‘You still think I’m being unreasonably superstitious about this planet?’
‘Consider that under review, dear boy.’ He tugged at the control stick and a line of alarm icons began to spin around Skrat like a swarm of angry wasps. He cursed. ‘What’s this, then?’ Skrat swatted the control board, rolling hologram information across the air. He cursed again, sounding genuinely angry. ‘Our main fuel cells have been drained. We’re running on emergency juice now.’
‘But they were full?’
‘Indeed. I checked them myself before I flew out of the base.’
‘Is it possible that energy field in the sky is responsible? It must take a lot of power to produce something like that?’
‘Quite an understatement. I don’t believe my little shuttle has much to contribute in the grand scheme of things. Best we undertake an exterior inspection of the engines, see if we took any damage picking you up from the hunting lodge.’
They climbed down from the cockpit and passed through the cargo hold, a look of fear crossing their female passenger’s face as she realized they were about to lower the rear ramp again. Momoko came over, the robot making a fuss of Janet Lento and helping keep her quiet. Calder took his rifle to cover Skrat as he fished a diagnostics box out of the hold. They left the shuttle and walked into the thick humid air outside, the strange grass of the clearing lit by the shuttle’s lamps and the peculiar net of energy above. Were their lights flickering now the boat was persisting on backup power? Skrat unscrewed a panel below the engine and plugged his box into the exposed machinery, Calder standing guard nervously.
‘Interesting,’ announced Skrat after a couple of minutes of testing. ‘The engines should be working. Not so much drained, as full but completely inert. I might as well have topped up the shuttle with a couple of barrels of gin before I flew out.’
‘How the hell could your fuel cells have been tampered with?’ asked Calder.
‘Theoretically speaking, if your civilization was advanced enough,’ said Skrat, ‘and your planet had been subjected to a sudden nuclear assault and you wanted to shield yourself against further detonations, you could send out a pulse to transform fissile material into pure mush. Programming matter, so to speak. Our inert fusion power cells are merely collateral damage – whoever did this was, I believe, aiming to neutralize Steel-arm’s atomic warheads, not our engine’s pile. My shuttle’s backup runs on old-fashioned batteries, so at least we’ll have environmental systems until we deplete our reserves.’
‘Remote programming of matter? That sounds an awful lot like science fiction,’ said Calder.
Skrat pointed to the net of energy weaving across the heavens. ‘Old chap, it behoves me to point out that up until we showed up to take you into exile, this shuttle, myself and the robot in our hold were pure science fiction to your good self. Any significantly advanced technology appears like magic to those lower down the food chain.’
The lizard-like crewman had a point. But even if his theory was correct, they were still stranded hundreds of miles from the base. If they managed to survive the trek back to the mine through the jungle on foot, who knows what might have happened to Lana by the time they arrived. And Zeno, of course. He mattered every bit as much as the captain, didn’t he? ‘We had better gear-up and light out of here, then.’
‘Not so hasty, dear fellow,’ said Skrat. ‘If I’m correct, such a pulse would need to be tightly directed, otherwise it would risk damaging its maker’s systems. In this case, directed at the pirate’s assets in orbit. We were unlucky enough to be close enough to ground zero of the pirate’s opening volley to be caught in the counter-response. But—’ he pointed at the fissure in the ground—, ‘this old colony vessel is buried by sediment and shielded by the best part of a very deep valley…’
‘The settlers would have exhausted all of their ship’s power reserves, surely, before they died off?’
‘That rather depends on the manner of their passing,’ said Skrat. ‘And even if there are no operational cells underground, at this point I’d be grateful for anything that shortcuts our journey… a raft, a bicycle, a diesel vehicle, a bally hang glider.’
Navigating the boiling rapids of the world’s rivers, or riding thermals alongside flocks of hungry dragons? Calder would almost take the dubious shelter of the beast-haunted rain forest’s vaults. ‘Do you think the pirate’s landers are grounded the same as us?’
