Red Sun Bleeding Read Free Page B

get into the tree. Then Calder found an easier way… it started raining spiders and he lost his grip, plummeting towards the jungle’s floor without the benefit of a spider’s webbing rope to control his fall. The ground slammed into him sideways – or maybe he was sideways, knocking the life out of him for a couple of seconds. His rifle securely slung around his back as two aggrieved wolf-sized arachnids landed close enough to reach out and touch.
    ***
    Captain Lana Fiveworlds ducked under the helicopter’s slowing rotor and ran towards the waiting miners and her lizard-like first mate, Skrat. Her android, Zeno, was off the helicopter and by her side.
    ‘What’s the situation?’ demanded Lana.
    ‘It’s terribly perplexing,’ said Skrat. ‘Calder appears to have disappeared from the camp. We were working together unloading the supplies. He went to check on a malfunctioning loading ramp. Calder seemed to be gone an inordinately long time, so I went over to see how he was doing. There was simply no sign of the fellow. We have searched the base and the landing field and every shuttle, but he’s completely vanished.’
    The camp’s manager, Kien-Yen Leong, appeared behind them, coming from the second copter. He addressed his own staff. ‘You’ve checked the fence’s sensor logs and all the automated guns?’
    ‘Of course we have,’ said one of the miners. ‘There’s no record of anything leaping the fence or flying through our air-space’ He pointed to one of the sentry guns on a tower, rotating with elephant-like radar manifolds sticking out of its turret, tracking a dragon-sized beast in the sky above.
    ‘Could you have had a power outage on your guns or the senor line?’ asked Lana.
    ‘’There’s no hole in the logs to match that,’ said the miner, looking up at the bloated blood-red sun. ‘Before you ask, all your crew are listed in the camp system as friendlies. None of our guns glitched and blew him to pieces... and even a mortar round leaves some remains. And these systems are hardened against solar activity. They’re rated for badly nuked battlefield environments. Background radiation here can be erratic, but it’s never approached anything close to that.’
    Lana held back from retorting that it was a pity the base hadn’t taken the same trouble with the truck that the missing miner had been driving. Maybe she and Zeno wouldn’t have been wasting their time searching for a probably long-dead worker when her crewman disappeared. Just like Calder Durk . Green as a meadow – at least, the ones on most worlds, if not Abracadabra - and trouble through and through. She gazed back to her helicopter… Professor Alison Sebba dismounting with a dainty disdain for the landing field’s mud. If the academic they’d transported to this world hadn’t been flying with Lana during the search for the missing miner, she would have suspected the life extended harpy had finally gotten her claws into Calder. Lana would have asked them to search the base again, checking under bunks for the pair.
    ‘One thing,’ said Zeno, the android’s skin glistening orange under the auburn light. ‘We asked you to do one thing out here, and that was to keep the new guy safe.’
    ‘I seem to recall advising the dear boy might be better occupied in the engine room,’ said Skrat, his thick green tail swishing irritably behind him.
    ‘I know, I know… it’s my fault,’ said Lana. ‘I thought a bit of shore leave and seeing his first real alien world would be good for him.’ It had hardly been a bribe at all, had it? Lana was the captain. She certainly wasn’t in competition with the professor over some ill-educated exiled nobleman… a junior crewman she shouldn’t be involved with in the first place. And this was meant to be a cake walk. A supply drop to a barely inhabited planet. How dangerous could it be?
    The conceited professor who might be able to answer that last question approached the group. ‘Please