Red Sun Bleeding (4 page)

‘I understand,’ said Calder. ‘I helped you kill it. Now I have to eat it.’ He scooped out a large chunk of entrails from the spider – a cake of flesh that would have kept a peasant family in sausages for a week back home. He was queasier than he should be. Whale meat was a delicacy on Hesperus… and the massive things that hunted under the ice were called whales only because his distant descendants had been offworld Nordic settlers.
I’ve gotten too used to ship rations
. Chief Paopao’s expertly rolled sushi. A wide variety of frozen ration-packs from a hundred worlds. Damned if he was going to eat raw arachnid. He stood up and recovered a couple of the fallen branches the knights had sawed out from under the spiders’ nest. He drove a long thin branch through the spider meat like a stake; the big thick log he tucked under his arm. He walked to the other side of the clearing, pinning the meat with the wood into the ground. Then he took seven steps back and heaved the sawn-off log at the cluster of striped plants, the wood tumbling through the air before smacking into one of the huge bulbs and falling into its bed of vines. A furious wave of steam jetted out from the spines, trying to cook the creature foolish enough to blunder into the murderous vegetable plot. It enveloped the spider guts, rocking the meat on his makeshift stake. He gave it a couple of seconds after the jetting finished, to ensure the plants had exhausted their reservoir of solar-heated rainwater. Then he retrieved his share of the slaughter and happily went back to re-join the odd picnic.

Calder waved the hunk of meat at the riders. ‘I prefer spit-roasted, but steamed is as good as it’s going to get in this place, I reckon.’ He tore off a strip and offered it to Lento, but she stared at him with the same wide-eyed expression as always, as if the exiled nobleman was the true oddity here.  He tried the nearest rider, which sniffed at the boiled meat, little nostril strips along the top of its beak opening and closing. It nibbled at the strip, made an almost human sound of disgust, tossed the cooked meat over its shoulder and reached into the burst spider to get a fresh handful of the good red-raw flesh.

‘I’m among the heathen, here,’ said Calder. He bit into the hot meat. Slightly crunchy, as if the flesh was mixed with flecks of grit, not much flavour – and what there was almost tasted curiously as if it had been marinated in vinegar. He’d eaten worse. Hell, when Calder had been retreating across the frozen sea with his sole remaining ice schooner, pursued by half the enemy’s navy, he and his desperate crew had boiled shoe leather and mixed it with rock moss, so close to starvation had they fallen. He lifted up the steamed entrails. ‘Better than my boots, I have to give you that.’

Calder ate his fill. He could tell the impromptu picnic was drawing to a close when the six-legged predators finished feasting. Some of them started play-chasing each other around the clearing, while one of the larger members of the pack with the grandest set of horns reared up in front of the tree where Calder had sheltered, scratching bark off with its sharp points. Marking its territory, or showing the tree had been denuded of all spider-like ‘fruit’ and wasn’t worth revisiting for a while? Calder couldn’t make his mind up about these creatures. No clothes. No tools. No real attempt at speech or communication, even among each other – unless they chatted by covertly exchanging odours or whistles outside his pitch of hearing. But they had clearly acted towards the two humans with a measure of basic intelligence.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
. You could live and die by that on Hesperus. Calder nearly had, before he’d had his eyes opened to the existence of the rest of the universe. The reports on this world said it was uninhabited by sentient life. Of course, the reports had been self-serving mineral surveys for the large part. Calder had done enough cop show sims in his brief tenure as crew to know where the motives lay with an offworld mining operation like this.  As soon as local sentience was declared and news spread, you risked having your supply runs boycotted by environmentalists and do-gooders. Starships dropping automated camera drones to record every felled tree and any herbivore running into your laser fence. The word ‘blood’ tagged in front of every product you attempted to extract and sell. The knights mounted their steeds, a doll-sized hand clutching a curled horn apiece. Lento stood up, still clutching a broken spider leg with a chunk of gore on the end of the limb, as if this was the last food she expected to find for quite a while. Calder joined her. The answer to what was going to happen next came when one of the predators and its rider stalked up behind Calder, nosing him forward to join the chain of departing riders. Janet Lento seemed as unconcerned by their elevation to pack members as by everything else. Perhaps a pair of strange over-sized visitors that could lay out a carpet of spider corpses – and knew the secret of fire… or at least, steam – were too valuable to be left here as bait for one of those giant winged lizards whose shadows floated over, throwing the jungle floor into darkness. They moved through the rainforest for hours, an unhurried pace, nothing to do but trudge and listen to the unfamiliar sounds hooting, honking, chirping and roaring in the undergrowth. It was ironic. This was meant to be a world in its twilight years… a dying sun throbbing above them. But the jungle had never seemed so alive, literally shaking and shrieking with life. Nothing like the silent snow-bound cathedrals of the forests Calder had grown up with. Trees so hard the human settlers lacked tools sharp enough to fell them. Whether it was the locals’ knowledge of the jungle or the rest of the eco-system’s knowledge of how dangerous the pack was, the hike was uneventful. Nothing else appeared to try to attack them – a situation which Calder suspected wouldn’t have been the case if he and Lento had been blundering through the undergrowth on their own. Lento was little company, and the pack moved silently, halting occasionally for the predators to scratch at trees and sniff the ferns… for what, Calder was hard pushed to say.

