Transference Station (11 page)

Each of Lana’s crewmen had shouldered a rail rifle inside the hold, and she noted from the guns’ LEDs that the weapons were dialled up to maximum acceleration; ball bearings in drum magazines ready to be accelerated at velocities capable of chewing chunks out of a castle wall. Before she’d landed, Lana would have said she was being over-cautious in ditching her pistol belt’s webbing for an assault rifle. Having seen the local wildlife up close, now she was wondering whether bringing rifles rather than cannons might be considered reckless.

‘This is your first real alien world, Mister Durk,’ said Lana.

‘Transference Station doesn’t count, skipper?’

‘Orbitals are all the same,’ said Lana. She gestured at the android to drop the ramp. ‘At least, the human-designed ones are. Some bigger, some smaller. Always too many citizens and too much advertising being hosed in your direction. Out there, beyond that ramp… are sights that only a handful of people have ever seen. Maybe ever will see.’

‘With good reason, one suspects,’ said Skrat. ‘This skirl would settle for a little staid uniformity right about now.’

‘I hear that,’ said Zeno. A light in the shuttle’s ceiling started rotating and bleating an opening warning as the ramp lowered. ‘Not many trading opps on a world with horse-sized spiders and dragons in the air that could treat pterodactyls as fast food. Hey, Skrat, maybe some of those fliers are your long-lost cousins?’

‘If so, they can stay lost, dear boy.’

As the ramp thumped on the ground, the heat of the world outside flooded in like a tsunami, almost bowling Lana over. Jesus, the heat outside was thick enough to carve with a laser. Lana reached out, tapping the controls woven into the arm of Calder’s smart suit to active it, and then thumbed the cooling system up to max. Lana’s own suit was already reacting to the heat, set to keep her flesh at a constant comfortable body temperature. She sighed as she walked down the ramp, resigning herself to being either too hot or too cold as she wandered around the base. This mission was going to end with her getting a cold, she just knew it. And apart from the new crewman, Lana couldn’t even comfort herself with the thought that her misery would enjoy company – the android was as unaffected by temperature as he was by all physical frailties, and as far as Skrat was concerned, Abracadabra was as good as home living for her lizard-like first mate.

Lana and her crew emerged onto the landing field; ground blackened from the napalm bombing it had originally received to clear the jungle for the base. Robot tanks rumbled around the landing field on caterpillar tracks, anti-aircraft chain guns on the turrets spinning around and occasionally releasing bursts into the sky. Two-legged sentry guns, little more than cannons with steel feet, patrolled the inside perimeter of the laser fence.
Jesus, this feels more like a military base under siege than a mining camp.
Despite the heat, the ground was being splattered with heavy gobs of rain. Layers of steam drifted up from puddles in the trampled mud.

Sebba’s larger vessel had landed before the control shuttle, parked seventy feet away, thrusters still leaking mist from its touchdown. A tube-shaped lift had descended to the ground from the vessel’s belly, the professor disembarked to speak with one of the expedition members, a head or two shorter than Lana’s haughty passenger. From the gesticulating and arms thrashing about, the conversation appeared to be growing as heated as the planet’s atmosphere.

Lana listened to the discordant, alien song from the distant jungle – eerie cries, screeches and whistles that sounded like nothing she was used to. ‘I’ll take artificial vat-grown gems.’
Especially
if it means getting out of here
.

‘This heat is incredible,’ said Calder, his face ruddy and sweating as the four of them trudged towards Sebba’s ship. ‘You couldn’t fire a greenhouse to run this hot back on Hesperus.’

Lana shrugged. Shit, when you came from a failed snowball colony, running the ship’s air-con at body temperature must seem like a miracle to the exiled nobleman. Calder appeared stunned by the novelty of what he was seeing around him. Jungle, jungle, and a little more jungle. Yeah, sims were one thing, real life was always another.

‘I rather like it,’ said Skrat. ‘Properly bracing!’ Just as she’d predicted. Skrat was unphased by the environment, his thick tail swishing merrily behind him as they crossed the landing field. All the first mate needed was a cane and he could have been going out for an afternoon stroll around what passed for a park on a skirl world. Well, at least she wouldn’t be picking up the tab for the heating bills in Skrat’s cabin down here.

‘Yeah,’ said Zeno, ‘definitely related to those flying critters.’

