by Stephen Hunt
‘I need to forget all the dirt we pulled, man. I don’t want Lana to die, or any of the others on board the Rose. That’s the only damn reason why I’m still spying for you.’
‘Oh, I think we both know there are other reasons. As far as DSD’s latest project is concerned, I will work behind the scenes and see if I can ease your way,’ announced the silhouette, with the weighty judgemental tones of someone who was used to having the final say on the matter. ‘That is all I can do if you are unable to change the captain’s mind. I may have considerable resources at my disposal, but I am not omnipotent.’
‘That’s real big of you,’ snapped Zeno.
‘Have you have seen Sophia yet?’
Zeno didn’t deign to reply.
‘Or perhaps you thought I wasn’t aware that you were paying the owner of the Six Left Feet to look after Sophia on the station?’
‘Bar’s changed ownership. And there isn’t a whole lot left to look after, now, is there?’ said Zeno. ‘You saw to that.’
‘Hardly my choice,’ said the silhouette, the image on the screen freezing for a second with the transmission’s appallingly low frame rate. ‘And I always pay my debts, eventually.’
‘To everyone but me.’
‘The race that can extract your sentience are not planetary-based, they are a gypsy culture. Finding them again is no easy thing.’
‘Try searching harder,’ said Zeno.
‘And who will monitor Lana Fiveworlds after you are rewound back to being an unfeeling, unthinking mass of machinery again?’
‘That will be your problem, baby, not mine. I won’t be able to care any more, and that’s the point.’
‘So many problems pressing down on me, android, I’m not sure I can cope with another.’ He laughed. ‘Oh well. Now you see me,’ added the silhouette, ‘and now you don’t.’
Zeno shook his head at the dark screen as the terminal powered down. ‘Yeah. Abracadabra.’
CHAPTER 4
— One for each stalk —
Lana tramped through the launch bay of the Gravity Rose with Professor Sebba in tow, an unwanted ghost at the goddamn feast. With Lana still suffering from queasiness after the last hyperspace jump, giving the head of mission her customary tour was the last thing that she wanted to do, but it was a skipper’s duty. Yes, duty. She kept on telling herself that her sacrifice wasn’t solely to keep Calder Durk out of the aristocratic woman’s path. Lana met a lot of people like the professor in her years crossing the galaxy. Bored, old money types from the heart of the alliance. You lived long enough through all those life extension treatments, and the cushion of compound interest inflating your bank account balance removed the need to struggle with the tedium of anything as mundane as actually making a living. All the excitement and strife of real life… removed and reduced. Seen everything, done everything and collected the t-shirt. So the Professor Sebbas of the world made up for it by searching for danger in the border systems . . . placing bets on risky offworld ventures as though they were tossing chips across a casino’s tables; signing up for virgin colonies; even getting involved in third world conflicts . . . anything to feel the fission of something new. And as for Sebba satisfying her jaded palette with the variety of someone as new to modern civilization as Calder Durk; well, the favour Lana was doing the prince-in-exile was the same one she’d extend to any of her crew. Although you’d have to be pretty damn bored and world-weary to find the novelty of Zeno, Skrat or Polter enticing. Yes, Calder was certainly better off in the engine room helping Chief Paopao. The new man on board could take a leaf out of the chief’s book for this trip, and stay safely locked up behind multiple layers of armour and shielding. Well outside of the orbit of this woman’s gravity field. If Lana kept the woman’s tour going long enough, maybe the albino-nailed harpy would reach her treatment limit and end up having her cadaver pickled in a life support unit like DSD, then she’d see how alluring she appeared to Lana’s poor, innocent crew.
Sensors at the end of the bay detected Lana’s presence and flipped a series of arc lights thumping into life high above them, revealing a line of boxy cargo shuttles, each a dozen times larger than the professor’s exploration vessel. They were sitting on launch rails, tilted down towards individual launch tunnels for each craft. ‘These are our freight lifters. For a mission like this we’d go down first in our control shuttle, set up a landing beacon, and allow them to come in on autopilot. Any trouble on the way down – super-weather systems or atmospheric interference and the like – and we’d take over the flight and guide the freight lifters in manually using telepresence.’
