Neptune's Cauldron

by Michael G. Coney

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Military Sci-Fi

Synopsis

Pursued by the interplanetary police for a crime he did not commit, space traveller Tyg is forced down on the planet Storm, where he finds a revolution brewing among the Tadda against King Caiman, the planet's tyrannical ruler. He must prove his innocence of the crime with which he is charged, as he fights for survival beneath the Storm's seething oceans, where the very existence of the Tadda is threatened by the deadly undersea volcano known as NEPTUNE'S CAULDRON.

Release date: September 24, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 235

Sample

“We expect some slight turbulence during our descent through the atmosphere. Please ensure that your restraints are activated and that your hand baggage is correctly stowed.”

The voice was sing-song, the stresses carefully placed on unimportant words.

“Average wind speed at the spaceport is over two hundred k.p.h.” My neighbor said this, glancing into my face to see how I took it. “Departures leave from a deep pit on Rodda island, so they’re already climbing fast by the time the wind hits. Arrivals aren’t so lucky. They touch down on the exposed concrete pad, then an elevator takes them below.”

The shuttle bucked. The solid vastness of the starship seemed a long way behind. “I hear it’s a wild planet,” I said.

“That’s why it’s called Storm. It’s a hell hole, I tell you. No place for Man—that’s for sure.” He’d told me this before, an hour ago, together with a complete run-down on his career to date, his hopes and his fears. He was that kind of fellow-passenger. “Three islands in our sector, and the rest is ocean, too goddamned rough for any ship. The factory ship—the Providence—is nine-tenths submarine. Just a small dome sticking above the surface, that’s all. And over a thousand people work inside.…”

He fell silent, brooding maybe on his decision to return to the planet Storm for a second tour of duty on the Providence. And maybe regretting that decision. “It’s the money,” he’d told me. “You can’t make that kind of money anywhere else in the Galaxy.”

And his eyes had gleamed with greed, the greed which drives men to risk their lives for the sake of a few black digits on a bank statement. The greed which civilizes savage worlds.

“Would you mind pushing your bag a little further under the seat? “A stewardess leaned over us, humanoid, smiling.

He complied, nudging the offending bag with his foot. His fingers whitened on the armrest as the shuttle bucked again. He said in a voice carefully controlled: “You said you were a tourist, huh?”

I hadn’t said anything of the kind. He’d been too intent on telling me about himself to ask. But now, with the ship beginning to sway wildly to the buffeting of mighty winds, he needed something new to think about. I said, “I’m visiting friends.”

“In Storm City?” His eyes jerked away as somebody screamed. Across the circular seating area, stewards grouped around a passenger whose nerve had broken. A sedajet glittered and the screaming stopped. A stewardess walked past us, her reassuring smile never faltering as the shuttle lurched and she all but fell. Now a peculiar cackling sound broke out, harsh and insistent, the panic-noise of some unidentifiable alien behind us. “In Storm City?” My companion grinned suddenly, a watery grin of almost-terror, and stuck out his hand. “Hell, I didn’t give you my name. Hy Willard. Look me up anytime. You’ll find me at the Providence.” He regarded me, eyebrows raised enquiringly.

He wanted to know my name. And I lied.

But I don’t know why I lied. My real name was on the passenger list of the orbiting starship Venturer and it was on the transfer list of this shuttle. I was trapped. Probably the flight crew had already singled me out— “See, the guy in blue, about twenty-eight? Just keep an eye on him, huh? No use scaring the passengers unless he starts giving trouble.…” Across the aisle, a steward glanced at me. I fancied I saw a knowing look in his eye. Then the shuttle bounced and bucked, and he was gone, hurrying to some minor emergency. A buzzer sounded. My companion still had hold of my hand, like a child. I detached myself and my hand came away wet. He mouthed something unintelligible…

The announcement had come through half an hour ago.

Willard had stopped talking for a while and I’d been listening to the news. I noticed that a number of the passengers were wearing headphones, familiarizing themselves with the events of the planet on which they were about to set foot. And news of the trial had come through. The jury had reached a verdict. The defendant was guilty of first degree murder.

But the defendant was already dead.…

What did that make me? How would the lawyers have described me, back in the twentieth century, say, when relationships were simpler? An accessory? Before, during or after the fact?

It was immaterial. I was on the run. And when they caught me I would be charged and, in due course, executed without trial. Legally, I’d already had my trial.…

“I said, what do you do? For a living, I mean?”

