Helix Wars (26 page)

Dan looked across the table at her. “What was all that about? Any idea who – ?”

She shook her head. “I can’t begin to imagine...” She tapped the activation code into her wrist-com. “But we’ll soon find out.”

“Another drink?” he said.

“No. No, let’s go for a walk along the coast. You okay with that?”

“Fine. Come on.”

They left the hotel and took the littoral walkway, Maria wondering why she was nervous at the thought of the call from the Governor’s office.

As ever, the day was warm and sunny. The beach was dotted with holiday-makers, their children splashing in the sea. A dozen Sails were putting on a spectacular aerial display, a synchronised series of swirls and arabesques.

Maria’s wrist-com chimed.

“Yes? Dr Maria Ellenopoulis here.”

A young woman’s face stared up at her from the tiny screen. “Dr Ellenopoulis, I have a priority call for you. One moment while I put you through to Director Reynolds’ deputy.”

She looked at Dan. “Reynolds’ deputy? What the hell?”

A second later the stern face of a middle-aged woman stared out at her. “Dr Ellenopoulis?”

“Speaking.”

The woman’s eyes flicked beyond Maria, and she said, “Dr Ellenopoulis, I suggest you sit down.”

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

She experienced a feeling of unreality as Dan steered her to a nearby bench and sat her down. She didn’t know why she was feeling like this. With the man she loved by her side, no news could possibly harm her.

The woman said, “I am sorry to have to report that your husband’s shuttle came down, in hostile circumstances, on the world of Phandra. This happened over a week ago, but we have only just been cleared by security to report the incident.”

She shook her head. “
Came down?
”

The woman smiled in an attempt at sympathy. “Your husband’s shuttle crash-landed, Dr Ellenopoulis.”

She felt Dan’s arm tighten around her shoulders, but at the same time he seemed to be a million miles away.

“And... and Jeff? My husband?”

“We are unable to ascertain at the moment the exact status of the pilot or passengers.”

Maria wanted to say, “I don’t want you to ascertain his exact status, you bitch. Just tell me if he’s alive or dead.”

The woman went on, “Of course we are monitoring the situation and will be in contact just as soon as we find out anything more definite.”

Maria nodded in silence and cut the connection.

Dan massaged her neck. “I’m sorry.”

Maria stared into the distance, across the ocean, and tried to assess her feelings. Jeff had crash-landed in his shuttle... what were the chances of his surviving that? Very low? Nil?

In all likelihood, Jeff was dead – and how did she feel about that?

Dan said, “I’ll drive you back to Carrelliville.”

She surprised herself by saying, “No!” She shook her head and smiled at him. “No. I mean, there’s nothing I can do there, is there? I’d rather be here, with you.”

“If you’re sure.”

“Sure I’m sure. Come on, let’s walk.”

Later, back at the hotel, they had an early dinner and returned to their room. Dan was quiet, considerate, obviously concerned for her. She led him across to the bed and kissed him, slowly at first, and then with mounting passion. They made love savagely, unlike all the previous times, and she wondered if she were doing this to prove something.

She said, as they lay in the sweaty aftermath of their exertions, “I love you, Dan. I love you more than anything. You matter to me more than...” She stopped herself, then went on. “More than anything.”

Later still, as Dan slept, she slipped from the bed and padded across to the window. She sat on the window-seat and stared out across the ocean, glittering in the ring-light.

In all likelihood, her husband was dead, killed horribly in a shuttle accident, not long after they had parted so bitterly.

She looked into her heart, and tried to find the stirrings of grief there. But it was as if her quotient of that emotion had been used up, spent on the death of her son, and there was none left for the man she had come, over the years, to despise.

And, she wondered, if he had managed to survive the crash-landing? What then?

She returned to bed and held Dan to her.

She knew what she would do if Jeff had survived and returned to New Earth: she would confront him with the truth, tell him that she had found someone else, someone she loved very much, and that their marriage was over.

Her future, from now on, was with Dan Stewart.

T
HIRTEEN
/// T
O
D
’RAYNI

1

C
ALLA STILL HAD
the shocking image of the executed barge woman lodged in her head, many hours after the event. She knew that it would be a memory that would stay with her until the end of her days: the image of the Sporelli soldier casually aiming his weapon, firing at the innocent woman, and then cynically wiping the toe of his boot – smeared with the woman’s brains – on her smock.

Calla had been one with the woman in the seconds leading up to her death, sensing her disbelief and sudden shock at what was about to happen. And then sudden emptiness, as the bargee’s consciousness fled to another place, to Fahlaine.

Then Jeff Ellis had acted, and attacked the Sporelli soldier, and Calla had found what happened then almost as shocking as the woman’s death, as the soldiers attacked him with their rifles and he’d fallen to the cobbles.

The Sporelli had bundled her from the square, slung her in the back of a waiting truck with other Phandran Healers, and driven her away at speed.

For the duration of the journey, which lasted for hours until sunset, she told herself that their parting had been foretold, and she reminded herself of what Diviner Tomar had told her – that she and Ellis would at some point be reunited. She would go through much hardship, both mental and physical, but she would overcome it. It was a comforting, reassuring thought, as night fell and the truck rattled and bounced over an uneven track.

Until now she had been aware only of her own thoughts as she went through the events of the past few hours. She registered the presence of other Phandrans peripherally, other Healers rounded up like her, but she worked at keeping her thoughts calm, telling herself that she would survive what was to follow, that her safety and eventual reunion with Jeff Ellis was assured. Now, however, she sensed distress in the mind of one of her fellow Healers, a young boy just a year out of the seminary.

