Splintered Suns Read online

  Aimed straight at my heart, he thought as Dervla followed the others out. She’s persistent, give her that.

  At last the office door closed and Pyke and Van Graes were alone. For a moment, Pyke stared at the door then went over to the low armchair Dervla had been sitting in and took up the same position.

  “I assume you’ve read over your own mission summary?” said the older man.

  “I did. Travel to the Myzety system, land on the warrenworld Geskel, find a sinktown called Zheen, find a Henkari called Runken Burlet, persuade him to let us have a sample of his DNA. Then it’s back to the ship and we burn a groove through hyperspace to meet with the others on Ong, but …”

  “But you feel some details are lacking,” Van Graes said. He had risen from his chair and was detaching the thinscreen from his desk, folding it away into an inner pocket.

  Pyke gave a half-smile. “Not just the details that’s tweaking my curiosity. Dervla’s right, isn’t she—it would make just as much sense to send us all off to get the DNA first—” He broke off as Van Graes came round the desk and made a small beckoning gesture while heading for the far corner of his office. “Are we going somewhere?”

  “My private launch bay,” the billionaire said as he pressed something on the side of a glass-fronted bookcase. It slid aside to reveal a small elevator, all austere white and dark glass. “We can talk on the way.” He ushered Pyke inside and a white panel closed behind them.

  There was no noticeable sensation as the capsule fell away from Van Graes’ office, just a succession of shadowy flickers barely visible through the long panes of dark glass.

  “Understand this, Captain Pyke,” Van Graes said. “I’ve been hunting for the Angular Eye for more years than you’ve been alive. You could say it’s gone from being a middle-aged man’s hobby to an old man’s obsession.”

  “My hobby just now is keeping my ship flying and stopping my crew from killing each other.” Pyke gave a wry laugh. “Well, to be frank, it is more a compulsion than a hobby …”

  “That I can identify with,” said Van Graes. “It’s been a long, strange journey, decades full of twists, turns, fake artefacts, and false leads. If I, too, were being frank, I might say that it’s also been a sequence of odd satisfactions—the prospect of an actual end-point feels curiously daunting.”

  “Must say I’m dying to know what it does, your eye gadget.”

  Van Graes looked thoughtful. “Without revealing too much at this stage, I’ll just say that it leads the way to a very ancient, very specific hoard of treasures.”

  “Uh-huh—a tracking device,” Pyke said. “So Ong’s where this treasure’s hidden?”

  “I am … uncertain,” Van Graes said. “My researches have narrowed down possible locations of this hoard to four worlds in areas rimward of the Sendrukan Hegemony. However, what complicates matters is that we’re not the only ones engaged in this hunt.”

  Pyke managed to avoid laughing out loud. So there is a catch!

  One of the regular hazards for trader-smugglers like Pyke was the client whose job offer started off as something fairly innocuous, then somewhere along the line turned into a proposal to go in search of legendary treasures, lost alien worlds, buried temples, or underground caches of ancient mechs/devastating weapons/mechs armed with devastating weapons. Close questioning nearly always revealed that these locations lay within the territory of some ruthless regime, or criminal organisation, or beneath the sacred monument of a homicidal cult, or floating somewhere in an asteroid field, being fought over by rival scavenger squads …

  Not so different from working for Mr. Van G, he thought. Except that he pays the prettiest penny going!

  “Competition, eh? Who are we up against? Another billionaire?”

  “I doubt it. For many years most of my rivals have been enthusiasts, amateurs, academics and compulsives—a couple were genuinely brilliant but none of them have my kind of resources to draw upon. Anyway, one of those brilliant amateurs, a Martian who gloried in the grid-name Valentyne Dawnkiller, announced less than a month ago that he was giving up, ‘getting out of the Chase,’ as the hunter community calls it. I felt a bit sad and a bit relieved. There had been a couple of times when he beat me and my money advantage to rare and desirable relics, and I’d thought that if anyone was going to figure out the Angular Eye’s whereabouts before me it would be Valentyne. Yet here he was, throwing in the trowel, as it were.”

