Binary system, p.19
Binary System, page 19
They jumped over the crest and ducked for cover. Delia raised her head above the stone, and wished she hadn’t. Along the boulevard, more Skelt emerged from the jungle, a smear of movement flowing towards them in a solid, quicksilver river.
Oma fired, and Delia picked off the aliens one by one.
Mahn cowered beside her, shaking in fear. She glanced behind her, to where Var was attempting to hide her giveaway bulk behind the stones.
Then, beyond Var, she made out a shimmering phalanx of advancing Skelt. She swung and fired her laser five times in quick succession, skittling the aliens.
“They’re coming from behind,” she warned Oma.
Crossbow bolts lanced through the air. Delia laid down a barrage of fire to the rear, scattering the Skelt and gaining a temporary reprieve.
She looked around in desperation while firing strategic shots to slow down the advance of the Skelt. She and her friends were trapped. She looked up at the stepped side of the ziggurat rising against the glowing starscape.
“I don’t want to sound defeatist,” Oma called, “but I don’t see a way out.”
“How many of the damned things are there?”
“Is that a rhetorical question? We must have killed a hundred, but they keep on coming.”
“From their underground lair?”
“Maybe. Hell, don’t they fear death?”
“Insect hive mentality,” Delia said. “The collective mind. Perhaps they don’t see themselves as individuals.”
“Interesting. Let’s get into a philosophical debate with them when they capture us.”
“I don’t think they’ll be in any mood to trade xenological theory, Oma. They might not be so lenient with us now we’ve put up a fight.”
“As I said earlier, I don’t see any way out.”
Delia looked up at the summit of the ziggurat.
“But I do.”
“Do what?”
“See a way out,” Delia said. “Look.”
She pointed.
Oma said, “So, how do we do this?”
“We lay down a barrage of non-stop fire and run like hell up the zig.”
“Hokay. You brief the troops while I keep the hordes at bay.”
Delia turned to Mahn and Var. “When I give the word, make your way up the ziggurat, okay? I’ll cover you.”
“But they will surround us and have us trapped!” Mahn objected.
“Trust me. It’s the only way. Okay, after three. One, two, three – move it!”
Showing surprising agility for a creature her size, Var leapt and scuttled up the stepped side of the ziggurat. Mahn followed, scrambling like a child.
Delia fired left and right, hosing blinding laser fire at the advancing Skelt. She called out to Oma, “You next. Run!”
Oma leapt from the crest of the rubble, gained the first tier, and climbed at speed.
Delia followed, falling into a rhythm of ascent. Each stepped tier was waist high and she leapt, landed, turned and fired. Crossbow bolts rattled against the stonework all around her. She looked over her shoulder. Five metres below, a Skelt had reached the ziggurat and jumped onto the lowest tier, pausing to take aim. Before it fired, Delia loosed a laser bolt that burned through its sternum and sent the alien tumbling into its fellows. She took off up the tiered flank of the edifice.
Something hit her back, a dull thud that could only be one thing. Don’t dwell on it, she told herself, just run. She’d heard accounts of being hit by projectiles – how the pain was not immediate; first came the realisation of the impact, a dull thump... Don’t think about it!
Above her, Var had reached the summit beside the hulking weapon and turned to peer down. Mahn followed quickly, ducking into the protective custody of the Vo’s many legs. Oma was on the tier three above Delia, firing right and left with manic energy.
Oma gained the summit and hauled Delia up after her. On all four sides of the ziggurat, Skelt militia climbed towards them.
“We’re surrounded!” Mahn cried.
Delia stared at the weapon, its great barrel thrusting into the night sky. Its working end was a bubble enclosing a bucket seat and a control array.
“They coming!” Oma yelled.
Delia thrust her weapon at Mahn. “Join Oma. She’ll tell you what to do.”
Mahn ran to Oma’s side, gripping the laser, and Delia hauled herself up into the great weapon’s bubble cover.
