The Devil's Nebula (25 page)

Leah passed the jug of naar. “More drink!” she said, insisting on refilling Carew’s empty mug.

He drank, but sparingly, while the evening continued around him and the guests became slowly more inebriated. At one point he looked from the long-house, into the dark sky above the clearing, but the moons had not yet risen.

The party broke up an hour later and Carew and Lania grabbed the arms of an insensate Jed and half-carried him to their hut. The others retired to their dwellings, and within minutes a silence had settled over the clearing.

They eased Jed into his blister-tent and in seconds he was snoring.

Lania sealed the front of the tent, then turned to Carew. “All that talk about the passing of Leah and Rahn, Ed? Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“That they’ve come to the end of their usefulness, for whatever reason.” He paused, looking at her in the half-light. “Euthanasia?”

“That’s what I thought. But why? I mean, they’re still young.”

The average life-span in the Expansion, given the latest healthcare and bionics, was in the region of two hundred standard years. The thought that Leah and Rahn would live for only a quarter of this, for reasons connected to the Weird, sickened him.

“Perhaps Hahta will be able to tell us more,” he said.

Lania moved to the door of the hut and peered out. She waved Carew over.

“Look,” she said.

Over the jungle on the far side of the fissure, the huge moon was rising, its pocked face flushed with the light of the supergiant. Riding high above it was the smaller moon, and their combined light filled the silent clearing.

He stepped out into the pleasantly warm night; a cooling breeze blew across the fissure. He looked towards the place where he had spoken with Hahta that morning, but there was no sign yet of the girl.

He heard movement from a hut further down the clearing to their right. Hahta, he thought, leaving to keep her rendezvous.

The figure that emerged from the hut, however, was not Hahta. He watched as Leah stepped out into the moonlight. She turned, beckoned and a second figure joined her: Rahn.

And with him was a third settler.

Lania whispered, “It’s the girl...”

His first thought was that the Elders had found out about the rendezvous, and were preventing it. But there was no signs of struggle or protest from Hahta; she walked off down the clearing, between Leah and Rahn, as if this late night promenade was a regular occurrence.

Lania said, “She looks... drunk, or drugged.”

Carew stared at the girl and saw that indeed there was something mechanical about her movements, unresisting and compliant.

The trio moved off down the clearing, passing the serried huts, until they were almost lost from sight.

“I wonder where they’re going?” he murmured.

Her tongue nipped between her teeth, Lania looked at him. “There’s only one way to find out.” She grabbed his arm. “Come on.”

They crept from the doorway of the hut, the double moonlight sending their shadows sprawling to their right as they followed the three figures. Lania lay a hand on his arm, counselling wariness, and they slowed their pace.

Carew expected the trio to turn into one of the huts at any moment, but they kept on walking and, perhaps five minutes later, passed by the last of the huts. Lania’s grip tightened on his arm. “They’re heading for the long-house.”

She dragged him into a gap between two huts. They came to the margin of the jungle behind the huts and ran west, parallel to the clearing. In a few minutes they came to the last hut and paused, ducking down and watching the trio approach the long-house.

The Harvester beneath the thatch was a dark shape, and at this distance it was impossible to discern the slightest detail. The trio came to the long-house and stepped into its shadow, and Carew saw that there were other settlers there who greeted them.

Lania leaned towards him and whispered in his ear, “Into the jungle, Ed. We’ll be able to get closer to the long-house, see what’s going on in there. And they won’t be able to see us. Okay, keep close.”

Then she was gone, a fleet figure at his side one second, and the next vanished into the jungle: in her jet black smartsuit, it was as if his shadow had detached itself from him and fled.

He followed. She was waiting for him, took his arm and pulled him along after her.

They passed through the undergrowth without a sound, moonlight flashing through the fronds like blades of silver. He felt his heartbeat loud in his ears.

