‘Got to be somewhere,’ said Zeno. ‘And he sure ain’t here.’
‘Damnable fool if he is,’ said Skrat.
‘We knew that much,’ sighed Lana, ‘when we took him on.’ She stepped aside as a robot drilling unit rumbled past, clouds of dust spilling from its tank-like tracks. ‘I see the miners and I see the mining gear. So why doesn’t this feel like a mine? I don’t trust that woman. When we get a clear moment, we’re going to have good snoop around here.’
‘And when are you hoping for that?’ said Zeno.
‘As soon as.’ They were going to find Calder. They had to. Lana hadn’t lost a crewman yet, and she certainly wasn’t planning to start with Calder Durk. It was a matter of professional pride, she told herself. No more than that.
***
Calder struggled with his rifle’s strap, fumbling for the weapon even as the closest spider leapt at him, its jaw parts open, mouth hissing and whistling victoriously. He wasn’t even close to getting the weapon clear when the spider flipped over in the air, something wet, green and muscled barrelling into it mid-air. Flailing legs and ripping flesh. None of it Calder’s! He desperately rolled over and knelt up to see what was happening. A pack of green six-legged panther-sized creatures had entered the clearing, many of them feeding on the blood-stained mess of spiders his rifle had left on the jungle floor. They carried some kind of symbiotic biped riding them like mounted knights, holding horn bones curling from each mount’s head; riders leaping off their scaled steeds. The symbiotes were naked, smooth-skinned and no higher than his knee. One scampered past Calder, ignoring him, leaping up into the tree and climbing it with sucker-tipped fingers. Another came sprinting past. Halting by Calder. It had a long serrated beak resembling the sharp visor of a knight’s helm, but when it opened the beak, gawping at him, he saw a wide perpetually grinning mouth below, interlocking white teeth as sharp as needles. It almost shook its head in disbelief, wide oval eyes blinking in surprise, then ran up the tree after its comrade. That’s the child I thought I saw in the undergrowth! It must have been out scouting for food. Probably thought it was a festival day when it came across the feast I’d left laid out under the trees. There was a splintering noise from above. Calder could just see the riders cutting through branches with their beaks, using them like organic anvil loppers, then it was raining spiders… these ones involuntarily dislodged rather than ambushing their prey. The knights were quite literally shaking the tree for their dinner. The green scaled predators below leapt at each spider as it landed. Transformed from hunters to hunted, the arachnids obviously knew how combat against these ferocious six-legged carnivores usually ended for them… they didn’t try to put up a fight, just scurried back into the jungle, pursued by the long, loping predators. Calder found Janet Lento on the other side of the clearing, backed up against a series of giant orange ferns. The newly arrived predators appeared to be ignoring her and Calder for the best part. Too strange to be considered part of the food chain? Or were the predators intelligent enough to appreciate that any animal that could lay down a carpet of free food with a rail-gun was worth preserving for a while? Calder watched surviving spiders in the high branches exit from his tree exactly as they had arrived, swinging on web ropes to the neighbouring trees – like pirates fleeing a burning galleon. There was a rustling from the other trees as large arachnids abandoned this corner of the rain forest. Calder stood up, his rifle in his hands. He tentatively eased himself between the spiders’ remains and the feasting predators, moving towards Lento. Eager not to disrupt the scene. The predators were all muscle, scaled green hides rippling as they nudged and snuffled at the corpses’ entrails. Four long legs for balance at the front of a body that might have been an alligator bred with a hunting hound, two powerful muscled limbs bent at the back. Legs that looked like they could leap across quite a distance. The curled horns on their heads whipped from side to side as they tore into the dead spiders. A wave of riders flowed down the tree trunk. They assembled around the corpses, sitting down as though this was a picnic laid on for their benefit, branch-breaking beaks snapping open into a locked position, little green hands gathering up pieces of arachnid meat and stuffing it into their rictus-grin mouths. They were obviously welcome guests at the feast. The predators pushed torn bodies towards their symbiotic partners, rolling arachnid corpses with snout and forelegs, some of the bodies’ hairy legs still quivering and sending a wave of primeval fear down Calder’s spine. But he didn’t have to fear the spiders around here anymore. Only what had driven them away. Calder reached Lento and raised his finger to his mouth, when he remembered that she hadn’t exactly been loquacious before. He took her hand in his and turned, only to find himself staring at one of the predators, its head lowered in a menacing manner, a cluster of nostrils snorting as it tried to identify this unlikely pair. Other predators emerged from the undergrowth, returned from their spirited jungle pursuit of the spiders. They advanced slowly on Calder and the woman, pushing them back towards the knights’ strange picnic. For a moment Calder thought that they were being offered as food to the riders in the same manner as the spiders’ corpses, but then one of the predators appeared rolling a dead spider across the ground, halting its progress in front of the two humans.
