Red Sun Bleeding (13 page)

‘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.

‘What’s happening out there?’ bellowed Steel-arm.

‘Coming—through the—laser fence—just—walking through.’

The pirate captain’s face was turning purple. ‘What, damn you? What?’

‘Covered in—spines—they’re—’ The voice cut off in a bloodcurdling scream.

One of the pirates turned and fled, his nerves snapping. Steel-arm didn’t wait or waver. The commander’s arm snapped up and a bolt exploded inside the confines of the brig, the deserter tumbling forward into the shaped concrete wall with a smouldering hole where his spine used to be. ‘I’m still to be a-feared more than some antique robot sentry!’ yelled Steel-arm. ‘Spines or no. And if any of you dogs doubt it, just try to desert on me.’ He waved his pistol at the imprisoned miners. ‘Out, my little flock of canaries! We’re heading for the shuttle on the roof.’ He took the broach and shoved it under the professor’s nose. ‘How do I activate this?’

‘I need to trace an activation sigil on its surface. But wait until we’ve arrived at the mine. The broach’s power source only remains active for an hour now… then it takes days to self-recharge. We’ll require it far more inside the Heezy complex than here.’

Lana thought about the screams she had just heard. Their needs were a relative business, it seemed.

‘Just an hour?’ snarled Steel-arm.

Sebba shrugged without looking apologetic. ‘We can’t tamper with the broach without destroying it. Even the Heezy’s wireless recharging systems are encrypted.’

‘After a million years, my power cells should last an hour,’ muttered Zeno.

‘Let’s just try and survive the next few minutes,’ said Lana. She found herself bundled outside the cage alongside Zeno and the surviving base staff, driven like a flock of sheep through the plain concrete corridors while the armed pirates jabbed at them with rifles barrels, their captors snarling and threatening to hide their own fear. Lana felt her heart thudding like a cannon volley inside her chest, terror rising; shared with everyone stumbling, half-running, alongside her. Fear so strong she could taste it.  Every second she resisted the desire to sprint as fast away from here as she could. The unknown beyond the base, seeping inside, making a mockery of humanity’s pathetic laser fences and robot guns and sensor grids. Mere savages’ trinkets fashioned from mud and sticks in the face of what they unleashed. But as fast as Lana ran, she could never outpace the coming solar storm, lashing everything inside the system with its killing fury. The monkey inside her, the barely evolved ape, hardly feared that fate – it was the Heezy’s reanimated ghosts that filled her with dread. Rising out of their underground lair to punish them for their arrogance – the professor’s arrogance - in thinking she could steal sparks from the god’s fire and live to tell the tale. They approached a cargo lift at the end of the corridor, an abandoned trolley with crates of supplies on its metal surface partially blocking their way. Steel-arm growled as he sent the trolley skidding into a side-corridor. Lana swivelled as Zeno barked a warning. Behind them, the walls bubbled as though someone burnt at them with a laser set on low-power. A shape formed in the wall and Lana suddenly remembered the Heezy’s peculiar method of transportation – motile bubbles passing through the planet’s solid bedrock. A figure stepped out of the wall’s surface, humanoid but faceless. Six foot-tall, slick ebony black and covered in evil sharp spikes, as though an armoured knight had combined with a giant porcupine. The thing’s skull resembled an eyeless hatchet. It instantly latched onto the nearest pirate and wrapped its spiked arms around the man’s chest, his body impaled and only enough breathe for a swift yell that immediately turned into a gasp. He was crushed as though caught in the jaws of a trash compactor, a sudden spray of blood as his body burst. All around them the walls bubbled and ran, sentinels born from the bare concrete, stepping out and crushing miners and pirates alike, the humans’ guns chattering to little effect beyond deafening her ears. Lana stumbled back towards the lift, half dragged by Zeno, a press of desperate, shrieking survivors trying to escape the corridor’s slaughter. Steel-arm was inside, one arm around Professor Sebba, using her as a shield as he emptied his pistol into the narrow space of the corridor. Lana hit the button for the roof. The nearest of the sentinels rocked as it advanced into the line of fire from the frantic pirates cowering inside the lift, reaching out to seize human necks and snap them as it lurched forward. It was nearly on them as the doors shut and the lift rose upwards on its antigravity field, a second before the sentinel’s hand reached the lift, a distorted screech of metal as it dug its fingers into the disappearing elevator.