‘It’s covered in spines,’ whispered Lento, hardly louder enough to hear.
Calder switched the view to what looked like a corporate video for large scale solar energy deployments and killed the audio’s foreign gabbling. ‘Go to sleep. We’re safe in here.’ I hope.
As safe as those mounds outside? He left her door open and walked into the viewing gallery. The thick slanted windows were being covered, armoured storm blinds rolling down from recesses at the top of the lodge. Solid enough to stop one of those dragons ripping them off? Calder wasn’t sure.
Momoko caught up with him. ‘Does the honoured female guest wish me to sing to her? The lodge protocols contain many renowned company songs.’ It started to sing, accompanied by a burst of jaunty recorded music. ‘The Etruka Energy Company is as powerful as our shafu; our never-ending energies come from without and within; only by giving our all can our honoured customers win.’
‘Maybe later.’ He remembered the toxin fence swaying as though something had just brushed it. ‘Can you show me what’s outside on the wall here using the cameras? The fence perimeter?’
Momoko pointed to the steel blinds. ‘Cameras are covered when the carbon-reinforced storm shielding comes down. All except the shuttle monitor cam on roof.’
‘There’s not a storm outside.’
‘Fear the night,’ said Momoko. ‘Storm shielding protocols have been over-written.’
And Calder could guess by who – five graves full. Safe inside, or trapped inside? Momoko activated the roof-top camera, a view of the night sky appearing on the ceiling, dark swirling clouds pierced by the wan wine-coloured light of the world’s three moons. No sign of a rescue shuttle or his ship streaking like a comet through the heavens. Lento had survived outside for over a week. She might have come through the experience slightly deranged, but she and Calder Durk were now inside a human-built lodge specifically constructed to survive the rigours of the jungle. How hard could it be to get through a single night? Maybe he should have asked one of the suicide machines standing decapitated in the lodge’s charging stations. Or the mounds in the garden.
‘Can you move the camera? Turn all the roof’s spotlights on and keep them on.’
In response, the dark sky twisted around above them, dizzying Calder. He was getting a crick in the neck looking at the view.
Janet Lento appeared, white silk sheets wrapped around her. She looked like the sort of deranged elder meant to haunt the upper levels of badly maintained castles. Saying nothing she approached a makeshift charging station that had been set-up opposite the board in the viewing gallery. Presumably this was Momoko’s work. So the robot would wake up in the morning with amnesia and read the instructions right away… then download what passed for the lodge’s maintenance manual and get on with its job. Lento sat down at the foot of the robot, like she was its pet, huddled under her blankets. Her eyes still stared wide and glassy. But there was something else there now. Resignation? She stared at the heavens, waiting for a sign. Calder felt dog-tired. But if he closed his eyes now, he’d go straight to sleep on one of the sculpted sofas – leaving his fate reliant on a mute woman in deep shock and a robot caretaker about to forget everything that had happened to it today including its visitors’ presence. Neither woman nor machine seemed a safe bet to trust his life to. So he stayed awake and watched and waited for help to arrive. It had started raining outside. Big fat gobs of water which steamed as they hit the roof, dripping down the external camera dome and generating artefacts across the projected image… and… a dark shadow flickered at the edge of the image for a fraction of a second. Calder might have written it off as a symptom of his tiredness or the storm front building outside, but Lento had obviously seen it too. She started rocking and moaning beneath her blankets. Calder felt a chill run down his spine. Something sharp and razor-edged yet lethally sinuous and flowing. What could pass through the toxin fence out there?
Calder looked at Momoko. ‘Did you see that? It looked like a humanoid figure.’ It’s covered in spines.
‘I didn’t see it,’ protested the robot. ‘And anything I do, I wish to forget.’
Calder checked his rifle. It was still set to single shot. Over a hundred projectiles. He boosted the magnetic acceleration to maximum and damn if the gun’s energy cell lost its juice. He could always recharge it in the lodge’s boot room. A rail rifle on max-mag. He could blast a flechette through a castle wall and watch it pass out the other side with enough kinetic energy to penetrate a tank. He jumped back as there was a massive clang from the outside wall. It sounded as if the tank he was planning to shoot had just collided with the lodge. Another loud metallic boom, and a dent appeared in the wall, the nearly indestructible composite metal as pliable as clay under the raw force of whatever was battering the lodge.
