Weird Space 2: Satan's Reach (28 page)

“I’m worried by what
Judi
reported, about all the uninhabited towns.”

“I know. It doesn’t make sense. I thought at first that we’d have heard about a mass exodus from a planet on the Reach... But then Kallasta is a backwater. It was never really colonised in the true sense of the word – on a mass, industrial scale with hundreds of thousands of immigrants settling the planet. You said your parents were part of a cult of pacifists.”

She glared at him. “I never used the word ‘cult’.”

“Forgive me. A ‘group’ of pacifists, then. I take it that the other settlers were of like mind?”

She nodded. “I’m pretty sure, yes. They selected Kallasta because it was so far away from any other inhabited planet, and wasn’t ripe for colonisation. It has no deposits of heavy metal, or anything else that the big mining companies would want to get their hands on.” She shrugged. “It’s just an agricultural world.”

“That’s probably why we didn’t hear about the exodus – because, on the scale of these things, it wasn’t that big an operation, a few thousand souls. But... I wonder why they left?”

She shook her head. “Growing up here, I recall a paradise world. Sunshine, abundant fresh food, no predatory animals or native aliens.”

They fell silent and walked on.

To their left, through the gaps in the canopy, Harper made out a distant range of snow-capped mountains. He scanned the sky for any sign of the Ajantan ship, then listened out for the sound of its engines. All was peaceful, and the only sound was the throb and screech of the local fauna.

The land inclined gradually, and after thirty minutes of climbing they came to a ridge. Zeela stepped forward and peered through the vegetation. Harper came to her side and looked down. They were standing on a rising shoulder of land that looked out over a plain, with a shimmering blue lake in the distance. Beside the lake was a small settlement, a collection of huts and pre-fabs set out on the margin of the rainforest.

Zeela smiled at him. “The town,” she said.

He stared into the skies above the lake. There was no sign of the Ajantan ship. With luck,
Judi
had led it around the other side of the planet.

He turned his attention to the town. “I can’t see any movement.”

“Well,
Judi
did say it was inhabited.”

The streets between the buildings were quiet, deserted. There was no sign of traffic, nor of pedestrians. He would have imagined some indication of life in even so small a community; it was midday – the sun was directly overhead – but even so the heat was not oppressive.

She looked at him. “What should we do?”

“Let’s give it a while. Sit tight and make sure the Ajantan ship doesn’t show itself. After a few hours... maybe then we should make our way down there, with caution.”

She looked beyond him and smiled with sudden delight. She plucked a long red fruit from a bush and passed it to him. She took a fruit for herself and showed him how to eat it.

“I remember these from when I was little! They’re called dhubars.” She squatted on the edge of the ridge, facing the distant town, and raised the fruit to her mouth. “Bite into it only so far. The long seed in the middle is really bitter, but the flesh is delicious.”

She dug her teeth into the red flesh and juice dribbled over her chin.

He sat next to her and took a bite of the dhubar. It was sweet, with a vanilla foretaste and an aftertaste of berries. Its juice was cold and refreshing. “Well, we certainly won’t starve while we’re here.”

She picked two more dhubars, and a round green fruit like an apple growing nearby. He was about to bite into the apple-like fruit when Zeela looked up and said, “What’s that?”

She was staring out across the lake to the distant mountains, and Harper followed her gaze. He made out two tiny airborne shapes moving through a gap in the mountain range on the horizon, mere specks at this distance but growing ever larger as they watched. At first he thought it was
Judi
, followed by the Ajantan vessel.

They moved at speed, eating up the distance between the mountains and the lakeside settlement, and it soon became obvious that they were neither the Ajantan ship nor his own.

“What
are
they?” Zeela asked.

The craft came in over the lake and approached the settlement. They were huge and bloated, and resembled less space-going vessels than something biological – grey-green whales made air-worthy and powered by some mysterious means. Harper made out no features on the tegument, either organic, in the form of fins and flukes, or manufactured like hatches or viewscreens.

“They look... horrible,” Zeela whispered to herself.

