LoneFire Read online

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  One – Guns in the Sky

  Two – Scrambled Egg

  Three – Worms

  Four – Smoking Boots and Deadly Dustbins

  Five – Beginnings

  Six – The Space Anemone

  Seven – K’Tial

  Eight – Gemini

  Nine – Gateway

  Ten – Dead Souls

  Eleven – Second Coming

  Twelve – Jezebel

  Thirteen – The Kitchen Dispute

  Fourteen – The Seven Samurai

  Fifteen – Untamed News!

  Sixteen – The Thin-necked Man

  Seventeen – Welcome to The Crypt

  Eighteen – Tunnels and Terrorists

  Nineteen – Sanctuary

  Twenty – Sodium Haze

  Twenty-One – Utopia

  Twenty-Two – Seek and Destroy

  Twenty-Three – Strange Days

  Twenty-Four – Parthenogenesis

  Twenty-Five – Surgical Strike

  Twenty-Six – Victor Goes Splat

  Twenty-Seven – Dead Box Quickstep

  Twenty-Eight – I always wanted to shoot a lawyer

  Twenty-Nine – LoneFire

  Thirty – War

  Thirty-One – Thirty Angels Dancing

  Thirty-Two – Sex

  Thirty-Three – Raining Blood

  Thirty-Four – Monsters In The Dark

  Thirty-Five – Excuse Me, May I Borrow Your Phone

  Thirty-Six – Weird Scenes Inside The Spaceport

  Thirty-Seven – Face to face

  Thirty-Eight – Sunfire

  Thirty-Nine – A Rock and a Hot Place

  Epilogue

  LoneFire

  Stephen Deas

  © Stephen Deas 2015

  Stephen Deas has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd in 2015.

  Table of Contents

  One – Guns in the Sky

  Two – Scrambled Egg

  Three – Worms

  Four – Smoking Boots and Deadly Dustbins

  Five – Beginnings

  Six – The Space Anemone

  Seven – K’Tial

  Eight – Gemini

  Nine – Gateway

  Ten – Dead Souls

  Eleven – Second Coming

  Twelve – Jezebel

  Thirteen – The Kitchen Dispute

  Fourteen – The Seven Samurai

  Fifteen – Untamed News!

  Sixteen – The Thin-necked Man

  Seventeen – Welcome to The Crypt

  Eighteen – Tunnels and Terrorists

  Nineteen – Sanctuary

  Twenty – Sodium Haze

  Twenty-One – Utopia

  Twenty-Two – Seek and Destroy

  Twenty-Three – Strange Days

  Twenty-Four – Parthenogenesis

  Twenty-Five – Surgical Strike

  Twenty-Six – Victor Goes Splat

  Twenty-Seven – Dead Box Quickstep

  Twenty-Eight – I always wanted to shoot a lawyer

  Twenty-Nine – LoneFire

  Thirty – War

  Thirty-One – Thirty Angels Dancing

  Thirty-Two – Sex

  Thirty-Three – Raining Blood

  Thirty-Four – Monsters In The Dark

  Thirty-Five – Excuse Me, May I Borrow Your Phone

  Thirty-Six – Weird Scenes Inside The Spaceport

  Thirty-Seven – Face to face

  Thirty-Eight – Sunfire

  Thirty-Nine – A Rock and a Hot Place

  Epilogue

  Yuen, H. F., Baxter, H., Liu, X. J. et al:‘Control of Gene Expression In Foetal Development.’ Journal of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, 123, 2987-4020 (2317).

  These guys were working on putting some of the theory into practice, switching genes, rapid growth acceleration, trying to keep everything together by dosing them up with whatever came to hand, that kind of shit. Medical ethics being what they are in the Rim, they got away with a lot. They also tried their potions on normal foetuses, trying to produce a creature with characteristics and growth rates of their choosing. Fair’s fair, most of the work was done on animals. Most.

  One – Guns in the Sky

  Life can be a real bitch. People say that, don’t they? Life’s a bitch and then you marry one. Ha fucking ha, have another glass of sherry and then do please amuse me by choking on it. Life’s a bitch and then you die. Well, go on then, do us all the favour you nihilistic twat. Life’s a bitch and then you wake up? Still waiting.

