Solaris Rising 1.5

by Ian Whates

  1.

  VILCA’S MEN WERE going to kill him. He tried tolose himself in the improvised warrens of the vertical favelas, but knew it was only a matter of time before they found him. He’d been away too long; his memories of the rat runs and back ways were out of date by at least a couple of decades. In the end, two of his pursuers cornered him on one of the innumerable wire footbridges stretched between the barrios that clung coral-like to both walls of the steep, narrow canyon.

  “Stay where you are, Jones.” The short one’s name was Faro. He was a tough young street kid. His elder brother Emilio blocked the other end of the bridge. They would have both been small boys the last time Napoleon Jones had been here; but now they were in their mid-twenties and armed with machetes. Caught between them, he realised he had nowhere left to run. The springy bridge was less than two metres in width and fifty in length. Half a kilometre below, corrugated metal rooftops patchworked the canyon’s rocky floor. Other bridges crisscrossed the gap at various heights. Flyers and cargo zeppelins nosed like cautious fish between them. Shanties crusted both the canyon’s cliff faces, layer upon layer. Lines of laundry drooped from window to window. Cooking fires filled the air with the bitter tang of smouldering wood and plastic. He could hear shouts and screams and children’s voices. Somewhere a young woman sang.

  “What do you want?” he said, buying time.

  The two kids each took a step onto the wire bridge. Napoleon took hold of the handrails to steady himself.

  “We got something for you, from Vilca,” Emilio said.

  Napoleon tipped back the brim of his Stetson. “Maybe I don’t want it.”

  Faro laughed cruelly. He slapped the flat blade of his machete against the palm of his hand. “Maybe you’re going to get it, whether you want it or not.”

  Napoleon risked a peep over the handrail. This canyon was just one of hundreds arranged in a vast, sprawling delta, carved out over millennia by the patient action of wind and water. Like the tentacles of an enormous squid, the canyons stretched from the mountains at one end of the planet’s solitary supercontinent to the sea at the other, providing the only shade in what was otherwise a pitiless, UV-drenched desert.

  Looking down, he saw a cargo zeppelin about to pass beneath the bridge, its broad back like the smooth hump of a browsing whale; and felt the walkway shudder beneath his feet as the street kids advanced, weapons raised.

  He should never have come back to Nuevo Cordoba. At his age, he should have known better. He looked longingly down the canyon, towards the distant ocean. The wind tugged at his lizardskin coat. If he could only get back to his starship, the Bobcat, floating tethered at the offshore spaceport, he’d be free. He could finally shake this planet’s dust from his boots. As things stood, though, it looked as if he’d be lucky to make it off this bridge alive; or at least in one piece.

  He glanced at the approaching thugs. They were closer now. Emilio swung his machete from side-to-side.

  “Nowhere to hide?”

  Napoleon glanced from one brother to the other. They were almost within striking distance.

  “I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Shut it,” Faro said.

  Below, the zeppelin slid its blunt nose into the shadow of the bridge. Napoleon took the antique flying goggles that hung around his neck and pulled them up over his eyes. Seeing the movement, Emilio stepped forward with a grunt. He scythed his machete around in a powerful swing aimed at Napoleon’s head. Napoleon ducked the blade and came up hard, grasping for the big lad’s arm while the force of the swing still had him off-balance. He slammed Emilio’s wrist against the rail of the bridge, trying to get him to drop the knife. Emilio roared in annoyance and pushed back. The machete came up in a vicious backhand swipe. Napoleon tried to twist out of the way, but the tip of the blade caught him across the right forearm, biting through lizardskin, cotton and flesh.

  “Ah!” He staggered back, clutching the stinging wound. He saw more of Vilca’s men arrive. They began to advance across the bridge, and Napoleon knew this was a fight he couldn’t win. As the brothers dropped into fighting crouches on either side of him, ready to hack him to pieces, he braced himself against the handrail.

  “Sorry, boys,” he said.

  Using his boot heel to push off, he crossed the width of the walkway in two quick steps and launched himself over the opposite rail, into empty air.

