Chaos Space (Sentients of Orion) Read online

  ‘Pet!’ shrieked Bethany.

  But the big man was dazed, grabbing the back of his head and moaning.

  ‘Crap.’ Jo-Jo darted out and seized a shard of the chair leg.

  The creature’s feelers flickered in his direction and then back to Petalu as if confused by the choice.

  Jo-Jo didn’t wait for it to decide. He stabbed the shard into the crack in its exoskeleton with all his strength, jerking the piece from side to side. A large fracture opened along its abdomen and an opaque fluid began to leak out.

  The creature doubled over as if surprised, and its feelers reached towards the fluid. The tiny maws on the end of each one began to swallow the fluid from the wound. It seemed to forget Jo-Jo and Mau altogether—but across the trade court others were beginning to move in their direction.

  Jo-Jo tried to drag Petalu towards the lift. ‘Beth!’

  Bethany grabbed one of Petalu’s massive arms and heaved with a strength that startled Jo-Jo. They dragged and rolled and pushed the big man into the lift and Bethany pinged the doors shut.

  As the lift headed to the top of its shaft, Jo-Jo straddled Petalu’s chest. ‘Come on, man. No time for wimping.’

  ‘We can’t carry him any further,’ said Bethany. She knelt near Petalu’s head, rocking on her knees, hands clasped together.

  ‘How did you get so strong?’ Jo-Jo asked her.

  She exhaled softly. ‘Fear makes you strong. Isn’t that what they say?’ She turned wide serious eyes on him. ‘And I have never been this scared, Joey.’ There was no brave follow-up smile, no laugh.

  No one had called him ‘Joey’ since his mum. She’d run off with a Galaxy Productions sales manager. Not that it ever stopped Jo-Jo from buying Galaxy sims. On the contrary, he felt compelled to do so. Just to make sure that his mother hadn’t wound up on the screen. Something about Bethany reminded him of his mother. Except that Bethany had balls—and a sense of decorum.

  ‘Me neither.’ Jo-Jo sighed. ‘I will live to regret this,’ he muttered.

  He slapped Petalu Mau across the face with enough force to get the man’s attention. Then he leaned close to him. ‘What am I gonna tell Mama Petalu? That you got knocked down and wouldn’t get up? That you had your fat arse whipped by a slug?’ Jo-Jo taunted. ‘THAT YOU LAY DOWN AND DIED!’

  Mau’s eyes focused. ‘Mama Petalu,’ he said hoarsely. He edged up onto one elbow.

  Thank Crux—

  Then one huge fist knocked Jo-Jo sideways into the lift wall.

  ‘No one tells Mama Petalu her man is a wimp.’

  Bethany hugged his neck. ‘You saved us, Pet.’

  The man patted her gently and sent Jo-Jo a dirty look.

  Jo-Jo righted himself and rubbed his jaw. It felt broken—dislocated at the very least.

  ‘Which way is the Savvy?’ he asked clumsily.

  Mau pointed to his left. ‘Long walk.’

  ‘Along the flute?’

  Mau nodded and sat up. Little bits of exoskeleton peppered the skin on his arms and face as if he’d rolled in liquid and been crumbed.

  Bethany tore some cloth from her shirt and wiped off what she could. ‘Might be toxic,’ she said.

  Mau sat still like a docile animal.

  His submission to her ministrations baffled Jo-Jo. As though the pair of them had known each other for years. He shrugged off the notion and climbed to his feet. They were only a few levels from the top of the station now.

  The lift halted and the doors pinged open. ‘Keep it open for me, Beth.’

  Jo-Jo felt his way to the door and peered around the edge. The little he could see to the right seemed impregnable: plastic conduits twisted around fallen metal joists and giving off a God-awful stinking gas where the fire had melted them. The left was clearer with enough room for single-file access.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he told the others. ‘Mau, show us the way.’ He stepped out to let him pass.

  The big man lumbered ahead. Bethany followed.

  Jo-Jo found it impossible to see around Mau’s bulk, so he fell to glancing nervously behind. Would the creatures follow them? Maybe he should have destroyed the lift panel—but what if they needed to get down again? What if the Savvy had already gone?

