Helix Wars (4 page)

He blinked. Where was the shuttle? He expected to see the wreckage of the cockpit all around him, expected to find himself entangled – embedded, even – in its torn and twisted metal. But he was lying on his back on something very soft and staring up into a mellow twilight. The scene above him was so idyllic that he could only smile in wonder. The sun was going down over distant jagged peaks. The fiery orange ball set the cloud cover ablaze and ignited a silver filigree mist high above his head. Then he knew what the spun silver was: the cloud-like foliage of the trees he’d seen while descending.

He tried to move, to roll onto his side. Instantly, pain attacked him with a thousand talons. He caught his breath, not daring to let it out. He fell onto his back, the wind expelled painfully from his lungs, and lay panting. He must have passed out; the next thing he knew he was staring through the gaps in the silver foliage at the twinkling points of distant stars.

He drew a breath without causing his ribs to explode. “Abi?” he called.

He willed her to respond. A silence greeted his call – no, not silence: wind soughed through the forest canopy, and somewhere far off an animal, or bird, called a low, achingly poignant, oboe tremolo.

“Abi!” he shouted again, with increasing desperation. He wanted to hug the tiny woman to him.

His vision faded a few moments later and he passed out again.

It was daybreak when he next came to his senses.

He stared up, shocked. Maria was standing over him, staring down. Her face was a mask of undisguised contempt. He tried to reach out to her, wanting nothing but her comforting embrace. His stretching hand fell well short.

“How dare you?” she shouted.

He blinked, and realised that he was crying. Tears flooded his eyes, distorting Maria’s image. “I’m sorry?”

“I wanted you more than just someone who’d give me a son!” she cried. “How dare you accuse me of such selfishness?”

Had he ever made such an accusation – or was it his guilty conscience, conjuring this apparition?

He tried to recall the content or their last – their final? – argument.

Something about the fact that she would not be at home when he returned. She would be on a fifteen-day field-trip to the coast, working with her team at the Builders’ ziggurat.

“And no doubt you’ll be spending all your free time with Director Stewart?”

Her icy gaze had frightened him with its intensity. “And what do you mean by that?”

“I’ve seen how he looks at you. That party we attended –”

She cut him off: “Dan’s a good friend. Nothing more. We’re colleagues, we share theories, ideas.”

“As if that’s all you share.”

She had lashed out then, slapped him across the face, and left him standing in the lounge while she stormed from the house. Later Ellis had made his way to Carrelliville spaceport, feeling sick at his stupidity and wishing he could go back and un-say what he’d said.

He blinked, and Maria was gone.

“Abi!” he called out again, sobbing.

The day warmed. The sun shone through the gossamer foliage. A distant bird gave a sad, prolonged call.

He raised a hand to his face and felt his flesh. It moved like slit blubber beneath his finger-tips, and when he lifted his hand away he saw dried blood. His face had been lacerated in the impact, had suffered a dozen cuts. He smiled, then laughed. Well, he’d never been all that handsome.

What about his limbs?

Both arms appeared to function reasonably well, though they too had been sliced here and there.

He moved his right leg, bending it, and he felt no pain. But when he tried to move his left leg, bring it up to mirror his left, a vicious stabbing pain lanced up his femur. The material of his right legging was ripped, blood-soaked. He decided not to look too closely at the wound beneath the fabric.

“Abi! Abi, answer me! Travers!”

He moved his head, squinted. To his left he made out a sward of red grass embroidered with a million tiny, polychromatic blooms. He really was, he thought, in paradise.

He turned his head the other way and saw, for the first time, what was left of the shuttle.

Only its nose cone had survived, buried in the loam of this alien world. Beyond the cone, in a long trail that receded into the distance and defied his vision, was a confetti of metallic fragments. How the hell, he wondered, had he survived the crash-landing?

He closed his eyes, opened them, and stared at something twenty metres away. “Abi?”

She was lying on her back, but something about her posture told him that she could not be alive. Her right leg was twisted, bent back on itself. Her red Peacekeepers’ uniform was slit like a Chinese lantern.

He moaned to himself and determined to reach her remains. He wanted to straighten her twisted leg. It was undignified, the way death had dealt with her posture. She was a beautiful woman, and it was not fair.

He would... he would reach her, rearrange her leg, set her head straight, and kiss those lips for the first and last time.

He propped himself up on his elbows, trying to ignore the pain. He might not be able to walk, but he could drag himself along, backwards, towards where Abi lay. He set off, digging his elbows into the soft loam, humping himself along, stopping for frequent deep breaths when the effort and the pain became too much.

Fifteen minutes later, soaked with sweat and shaking with the exertion, he reached Abi.

He sat up beside her, staring at her remains. Something had scored a deep incision across her torso, opening her up from shoulder to pelvis, revealing the bloody slick surfaces of her internal organs. Her right leg was bent at the knee, so that the toe of her boot was inserted into the space between her thighs.

Ellis wept as he reached out and, gritting his teeth against the pain, took hold of her heel and pulled. He straightened her leg, and in doing so it came away at the knee, held together now only by the thin material of her slacks. Weeping, he set her right leg parallel with her left, and then straightened her head.

He face was unmarked, perfect. She seemed at peace, her eyes open and staring up at the beautiful canopy above them.

He reached out and closed her eyes, and then, with difficulty, leaned forward and kissed her lips.

Exhausted, he fell onto his back beside her and passed out.

When he came to his senses, much later, the sun was directly overhead. He could not bring himself to look at Abi’s body, preferring to recall her in the shuttle when he had been so close to agreeing to visit her back at Carrelliville. She had been small and perfect then, and wonderfully alive.

