Forbidden Planets (9 page)
“No way. My gig isn’t exactly robust, and its motor is much less powerful than that of your boss’s lander. Also, I’m the only person rated to fly it, and I’ve never, ever used it for an orbit-to-surface flight in anything other than a simulator. Even if it survived the descent through the storm undamaged, and that’s a pretty big if right there, it wouldn’t be able to get back up.”
“We will return in Mr. Palmer’s lander, which I am sure he will allow you to keep to compensate you for the loss of your own craft.”
Bea, pushed into a corner by the neuter’s calm certainty, finally lost her temper. “Mr. Palmer and me, we agreed I didn’t have any responsibility to rescue him if things went wrong. I’m sorry, but there it is.”
She
was
sorry, too. Linval Palmer was reckless and impulsive and had far too much confidence in his own abilities, but he was flamboyant and charming too, a big old handsome rogue with an abundance of red curls spilling to his shoulders, a ready smile that split his piratical beard, and a fund of unlikely but amusing and fascinating stories. He’d come to Hades to search for his younger brother, Isham, who’d vanished three hundred days ago while chasing a rumor of functional Elder Culture technology in the vast tunnel city at the edge of the twilight zone of Hades. Isham Palmer’s father had paid for a rescue expedition that had discovered his ship in orbit and the remains of his lander on the surface—it seemed that the lander had crash-landed after its motor had flared out a couple of hundred meters above the surface—but had failed to find any trace of any survivors. Then, just over fifty days ago, the automated way station at the mouth of the system’s wormhole, anchored to the gravity well of the outermost gas giant, had detected a weak radio signal on the surface of Hades. The signal had come and gone ever since. Although it contained no discernable information, it had convinced Linval Palmer that Isham had survived, and despite his father’s threats of disinheritance, he’d set out to rescue his brother.
was
sorry, too. Linval Palmer was reckless and impulsive and had far too much confidence in his own abilities, but he was flamboyant and charming too, a big old handsome rogue with an abundance of red curls spilling to his shoulders, a ready smile that split his piratical beard, and a fund of unlikely but amusing and fascinating stories. He’d come to Hades to search for his younger brother, Isham, who’d vanished three hundred days ago while chasing a rumor of functional Elder Culture technology in the vast tunnel city at the edge of the twilight zone of Hades. Isham Palmer’s father had paid for a rescue expedition that had discovered his ship in orbit and the remains of his lander on the surface—it seemed that the lander had crash-landed after its motor had flared out a couple of hundred meters above the surface—but had failed to find any trace of any survivors. Then, just over fifty days ago, the automated way station at the mouth of the system’s wormhole, anchored to the gravity well of the outermost gas giant, had detected a weak radio signal on the surface of Hades. The signal had come and gone ever since. Although it contained no discernable information, it had convinced Linval Palmer that Isham had survived, and despite his father’s threats of disinheritance, he’d set out to rescue his brother.
In Bea’s opinion, Linval Palmer had made the rescue mission a matter of personal honor. It had little to do with filial duty and everything to do with a need to prove himself a braver, cleverer, and more resourceful man than his father. Nevertheless, it was a huge, daring, and utterly romantic gesture, and despite her reservations, Bea admired the hell out of the man for it. That was one reason why she’d agreed to sign up with him. As for the rest, when she’d heard that a crazy zillionaire wanted someone to deliver his expedition into orbit around Hades, she’d just hit forty and split with her live-in lover of the past five years and had been wondering if there was anything more to life than routine cargo runs and haggling with merchants and customs officers. In other words, it was exactly the right time in her life for an adventure, but things had gone wrong very quickly after arriving at Hades, putting her in an impossible position.
John-Jane Smith touched its palmer. The three-dimensional scan of the tunnel city winked out. The neuter’s expression was severe, eyes sharp, mouth tightened to a bloodless slot. “Captain Edvard, your position is very simple. Every minute we waste in pointless discussion, the survivor is consuming precious reserves of air, water, and power. In approximately eight and a half hours those reserves will fall to dangerously low levels. His suit will place him in hibernation, but after ten days the last of his suit’s power reserves will be exhausted, and he will die. There is not enough time to reach the wormhole, raise a rescue expedition, and return. If we do not save him, no one will. And if we do not make the attempt, Mr. Palmer’s family will take its revenge.”
“They can take me through every court in the First Empire, but the contract is airtight. And it was Mr. Palmer’s decision to visit Hades against their advice, not mine.”
