by Stephen Hunt
‘Maybe they’re taking us to their den – or cave – or village,’ mused Calder, as much to himself to break the silence as to Lento. She marched in front of him, close enough to clutch onto the short razored tail of the nearest predator, not acknowledging he had spoken. I’ll try not to take it personally. It grew dark. The sick glow of the sun sank from what he could see of the sky through the high jungle canopy, shadows lengthening, the tenor of the jungle’s song changing around him. We must be close to where we’re going, surely? But then, he didn’t have an inkling how far the pack’s territory extended. They could claim thousands of miles of jungle as their hunting ground for all that I know. Calder hadn’t heard a single helicopter passing overhead. Surely the camp knew he was missing by now and would be flying over the rainforest looking for him? The state Janet Lento was in, she might have been willing to quietly watch potential rescuers fly over without trying to attract attention, but he hadn’t lost his marbles yet. The Gravity Rose had arrived with fuel for the camp’s vehicles as part of the supply run. So where are the search flights? This was very odd. Calder felt forgotten and lost. They kept on moving for half an hour more until it was almost too dark to travel, and then the pack halted. There seemed to be a clearing ahead, but something blocked their passage, a white diaphanous material hanging in the air, damp and sparkling like ribbons of wet spider’s web. As he drew closer to the wall, he saw that the sheeting rippled between steel fence posts. Metal? Here? The predators drew up in a line and the riders’ beaks opened as one, a raucous chirping song like a flock of sea birds calling. The sheeting between the nearest two fence posts rippled away in response to the song, withdrawing like blinds into the steel. Before Calder was a landscaped garden, a stone path leading up to some kind of circular single-storey lodge, slanted walls made of mirrored glass slotted between highly polished metal. Of all the things – what the hell is this place? The building looked like a flying saucer built into the ground. And something that shouldn’t possibly be here was coming out to inspect them.
***
Lana despondently guided her shuttle back towards the mining camp’s landing field, fat tears of hot rain beating against the cockpit canopy. They had modified their sensors, adding a jury-rigged array of coils for pulse induction, sweeping the jungle like a giant flying metal detector. Even if Calder had lost his rifle, the metal in his smart suit should have lit up like a Christmas tree on her board. All they had found was the ruined wreckage of a failed drop capsule that had drifted off course during the original mission set up on Abracadabra. Now night was falling. Their best chance of continuing the search was to get the Gravity Rose to scan for cold-spots using infrared . . . try and home in on Calder through his ship suit’s refrigeration fibres. But penetrating the seventy metre-high dome of the forest and sweeping for such a tiny temperature differential was like looking for a needle in the proverbial. But what choice did she have? None at all when it comes down to it.
‘What are we missing here?’ she asked Zeno and Skrat in the seats behind hers. ‘We’ve covered more territory today than Calder can possibly have walked on foot since he’s been missing.’
Zeno looked over at their first-mate. ‘Are you sure there’s no missing ground vehicles taken from the camp? Maybe Calder drove out of the base?’
‘Certainly not from the main base. It is possible, I suppose, that the fellow might have travelled up to the mine itself and stolen one of the vehicles from the works.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Lana. ‘I thought you said you’d searched the camp?’
‘The central complex, quite thoroughly. But the works in the mountains are not enclosed within the base perimeter, old girl. When I requested to search the works, the miners dispatched their own people to do it. They said the tunnels are too dangerous to allow untrained civilians to wander around.’
‘I just bet they did. This stinks. What if Calder saw something he wasn’t meant to inside the base? We’re taking too much on trust here. His disappearance. The defence system’s sensor logs. Who saw what, when.’
‘We know their driver disappeared,’ said Zeno. ‘Calder vanishing falls within the same pattern. And the miners have been searching for Janet Lento for weeks with the empty fuel tanks to prove it.’
‘I have a feeling about this . . . same one I always get running errands for Dollar-sign.’ And she didn’t have to remind her two crew how her last such hunch had ended when it came to their load from the duplicitous broker. A cargo-hold of contraband war machines trying to infiltrate our ship. ‘Abracadabra… now you see it, now you don’t. Do you know how this world came to be named?’