It was as if the bucket seat had been expressly fashioned for her. A good omen, she thought. She gripped two handholds before her, with firing studs set into their housings. The seat tipped on gimbals and the barrel of the weapon dipped suddenly towards the jungle.
“Whoa!” Delia cried.
Surely, she thought, as she thumbed the firing studs, it couldn’t be so easy...
She almost wept with delight as a great pulse of white energy lanced from the muzzle of the weapon and screamed off into the jungle.
She cried over her shoulder, “Get behind the gun!” and didn’t have time to ensure that her friends obeyed before leaning forward and bringing the barrel of the weapon to bear on a phalanx of Skelt swarming up the flank of the ziggurat. She was blinded by the resulting laser discharge, and when her vision recovered from the after-blur she made out a falling line of charcoaled aliens. She leaned right, the barrel swinging with her. She depressed the firing studs and blitzed the advancing Skelt.
Behind her, Oma said, “Move clockwise, okay? We’re dealing with the bastards on this side.”
Delia did as instructed.
She blazed away at the Skelt swarming up the flanks, mowing them down in their dozens – but as she made one circuit of the ziggurat and came back to the flank fronting the boulevard, it seemed that the alien attack was relentless. The Skelt came and came again, as if their numbers were being renewed from a limitless source.
On her third circuit, however, she noted that not as many aliens seemed as willing to make the sacrifice.
“They’re retreating,” Oma called out.
She ceased firing. A sudden silence replaced the deafening sound of laser fire.
Oma was at her side, her round face sweating in the starlight. “So far, so good, but you do realise that they have us trapped. And look,” she went on, pointing down at the boulevard, “they’re massing for another attack.”
Delia looked up, into the heavens. “I think we’re going to be fine, Oma.”
“How do you work that out?”
She smiled to herself and issued a command to her Imp. Instantly, the silence was replaced by the soothing strains of Arvo Pärt’s third symphony.
“Delia,” Oma said, staring at her, “now is hardly the time for a musical accompaniment.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that...”
Beside her, Mahn and Var looked up in unison.
Three diaphanous yarm, their pulsing domes phosphorescent in the starlight, drifted towards the summit of the ziggurat.
Oma grinned. “Hokay... but will we make it in time?”
Delia followed her pointing finger, and her heart sank. The Skelt had begun their counter-offensive up all four sides of the edifice.
Delia brought the super-weapon to bear yet again and fired at the Skelt swarming up the ziggurat; not all them, she saw with relief, were armed with crossbows. Most of them wielded swords, useless in anything but close combat. She swept the laser around, while behind her Oma laid down a constant barrage.
Delia glanced up at the yarm. Their trailing tentacles were perhaps ten metres away and descending. She felt something swell in her chest, a response to the music and a reaction to the realisation that her scheme to evade the Skelt might just work.
She waited for the pain in her back to kick in, but felt nothing. Adrenalin, she thought; I’m running on adrenalin.
A crossbow bolt seared past her head, missing her by centimetres, and thwacked into Var’s upper left foreleg. The spider-crab grabbed the bolt with a great pincer and pulled, removing it along with a spurt of green ichor.
Delia looked up. The first yarm was hovering over the summit, its tentacles dangling, and she yelled, “Mahn, Var, grab a tentacle each and hold on for dear life!”
Mahn tossed Delia her laser, then reached out, embraced a swinging tentacle and hung on. Var, dancing in what she thought might be fear, took hold of two trailing tentacles in her forelegs and swung. The yarm moved off with its cargo, losing altitude due to the sudden burden, then regained its equilibrium and rose.
Oma hauled Delia from the control seat. “What?” Delia yelled.
“We came here to destroy this thing, didn’t we?” Oma said.
Two yarm hung over the summit of the ziggurat, tentacles trailing.
“Do it and get out of here,” Delia said.
As she watched, Oma stared at the control panel, wide-eyed.
“What?” Delia shouted.
“Nothing...” Oma said. “Just... just trying to work out the best way...”
