Weird Space 2: Satan's Reach (24 page)

“You’ll sleep well. I find the thrumming of the skis on the ice a soporific. Good night.”

The cupboards were little rooms in themselves, with a margin before each bed which contained a sink, a table and a container for clothes.

Zeela yawned. “It seems like an age since we last slept, Den.”

He looked at his watch. “You’re right. Eighteen hours. Goodnight, Zeela.”

She smiled. “Goodnight, Den.”

He pulled the sliding door shut behind him, and a low light came on to illuminate the chamber. He undressed and washed, and slipped in between heated sheets. He switched off the light and considered leaving Vassatta tomorrow. Before that he would see if Bjorn was interested in the engine, and if so have
Judi
attend to its removal and storage at the port.

He heard the sound of a door, sliding, and a few seconds later a small voice. “Den?”

“Mmm?”

“I can’t sleep.”

He sighed. “I was almost dropping off.”

“I’m sorry.”

He listened. A silence, followed by soft tapping at his door. “Den?”

“Mmm?”

“I wonder... can I come in and talk?”

“We should sleep. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”

“I know, but just for a few minutes...”

He considered what he’d read, inadvertently, in her head on Tarrasay... “No,” he said. “Zeela, I’m dog tired and I need to sleep.”

Another silence, followed by, “Why are you being like this?”

He sighed. “Like what?”

“Like this. Cold. Reserved. As if we haven’t shared anything over the past week and more.”

“That’s not true. But I’m tired now. And I have a lot to think about.”

“Den,” she said after a short silence, “what’s wrong with you?”

“There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“I know what it is,” she said. “That time on Tarrasay, at the café. You put on your ferroni-thingy, and... and you didn’t like what you read in my head, did you? You didn’t like the kind of person I was.”

He sighed in exasperation and rubbed his eyes. She was wrong, very wrong. The fact was that he
had
liked the kind of person she was. That was the problem.

“Well?” she said.

“Zeela...”

“Yes?”

He tried not to laugh. “Come here.”

She slid the door open. The light came on, showing Zeela in a short undergarment that came to just above her knees. She stood regarding him with big eyes. He patted the bed. “Sit down.”

She sat down, regarding her dark hands pressed together on her lap as if in prayer. She looked up.

“Zeela. I’m sorry. I’m not being cold, or reserved. At least, I hope I’m not. And when I read your mind – briefly and accidentally – it wasn’t that I didn’t like what I read in there.”

She looked up, hopefully. “Well, then...”

He tried to formulate the words that would tell her about himself, his life, in a way that would not hurt her. He said, “For the past few years I’ve lived alone, aboard the ship. Moving from star to star, planet to planet. Trading. And, for the first couple of years, running. And in all that time I’ve... I’ve been content with my own company. I don’t want... complications. And I wouldn’t want to burden anyone with the dangers that being with me would bring.”

She stared at him, wide-eyed. “As if we haven’t gone through dangers together already, and survived them!”

“I know. I’m not expressing myself very well.” He gathered his thoughts. “I’m thirty, Zeela, and you’re not yet eighteen. I’m too old to... It wouldn’t work. It would end... unhappily, for one of us, both of us. The best thing, the only thing would be if we were to remain as friends.”

“Friends?” She spat the word, staring at him incredulously. “As if everything we’ve shared didn’t matter?”

“Of course it matters! It’s just...”

She reached out and grabbed his hand. “I want you to do something, Den. I can’t really express with words what I feel, not very well. So... so use your device and read my mind, read what I’m
really
feeling.”

Her small hand felt very hot in his. He stared at her, feeling waves of hopelessness sweep over him. How could he begin to tell her what he had experienced, all those years ago?

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Zeela. I can’t do that. You don’t realise how painful it is, to read another’s mind. Why do you think I ran away, back then?”

“You ran from the Expansion,” she said, “from what they made you do. Not from a woman–!”

Before he could stop himself, he cried, “For chrissake, that’s exactly what I was running from, you little...”

She stared at him, wide eyes, as if he’d slapped her. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. She pulled her hand away.

“No,
I’m
sorry. I... Look, one day I’ll explain. When we’ve outrun the bounty hunters and we have plenty of time on Kallasta, then I’ll explain.”