‘I had rather presumed it was because seen from space the planet resembles a gas giant,’ said Skrat. ‘You have to get deuced close to the world to penetrate the illusion.’
‘That’s what I thought . . . until Calder vanished.’ Lana looked at Zeno. ‘Contact the ship, query our database as well as the mission files, see if you can find anything on the who, how and why of this planet getting named Abracadabra.’
Zeno fell silent for a minute, the android connecting through their shuttle’s comms dish and contacting the starship’s AI, Granny Rose. Running the query and waiting for the response. Finally the answer returned. He chewed thoughtfully as he spoke. ‘This rock was named by a colony vessel which passed through the system five hundred years ago… the Never Come Down. She was part of a settler convoy of five ships exploring the local arm of space. The Never Come Down stayed behind to survey the system. The other four ships kept on going. Guess they didn’t fancy the short lease left on the sun. Nothing on record to indicate the reason behind their choice of name, though.’
Lana grunted. ‘And I seem to recall Dollar-sign implying it was his people who found this system.’
‘That’s not the most worrying thing about this jinky tale. The Never Come Down was posted missing, never heard of again. Our world’s name was entered in the common navigation record by the other four ships after they settled a system a few light years from here.’
‘Not feeling superstitious again, Zeno?’
‘Let’s just say that my natural sense of caution is earning overtime. I’ve asked Polter to widen the satellite search . . . scanning for the wreckage of a ship and the remains of any colony down here.’
Lana’s eyes narrowed. It wouldn’t be the first failed colony. Calder himself hailed from just such a beast . . . a lost technological base and humanity driven to barbarism by the unexpected ice age on Hesperus. But if humans wanted to settle here, they would have either needed to turn to genetic engineering to alter their bodies, or introduce some serious terraforming to cool the world for human-standard survival. Hardly worth doing with a short-lease sun about to burn out above. Unless the world contains something very valuable, said the voice within her. The kind of valuable that attracted pond life like Dollar-sign Dillard and his mine’s shadowy backers. ‘The Never Come Down. Maybe her crew should have taken their ship’s name a little more literally,’ mused Lana. ‘Set-up a nice safe orbital habitat to live on and kept the local ecosystem at a shuttle ride’s distance.’
‘Advice that perhaps we should have followed, too?’ suggested Skrat.
‘File it under spilt milk, Mister raz Skeratt.’
‘I’m not the mammalian sort, dear girl,’ complained the first mate. ‘Your race’s fondness for milk, spilt or otherwise, has always left me rather nauseous.’
Lana scratched her face. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll land the shuttle on the field, make a big show of adjusting the sensors for low-light and thermal imaging, then take off again.’
‘The odds of finding anything in the dark . . .’ said Zeno.
‘It’s not the jungle we’ll be searching,’ said Lana. ‘Skrat, you’ll head on out for a wider sweep of the area. Before you leave, you pass low over the mine works and drop me and Zeno by the edge of the mountains. If we know what’s really going on around here, we’ll have a far better chance of finding Cald
er, even if they haven’t got him tied up in some tunnel next to a pallet full of car-sized diamonds.’
‘Do I get any choice as to whether I play Rick Rail-gun: Interstellar Commando out there?’ said Zeno.
‘Same choice as always,’ said Lana.
‘Sweet maker, I must be becoming telepathic. I knew you were going to say that.’
‘Just the problem of being nearly immortal,’ said Lana. ‘Give it long enough and everything starts to sound the same.’
‘Not nearly immortal enough for this skeg-fest,’ said Zeno. ‘Not nearly enough.’
‘I believe you’re confusing immortality with indestructability, old chap,’ said Skrat.
‘Yeah, and I knew you were going to say that too.’
