Horizon Storms (43 page)

Fortunately, one of the settlement’s architects was an amateur astronomer by hobby. He owned a fairly sophisticated telescope with which he’d intended to study the night skies of Crenna, though his avocation had largely been foiled by the planet’s bright moon, which washed out most stars and nebulae. When the recent sunspot activity had grown bad

enough to disrupt local communications, the architect had converted the device to a solar telescope, occasionally focusing the eyepiece on the sun and projecting its image onto a screen. But he had not used it in months.

“I need to see what’s going on up there,” Davlin told Mayor Ruis when he learned of the telescope. “I should have understood when Rlinda Kett told me she’d sighted hydrogues in this system a year ago. I didn’t connect it with the sunspots and the ion storms. Something’s happening there, something bad.”

Because he’d read many confidential Hansa briefings that related to the hydrogue war, Davlin felt a growing dread about what might be happening here. The warglobes had not attacked the colony—yet their actual purpose might prove even more sinister in the long run.

He and the mayor waited while the astronomer took his telescope out of its shed and positioned it so they could observe the sun at noon. As he focused the eyepiece and held up the projection screen, the architect said,

“The sunspots were humongous before, and judging from the static on our radios, I bet they’re even worse now.”

“I don’t believe that ‘worse’ is an adequate word to describe it,” Davlin said as the wavering image came into focus. Not long ago, Crenna’s star had been a stable yellow-orange sun; now it was an absolute battleground.

Faeros fireballs and hydrogue warglobes swarmed about like sparks flying from a disturbed campfire and battered each other. The sun itself had become a boiling cauldron.

Davlin turned quickly to the mayor. “Is there a ship I can use? Does this colony have a vessel that’ll reach orbit? I need to get closer to investigate.”

Ruis and the astronomer didn’t entirely understand what they were seeing, but Davlin was obviously agitated. They looked at each other.

“Since Branson Roberts took the Blind Faith, we’ve been without any ready transport, not even to Relleker—which isn’t very far away.”

“Well, there’s one ship, a single-passenger craft,” the astronomer pointed out. “It’s old and doesn’t run very well, and there’s not much ekti in its tanks, certainly not enough for a round trip anywhere.”

“Let me tinker with the engines and see. I don’t need the stardrive. I’m just going to use it in-system.” Before he left, Davlin turned back to the 266

two men. “Better not tell anyone else about this until I come back. If it’s what I’m afraid of, there’ll be plenty of time for us all to panic.”

Reluctantly, the ship hauled him out of Crenna’s gravity well. Davlin had spent a day working on its engines and systems. There seemed no point in maintaining a ship that didn’t have enough fuel to fly, so its previous owner hadn’t taken care of the vessel since the ekti shortage.

But standard rocket propellant carried it away from the planet and closer to the stirred beehive of the sun. Luckily, the single-passenger craft was designed as a tourist vessel, outfitted with image-capturing equipment and enhanced sensors—not for any scientific purpose, but just to take sou-venir pictures.

Davlin used the imagers to focus in on the star’s surface, already feeling his heart sink. Masking out the central sphere with an eclipse circle allowed him to discern the tattered remnants of the furious corona. “This is bad. Very bad.”

The faeros and hydrogues were causing damage deep in the stellar core, churning the nuclear fires. The EDF had already reported such all-out brawls of elemental superbeings in numerous uninhabited systems. Now, though, it was happening here, at Crenna.

When Davlin’s instruments analyzed the solar flux, he was astounded at how low the energy output had already dropped. The sunspots were large, dark blotches like bruises and bloodstains spreading across the surface of the sun.

He activated his communications system and sent a transmission back to the colony, where Mayor Ruis waited for him in the town’s receiving station. His answering transmission was full of static, the words torn apart and fuzzed. “Yes, Davlin. What’s your report?”

A huge flare erupted from the solar surface, an early death throe of the sun, and Davlin watched the hydrogues sweep in like piranhas. “My God, it’s already started.”

Crenna was in terrible trouble, and the people there did not yet understand. Davlin delivered the harsh news as clearly as he could. “They’re going to extinguish the sun.”

