The Long Forever
‘Tell him!’ she rages.
Shame-faced, Stitch admits we’re almost out of food.
‘He couldn’t be arsed to check,’ Anuk says.
I figure Murdo will go off on one, but all he does is shrug. ‘Just as well we’re only four days out from Shanglo, not a month out from Enshi Four. Isn’t it, Sky?’
Sky gives him a spike-eyed glare, but says nothing.
Anuk says we’ll manage, but it’ll mean short rations and going hungry. Been there, done that, but it’s still bad news. Murdo reassures us we’ll be able to load up with food at Shanglo.
Everybody settles back down.
But when nobody’s looking, Murdo whispers that I should meet him outside the cargo hold. Before I can ask why, he slides off in that direction, real furtive.
I tell Sky. She says she’ll come with me.
The few kids that aren’t sleeping are playing games or taking it easy. Anuk’s in the galley, chewing Stitch’s ear off about the food, so nobody notices as we stroll out after Murdo. At the far end of the main companionway, we catch up with him. He’s outside the hold’s closed hatch, by the big red warning sign about the lack of shielding.
When Sky goes to say something, he shushes her.
‘Keep it down,’ he hisses. ‘There’s something I have to do, but I’ll need Kyle to help.’
‘What with?’ I whisper, suspicious.
Murdo glances past us, but we can’t be seen back here because of a dog-leg in the corridor. His lived-in face is less battered by now, but he looks uneasy.
‘These dark-market contacts of mine,’ he says. ‘They’re all chancers. With promethium being so valuable, there’s a risk they’ll just try to take it off us.’
‘Let them try,’ Sky mutters.
Murdo grins. ‘All the same, I’d feel better if we had insurance. We should stash some of the cargo. That way, if we have to run for it, we won’t have lost everything.’
Sounds reasonable to me. ‘Where would we hide it?’
‘In that escape craft, with the prisoners.’
Sky sniffs. ‘Oh yeah, nobody would look there.’
But Murdo’s no fool. He tells us that after we’ve loaded a couple of crates aboard, he’ll launch the escape craft. It can float about until we come back to retrieve it.
‘But what about the guys in stasis?’ I ask.
He shrugs. ‘What about them? Won’t do them no harm.’
‘And you’re sure we can find it again?’ Sky asks.
‘They have distress beacons, but you have to be close to pick up the signal. We know where to listen.’
‘What if somebody else hears it?’
‘They won’t. I’ve altered course. We’re in dead space now. No starship has any reason to be out here.’
‘So how come we’re sneaking off to do it?’ Sky asks.
Murdo glances past us again. ‘The fewer who know, the better. So don’t go telling anyone.’
About now, the warning sign behind him catches my eye.
‘Will you shut the drive off ? Or we’ll be zapped.’
He grimaces. ‘Best not to. The others would feel it and wonder what’s going on. It’s not like it’ll kill us.’
I look at Sky, unsure.
She shrugs. ‘Makes sense, I guess.’
Thankfully, Murdo knows his way around handling cargo, so we’re not in the hold too long being fried. Using an overhead hoist we lower two of the massively heavy crates into the airlock compartment. Using levers, rollers and wedges, we sweat them into the pod. It’s heavy work and even I’m shaking by the time Murdo slaps a push-panel with a red handprint on it and the access lock snaps shut. We scramble back up into the hold and Sky lets us out.
When she closes the hatch behind us . . . it’s bliss!
After a breather we return to the crew compartment. We haven’t been missed. Murdo carries on through to the flight deck. A minute later, the deck shifts under me.
‘Did you feel something?’ Anuk asks.
I look at Sky. She looks at me. We shake our heads.
7
SHANGLO BACKWATER
I don’t have a problem with heights, but looking down at Shanglo makes my stomach squirm. Our freighter hangs nose-low over the moon, yet my feet stay planted on the deck behind Sky’s seat and I don’t fall forward. I know we make our own gravity, but it does my head in. We shifted back into real space an hour ago. Since then the freighter’s been decelerating and manoeuvring us into orbit, all on automatic, while Murdo watches and tries to chew his lip off. I’d been looking forward to see the storm-like nebula again, but this close it’s all spread out and too faint to see.
That’s what Murdo says anyway.
Sky was funny. She had a right go at him, sure he’d flown us to the wrong system. But the star map is on his side.
We saw Shanglo’s planet on our way in, a lifeless-looking grey blob. That’s away to our right now. The system’s half-dead sun is somewhere behind us, a red giant.
