Weird Space 2: Satan's Reach (23 page)

“But why...?” Harper began, already peeling off his padded jacket.

“When you’ve got rid of your old stuff, give them to me. I’ll have a couple of my men wear them and leave the building. With luck it will draw off the bounty hunters, no?”

Harper smiled. “Ingenious.”

Zeela was struggling from her garments. She divested the rolled-up trousers and began climbing into a silver one-piece which fitted her much better. Harper took up his own new garment and pulled on the leggings.

“You’ve timed it just right,” Bjorn said, glancing at a tall clock standing against the wall. “I’m due to pilot a liner out to Ostergaart and beyond. You’re coming with me.”

“How long will the journey take?”

“All round? Just over a day – Reach standard. We pass the spaceport on the way back. I’ll drop you off there.”

A minute later they were both wearing the silver one-piece suits, and already Harper could feel their superior quality. He was in danger of asphyxiating so close to the open fire. He backed away and donned his face-mask, drawing the one-piece’s hood over his head.

“Follow me,” Bjorn said, and led the way from the room.

They hurried down the wooden stairs after the giant. He gestured them towards a door at the back of the garage, then crossed the oil-stained concrete, addressed a knot of mechanics, and handed over the padded garments.

Harper pushed through the door, followed by Zeela, and found himself standing on the edge of an open loading bay before the lighted cab of a huge ice-liner.

A keen wind whistled along the bay, but in the Vassattan protective garments he didn’t feel the slightest bit cold. The door swung open behind them and Bjorn strode out in his own stained one-piece.

“Magnus and Knut are suiting up and will leave the garage in minutes,” he said. “With luck the woman and her animal will leave us be.”

The giant climbed a metal ladder on the flank of the liner and opened a hatch at the top. Zeela followed him up, and Harper brought up the rear. He squeezed himself in through the hatch after Zeela and found himself in a corridor which ran the length of the liner. They followed Bjorn until they came to a hatch at the end of the corridor, which he pushed open and ducked through.

They were in the lighted cab which resembled less the working end of a juggernaut than the sybaritic flight-deck of a starship. The furnishings matched those in Bjorn’s lounge, settees, armchairs and fur rugs. The only indication that this was the cab of an ice-liner was a bank of controls ranged before a delta windscreen. Bjorn had even personalised this working area with an armchair as huge as a throne.

Harper removed his mask, lowered his hood, and unzipped his one-piece. He sat with Zeela on a settee by the windscreen and watched as Bjorn slipped into his pilot’s chair.

“I’ll get this thing started, then we can relax a little, no? Have you eaten? Then later we’ll eat and you can tell me all about your adventures so far.”

He pulled at control levers and seconds later the liner’s engines thundered into life. The vehicle throbbed and shook as Bjorn backed it from the bay with a wailing of warning sirens, then eased it into a slipway that joined the main radial canal.

He flicked a switch and pointed with a big hand at an overhead screen. The image showed an ice-canal and its traffic. “That’s the scene to the rear,” Bjorn explained, “and it would seem that the bounty hunters have gone, no?”

Harper examined the street scene for Janaker and the Vetch. There was no sign of their ice-sled.

He stared ahead through the main windscreen. They were high up here, staring down at the silver ice-canal as it stretched as straight as a ruler to a distant vanishing point. They were leaving the area of low warehouses behind and streaking through a silver-blue ice-field lighted by nothing more than the stars and three small moons.

Bjorn left the driving seat and pulled up a chair. He caught Zeela’s concerned expression and laughed. “Don’t worry. This thing drives itself, once we’re locked into a canal. It’s a hundred kilometres per hour from here until the first stop, two hundred kays north of here. After that we swing east and deliver machine parts to the oil works at Tromso on the New Oslo plain. From then on its south again on to Stromgard, with just a couple of stops before home.”

He moved to the back of the cab and returned with containers of food, which he handed to Harper and Zeela: crisp-bread and hard cheese, and what tasted like strips of dried fish, washed down with bottles of what Bjorn declared as the finest lager in the Reach – or at any rate the finest he’d ever tasted.

Harper told Bjorn about his escape from the Expansion, his life on the run, the many worlds he’d visited and the close shaves he’d had with the bounty hunter the Expansion authorities had sent after him. He elected not to describe how that particular chase had finished.

