Parallax View (23 page)

He heard a dinning sound from directly overhead. He managed to bend his neck and look up, through the enfolding canopy. He made out a glimpse of flier, a flash of crimson against the strata’d cloudcover. Its engine whined as it decelerated. It banked. For a second, Abbott wondered if it had spotted them, and he thought that there might be hope yet.

The flier came down through the trees perhaps a hundred metres away, and settled.

The Kryte moved with greater speed than it had shown for hours. It darted up a rise, into the cover of a stand of shock-haired thorns, and crouched. Through the thorns, Abbott made out the flier. Its side irised, disgorging three heavily-armoured troops. Their smartware exo-skeletons took on the background colouration of the jungle, and for a brief second, as they stood still and reconnoitred the lie of the land, they were invisible. Then they moved, and the effect was disconcerting, as if a human-shaped section of the jungle had come suddenly to life. Abbott tracked the three shimmering outlines as they left the flier and ran up the incline, towards where the Kryte was crouching.

There was a human cry, its shout transistorised. “Ahead!”

The first laser vector took the top off the thorn bush, and the Kryte was turning and running faster than Abbott had thought it could manage. It dodged right and left, running with its chest impossibly low to the ground. Abbott, jouncing along on its back, heard another laser burst, a nearby explosion – then he assumed that the alien had been hit as he was flying through the air.

He landed on his back with a thud and lay there, staring into the underside of the jungle canopy. He looked around, bending his head this way and that, but there was no sign of the Kryte.

And then the pain returned. The presence in his head, the soothing sensation which had been so constant for the past day that he had forgotten it, seemed to withdraw gradually, and into the vacuum that its absence created poured the acid of unbearable pain.

Abbott screamed.

He wondered if the Kryte were dead, and begged it to return to him.

He sensed movement, but no accompanying cessation of pain.

He saw a flash of colour to his right and left, shimmering sheens of green. The movement stopped and he made out, distinct at close quarters, the shapes of three human combat soldiers.

He would have reached out, if he were able, but all he could do was cry aloud and beg them to help him.

Two soldiers bent low and inspected him, and he could see, behind their tinted face-visors, their horrified and disbelieving expressions.

And their reaction to his plight brought home to him, as nothing had done so far, his piteous state. What must he look like, a naked torso scabbed and eaten away by alien parasites, bruised and bleeding and crying at them to help him?

The third soldier knelt and examined his body, looked into his eyes. The soldier’s own eyes were wide, wild, the whites showing around her grey irises, the horror on her face quite evident despite the polarised visor she wore. She turned and said, “Human, Sergeant. From the shuttle?”

“Abbott,” he croaked. “The Kryte... the alien...” He wanted to explain, then, perhaps irrationally, how he had come to be in this situation, as if apologising for his state.

The closest soldier ran diagnostic smartware across Abbott’s torso and read the results from a screen inset into the wrist of his body-armour.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Lieutenant?”

The Lieutenant shook his head. “Barely alive, sir.”

It was the tone of voice that shocked Abbott more than the actual words, the finality. He was barely alive, he could not have much longer to live.

Just then there was a sound from the undergrowth – movement, a raspy sigh...

The soldiers moved as one, turning to face the source of the noise, weapons poised, Abbott forgotten.

“The fucker’s still alive, sir,” hissed one of them, the woman. “It’s still alive...”

The soldiers stood as if frozen into position. Seconds passed. And then – another sound, another movement.

One of the troops let loose a blast of laser-fire into the undergrowth.

“Hold your fire!” snapped the commander. “It’s playing with us. The fucking thing is toying with us...”

“It wants me...” croaked Abbott. “It has to have me in order to live...”

The commander turned on him, slowly. “You’re Abbott? You’re the fucker’s
anchor
!” He turned to his two soldiers, explained, “It was in the briefing. Without him the devil dies. That’s why it’s closing in on us – it has to have him alive...”

Something unspoken passed between the three.

“Sir?”

“Finish him,” said the commander. Kill Abbott and the Kryte would die too...

“Sir.”

