by Stephen Hunt
‘That’ll be your fleshy body jerking your chain,’ said Zeno. ‘Hey! Hey, Calder Durk, you’re missing the last couple of million years of evolution you need to survive out here.’
Professor Sebba turned towards the Gravity Rose’s crew as they halted in the shadow of her ship, indicating the local she was talking to. ‘This is Kien-Yen Leong; he’s in charge of mining operations. We’ve got something of a problem.’
‘Anything we can sort with the supplies we’ve got parked in orbit?’ asked Lana.
Kien-Yen Leong was a squat, broad man sporting a thick brown beard. He must have come from one of the alliance’s Sino-settled worlds, and a high gravity one at that; the man’s ancestors genetically engineered in the dim and distant past for an environment that Lana would be lucky to stand up in without an exo-suit. When he spoke, looking at his pallid face’s muscles was like watching the tectonic movement of slabs of granite sliding across each other. ‘Damn straight,’ growled Leong. He indicated a pair of helicopters parked on a helipad above the base. They were hybrids, half-transporter, half gunship, with missile pods and machine gun domes studding their grey fuselage. ‘You’ve brought fuel for our choppers?’
‘That we have,’ said Lana. ‘There’s a shuttle’s worth in orbit.’ She indicated the large metal fuel tank squatting in front of the pad. ‘But you can’t have burnt through as much juice as that? You’re running a mining operation here, not an airline.’
‘Not much damn mining going on this week. One of our staff, Janet Lento is missing,’ explained Leong. ‘She disappeared seven days ago. We’ve been running search and rescue flights across the jungle, day and night, trying to find her.’ His tone was brusque and direct, but he couldn’t hide the concern in his voice. If you were going to be swallowed up by that squawking crimson netherworld beyond the laser fence, Lana had the feeling you’d want someone like Kien-Yen Leong looking for you until the base had burnt through its fuel reserves.
Lana gazed back at her control shuttle and the professor’s vessel. Both ships were too big to be much use hovering above a jungle canopy – even with antigravity assist, their orbital thrusters would tear up the jungle and fry the lost expedition member well before she could be winched out. ‘Okay, I’ll radio Polter and get the helicopter fuel loaded onto the cargo landers first. You can fill us in on the situation on the hoof, Mister Leong.’
‘Finding the missing woman,’ said Calder. ‘Is that a challenge, skipper?’
Lana didn’t like the way he’d said that. ‘Only for me and Zeno, your most regal highness. You and Skrat can remain here and work on the job we’ve been paid to do. And you can stay on this side of the laser fence while you’re doing it.’
‘I was only offering to come out and help look for her. By helicopter… I’m not actually mad enough to want to put boots on the ground out there.’
‘Then you’ve already mastered the second rule of survival on Abracadabra,’ said Leong. ‘Never touch the dirt when you’re in the air.’
‘What’s the first rule?’ asked Calder.
‘Never leave the base.’
‘This side,’ emphasised Lana for her new recruit’s benefit. As if she didn’t have enough problems, without Calder casting around for a white horse which he could use to rescue the missing driver… or maybe they rode snow bears on his homeworld, she’d have to ask some time.
‘You’re the boss, skipper,’ sighed Calder.
‘Damn straight. Shit, I guess you’ve mastered the first rule of sliding void with me, too.’
CHAPTER FIVE
— Someday a real supernova’s going to come —
Lana gazed out of the newly refuelled helicopter, seated and belted in one of the passenger seats behind the pilot and gunner’s position. Kien-Yen Leong was occupying the gunner’s seat – every time he moved his head, the chain gun on the nose swivelled as it tracked the movement of his helmet. Zeno and Sebba were sitting alongside Lana. They were skimming low over the jungle, the second helicopter following directly behind, the crew’s voices bouncing beseechingly off the canopy from loudspeakers mounted under its fuselage, calling for the missing woman to fire off a flare if she could hear their flight. Both helicopters were following a straight ugly road that had been firebombed out of the wilderness. Calder and Skrat had stayed behind as she’d ordered – the former, reluctantly; keeping busy with the work of landing cargo shuttles inside the camp, disgorging crates for robot tractors to trundle away with to pile inside the base’s concrete hangars.