Willard was questioning me desperately, plump face sweating. The shuttle tilted at an unnerving angle, then corrected.

“I’m a diver.”

“Plenty of w-work for you here. Wow, that was a bad one!” He grinned feebly at another jolt. “Yessir, plenty of work for divers on Storm. Ninety-nine percent water—and all of that owned by King Caiman, or so he’d have you think.”

King Caiman.… “He’s the industrialist, isn’t he?” Francis had mentioned Caiman many times in his taped communications. “He owns the Providence?”

“And damned near everything else on Storm.”

“What kind of man is he?”

“Goddamn it, I need a drink!” Another lurch had finally cracked Willard’s facade and he was whimpering with fear, stabbing the button for the steward. I had the uncomfortable feeling that the ship was rotating on its axis, slightly out of control. I imagined I could feel centrifugal force pushing me toward Willard. He began pawing at my shoulder. “Get that goddamned stewardess, get her over here, huh?” He was leaning over me towards the aisle, gesticulating. “She’s not doing anything—what in hell is the matter with her? Is she blind? Hey—you!”

He was trying to deactivate his restraints. I knocked his hand away. His terror began to transmit itself to passengers nearby. A murmuring arose, and a few shouts. The interior of the shuttle seemed suddenly small; a shallow cylindrical coffin packed with two hundred souls, falling vertically toward the unyielding surface of the planet Storm. “Sit down, for Christ’s sake,” I muttered, fighting Willard away. “You’ll cause a panic!”

The shuttle bumped as though it had hit a solid cloud. There was a horrifyingly structural cracking sound. Then the motion steadied and my heart began to beat again. Relief turning to anger, I threw Willard off me.

“May I see your pass?”

A steward was bending over me, face blank.

“What the hell for? I couldn’t have got on this shuttle without a pass!”

“Just a routine check. A slight problem with the seat count.”

“But all the seats are full! You must know how many passengers you have!” I was aware that my voice had risen a couple of notes. There was a heavy sickness in my stomach.

“All the same I must ask to see your pass.”

Feigning resignation I produced it, hoping a bout of turbulence would knock the man off his feet, make him forget. The shuttle remained steady as he checked the seat number and read the name.…

“Would you come with me for a moment?”

“Can’t it wait? We can’t be more than ten minutes from touchdown.”

“I’m sorry.” There was still no expression on his face. None at all. He could have been a robot, programmed to please, programmed to remain polite. He probably was.

“Well, it’s goddamned inconvenient…” I was already following him along the aisle. We took the helical escalator. He didn’t look around as I followed him; he didn’t need to. I had no place else to go. As we reached the crew’s quarters, I heard again the calm tones of the captain.

“Sorry about that rough patch back there, folks. But this old ship’s been through far worse. Only eight minutes to go. Which reminds me, did you hear the one about.…”

“I had to bring him in.” The steward was explaining to his superior.

“Hell.” The man—tall, dark, Mediterranean—regarded me as though I were a minor nuisance, nothing more. He wasn’t going to die. Or so I thought at the time.… “Did you really have to?”

“There was a commotion. He was fighting with the guy next to him. The passengers were getting nervous.” The steward spoke defensively.

“All right. But I’d rather we’d left it to the police at Storm City.” He turned to me again. “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to lock you up. It seems the police on Storm are after you.… Why did you come here, anyway? You don’t look the criminal type to me.”

“I’m not. It’s all a misunderstanding. I’ll sort it out when we get to Storm. You can let me go back to my seat.”

The shuttle began to dance about the sky as we hit more turbulence. The chief steward, hanging on with one hand, produced a stubby laser pistol in the other. “Sorry, but you might just get the idea of highjacking the shuttle and holding us all to ransom. It’s been done before. Now.… in here.”

He gestured me into an elevator. For a few seconds we bounced from wall to wall, rising meanwhile, and he kept the gun on me all the time. Then the door opened and we staggered along a heaving corridor. Finally we took an escalator which gave onto a single, circular cabin, about five meters in diameter and three high, dome-shaped.

“This is the top of the ship,” he said conversationally. “There’s nothing above you but the antenna, and space. The walls are as strong as all hell, and so is the door. So it should hold you for five minutes.” He smiled. “Sorry, again. I realize it’s not the kind of service we’re famous for, but what can I do? There’s no light, either.”

