Parallax View (19 page)

“Go on.”

“Maybe the Kryte are reeling in this sector. They’ve suffered severe losses over the past couple of years. We control three of the four main wormhole-pairs in the sector... So we reckoned the force they threw at St Jerome was all they could muster at the time.”

Abbott nodded and sat back in his seat. “Well, it’d certainly be nice to think so.”

Travers resumed her inspection of St Jerome. Abbott looked ahead, through the viewscreen, at the fulminating membrane of the wormhole. Even at a distance of six parsecs, it was ten times as bright as the primary, a roughly oval portal like a gemstone ignited by internal molten fires.

The transition will soon be over, he told himself. And then Earth, and a period of research leave in which to concentrate on the captured alien.

Travers turned to him. “You re-married after...?”

Abbott shook his head. “Too busy with my studies.” He’d had a couple of brief affairs since Stella’s death, superficial liaisons that had failed to match the joy of his marriage, much to his despair and guilt.

“What about you?” he asked, to deflect Travers’ interest.

She smiled. “Husband and a daughter waiting on Kallithea. Haven’t seen ’em for a year. I have another month before the next leave, and then six months off. So I’ll see ’em soon, God willing.”

Abbott shook his head. “Yours is not an occupation I could easily contemplate, Major.”

She laughed. “Someone has to do it, Abbott.” She looked at him. “But I’m not being virtuous. The pay is good, and after ten years at the front, I get a cushy desk job back on Kallithea. I could do worse.”

“How many more years do you have to serve?”

Travers laughed. “Just six months, once I return from the next leave.”

That made him think of Kallithea, and her life there, and the teeming colonies of the human expansion. And that, inevitably, led him to contemplate New Hampton, and the life he might have been leading now but for the Kryte attack a decade ago.

He heard a sound behind him, and Travers said, “Wha-?” and he turned and, through the viewscreen in the bulkhead door, saw movement.

Travers raised a hand – she was armed. Why was she pointing a gun?

The bulkhead door... the viewscreen... the Kryte had somehow freed itself from the stasis brace, and was – impossibly – opening the hatch from the inside. He saw these things, understood that they were happening, even though they were impossible – the creature could not have broken out of stasis, it could not know the key to the combination lock on the door – but his brain would not react. He saw the combination lock turn, and the hatch crack, and he wanted to cry out in terror. He opened his mouth in warning, but too late.

The Kryte moved, lightning fast, even as Travers raised her gun and Abbott sat there unable to make a sound.

Beside him, Travers was reduced to a dozen slabs of flesh, blood expelled in as many spurting fountains.

Abbott screamed, finally, then closed his eyes and prayed.

He expected to be next.

The seconds stretched, and he remained alive.

He opened his eyes, heart pumping in terror.

He was alive, but the three other humans in the shuttle had suffered Travers’ fate. They were flensed carcasses now, hanging in their slings. Their blood was a dark slick on the floor, coagulating in the heat of the command cabin.

Abbott wept, frozen in place. He gripped the arms of his seat and watched the Kryte, waiting for it to attack.

Only then did it come to him that the last thing the Kryte would do would be to kill him: if he died, then the alien died too. Anchor-slave dependency. So he would be spared death, but to suffer what fate?

The Kryte was removing the pieces of the pilot from her sling and slipping into her place. It turned, fast as an eye-blink, and said to him, “Do not move!”

The sound terrified him, the voice high and feminine, all the more horrific for sounding almost human.

The Kryte reached out, its spidery fingers sweeping over the touchpad.

Abbott said, his voice faltering, “We control the wormholes. You won’t get through. You’ll require a voice-recognition pass to–”

The Kryte turned to him. “Silence!”

He wondered at its motives. It was effectively stranded in this sector of space, between the wormholes. St Jerome was under human control, and the shuttle was not equipped with a light-drive to take it through normal space.

As he watched, the alien reached out and sliced at a section of smartware banks. The ship bucked and the Kryte took manual control, gripping control bars and wresting the ship from its course.

The creature’s action demonstrated how it had succeeded in slaughtering five humans in as many seconds. Its fingers were taloned with six lethal scimitars.