As we track over the moon’s day-side, most of the surface is hidden by yellow-white clouds towering above their dark shadows. But I catch glimpses of lush green land too. Towards the far horizon I see glittering blue. Murdo says this is an ocean, which is like a really big lake.
Dodgy stomach or not, I’ve never seen a more beautiful sight. I could gaze at it forever.
‘Okay, I want everybody out of here,’ Murdo says. ‘Now!’
He reckons our descent could get rough so we all need to be strapped in. With Sky being a jammer pilot too, she’s in the right-hand flight seat. I’ve a few hours’ flying time myself and have bagged the seat behind them.
Anuk herds the other kids back to the crew compartment.
I’m pulling my straps tight when Murdo summons up a graphic display of the star freighter.
‘Initiating separation, in three, two . . . go!’
The flight deck shudders violently. On the graphic our freighter splits into two parts, our dropship front end shrugging off the larger dee-emm drive assembly.
‘Split complete,’ Sky says. ‘Everything’s in the green.’
Anuk yells that they’re all strapped in.
Murdo rest his hands on the controls for atmospheric flight, built into the armrests of his pilot seat. On the left are the throttles to control our speed. On the right a pistol grip controls pitch, roll and yaw. He swears it’s called a joystick, which is weird. These last few hours, I’ve never seen him so excited, and I’ve caught it off him. My heart thumps like it’s trying to punch its way out. If we manage to offload this darkblende he says we’ll be up to our necks in creds, so rich that we’d struggle to spend them all in our lifetimes.
I’d settle for never being cold, hungry or scared again.
Not for the first time I have to pinch myself that I’m not dreaming. Days ago I was Wrath’s most wanted. A hunted rebel, hiding out in holes in the ground, misery and suffering all I had to look forward to. Now this . . .
‘Right,’ Murdo says, giving us his most annoying grin. ‘Let’s see if I can remember how to fly a descent.’
‘Try real hard,’ Sky says.
My feeling exactly. I saw this thing when it was on its way down to Wrath. It doesn’t hang about.
‘I’ll do my best,’ he tells us. ‘Hold on.’
Our drop starts smooth, but the atmosphere thickens fast and we start to be buffeted. Soon I’m glad for my wrap-around seat and my straps. I’ve been on wild flights in jammers back on Wrath, but they were nothing compared to this. After one particularly savage buffet rattles my teeth, I shout out to Sky, asking if something’s gone wrong.
She checks her displays. ‘No-o, we’re go-o-o-d.’
And then, quite suddenly, everything calms down again. I can make out features below us, mountains and rivers. But they seem to be leaping up at us hellish fast.
‘Hey, pull up!’ Sky yells.
I reckon the dropship does it for him, but only at the last possible second. I’m shoved down into my seat so hard it’s as if ten heavy men have piled onto me. My seeing greys out. By the time I can focus again we’re in level flight with clouds whipping past unbelievably fast. And we’re definitely not on Wrath. Shanglo’s sky is a different blue, and shot through higher up with weird, ghostly tendrils of green.
Murdo gives himself a shake. ‘Switching to manual.’
‘Is that a good idea?’ Sky says, only just beating me to it.
‘You want me to wait until I’m landing it?’
A fair point that shuts us up.
He does a few shallow practice dives and mildly banked turns without any problem. Then throws it around more confidently like he’s back aboard his windjammer.
A big grin splits his face. ‘See, nothing to it, huh?’
‘Where’s this old contact of yours?’ I ask.
‘Cobb’s a thousand klicks that way.’ Murdo points in the direction we’re flying. ‘A compound at the edge of a great big plateau. Should be hard to miss.’
That I can believe as the surface of Shanglo flashes past beneath us. Apart from a dark smudge in the distance, all I see are flat, tree-smothered plains in every direction. Murdo noses us lower, until we’re skimming the tops. These trees are way bigger than anything on Wrath.
‘Fine bit of lumber here,’ I say.
Murdo glances at me, as if I’ve said something funny.
Not long after, we arrive at that brown smudge I’d seen. The trees disappear like somebody flicked a switch. Under us now is a scarred and shattered landscape, criss-crossed with tracks, dotted with stumps where trees once jostled.
The brown stretches ahead to the far horizon.
‘What the hell happened?’ Sky says.
‘Auto-loggers happened,’ Murdo says. ‘Lumber’s big business. No trees left on the Core worlds, so they log it here and ship it back. Rich folk like a bit of wood.’