He shut the door and left me in total darkness. I took to the air for an instant as the shuttle dropped like a stone, then I hit deck with spine-jarring force. Alarmed, I wedged myself into the corner between floor and curving roof, and crouched there while the ship continued its wild descent to the planet Storm.

What would the police do with me?

There would be no trial, which meant that they would either execute me on Storm, or ship me back to Earth—a costly and pointless journey. No—they would do the job here. When? Well, once the identification procedures were completed, say in a few hours, there would be nothing to prevent them killing me immediately. I glanced at my watch. The tiny digits glowed back at me. 1600, Storm time.

By tomorrow morning I would be dead.

I was trying to come to terms with this notion when the wall of the shuttle hit me a smashing blow across the side of the head, and all thoughts dissolved in a blinding red flash, then a long, cold nothingness.

I was cold, so I was still alive. All was quiet now. Against me was unyielding metal, within me was a growing sick pain—and I felt myself slipping away, slipping backward in time.

I remember the Flash.

I’d been driving the motorway with Wenceslas, listening to the concern in his voice. I was at the wheel, but the controls were set at automatic. In this, we were lucky.… Outside, the hills of Earth rolled by.

Wenceslas had said, “I’m worried about Francis. You must feel it too, huh? There’s something wrong.” His face was drawn with anxiety. He looked on Francis and me as younger brothers, and more. “He’d found something good on that planet—what was it called?”

“Storm. I think he’d found love there. It felt like love to me.”

“That’s what I thought. Anyway, it’s all gone sour for Francis now. The love’s still there, but there’s something else. Anger? Fear?”

And I thought back, casting my mind into those unguarded moments which come to Wenceslas and me sometimes, when suddenly there slips into our thoughts a knowledge of what Francis is doing, thinking and feeling. “It was a kind of outrage,” I said carefully. “Francis had found something which affected him so deeply that it went beyond anger. There was frustration there too—didn’t you feel that?”

“A teletalk arrived this morning.” Wenceslas watched as the giant ponds of a hydroponic plant slid by. “It was heavily censored. I’ve never known them to be so obvious before.” He took the small cassette from his pocket and activated it. Francis’ voice came through clearly, filling the cockpit with his presence, talking of nothings.…

Censorship. Sometimes they run tapes through a computer before transmission. The computer assembles a pattern of the speaker’s voice and mannerisms, then substitutes its own sentences. Usually the recipient can’t tell the difference—but Wenceslas, Francis and I had a close relationship. And although the voice on that tape sounded like Francis, the words were not his. They were trite and inconsequential—whereas we knew Francis, and we knew he’d intended to tell us something important.

“But they fouled it up. They made one little slip…” Wenceslas was smiling grimly as the tape drew to its close.

Francis’ voice, or a facsimile thereof, was concluding: “… miss you all, of course, but I shall look forward to seeing you all after this tour is over. Boy—am I looking forward to seeing Earth again! Regards to you all, signing off—Francis.”

Silence.

Then, so unexpected that it was almost frightening, a click—and Francis’ voice again, but his real voice, this time, and deadly serious.

“…Caiman too strong for the Commission—hell, I’m scared for my own life, but that’s nothing to the natives’ problems. The only hope for their future is Alkin.”

End of tape.

Wenceslas and I had sat silent for a long time, watching the road roll by. At last he said, “You’ll go, of course?”

And before I could answer, had come the Flash. Wenceslas cried out, and maybe I did too. It was deadly lightning inside the brain, cauterizing, cutting away thought and memory like a laser scalpel. I suffered, I wept, I was dumb. Names disappeared, places, events half-experienced but now forgotten forever. The sense of loss was overpowering. I heard Wenceslas groaning. We waited, lost to each other and everything, for the worst to pass.

Afterward, Wenceslas repeated, “You’ll go, of course.” But this time it was a statement, not a question.

So I came to Storm, but too late.

My delirium had gone the full circle and I was back in the shuttle, in blackness, wondering what had happened and why my head hurt, and why my right arm seemed to be broken. Everything was still and quiet. We had landed. Had they forgotten me? A sudden hope died when I remembered that the door was locked, and a lapse of memory on the part of my captors would only postpone death. I shouted, and tried to stand.

It was then I discovered that the floor was concave.

