by Stephen Hunt
Calder pushed past Lento and the robot, heading for the cabin above, and Skrat seated in the pilot’s seat. He looked a little like a miniature green dragon himself – albeit bipedal – and the irony of a sentient human-sized lizard having rescued him from a flight of far larger more savage cousins wasn’t lost on Calder. ‘Lords of Ice, Skrat, but am I glad to see you! I’m surprised you’ve even got the power left to lift-off after you took your laser cannons to those dragons.’
Skrat gazed quizzically around. ‘This is a spare freight shuttle, old bean. It doesn’t carry weaponry.’
***
‘Ah, my favourite girl,’ laughed Seth “Steel-arm” Bowen from behind the barricade. His cybernetic arm buzzed as it rose towards her in a mocking greeting.
Lana kept her hands conspicuously away from the rifle on her back, her chest practically cooking under the heat of the targeting dots flitting around her ship suit. ‘I wish I could say the feeling was mutual.’
‘This is probably the time for a little diplomacy,’ advised Zeno, standing by her side.
‘The tin man always did have a wise head on him,’ said the pirate captain. ‘But it’s a little late for that.’
‘You’re early,’ said Lana.
‘A cautious girl like you, I figured the Gravity Rose would seed a few trip-wires around the system on the way in – spot the Doubtful Quasar early . . . and then I wouldn’t be seeing you and your crew for comet dust. So me and the gang—’ he indicated the motley assortment of armoured toughs, mostly the three species of the Triple Alliance with a few races she didn’t recognise thrown into the heavily-armed mix,—‘we took a lander ahead of the old girl and flew in on the QT to have a nosey around and make sure your cargo shuttles stayed on the ground.’
‘You’ve come a long way for nothing,’ lied Lana. She glanced over to the guardhouse in the defence perimeter. It was on fire, the people inside on the nightshift either dead or captured. ‘We’re running set-up supplies to a mine that hasn’t even got going yet. Nothing for you to steal yet except a few drilling rigs and some rubble from an initial exploratory tunnel.’
‘You’re too modest, lass,’ laughed Steel-arm. The pirate commander hadn’t changed a bit. Always merry, a quaking pile of false bonhomie, right up until the moment he ordered you to be pushed out of the airlock sans a vacuum suit. A tall, muscular, grinning homicidal maniac. ‘Besides, we’ve already been well-paid for this here jaunt. To make sure that you and the local lads down here are never heard from again. Seems there are interests back on Transference Station who want to send the message that hiring independents is a loser’s game. Sadly, for that message to get across, your client’s actually got to lose something. I don’t think Dollar-sign Dillard will really miss you that much. But the investment he’s sunk into this illegal mining camp? A nuke or two down here and he’ll get the message, strong and hard, do you not think so?’
Damn! Why did all her problems stem from the men in her life? First Steel-arm, and now Pitor back on Transference, her ex-fiancée lightening the competition for his new corporate masters. The treacherous, conniving slime-worm. ‘You’re not planning on tying me to a ticking warhead, are you?’
‘Perish the thought,’ grinned the pirate skipper. ‘The Invisible Port has a very healthy slave market, and a skipper’s got to make a profit. What do you say, Mister Morales?’
A human pirate by his side tapped at the screen of his phone. He wore a metal collar, just like all the other pirates. A high-power battery to fry his skull if the crewman ever went against Steel-arm. The device to transmit the encrypted murder code hanging from the pirate commander’s belt and never far from his fingers. If wearing the suicide necklace bothered Steel-arm’s minion, the man disguised it well. ‘The miners over in the main camp will all have received specialist training – they should be worth ten thousand T-dollars apiece at least. Ship crew will be worth double that in the port’s market. A little less if they’re uncooperative and we have to scrub their minds and give them a more obliging personality.’
‘Call our fighters,’ ordered Steel-arm. ‘Tell them to lay off bombing the base. We’ll “encourage” the camp commander to surrender and take as many alive as possible.’
