“Hope you brought some spades along,” Kaluchek said.
“There was a set in the truck’s storage unit,” Olembe said. “I’m going to crack the hatch, okay?”
They pulled up their hoods and sealed the faceplates of their atmosphere suits. Hendry upped the temperature against the imminent cold and unfastened his harness. Olembe climbed out, followed by Carrelli.
The wind buffeted Hendry as he opened the hatch and peered out, assessing the drop from the truck’s step. The ice appeared to be level, perhaps half a metre below the track. Hendry climbed down, then turned to help Kaluchek out.
The grey gloaming, which passed for daylight on this world, was light enough for them to make out the feature that had impeded their progress. The trench was perhaps a hundred metres long and five wide; it came up to Hendry’s shoulders.
Kaluchek was staring about her, frowning at Hendry through her faceplate. “Strange,” she said.
“What?”
“This. I mean... I know all about ice and snow, Joe. But this doesn’t make sense.”
He felt a prickle of unease migrate the length of his spine. “How so?” He glanced at Olembe, who was lifting a hatch on the side of the truck and handing out the short-handled spades.
“Maybe I’m being paranoid,” the Inuit said, “but this doesn’t look natural to me.”
Olembe looked at her. “Hey, sweetheart, we’re on an alien world light years from Earth. This isn’t the North Pole here. Things are different, yeah?”
Kaluchek pointedly ignored him, turned her back and examined the side of the trench. She reached out and touched the face of the ice, tracing something with her gloved fingers.
Hendry crossed to her. “What?”
She was shaking her head. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that the ice had been cut.”
Olembe was standing beside the front of the truck, staring at where its snub nose was embedded in the wall of ice. Using the bonnet as a step, he climbed up, then hoisted himself onto the plain of ice and looked down at them. Even at this distance he appeared a faint ghost in the mist that had suddenly descended.
“Okay,” he called. “I suggest we start digging up here. If we excavate a ramp, starting around five metres back... the four of us should have it done in no time.”
He moved away, out of sight across the plain. They heard the crunch of Olembe’s spade as it bit into the ice.
Hendry looked at Kaluchek. Her expression, framed in the rectangle of her faceplate, was worried. Carrelli was about to join Olembe by way of the truck’s bonnet, but stopped to say, “Are you two okay? Joe? Sissy?”
Kaluchek shook her head. “This isn’t right, Gina.”
Standing in the ice pit, with the wind raging above his head like a banshee, Hendry felt suddenly desolate and very afraid.
They all heard Olembe’s cry, a sudden grunt followed by a truncated exclamation—and then silence. Carrelli jumped onto the truck’s snout, peering over the edge of the pit and across the plain.
“Friday!” she called.
Hendry joined Carrelli, hauling Kaluchek after him. The hood dinted under their combined weight. They stood unsteadily, gripping the lip of ice before them and staring at ground level across the plain.
There was no sign of Olembe.
Only then did Hendry realise that he’d left his laser in the truck.
“Oh, Christ,” Kaluchek wept beside him.
Hendry opened radio communication and hailed Olembe. Silence greeted his call. “Olembe, for Chrissake, are you reading?”
“What happened to him, Joe?” Kaluchek sobbed.
Hendry reckoned that he could see for about five metres, though the depth of visibility was hard to judge; it was impossible to focus on the grey mist before them.
Carrelli said, “He fell—he must have fallen into another ravine like this one.”
Before Hendry could stop her, she had hopped up onto the ice. She squatted for a second, taking in the scene ahead, then stood and strode into the mist.
Hendry said, “Gina, switch on your radio, okay? Keep in contact.”
Through his headset he heard a crackle, and then her voice. “Okay, Joe.”
They looked over the edge of the ice, watching Carrelli peer ahead into the mist. She was perhaps fifteen metres from them now, moving cautiously forward, a step at a time.
Hendry was not sure what happened then. He heard a quick cry, almost an exclamation as if the medic had slipped. She fell onto her back, heavily, and seemed to be dragged forward through the mist. It was over in seconds. She was there one instant, gone the next.
“Gina!” Hendry yelled.
“I... I’m being—!”
Silence.
Kaluchek cried, “The lasers! I’m going to get the lasers!”
She dived from the bonnet, slipping on the ice then scrambling on all fours towards the slanting tracks of the truck. She used them as footholds to climb, then hauled open the hatch and pulled herself inside.
Hendry was about to start after her—gripped by a sudden fear of being left alone—when he felt something fasten tight around his neck, then a quick vicious pressure around his upper arms. Something was forced over his head and he was aware of being yanked from the pit and dragged across the ice.
He yelled, a cry inarticulate with terror. He felt something crash into the side of his head, the pain unbelievable for a split second. Then, thankfully, before either the agony became unbearable or the awareness of what was happening to him increased his terror, he slipped into unconsciousness.