  The titanium corridor of the flute section was tarnished with wear. Dark green oil had seeped along the floor from a ruptured hydraulic, and Jo-Jo and Bethany slipped every few steps. Mau was surprisingly steady on his feet, his bulk leaving little gap between either side of his body and the sloping walls.

  Eventually the corridor opened on to a narrow mesh platform that hung above a huge scallop-shaped chamber filled with crusted tanks. A long pipe ran from one tank to the next, then joined another to make a thick conduit that disappeared through the chamber wall.

  Mau pointed to one particular tank. ‘Bad shit, that. Made Mau piss green stuff.’

  Bethany took a spontaneous step away. Her reaction made Jo-Jo want to laugh. Right now pissing green stuff seemed more attractive than having his body fluids sucked out. Then he remembered that his Health Watch had expired.

  He took a step that put him even further away from the tank than Beth.

  Mau pointed to where the pipes converged into one. ‘Go through underneath there. You first.’ He turned his finger to Jo-Jo and prodded him in the chest.

  From his expression, and the jab of the finger, Jo-Jo figured that Mau hadn’t forgiven him for the bagging yet. It didn’t seem like the right time to make up.

  He squeezed past Beth and Mau to take the lead. The narrow gallery was joined to an even narrower ramp that spiralled down into the chamber in a looping slope. As Jo-Jo jogged ahead of the other two he noticed globs of dried uuli secretions on the ramp grating. He’d heard they had a high tolerance of heavy metals. Maybe that was why they smelled so bad.

  When he reached the bottom he realised that Mau was walking sideways to fit the constricted passageway. Bethany was only a little way in front of him, making gestures of encouragement.

  Her patience and consideration impressed Jo-Jo. His own mind was firing off a bunch of wild messages, including one that he should leave the others behind.

  ‘Hurry!’ he bellowed helpfully.

  Bethany shot him an annoyed look.

  Jo-Jo shrugged and ducked in under the convergence of pipes. In the recess behind them sat a docking hatch whose display strip flashed unoccupied above, it.

  The Savvy had gone.

  Jo-Jo sagged back against the pipe, his mind racing even faster. They could return to the lift and search level by level for survivors. Or they could try to get through the trade hall to the main docking area. He discarded the second idea as a last option: the creatures must have come in that way.

  How they got to Dowl in the first place was another thing. They didn’t seem smart enough to transport themselves, which meant that someone else had brought them in. Araldis must be their target.

  Jo-Jo suddenly felt exhausted. He hated all the crap that went with worlds. If he hadn’t followed that manipulative little cunt Tekton here he would never have got slammed in confinement. No confinement—no wrong place, wrong time—no scrabbling around this toxic craphole looking for a way off. He spat on the filthy acid-scoured floor.

  ‘Josef?’

  Beth’s anxious face appeared beneath the pipes.

  He waved his hand at the display above the hatch. ‘Savvy’s gone.’

  She made a despairing sound.

  Mau squeezed under to join them. Sweat streamed from his face. His skin was as crimson as an Araldisian native’s and his breath came in irregular grunting gasps.

  ‘We’ll have to go back,’ said Jo-Jo.

  But then a noise above them had them all craning their necks. Two of the aliens were on the high platform.

  ‘They look like slugs,’ said Jo-Jo.

  ‘Not slugs,’ said Bethany. ‘Maybe arthropods of some type. They have an exoskeleton. And they can see.’

  ‘Call ‘em what you like, Beth. Mau? Ideas?’<
br />
  ‘Go out onto dock.’ Petalu Mau leaned past them and banged the hatch panel. It popped its seal with a sucking sound.

  The noise carried high.

  ‘They’ve seen us,’ said Beth. ‘Josef.’ She grabbed his chin between her hands and forced him to look into her eyes. ‘In case... promise me you’ll find my daughter and tell her that I tried to come after her, that I didn’t abandon her. Promise me.’

  Jo-Jo pulled away, perturbed by the strength in her fingers and by her emotion. ‘I don’t do promises, Beth.’

  Her head went up and she gave him a fierce look. ‘Promise me or I’ll—’

  ‘Hatch stuck,’ Mau interrupted.

  ‘Shit!’ Jo-Jo added his effort to the battle against the malfunctioning safety mechanism until the aperture was wide enough for Bethany to get through.

  ‘Go down the tube,’ Jo-Jo instructed her. ‘There’ll be a secondary hatch somewhere along it. Stick your head outside it and see what’s there. There’s got to be some other way off this piece of crap.’