But how had it escaped from the brace, and worked out the combination to the shuttle’s hatch? Abbott would have thought it impossible, had he not witnessed it.

The shuttle banked, and through the delta viewscreen he saw the wormhole slide away and slowly vanish. Seconds later it was replaced by the disc of St Jerome.

Abbott experienced a quick surge of hope. The planet was under Earth control. The shuttle’s approach would be detected, its aberrant course noted by observers and investigated.

The shuttle was unarmed, so the creature’s motives could not be to attack the Fort Campbell.

The planet swelled, sea and land soon becoming distinct configurations beneath the swirling cloudcover. The Kryte lay in the sling, adjusting the control minimally.

A terrible thought occurred to Abbott. The shuttle might not be armed, but it could be used as a weapon in itself. Was this what the hijacking was all about, some desperate attempt by the alien enemy to disable the defensive capabilities on St Jerome, prior to an all out attack?

It would fit with what they understood of Kryte thinking perfectly: on the one hand life was sacrosanct, as you would expect from a race of near-immortals – so much to lose! But on the other... the Kryte were savage to the point of recklessness in combat, and would readily sacrifice themselves for their cause.

Would this be how his life ended, he wondered, some dupe in an alien suicide mission? He prayed God to save him... Ten years ago, the deaths of Stella and Rob had shaken his complacency, severely tested his faith in a benevolent Christian God. He had, through counselling and the support of friends, come through the fire with his faith and his belief in the destiny of humanity strengthened. He had seen the work of the Kryte, and knew now what evil was.

Though, he kept telling himself, evil might be redeemed.

Through the viewscreen he watched as the shuttle approached St Jerome. Soon, only the silver-blue face of the planet filled the screen. The alien trimmed the control, adjusting the shuttle’s inclination for insertion into the planet’s troposphere.

They hit turbulence and rode it, the vibration numbing Abbott’s body. Seconds later they were through it, and floating miles above the surface of the planet; continents with rucked mountain ranges passed dreamily below, then an ocean bisected by the planet’s terminator.

They passed into what normally might have been the planet’s night-side, but for the fact that thanks to the binary wormholes St Jerome was bathed in eternal daylight.

From the little he had read about St Jerome, Abbott knew that Fort Campbell was on the planet’s largest landmass. Ahead, he could see that vast spraddling continent slide into view over the curved horizon.

He closed his eyes. So this was it. The Kryte was on a suicide mission. He wondered if this had been the plan all along, its easy capture in the war zone the overture to this kamikaze attack.

They dropped through the cloud layer, and the creature’s movements became frantic as the shuttle swayed, tipping first left then right. Abbott rocked in his seat, gripping the arm-rests. Through the side-screen, the planet’s surface had undergone a transformation, from the silver patina of high-altitude observation to its actual coloration, the dazzling verdure of total jungle cover.

Seconds later the shuttle ripped through the canopy. Abbott closed his eyes, expecting the fatal impact at any second.

The ship turned on its side and Abbott screamed. He opened his eyes. He saw a blur of green through the screen, flashing foliage and strobing boles. The final impact came with a surprising lack of pyrotechnics. The shuttle hit something and slewed, fetched up against something else and came to a jarring halt.

Abbott hung in his seat, shaken. The floor of the shuttle was canted at a forty-five degree angle.

The Kryte turned and looked at him with huge, almost human eyes.

Abbott smiled, then laughed. “You didn’t do it, you bastard!”

The alien blinked, as if in incomprehension.

“The base, you didn’t–” Abbott began.

The Kryte said, “Human base, two hundred kilometres west of present location.”

“And you planned to attack it.”

The alien blinked again. “No. You are in error.” If he closed his eyes, Abbott could make believe that it was a woman speaking to him.

“You’re lying.”

“Lying?” The Kryte regarded him, then said, “A human concept. Kryte do not lie.”

“Then why did you...?” And Abbott gestured to the dead crew, the canted shuttle.

The alien took in the remains of the humans, which had slid across the deck and wallowed now in a perfectly level pool of blood, like atolls emerging from some macabre lagoon.

“Why?” Abbott pressed.

