Red Sun Bleeding

Red Sun Bleeding

Book 3 in the Sliding Void series

Stephen Hunt

Green Nebula

RED SUN BLEEDING

Book 3 in the Sliding Void series.

First published in 2011 by Green Nebula Press

Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Hunt

Typeset and designed by Green Nebula Press

The right of Stephen Hunt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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There once was a man up on high

Who stepped off a cliff,

And all the way down he complained

That gravity sure is a bitch!

- Ancient spacer’s shanty (anon).

Praise for Stephen

‘Mr. Hunt takes off at racing speed.’

- THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

‘Hunt’s imagination is probably visible from space. He scatters concepts that other writers would mine for a trilogy like chocolate-bar wrappers.’

- TOM HOLT

‘All manner of bizarre and fantastical extravagance.’

- DAILY MAIL

‘Compulsive reading for all ages.’

- GUARDIAN

‘An inventive, ambitious work, full of wonders and marvels.’

- THE TIMES

‘Hunt knows what his audience like and gives it to them with a sardonic wit and carefully developed tension.’

- TIME OUT

‘Studded with invention.’

-THE INDEPENDENT

‘To say this book is action packed is almost an understatement… a wonderful escapist yarn!’

- INTERZONE

‘Hunt has packed the story full of intriguing gimmicks… affecting and original.’

- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

‘A rip-roaring Indiana Jones-style adventure.’

—RT BOOK REVIEWS

‘A curious part-future blend.’

- KIRKUS REVIEWS

‘A ripping yarn … the story pounds along… constant inventiveness keeps the reader hooked… the finale is a cracking succession of cliffhangers and surprise comebacks. Great fun.’

- SFX MAGAZINE

‘Put on your seatbelts for a frenetic cat and mouse encounter... an exciting tale.’

- SF REVU

Contents

1. Two legs bad. Six legs good.

2. The mother-lode

3. All that must be left behind

4. The settlers’ vessel

5. Walk the Heezy’s guts

6. Of epilogues

7. Book 4 Sampler: Anomalous Thrust

Chapter 1

Two legs bad. Six legs good.

Calder Durk pulled the rifle stock close to his shoulder. Part of him – the barbarian part, probably – devoutly wished he carried one of the familiar broadswords he had trained on since a babe to face the beast about to leap out of the thick undergrowth. The more sensible part was grateful he carried a modern weapon with a six-hundred pellet drum, each shiny small metallic dart capable of being accelerated to bone-shattering velocities by the gun’s magnetic field. He listened to the crashing sound through the vines, growing closer every second. Snow-bears he knew how to fight. Mega-wolves he had hunted across glaciers, slain, stuffed and hung over the fireplace in his creaky old castle. But whatever was coming towards him now was going to be well out of his field of experience. That was the trouble with being reluctantly exiled from an icy-cold medieval homeworld, taken to the stars, signing up with a strange starship crew, then finding himself mysteriously and unceremoniously dumped into an alien jungle. None of this was exactly familiar . Except . . . the startled-looking woman who came hurtling out of the glistening wet scrub. She wore a green suit that Calder recognized. The same uniform as the other miners from this world’s lonely human outpost. Is she the missing driver? The one the camp had already spent weeks vainly searching the jungle for?

‘It’s alright,’ said Calder, lowering his rifle to show he intended no harm. ‘I’m from a ship chartered to bring supplies to the mining camp. Are you Janet Lento? My crew’s been helping your boss search the jungle for you.’

The woman stopped, but said nothing. What’s the matter with her? Calder might as well have been some statue she’d unexpectedly stumbled across in the jungle. He noticed the name tag stitched across her breast pocket, Lento. This is the missing driver, then. Still no reaction. The look of shock on the driver’s face appeared to be a more or less permanent fixture – nothing to do with her running into another human out in the middle of nowhere. Wide green eyes, glassy and wild. Taller than Calder, her frame starvation-thin from surviving weeks in the wild on nothing but berries and bugs, long dark hair matted with dirt and leaves. She didn’t seem to be sweating, even with the furnace heat from the mad red sun squatting high above the forest canopy. At least her suit’s cooling systems are intact and powered. If they’d failed, heat stroke would have claimed the lost miner within the hour.

‘I’m Calder Durk. My ship’s the Gravity Rose. I was working out on your camp’s landing field, unloading supplies. I lost consciousness, and when I woke up, I discovered myself here. Damned if I know what happened or how I travelled beyond the base’s defence perimeter. Did something similar happen to you? My radio’s vanished, but I’ve still got my rifle.’