Ending up on a radiation-leaking pirate hulk – a short, dangerous life with even fewer memories that I already have; helping scum like this seize free traders and liners? Lana would sooner prefer it if they shot her right here, rather than hauling her back to the pirates’ hole of an asteroid hideaway permanently anchored in hyperspace. ‘Screw you, Seth.’
Steel-arm lifted his head back and roared with laughter, a cruel unamused sound. ‘You’ll get your chance, Lana. Who knows, if you please me enough on the jump back to the Invisible Port, I might even offer you the chance to sign up with me.’
‘Now you’re really playing dirty.’
‘So, you do remember. We’ll head back to the main base, accept their surrender, collect our trading flesh, wire the place for a few fireworks, and let’s see if the lass can’t talk the Gravity Rose into surrendering without needing to break her too badly. She’ll be worth a lot more on the open market without missile damage.’
‘You’re the one who is going to get damaged,’ snarled Lana.
‘You always did love that ship a little too much, Lana girl,’ said Steel-arm. ‘But isn’t that you all over, always picking the wrong thing to love?’
Pirates stepped forward, guns at the ready, locking an electric collar around Lana and Zeno’s neck. The female pirate who had put the collar on Lana, an Asian-looking woman, examined her handiwork with satisfaction. ‘Try and run, now. You’ll fry.’
‘I won’t be worth much then,’ said Lana.
‘You’re too much trouble,’ she growled. ‘All this way for you? I don’t see why.’
‘You and me both.’
‘Come over here and stop playing with the cargo, Cho,’ boomed Steel-arm. ‘If the camp doesn’t surrender quickly, I’ll let you carve up some of the miners when we take them.’
Lana watched the female pirate, Cho, saunter back to the heavily armed crew, maliciously fingering a dagger hanging off her belt. Lana Fiveworlds wasn’t a free trader anymore – mistress of a starship. I’ve been reduced to mere property.
CHAPTER THREE
All that must be left behind.
‘I assure you,’ insisted Skrat, ‘I am not joking. My landing was thoroughly un-opposed by any of the local wildlife. Your building’s light signature was picked up by the Gravity Rose from orbit. I was already in the air when Polter sent me the coordinates and I nipped across here as soon as I had them.’
So, Calder had made the right decision dropping the lodge’s camouflage field, even if it had nearly ended up in the lodge’s guests becoming lizard bait. But if Skrat’s shuttle hadn’t driven away the flock of attacking creatures, then what . . .? Calder’s mind drifted back to the figure he thought he had glimpsed outside the building after they had sealed themselves inside. One impossibly fast humanoid native couldn’t possibly account for an entire squadron of those winged monsters, could it?
‘I’m sure the base will be happy that you discovered their missing driver,’ said Skrat, ‘but next time you decide to play the gallant, old fellow, do feel free to inform me first. You left me looking like a complete imbecile in front of the skipper. One minute you’re unloading cargo, the next, you’re off plunging into the dark uncharted heart of the jungle.’
‘It wasn’t my idea,’ protested Calder. ‘I don’t even know how I ended up inside the jungle. I was on the landing field helping you. Then I blacked out. After I woke up, I found myself inside a clearing in the rain forest. No sign of the mining camp from the tree-tops . . . just jungle.’
‘And do you know how you and your damsel-in-distress in our cargo bay travelled so far?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just jungle? The mining camp is over five-hundred miles away from our present position. You’re jolly lucky Polter picked up you
r building’s lights and decided to send me to investigate further. What were those ruins I plucked you out of, by the way?’
