The Devil's Nebula (3 page)

“We’ll sit tight here,” Carew said. “No radio communications, okay?”

Lania smiled and punched his shoulder. “No need to tell me that, fool.”

She took off like a cat and disappeared silently into the shadows.

Carew looked at Jed. His big face was drenched in sweat. “Try not to worry, Jed. We’ve been in tough situations before now.”

“But we’ve never had Vetch warriors breathing down our necks,” Jed said. He paused, then went on, “What will they do to us, if they find us?”

Summary execution and confiscation of all hardware... But Carew wasn’t about to tell his engineer that. He shook his head. “Not applicable. They won’t find us.”

Jed looked up at his captain, something almost puppy-like in his expression of trust.

“Remember Altair?” Jed laughed.

Carew smiled at the recollection. That had been almost five years ago, just after Jed had signed aboard the
Poet
. They’d had word that a liner travelling from Mars to Betelgeuse II, a hundred years earlier, had fallen foul of a meteor storm just off Altair; the wreck was still there, awaiting salvage. Carew had taken the
Poet
in for a swift reconnaissance and found the spavined ship becalmed. They’d also discovered, on boarding the ship, that it had been taken over by a ferocious race of crab-like aliens who took exception to their domicile being invaded.

Carew had learned something about his crew then, as they beat a retreat back to their ship limpeted onto the skin of the liner.

One, that Jed Neffard, despite being an ex-small-time-crook, and although he was a fine engineer, was not to be relied on in a skirmish. In a flight or fight situation, Jed had self-preservation down to a fine art: he always ran.

Two, that Lania Takiomar, despite standing five feet nothing and being as slim as a wand, was a tenacious fighter who never let a situation, no matter how tough, get her down. Although Carew himself had been far from useless in the fire-fight, it had been Lania who had laid down covering fire and picked off the advancing crabs, one by one, before hauling the men back to the safety of the
Poet
.

Jed laughed. “Lania saved us then, boss,” he said, something like hero-worship in his voice.

“As I recall,” Carew said, “you redeemed yourself a little later.”

Jed shrugged modestly.

Lania had been all for pushing off back into the void and leaving the ship to languish among the asteroids, but Jed had had an idea.

If they could get rid of the hostile crabs, then they’d be able to attach grapples to the wreck and haul it through the void to the scrap-station at Antares VII.

Lania had grunted, “So you’re going to volunteer to go back in there and flush the crabs out single-handedly, Jed?”

“No need,” he’d replied. “The crabs are in the cargo hold, right? And the hold is pressurised. So all we have to do is blow a hole right through the hold and the crabs’ll be sucked out into space.”

Carew had baulked at the idea of annihilating the extraterrestrial crabs, but Lania was ahead of him. She accessed her suit’s memory and said, “Don’t worry your conscience on that score, Ed. The Karyx are vacuum dwellers. They live in space. We’ll just be dispossessing them of a temporary home.”

So they had taken Jed’s suggestion and blown two holes in the carapace of the hold and watched as a thousand tumbling crabs were sucked, cart-wheeling, into the star-lit vacuum.

Then they’d towed the wreck back to Antares, and Carew’s confidence in his unlikely-looking crew of two had grown appreciably, not to mention his bank-balance.

“What’s she doing up there?” Jed said now.

“Don’t worry. She can handle herself.”

“But it’s been ten minutes, at least.”

“I think we might have heard something if the Vetch had caught sight of her. Ah, speak of the Devil.”

A sable shadow detached itself from the darkness at the rear of the room and padded across to them. “Okay,” Lania whispered. “Come and look at this.”

Jed followed her, Carew bringing up the rear. They climbed a flight of concrete stairs to an upper-storey room, lit by errant shafts of sunlight filtering through a vine-shrouded window.

Lania indicated a door leading to to another flight of steps. They climbed and emerged a few moments later onto the flat rooftop, then crept through the vegetation and paused, side by side, at the edge of the building, concealed by the lolling leaves of a giant fern. Lania hunkered down and carefully back-handed a leaf aside. “There,” she whispered.