He stared past Abi, towards the wreckage, and wondered if the com had managed to emit a distress signal, if right now a rescue team was on its way. Or had the com malfunction prevented the activation of the signal? There was no way of knowing, until the team turned up, or failed to.

Among the wreckage he saw Dr Travers’ body. A fragment of the shuttle’s superstructure had sliced his torso and opened up his chest like a clamshell. Ellis looked away, gagging.

He lay back and thought through the last few minutes of their descent. He told himself that there had been nothing he could have done to prevent the crash-landing, but even so he felt the first stirrings of guilt.

He had a sudden vision of Abi laughing and telling him that guilt was
his
thing.

It was not his fault that Abi and Travers were dead, but the fault of whoever was responsible for the razing of the Phandran township; the operators of the military vehicles he had seen winding their way up the mountain track.

What had Abi said about the Phandrans? That they were a pre-industrial, peace-loving people? So it was unlikely that they were responsible for the attack on the township and his shuttle. But the thought of an invader from another world was almost as impossible to contemplate.

He felt a sudden stab of anger at the unknown assailants, followed by a sense of incredulity. In the two hundred years humankind had dwelled on the Helix, peace had reigned. No race had thought it necessary to attack another. Now, that had changed. Now, for whatever reasons, an alien race had set about another.

He shook his head at his reaction: he wanted to smash to pieces whoever had done this, annihilate the people responsible.

So much for reasoned pacifism, he thought.

He was distracted by the sound of something buzzing nearby. When he turned his head he saw a tiny tornado of flies – or their Phandran equivalent – swarming over Abi’s body. They landed, invading her, and he wept and propelled himself away.

Later, exhausted, he passed out again.

2

T
HIS TIME WHEN
he came to his senses he was aware of another sound. It seemed to be close by, and he wondered how he had failed to notice it earlier.

The soft plash and play of flowing water.

Suddenly he realised how thirsty he was. He raised himself and looked around. Directly behind him, glinting between the boles of two trees, he made out a stream. He drew a deep breath and dragged himself towards it, grimacing with the effort.

It took an age for him to reach the stream’s bank, but when he finally lowered his head to the silver water and drank, the relief was worth the effort. He laughed aloud at the sensation of the cold cut of the liquid down his parched throat. Water had never, ever, tasted so wonderful.

He drank his fill and lay back on the bank, warmed luxuriously by a patch of sunlight. There had been rations aboard the shuttle, but how to find them among all the mangled wreckage? It would be an impossible task. Better, he thought, to seek fruit or other food in the forest.

But how to tell if they were poisonous?

He sat up carefully and looked around. Bushes grew nearby, and on them hung clusters of pale pink berries. He propelled himself away from the stream towards the bushes, and ten minutes later arrived, exhausted, before the shrub. The berries looked tantalising, mouth-watering – too good to be true. And when he tasted one, tentatively, he instantly spat it out, and then the tainted saliva that remained. If taste denoted poison, then the bitter berries were surely toxic.

A few metres beyond the bush he saw a low shrub bearing a hundred golden globes. He shuffled towards it and plucked a fruit – the size of a pear and similarly shaped. It smelled ripe and sweet, and he took a small bite. The soft flesh flooded his mouth with nectar, and he reasoned that a fruit so wonderfully tasty could surely not be poisonous. He ate one, then another and another, then lay down beneath the bush and closed his eyes against a wave of pain from his leg.

Seconds later he heard something move in the undergrowth beyond the shuttle’s wreckage.

He sat up, startled, and stared across the sward.

His first thought was that the military responsible for bringing the shuttle down had, finally, traced him. It was a measure of his mental confusion that until now he had not thought of getting away from the site of the crash. But how to do that, with an injured leg and cracked or broken ribs?

He dragged himself into the cover of the golden-fruit bush and peered out.

Something moved among the still steaming wreckage. He expected to see an invader, or a Phandran, but what he saw, shuffling its way through the debris, was certainly no elfin native. Was this the invader, then? He stared, trying to make sense of the thing. It resembled a cross between an overgrown seed-pod and a giant crimson caterpillar, three metres long, with an open-ended orifice surrounded by what looked like tendril feelers that quested across the ground as it pulled itself along.

Only when it emerged from behind a smoking engine cowling did Ellis see that its back end was connected to a long stalk or vine. He followed the course of the vine and traced it back to the trunk of a gossamer-cloud tree. The vine coiled around the trunk and vanished into the foliage.

He wondered why the pod had descended from the tree, and what it was doing probing through the wreckage.

Absently he plucked another golden fruit and ate it as he watched.

Five minutes later, his question was answered.

The shuffling pod approached Abi’s body. At first Ellis assumed it would caress the corpse with its tendrils in the same way it had felt all other obstacles in its path, before moving around them. But not this time.

The pod’s orifice opened slowly, a rheumy sphincter strung with drools of saliva like harp-strings. The pod shuffled forward and, as Ellis watched with mounting revulsion, eased first Abi’s feet into its maw, then her legs.

He wanted to cry out, distract the creature so that it would leave Abi in peace. But he quelled the impulse, fearful of the thing’s attention.

He watched as, little by little, the pod drew Abi into its maw like a snake ingesting a rat. Ten minutes later Abi’s head disappeared through the orifice, which slowly closed. She was now encapsulated within the pod as if it were a body bag.

As he stared, the tendril that connected the pod to the tree tightened, and the pod was dragged slowly backwards along the ground. Minutes later the pod bearing Abi’s mortal remains tilted upright and was drawn into the tree-top. There the pod hung, spinning slowly, as its digestive juices set about breaking down Abi’s flesh.