Empty Between the Stars (The Songs of Old Sol Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  CHAPTER ONE Epi-Log. As prologue.

  CHAPTER TWO Difficult. Arrivings.

  CHAPTER THREE The Blitz of Blez.

  CHAPTER FOUR Alice. Curiouser.

  CHAPTER FIVE Trouble. And strife.

  CHAPTER SIX Watched.

  CHAPTER SEVEN Fast to the feast.

  CHAPTER EIGHT Rebel. Rebel.

  CHAPTER NINE Dangerous waters.

  CHAPTER TEN Hot rain.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Moths.

  CHAPTER TWELVE Networks.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Eclectic lie.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Spores and spice. All things nice.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Rolling dice.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Deep trouble.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Corpses and comets.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Renewal.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN Death. From above.

  CHAPTER TWENTY Such stuff as dreams.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE A Lord’s library.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Trabbs.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE For a Muse of Fire.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Consignor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Escape.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX First. As farce.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Second. As tragedy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Marriage gifts.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Ink-black shadows.

  CHAPTER THIRTY Dragon’s teeth.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Evolution. In action.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO The Lady’s answer.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Sublime in the slime

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Reader’s Universe offer

  “The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our own intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”

  - Norbert Wiener, cybernetics pioneer. Carbon Age (1894–1964).

  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

  - Arthur C. Clarke, author. Carbon Age (1917–2008).

  EMPTY BETWEEN THE STARS

  Book 1 in the Songs of Old Sol series.

  First published in 2018 by Green Nebula Press.

  Copyright © 2018 by Stephen Hunt.

  Typeset and designed by Green Nebula Press.

  The right of Stephen Hunt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Cover illustration by Grand Failure (via Deposit Photos, Inc).

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

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  For further information on Stephen Hunt’s novels, see his web site at http://www.StephenHunt.net

  PRAISE FOR STEPHEN HUNT’S FICTION

  ‘Hunt’s imagination is probably visible from space. He scatters concepts that other writers would mine for a trilogy like chocolate-bar wrappers.’

  - TOM HOLT

  ‘All manner of bizarre and fantastical extravagance.’

  - DAILY MAIL

  ‘Compulsive reading for all ages.’

  - GUARDIAN

  ‘Studded with invention.’

  -THE INDEPENDENT

  ‘To say this book is action packed is almost an understatement… a wonderful escapist yarn!’

  - INTERZONE

  ‘Hunt has packed the story full of intriguing gimmicks… affecting and original.’

  - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  ‘A rip-roaring Indiana Jones-style adventure.’

  —RT BOOK REVIEWS

  ‘A curious part-future blend.’

  - KIRKUS REVIEWS

  ‘An inventive, ambitious work, full of wonders and marvels.’

  - THE TIMES

  ‘Hunt knows what his audience like and gives it to them with a sardonic wit and carefully developed tension.’

  - TIME OUT

  ‘A ripping yarn … the story pounds along… constant inventiveness keeps the reader hooked… the finale is a cracking succession of cliffhangers and surprise comebacks. Great fun.’

  - SFX MAGAZINE

  ‘Put on your seatbelts for a frenetic cat and mouse encounter… an exciting tale.’

  - SF REVU

  Also by Stephen Hunt

  THE FAR-CALLED SERIES

  Season 1

  In Dark Service (#1)

  Foul Tide’s Turning (#2)

  The Stealers’ War (#3)

  THE JACKELIAN SERIES

  Season 1

  The Court of the Air (#1)

  The Kingdom Beyond the Waves (#2)

  Rise of the Iron Moon (#3)

  Secrets of the Fire Sea (#4)

  Jack Cloudie (#5)

  From the Deep of the Dark (#6)

  Season 2

  Mission to Mightadore (#7)

  THE SLIDING VOID SERIES

  Season 1

  Sliding Void (#1)

  Transference Station (#2)

  Red Sun Bleeding (#3)

  Season 1 Omnibus Collection (#1 & #2 & #3)

  Void all the Way Down

  THE AGATHA WITCHLEY MYSTERIES: AS STEPHEN A. HUNT

  Season 1

  In the Company of Ghosts (#1)

  The Plato Club (#2)

  The Moon Man’s Tale (#3)

  Season 1 Omnibus Collection (#1 & #2 & #3)

  Secrets of the Moon

  THE TRIPLE REALM SERIES

  For the Crown and the Dragon (#1)

  The Fortress in the Frost (#2)

  OTHER WORKS

  Six Against the Stars

  The Alien who Ate Christmas (children’s illustrated)

  For links to all these books, visit http://stephenhunt.net/novels/

  CHAPTER ONE

  Epi-Log. As prologue.

  I moaned. It wasn’t easy being crucified. Certainly not at my age. Even a few centuries ago I would have been better prepared to survive this horrifying ordeal. Blood soaked my arms underneath the tight orange restraining suit binding me. I had just started coughing part of my lungs over my chest, too. I didn’t need to have trained as a surgeon to know that wasn’t a good sign.