Abbott was aware of a sudden lessening of his pain, and he wondered if it were because he knew that he would soon be dead, that soon his pain would cease for ever. He felt a familiar soothing sensation in his head, and he wept at the thought of his death.

The lieutenant raised his laser, swung it down so that its ugly muzzle was an inch from Abbott’s forehead. In that instant, Abbott saw the same staring eyes as those that had peered closely into his own, only moments before – mad, staring eyes – and he realised that these troopers were as mad as the monk they had encountered way back in the jungle. It was in the air – quite literally. Visors and body-suits couldn’t keep the planet out.

He stared back into the eyes of madness. And laughed.

The soldier’s eyes widened even further and he hesitated, and in that moment the commander of this little group cursed and raised his own weapon and it was then that Abbott screamed, his cry was drowned out by the canting of the female trooper, who intoned, “May the Lord have mercy on our souls, but we act in...”

Abbott heard a scream, and for a second thought that it was his own. Then he saw a blur of movement and one of the soldiers tumbled to the ground. A second soldier, the lieutenant, fell to his knees, head flung back, his face-visor shattered, his helmet a goblet brimming with blood.

The commander turned like a dervish, laser rifle swinging madly, and sprayed vectors through the jungle in a beautifully geometric pattern of lapis lazuli spokes.

Something tugged a lead from the back of his body-armour, and the wiring came away with a gobbet of flesh and a geyser of blood as some implant was torn from his torso. He fell, writhing.

The Kryte moved into Abbott’s view, snatched the dying soldier’s rifle, and finished off the commander and his troopers with quick bursts of laser through their visors. For a moment, it paused over the bodies, and Abbott wondered what it might do next, then with another blurred slashing movement it had severed the comms pack from one soldier’s headware.

The Kryte stopped, as still as a statue, staring at the item of equipment it had secured. Then, apparently satisfied, it tucked the comms set away on its body somewhere and turned to Abbott.

Abbott stared up at it, and he did not know whether to be thankful that his life had been spared, or resentful at the continuation of his torture.

They had been moving through the undulating jungle for an hour, the Kryte stopping occasionally to listen, or so Abbott thought. They came across more gun emplacements, fortified blocks defending Fort Campbell. The Kryte gave them a wide berth, and fell into the cover of vegetation when another flier screamed at low altitude overhead.

On either side of the sky, the Jehovah wormholes shed their coruscating light. The sun, overhead, seemed a pale thing by comparison. The heat was excruciating, and sweat – either his own or the alien’s – created a rank adhesive film between the skin of his chest and the Kryte’s scaled back.

Abbott dozed, then came awake abruptly. It felt as though only minutes had passed, but the sun had slid down the sky a full thirty degrees. The Kryte had stopped suddenly, poised and tense, and the angle of its head suggested that it was staring intently to the right.

Abbott turned his head and saw Fort Campbell.

The sight filled him with a strange mixture of pride and futile hope. Here was a construct manifestly human, and in its own harsh way weirdly beautiful. It stood on a rise, an agglomeration of bubbled habitat domes surrounded by defensive plasma shields and emplacements, shimmering rainbow colours in the light of the wormholes. Abbott made out the tiny shapes of fliers flitting back and forth from landing platforms, for all the world like bees arriving at and departing a hive. He even saw minuscule human figures within the domes, and something like nostalgia for these safe and whole comrades made his heart ache.

He managed, “What now?” It was an effort to manufacture the words, and they emerged as barely a croak.

“Now we move on,” replied the Kryte.

“How do you... how will you destroy the base?”

The alien was silent for a second, then said. “I informed you that destruction is not my intent. Kryte do not lie.”

“Then...” Abbott began. A sudden strange idea sprang into his mind, so absurd it made him laugh aloud. “Then what? Will you... will you present yourself at the Fort, give yourself over to the enemy, and display me as... what? Some kind of symbol of your intent? Is that it? Is all this nothing more than a gesture, a gesture of defiance?” Abbott laughed. “They won’t take kindly to that! You killed three of their colleagues back there–”

“They had to die,” the Kryte returned. “They were about to kill you.”

Abbott laughed maniacally. “And you couldn’t have that, could you? If I die, then so do you!”

