Helix Wars (10 page)

Maybe an hour later he made out approaching footsteps. Two individuals, chattering together in their piping tongue, took hold of each end of his pod and lifted.

They exclaimed – perhaps in surprise at the weight of the pod – and staggered under their burden across the clearing. He found himself being swung through the air. He landed with a thud on something soft, and shortly after felt another pod land beside him.

He tried to move, but to no avail. He was still locked in frustrating paralysis which, as the minutes elapsed, he began to fear might be more than temporary.

Ten minutes later the sound of the chopping ceased and he heard the sound of voices approach the place where the pods were stacked. He wondered if the native workers were standing by, admiring the piled pods and congratulating themselves on their magnificent haul.

Were they meat-gatherers? Was this a harvest wrested from the pod-trees and consumed as a delicacy by nearby villagers? He considered their surprise when they opened his pod to find an alien within.

Seconds later he heard a shout and the piled pods shook and juddered. He had been placed aboard a cart or some such, and now they were setting off.

The movement as they progressed – the tilt suggesting that they were travelling downhill – was somnolent, lulling, and Ellis found himself drifting off.

He came awake, startled by a cry, some time later.

His instinct was to sit up, and he attempted to do so, but the skin of the pod had shrivelled and cocooned him tight. He moved his arms with difficulty and brought his right hand up to his face to scratch at the encrusted blood on his cheek.

Only then did he realise that he had moved. The pod’s anaesthetic had worn off, and he felt a surge of relief at the thought that he had survived the alien poison.

The cry which had awoken him came again.

The native harvesters were communicating among themselves with some degree of consternation, their voices even shriller than normal.

Ellis heard a low rumble, which grew as he listened, then cut out abruptly. The natives ceased their twittering and fell silent.

He heard something creak, ahead of the cart, and then a metallic slam. Boots approached the cart – more than one set – accompanied by harsh, guttural conversation.

He found himself holding his breath.

The boots halted before the cart and a gravelly voice called out what sounded like, “Krayak gah.”

The natives on the cart responded with silence.

“Gah, rankah. Krayak!”

The pod’s skin was desiccated. He raised a hand and prodded a hole through the thin vegetable matter before his face.

He adjusted his position minimally, not wanting to attract the attention of whoever had apprehended the cart, and peered out. He was stacked with other pods on a flat-bed drawn by what looked like a shell-less turtle. A slight being, pale and elfin-thin, with a pelt of silver hair, sat upon the beast’s neck. Others of its kind – Phandrans, obviously – squatted behind it on the turtle’s humped back.

Before the beast stood an alien in a black military uniform. He appeared human, but for the slight blue cast of his features. Six other soldiers, positioned behind their leader, carried bulky weapons held across their chests. Ellis made his breathing shallow.

Their commander spoke again, a barked order, but it was obvious that the Phandrans did not understand.

The alien stepped forward and gestured towards the cart and its cargo of pods, then pointed to the ground. His meaning was obvious: deliver a pod for my inspection.

Ellis felt his stomach clench. He judged there were around a dozen pods stacked on the cart – two of which contained human remains, and his own. If the alien commander should find any one of them...

Belatedly the Phandrans atop the turtle-beast moved to obey. Two of their number rose from the turtle’s hump and skipped nimbly onto the cart. They bent towards the closest pod to hand – which happened to be the one in which Ellis lay – and took hold of either end. In doing so, the membrane where Ellis had poked a hole split even further and he found himself staring into the startled visage of a Phandran – an albino angel, as he came to think of them later.

With a gesture he hoped might be universal, he raised a finger to his lips and held it there.

After a second of bewilderment, the Phandran piped something to its neighbour and they moved to take hold of the pod next to Ellis. They lifted, grunting with effort, and eased the pod over the side of the cart and carried it to the feet of the alien commander.

The alien reached down and, with the tip of its weapon, ripped the skin of the pod to reveal the corpse of a deer-like animal, striped red and black.

The commander, not satisfied, repeated his command and gestured towards the cart. The Phandran duo returned, clambered aboard the cart, and selected another pod. Ellis closed his eyes, praying that it was not one containing either Abi or Travers.

They dropped the pod at the feet of the alien and retreated. Heart pounding, Ellis peered through the rent in the membrane, hardly daring to breathe.

The alien reached out and prodded the pod with the snout of his rifle, worked a hole in the membrane, and ripped it open. He stood back suddenly, as if in alarm, and Ellis feared he’d found human remains.

Only then, seconds later, did the stench of putrefying meat reach his nostrils. The rotting corpse of some six-legged beast lay at the commander’s feet.

One of his minions barked a comment which was not to the commander’s liking. As quick as lightning, the commander turned, levelled his rifle, and fired. A blue beam drilled a hole in the centre of his chest. The commander barked an order and the remaining soldiers retreated hurriedly to their troop-carrier parked further down the track. He moved to the body, stared down at it with contempt, then rolled it into the ditch with his boot.

Ellis swallowed and realised that he was shaking uncontrollably.

The commander turned to the Phandrans and snapped in its ugly tongue: “Garak sen. Kayag-na!”

He turned on his heel and marched back to the carrier, and a minute later the vehicle started up and accelerated towards the cart. Only swift action by the turtle-handler, and somewhat slower footwork from the beast, prevented a collision. The carrier swept by, its commander staring at the Phandrans imperiously from the high cab.

Ellis closed his eyes and released a long breath.

Only when the roar of the carrier’s engine died to a distant murmur did the Phandrans resume their onward journey. A minute later three of their number jumped from the turtle’s hump and landed on the cart beside Ellis’s pod.