Oma raised her laser, aimed at the control array before her, and fired. The array smouldered, then sparked, and she jumped clear of the resulting explosion.
A yarm tentacle swung towards them and Delia steadied it for her friend.
“Take it!” she yelled. “I’ll cover you.”
Oma grabbed the tentacle, swarming up its length like a trained gymnast. She hung on and leaned out, firing down at the advancing aliens. A dozen Skelt had reached the tier below the summit. Delia aimed at those armed with crossbows and picked them off, glancing desperately around her. She was unable to see a handy tentacle. For a second she wondered if this was her fate, to be overwhelmed by alien hordes while her friends drifted to safety.
“Behind you!” Oma yelled at her – and thinking that a Skelt was approaching on her blindside, she pirouetted to see a tentacle swinging through the air towards her. She reached out, took hold, hoisted herself and swung. As she lifted with an exhilarating buoyancy, and the Terran symphony swelled in the alien night air, she wound her leg around the tentacle, easing the strain on her arms, and peered down.
The nested squares of the ziggurat fell away. A dozen Skelt gained the summit and looked up. One was armed with a crossbow, and before Delia could bring her laser to bear, the alien fired. The bolt missed her by centimetres and tore through the yarm’s pulsing cowl. She expected the creature to react by descending, but the yarm merely increased the rate of its pulsing flight and rose swiftly. Delia took aim on the crossbow bearer and fired, delighting in its loose-limbed tumble down the side of the ziggurat.
Ahead, silhouetted against the stars, she made out Mahn and Var hanging onto their yarm. Oma swung on her own yarm, ten metres ahead. Delia looked down. The stepped shape of the ziggurat was diminishing rapidly, individual Skelt now lost to sight.
She was unable to feel the crossbow bolt in her back. She wondered if she were still anaesthetised by adrenalin. Soon, when the rush abated, the pain would kick in.
Oma called across to her. “Delia, you’ve been hit.”
“I know, but I can’t feel a thing, at the moment.”
Oma laughed.
Indignant, Delia asked, “What’s so funny?”
“Of course you can’t feel a thing, Dr Kemp. The bolt’s embedded in your backpack.”
“What?” She reached an arm up behind her, contorting herself, and found the bolt. She pulled it out, felt nothing, and inspected its point for blood in the starlight.
“And I thought I’d earned my first battle scar,” she called out.
Serenaded by Arvo Pärt, the yarm and their cargo drifted serenely through the sultry alien night.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
DELIA OPENED HER eyes, startled.
She’d resisted dozing off during the night for fear of losing her grip and falling to her death, but exhaustion must have got the better of her. She looked around, wondering how she’d managed to hold on while asleep, and saw that a second thick tentacle had wound itself around her torso, securing her.
The night had passed and the huge, bloody face of the rising sun spanned a quarter of the far horizon.
She looked around for the others.
The yarm carrying Oma was a hundred metres ahead; Mahn and Var swung on their yarm just ten metres away. Similarly, they were secured by multiple tentacles, as if their saviours had somehow guessed at their passengers’ need for sleep.
She called across to Mahn, “But I thought you said the yarm weren’t sentient.”
“They’re not, Delia.”
“And yet while we slept, they moved other tentacles around us to keep us safe.”
“A mystery. But by all reckoning, the yarm are not intelligent.”
“But empathetic, perhaps?” She looked up at the beating skirt of the alien creature. “Thank you, yarm.”
She looked down. They were drifting five hundred metres above the jungle, a multi-coloured tapestry of visible growth. Vines writhed like a pit of serpents, flowers opening and turning towards the hemisphere of the sun. A flotilla of multi-winged butterflies – or rather the Valindan equivalent – drifted en masse through the air, the perfect visual accompaniment to the symphony still issuing from her implant.
She instructed her Imp to stop the music, then got through to her friend.
Delia: Oma, you awake?
Oma: I’ve just woken up. I must’ve slept. Hey! How come I didn’t fall?
Ahead, Delia saw Oma’s tiny figure start and stare about her.