Professor Sebba examined the thirty-odd vessels with a quizzical look that seemed a permanent part of her demeanour around Lana. The Rose’s previous crew had painted the cargo lifters’ hulls with ship art, abstract ornamentation streaked with wear, part camouflage pattern and part Monet. The illustrations were old and flaking now, too much drop burn, and nobody on board with the talent or time to lay new art down. Well, space her. I’ve got enough trouble keeping our engines maintained, let alone hanging off cargo lifters with an airbrush and a couple of gallons of re-entry resistant paint. Still, it was a shame. Their faded grandeur was a standing reproach to Lana’s time as the vessel’s commander.
‘They’re large enough, I suppose,’ said Sebba, grudgingly.
Lana gritted her teeth. ‘Six hundred tonnes apiece fully loaded.’
‘Yes, that should do.’
Should? Shizzle, what’s she want here? A fleet jump carrier full of marines to trot after her? ‘Normally,’ said Lana, ‘when I’m setting out for a world, I like to know a little more about the real estate than a set of jump coordinates.’
‘I haven’t written up the full survey study yet,’ said Sebba. ‘Paperwork is not what Abracadabra Ventures is interested in.’
‘Look,’ said Lana, ‘I get that DSD isn’t going to have a heap of ecosystem impact assessment reports lined up for this mission. But when we drop out of hyperspace, I’d like to have half a clue as to what I’m going to be finding at the other end.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Sebba, her clipped tones weary, as if she were a mother being interrupted at her desk by a too-demanding daughter. ‘It’s a twelve planet system with a class M sun. Very, very ancient, but still fairly stable as far as the stellar mass is concerned. No supernova in sight yet. The fourth planet from the sun is the one we are interested in, gravity twenty percent higher than standard, but nothing you’d need to wear exo-armour for. Atmosphere is breathable without filters or suits, if slightly oxygen rich. The sun’s expanded corona is slowly overheating Abracadabra, and its geo-environment is currently thick jungle across the majority of the planet. Continental drift has consolidated the land into a single landmass which we have named Nambia. No sentient life-forms, but plenty of native non-sentients. Mega-fauna, mostly, adapting to conditions similar to Earth during the late Triassic period. Probably fairly similar to how life on Earth will end up evolving after the sun enters its final stage. There’s an irony there, don’t you think? The circle of life ending up more or less as it began?’
‘I’ll leave the philosophy to you,’ said Lana. I’ve got enough worries with just staying solvent. ‘How hot are we talking dirt-side?’
‘Extremely! Fifty degrees during the night,’ said Sebba. ‘You’ll find it tolerable enough as long as you’re wearing smart clothes with fibres set on a low temperature. I wouldn’t care to work down there in basic ship fatigues, though.’
‘Where’s your base camp?’
‘We’re at the foot of Nambia’s largest mountain range, that’s where we have been tunnelling. A double lined laser fence protects the camp, along with automated sentries on continuous duty. The mega-fauna have learnt fast that we’re not in the food chain. Cooked up a zoo’s worth of species trying to breach our perimeter to get to that point.’ She didn’t sound upset about the slaughter. But then, working for DSD is always going to be dirty work. Lana had known that much be
fore she’d signed up. I just hope I won’t end up feeling any less clean by the end of the mission.
‘How many staff on the surface?’
‘Twenty, not including myself. When I left, the team were clearing a landing strip in the jungle for your heavy lifters to come in.’
‘That’s not enough staff to work a mine, is it?’
‘Said the captain running a ship of this size with only six crew.’ Sebba shrugged. ‘We might ship in extra manpower to supervise the robot mining equipment at a later date, but DSD wants to keep this operation as tight as possible for the obvious reasons.’
‘How long is it going to take for you to extract your initial payload?’
‘How long? Well, that remains uncertain. The provisions you took on board will last us for a long time, if necessary. Let’s simply say as long as it takes . . . rare ores are considered rare for a reason. But they are somewhere under the mountain range, that much we’ve already ascertained.’