He cranks us round and we get a look at how the forest ends behind us in a straight line that can’t be natural, before we fly on again over the devastation.
‘No trees left?’ I say. ‘What happened?’
‘Used them all up. Poisoned them. Who cares now? I reckon that’ll be our rock ahead in the distance.’
A cluster of strange plateaus sticks up from the ravaged landscape. Flat-topped, sheer-sided, they look like they’ve been squeezed up out of the ground. Murdo’s flying us towards the biggest one, which must be a good few klicks across. I can see the outline of buildings on top of it.
‘Weird,’ Murdo says.
‘What’s the matter?’ Sky asks.
‘Cobb’s guys must see us coming, so why aren’t they on the comm, demanding that we identify ourselves?’
‘Why don’t you give them a shout?’
Murdo sucks his teeth, not looking too keen, but then he presses a button on the joystick. ‘Cobb compound, incoming free-trader is the . . . Never Again Two. D’you copy?’
Nothing. He calls again. More nothing.
When we make a low pass over the compound we find out why. All that’s left of Cobb’s compound are tumbled-down walls and burnt-out skeletons of buildings. Murdo curses, and cranks us back round in a steep turn.
It looks no better on the second pass.
Still cursing, he sets us down on an open area outside the ruins. It’s not his best landing, but I’m saying nothing.
‘This is dumb,’ Sky says. ‘Nothing’s left here.’
But Murdo’s already unstrapping himself. He growls that he wants to take a look around. Minutes later, all of us except for Sky are crammed on to the loading platform as it lowers.
We step off it on to the surface of another world.
ANOTHER. WORLD.
Never did I think this day would come. My head bangs with trying to take it all in. The ground feels springy underfoot, but it’s just some reddish dirt. And that’s when I realise gravity here must be weaker than I’m used to. I take a cautious breath and taste the air. Tingly. Rich. Painfully fresh after the scrubbed and processed stuff we’ve been sucking in. A host of weird smells shove their way up my nose, none of which I could put a name to. But the most amazing thing has to be Shanglo’s sky, creepy tendrils of green reaching across a blue so deep it’s on its way to purple.
Cam crumbles some of the red soil between his fingers.
‘See this? Even the dirt looks different.’
Murdo claps his hands to get our attention. He tells me and Cam and Ravi to come with him to check out the remains of the compound. The rest are to stick close to the ship and keep a lookout. Sky’s up in the freighter’s nose turret, covering us. As we head off, I wave at her.
Do I get a wave back? Nah. Just a shake of her head.
Murdo asks if I have my blaster.
I pull it out and check it. ‘Expecting trouble?’
‘It has a habit of following me around.’
The scorched wall of the compound tells its own tale of trouble. It’s obvious that no ordinary fire tumbled these massive stones. They’ve been smashed down.
‘Somebody fired heavy-duty weapons at this,’ I say.
Murdo says nothing, but the grim look on his face tells me I’m not wrong. All three of us scramble inside through one of the torn gaps. The compound must’ve been a sight to see once, with dozens of warehouses and storage silos. Now it’s a tangle of twisted metal and charred wood.
Moving cautiously, we pick our way deeper inside.
The scars of a vicious fight are everywhere. Ragged blaster splashes. Neater holes punched by pulse-rifle shots. But rust has taken big bites too, and when I accidentally step on some wood it gives way, rotten all through.
I straighten up and let out the breath I’ve been holding.
‘Whatever happened, it was years ago.’
Murdo grunts. ‘Looks like it.’
‘Who d’you suppose did this?’ Cam asks.
‘How should I know? Cobb dealt with mean people. Maybe he crossed one of them. Only . . . he was no pushover. Not just anyone could come here and make this mess.’
Clearly gutted that we won’t be flogging our darkblende, he kicks out at some of the burnt wood.
‘Could ComSec have shut him down?’ I ask.
According to Murdo, Combine Security forces are the only law that reaches out this far from the Core worlds. He’s been telling us stories about his run-ins with them.
But he shakes his head. ‘Nah. That lot would take care of Cobb from orbit. There’d be nothing but a crater here.’
‘Shush!’ Ravi hisses. ‘Hear that?’
We all shut up and listen.
After a while, a clang of metal on metal comes from ahead of us, where warped and rusty girders stick up from the remains of what must once have been a warehouse.
‘Now would be a good time to leave,’ I say.