  It’s a while before I figure out I’m in a shuttle and longer before I remember why. Head’s stuffed full of cotton wool with an attitude problem. Mouth tastes like someone pissed in my face. Could be that they did. Out through the bubblediamond window I see stars. Lots of them. Yeah, yeah, go on, revel in it: billions and billions of twinkly little stars. The Milky Way, delicate as a lacewing, diamonds strung across the sky like dawn dew. Wow! Space! Yeah… Christ, change your fucking glasses and see it for what it really is, a badly wiped-off cum-stain smeared across the face of the universe. Pretty as a pig in shit.

  The sun here is bluer than I expected. There’s no gravity. I fucking hate no gravity. The too-blue sun dims for an instant. Whatever put me out, still messing with my head. The shuttle spins. A planet slides into my vision, filling it. White flecked with green. Proven is supposed to be red. Like Mars used to be, back when there was a Mars.

  Guess this place isn’t Proven after all.

  ‘Shit,’ says Mr Cray.‘Testicle hammer vice screaming shit!’

  Cray’s not quite the short-arse he looks, it’s just the way he slumps when he’s not had one too many espressos and ends up acting like a spider on speed. I push up into the cockpit. Jester lies slumped in the pilot seat, snoring. Jester comes from an orbital in the Dust Sector, Tybalt, the one the Stars forgot to hurl a rock at that hangs over what’s left of Earth like a too-young calf still nosing its dead mother after the corpse has long gone rotten with flies. Jester considers himself a true native, a class above us colonials. That’s about as much as he’ll say. Whatever the rest of his story is, it’s left him with a chip on his shoulder the size of Io. He’s mostly made of… fuck, I don’t know. Not squishy stuff like the rest of us.

  Numbers appear before my eyes, tiny green flashes tattooed on the back of Mr. Cray’s head. More than twenty-four hours have passed since we left Cestus and I don’t have the first idea what happened for most of them. A turd of dread slops about in my gut. This is not good.

  ‘ Fuck!’ says Mr Cray again. Mr Cray says‘fuck’ the way other people breathe. Could mean we’re all about to die, could just mean he’s lost a game of Megafighter XIV that he’s been playing on the sly.

  We’re not dead, so that’s something. And we seem to have found one of those rare interstices of space-time where there isn’t someone shooting. I take a moment, put Mr Cray on mute and look about the cockpit. Not that there’s much to see. Sparse. Minimalist, the new chic in spaceship interiors. About time. Can’t abide that exposed piping and gaudy flashing lights vibe the fashionistas are so fond of, that old man’s-first-art-deco-dreams-of-spacetravel wank. On the other hand, minimalist doesn’t offer much. Us. Some seats. A socket with a wire coming out, currently plugged into Jester’s head, the manual override that took us exactly seventy-eight seconds to find, all three of us searching every surface. Seventy-eight gut-fucking seconds when we were all sure we were going to die.

  ‘ So where are we? Cestus low orbit?’ I try to make out like I’m calm. The planet’s about the
right colour for Cestus; well, sort of, but if it is then I’m buggered if I know how come we haven’t been turned into a cloud of super-heated space-dust.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, right, and I’m the Metatron, Angel of the Voice of God. This is New Amazonia, dickwad. Socket pig-sty balls, balls, balls!’

  ‘Well, that can’t be right.’ Can’t be.

  Mr Cray flips me a finger.‘Oh, yeah, right. How fucking stupid of me to think that any of the fucking flight instruments are fucking working!’

  ‘So what? We’ve got some magical fairy shuttle made by unicorns and pixies that can hoppity-skip through time and space fuelled by magic fucking mushrooms?’ Shit. I should know better than to lose my rag but we’re in a shuttle, a thing that goes from one planet to the next like every other fucking shuttle in the whole of time and space. We both know nothing this size can spin a warp.

  Be generous: put it down to waking up in the middle of god-knows-where without the first clue how we got here. I guess I find that a touch stressful.

  ‘I said we should have stolen some old rust heap, but you had to go for some fucking topclass executive palace. If we’re still in Cestus then how come the sun’s gone blue? Magic fucking star paint?’ He’s quivering. Fear and fury crushed together.