Lania slowed, turned and placed a long finger before her full lips. She trod with exaggerated steps through the shrubbery, as stealthy as a stalking cat.

Something eclipsed the moons to his left: the dark, square bulk of the long-house. Lania continued for another ten metres, then settled into a crouch. He knelt beside her and she reached out and eased back a broad leaf.

A group of settlers stood in silence before the head-end of the new Harvester. Carew watched as Leah knelt before the creature’s probing trunk and offered it something – a husk of fruit? – then stood and made way for Rahn to do the same. Then it was Hahta’s turn and Carew knew then that she was definitely drunk or drugged: she stared ahead with wide, unseeing eyes, and her movements were stiff, automatic.

Behind her stood the two younger settlers, Jarl and Keer, and when their turn came, they too offered the swinging proboscis a chunk of gourd.

It appeared, from the reverence of their movements, that they were making an offering to the new Harvester – supplying the creature with the first of many meals to come.

Carew wondered if that was the extent of this ceremony; they had fed the beast and now they would return to their huts. But another voice told him that there was more to come.

He glanced at Lania and was struck by how beautiful she appeared in the moonlight, with her rounded brow and flat nose, her jet hair swept back and gathered behind her head.

She saw him looking and pulled a grim face.

He returned his attention to what was happening within the long-house.

The five settlers had moved from the head-end of the creature and now stood with their backs to the jungle, facing the flank of the Harvester. Carew judged they were perhaps three metres from Lania and himself. His breathing sounded loud in the silence and his knee joints creaked as he shifted position minimally. He winced, fearing discovery, and tried to control his breathing.

One of the settlers was intoning something, some religious incantation, some paean to the mighty Weird, the giver of all that was good in the universe.

Then Leah and Rahn turned to face each other. They remained like this, face to face, for perhaps a minute, their expressions in shadow. They reached out and embraced, and Carew thought that the embrace had about it the finality of a farewell gesture, while the rational part of his mind told him that this could not be so.

Then they disengaged and Rahn turned and faced the flank of the Harvester.

Jarl and Keer stepped forward and approached the creature. They were carrying something between them, a container into which they dipped their hands. What they did next disturbed and surprised Carew – and evidently Lania, too, as she jerked back involuntarily and glanced at him, her expression screwed up in distaste.

Jarl and Keer reached out and anointed a slit in the flank of the Harvester. Jarl began at the top, Keer at the bottom and massaged their hands – smeared with a thick, oily fluid – up and down the length of the pink, shining labia, something almost sexual in the passion with which they worked.

Slowly, the vertical slit responded to their ministrations and began to part.

Jarl and Keer, their duty done, stepped back.

Carew’s heart pounded. He felt dizzy. He didn’t want to watch what was about to happen.

A second later Rahn stepped forward. At that moment a frond fell before Carew’s face, and when he waved it away Rahn had disappeared.

He blinked. He looked at Lania, saw his shocked expression mirrored in her face.

He looked back, but there was no Rahn. He had vanished, as if he had never been.

Then Hahta stepped forward, walking like a zombie, and Carew wanted more than anything to shout out loud, to leap forward and stop whatever was about to happen.

Hahta moved towards the glistening slit in the flank of the Harvester, and as he watched the aperture opened wider to receive her, and she was drawn inexorably within.

He felt a hand on his arm as Lania grabbed him and hauled him away, through the jungle. He stumbled after her, his only thought to get away from there, to get back to the others and warn them.

Only then was he hit by the thought that the girl, Hahta, had been punished for speaking to him.

Lania gave an abbreviated scream to his left and he heard a brief, frantic struggle. He turned in panic. Something whipped around his waist and lifted him off the ground. He tried to scream but a warm wet mass fastened around his mouth – something soft and rubbery and terrible.

He was pulled off his feet, dragged through the undergrowth, carried by a creature which possessed immense strength and speed. Then whatever had taken him climbed and swung through the air, and he had the dizzying sensation of travelling high, far higher than he should have been if his abductor had been a mere human being.

