Weird Space 2: Satan's Reach (30 page)

He told her.

When he looked again, the remaining aliens were conferring. Harper heard fluting calls, and seconds later they were joined by a further four Ajantans. The original trio indicated the hut from which the young man had emerged.

Slowly, weapons levelled, the Ajantans left the margin of the jungle and approached the building. Four moved around the hut while the first pair stood their ground and raised their trumpet-muzzled weapons.

He reached out and pulled Zeela to him. He heard a roar and the rear wall of the hut was consumed in flame. Through the window he saw one of the aliens step forward and call out, its words lost in the sound of the conflagration at their backs.

Then the alien raised its rifle and fired again. Flame belched through the empty window and filled the room with its actinic heat. Another blast accounted for the flimsy timber wall. Harper backed from the raging flames, despair like physical pain in his chest. The rafters above his head were alight now, threatening to bring the room down on top of them.

Zeela clutched him. Through the window he saw the Ajantan pair step forward, raise their weapons and call out in their own language.

The façade fell outwards and the flaming ceiling sagged towards Harper and Zeela. The Ajantans gestured with their weapons, excited now that they had their prey in sight, their fluting calls vying with the roar of the flames.

Harper held Zeela to him and said, “I’m sorry,” as he eased her forward, over the blazing remnant of the wall, and out into the sunlight. They were surrounded by the ugly, squat creatures, who gestured feverishly with their weapons. Harper and Zeela raised their hands above their heads.

The creatures barely reached Harper’s ribcage, and in a one-to-one fight he would tear them limb from limb... He quashed the revenge fantasy and tried to focus his thoughts on reality.

Beside him Zeela was taking deep breaths. Part of him wanted to meet her gaze, reassure her... but he was unable to do so. He felt guilty; he had done his best to rescue Zeela from the Ajantans, had brought her to what he hoped would be sanctuary...

The aliens were dancing around them now, occasionally leaping forward to prod at them with their weapons. Harper made out a repeated, sibilant phrase, and he realised they were chanting, “The girl! The girl!”

They were prodded forward, and they stumbled in the sand as they made their way around the lake towards the clearing and the waiting Ajantan starship.

A dozen Ajantans emerged from the ship and crossed the clearing towards their triumphant fellows. If only he had a weapon, then he would go down fighting; anything would be better than this graceless capitulation.

He saw movement ahead and to the left. The Kallastanians were peering from the open door of the long-house, watching silently as Harper and Zeela were led towards the waiting starship.

He saw the old woman. Their eyes locked and he smiled at her. She raised a hand, her expression one of sadness and impotence.

Zeela whispered to him, “I don’t want to go, Den. Not back to Ajanta. Not to... to what I know they will do to me.”

“Zeela...”

“I’d rather die
here
, on the soil of my home. You go if you want to, but... Den, I’m sorry. I’m going to make a run for it...”

“No. Zeela...”

“I’m going. I... I can’t let them take me back to Ajanta, Den. I can’t!”

He stared at her, saw the tears tracking down her cheeks. She smiled, sadly, then looked around and tensed herself for flight towards the forest.

“Zeela...” he pleaded. He reached out and gripped her arm.

He saw a glint of something swift and golden above the rainforest, a second before he heard the sound.

Zeela moved, tugging herself from his grip.

She tensed, preparing herself to run, when a split second later the Ajantan starship exploded in a fountain of flame as if all hell itself had erupted, radiating cascading debris of hot metal and flame. Harper reached out, grasped Zeela and pulled her to the ground as the watching Kallastanians cried out in alarm and took refuge in the long-house.

All around, the Ajantans were falling, sliced by lancing laser beams that screamed down from the sky.

Harper looked up and saw a sleek golden ship swooping over the clearing, laser fire raining down from a nacelle slung beneath its nose-cone. As he watched, laser beams targeted the aliens one by one in quick, fraction-of-a-second bursts. The Ajantans barely had time to cry out as they were sliced as they ran. It was wholesale butchery, with severed limbs and body parts sliding to the ground all around. Harper had never witnessed such slaughter, and in less than a minute, he calculated, there was not one green alien left standing or in one piece.