  The capsule elevator slowed to a halt and the two men stepped out into a low-lit launch bay. A small combat vessel, looking to Pyke’s eyes like a rebuilt cutter, was resting in the latticed grav-cradle. He could see an indistinct figure sitting further along, near the walkway that linked the dockside to the ship’s entry hatch. Van Graes, however, paused outside the elevator to finish his tale.

  “Anway, to cut the story short, I dug into Valentyne’s background, much deeper than I had before, when I only wanted to know the basics. It turned out that he had two dependants back on Earth, an ailing father and a bedbound grandmother, and a job as a cogware debugger for Stanburgh Civ Authority, a domecity on Mars. Twelve hours before Valentyne announced his retirement, the care facilities looking after his relatives both received a very large one-off payment, more than enough to cover all expenses till end-of-life. And twelve hours after his announcement he disappeared—no sightings by his neighbours and nothing on city surveillance; just gone, vanished into thin air.” Van Graes frowned. “Along with all his papers, notes and data.”

  Pyke nodded. “So, serious competition, then.”

  “Indeed, someone capable of devoting resources equal to or greater than mine to the hunt for the Angular Eye. I gave your companions a rather anodyne version of the situation to avoid any, erm, disruptive anxieties and so that we could make swift headway in this matter.”

  “Disruptive anxieties?” Pyke said. “If—when Dervla finds out about this, it’ll be more than our anxieties that’ll get disrupted!” He jerked a thumb over one shoulder. “That yer man, Vaughan?”

  “Yes, it is. Come along—I’ll introduce you.”

  Twenty hours later, the bodyguard Vaughan and Pyke had landed on the warrenworld Geskel, paid over the exorbitant wharfage fees, then gone in search of a sinktown called Zheen. Less than twelve hours after that, Vaughan had disappeared in the dark passageways, but Pyke had found the reluctant Henkari DNA donor, Runken Burlet. Together they were trying to stay one step ahead of a gang of mysterious pursuers.

  They were hiding out in a decrepit chamber in a boarded-up carriage-office on the edge of Luju, a downlevel sinktown not far from Zheen. The light from Pyke’s wristband revealed several chairs, a couple of desks tipped against windows, and a burned-out campfire. Without Vaughan, Pyke had realised that he’d have to rely on Burlet’s help to find a way back up to the surface and the ground-port. Persuasion, however, was proving tricky, even with the translators they were wearing.

  “Look, you have to understand that the ones hunting us want the same thing that we do,” he said. “So if we can get back to my ship …”

  “You’ve ruined my life!” wailed Runken Burlet. “Why didn’t you take the leaflet from the door and go and see my legalist?”

  “Wouldn’t have made any difference, because then those thugs would have got to you before us …”

  “And you don’t trust me! Here I am, in desperate fear for my life, and you won’t give me a weapon to defend myself.”

  “Only because you’d turn it on me and hand me over to those skaggers out there!”

  “Just as you fully deserve!”

  “Uh-huh, then they’ll cut yer head off, stick it in a cryobag, and walk away whistling. There ye go, job done, eh?”

  Suddenly realising that he was almost shouting, Pyke took a deep breath and let it out through pursed lips.

  “We have to get out of here,” he went on in a low, calm voice. “If they catch us we’re dead, it’s that simple.” He thought for a moment then took out his backup weapon, a compac
t needler, adjusted the fire rate then presented it to the diminutive Henkari who hesitantly accepted it. “I’ve switched it to burst firing so it’ll spit out three needles every time you squeeze the trigger. Probably won’t kill anyone but it should slow them down a bit.”

  “Thank you,” said Burlet. “For my part, I promise not to betray your trust.”

  “Okay, that’s something.” Pyke studied the charge-level on his own blast-repeater; yep, still only seven rounds left. “So, like I said, getting to the surface would be a good move, if you’ve any notion of how we might do that, eh?”

  Burlet gave a tired shrug. “From here the most direct route to the port is back the way we came.”

  “It’ll be watched—what else?”

  “A couple of pinchways close by lead further onto the fringes of Luju,” Burlet said. “But that’s just a series of dead ends, no exits up or down.”

  “Any other exits to anywhere?” Pyke said, anxious now.

