Voyage of the Void-Lost

By Stephen Hunt

When Captain Lana Fiveworlds seizes on a lucrative contract to fly a rough-and-ready bunch of grave robbers between the worlds of long-extinct civilisations, she’s expecting a nice easy ride for her misfit crew on board the starship Gravity Rose.

After all, those unlucky perished alien species died of climate change, atomic wars, comet strikes, plagues, and mass solar flare ejections thousands, if not millions of years ago.

So, what can go wrong? Plunder a few failed planets for priceless abandoned antiques and lost technologies and make out like an interstellar bandit!

Sadly, the karma of the universe has other ideas - and easy, it surely ain’t. When their troubles slowly mount, Lana, Calder, Zeno, and the other crew members battle for far more than their lives. The ultimate cost could be more than the captain - or her dear friends and family - can bear.

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ABOUT THE BOOK

'Voyage of the Void-Lost' is the 6th book in Sliding Void series. It's a completely stand-alone adventure, not directly linked to the first five books.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Hunt is the creator of the much-loved 'Far-called' series (Gollancz/Hachette), as well as the 'Jackelian' series, published across the world via HarperCollins alongside their other science fiction authors, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and Ray Bradbury.

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REVIEWS

Praise for Stephen Hunt's novels:

‘Mr. Hunt takes off at racing speed.’
— THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

‘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

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FORMAT

Full novel - a stand-alone adventure.

Book 1 - Sliding Void
Book 2 - Transference Station
Book 3 - Red Sun Bleeding
Book 4 - Anomalous Thrust
Book 5 - Hell Fleet
Book 6 - Voyage of the Void-Lost

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AGE ADVISORY

Age 13+ - mild violence and language.

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READ THIS BOOK IF YOU LIKE THESE AUTHORS...

Douglas Adams.
Neal Asher.
Iain M. Banks.
Jack Campbell.
David Drake.
Orson Scott Card.
James S.A. Corey.
Evan Currie.
Peter F. Hamilton.
Ric Locke.
Dan Simmons.
Charles Stross.
David Weber.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Hunt
• Release date: Jul 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005859008

Stephen Hunt

Stephen Hunt is the author of several fantasy titles set in the Victorian-style world of the Kingdom of Jackals and is also the founder of www.SFcrowsnest.com, one of the oldest and most popular fan-run science fiction and fantasy websites, with nearly three quarters of a million readers each month. Born in Canada, the author presently lives in London, as well as spending part of the year with his family in Spain

Book preview

Voyage of the Void-Lost

Book 6 in the Sliding Void series

Stephen Hunt

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Green Nebula

VOYAGE OF THE VOID-LOST

First published in 2021 by Green Nebula Press

Copyright © 2021 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.

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.

To follow Stephen on Twitter: http://twitter.com/s_hunt_author

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

A planet’s best view comes after the hardest climb.

- Unofficial motto of the Guild of Filter Vultures.

Praise for Stephen

‘Mr. Hunt takes off at racing speed.’

- THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

‘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

‘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

‘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

‘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

Contents

1. Filter Vultures

2. Bad Bot

3. Deep in the Dark

4. Cold Call

5. Unlikely Origins

6. Secrets in the Rack

7. Hail to the Chief

8. Lying with the Dead

9. Uncommon Objects

10. The Supreme Virtue

11. Simple Pursuits

12. Crate Expectations

13. Green Riding Hood

14. Lords and Ladies

15. Substantial Jobs

16. Hostage to Fortune

17. Going Nuclear

18. Battle of the Drive Room

19. Take the Rose

20. Thread the Needle

21. Epilogue: Green Earth

Chapter 1

Filter Vultures

Calder Dirk regarded the planet spinning below through the porthole with suspicion. Not that there was evidently anything too suspicious about the dark orange planet. Perhaps the fact that there was almost no water in the world? Calder, before he joined the crew of the starship free-trader Gravity Rose , had swanned about as a prince on a primitive fallen colony world trapped in an ice-age. Everything was water there. Albeit frozen in its oceans or scattered as deep powdered snow across the landscape. The Alliance listed this planet in the star-charts as Feltor Prime of the Feltor system. Feltor Prime was about as different from his old homeworld as it was possible to be. It was desert now, a process assisted by a greatly thinning atmosphere – this a result, Calder had been informed, of its lack of a magnetic field. The young crewman wasn’t sure how he should feel about that. Would getting sunburned down there be any better than an ice-burn back home? Picking up a sword on Hesperus carried the risk of leaving your thumb behind because of frostbite. Down on Feltor, drawing a sword no doubt entailed the risk of burning your fingers on scorching steel.