‘Sadly, one suspects not. The mine is a long way out and shielded by the mass of the mountain range, to boot. But let’s look on the bright side. Right now, Steel-arm and his band of cads have no way to escape the world and no starship to jump from the system even if they do. We only need to free the captain and Zeno and avoid the pirates until the Gravity Rose finds a way to extract us out of here.’
‘What if they can’t?’
‘That energy field in orbit will have to turn off at some point,’ said Skrat. ‘Or we won’t be the only chaps on the planet left with drained power cells.’
Just free the captain. The two of them on foot against the gods know how many pirates in the landing force. Quite a just. But Calder would attempt it, all the same. And not only because he had no other choices left. Lana.
***
‘My ship!’ roared Steel-arm, watching the last sparks of his vessel dwindle away in the night sky. ‘My Doubtful Quasar.’ He was close to apoplexy as he thrust his pistol in the direction of the brig, provoking calls of terror from the caged workers. ‘You witch, Sebba – you mined the orbit of your stake and destroyed my ship! Drag her carcass out here!’
Steel-arm’s pirates sprung the cage door and hauled the professor in front of him, the others’ rifles aimed straight at the prisoners. Lana winced. It wouldn’t take much for the excitable madman to order them all executed now. ‘That wasn’t me,’ pleaded Sebba, all traces of her arrogance evaporated. ‘I told you, it’s the Heezy.’
‘There’s nothing on this bloody planet but rainforest,’ yelled Steel-arm. He drew his dagger and touched its activator, the blade buzzing into life, vibrating so fast it was nearly invisible. ‘I’m going to take each of your fingers, one at a time, until you tell me where the rest of your miners are hiding out. Then I’ll have your lying tongue to feed the lizards out there.’
‘Please…’
‘I loathe your stinking, privileged breed – as good as immortal, looking down on the rest of us like rats to be dissected for your profit; more money than god layering up in your bank accounts over the centuries. Now it’s my turn for a little dissection… I’m going to cut the truth out of you!’ His men pinned the professor, holding her arm out straight. Sebba desperately tried to pull away as the pirate commander reached out with his metal fist, tightening around her hand like a vice.
‘Don’t!’ shouted Lana, almost as shocked by the sound of her voice breaking the tension as the other prisoners. She gripped the bars of the cage front. ‘She’s telling the truth. This was a Heezy world. The alien settlement is deep under the surface. I’ve been there with Zeno, below the mine.’
Sebba stared across in shock. Whether over Lana’s unexpected intervention or the fact the starship skipper had uncovered what the base was really doing on Abracadabra, she would be hard pushed to say.
‘So you have, have you?’ leered Steel-arm. ‘You’re not exactly top of my expert witness list, Lana girl, the stack of yarns you’ve spun me in the past.’
The female pirate, Cho, stepped forward. ‘Don’t trust her, captain. She’ll say anything to keep her friends safe for another hour. Her people are hiding out there in the jungle now, trying to work out how to retake the base. I guarantee it.’
‘You know me well enough to know I wouldn’t put myself up for finger carving lightly,’ said Lana, ignoring the pirate woman. What’s she got against me, anyway? ‘And look at that glowing energy net in the sky. That’s like no mine field I’ve ever seen before.’
‘What do you say it is, then?’
‘The professor here
’s the expert, I reckon. But she’s only any good to you with her tongue attached inside her mouth, not flapping in the dust.’
‘It’ll be a pair of tongues if you play me false, Lana girl,’ spat Steel-arm. He slowly deactivated his dagger and slid it back into his belt. ‘Tell me how you came across this place, professor. Make it convincing, or I’ll be taking my fun with you.’
‘Dollar-sign Dillard’s people discovered the Heezy’s presence here,’ spluttered the professor. ‘The world’s location was in the logs of a derelict vessel found drifting in space… a small packet used to bring in big game hunters to Abracadabra. All the crew and passengers had died of starvation after its systems failed. They’d stumbled across the ruins of a failed human colony while hunting on the planet, the settlers presumably exterminated by the Heezy’s automated defences. The hunters nearly met the same fate, but a handful of them managed to escape off-world in their ship, though obviously not intact enough to reach home.’