* * * *
4
“Joe?”
Hendry groaned and tried to lift his head. His skull throbbed. He let it drop and stared into the greyness. He was aware of heat, and a terrible stench.
“Joe? You okay, man?” It was Olembe, speaking as if from a great distance.
His awareness faded. He was alive, at least. And so was Olembe. He was suddenly taken by the need to know that Sissy was safe, the desire overwhelming, but he could feel himself drifting back into unconsciousness.
Later, he was aware of voices. He was sweating, and the stench was just as strong, and this time he felt movement, a constant jolting sensation as if he were aboard some kind of rapidly moving vehicle. He kept his eyes closed, listening.
“They’ll be okay.” This was Carrelli.
“What about Kaluchek?” Olembe asked.
“I don’t think her skull is fractured, but she’s concussed. She’ll pull through okay.”
Hendry felt relief flood through him.
Olembe was saying, “... reckon they’ll do with us?”
A silence, then Carrelli responded. “If they wanted us dead, they would have killed us back there. They’re taking care of us, after a fashion.”
“How the hell do you make that out? First of all they beat our brains out, then tie us up in the back of a sledge—”
“And they have supplied us with pelts, to keep us warm.”
That explained the stench, Hendry thought, and the cloying heat. He was weighed down by a great animal skin, and his atmosphere suit was still set to combat the freezing temperature of this world.
“Wonder where the hell they’re taking us?”
Carrelli said, “To their leaders, in some town or other? These people obviously have some degree of organisation.”
“People?” Olembe half-laughed. “You call those thingspeople?”
“Whatever,” Carrelli said. She seemed too tired to argue the point.
Olembe grunted. “Just hope their leaders show more humanity than these bastards.” Then he laughed at the irony of his words.
“We will find out,” Carrelli said, “in time.”
Hendry gathered his strength, pushed off the stinking animal skin and struggled into a sitting position, his head throbbing.
Olembe helped him. “Hey, take it easy, okay? You’ll be fine. They clobbered you on the head, but Gina took a look and said you’ll be okay.”
Hendry blinked. They were sitting in some kind of open cart, which was sliding at speed across the ice. Olembe was sitting across from him. Carrelli sat beside Hendry, cradling Sissy Kaluchek’s head in her lap.
“Sissy?” Hendry managed.
Carrelli said, “She took a bad blow to the back of her head, Joe. I think she’ll be okay. Don’t worry.”
He looked at Sissy. Her expression appeared serene behind her faceplate. The hood at the base of her skull was discoloured with blood.
“The truck,” he said, more to himself.
“We’ve lost everything, Hendry,” Olembe said. “The truck, the softscreens, lasers, provisions...”
He glanced at Olembe. A dark stain covered the material just above his faceplate and rivulets of blood had run down the sides of his nose like tears.
He looked at Carrelli. “You okay?”
She smiled. “They spared me their clubs, just tried to strangle me into unconsciousness.”
He tried to move his legs, and only then realised that his ankles were shackled by some kind of leather thong, which was attached to metal rings set in the central timbers of the cart.
Olembe said, “I’ve tried to unfasten them. No way—they’re frozen solid.”
Hendry shuffled into a more comfortable position, his back against the cart’s sloping side timbers. From here he could see that a team of six shaggy animals—identical to those they had seen earlier— was drawing what seemed to be a sledge, judging by the hiss of runners on ice.
All around, he made out more of the animals, dozens of them, with hunched figures mounted upon their backs. The closest was perhaps five metres away, indistinct in the descending twilight. The creature riding the bovine-equivalent was small, and Hendry was unable to tell whether the pelt that covered its arms and legs was some kind of protective cladding or natural fur.
He tried to make out its face, desperate to know what kind of being had captured them, but at this distance all he could see was a faint, dark blur.
“We’re heading for the mountains.” Carrelli pointed ahead, and Hendry was surprised to see that the jagged peaks, which earlier had been hundreds of kilometres distant, now loomed close, their stark summits jet black against the perpetual grey sky. The sledge was approaching the foothills, a series of folds in the ice perhaps five kilometres away.
He looked at the medic. “You think the trap was set deliberately? They saw us coming and dug the trench?”
“Either that, or it was one of a series already dug, perhaps to capture the animals they use. They probably herd them towards the trenches, as prehistoric man did on Earth.”
“But these creatures are more advanced than prehistoric man, right?”
She nodded and indicated the rings in the floor. “They have metals, and we know that others of their kind have airships.”
“You think they’re the same people?”
“I wonder if two sentient races would be brought to the same world?”
Brought to the same world, he thought. “What kind of being would construct a helix and then populate it with sentient extraterrestrials?”
Olembe grunted. “Beings, Joe, who have the ability to do so.”
“Perhaps that was the wrong question,” Hendry said. “I should have asked, why?”