Murdo ignores me. Next thing he’s jogging towards the sound. Cam and Ravi sneer at me before following him. I curse, and hustle to catch up. One of the stone-arched entrances is still mostly standing, and somebody’s cleared a path through the rubble under it. Murdo swings wide, approaching it from the left side so he won’t be seen from within. He waits there until we’re all crouched beside him before sneaking a quick peek in.
Whatever he sees, he grunts and relaxes.
And then, before any of us can stop him, he’s striding through the archway, showing off his empty hands.
‘Hey there,’ he calls. ‘Can we have a word?’
Me and the other two lads swap uncertain looks, before leaping up to chase after him. We don’t get far though, because Murdo comes tearing out again . . .
Snapping at his heels is the weirdest creature I’ve ever seen. Way bigger than a bull fourhorn, its hide is mottled orange and six massively powerful legs drive it forward. At the end of a stupidly long neck, the thing’s head is no bigger than my fist. Lucky for Murdo, it’s being slowed down by hauling a long flatbed wagon. Perched on this, whipping the creature along, is a white-haired old man.
‘Hi-yah!’ he bellows, spit flying.
Murdo flings himself aside and rolls out of the way. Ravi scrambles left and clear, Cam and me dive right.
Creature and wagon thunder past us.
‘Don’t let him get away!’ Murdo yells, scrambling up.
How we’re to do this I don’t know. But now one of the wagon’s wheels clips a heap of debris it’s swerving round. Top-heavy and carrying too much speed it tips over and crashes on to its side, spilling a load of scavenged steel. Red dust boils up. Blaster in hand, I run towards it. At the front the unhappy creature is jammed between the pulling poles, snapping and making all sorts of hideous noises.
I’m sure scavver guy must have broken his old neck. But what do I know? He comes hobbling out of the dust.
‘Look whatcha done!’ he wails angrily.
Murdo curses and makes a show of knocking dirt off himself. ‘It’s your fraggin’ fault, you old fool. If you hadn’t tried to run us down, it wouldn’t have happened.’
The guy’s beast is full-on weird, but otherwise I’ve seen his like back in the Barrenlands. A shock of hair that might be white if it got washed. Straggly beard. Mouth full of broken teeth. Bent back. Calloused hands. Lined face and deep-sunk eyes that have seen too much hardship.
‘Didn’t mean to run you down,’ he says. ‘Wouldn’t do that. Didn’t see you, did I? No.’
He squirms, like he doesn’t know how to stay still. Head tilted back, his watery eyes slide around strangely, never settling. I realise he’s blind, and a bit mad.
‘Relax. Nobody’s going to hurt you, old-timer,’ Murdo growls. ‘We just want to know what happened here.’
The man twitches. ‘Don’t know nothing ’bout that. I’m only a blind old scrapper who minds his own business. What I don’t know can’t hurt me, see.’
Murdo tries again, but gets the same answer.
Cam wanders over, a length of steel pipe in his hand. ‘I’ll make him talk, if you like.’
Murdo tells him to leave the guy be. ‘Maybe he doesn’t know. There’s a crewed maintenance platform near here, where they service the auto-loggers. We’ll drop in, load up on supplies and see what they have to say.’
Cam looks gutted. ‘The guy must know something.’
‘You heard Murdo, we’re out of here,’ I say.
Now if I was the old scavver, I’d keep quiet and be glad not to get my last few teeth kicked out for nearly running us down. But not this guy. He starts pleading with us to help him right his wagon. Murdo goes to shove him aside, but gets grabbed and whined at from close range.
Nasty, with all that spit flying.
‘All right, all right!’
With its heavy load shed and using a length of timber as a lever, the wagon is soon back on its wheels. It seems no worse for its crash. Neither does the beast. It heaves itself up and very nearly gets a mouthful of Ravi.
We leave the scrap metal where it fell though.
‘He loaded it once, he can load it again,’ Murdo says.
The old scavver feels his way slowly round the wagon, like he can’t believe we did it. He mumbles to himself too, that we ‘ain’t Syndicate guys, and that’s for sure.’
We’re walking away, but I turn back.
‘Syndicate? What’s that?’
I tell Murdo what I overheard.
The guy licks his shrivelled lips, plainly wishing he’d kept his gob shut. And starts up again with his I’m-only-a-blind-old-scrapper-and-don’t-know-nothing routine.
‘These Syndicate guys, was it them who destroyed this place?’ Murdo gestures around at the devastation.
Dumb if you ask me, as the blind scavver can’t see him.
‘Don’t make us ask again!’ Cam snaps.