  I take a tiny hit of endorphins and try to find my happy place, which I discover to be a gloomy attic, empty except for a sofa assembled from pieces of Mr Cray’s violently dismembered corpse. Step by step. Break it down. I get us through security at Network SixtyNine. Mr Cray and Jester do what Mr Cray and Jester do– steal some data, fuck up, trigger some alarms, steal a helicopter when really all we needed to do was walk right back out the front door, that kind of shit. Only the helicopter has no fuel and so we have to land– if you can call it that– on the TransOrbit tower. I steal the shuttle, Jester coaxes it into flying while Cray wires up all manner of crap so it doesn’t go telling the world where it is. All the while with the cops buzzing about and liable to drop fifty shades of semi-automatic armourpiercing shit all over us if we get caught, but we don’t. By the time the alarms go off and there are people shouting at us everywhere we don’t give a shit, because by then we know they can’t catch us. So we set a trajectory, burning hydrogen all the way to Proven Freeport, set up a sell and slip quietly back home to claim our cash… Only Mr Cray’s right. We’re not even in the right system. Somehow we’ve been buttfucked.

  I stare at the planet in case that helps. It doesn’t, though. Seems like it’s getting bigger.‘I think we’re going to crash,’ I say.

  ‘Thank fucking Gandhi for that!’

  I stare at Mr Cray like he’s mad. He responds by having some sort of spasm that ends with a lot of shaking a finger and some flailing at the planet outside.‘This is New Fucking Amazonia. GZW see us snooping around their top-secret-but-everybody-knows-about-it research planet they’ll turn us into a really fucking angry neutrino stream before you can shout.’ Cray unbuckles his harness and kicks off to the back of the cockpit.‘There’s gotta be some sort of escape capsule or something.’ He starts running the user manual and the stops as some new panic hits him.‘Wanker! You see how hot we are? Shit! We’re fucking melting out there, our hull is fucking melting! Why the fuck are we so hot?’

  We’re way, way too high to be skimming any atmosphere. Maybe spinning a warp does that but what do I know? Cray’s panic is starting to infect me through the endorphins so I take another tug.‘So why don’t you plug yourself in and talk nice to the pilot golem and make it take us somewhere else.’

  Cray gives me this look. He throws his hands to his head and falls to his knees.‘Holy fucking shit, C, what a great idea! I mean, who else could have come up with that? Shit, I mean, no way, no way ever would that have crossed my mind on my own. It’s just so awesome to be around someone who’s just so fucking full of brilliance!’ His voice ratchets up from flaying sarcasm to full-on screaming in my face.‘Am I a fucking infant? Do I look like one? You think I haven’t tried? It’s all plugged into Jester’s head, or hadn’t you noticed?

  Fuck knows what happened when he passed out but it’s all fucked to shit and we can’t do a fucking thing until he comes round.’

  ‘So fucking plug him back in and fucking wake him up or fucking reboot him or whatever, right? Fucking fuck, man!’ I clearly need a bigger endorphin boost to deal with Cray today. I tap three more hits in quick order. Five in the space of a few minutes. One more and we’ll have a new record.

  Jester suddenly sits up. Wakes up very quickly does Jester, with a reflex impulse to go for a gun and shoot someone; yes, he really has that wired into his cortex. You learn to hit the deck real quick if Jester wakes up kind of dopey-looking, and whenever when space is tight, Jester gets the single room. Today he looks more annoyed than dopey. Experience beams and charmingly suggests that annoyed is maybe a bad thing and I should break the news gently. It suggests this in an irritating singsong voice that makes me want to ram a small explosive into my ear.

  ‘New Amazonia. We’re totally buttfucked. Sort it!’ Fuck you, experience. The shuttle lurches.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Jesus, fuck! Look!’

  Mr Cray points. Ahead, space is scintillating. A thousand twinkle specks scattered in a line like stardust falling from the fingers of God.

  ‘Fucking hell! Are we in a meteor shower now?’ We can’t be in a meteor shower. No one hates me this much.

  Cray is frantically reaching over Jester for the plugs.‘That’s a laser you menstrual stain!

  They’ve got a big fuck-off laser in a higher orbit and they’re shooting at us with it! I told you! Didn’t I? Didn’t I say? Jesus! How far away was that? If they hit us then we’re gone, and I mean gone. Pouf! Cloud of pissed off hyper-energetic particles. More Watts than that porn place you use where they shove electrified rods up your arse.’