  She nodded and disappeared while he and Mau continued to push at the door. It opened wide enough for Jo-Jo but not for Mau.

  Mau suddenly stopped pushing, exhausted, and fell back against the pipe. His face crumpled, looking as though he might cry. He pointed upward. ‘You tell Mama Petalu that Mau died brave. Tell her not let my little Kia handfast with Toki Lomas. No good, that family.’

  Jo-Jo groaned and glanced roofwards. The arthropods were over halfway down the ramp. Goading Mau again might work or... Mau just might kill him.

  Short on options, he took a deep breath. ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever. But I figured you could handle tough situations, man. Turns out you’re green as that stuff you’ve been pissing. I’m reckoning Beth’s got bigger balls than—’

  The muscles in Mau’s neck corded in fury. His big fists came up from where they had dropped by his sides. He charged at Jo-Jo who ducked to one side.

  Mau caught the corner of the hatch at full tilt. His momentum sprang the hatch—and cracked his collarbone. He doubled over, moaning, but Jo-Jo didn’t give him a chance to suck in the pain. He pulled him through the door and into the docking tube.

  Halfway along, Bethany was leaning out through a flexi-hatch. She heard them and turned awkwardly around in their direction. ‘What’s wrong with Mau?’

  Jo-Jo didn’t answer. He squashed down next to her and peered out of the hatch.

  The dock was grime on grime. Rubbish filled every corner of the chamber and metal littered the floor space like a shower of food scraps.

  From what he could see the berths at each of the four flexi-tubes were empty. The Savvies had most certainly gone.

  Jo-Jo jumped down onto the floor and felt the crunch of crystallised corrosion under his feet. He skirted the perimeter of the chamber, praying that his soft detention bootees would survive whatever was eating away at the floor. He couldn’t think of many worse places to die.

  Soon his feet began to tingle. He lifted one. The fabric was dissolving.

  Shit.

  Along the farthest wall, though, he spied a dull glow above another hatch. He ran over to the hatch’s spyhole and rubbed it clear. A tiny tubular lug with a one-operator cabin drifted on an external mooring. It wouldn’t get them far but it would get them off Dowl. Hopefully, someone would pick them up. Hopefully, there were ships out there still...

  ‘There’s a lug left,’ he bellowed.

  Bethany stuck her head out of the flexi-hatch again and signalled that they were coming. She jumped down, naked to the waist. Mau followed, his shoulder strapped with her shirt.

  Jo-Jo gaped at her as she approached.

  She scowled. ‘Stop acting like you’ve never seen me naked before. You know my butt better than I do.’

  Jo-Jo gave her a grin and unhooked an EVA suit from the wall. ‘Lug’s got a one-person cab. Better be Mau because he won’t fit into one of these.’

  Beth took the suit and deftly folded her small body into it.

  ‘Done this before?’ said Jo-Jo as he struggled with his own.

  ‘I’m a biologist, remember?’ She grabbed the collar of Jo-Jo’s suit and yanked it upward in one smooth movement. ‘There.’

  ‘There!’ echoed Jo-Jo. Only now he was looking back at the flexi-tube. It was vibrating as if it had suddenly filled with a lot of shifting weight.

  He turned to the lug controls and set them to wind it in. A few precious minutes passed while Jo-Jo and Bethany fumbled with their helmets and primed their airflow. Jo-Jo’s suit had about a half-hour supply, Bethany’s a bit more.

  When the lug slotted into its bracket the hatch popped open for the driver.

  ‘Pick us up at the first Savvy lock,’ said Jo-Jo. ‘If you miss us coming out of the chute...’

  Mau gave a grimace that wasn’t pain. ‘Miss you, mebbe. Not her,’ he said before he slammed the door shut.

  Jo-Jo sealed his faceplate.

  ‘Josef.’ Bethany’s voice sounded choked-up through the suit’s transceiver. ‘Hurry!’

  An arthropod crawled out of the flexi-tube.

  Jo-Jo grabbed Beth’s hand and they stumbled, clumsy in their suits, to the larger external hatches.

  Now the arthropods were piling over each other to get out.

  Jo-Jo worked the chute levers and gave Beth the thumbs-up. ‘Go!’