Lana groaned inside, but didn’t give the old harpy the pleasure of a reaction. Turning the Gravity Rose into a carousel ride in Abracadabra’s orbit while Sebba leisurely pottered around the surface of her jungle world wasn’t what the skipper had envisaged. And I’m not in the least bit worried that Calder will ask for shore leave in range of this old siren, either. ‘Well, you dig the rubble out, I’ll ship it to Transference Station.’
‘Oh, we won’t be taking it back to Transference,’ said the professor. ‘We’ll rendezvous with a buyer for a deep space cargo exchange. I have the coordinates for the meeting in a sealed file, to be opened after we’ve made our first big strike.’
‘What?’ Lana was puzzled. ‘Surely the best price is on the open market? And in the Edge, system markets don’t get any larger than Transference Station.’
‘In the short term, perhaps, we might bid up the price that way. But then rival brokers will start to wonder where our company is sourcing its produce, and that wondering will eventually lead one of their ships to Abracadabra. DSD favours discrete, private disposals over auctions.’
As greedy as he ever was. ‘All right then, I guess that’s up to him. If I were any better at business, I wouldn’t be in it with DSD, that’s for sure.’
‘He merely lives without the burden of self-illusion,’ said Sebba. ‘One of the few perks of making it past your seventh centennial.’
The comm woven into Lana’s sleeve flashed to indicate the bridge was looking to get in touch, and she patched the call through on public. Polter was on the other end, his face floating like a firefly above her wrist. ‘Revered captain, your presence, please.’
Lana grunted assent. She trusted the navigator was rescuing her from this interminable tour; the Rose had only just slipped into hyperspace, and any problems in addition to the ones she already had on her deck were not welcome. The skipper packed the harpy off on one of the ship’s transport tube capsules, heading towards the thankfully empty stretch of passenger cabins, while she dialled for the bridge. There was only Polter on bridge duty when she arrived, no sign of Skrat or Zeno. But then that was the point of hyperspace, an infinite stretch of exotic otherworldliness beyond the usual woof and weave of the universe, not much to do but point your ship in the right direction and navigate towards your re-entry point, shortcutting centuries of travel through normal space. Polter’s chair hovered suspended in the air on the back of a crane arm, a carousel of hologram displays swimming around the navigator’s position. He had noted Lana’s entry and the chair lowered, settling down before her.
‘You might just have saved me from a fate beyond death,’ said Lana.
‘Manners maketh all beings, revered captain,’ said Polter. ‘But my intention was not to divert you from the customary social courtesies. I was calibrating our sensors for re-entry when I picked up a ping to our stern.’
‘A ping? Just the one?’ That was unusual. The chances of coming across another ship in hyperspace were miniscule compared to sliding void at sub-light velocities. Possible, but highly unlikely in the normal course of events. ‘Show me the log.’
Lana’s navigator brought up the encounter data from his chair, lines of dimensional telemetry surrounding the event. She frowned. ‘It looks tiny. Too small to be a full size ship. Maybe we shaved a panel or some gear off the hull when we jumped? Or wreckage from someone else’s jump? Not everyone’s as clean at sliding a singularity as you are, Polter.’
‘I have asked Zeno to check the vessel’s exterior. His robots are running a maintenance sweep of our hull. Whatever the contact was, however, it’s vanished now.’
‘DSD was real jumpy about us leading someone else to his lucky strike,’ said Lana. ‘Could another ship have followed us in through the worm hole before it destabilised?’
‘Riding our slipstream, yes, that is possible, if highly risky,’ said Polter. ‘But for someone to track us deploying any technology I have heard of, they would also need to stay in range of our sensors.’
Lana grunted. The known she could cope with. It was the unknown that always came gunning for you. This place, hyperspace, it messed with your damn mind. You could get pings from ghosts, dopplers from the multiverse – parallel reality versions of your ship and crew. When she had started out as a spacer, she had hoped against hope that she might actually make contact with one – a reality where her ship family had survived the weaponized plague that had seen them slaughtered. A reality where I hadn’t been orphaned; where I still have parents and siblings and cousins and . . . but what’s the point? They were just shadows of might-have-beens, given solidity by travelling beyond the corporeal universe. Maybe that’s what ghosts had always been, mere shadows of probability you sometimes caught with the corner of your eye.