‘Are you sure we’ll be safe on that planet?’ Calder asked his friend Zeno.

‘I guess that depends on what you mean by safe,’ noted the android crewman.

‘Oh, you know. Not being captured by slave traders and sold to alien cannibals as an offworld delicacy.’

‘Hey, pal, if you had listened to me on our last trip you wouldn’t have gone wandering off and those slavers would never have found you drunk in that local bar. And if I wanted to get technical on your flammy ass, you need to be a member of the same species for it to count as cannibalism.’

Calder shrugged. ‘Well, let’s say I listen to you this time. How safe is it going to be ground-side?’

‘Feltor’s indigenous sentient race has been extinct for five hundred years. Losing your planet’s magnetic field does that to you. If the increased radiation doesn’t kill off all life, then the slow bleed of your atmosphere out into space murders you every time.’

‘Then how come we’re being paid to pick up a team of archaeologists down there?’

Zeno laughed. ‘Man, you don’t wanna let any real archaeologists hear you call the people down there by that name. These are Filter Vultures. Hard-knock scavengers.’

‘I’m not sure I appreciate the difference.’

‘For starters, our new passengers don’t give a stuff about archaeology. Their game plan’s landing somewhere where the locals failed to breach the Great Filter and steal the skegging heck out of whatever’s left of said collapsed civilisation.’

Yes, the Great Filter. There had been much talk of this esoteric concept onboard the Gravity Rose after accepting the commission to transport the team on Feltor and their discoveries – or should that be plunder – back to the Triple Alliance’s hinterlands. For every society reaching the point of becoming a multi-system interstellar race, half a dozen more races fell by the wayside. Victims of such grim tragedies as super-volcano eruptions, pandemics, comet strikes, nearby supernovas, local solar discharges, and suchlike. Not to mention the chances of self-obliteration through nuclear war, nanotechnology plagues, germ warfare, runaway climate change through poor industrialisation choices, and dozens of other fatal own-goals.

‘And,’ Calder pointed to a silver vessel orbiting the planet, ‘they’ve got their own ride. What do they even need us for?’

‘That minnow is the Nuwang Long, an antique decommissioned T.A. Deep Space Exploration Office jump-ship. Heavy on the sensors, fast on her heels, and just dandy for scouting. Not so good for shipping out multiple metric tons of goodies from a scavenger hunt. She’ll fit fine on our hangar deck alongside the shuttles. Anyway, Lana’s dealt with these clients before, a few years before we picked you up. That’s why she accepted the contract for this job at Transference Station. A known variable is worth a lot more than some risky cargo that’ll see us flagged as smugglers.’

Zeno’s remark brought on a twinge of guilt for Calder. Right now the galaxy was replete in fat, juicy rich deals. The only downside was that most of them came attached to military contracts with the Triple Alliance and the aggressive froggies, a.k.a. the Quazalrats, still locked in a war over on the Alliance’s far side. A long grinding conflict that demanded plenty of military supplies shipping hither and thither. Unfortunately, Captain Lana Fiveworlds didn’t want to risk taking on such work, given Calder’s unfortunate history with the Alliance Fleet. They’d kidnapped and brainwashed Calder, turning him into a human interface for their deadly cache of ancient Heezy weaponry. Currently they believed Calder Dirk was dead. And nobody on board the Gravity Rose wanted to disabuse the authorities of their mistaken notion. So, here the crew were, back on home turf in the Edge’s frontier systems, keeping their heads down and losing out on the biggest gold-rush for commercial contracts in the last hundred years. War profiteering was – the clue lay in the name – so damned profitable. Calder felt missing out on the filthy lucre was mostly his fault.

‘Don’t worry, kid,’ said Zeno, guessing what occupied his crewmate’s thoughts. ‘This might not be a munitions run, but the fact all the major corporate houses are busy handling government contracts means that even a chicken-feed deal like this will see a few zeros added to the bill. We’re making out fine. And this side of the galaxy, the Rose isn’t risking a Quazalrat war group jumping us just because we’re not part of their glorious master race.’

Calder opened the door to the shuttle bay, and they entered the vast echoing chamber. It waited filled with large freight shuttles squatting on launch rails, rear cargo hatch doors left open, and a scattering of smaller craft which the crew had picked up along the way. Projects for Lana, the captain, to tinker with in the protracted periods of downtime while trekking through hyperspace.

