The Devil's Nebula (15 page)

One of the adults called out, “Will the Weird be moving across space to the Human Expansion?”

Leah inclined her head. “Though my contact did not say as much, I suspect this is so. We have enjoyed the benefits of the Weird for many years, and now the time has come for us to share with our fellow humans the full wonder of our benefactors.”

An appreciative murmur passed through the gathering. Someone asked, “When will the humans arrive?”

“Within days,” Leah said, “though my contact was not specific. We will hear their ship’s approach, and the Sleer will notify us when the crew disembark so that we might prepare a suitable welcome.”

The gathering broke up a short while later, but not before Leah announced that, to celebrate the good tidings, naar would be circulated and they would drink as the sun went down.

As the adults drank and the children played, Maatja slipped away and slithered down the bank of the fissure. She came to her tree and shinned her way up, until she came to the wide, accommodating fork and sat with her back against the trunk.

She reached out, plucked a freer fruit and sucked the sweet juice from its flesh.

She stared at the spread of stars that was Vetch space and the fainter sweep of far suns that was the Expansion. Hard to believe that, right now, a human ship was on its way to World.

She wondered at what Leah had said, about the Weird spreading into human space, and what the Outcasts might think about that.

She was startled, a short while later, by a commotion from the clearing. She heard a cry, followed by a ragged cheering and then a chant.

She slid down from her perch and climbed the steep incline until she came to the edge of the fissure and peered over.

Everyone, adult and child, was gathered outside the long-house where her people conducted all their important meetings. The adults were chanting, their blood warmed with naar. Maatja wondered if Leah was giving a speech: the crowd seemed to be gathered about some focal point, staring and cheering at something Maatja could not see.

She scrambled from the fissure and hurried across the clearing. She wormed her way through the crowd, using her elbows to part reluctant adults. She eventually emerged through the press, then stopped dead in her tracks.

A giant Sleer, shadowy in the twilight, stood under the thatch of the long-house. It was holding something aloft, something reduced in its mammoth grip to the dimensions of a carved doll.

As Maatja’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw that the Sleer was holding a body – the body of a human being.

“An Outcast!” someone cried and another cheer went up from the crowd.

Then the body, which Maatja had assumed was dead, set up a feeble groaning, and she felt suddenly sick. She stared at the Outcast’s face, hoping that it was not Kavan, or one of the other Outcasts she had met the other day.

She did not recognise the limp figure – but that did not make her feel any better.

Leah stepped forward and spoke to the Sleer, and the creature slung its burden over its shoulder and stepped from the long-house. It passed within a metre of Maatja, and she caught the reek of its body, and of something else, the stench of the Outcast, who had soiled himself in terror. The crowd parted and the Sleer loped down the length of the clearing.

“To the Harvester,” Leah called out, and the cheering crowd followed the Sleer and its feebly struggling victim.

Maatja remained where she was, not wishing to witness the grisly disposal of the Outcast. Tomorrow, she would go to the ghala clearing and tell Kavan what had happened, and apologise on behalf of her people.

Now she rushed behind the nearest hut and vomited onto the floor.

She heard the desperate screams of the Outcast as he approached the Harvester.

CHAPTER TEN

C
AREW STOOD BEFORE
the viewscreen and stared out at the swirling grey of void-space. The scene was hypnotic, strands of sourceless light twisting like smoke in an ever-shifting monochrome kaleidoscope. He thought he could make out images, definite outlines. It was said that if you stared long enough into the void, you would see whatever you wished to see. But that way lay madness.

Director Anish Choudri stood beside him. The Director had summoned the chart of this sector of space, showing them as having passed from Vetch space and on the cusp of the Devil’s Nebula, fast approaching the system from which the distress signal was issuing. Behind the two men, Jed and Lania were phasing the
Hawk
from the void.

“How did you come by your crew, Captain Carew?” Choudri asked now, apropos of nothing.

He glanced at the diminutive Indian. “Why do you ask? And call me Ed, by the way.”

