Red Sun Bleeding (16 page)

‘One problem at a time,’ said Lana. ‘Let’s stay focused on getting off this hothouse world alive first.’

‘You saved my life back in the brig,’ said Sebba, turning back from the head of the line.

‘I saved our best chance of getting off the world,’ said Lana, uncomfortable with the professor’s tone – a little too close to conciliation for her taste.
Let’s keep this relationship based on mutual hostility, rather than head down the touchy-feely route.
‘This planet isn’t exactly overrun with Heezy experts.’

‘There are no Heezy experts,’ said the professor. ‘Even now, centuries after the first find, we might as well be ants crawling over an antimatter generator, trying to understand what the hell we’re looking at.’

‘You’re who we’ve got, lady,’ said Zeno. ‘You’re
all
we’ve got.’

‘I was removed from the alliance archaeology science unit centuries ago,’ said the professor. ‘A casualty of internal politics. My original career had barely started. I’ve been waiting for this moment ever since, scratching a living lecturing in brand archaeology while supplementing my income with offworld development projects. Downgrading the ruins of dead civilizations so planets can be strip-mined without creating product boycotts against the houses responsible. Can you imagine what that feels like? Reduced to a paid shill, helping destroy what I should have been preserving. Shut out of my true vocation: making major discoveries in a part of the past so distant that protogalaxies were still cooling down after the big bang. This was my chance to show those bastards how wrong they were. To bring home a find outside of the government’s control and rub their noses in their mistake in tossing me out.’

Despite herself, Lana almost felt a jab of sympathy for the woman. Apart from the gap in years and wealth, were the two of them really that different? Both squeezed by circumstances and a hostile universe that seemed determined to derail the women from only path in life that seemed to make sense to them.

‘Well, they’re sure as hell going to be sorry now,’ said Zeno. ‘Especially if Steel-arm gets out of here with a ship stuffed full of Heezy booty. Probably not as sorry as us, but…’

‘Who was Dollar-sign planning to sell the Heezy artefacts to?’ asked Lana.

‘All I know is that he had held a blind auction for the rights to examine the first set of extracted material,’ said the professor. ‘Your ship was meant to rendezvous with the buyers after we’d used the new mining gear to open up a decent-sized shaft down to the Heezy core.’

And she opens her mouth and all sympathy fades
. ‘No doubt with artefacts hidden inside ore-filled containers so we never cottoned onto the value of what had been uncovered here,’ snarled Lana.

‘At least in that, Dollar-sign’s caution was understandable. You could have asked for more money or sold the location of Abracadabra to one of his rivals.’

‘I would have jumped to the opposite end of the Edge and never looked back is what I would have done,’ said Lana. ‘Skeg this. A simple supply run? It was a suicide mission from the start. You were juggling with antimatter rods down here.’

‘I had matters completely under control,’ protested Sebba. ‘Until your thuggish pirate friend started slamming atomic weaponry into this planet.’

The memory of Calder’s face swum into view, still missing in the vast jungle along with the camp’s tanker driver.
Under control
? Why did Lana think that the professor was as wrong about that as she had been about everything else? They had been in deep trouble long before Steel-arm showed up. They just didn’t know it, is all.

‘The wise thing to do would have been to pass this world’s coordinates over to the alliance and let their specialists handle it.’

‘Specialists?’ Sebba snorted. ‘That’s relative.’

‘The alliance discovered the cache of Heezy weapons that ended the war, didn’t they?’ said Zeno. The android didn’t add that he was old enough to have seen both the war’s start and close in person. Lana reckoned that was something he liked to forget. A very human trait.

‘And you know what the original science team did, after the end of the war against the Skein?’ said Sebba. ‘They surveyed what they had wrought… the cinder of countless worlds and suns left devastated by their “find”… and they mutinied and destroyed their work. The majority of the team disappeared while the ones who stayed behind wiped their minds. The alliance still knows less about handling the Heezy’s systems today than we did a thousand years ago. That’s your precious specialists for you.’

‘You should have taken a leaf out of their book,’ said Lana.

