Red Sun Bleeding (17 page)

‘No, witch, I was planning to stick my blade in you and your blighted underlings until one of you turned off the shield.’

‘Just let us get on with it, man.’

Steel-arm spat contemptuously on the floor and stalked over to where his raiders were examining Heezy artefacts accumulated from the excavation by the base staff. His brutes tossed the objects between each other and cackled as they imagined the riches the things would be worth to collectors. Steel-arm shoved the crew aside, yelling at them to store the priceless alien gewgaws in their equipment packs. Professor Sebba motioned to Lana and Zeno as she slid open a silvered steel crate. Lana peered inside. A rack of crystals similar to the broach that Steel-arm had commandeered. Sebba activated them and passed one each to Lana and Zeno. As the surviving base crew came past hauling the professor’s equipment, she quietly slipped each member of staff a broach. Lana noted she wasn’t handing them out to the pirates still squabbling over the alien treasure.
Sneaky bitch
. Not that the professor would have cared, but Lana approved.
Anything to even the odds
. Also in the case were a series of black pebble-sized globules held in foam mesh… more Heezy artefacts.

‘Matter programming instructions,’ whispered Sebba. ‘Take them. If we’re attacked by the sentinels, hurl one at the things.’

Lana surreptitiously pocketed a handful, glancing over her shoulder as Zeno and the professor did the same. The artefacts felt warm and jelly-like to the touch, yielding to her fingers when she squeezed. ‘What effect will these have?’

‘Not much,’ admitted Sebba. ‘But they should disrupt the sentinels for a few seconds; their matter had been programmed to perform as sentries… this will instruct the machines they should be acting as something else. It will take them a few moments to prioritise which instruction takes precedence and purge the new code set.’

‘What if these blobs instruct them to turn into something even worse?’ asked Zeno.

‘Ever the optimist,’ said Lana.

The android indicated the Heezy chamber and Steel-arm’s pirates. ‘Hey…’

She took the point, they were well and truly trapped underground; a crew of cutthroats on one side, with a legion of murderous automatons lurking in the bedrock on the other.

Sebba shut the case and turned to call to the miners packing away her equipment. ‘Be careful with the interface deck. That’s a one-of-a-kind.’

‘Let me guess,’ said Lana. ‘Borrowed from the alliance science team before you left.’

‘Their redundancy package wasn’t nearly as generous as it should have been,’ said Sebba, in mock justification.

‘Working for Dollar-sign Dillard, I can sympathize.’

Sebba snorted and went to oversee her precious equipment being sorted for transport. The base crew were piling gear across the dais where the Heezy version of a transport tube awaited its latest consignment of passengers. Lana had a nagging suspicion that as uncomfortable as dropping down the tight well had been, being squeezed through the depths of the underworld inside a claustrophobic alien force field – Abracadabra literally rearranging itself around her – would not be an experience tourists would pay for. She imagined her and Zeno’s presence as trespassers detected by the ancient systems, both left to rot deep in the bedrock like bugs in amber.

Zeno sighed. ‘If we can get the shield down, between the upcoming supernova and the Heezy-built brothers out there, we’re not going to have a whole lot of time to find Skrat and Calder. You might have to choose. Crew or ship.’

‘That’s not a decision I’m willing to make,’ said Lana.

‘Not making the decision is pretty much the same as making it, skipper,’ warned Zeno.

She knew that. Lana just wished she didn’t.

When it came to actually taking the alien transport system, the journey proved every bit as claustrophobic and terrifying as Lana anticipated. Almost as soon as she stood on the platform, the wall lunged out at her encasing her within rock. She caught a momentary glimpse of Zeno coming up onto the platform, but for whatever reason, he wasn’t included in her little bubble of mobile rock. Lana was pulled alone through the underworld. She got the impression that she was traveling at an incredible velocity, although she had no way to gauge the speed she was actually traveling at. The spherical field she was encased in held her tight, as though she were embedded in invisible foam. Her stomach did somersaults that left her feeling queasy as she plunged deeper and deeper into the heart of the world – was the bubble rotating with her inside? Lana had lost track of time as she was regurgitated at velocity into a new chamber, tumbling over its transport platform and narrowly avoiding colliding with Professor Sebba who must have arrived moments before her. She picked herself up, and quickly moved out of the way as the android and other members of the base staff vomited out of the hard-face of the chamber.

