by Guy Haley
Then it was over. They burst through the wall of rain and light and into Nychthemeron’s nightside. She checked her radar: nothing. She feared for Sand, until a strong return pulse indicated that she too had come through. Mist drifted in patches below, and above them was a ceiling of cloud. They flew in the clear space between.
“Heya, honey,” said Sand. “That was pretty hairy, you all okay in there?”
“Yes,” said Kasia, although looking at Marcin, she thought she might be pushing the definition of ‘okay.’
“Alright, let’s fly on until I’m close to half empty, then let’s line up and fill you up.”
She didn’t say, “Then I’m going to have to say goodbye.” Kasia sensed it in her words.
“Okay, locking onto the locator beacon. Marcin?”
“Got it,” he said.
Kasia lined the plane up. Marcin kept a close eye on the radar.
They flew on, heading toward the chittering beat of the Syscore’s locator beacon. It repeated on a loop, the same tuneless, digital ditty, a break of half a second between each repetition. Dit-dit-dit-dah-dah-dit-dah-dit. Several hours went by. Lights moved in the fog. When the mist cleared, swathes of the landscape were carpeted in some kind of vegetation that gave out a phantom glow. Sand and Kasia talked now and then about what they could see, trying to match their vision to the radar screen, which pulsed with contacts large and small. Every so often, some huge, dark body would come toward them, flying fast, alive with gold and red lights, blue tips to its wings and tails. Kim was vigilant at her gunnery post, but Marcin engaged the EM deterrents, and the lifeforms swung away from them.
“So much light,” said Sand. “So much light in the dark!”
The sky was thick with cloud – perhaps the rains were building again – but every now and then the sky cleared and the travellers were afforded a view of the open heavens. While they flew under the canopy of stars, they were silent.
Eventually their fuel tank indicators made their alarms, announcing the time for the refuelling to begin and for Sand to return. Sand’s airplane drew in close, navigational lights winking. Kasia dropped back until she was trailing it. A long hose deployed from the rear of Sand’s plane, a cone on the end. Kasia lined the probe on the nose of her plane up with the nozzle. In-flight refuelling is difficult. Sand and Kasia had none of the benefits of computer systems or other guidance. They did it all by hand, eye and radar. It took many attempts, and Marcin grew anxious at their fuel consumption. Not for their sake, but for Sand’s.
With the gentlest bump, the line slid home. Lights on the dashboard lit up to show they were taking on fuel. It was done in fifteen minutes. Kasia eased back and dropped underneath Sand’s plane, then flew alongside them, waggled her wings in salute then turned and flew away.
“Be careful, honey,” Sand said. “When you come home, I’ll be waiting.”
KASIA WAS IN that nowhere space of concentration, where somatic function gives way to unconscious direction and the mind is freed to wander. She flew without thinking, toward the strengthening signal of the Systems core. The True Night was a marbled land of phantom green and utter black. Sparks of light moved over it. She moved through the clouds, a spark of light herself.
They were close when a loud return sounded from the radar. “Kasia,” said Marcin.
She shook herself into full awareness.
“Look,” he said, pointing. “Something’s coming.” He fumbled his map and instruments from his lap, adjusted the radar’s controls to get a better fix. “Something big. Keep an eye out there, Kim. Six o’clock, or thereabouts.”
“Got you,” said the girl. Motors whirred behind their heads as the gun turret swept round. “I’m not seeing anything.”
“It’s there alright,” said Marcin. “Very big. Activating EM deterrent, we’ll be radar blind for a second.”
The radar gave out ten fleeting pings as Marcin turned on the deterrent. It returned to normal. Kasia glanced at the round screen. “Has it gone?”
“Hang on... Maybe. Wait.”
A solid ping, a large return.
“No,” he said. “EM had no effect.”
“Okay,” said Kasia. She pushed forward, putting the aeroplane into a steep dive.
“It’s still coming.”
“I can’t see anything,” said Kim.
“Watch your seven. It’s getting closer... 700 metres. Can you see anything yet?”
