Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (48 page)

‘I think it’s gone,’ said Eshean. ‘I can’t see it anymore.’

‘Did any of you tell anybody back on the station about this?’ said Carter. ‘Sound someone out who showed a little too much interest… but then didn’t want to sign up with us?’

Deeli angrily shook his head. ‘I didn’t tell anybody, man. I barely trusted you when you approached me, in case you were setting up a phoney escape; a loyalty test to earn you a reward for handing me in. Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened on the station.’

‘No one’s talked,’ said Noah. ‘We set this up real quiet.’

‘Paper trail is covered, too,’ said Deeli. ‘Every piece of kit we’ve taken with us was allocated to genuine mining gangs months ago. Nothing to be missed.’

Carter frowned. ‘Then why the hell is that patrol ship nosing around here
now
? Risking clogging their fancy engines in this almighty turd-storm? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Maybe the station’s worried we crashed during the eruption?’ said Eshean. ‘Our radio room could have sent for them?’

‘And the kind empire risks its people’s lives to help stranded slaves? Maybe they’re transporting a suckling pig roast to us, with a crew of dancing girls to serve food and kiss our burnt knees better. Nobody on the station should be thinking about a missing crew until the princess has herself a second shiny new stake tethered next to her first. I don’t like this.’

Carter liked ducking as the Vandian patrol ship shot overhead even less. The noise of its passage left his ears ringing so badly he could hardly hear the others’ yells of surprise. Alan pulled the transporter to the side, heading for a roll of thick dark cloud, the transporter shaking in the patrol ship’s shock wake. Behind them, the ship came roaring back, slowing and hovering on towers of flames as engines on its flank angled and held it suspended there like a hunting hawk. The patrol vessel was an ugly long elongated tube of shiny silver steel, the pilots’ silhouettes just visible through the light of the bridge’s windows on its prow. The lines of its streamlined hull were broken by the shape of a cannon turret, four barrels rotating towards them. Just as black cloud swallowed the transporter, the hovering patrol ship’s gun starting banging shells after them, a rapid thud-thud-thud faster than any man could work the lever on a rifle. Carter didn’t hear the shells whizzing past, but the scream of tearing metal from the engine housing below their craft was unmistakable, as was their sudden pitch downwards. Black clouds rushed past, the transporter corkscrewing as Alan fought for control; the party thrown about in the back, desperately clinging to seats and cage sides as the transporter gained speed. Every man was yelling and shouting, Carter’s fear added to theirs. Licks of fire climbed up the back of the transporter, a streaming tail of flames from their engines. Haemorrhaging brown fuel that reeked as badly as the poisonous gas surrounding them. Nothing Carter could do but hang on, vowing that if he survived, whoever had betrayed them was going to pay for this with their life. A wrenching noise and an engine assembly came twisting past in the open air, sheared off by shell damage. Then a fierce buzzing. One of their rotors must have cleared after shrugging away the mangled mess.
We have lift again
. Carter was pushed back into the cage wall as the transporter pulled up. Alan yelled in front, screaming at his flight stick as if he could urge it to greater labours. For a moment Carter allowed himself to believe they were going to make it. If they could lose the patrol ship… he had only shared the final piece of his escape plan inside the cave… hitching a lift on a barren rock from the eruption. The Vandians wouldn’t know his escape route was straight up and out, not attempting to flee the dead zone in the transporter. Carter could feel from the increasing gravity how close they were to the ground, and then they were fed rock, right into the craft’s nose as the slope burst through the mist and met the corkscrewing transporter. Its hull rolled, Carter smashed around, striking bodies and metal. Suddenly he rolled free, hard sur­face burning through his survival suit. He spun out the worst of the momentum until he collided with a rocky outcrop, smashing his spine into it, leaving him gasping and stunned.
Hot, hot. Where have we come down
? A roar sounded from the sky as loud as anything he’d ever heard, passing as quickly as it appeared. Their crash site had just been overflown by the patrol ship. Carter found it hard to breathe, until he realised his air mask had become dislodged. He pushed the respirator back around his mouth, holding it in place through the silvery fabric of the survival suit. Staggering to his feet, Carter had trouble locating the transporter until he spotted it behind him, lying on its side, bent and smashed and smoking from its mangled engines. Up above, he could see sky and slope mixed through the fumes and ash-fall coming down like rain, and with a start he realised where they had come down… they were stranded close to the lip of the crater. A minute climbing the slope, and he could stare straight down into the heart of the beast. Carter limped over towards the downed craft, seeing Noah emerge from the back, Eshean leaning against him. From the state of Eshean’s left leg, unnaturally bent at an angle no man should be able to bear, Carter knew that a quick amputation was the only chance of survival the Weylander had left. Deeli had been thrown clear of the craft, same as Carter, the man trying to get to his feet. He moved forward to get a look into the cockpit at the front. Crushed and destroyed. Carter turned his face away in shock and went back towards Deeli. There wasn’t enough of Alan left to fill a casket at the front of a church.
Weren’t exactly aiming to take us alive. At least I know that none of us down here is the son-of-a-bitch traitor who whistled on our scheme.