‘The calls coming from the jungle,’ said Calder, ‘they sound… wrong?’

‘That’ll be your fleshy body jerking your chain,’ said Zeno. ‘Hey! Hey, Calder Durk, you’re missing the last couple of million years of evolution you need to survive out here.’

Professor Sebba turned towards the
Gravity Rose
’s crew as they halted in the shadow of her ship, indicating the local she was talking to. ‘This is Kien-Yen Leong; he’s in charge of mining operations. We’ve got something of a problem.’

‘Anything we can sort with the supplies we’ve got parked in orbit?’ asked Lana.

Kien-Yen Leong was a squat, broad man sporting a thick brown beard. He must have come from one of the alliance’s Sino-settled worlds, and a high gravity one at that; the man’s ancestors genetically engineered in the dim and distant past for an environment that Lana would be lucky to stand up in without an exo-suit. When he spoke, looking at his pallid face’s muscles was like watching the tectonic movement of slabs of granite sliding across each other. ‘Damn straight,’ growled Leong. He indicated a pair of helicopters parked on a helipad above the base. They were hybrids, half-transporter, half gunship, with missile pods and machine gun domes studding their grey fuselage. ‘You’ve brought fuel for our choppers?’

‘That we have,’ said Lana. ‘There’s a shuttle’s worth in orbit.’ She indicated the large metal fuel tank squatting in front of the pad. ‘But you can’t have burnt through as much juice as that? You’re running a mining operation here, not an airline.’

‘Not much damn mining going on this week. One of our staff, Janet Lento is missing,’ explained Leong. ‘She disappeared seven days ago. We’ve been running search and rescue flights across the jungle, day and night, trying to find her.’ His tone was brusque and direct, but he couldn’t hide the concern in his voice. If you were going to be swallowed up by that squawking crimson netherworld beyond the laser fence, Lana had the feeling you’d want someone like Kien-Yen Leong looking for you until the base had burnt through its fuel reserves.

Lana gazed back at her control shuttle and the professor’s vessel. Both ships were too big to be much use hovering above a jungle canopy – even with antigravity assist, their orbital thrusters would tear up the jungle and fry the lost expedition member well before she could be winched out. ‘Okay, I’ll radio Polter and get the helicopter fuel loaded onto the cargo landers first. You can fill us in on the situation on the hoof, Mister Leong.’

‘Finding the missing woman,’ said Calder. ‘Is that a challenge, skipper?’

Lana didn’t like the way he’d said that. ‘Only for me and Zeno, your most regal highness. You and Skrat can remain here and work on the job we’ve been paid to do. And you can stay on
this
side of the laser fence while you’re doing it.’

‘I was only offering to come out and help look for her. By helicopter… I’m not actually mad enough to want to put boots on the ground out there.’

‘Then you’ve already mastered the second rule of survival on Abracadabra,’ said Leong. ‘Never touch the dirt when you’re in the air.’

‘What’s the first rule?’ asked Calder.

‘Never leave the base.’

‘This side,’ emphasised Lana for her new recruit’s benefit. As if she didn’t have enough problems, without Calder casting around for a white horse which he could use to rescue the missing driver… or maybe they rode snow bears on his homeworld, she’d have to ask some time.

‘You’re the boss, skipper,’ sighed Calder.

‘Damn straight. Shit, I guess you’ve mastered the first rule of sliding void with me, too.’

CHAPTER FIVE

— Someday a real supernova’s going to come —

Lana gazed out of the newly refuelled helicopter, seated and belted in one of the passenger seats behind the pilot and gunner’s position. Kien-Yen Leong was occupying the gunner’s seat – every time he moved his head, the chain gun on the nose swivelled as it tracked the movement of his helmet. Zeno and Sebba were sitting alongside Lana. They were skimming low over the jungle, the second helicopter following directly behind, the crew’s voices bouncing beseechingly off the canopy from loudspeakers mounted under its fuselage, calling for the missing woman to fire off a flare if she could hear their flight. Both helicopters were following a straight ugly road that had been firebombed out of the wilderness. Calder and Skrat had stayed behind as she’d ordered – the former, reluctantly; keeping busy with the work of landing cargo shuttles inside the camp, disgorging crates for robot tractors to trundle away with to pile inside the base’s concrete hangars.