‘That ain’t never going to take off,’ said Zeno as he brushed himself down. ‘Give me an old-fashioned elevator anytime.’

The android stepped to the side as Steel-arm arrived, the female pirate Cho holding onto him in a very un-pirate-ish pose. Bowen glanced around the arrival chamber, identical to the one they had departed from. ‘Where’s the rest of my crew?’ he bellowed towards the professor.

‘I only programmed one set of destination coordinates,’ said Sebba. ‘You watched me do it.’

‘Then where are my men at, witch?’

‘They were carrying weapons,’ said Sebba, wearily, by way of explanation. ‘But without the protection of your brooch.’ She wisely didn’t mention that all of her survivors now had alien ambassadorial credentials secreted about their person. Had the professor known that traveling down here without a friendly Heezy transponder code would be a one-way trip?

‘You didn’t warn me that bringing guns down here would be a problem,’ growled the Pirate captain.

‘How was I to know for sure? Besides, would you have left them behind if I had asked you?’

Steel-arm raised his pistol at the mission commander. ‘If I didn’t need you so much...’

‘But you do,’ said Lana.

‘Maybe we should kill you instead?’ said Cho, pointing at the
Gravity Rose
’s captain. ‘Just to make ourselves feel better.’

Steel-arm placed his cybernetic hand on the barrel of her rifle, lowering it towards the floor. ‘Don’t spoil the goods, Cho. Getting off this miserable rock with enough profit to buy a new ship is what I need to make me feel better.’

If looks could have killed, the alien chamber would have been in the middle of a firefight. It was a lot hotter in this chamber than their last; nearer the heart of the core, probably. Lana wiped the sweat dripping off her forehead. ‘Which way now, professor?’

Sebba indicated a panel in the wall behind them, another one of the team’s makeshift interfaces. ‘That way, I think. We have only been this deep a couple of times; and as I said, we abandoned exploring the control levels after my assistant was lost in a transport glitch.’

‘If it was a glitch,’ said Zeno.

‘We weren’t carrying weapons.’ Sebba motioned to her people to carry the equipment crates with them. Steel-arm and Cho stood behind, covering the prisoners with the guns. Lana didn’t know what the pirate captain hoped to achieve by threatening his human hostages. She had a sneaking suspicion that shooting a weapon down here would trigger the Heezy defence systems quicker than bad chilli through a hound dog. Another instant corridor fell away in front of the survivors, which they explored carefully, Lana and Zeno helping carry the heavy steel cases with the professor’s scientific gear. As the passage opened out, Lana found herself standing by the doorway into a truly vast space; an alien cathedral, the roof above so distant that it seemed to be cloaked in mist. Massive columns broke up miles of cavern floor, but they weren’t fixed, more like tower-sized candles composed of glutinous programmable matter, shifting and flexing as she gawked at the vista. She had spotted crescent-shaped hills shaped from smart matter, and these, she realized, must be the alien analogue of control panels, attended by groups of bizarre creatures that bore little relation to any organic life form Lana knew of. The most normal of these machine attendants were zeppelin-sized aerial workers that drifted across the open space like ebony jellyfish, clusters of tentacles hanging from their belly picking up smaller machines and carrying them away to be dropped off at alternative mounds. Occasionally, dark creepers extended out of the cave’s columns and merged with the zeppelins, pulsing spheres of matter passing between them as though one side or the other was either feeding or being fed. Lana wasn’t quite sure if she was looking at what passed for a bridge or the station’s intestines.

‘Now I really have seen everything,’ said Zeno.

‘The attendants ignored my presence the last time I visited,’ said the professor. ‘It was as if I didn’t exist.’

Lana wished they were ignoring her. She glanced back towards the last two pirates. Yeah, but that was before Steel-arm decided to seize the station’s attention with an impromptu display of nuclear weaponry.

‘Tell us where you need to go to lower the planet’s energy shield!’ ordered Steel-arm.

‘The nearest control system,’ said the professor. ‘That hill over there will do. I’ll need to reconfigure it as an access control for the shield.’

Sebba made it sound so easy; Lana had to give her that. Whatever other weaknesses the professor possessed, she wasn’t lacking in confidence. They arrived at a mound fifty feet away from the entrance. The professor and her team unpacked their precious control board, removing a glutinous dark snake of programmable matter which seemed to latch on to the control system before winding out to the black, undulating mass of the hill in front of them. Sebba began to work, muttering to herself. Lana could tell she had reprogrammed the mound to accept her input… a swarm of the strange robotic creatures covering the mound like dung beetles began to abandon the rise, rolling away towards nearby mounds.

