Parallax View (18 page)

“Can’t you see?” begged Philip. “Can’t you just stay out of it? This is all wrong!”

Mackendrick said, “What? I don’t understand–”

I want to take the punishment myself!” Philip cried. “I want to speak with the spirits of the dead...”

Mackendrick almost wept. So his son had not sought revenge...

He remembered Belinda’s accusation that he and Philip had been cast from the same cynical, rationalist mould. But somewhere along the line Philip had changed.

Sadly, he turned to Bronowski. “Take care of him, Bron. Make sure he doesn’t do anything foolish.” And then he turned away from his friend and his son, and stared into the face of Antares.

Mackendrick raised the tin goblet to his lips and tasted its contents. The liquid looked like some kind of sherry, but it was hot with exotic spices, and it left a distinct metallic after-taste. He tipped the goblet and drank it all.

He raised his arms and two Shand guards bound his wrists gently but tightly to the opposing trees.

Then they let the trunks slowly upright. The joints in his arms and legs detonated as they were wrenched from their sockets and the small bones of his wrists and ankles snapped. The pain became unbearable and Mackendrick screamed until his throat was afire, and then the drug-laden drink rushed over his senses, numbing the agony to a steady, thudding, whole-body ache.

As the trees reached their fullest extent, Mackendrick hung his head back and cried out as the swollen, blood-red dome of Antares stared down on him without mercy.

And then the voices began...

In Transit

The
White Swan
left the war zone and burst through the Jehovah wormhole with an actinic explosion of supercharged particles.

Abbott clutched the arms of his seat and closed his eyes as the swirling fire of the membrane swallowed the shuttle and spat it out the other side, five hundred light years along the galactic rim. The transition seemed to twist him inside out and wring his soul dry. It left him light-headed and nauseous, his head fizzing with static.

When he opened his eyes, he was amazed to see the crew going about their business as if nothing had happened. They hung in their slings, slaved to the shuttle’s smartware nexus, hands drifting across touchpads and parallel sensors with the dreamy grace of narcoleptic ballerinas. The pilot was setting course from the Jehovah wormhole to its twin, a thousand parsecs across the star system, while an engineer and a smartware specialist communed with the shuttle as if in comas.

Abbott’s head still reeled.

Through the forward viewscreen, a delta strip above the command slings, he made out the main sequence primary, its lone planet in transit across the sun’s fiery disc. Ahead, a mirror image of the wormhole they had just left, its twin was a coruscating oval interface through which they would pass in six hours en route to Earth.

At least, he thought with relief, they were out of Kryte-controlled territory now. This intermediate system was technically in no-man’s land, strategically important and sporadically fought over.

“... though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” a woman’s voice intoned to his left.

He turned. Some neurological side-effect of the transition had blitzed his short-term memory.

“...I will fear no evil.”

He fingered his crucifix, where it rested on an inflamed area on his chest. Memory started to kick in... The smartware implant, fed in through his chest wall, from where it had infiltrated his entire body. The slave device.

He’d been in conversation with Major Travers, he recalled. Just before the jump. Something about a briefing...

“...For thou art with me.”

It came back to him now. Travers, a blocky grunt who did nothing to disguise her disdain of civilians in general and xeno-psychologists in particular, had been filling him in about the captured Kryte in the shuttle’s hold.

“You okay, Abbott?” Travers looked across at him now, her superior expression putting him in his place. She was an uncompromising-looking woman, with the look of a street-fighter, only accentuated by the reconstructive surgery that left half her face composed of n-gel – so nearly natural-looking, but not quite. Responses on that half of her face lagged a split second behind so that an expression would start on one side of her face and migrate to the left, a peristalsis of the self. “You look rough.”

“I’m fine. Where were we?” He sat up, attempting to look competent.

Travers smiled, her time-lagged smile that Abbott tried hard not to find disturbing. “I was telling you about the Devil,” she told him. “I was telling you about
your
Devil...”

Abbott held up a hand. “Please. I know they’re the enemy, but demonising them like that does nothing to foster understanding.”

Travers sneered. “I don’t want to understand the bastards, Abbott. I want to eradicate them.” As she said this, she ran a finger across the crucifix tattooed on her left forearm.

“The best way to win the war, or even to contain it, will be to come to some understanding of how the enemy works, how it thinks. Reducing a dangerous foe to stereotypes is self-defeating and foolhardy.”