They had a perfect view of the square and the Vetch patrol vessel squatting before the jungle-covered triangle of the museum building. The ship looked like a bloated black-and-yellow wasp, twice the size of the
Poet
.

And then Carew saw a Vetch warrior for only the second time in his life and, in spite of himself, he experienced a sudden flare of hatred.

The alien emerged from the entrance of the museum and crossed to the ship. The Vetch was perhaps eight feet tall, its legs disproportionately long, its body compacted. But it was its head that marked it as grotesquely alien. Hairless and mottled pink, it had the wattled appearance of something haemorrhoidal: a more charitable comparison, Carew thought, was to an albino hound-dog after a bloody collision with a brick wall.

Either way, it was hideous.

The sight of it brought back a slew of unwanted memories, and Carew fought to suppress them.

Jed said, “What are they doing?”

“They’ve been at it ever since I got up here,” Lania said.

Only then did Carew see that the first Vetch was merely the vanguard: it was leading other aliens from the museum. A dozen Vetch carried boxes and cases across the square and filed aboard their ship.

“What the hell?” he said.

“Raiding the place for artefacts,” Lania murmured.

“I didn’t have the Vetch down as aficionados of human history. Can you make out what’s in those cases?”

Lania pulled something from the material of her suit, a transparent strip which she placed across her eyes. She tapped the end of the strip over her temple.

“It’s hard to see. They’re... I don’t recognise anything... Weird, they seem to be scraps of metal, burnt and twisted. Not artefacts, as such. They’re all the same, in every box and case; just scraps of wreckage.”

“Wreckage?” Carew repeated, his interest aroused.

Lania shrugged. “That’s what it looks like to me.”

Carew wondered. The other reason he had brought his ship to Hesperides, quite apart from the retrieval of the alien statuette, was to investigate a story he’d heard from a reliable source not that long ago.

And now the Vetch were taking what might be starship wreckage from the museum.

Jed whispered, “Perhaps they don’t know anything about us being here, boss. Perhaps they just came for that stuff.”

“That would certainly let us off the hook,” murmured Carew.

They watched for the next hour as the Vetch transferred their haul from the museum to the ship. Carew kept a lid on his revulsion, but it wasn’t easy. Even the way the Vetch
moved
caused his flesh to crawl. Their legs were long and muscular and gave at the knee with a peculiar snap and fall: he could almost hear the cartilaginous grind as they bobbed along.

A little later Lania touched his arm and whispered, “I think they’re leaving.”

The last alien had climbed the ramp into the ship and the hatch dropped shut behind it. A second later the ship powered up with a crescendo of engines, lifted and turned on its axis. It seemed to hang for a second before climbing slowly from the square, clearing the triangular apex of the museum and heading north and out of sight.

Carew sat back and let out a long breath.

“So they don’t know we’re here!” Jed laughed.

“Perhaps,” Carew said, “hard though I find it to believe.”

Jed wiped a slick of sweat from his grinning face and said, “So what now?”

“Now we wait a while,” Carew said. “We don’t want the Vetch realising they’ve forgotten something, coming back, and finding us.” He pulled the canteen from his backpack and drank.

Lania was watching him. She said, “Hell of a coincidence, hm?”

“Their being here just as we land?”

“And their raiding the museum like that,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

He stared at her. “What’s not to like? It’s just a coincidence, nothing more.”

She shook her head, clearly bothered by something she was unable to articulate. “I don’t know. But... things like that don’t just happen. I mean, what are the chances?”

“What else can it be?”

He consulted his chronometer, then gazed into the sky, aluminium-white with the glare of the giant sun. There was no sight or sound of the alien vessel.

“You ready to move on?”

Jed nodded and Lania pushed herself to her feet. They retraced their steps to the staircase and descended, then paused in the cover of the hanging vine and scanned the square.

Carew glanced at Lania. “I don’t detect anything out there, Ed.”

“Okay, we keep to the shadows and make for the museum. After me.”

