The Devil's Nebula (11 page)

She turned her back on them, pulled her prison garb over her shoulders, and stepped into the smartsuit. It seemed to flow up and over her nakedness like something alive, coating her contours as if made to measure.

“Ed,” she said in amazement, “they’ve downloaded my old suit’s memory core and settings. This one is exactly like the old one, but...” She closed her eyes and murmured something, communicating with the suit. “It’s faster. It knows more – its memory cache is far larger than the old suit’s.” She shook her head, laughing.

Carew reached into his trouser pocket and found the old coin which he’d carried with him since the age of ten. He felt for the statuette, thinking that the authorities might have seen their way to supplying him with that too – but such largesse was too much to hope for.

Jed found a mini-bar and broke out three ice-cold beers in celebration. He passed them round and hoisted his own. “To life,” he toasted.

“If not liberty,” Lania rejoined.

“That supposes,” Carew said, slaking his thirst with a mouthful of beer, “we agree to undertake the mission.”

“As much as you detest the Expansion elite,” Lania said, “I can’t see you not agreeing to their offer. Or would you rather die by lethal injection?”

Carew smiled. “As much as I detest the bastards...” He paused. “You’re right. I’ll agree. Jed?”

“What do
you
think, boss?”

“And Lania?”

“I’d choose life over death any day. And to tell the truth, the idea of speeding through Vetch space on the
Hawk
is rather exciting. Call me shallow, but I’d do this even if my life didn’t depend on it.”

Carew nodded. “That’s settled then. We accept the offer.”

“Does that mean we’re going?” Jed said.

“Yes, Jed,” Carew said, clapping the engineer on the back, “that means we’re risking our necks on a harebrained mission through Vetch space on a spurious errand after long-lost colonists.”

Lania cocked her head at him. “You don’t believe what Gorley said?”

Carew thought about it. “Let’s say that I’ll treat his explanation with a healthy dose of scepticism, until we find out the real reason – if we ever do.”

She nodded. “I must admit, when he claimed it was a scientific mission, as well as a rescue mission, I began to wonder.”

“And yet,” Carew began, “what else can it be? I’d like to know a little more about these cultists from Procyon, if possible.”

Lania spoke to her smartsuit, but shook her head. “Nothing in the cache,” she said.

“I wonder if the information was intentionally excised?”

Jed pointed to a terminal and screen in the corner of the room. “How about trying the station’s net?”

“I’ll give it a go,” Lania said, striding over to the screen and running expert fingers across the touchpad. The Expansion flag, a florid capital E bounded by a dozen stars, rotated on the screen.

She smiled up at Carew and said, “Limited access only. But” – she nipped her bottom lip between white teeth – “I’m pretty certain I can get around that.”

Carew drained his beer and opened another one. He moved to the viewscreen and stared out. A dozen starships, varying in size from two-person exploration vessels to vast void liners, moved slowly to and from the station, scintillating in the starlight.

Lania said, “That’s strange.”

“What?” He joined her at the terminal. Jed stood beside Lania, staring at the scrolling text.

“There’s absolutely no information at all on the cultists from Procyon.” She looked up at him. “It’s obviously been removed.”

“Procyon cultists,” Jed said to himself.

Carew looked at him.

“It’s just...” The chunky engineer hesitated. “When I was on Tamalkin, twenty years ago and I came across that crashed starship I told you about – well, I remember this group who didn’t exactly worship it, but it was the centre of their beliefs in some way.”

“In what way?” Lania asked.

Jed shook his head. “That’s just it... I can’t remember. But I do recall they called themselves the Sons of Procyon.”

Carew said to Lania, “Trawl for crashed starships and see what we come up with.”

Lania nodded and her long fingers danced across the touchpad.

Seconds later the results came up and she shook her head. “Same again. Absolutely nothing.”

Carew took a long swallow of ice-cold beer and nodded. “That’s interesting in itself. So we know that the authorities want no-one to know anything at all about Procyon cultists or crashed starships.”

Jed said, “What do you think they’re hiding?”