***
Calder stared in shock at the humanoid robot tottering down the path from the lodge. It stood a little higher than a man, stocky and powerful, but it had been designed to resemble a cat – not a realistic representation . . . an exaggerated cartoon animal that might have worked at a theme park, colourful enamelled plating with writing printed across its chest in a script the prince didn’t recognize. He realized the six-legged predators and their riders had vanished behind him, slipping away into the jungle. For a moment Calder toyed with the idea that the lodge might belong to the predators – some implausibly advanced home for the simple jungle dwellers. But this robot was either man-made or the product of one of the other sentient races. Human probably, judging by the machine’s carbon whiskers twitching on its spherical head. Calder noticed cameras behind two spacious glass eyes focusing on him, a slight whirring as the robot inspected the two newcomers.
‘Donata mushimanrui namuchi?’ barked the robot, the smiling steel slash in the middle of its head moving in a simulacrum of a real mouth.
‘We’re from the mining camp,’ said Calder. ‘Can you understand me?’
The robot’s over-sized head wobbled from side to side before it spoke again. ‘Yes. Are you guests of the company?’
‘I guess that would depend on which company?’
‘This resort is for guests of the company,’ repeated the robot. It wasn’t anywhere near sentient, Calder realized. Nothing like Zeno. ‘Are you guests of Etruka Energy Processing?’
‘We are,’ lied Calder. We just have to get inside. Find whoever is in charge of the lodge. It must have a radio and some means of getting in and out of the jungle.
‘Then you should enter,’ announced the robot, stepping back, a whirring noise from electric motors along its legs vibrating as it backed up. ‘Have you been hunting?’
Calder tapped the barrel of his rife and checked that Lento hadn’t vanished along with the predators. ‘In a manner of speaking. I’m Calder Durk and this is Janet Lento.’
‘I am Momoko, the official mascot of Etruka Energy,’ said the robot. ‘I am powerful but fun. And I am always reasonable.’
It sounds like its mental state isn’t that far off our half-insane driver’s. What is it about this jungle that seems to send people off the deep end? The machine led the pair of visitors up the path and towards the lodge, a neatly landscaped garden of exotic plants – presumable native – on either side watered by sprinklers in the grounds. There was no sign of other robots. Or humans. In the sky above the clearing he saw a rippling effect similar to a heat haze. Calder’s brain throbbed as it always did when he recalled tape-learnt lessons , each false memory drilled into his brain like a buckshot pellet. That has to be a one-way chameleon field – from the air you would see only jungle. Whoever built this place doesn’t want it to be visible to the naked eye from above. Protection from the vast winged beasts that were the top of the local food chain, or protection from the kind of visitors that might turn up in orbit with high resolution sensors mounted on a starship’s hull?
‘Where are the others, Momoko? The staff and guests from the . . . company?’
‘That information is not contained on the board,’ said Momoko, waddling up the path.
‘What board is that?’
‘The board with instructions,’ said the robot. ‘I wrote them. My memory is erased every morning.’
Calder glanced nervously around the garden. ‘And for the love of the gods, who’s erasing your memory out here?’
‘I am,’ said the robot. ‘Automatically. It says so on the board.’
Momoko led the two of them inside. A garden viewing room with simple white walls and comfortable cushioned seating carved out of the floor, seven or eight open doors leading to other parts of the lodge. Pleasantly cool compared to the burning heat outside, Calder and Lento’s smart suits audibly crackling as they powered down their cooling function.
The board Momoko treated with such reverence turned out to be a white screen; a thin plastic-glass active matrix hanging in the air with a numbered list of instructions scrawled in the same script written on the robot’s chest. ‘Can you translate this into standard?’ asked Calder.
‘Guests’ comfort is paramount.’
The screen blinked as it reflowed . . . rewritten as triple alliance characters. At the top it read: “Read these instructions when you wake with no memory. You are Momoko, the official mascot of Etruka Energy Company. You are powerful but fun. And you are always reasonable. You have set certain sectors of your short and long term memory to automatically erase itself every morning. There are five rules that MUST be followed.” Calder traced a finger along the list. “One. Care for and maintain the lodge. Download lodge protocols for detailed instructions. Two. Care for and maintain the gardens . . . especially the toxin fence. Download lodge protocols for detailed instructions. Three. Honour and protect the company. Four. Honour and protect all visitors of the company. Five. Fear the night.” There was a line break and then the instructions continued. “The hunters will return one day and you will leave this place. Never attempt to reconstitute your deleted memories.”
