Read The Saga of Seven Suns: Veiled Alliances Online
Authors: Kevin J. Anderson
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General
22
COREY KELLUM
Another explosion on the sinking cloud trawler cracked open an ekti storage canister, belching out flames that were quickly smothered by the superdense gases deep within Daym’s atmosphere.
Sealed inside the control chamber at the top of the dying facility, Corey could not guess how many crewmembers had been killed. According to the boards, all of the evacuation pods had been launched. He sent a silent thanks to Sara Becker, hoping the majority of his crew had successfully evacuated.
He had brought every one of those people over here, convinced them that he could fix the third cloud trawler . . . and he had let them down. Now their hopes were crashing and burning all around him.
The Redheaded Stepchild was out of time. The facility had sunk even deeper, and the thick gases were dark around them, although the fires of the burning decks lit up the nearby cloud layers. Static lightning rippled around them. The outer hull plates and the bulkheads groaned and began to buckle as the pressure increased outside.
Strange shadows flickered across the wide viewing windows, and Corey stared with a mix of wonder and terror at a cluster of bloated gas-filled sacks, eerie tentacled things—living creatures!—that floated around the doomed cloud trawler. A flash of nearby lightning illuminated sluggish jellyfish beasts filled with fluorescent internal organs: protoplasmic bags that drifted along, consuming chemicals or alien plankton in the cloud layers. Their tentacles streamed out like lightning rods, drawing in electrical energy from bursts of static discharge.
No one had ever gone this deep into a gas giant; there could be no telling what sort of amazing miracles, or nightmares, the Redheaded Stepchild might encounter down there. He didn’t intend to find out.
Corey’s head pounded, from guilt and desperation as well as from the crushing atmosphere. His eyes felt as if they were about to burst. “We’re reaching critical depth,” he gasped into the intercom. Thank the Guiding Star the intercom still worked!
The comm was a chatter of panicked voices.
From down in the smoke-filled engineering deck, Oliver replied, his voice muffled through a breathing mask. “Still no luck on the levitation engines, Corey! There’s no power to them. They’re just adding extra weight.”
The remaining people aboard were stranded and doomed, unless they could find a way to shove the cloud trawler higher up into the sky, lifting it to an altitude where they could be rescued.
He yelled into the intercom, “I want any options you can think of—innovative, even crackpot, ideas. Now’s not the time to be shy.”
A staccato patter of gunshot sounds erupted as the continuing pressure popped rivets out of their connecting holes, and the metal projectiles ricocheted against walls. Several of the people yelped or dove out of the way. The images on the communication screens blurred into static; a few winked back on.
Down in engineering, Oliver looked up at the imager, sweat streaming down his face. “All right, Corey, I’ve got an idea . . . but I’m not crazy about it.”
“Crazy’s all we’ve got left, Oliver. What is it?”
“We could pipe some of that supercharged stardrive ekti from the reservoir tanks into one of the levitation engines. It might be enough to give it a jump start.”
“Levitation engines aren’t designed to operate on stardrive fuel.”
“They aren’t operating
at all
right now.”
He had a point. “Will it work?” Corey asked.
Oliver’s eyes were wide and he stared at the screen. “Probably not.”
Corey took a quick breath and made up his mind. “Do it anyway. At this point it’s only a matter of time. If we get the levitation engine active, I can guide us upward from the control chamber.”
Oliver’s voice was ragged. “Better seal yourself in, Corey . . . just in case anything goes wrong.”
“Sure, I’ll be here safe and sound.” Corey muttered, “Not that it’ll do me any good.” He activated the controls, sealed the hatch. The armored control chamber was now a self-contained bubble as the rest of the cloud trawler heaved, shuddered, and died around him. “Ready, Oliver . . . and waiting.”
“Got it rigged—no time for finesse, but it should work. In theory anyway. Twenty percent chance.”
“Pretty good odds, compared to zero,” Corey admitted. “Make it happen.”
