The Devil's Nebula

THE DEVIL'S NEBULA

The Sleer led the way through the undergrowth, snapping branches and uprooting shrubs as they went. Langley and Lania skidded along behind them and Carew brought up the rear, picking his way with care and occasionally shuffling along on his backside when the drop became almost sheer.

He’d slipped the laser into his belt, to free his right hand, when something shot past his left ear and slapped into a tree trunk directly before him. He saw the trunk dissolve before his eyes, the whole process taking perhaps two seconds. He fell onto his back and rolled. In an instant his laser was in his right hand and he was firing up the incline. Whatever was following them had vanished. He yelled to the others, glanced over his shoulder down the hillside. There was no sign of Lania, Langley, Villic or the Sleer. Then he caught a glimpse of Lania as she took cover behind a tree and drew her weapon.

He saw a boulder to his right and rolled into its shelter. He scanned the vegetation cloaking the incline above him. All was still, quiet. Only his heart sounded, deafening in his ears. He peered over the rock, willing whatever it was to show itself. A Sleer, he guessed. Armed with an acid weapon? He glanced at the unfortunate tree. It was stripped down to its inner rings, the wood steaming. An acid weapon of some kind, then. Which, in the hands of a Sleer, was a combination to be feared.

Eric Brown

WEIRD SPACE

The Devil's Nebula

Also by Eric Brown

Novels

Xenopath

Necropath

Cosmopath

Kéthani

Helix

New York Dreams

New York Blues

New York Nights

Penumbra

Engineman

Meridian Days

Guardians of the Phoenix

Novellas

Starship Fall

Starship Summer

Revenge

The Extraordinary Voyage of Jules Verne

Approaching Omega

A Writer’s Life

Collections

Threshold Shift

The Fall of Tartarus

Deep Future

Parallax View (with Keith Brooke)

Blue Shifting

The Time-Lapsed Man

As Editor

The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures

(with Mike Ashley)

An Abaddon Books
TM
Publication

www.abaddonbooks.com

[email protected]

First published in 2012 by Abaddon Books
TM
, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

Editor-in Chief: Jonathan Oliver

Desk Editor: David Moore

Cover Art: Adam Tredowski

Design: Simon Parr & Luke Preece

Marketing and PR: Keith Richardson

Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

Weird Space
TM
created by Eric Brown

Copyright © 2012 Rebellion. All rights reserved.

Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-368-7

ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-369-4

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

For Josh, Bella and Esther.

CHAPTER ONE

S
HE KILLED THE
creature on the third attempt.

Her first shot singed its hackles and fizzed off into the jungle canopy. Her second ploughed a bloody furrow through the meat of its shoulder, succeeding only in enraging the beast. The six-legged kreesh howled and slunk off into the undergrowth.

“Oh, very well done,” Ed Carew said.

They crouched behind a spur of rock, Lania Takiomar cocking her head to follow the sound of trampled vegetation as the kreesh made a detour and came in from behind.

On her haunches, she swivelled. She was like some kind of primitive wild beast herself; a jaguar, perhaps, her small, compact body injection-moulded into the curved confines of her jet-black smartsuit.

She snapped, “If you could do any better...”

Carew smiled. That’s what he liked about his pilot: she spoke her mind.

The third member of their party, Jed Neffard, cowered behind his captain. For an ex-convict who had sampled the hospitality of half a dozen prison planets in his thirty-odd years, he exhibited a surprising, and endearing, lack of courage.

They turned slowly as one, tracking the sound of the kreesh as it circled through the vegetation.

“I thought you said,” Jed whined, “that Hesperides had no wild animals.”

“It didn’t,” Carew said under his breath, “fifty years ago, when it was evacuated.”

“So what happened?”

“My guess is that the kreesh escaped from a menagerie. Lania?”

Her smartsuit wasn’t called a smartsuit for nothing. Carew liked to garner his information the old way, from screens – and preferably in a quiet library on some idyllic backwater world – but he had to admit that there was no beating a smartsuit for getting information on the fly.

It was Lania who, ten minutes ago on first sighting the creature, had accessed her suit’s memory cache and identified it as a kreesh. Now she said, “You’re right. Kreesh aren’t native to Hesperides. There was a zoo on the outskirts of Valderido. Probably got out of there.”

“Is there anything else you aren’t telling us about this place?” Jed asked.

Carew smiled, to mask his guilt. There was one other piece of information he’d thought it prudent not to tell his crew, but now was not the right time to come clean.

“We’ll be fine, Jed,” Carew reassured the engineer. “Trust in Lania’s markswomanship.”