Cautiously, like frightened children, they approached him.

Ellis sat up, aware that the pod-tree’s toxin had not only anaesthetised him but had acted as an analgesic. The pain in his ribs and leg had abated to no more than a dull ache.

The Phandrans backed off quickly. They dropped into squats at the front of the flat-bed, staring at him in amazement.

They turned and called to their colleagues, and the turtle drew to a halt. Seconds later all six Phandrans were crouching before him, swapping comments and swift, bird-like gestures. If the biology of these aliens correlated at all with that of humankind, then these creatures before him appeared to be male; at any rate, they were flat-chested and slim-hipped.

One of the Phandrans returned to the turtle-beast and the journey resumed.

Ellis looked beyond the staring aliens and took in the countryside. They were passing through a broad valley made idyllic with the spun-silver clouds of a million gossamer trees. The sun slanted down from above distant mountains, warming him.

An alien, the individual who had discovered Ellis, knelt before him and held out his hand, palm down. As Ellis watched, the Phandran moved his palm through the air until his slim fingers collided with a pod and his lips made a silent plosive.

Ellis smiled, suddenly understanding. “Yes. Yes, that’s right. I was aboard a shuttle. We... we were shot down by...” He gestured over his shoulder to the alien military.

The Phandrans laughed among themselves, obviously finding the sound of his deep voice a source of amusement.

The Phandran spoke, a series of high piping notes, and Ellis smiled his incomprehension. It looked at its fellows, and then they withdrew to their positions on the turtle’s hump, casting him curious glances from time to time as they proceeded down the narrow track between the gossamer trees.

Ellis lay back in his pod and closed his eyes, and within seconds he was dozing.

2

H
E WAS SHAKEN
awake abruptly. He cried out and sat up, alarmed.

The speed of his movement startled the Phandran, who backed off with a look of fear on its angelic face. Ellis reached out in a placatory gesture. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I was dreaming.”

In his dream he was confronted by an alien in a sable uniform and a visor, and when the being lifted its visor he saw that the face beneath belonged to his wife.

The turtle had halted in the shade of a low, spreading tree – not a gossamer tree, he was glad to note – whose gnarled branches bore round yellow fruit which glowed like lanterns in the descending twilight.

The other Phandrans were seated in a circle beneath the tree, eating. The native before him gestured to Ellis, then indicated the group. The alien appeared young, with a long scar running down its right check from its eye to the side of its mouth. It hopped down from the cart, then gestured for Ellis to do the same.

He smiled. “Well, that’s very kind of you. I’ll do my best, but you’ll have to forgive my lack of mobility.”

However, when he sat up and swung his legs from the pod, he found that the ache in his right leg was manageable; even his ribs no longer throbbed. He would have to recommend the analgesic properties of the pods when he returned to New Earth. However the hell he might manage that small task...

He climbed down from the flat-bed, the alien taking his hand as he stood, swaying. He smiled and withdrew his hand. He’d known the Phandrans were tiny, but only when he was standing next to this one did he realise quite how small they were: the alien barely reached his ribcage.

He took a deep breath and moved carefully away from the cart, surprised at the lack of pain. He felt like an invalid, walking for the first time after weeks of convalescence. The scar-faced Phandran danced attendance all the way, reaching out a hand when Ellis stumbled or swayed.

He stepped into the shade of the yellow-fruit tree. Although it accommodated the aliens with headroom to spare, he had to duck beneath its drooping branches. The Phandrans shuffled around to make room for him.

They were eating what looked like flat-bread, each of them dipping it into a communal bowl of bright orange paste. Ellis was handed an oval of bread, and he broke off a chunk and scooped up the slurry. He ate hungrily – having had nothing to eat but the golden-fruit hours ago – and found the paste to be sweet at first, and then hot, and not unpleasant.

The Phandran who had escorted him to the tree now scooped a small cup into the paste, took an oval of bread, and retreated to the turtle. It sat on its hump, eating, from time to time looking up and down the track.

The alien next to Ellis saw him looking and touched his arm. In explanation, the Phandran placed a thumb and forefinger below and above its right eye and moved its head back and forth in a scanning motion.

Ellis nodded. “A lookout. Good idea. I just hope...” he began, then shook his head and smiled. He had been about to say that he hoped no harm would come of his rescuers if the invaders discovered him – but what was the point when they obviously didn’t understand a word he was saying?

The Phandran seated across from him, whose lined face marked him as the oldest of the group, raised a small hand to attract Ellis’s attention. He spoke a few piping words and indicated the loam before him.

As Ellis watched, the alien drew a symbol in the soil.

It consisted of two big curves, like grammatical brackets, one nestling in the other. Ellis stared at it in mystification for long seconds, and only then did he smile in understanding.

The two curves were the Helix – or as much of the structure as was observable from the surface of Phandra. These people, he reminded himself, were pre-industrial, and though some of their number must comprehend the notion of the Helix in its entirety, he guessed that these relatively uneducated agricultural workers, his saviours, did not.

He nodded, and then the alien drew a series of rectangular blocks on the lower curve to represent the individual worlds and the seas between them.

The alien paused, then bent forward and indicated a central block. He looked up at Ellis and said what sounded like, “Fahn’ra.”

Ellis nodded. “Phandra. Yes, I understand. Your world.” He indicated the central section. “Fahn’ra.”

The alien bent forward again and pointed to the adjacent section or world. “Zzprell!” he spat. With marching fingers he moved his hands from Zzprell to Fahn’ra.

Ellis understood. “Sporell,” he said under his breath. “Yes, of course. The invaders are from Sporell.”