  I tried to recall how I had reached this desperate point. There had been a moon and a hard, thankless task. The kind I often find myself lumbered with. Death, treachery, murder. The usual.

  Dying. My turn, this time, at long last.

  Then I remembered. Everything!

  CHAPTER TWO

  Difficult. Arrivings.

  Like so much of my life, arriving at Hexator was a harder process than it should have been – a journey of three parts, nested like a Ru
ssian doll. Poor William Roxley. Never the easy path for Sweet William. First, departing the foldship carrying visitors to this tidally-locked moon. My departure was entirely necessary, of course. The thirty-mile-long black dart of artificial diamond-hull composing our monstrous foldship had never been designed to land on any world. Not even a world-sized moon, one of many orbiting the ferocious crimson gas giant below. The name the foldship had chosen for herself was You Can’t Prove It Was Us. An appropriate appellation for Madame Monster. Her massive bulk would stay hugging orbit until after the auctions had concluded below.

  Thousands of mile-long tendrils quivered behind the foldship’s stern, giving her the look of a cathedral half-swallowed by a squid. A sailor on board the vessel had told me her tendrils were designed to squeeze the universe so tight the universe begged the foldship to release it; passage across the vast gulf between stars being the tribute—or extortion, depending on your viewpoint—struck between craft and universe. Hah. Sailors never run short of their superstitions. Well, our foldship had squeezed space-time to beneficial effect. Here we were, now, only two months relative time-lapse out of Arius. You couldn’t do much better than 2RTL reaching this forgotten corner of the galaxy.

  Second, my own craft, the Expected Ambush, cut her mooring lines and drifted away from the mothership on controlled thrusts of air, her sleek lines trumpeting my true origins a little too loudly. I was enormously proud of Exy’s capabilities, don’t doubt that. Her speed, her ability to soak up and dish out punishment second-to-none. I have even grown fond of her over-familiar manners. But as far as Hexator’s inhabitants were concerned, possession of the Expected Ambush would be like dragging a sack of treasure into a tavern owned by outlaws. In the unlikely event I was permitted to land her on Hexator, my prize vessel would draw unwanted attention to her owner. Only the gods knew how many imbeciles I would need to slay to keep her as my property.

  I had a more pressing problem to deal with: a rotting corpse to eject towards Hexator. A cadaver encased using a rock-like spray, all the better to burn up during re-entry while doing a fine impression of a meteoroid. I never discovered the woman’s name or indeed much else about her. Except she hadn’t anticipated my checking hand-move during the brief knife fight which ensued when she tried to fillet me on board the foldship. I suppose I could have teased out her identity, career highlights and who hired her to kill me. But the truth is I no longer cared enough to take would-be assassins alive. Like coping with toddlers throwing tantrums, I had grown tired of constantly being expected to be mother. “Oh dear, my little love. What have I done to upset you? What can I dangle before you to make you sweet again?” Mother was weary. No, I simply couldn’t muster the requisite enthusiasm to sound like a detective in a bad piece of theater. “Who sent you? What do they want?” Better to slap that screeching brat down and shut it up. Motives are irrelevant. Intentions everything.

  Irritated with humanity at large, I watched my identityless would-be executioner flare like a firework as her fake rock-covered coffin tumbled down towards the moon. I would have whispered a prayer for her if I knew what god she favoured; as pointless as such communion would have been. There weren’t any gods in this system. But they were certainly coming. Sooner or later.

  The Expected Ambush was one of a hundred smaller ships hitching a ride in the foldship’s hangars or clinging limpet-like to her hull. Hexator’s traffic control system operated as primitively as the planet itself, but even so, I didn’t want to give the locals a fair chance at tracking me among the separating swarm of visitors. I had already positioned myself in a battered ferry loaded inside the Expected Ambush’s starboard launch tube – for my arrival’s third act. The most notable thing about this previously owned ferry was that she had actually visited Hexator on several occasions – her transponder on record as a known quantity with the port authorities. The ferry didn’t come with a name in the flea-market where I purchased her. Only a code, the CF-57D, registered out of Rigel. That and the logo of a heel with wings engraved on her saucer section. Mercury, perhaps? From an age where gods were imagined rather than manufactured. I had named the rickety ferry the Pleiad’s Daughter. A twang from the rail and we launched. My ferry spun down towards the moon as the Expected Ambush started to fold gravity around herself like a cloak. Optical camouflage made her shimmer and vanish to the naked eye while she withdrew to a safe distance. The only trace of her presence from now on — even to me — would be tiny streaks of micrometeorites burning up in Hexator’s thin atmosphere. In actuality, disposable communications packages. It was comforting to know I possessed a guardian angel circling in outer orbit. More immediate than praying to the many gods, in my experience. Good. I could do with the reassurance. I was a regular visitor to dark places. There were few darker than Hexator.