735RLINDA KETT

The Blind Faithand Voracious Curiosityflew side by side through space.

Just like old times. Both vessels were packed with provisions, sophisticated processing equipment, weather gauges, and instruments for the optimistic colonists who ventured through the Klikiss transportals.

Each candidate planet had its share of native metals and minerals that could be converted into useful objects, but even the most ambitious pioneers couldn’t make do without the proper fabrication tools. This time, the Blind Faith carried large excavators and rock-crunchers, machines so big they could never fit through a transportal, even if someone had been able to get the behemoths up the cliffside on Rheindic Co and through the tunnels of the abandoned alien city.

Rlinda’s Voracious Curiosity held a four-month supply of protein and vitamin concentrates to ensure the settlement’s survival through lean times, until the colonists could establish their own agriculture and determine which of the native life forms were edible. It offended Rlinda’s sensibilities to be hauling such bland fare—was life really worth surviving if a person had to eat flavorless protein pastes?—but she wasn’t in a position to quibble with what the Hansa placed on the manifest.

Neither was BeBob. While following Rlinda on her extended delivery runs, her favorite ex-husband worked hard and maintained a low profile.

Chairman Wenceslas had come through on his promise to “ignore” his unofficial absence from EDF duty, but BeBob didn’t trust General Lanyan or the other stuffed-uniform military officers.

The two vessels arrived at the fledgling colony on Corribus a full two hours ahead of schedule. Early in her merchant career, Rlinda had made a habit of padding her estimated flight time so that she would routinely complete her deliveries earlier than expected. The exaggeration harmed no one.

It made the customers happy and gave them an inflated sense of Rlinda’s reliability, though if anybody had bothered to check her competitors’ flight times, they would have realized she was no faster than anyone else.

They flew in tandem, perfectly familiar with each other’s skills. The 268

two ships looked like a pair of falcons cruising toward the granite-walled canyon and the once-empty Klikiss settlement. When they landed at the cleared spaceport on the rustling plains outside of the canyon, Rlinda saw no reception committee. Only a few hundred people had passed through the transportal to set up their foothold, and no doubt they had heavy schedules and hard work. They had been here only a few weeks, but they needed all the equipment and supplies the two ships could deliver. The next stopover was scheduled for a month hence.

She opened a channel to the Blind Faith. “Here we are, BeBob. Corribus at last. I’ll bet you’ve always wanted to come here.”

His response wasn’t surprising. “Never heard of the place before you told me it was on our route.”

“Never heard of Corribus? With all that time alone on your ship, why don’t you take an interest in history?” The man used most of his free time to amuse himself with simulated gambling games and vapid entertainment loops.

“Oh, I don’t avoid learning just history. Never much cared for current events, either, except when they affect me.”

“You’re hopeless, BeBob.” She switched off the comm and opened the hatch of the Curiosity. The gravity was slightly heavier here than she was used to, so she stepped forward with a lumbering gait.

Of all the abandoned planets connected by the Klikiss transportal network, mysteries lay thickest on Corribus. Here the Klikiss ruins were scorched, burned, vitrified. In their initial investigation report, a survey team had speculated that on this very planet the Klikiss race had made their last stand against . . . something. Rlinda recalled that Corribus was also where Margaret and Louis Colicos had deciphered the alien engineering diagrams for the Klikiss Torch. She seemed to be crossing paths with Margaret Colicos wherever she went.

BeBob emerged from his spacecraft and quickly put on a pair of sun-filtering goggles. Rlinda was the first to notice the lone man coming toward them. “One guy? He’s awfully ambitious if he thinks he can unload all the supplies and equipment by himself.”

BeBob waved. The man trudged forward and stopped, cocking his head to look at the two delivery ships. He had shaggy, gray-yellow hair and wore old clothes and padded boots; the heavy pack slung over his shoul-

ders was swollen with gear. His wooden walking stick was freshly whittled from a native tree. He had not shaved for just long enough that the stubble on his cheeks looked like unkempt bristles rather than an intentional beard.

Rlinda was amused. “Are you trying to win a Daniel Boone contest? Is that who you think you are?”

“No. I think I’m . . . Hud Steinman. Never wanted to be anybody else.”

