Helix Wars (14 page)

She moved back to the wreckage and examined the halved cockpit. She made out a generous spray of dried blood, but no bodies. According to information cached in the smartcore of her varnika, Ellis had been ferrying two peacekeeping diplomats to D’rayni, a man and a woman. If they had perished in the crash, then the Sporelli might have taken their bodies for reasons known only to themselves. If they had survived, then like Ellis, there was no evidence to suggest where they might be now.

According to her varnika, the cloud-trees were harvested from time to time, and animals taken from their ambulatory pods. A team of yahn-gatherers had been in the vicinity not long after the crash, according to the satellite images. So perhaps...

She walked towards the closest cloud-tree, stood beneath its spreading white foliage and looked up. Twirling in the slight breeze was a pod, and she was surprised at its size. She had expected something much smaller.

She began to wonder.

Ellis had been injured, and on his back, and at one point had been propelling himself away from something...

Could he have been taken by one of the cloud-tree pods? According to her varnika, they were carnivorous.

But surely he could have fought it off, kicked out in self-defence... always assuming, of course, that he was not too badly injured.

She moved from tree to tree in the area, staring up at the hanging pods. They all appeared to be empty, and she made out tendrils from which the pods had evidently been cut, which stood to reason. The yahn-gatherers had been here just three days ago, harvesting the captive meat.

Was it conceivable, she thought, that Ellis had been captured by a cloud-tree pod, then harvested by a yahn-gathering team?

It was a possibility worth investigating.

The priority now was to find the local yahn-gatherers.

She would gain high ground – the bluff a few hundred metres to the north of the glade – and assess the lie of the land. From there she might make out tracks, habitation.

She was heading for the outcropping of balding rocks when she heard the unmistakable sound of a flier’s engines. She ducked behind the bole of a cloud-tree, even though the precaution, protected as she was by the varnika’s shield, was unnecessary.

A Sporelli flier landed in the glade fifty metres away. She watched as a hatch in its side folded open and a dozen black-uniformed Sporelli soldiers filed out.

2

S
HE CROUCHED BEHIND
the tree and watched the troops deploy themselves around the cloud-tree grove, a sick feeling in her stomach as she anticipated their stumbling across her ship. Six of their number stood guard while the remaining six picked over the wreckage, poking through the shattered metal debris with the snouts of their carbines. Her ship was situated behind their flier, and fortunately the Sporelli showed no inclination to move in that direction.

A tall, attenuated, grey-haired Sporelli officer strode down the ramp from the ship. He approached the shuttle, kicking aside fragments of debris with a look of distaste on his lean, pale blue face. He looked up from a scorched fragment of bucket seat and snapped something to the nearest soldier.

Kranda instructed her varnika to increase its amplification and initiate a translation.

The soldier approached the officer and saluted. He spoke in the guttural, grating Sporelli tongue. The translation sounded in Kranda’s ear-piece. “As I reported yesterday, Commander. Nothing.”

The commander replied, “You do realise that we are not looking for whole corpses, Sergeant? The remains might very well be shredded. Humans, after all, are physically feeble.”

“Yes, sir. But there are no remains of any kind. Plenty of dried blood, but no body parts.”

The commander looked up, staring into the distance, and more to himself said, “In that case, what happened to the pilot and crew?”

“I’ll continue searching, sir.”

“Very well – and make it thorough.”

The commander strode back and forth, occasionally kicking at scraps of wreckage. He glanced at his wrist-chronometer, then looked up at the sound of an approaching vehicle and moved from the grove to a narrow track.

An open-topped ground-effect vehicle drove up and braked in front of the commander, a hundred metres from Kranda. She instructed her varnika to magnify the image, and the scene jumped, became clearer. An overfed soldier climbed from the car, crossed to the officer, and saluted.

They exchanged words, and when the varnika failed to translate, Kranda thought:
What’s the problem.

“
Proximity issues
,” the voice sounded in her ear-piece.

“You can’t increase the gain?”

Negative
.

“So in other words, I’ll have to get closer?”

Affirmative
.

She glanced around the grove. The closest Sporelli soldier was ten metres away, searching through the wreckage. Even though she knew that she was perfectly safe, concealed in the varnika’s visual baffle, she still felt terribly vulnerable when she stepped from behind the tree and crossed the crimson grass towards the Sporelli officers. She expected to hear a shout at any second, followed by gunfire.

She moved carefully, aware that her steps were tamping down small areas of red grass. Only the most astute observer would notice the disturbance, but even so she approached the Sporelli soldiers on their blindside. When she was three metres away, she crouched behind a bush of golden-fruit and listened.

“...no chance of surviving the crash, but then why no bodies?” the portly soldier was saying.

The commander looked back at the grove, his gaze lingering on the cloud-trees. Kranda wondered if he had made the same connection as she had.

He said, “I read somewhere, before we invaded this fairyland, that the natives harvested the pods of these trees. I want you to locate the nearest village and question the harvesters, using all means necessary to extract the required information. If one or more of the humans survived, then I want him found.”

“I have the guran ready, sir.”

“Very good.”

“The only problem being, if we do find a survivor and use the guran, then the human might not survive.”

The commander turned an imperious gaze on his subordinate officer. “And why is that a problem, Sergeant?”

“Well, if the Peacekeepers find out what we did to one of their...”

“As if that matters!” the commander retorted.

The portly sergeant snapped off a salute. “Very good, sir.”