He led the way from the building, turning left and skirting the square. The Vetch ship had burned a great patch of vegetation in the centre of the square, but around its edges the undergrowth was a dense tangle. Carew was loathe to use his laser to clear a way, even though common sense told him the Vetch were long gone. Instead he high-stepped through the undergrowth, barbs and brambles catching at his leggings. He was thankful they were in the shade for much of the time: according to the gauge on his chronometer, the temperature was touching forty Celsius.

They had almost reached the museum when they saw the figure, standing before the building’s triangular entrance. A moment later, a hundred metres across the square and partially concealed by vegetation, he made out a second Vetch vessel, a one-man scoutship.

Lania was the first to react. She grabbed Carew and Jed and dragged them into a mews between the museum and the next building.

The corridor was haywire with jungle, but plants had no thorns and were not too tangled, allowing the three relatively easy passage. By the time Carew’s shocked senses had processed the image of the Vetch – the alien had seen them and had hesitated between drawing its firearm and giving chase – they were a hundred metres from the front of the museum. They tumbled from the undergrowth and found themselves in a clearing behind the museum, a scorched area that suggested Vetch ships had landed there recently.

“Split!” Lania hissed. She pushed Carew across the clearing. “There was only one Vetch. Jed, that way. Find a hiding place and lie low. I’ll find you. Okay, go!”

Lania turned left and dived back into the jungle, while Jed drew his laser and turned right. The pair soon disappeared. Carew took off, sprinting across the burned vegetation to the jungle on the far side. As he ran, he wondered at the Vetch’s sudden interest in the museum. Had they happened upon the same information as he had himself?

He came to the cover of the jungle and fled into its shade with sudden relief. The temperature dropped appreciably, out of the direct sunlight. He turned and looked across the clearing.

The Vetch stumbled from the jungle on the far side and looked left and right. There were no tell-tale signs of where Lania and Jed had fled to, but Carew’s own passage was clearly marked in the ash. The alien saw the trail and gave chase.

Heart hammering, Carew turned and struggled through the riotous growth: the vegetation was not as benign here and every bramble seemed to grab him and hold him back like hands intent on impeding his progress. He gave a shout of frustration and resorted to firing his laser straight ahead, burning a path through the growth. He knew, even as he fired, that he would lead the Vetch to his position, but his immediate concern was to put as much distance as possible between himself and the alien.

The jungle vegetation gave way to something a little more tamed and ordered, and he realised that he had strayed into what once had been a municipal park. He made out an orderly plantation of trees to his right, and to his left a pavilion of some kind.

His earpiece bleeped and Lania’s voice sounded. “Ed!”

He panted, “I thought I said no radio communication?”

“Desperate measures, Ed. I saw the Vetch follow you. Just to say, I’m right behind it, okay? As soon as I get a clear shot, I’ll take it.” She cut the connection.

A palpable wave of relief swept over him. He came to the vine-cloaked wall of the pavilion and scrambled through an open window. He was panting hard and his right ankle throbbed painfully. He dropped to his haunches and leaned against the brickwork. With luck he had lost the alien, and Lania would account for it in short order.

He controlled his breathing, calmed himself and decided to take a look. He turned slowly, lifted his head and peered cautiously through the window.

The alien had emerged from the plantation of trees and was looking out across the waist-high tangle of undergrowth.

Carew would have fired on the Vetch there and then, but he was shaking so badly that he stopped himself for fear of missing and giving away his position. He could see the alien as it stepped cautiously from the line of trees, concealed himself by the shrubbery growing around the window frame.

He was much closer to the Vetch than earlier, when he had viewed the aliens from the top of the building in the square. At close quarters, he saw how monstrously tall the creature was, and how broad. Atop the pink mess of its face was a mane of ginger hair that gave it, despite its black uniform, an animalistic aspect.

Its appearance was painfully familiar to Carew; he fought back the urge to vomit.

As he watched, the Vetch touched something at its throat. Then it spoke.

“Human, I know you are nearby.” It made a noise, which the translator did not reproduce: a sound like a growl, which Carew guessed was laughter. “I can smell you. Humans stink, did you know that? You reek of the stench of your mother’s blood!” Again the growl of alien laughter.

It stepped forward, towards the pavilion, its large, flattened fish-eyes raking the building’s façade. Then it was staring directly at where Carew crouched.