  THE WIND TORE at him. His coat flapped. The fall seemed to take forever.

  Then his boots hit the top of the zeppelin hard enough to jar his spine. He bounced, sprawling forward in an ungainly tangle of limbs and coattails. For a second, he thought he was going to roll right off the side and fall to his death at the bottom of the canyon. Then his hands and feet found purchase against the fabric and he clung spread-eagled, sucking in great raw lungfuls of cold canyon air.

  If he raised his head, he could see, over the curve of the hull, one of the engine nacelles, with the blurred, hissing circle of its black carbon impeller blades. Beyond that, nothing but air and rooftops.

  Heart hammering in his chest, he clawed his way back up to the relatively flat surface at the top of the zeppelin. Once there, he rolled onto his back and sat up. He’d skinned his knees and palms. His right arm hurt and his hand and sleeve were slathered and sticky with blood. Worst of all, he’d lost his hat. Still, he was alive. Behind him, Faro and Emilio boggled open-mouthed from the footbridge. He pushed his goggles up onto his forehead and raised a bloody, one-fingered salute.

  “So long, fuckers.”

  The wind straggled his hair. Staying low to avoid being blown off the airship altogether, he crawled back towards the tail fin and found a maintenance hatch set into the fabric at its base. He pulled the hatch open and climbed down an aluminium ladder into the shadowy interior.

  The outer envelope of the airship housed a number of helium gas bags, with walkways and cargo spaces wedged between them. The air was dark and cold in there, like a cave. Moving as quickly as his protesting limbs would allow, Napoleon made his way shakily across a catwalk and down another ladder to the access panel leading to the control gondola slung beneath the main hull. As he dropped into the cabin, the pilot—a scruffy young technician sipping coffee at a cup-strewn computer console—turned to him in amazement.

  “Where did you come from?”

  Clutching the torn sleeve of his snakeskin coat, blood seeping through his fingers, Napoleon glowered. He pointed forward, through the windshield, at a docking mast protruding from a cluster of warehouses near the base of the canyon’s right-hand wall.

  “Take us down, boy,” he said.

  AS SOON AS the zeppelin’s nose nudged the mast, Napoleon Jones was off and running again. He pushed through the narrow stairwells and crowded walkways that formed the streets of the vertical town. His boots splashed through water; broken glass floors of shattered tile. Down here at the base of the favela, water dripped constantly from the upper levels. Strip lights flickered and sizzled; power cables hung in improvised loops. He passed dirty kitchens, tattoo parlours, street dentists. Blanket-wrapped figures slept in alcoves behind steam pipes. He smelled hot, sour plastic from the corner kiosks, where fabbers made shoes and toys from discarded bottles and cans. He turned right, then left, trying to put as much distance as he could between himself and Vilca’s men. He moved awkwardly, cradling his hurt arm, trying to keep pressure on the wound.

  Reappearing like this, after two decades, had been a mistake. Twenty years ago, he’d been at the top of his game: a celebrated daredevil repeatedly flinging his craft into hyperspace on arbitrary trajectories, just to see where he’d end up. The media called the sport ‘random jumping,’ and it was a dangerous pastime; not all the pilots who took part returned. Those who did, especially those who’d discovered a newly habitable world or the location of an ore-rich asteroid belt, became celebrities. Venture capitalists and would-be entrepreneurs lined up to sponsor them. And in his time, Napoleon Jones had been one of the best and brightest of
their number. But he’d been unable to manage the wealth and attention. He fucked up. He developed a tranquilizer dependency and let things slide. He got sloppy. And then one day, he simply disappeared.

  Now he was back, he was a fugitive. In his absence, Vilca had gone from a small-time gang boss to de facto ruler of Nuevo Cordoba’s favelas, and he wanted the money Napoleon owed him; money that should have part-financed another random jump into the unknown, but went instead to supporting an extended stay on Strauli, a crossroads world eight light years in the wrong direction.

