked the Matilda sideways, sending her into a sharp spin which took a few moments to correct. Harlan5 peered at the plume of molten rock and gas on the view-screen, his programming breathing a sigh of relief.

  ‘That was a close one,’ he said.

  23

  Beth

  Chaos filled every available space inside the Matilda. Beth, groggy and bedraggled, stumbled from one room to the next, swaying with the ship’s motion, occasionally grabbing a coolant pipe or a door jamb as the ship dipped and dived. Paul had tried to get her to go into one of the two working recuperation tanks, arguing that as crew she was more important than the refugees, but besides a few cuts and bruises and a lot of regrets, she was fine. Numb, groggy, unsure quite what had happened over the last few hours, but still alive.

  Paul, his face showing that eternal adoration she sometimes wished she felt in return, had clearly been prepared to argue his case, that she was as fragile as a flower, needing to be wrapped in tissue, protected from the evils of the galaxy. Luckily perhaps, Harlan5 had needed him to fly the ship as they attempted to get out of Dynis Moon’s atmosphere, and through a Shadowman blockade that had closed in to support the collection of the prisoner General Grogood. And in addition, of the dozens of refugees onboard, many were seriously hurt.

  Teer Flint had done a remarkable job of fixing up their battered old ship, repairing view-screens and control terminals in the corridors which had never worked in all the time Beth had been onboard. However, as the sky darkened, and moving lights that could only be orbiting Shadowman battleships came into view, she preferred not to know what they were about to encounter. They had survived one nightmare, and were about to fly into another.

  Switching off the nearest screen, she squeezed through the crowd into the closest cargo bay, now filled with bedraggled passengers, looking for some way she could help.

  Most of the refugees were Lork settlers, their physiology allowing them to withstand the heavy gravity and lower oxygen levels of Dynis Moon. They were pressed into every available space, some working to help the injured, some ecstatic to be off the collapsing moon’s surface, others lamenting what they had lost. Beth sat down next to one woman and spent a few minutes comforting her for the loss of her husband, then moved on to another who was crying into the shoulder of the daughter she had thought she had lost, only to find in the minutes before they had got onboard.

  She was helping to dress wounds in one cargo bay when Teer Flint found her. Two of Teer’s legs had been reduced to
bandaged stumps, but when she mentioned it, he shrugged it off.

  ‘That’s why I have eight,’ he said. ‘And believe it or not, they grow back. It’ll take a couple of years, but eventually I’ll be good as new.’

  He wanted to know about Caladan, but Beth’s memory was vague. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We got away from the guards, but then….’ She reached up and rubbed the side of her face, frowning. She had blacked out for a while, and upon waking had thought the bruise caused by hitting the rock she had been lying near. Now, a difference sequence of events began to replay.

  ‘We found them,’ she said, looking around at the refugees. ‘The ship … he….’ She rubbed her face again. ‘He did what he had to do to save them, and to save me.’

  Teer Flint looked down. ‘Could he be alive?’

  Beth shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see what happened.’

  Teer Flint nodded. ‘Let’s get as many of these people comfortable as we can.’

  They set to work, assisting where they could. Teer Flint was as good at medical work as he was at mechanics—‘The body’s just another machine, isn’t it?’—and Beth did what she could to make people comfortable, but almost everyone was carrying some injury or other. They needed to get the people to safety as soon as possible.

  Having helped everyone in one room, they moved to the level below. Beth reached for a door control, but Teer Flint lifted a hand to stop her.

  ‘That’s the prisoner hold,’ he said.

  ‘Prisoners?’

  ‘Captain Adams and Revel Sind. I caught them trying to steal the ship.’ Teer Flint puffed out his chest. ‘They didn’t know I was here.’

  Beth smiled at Teer’s obvious pride, but at the thought of the two inside the cell, her smile dropped. ‘Are they secured?’

  ‘Yes. The cell door has been electrified, just in case they have any little tricks.’