‘Okay, okay. It was the Syndicate. Who else? But you can’t tell anyone I told you. If word gets back to them –’
‘Relax. It won’t,’ Murdo says, waving at Cam to back off. ‘I’m an old friend of Cobb, the guy who owned this place. Don’t suppose you know what happened to him?’
The man grunts. ‘Dead. Like the rest.’
Takes a while, but Murdo eventually worms the full story out of the guy. An outfit calling itself the Syndicate has blasted and slaughtered its way to the top of the many criminal gangs operating in the Vulpes sector. They’d come calling and told Cobb he worked for them now. Cobb didn’t fancy that and had told them to go to hell.
‘Always was a stubborn son-of-a-bitch,’ Murdo says.
The scavver shrugs. ‘And now he’s a dead son-of-a-bitch. That’s what happens when you mess with them Syndicate guys. You want my advice? Steer well clear.’
We’re slogging back to our freighter when it hits me. ‘Hey, maybe Shanglo wasn’t a complete bust. We could flog the darkblende to this Syndicate mob.’
Murdo shoots me a glare like I’m the biggest gom ever.
‘And what if it’s their darkblende? You heard that scavver guy. They run pretty much everything now.’
‘Any other great ideas?’ Cam says, all mocking.
I go to snarl that we can ask our skinny prisoner, but remember in time that he’s light years behind us by now, frozen inside the jettisoned escape pod with his gobby mate.
8
BLAST FROM THE PAST
With riches at stake, Murdo doesn’t give up easy.
Over the next few days we set down on three more worlds. On the first his contact had been taken out like Cobb. The second made no bones about working for the Syndicate now and wanted nothing to do with our darkblende, just in case. On the third world his contact had done a runner. Frustrating as hell, but it’s not all bad. We’ve been able to buy supplies and fill our aching bellies. Anuk had him load us up on working clothes too so we’ve ditched our ident-camp rags and look less out of place. Money is called creds out here too, but there’s no minted coins like on the Wrath, only numbers stored in weird little plastic devices. You scan the creds on and off. We scavved some off the freighter’s old crew and Murdo knew how to use them.
On Barzahk, a desolate and wintry mining world where surface temps can’t be arsed climbing above zero even in summer, we get a scare. And then, at last, a break.
Our scare comes as Murdo’s lining up our descent to the surface. Sky’s in the co-pilot seat again. I’m watching from behind them. Our lights are dimmed and I’m drinking in the view of Barzahk below. One second Murdo’s tapping away at a control panel, the next he’s cursing.
‘We’ve got incoming.’ He jabs a finger at the display before him. ‘It’s a fraggin’ warship. ComSec!’
The screen shows an outline of the planet below, with our yellow dot orbiting it. The bigger red dot that Murdo points out is closing in from our right side. I peer through the side viewport and spot a tiny speck.
‘There! I see it.’
Murdo gets busy at his panel. The display dissolves, reforming to show a brutal-looking spaceship.
‘Can we outrun it?’ Sky asks.
Murdo shakes his head. ‘Doubt it. Too late to try. We’re already well within range of their blast –’
A shrill alert from the comm system interrupts him.
‘Freighter in Barzahk orbit, this is Combine Security cruiser Nantahala. Identify yourself immediately and make ready to be boarded for a routine inspection.’
A woman’s voice. Casual. Assured.
‘Crap!’ Murdo thumps his head back into his headrest.
Sky lashes out at him. ‘Well, do something!’
‘Like what?’ he groans.
Nantahala woman repeats her demand, curtly this time.
My racing mind comes up with a desperate idea. ‘Maybe being caught by ComSec isn’t so bad? We could come clean and tell them everything. Wrath, idents, the Saviour exploiting us. It’s not our darkblende, is it? And we haven’t done anything wrong. All we’ve done is escape.’
Murdo and Sky both scowl at me.
‘Why not?’ I say, as bile fills my throat.
‘Because, Kyle,’ Murdo says savagely,‘ComSec play rough and they wouldn’t listen. They’ll just hang us as smugglers. Oh yeah, and escaping from a dump world is a hanging offence too. Good luck confessing to that.’
But now Sky makes us jump by letting out a loud yell.
‘The cruiser’s breaking off !’
I drag my eyes back to Murdo’s screen. Stabs of blue light flicker at the cruiser’s bow. Thrusters? Slowly but surely it swings around and shows us its stern. Next thing, a massive flare of blue overloads our screen as it lights up its drive. By the time the screen’s working again, all it shows are stars and a blue dot that’s getting smaller fast.