  Napoleon came to the end of a corridor and cut through a laundry area. Hot wet steam filled the air. He squeezed through the narrow spaces between the vats of boiling clothes, searching for another way out. Spilled detergent made the floor slick and slippery. The workers watched him with dull, incurious eyes. They knew better than to get involved. Eventually, he found a hatchway that led into a narrow service duct between one set of buildings and the next. Thick cables ran the length of the floor, beneath a layer of waste paper and discarded packing materials. At the end of the duct, he emerged into daylight. He was on the floor of the canyon now, looking up at the layers of improvised dwellings that towered a hundred metres up the side of the cliff above him.

  A tangle of shacks and warehouses covered the ground between him and the vertical settlements on the far wall, clustered to either side of the meltwater stream that ran from the mountains at one end of the canyon to the sea at the other. Napoleon looked left and right, trying to orientate himself. He wasn’t familiar with this part of town. His old stamping grounds were further downstream, towards the port. He’d come this far inland seeking an old flame: the girl he’d ditched twenty years ago, when he’d jumped out of the system en route for Strauli, half-baked on tranquilisers and intending never to return. He brought his ship down in the ocean off the coast, where the canyons met the water, and left it floating there. Then he went looking for her.

  Her name was Crystal. He found her in a small room off a darkened landing, half an hour before Vilca’s men found him.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “It’s me, honey. Napoleon.” He took off his hat.

  “I know who you are.”

  “I’ve come to see you. To see how you are.”

  She looked him up and down with contempt.

  “You still look exactly the same,” she said.

  He forced a smile.

  “So do you.”

  Crystal gave a snort. “You always were a lousy liar, Jones.” She stepped back from the door, her heels clicking on the vinyl floor. “You can come on in, if you want.”

  Napoleon hesitated at the threshold, both hands holding the brim of his hat. The room wasn’t much larger than the bed it contained, and dark; and the air smelled of stale sheets.

  “I thought you might have been married.”

  “I was, for a while.” Crystal squeezed her hands together. “It didn’t take.”

  “What happened?”

  She stopped kneading her fingers and wrapped her arms across her ample chest.

  “Why the hell do you care?”

  Napoleon shrugged.

  “Look, I’m sorry—”

  “You’re sorry? You stand there all sorry, not having aged at all. While the rest of us have had to live through the past twenty years.”

  He held up his hands.

  “I just wanted to see how you were.”

  Crystal tossed back her mane of red hair.

  “I’m fat and middle-aged and alone. Are you happy now?”

  Napoleon stepped back onto the landing. While the hyperspace jumps from one star system to the next took the same amount of time as it took light to cross the intervening distance, the jumps themselves felt instantaneous to the crews of the ships making them; so for every light year Napoleon had travelled, a calendar year had worn away here, for Crystal. She’d gone from her mid-twenties to her mid-forties, while he’d only aged by a couple of years.

  “I should be going,” he said, regretting the sentimental impulse that had brought him to her door.

  Her lip curled. She took hold of the door, ready to close it.

  “Yes, go on. Leave. It’s the only thing you’re good at.”

  Napoleon backed off another step.

  “I can see you’re upset—”

  “Oh, just go.”

  She closed the door, leaving him standing alone in the gloom of a solitary overhead fluorescent strip. He could hear her sobbing behind the door. The sound gave him a sick, empty feeling.

  He replaced his Stetson and, hands in pockets, walked back to the stairwell. From there, he went looking for a bar; but before he could find one, Faro and Emilio found him.

  Now, still on the run after his adventures on the zeppelin, and still bleeding heavily from the gash in his arm, Napoleon started making his way through the maze-like shanties on the canyon floor, heading for the transport tube that threaded along the base of the far wall, fifty or so metres away. If he could get there and get on a train, he’d be at the port in no time.

  He staggered forward. The sky was a thin strip of blue, high above. Flyers and zeppelins floated like fish in an undersea trench. Down here at the bottom, a thin frost covered everything. The sun rarely penetrated to this depth.