  She climbed up the short ladder and into the mouth of the tube. Jo-Jo expected her to slide in and shut the two-way, but she rolled onto her stomach and bumped the top of her helmet against his. ‘Her name is Djeserit. You come back here and find her.’

  ‘I’ll be the one who’s dead if you don’t shift your arse,’ he barked and gave her a shove. She slid down to the bottom of the tube and he closed the first part of the lock. The distant ‘pop’ told him that she was out.

  The lever icons blinked their changing sequence and the top hatch reopened. He began to climb the steps but a blow knocked him off onto his side. He crossed his arms automatically to deflect another hit but instead something long and wet slithered across his faceplate. The arthropod seemed confused by the EVA suit.

  Jo-Jo tried to breathe but the air seemed to have gone out of his lungs and his suit.

  Another set of feelers joined the first, then another.

  His muscles turned watery. How long before they realised that his brain fluids were behind the shiny faceplate they were playing around with?

  Slowly he brought his knees up to his chest so that he made a smaller target. But that seemed to agitate them. The arthropods unfolded to their full height and crowded in, their movements more aggressive. Claws scraped and rattled on his suit as they began to paw him. The maw of a proboscis opened above his left eye and a needle-thin hollow stalk protruded.

  Fuck!

  Jo-Jo’s strength returned on a tidal wave of terror and he kicked at the middle section of the closest creature. It fell back, creating enough space for him to launch himself at the steps. He scrambled up them and dived into the chute where he floundered around for the hatch control.

  The lock snapped shut, crushing the head section of the pursuing arthropod. Its slimy innards sprayed down the chute and coated his already blurred visor. Then came the pop of the outer hatch and he was out in the black: weightless and tumbling.

  Jo-Jo scraped his hand across his visor, trying to clean it, but the movement left streaks. On each rotation he glimpsed the lug with Bethany tethered onto its flat back. It was moving away from him.

  Beth will make him come back. She will.

  Another swipe across his visor made things worse. He could see nothing now.

  For long, long, long moments he tumbled sightlessly through space. His mind revisited the sequence of events. Had he made the right decisions? What should he have done differently? What would it be like to suffocate? What would he miss most? Who?

  It was the last question that unravelled Jo-Jo completely. There was no one he would miss. No one he cared for enough to grieve over. And worse
than that—no one who would miss him. Not a single person to acknowledge his passing.

  A sensation formed in his chest and forced its way up to the back of his throat. It would have been a relief to cry then: anything. But it vented itself in a sound that he had never made before: a whimpering animal noise that was part fear but more anguish, a noise that had no end: no intake of breath, no cathartic climax.

  ‘Josef. Take the tether. We can’t come any closer. You’re going to collide with junk from the detention mod.’ Bethany’s voice was in his helmet, drowning out his own cries.

  Why? he asked himself. Why save myself? An answer came that surprised him. Tekton. Tekton, that’s why. The prick will pay.

  ‘Josef!’ Bethany cried again. ‘Take it!’

  Something thumped against his chest. Jo-Jo grasped it automatically with both hands and felt a soft jerk as his momentum changed. He was no longer tumbling away from Dowl but falling towards it. It took him time to steady his forward motion enough to pull himself along the length of the tether.

  Finally he felt Bethany’s gloved hand on his shoulder and the solid pressure as his thighs encountered the edge of the barge.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Can’t see anything.’

  ‘Just do as I say.’ Beth sounded reassuringly composed now. ‘Lift your right knee...’

  As he followed her calm instructions, Jo-Jo’s rational mind reasserted itself. Shame over his moments of panic welled, and flowed, and subsided. Revenge might not be a noble or even a decent reason for living. But he’d take it.

  THALES

  The next few days passed in a pattern of conversation and meals which at another time, in other circumstances, would have nourished Thales’s soul. Amaury was truly learned but was neither pompous nor dogmatic with it—in fact, his inquiring mind was so bright and fresh that Thales sometimes felt like the older of the two. Aside, that is, from the calm that Amaury exuded.

  For once, Thales and Rene would have been in agreement—no young man could have hoped to have been so at peace with himself.

  They enjoyed an undisturbed exploration of each other’s minds, interrupted only by the arrival of meals that were brought in on a cart by a politic guard and left for them to arrange at the table however they wished.