“Right, Captain.” Oliver’s voice sounded resigned. “Give me two minutes.”
Corey went to the reinforced window of the control chamber and stared out at the depths, knowing he was about to die. He thought perhaps he’d see more of those exotic jellyfish bags, or something even stranger. It was small consolation to know that he was in a place no human being had ever seen.
“Sure isn’t very friendly down here.”
Then, flashes of static discharge illuminated the cloud decks, and he spotted shadowy shapes drifting among the dense mist—gigantic crystalline spheres, perfectly geometrical, studded with pyramid-shaped protrusions. The strange and impossible globes tumbled through the sky and approached the ruined skymine, as if . . . curious.
Corey stared. They were too perfect to be natural. Lightning bolts arced from the tips of the pyramid protrusions. He realized what he was seeing. “My God, they’re
ships
!”
But what sort of ships could be this far down in the depths of a gas giant? What could possibly survive down here?
Fire and leaking fuel continued to ooze out of the crumbling Redheaded Stepchild. Five more of the spiked globes closed in like a cluster of sinister bubbles coming to investigate a trespasser. Corey doubted that these ships had come to rescue him and his crew.
“It’s got to be now, Corey,” Oliver said over the intercom. “Hang on!”
Corey ran back to the comm. “Wait, there might be—”
“Ekti is flowing into the levitation engines. Supercharging, igniting . . .” A very long pause. “Oh, no.”
As the crystalline spheres drew close to the cloud trawler, the levitation engines exploded, unable to withstand the stardrive fuel. Gouts of flame and jets of compressed debris and molten fuel spewed out in all directions—striking the spiked globes.
The whole skymine lurched and tumbled. Enclosed in his armored command chamber, Corey pounded on the comm controls. “Oliver, are you all right? Anybody?”
He looked up to see the alien spheres pummeled by the debris and shockwave. They glowed incandescent, and arcs of building energy sparked from tip to tip of the pyramids. The energy gathered into a single discharge, a weapon! He realized that the explosion in the levitation engines might have appeared to be an attack on them. And whatever those strange, deep-core beings were, they were firing back.
The directed beam blasted the Redheaded Stepchild—ripping the cloud trawler apart.
As the impact threw Corey to the deck, he kept screaming, at the aliens, at Oliver, at the insanity. But nobody was listening.
The remnants of the Redheaded Stepchild broke apart, crushed in the high-pressure depths that snuffed out the burning fuel, but without all that weight the armored command chamber was like a soap bubble. It rose from the depths, accelerating.
Below him, the alien spheres launched a second blast at the cloud trawler’s wreckage.
Corey cried out, pressed flat against the deck by gravitational forces like an iron-heeled boot stepping on his chest. The thick, transparent windows began to crack. Thin fracture lines stuttered like lightning bolts across the panes.
“Rising . . . too . . . fast,” he gasped.
Finally, like a projectile fired from large artillery gun, the command chamber rocketed up through Daym’s upper cloud decks, tearing through the white and lavender gases until it reached equilibrium at the skymining level.
He knew everyone was dead on the cloud trawler, everyone he had left behind. Oliver, his engineers, the technical crew that had stayed, trying to save them. The Redheaded Stepchild was completely destroyed, partly from the explosion of the levitation engines and then finished by those crystalline alien globes, whoever—or whatever—they were.
Corey was drained and shaking, grieving for everything and everyone he had lost. But alive. The only one.
Safe.
Safe?
he thought.
23
MADELEINE ROBINSON
It was a standoff with the hundreds of black Klikiss robots. The awkward silence grew heavier, more sinister.
“What happens now, Mom?” Derek asked. They stood together on the shuttle’s extended ramp, facing the mechanical army that surrounded the camp. The sheer number of metallic beetles was intimidating.
Jacob hovered near his mother, obviously frightened. She pulled him close, but did not tear her eyes from all those glowing red optic sensors that shone from the beetlelike robots.