Staring intently ahead, Lania hissed between gritted teeth, “If that’s supposed to be funny, Ed, stow it.”

“Not funny, Lania. Merely ironic.”

He glanced at Jed, who was ogling the way Lania’s curves moved beneath the figure-hugging smartsuit. Lania crouched, laser rifle solid against her right shoulder, a study in concentration.

A rustle sounded directly in front of the cowering trio, and a moment later the beast leapt at them from the jungle. Lania fired. Jed yelled. Carew felt his heart leap. Before he knew it, half a tonne of dead meat slammed to the ground before them. The stink of part-cooked flesh and gamey body odour wafted their way in a sickening miasma.

Lania stood up, blew across the muzzle of her weapon with a hollow piping note, and lodged a foot on the haunch of the carcass. “One for the album, Ed?”

Carew stood and examined the animal, working to maintain his characteristic reserve. “Well done, Lania. My word, but it certainly is an ugly beast.”

Evolution had primed the kreesh well in the dental department. Its face was all teeth, a circle of sickle barbs below two eyestalks.

Lania frowned as she accessed her suit’s memory. “A native of Deneb III. Used by the natives there as a hunting animal. It was listed as an endangered species twenty years ago and its captivity proscribed by the Terran Zoological Organisation.”

Carew said, “There must be others in the area. What say we round them up and transport them to the nearest breeding centre? They must be worth millions.”

Lania gave him an uncertain look.

Carew smiled. “I’m joking. We came here to locate an
objet d’ art
, not wild animals.”

Jed gave a relieved laugh. “For a second, there...”

“How long have you known me, both of you? Five years, Jed? Ten, Lania? When will you come to realise that I
do
have a sense of humour?”

“That’s the thing, Ed. You really don’t.”

“I’m offended, Lania. Now, if you’ve finished posing, shall we continue?”

He stepped gingerly over the corpse of the kreesh and led the way through the jungle.

O
NE HOUR LATER
, Jed said, “How far are we from Valderido?”

“As the cyber-assisted crow flies,” Lania said, “about an hour. Through this salad, it’s going to take us about two.”

The haywire tangle of ferns and lianas was proving no barrier to their progress. Carew simply adjusted the setting of his laser and burned a path through the undergrowth. The terrain was a little uneven, taxing muscles accustomed to light exercise aboard his ship,
The Paradoxical Poet
, but he kept the pace at a little above a leisurely stroll. Days were long on Hesperides – the planet turned slowly on its axis, so that a day lasted over seventy standard hours – and they had landed just after dawn.

He had wanted to come down closer to the capital city, but after consultation with his crew had elected to land ten kilometres south of Valderido. On the way to Hesperides, Lania had reported picking up the ion trail of another ship; she’d had no idea how old the trail was, and even though there was no visual sign of a Vetch ship in the area, they’d decided to play it safe. The Vetch were vigilant in their patrols of their territory, and the capital city of the once-thriving human colony would be the obvious place for a salvage vessel to make landfall. Carew suspected that the ship was long gone, but he was taking no chances.

He led the way through a steaming tunnel of his own making, breathing shallowly so as not to inhale the smoke from the burning vegetation. Jed followed, trotting at his heels, and Lania brought up the rear, ever ready to repel the next attack.

The haunting calls of unseen wildlife bassooned through the sultry air, counterpointed by the piccolo notes of tiny birds darting through the slanting sunlight in riotous profusion. Hesperides was a world returned to bounteous nature, now that humankind had fled.

“Thirty thousand?” Jed asked.

Carew blasted a clear cone through the jungle. “Approximately.”

“Thirty thousand for
each
of us?”

“That’s the agreement.”

“If,” Jed went on, “the dealer is as good as his word.”

Carew stepped over a charred log. “I’ve no reason to doubt his honesty, Jed. I have worked with him before.”

“And if,” Lania called from the rear, as pessimistic as ever, “
if
we find the thing.”

Carew said, “We will. Of that I have no doubt. The museum was cleared of all that was considered valuable in the hours before the start of the evacuation.”

“And the statuette wasn’t considered valuable?” Lania asked.

“They had limited time in which to make their choices. According to the dealer, the museum’s director and his staff tore through the place and crated up only about half their holdings.”

And the tiny alien statuette, made by the race native to Hesperides but extinct for millions of years, had been left. The dealer, a colonist on Hesperides at the time of the forced evacuation, had spent many a childhood weekend staring at the figurine, his imagination fired by its alien makers, who had long since ceased to exist.

And now he was prepared to pay Carew and his crew a total of one hundred thousand units if they could secure the statuette and bring it to him.