Bjorn heard him out, then gestured with his half-full bottle. “But that was years ago, Harper. And now they’re after you again... Why? You don’t think they’ve been after you all along, and just happened to find you again after all these years?”

“That’s the worrying thing. I don’t. For the past couple of years I haven’t exactly been trying that hard to cover my tracks. Perhaps it was stupid of me, but I felt that they’d given up the ghost when I evaded the original bounty hunter. So, as you say, why now?”

“And two of them. One of them a Vetch... But I thought the Vetch and the Expansion were deadly enemies?”

“They were, once upon a time. In recent years there’s been a cooling off of hostilities, an uneasy truce. But yes, it’s strange that they should send a human-Vetch team.” He smiled. “And if that was not bad enough, Zeela is on the run from a nasty bunch of aliens.”

“Well I was,” Zeela said, “until you blasted their ship to smithereens.”

The big man was wide eyed. “I never had you down as a bellicose sort, Den.”

“When needs must. Do you know what the humans of Ajanta suffer at the hands of the Ajantans?”

“My knowledge of the ways of the Reach,” Bjorn admitted, “is deplorably scant. Tell me.”

For the next hour, before the liner stopped at the town of Ostergaart, Harper regaled the haulier with the story of Ajanta, with Zeela contributing graphic details from time to time.

While she detailed her day to day life, in thrall to the aliens and the dhoor alike, Harper considered his order – just a day ago – to fire upon the Ajantan ship.

The situation, he realised, had been comparable to what had happened with the bounty hunter. He’d fought for his life on that occasion, and killed the mercenary as a result. Scale up the situation, replace one human with an unknown quantity of aliens, add the same imperative to save one’s skin... and the result was that it was an ‘us or them’ scenario with only one logical option. No... he told himself... he did not feel the slightest guilt, or regret, for the loss of life he had caused.

Zeela was interrupted, a little later, by a computerised voice issuing from the control console. “Ostergaart in ten minutes. Repeat, Ostergaart in ten minutes...”

“Come, and I’ll show you how we drop. Suit up, as this will be a little cold.”

Intrigued, Harper followed the giant from the cab and along the lateral corridor. At the far end they descended a spiral staircase to a cavernous cargo hold.

Three workers drove fork-lifts back and forth, ferrying packing crates to a raised platform on the left of the hold. Bjorn led the way across the chamber and paused before the platform as the last of the crates was slotted into position.

Bjorn moved to a control box set against the metal wall and depressed a red stud. The platform began to rise slowly with its cargo of crates, and at the same time a corresponding hatch in the side of the liner hinged open with a sigh of ramrod hydraulics, revealing what appeared to be the interior of a shipping container. As they watched, the platform lifted the crates and slotted them into the container.

Bjorn gestured to a viewscreen in the flank that looked out over the icy wastes. Harper peered back and saw the bulky rectangle of the container obtruding from the flank.

Bjorn pointed ahead, to a collection of lights and oil-flames a kilometre further along the ice-canal. “Ostergaart,” he said. “Now, we don’t actually have to halt in order to drop the provisions.”

“I see...” Harper said, and understood why they’d had to suit up for the operation.

Ahead, a cat’s-cradle device of metal spars appeared beside the ice-canal, and seconds later he and Zeela flinched in unison as something smashed into the flank of the liner.

He turned quickly, and where the container full of crates had been was now an empty rectangle open to the long Vassattan night and the blasting icy wind.

Bjorn laughed and slapped the controls, and the hatch lowered itself and sealed the hold. “It’s a method of delivery that goes back thousands of years,” he said. “To the railways of Old Earth, if the legends are to be believed.”

He gestured to the spiral staircase. “Come, after that we deserve a drink. Have you ever tasted Vassattan vodka?”

They retraced their steps to the warmth of the cab and resumed their seats. Bjorn poured three ice cold glasses of vodka and proposed a toast. “Skol! To old friends – and new friends – and to the thwarting of ugly bounty hunters!”

Harper drank to that, and Zeela took a tiny, experimental sip of the clear liquid. She coughed and spluttered and pulled a disgusted face, and Harper slapped her back and tried not to laugh.

