Helix Wars (24 page)

“Saved my life.”

Kranda aimed the weapon at the chain beside Ellis’s foot, fired and shattered the links, then grabbed his arm. “Now swiftly. We have little time.”

A second later, Kranda was rendered invisible.

Choking, Ellis stepped over the corpse of the soldier he had killed –
he had killed!
– and followed Kranda from the shack.

2

T
HEY EMERGED INTO
dazzling sunlight. Ellis felt Kranda’s grip, painful on his wrist, and stared at where the Mahkan should have been. All he saw was a vague, Mahkan-shaped outline, and beyond it the distant grassland and trees.

They ran towards a Sporelli roadster – the very same one the fat soldier had arrived in – dodging between the burned and lacerated corpses of half a dozen troops. He looked away but couldn’t avoid the stench of burning meat that filled the air. All the while he saw in his mind’s eye the look of incredulity on the face of the soldier he had killed, the appalled realisation that he was going to die.

They reached the car and Kranda let go of his arm. The door on the driver’s side opened as if by itself and Kranda called, “Get in!”

He jumped into the passenger seat and Kranda fired the engine. As the roadster raced away, Ellis looked back at the carnage. Around twenty soldiers lay dead and dying. The tank and the troop carrier were burning lustily, sending great billows of oily smoke high into the bright blue sky.

He was startled as Kranda appeared, suddenly, in the driver’s seat beside him.

Back at the shack Kranda had seemed bulkier than he recalled from previous meetings – and now he knew why. The Mahkan’s body and limbs were contained in the struts and spars of an exo-skeleton, a carbon cage which moved with a fluidity alien to Ellis’s understanding.

Quite aside from the exo-skeleton, there was something else very different about Kranda compared to the last time they’d met. The Mahkan’s scaled reptilian tegument had been a dull charcoal grey, but now Kranda’s skin had the burnished, copper complexion of lubricated leather.

Kranda glanced at him as they sped away from the shack and into the wooded hills at speed, pulling back a long top lip to reveal a fierce set of upper teeth. “Since our last meeting, I have undergone
hayanor
.”

Ellis stared at the alien. “You’re female now?”

The exhibition of teeth again. “How to explain
that
,” Kranda said, inclining her head back towards the carnage they were fleeing, “other than as the result of female strength of body and will?”

Ellis realised he was shaking. “The Kranda I knew, you wouldn’t have...?”

Kranda gripped the steering column and accelerated along the forest track, the Sporelli vehicle’s excellent suspension compensating for the rough terrain. “I would have been driven to save you, my friend, for I was honour-bound to do something to effect your escape. But, as a male, I might have been more... careful as to the means I employed.”

Ellis said, “You killed...” He floundered, considering what the Mahkan had just done on his behalf.

“I did what I had to do in order to rescue you.”

“Even if that that meant the deaths of twenty Sporelli?”

“Don’t start your specious human preaching, Jeff. The Sporelli invaded a peaceable people, and right now they are bombarding another. I do not hold to the humans’ – or the Builders’ – liberal ethos of the sanctity of all life. Also,” she went on, “I have personally witnessed the depravity of the Sporelli.”

“But you said as a Mahkan male you would have gone about it differently?”

The Mahkan flicked him a lizard-like glance. “And so I would. But the difference of approach would be in terms of spending more time calculating the attack so as to minimise not Sporelli casualties, but the danger to myself. Mahkan, in their male phase, are famously... circumspect.”

“While females...?”

“Are impulsive, headstrong. We get the job done with the minimum degree of procrastination.”

Despite himself, Ellis smiled. “But even so,” he found himself saying, “was all the killing necessary?”

The Mahkan turned her cold gaze on Ellis. “Do you realise,” she said, “what the Sporelli sergeant was about to do to you?”

The skullcap, he thought.

Kranda went on, “The guran would have scoured your mind. I suspect they wanted to know why you had come to Phandra, whether you knew of their intentions and were an advance party. Whatever. The end result of being subjected to that device would be that the Sporelli would have a record of your last few days – and you would have ended up brain dead.”

Ellis closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, Kranda was watching him in silence.

She said, “I only wish I had been more alert in the final few seconds. I am honestly sorry that my inattention resulted in your taking the Sporelli’s life. As much as I fail to comprehend your aversion to killing, I believe you hold the ethos with sincerity.”

“The Sporelli troops could not, individually, be held accountable for the actions of their commanding officers,” he said.

Kranda hissed with what Ellis thought was disgust. “And now you sound just like your pusillanimous Peacekeepers! As soon as each and every Sporelli soldier donned the uniform and invaded a peaceable world, they surrendered peacetime rights of safe conduct and subscribed to the ethos of war: kill or be killed. And for your information, the soldier I killed in the shack was the very one who used the guran on an innocent Phandran villager. I swore to avenge his death, and I am pleased to say that I succeeded.”

They drove on in silence for a time.

Ellis contrasted this aspect of Kranda’s character with that of the Kranda he had last met a couple of years ago. In his male manifestation he had been coolly philosophical, gentle of mien: the Kranda beside him now might have been another Mahkan entirely.

He said, “Did New Earth know of your mission here?”

Kranda hissed again. “What? The Peacekeepers? Had we approached your governors, they would have sat upon my request for a few days, discussing the ramifications of my actions, and by now you would be dead.”

Ellis closed his eyes, but all he saw was the dying expression of the Sporelli soldier. He opened them again and stared ahead at the track rising through the trees.

“How did you find me?”

“A Mahkan ship charted your shuttle through Phandran air-space, and reported when it vanished.”

“You located the wreckage.”

