The Moons of Lannamur

by Douglas Hill

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Jaxie Cade continues his hunt for the fabled Phantom Planet, in the high-tech world of Lannamur and its moons. Accompanied by combat-ace, Raishe, Cade is just one jump ahead of his pursuers, the wrinkly alien Occians.

Release date: June 30, 2014

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 182

Sample

If anyone came here looking for their heart’s desire, Cade thought, not for the first time, they’d have to be keen on dirt, sleaze and danger.

He glanced back, and up, at the huge bright letters hovering against the night sky, quivering slightly from clumsy projection. WELCOME TO MIC CITY, the letters said. PLAYGROUND OF THE STAR-LINES, WHERE YOU MAY FIND YOUR HEART’S DESIRE.

The letters in fact were hovering directly over the spaceport, some distance away. But they were designed to be visible in every part of the town, Mic City, that sprawled around the port, on a world called Miccab in the Bal’miccaba System.

As with spaceport towns on many worlds, Mic City earned its living by selling things to visitors – mainly amusements, which tended to be cheap and tawdry and sometimes illegal. But where other spaceport towns might display a raucous, raffish fizz that could be fun, in Cade’s view, Mic City tended more towards gloom and menace behind the glitz, like an ugly infection under a painted mask.

Still, Cade and his companion had no plans to stay. And, he thought to himself grimly, it was not the worst planet they had visited, or the longest delay they had endured, over what had definitely been the most unpleasant interstellar journey of Jaxie Cade’s entire life.

He slid one hand into a pocket to touch the ceramoplast cylinder that he was carrying. The cylinder held data-flash flimsies, their tickets out of Mic City, off Miccab – to a world that might actually offer them their heart’s desire. And they were on their way to a pick-up point for the robo-rail that would take them to the spaceport, and away …

The young woman beside him, Raishe Kelme, made a small movement to get his attention. ‘I think we’re being followed,’ she murmured.

Cade fought the urge to whirl and look behind him, and instead merely slowed his pace, turning idly as if to watch a nearby street chef microbroiling small dead creatures with too many legs. At the edge of his vision he saw three figures – looking slightly spooky in long grey robes with deep hoods – who were hesitating, slowing their pace to match his.

‘Got them,’ he said softly. ‘The three in hoods …’

‘No,’ Raishe said with a hint of surprise. ‘The five young Illiyans across the street!’

Cade tensed again, but managed still to seem casual as he moved his head. The five aliens – short and orange-skinned like all Illiyans, and wearing micro-kilts – stood in a cluster, staring openly at him.

Wonderful, Cade thought unhappily. Either group might be ordinary Mic City scavengers out to take some tourists down. Or they might be there for different, more dire reasons – like other sorts of hunters who had pursued him and Raishe, not so long before.

‘I see the ones with hoods now,’ Raishe said. ‘The Illiyans are probably just street thieves. But those three are weird.’

‘I don’t care what they are,’ Cade muttered, ‘as long as they don’t make us miss that ship.’

They moved away, not hurrying, looking like an ordinary young tourist couple – even carrying luggage, a light shoulder-bag each – out for a stroll, taking in the sights. Cade, who was not quite twenty years old, solidly well-built with curly brown hair and blue eyes, had a youthful face that could always seem innocent and engaging, when he wished. Raishe – a few years older, slim and lithe with short dark hair and pale green eyes – might have seemed, to an onlooker, just a harmless young woman. They were also dressed unremarkably: Cade in a short light tunic and plain trousers, Raishe in a loose sleeveless tabard over leggings.

But their appearance – of ordinariness – was deceptive.

‘We’ll be all right for a while, with people around,’ Raishe murmured. ‘But the pick-up point’s on a back street …’

‘With plenty of dark empty places before we reach the robo-rail,’ Cade added. ‘Let’s move a little faster, try to lose them first.’

Over the next while, still without seeming to hurry, the two of them managed to get some way ahead of the two separate groups of pursuers. Then they began dodging in and out of stores and eateries, and around a few corners, and were sharing a minor triumph when they reached a shadowy back street, where the lights of the robo-rail pick-up point were gleaming at the far end, and saw no one at all behind them.

But it was a short-lived triumph. As they hurried forward, five short figures moved out of a deeper patch of darkness at the mouth of an alley to bar their way. The Illiyan gang, obviously at home in all the town’s by-ways – and short cuts.

Four of them held heavy slash-clubs, the evil embedded blades faintly visible, while the fifth was brandishing an even deadlier ice-knife.

‘Bags on the ground, an’ ever’thin’ out of yer pockets, now!’ the knifeman said.

Cade was aware of Raishe gathering and poising herself, but he looked only at the knifeman, with a flinty gaze. ‘You don’t want to do this,’ he said calmly. ‘You’d be making a mistake.’