‘There it is,’ said Leong, pointing to the slash of a wide, winding river, an azure-coloured snake slipping all the way down from the mountain range. Fast moving and wild, its waters were powerful enough to plunge on for thousands of miles across the continent. A pall of surface steam from the river leaked out over the jungle – as though the rapids had been poured out of a tipped kettle. The makeshift road they were following ended by a riverbank, and Lana noticed the tanker parked below. It was a long, caterpillar-tracked, double-segmented truck. Up front, the cab wouldn’t have looked out of place on a battlefield – four sets of turrets sporting heavy machine guns, anti-aircraft missiles and recoilless cannons, radar dishes mounted on its sides like steel elephant ears. Suction pipes had been unfurled from a trailer section that was capable of holding a small lake’s worth of water, hoses left dropped near the river. The drone responsible for handling the pumping gear was standing as inactive as a statue in a space designed for it on the vehicle’s rear. But of the human driver, there was no sign.
‘Lento must have got out of the cab,’ pronounced Sebba. ‘Despite all instructions to the contrary.’
‘If she dismounted, she had a good reason,’ said Leong. ‘Maybe the truck’s robot jammed when it was dragging pipes into the river. The lightning in the gas layer does weird things to the systems down here. Nothing works as it should.’
‘Least of all the workers,’ said Sebba, making a little real labour sound like a dirty word.
‘Listen,’ said Leong, ‘if DSD wasn’t so damned cheap, he would have paid for us to be outfitted with mining nano-tech from the start, rather than relying on antique water knife drills and liquid pressure blasting.’
‘Doesn’t the driver have an implant you can track?’ asked Lana, eager to turn the conversation back to the practical matter at hand.
‘Janet Lento did, but the atmosphere can fry your uplink if you’re caught out in a storm. There’s been three storms since she went missing.’
Landing skids extended from the helicopter as it settled down next to the abandoned tanker, Leong pulling off his helmet, leaving his seat and throwing the side door open. Nearly bowled over by heat-rush filling the air-conditioned cabin, Lana pushed out after Zeno, the android first on the ground next to the vehicle. Above them, the second helicopter circled in low, lazy loops, its rotor’s downdraft blasting blankets of leaves off the nearby jungle. Given what might be lurking out there, Lana would rather have the chopper riding shotgun over them, than not. The sky was a dull red crimson crackling with forks of energy. It appeared as if the sun was pulsing through the clouds, although that was just an optical illusion. Damn, but the sun looks like it’s bleeding. If you stared up at the bloody orb for long enough, you ended up with one hell of a headache.
Lana had to raise her voice to be heard over the whup-whup-whup from the copter hovering above. ‘You haven’t been able to move the truck?’
Leong shook his head. ‘Its power plant is as dead as a dodo. Don’t know why. I plugged in system diagnostics on a battery pack and there’s no damage I can find inside any of its engine systems.’ He pointed up at the sparking heavens. ‘Just more of that, I reckon.’
‘Let me have a try,’ said Zeno, making for the ladder up towards the tanker’s cabin. ‘I can tease more out of machines than the average bear.’
‘No shit,’ said Leong.
‘It’s a definite talent,’ said Lana, watching him climb. ‘Up on our ship, Zeno can ride herd on a couple
of thousand robots in chorus.’
Zeno stopped by the thick steel entry access above. ‘There’s burn damage on the door.’
‘That was us,’ Leong called up to the android. ‘We had to cut the lock away when we first turned up here looking for Lento. It was sealed as tight as a coffin.’ His face crinkled, and Lana reckoned he had immediately regretted his choice of words. If the missing worker was in any coffin, then Lana reckoned it was the dense red and green jungle squatting beyond the tree line.
‘Did you check the ammo canisters up top?’ Lana asked Leong.
The squat man nodded. ‘Did it myself. No caps fired off in the vicinity.’