The Kryte blinked, and chose not to reply.

Abbott looked through the tipped viewscreen at the riotous jungle outside. “What now? We’re trapped in here with no power – we’ll suffocate. And we can’t go outside.”

“We can go outside,” the alien interrupted. “We are biologically vulnerable, however. We have ... approximately 120 of your hours, if luck applies. Kryte will last longer than human.” But only minutes more, thanks to the anchor-slave treatment...

Abbott nodded. “Okay. Five days. So...”

“We leave the shuttle.”

Abbott managed a smile. “And go where, exactly? The base?”

“Affirmative. The base.”

He opened his mouth to speak. So the Kryte was still intent on attacking the Fort Campbell? Had it somehow equipped itself with some form of bomb, a back-up should its primary plan of crashing the shuttle fail?

“We’ll need food, water–”

The Kryte reached out, opened a locker, and threw a canister at Abbott. He caught it before it smacked him in the mouth.

The Kryte touched a control and the shuttle hatch cracked below them.

Abbott watched with hypnotised fascination as the blood drained through the hatch, followed by three or four sectioned torsos. Smaller pieces, arms and legs, fetched up in the angle of floor and cabin wall. He saw Travers’ head gazing up at him with open eyes, and looked away. As the major had lost her grip on life so the n-gel had lost its form, so that now the left side of her face slumped like molten wax.

Rank humidity, freighted with a sour, metallic note, filled the shuttle. He told himself that he could already feel the alien spores at work in his lungs, fibres probing deep into his body.

He watched the Kryte unbuckle itself from the command sling, and knew exactly what he was going to do. It would have been nice to have had the opportunity to study the alien back on Earth, but that wasn’t an option now.

If he failed to act, then the human outpost here was under threat.

He would go along with the Kryte’s plan, initially. Then, when they were out of the shuttle and in the jungle, he would simply make a break for the nearest cover...

When he reached a distance of somewhere between five and ten metres from the alien, the n-ware that had infiltrated the creature’s body would activate, deliquescing its flesh in seconds.

All that would remain for Abbott to do then would be to return to the shuttle, seal the hatch and contact Fort Campbell.

The alien moved. It stood, its long legs braced against the sloping deck, and stared at him.

Then, before Abbott could act, or take in what the creature was doing, it crossed the deck lightning fast and sliced off his left leg above the knee.

Abbott woke, although he did not realise it at first.

He woke to a strangely smooth swaying motion, to air on his face, his skin hot and feverish.

He woke to heat, humidity, a slight giddy light-headedness. He was aware of a dead ache somewhere below the waist, and pain in his shoulders and neck.

Abbott woke, and threw his head back and screamed as recollection struck him.

Torsos sliced into random slabs, blood fountaining out into the command space of the shuttle, the sheer alien-ness of the escaped Kryte with its scimitar-like talons... its eye-blink fast advance on him, a flash of movement and the dull, nauseous ache ... looking down, the stump of his thigh, the pulsing waves of blood, his leg falling away as if in slow motion... the dark blanket descending.

Abbott woke and screamed and tipped back and suddenly he was falling.

He hit the ground, his fall broken by a crackling blanket of crisp vegetation. An instant later, leathery smooth alien flesh landed on him as the Kryte fell too, tipped off balance by his convulsion.

They were outside.

They had been travelling through the jungle, Abbott mounted on the alien’s back.

The Kryte flipped sideways onto its feet in a low, athletic crouch, its wide, fathomless eyes fixed on Abbott, as far as he could be sure.

A pulsing dark ache rolled through his body, the impact of landing jarring his... He looked down. The stump of his leg had been sealed with n-gel. Darkness fell on him again, as the Kryte hoisted him onto its back and set off through the jungle.

Abbott woke, and he remembered.

He kept his eyes closed and prayed to the Lord for mercy. He wondered if he would find his reward in Heaven sooner than he had ever anticipated. He wondered if Stella and Rob would be there, waiting patiently, if they were even watching over him right now. Years ago he would not have wondered – he would have
known
. When had he become like this? Had these aliens – these Devils, as poor Travers had called them – really shattered his faith as well as his family?