“Dammit, Marcin, it’s pitch black out there!”
“No lights?”
“Nothing!”
Kasia pushed the plane faster.
“Still coming. It’s gaining. How the... We’re doing nearly 300kph. Impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible,” said Kasia. She kept switching her gaze to the radar screen and back again.
“Whatever it is, it’s big,” said Marcin, “and it’s changing shape.”
The return on the radar showed as a luminous green blob. With each sweep of their plane’s pulse, it took on a different form: first kidney shaped, then a long ellipse, then round.
“I see it!” shouted Kim. A second later, the guns rattled. They were loud, unsuppressed, the technology manufactured here more primitive than what they’d arrived with.
The shape was close to the plane. Kasia could not get the plane to fly any faster.
“What the hell? Crabhawk?” shouted Marcin behind him.
“No!” replied Kim. “Like a cloud, many lights. A swarm of something.”
They hit. Hard bodies rattled against the plane’s fuselage like hail. The din was terrific, Kim’s gunfire lost within it. “I can’t hit them!” she screamed. “They’re too small!”
Kasia glanced to her right, out of the window. Small things were scrabbling at the clear plastic. Hooked limbs scraped along as the creatures grappled with the plane. She saw a wide, tentacle-fringed mouth work against the glass, set under a long, comma-shaped body. Pale lights glimmered upon it; something like wings. Then it was gone, torn away by their speed. More took its place.
“Shit!” said Kim. “They’re all over us. What do I do?”
The cockpit too was getting thick with them; more were landing than were being torn away. There was an engine’s tortured cough, and the noise of the props diminished, replaced by a puttering sound. An alarm sounded, amber lights blinking frantically. “We’ve lost the starboard engine!” Marcin shouted.
Kasia struggled to compensate. Through gaps in the swarm she could see slick bodies all over her wing, disrupting the airflow and pulling it down.
More alarms. Another cough. “Port engine fouled!” shouted Marcin.
“Hang on!” shouted Kasia.
The rattle of the creatures against the hull changed in character, soft thumps as bodies hit bodies. The plane dipped. She pulled hard on the stick. Her flaps were clogged. A loud cracking noise, then a scream. Kim: “Get them off me! Get them off me!” She grew increasingly panicked, incoherent.
Kim’s screams cut out in their headphones.
Marcin glanced nervously at the hatch leading to the gun turret over their heads. “There’s nothing we can do, nothing!”
“Shitshitshitshitshit,” said Kasia. “Marcin, bail out!”
“The things! Kim! She’s dead.”
“Bail out now!”
Marcin hammered his seatbelt off. The plane was tilting. He staggered as he went backwards to the door. Wind roar filled the cabin as he hauled it open. Creatures flopped into the cockpit. He threw himself out without a backward glance.
Kasia wrestled with the stick, crying out as something bit into her shoulder. Then another. It became too much, and she released the stick, flailing at the creatures. The altimeter was spinning round and round.
A bang. Another bang. Rending noises, tumbling. She might have blacked out, she wasn’t sure.
She was suddenly awake. The stink of fuel hit her nostrils. She smashed at the belt release, fell forward with the tilt of the plane. Her ankle twisted painfully, caugh
t in the pedals mangled in her footwell, and she wrenched it free. There was a soft noise, of fuel igniting.
She staggered back, teeth digging into her lip at the pain in her foot. The creatures had stopped biting her; a few still in the cockpit moved feebly. Blood ran down her back. She grabbed her pack from the rack by the door, and stepped out into the night.
The plane was at an angle, nose down and top presented to her, in a tree that glowed pale green. In the firelight, through the shattered mess of the gun turret’s transparent cover, she saw the bloodied remains of Kim. And then the fire took hold, and she scrambled away as quickly as she could, pushing herself from tree trunk to tree trunk to save her injured ankle.
She was close enough when the fuel tanks exploded for the shockwave to send her sprawling. Liquid fire rained down; she beat frantically at her arm where it touched her. The strange, contorted limbs of the alien trees were alight with flowers of borrowed flame. Their foliage stirred, whisking back into the holes that lined every branch, leaving them bare.
