Free Solaris Rising 1.5 by Ian Whates Page A

pieces fallen from the cliff-hugging favelas looming over them on either side: minor debris presaging a forthcoming avalanche. The houses belonged to mushroom farmers. Between them lay tended rows of edible fungi, like the fingers of dead white hands thrusting up through the damp soil.
    Napoleon picked his path with care, sticking close to the houses, avoiding the crops. The last thing he needed was an irate farmer taking pot shots at him; and besides, he didn’t want to get his boots any dirtier than they already were.
    He was almost to the river before Vilca’s men caught up with him again. This time, it was four of them in a flyer. They came in low and fast, the flyer’s fans kicking up dirt and rubbish. Napoleon started running as best he could, but he couldn’t move quickly while cradling his arm. Bullets ripped into the ground around him, sending up angry spurts of dust, each one closer than the last.
    He made maybe ten metres before something punched through his thigh. The impact spun him around in a graceless pirouette.
    He landed on his back in the dirt. The flyer’s howling fans kicked up a maelstrom of dust and grit around him, and he rolled onto his side, trying to curl into a ball, cringing in anticipation. Waiting for the next shot.
     
     
    2.
     
    T HE TRADING SHIP Ameline flashed into existence a thousand kilometres above the inhospitable sands of Nuevo Cordoba. The ship was a snub-nosed wedge, thirty metres across at the stern, narrowing to five at the bow; its paintwork was the faded blue and red livery of the Abdulov trading family. Alone on its bridge, her neural implant hooked into its virtual senses, Katherine Abdulov looked down at the planet beneath, with its deep, fertile oceans and single barren supercontinent. Even from here, she could see the tracery of fissures that made up the canyon system that gave shelter and life to the planet’s human population.
    “Any trace of infection?” she asked the ship, and felt it run a sensor sweep, scouring the globe for signs of The Recollection’s all-consuming spores.
    > NOTHING I CAN DETECT, AND NO MENTION OF ANYTHING SUSPICIOUS ON THE PLANETARY GRID.
    Kat heard the ship’s words in her mind via her neural link, and pursed her lips. For the moment she was relieved, but she knew her relief to be premature. Even if the contagion hadn’t yet spread to this planet, it was almost certainly already on its way, using cannibalised human starships to spread itself along the trade routes from Strauli Quay. She took a moment to remember the other worlds already lost to the unstoppable red tide. Their names burned in her mind: Djatt, Inakpa... Strauli.
    She’d seen her home world swallowed by The Recollection; lost most of her family, including her mother, to its insatiable hunger. Now she was out here, at this world on the edge of unknown space, hoping to warn the inhabitants of the approaching threat, and rescue as many of them as she could.
    Through the ship’s senses, she felt the arrival of the rest of her flotilla: two dozen fat-arsed freighters, each piloted by a crew of Acolytes, and each with the cargo capacity to transport several hundred refugees.
    One by one, they reported in.
    “Target the spaceport and the main canyon settlements,” she told them. “Save as many people as you can.”
     
     
    H ER ONLY PREVIOUS visit to the isolated world of Nuevo Cordoba had taken place years ago—whole decades in local time—during her first trip as an independent trader. That had been back before her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter; back before the coming of The Recollection and the loss of her left arm. She remembered the planet as a corrupt, mean-spirited place, the canyon dwellers made hard and cynical by the harshness of their environment, and lives spent mining the rock or grubbing for mushrooms and lichen. She wondered how they were coping without the arch network. She also remembered one Cordoban in particular: a random hyperspace jumper