“His family is rich and powerful and ruthless, Captain Edvard. It’s quite true that they forbade Mr. Palmer from setting out on this adventure. That is why he had to hire you and your ship with his own funds, rather than use a ship from his family’s fleet. However, in the eyes of his family, that will not absolve either you or me from responsibility for his death, and I can assure you that they will not seek revenge in a court of law. You do not want to make an enemy of them, and neither do I,” John-Jane Smith said, and it raised its palmer and shot Bea with the taser taped to its underside.
They were in Bea’s cabin, a simple sphere padded with memory plastic. The taser’s high-voltage charge bounced her spinning off the walls, wrapping her whole skin in white fire that knotted her muscles with spasming cramps and blasted up her spine into her skull. The hatch that was supposed to open only at her command sprang back, and the two Marys, Linval Palmer’s bodyguards, shot through it and grabbed Bea and cuffed her wrists to her ankles, used a focused EMP blast to destroy the implant that linked her to the ship, and towed her to the bridge, where Tor Torqvist, Bea’s engineer, was already in chains.
Two minutes later, after one of the Marys had threatened to chew the fingers off Tor’s right hand while the other wondered if she should suck out his eyeballs or bite off his balls, Bea surrendered command of her ship. The two clones, got up in tight yellow jumpsuits, blond hair bunched in ponytails, looked like fresh-faced teenagers, but they were stone-cold killers, hardwired with a dozen martial arts techniques, their nervous systems and muscles tweaked to run faster and harder than those of ordinary humans.
Thirty minutes later, Bea and Tor were down in Number Three hold, prepping the gig. Although they were watched by the two Marys as they maneuvered the shell of the heatshield over the nose and belly of the little delta-shaped gig and bolted it in place, they managed a brief conversation in a version of the hand-talk sailors and free-fall workers used to communicate privately in hard vacuum.
Bea told Tor how she planned to survive this, told him that as soon as the gig started its descent, he was to take back control of the ship and make a run straight for the wormhole, told him what to do when he reached the High Haven reef on the other side.
Tor told her it was her second dumbest idea, her first being to take this contract.
Whatever happens,
Bea signed,
if they find their boss or if they don’t, they’ll have to kill us because they’ve committed piracy. Take back control of the ship and get out of here as soon as you can.
Bea signed,
if they find their boss or if they don’t, they’ll have to kill us because they’ve committed piracy. Take back control of the ship and get out of here as soon as you can.
She was frightened and angry, and being cut off from her ship, the tingle of vacuum and raw sunlight on its hull, the ponderous presence of its slumbering engines, the quick pulses of its lifesystem, was like losing a limb. But she believed that her plan was sound, and she knew that she could trust Tor to do the right thing. They’d been working together for less than a year, but he was a smart, competent, serious man, a member of a highly respected family back on First Foot. Besides, it wasn’t as though she had any other option.
Tor started to connect the heatshield’s sensor array to the gig’s neural network, turning his back to the two Marys, his fingers making quick shapes.
Don’t you worry, boss. I take good care of everything.
It was the best Bea could hope for, but it was only a slender hope, and there was no turning back. Less than an hour after she’d been tasered, she climbed into the gig with John-Jane Smith and one of the Marys and nudged it away from the ship before firing the long burn that would take it down to the surface of Hades.
Hades was one of the few rocky planets in the so-called First Empire, fifteen red dwarf stars connected by a wormhole system the Jackaroo had sold to humanity in the early days of first contact. Apart from Earth and First Foot, most people lived in asteroid reefs or on the moons of warm Jupiters, and no one at all lived on Hades, a small, dry, dusty, pockmarked world tidally locked to its feeble M-class star, one hemisphere in perpetual day, the other in perpetual night. At the twilight zone between the light and dark hemispheres, katabatic storms howled off the flanks of shield volcanoes, and every so often two or three storms merged into a hypercane that lofted billions of tons of dust into the atmosphere, shrouding the entire planet for hundreds of days and generating continent-sized thunderstorms that hung above fields of iron-rich lava that oozed from the vents and calderas of the planet’s many volcanoes, which were fed by a core kept molten by tidal heating.