She nodded, eyes downcast, not meeting his gaze. “Okay, Den,” she said quietly.

Seconds later she slipped from the bed-chamber and slid the door shut.

He lay in the darkness, cursing himself, and it was a long time before he slept.

“T
ROMSO
! T
ROMSO
!” B
JORN
yelled.

Harper came awake instantly, sitting up and wondering where the hell he was. It was the second time he’d awoken recently to find himself in a confined space. He felt the thrumming of the skis conducted through the superstructure of the ice-liner. He was hundreds of kilometres north of Stromgard, coming into the oil refinery at Tromso on the New Oslo plains.

He dressed quickly, rinsed his face at the sink, and emerged to find Zeela stepping from her own bed-cupboard. She smiled at him brightly, as if their conversation last night had never taken place.

By the time they reached the cab, Bjorn was back in his seat at the controls. He indicated a small table bearing spiced coffee, crisp-bread and hard cheese. “Breakfast. I trust you both slept well?”

“You were right about the effect of the skis,” Zeela said. “I was fast asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow. What about you, Den?”

He glanced at her. “I was a little longer getting to sleep,” he said, then whispered to her, “I was visited by a demon in the night.”

They ate standing up and staring through the windscreen.

“Tromso,” Bjorn said proudly. “What do you think?”

The darkness was banished by a thousand burning fires which illuminated a complex web of silver pipes like a giant’s metal puzzle. Between the pipes Harper made out granite buildings, seemingly entangled in the pipe-work. The city-refinery extended for kilometres across the plain – in fact for as far as the eye could see – washed with the orange light of the burn-off chimneys.

“Ten thousand citizens work here,” Bjorn was saying. “And the refinery produces the oil which keeps the planet going.”

Zeela asked, “And how long will the reserves last for?”

“Experts estimate they’re good for another thousand years.”

“And after that?” Harper asked.

Bjorn nodded, his face grave. “Vassatta is viable only through the continued supply of oil,” he said. “Without it, the planet would freeze – or rather we, the inhabitants, would freeze. So when the oil runs out, life on our world will be impossible, and my descendents will have no option but to leave. Vassatta will become a ghost world,” he went on, “an epitaph to our brief time here.”

He smiled. “But that will not be for another thousand years, maybe more, and before that there will be many Bloomings that my grandchildren, and their grandchildren, will witness and enjoy.”

Just twenty Bloomings, Harper thought soberly.

Bjorn eased the ice-liner into a slipway, and the vehicle rang to the sound of fuel being pumped into the liner’s empty tanks. Through the viewscreen they watched as a file of muffled workers, coming off shift, shuffled towards the liner. Presently they heard footsteps below and the sound of the passengers’ voices.

“They’re heading for Stromgard at the end of a six week shift,” Bjorn said, “where they’ll party for a fortnight until work begins again.”

“It must be a hard life,” Harper said.

Bjorn smiled. “This is Vassatta. To off-worlders, all life here seems hard.” He laughed. “Now we swing homeward. Two more drop-offs before here and Stromgard, and a stop at the spaceport where we’ll say goodbye.”

They were on their way again thirty minutes later. An hour after that Zeela was leafing through a pictorial atlas of the planet and Harper was reading the Sagas, the epic prose-poems penned by the first human inhabitants of Vassatta. Bjorn turned in his seat and said, “I don’t want to alarm you, but...”

He indicated a screen which showed the view of the ice-canal behind them. “This is magnified,” he said. “The sled is perhaps three kilometres away. The thing is, it shouldn’t be there.” He pointed a calloused finger at another screen. “There’s the schedule, and the next vehicle is a liner, two hours behind us.”

Zeela jumped up from the settee and joined them at the controls. “Do you think...?”

Bjorn nodded. He increased the magnification, and the pursuing sled expanded. “I do. It’s the same make of sled as your two friends had outside my place yesterday. Too much of a coincidence for it
not
to be the bounty hunters.”

Harper tried to keep the fear from his voice. “And I thought we’d given them the slip. But how...?”

“They’re tenacious, and skilled,” Bjorn said, with not a little admiration. “They would do well hunting skarl across the southern plains. It’s a pity they can’t be persuaded to remain here.”