“Just because they’re big, strange, and scary doesn’t mean they’re going to hurt us,” she said, trying to convince herself as much as her sons. The mysterious robots extended sharp, powerful claws.
TZ piped up, “The Klikiss robots don’t know how to proceed. To the best of their knowledge, they have been dormant since their creator race vanished. They are surprised and somewhat unsettled to find us here.”
“We’re the ones who found
them
,” Derek said. “Somebody else sealed them up in those underground tunnels. We rescued them.”
Madeleine ventured forward as far as she dared, stopping at the bottom of the shuttle’s ramp; she wasn’t willing to walk among the Klikiss robots. All around the camp, Exxos and the rest of the black machines stood in silent communication with one another, discussing—planning?—in a language she could not hear.
After a long silence, the leader of the robots spoke again in his crisp metallic voice. “Now that we are awakened again, we wish to investigate. Your race is new to us.”
Like a choreographed troupe, the numerous robots straightened, extended their segmented limbs, opened their grasping claws. Exxos continued, “We need to acquire information.” With a lurching step on his clusters of fingerlike legs, the robot came closer to the shuttle. All of the Klikiss machines moved forward as well, closing in. “Acquire information by any means.”
Exxos reached toward where Madeleine stood with her two sons.
She had had enough. “Derek, Jacob—get inside the ship. We’re leaving!”
The boys didn’t need to be told twice. They ducked back into the Ildiran shuttle.
TZ suggested, “Perhaps I should stay and converse with them, Madeleine Robinson.”
As panic set in, she pushed the little compy up the ramp and inside. “Come on, TZ—hurry.” Once through the hatch, she withdrew the ramp. As Exxos and the robots reached the opening, she sealed it. With her last glimpse of the outside and the haunted alien city, she saw even more black robots streaming out of the ruined Klikiss towers.
Derek had already thrown himself into the piloting seat and activated the controls. The Klikiss robots closed around the ship, like a crowd pressing in, their red artificial eyes glowing. Madeleine shouted, “Forget the checklist boys—we’re getting the hell out of here!”
With a shudder that skittered down her spine, she heard scraping sounds against the outer hull, an increasing clatter as the robots searched for a way into the ship. “If we don’t go soon, they’ll damage the hull, and we’ll never make it to orbit!”
“Go, Derek! Let’s go!” Jacob yelled.
Derek punched the rocket engines, and the shuttle blasted exhaust, dust, and debris in all directions. As the fuel chambers heated up, the flames were bright and white. The hot burst scattered the robots below, knocking them aside as the shuttle lifted off the ground.
Several of the Klikiss robots had tumbled aside, but they squirmed and scrambled to right themselves. More waves of black robots pressed in, like ants from a stirred up colony.
“We got ‘em, Mom,” Jacob said.
“We got out of there alive—that’s the important part. I doubt we damaged those things,” she said. The black robots had been buried in the rocks for centuries and had survived intact; a blast of exhaust probably hadn’t destroyed them.
Looking down through the expanding exhaust cloud, Madeleine could see the burned remnants of their campsite that they had left behind. The samples, many of the records . . . but she had backed up most of the data onboard the shuttle. She hoped it would be enough to satisfy the Hansa. Would they accuse her of overreacting?
Had
she overreacted?
She tried to control her pounding heartbeat as Derek guided the shuttle up into Llaro’s pastel sky. Madeleine kept trying to understand what the Klikiss robots had truly intended to do. They had dismantled the survey skimmer and could just as easily “dismantle” humans to study how the biology worked. From her perspective, the threat had been absolutely clear. She worried that they’d damaged the shuttle’s hull or the engines themselves when they pressed up against the craft, trying to get inside. At any moment, she expected to see flashing red lights on the diagnostic panels.