‘What is it out there?’ shouted Calder.
‘It’s not written on the board,’ said Momoko. ‘Soon, soon,’ it hummed to itself. ‘I will forget soon. I am powerful and fun.’
Lento joined the robot with a low keening noise. Calder ran to the viewing gallery’s wall, banging it in futile anger with the butt of his rifle. ‘I am Calder Durk, a prince of Hesperus,’ he roared. ‘I fought the Narvalak fleet to a standstill with nothing more than a flotilla of ice schooners and loyal men armed with crossbow, shield and sword. I’ve laid piles of corpses around me until the heaps grew larger than even the bards’ songs could accurately count. I am an apostate, sentenced to death by burning by every dirty priest and corrupt cardinal on my planet. I have been betrayed and exiled. There is nothing in this damp, humid, furnace of a half-corpse world that can cost me more than I have already lost, so I spit upon you, you wall-banging coward. Throw aside the shadows and enter! Face me and let us see which one of us knows fear!’
The banging seemed to stop. Calder was amazed. He’d only been trying to mask his creeping sense of dread, but had the prowling entity actually taken his challenge to heart? The robot hummed about its impending self-inflicted amnesia like a priest holding to a mantra. What was left of Lento had tugged the sheet over her face as if she couldn’t see the threat, it wouldn’t exist. He was as good as on his own here. Calder eyes flicked towards the ceiling, desperately searching for any sign of what he thought he had seen outside. The moon on the left winked at him. Then the smaller moon on the right. Then the fat crimson lunar disk in the centre winked too. All three moons sending him a strange semaphore signal. Is this how Lento’s madness began? Suddenly, the blinking orbs resolved into the fluttering shadow of wings as a flight of dragons dropped close enough for their cawing challenge to overwhelm the external speakers’ ability to process the volume. Calder and Momoko fell over as the lodge rocked and shook on its foundations, the exiled nobleman sprawling across Lento’s huddled form, the afterimage of lizard-like heads as large as ground vehicles throwing their thundering open maws against the roof, fang scratches left against the juddering camera dome. Calder had dropped his rifle in the dragon-created earthquake. He scooped it up again. A mouse lifting a toothpick against an ambush of tigers.
CHAPTER TWO
The mother-lode.
Lana glanced up as Skrat’s shuttle drifted away over the rain forest canopy, steam burning up from the clearing where the craft’s engines had burnt the ground, dipping down low enough for her and Zeno to leap off the loading ramp. In the distance were the mountain range’s black shadows and the glow of the mine head. Zeno had turned their mission to uncover the truth behind the local operation into melodrama, altering the pigment of his artificial skin into dark camouflage stripes. You could take the actor out of the android, but you could take the android out of the actor. Lana knew he was well capable of adjusting his face to match the background in real-time… becoming almost invisible to the naked eye. The camo tiger strips were purely for show. Possibly to show Lana what he thought about her plan to sneak into the mine.
‘The road to the mountains is half a mile in that direction,’ said Lana. ‘You want to walk t
o it, or would you prefer to roll across the ground and take cover behind a tree every few yards?’
‘I’m as serious about doing this as you,’ said Zeno. ‘Relations between you and the professor are frosty enough as it is. I don’t need us to be discovered creeping around the miners’ high-value mineral stores for things to get any worse.’
‘I’m not letting my feelings about that damn woman get in the way,’ said Lana. ‘I’d be doing this whoever Dollar-sign had sent to dig out this world.’ And I’d be doing this for any member of crew, too. Not just Calder.
‘Sure,’ said Zeno. ‘Keep on telling yourself that. There can be only one.’
‘What?’
‘Classic media reference,’ said Zeno. ‘Don’t worry your head about it.’