  The Henkari sighed. “The only other way out of our predicament is in a closed-up vustillery at the end of a nearby alley. It’s an excavated shaft which descends to deep underground ruins—that might be safe.” He gazed side to side nervously. “Or at least safer than here.”

  “Underground ruins?” Pyke said with a grin. “Maybe we’ll pick up a few knick-knacks.”

  Burlet gave him a slightly horrified look. “I would not advise taking anything—Dead Temple City is haunted.”

  “Places with such names usually are,” Pyke said, indicating the side door. “Care to lead the way?”

  Back outside they went, to low, gloomy passages, broken floors strewn with the debris of abandonment. Earlier they’d been dodging pursuers who exchanged guttural shouts and barked instructions, hiding in the shadows, using any gap or recess for concealment. Now they crept silently along narrow pinchways redolent of musty decay and foot-stirred dust. It wasn’t long before they reached their goal. Pyke had already speculated as to what a vustillery might be and was holding out for some left-behind flasks containing flavoursome beverages of a fermented nature …

  Sadly, it transpired that the main output of a vustillery was different grades of oil and associated products. Inside was a shambles of broken furniture, shattered crates, tipped-over shelves, dust and ceiling burst-ins. Pyke turned up his wristband torch as they picked their way through the mess, following Burlet’s lead.

  “The discovery of the shaft and the ruins came over a year ago,” the Henkari said. “The managers of the vustillery had wanted to expand their storage capacity so they started digging to extend the cellar, and broke through to a big black emptiness …”

  Burlet stopped before a heavy looking door with a shiny new locking mechanism that spanned the full width.

  “The Council of Warrens sent in an antiquities team to assess the find,” he said as he flipped open an odd keypad which had three groups of keys. “I was part of the Methods Support squad at the time. I saw it all.”

  With both hands Runken Burlet input a sequence of numbers too swift for Pyke to pick up. Deep clunking sounds came from the door which swung inward to reveal steps leading down into darkness.

  “Well, that’s handy …” Pyke began to say.

  The silence was shattered by a detonation as the main doors of the vustillery blew in. Chunks of wood and stone flew as dust billowed through, a choking gritty fog. Pyke shouted at Burlet to head down, turned and saw that he was already gone, then he dived through, grabbed the door and slammed it shut behind him. It made a satisfyingly solid locking sound.

  A dim illumination was on down in the cellar, Pyke saw as he hurriedly descended. Lights were on but Burlet was nowhere to be seen. The walls were lined with shelves, racks and niche arrays for all sizes of containers, but only empty ones were left. Pyke frowned, scanning the stockroom, then saw that the dark shadows in the far corner were in fact a wide unlit entrance into the extension. A few steps led down to a low, square room lit only by a single knee-high wall lamp. Burlet stood near the centre, his face a picture of bewilderment as he gazed at the vacant floor all around him.

  “I don’t know what’s happened,” he said, putting a hand to his forehead. “There used to be cases and cannisters of tools and supplies, all carefully locked and stacked when the Council of the Warrens shut down the dig …”

  The Henkari was right—Pyke could just make out scrape marks, then fumbled around the wall near the new entrance, flipped a switch and a couple more wall nodes came on, lighting up the place. Just as he did so, sharp thuds and banging came from the door at the head of the steps. The extra light revealed that one entire wall of the extension was occupied by a hub-and-leaf-style security door, sloped into the wall; looking closer he could see that it was high-spec, practically a blast door. Not the usual thing to find in a place like this, I’d’ve thought …

  “Look, Mr. B, I assume that the downwards shaft is behind this door, so can you deal with it?—’cos I don’t how long that door back there will keep them out.”

  Burlet nodded and hurried over to the far side of the big security door and slid open a small panel to gain access to another keypad. Moments later the middle third of the armoured leaves hissed as they retracted into the overhead hub, creating a doorway.

