Helix Wars (7 page)

Kranda felt a weight of relief. “It might be over very quickly,” she said. “Then again, depending on exactly what it might entail.”

“I fully understand, Yankari-Kranda. Come, I’ll show you back to the interworld ship.”

3

I
It was almost
one Mahkana day later when Kranda piloted her flier over the familiar coastline of her homeworld and headed for the central mountains.

She had not been home since undergoing her last
hayanor
, fifty days ago. He – as she had been then – had fallen ill while on a routine supervisory field-trip to an arctic world on the eighth circuit, and had requested immediate leave. Rather than seek hospitalisation, and ease his
hayanor
with the drugs that were so common these days, he had elected to undergo the process of transition in the old-fashioned way, as was expected of his hive-tribe, and see out the change using only the old tried and tested herbal medicines. He had set off with a family servant, with the traditional furs of
hayanor
to protect him from the bitter cold, and trekked into the mountains. There he had found the family cave, built a fire, and waited.

Hayanor
occurred approximately every five years, and he had quite forgotten the pain of the last transition. Now it leapt upon him like a wild animal, taking his breath away with its savagery, and for three days Kranda had suffered the physical agony of change and the accompanying mental fever-dream, ministered by the loyal servant and soothed by the foul-tasting elixirs made from ground herbs. More than once during the process Kranda had wished he/she’d taken the easier option of hospitalisation.

Then, miraculously, on the dawn of the third day, with the sun climbing over the southern mountain range and shining directly in through the mouth of the cave, the pain had passed and Kranda was female.

She had felt whole again, and strong, and it seemed that the man she had been for five years had been a shallow, weak alter ego, and the period of maleness a time of half-life she was glad she had overcome.

Now she smiled at the recollection of her
hayanor
and steered her flier over the mountain pass leading to the cave. She made out a dark trail of footprints through the snow, and wished the Mahkan who was undergoing
hayanor
now the best of transitions.

As she flew on, the ice-grey mountain ranges of her homeland brought back a slew of nostalgic memories which intensified when her hive-mother’s manse came into view.

It was an architecturally ingenious series of castle-like fortifications erected in and around the mountain’s natural crags and fissures. In certain places it was hard to tell where the cliff-face ended and buildings began, and the few facades that could be seen – with illuminated slit-windows shining in the twilight – gave a false impression of the manse’s true dimensions. The dwelling extended far back into the mountain itself, over a hundred rooms chiselled by Kranda’s forbears from the hard heart of the rock.

She brought the flier down in a cantilevered courtyard surrounded by frost-trees, iron-hard growths that protected the entrance to the manse with a tangled thicket of deadly thorns.

A servant, lagged to twice his usual dimensions against the cold, stood beneath the archway between the frost-trees with a torch to guide her way.

Kranda shut down her ship and hurried to the exit.

The cold smote her face with the audacious familiarity of an old, rambunctious friend. She steeled herself and strode to where the servant waited, hopping from foot to foot.

He greeted her with the familial honorific, “Yah-Kranda,” and hurried before her, his torch lighting the way through the enfilade of frost-trees to the massive arched timber entrance of the manse.

Once inside, warmth fragranced with summer-flower oils replaced the bitter cold, and Kranda shed her cloak and strode after the servant to the main hall.

Her hive-mother waited on a chair like a throne positioned before a blazing fire. The open fire was an anachronism, of course, a tradition kept alive like much else in and about the manse. This was her hive-mother’s way: in tradition she found comfort, a link to the distant past on a world far away from this one.

Her valet, Khell, a shrunken oldster in his male phase, perched upon a high-stool at her side.

Kranda knelt and kissed her hive-mother’s hand. “Marran,” she murmured. She noticed grey hairs sprouting between her mother’s facial scales, which themselves had faded from brown to fawn – all signs of advancing age.

Marran said, “You look well, Kranda’vahkan. Congratulations on the promotion.”

“You know?” Kranda asked, surprised.

“There is little I don’t know, Kranda. What else have I to do with my time, sequestered up here, but observe the progress of my daughters, all... But guess how many, Kranda.”

Kranda smiled. Her hive-mother was astoundingly fertile, even in her sixtieth year. “Fifty?” Kranda guessed.

“Fifty? More like seventy, you scabbed coyti! Seventy. And of all of my offspring, you have done me proudest.”

“And now
Sophan
,” Kranda said, bringing her mother back to the reason for her presence.

A servant hurried in with big goblets of mulled juice; Kranda’s favourite, which she had not tasted since her last
hayanor
.

Marran indicated a seat opposite her, and Kranda eased herself into the padded cushions. Khell handed Marran a softscreen, which she in turn passed on to Kranda.

The image on the screen was stilled, showing an aerial view of an unfamiliar landscape.

Marran was saying, “I have informants in many places, in this case a clerk in the Observation Corps. He keeps me abreast of the Sporelli situation.”

“I’ve heard rumours.”

“I can tell you for certain that rumours of invasion are true. The
skath
” – she almost spat the word; skath were vermin which lived in the manse walls – “have invaded Phandra. The casualties, so I’m told, are high.”

“Have moves been instituted to halt the slaughter?” she asked.

“You know what the human peacekeepers are like, Kranda, and our ruling council are little better these days, since Jekeri’s hive gained ascendency. Who knows how it will end.”

“But...
Sophan
?” Kranda reminded her.

Marran indicated the softscreen on Kranda’s lap with a palsied claw. “Touch the screen to set it into motion.”