  I briefly picture Mr Cray as a cloud of neutrinos that says‘fuck’ a lot. While I do that, the word‘laser’ makes some connection and Jester springs into action; or at least, his artificially enhanced reflexes do, and what’s left follows along in its own time. Not that there’s much left that’s organic anymore. Mr Cray calls him Darth Jester, but only when he’s quite sure that Jester isn’t listening; and I can’t help thinking those organic bits must be so pickled in drugs they can’t possibly work the way they were designed to, but who cares about that, right? He grabs the autopilot wire and slots the jack into his head. A moment later he’s in control of our flight.

  ‘We haven’t got any fuel left,’ he says, flinging the shuttle sideways towards the planet. Mr Cray sets off a broadband hail to anyone who might be dumb enough to listen to him.

  ‘Hey! Stop shooting! We’ll land, okay! You can come and arrest us or something. We didn’t mean to be here! It was an accident. It just took us here!’ Another jink sends him tumbling, floating across the cabin, bouncing off the ceiling and into the window. Jester laughs at him.

  Glad I stayed strapped in.

  The planet spins gracefully around the edge of the canopy. Quaint. Hadn’t figured it before, but this must be a real top spec ship to have a genuine transparency instead of screens. Perfect bubblediamond don’t come cheap.

  ‘That’s no laser,’ says Jester.‘They missed by miles and we’re still getting fried by the secondary radiation. Also, did I mention that they missed?’

  Mr Cray peels himself off the navigation controls exactly in time to be sent flying backwards by a sudden acceleration. I feel myself pushed back into my seat.‘Then what is it?’

  ‘For pity’s sake strap yourself in, Cray. They’re using a particle beam. A really, really big one.’ There’s a pause and then Jester’s mouth makes a little‘o’ shape and his eyes go wide, and just for a tiny fraction of a moment he looks like he might have had some sort of human childhood instead of being assembled in a vat. See, even Jester can be awestruck as long as it’s something to do with weaponry.‘Jesus wept! Look at the sun! It goes dim each time.

  That’s whe
re this is coming from. They’ve got a Sunscreen! We’re being shot at by a fucking Sunscreen!’ He says it like it’s some sort of religious experience.

  ‘A what?’ I shake my head. Legions of shabby salesmen brandishing squeezy tubes of anticancer skincare products? Eat factor thirty, pond scum? This is not what Jester’s talking about.

  He guns hard for the planet.‘They started building them after the Stars smashed the Dusties. It’s for vaporizing near light-speed asteroids, not for this. That’s why they’re having trouble hitting us. We have to put ourselves between the sun and the planet. They might think twice about firing it then. Cray, for pity’s sake strap yourself in. I don’t want to slip on your messy remains and crack my head on something when we land.’

  The shuttle shudders. Mr Cray pulls himself into his seat and huddles there, muttering. I’m tempted to do the same but I’ve got an image to look after. Fortunately I have drugs to help with this.

  Jester shouts over the noise, telling us that we’re entering the atmosphere of New Amazonia, presumably in case either of us has gone spontaneously deaf and blind and lost all sense of motion.‘We’ve taken a lethal dose of radiation several times over,’ he says.‘You’re going to have to turn yourselves in after we land and hope someone with a medical centre is in a good mood! Shit, that was close.’

  You. Not we. Can’t help noticing that little slip of a pronoun.

  The shuttle lurches. The planet fills the screen. I can see the shapes of the clouds, far below.

  Spinning round and round and round. Lethal dose. No, can’t say I’d spotted that. I focus inward, bring up the brainweb– another present from the Company– and run a systems check. Correction. I try to run a systems check. Just as well I never went into this augmentation shit too much. At least the baseline web still works. Christ! Do I want to think about all those hundreds of filament-miles in my head, soaking up all that radiation? The first brainwebs, back in the early days, were raw metal. There are some quite funny videos about what happened when they got mixed with a healthy dose of microwaves. Funny in a sick way, anyway. And mostly the videos are of animals. Mostly.

  They make them better now, so I’m told.

  A giant hand reaches out and hurls us end over end across the sky.‘Try dodging,’ I suggest. ‘You want to get out and push?’