Carrelli gave her graceful shrug. “Who knows that, Joe? Perhaps only the Builders themselves.”
“The Builders,” he said. “At least now they have a name. You’ve christened them, Gina.”
She smiled, “Unoriginal, but it will suffice, for the time being.”
He looked around, attempting to assess the numbers of riders escorting their sledge. He could see a dozen or so, but occasionally became aware of more as their forms drifted in and out of the rapidly descending twilight.
He said, “Sissy was right. We should have listened to her.”
“Huh?” Olembe grunted.
“She said the trenches weren’t natural. If we’d thought about it, gone back for the lasers...”
“She was right,” Carrelli said, “but we didn’t act. There is nothing we can do now but attempt to appeal to these peoples’ higher authorities. If they have airships, some kind of sophisticated civilisation... perhaps they might be amenable to reason.”
Olembe laughed. “Sophisticated civilisation and amenability doesn’t always follow, Gina. Look at the Nazis, the Moroccan fascists this century.”
She considered his words. “My guess is that these people, or at least the makers of the airships, are progressive, curious. I think they will want to know more about the universe, their place in it... But look at this overcast. I think they know nothing about the helix. Perhaps we are their first visitors. We can tell them a lot about the universe, if they are willing to listen.”
“That’s a big if,” Olembe said. “And you’ve forgotten one thing—we don’t speak their language.”
Carrelli smiled at him through her faceplate.
Hendry considered where this was leading. “But even if we can communicate with their leaders in some fashion, what’s the chances of them being able to help us get to the next level? Dirigibles are one thing, space-going vehicles quite another.”
“They have the basis of a sophisticated technology,” Carrelli said. “With our instruction, they could perhaps help us develop a simple rocket to take us into space.”
“Great idea,” Olembe grunted, his tone suggesting he thought it highly unlikely.
“We’ve overlooked one thing,” Hendry said. “Perhaps each level has more than one ziggurat? For all we know there might be dozens of them dotted around each tier.”
Carrelli nodded. “There is that possibility.”
Sissy Kaluchek, her head in Carrelli’s lap, groaned and flailed an arm. The medic restrained her. “Take it easy,” she soothed. “You’ll be okay, Sissy. Lie back and rest.”
Kaluchek opened her eyes, stared up at Hendry. He smiled and reached out for her hand, took it and squeezed. Her eyes registered nothing but surprise and mystification, before she closed them again, her lips moving silently.
Carrelli felt for her pulse, attempted to judge her temperature by placing her hand against the brow of the Inuit’s atmosphere suit. “It’s good that she came round so soon,” she said. “I think she’ll be okay.”
Hendry retained his grip on Sissy’s hand, aware that Olembe was staring at him. He rested his head against the hard timbers and closed his eyes.
The feel of her hand, even through the layers of their atmosphere suits, reminded him of the time in Paris when Chrissie had fallen from her bike and cracked her head on the pavement. She’d been unconscious for hours, then rushed from the local hospital to a clinic specialising in head injuries. There, Hendry had been told that there was a possibility that, even though Chrissie would come round, she might have suffered some degree of brain damage. The next four hours, sitting beside her bed with her small hand gripped in his, had been the longest of his life. Chrissie was seven, and Su had left him a few months previously, and he’d wondered if things could get any worse than this.
Then Chrissie had blinked herself awake, and smiled up at him, and a Thai surgeon had checked her over and told him that she was going to be okay.
Sitting in the back of the alien sledge, Hendry wept as it came back to him... along with its corollary: Paris and the smiling surgeon, everything he had known on Earth... a thousand years gone, now.
“Hey!” Olembe’s exclamation brought his reverie to an end. “We’ve got company.”
Hendry opened his eyes and sat up. He heard the snort of the bovine animal first, as it shuffled up to the side of the sledge. The stench that was ever-present from the animal pelts increased with the approach of the living article. The sharp reek of ordure, urine and sweat hit his sinuses like a driven spike.
He turned awkwardly, hampered by the ankle shackles, and stared at the beast and its rider.
“We were captured,” Olembe said with disgust, “by monkeys.”
“Hardly monkeys,” Carrelli corrected. “More like... lemurs. But we can’t let ourselves be prejudiced by appearances. The fact that they captured us suggests a certain level of sophistication.”
Hendry stared at the creature perched upon the back of the beast of burden, and it stared back at him. It was mounted like a jockey, knees drawn up, small bare paws gripping an arrangement of leather thongs connected to the beast’s dripping nostrils.
The creature was small, perhaps the size of a ten-year-old child, and wore only a bandoleer across its torso. Hendry found something about its spindliness unsettling, but its face was more disturbing still. It was covered in blue-black fur and dominated by a sharp, vicious snout, above which were two big, black eyes. Obvious intelligence was at work behind those unfathomable eyes as it stared at Hendry and the others.
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