‘We’re finished,’ moaned Deeli. ‘Might as well taste my canteen now. Share the poison around!’

‘Not yet,’ said Carter, the words squeezed out dry and hoarse. ‘We’ll slip away down the slope; find some of those ground worms mining the rock-fall. They’ll have transport we can steal.’

‘Dead,’ said Deeli, as if he hadn’t heard Carter’s words at all. ‘Quick or slow, that’s our only choice.’ Carter ignored the slave and pushed him towards Eshean and Noah, more roughly than he had intended. The scrawny sky miner nearly fell over.

‘You better leave me here,’ announced Eshean, his face pale through the transparent visor of his hood. ‘If you’re planning to cross the dead zone on foot, you might as well strap that wreckage back there on your back as take me along.’

‘Let’s carry you anyway,’ said Noah. ‘It’s a fine day for it.’

Below Noah’s hood, Carter noticed the glass of the man’s spectacles had been broken across both lenses. Shouts sounded from the thick clouds to their side, distant and muffled, and with all the survivors accounted for here… that only left one possibility. Carter shot a look at Deeli. ‘How many crewmen does a patrol vessel carry?’

Deeli pulled himself together to answer. ‘There’s a pilot and a co-pilot/gunner. The standard complement in the back is five guardsmen.’

‘Grab the clubs from the back of the transporter. We can drop the guards in the mist, take their guns and hijack the ship.’

‘That’s as mad as anything I’ve heard,’ said Noah.

‘They can’t see us in this damn smoke,’ said Carter. ‘And they’re overconfident, same as the scum I killed back on the station. We can circle them, ambush them, arm up with their weapons and then we jump the patrol ship.’

‘Hunters don’t expect to be stalked,’ said Eshean. ‘It could work. Nobody fool enough to do that. Except you, Carter.’

‘More desperate than foolish, today.’

‘Crazy! Who’s going to fly the ship, man?’ whined Deeli. ‘Ferris is gone!’

‘I’ll do it myself,’ said Carter. ‘If it comes to it. The imperium must keep the ships’ controls simple if they expect those big lazy brutes to fly them. But we can take one of the pilots alive and tickle him with the edge of a blade to get some cooperation.’

Carter took Eshean on his shoulder and half-walked, half-dragged the man back towards the transporter wreck. Eshean moaned in agony as he was helped. ‘Try real hard to keep at least one pilot alive, eh? Don’t need matching splints on my legs.’

‘I’ll lay you up inside the cage. When we’re in the mist, you yell for help, loud as you can, as if you can’t move and you’re bleeding out. Draw the soldiers in towards here.’

‘Carter, I
can’t
move, and I
am
bleeding out.’

Carter climbed into the slanting back of the craft, Noah helping lift Eshean’s body up, Carter dragging him under cover. ‘Won’t need to act much, then.’

Carter broke open the compartment holding the heavy wooden clubs, took his and passed a handle apiece to Noah and Deeli.

‘I’ll have one too,’ said Eshean.

Carter tossed a length of wood at the Weylander. It was going to be more use as a crutch. ‘Swing hard, big man.’

‘I’ll cuff them with what’s left of my leg if they get too close.’

Carter grunted. He didn’t voice it, but part of him wished that it had been one of the other two who had taken that mangled leg. With his size, Eshean was a hell of a hitter, while both Noah and Deeli would have been better suited to filing archive updates in a librarian’s hold. Alan Ferris dead and crushed in the pilot’s seat. Their transporter wrecked. Carter’s perfect escape plan spiked. Eshean crippled. Four of them against a company of heavily armed thugs. Kerge’s ominous warnings about attempting to escape were proving to be every bit as accurate as the gask’s prediction of the eruption. Their trail along the great fractal tree was narrowing to a single, desperate branch; with assaulting the Vandians sent to kill them the only direction left to travel.