“Very well, Ed. I asked because I’m curious. You are three very different characters, in age, background, temperament, and yet you seem to get on very well.”

Carew smiled. He had never really given much thought to it. He’d had quite a few combinations over the years, but he had to admit that Lania and Jed were the best – the best at their jobs and the people he liked the most.

“I guess I... found them.”

Choudri repeated the word, smiling.

“I found Lania on Rocannon’s End. She was... drifting. She was around eighteen at the time, living by her wits in the pit city and looking for a better life. She’d had training – she could fly a starship and she could fight like a cat. But she was on the run from something. She told me that she couldn’t sign aboard a legitimate ship. So I took her on for a trial period, and that was ten years ago.”

“Did you ask her what she was running from?”

Carew shook his head. “She never volunteered the information, so I never asked. Privacy is important when you’re living on top of someone in a cramped salvage vessel.”

“Are you curious?”

“To tell the truth, I’m not.”

Choudri laughed.

“What?” Ed asked.

“You’re a very personable individual, Captain Carew. You’re intelligent, superficially amiable, and yet there’s something about you, a distance, an aloofness. Often with aloof people there’s also a certain arrogance, but I do not detect that in you. A cynicism, yes, a weariness with the ways of the world, but no conceit.”

He wondered if the Indian was right in his assessment. “I’ll take that as a compliment, Anish.”

Choudri looked at him. “You do realise that Lania is in love with you?”

Carew stared at the Director. “What?” The idea was ludicrous.

Choudri laughed. “No, of course you don’t. Your aloofness precludes you from truly apprehending the needs of others. I hope you don’t mind my speaking frankly. But” – the Indian gestured with a fine, thin-boned hand – “the fact remains that Lania Takiomar loves you.”

“What makes you think...?”

Choudri held up his right hand and counted off points on his fingers. “The way she speaks to you. The way she watches you when you’re talking to other people. The way her admiration almost radiates from her. She’s devoted to you, Ed.”

He shrugged. “She’s grateful to me for saving her from a life of hardship, that’s all.”

“That isn’t all. Open your eyes, man.”

“I’m old enough to be her father, for heaven’s sake.”

The Indian shrugged. “She’s lonely, Ed. Show her a little compassion, hm?”

The silence stretched and Carew was happy for it to do so. He hoped Choudri would drop the subject.

The Indian said, “And Jed? You found him too?”

Carew nodded. “That’s right, only Lania found him. She was in a bar on Replenish, and he tried to pick her up. They got chatting and she pretty quickly worked out he was on the run. As it happened, he’d sprung himself from a prison ship and didn’t have the funds to buy a new identity. He said he was a ship’s engineer, so Lania brought him back to the
Poet
. We needed an engineer – I was doubling in the post, after sacking the last one. So I hired him, and the rest is history.”

“I suppose you haven’t enquired too much about his past, either?”

Carew smiled. “I didn’t have to enquire. Jed was only too willing to tell us. Ran away from home at the age of fifteen. Taken on as an engineer’s apprentice a year later, worked for the Addenbrooke Line for five years before killing a man in a bar brawl. After that, it was all downhill. Five years in jail, out for a few months before falling in with the wrong crowd and getting himself caught raiding a munitions plant. Jailed for three years, escaped. Captured again.” He shook his head. “He was heading nowhere, in a manner of speaking. And then Lania found him.”

“Your ship is a veritable refuge for waifs and strays.”

Carew stared into the void and said bitterly, “Well, it was.”

Choudri laughed. “Knowing your propensity for extricating yourself from tight situations, I’m sure everything will work out for the best.”

“I hope you’re right, Anish. I sincerely hope you’re right.”

The Indian hesitated, then said, “When all this is over and we’re back in Expansion space, I’ll do my best to ensure you get on your feet again, as it were.”

Carew looked at the Indian. “Isn’t that a strange thing for an Expansion Director to say to an unreconstructed outlaw?”

“It might be, put like that. But it isn’t an odd thing for one human being to say to another, Ed.”

From behind them, Jed called out, “Phasing in three, two, one...”