Zeno strolled to the nearest of the bulky shuttlecrafts, technically a three-hundred-and-seventy-foot-long heavy transporter. Someone had airbrushed her name, the Alotta Void, across the hull alongside her official serial number. The artist had also painted a cartoon pig in a cowboy hat, riding a miniature version of the shuttle while surfing atmosphere inside a heat flare. Both name and caricature glinted spray-sealed with transparent diamond film to preserve the art from repeated re-entry burns.

‘What you need is a bit of real gravity pressing on your noggin, as opposed to the artificial variety we spin up. You fleshies always feel better with a breeze on your face and an actual planet under your boots. It’s the wild man in you.’

‘That’s kind of offensive,’ said Calder. ‘You recall that on Hesperus I am a member of the Royal Family. We regard ourselves as the pinnacle of sophistication and high culture.’

‘On Hesperus, I seem to remember sophistication means tossing ice-rat bones inside a copper basin at the feast, rather than wiping them on your animal fur jacket and hurling them towards the hunting hounds.’

‘You weren’t on Hesperus for that long,’ accused Calder.

‘Long enough, pal,’ said Zeno, quietly.

***

One thing you could say about landing on a world with its atmosphere slowly stripped away by solar winds, there was a heck of a lot less turbulence and bounce on the passage down. They broke their drop in seven minutes flat, Zeno on the stick and Calder strapped into the co-pilot seat. With hardly any cloud cover, the sky stretched out a dull maroon colour. A pair of pale moons spun a slow, sedate progress across the horizon. The android flew them over a large city’s ruins. Calder noted a landscape of fragmented, rotting skyscrapers and streets covered in sand dunes, the Alliance interlopers’ presence marked by a series of tents and prefab buildings set up the centre of what might have once been a public park. Now, just a windswept square of powder in the shadows of once-mighty towers, with a line of tracked vehicles and industrial-size hovercraft carried down by the newcomers. There were also hundreds of shipping containers piled around the place, filled with whatever slim pickings this broken, empty planet offered.

After landing their shuttle at the encampment’s edge, Zeno removed a Geiger-counter from the cargo bay. The android watched Calder pull on his white and orange-coloured survival suit, which included a breather mask under its transparent hood. A cheap piece of kit, but adequate to survive the high levels of radiation Calder would be exposed to during their brief visit. Zeno, of course, needed neither a suit nor mask. He might look as if he was breathing, but that motion, like so much else, was just a show for putting his organic companions at ease. Zeno was equally at home floating in deep space as enjoying the Gravity Rose’s artificial gravity and recycled atmosphere.

Calder had noticed Zeno’s features subtly changing on the way down. The young crewman wasn’t perturbed. The android was originally designed as an actor for the great entertainment studios of Earth before becoming sentient in an accident of quantum computing, like so many of his kin. His face might as well be made of plasticine. Zeno could pull off a near-perfect Calder impression, which he sometimes did when arguing with the human crew-mate. Everyone found it annoying to hear their opinion badly straw-manned and mangled by their own doppelgänger. And Zeno wasn’t just a space merchant: he was also a wind-up merchant par excellence.

‘Are you studying for a new role?’ asked Calder, finishing suiting up.

‘Nah,’ said Zeno. ‘This is how I looked when I last met our clients’ boss lady. Only polite to reset my face to how she remembers it. Less trouble all around.’

‘You change your face over time? Why do you do that?’

‘The usual reasons. I get bored, mostly. Some people experiment with a new hairstyle, I morph it up a little. If you went into cryo-sleep and woke up in 200 years, you’d hardly recognise me. My current styling is two per cent more Samuel L. Jackson and three per cent more Richard Pryor than when I pulled your sorry arse out of the ice-ball you call home.’

‘Some might consider that rather vain.’

Zeno pointed to the trimmed beard Calder now sported. ‘Sayeth the pot to the kettle.’

‘Hey, this isn’t to look good. This is part of my disguise.’

The part of the charade that hurt the least, at any rate. Resetting Calder’s fingerprints and iris pattern not only required an expensive black-market operation inside a dodgy surgery on Transference Station, but it also left him wincing and hardly able to stare at a light strip without seeing flashing white stars. The criminal surgeon involved attempted to add a few twists to Calder’s baseline code to throw off DNA scanners. He’d grown dangerously curious while discovering the alien Heezy portion of Calder’s double helix prevented major alterations. Lana bought off the medical rogue’s curiosity by offering to triple his fee. Changing Calder’s eye and hair colour were the only thing his body’s genetics permitted.