She did so. The screen showed a mountain vale with strange, white-blossomed trees and scarlet grassland. She increased the magnification, and the view zoomed in. She made out, between the trees, a tangle of burnt-out wreckage.

“A human shuttle...” she said, fearful.

Marran turned her hand in acknowledgement. “The shuttle came down – was brought down by Sporelli fire – two days ago. Our observers noted the infringement and contacted the human peacekeepers, and it was from them that Darvian learned the identity of the pilot and his crew.”

Kranda said, “Jeff Ellis?”

“Darvian knew of Ellis, and your
Sophan
, and contacted me.”

Kranda stared at the wreckage. “But there is no way Ellis could have survived this...”

Marran gestured. “Scroll to the next image. Magnify to its utmost resolution. Observe the shape at the bottom of the screen.”

Kranda scrolled, with shaking fingers, and made out what might have been a human figure lying beside a silver stream.

“Now scroll to the next image,” Marran said. “See, the figure has moved. This image is one hour later. The evidence is that the figure, the human figure, was alive at this point.”

Kranda looked up and asked, “But is the figure Ellis?”

“It wears the blue uniform of a shuttle pilot,” Marran said. “According to the human authorities, he was not accompanied that day by a co-pilot.”

With increasing apprehension, Kranda scrolled to the next image. It showed the same scene, but there was no sign of the human figure.

“What might have happened to him?” she asked.

“We cannot tell. Cloud cover obscured the next dozen or so satellite images. When the cloud cleared – scroll on, Kranda – we see only a team of Phandran natives harvesting some local growth.”

Kranda scrolled, taking in all the images captured by the satellite. The later ones showed the tiny figures of a dozen natives and some kind of cart hauled by an ugly, bloated creature.

Kranda scrolled back to the image showing the human figure – Jeff Ellis – and stilled it. She looked up. “The natives might have found him, or know what happened to him.”

Marran inclined her head. “That is one possibility, yes, Kranda.”

Sophan
, she thought. Debt of honour.

“I must travel to Phandra immediately.”

Her hive-mother pulled back her top lip in an affirmative grimace which also signalled her pleasure. “I knew that no daughter of mine would baulk at such a thought, despite the dangers involved.”

“The Sporelli?” Kranda asked.

“They are advancing across the face of Phandra. We suspect their destination is D’rayni, a world rich in metals, which their own world lacks. Along the way they show the hapless Phandrans no mercy.”

“I will have to be armed, and well-protected.”

Marran said, “I have acquired a varnika, and a complement of weapons.”

She stared at her hive-mother. Was there no limit to her ingenuity? “A varnika?”

“I know hive-mother Shaar, over in the neighbouring canton, and her daughter is Director of Builder artefacts.”

With a varnika, Kranda thought, I will be invincible.

She would find Jeff Ellis, and save him, and in doing so would discharge her
Sophan
.

She stood. “My love and respects, Marran. I will leave for Phandra without delay.”

She knelt and kissed her mother’s hand, then stood and strode from the room.

4

K
RANDA EASED HER
flier from the courtyard and instructed the computer to chart a course along the fourth circuit to the world of Phandra.

“And when we approach Sporell and Phandra,” she said, “establish a visual and aural shield.”

Sophan.

She thought back to the time, four years ago...

It should have been a routine flight, but a mechanical error had almost cost Kranda her – or rather his – life.

He’d been returning from a world on the second circuit and looking forward to a period of leave. His attention had been on the future, and a holiday in the glacier fields of his homeworld, when the meteor hit his ship and his com-system shrieked a system failure alert and advised immediate evacuation.

He had attempted to escape his failing ship, and might have successfully done so had the impact with the meteor not ripped a hole through the escape hatch, taken out the store of vacuum-suits, and allowed the air to escape at an alarming rate.

Only the fact that, quite by chance, a human shuttle had been in the vicinity had saved his life. The human Jeff Ellis had matched his shuttle’s flight-path to that of the stricken Mahkan flier, left his ship with spare breathing apparatus, and made his way across the intervening vacuum, inserting himself through the meteor impact gash and dragging Kranda to safety.

Only later had the human shuttle pilot admitted his gut-wrenching fear at the thought of the operation; to his credit, he had carried it out as if he’d performed the same actions every day of his life.

Over the next few years Kranda and Ellis had met up occasionally, and their meetings had served to dispel Kranda’s prejudices against humankind. Kranda’s people were a proud warrior race, originally hailing from a world thousands of light years away from the Helix, a planet whose conditions had been harsh, inimical. In order to survive and prosper, a collectively brutal regime had been necessary: the Mahkan were, like all other races, a product of their environment.

That brutalist regime had been tempered somewhat after their transfer to the Helix, where life was easier, and where the Builders, a thousand years ago, had honoured her people with the mantle of Engineers. But even so, her people were genetically predisposed to bellicosity – so it was little wonder that when the human race became Peacekeepers and the Mahkan found themselves working alongside this puny, effete race to the betterment of the Helix, Mahkan prejudice against the feeble simian species came to the fore.

And then Jeff Ellis had saved his life, and Kranda had looked past his people’s prejudices – the humans were, after all, merely the products of their own Earthly environment – and come to see in this example of the human race a being who, while physically weak and sharing none of the Mahkan’s strengths, lived by admirable codes of honour and a clear morality.

She had never told Ellis about the code of
Sophan
, the debt of honour incurred when he had saved Kranda’s life.