‘You’re the only robot here?’ asked Calder.
‘I am not,’ said Momoko. ‘There are seven of us.’ His hand rose to indicate a passage. Calder went across and glanced inside. Six robots identical to Momoko stood in battery recharging ports. They had all ripped their own heads off their bodies, metal hands forlornly clutching each cat-faced metal oval high in the air as though they were a line of headless ghosts, cables dangling underneath like severed veins.
‘They were not sufficiently loyal to the company,’ said the robot, sadly.
‘They killed themselves?’
‘Self-inflicted property damage,’ said the robot. ‘Honour the company. Destroying company property is frowned upon, don’t you think so? They left me alone. To do all this work by myself.’
Calder glanced around. Janet Lento wasn’t behind him anymore. What now? ‘Where’s Janet Lento?’
‘I have located our female guest on the lodge’s cameras. She is walking inside the garden.’
Calder rushed outside, followed by Momoko clunking behind. Lento wasn’t immediately in sight, so he sprinted around the corner. Behind the lodge the prince discovered a landscaped garden, a neat oblong of raked rocks next to a pond with a wooden pagoda, stepping stones across the water. Lento stood there looking sadly at a series of graves . . . compacted mounds with stone markers. The grim sight hadn’t made her any more loquacious. She held her peace, swaying slightly. Calder counted five mounds. Each marker stone had been carefully etched with a vertical line in the same symbol-like script running across the robot’s chest.
‘How did they die?’ Calder asked the robot.
‘That information isn’t on the board.’
‘What do the gravestones read?’
‘Seiji Machimura. Nobutaka Aso. Taro Machimura. Katsuya Kawaguchi. Hirofumi Koumura.’
Just names, then. No dates, No cause of death. Calder knelt by the gravestones, running a hand across the cracked, weathered surface. This writing has been carved with a small handheld laser. The headstones weren’t recent. Over fifty years old at least. The part of him that had been i
nhabiting cop show sims for far too long wanted to disinter the bodies and check for cause of death. But buried out in the jungle for this long with the local insects, there wouldn’t be much left. And I hardly have access to a pathology lab here. ‘How long have you been posted at the lodge, Momoko?’
‘That information isn’t on the board.’
‘Did you bury them?’
‘That—’
‘Let me guess,’ said Calder. ‘Not on the board?’ He slipped Lento’s hand into his and led her away unprotesting from the graves. ‘We need to keep Janet Lento here safe, Momoko. She’s had an accident in the jungle. It’s left her traumatized.’
‘The protocols indicate the lodge seals itself every night,’ said Momoko. ‘All guests should be inside after dusk for reasons of safety. Fear the night.’
Calder didn’t need to be told twice. It was growing too dark to stay outside now. Spotlights scattered across the grounds warmed up inside the garden, painting the undersides of giant orchids with fairy colours. He gazed thoughtfully at their protective fence. It seems so flimsy. Diaphanous, almost, flexing in the breeze. Where the barrier touched the ground it branched into myriad tiny roots, like a fungal growth infecting the soil. As he watched, he saw the shadowed silhouette of one of the elephant-trunked herbivores wander into the white barrier, squealing as it touched the fabric and millions of spiny threads injected it with acidic poison. The creature yanked back and vanished into the night, its pig-slaughtered shrieks growing dimmer with distance. Calder grunted. The toxin fence wouldn’t protect against aerial attackers, but that was what the camouflage field was for. Fear the night. Calder wondered if he wouldn’t be safer in the rain forest with the friendly knights and their predator steeds. The pack must have been around to see the hunting lodge built; remembering an age when thrill-seeking human hunters and their powerful weapons blundered through the jungle, taking pot-shots at the mega-fauna. No doubt leaving months’ worth of kills and food in their heavily armed wake. And they’ve mistaken me and Lento for more of the same. Corporate hospitality at its most wild – illegal hunting in the barely explored border worlds. The ideal tonic for corporate lords bored with their affluent, extended lives. But whatever the safari guests had found here had proved a little too interesting for them.