The young Illiyans chortled merrily, crowding closer, ready to be entertained. ‘Why a mistake?’ their leader asked, grinning.

‘Because,’ Cade said, putting a steely edge on his voice, ‘I’m carrying the latest model of viper-gun, with a psycho-poison that would wreck your mind and then dissolve your brain. And she is a professional bounty-hunter with full combat training – and the hype.’

The Illiyans stopped smiling. They knew about viper-guns, of course, firing darts that might carry any sort of chemical. And they had clearly heard of the hype implant, which produced a short-lived, almost superhuman increase in speed and strength.

‘Yer bluffin’ …’ the knifeman said, scowling.

Cade drew his hand partway from his pocket, opening it just enough so that the aliens could glimpse the shiny cylinder. ‘You want to call my bluff?’ he asked stonily.

The Illiyans hesitated, glancing at one another. But before they could reach a decision or make a move, there was an odd hissing croak from back in the shadowed alley – and three robed and hooded figures stepped out, ghostly in the dimness.

‘Move away, weak-skins,’ one of the figures hissed. ‘They are ours.’

Cade and Raishe tensed even more as the five Illiyans whirled around. ‘Who’re you freaks?’ snarled their leader.

As if in answer, one hooded figure thrust out a hand – which seemed to have rough bumpy skin and webbing between the fingers – from his robe’s sleeve, holding a small tapered gun.

‘Phibs!’ the Illiyan knifeman shouted, and sprang forward just as the hooded one fired the mini-viper that he was carrying.

The shot missed – and before the gun could fire again, the other four Illiyans, waving their clubs, joined the charge. The hooded figures met them face to face, with viper-guns and what looked like vibrating thread-knives. And as they all howled and hissed and slashed and shot, Cade and Raishe sprinted away at headlong speed towards the robo-rail pick-up in the distance.

Skidding into the bright enclosure, they saw the robo-carrier already waiting, and sprang aboard. And Cade was laughing as well as gasping as they found a seat. ‘That was perfect!’ he said. ‘I never thought of them fighting each other!’

Raishe was also trying to catch her breath through her laughter. ‘I don’t believe you tried to bluff them with our tickets.’

‘It was working, though,’ Cade said happily, bringing out the shiny cylinder from his pocket.

‘Maybe,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘But the real worry is that we were located here, by more Phib hunters.’

‘Phib’ was the insulting human nickname for the alien species properly called Occians, who were amphibious – and just as numerous, aggressive and expansionist as the human species. So the Occian Unity and the Human Commonwealth were each other’s main competitors throughout the galaxy, which led to a lot of nervous interstellar tension.

And Cade had probably made it worse, some while previously, by taking a truly priceless object away from an Occian.

The object was only an ordinary hard data-slice – but the information on that slice had led many groups of Occians, at different times, to come violently and relentlessly in pursuit of Cade. And now it was clear that the pursuit was continuing, despite Cade’s and Raishe’s journey across half the galaxy.

So Cade’s smile wavered a little at the reminder, even though he tried to shrug offhandedly. ‘Maybe they got lucky, because we were held up so much along the way. They might not find it so easy to track us from here.’

‘You hope,’ Raishe said gloomily, staring out of the window-slit at the darkness as the robo-carrier pulled away. ‘But right now I don’t care. I just want to get there. This has been an absolute nightmare of a journey, and I want it to be over.’

‘Me too,’ Cade said sympathetically. ‘But Lannamur is only two days away.’ He smiled reassuringly. ‘When we get there, everything will be fine. You’ll see.’

A day later, halfway through their flight, they were trying to relax and pass the time on board their ship – a graceless, broad-beamed Starhopper, designed for short-range jumps between neighbouring star systems rather than for the vaster transgalactic leaps of a great Starliner.

And on more or less the same day – as much as days could be the same, across galactic distances – two people were meeting in a large office on one of the primary worlds of the Human Commonwealth, in a cluster of tall buildings housing the Commonwealth Intelligence Agency. And the two people were talking about Cade.

‘It’s been a real drain on the budget, these data-sweeps,’ growled one of the two, a balding man who was a CIA section chief. ‘But we got young Jaxie at last.’

The other person – a grey-haired woman with tired eyes who was his commander – lifted a shoulder in a shrug. ‘If Cade really has what he’s supposed to have, it’ll be worth a great many budgets. Where is he?’

The section chief grunted. ‘He’s been wandering all over the place for weeks, sort of aimless. Stayed a while on a grubber planet in a backwater system, don’t know why. And now he’s on his way to another backwater world – called Lannamur – where he’s apparently hoping to find someone …’

He paused, then, because the commander had started to smile.

‘Interesting,. . .