“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!
Chapter Two
As the morning progressed the temperature at the Jacksonville field had climbed steadily until exposed metal surfaces were too hot to touch. The work of maintaining and servicing the big starships went on as before, but the sounds of the cargo handling machines and repair robots now seemed to have a drowsy quality, as though even their metal limbs had been made sluggish by the oppressive heat. The air was heavy and humid, blurring the flat, distant horizon.
Jan was helping his father carry out final checks and adjustments on the controls of the Seeker. The time had almost arrived for the rocket ship to be moved out of the workshop area to the north side of the spacefield for loading on to the Culcheth, the specially adapted starship which would carry it across the light years to Verdia. Being small and chemically propelled, the Seeker was only capable of short-range orbital flight. To get it out of the Solar System and across the inconceivably vast distances that separate the stars, it was necessary for it to be carried in the cargo bay of the huge warp-driven freighter which could leap from one star to another in a fraction of a second.