Killer Planet

Chapter One

It was a fine summer morning and the air above the concrete expanse of the Jacksonville Commercial Spacefield was already beginning to shimmer in the growing heat. The hangars, workshops and office buildings of the various transport companies which used the field as their headquarters gleamed in the strong Florida sunlight. A faint breeze wafting in from the Atlantic sent swirls of dust dancing across the flat ground, but failed to bring any coolness to the interiors of the big warp-drive freighters whose towering hulls dominated the scene. Mechanical handling vehicles bustled continuously among the starships, loading or unloading interstellar cargoes, their drivers occasionally dabbing sweat from their faces and thinking wistfully about the next refreshment break.

In contrast to the noise and activity outside, the scene inside the office of the Hazard Line was quiet and almost religiously solemn. Donn Hazard, owner of the shipping line, had just opened a bottle of champagne and was pouring the sparkling liquid into four plastic cups. Donn was a tall man with friendly but commanding features, and although he was nearing fifty his black hair was only slightly flecked with grey. He smiled as he finished pouring the champagne and handed a cup to each of the three much younger people who were standing by his desk.

“This is my last bottle of bubbly—it’s just too expensive these days—but it’s the most fitting drink for a celebration,” he said. “I want to show my appreciation for all the hard work you’ve done in the last year. Without your help the Seeker would never have been finished—so here’s to the successful conclusion of the most important project of my life!”

He turned and raised his cup towards the sleek crimson shape of the Seeker, which was visible through the office window. The specially designed rocket ship was only fifteen metres from needle prow to tail, a symphony of streamlined curvatures, and was sitting vertically upright on a multi-wheeled transporter at the edge of the spacefield.

Jan Hazard, Donn’s son, echoed the toast and sipped dutifully from his cup, hiding the fact that the dry wine was unpleasantly bitter to his taste. Already as tall as his father, Jan had thick black hair and the muscular frame of a natural athlete. His features were pleasantly unremarkable, but at times his face bore a look of seriousness which made him seem older than his sixteen years. He and his two best friends—Petra Moir and Ozburt Groom—had been devoting every minute they could spare from their education schedules to the Seeker project and were justifiably proud of the outcome. Jan felt a great sense of personal achievement on seeing the little ship completed, but his pleasure was tempered by deep concern about what was supposed to happen next.

His father was absolutely determined to fly the Seeker single-handedly down through the eternal cloud cover of the planet Verdia. It was bad enough that nobody who had landed on Verdia had ever come back, but Jan had an even greater cause to worry about his father’s safety.

So intense were his fears that he had recently come to the most momentous decision of his life, one which had to be kept secret at all costs.

“My nose!” Ozburt snorted, choking over his drink. “It’s hurting my nose! Do people actually enjoy drinking this stuff?” He was a chubby-faced redhead who had great difficulty in controlling his outsized hands and feet, but behind his clumsiness was a rare talent for all forms of electronic engineering. It was his seemingly instinctive skill in maintaining the flight simulator which had made it possible for Donn to practise ‘flying’ the Seeker, even though the unique ship had never left the ground.

“We grown-ups enjoy champagne,” Petra told him coolly. “You should stick to your cherry sodas.” She was tall and athletic looking, with fair hair and tanned skin which had earned her the apt nickname of the Golden Girl of the school sports squad. Her favourite sport was archery, in which she had won several junior championships. Jan often thought it ironic that it was prowess in such an ancient sport which had enabled her to play an important role in his father’s preparations for the mission to Verdia. In the strange conditions of that planet modern weapons were worse than useless, and for self-defence his father planned to rely largely on a bow and arrows. Petra had devoted a lot of time to teaching him to shoot accurately.

“Grown-ups! Listen to old Granny Moir!” Ozburt replied. “You’re only five months older than I am.”

“That’s going by the calendar, but if you consider mental age I’m…”

“That’s enough of that, you two,” Donn put in. “Remember we’re all part of a team. Isn’t that right, Jan?”

“I agree,” Jan said, meeting his father’s gaze squarely.

“And that’s why I think I should be going to Verdia with you—as part of a team.”

“We’ve already been through all that, and my decision is final.” Donn set his cup down, signalling that the impromptu celebration was over. “This is a job for me alone.”

“But…”

“For me alone, Jan.” For a moment the expression in Bonn’s eyes was troubled as he gazed at his son, then he produced a smile for the benefit of all three young people. “Now, if the gang will kindly get out of here I’ll be able to get on with some urgent work. There are quite a lot of last-minute details to take care of if I’m going to take off tomorrow morning.”

“We have things to do as well,” Petra said tactfully. “We’ll see you later.” She set her cup aside, gestured for Jan and Ozburt to do likewise, and ushered the two out of the office.

“Don’t shove!” Ozburt’s round face looked indignant as they emerged to the fierce sunlight of the spacefield. “What’s the mother hen routine for? Huh?”

“Mr Hazard has enough on his mind without you cluttering up his office.” Petra turned to Jan. “And I don’t think you should keep on arguing with him.”

“Don’t you?” Jan said heatedly. “Perhaps you’d think differently if it was your brother that was missing and presumed dead.”