‘How long will this damn hack of yours take?’ queried Steel-arm, swinging his pistol about towards the swarm of attendants scurrying away.

‘A lot quicker with your silence,’ said the professor. ‘I’m going to try to convince the station that there is an inbound Heezy vessel on the way, and that it needs to lower its shields to avoid destroying it.’

She set about her work with a resolute look in her eye, oblivious to the nerves of her team or captors as they scanned the massive space for the first signs of hostile activity. Sebba’s machine, it transpired, was a combination of human-to-Heezy interface, decryption machine and on-the-fly alien DNA sequencing. Every little step required DNA-based authorization, and the deck hummed gently as it ran through the millions of combinations needed to do something as simple as open an alien program. It quickly became apparent that the professor wasn’t having much luck with this particular Herculean task.

‘Let me help,’ suggested Zeno.

‘And just what assistance are you going to be?’ asked the professor.

‘Zeno’s the one who hacked the Heezy corridor system and got us down here behind your back,’ said Lana.

‘Very well,’ Sebba conceded. ‘Plug yourself in alongside me and see if you can accelerate the decryption routines I’m running.’

Zeno stepped forward and established a physical connection between himself and the professor’s equipment from an exposed port along his arm. ‘Creator-on-a-stick, I’ve never seen anything as complex as the high-throughput sequencing running inside here! There isn’t a bank in the galaxy that could stand up to algorithmic self-assembly this strong if you decided to hack your way to riches.’

‘Don’t give those two ideas,’ said Lana, glaring at Steel-arm and his pirate woman.

‘Here is a skegging idea for you: speed it up!’ threatened the pirate captain.

‘I would love to,’ said the professor, ‘but my attempt to convince the shield system it should turn off because there’s no further danger is being somewhat hampered by the fact there’s a fleet boosting towards Abracadabra.’ She waved at one of the base staff and they brought over a data slate which she used to project the Heezy’s sensor telemetry.

‘A pirate fleet,’ said Steel-arm with more animation than he had showed to date.

‘The shuttle you set to watch the jump point must’ve observed the
Doubtful Quasar
’s destruction and sent for help,’ said Cho. ‘They’re coming for us!’

‘That’s just dandy,’ said Lana. ‘You think they’re going to help save you? What’re the chances your people are flying with ordinance capable of making a dent in the shield?’ And there was only one force at the Invisible Port capable of mustering such an armada. Renan Barcellos, the Pirate King himself. They’d gone from having to deal with a psychopathic killer to dealing with the only man brutal enough to keep the rest of them in line.
Great
.

‘There is no way I can fake a friendly incoming transponder signal with every Heezy sensor tracking a real threat,’ said Sebba.

‘I agree,’ said Zeno. ‘There’s way too much attention being paid at deep space for us to bluff a bogus friendly past the Heezy systems now.’

‘Then turn off the dark energy tap,’ commanded Steel-arm. ‘Cancel that damn supernova before we all fry. Maybe losing their power will kill the shield too. ’

‘You’re insane!’ protested the professor. ‘I have no idea what stopping the solar feed will do. The only use the alliance has been able to make of that technology is burning Skein systems into cinders. We’ve never been able to successfully restart a sun. What does that tell you?’

‘That you’ve never known what you’re doing!’ Steel-arm pushed his pistol barrel into the side of her head. ‘I’m a gambling man with no more chips left on the table. Kill the solar feed or I’ll kill you. I’ll take my chances that the shields will go down with it.’

‘Don’t do this,’ begged Lana.

‘Skeg him,’ said Zeno, ‘kill it and let him fry.’

Steel-arm turned his pistol to point at the professor’s leg and triggered a shot, sending her sprawling to the floor in agony, the blood splatter from the impact spraying across Lana’s ship suit. Sebba’s miners tried to protect her; not, she suspected, through any great loyalty, but because without her the rest of them were all dead anyway. Cho jabbed her rifle at the staff and yelled for them to step back. Steel-arm shoved his gun barrel down against Sebba’s good leg. ‘You can die fast or you can die slow, witch, your choice!’