  The houses were ramshackle affairs. Some were two or three storeys in height. They looked like pieces fallen from the cliff-hugging favelas looming over them on either side: minor debris presaging a forthcoming avalanche. The houses belonged to mushroom farmers. Between them lay tended rows of edible fungi, like the fingers of dead white hands thrusting up through the damp soil.

  Napoleon picked his path with care, sticking close to the houses, avoiding the crops. The last thing he needed was an irate farmer taking pot shots at him; and besides, he didn’t want to get his boots any dirtier than they already were.

  He was almost to the river before Vilca’s men caught up with him again. This time, it was four of them in a flyer. They came in low and fast, the flyer’s fans kicking up dirt and rubbish. Napoleon started running as best he could, but he couldn’t move quickly while cradling his arm. Bullets ripped into the ground around him, sending up angry spurts of dust, each one closer than the last.

  He made maybe ten metres before something punched through his thigh. The impact spun him around in a graceless pirouette.

  He landed on his back in the dirt. The flyer’s howling fans kicked up a maelstrom of dust and grit around him, and he rolled onto his side, trying to curl into a ball, cringing in anticipation. Waiting for the next shot.

  2.

  THE TRADING SHIP Ameline flashed into existence a thousand kilometres above the inhospitable sands of Nuevo Cordoba. The ship was a snub-nosed wedge, thirty metres across at the stern, narrowing to five at the bow; its paintwork was the faded blue and red livery of the Abdulov trading family. Alone on its bridge, her neural implant hooked into its virtual senses, Katherine Abdulov looked down at the planet beneath, with its deep, fertile oceans and single barren supercontinent. Even from here, she could see the tracery of fissures that made up the canyon system that gave shelter and life to the planet’s human population.

  “Any trace of infection?” she asked the ship, and felt it run a sensor sweep, scouring the globe for signs of The Recollection’s all-consuming spores.

  > NOTHING I CAN DETECT, AND NO MENTION OF ANYTHING SUSPICIOUS ON THE PLANETARY GRID.

  Kat heard the ship’s words in her mind via her neural link, and pursed her lips. For the moment she was relieved, but she knew her relief to be premature. Even if the contagion hadn’t yet spread to this planet, it was almost certainly already on its way, using cannibalised human starships to spread itself along the trade routes from Strauli Quay. She took a moment to remember the other worlds already lost to the unstoppable red tide. Their names burned in her mind: Djatt, Inakpa... Strauli.

  She’d seen her home world swallowed by The Recollection; lost most of her family, including her mo
ther, to its insatiable hunger. Now she was out here, at this world on the edge of unknown space, hoping to warn the inhabitants of the approaching threat, and rescue as many of them as she could.

  Through the ship’s senses, she felt the arrival of the rest of her flotilla: two dozen fat-arsed freighters, each piloted by a crew of Acolytes, and each with the cargo capacity to transport several hundred refugees.

  One by one, they reported in.

  “Target the spaceport and the main canyon settlements,” she told them. “Save as many people as you can.”

  HER ONLY PREVIOUS visit to the isolated world of Nuevo Cordoba had taken place years ago—whole decades in local time—during her first trip as an independent trader. That had been back before her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter; back before the coming of The Recollection and the loss of her left arm. She remembered the planet as a corrupt, mean-spirited place, the canyon dwellers made hard and cynical by the harshness of their environment, and lives spent mining the rock or grubbing for mushrooms and lichen. She wondered how they were coping without the arch network. She also remembered one Cordoban in particular: a random hyperspace jumper with whom she’d had a brief affair. She remembered his Mephistophelean beard; his long hair tied back in a dark ponytail; his Stetson hat and lizardskin coat. The way his skin smelled of cologne and old leather.

  On a whim, she said, “Scan the port for the Bobcat’s transponder.”

  > ALREADY LOCATED. THE BOBCAT IS CURRENTLY FLOATING IN THE PARKING ZONE OFF THE CONTINENT’S WESTERN COAST. DO YOU WANT TO MAKE CONTACT?

  Kat settled back in her couch. She drummed on the instrument console with the tungsten fingers of her prosthetic hand.

  “Just see if he’s on board.”