Red Sun Bleeding (12 page)

‘Everyone’s here,’ said the professor, coldly. ‘Except for a tanker driver who went missing in the jungle a few weeks ago. She has to be dead.’

‘There’s the thing,’ said Steel-arm. ‘She’s not the only one who is absent without leave. I left a team of sixteen crew and two shuttles at the mine to strip out your gear. They’ve all gone missing, including my boats. Now, you’re not telling me that a single driver managed to disappear sixteen heavily armed fighters and their craft without them calling for help once, are you? How many survey teams do you have out in the cursed jungle? How many of your people jumped us?’

Sebba shook her head, furiously. ‘That’s nothing to do with me. Maybe they crashed trying to fly back to your carrier? You can’t always rely on your instruments on Abracadabra.’

Lana felt a desperate, brief burst of hope. Was this Skrat’s work? Maybe he had found Calder and they were working some mischief together in the shuttle?

The pirate’s artificial arm whined as he lifted his pistol into the air. ‘Here’s one tool that rarely lets me down, lass. Now, I say this
is
to do with you. How many staff do you have working on the world? Even with robots, you’re not planning to run a mine with so few people.’

Lana grimaced. No, but you could run an archaeological dig and arrange a little tomb raiding with that small a team. Sebba stood up, waving her arms at the pirate. She was still talking at the pirate as though she was a school teacher admonishing a child. Lana knew from painful experience that wasn’t how you handled Steel-arm. ‘Everyone’s here! We’ve only just started exploratory tunnelling… we were planning to ship in extra hands in a month or so.’

Steel-arm shrugged and looked at his crew. ‘Don’t I always know a lie when I hear it? It makes me sad. I thought we had built up an understanding here, you and I, professor. You give me what I want without trouble, and I won’t have to make things problematic for you. I dislike damaging the merchandise to make my point.’ He raised his pistol in the direction of the cage and it jolted in his hand, an explosive crack, and one of the miners collapsed into his colleagues, the rear of his head a bloody ruin where the magnetically accelerated pellet had exited. Screams of outrage and terror came from the miners, some of the prisoners acting on blind impulse and trying to scramble away behind their colleagues or to the sides of the brig to minimise the chances they’d be the next target. Lana noticed that Zeno had positioned himself in front of her – damn the android. Zeno might have a better chance of surviving a rail-gun shot than her, but he had no right to try – he was the ship’s droid herder, not her private bodyguard.

‘Tell me the truth!’ Steel-arm yelled at the mission head. ‘Or I’ll put one in your leg on low-power and work my way inch-by-inch up to your skull. I’ll give you plenty of time to bleed-out and recover your delicate memory, lass.’

‘Don’t tell him a thing!’ demanded Kien-Yen Leong.

Steel-arm pivoted and shot the mining chief three times, starting in the chest and working his way up as the man yelled, flung back the fierce velocity of the sudden volley. Leong was dead well before he hit the concrete floor. ‘Did I ask
you
to speak, did I?’

Lana wanted to be sick. The base chief had been a good man. But that wasn’t nearly enough to protect him from a ruthless human predator like Steel-arm. The pirate woman, Cho, stared at the prisoners trembling behind the bars, a flash of malice crossing her eyes. ‘Use the speakers to tell the workers hiding in the jungle to surrender, or we’ll feed the lizards a corpse every five minutes.’ The pirate girl pointed at Lana and the professor. ‘Them next!’

Sebba clung to the bars of the cage-front, a frantic look breaking through her normal aura of haughty disdain, ignoring the weeping and yells behind her. ‘It’s not us! It’s your fault, you pinhead – you detonated a nuke down here.’

‘Ah, a little bit of fallout didn’t vanish my lads now, did it?’

‘You have activated the defence protocols!’

‘Your base’s systems are under my control now, lass, or have you forgotten?’

‘Not the camp, you fool… this was a Heezy world.’

Lana groaned inside.
That’s right; give the homicidal maniac with a gun the map for a far deadlier weapon
.

‘You think some nonsense fairy-tale’s going to save your life?’

‘We’re beneath its notice,’ moaned Sebba as though she was conversing with a tutorial group, not an insane pirate lord. ‘I was keeping it dormant. We hardly even registered as a threat. Until you proved we
are
. By awakening it with a nuclear-tipped warhead!’

Steel-arm’s comm on his ship-suit sleeve started bleeping. He passed his hand over it and a voice frothed out over the static. ‘
Doubtful Quasar
—we’re—being sliced. Sliced—and—losing—environmental integrity.’

‘Sliced?’ Steel-arm roared. ‘What are you talking about, damn you?’ His only answer was raw static. The other pirates’ comms started to go off too, urgent calls flooding in from throughout the camp, reporting something weird in the sky. One of the raiders sprinted to the storm shutter and raised it, slowly grinding, into the roof. Beyond was an abnormal sight – the dark sky above the jungle criss-crossed by a lattice of glowing yellow energy lines, a firework display seemingly erupting between a couple of the moons. The kind of display a carrier might make if it was being cut into pieces with its atomic arsenal of ship-to-ship missiles detonating all at once, sections of hull fleeting away as radioactive sparks, miles of hull racked by secondary explosions. Then a sudden flare as the anti-matter in her engine containment area breeched, rapidly dwindling away to nothing. As it died away, Lana noticed an unholy light in the sky, a huge cable of energy shifting sinuously from side to side – it seemed to be stretching from the world far out to space.

‘There’s your bloody fairy-tale,’ moaned Sebba. ‘You’ve killed us all!’

CHAPTER FOUR
The settlers’ vessel.

Calder spun aimlessly in the shuttle chair as Skrat examined the boat’s instruments, the interior of the vessel lit by the glow of the strange shifting energies pulsing across the sky.

‘Whatever that bally energy field in the sky is, it’s cut off contact with our satellite net. We can no longer reach the
Gravity Rose
,’ said Skrat. ‘I’m tracking falling debris, too. I think the pirate ship was caught up inside the field when it activated. By my sweet nest, there’s not a bean left of the
Doubtful Quasar
in orbit. Let’s just be thankful Steel-arm showed up and scared the
Rose
off, or it’d be raining fragments of the chief and Polter.’

‘If the field’s not being projected by the pirates, then who…?’

‘A rather pertinent question.’ Skrat scratched his scaly green skin absentmindedly. ‘Damned world always did have a curious-looking atmosphere, but it’s certainly no natural phenomena I’m familiar with. The grid lines are too regular, and while atmospheric interaction with the system’s sun might create ionization, it wouldn’t be enough to fry a heavily armoured warhorse like the
Doubtful Quasar
. So we have a quandary. I doubt the field is being produced by the jungle’s locals. There was no sign of any technological civilization on Abracadabra from orbit. You can’t cloak an active society so thoroughly, even an energetically paranoid one. That leaves the legacy of dead cultures, which is almost as worrying.’ He activated the main control board, a field of icons and readouts flicking into life and orbiting his head. ‘I’d rather devote my noggin to the more practical question of how we can safely fly through it. One step at a time, I suppose. Let’s retrieve the captain.’

‘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.