Janet unclipped a communicator from her belt and tentatively offered it to Calder, her mouth open as though she was trying to speak but couldn’t. He took it from her and tried the device, but only static came back at him. ‘It’s broken? I was warned communications on Abracadabra would be spotty. Something to do with the solar activity from that pig-ugly sun in the sky?’

He was about to pass the useless device back to her when he heard a crunching sound behind him. Calder wheeled around. A long whippet-thin creature emerged from between two of the trees, maybe a foot high, a bony nose like an elephant’s trunk reaching out to pull leaves off the bushes and shove them into twin mouths either side of the trunk. It made contented snorts as it munched its way through the jungle, wobbling almost comically while grazing. Calder lowered his rifle. It headed towards a large series of globular plants at the far side of the clearing, each sphere striped yellow and red like giant sweets and resting on a bed of vines and spiny cushions. As the creature followed the leaves towards the spheres they started to quiver. A sudden lance of heated steam burst out of the bed of spines. The leaf eater squealed in an offended manner, leapt out of the way and bolted back the way it had came. Calder made a mental note to give any strange-looking plants a wide berth. Of course, being an alien jungle, there weren’t any plants here that were familiar to Calder.

‘You’ve stayed alive out here for week? Do you give survival lessons?’

The woman just stared at Calder as though he was speaking a foreign language. He tried to offer the radio back to her but she showed no interest in receiving it. Lento really did appear quite insane, as though she was looking through Calder rather than at him. ‘Stay here,’ ordered Calder, gesturing pointedly at the ground as if he was speaking with a particularly dim foreigner. He approached the nearest tree, slung the rifle over his shoulder and climbed the trunk with both hands. Calder shinned up until he reached its lowest branches, large waxy shield-sized leaves an angry red . . . the same shade as this system’s dying sun. He used the branches as a ladder, easy climbing compared to the frozen forests of home, where slipping on a single icy bough would end in a fatal plunge to the ground. Calder’s eyes flicked down to ensure the mute woman hadn’t wandered away; but quite the opposite . . . she had followed his example and shinned up the tree too, stopping by the lower boughs. Sensible. Staying out of the way must have been how Lento had survived in the jungle for so long. He reached the canopy top, poking his head through. Calder felt hope drain from his heart. Just an endless crimson forest steaming from the last rain. Abracadabra’s ugly bloated sun pulsed high in the firmament, making the clouds appear to glow intermittently, filaments of red spreading out like running blood. No sign of the mining camp. No sign even of the mountain where humanity’s sole outpost on this faded world had been blasted out of the thick jungle. How far have I been dragged from the base? If a predator had been responsible for dragging Calder away from the camp, then the exiled nobleman should have been food for its larder long ago. He spotted two dragon-sized lizards wheeling over the distant forest . . . the same species which had attacked his shuttle on the way down to the world, hungrily eyeing the new arrivals through the cockpit’s transparent ceramic as they dove at him. The only way things can get worse was is if the dying sun goes supernova early and kills me in the explosion. He ducked his head before the flying lizards noticed him, then carefully climbed back down, stopping on a branch close to Janet.

‘I don’t suppose you remember the way back to the mining truck you were driving?’

Her mouth opened but she said nothing.

‘Well, I guess we’re both lost. Our best chance is to listen out for a helicopter from the base. If one comes close I can take a pot-shot close to it with my rifle – that should set off its perimeter alarm. Let them know we’re close.’

Lento looked around twenty five, but with life extension treatments, she could have been older than Calder’s grandmother. I really am lost – wrong planet, wrong time period, wrong situation. Janet’s mouth opened, but this time, rather than just sucking air, he heard words, so faint and rasped he couldn’t make them out. ‘What did you say?’

Now Calder was listening, he heard her the second time.

‘It’s covered in spines.’

Calder glanced around. Some of the jungle’s plants resembled giant cacti, but he couldn’t see any from where they were seated. ‘What is?’

‘It’s covered in spines,’ she repeated, hardly louder than a breath.

Calder groaned in frustration. I’m sitting in my tree with someone who is clearly out of hers. What had Janet Lento run into out here to send her off the deep end? ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll get out of this, Janet Lento. My crew won’t give up on me. And your people have been searching for you since you were posted missing.’

‘It’s covered in spines.’