‘And you thought you’d play with the same fire?’ said Zeno. The android really didn’t sound pleased to be involved in such foolishness without being asked. Lana knew how he felt.
‘The previous explorers didn’t know what they were doing,’ said the professor. ‘I’ve had experience of alliance-sanctioned Heezy digs. I have been trained in how to keep Heezy defences from going live while a team strips out what it can.’
Steel-arm waved at the lattice of glowing yellow and the odd shifting cable of light. ‘You’ve failed, you witch! Let’s be having the rest from you…!’
‘If I tell you what I know,’ moaned the professor, ‘I’ll be breaking every level of classified clearance the alliance possesses. If the government finds out, I’ll be executed. They’d murder you merely for knowing…’
‘There won’t be enough of you left for the alliance to torture,’ threatened Steel-arm, ‘not after I’ve done cutting you. Tell me!’
‘The grid you can see in the atmosphere is a shield to protect the world,’ moaned Sebba. ‘Your carrier was caught inside the field when it activated after you detonated your nuke…’
‘You’re talking impossible nonsense,’ spat Steel-arm. ‘An energy shield for an entire planet? There’s not enough juice in the galaxy to power such a thing!’
‘It’s possible. The Heezy knew how to tap dark flow,’ said Sebba.
Lana gawped. Dark flow. The weird, seemingly unlimited power driving the ever-speeding expansion of the universe until, it was theorized by the Hunt-Ekotto effect, an impossibly distant cosmological future when dark energy overloaded all of existence and caused a fierce sequence of new big bangs… thousands of baby universes thrown out of the dying one like seeds. ‘You’re skegging kidding me!’
‘The planetary defence grid and that energy line you can see snaking through the sky,’ said Sebba, ‘are powered by a dark flow generator at the world’s core. The alliance still doesn’t understand the physics of how the Heezy tap dark energy, but we know the species refashioned their worlds’ inner cores as vast spinning toroidal disks to achieve it.’
‘That cable-line of energy lashing about in the sky’s not part of the planetary shield, is it?’ said Lana.
Sebba shook her head, forlornly. ‘What you’re observing is an umbilical cord between us and the sun. It’s the same class of technology that the alliance scavenged its sun-buster technology from to end the war between humanity and the Skein. Abracadabra is acting as a dark energy transformer to charge its system’s dying sun. The Heezy didn’t believe in wasting planets they had occupied through anything as trivial as a sun death.’
‘A star’s not a battery,’ said Lana. She was stunned by the level of science she was seeing here. A species with enough hubris that they wouldn’t permit their own sun to die. Immortality for an entire solar system.
‘And neither is this system’s,’ said Sebba. ‘There’s going to be an accelerated supernova and then the star will be restarted as good as new. The explosion won’t be as fierce as a full naturally occurring supernova, but the radiation blast will still be strong enough to kill everything organic in the system. It wouldn’t have bothered the Heezy, of course. They were non-corporeal towards the end. Our two best guesses about their extinction are that their species either killed itself in a war with a species from the Large Magellanic Cloud or went sublime… my money’s on the latter.’
Steel-arm seized the woman and dragged her up from her knees. ‘And where’s your damn money on dropping that shield and getting us out of this cursed system before we’re all fried?’
‘We’d have to travel deep inside the Heezy complex to try to deactivate it,’ said Sebba. ‘That wouldn’t have been so much of a problem a few hours ago. But now we’ve been re-classified as a real and present danger, rather than low-level rodents scampering around their race’s ruins… I doubt we will be able to get close enough.’
‘You doubt?’
‘Listen, there was a world in the Omicron Ceti system where a Heezy dig’s defences were accidently triggered by an alliance exploration team. Outside of the team’s single call for help, we don’t know much about what happened because the world simply isn’t there anymore. It just disappeared along with all our scientists and archaeologists. Sun’s still good, just missing the fourth planet in the system, is all. Our best guess is that they teleported the whole world somewhere else. That’s the level of threat we’re dealing with.’
Teleportation? Lana had never encountered a species that had made teleportation work, beyond pushing a few atoms around using quantum entanglement. A whole world? They really were in deep trouble now.