Derek flew them high above the dry landscape, finally reaching the starry black emptiness on the edge of space. She let out a quiet sigh of relief. “We can catch our breath and just cruise along in orbit while we wait for the Ildiran ship to pick us up. We’ve got life support and supplies for a few days.” According to the schedule, the Ildiran warliner was already en route to retrieve them.
“Fine with me,” Derek said. “I’ve seen all I want to see of that place.”
They could have gone to the other side of the continent, selected a new campsite, and continued their work for a few more days. It wasn’t likely the Klikiss robots would find them . . . but how many robots remained on the planet? Madeleine wondered where the black machines had come from. She was just glad to be safely away from them.
For three days, the shuttle drifted in high orbit above Llaro.
Ever since the death of her husband, Madeleine’s life had ricocheted like a metal ball through a maze, bouncing one direction then another, reacting, trying to salvage the situation, then bouncing again. She’d hoped this exploration mission would be a ticket to stability again. The boys had nearly been killed—and it had been her decision to bring them out here. “I’ll make it up to you, boys. I promise.”
Derek looked at her, perplexed. “We’re all in it together, Mom. We did what we needed to.”
Before she could say anything, the long-range sensors detected an Ildiran warliner approaching the planet. “Looks like the Septar’s here to pick us up,” Jacob said.
Madeleine picked up the comm and sent a message to the great warliner. “Boy, are we glad to see you.”
The response was crisp, without any sense of humor. “Shuttle, prepare to enter docking bay.”
Septar Gro’nh came to greet them himself as they emerged from their battered shuttle. He waited for them in the warliner’s huge landing bay, curious to hear their report.
Jacob bubbled with excitement. “You won’t believe what we found down there! We barely made it out alive.”
Madeleine stepped away from the shuttle and paused, feeling a chill as she saw jagged scrapes and scratches on the outer hull. Her throat went dry. If those claws had grabbed onto her arms, or seized one of her sons . . .
Had
she overreacted?
Septar Gro’nh greeted her. “I’m pleased that you have returned to us intact and safe.”
She gave a snort. “If you Ildirans like stories, we’ve got a good one for you. Old alien ruins and big black robots and—“
Gro’nh crossed his arms over his chest. “Yes, Klikiss robots are the only remnants of that lost race. We have uncovered them elsewhere, but they tend to keep to themselves. They have assisted us at some difficult construction sites. We have no enmity toward them.”
“I think they tried to kill us,” Derek said.
“You may have misunderstood their intent.”
Remembering how frightened she had been, Madeleine raised her voice more than she should have. “Why didn’t you warn us about the robots, if you knew they existed? All you said was that Llaro had abandoned Klikiss ruins. We could have been better prepared. Why didn’t you warn us?”
The Septar did not seem concerned. “They are part of a different story, not ours. Perhaps human historians and archeologists can learn more about the Klikiss saga at some later time.” Apparently not interested in talking further, he excused himself and returned to the warliner’s command nucleus.
After Madeleine, Derek and Jacob found their temporary quarters, TZ dutifully helped put away their packed belongings, unfazed by the entire incident.
Madeleine had a heavy heart, and both of the boys looked restless and disappointed. Derek threw himself on one of the bunks. “Has this whole expedition been a flop, Mom?”
On the bunk across from him, she pulled her knees up to her chest. She was relieved to be heading away from Llaro, but she didn’t want her sons so discouraged. “No, Derek. We have my reports and plenty of images—not the thorough package I wanted to give to the Hansa, but the discoveries we made will be valuable to archeologists at least. I did keep all the records, the survey grids, the geological maps, and with all those ruins, scraps of alien technology, even those robots themselves, somebody’s going to pay us a hefty finder’s fee.”
The boys looked relieved to hear it. Jacob kicked Derek in the knee with a stockinged foot. Derek jabbed his brother with his elbow.
Yes
, Madeleine thought,
things were getting back to normal
.
“Maybe we’ll even earn enough money to make another try at this.”