They came to the settlement and slowed, hung in the air like great ungainly dirigibles, then settled to the ground. Only when they landed side by side next to a long-house did their true dimensions become apparent; they were perhaps two hundred metres long, and as they sank to the ground and their great weight settled, they bulged sideways as if constructed from some adipose matter.

Constructed? Grown more like,
Harper thought.

He turned to Zeela. “What are they? Do you recall anything...?”

She cut him short. “No. There was nothing like this here when I was a child.”

Something moved at the front end of the flying things. As they watched, a single thick, tube-like pseudopod obtruded from each craft, for all the world like the antennae of a slug.

Zeela exclaimed as something was ejected from the tube, and then another and another.

Dozens of big, featureless humanoid creatures slipped feet-first from the ovipositor, landed with nimble agility and moved off a little way to allow for the ejection of the next.

Zeela gripped his arm. “What are they, Den?”

He shook his head. He found his voice at last. “I’ve no idea. Aliens, obviously. I’ve never seen anything like them.”

The creatures were perhaps three metres tall, and reminded Harper of anatomical diagrams of the human subcutaneous layer, empurpled and varicose. They moved with a fluid, boneless ease, their domed heads featureless apart from big, staring black eyes.

He counted more than a dozen of the creatures before the ovipositors were retracted.

The creatures moved away from the vessels and loped across the clearing towards the long-house.

They stood side by side, very still, and did nothing but stare at the building.

Zeela’s grip tightened on his arm.

A wide door, like a barn door, opened in the end of the long-house and slowly, one by one, small, dark-skinned humans emerged. They stood in a frightened knot in the entrance, moving reluctantly forward only when others pressed at their backs. Harper counted almost a hundred colonists – Zeela’s fellow Kallastanians – as they left the long-house and stood in a cowering group before the giant, embryonic creatures.

Nothing happened for what seemed like an age. Harper could sense the tension even at this distance. At last one of the aliens stepped forward and advanced on the humans. It stood before them, staring, and the colonists seemed to shrink back under its gaze.

The creature stretched out an arm, pointed, and another two empurpled giants stepped forwards and approached the human selected by their mate.

The young woman fell to her knees, and her fellow colonists suddenly backed away from her as if she were infected. The alien pair stood over the woman, each taking an arm, and pulled her to her feet. She struggled, wriggling like a child in their grip, as she was carried away from the long-house, through the cordon of aliens, towards the closest whale-like vessel.

Harper watched, incredulous, as a vertical slit opened in the flesh of the vessel and the creatures forced the young woman, still struggling, into the fleshy crevice; seconds later the lips sealed behind her.

A further five humans were selected, carried protesting from their fellows, and forced into the bodies of the bloated vessels, two more into the first and three into the second.

When the last human was ingested, the empurpled humanoids moved away from the long-house and approached the vessels. The ovipositor emerged and, one by one, the creatures were sucked up in quick succession.

Minutes later the biological craft eased themselves into the air – slowly, as if burdened by their extra human cargo – turned lazily and moved off across the lake, gaining altitude as they did so and heading towards the distant mountain range.

Harper murmured, “Perhaps, Zeela, we’ve witnessed the reason why the towns of Kallasta are deserted?”

“What are they doing to my people?” she said in a tiny voice.

Harper watched the vessels recede into the distance, and within minutes they were mere dots on the horizon. Was this what Zeela’s parents had fled, all those years ago, and why life on Ajanta in thrall to the reptilian aliens had seemed preferable to
this
?

Seconds later he heard what he thought was a footfall in the rainforest at their backs.

Startled, he turned and caught the fleeting glimpse of a figure before it reached out and pressed something wet and foul-smelling to his mouth and nose. Beside him, Zeela gave an abbreviated scream.

His vision blurred, and he felt as if he were sinking under the influence of some powerful anaesthetic.

His first, fleeting thought when he’d heard the sound behind him was that the Ajantans had somehow tracked them down. But their assailants were human – or at least the quick figure who accosted him had been.