‘Are you inviting us to the party?’ said Calder.
The circle of riders had shuffled to either side, leaving a space the right size for Calder and Lento to join their ranks. It was as bizarre an offer as he was likely to receive today, but he’d rather humour the pack than waste the dwindling reserve of pellets in his rifle’s drum. Janet Lento sat down, as if breaking bread with these strange natives was an everyday occurrence. She reached into the spider’s body, barely recognizable after being shredded by his rail-gun, scooping out the pink meat as though this was a crab delicacy, stuffing it into her face until her cheeks were puffed out, strange juices running down her throat. Calder tried to stop himself from retching. It was as if the jungle had claimed her soul. Regressed her to some more basic, primeval state. Maybe this is how humanity would end up if they stayed on a world long enough for a sun to reach its nadir and start to die? Beside Calder, one of the knights nudged him with its sucker-tipped hand, indicating the spider’s corpse. A tentative bird-like noise – somewhere between tweeting and whistling – escaped its mouth.
‘I understand,’ said Calder. ‘I helped you kill it. Now I have to eat it.’ He scooped out a large chunk of entrails from the spider – a cake of flesh that would have kept a peasant family in sausages for a week back home. He was queasier than he should be. Whale meat was a delicacy on Hesperus… and the massive things that hunted under the ice were called whales only because his distant descendants had been offworld Nordic settlers. I’ve gotten too used to ship rations. Chief Paopao’s expertly rolled sushi. A wide variety of frozen ration-packs from a hundred worlds. Damned if he was going to eat raw arachnid. He stood up and recovered a couple of the fallen branches the knights had sawed out from under the spiders’ nest. He drove a long thin branch through the spider meat like a stake; the big thick log he tucked under his arm. He walked to the other side of the clearing, pinning the meat with the wood into the ground. Then he took seven steps back and heaved the sawn-off log at the cluster of striped plants, the wood tumbling through the air before smacking into one of the huge bulbs and falling into its bed of vines. A furious wave of steam jetted out from the spines, trying to cook the creature foolish enough to blunder into the murderous vegetable plot. It enveloped the spider guts, rocking the meat on his makeshift stake. He gave it a couple of seconds after the jetting finished, to ensure the plants had exhausted their reservoir of solar-heated rainwater. Then he retrieved his share of the slaughter and happily went back to re-join the odd picnic.
Calder waved the hunk of meat at the riders. ‘I prefer spit-roasted, but steamed is as good as it’s going to get in this place, I reckon.’ He tore off a strip and offered it to Lento, but she stared at him with the same wide-eyed expression as always, as i
f the exiled nobleman was the true oddity here. He tried the nearest rider, which sniffed at the boiled meat, little nostril strips along the top of its beak opening and closing. It nibbled at the strip, made an almost human sound of disgust, tossed the cooked meat over its shoulder and reached into the burst spider to get a fresh handful of the good red-raw flesh.
‘I’m among the heathen, here,’ said Calder. He bit into the hot meat. Slightly crunchy, as if the flesh was mixed with flecks of grit, not much flavour – and what there was almost tasted curiously as if it had been marinated in vinegar. He’d eaten worse. Hell, when Calder had been retreating across the frozen sea with his sole remaining ice schooner, pursued by half the enemy’s navy, he and his desperate crew had boiled shoe leather and mixed it with rock moss, so close to starvation had they fallen. He lifted up the steamed entrails. ‘Better than my boots, I have to give you that.’