The Ajantan ship burned, secondary explosions detonating deep within its shattered shell. He made out dancing, flame-engulfed figures in the ship’s interior. He climbed slowly to his feet and pulled Zeela up after him.

The golden ship landed with a quick genuflection of its ramrod stanchions, and seconds later a ramp extended from its belly and – as Harper had expected – two figures marched down the ramp. They strode across the battlefield towards where he and Zeela stood amidst the rendered flesh and spilled blood of their erstwhile captors.

Sharl Janaker and the Vetch stopped before them, and the woman smiled. She carried a small pistol in her right hand, not yet raised.

“So, Harper, we meet at last.”

He tried to stare her down. “If you think,” he said, “that I am grateful for your intervention...”

“Spare me your futile words, Harper.” Now she did raise her pistol. “Contact your ship and order it to get here, quick.”

“My ship?”

“You heard the woman,” the Vetch growled. “Contact your ship, now, and order it to open its hatch when it gets here!”

He was about to ask why they wanted the ship – but wasn’t that obvious? They were rapacious mercenaries, and would gain as much in salvage fees for the ship as they would in hauling his corpse back to the Expansion authorities.

He looked from the Vetch to the woman. “Go to hell.”

Janaker smiled. “If you contact your ship, Harper, then I might let you and the girl live. If not...”

“I say we kill them now!” the Vetch said, raising its weapon and aiming at Zeela.

“Harper,” Janaker said, “let’s do this the easy way, hm? Call your ship.”

“If you refuse,” the Vetch said, “then the girl will die.”

Alone, he might have defied them. But Zeela, at his side, said pleadingly, “Den...”

He activated his wrist-com, got through to
Judi
, and ordered her to lock onto his current co-ordinates and make her way here immediately.

Janaker smiled. “There, that wasn’t so difficult, was it, Harper?”

Then she raised her pistol and shot him.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Y
OU’VE KILLED HIM
!” the girl screamed.

Janaker holstered her pistol and watched the girl drop to her knees and stroke Harper’s face. There was something touching about the sight, and at the same time unsettling. She told herself that it had nothing to do with envy.

She strode to the girl, knelt and gripped her upper arm. The kid was tiny, a child; even kneeling, Janaker was taller than her.

“Listen to me.” She shook the girl until she ceased sobbing. “He isn’t dead. I’ve merely stunned him.”

“He isn’t...?” The girl shook her head. “But he told me you wanted him dead, or that you’d take him back to the Expansion and they’d execute him there. That’s what you’ll do!” She struggled, but was unable to free herself. “You’ll take him back to the Expansion and
they’ll
kill him!”

Janaker stood, bringing the girl with her, and walked her away from where Harper lay. “I promise you that they will not kill him,” she said. “It’s a long story, but they want to hire Harper for his telepathic ability. That’s why I was sent out here after him. Not to kill him, but to take him back.”

Kreller approached and snapped, “Tell the girl to join the others in the long-house.”

She turned to him. “Go to hell, Kreller. I’ll take her there when I’m through explaining.”

The Vetch muttered something and turned away, yelling at a knot of straggling Kallastanians to go back to the long-house. The natives looked stunned as they picked their way through the carnage of slain aliens and the scattered starship debris.

Janaker reached out and stroked a strand of hair from the girl’s tear-streaked cheek. “If we wanted Harper dead,” she said softly, “we would have let the Ajantans kill him and take you. I don’t know what Harper told you about the type of people following him, but I assure you that I am not... inhumane.”

She stared around her at the fragmented alien body parts, and shook her head sadly. “As for this... I regret the deaths of so many, but...”

The girl interrupted her. “I rejoice at their deaths! The Ajantans are monsters.”

“They contacted us before we reached Kallasta, and said that they owned you.”

The girl smiled bitterly. “They thought they did – just as they think they own every other human on Ajanta. But Harper saved me from certain death, and the frogs didn’t like that.” She turned and spat at the halved corpse of the closest alien. “I have nothing but hatred for their kind!”

Janaker eased the girl towards the long-house. “Do as Kreller says, for now. Join your people in the long-house.”