For a moment he wondered if she was talking about what passed for grass underfoot. Thick orange blades that bristled when you walked across them. ‘Well, I’ll be sure to wear gloves if I have to pick them up.’ Humouring her seemed to have the desired effect. She fell silent. ‘We could light a fire and try to attract attention. But everything in this land is so damn damp, I’m not sure how well it’d burn. And with the steam from the rivers and rain, distinguishing the smoke from the general boil-off isn’t going to be easy.’ It might be worth a try, though. The Gravity Rose’s crab-like navigator, Polter, was still in orbit alongside Chief Paopao. They had still been seeding orbital satellite coverage around the planet when Calder’s shuttle launched down to the ancient world. Could modern technology distinguish the difference between a rescue beacon’s smoke and natural steam from rainfall? Satellites still seemed like magic to Calder. The wizard’s all-seeing eye. Science or sorcery, he would take whatever help he could get right now.

Calder heard a scratching noise at the end of the branch. He peered through the bloody red leaves. A spider the size of a rat shook the tree’s vegetation, a peacock-like fan of multi-coloured fur at its rear, bristling as it drummed its fore-legs against the wood. Disgusted, Calder reversed his rifle and swiped the thing away using the gun’s collapsible metal butt. ‘Off you hop! This tree isn’t big enough for everyone. Guests get priority.’

As the spider fell it made a keening whistling noise like an angry kettle brought to the boil. Its cry was answered in the jungle, distant echoes muted by the thick undergrowth. That’s not good. The creature he had dislodged fell to the ground in the tree’s shade before whipping around in circles like a puppy chasing its tail.

Janet Lento shinned higher up the tree as the faraway whistling grew closer, ferns rustling as more spiders appeared. And Calder realized that what he had ejected from the tree wasn’t exactly a spider . . . at least, not an adult one. The mature hunters weren’t rat-sized. In fact, mastiff hunting hounds in the exiled prince’s palace kennels would have given the fully grown spiders a respectfully wide berth. The creatures swarmed forward, a series of legs pincering down either side of their orb-like bodies; large and small limbs interweaved like dancing tanks, at least four feelers up front for carrying and hacking with sharp, poisoned bristles. Dagger-sized fangs angrily clattered around their mouths, clusters of eyes at the mount of the central body bulb focusing on Calder. They didn’t appear happy in the slightest to find uninvited visitors in their tree, mistreating their hatchlings. The feeling is mutual. Calder realised that the long, low sound like creaking wood originated next to him. Janet Lento wasn’t speaking, but she could still make some noises and was at least aware enough of her surroundings not to appreciate dozens of nightmare-sized spiders scampering towards their perch above the jungle. Calder unslung the rifle and pointed it towards the ground. He squeezed the trigger but nothing happened. Cursing, he pressed the safety selector to semiautomatic and let have at the creatures below. His rifle was recoilless . . . the same magnetic field that accelerated the darts to hypersonic velocities catching the back burst and absorbing the energy, recovering it to help power the gun. Only a slight quivering with every hail of pellets triggered. Every short burst made a zup-zup sound as the gauss field flexed, followed by an angry explosive cracking as his ammunition broke the sound barrier. Swine-like squeals came from the spiders below as they were literally blown apart by each volley. They didn’t sound much like spiders . . . the arachnids back on Calder’s freezing home world, Hesperus, had been coin-sized, silent and joyfully shy. Shrewd enough to avoid humanity for the most part. These ones kept coming, leaping up at the lower trunk until Calder sighted on them. Not much more to it than pointing and squeezing. Colourful bodies burst apart with the impact. The nobleman heard a scampering noise from the back of the tree, and he leaned against a branch to hose a wave of spiders climbing up the rear. He changed position, the assault on the front renewed with fresh vigour. They drummed against the wood as they climbed. Calling their pack, or communicating with each other? Calder fought the impulse to check his ammunition count. He sweated, shooting furiously into their ranks for maybe five minutes, beating back a last attack made from all sides simultaneously. The spiders finally learnt caution, backing away from the tree, whistling angrily and impotently against the intruders, shaking their colourful fur fans as they attempted to intimidate the two newcomers. What was it the mining camp manager had said back on the landing field, describing the base’s murderous automated weapons? "We’re not in the food chain and they’ve learnt it the hard way." Too damn right. This was probably the first time this pack had run into humanity. Their fate was the same as so many non-sentient predators introduced to mankind across so many worlds.

‘Keep away!’ yelled Calder. ‘This tree is my kingdom now.’ So, this is what his realm had shrunk to, the measure of his reduced circumstances. The first time he’d actually shot a modern weapon, too. Guns in the sim entertainment shows that the ship’s android, Zeno, had used