Lana caught sight of something on the other side of the riverbank, a pack of six-legged creatures the size of wolves moving slyly through the steam cover, green scales glittering like spilled oil in the moisture from the burning river. Bizarrely, each of the beasts bore a little saddleless rider, a small sharp-beaked lizard clinging proudly onto horn bones curling from the mount’s head. She was put in mind of alien bikers on the back of a line of motorcycles. ‘Company!’
‘I see them,’ said Leong.
‘Are the riders intelligent? Could they have something to do with your driver’s disappearance?’ said Lana.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped Sebba. ‘They’re a symbiotic life form, no tool use or language. Not much smarter than a dog.’
‘We call them “cowboys”,’ said Leong. ‘One of the few things around here too small to want to bother us. The riders climb up trunks and shake them out for tree spiders, then their six-legged friends chew through the spider’s armour and share its entrails after a kill.’
‘Armour?’
‘Yeah, if you come under attack by something in the wild, not climbing up creepers to escape would be a top tip.’
Lana shook her head in disbelief and started to climb after Zeno. The android cycled open the door and disappeared inside, the mining boss and professor following fast below the soles of Lana’s boots. Aliens calls from the jungle depths chased after Lana, reminding her that inside the vehicle was going to be safer than out. Marginally safer. True to what Leong had said, the lights inside the cab weren’t working, but there was enough illumination from the heavily armoured curve of glass in front of the driver’s seat for her to make out the interior. Even easier for the android, whose vision extended into complete darkness as an integral part of his specification. Zeno moved down the back of the cab, control panels and built-in stools on either side for monitoring the gunnery up top. He located the control computer and broke open its console, pulling out sections of circuitry. After a quick manual inspection, he rolled up the sleeve on his ship suit and a section of golden skin rippled back, revealing a physical jack which he plugged into the truck’s systems. A look of concentration settled on Zeno’s face, and LEDs began to blink across the exposed machinery. He was powering the device from the miniature fusion plant inside his body.
‘Ah,’ said Zeno, pushing back a circuit board hanging from the panel. ‘Now that’s what I’m talking about.’
‘You have the truck computer’s logs?’ asked Leong. ‘How about the cabin’s interior and external camera feeds?’
‘Burnt out,’ said Zeno. ‘But I got me the text entries left in the auto-drive’s log.’
Sebba arched a supercilious eyebrow. ‘And?’
‘It shut down,’ said Zeno, ‘and made a pretty good job of trying to erase itself.’
‘What the hell?’ spat Leong. ‘You’re talking a hack? Someone down here hacking the truck’s computer?’
‘Nope, best I can tell, the vehicle chose to kill itself. Because the system core’s artificial intelligence was scared.’
‘Scared? Scared, my arse. It’s just a machine.’
‘I’m a machine.’
Leong shook his head. ‘No, you’re sentient, android. Our haulers don’t even come close. I’ve got chess software back on base with more personality than this tanker. This is a fucking low-level truck system we’re talking about here.’
‘High functioning enough to decide to commit suicide,’ insisted Zeno.
‘But that’s not possible,’ said Lana. ‘It’s not even permitted.’
‘No,’ said Zeno, sounding curious and oddly wistful at the same time. ‘No it isn’t.’
‘I think you’re the one with a programming fault, android,’ said Sebba. ‘What you found in the logs was merely a last-second burst of garbage from a dying and very limited AI. How do you explain the drained power on board? Let’s deal with the most likely scenario. There was an atmospheric surge that our weather forecasting didn’t predict. It must have knocked out some of the truck’s systems. Lento got out of her cab to attempt to fix the vehicle. Then a second larger surge killed the tanker and its weapons and locked her out of the protection of her own cabin.’ Sebba pointed to the river before her hand encompassed the thick walls of the jungle. ‘And how many species are there in the vicinity who would look on a stranded worker as a little variety in their usual diet?’
‘What if she tried to walk back to the base?’ asked Leong.
‘It’s a straight dirt track,’ said Sebba. ‘You might get dragged off it by one of the local beasts, but you tell me how you can get lost on this road? Thirty miles to the base from the river. I could walk that in a day. If her implant’s stopped broadcasting, it’s only because the body it was inserted into has been digested.’
‘She could be lying wounded out there,’ protested Leong.