I was standing on the wall—which meant the shuttle had to be lying on its side. Could we have crashed? I yelled again, and my head throbbed. There was no reply. In the silence, I shivered. Cold was eating into me from those metal walls and I was weak; maybe I’d lost blood. I had no means of illumination and the terrifying thought occurred to me: had the blow to the head sent me blind?

I knelt, and began to crawl about my prison, feeling before me with the numbed fingers of my left hand. Soon I encountered a flat surface—the section of wall into which the door was set. Then I found the door itself, directly above me. The surface was buckled. Bracing my shoulder against the cold metal, I pushed upward. Something gave. I pushed harder, knees trembling with the effort.

The door swung up, hesitated at the point of balance, then crashed open. Instantly a biting wind swirled about me, bringing the acrid smell of burning. In sudden terror I flung myself upward, scrabbling at the metal with my good hand. I got a knee over the door jamb and scrambled onto the slippery wet outer surface of the shuttle. Then I lost my balance and began to slide, snatching at projections and missing, feeling my clothes catching on snags and tearing, until suddenly there was nothing and I was falling, falling.…

The impact knocked the breath out of me. I rolled onto my back, fighting to get air back into my lungs. I was not blind, thank God. Continuous clouds raced across a dull sky. Rain lashed down and drenched my clothes within seconds. The horizon was unnaturally high, and as the cool rain brought me to my senses I realized that I was lying within a volcanic crater about a kilometer wide. I sat up and looked around.

Wreckage was everywhere. Away to my left, the main body of the shuttle appeared as a tangled skeleton, flames trickling among the broken bones. Small residual fires glowed on the crater floor, their flickering light revealing more wreckage—and countless motionless forms scattered like driftwood. Somewhere a woman was screaming thinly, and from nearby I heard sobbing. It was a scene straight from a nightmare. How long had I been unconscious? I didn’t think it could be very long—there were no signs of rescuers yet.

Shakily, I stood. The wind howled around the wreckage, fanning flames, scattering sparks, constantly shifting direction as it tumbled over the lip and whirled around the crater. It looked as though the top of the shuttle had broken off clean—most of the wreckage was almost half a kilometer away. Stunned, not thinking straight, I began to walk toward it.

“Help me. Please help me.” The words came from a dim huddle nearby, a twisted bundle of rags which was incredibly a human being. I knelt beside the woman.

“You’ll be all right.” And a chance flare of light revealed the dreadful wound in her side—revealed that she would not be all right, that she would die before I, or anyone else, could do anything. I said, “What’s your name? “I felt a great guilt in my helplessness, and I wanted a name to torture myself with.

“Sandy … Sandy—” The whisper was whipped away by the wind and I never did hear what her other name was, because she died trying to tell me.

I moved among the injured and the dead, and it seemed that my own predicament was nothing beside all this suffering. People raised their hands and clutched at me as I passed, as though by holding me they would keep a hold on life, as though I were some kind of Christ. I paused to vomit, and walked on.

Lights were moving ahead, now. Fierce yellow beams glowed and swayed as the rescue vehicles roared across the crater. Some stopped, and I saw running men outlined against the glow, carrying hoses and stretchers.

I moved behind a smoldering pile of wreckage, out of sight. Bodies were strewn all over the ground here, twisted into impossible attitudes, still and broken. Flames illuminated torn flesh, glistening blood. I swallowed, called myself a few names and searched…

“What in hell are you doing?”

I jerked around. An eye watched me; just one eye in an ocean of blood and tangled metal. The eye blinked, the voice continued as though what it said was the most important thing in the world—more important than pain, even death.

“Dead people. All around, dead people and hurt people. And you’re robbing them. You bastard.”

“Listen—it’s not like you think. You see, I need this stuff.” It seemed important to explain, to convince the Eye. I flipped through the contents of the wallet and found them satisfactory. A new identity and a reasonable amount of cash, in negotiable credits. I took out my own wallet and showed it. “Look,” I said. “I’m putting this back—see?”

But the Eye didn’t see. The Eye had died accusing me.

I avoided the rescue parties by making for the darkness around the edge of the crater. The rain continued to fall in a swirling torrent and after awhile I felt too weak to continue, so I sat on a rock and tried to work things out. I was free of the police until they found that the physical characteristics of the man with my wallet didn’t match their records. Then they would assume I was still alive. By process of elimination, using the passenger list, they would deduce the name I was going under.

I checked the wallet. It seemed I was now Winthrop Oates.

So what should Winthrop Oates d. . .