“Very well. Take three of my men and question the locals.”

The soldier saluted again. He moved to the grove and spoke to the Sporelli troops, then returned to the vehicle with three of them and accelerated down the track.

Minutes later the commander called out, ordering his men to return to the flier, and followed them up the ramp. Kranda watched it take off with a thunderous roar, gain height and swing away over the cloud-trees.

There was only one course of action to take now: follow the soldiers in the car. If they did learn from the locals what had happened to Jeff Ellis, then she wanted to be there.

She rose and ran after the vehicle, amazed at the speed with which the varnika was carrying her. Within seconds she had caught up with the speeding car and was compelled to slow down in its dusty wake so as not to overtake.

As she followed the car along the winding track, she considered the guran the sergeant had mentioned; evidently some device of torture which they intended using on any survivor of the shuttle crash.

Half a kilometre away, nestled into the side a rolling hill, a cluster of conical huts appeared. Tethered in a central clearing were three of the big beasts of burden Kranda had seen on the satellite images.

The Sporelli car braked on the track before the thatched huts. The fat sergeant climbed out and, drawing a pistol, climbed the incline followed by the other Sporelli troops.

Kranda recalled the commander’s instructions. “
Question the harvesters, using all means necessary to extract the required information
.”

At the sound of the engine, Phandrans had begun to drift from their huts. They huddled together in twos and threes, reminding her forcefully of frightened children: they were tiny. Even the tallest amongst them would barely reach her upper thigh. The Sporelli’s brutal invasion of these people was even more barbaric in light of their size, though she told herself that this was hardly relevant. Any coercion against another race was a violation of the Builders’ ethos of non-violence.

So the Builders created a force tasked with keeping the peace – which was all very well if they
succeeded
in keeping the peace; but what about when war broke out? The Builders’ ethos had to be contravened, in certain circumstances. For example, how did one deal with a race of merciless invaders like the Sporelli?

The overweight soldier approached the gaggle of Phandrans and spoke, haltingly, in their language.

Kranda’s varnika translated, “A human ship crash-landed in a yahn-tree plantation east of here. We have reason to believe that there were survivors. Do you know anything about the humans who were aboard the crashed ship?”

Phandran children stared with big eyes at the Sporelli, clinging to their parents’ rudimentary smocks. If the adult Phandrans appeared small, then their children were minuscule. The smallest infant, a babe in arms, would have nestled in Kranda’s palm with room to spare.

A male Phandran stepped forward, evidently an elder, judging by the nexus of wrinkles around his thin-lipped mouth. He looked up and spoke hesitantly to the towering Sporelli soldier.

“There were no survivors of the terrible accident,” he said. “We found two bodies, and we interred them with all due ceremony.”

They found two bodies, Kranda thought. So Jeff Ellis, who had been alive at the time the aerial image was taken, had managed to flee the area.

The soldier stared at the oldster with ill-disguised contempt. “Show me the graves.”

With an open-handed gesture the Phandran indicated the hillside. He led the way, followed by the soldier and his troops. The rest of the Phandrans brought up the rear. Kranda followed at a safe distance.

They crested the rise and came to a small glade on the far side of the rise. Kranda made out two dozen small mounds in the short red grass, each one marked by a bush of red berries. She noted that the two nearest graves were considerably longer than the others.

The elderly Phandran gestured. “They are there.”

The soldier moved down the hillside and paused at the first grave. He turned and looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun. “Dig them up.”

A fluting murmur passed through the gathered Phandrans. Their spokesman said, “This would be disrespectful, and against our ways.”

“I said, dig them up!”

The Phandran turned and murmured to his people, and a young man ran off. He returned a minute later with a wooden spade.

The oldster took it and approached the first grave. With reluctance manifest in his every movement, he leaned forward and dug the spade into the soft loam. A few strokes were all it took to dislodge the earth and reveal the red fabric of a Peacekeeper’s uniform.

“Give it to me!” the soldier snarled, grabbing the spade and attacking the grave.

He shortly had the corpse uncovered from head to foot. Kranda caught sight of a shattered ribcage.

The soldier moved on to the second grave and began digging, soon uncovering another human corpse.

The Phandrans looked on with ill-concealed horror at the Sporelli defilement.

“Two Peacekeepers,” the soldier said. “So... where is the pilot?”

The old Phandran looked mystified. “The pilot?”

“The human who piloted the shuttle. He would be wearing a blue uniform. Where is the third human?”

The oldster turned his palm. “But there was no third human. Just these two, and they were dead. We interred them, as is our way.”

“You’re lying! There was a pilot. Where is he?”

The oldster remained gazing evenly at his interrogator. “But I assure you, there was no third human. No... pilot, as you say.”

The Sporelli soldier snarled something untranslatable. He turned and snapped an order to one of his men, who hurried down the hillside and approached the car.

He returned bearing a device that looked like a skullcap.

The guran, Kranda thought.

How could she stand by and watch the Sporelli torture a Phandran, when it was within her ability to kill all four invaders here and now and save an innocent life? She would have no compunction about exterminating the soldiers – Builder ethos against taking life notwithstanding – but knew that she had to be very careful. It was all very well saving one or two lives now by taking out these thugs, but, when the Sporelli learned of their deaths, then retribution against the Phandrans might be terrible and disproportionate.

The fat soldier took the guran and approached the oldster, who eyed the skullcap with manifest unease.