Five-hundred miles? No wonder Calder hadn’t seen rescue helicopters in the air. He and Lento had been well outside any sane search radius. ‘It was a hunting lodge of some sort. And it wasn’t ruins when I arrived. The dragons demolished it tonight after I turned off our aerial camouflage field. I think it must have been sitting out there abandoned for centuries.’ Calder told the first mate about the amnesiac robot janitor and what he had discovered, including the local symbiote predators who helped him and Lento to safety from the deadly tree spiders, the ancient safari lodge, the dragon attack, and the strange fleeting figure he thought he’d glimpsed stalking around the building.
Skrat glanced at the images from the cargo camera – Lento sat there, still clutching her blanket around her and shivering while the robot inspected the walls of the hold; possibly its first time outside of the jungle if it had been activated inside the lodge. ‘I’m no doctor, but the dear lady needs more help than her camp can give her. The robot is a kawaii . . . a walking logo and mascot for one of the large corporations of the Cygnus arm. Big game hunting on the border worlds is frowned upon in many alliance markets, a PR disaster in the making, for all its popularity among the top brass. No wonder they didn’t want the lodge on the charts.’
Calder scratched his stubble. ‘What about the biped that attacked the lodge? The dragons that were massacred?’
‘Always look for the simplest explanation, dear boy. The dents in the lodge were probably from the spiked balls at the business end of the creatures’ tails. The dead ones . . . no doubt two rival flocks arrived at the same time and had a set-to over which group had first dibs dining on the strange-looking mammals. As for the mystery biped, this whole world is barely catalogued. Possibly the local equivalent of an ape, or the silik from Raznor Raz I used to feed dates to outside the old home-nest, a curious low-level sentient come to gawk at the strangers.’
‘And the distance from here to the base?’
‘I would put money on one of those rascals with large wingspans flying through a hole in the camp’s anti-air defences, dropping a stone on your head to stun you, then carrying you away to feed its young. Must have met another chap higher up the food chain and abandoned you on the jungle floor to fight its corner. Or maybe your attacker was one of the smaller fliers and you were too heavy for it, so it decided to dump your body and go after something a little more familiar.’
‘I don’t know. Both me and Lento?’
‘There’re enough complications arising in the universe without looking for hidden ones, old bean,’ said Skrat. ‘You’ve seen the size of those scaly critters in the air. They have to eat their own bodyweight . . . which means an awful lot of snatched prey from the rain-forest. Our distressed damsel down in cargo was probably conscious when one of the locals got its talons into her outside her cab and gave her an alfresco view of the continent as it attempted to fly home. That’s enough to leave anyone a little unhinged.’ Skrat’s chair had a hole in it for his thick tail to squeeze through, and his scaled green appendage swung from side to side as he tapped at the communications panel. ‘Most peculiar? The base’s communications room doesn’t seem inclined to receive the good news of your recovery. They’re broadcasting something on a loop, though.’ He waved his hand and a disembodied voice fizzed out of the cabin’s speakers. It sounded a lot like the camp’s stout mining chief, Kien-Yen Leong.
‘Mayday, mayday. This is Abracadabra station. We are being bombed by fighters from an unknown starship refusing to identify itself. It has just issued a demand for our complete unconditional surrender. If any naval vessel from a Protocol signatory world is in range, we are a mining concern registered at Transference Station, and we are requesting urgent military assistance. Our coordinates are attached.’
‘Very loosely registered,’ observed Skrat. ‘An unknown starship? It would appear that Dollar-sign wasn’t being paranoid about claim-jumpers after all.’
‘If the base is breaking cover then it has to be pretty bad over there,’ said Calder, his mind racing. Nobody is going to admit to an illegal mining operation lightly, let alone give away their position to every competitor within a couple of light-years.
‘It won’t matter,’ said Skrat. ‘I doubt if their signal will even clear the atmosphere of this queer place. And if by some miracle it does, it will be years before a civilized system picks up a transmission from this deep in the wilds.’
‘What about Lana . . . I mean, the skipper?’
‘She was at the mine-head in the mountains along with Zeno.’ Skrat began to bank the shuttle, heading down towards the dark floor of jungle canopy.