Rlinda shook the man’s hand and tried not to be too obvious when she wrinkled her nose. The man had an odor about him. Apparently his adherence to the true pioneer spirit extended to infrequent bathing, laundering, and changing of clothes. “Are you the colony rep? We’ve got a full manifest of stuff to unload.”

Steinman glanced back toward the tall canyon, where small figures were finally hurrying toward the landed ships. “Colony rep? Hell, no.

They’re too busy dicking around setting up committees, filling out permits, and bickering over who gets to be the first mayor. Me, I came here to get away from all that. I plan to walk out onto the plains and fend for myself for a while.”

BeBob looked forlornly at the Blind Faith. “We’ve brought some pretty useful equipment here. You sure you don’t want any of it?”

“Nah, it’s not on my list of needs. I already did my work for the Hansa and now I’m taking my well-deserved reward.” With a smile, he gestured to encompass the big sky. “I’m the one who tracked this place down, you know. I was a transportal explorer, punching a random destination tile and jumping right through—like closing your eyes and leaping headfirst off a diving board, without even knowing if there’s water in the pool.”

BeBob shook his head. “I can’t imagine what would drive anyone to do a crazy thing like that, Mr. Steinman. Better you than me.”

“Davlin Lotze did it,” Rlinda said. “Plenty of times. He didn’t have much common sense.”

The pioneer shifted his grip on his wooden walking stick. “Maybe you two just aren’t old enough or bored enough to take a random gamble. I wanted to go fight the damned drogues. Pissed me off with all that baloney, wrecking Roamer skymines, attacking scientific research platforms, wiping out decent settlements. I had relatives on Boone’s Crossing, hardworking 270

lumberjacks who didn’t give a stale rat turd about who lives at the bottom of a gas giant.

“But the EDF wouldn’t have me because I’m too old. They didn’t actually laugh at me, but I could see it in their eyes at the recruiting desk.

Hell, why didn’t they think I could ride a navigation station or operate a weapons console as good as any kid? I just had the bad luck to be born at the wrong time.”

Rlinda opened the Curiosity’s cargo doors and studied the stacked crates, then used her own control codes to split open the Blind Faith’s hatch as well. Huge mining machines waited there like sleeping behemoths ready to be put to work.

BeBob, though, wanted to hear the rest of the man’s story. “Born at the wrong time? You got to live through decades of full Hansa peace. Why complain? You must have had a good and productive life.”

“Yes, but it gets tiresome reading historical accounts of other people’s adventures. The Spiral Arm finally got interesting when I was too darned old to enjoy it. But I didn’t let that stop me. I risked my scrawny ass by jumping through transportals. I documented fourteen viable Klikiss worlds—more than anybody else.”

Rlinda wasn’t so sure about his claim. She couldn’t remember how many places Davlin had visited, whether on purpose or by accident when he’d been lost in the network. Thinking fond thoughts, she hoped Davlin was settling in well at his quiet colony. After this mission, she and BeBob were due to return to Relleker, near Crenna, but she doubted she’d have time to visit him.

“And Corribus was your favorite of all those places?” BeBob asked.

Rlinda wondered if her partner was shopping for a place to settle down himself, if he decided against going back to Crenna, where he’d hidden for so long.

“It was—when it was empty and quiet,” Steinman answered. “We’ll see what happens after this whole colony business shakes out.”

Rlinda frowned at him. “You didn’t think you’d have a whole planet to yourself, did you?”

Steinman chuckled, showing bad teeth. “No, the Hansa isn’t quite that generous.” He looked back again at the group approaching from the vil-

lage. “Time for me to go. Give my regards to . . . whoever ends up being the mayor of this place.”

Before he set off onto the whispering plains of brown grasses and stark poletrees that stood up like the masts of partially sunken ships, Rlinda called, “You sure there’s nothing we can give you, Mr. Steinman? Some mealpax or a couple of tubes of protein paste? I have Bland and Extra Bland.”

He stuck his walking stick into the soft ground. “No, thanks. I’ll try hunting on my own.” The tall grasses had folded around him by the time the rest of the Corribus colonists arrived.