‘There it is,’ said Leong, pointing to the slash of a wide, winding river, an azure-coloured snake slipping all the way down from the mountain range. Fast moving and wild, its waters were powerful enough to plunge on for thousands of miles across the continent. A pall of surface steam from the river leaked out over the jungle – as though the rapids had been poured out of a tipped kettle. The makeshift road they were following ended by a riverbank, and Lana noticed the tanker parked below. It was a long, caterpillar-tracked, double-segmented truck. Up front, the cab wouldn’t have looked out of place on a battlefield – four sets of turrets sporting heavy machine guns, anti-aircraft missiles and recoilless cannons, radar dishes mounted on its sides like steel elephant ears. Suction pipes had been unfurled from a trailer section that was capable of holding a small lake’s worth of water, hoses left dropped near the river. The drone responsible for handling the pumping gear was standing as inactive as a statue in a space designed for it on the vehicle’s rear. But of the human driver, there was no sign.

‘Lento must have got out of the cab,’ pronounced Sebba. ‘Despite all instructions to the contrary.’

‘If she dismounted, she had a good reason,’ said Leong. ‘Maybe the truck’s robot jammed when it was dragging pipes into the river. The lightning in the gas layer does weird things to the systems down here. Nothing works as it should.’

‘Least of all the workers,’ said Sebba, making a little real labour sound like a dirty word.

‘Listen,’ said Leong, ‘if DSD wasn’t so damned cheap, he would have paid for us to be outfitted with mining nano-tech from the start, rather than relying on antique water knife drills and liquid pressure blasting.’

‘Doesn’t the driver have an implant you can track?’ asked Lana, eager to turn the conversation back to the practical matter at hand.

‘Janet Lento did, but the atmosphere can fry your uplink if you’re caught out in a storm. There’s been three storms since she went missing.’

Landing skids extended from the helicopter as it settled down next to the abandoned tanker, Leong pulling off his helmet, leaving his seat and throwing the side door open. Nearly bowled over by heat-rush filling the air-conditioned cabin, Lana pushed out after Zeno, the android first on the ground next to the vehicle. Above them, the second helicopter circled in low, lazy loops, its rotor’s downdraft blasting blankets of leaves off the nearby jungle. Given what might be lurking out there, Lana would rather have the chopper riding shotgun over them, than not. The sky was a dull red crimson crackling with forks of energy. It appeared as if the sun was pulsing through the clouds, although that was just an optical illusion.
Damn, but the sun looks like it’s bleeding.
If you stared up at the bloody orb for long enough, you ended up with one hell of a headache.

Lana had to raise her voice to be heard over the whup-whup-whup from the copter hovering above. ‘You haven’t been able to move the truck?’

Leong shook his head. ‘Its power plant is as dead as a dodo. Don’t know why. I plugged in system diagnostics on a battery pack and there’s no damage I can find inside any of its engine systems.’ He pointed up at the sparking heavens. ‘Just more of that, I reckon.’

‘Let me have a try,’ said Zeno, making for the ladder up towards the tanker’s cabin. ‘I can tease more out of machines than the average bear.’

‘No shit,’ said Leong.

‘It’s a definite talent,’ said Lana, watching him climb. ‘Up on our ship, Zeno can ride herd on a couple of thousand robots in chorus.’

Zeno stopped by the thick steel entry access above. ‘There’s burn damage on the door.’

‘That was us,’ Leong called up to the android. ‘We had to cut the lock away when we first turned up here looking for Lento. It was sealed as tight as a coffin.’ His face crinkled, and Lana reckoned he had immediately regretted his choice of words. If the missing worker was in any coffin, then Lana reckoned it was the dense red and green jungle squatting beyond the tree line.

‘Did you check the ammo canisters up top?’ Lana asked Leong.

The squat man nodded. ‘Did it myself. No caps fired off in the vicinity.’

Lana caught sight of something on the other side of the riverbank, a pack of six-legged creatures the size of wolves moving slyly through the steam cover, green scales glittering like spilled oil in the moisture from the burning river. Bizarrely, each of the beasts bore a little saddleless rider, a small sharp-beaked lizard clinging proudly onto horn bones curling from the mount’s head. She was put in mind of alien bikers on the back of a line of motorcycles. ‘Company!’