  Pyke was hard on the Henkari’s heels as he dashed inside, and heard that slicing sound as the door closed up behind him. A few wall-globes blinked on, and the Henkari’s feet clattered on metal steps, part of a scaffold extending from the entrance to the floor of a chamber with a four-sided pyramidical ceiling. The walls were of massive masonry blocks adorned with simple bead-style bordering. At the centre was a square, waist-high wall with a gap in one of the sides. As soon as Burlet laid eyes on it he cried out.

  “What the hell’s wrong?” Pyke said.

  “… gone … it’s gone!” Burlet tugged on the short, tight curls of his hair. “There was a grav-assisted cable platform and a supporting frame and a motored cable winch …” He spread his hands. “The Council of Warrens must have sent their people back after the antiquities team closed it all up—they just removed all the equipment …”

  A sudden hammering from the other side of the security door made Pyke jump, and he cursed. There’d been no loud noise or blast announcing a breakthrough at the first cellar door, which told him that those skaggers had somehow cracked the lock. And that didn’t bode well for the one on this door.

  “… but why take all of it away …” Burlet was muttering to himself.

  “Forget that,” said Pyke, glancing anxiously back at the security wall. “Is there any other way down? Is the shaft wall climbable?”

  “Well, the shaft was originally a stairwell …”

  “Stairs! Great!” Pyke said rushing over to the low wall.

  “… but most of it had collapsed during the preceding centuries …”

  Even as Pyke leaned on the wall, and before he could look down, a glowing shape flew up out of the ancient shaft. He stumbled back, snatching his blast-repeater from his waist and yelling at Runken Burlet to take cover. Burlet, however, held his ground, glowering as he pulled out the needler and took aim at the oddly shaped object.

  “Ah, good, found you both at last,” said a synth-voice approximating the tone of an irascible Human male. “You are Captain Pyke, I take it?”

  Pyke kept his own weapon on target but held out his hand towards Burlet, gesturing for him to back off a little. “Maybe—who’s enquiring?”

  “I was despatched by our mutual friend, the Construct. Having acquired certain intelligence assets of immediate pertinence, he felt you might be getting into a bit of a tight spot. Look, I would recommend a speedy evac as your pursuers are close to cracking their way through that door over there.”

  Pyke laughed, more a snort, holstered his weapon and gave Burlet a no-danger nod, then watched as the pale, ovoid-shaped newcomer snapped into a new shape, a two-metre-long cylinder with rounded ends. “Ah, a Construct drone. Right mouthy sods, the lot of them. Okay�
��what’s the plan? Do we hop aboard and you get us safely down to the ruins?”

  “Partially, yes,” the drone said as it glided over to the gap in the shaft-surrounded wall. “Getting you to safety means avoiding those ruins!”

  The drone’s hardfield shell had grown a couple of bucket seats, one on each side, along with extensions for bracing the feet. Pyke eagerly seated himself and cheerily urged Burlet to follow suit. The Henkari nervously did so.

  “Is this a machine intelligence?” he asked Pyke. “Or an intelligent machine?”

  “I often wonder that about some people I meet,” Pyke said.

  An odd triple-ping came from the security door and one by one the armoured leaves began retracting into the hub, making a sound like a dozen swords being drawn.

  “That’s our cue,” said the drone. “Hold on tight!”

  Suddenly and silently, the drone and its passengers dropped into the darkness of the shaft. The drone dimmed the brightness of its shell to almost nothing, and Pyke steeled himself for any unfriendly fire coming down after them. An eager batch of questions for his rescuer jostled in his thoughts, but he reckoned that now probably wasn’t the right moment.

  “Don’t worry,” the drone said. “They can’t see us, and, besides, we’ll be ducking out of the shaft quite soon. Ah, there it is!”

  Rapid deceleration crammed Pyke down into the bucket seat, then there was a sideways swerve as the drone plunged into a passage opening.

  “Why aren’t we descending to the ruins?” Burlet said loudly.

  “Simple, really,” the drone said. “Despite having been called Dead Temple City by your expedition’s remote probe pilots, not everything down there is dead. In one of my previous iterations, I had cause to visit that grand metropolis in order to visit one of its subjugees.”

  “Sounds like a prison,” Pyke said.

  “More like a re-education facility—with maximum security elements. Won’t be long before this shaft gets refilled, permanently this time.”