The Devil's Nebula (2 page)

He had assessed the dangers, considered the rewards, and bargained the dealer up from fifty thousand units to a hundred thousand. The stretch of space demarcating Vetch space from human space was long indeed – some thirty light years, in total – and the Vetch had only so many ships with which to patrol the border.

In his thirty years of space-roving, Carew had undertaken more dangerous missions.

Jed had taken some cajoling, though. Thirty thousand units had proved persuasive enough, in the end.

“I’ll spend a month on the pleasure planet of Darby’s Landfall,” Jed said now. “I’ll eat the finest food and make love to the most expensive courtesans.”

Lania sneered. “The most expensive courtesans wouldn’t touch you with remote somaforms, Jed.”

“Then I’ll make do with the not quite as expensive,” the engineer replied, “and save money.”

“You’ll end up with the cheapest, most diseased whores on the planet and consider yourself lucky,” Lania laughed.

“Or even,” Jed mused, “I’ll pleasure myself in the virtual palaces. I’ve heard the sex is just as lifelike.”

“You’re a sad, sad man, Jed Neffard,” Lania sighed.

Carew smirked as he listened to his faithful crew. He was delighted they rubbed along so well.

“And you, Captain?” Jed asked.

He had promised his crew a month’s leave on the successful completion of the mission. He imagined he’d be in need of a retreat after Hesperides, somewhere quiet and restful after the memories the evacuated planet would no doubt provoke.

“I’ll be going to the phrontistery at Yann,” he said.

“Never heard of the place,” Jed admitted. “What’s a phron... phron – ?”

Lania said, “Phrontistery. The area in a monastery used for contemplation. What do you intend to contemplate?” she mocked.

Ed smiled. “Life, death, existence, non-existence. The arbitrary nature of the universe; the chaos, the order...”

Jed grunted.

Lania said, “Why bother, Ed? I mean, that way lies madness. Why not just live for the minute and leave the thinking to the philosophers?”

Because to live for the minute, he thought, does not bring me the remotest satisfaction. He said, “Each to his own, Lania. Each to his own.”

He pressed the stud of his laser and the tangle of vegetation before him disintegrated. This time, instead of the blast revealing a further expanse of packed undergrowth, he found himself staring at a vast panoramic view.

Cautiously, he picked his way over the charred ground and halted. Jed was beside him, then Lania. She whistled.

They were standing on the edge of an escarpment, which dropped precipitously for a hundred metres. Beside them, the boles of trees thrust up into the sunlight. He imagined that the three of them would look like ants on the edge of the drop, between the rocky precipice and the sprouting trees.

He stared out and his breath caught. There, perhaps a kilometre distant, was what once had been the planet’s proud capital city. Now it resembled an architect’s scale model of a city, but one which had been left in a great Petri dish and overrun by fungus.

Lania pointed. “Look,” she said.

She was not pointing to the city, but the far horizon and what lay above it.

The sun was still rising slowly behind them, and ahead the sky was a twilit indigo expanse, scattered with a million tight-packed stars. Jed laughed. “It’s beautiful.”

“But how can something so beautiful,” Lania said, “harbour a race so evil?”

“The Vetch aren’t evil,” Carew said. “They’re just acting out a hardwired biological imperative, one we don’t understand.” He wondered, even as he spoke the words, if he really believed them.

Lania turned to him, her expression harshly incredulous. “Not evil? Was what they did on Palladine not evil? What they did on Tourmaline and Santiago? They razed those planets. They killed millions of innocent men, women and children. And that wasn’t evil? I didn’t have you down as a Vetch-lover, Ed.”

He turned away from her, staring at the array of far stars, and let his anger flare and subside. Now was not the time or place – if there ever would be a time and a place – to lecture Lania on the Vetch and what the alien race had done, fifty years ago. She was mouthing cheap prejudice and ignorance common across the human Expansion; it would be hard to correct that prejudice with a lecture now. They had more pressing matters to hand.

But she said, “Well?”

He turned to her. “Was the kreesh that attacked us evil, Lania?”