Carter and his two accomplices slipped down the slope and glided into the smoke. This fog wasn’t spilling over from the crater’s lip, but hissing from side vents, solidified magma holes ranging in size from molehills to rocky mounts, arranged like wounds along the slope and bleeding fumes and gas. Smoke cover. The three of them stalked wide, until they trailed behind the guardsmen’s excited shouts. Carter quickly lost sight of Deeli and Noah, and had to trust that they were still doing what they needed to. In the distance he could hear Eshean’s pleading yells, begging for help and transport back to the sky mine. These Vandian soldiers sounded enthusiastic and pleased with themselves, hollering like they were out hunting game in the woods. What could be easier? Pumping a bullet or two into a handful of slaves who’d already been shot-up and forced down on the volcano. Given how few escape attempts had been made since Carter had arrived, this must be the highlight of the soldiers’ year. This is what the bastards lived for.
Let’s see if I can’t dent their enthusiasm, along with a skull or two.

A shape coalesced in front of him – the familiar sight of a Vandian’s armoured back below a cape, the soldier clutching a rifle and whistling to his people to let them know his position. An intimidating size, heavily built and over six foot tall. He wore a silver helmet with a rigid red brush coming down the back of the helm – a more perfect target Carter couldn’t have hoped for. Carter suppressed a yell of fury as he ran in – surprise his most effective weapon – and swung at the helm, felling the brute as his gouged helmet tumbled off to the side. An initial moan and the guardsman collapsed forward, lying face-down and still across the slope. Carter rolled him over and lifted the rifle away from the soldier’s body, keeping a wary eye on the mist. The weapon didn’t look much like the rifles back home – a metal stock engraved with imperial emblems, heavy, a metal magazine the length of a hand protruding in front of the trigger guard. Its safety catch was where its equivalent would be from the Landsman Weapon Works, though, and that was all he needed to know to work it. There was a sharp saw-toothed bayonet attached under the barrel for when it ran out of ammunition. Carter removed the soldier’s air mask and and exchanged it for his own, making sure the pig wouldn’t be coming around if he wasn’t dead already. Shouts and shots sounded from inside the hot mist, hard to triangulate but very close. Somewhere, Eshean was still calling. Carter couldn’t shoot blind – not without risking hitting Noah and Deeli, so he climbed the slope, the stinking fog starting to thin out. He figured if he could get on the lip of the crater and take position above the wrecked transporter, he’d have enough of a view to pick the soldiers off as they went for Eshean. There was a moan to his right and Carter swung the rifle around. Bodies on the rock, fuming mist passing over them like a river. Not the soldier Carter had just brained – another armoured Vandian stretched out, with Noah and Deeli close by, all prone and on the ground. The Vandian had been beaten down with clubs, same as Carter’s. Noah had a red crater where his forehead should be, below the shattered faceplate of the survival suit. Deeli was the only one alive, just, moaning as he clutched at his bleeding gut, blood smeared across the silvery fabric as though Deeli had been swinging a cleaver at a butcher’s table. The dead soldier’s rifle wasn’t here – must have had comrades who didn’t want to leave it behind with escaping slaves stalking the slopes.

Carter knelt by Deeli, hand still on his rifle, taking his hand. ‘Stay still. They’ll have bandages and medicine on the patrol ship. I’ll come back for you.’

‘Won’t — need my — canteen, now,’ whispered Deeli, hard to hear through his respirator. ‘You take — it.’

‘Stow it. We’ll be drinking wine to celebrate getting out of here.’

‘Just— bones,’ said Deeli, his voice growing even fainter, ‘that’s all — we are. My wife. My boys — me. Piles — of—’

Deeli rested his face against a rock, as if he was making himself comfortable on a pillow. He grew still, his eyes shutting and his fingers trembling no more. Carter stood up and pulled the rifle in hard under his arm. Noah’s corpse stared accusingly at him through his broken glasses, saying not a thing. Guilt and anger fought for control of Carter’s mind, but he shook them both away. Only a cold, detached sense of purpose left. To accomplish what he had left the station to do.

Narrower and narrower, the paths on the great fractal tree. Carter was balanced on a twig, now. ‘See you soon, boys.’