“Lania!” he called out.

Then his head connected with something solid.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

L
ANIA SCREAMED AND
knew terror as she had never known it before.

What was happening to her was unbelievable, could not be happening. She screamed again, not wanting to believe that she was thirty metres above the jungle floor and travelling at speed in the arms of... of what?

She was like the rag-doll plaything of an ape, except that whatever had abducted her was supporting her back and head solicitously. She was aware of its great strength as it swung through the jungle canopy, leaping and diving, and she knew that, had it intended to kill her, it could easily have done so. Therefore, it wanted her alive. And Ed?

She rose and fell with the creature, the motion making her feel sick. She saw flashes of green vegetation, a starlit sky, then the ground far below. She tried to twist her head to see what was carrying her, but the thing held her fast in arms. It felt slick and wet and rubbery. No, not arms – she was gripped merely by one arm, while the other was employed to swing through the treetops. This she could see, a thick, muscular appendage that grabbed and released branches and vines in quick succession, launching itself from tree to tree with great powerful swings. She thought back to what she had seen just minutes ago: Rahn and then the girl Hahta, absorbed into the Harvester, and her mind revolted.

She cried out Ed’s name, then made a concerted effort to twist her head and look to her right where she heard a clattering through the foliage.

She saw Ed, floppy in the arms of...

She closed her eyes and screamed, but when she opened them again the monster and Ed were no longer in sight.

Had she really seen the thing that held Ed as it swung through the jungle canopy, or had she hallucinated?

It had been man-shaped, but of an umbilical, new-born purple-blue, a hideous thing corded with veins, with great powerful arms and legs, a domed head featureless but for two great, black, circular eyes.

Why had the settlers not mentioned these monsters that haunted the jungle? Why had they kept quiet about these simian tree-dwellers when they had told of the Weird?

Unless, of course, they
were
the Weird.

For a second she found herself almost upside-down, gasping and staring down at the jungle floor. And there, far beneath her, she caught a fleeting glimpse of two tiny human figures, darting through the forest and looking up at her from time to time.

The sight filled her with hope. The settlers had sent people after her, to wrest her away from these monsters. She wondered if they were armed. She tried to recall if the settlers had carried weapons, or had spoken of them, but she had no recollection of either. How, then, would they effect her rescue?

She tried to fight, to kick her legs and move her arms so that she might swing at her captor. But the single arm pinned her tight to the hot, wet torso and she was powerless to resist her abduction. She closed her eyes and fought to keep the contents of her stomach in place as she pitched and rolled through the air. She had once piloted the
Poet
through a meteor hailstorm in the Barnard’s Star system, but though fearful, she had been fuelled by adrenaline, in control of the situation, confident of surviving the ride. Now she had no such confidence, was not in control, and felt not an iota of the same adrenaline course through her, just fear.

They seemed to swing through the treetops for hours on end: she would not have been surprised to see the hemisphere of the supergiant heave itself into sight, heralding the end of night. Would their flight ever cease? Where were they taking her, and why? One scrap of comfort was the fact that she was not alone, that the monsters had taken Ed too.

Then it seemed that the creature slowed in its manic swinging from tree to tree; it felt as if it were walking upon something solid. She screwed her head away from its chest in order to see where they were going.

They were in the very upper canopy of the jungle, and a scintillating dazzle of starlight, like a chandelier, illuminated a magical scene. Pendant from high branches were dozens of orange globes; at first she was unable to work out how big they were – the size of flyers or as small as oranges? – until she saw that they were connected by a network of walkways, and upon these swaying bridges scurried the tiny figures of human beings. She saw a woman duck into one of the orange spheres and knew them to be dwelling places high in the jungle canopy.

They slowed still further and she saw that the creature was carrying her along one of the walkways. At length they entered a globe, and she found herself inside a circular space with curved, ribbed walls.