The scene through the viewscreen flickered. The grey of void-space stuttered, then faded. A cluttered spacescape filled the screen.

Jed whistled. “Would you look at that!”

Carew stared out, wondering if this was one of the reasons why he could not lead the life of a planet-bound citizen. He needed vistas like this one to renew his sense of wonder in the universe.

A quarter of the screen was filled by a fulminating supergiant. It blazed like a coal, giving off frequent geysers and plumes of superheated plasma. Before it, strung out in perspective along the plane of the ecliptic, were perhaps thirty planets ranging in size from gas giants to tiny, ice-bound planetoids.

The solar system was majestic in its absolute silence.

Behind it, the orange drift of the nebula provided a dramatic backdrop.

“Welcome to the threshold of the Devil’s Nebula,” Lania said, extricating herself from the pilot’s sling and stretching. She joined them before the viewscreen and smiled at Carew. He nodded in reply, recalling what Choudri had told him earlier, and returned his gaze to the view.

The hatch at the far end of the flight-deck sighed open and Commander Gorley strode into the chamber.

He came and stood beside Lania. “I must congratulate you on getting us safely through Vetch space, Ms Takiomar.”

Lania’s response was formal. “It’s what you hired me to do, Marshall.”

“Have we located the source of the signal yet, Director?” Gorley asked.

Choudri said, “Apparently it hails from a planet closer to the sun and at the moment on its far side.”

Lania pointed. “What’s that?”

Choudri touched a slide on the frame of the screen, homing in on the object Lania had indicated.

At first, Carew thought it was an irregular-shaped satellite in orbit around an icy outer planet, but as the screen magnified the image it became obvious that the object was not natural. As vast as a moonlet, Carew realised, and
manufactured
.

Choudri looked at Gorley. “Should we take a closer look?”

Gorley nodded minimally.

Lania returned to her sling and guided the
Hawk
through space towards the object. Choudri returned the screen to its default setting. The object shrank suddenly and then proceeded to grow as they approached.

Ten minutes later they hung in front it, dwarfed by the immensity of the thing.

It was approximately cuboid, but the irregularity Carew had noted earlier was the result of a great section of its top right-hand corner having been sheared off.

It was dark grey and pitted as if with missile impacts, its face scorched and blackened. Where the corner had been blasted away, Carew made out interior cells, like those of a vandalised beehive.

Jed said, “Looks like some kind of orbital emplacement to me, boss. And it looks like it came off second best in the battle, too.”

Only then did Carew see the debris that floated in the vacuum all around the fortification. He asked the Indian to increase the magnification again. Choudri homed in on the drifting wrecks of shattered starships, the lifeless casualties of some long ago war.

“There must be hundreds of them,” Lania said.

Perhaps even thousands, Carew mused; everything from eviscerated liners to tiny, mangled shuttles. The wrecks were blasted, burned out.

Jed said, “You think the Vetch did this? Attacked the race who inhabited this system?”

“Who knows,” Carew said.

Choudri looked to Commander Gorley. “Perhaps we should take a closer look at the planet down there,” he said.

Gorley nodded. “We did come here in the spirit of scientific investigation, after all. Ms Takiomar, takes us down to the surface, please.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Lania said, winking at Jed as she instructed the
Hawk
to begin its spiraldown.

The beleaguered fortification drifted off-screen as the
Hawk
banked and approached the planet far below, a small world scarved with dun and ochre coloration, which resolved to reveal vast deserts dotted with cities.

They dropped quickly and Lania flew them low over the arid surface. Carew stared out at approaching cities, one after the other, strung out across the desert wilderness. Surprisingly, the cities and towns appeared undamaged; Carew had been expecting to find them as devastated as the orbital emplacement. But they appeared pristine, if deserted, like the forgotten sets of some high-budget holo-vision extravaganza. The only signs of the battle that had raged above were the remains of crashed starships of alien design, half-buried in the shifting desert sands.

Ahead, the largest city of all appeared on the horizon, as eerily quiet and deserted as all the others.

Lania called out. “Should I bring the ship down there?”