Something flared in Travers’ eyes, a fighter’s response, an unthinking, uncomprehending reflex. “Listen, Abbott. I lost an entire platoon capturing that fucker back there. Twenty-five fine men and women, blitzed in an instant. If you think I give a damn about what I call the...”

Something in Abbott’s expression halted her tirade.

He reached out and laid a hand over hers. The touch froze her. He wondered at the last time she’d felt the contact of human flesh.

“Major, ten years ago an advanced strike of the Kryte’s rim division killed five thousand colonists on New Hampton. My wife and two year-old son were among the fatalities. Please don’t doubt my enmity towards the Kryte.”

She had the good grace to looked away, cowed.

Abbott went on, “So... where did you say we’d got to?”

“I was describing the... the Kryte. We’re of the opinion that it wasn’t a combat soldier.”

“I thought all Krytes in the forward sector were militia?”

She shook her head. “Not this one. It didn’t have battle armour, and wasn’t equipped with phase array nucleonics. It was in a sub-light shuttle, grounded behind the front line. It was attempting to get away when we broke through and disabled the ship.”

“So what do you think it was doing there?”

“Beats me,” Travers said. “Anyway, it didn’t have time to kill itself. We took it by surprise. It put up a hell of a fight, but we quelled the bastard. We contacted the sector base unit immediately. The rest you know.”

“This is our big chance, Major,” Abbott told her. “Our big chance to understand.”

He saw in her eyes that she knew that this time his use of the word
understand
had a more specific meaning. The Kryte were known to be extremely long-lived, under normal circumstances – perhaps even immortal. Humankind had never even come close to understanding the secret of this longevity until now. Only three Kryte had ever been captured alive before, so badly wounded that they’d died a few hours later without yielding their secret.

Travers was looking at him, her lop-sided expression unfathomable. “Do we really
want
to understand?” she asked, her tone even, controlled.

Abbott studied her face, his eyes drawn to the join between natural flesh and n-gel reconstruct. He knew the Major was uncompromising, but he hadn’t had her down as a fundamentalist. There were some – including Travers, it appeared – who thought immortality was a temptation too far. How would you ever reap your reward in Heaven if you were forever bound to mortal existence? In his head he continued the Twenty-third Psalm that Travers had been recounting earlier:

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:

And I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

Travers and her like wanted to dwell in the Lord’s house; life was but a step along the way.

“I want to understand,” he finally answered. “I
have
to understand these ... Devils, as you call them. They destroy lives...”

He had been waiting for an opportunity like this for years.

Two days ago he’d been roused from sleep in the faculty of his university at three in the morning. The colony commander had explained the situation and, still groggy with sleep, Abbott had attempted to take in the enormity of the proposition. He was being offered the opportunity to escort a captured Kryte to Earth, and there work – alongside other specialists – at coming to some understanding of the extraterrestrial.

“We want you to be its anchor,” the commander had said, and it had taken a few seconds for the import of his words to sink in. Abbott and his peers had discussed ways of handling captive Krytes on many occasions, but it had always been an academic exercise, an exploration of hypotheticals. The anchor-slave approach may even have been Abbott’s suggestion; his name had certainly been one of several attached to a long-suppressed paper on the subject.

“Anchor?” Abbott had asked. “As in ‘Anchor-Slave Dependencies and the Leveraging of Xenopsychologies’?”

A nod.

In an anchor-slave dependency, so the argument went, tailored n-ware was to be implanted into both parties, tying their existence together on a deep biological level. The two would be keyed into each other, and so become dependent on each other – or rather, in an anchor-slave relationship, the slave would become dependent on its anchor for the simple reason that if its n-ware could not detect the biological signature of its anchor in the near vicinity – either because the two had been parted or if the anchor died – the ’ware would turn against its host, destroying cell structure, dissolving tissue... The slave would deliquesce. This approach had the double advantage that on one level it was a simple security device preventing escape, but on a deeper, more subtle level, it established a bond between captive and captor, a dependency through which all kinds of intimacy and information seepage could be leveraged. It had all made perfect sense in the paper.

“We have a Kryte?” Abbott had asked, head still racing. “A live one?”

Another nod from the commander.

Abbott had promptly volunteered, and attempted to suppress an instinctive hatred of the creature when he’d first seen it a day later, its tortured form frozen in the shuttle’s stasis brace.

Now Travers eased herself back in her seat and stared through a side-screen at the system’s only planet, a tiny asterisk to the sun’s blazing statement high above.