“That would be one solution,” Harper said. “The other, that we somehow evade them.”

Bjorn nodded. “I’m taxing my brains to that very end, my friend.”

“How far are we in front of them, in terms of time?”

Bjorn shook his head. “A matter of minutes only.” The Vassattan looked from Zeela to Harper. “But I have an idea...”

Harper said, “Go on.”

“It would work, and leave the bounty hunters chasing shadows.” He paused. “I’ve done it myself, in my younger days. Granted, it’s not exactly comfortable, and you must hold on for dear life for fear of earning a body-full of bruises... but the alternative is not worth considering.”

Zeela stared at him. “Would you mind explaining?” she pleaded.

Harper said, “I think Bjorn’s trying to tell us that we’re about to be delivered, like a container of goods, at the next drop point. Am I right?”

Zeela gasped.

The big man grinned. “It’s the only way, and cannot fail. From there – a small pumping station town called Eklund – you can catch the next liner that’s scheduled to halt, which should be no more than a six hour wait. That will take you directly to the spaceport.”

“I have a better idea,” Harper said. “I don’t like the idea of arriving at the port to find the bounty hunters waiting for us.”

“But how can you leave Vassatta if you don’t go to the port?” Bjorn asked.

“We don’t go to my ship,” Harper said. “The ship comes to us.”

He asked Bjorn for the exact geographical location of Eklund, and the big man consulted his screen and relayed the co-ordinates. Harper tapped them into his wrist-com. “And when will we be arriving at Eklund?”

“In a little over twenty minutes,” Bjorn said.

“In that case I’ll get my ship to arrive on the ice plain outside Eklund in thirty minutes. The bounty hunters will have passed the town by then.”

Bjorn laughed.

“What?” Harper asked.

“And the only reason you sought me out was to see if I wished to purchase a steamboat engine! Which, at five thousand units, I would very much like to... If your ship has time to off-load it, that is.”

Harper smiled. “I’ll contact
Judi
with instructions,” he said, “and I’ll not accept a single unit for the engine. It’s a gift, and I’ll hear no protests.”

Bjorn regarded him, then stretched out a hand. “In which case I will accept, with thanks.”

They shook, and Harper activated his wrist-com. He got through to
Judi
, relayed the co-ordinates, and told her to meet them on the ice-plain a kilometre north of Eklund in thirty minutes. He explained the situation, adding, “And come in on a circuitous route, avoiding the ice-canal so that the bounty hunters don’t catch sight of you.”

“Understood.”

“And before you set off, have the port authorities unload the engine and store it for one Bjorn Halstead.”

“Affirmative.”

They left the cab and made their way down to the cargo hold. Bjorn strode to the bulkhead and slapped the controls. They stood back as the platform folded itself from the wall.

Through the viewscreen Harper watched the ice-bound land race by... and soon they would be placing themselves in a container which would be whisked by mechanical grabs from the liner as it sped by without stopping.

Zeela, as if guessing his thoughts, smiled bravely.

They watched as workers fork-lifted half a dozen containers onto the platform. Bjorn crossed the hold and came back with an empty container and a roll of plastic bubble-padding which he wadded inside. “To make for a more comfortable ride,” he said. “When we did this, way back, we went without a container and just held on. I know, the stupidity of youth!”

Zeela looked at the container dubiously. “But what if it tips and cracks open?”

“It won’t,” he assured her. “I’ll wedge it between two sturdier crates. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

Harper glanced at his wrist-com. They were due to pass Eklund in ten minutes.

Bjorn asked, “Are you armed?”

“No, and I hope we have no need to be.”

Bjorn nodded. “Excuse me a moment.” Harper watched the giant as he strode across the hold and slipped through the exit.

He returned minutes later with a laser pistol in one hand and a bottle of Vassattan vodka in the other. He passed Harper the pistol. “Simple stud operation, three settings: disable, stun, and kill. It’s set on stun now.” He gave Zeela the bottle of vodka and explained, “The receiving station should be empty, but in case there’s someone about, give them this from Bjorn Halstead. I’ll call ahead to see if it’s manned, and if so warn them to look out for a surprise package.”