“I wish I knew,” Carew said. “But it must relate to the mission. They want to trace the colonists for some reason known only to themselves, and all this talk about ‘scientific exploration’ is so much hot air.”

For the next hour they drank and chatted amongst themselves, Carew impatient – now that they knew the mission was imminent – to give their decision to the officials and get under way. There would be the
Hawk
to test-fly, the flight-path through the void to program into the ship’s smartcore.

Lania lay on a foam-form, miles away, as she played with her new smartsuit. For his part, Jed drank a great many beers – suggesting at one point that he regale his friends with a series of bawdy poems he had learned from a bar-keeper on Mintaka III. Carew managed to dissuade him, nursing his beer and contemplating what the future might hold.

Lania resurfaced from her communion with the smartsuit and smiled across at him. “What are you thinking, Ed?”

He grunted a humourless laugh. “Looking ahead, Lania. Wondering what we’ll do when we get back.”

“Tough they won’t let us keep the
Hawk
.”

Carew smiled. “I never really thought they would, in all honesty.”

“So we’ll be bankrupt, without a ship – and who’d employ three known ex-criminals?” She gave him an odd look. “And what about the statuette the dealer wanted?”

“Destroyed with the
Poet
,” he said. “I left it on the flight-deck when they dragged us out.”

She looked at him, smiling her
I-know-something-you-don’t-know
smile. “You sure about that, Ed?”

“Sure I’m sure. How was I to know the bastards would slag the
Poet
?”

She said, “You left it on the recess beside your lounger, hm?”

Carew laughed. “You picked it up, didn’t you? But they searched us.”

“They just stripped us to ensure we weren’t carrying weapons, Ed. But I
was
carrying the statuette and the animal figure I liberated from the museum.”

Jed looked across at her drunkenly. “How could you be carrying them if they strip-searched you?” He stopped. “Oh.”

“Didn’t you wonder why I was fidgeting on the couch, Ed?” She shuffled uncomfortably. “I’ll retrieve them just as soon as we’re installed aboard the
Hawk
.”

Carew laughed. “Does your talent know no limits, Lania Takiomar?”

“So when we do get back from the far side of Vetch territory,” she said, “you think a hundred thousand units will buy us a new ship?”

“Something at the bottom end of the market, perhaps.”

Jed raised his bottle. “To... to L-lania Takiomar!” he slurred.

“I’ll drink to that,” Carew said.

The toast was interrupted by a chime from the door. It slid open, and Commander Gorley and Director Choudri strode into the room.

Gorley looked from Jed to Lania; then his contemptuous gaze alighted on Carew. “I can see you have been availing yourselves of the hospitality provided,” he said. “I take it you’ve come to a decision?”

Carew raised his bottle. “You’ll be pleased to know that the decision was unanimous,” he said. “We’ll fly you through Vetch space to the Devil’s Nebula.”

Director Choudri tempered the atmosphere with a smile. “Excellent, my friends. Now, I advise you to get some rest. The test-flight is scheduled to commence in a little under ten hours from now.”

He nodded a farewell and strode from the room.

Carew stood and moved to the viewscreen. Soon, he would have liberty, of sorts. He looked beyond the starships moving around the station and stared at the sweep of stars that was Vetch space.

Way beyond, a faint smudge at the limit of his vision, was the distinctive horned shape of the Devil’s Nebula.

CHAPTER SEVEN

T
HAT MORNING OVER
breakfast Maatja tried to detect some change in her parent’s manner. If her father had indeed been chosen by the Weird, then surely he would have said something. At the very least, the honour conferred by the aliens would be obvious to her. But he behaved just as he always had: calm, softly-spoken, smiling and joking with Maatja and her sister.

They sat in their cool hut and ate a meal of fruit and phar, dried now and cut into chewy strips. It was more palatable like this, but still Maatja found it hard to swallow. She wondered if this was because she knew what it was doing to her people, or simply that it didn’t taste very good. Perhaps a bit of both, she thought.

“Tomorrow the Flyer comes!” Hahta said.

Maatja looked at her father. “Why is it coming?” she asked.

“It brings news,” he said. “News that will be important to us.”

“Did Leah and Rahn tell you this?”