She turned to him in the half-light of the truck. “Try not to be afraid,” she said. “The Sporelli will not harm us.”

In the twilight, she saw the boy’s brave smile.

Another Healer, a shadowy figure at the front of the truck, said, “How do you know that? They’ve killed hundreds of us so far, thousands for all I know.”

She turned to the voice, registered the despair in his mind. He had witnessed the murder of someone who just days ago he had healed. She said, “They have killed many of our kind, but they want us, Healers, to tend to their injured. Therefore they will not harm us.”

“And when we’ve tended to their injured, and they have no further use for us? What then?”

“Then eventually... Fahlaine awaits us,” she said.

The boy stared at her. “I sense... Diviner Tomar, he told you that you would overcome suffering and travel far,” he whispered.

She smiled at him. “Your ability is powerful,” she said, “for one so young.”

Someone else said, “I sense that you and... and an alien, a
human
... Your destinies are linked, or so you’ve been told.”

This occasioned excitement among the half a dozen Phandrans in the back of the truck. “Tell us more...”

So she told them what Diviner Tomar had told her about the human, Jeff Ellis, and how she would travel to another world on the Helix, and she was gratified that her account served to increase the morale of her fellow prisoners.

Dawn was slicing long bloody gashes across the horizon when the truck stopped and a Sporelli soldier shouted at them to climb out. They were on the coast, with the ocean a calm pewter vastness. She shuffled away from the truck with her fellow Phandrans. A flat compound stretched away for kilometres, encompassed by a tall wire fence. A hundred black ground vehicles came and went from the compound. Columns of soldiers marched up the ramps of waiting fliers, which then rose into the air and lumbered low across the ocean towards D’rayni.

A soldier shouted at the Phandrans in their own language, “Move! Get into the flier!” and gestured with his rifle towards a hunched, black shape which squatted on the tarmac like an overgrown insect.

Calla sent a probe towards the soldier, but met only the resistance of an alien mind. She sensed something almost corresponding to emotions, but they were of a shape and colour wholly unfamiliar to her, and his thoughts were as unreadable as a foreign language.

They hurried towards the vehicle and the young Healer trotted alongside Calla and found her hand. She squeezed reassuringly and sought to transmit tranquil thoughts.

They climbed a ramp into the belly of the flier and found a dozen other Healers squatting there in silence. She sat on the floor with her back against cold metal, gripped the boy’s hand and worked to muffle her thoughts. Around her, the other more experienced Healers were doing the same. In such a confined space, the presence of a dozen Healers, and their attendant mind-noise, could prove discomfiting.

The flier made a low grumbling noise which grew in volume. The vehicle shook and rattled, then lurched as it left the ground. Several Phandrans cried out in alarm, and Calla found herself holding onto the boy with her right hand and, with her left, gripping a spar affixed to the wall as the flier tipped alarmingly and banked out over the sea.

Through a strip window in the back of the flier she watched the coastline of Phandra, and the distant jagged mountains of the interior, grow ever more distant.

She wondered if she would ever set eyes on her homeworld again. Diviner Tomar had not mentioned that.

2

S
OON THE THIN
, distant filament of Phandra’s coastline was lost to sight and Calla felt a cold weight lodge itself in her stomach.

She found herself thinking about the human, Jeff Ellis, and their time together.

Had she been told, beforehand, that she would come to know an alien so well, would come to feel kinship and even affection for someone so different from her and her kind, then she would have been disbelieving. She had found the human very strange at first, the product of an environment she had no hope of understanding, his emotions alien to her. And then, as the days passed and she tended him around the clock, his emotions became a little less alien, a little more comprehensible.

There was a contradiction at his heart, though, and one she found hard to comprehend. She read his anger, the latent aggression that lived just beneath the surface of his psyche – which to her and her kind was an unknown emotion. However, as she came to know him better, she came also to appreciate his innate gentleness. He abhorred violence, knew it to be a sickness that not only injured the victims but also corrupted the perpetrator.

She had looked into his psyche, come to understand his grief, and how that grief had soured his relationship with his mate; and she had spoken to him, tentatively, as to what he might do about that, if he ever had the chance.

She wondered if it were these experiences that were responsible for all his anger.

Towards the end of their time together, she had found herself feeling closer to Jeff Ellis, an alien, than she had to any other living being. And she had come to a strange understanding: that, despite their differences, Phandran and human were very much alike. She wondered also if the same was true of her people and the Sporelli.

The flier carried her across the sea to D’rayni, and she comforted herself with the thought of her predicted reunion with Jeff Ellis. As they climbed, the cold became intense.

Hours later she glanced through the strip window and saw that they had left the ocean far behind. They were flying over an iron-grey land now, and snow flurried from a leaden sky. So this was D’rayni, home to a rough, squat people she had only ever heard Phandran sea-traders talk about: they were a people toughened by their severe environment, she had heard, ugly of body and even uglier of mind.

She huddled next to the young boy, and an older woman to her left, and gained warmth from their bodies.

Later she managed, despite her uncomfortable position seated against the wall, to snatch a little sleep.

She was awoken some time later by a startling sound.

She came upright with a cry, yanked from dreams of childhood, riding on the back of a somnolent rurl with her father. The other Phandrans in the darkened hold were crying out in alarm too, and the flier lurched like a toy boat in a torrential river. Something exploded close by, and through a sidescreen she saw a bright orange flash.