Helix Wars (31 page)

“That’s another thing,” Kranda’s voice sounded, transistorised, in his ear. “The varnika increases muscular strength. And it’s equipped with the same shielding facility as the flier, when instructed. We’ll appear as blurs in transit, but when we halt, the varnika takes only a nano-second to adapt to its surroundings, and we’ll be effectively invisible.”

“And I thought we humans were technologically advanced.”

A chuckle in his ear-piece. “I’ll let you into a little secret, my friend,” Kranda said. “These varnikas aren’t Mahkan technology, but Builders’, bequeathed to us when we became the Helix engineers.”

Ellis stared at the spars that covered his hands and arms, and wondered how old the varnika might be. He smiled to himself at the wonder of it, then turned and jogged across the clearing to the tall Mahkan, covering the fifty meters in less than five seconds.

“And now?”

Kranda indicated Ellis’s weapons. “We will test them before we set off.”

Ellis hitched the blaster into his left hand, then selected a target in the forest – the stump of a tree a hundred metres away. He took aim and fired. A dazzling blast streaked from the muzzle of the blaster, and when his vision compensated for the floating afterimage he was surprised to see that all that remained of the stump was a blasted pit in the ground.

Next he tried the rifle, setting it to stun and firing at a tree trunk fifty metres away. The laser vector streaked out and connected with the tree, leaving no visible trace on the bark.

“Rest assured,” Kranda said. “Had that been a Sporelli, she’d now be a twitching wreck.”

“I’m amazed I hit the targets,” he admitted.

Kranda laughed. “With just a little help from the varnika.”

She unclipped the blaster from her left flank and held it up before Ellis. “They can also be used, if we need recourse to such weaponry, as bombs. The blasters are nuclear charged, and when primed will take out a city.” She replaced the blaster. “Now, instruct your shield to activate by
thinking
it...” She gave Ellis the numerical code and Ellis repeated it mentally.

“Good,” Kranda said. “Now, watch as I do the same.”

One second she was towering over him, and the next she was a vague blur, a fractal outline. “This is how we’ll appear to each other at all, thanks to the varnikas’ visual enhancement. To others, we will be very nearly invisible.”

The blur moved. “Let’s go. Follow me and keep me in sight at all times.”

3

K
RANDA TOOK OFF.
One second she was before Ellis, and the next she had vanished. He looked up, into the distance, and saw Kranda as a Mahkan-shaped outline between the trees.

He gave chase, sprinting, and soon caught up with the alien.

Trees flashed by like strobing pillars seen from a speeding monotrain, making a whipping sound to his heightened hearing. He had worried about losing his footing at this speed, but his concern proved unfounded. The exo-skeleton compensated and corrected any mis-step he made, smoothing his breakneck passage through the forest.

He trailed Kranda by a couple of metres. In terms of effort expended, he would have judged himself to be moving at a leisurely jog. He guessed, by the blur of foliage to either side, that he was travelling at fifty metres every five seconds.

“Stop!” The order was loud in his ear-piece, and a moment later Kranda came to a halt before him.

He stopped beside the Mahkan, heart hammering. “What?”

Kranda was outlined in a fractal-edged representation of the background vegetation. The Mahkan was crouching. “I heard something – stalking us.”

Ellis raised his laser, swinging in a three-sixty sweep of the forest. “I don’t see –” he began, then stopped.

He did see something then, through the trees to their right, a swift silver-grey blur of motion he was sure his normal, unaugmented vision would never have caught. “Kranda. Two o’clock, three, and moving.”

“I see it.”

“Ugly beast.”

“A dryll. Carnivorous. The D’rayni’s worst enemy and nightmare, back when the locals lived in caves on Old D’rayni.”

“Can we outrun it?”

“Probably not. They’re fast. They’d chew through our varnikas in seconds and spit out the spars along with our bones.”

Ellis glanced at the Mahkan, trying to discern Kranda’s face. All he saw was a shimmering fractal pattern in the approximate outline of a lizard’s headpiece. “How do you know all this?”

He saw a blur of movement, which he interpreted as Kranda’s arm moving to tap something on her exo-skeleton. “I downloaded all the necessary information into my varnika’s smartcore before I set off.”

“Good move. So what now?”

“Now I do this. Stay here.”

Then Kranda was no longer at his side. He watched her blur streak up the incline, dodging through the trees at incredible speed. He almost called out for Kranda not to kill the creature, but stopped himself just in time.

She came to a clearing and a second later the dryll – the size of a lion – emerged from the trees. It snarled, exhibiting a nasty set of sickle-shaped fangs, and approached Kranda warily, low to the ground.

Ellis caught sight of a silver blur as the dryll leapt, then heard a piercing, high-pitched scream.

For a split second he thought Kranda had been injured, then saw the dryll flop through the air and land on its back before the Mahkan.

“Here,” Kranda commanded, and Ellis ran up this hillside.

The dryll had three sets of legs and a domed carapace; its long muzzle drooled blood.

“What did you do?”

“Merely a well-judged blow to its larynx,” Kranda replied. “Let this be an excellent reminder for us to keep alert.”

She took off, a blur through the trees, and Ellis gave chase.

Minutes later Kranda came to a halt on a spur of rock overlooking a broad valley.

At the far end of the valley, five kilometres away, the lighted town of Panjaluka occupied the valley bottom. At this distance, with his enhanced vision, Ellis made out narrow streets between square block buildings constructed from black stone. The architecture was brutalist – in keeping, he thought, with Kranda’s description of the natives as resembling Neanderthals.

“What’s the local time?” he asked.

“A little before three in the afternoon.”

