John Ayliff - Belt Three

JOHN AYLIFF

Harper Voyager

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Harper Voyager 2015

Copyright © John Ayliff 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2015. Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

John Ayliff asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.

Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-811357-5

Version: 2015-05-15

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page Belt Three JOHN AYLIFF

Copyright Harper Voyager An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk First published in Great Britain by Harper Voyager 2015 Copyright © John Ayliff 2015 Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2015. Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com John Ayliff asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress. Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-811357-5 Version: 2015-05-15

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

The ship was a spindly two-ring clipper, tacking against orbit as it dropped sunward through the main shipping lanes of Belt Three. Jonas magnified the image to fill the bridge screen, so that the insect-like body of the clipper stood out against the golden plane of its sail. The ship was battered, asymmetrical, its grav-rings and spine lost beneath a crust of repairs. There was a marking on the side of its cargo bay, a feathered spiral of white on blue, presumably the logo of some minor shipping company. Apart from its heading, it looked like any of the other ageing tramp freighters that plied the orbits of the inhabited belts.

‘Ayla, is that course reading correct?’ Jonas asked.

The pilot jumped in her seat. ‘What was that, sir?’

Ayla often became so lost in her connection with the ship that she stopped paying attention to her physical surroundings, but she normally hid it better than that. Jonas made a mental note to give her some time off when they reached port. The stress of the evacuation was getting to all of them.

‘That ship,’ Jonas said, indicating the screen. ‘It looks like it’s heading for our rock. Can you get its transponder data?’

Ayla’s eyes defocused for a moment as she checked the Coriolis Dancer’s sensors. ‘Yes, sir, the course reading is correct. It’s the Remembrance of Clouds , a private trader registered out of New Calais.’

Jonas frowned. ‘ Clouds ? Odd name for a ship.’

Ayla consulted her implant again. ‘That’s not its original name. The transponder has been hacked. With more time I could tell what the original name was.’

‘No, don’t worry about it,’ Jonas said. A hacked transponder was a warning sign, but if the ship really was heading into a Worldbreaker Red Zone, time was the last thing it had.

He looked back to the local belt chart. His abandoned uranium mining outpost, LN-411, was a day’s orbit behind the Dancer , deep inside the conical Red Zone that marked the probable course of the Worldbreaker. Warning glyphs flagged that the rock was forty-five hours from Black Line. The trajectories of dozens of ships traced curved lines across the screen, abandoning rocks in the Red Zone and fleeing towards distant cities.

There were the usual couple of Scriber Immolation ships heading back into the Red Zone, cheap eggshells filled with suicidal cultists on their final pilgrimage. Jonas stabbed a control to filter them out of the image. With the Scribers gone, the only ship moving into the Red Zone was the Remembrance of Clouds .

Something was wrong here, and if it might affect the Dancer’s safety then Jonas wanted to know what it was sooner rather than later.

‘Hail the Remembrance of Clouds .’ Ayla spoke quietly into the air, letting her implant pick up the words. ‘ Remembrance of Clouds , this is the Reinhardt Industries mining hauler Coriolis Dancer . Please acknowledge.’

A woman’s face appeared on the screen immediately, as if she had been waiting for the hail. She looked perhaps thirty, square-jawed, with a mass of unkempt blonde hair and a web of pale scars across one side of her face like an impact crack on glass. Jonas could make out a blue-and-white circular symbol behind her, the same one that he had seen on the side of her ship. She looked at him with an unfriendly smirk, not speaking.

He ignored the woman’s expression and put on a business-like smile. ‘This is Captain Gabriel Reinhardt on the Reinhardt Industries mining hauler Coriolis Dancer .’

‘Captain Keldra ’82-Pandora, Remembrance of Clouds .’ Her voice had the coarse accent of a Belt Three tank-born.

‘Captain Keldra, it looks like you’re heading for the LN-411 asteroid. Are you aware that rock is in a Worldbreaker Red Zone? All the mining stations have been evacuated, so if you’re going there to trade…’ Jonas left the sentence hanging. The woman’s smile was unnerving, and she had shown no surprise at the mention of the Worldbreaker.