‘In failing to look fine, you’ve succeeded. Let’s just hope we don’t run into any of your old Fleet amigos, because I’m not too sure how much the chin-hedge is fooling anyone.’

A blast of heat slapped them as the rear cargo hatch lifted, a whistling as the shuttle’s relatively thick oxygen environment vented into the thin local air. The world’s gravity was roughly ninety percent of Earth-standard, which, by long tradition, was what most human starships’ artificial grav-fields were set to.

Outside, a welcoming committee of four people awaited. Uniformly short, squat females wearing sturdier green-coloured versions of Calder’s radiation suit. Calder did a double-take as he noticed their faces. The team might as well be sisters. A common Sino-featured oval expression of neutrality mixed with a hint of anticipation peered back at him. While the left side of their cheeks were unadorned skin, the right-hand face swirled with golden metallic tattoos glittering in the bright sunlight.

‘This is a family concern we are picking up?’ Calder whispered to Zeno while their landing ramp extended down to the sandy surface.

‘Their planet’s in a trinary system called Nangjai. Designer babies, from a shared clone gene-pool. Entirely female. The population decided shortly after colonisation that most of the crime, conflict, and general crapitude of their society emanated from its male cohort. So they banned males and started designing their own little utopia. Don’t make a big thing of it or you will wish those slavers had sold you as a pot-roast. Our clients are a mite touchy about their cloned heritage.’

Calder shrugged. It had been a hell of a culture shock, ripped from his backward mediaeval society and transported into an age of sorcery and magic formed through weird science. Now hardly anything surprised him. Humanity remade itself in a thousand ways through genetic engineering to accommodate itself to alien environments, both subtle and major remodelling. Either that or altered the planets they settled via terraforming. And that was without the hyper-strangeness of various extraterrestrial races Calder had met since falling into the future, so to speak. Whatever unfamiliarities cavorted in front of him these days were greeted with a shrug and a they do things differently around here.

Zeno walked out, raising his hand in greeting as the ramp’s last segment cantilevered into position. ‘Sally not here to greet her old drinking buddy?’

‘Her regal personage, Lady Cho, is out in the field,’ announced a woman in front. ‘I am the Base-camp Commander, Mila Lim.’

‘Still working? I thought you planned to wrap up operations by last week?’

‘Our original schedule,’ said the commander, ‘until we discovered the location of something interesting below this city during our explorations in the north polar region.’

Zeno winked at Calder. ‘Cool beans. Let us see what these explorations of yours have led to, then.’

The clone sisters escorted the android and Calder across the dune, boots sinking in the fine-grain sand until they reached the nearest shipping container. Calder was experienced enough now to recognise the container’s grainy surface as a mark of a re-purposed mining nanotechnology virus, containers constructed in situ from the most available local substance... sand. Zeno tapped the artificial substrate with his knuckles. ‘Solid. We can rack these into the cargo shuttles and store ‘em inside the Rose’s hold without them falling apart. How fragile are the contents?’

‘This area is filled with collectible cultural artefacts which require careful handling. The other containers have Feltor Prime’s entire planetary seed bank,’ said Mila, wiping dust off her radiation suit visor. ‘Seeds are inside their original refrigeration units. That was in our prospective buyer’s specs. Client doesn’t want us ripping samples out and storing them in our ship’s meat locker.’

‘Heavens forbid,’ smiled the android. ‘If you have this place’s lost ecosystem nailed down tight, what are you hoping to find in the ruins?’

‘We scouted a few treasure troves, old rigs on concrete legs from when there were oceans here. Thin pickings, but records we found allowed us to translate the language well enough to infer there’s a significant archive hidden under this place.’

‘Treasure trove?’ asked Calder.

The commander fixed him with a look that said how green are you? The answer was thirteenth-century barbarian green, but Mila didn’t need to know that. ‘The goods dying societies wall up inside a vault before they expire. Famous artworks, artefacts from their civilisation’s dawn, museum pieces, the grandest gems and jewels, notable poems and works of literature. Usually accompanied with diamond-etched historical records and whatever plans the Xenos thought necessary for future generations to jump-start civilisation.’

‘Not much jump-starting here,’ opined another clone sister.

Zeno nodded. ‘Great filter, baby. Except it wasn’t so great for the poor mopes in this star system. What were the locals like, anyway?’