So how the hell had Janaker and the Vetch managed to locate him, yet again?

H
E GROANED AND
opened his eyes. He expected to find himself in the hold of the bounty hunters’ ship. But, when he blinked in the sunlight and his eyes accustomed themselves to the glare, he found that he was lying on his back on the sandy floor of a crude timber hut, a shaft of sunlight slanting through a gap in the timbers and blinding him. He rolled to one side to escape the beam and fetched up against Zeela.

He sat up with difficulty and found that his hands and feet were bound.

Zeela moaned and rolled over. She blinked up at him. “Den? What happened? The Ajantans?” she asked in panic.

“Not the Ajantans. Not the bounty hunters, either.”

She struggled into a sitting position, her hands tied behind her back. “Who, then?”

“Your fellow Kallastanians,” he said. “Some homecoming greeting, Zeela.”

She looked at him. “Well, it’s better than being captured by the Ajantans or the bounty hunters, isn’t it? Or...” she went on, “those
things
we saw...”

He agreed. “But they could have gone about saying hello with a little less force. Whatever they used to sedate us has given me one hell of a sore head.”

He heard the sounds of footsteps outside the hut, and then a voice.

Zeela tipped her head, listening. She whispered, “They’re saying that we’re awake.”

Seconds later the flimsy wooden door was dragged open, admitting a dazzling block of sunlight. A small figure appeared on the threshold, silhouetted against the light.

The woman spoke again to someone behind her, and a man and a woman slipped into the hut, hauled Harper and Zeela to their feet and bundled them outside. Their legs were bound with a length of rope which allowed them to take short steps as they were led along a deserted street to the long-house.

They passed inside, to find themselves faced by a massed audience of Kallastanians seated cross-legged in rows: the people who, earlier, had seen their fellows abducted by the aliens.

Hands pressed down on Harper’s shoulders, and he sat down on the floor. He glanced at Zeela beside him. She looked frightened as she gazed about her with wide eyes.

The woman who had first appeared in the doorway now seated herself before Harper and Zeela, flanked by the man and woman. The woman was old, her black face weathered and wrinkled. The couple were younger, the woman bearing a striking resemblance to Zeela: thin face, high cheek bones and full lips.

The old woman spoke, and Zeela replied in Anglais, “My friend does not understand our language. Please speak in Anglais.”

The woman bowed her head, then looked from Zeela to Harper. “I said, please accept our apologies. We do not usually apprehend strangers with violence.”

The young man leaned forward and snapped, “We should not apologise to... to these... whatever they are. We don’t know that they’re not vakan.”

“Vakan?” Zeela said. “What are the vakan?”

The aliens?
Harper wondered.

The young man laughed bitterly. “She feigns ignorance!”

The old woman glared at him, and turned to Harper and Zeela. In a soft voice she said, “Who are you, and where do you come from?”

“I am Zeela Antarivo. Around thirteen years ago, by standard reckoning, my mother and father left Kallasta with me. I have dreamed ever since of returning. My friend is Den Harper, a star trader, and it is thanks to him that I am here.”

Behind the trio a murmur passed through the gathered villagers. Someone spoke up from the back of the longhouse.

Zeela whispered to Harper, “They say they recall my father, Val Antarivo, a farmer.” To the old woman she said, “They are correct, my father farmed land in a small village. My mother’s name was Zara, and she was a wood-worker.”

The young man said, “Why should we believe her?” The was venom in his words, and mistrust in his dark eyes. “The vakan have all this information. These two are spies, sent to work out who they will take next!”

The old woman turned to the man and, with what sounded like infinite patience, said, “But why would they do that? The vakan are all powerful. They do not
need
to send spies amongst us. They come and take who they wish without resorting to emissaries.”

It occurred to Harper that if only his hands were untied, and he could don his ferronnière, he might learn what was happening here.

“And anyway,” the young woman spoke up for the first time, “the vakan came amongst us just a day ago and took our people.”

Harper glanced at Zeela and raised his eyebrows. So they had been unconscious for a day.