The Kryte paused, then turned its head disconcertingly, almost one-eighty degrees, and stared at him. “That is correct, but believe me when I say that you are more important to this mission than I am. Your survival is what matters. I tell the truth. Kryte do not lie.”

“My survival?” Abbott laughed crazily. “My survival, for chrissake! But I’m just about fucking dead, you bastard!”

The alien did not reply, but returned its head to face forward and began jogging.

To Abbott’s surprise and consternation, they did not head towards Fort Campbell. Instead, the Kryte moved away from the fortress and increased its speed.

But earlier, the Kryte had said that it was taking him to the ‘base’. “You said–” he began.

The alien interrupted, “Yes, the base.”

Abbott cried out, “Where the hell are you taking me!”

Still running, and staring ahead, the Kryte said, “Towards enlightenment, Abbott,” and said no more.

“You apologised...” His throat... so dry! He could barely speak, and each breath hurt, but still... “You said that you were sorry.” He was doing what the Kryte did: resuming a conversation after a long interval. Long before – how many days? – the Kryte had said that its kind were sorry for the slaughter at New Hampton, for the deaths, the lost souls. For Rob, for Stella. Sorry.

The Kryte gave a brief nod, acknowledging Abbott’s question, but not yet answering. Abbott knew now that the Kryte would only speak when it had the right words, and thought nothing of long pauses.

They passed through a jungle of heavily-needled branches, draped with a cobweb-like blanket of silk. Bugs and scabbed moulds glowed in the gloom of the interior, twinkling, giving the whole scene a perversely yuletide look. Ghost-like creatures floated through the diaphanous drifts of gossamer, suspended by membranous sacs of gas, looking like monstrous, floating jellyfish.

Abbott closed his eyes. He had given up trying to work out how much of what he saw was real and how much illusion, mirages cast in his head by the psychotropic spores and microbes that laced this planet’s air.

“Life is ch’tek...” said the Kryte, stirring Abbott from his somnolence with an answer to his earlier question. “A thing to be valued, to cherish.”

“You live forever,” said Abbott. “Your kind.”

“Only if we are allowed to... Otherwise – we
join
.”

“Join what?”

“We join
with
, not
what
.”

“Heaven!” said Abbott, abruptly triumphant that he could reduce the alien’s beliefs to the same labels he used, labels that covered ... doubt, uncertainty.

“No,” the Kryte said simply. It offered no further explanation, almost as if none were needed.

After several minutes of silence, Abbott realised that the conversation was over, without even answering his question. “You apologised,” he prompted again.

“You do not
join
,” it said. And again, a simple statement was followed by silence, no further explanation needed. The aliens were sorry because they had not realised that humankind could not join them in their heaven: to them, the five thousand killed on New Hampton were no more, whereas a Kryte who died would go on to “join” the others of their kind. For a moment, Abbott marvelled that they should have a concept of Heaven – no-one had documented this before – and that it should be so close to human ideas of the afterlife. And then he wondered if they really were an ungodly race after all, which made him both surge with hope and despair that humans and Kryte were engaged in such relentless conflict.

And then his mind was taken off such thoughts altogether as they came to a dark cleft slashed into the face of an escarpment. A cave, a passageway even. It was about ten metres high and forty across and a constant stream of fist-sized creatures flew in and out with a loud buzzing that dopplered high and low as they swerved and stooped in the sultry air.

Abbott peered up at the sky, visible here through the thinned tree cover of the escarpment. This cavern would be all but invisible from above, sheltered as it was by vegetation and the overhanging lip of limestone.

The Jehovah wormholes coruscated above them, watchful, baleful presences, and Abbott felt that he was being judged and found wanting. He felt sweat on his brow, his face, and he felt an ache deep in his chest, a longing, a despair ... the ache of grief, the ache of existence.

He looked away, turning his face from judgement, ashamed at the hollowness of his own heart, ashamed of his human failings.

He looked at the dark mouth of the cavern and his eyes were still affected by the wormholes’ shimmering aurorae and he saw flickering, insubstantial shapes and patterns etched into the black.