Wormhole by Eric Brown

Author:Eric Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857669988
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

19

Captive

Rima woke encased in vegetation, long tendrils coiled spring-like around her arms and legs. Her mind was a fug, thoughts confused, scrambled. A dark veil lifting slowly, slowly.

She was not encased: she was imprisoned. Those coils were not a natural settling of vegetation, but a deliberate entanglement, too precisely positioned to be a chance configuration: manacles of living, pulsing tissue.

She screamed, the sound deafening within the confines of her helmet. The sound cut off abruptly. As she exhaled with the scream, the tendrils tightened across her chest, and she panicked that she might never be able to breathe in again.

She could see nothing, her visor obscured by growths. She wondered how deeply she lay embedded in the jungle.

Rima forced herself to inhale deeply, relieved that the tendrils across her chest relaxed as she did so. She held the breath, felt her heart rate slowing. Now was not a time for tachycardia and panic.

“Franco? Are you there?”

The comms channel hissed static back at her. Then – thank whatever god there might be – she heard a faint reply: “Rima? You there?” A pause, then he added in tones of awe, “Just how damned fascinating is this?”

If it had not been obvious before, then this response highlighted just how unlike Franco she was.

“Are you okay?”

“Hell, yeah,” he said.

“What happened? Did we escape the aliens?” She remembered the vaguely glimpsed grey figures scurrying through the confines of the jungle tunnel.

“Escape? Well I wouldn’t exactly say that.”

She sensed movement then. Pressure against her body, as if a weight pressed from above, cushioned by the springy vegetation. Then a scrabbling sensation, the tendrils that closed around her being pulled apart.

Light blinded her for a moment, just as she felt a release of pressure and the undergrowth parted from around her.

When her eyes adjusted, she saw a grey face peering down at her, oriented at one-eighty degrees so that for a moment she was reminded of the lack of up and down when she had been in freefall. Then the being was leaning over her.

The face vanished, then a moment later it – or another, different, creature – leaned over from the side. Large almond-shaped eyes studied her, jet black and unblinking.

The face disappeared instantly. These things moved so fast!

She felt more movement, a pulling at the vegetation around her, and at the fabric of her suit.

“No!” She feared they would damage the suit, breaching its protection.

She sat abruptly, triggering a flurry of movement. Grey figures retreating into the shadows of what was a chamber in the jungle growth.

To her left, Franco squatted on his haunches, grinning at her through a green-smeared visor. Tendrils of vegetation twined around his limbs, securing him in place.

“Did you see them?”

He had a knack for asking the blindingly obvious.

“Okay, Franco. Just tell me what’s happening, and your assessment of the situation.” She remembered Harrie Spier’s frustrations with the young exotic sentience specialist on their journey to Base West One – at Franco’s awkward manner and his inability to answer a straight question.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.