Read Online The Devil's Nebula by Eric Brown - Free Book Online

from her friends. She had no idea what the Weird wanted with her people – not even Kavan could tell her that – so she thought that her playmates’ wild guesses were a waste of time.
    That night she slipped into the fissure and climbed her tree. As the bloated sun sank over the horizon, the sky slowly darkened and the stars came out. To the north, over the jungle, the night sky was resplendent with the gaseous pale red cloud that her father had told her was the Devil’s Nebula. To the south was a mass of brilliant stars: the swathe of Vetch space, and, beyond, the hazy sweep of stars that was the human Expansion, from where her people had originally ventured.
    She stared for a while at the distinctive horned shape of the nebula, then transferred her attention to the stars of the Expansion. She wondered how many populated planets existed out there, and not for the first time found herself wishing that one day she might be able to leave World and explore them all.

 
     
    CHAPTER FIVE
     
    T HE REGIME THAT governed the human Expansion represented everything that was anathema to Ed Carew’s philosophy of life. They were draconian where he was liberal; authoritarian where he was anarchic; and conservative where he was bohemian. He had spent his life in open – and not so open – defiance of their ideals. As a child, raised on the planet of Temeredes on the edge of Vetch space, he had dreamed of free travel among the stars, adventuring with a ship of his own. When the Vetch had declared their ultimatum and the Expansion had stood by, too weak to intervene, while his planet was evacuated, Ed Carew’s hatred of the Expansion government had been born.
    Later, as a young man travelling the length and breadth of the Expansion, teaching and learning and soaking up as many of the diverse philosophies – human and alien – as it was possible for his intellect to comprehend, his disgust at the ruling regime was compounded: again and again he came up against repressive laws and codes, illiberal and totalitarian regimes that held entire planets in thrall. Somewhere along the way, his defiance of the rules crossed the line into lawlessness – though where the authorities might have called him a criminal, Carew preferred to think of himself as a free-thinker bound not by the laws of planetary governments but by his own morality. It had begun, he supposed, when he purloined a small starship from someone he considered a true criminal, and for almost thirty years he had managed to keep one step ahead of the law, mixing legitimate salvaging operations with shadier deals. Now, it would appear, his run of good fortune and freedom had come to an abrupt end.
    His one regret was that Lania and Jed had been brought down with him. They were good people, despite what the authorities might claim about their respective misdemeanours, and over the years they had been with him he had come to see himself as their protector.
    Well, no longer.
    They had left the Poet as instructed, unarmed and arms aloft, attended by an overkill of armed guards, and had been rapidly and silently processed into the custody of a convict shuttle. Here four guards had inserted him into a narrow metal tube like a coffin. As cold as a corpse, garbed only in a prison shift, he’d experienced the subtle nausea of void transition and wondered where in the galaxy they were sending him.
    Now he rolled and rattled inside the torpedo. No matter how hard he braced his arms against the curving walls of the tube, he could not prevent his head and shoulders connecting painfully with the cold, hard steel. The journey seemed to last an age.
    It was yet another example of the regime’s inhumanity, meant to cow a criminal, physically as well as mentally, before he or she came to trial.
    Then the rattling stopped, and a period of blessed calm followed; blessed to begin with, that was, after the discomfort of transit. As time passed, and the temperature within the tube grew even colder,