‘I won’t. You can lead the way,’ said Lana. ‘Seeing as you’ve got perfect night-vision out of the box.’
‘Maybe I’ll get eaten first, too,’ said Zeno, gloomily.
Lana checked her rifle was running warm with a full magazine. ‘Most of the really dangerous creatures are lizards. They’re not nocturnal hunters.’
‘Everything on this rotten world’s dangerous,’ said Zeno. ‘Including half the vegetation. Lady evolution, she sure does get cranky when she reaches the final stages of her solar cycle. It’s like all the fauna and flora on Abracadabra have realized they’re heading for a supernova and lights-out, and are all running with their “pissed-off” button jammed on full in protest.’
‘I know how they feel.’
‘And those flying monstrosities we faced when we landed… they’re warm blooded, even if they do look like Puff the Magic Dragon’s angry big cousin. They can operate in the dark.’
‘Pretend you’re acting in one of your old movies,’ suggested Lana. ‘Zeno the Dragon Slayer or something.’
‘You’re not really helping.’
‘Sure I am. You’re just too pig-headed to admit when the captain’s right.’
It took the two of them half an hour to reach the road between the main landing field and the mine head. Lana nearly tripped over tree stumps left by the side of the strip, blackened and dead from being speed-sliced by an industrial laser on high power. She suspected Zeno had let her wander into them as punishment. The road itself was a quick-spray multi-layer composite, resistant to rain and weeds – the ugly kind of non-degradable tech that would have placard-waving environmentalists suicidally throwing themselves in front of diggers… if the nearest human settlement of any size hadn’t been hundreds of light years away. Spike-like beacons had been driven into the dirt by a pile driver on both sides of the road – to help ensure drone equipment didn’t slip off the highway. With the level of static from solar flares, it would be suicidal to rely on sat-nav to guide drones out here.
‘There’s a vehicle coming,’ said Zeno. ‘Robot… nobody in the cab.’
Lana nodded. She’d been counting on the night-shift running more or less automated. Too few hands at the camp to operate twenty four hours with a manned presence. Time to let the android earn his keep with the codes he’d hacked from the landing field. ‘Slow it down and let’s see what we’ve got.’
The Gravity Rose’s skipper was almost blinded by the truck lights when the drone rumbled into view. A big robot engine up front with a high bank of arc-lights, the vehicle riding six spherical rubber wheels taller than her head by a yard. Lana blinked her eyes. A storm of insects fluttered in and out of its beams. Three freight cars sat behind the engine on similar ball wheels, each car linked to the next by snaking cables. Two sealed trailers, one open flat-bed. Zeno popped the doors on the closed cars, easily bypassing the simple locking mechanism in a couple of seconds. After all, who was going to steal the supplies out here… tree squirrels? He rolled the doors back. One car was too full of the supplies they had hauled down from orbit to even attempt to hide inside, but the second trailer had enough space for them to conceal themselves amongst the piled crates and drums.
‘Your carriage awaits,’ said Zeno.
‘It just has to get us through their fence,’ said Lana.
They mounted the vehicle and pulled the heavy doors shut, hiding in darkness as the hacked truck received the all-clear from Zeno and resumed its drive towards the mountain mine. Ten minutes later they slowed down for the mine’s protective perimeter, the engine up front idling before it cleared the gates and rumbled on towards its destination.
‘I’m inside the local network,’ announced Zeno. ‘The truck’s been told to open its doors in two hours when there’s a spare loader available, then head back empty to the landing field for more supplies.’
‘Enough time for us to get a look at what they’re digging out and hitch a ride out of here,’ said Lana. ‘Is there any indication that Calder’s been here?’
‘Not that I can see. But I’m only nosing around the low-level stuff – vehicle routes and cargo schedules. The real security systems are every bit as heavily encrypted and fire-walled as you’d expect a paranoid like Dollar-sign Dillard to deploy. He doesn’t even trust his own people, let alone us.’
‘Well, that’s fine. Because with him, the feeling’s always mutual. Let’s see what we can see.’