A cacophony of animal noises sounded from the dark around her, a darkness made deeper by the glow of fire.
She ripped open her bag, panic making her clumsy. She found the first aid kit, snatched up her pad and quickly scanned her ankle. The machine gave its diagnosis and treatment. Not broken, lightly sprained, anti-inflammatories, pain management, rest.
She could manage the first two. Yanking a hypospray and a cannister from the first aid case, she lifted her trouser leg and pressed the cold plastic into her flesh. A hiss, a tickle, the pain receded. Her ankle salved, her arm throbbed, as if to remind her it was burned. Another scan, another shot of pain relief. Her back then, awkward angle. No toxins, not that the pad could detect. Two bites. She’d been lucky.
Cautiously she stood, placing weight as carefully as she could upon her injured ankle. It bore her with little complaint. She made an exploratory step; stiff, sore, but workable. That was one thing, she supposed.
The night was a wall of black beyond the fire. A rumbling call had her turning, breath catching in her throat. She strained her ears. Something moved off to her right.
The pop of flames was already dying. Nothing else but that and the thunder of her heart.
She was alone in the night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Kasia in the Nightside
KASIA LIMPED BACK along the line of devastation her airplane had carved through the forest. Fog insinuated itself into the trees. The light intensified, illuminating the mists with a pervasive, shadowless glow that challenged her eyes to make sense of it. Away from the wreck, the trees were garlanded with fronded leaves that moved with animal purpose, wafting in the air like anemones in a current. Limbs had been torn off the plants and cast to the ground, and she saw they were large, heavy, made of something like stone. Sap ran freely as blood from the wounded organisms, pulped flesh in revealed cavities. Where the plane had cut, they glowed dimly. She kept to the edge of the scar where the light was stronger. Her feet crunched on twigs like fingerbones. She shivered. With the fog came a chill, and her breath gusted from her mouth in clouds to mingle with it.
The further she went, the less damage to the forest she saw, until only by craning her neck could she make out broken spear tips of stone at the very tops, dark where they had been wounded. The forest became the insubstantial cathedral to some indescribable alien god; stone trees its pillars and vaulting, its walls of luminous chill vapour. The night-time noises returned, loud and terrifying. She saw many creatures flit into view and disappear again – insect analogues, strange bat-things with multiple wings, something like a cross between a millipede and a snake, swift and with a noisome stink; other creatures were shapes, they were nightmares. She lacked the mental architecture to process their forms from a single glimpse, they were too unearthly.
Larger animals moved around her; past her, toward her, she couldn’t tell in the fog. And the trees – the trees were not trees but sessile beasts. The feelers that protruded from the trunks glittered a hundred entrancing colours. She watched as small, ant-like things stroked at them with their hind limbs, gathering the fronds into bunches and then scuttling away. One of these ants was snatched up as it approached, and pulled inside the trunk with a watery hiss. Others of the same type were left alone.
She heard a cackle, and a thrash of movement overhead. She followed it, found simian shapes bouncing through the skeletal canopy. They converged on something with hoots of excitement.
She pulled a torch from her backpack, and flicked it on.
Marcin hung from the tree, his arms caught up grotesquely in his parachute lines. The monkey things fled from his corpse as she approached. His flightsuit was torn, blood glinted blackly on his legs. He had hit hard. His parachute might not have opened, or he’d made his jump too late. She couldn’t remember what the altimeter had read, all she remembered was the swarm, rasping on the fuselage. She didn’t know if she’d done the right thing. Marcin was dead in either case. She was sad for his death, and Kim’s, but not greatly affected. She had seen a lot of death in her lifetime. She would mourn when the situation allowed.
There was a noise in the forest, heavy breathing, the crash and crumble of the corals breaking. It was approaching her. She backed away, shone her torch into the dark. There was nothing. Her back met a coral trunk. A frond whipped her face, wet with caustic slime that burned her cheek. She stifled a cry and wiped at it.