“And the street-lighting’s still on. I wonder if they’ve ever seen the sun?”

A pause while Kranda accessed her smartcore. “Negative. The cloud never dissipates. Not only have they never seen the sun, but they have never beheld the wonder of the Helix.”

Ellis thought about it. “If they’d been brought here earlier in their evolution, they might still not know what they’re a part of.”

“As it is, they are a technological race, here only a thousand years, with written records of their removal to the Helix.”

He smiled to himself at the thought of having access to those records, and those of the thousands of other races of the Helix who had documented their respective translocations.

“The holding station is situated to the north of the town,” Kranda said, “at the far end of the valley. We will skirt the town to the west, keeping to the moorland.”

They set off again, jumping from the spur of rock and entering the forest. They ran side by side. “In my youth,” Kranda said, “I hunted with my hive-mother.”

He glanced at the blur beside him. “Hunted?” What the word conjured did not sit comfortably with the thought of a civilised, technological race.

“We might be Engineers, my friend, we might be highly sophisticated beings capable of scientific wonders beyond the imaginings of your race, but also we have deep connections to our racial roots. Hunting was, and is, a large part of what it is to be a Mahkan.”

“What did you hunt?” he asked as they ran.

“Don’t say the word as if it is tainted with poison, human. Hunting, I’ll remind you, is an evolutionary necessity for both the hunter and the hunted. One of your greatest thinkers on Old Earth knew that. The survival of the fittest.”

Ellis stopped himself from saying that his race had moved on a little from the need to prove Darwin’s axiom.

Kranda went on, “We – that is, the Mahkan in their female phases – traditionally hunted coyti and jarl, both carnivorous beasts analogous to your lions and tigers, though twice their size and ten times as dangerous. It was a fine day indeed when a young female Mahkan came back from her first bloody hunt, often lasting ten of your days, with the pelt of a coyti to show for her efforts.”

“And your first hunt?”

“I was seven. I went with my hive-mother and we tracked a pair of coyti for two hundred kilometres across the glacial belt. By the end of the hunt, I don’t know who was the more exhausted, the coyti or ourselves. We faced each other, we two Mahkans and the pair of coyti, on a glacial ridge, and my mother had the good grace to step back and allow me to prove myself.”

He looked at Kranda, or rather at the fractal outline running along beside him, and wished that he could behold the Mahkan’s expression.

“Alone?” he asked.

“How else? What would be the joy of being assisted in the kill – I would have felt a deep shame to this day!”

“But the danger...”

“The danger? Fah! What would be the point of the hunt if there were no danger? What would be proved if the coyti were a... a pussycat, you call them?”

“What happened?”

“I, a small girl of seven, exhausted beyond reason, but with joy in my heart, advanced across the ice and attacked the pair of coyti with a kenka blade, and killed them within minutes. My mother bore me home in triumph, bleeding severely from my wounds, but I tell you this – I would not release my grip on the coyti pelts until the time we stepped back into my clan’s compound.”

“And I,” Ellis said, “thought myself brave hurrying past my neighbour’s slavering dog, chained up though it was.”

Kranda made a sound that might have been laughter, and said, “Humans!”

“Mahkans!” Ellis responded, realising how very alien indeed was his reptilian friend. “And now,” he went on, “your race is the Helix’s engineers.”

“Chosen a thousand years ago by the Builders, to follow on from the Maerl,” Kranda said proudly.

“And you consider the Builders wise in their decision-making?”

The Mahkan slowed. “Of course. Why do you ask?”

“Because the Builders also chose my race to undertake an important task, to oversee the reign of peace on the six thousand inhabited worlds of the Helix.” He paused, then went on. “I sometimes wonder, considering what I know of my government, if the Builders knew what they were doing.”

“And I,” said Kranda, “sometimes wonder the same myself.”

They came to the valley where the forest petered out and seceded to coarse moorland. They slowed, then halted in the cover of the last of the trees and scanned ahead.

The lights of Panjaluka glittered in the gloom two kilometres away. Now Ellis made out traffic: small grey cars beetling like trilobites along the narrow streets, and the occasional shuffling pedestrian, lagged like boilers against the biting cold.

Of the Sporelli occupying forces there was no sign.

“The run thus far was merely light exercise,” Kranda said. “From now on we will be traversing open ground. So we sprint.”

She took off, surprising Ellis with her haste, and he sprinted after her.

The sensation was as if he had been caught up in a tornado that bore him in a straight line. The ground was a blur, the wiry moorland shrubs susurrating against the carbon spars protecting his legs. He reckoned that his feet touched the ground every five metres or so, light impacts that sprang him on as far again. He almost cried aloud with exhilaration as he followed Kranda across the open moorland towards the rapidly approaching lights of the D’rayni town.

He thought of Maria, and was surprised to find that for the first time in months he no longer considered her with resentment, nor even jealousy. He was as much to blame for the state of their relationship, he knew, as she was; and yesterday he had gone some way to admitting as much to her.

He smiled as he considered what he was doing here, the sheer absurdity of his actions in relation to his normal, everyday life. What had Maria often accused him of, in her most acerbic moods: apathy and complacency?

They were within a kilometre of the town when Kranda slowed and crouched low to the ground. Ellis came to a halt beside her and did likewise.

“Look.”

He peered in the direction the Mahkan was pointing. They were on a slight rise above the town, within sight of the northern edge where Kranda said the holding station was situated.

He made out black Sporelli troop-carriers moving out of the town on the single road that headed towards the distant pass between the enclosing hills. He counted five of them trundling through the grey mist.

Kranda indicated a foursquare building on the edge of town. “The holding station.”