Lana cracked the door enough for them both to squeeze out. They dropped into a vehicle park at the foot of the mountain range, irregularly lit by electric lanterns hanging from the granite rise. A variety of drone and manned vehicles - a couple of large lorries, oversize dump-trucks, a heavy mole-like drilling rig, small manoeuvrable staff-transporters, caterpillar-tracked water-knife carriers stamped in yellow industrial-painted steel. A little robotic forklift moved up to one of the other lorry’s trailers and fished out crates on magnetic loading arms before humming away, an activity warning light rotating on top of its metal roof. She and Zeno picked their way towards the tunnels at the foot of the mountain, using the empty vehicles for cover. Most of their illumination came from a perimeter fence circling the mine three hundred yards away, the peaks above casting heavy shadows in the triple-moons’ light. The fence wasn’t much different from the one that surrounded the main base. Automated sentry guns on tall posts scanning the rain forest beyond. A couple of human silhouettes were visible moving behind the armoured windows of a concrete guard post squatting behind the entrance gate. No sign of anybody else out here. With any luck, most of the miners would be back in the main base, asleep in their bunks. Lana spied a variety of pre-fab buildings set up within the fenced area, none taller than two storeys, as well as large dark mounds of slurry piled by the digging equipment. A mesh canopy ran above the camp to protect it from the slope’s natural rock-falls. The mine head was a fraction of the size of the main base and its landing fields. But then, all the fence looked to be protecting here was a vehicle park and a few equipment sheds. She halted by a sign carrying a hard hat icon, which read “Protective clothing at all times”. Ahead, rails ran into multiple tunnels. The mine-head was more noticeable for what was missing.
Lana nudged the android. ‘Where’s the storage silos for the ores they’re extracting? All those expensive drums full of promethium, samarium, gadolinium?’
‘Maybe they haven’t hit the mother-lode yet?’
‘They’ve spent a lot of money and time for the sniff of a promise, if that’s the case,’ said Lana. ‘Does that sound like the Dollar-sign you know?’
‘Always seemed more of a sure thing-guy to me.’
‘Precisely.’
With the exception of the automated forklift tasked with unloading cargo the only other things moving out here were Lana and Zeno, but this wasn’t the time for overconfidence. They sprinted low towards the largest of the passages cutting into the mountain’s brooding weight, taking cover behind a pile of hydraulic tunnel supports waiting to be carried into the mine. ‘Any temperature variance in there to suggest someone’s still working?’
‘Just you, me and the hamster-sized mosquitoes,’ said Zeno. ‘Of course, if they’ve got other androids working in there, they won’t nee
d smart suits with cooling fibres.’
‘You’re one of a kind,’ said Lana.
‘Well, they wouldn’t be as smart as me.’
Lana glanced behind her. The staff in the guard post were behind them, monitoring the rainforest for anything dumb enough to amble into their fence. ‘Smart-mouthed… I’d agree. But that’s not the organ I need. Keep your enhanced peepers peeled.’
They crossed the open space fast, reaching the tunnel mouth and vanished into cover. A tunnel, twenty feet high, wide enough to accommodate the digging equipment they had crept past. A chain of electric lights hung from the rock ceiling, thick green cables stapled into the walls. Two sets of narrow rails, so they could run trucks in and out simultaneously. Zeno examined the sides of the walls, then put a finger to his mouth and crept back into the open again. Lana waited nervously, not wanting to go any deeper down the tunnel without the android, anxious about being discovered every second she stayed here exposed like this. Zeno was gone for five minutes before he returned.
Lana frowned at the android. ‘What, you’re tagging their equipment with graffiti now?’
‘Checking on something… what you said about the lack of ores stored for shipping out of here. There’s no sign of exploratory digging around the mountain. Normally, the slopes would be left like Swiss cheese where the team went in with survey worms, exploring for the richest lodes to start with. It’s as though they arrived here, set up shop, and just got going immediately. Like they knew exactly where to start. Ground penetrating radar is good, but not that good. It’s like Olympus Mons on Mars above us. There’s a lot of rock for them to have got this lucky this fast.’
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