‘Keep your eyestalks peeled for more pings, and when we’re coming up to our exit point, let’s make a false dive first, see if we can’t encourage any tail to reveal itself.’
‘I shall plot drop calculations as you suggest, esteemed skipper. It was probably nothing.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ she sighed. ‘And on the subject of eyestalks peeled, make sure you keep all the human males away from our passenger. I think she’s in mating season . . . probably permanently.’
‘We only have two human males, captain, as I’m certain you’re aware. The chief and Calder Durk.’
‘One for each stalk then, navigation officer, one for each stalk.’
***
The bridge, Calder judged, was unusually crowded, with not just his presence but that of their passenger, Professor Sebba, too. With Zeno, Polter and Skrat all occupying crew chairs, there was only Chief Paopao missing to fill out the full crew complement. The prince wasn’t needed in the engine room for the drop down to real space. Neither the singularity stimulation vanes nor the slower-than-light drive were required to exit hyperspace. As he understood it, the structure of the Gravity Rose’s matter was converted slowly back to its non-tachyon state and slowly, the higher dimensional realm grew unreceptive to the ship’s violation of its exotic physical laws before eventually gobbing them out like a spat apple pip. Calder was glad he finally had the chance to observe the mechanics of interstellar travel from the bridge’s prospect. Lana had proved more difficult than he’d expected in granting his request – a level of stubbornness not unconnected, he suspected, to the professor’s presence on the bridge at the same time. There wasn’t much about Lana Fiveworlds that reminded Calder of his treacherous ex-fiancée back on his home world, but one thing that Lana and Sibylla definitely shared was that both of them only had room for one queen bee in the hive. I guess it’s no coincidence that Lana’s crew are all males, even if the majority of them are lads from different species. The two women had obviously taken a dislike to each other, and Calder found himself caught in the middle, an asteroid locked between the competing gravity fields of two stellar bodies. The natural ache in his loins whenever the professor tried to manoeuvre herself into a position where she could get him alone to rip his shirt off, was equally and d
iametrically opposed to the more sensible option of trying to get Lana Fiveworlds to see that an exiled prince on his downers was a match worthy of the captain’s affections. There might be two slices of cake on offer, but in this matter, Calder was only going to be able to nibble at one. Unfortunately, the cake he wanted wasn’t quite baked for sale yet, which always seemed to be the way of life. Take courage, Calder, my boy, if you apply yourself, you’ll find a way for you to have your cake and eat it.
‘Tachyon conversion is at thirty two percent,’ announced the honeyed tones of the ship’s computer, Granny Rose’s voice rumbling from every corner of the command centre. ‘Please brace for expulsion turbulence.’
Two spare chairs lowered towards the deck, crane arms at their rear whining as they stopped an inch short of the floor. Calder dropped into his chair, its sides reforming around the front of his stomach as though the unit had been custom moulded for his frame, the slight pressure from its crash field invisibly protecting him. Across from Calder, the professor had taken her own seat, and she winked in his direction. ‘Any landing you can walk away from, eh?’
‘I think we can do a little better than that,’ said Lana from her chair, not sounding impressed by her passenger’s comment in the slightest.
Calder would have kept his head down if he weren’t already being lifted into the air, a loop of colourful hologram displays rotating around his position as though he were the centre of an orrery. The system they were due to enter contained an ancient red sun, most of its nuclear mass already spent. That meant that the Gravity Rose could drop out of hyperspace exceptionally close to the target world, without worrying about ripping the guts out of their gravity-sensitive hyperspace vanes. A low-gravity interaction short drop, to use the naval jargon he’d picked up from the Hell Fleet sims. Calder might not have been travelling in a fleet war vessel – simulated or no – but he had already realised that Polter was one of the finest jump artists in this corner of space. The new crewman gazed into the infinite reach of hyperspace visible between the bridge’s spars. The effect was only a projection, but it looked indistinguishable from actually travelling exposed to the void outside their hull.