The Devil's Nebula Read Online Free PDF Page B

shoulders, and looked up as the Vetch scoutship swept overhead, flew in a great loop over the capital, then angled upwards and vanished into the stratosphere.
    A great weight seemed to lift from Lania’s shoulders.
    “Well?” she said, staring at her captain.
    “I’ll contact Jed, and then I’ll explain.”
    They stood in the shadow of the jungle and Ed opened up radio communications. “Jed?”
    “Captain...” The engineer’s voice sounded, tremulous with fear, in Lania’s earpiece.
    “Where are you?” Ed asked.
    “I... I don’t know. In the jungle. I heard firing.”
    Lania instructed her smartsuit to locate Jed’s position, then projected a map on the air. A tiny red light blinked, half a kay north of the museum.
    “Follow me,” she said.
    “We’re coming for you, Jed,” Ed said.
    Lania led the way through the jungle, following the map that hung in the air a metre before her.
    They came across the engineer ten minutes later.
    He was still cowering in the undergrowth, for all the world like some animal gone to ground in fear of its life. Which he was, Lania thought as she stood above him and prodded his ample backside with the toe of her boot – an overweight, cowardly animal burying its head in the sand.
    Ed helped him to his feet and he looked sheepishly at Lania. “I thought you were dead. I heard firing. What happened?”
    She told him what had occurred in the clearing. “But Ed has a confession to make.”
    Jed looked confused, an expression which rather suited his doughy face.
    They followed the blasted tunnel back through the undergrowth towards the museum. Ed said, “Not a confession, Lania. More an admission.”
    Jed shook his head. “Will someone please tell me what you’re both on about?”
    They emerged into the sunlit square and moved into the shade of the museum’s entrance. A plinth of steps rose towards a triangular glass door, shattered to opacity now but still intact.
    They sat on the top step and drank from their water bottles.
    “A month ago I heard a story about a crashed ship on Hesperides,” Ed began. “I was on Terpsichore, while you two were on leave.”
    Lania looked away. She’d told Ed she was going to her homeplanet of Xaria, to visit her family. Instead she’d spent her time in a gymnasium on one of the moons of Terpsichore.
    Ed was saying, “You know I have an interest in the evacuated worlds. In my research I came across the story of an alien ship that’d come down a hundred years ago, here on Hesperides. I tracked down a politician in office at the time and he told me a little more about it. All very hush-hush. The ship had crash-landed almost fifty years before the Vetch ordered the evacuation, but it wasn’t a Vetch ship, nor did it belong to any of the other known star-faring races. The odd thing was that the authorities who investigated the wreck found no signs of life aboard the ship, and it couldn’t have been running on auto as it didn’t posses the technology to do so. The authorities feared that whoever had landed were abroad on the planet, which opened up all sort of security problems.”
    Jed said, “Were aliens ever traced?”
    Ed shook his head. “No, which makes it all the more mysterious. And now we find that the Vetch are curious about it, too. So that’s why I wanted to come here, quite apart from the fact that we could make a little money by retrieving the statuette.”
    Lania said, “Presumably the crash-site has been well and truly scoured by now?”
    “I still wanted to see for myself,” Ed said. “Also, the politician said that items from the ship were stored in the vaults of the Valderido museum.”
    Lania tapped his knee. “That’s before our ugly friends took them away, Ed.”
    He moved his leg from her reach and nodded, conceding the point.
    She said, “I still wish you’d told us about it, Ed.”
    He stood quickly and regarded the shot-glass doors of the museum. “You forget yourself, Lania. I’m the Captain of the