“And from there it was a matter of diligent investigation to follow your route across the face of Phandra.”

“I was travelling with a woman called Calla, a Phandran Healer. Do you know what became...?”

“Not specifically. As with all Healers, and other Phandrans of special abilities, she will have been taken into Sporelli custody. She will be shipped from here, whether to Sporell itself or to the battlefront at D’rayni, I do not know.”

Ellis was silent for a while, thinking about the tiny Phandran who had healed his wounds and accompanied him so selflessly. He recalled her fatalism, and hoped it would help her to accept the hardships she was suffering now.

He said quietly, “The debt of honour you felt towards me, Kranda, I have to the Healer called Calla. If there is any way in which I might help her...”

The Mahkan turned her reptilian visage to regard him. “I understand, and sympathise.” She paused, then went on, “When I return to Mahkan, I will do my best to locate the Healers taken from this world. Perhaps my people might be able to take action there, too.”

It was a small sop to his conscience, but, Ellis reasoned, better than nothing.

“If you could inform me if and when you learn anything.”

“I will do that, my friend.”

“And now?” Ellis asked. “How do you propose we leave this world?”

Kranda pulled back her lips to show both sets of teeth. It was a gesture Kranda had developed to mimic a human smile, but as such it fell well short of the intended effect. “First, we have to evade the Sporelli,” she said.

“They know where we are?”

Kranda glanced at a series of alpha-numerics sequencing along the spar of her left forearm. “They have had a ground-effect vehicle on our trail for the past three minutes. Hence my speed.”

Ellis turned in his seat and looked back along the track. It snaked tortuously through the forest, intervening trees obscuring the view. He hoped that the Sporelli were following only by car, and not by flier. From the air they would be an easy target.

“A ground-effect vehicle, nothing else?”

“Not as yet, Jeff. But I think it will only be a matter of time before they have a flier in the vicinity.”

“How far are they behind us?”

Kranda glanced at her read-out. “Approximately half a kilometre, and holding steady.” She glanced at Ellis. “But do not worry yourself.” She patted the ugly weapon on her lap. “If they draw any closer, I will simply stop the car and ambush them.”

“Great,” Ellis said. He glanced at the Mahkan. “And just where are we going?”

Kranda pointed ahead. “See that hilltop? By the time we arrive there in exactly thirteen minutes, according to my varnika” – she tapped the spars of her exo-skeleton – “we will be safe.”

“We have a saying back on New Earth,” he said. “Unlucky thirteen.”

Kranda hissed. “Spare me your superstitions, human!”

Ellis was about to ask why they would be safe on reaching the hilltop when he heard something loud in the air high above. He looked up. The sable shape of a flier appeared in the strip of blue sky between the treetops.

“What did I say about unlucky thirteen?” he muttered.

3

T
HE MISSILE STRUCK
the track just ahead of the roadster, and only swift evasive action from Kranda saved them. She swerved around the explosion, and Ellis covered his head and ducked.

“Their intent now is certainly to kill us,” Kranda said, “not capture.”

“And I wonder why?” Ellis glanced up. The flier was keeping pace. “We’re sitting ducks!”

Kranda glanced at him. “That makes no sense at all.”

“I’m sorry. Old human term. Means, approximately, we’re dead if we don’t do something.”

“Understood.”

Without warning Kranda swerved the roadster from the track and bucketed it through the forest.

“And I didn’t mean slam us at speed into a tree, Kranda!”

She braked before the vehicle did just that.

“This is as far as we go in this, Jeff. The rest of the way is on foot.”

Ellis leapt from the roadster and followed Kranda through the forest. For a second they halted, at the Mahkan’s behest, and listened. The vehicle in pursuit sped past the point where Kranda had left the road.

He looked up. He could hear the deep thrum of the flier’s jets high above, but the craft was hidden by the tree cover.

“This way,” Kranda said.

She took off, not employing her exo-skeleton to power her flight, for Ellis’s sake, but even so running much faster than him. Ellis struggled to keep her in sight, aware that tiredness and lack of food was contributing to his exhaustion. Ahead Kranda paused beside a moss-covered gossamer-tree. As soon as Ellis drew alongside, the Mahkan took off.

He took a deep breath and set off again. He wanted to shout at Kranda to stop and rest, but it was all he could do to conserve his energy in order to keep on running.

At least now the forest floor was tending to incline upwards, which suggested they were climbing towards Kranda’s hilltop.

The gradient increased until they were forced in places to scrabble on all fours up rocky outcroppings. He could still hear the thrum of the flier’s engines high overhead as the Sporelli searched for them.

Kranda had come to a halt, much to Ellis’s relief. The Mahkan was standing on the summit of a small knoll, looking like a heroic war statue with her rifle lodged on her hip as she swept her gaze across the forest.

“What?” Ellis panted. “What is it?”

“Foot soldiers,” she said. “Following.”

“Just... just what we need!” He braced his hands on his thighs and breathed deeply, wondering if his feebleness was due to the poison from the gossamer-tree pod lingering in his system.

“Keep climbing,” Kranda said. “When you get to the last of the tree-line, stop in its cover. I’ll be back.”

“Where the hell are you going?” Ellis said. Kranda vanished. He heard the sound of her footsteps as she retraced her steps through the forest. He swore, hoping that the crazed Mahkan knew what she was doing. If she went and got herself killed now...

He looked up the incline. The rocky prominence was half a kilometre away, dark against the blue sky. There was a little open ground between him and the last of the tree-cover, but he could skirt it and keep himself hidden behind the trees. He climbed, heading through the forest. Once he paused to listen, but there was no sound of the Sporelli flier.