‘Maybe they’re taking us to their den – or cave – or village,’ said Calder, as much to himself to break the silence as to Lento. She marched in front of him, close enough to clutch onto the short razored tail of the nearest predator, not acknowledging he had spoken. Calder tried not to take it personally. It was growing dark. The sick glow of the sun sinking from what he could see of the sky through the high jungle canopy, shadows lengthening, the tenor of the jungle’s song changing around them. They must be close to where they were going, surely? But then, he didn’t know how far the pack’s territory extended. They might claim thousands of miles of jungle as their hunting land for all that Calder knew. He hadn’t heard a single helicopter passing overhead. Surely the camp knew he was missing by now and would be flying over the rainforest looking for him? The state Janet Lento was in, she might have been willing to mutely watch potential rescuers fly over without trying to attract attention, but
he
hadn’t lost his marbles yet.  The
Gravity Rose
had brought fuel for the camp’s vehicles as part of the supply run. So where were the search flights? This was very odd. Calder felt forgotten and lost. They kept on moving for half an hour more, almost too dark to travel, and then the pack halted. There seemed to be a clearing ahead, but something was blocking their passage, a white diaphanous material hanging in the air, wet and sparkling like a sheet of a wet spider’s web. As he got closer to the wall, he saw that the sheeting rippled between steel fence posts.
Metal? Here?
The predators drew up in a line and the riders’ beaks opened as one, a raucous chirping song like a flock of sea birds calling. The sheeting between the nearest two fence posts rippled away in response to the song, withdrawing like blinds into the steel. And before them was a landscaped garden, a stone path leading up to some kind of circular single-storey lodge, slanted walls made of mirrored glass slotted between highly polished metal. The building looked like a flying saucer built into the ground. And something that shouldn’t possibly be here was coming out to inspect them.

***

Lana despondently guided the shuttle back towards the mining camp’s landing field, fat tears of hot rain beating against the cockpit’s canopy. They had modified their sensors, adding a jury-rigged array of coils for pulse induction, sweeping the jungle like a giant flying metal detector. Even if Calder had lost his rifle, the metal in his smart suit should have lit up like a Christmas tree on her board. All they had found was the ruined wreckage of a failed drop capsule that had drifted off course during the original mission set up on Abracadabra. Now night was falling. Their best chance of continuing the search was to get the
Gravity Rose
to scan for cold-spots using infrared… try and home in on Calder through his ship suit’s refrigeration fibres. But through the seventy metre-high dome of the forest, sweeping for such a tiny temperature differential was going to be like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack. But what choice did she have? None at all when it came down to it.

‘What are we missing here?’ she asked Zeno and Skrat in the flight seats behind hers. ‘We’ve covered more territory today than Calder can possibly have walked on foot in the time he’s been missing.’

Zeno looked over at their first-mate. ‘Are you sure there’s no missing ground vehicles from the camp? Maybe Calder drove out of the base?’