Delia: The kindness of the yarm. Mahn insists they’re not intelligent, but I don’t know.
Oma: Well, we got away from the Skelt. But where are we now?
Delia asked her Imp to plot their position, and a second later it responded: Currently three hundred kilometres north west of Larahama, and heading due west.
She communicated this to Oma.
Oma: We’ve made progress to Larahama, but we need to be thinking of saying goodbye to the yarm.
Delia: Good idea. But just how on earth do we communicate that to them?
She called across to Mahn and explained the situation.
“Don’t worry,” he called back. “We’re descending.”
“We are?” She looked down, and sure enough the treetops were closer now than they had been just minutes ago.
Mahn clung to the tentacle with one arm and pointed. “Look, the river.”
Delia looked down and saw the winding, serpentine length of the river looping its way through the jungle. “But how do the yarm know we...?”
Mahn interrupted. “They don’t. But they do need to drink from time to time.”
“They’re not the only ones. I could kill for a beer.”
“And look,” Mahn said, “further along the riverbank, a settlement. Riverboats ply the river every day. So we won’t have long to wait for a boat to take us the rest of the way.”
“And Larahama?”
“A day south of here by boat,” Mahn called out, “followed by a trek of half a day inland to the city.”
The yarm came in low over the treetops and descended towards the river. The tentacles unwound from around her – further convincing Delia of the yarm’s empathy, if not sentience. She caressed the smooth skin of the last tentacle, murmuring her thanks.
She peered down at the river, then let go and dropped three metres and hit the warm water with a deafening splash. She surfaced, spluttering, and swam to the bank.
She watched Oma fall feet first, resurface spouting water, and helped her out. Mahn and Var dropped a little further downstream, the Vo hitting the water with a smack, disappearing for a second, before resurfacing and paddling towards the bank with Mahn on her back.
They stood together and watched as the three yarm hovered above the river, a sight at once awe-inspiring and moving. The tentacles dropped to the water and the yarm hung, taking in sustenance. Then, having drank their fill, as stately and silent as ever, one by one they rose high into the air and drifted off across the treetops.
Delia and her friends watched them disappear from sight, then made their way along the riverbank towards the settlement.
Chapter Thirty
THEY CAUGHT A riverboat at midday, this time sharing the deck with a group of Fahran making the pilgrimage for the first time. Mahn joined their group and Delia watched him chat to his fellows; she wondered if he were recounting his adventures so far. He was certainly animated, gesticulating with his long arms as his audience sat spellbound.
The jungle grew high on either side of the river. In the distance, to the south west, a hazy range of mountains created a saw-toothed horizon. In the foothills of this range, according to Mahn, was the valley of Mahkanda, where Chalto’s ship had come to rest. Halfway to the valley, buried deep in the jungle, was the shrine at Larahama.
She inspected the shattered chitin of Var’s left foreleg; but there was little she could do to heal the wound, and Var assured her that she was not in pain. “It will heal in time,” she told Delia. “In the meantime, I have plenty of other legs to serve me well.”
“That’s the trouble with being bipedal,” Delia said. “Lose one leg and we’re disabled, two and we’re in dire straits.”
Var reached out a great pincer and touched Delia’s hand with surprising delicacy. “And your flesh is so soft. The slightest knock must pain you.”
“Well, we’re careful,” she said. “But I admit there are times when I wish I had a shell.”
Var raised an eye-stalk to take in the passing jungle. “The stories I will have to tell when I return home: a Skelt attack, imprisonment, yarm flight, and a long journey to the Fahran god of Chalto. My hive siblings will not believe me.”
Delia moved into the shade of a great sail. The sun was growing hotter by the hour; already the temperature was in the high thirties, and Imp had said that at the height of summer the mean temperature would be in the mid-fifties. And added to the heat was the humidity, making every breath a labour.
She thought of her parents, no doubt grieving her death, and her friends on Earth and the colony worlds. She would never see them again, and even the possibility of being able to reassure them that she was alive and well was denied her.