Elder Cultures had attempted and failed to planoform the bleak, hostile little world. It was littered with impact craters from successive bombardments with comets that had enriched its thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide and nitrogen with water and other volatiles, and several times it had been seeded with cunningly engineered mixtures of microbes. But the water had either become chemically locked in Hades’ rocks or had frozen out on the night side’s equatorial ice cap, and most of the microbe populations had either died out or retreated deep into the planet’s crust. Only a tough microbial symbiosis containing organisms from at least three different evolutionary trees flourished on the surface, littering the playas and inter-mountain basins of the day side with stromatolite mounds, spattering dust-smoothed rocks and lava fields with slow-growing crusts wherever there was a little moisture and sunlight.
The symbiosis and a few refuge species of microbe in the deep crust were the only life now known to exist on Hades, but in the deep past at least three different Elder Cultures had attempted to settle the planet. The most successful had been the Tunnel Builders, a species that had excavated city-sized mazes deep beneath the surface. The largest surviving tunnel city was in the twilight zone of the southern hemisphere, more than a thousand kilometers of tunnels in a hundred separate systems that wound around each other, each with its separate entrance, some simple burrows less than a kilometer long, others elaborate mazes. No one knew if each tunnel system had been inhabited by a family or an individual, or if each system had had a different civic use. The Tunnel Builders had ascended some ten thousand years ago, leaving behind no records or artifacts except the tunnels themselves. Well, maybe the Jackaroo or the !Cha or the Reedemers knew, but the one trait shared by the un-ascended alien species was that they became maddeningly vague and elusive when questioned about how other species had lived before they ascended to wherever it was that the ascended went.
Isham Palmer had chased the rumor of surviving alien technology he’d bought from an itinerant Jackaroo trader to the tunnel city on Hades. That was where Linval Palmer had gone to find out what had happened to his younger brother. That was where Bea Edvard was headed in her ship’s tiny gig, with John-Jane Smith and one of the Marys. All three were sealed inside pressure suits and strapped side by side in acceleration couches. Because her link had been burned out, Bea was flying by manual control, something she hadn’t done since her apprentice days. It mattered little that the storm had passed its peak. On the horizon dead ahead, the crown of a shield volcano rose above dull brown haze and reflected a red spark of sunlight; here and there the flashes of lightning storms or the glow of an eruption showed feebly under the deep murk, but otherwise the day side of the planet was entirely shrouded by dust storms. Pushing a dense wedge of superheated gases ahead of it, scratching a flaming trail across the sky, the gig plowed through the upper edge of the dust and began to buck and sway as the atmosphere thickened and hypervelocity winds plucked at it, sending it miles off course. Bea blew the explosive bolts and took control as the scorched heatshield dropped away, the stick juddering hard as the gig slammed and skidded through howling dust-laden winds. Coming in on radar alone, she overshot the level stretch of playa she’d selected as a landing site and had to haul hard about, pushing the envelope of the gig’s aerodynamics, the Mary shrieking with crazy glee in her ears.
The gig swooped higher as it swerved around, dropped into a steep glide against a headwind. Perfect. But then it hit a pocket of still air, dropped five hundred meters in a couple of seconds, and was suddenly coming in too fast and too low. Bea fought the stick, managed to level out, and fired the retrorockets, but the gig came down fast and hard in a slide that collapsed two landing struts and left it canted nose-down at a twenty-degree angle.
After asking John-Jane Smith’s permission as politely as she knew how, Bea sent a brief message to the ship to report that although they had landed safely, the gig was out of commission, then powered down the little craft’s systems.
Whips of dust flickered in dim smoggy light beyond the narrow wedges of the windows; there was dust in the air of the cabin, too, blowing in fine sprays through splits in the seal of the hatch, and the hatch was jammed—it took the combined effort of all three of them to pop it open. In howling wind and blowing dust, trailed by John-Jane Smith and the Mary, Bea walked around the gig and knew it wouldn’t fly again. It might be possible to make it airtight and jack it up to the right angle for takeoff, but the nozzle of the main motor was crumpled beyond repair.
John-Jane Smith remarked dryly that this must count as a good landing because they could walk away from it.
Bea checked her headup display and pointed with an outflung arm. She was still buzzing from the massive amounts of adrenalin that had squirted into her bloodstream when she’d wrestled the gig down to its crash landing. “Your boss’s lander is sitting five and a half kilometers away, just a shade off due east. We better get going.”
It took them three hours, trudging across the flat, featureless plain in the dust storm, to reach the lander. Every ten minutes, John-Jane Smith broadcast a message to Linval Palmer across every radio channel, but there was no reply, nothing but the meaningless throb of the shortwave radio signal, steady as a sleeping giant’s heartbeat.
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