‘Wounded for over a week? Eating bugs? You need to face up to reality. This is a highly unfortunate accident, I grant you, but everyone on the team signed on for danger money-plus. This is what it covers. Operations in the mountains are to resume immediately. I need an initial load to transport to DSD’s buyers… or the funding for our operation is going to evaporate like a rain puddle in dry season. If you want to keep on combing the badlands of Nambia; you can do it in your own time when you’re off-shift. I’ll even throw in the flight time fuel for free.’
‘Damn straight we’ll keep on with the search,’ snarled Leong.
‘I can assist you,’ said Lana. ‘The Gravity Rose has been laying down her satellite network ever since we put into orbit. We’ll have eyes in the sky, soon. We can run scans for fires, flares and messages scratched into the dirt… whatever it takes.’
‘You,’ said Sebba, ‘are going to be too busy lifting containers back to orbit to be distracted by this.’
Lana’s eyes narrowed. ‘Here’s how chain of command works on a starship, prof. Above me, there’s only God, and I don’t even answer to him… he’s strictly advisory only. Whatever you shovel dirt-side, I’ll ship up and out for Dollar-sign, because that’s the deal I would have shook on if DSD still had hands worth a damn to press the flesh. You even get to supply the jump co-ordinates, but that’s as near as it fucking comes to giving commands to my ship, my crew, or me. So, Mister Leong, my satellite net will be at your disposal, just as soon as its operational.’ Sebba looked as if she was going to argue further, but Lana raised a finger. ‘Or… as base head, Sebba, you can tell me to piss off, and I’ll unload for you, and when I return to the next Edge world that’s actually on the grid, I’ll drop an e-mail to DSD telling him to find another chump to ship out his untaxed, unregulated, environmentally unfriendly, black-market ores to his dodgy buyers. And maybe, if you’re real lucky, said chump’s ship will actually turn up in Abracadabra orbit to haul containers before your sentry tanks run out of ammo.’
‘I can see why DSD chose you,’ said Sebba before she turned to storm out of the cab and back towards her helicopter. ‘You’re not a starship captain… you’re a blackmailer.’
‘Whatever it takes,’ sighed Lana, watching the irritating blueblood flounce off. She felt a flush of relief at the woman’s departure. The mining chief mouthed a silent thank-you in her direction, and turned to follow, no doubt trying and placate his hopeless boss.
‘She had one thing right,
’ said Zeno, shutting the panel on the vehicle’s computer core. ‘Satellite net or no, we ain’t going to find shit out there. That poor unfortunate mope of a driver’s long dead.’
‘Leave no crew behind,’ said Lana, dabbing at her sweating brow with the back of her sleeve, only a moment’s relief from the refrigerated fibres.
‘She ain’t our crew.’
‘Part of the mission, anyway, as long as we’re on contract to this fiasco.’
Zeno moved up towards the stretch of armoured glass at the front of the cab, staring out at the jungle and the baneful crimson sky. ‘Man, there’s nothing good going to come of being on this planet. Look at that wrong sky. A dying world under a dying star. The animals know it. The jungle knows it. Everything alive here knows it’s been born a couple of billion years after a righteous geological era. This place has evil in its bones – just waiting for the day a real supernova’s going to come and wipe the planet clean.’
Lana was shocked. The android was often cynical about things, but rarely this bleak. ‘You’re not terrified by a little tropical offworld bush, are you?’
‘Sure I am… another entry in humanity’s goddamn long list of gifts to me. The glorious joys of sentience.’ Zeno pointed back to the cab’s computer. ‘Even this rat-brained truck was smart enough to fry itself rather than stay driving around here. What’s that tell you?’
‘Shit,’ said Lana. ‘I guess that it’s business as usual for Fiveworlds Shipping.’
‘Well, we are where we are, skipper. File it under spilt milk.’
‘If only I hadn’t run into Pitor Skeeg back on the station. I think seeing him running a small flotilla… it made me jealous. Made me reckless. I would have taken any damned job DSD had to offer.’
‘You think Skeeg’s going major? He’s just a bagman for Hyperfast, now. The best move you ever made was dumping that janky flam artist.’