‘Certainly not from the main part of the base. It is possible, I suppose, that the fellow might have travelled up to the mine itself and stolen one of the vehicles from the works.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Lana. ‘I thought you said you’d searched the camp?’

‘The central complex, quite. But the works in the mountains are not enclosed within the base perimeter, old girl. When I requested to search the works, the miners dispatched their own people to do it. They said the tunnels are too dangerous for untrained civilians to wander around.’

‘I just bet they did. This stinks. What if Calder saw something he wasn’t meant to on the base? We’re taking too much on trust here. His disappearance. The defence system’s sensor logs. Who saw what, when.’

‘We know their driver disappeared,’ said Zeno. ‘This falls within the same pattern. And the miners have been searching for her for weeks with the empty fuel tanks to prove it.’

‘I have a feeling about this… same one I usually get running errands for Dollar-sign.’ And she didn’t have to remind her two crew how her last such hunch had ended when it came to the duplicitous broker. A cargo-hold of contraband war machines trying to infiltrate her ship. ‘Abracadabra… now you see it, now you don’t. Do you know how this world came to be named?’

‘I had rather presumed it was because seen from space the planet resembles a gas giant,’ said Skrat. ‘You have to get deuced close to the world to penetrate the illusion.’

‘That’s what I thought… until Calder vanished.’ Lana looked at Zeno. ‘Contact the ship, query our database as well as the mission files, see if you can find anything on the who, how and why of the planet being named Abracadabra.’

Zeno fell silent for a minute, the android connecting with shuttle’s comms dish and contacting the starship’s AI, Granny Rose. Running the query and waiting for the response. Finally the information was returned. He chewed thoughtfully as he spoke. ‘It was named by a colony vessel that passed through the system five hundred years ago… the
Never Come Down
. She was part of a settler convoy of five ships exploring this arm of space. The
Never Come Down
stayed to survey the system. The other four ships kept on going. Guess they didn’t like the short lease left on the sun here. There’s nothing on record to indicate the reason behind their choice of name.’

Lana grunted. ‘And I seem to recall Dollar-sign implying it was
his
people who found this system.’

‘That’s not the really worrying thing. The
Never Come Down
was posted missing, not heard of again. This world’s name was entered in the common navigation records by the other four ships after they settled a system a few light years from here.’

‘Not scared of superstition again, Zeno? Isn’t that was the damned professor said?’

‘I’ve asked Polter to widen the satellite search… scan for the wreckage of a ship and the remains of a colony down here.’

Lana’s eyes narrowed. It wouldn’t be the first failed colony. Calder himself had come from just such a beast… a lost technological base and humanity driven to barbarism by an unexpected ice age on Hesperus. But if the race of man were going to try to settle here, they would have either needed to turn to genetic engineering to alter their bodies, or have been planning some serious terraforming to cool the world for human-standard survival. Hardly worth doing with a short-lease sun about to burn out above.
Unless the world contains something very valuable
, said the voice within her. The kind of valuable that attracted pond life like Dollar-sign Dillard and his mine’s shadowy backers. ‘The
Never Come Down
. Maybe her crew should have taken the ship’s name a little more literally,’ mused Lana. ‘Set-up a nice safe orbital habitat to live on and kept the local ecosystem at a shuttle ride’s distance.’

‘Advice that perhaps we should have followed, too?’ suggested Skrat.

‘File it under spilt milk, Mister raz Skeratt.’

‘I’m hardly a mammal, dear girl,’ complained the first mate. ‘Your race’s fondness for milk, spilt or otherwise, has always left me rather nauseous.’

Lana scratched her face. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll land the shuttle on the field, make a big show of adjusting the sensors for low-light and thermal imaging, then take off again.’

‘The odds of finding anything in the dark…’ said Zeno.

‘It’s not the jungle we’ll be searching,’ said Lana. ‘Skrat, you head on out for a wider sweep of the area. Before you go, you’ll pass low over the mine works and drop me and Zeno by the edge of the mountains. If we know what’s really going on here, we’ll have a better chance of finding Calder, even if they haven’t got him tied up in some tunnel chamber next to a pallet full of car-sized diamonds.’