“But that’s awful!” she cried. “Like poison!”

“Perhaps something a little milder,” Bjorn said, and fetched a beer from the cooler.

They sat and drank as the ice-liner raced through the Vassattan night. Bjorn grew quiet and mellow under the influence of the alcohol, and spoke of his life on the ice planet.

“I was lucky to be born at a time which meant I would live to see summertime,” he said. “Citizens of Vassatta born after summertime never see its like. They experience only one long lifetime of winter.”

“It must have been amazing,” Zeela said.

Bjorn shook his head as if in retrospective wonderment. “The years leading up to the Time of Thaw were filled with excitement and anticipation. Everything we knew, the way of life that had lasted for a hundred years, was about to come to an end. The ice, which was the entirety of our world, would vanish... It was too great a concept to comprehend. And then...” He laughed. “The thaw began. The sun appeared as a small red coal in the distance, growing ever brighter as the days and weeks progressed. The temperature slowly rose. And the ice melted. It was a little frightening, I must admit, to see everything we had relied on to make our world what it was slowly... vanish. And then daylight came to Vassatta, and the ice melted completely, and the Time of Blooming came to our world – and with it a million tourists from all around the Reach.

“The colours!” he went on. “I am not a man much given to beauty and aesthetics, but even I was reduced to tears as I gazed out across the former ice plains and beheld a million multi-coloured blooms.”

“It sounds... magnificent,” Zeela said.

“And following the Time of Blooming,” Bjorn said, “the Time of Burning.”

“Burning?” Zeela asked.

“On its wild elliptical orbit,” Bjorn said, “Vassatta passes so close to Vass, our red dwarf sun, that the daytime temperatures reach seventy-five Celsius. We take refuge underground, in the system of vast caverns that riddle the crust of the planet. Here we wait out the Time of Burning – but not before the brave, or the foolhardy, amongst us have remained on the surface to witness the depredations of the sun’s heat. I,” he went on, “was one such. There was no way that I was going to miss out on a once in a lifetime experience like the Time of Burning.”

Zeela leaned forward. “What was it like?”

Bjorn sipped his vodka reflectively. “It was... appalling, and terrifying, and humbling, Zeela. A small group of us cowered in the shadow of a cave, well away from the burning rays of the sun, and we watched as the light intensified, and the heat climbed steadily – and the beauty of the flower-covered plains shrivelled and blackened and gave off poisonous clouds of rank black smoke, which eventually drove us underground. When we emerged, some seven years later, it was to witness a miracle. Vassatta was moving steadily away from the sun, and it was the Time of Second Blooming, when the desiccated seeds of the first Blooming germinated again in an even richer, brighter display of abundant colour.” He laughed. “Listen to me! I’m sounding like one of our poets... But the Second Blooming is soon over, as Vassatta pulls away from Vass and begins its long voyage into space, and the ice returns, little by little, and the skies darken and the long night comes once again to our world.”

“This is when I came to Vassatta with the tourists,” Harper said, “to witness the Second Blooming – and astounding it was too.” He recalled the fecund display of riotous, polychromatic vegetation in complete contrast to the icy mantle that now covered the face of the planet.

Bjorn looked up from his drink and smiled at them. “I for one was secretly pleased that winter – the winter I knew so well – was upon the world again. I am an ice person, my friends. I was born to ice and I shall die to ice; it is my world, and I know it well.”

Zeela mock-shivered and gazed through the viewscreen. “I would never be able to live here,” she whispered.

“But you come from a warm world,” Bjorn said. “I would never be able to tolerate the heat, the constant summers... And daylight
every
day!”

He finished his vodka and stood up. “It is late. First thing in the morning we arrive at the refinery of Tromso, where we do stop to unload goods and take on passengers. And the refinery is a sight to behold. I will awake you at four, and we will breakfast and watch Tromso hove into view. Come, and I’ll show you to your sleeping quarters.”

They moved along the lateral corridor until they arrived at a door to their left, which gave onto a small room with a window looking out over the starlit ice-fields. There were no beds in evidence, but Bjorn answered this riddle by sliding open a door to the right, and another on the left, to reveal a cupboard-bed in each.