Calder ate his fill. He could tell the impromptu picnic was drawing to a close when the six-legged predators finished feasting. Some of them started play-chasing each other around the clearing, while one of the larger members of the pack with the grandest set of horns reared up in front of the tree where Calder had sheltered, scratching bark off with its sharp points. Marking its territory, or showing the tree had been denuded of all spider-like ‘fruit’ and wasn’t worth revisiting for a while? Calder couldn’t make his mind up about these creatures. No clothes. No tools. No real attempt at speech or communication, even among each other – unless they chatted by covertly exchanging odours or whistles outside his pitch of hearing. But they had clearly acted towards the two humans with a measure of basic intelligence. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. You could live and die by that on Hesperus. Calder nearly had, before he’d had his eyes opened to the existence of the rest of the universe. The reports on this world said it was uninhabited by sentient life. Of course, the reports had been self-serving mineral surveys for the large part. Calder had done enough cop show sims in his brief tenure as crew to know where the motives lay with an offworld mining operation like this. As soon as local sentience was declared and news spread, you risked having your supply runs boycotted by environmentalists and do-gooders. Starships dropping automated camera drones to record every felled tree and any herbivore running into your laser fence. The word ‘blood’ tagged in front of every product you attempted to extract and sell. The knights mounted their steeds, a doll-sized hand clutching a curled horn apiece. Lento stood up, still clutching a broken spider leg with a chunk of gore on the end of the limb, as if this was the last food she expected to find for quite a while. Calder joined her. The answer to what was going to happen next came when one of the predators and its rider stalked up behind Calder, nosing him forward to join the chain of departing riders. Janet Lento seemed as unconcerned by their elevation to pack members as by everything else. Perhaps a pair of strange over-sized visitors that could lay out a carpet of spider corpses – and knew the secret of fire… or at least, steam – were too valuable to be left here as bait for one of those giant winged lizards whose shadows floated over, throwing the jungle floor into darkness. They moved through the rainforest for hours, an unhurried pace, nothing to do but trudge and listen to the unfamiliar sounds hooting, honking, chirping and roaring in the undergrowth. It was ironic. This was meant to be a world in its twilight years… a dying sun throbbing above them. But the jungle had never seemed so alive, literally shaking and shrieking with life. Nothing like the silent snow-bound cathedrals of the forests Calder had grown up with. Trees so hard the human settlers lacked tools sharp enough to fell them. Whether it was the locals’ knowledge of the jungle or the rest of the eco-system’s knowledge of how dangerous the pack was, the hike was uneventful. Nothing else appeared to try to attack them – a situation which Calder suspected wouldn’t have been the case if he and Lento had been blundering through the undergrowth on their own. Lento was little company, and the pack moved silently, halting occasionally for the predators to scratch at trees and sniff the ferns… for what, Calder was hard pushed to say.
‘Maybe they’re taking us to their den – or cave – or village,’ said 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. Calder tried not to take it personally. It was growing dark. The sick glow of the sun sinking from what he could see of the sky through the high jungle canopy, shadows lengthening, the tenor of the jungle’s song changing around them. They must be close to where they were going, surely? But then, he didn’t know how far the pack’s territory extended. They might claim thousands of miles of jungle as their hunting land for all that Calder knew. He 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 mutely watch potential rescuers fly over without trying to attract attention, but he hadn’t lost his marbles yet. The Gravity Rose had brought fuel for the camp’s vehicles as part of the supply run. So where were the search flights? This was very odd. Calder felt forgotten and lost. They kept on moving for half an hour more, almost too dark to travel, and then the pack halted. There seemed to be a clearing ahead, but something was blocking their passage, a white diaphanous material hanging in the air, wet and sparkling like a sheet of a wet spider’s web. As he got 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. And before them 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. 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 the shuttle back towards the mining camp’s landing field, fat tears of hot rain beating against the cockpit’s 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 through the seventy metre-high dome of the forest, sweeping for such a tiny temperature differential was going to be like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack. But what choice did she have? None at all when it came down to it.
‘What are we missing here?’ she asked Zeno and Skrat in the flight seats behind hers. ‘We’ve covered more territory today than Calder can possibly have walked on foot in the time he’s been missing.’
Zeno looked over at their first-mate. ‘Are you sure there’s no missing ground vehicles from the camp? Maybe Calder drove out of the base?’
‘Certainly not from the main part of the 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. 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 for untrained civilians to wander around.’
‘I just bet they did. This stinks. What if Calder saw something he wasn’t meant to on the base? We’re taking too much on trust here. His disappearan
ce. The defence system’s sensor logs. Who saw what, when.’
‘We know their driver disappeared,’ said Zeno. ‘This falls within the same pattern. And the miners have been searching for her for weeks with the empty fuel tanks to prove it.’
‘I have a feeling about this… same one I usually 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 the duplicitous broker. A cargo-hold of contraband war machines trying to infiltrate her 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 the planet being named Abracadabra.’
Zeno fell silent for a minute, the android connecting with shuttle’s comms dish and contacting the starship’s AI, Granny Rose. Running the query and waiting for the response. Finally the information was returned. He chewed thoughtfully as he spoke. ‘It was named by a colony vessel that passed through the system five hundred years ago… the Never Come Down. She was part of a settler convoy of five ships exploring this arm of space. The Never Come Down stayed to survey the system. The other four ships kept on going. Guess they didn’t like the short lease left on the sun here. There’s nothing on record to indicate the reason behind their choice of name.’
Lana grunted. ‘And I seem to recall Dollar-sign implying it was his people who found this system.’
Red Sun Bleeding Page 3