Abbott turned in his couch. Through the viewscreen in the bulkhead door which gave access to the hold, he could see the Kryte.

It was the paradox of his calling that, although he’d studied the workings of the mind of the Kryte for fifteen years, he’d never actually seen one in the flesh, until now. He’d viewed HVs of them, footage taken on the battlefield and more useful images from spy-cams – but nothing had prepared him for the confrontation with the three-dimensional reality of the extraterrestrials.

They were tall and attenuated, humanoid but lizard-like, shimmery and silver-grey but possessed of sufficient facial likeness to human beings so as to appear all the more threatening: staring at this creature now, a female, Abbott had to admit that there was something bordering on beauty in the severe planes of its face, with its high cheekbones and huge eyes, held open as if in frozen shock at its custody in the stasis brace.

Abbott found himself touching his crucifix again as if in superstitious dread.

The Kryte were the first sentient aliens that humanity had discovered on its outward push through the galaxy. Like humans, the Kryte had spread from their homeworld, establishing several colonial outposts on planets within a radius of hundred light years. When the first Earth ship came across them, joyous though cautious at the prospect of first contact with fellow sentient members of the Creation, the Kryte had responded with characteristic alacrity and ruthlessness, annihilating the expeditionary starship and all aboard and issuing a warning that no further breach of their territory would be countenanced.

That was twenty years ago, and through their actions at that first contact the Kryte had effectively declared war on the human race, a war that humanity was well-equipped and supremely motivated to take to the heathen aliens.

After all, humankind was the innocent party in the conflict: they merely wanted to continue their expansion through the star systems of the rim, peacefully inhabiting the unoccupied Earth-norm worlds they discovered and terraforming others. They would have willingly co-existed side by side with the Kryte in the same star sectors, negotiating and collaborating on colonisation efforts. The Kryte, however, were implacable in their enmity... and the war raged on and on.

Suppressing a shiver, Abbott turned from the Kryte in the hold and stared through the sidescreen at the tiny, silver-blue planet.

Travers said, “St Jerome. There’s a human base down there, but the planet wasn’t deemed suitable for full-scale colonisation.”

Abbott nodded. “I can see that it’d be strategically important.”

“You said it. Whoever controls St Jerome controls the local pair of Jehovah wormholes. You should see the defensive and offensive armature down there. Bristling like a porcupine.”

“But it isn’t Earth-norm?”

Travers shook her head. “Almost, but not quite. A biological hell. The main landmass is covered with primary jungle, but that’s not the problem. The real issue with St Jerome is the wildlife. Some of the moulds try to colonise any exposed flesh – if the spores take hold they start to grow and dissolve the fats in our cell walls. Others embed themselves in the moisture in our lungs and send long fibres deep into our blood vessels. Others fuck with your head, leaching psychotropics into your blood. It’s not a fun place to be – I think the record is six days for someone to survive unprotected. And I used the word ‘survive’ in the loosest possible sense...” She smiled then, the expression migrating across her features, right to left, and then added: “But that doesn’t stop the Cistercians from setting up a monastery down there, God bless ’em.”

Abbott smiled as he thought of the self-mortification and piety of the monks driven to establish an outpost of God on such a far-flung and inimical world. He considered the spectacular celestial views the faithful would have down there, bracketed as they were by the fiery brilliance of the binary wormholes.

Travers must have misinterpreted his smile, because now she leaned forward, aggressive, defensive... “It’s true,” she snapped. She gestured at her face, pressing a finger deep into the reconstructive n-gel, which yielded disturbingly to her touch. “You think this is a battle trophy? Well it isn’t. It’s my reward for a tour of duty on St Jerome.” She paused, then added, “I managed five days unprotected, out on a patrol that was stranded when the Kryte attacked Fort Campbell. I was lucky: I kept most of my face and hardly lost my mind at all.”

Abbott turned away. “When was the last time the Kryte mounted an attack?” he asked awkwardly.

Travers grunted. “The bastards came in with sub-light ships a year ago, attacking Fort Campbell. We drove ’em off. Killed a couple of thousand of the Devils... sorry, the Krytes, and took about a hundred casualties ourselves. It was strange...” Travers paused, eyes lost on the planet far below.

“How so?” Abbott prompted.

Travers shrugged. “St Jerome is strategically critical. It’s one of the most important bases we’ve got. That’s why it’s so well defended. The thing was... why did the Kryte come at us with a relatively small force of two, three thousand? We were expecting at least a strike force of ten kay. We had a theory.”