“At a meeting three nights ago, they said they had been contacted by the Weird and told of the coming.”

Only the Elders, Leah and Rahn, communicated directly with the aliens. Sometimes, a giant Sleer came to the clearing and sought out the Elders, and they would all go into their hut and talk for hours. Or Maatja presumed they talked, though she had never heard voices issuing from the hut.

It was not a foraging day today, but even so Maatja told her mother that she was going into the jungle for berries. While her parents repaired the thatch of their hut and Hahta played with other children her age, Maatja stepped into the undergrowth behind the hut and ran into the jungle. She took the well-worn path used by the foragers, then struck off north to the clearing of the ghala tree.

On the way she stopped at a lakka bush, sat before it and picked a dozen berries. She ate them one by one, then felt her stomach heave. She vomited her breakfast all across the jungle floor and a minute later began to feel hungry.

On the way to the clearing, she picked fruit and berries and ate a second breakfast.

She came to the ghala tree and looked about for the twig-and-leaf symbol. She found it across the clearing, stuck into the loam. Kavan, the outcast boy, had told her that the circle of the clearing denoted the time it took the sun to circle World. The left half of the clearing marked the hours of darkness and the right half daylight. The stick symbol was planted in the daylight half, a body’s length from the top of the circle – which meant, Maatja calculated, that she didn’t have long to wait.

She would tell Kavan about the coming of the Flyer tonight and see if he knew anything about it. Sometimes he was full of information about the Weird and the fissure people, but at others he said he knew nothing. All his information was gleaned from what he overheard at the Outcast’s nightly meetings, and from what his father had told him about the fissure people.

At first, Maatja had refused to believe his stories. She had been brought up to believe in the goodness of the Weird – after all, they provided for the fissure people, didn’t they? But then a few years ago Kavan had told her about the effect of phar on humans, and as an experiment she had taken lakka berries every day for a week and expelled the phar from her system, and over the next few days she had begun to notice a difference. She felt brighter, more alert; and strangely, she no longer felt in awe of the Weird. They were just another life-form, one among many, but the ones who provided the foodstuff that kept her people drugged.

“But why do they give us phar?” she had asked Kavan a long time ago. “What do they want from us?”

The lithe jungle boy had simply shrugged and said, “They want
us
, Maatja. They want humans. You know that the Harvester sometimes takes humans, and sometimes they are Chosen and go to the lair of the Weird.”

“Yes,” she had persisted, “but
why
do they want us?”

And Kavan had shrugged again and admitted his ignorance.

She waited in the dappled light of the jungle, alert for sounds of Kavan’s approach. As an Outcast, he prided himself on his stealth. Only on time in twenty did she hear him coming; more often, he approached from behind and frightened her with a dangled vine or tossed yikka spider.

She sat up suddenly. This time, for some reason, Kavan was making no effort to soften his approach – if indeed it was Kavan crashing through the undergrowth. She leapt up and concealed herself behind a stand of ferns, her heart beating fast.

Seconds later Kavan burst into the clearing and looked around wildly, a tall gangly boy with thin limbs and a shock of almost-white hair. He saw her behind the fern and ran across to her.

He grabbed her hand and pulled her from the clearing.

“What – ?” she began as she stumbled along beside him, sprinting ever deeper into the jungle.

“Sleer!” he hissed.

The word sent a jolt of panic through her. They ran even faster, leaping over fallen trees and dodging hanging vines. From time to time Kavan darted a glance over his shoulder, then redirected their course minimally.

Then she heard it – the sound of pursuit – and her heart felt as if it might burst from her chest.

She heard a crashing in her wake, the rending of trees and undergrowth. She looked over her shoulder and caught a glimpse of something purple and blue – like a huge, animated afterbirth, in the approximate shape of a human being – following them at speed.

They darted left, beneath the purple fronds of a ghala tree. Kavan pulled her after him, jinking this way and that in a zigzag course in an effort to lose the creature.

“Lots...” – he panted – “...lots of Weird activity at the moment. Something’s... happening. Don’t know what.”

They burst into a sunlit clearing and Kavan tugged her across it, then stopped suddenly.