‘Damn your horror stories. What are their defences here?’ demanded Steel-arm.
Sebba shrugged. ‘Who knows? The Heezy were masters of programmable matter. Their automated defences are lying dormant as information viruses in the rock. I was working very hard to supress their legacy systems’ immune response to our presence. But now? They could manifest themselves as almost anything.’
‘How’ve you been keeping the Heezy defences dormant?’ pressed Steel-arm.
‘There’s a system installed at the mine carrying a faked Heezy signal that identifies human DNA as friendly, as if we’re a recently sanctioned addition to the official Heezy eco-system. Unfortunately for us, your attack will have re-characterised us as either malfunctioning or hostile or both. Right now we’re just a biological glitch awaiting deletion.’
‘Is there any way to travel below the surface without being exterminated?’ said Lana.
‘One of artefacts we retrieved is a crystal broach that acts like a transponder, given to visiting alien species as a guest pass. So visitors could travel into Heezy facilities for negotiations, or maybe worship would be a more accurate term, without being eliminated.’
‘And it would be enough to keep us safe?’
‘Depends on what you mean by safe, Captain Fiveworlds. Closer to a Heezy gardener avoiding slicing too many worms with its shovel because they aerate the soil,’ said Sebba. ‘And in case you’re in any doubt, we’re the worms in that analogy. The closer we get to sensitive Heezy systems, the more likely we are to be purged.’
‘Worms are useful in the garden,’ sighed Zeno, ‘but you wouldn’t want them getting into your garage and clogging your car up.’
‘Precisely,’ said the professor.
‘I’ll take that Heezy broach,’ snarled the pirate commander. Steel-arm shoved the woman into his crew of rogues. ‘Escort her to her stash of antiques and bring the thing straight back to me.’ He fingered the remote on his belt. ‘And remember, my bucks, in case any of you get ideas of absconding with it… you’re still wearing a fine pirate necklace around your precious necks.’ Steel-arm turned to the captain of the Gravity Rose. ‘We’re going on a little jaunt, Lana girl, you and your miner friends. The good news is I won’t be selling you on the slave market straight away. The bad news is that you and your crew are going to be my canaries down the mine.’
Lana grimaced.
A herd of cattle prodded into a mine-field to clear it was closer to the truth. She fingered the shock collar locked a little too tightly around her neck, a matching set to the bands worn by every member of the captured base staff. I guess this is how pirates volunteer.
‘Don’t be looking so angry, now,’ laughed Steel-arm. ‘I’ll do my best at keeping you alive until this planetary shield’s been spiked. I find myself in need of a new ship, and I reckon that your crew will return fast enough when they see my pistol shoved into your pretty mouth.’
Damn him. He had a point. Steel-arm understood her crew almost as well as Lana did. Polter would return with the Gravity Rose if he thought that surrendering the ship would spare her and Zeno. After all, what was a vessel compared to her immortal soul? That ship is my soul. It was a measure of how bad things had become on Abracadabra that surviving the Heezy’s deadly legacy, losing her beloved ship, then being sold into a merciless pirate slave market was currently looking like the best outcome out of a miserable bunch. She was held waiting in the brig for ten minutes. When the other pirates returned dragging the professor and the recovered broach, they did so at speed, their faces distorted with panic.
One of the men tossed the broach at Steel-arm who caught it. It resembled a flower carved in green quartz, intricate crystalline folds and no larger than a medal. ‘What’s the matter, lad? Out with it!’
‘Our crew guarding the corridors,’ spluttered the pirate, ‘they’re gone!’
Steel-arm frowned and pulled out his trigger for the suicide collars. He activated it, a hologram image springing into life above the device’s surface – a map with green dots marking where each recipient of one of his loyalty collars stood duty. All around the base, green points disappeared as they watched. Pulsing off. Lana guessed his people weren’t defusing their suicide collars. Steel-arm swore and turned off the device, holstering it and reaching for his comm, switching it onto general chatter – a confusion of screams and yells, as though he had tuned into the final moments of a starship being torn apart and exposed to vacuum.
Red Sun Bleeding Page 10