‘Where are you flying? We need to extract her out of there right now.’
Skrat pointed to a deep valley between two slopes. ‘Standard procedure, Mister Durk. We don’t go running into a fire-fight blind, and certainly not in an unarmed shuttle . . . you’re not riding a hard-ship in one of your Hell-fleet sims now. The fact we haven’t already heard this news from the Gravity Rose either means she’s boosting out of the system or she’s dead in space. We land, hide, and rattle the post box.’
‘Post box?’
‘Our satellite network, old fruit. If they had time, the skipper or our chums on the Gravity Rose will have popped a hidden message into our network. Hopefully, arranging an extraction plan. We’ll drop our own message into the post-box, advising them we’re alive and send the ship our co-ordinates.’ He tapped the scaly side of his snout knowingly. ‘A spoonful of stealth and subterfuge can be worth more in the Edge than a hangar deck full of fighter craft.’
Calder scanned the ground from the cabin window. He pointed to a clearing in a valley just large enough to accommodate the shuttle, grass shimmering in the light of three moons. ‘You can put down there without burning a landing site out of the jungle.’
‘I see it.’ Skrat twisted the shuttle’s thrusters around into landing position and switched the boat into anti-gravity mode, drifting them down silently, rocking on the freight shuttle’s pneumatic landing gear before it settled down. Thick tree foliage on both sides and everything else lost to the night. Hopefully without too many spiders. They waited ten minutes for a satellite to pass overhead, and then Skrat jabbed furiously at the controls, exchanging information in a tight-beam broadcast – heavily encrypted and as untraceable as any message could be. It took another ten minutes for the shuttle’s simple computers to process the first mate’s post box key, and then they took possession of the Gravity Rose’s last message. Calder watched a clearly stressed-out Polter explaining how he was withdrawing the ship to the world’s smallest moon, fleeing before an approaching pirate carrier; listened to the news of the tracking device the chief had found concealed on the Rose before jettisoning it inside a spare satellite. General communications were being jammed, but tightband point-to-point messages could be exchanged through the satellites, signals rationed to once an hour to avoid detection. Polter’s final warning was that the main mining base was under attack from an advance strike-force . . . and how he feared Lana and Zeno would shortly fall into the raider’s hands. Pirates. How are we going to get out of this fix? Calder remembered a Hell-fleet episode based on real events. The one with the hijacked passenger liner, the Queen Radiance. The TA fleet had been able to track the missing vessel by the passengers jettisoned from the airlock – minus vac suit, of course. If these people are even a tenth as ruthless, we’re in dire trouble.
‘So, you know this Steel-arm Bowen?’ asked Calder.
‘Some of us a little better than others,’ said Skrat, cryptically. ‘On our previous acquaintance, the captain may have given him the impression she was a fellow pirate commander from a rival clan amiable to an alliance. Steel-arm was, shall we say, a little disappointed when the truth came out. He lost a considerable amount of face among those who ply their rather disreputable trade stealing cargoes and ransoming hostage
s. Reputation is practically everything when you’re a pirate.’
‘Will he shoot the skipper?’
‘No,’ sighed Skrat. ‘Too fast and far too easy. The fellow will extract a rather long and tedious humiliation before he gets around to anything as pedestrian as an execution. He knows that taking the Gravity Rose will hurt the captain as much as any physical torture. Steel-arm will wish to torment her with our ship firmly in his metal digits.’
Calder was about to ask the first mate to elaborate, then thought better of it and bit his tongue. Skrat started to replay the message and just as he did, a blinding flash exploded outside, the night sky spreading into sudden fierce clarity before the cabin’s smart screens blanked out the exterior view for a second, returning to transparency with a bizarre orange afterglow lingering around the leaves. The wind built up outside, a fierce gale sweeping across the jungle canopy and rocking the shuttle on its landing gear. Then the gale died away, almost as suddenly as it had appeared.