The forest dimmed. Animals rushed away. The fronds of the trees retreated.
There came a snuffling, a louder bellow, and something huge burst through the fog and the trees into her circle of torchlight – massive shoulders, long arms ending in claws that curved halfway up its forearms, walking on its knuckles. Two pairs of lesser legs propelled it forward, twelve eyes lined its long muzzle. It carried no lights on its skin, which was mottled grey and black.
She turned and ran. The creature burst through the coral, its bulk shattering branches and cracking trunks as it pursued her. It roared loudly. Kasia ran, a hobble that was no match for the monster’s speed. She wove through narrow gaps, headed for larger coral trees to dodge through and behind, but the creature barely slowed. The rattle of its fists and feet on the bony litter of the forest drew closer behind her. She snagged her pack on a branch, and it was ripped from her. She fell forward, rolled onto her back, pedalled herself backwards as fast as she could, trying to get away.
The creature ran at her. It reared up, foreclaws unfolded to pin her to the ground. Its mouth gaped bright rows of teeth. There was the sound of a weapon, the rising hum of a rail gun. The creature’s face disappeared in a shower of black blood, and it fell onto its chest. It skidded to a halt by her feet, gave a last gurgling breath, and was still.
She scrambled to her feet, turned to run, and ran smack into a man who grabbed her upper arms in calloused hands. He held her with ease, and her treacherous body went limp.
She didn’t recognise him at first. His teeth were worn and brown in his mouth, his hair unkempt. His beard reached to his chest, and his skin was seamed with dirt. He stank too, in a pungent, bestial way. His smartsuit had died upon him, and was as filthy as its owner. But it was unmistakably Dariusz, the great betrayer, alive and well and looking at her.
“Dariusz?” she said.
He nodded. His mouth opened a second before he spoke, awaiting forgotten words. “Hello, Kasia,” he said. “It’s nice to see you.”
He looked past her, into the night. “Get your things,” he said abruptly. “Then we better go home.”
She stared at him. She could not imagine anyone surviving in this chill, midnight hell. “Home?”
He smiled. “My place.”
DARIUSZ LED HER through the dark, his railgun over his shoulder and a pistol at his side. There was a little more light here, intensifying as the strange land-corals of the nightside grew more thickly. The fog remained thick, and she lost all sense of where they were. Dariusz, however, moved unerringly. Small animals r
an up and down the trunks, bodies pulsing with vibrant displays of bioluminescence; ruby reds and blues the colour of broken glaciers, deep greens and rich, honeyed yellows. A pair of eyes appeared before her. They were a metre apart, and rose steadily into the air, a warning hiss emanating from between them.
“Dariusz!” she said.
Dariusz glanced at it. “Look closer. Don’t worry, it can’t hurt you.”
She walked towards the eyes carefully. The fog pulled back to reveal the trick. The eyes were spots on modified mouth rakes, belonging to a sinuous creature no bigger than her forearm. As she drew near to it, the rakes snapped shut, and animal raced up the quivering flesh of the beast-tree into an abscess. She gasped at it.
“It had no eyes. Why does it fluoresce?”
“Because the things that hunt it do have eyes, like the creature that attacked you, and the lights it makes are its camouflage, a trick.” Dariusz stepped over a root protruding from a coral chimney. It flopped around, clumsily reaching for him. “Watch your step here, the fronds and roots burn. Not too bad, but uncomfortable.”
“I know,” she said, and touched her cheek.
“Did you wipe it off?”
“Yes.”
He nodded.
“How did you know to find me?” she said.
“My ATV’s sensor suite still functions,” he said. “I tracked you as soon as you came into range. I plotted your course, figured you must be looking for the Syscore after its signal went up. I thought I’d try and send a signal or something. You shouldn’t have come, it’s dangerous here. What brought you down?”
“A swarm of... I don’t know how to describe them. Some sort of small creature in a swarm. They chewed through the airplane fuselage.”
Dariusz shrugged. “I am not familiar with those.”
“They were high up, a kilometre altitude. They died when we came down.”