“I don’t want to leave Den!” the girl wailed. “He promised that he’d take us with him, all my people.”

She nodded. “Very well. My ship would not accommodate so many, but when his ship returns...”

“You’ll take us away from here, away from the vakan?”

“The vakan?”

“Terrible creatures that come from the mountains for my people...”

She was talking about the Weird... Janaker considered the anomaly in the planet’s gravity well, the opaque ‘lake’ in the mountain valley. On the way down, Kreller had told her that he thought it a portal of the Weird.

She recalled the images Commander Gorley had shown her, and was gripped by a cold dread.

She said, “I promise that we’ll take you away from here.”

They arrived at the long-house and Janaker eased the girl through the door. “What are you going to do with Den?” she asked.

“I’ll take him to my ship, make sure he’s okay. Don’t worry. You’re safe now.”

The girl watched her with big eyes. Janaker smiled reassuringly, then turned and walked back to where Harper lay amid the chaotic battlefield scene.

Kreller joined her, staring down at the telepath. “So this is the human who has dragged us so far across the Reach.”

Janaker grunted. “Doesn’t look like a conscienceless killer, does he?”

“Appearances,” Kreller said, “can be deceptive.” He reached out a boot and poked the telepath’s body. “Remove his shield,” he said. “Human telepaths wear things called a ferronnière which...”

“Spare me, Kreller. I read the dossier Gorley gave us.” She knelt and touched Harper’s head, feeling for the device. He wasn’t wearing it, so she searched his cotton jacket and found the silver band in an inner pocket.

Kreller pointed. “Stand over there, out of range.”

She stood and backed off, watching the Vetch as he approached the supine telepath and knelt. He closed his eyes, concentrated.

What irony, she thought, if after all the effort they had expended in chasing Harper light years across the Reach he turned out to be infected and they had to kill him...

A minute later Kreller grunted and stood up.

“Well?”

“He’s clean.”

Janaker found herself releasing a relieved breath. She gestured to the long-house. “You should scan the girl, and the other Kallastanians.”

Kreller grunted. “In my own time,” he said. He turned away and stared into the sky above the rainforest.

Janaker lifted the telepath’s limp body, slung him over her shoulder, and crossed the clearing to her ship. She strapped Harper into the co-pilot’s seat, ensuring he was secure, then checked his pulse. She reckoned he’d be unconscious for at least another hour.

She gazed out through the viewscreen. Aside from the dead aliens and the burnt-out remains of their starship, the scene appeared idyllic, paradisiacal. She looked across the lake to the hazy, distant mountains, and wondered what horrors lurked there.

Kreller was standing in the middle of the clearing, staring out over the surrounding tree-tops. He seemed intent on something, and seconds later she knew what. She heard the sound of a starship’s engine, and a minute later Harper’s ship came into view, limping lopsidedly over the rainforest.

The ship landed, easing itself down on its ramrod haunches. When the dust of its descent had settled, a hatch in its flank slid open.

She saw Kreller raise his wrist-com, and a second later hers buzzed.

“Janaker,” Kreller said, “get yourself over here.”

S
HE LEFT HER
ship, the blazing sunlight prickling her skin, and crossed to where the Vetch stood before Harper’s starship. Its ramp had been sheared off, leaving a margin of jagged metal.

“You said you’d explain...” she began.

“Be quiet,” he snapped, “and you’ll get your explanation.”

He strode off, stepped over the torn remains of the ramp, and disappeared inside.

You bastard
, she thought, and followed him.

Harper’s ship was much older than hers, and over the years he’d outfitted it to his own peculiar tastes. It was unusual to find rugs and tapestries adorning the functional interior of a starship, but Harper had made his ship like a home – which, she supposed on reflection, it was. Or had been.

They strode along a lateral corridor hung with artwork depicting a dozen worlds, then dropped to a lower deck. The Vetch seemed to know exactly where he was heading.

A minute later they stood outside a sliding door marked: Hold 2.

Kreller raised a big hand and touched the panel, almost lovingly.

“This hold hasn’t been opened for well over a decade,” he said. “No one has been able to gain access. Even by force.”

She looked at the Vetch. “How do you know this?”