She blinked. “What?” She laughed. “It was an
animal
, Ed. A beast. It didn’t know the difference between right and wrong. It was acting out of primitive drives, to attack, to defend its territory, to eat. The Vetch are a civilised race. They should have known better.”

“They’re aliens. How can you judge aliens by our own standards? Our concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, are arbitrary when applied to alien races. We should not judge.”

She rattled a noise in her throat, a disgusted
achh
and strode off to stare down the precipice.

The problem was that Carew knew exactly what she meant, how she felt. He often felt the same himself. In his case, however, he was entitled to these feelings. He alone among them was entitled to pass such judgements. Even if the rationalist in him knew them to be wrong.

Jed hopped about beside Carew, playing the fool. He disliked it when Lania and Carew had their frequent spats. He was like a child whose certainties were undercut by the arguments of his parents.

He said now, “I don’t know about good or evil, Captain, but I know they certainly look damned ugly.”

Carew smiled and refrained from saying that even beauty was arbitrary. “Have you seen one, Jed?”

“Only in virt-houses. Ugly creatures! Like dogs, but with mashed-up faces. And they stink!”

Carew said, “Oh, they have olfactory virt-houses now, do they?”

Jed’s round pudding of a face looked blank. “What?”

“You smelled a Vetch in a virt-house?”

“No, but this guy in a bar on Hollister told me so. Like meat gone rotten, he said.”

Not like meat gone rotten, Carew thought, but like the sickly sweet smell of a flower in bloom, cut and left to die in the sun. A stench that, once smelled, seemed to live in one’s senses for ever.

Lania returned from along the precipice. “Well,” she said, “
aren’t
they ugly? I’ve always thought they looked pretty damned ugly.”

Carew said, “And you, with your scraped back hair and flawless coffee complexion, your soft curves; you’d seem pretty hideous to a Vetch, Lania.”

She stared at him. He stared her down and she gave in and turned, muttering something to herself.

“So,” Jed said, “how the hell are we going to get down this cliff-face?”

Lania bowed her head and sub-vocalised something to her suit. She stared at her forearm, where a map suddenly appeared on the material.

She pointed. “A couple of hundred metres west... there’s a track cut into the precipice.”

Carew brushed past her and released a cone of destruction into the foliage at the edge of the escarpment. He led the way through the smouldering corridor until they came to a dip in the land, then blasted away the cover of undergrowth to reveal a track sloping down the cliff-face.

He burned the blockage of undergrowth and they moved forward.

It took thirty minutes to reach the foot of the escarpment, where Carew called a halt. He looked up. The sheer façade of the escarpment seemed to go on for ever, terminating in a fringe of shaggy jungle which was incandescent now with the light of the rising sun.

He stared at the far horizon. The sky was paling, the stars of Vetch space fading as he watched.

The outskirts of the deserted city of Valderido stood perhaps two kilometres distant. The jungle down here was not as dense as that on the plateau above: the going from now on would be considerably easier.

They had left the ship three hours ago and Carew was hungry and thirsty. He called a break and they sat side by side in the shade of a leaning tree and broke out their water canteens.

Lania said at last, “Sorry if I touched a nerve back there.”

He smiled; even her apologies were confrontations. “Apology accepted.” He took a long swallow of ice-cold water.

“Why so touchy, though?”

He shrugged the question off. “You know me. Always playing Devil’s advocate.”

Lania grunted, “You intellectual types. Give me lunks like Jed, any day.”

The engineer wiped his thick lips on his sleeve. “That a promise, Lania?”

“In your dreams, dwarf,” Lania said.

Jed shrugged and tipped more water onto his face.

Lania commanded her smartsuit to project a map of the city into the air before them. She plucked a stalk of grass from the ground and indicated the centre of the map. “The museum’s here, in this square. It’s pretty central. We simply follow the main highway into the city and turn off here. Another hour and we’ll be there.”

Carew stared through the map at the silhouette of the city itself, or rather what remained of it: a cluster of low buildings furred by overgrowth, like a block graph denoting the rise and fall of some notional fortune. He wondered what feelings might hijack him on the journey into the city, what reminders of a once-thriving community might stir his own memories of the planet where he’d spent his childhood.