  It went without saying that Hexator was about to become important. I wouldn’t be visiting this arse-dirt clinging to the bottom cheeks of the galaxy if that wasn’t the case. The first danger to survive was re-entry. Inside my ferry, the ancient composites of her construction whistled and creaked as the hull expanded in a blaze of heat. Shaking like a vindictive amusement park ride designed by professional sadists. I caught an eye-full of fiery hell from her bridge, a pitted pod atop the saucer-shaped cargo section. Unlike the Expected Ambush — which settled and rose where she pleased — my ferry relied on a friendly reception at port. I knew precisely when the harbour’s landing beams locked onto the saucer’s iron skirt. Perfumed lemon gel inside my acceleration couch hardened, vibrations increasing to a crescendo, the small trading vessel’s iron skeleton flexed and squeezed. We slowed fast from that point. Man and saucer both. I smiled despite my concerns. The 50th millennium of man and here I was arriving at Hexator like some bug-eyed alien from a mid-twentieth century paranoia dream … an invader from Mars or Venus.

  It took twenty minutes from atmospheric interface to landing. Another five before I found my gravity legs inside the port proper. Initially, my ferry wouldn’t allow me to leave due to the high radiation readings outside. I overrode the craft’s warning system. The moon’s port was powered by a portable nuclear reactor, imported as a black box unit and left to its own devices as far as maintenance was concerned. A little like buying a ground vehicle and throwing it away after it ran out of its first battery charge.

  Local gravity matched Earth-standard. About the moon’s only similarity to our ancestral home, having studied Hexator’s almanac listing at leisure. My suitcase struggled behind me, metal legs buckling as it acclimatized to the world. Our welcome was surprisingly sophisticated. It didn’t matter how backward the planet. Where offworld trade was permitted, the local grandees ran as advanced a screening program as could reasonably be mustered. A series of sealed scrubbing locks, followed by scanning tunnels with clouds of medical and security nano. Imperceptibly sampling and poking, ensuring I wasn’t nurturing a pandemic which would infect half the locals before a cure could be distributed. After the medical probes, a security tunnel manned by human port soldiers. Male, as far as I could tell under their light hex-plate amour.

  They opened my suitcase and spread my clothes and possessions across a glowing table, little icons and trails of text floating above the surface indicating the origin and composition of my property. Prayer box. Oak. Universal configuration for multi-deity worship. Spare trousers. Seventy percent cotton, thirty percent polymer. A small bundle of yarrows for the i-Ching. Three bars of chocolate, eighty percent cocoa. My possessions, apart from the chocolate, did little to excite the soldiers’ interest. This brute squad were Hexatorian locals, if the albino-white skin of the wrists I glimpsed between gloves and amour was any guide.

  One of them leaned menacingly towards me. ‘You are Doctor William Roxley?’

  ‘I am,’ I agreed pleasantly. Butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth. Hah. Butter. Did they still have cows here?

  ‘Purpose of visit to Hexator?’ growled a soldier with rank markings on his shoulder plate. I obviously wasn’t important enough
to receive a polite reception. Marvelous, truly. If they began acting courteously towards me, I’d need to be seriously suspicious.

  ‘spore-spice trading,’ I answered. I noted the patina of text and images scrolling across his visor. Judging my papers, passport and visa details.

  One of the soldiers held up a small linen bag where a brass mouthpiece was visible poking out of the sack. ‘What is this?’

  ‘A flute,’ I replied. I saw he didn’t have a clue about what I was talking about. ‘A musical instrument,’ I explained.

  ‘The table told us that, but how can you play the thing when there’re no strings on it?’

  I drew the flute out of the bag, pressed it to my lips and blew a short piece from the Flight of the Bumblebee. ‘You’ve never seen a flute before?’

  ‘Clearly not,’ said the soldier.

  ‘You play well for a trader,’ growled one of his comrades. It was good to be suspicious and you could never be too mistrustful of Sweet William.

  ‘Traders spend a lot of time between the stars,’ I said. ‘It’s nice to carry something of home with you. When I play, I dream of my family far away.’ That might have been true, once. These days I played only to forget.

  The senior officer tapped my bars of chocolate. Expensive even for the world of Thun, a place of quiet luxuries where master chocolatiers were treated like royalty. ‘Foodstuffs aren’t allowed on Hexator without an import license.’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t possess a license. They are intended as gifts for my contacts here. Could I not keep them?’

  ‘Without a license they are confiscated.’ The soldier scooped the bars off the table, carefully dropping them into a basket behind the table. All government is a form of robbery; shit-holes like Hexator were just less subtle about it.

  I managed to look pained, but that was the point of those bars. Better they steal the chocolate than my flute. Refined sugar was unknown on Hexator. A sweet tooth, though, was still almost universal among the human race. On dry worlds I carried whiskey with me. On orthodox worlds, a chip of the filthiest sim-core. On sugarless worlds, chocolate. Bribing without offering hard currency is an effortless form of corruption.

  ‘Your auction fees have been paid, your credit line recognized by the banking guild.’