Before she could reply he spun on his heel and strode away in the direction of the transporter upon which waited the crimson shape of the Seeker, the unique spaceship built to his father’s own design. As he neared the huge vehicle and its load his thoughts returned to the enigma of the planet called Verdia, the distant and mysterious world which had claimed his only brother…

Although Verdia’s surface was totally obscured by cloud, the exploration ship which discovered the planet in 2191 was able to gather a substantial amount of information by conducting radar soundings and an instrument survey from orbit. Verdia was covered by a warm green ocean, except for one large land mass at the northern pole, where there were extensive deposits of valuable minerals. The single continent lay under a continuous blanket of dense jungle which probably harboured many species of alien wildlife.

In short, Verdia was far from being an ideal planet for colonisation, but Earth was already becoming expert in terraforming—that branch of engineering which dealt with modifying conditions on new worlds to make them more suitable for human habitation. Earth’s own Moon and the desert planet of Mars had been the first examples, their hostile environments altered by such means as importing water in the form of ice asteroids. It was decided to proceed with the occupation of Verdia, and a development team was sent in to prepare the planet for the arrival of settlers.

But what had started off as a routine operation soon went disastrously wrong.

Shortly after landing the engineers radioed back reports of finding the overgrown ruins of an ancient city—then all communication abruptly ceased.

The covering of cloud prevented any optical study of the situation from orbit, so a robot survey module was sent down to gather data. The torpedo-shaped module darted down through the clouds and skimmed low over the engineers’ landing site. It had time to send back grim pictures which showed dead bodies lying among wrecked and abandoned equipment—then it went out of control and crashed.

The next step was that a heavily armed and well-equipped trouble-shooting team from the Stellar Expeditionary Force was dispatched to the surface to investigate. They managed to send back a few seconds of garbled reports about their vehicles, machinery and weapons‘’going wild’, then they too fell silent.

A second survey module established that they had met a fate similar to that of the engineers, but its transmissions were cut short when it also went out of control and plunged to the ground.

Scientists who were observing from spacecraft in orbit noticed that at the exact time of each disaster there were severe disturbances in the planet’s powerful magnetic field. The most obvious sign had been the flurries of lightning which had danced around the landing sites. A theory was put forward that any large metallic object—such as a bulldozer or a tank—reaching the surface of Verdia attracted lightning bursts which destroyed the machines and killed their operators.

Unsubstantiated though the theory was, it was accepted by the politicians who made up the Council of Empire. A planet where machines could not be used was of no value, and other less troublesome worlds were waiting to be exploited. After a brief emergency session the Council declared Verdia a ‘no-go’ world and the official files on it were closed.

Jan Hazard, then a boy of thirteen, had heard the Council’s decision with shock and astonishment—because his older brother, Bari, had been with the Stellar Expeditionary Force.

It had been officially assumed—without proof—that there were no survivors of the Verdia mission, but every instinct that Jan possessed told him otherwise. Bari was tough, clever and resourceful, well-schooled in outdoor survival techniques, and an inner voice told Jan that he simply could not have died, no matter how hellish the scenes depicted in the reconnaissance photographs.

His father had thought along the same lines and had reacted with characteristic vigour and determination. Jan could remember his father—grim-faced and dark-eyed with exhaustion—fighting a months-long battle to have the Council’s decision reversed, and only gradually coming to accept bitter defeat.

In all the history of exploration—from the taming of the Earth’s continents to the conquest of space—mankind had never chosen to abandon an outpost. But now, simply because there was no commercial advantage in doing otherwise, the fat bureaucrats of the Council wanted to forget the brave men and women who had given their lives on Verdia. The planet was a ‘bad investment risk’.

Jan could also recall his father’s anger turning into a brooding, diamond-hard determination that no matter what the cost, no matter what dangers had to be faced, he was going to penetrate Verdia’s stormy grey atmosphere and bring back his first son. The Seeker—a spaceship unlike any other—had been born out of that determination, and the time for it to be pitted against the mysteries and terrors of the Killer Planet had almost arrived.

As he walked across the scorched concrete of the spacefield, his gazed locked on the glowing red outline of the rocket ship, Jan felt a stirring of excitement underlaid with fear. He was in full accord with the objective of finding and rescuing Bari, and he had every confidence in the Seeker’s computer-assisted design—but there was one aspect of the plan which from the start had filled him with apprehension.

He was convinced that his father was the wrong person to pilot the Seeker, and that his insistence on tackling the mission single-handed would lead to yet another tragedy.

Donn had spent most of his early life as a flier and he was still fit, but he would soon be fifty and his reactions had slowed. That would not have mattered had he been proposing to use an ordinary ship, in which most of the pilot’s work was handled by computers, but the Seeker had no automation whatsoever and flying it called for ultra-fast responses.

On a number of occasions the flight simulator had shown that Donn had been too late in making a vital control movement. Each time Donn had shrugged the matter off, claiming he would be fine on an actual flight, but Jan had known better and his apprehension had increased. Finally—and not without some feelings of guilt and disloyalty—he had reached a decision which he had confided to no other person.

When the time came to send the Seeker arrowing down towards the clouds of Verdia, no matter what last-minute trickery it took, he would be at the rocket ship’s controls.

Alone!