‘Maybe I should have,’ admitted Sebba. ‘But such knowledge can never truly be forgotten. Totally erased. One day we’ll have a similar level of science to the Heezy, whether naturally or as a result of reverse engineering from dig sites like this. Just knowing that it’s possible…’

‘If you fleshies ever last long enough to reach that point, here’s hoping you’ll be wise enough to handle it,’ said Zeno

‘You’re part of humanity, too,’ said Lana, touching the android’s arm. ‘The greater human story.’

‘Pinocchio to your Geppetto? Don’t remind me,’ said Zeno. ‘If we find God down below, ask him to reincarnate me as a toasting algorithm in a robot oven.’

Lana gazed down the dark passage. If the Heezy really had transformed themselves into gods, they were the absent kind. But their devils, those they had left scattered behind them aplenty.

‘How much did you see below the surface?’ asked Sebba.

‘’How much – skeg it, I don’t even know
what
I saw?’ said Lana. ‘A deep shaft with globules of programmable matter floating around like God’s own lava lamp. An anteroom with a transport system to move through stone like those gimp Heezy killing machines that literally walked into the base.’

‘We’ll have to use the motile bubbles to access the core control level,’ said the professor. ‘That’s where we can disable the planetary shield.’ She didn’t seem pleased at the prospect.

‘You
can
control the transports?’ asked Lana.

‘It’s not safe travelling so deep,’ said Sebba. ‘I’ve lost three people who took trips down there and never showed up at the other end, including my assistant. Most of our exploration of the complex has involved accessing levels closer to the surface since then.’

‘The Heezy’s sentinel machines?’ probed Zeno.

‘No, this is the first time we’ve seen them appear. Malfunctioning transport systems would be my best guess.’

And that was the problem, Lana reckoned. An extinct species that had lasted long enough to need to re-boot its own solar mass. Guessing only got you so far. They reached the end of the tunnel and the narrow well down into the Heezy complex.

Steel-arm caught up with them and waved the prisoners away from the rack of anti-gravity chutes. ‘We’ll let one of ours go down first. I wouldn’t want any of my canaries to fly the coop.’

‘A rat down a drainpipe would be a better analogy,’ said Lana. ‘You’ve finally found your true vocation, Seth.’

Steel-arm signalled at a pair of his pirate fighters. ‘You first, my bucks – make sure my canaries don’t try to fly away. Then you next, Lana girl. Be sure to scream loud enough to warn me if any of those faceless monsters start walking out of the walls down there.’

Lana made a zipping gesture across her lips and caught the anti-gravity chute as the pirate commander tossed it at her. ‘You ever think that a spot of honest labour would be easier than this?’

He laughed heartedly. ‘Labour? You mean running ration pack runs for bent brokers like Dollar-sign Dillard? Scrabbling in the dirt at Transference Station for a handful of T-dollars? I wouldn’t be caught stooping so low. And your honest career track… it never worked out for me.’

Yeah, Lana had heard the rumours that Steel-arm had once been an officer in one of the Edge systems’ local navies. Until he had been hung out to dry and left for dead during a nasty system-on-system conflict that’d escalated faster and harder than his political master had expected. But the rogue’s jump carrier hadn’t been quite as wrecked and non-operational in deep space as his superiors believed. He’d repaired her, deserted and been flying as a raider for the pirate lords at the Invisible Port ever since.

‘No,’ continued Steel-arm, ‘
taking
what I find is a far better line of work for a man of rough and ready tastes like me. And what’s under our boots for the looting had better be worth the price of my precious
Quasar
.’ He grabbed the professor by the throat. ‘How many weapons do they have stashed down there? They’ll be worth selling! Or maybe I’ll make a grand gift of them to the Pirate King Renan Barcellos in return for a share of the spoils.’

‘Let’s focus on taking down the shield and escaping from this system before its damn sun brews up,’ suggested the female pirate, Cho. She placed a hand on his arm and he dropped the professor, choking, to the floor.

‘Ah, that’s the reason you’re not the skipper, Cho,’ said Steel-arm. ‘Not bold enough by half. To live and step out of the front door is to take a risk. To live as a freebooter…’

‘No, I’m fairly sure the reason’s this.’ Cho tapped the shock collar around her neck.

‘The Heezy constructed tools not weapons,’ coughed Sebba, sounding affronted by the pirate commander’s naked avarice.