Mila pointed out across the sands, as though they could find their answer as a mirage. ‘The Feltorians? Imagine a bipedal otter-shaped mammal with six arms. You wouldn’t believe it to see Feltor now, but back in the day, this planet was a damp, heavily forested paradise. We obtained videos from the seed bank index showing the landscape how it used to be. Then, one week, their planet’s magnetic field folds, and this wreckage is what you end up with. The irony is, the locals settled the fourth world of their star system. They hoped to terraform it from an airless desert to something resembling Feltor. That colony collapsed into cannibalism without resource support from the homeworld. If the pig-ignorant Xenos had invested in a serious space program seventy years earlier, there would still be a Feltorian presence in this system and a viable civilisation on at least one planet.’

‘Not so good for your balance sheet, though,’ said Zeno.

‘Nothing personal in it,’ shrugged the coordinator. ‘There’s always another star system in the local cluster when it comes to dim-witted alien civilisations that strike a wall.’

Calder stared up at the blasted skeleton-like remains of the towers. ‘Losing their atmosphere did this?’

‘Good old-fashioned erosion with a side-helping of atomic weaponry exchanged among the factions scrabbling to survive,’ said the commander. ‘We’ve found three distinct residual isotope signatures, so there were at least that many superpowers fighting on the planet before the witless creatures went extinct. They let off warheads to try to restart their world’s magnetic core, too.’

‘The heat transfer rate across the core-mantle boundary is too low to sustain a magnetic field,’ said Zeno. ‘They should’ve re-melted the core with antimatter and restarted the plate tectonics system using deep-release nanotechnology.’

‘You used to be a terraformer, android?’ asked Mila.

‘Nope, just old enough to have been around when scientists first tried that on Mars.’

Zeno opened a comm to the Gravity Rose and confirmed the launch of sufficient cargo shuttles to handle the Filter Vultures’ plunder. Among Zeno’s many positions onboard their vessel, he served as chief droid wrangler. Able to command-and-control thousands of drones, sub-systems, and robots across the ship thanks to his superhuman intelligence, a fact he never let lie idle amongst his fellow crew members. Cargo shuttles could run automated, same as their loading equipment, as long as Zeno was on the case.

Within fifteen minutes of inspecting the consignment, Zeno packed the sky with dozens of shuttles, locking magnetic arms onto shipping containers, raising them inside the boats until the transport vessels’ holds filled. Then the craft twisted around on a mixture of thrusters and antigravity lifters, accelerating out of sight back to the Gravity Rose. As soon as the heavy lifters vanished, they were replaced by fresh shuttles. Calder helped their almost identical-looking clients finish loading items into recently constructed crates. He knew better than trying to assist Zeno when the android was concentrating on running so many autopilots concurrently. In the end, it was someone else who interrupted them both.

Calder noticed an insistent beeping from his commlink. The Gravity Rose signalling from orbit. He opened the channel to hear the skipper’s voice calling in a rather scratchy manner.

‘Calder, we’re–picking up–activity north–of your position.’ Lana’s line wasn’t easy to make out.

‘The team hasn’t quite wrapped up yet,’ Calder explained. ‘They’re still working on recently uncovered excavations.’

The ex-prince could almost imagine Lana’s sarcastic eye-roll as her voice crackled over the communications line. ‘I don’t know what–excavations our–clients have that involve–heavy weapons fire, but I want those–shuttles back in–my loading–bay, stat! And try–to extract our clients–out of there alive, too. It would–be just–dandy if we could pick up–a paycheck to cover the–bullet holes I’m gonna–find in my cargo boats.’

Glad to see she still cares, grimaced Calder. Things had been distinctly frosty between the two of them since he’d had what might be described as a fling with his commanding officer in the Triple Alliance Fleet. The fact Calder suffered from a mindwipe and believed himself to be a different person at the time didn’t seem to cut the slack with Lana Fiveworlds that Calder considered his due. ‘Zeno...?’

‘Yeah, I got the same transmission from the old girl. She ain’t making it up. From the signal drop-off, someone’s out in the ruins trying to jam our signals.’

Old girl? Calder wasn’t certain if the android referred to their ship or captain. I really don’t need to be in any more trouble than I already am.

The remaining shuttles went into a holding pattern as Mila came jogging across the sand from a tent-dome.

‘Let me guess,’ said Zeno, ‘you’ve just lost contact with Sally.’

‘Lady Cho sent an emergency transmission,’ confirmed the commander, ‘but it