He unsealed a tray of food and ate slowly, savouring the salad and protein slabs. Lania watched him as she chewed on her biltong. She’d been incredulous a decade ago when she discovered he was vegetarian: another philosophy, he thought, beyond the limited remit of her experience.

They rested up for a further hour, then stowed their water bottles and litter in their backpacks and set off again towards the city.

There was only limited canopy cover here, and for long stretches they were forced to walk in the full glare of the rising sun. The temperature climbed steadily, reaching thirty-five Celsius as they came to the first vine-entombed building on the outskirts of the city.

They found a highway overgrown with low bindweed and trudged along in the shadows of buildings to their right.

There was something beautiful, he had to admit, in the way nature had reclaimed the city, softening the harsh angles and embroidering the hidden façades with alien blooms. The flowers ranged from the tiny to the vast, from blooms the size of coins to others as huge as the blast-cones of a starship engine. A warm wind blew and the scent of the flowers wafted over them in heady, pollen-laden waves.

They passed down a narrow street between buildings like children’s blocks covered in vines. A muffled silence filled the canyons. There was no birdsong or calls from other wildlife. It was as if nature itself were aware of the atrocity committed here, and the resulting silence was its eloquent comment.

Lania pointed to an intersection up ahead and they approached the corner and turned into the square where the museum was situated.

And, as one, they stopped in their tracks.

Later, Carew would look back at his reaction and wonder what had prevented him from moving in a bid to save himself. Shock, obviously: the sheer, unexpected shock of seeing there, in front of him, the very last thing he had expected to see in the square of a long-deserted city.

A Vetch patrol vessel.

CHAPTER TWO

C
AREW FELT A
strong hand grip his arm as Lania yanked him back around the corner. Even then, they weren’t safe – they needed to put more distance between themselves and the alien ship. They scuttled frantically into the opening of an old store, clawing away at vines to gain entry.

In the cool, dark interior, he collapsed to the ground, gasping to catch his breath.

He expected a Vetch warrior to appear at any second.

Lania whispered, “Do you think they saw us?”

“No... no. They’d have sent someone.” Even to his own ears, he sounded pathetically panicked, his voice tremulous.

“What do we do?” Jed whispered.

It was enough, at that moment, that they were still alive. He had no thought for the future, only for how disastrously events could have played out.

He gathered his wits and tried to consider Jed’s very relevant question. “We sit tight. We don’t move.”

Lania and Jed nodded. The silence stretched.

At last Lania said, “It’s as if they knew where we were heading.”

In the half-light of the room, Carew stared at her shadowed face. She looked shocked. He said, “You mean, the museum?”

She nodded.

“No way,” he said. “There’s no way they could know that.” He thought about it, rationalised the presence of the ship there. “It’s one of the biggest squares in the city. The natural place a ship would come down.” He considered the ion trail Lania had detected in orbit. “So they were up there, and recently. The chances are they detected us and waited ’til we landed.”

Jed said, “Why? Why not just blast us to bits up there?”

Carew shrugged. “They wanted our ship?” He paused, something even more unpleasant occurring to him. They wanted
us
? But he didn’t voice the thought out loud.

“The fact remains, they’re out there and the chances are that they know we’re here.”

She sub-vocced, contacted the ship and nodded. “It’s AOK. They haven’t located the
Poet
.”

Carew let out a relieved breath. “Thank fate we decided to come down in the jungle.”

“Good thinking, boss,” Jed laughed nervously.

“So what do we do,” Lania asked. “Sit tight ’til they leave?”

Carew nodded. “That’d be safest.”

Lania looked around the room. “Okay. But I’d be happier if I was somewhere with a vantage point. I’d like to see all the approaches to this place, in case the bastards come close. Can I take a look around?”

Carew thought about it. She knew how to look after herself. He had no idea where she’d gained military training – he’d never felt the need to enquire too closely – but she could handle herself as well as any combat soldier he’d met. He nodded.

She pointed across the room to a staircase. “I’ll see where that leads.”