‘Tools that can snuff out suns,’ pointed out Lana. ‘And Steel-arm’s not so different from you, professor, for all your principled talk of advancing human understanding. The buyers for the artefacts in your blind auction weren’t going to be charities.’ In fact, she didn’t even want to think about
who
they might be.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Sebba, picking herself up from the floor. ‘Whatever you strip out of the complex will take centuries of study to understand.’

Steel-arm watched his first two pirates begin their decent down the narrow shaft. ‘Your alliance lads reverse engineered the aliens’ arsenal just fine during the great war.’

‘The original science team unearthed a DNA-based Rosetta Stone during their first dig on Neptune. The Heezy controlled their systems using genetic sequencing as a master key,’ said Sebba. ‘Our team were able to adjust their own DNA to establish control over the artefacts. All that knowledge vanished with them when they disappeared.’

‘Buried on Neptune? That was quite a conveniently placed discovery,’ said Zeno.

‘There are elements in the alliance that think humanity was chosen. That the Heezy left their treasure trove in the solar system by design.’

‘Yeah, I’ve met a few of those mopes… the universe revolves around Sol and you’re all descendants of the sun gods too,’ said Zeno.

‘I’m not talking about the cults that worship the Heezy.’

‘Enough stalling,’ said Steel-arm, impatiently. He tossed Lana a gravity chute. ‘Away with your theory and on with the practical. Down into the damn pit with you, Lana girl. We’ll be behind you.
Way
behind.’ He laughed loudly.

If going down the shaft had felt claustrophobic the first time, Lana didn’t reckon her journey was improved descending while terrified that any second a Heezy sentry machine might lunge out of the bare stone and pulp her like an orange husk being juiced. She sensed a thin breeze of cooler air rising up from the abyss, passing her face, holding onto the sensation with quiet desperation. Lana could see the lights of the pirates coming down above her; hear the faint crackling sound of her ship suit’s fibres adjusting to the cooler environment.  If it was plunder Steel-arm was after, he should have let the base dig a main shaft before attacking. He wasn’t going to be able to haul much of value up this narrow exploratory well. She landed in the anteroom, held there by the two pirates while everyone else came down the tube and assembled in the room. Sebba entered a code in the panel on the wall and Steel-arm and his brigands stepped back in shock as the corridor fell away, appearing in the stone like she had tossed a self-tunnelling spell at the rock.

‘How do you know the walls won’t close around us when we enter?’ snarled Steel-arm.

‘You need to think like a Heezy,’ said Sebba. ‘They made use of matter; they made use of its absence. Everything under their mastery.’

Everything under the sun, including the sun
. Lana wished her predicament felt as certain as the vanished species’ control of the universe. A minute later and they reached the vast, near-bottomless shaft at the other end. The glutinous spheres of machinery floating up and down its length were fair racing now, made hyperactive by the effort of controlling the dark energy being tapped to recharge the system’s sun. A power so strange and endless that it could literally move the universe. Lana shivered. And she – they – wanted to turn this off. They were no more than specks of plankton swimming against the currents of a tsunami, dreaming their insane dreams of controlling the sea.

Even Steel-arm stood awed by the sight, rubbing at his alien broach as though trying to summon a genie that could help them escape this trap. ‘Someone will pay for this!’ he laughed. ‘This’ll be the making of me!’

Yeah, we’ll pay, if we don’t get off this world
. Lana turned to Zeno and spoke low. ‘Keep your eyes peeled for a chance to make a break for it. Ditch Seth and his crew. They’re going to get us all killed.’

‘We had better escape with the Heezy broach,’ said Zeno. ‘Or we won’t need Steel-arm’s help to get killed.’

Professor Sebba led them to the hall where the Heezy transport system was located, pointing out the metal cases stored there to her surviving base staff, giving them orders to gather up her equipment stash. ‘Nothing without my command!’ barked Steel-arm. ‘What’re you doing?’

Sebba shot the pirate commander a withering look. ‘What do you think I’m doing? These are the tools we’ve been using to research the complex. If we’re going to interface with the Heezy systems on their control level, we’ll need every last piece of equipment. I have never attempted anything this difficult before. What were you planning to do, walk in and start shooting at Heezy instruments until the energy shield falls?’