Brown, Eric

by Helix [v1. 0] [epub]

  Kyrik turned and gestured to the others. Quietly, they filed away around the prow of the gondola, slipping through the falling snow like ghosts.

  Despite the chill, Ehrin was hot.

  Sereth spoke to the leader, more than the usual questions or short statements this time. She stopped and said in a whispered aside to Ehrin, “I’ve offered them food and knives. They don’t seem interested. They’re convinced we have people to trade.”

  The leader barked something.

  Sereth looked stricken. “God in the Grey,” she intoned. “They want people, and won’t leave till they get them.”

  Ehrin nodded. “Okay...” His throat was dry, and his legs felt suddenly weak. “Listen. Tell him that we might have someone... Tell him that we’ll return to the skyship and bring them out. Ask him to give us five minutes.”

  Sereth nodded, fear stark in her eyes, and turned to the leader. As she spoke, Ehrin watched the rider closely, trying to decipher his reaction.

  He heard Sereth out without expression, his gaze cold as he stared at the small city woman.

  Sereth paused, and the tribesman flicked his head in a quick gesture and barked his reply.

  “What?” Ehrin asked.

  She was smiling in relief. “He’s agreed. We can go. They will wait five minutes, then meet us back here with two zeer in exchange for... one of us.”

  Ehrin took Sereth’s hand and edged around the gondola, fear prickling the nape of his neck. He almost dragged Sereth the last few yards to the Expeditorand bundled her inside. Cannak was in the lounge as they entered. He looked up from his tisane as they hurried through to the control room. “There you are. I was wondering...”

  The rest was lost as Ehrin pushed through the swing door into the control room and busied himself at the control pedestal. Cannak was not to be deterred. He followed Sereth and Ehrin, enquiring fussily, “If you care to tell me what—”

  “Not now, Elder. With respect, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  Sereth took Cannak to one side, explaining the situation. Ehrin heard the Elder say, “Little more is to be expected from those who live a godless existence.”

  He was about to start the engines when he remembered Kahran with a sickening lurch in his stomach. “Sereth, where’s Kahran? Check his cabin.”

  She hurried aft, returning seconds later. “He’s not there.”

  Ehrin cursed. “That’s all we need.”

  Cannak had taken a seat. He looked up quickly. “Where is he?”

  Ehrin ignored the Elder and powered up the engines. The dirigible was still moored to the ground, but he had little time to worry about that. The speed of their lift would remove the spikes effectively enough.

  The dirigible rose, came up against the pull of the hawsers and strained. Ehrin accelerated. A hawser snapped, and then a second spike came flying from the ground and struck the gondola. The ship lurched forward suddenly, freed from its moorings.

  The gondola swayed, bringing a cry of alarm from Cannak as he attempted to save his tisane.

  Sereth was beside Ehrin. “Kahran?”

  “With luck he’ll still be in the ziggurat. I’ll come down right outside it and hope he’s somewhere close by.”

  Sereth pointed through the window. Ahead, the freighter was rising slowly and turning ponderously on its axis. Below it, Ehrin made out milling tribesmen staring up the dirigible in fright and consternation.

  As he watched, someone raised a weapon and fired. He saw the quick squib of its detonation, and a spark flew from the coachwork of the freighter. The dirigible lost no time and ascended.

  Seconds later the Expeditor was racing above the heads of the tribesmen. They scattered in a melee of snorting zeer, but not before firing on the fleeing dirigible. The metal of the gondola rang with the impact of their bullets.

  If they were to aim higher and damage the engines or the envelope... Ehrin tried not to dwell on this as he lofted the dirigible and made out the bulk of the ziggurat to starboard.

  He set the dirigible on a course around it, hoping that Kahran was still indeed within the building. If he had ventured out, alerted by the noise of their departure... Sereth was kneeling on a window seat, pressing her snout against the window and giving a running commentary. “They’re following the freighter, Ehrin. The trouble is, the freighter’s following us...”

  Ehrin swore to himself. He had his hands full with directing the dirigible, without signalling to the freighter to make its own course away from the ziggurat.

  He cut the engines and the Expeditor dropped, buffeted by the gales that raged around the ziggurat. Below, the base block loomed. He set the dirigible down with a clatter that jarred his bones and set up another protest from the Elder. The Expeditor settled, but without the stabilising hawsers it swayed in the gale like a child’s balloon.

  “Stay here. I’ll be right back. If he isn’t there...” He had meant to say that if Kahran was nowhere in sight, then they’d leave without him, but the words stuck painfully in his throat.

  He dashed to the hatch, hauled it open, and plunged out into the blizzard.

  He was mere yards from the long opening at the base of the ziggurat. He ran through the raging gale, blinded by snow, and entered the relative calm of the giant chamber. The wind ceased its keening wail, and he was enveloped in sudden stillness. He stared up the length of the chamber, sure he’d see Kahran there.

  There was no sign of the old fool.

  “Kahran!” he yelled, his voice echoing eerily from the walls, repeating his cry with diminished urgency.

  He ran a hundred yards, impelled by desperation. There were no niches in the sloping walls where Kahran might have been, and the space at the end of the chamber—where the altar would have been, had this really been some kind of temple—was open and offered no place of concealment.

  Ehrin turned, calling Kahran’s name again, and knew for certain now that the old man had left the ziggurat.

  He ran back to the entrance, going over and over his decision to flee the tribesmen, and wondered if he might have handled the situation any differently.

  He emerged from the ziggurat into the full force of the blizzard, his breath snatched from his lungs.

  To his right, the Expeditor swayed back and forth, only the weight of the gondola anchoring it to the ice. Even as he watched, the wind dragged it little by little away from the ziggurat. It was only a matter of time before it toppled, ripping the envelope.

  He peered into the blizzard, but saw neither the freighter not the pursuing tribesmen.

  He was about to run for the skyship, all hope gone, when he heard a feeble cry to his right. It came again. “Ehrin? Is that you?”

  His heart leaping, he peered into the raging storm.

  A figure emerged, dragging his bulky camera. “Ehrin! You should have seen it! Amazing! I caught it all—just minutes ago!” He emerged from the snow, beaming like an idiot, tears streaming from his rheumy eyes.

  Suddenly, beyond Kahran and the bobbing shape of theExpeditor, Ehrin made out the swelling envelope of the freighter. Below it, charging towards them in a stampede of snorting zeer were the tribesmen.

  Ehrin grabbed Kahran without ceremony and, almost pulling him off his feet, dragged the oldster towards the dirigible, the legs of his tripod clattering across the iron-hard tundra.

  “You should have seen it!” Kahran was saying.

  Only then, as they approached the open hatch of the dirigible, did Kahran perceive the danger. The tribesmen were a hundred yards away and closing. For a second, Kahran’s eyes registered shock, before Ehrin yanked him inside and slammed shut the hatch.

  He ran to the pedestal, powered up the engines, and yelledfor everyone to hang on as they surged into the air, the gondola swinging wildly as the engines screamed in protest and carried them ever further from the plain and the pursuing tribesmen.

  Sereth came to him and buried her face in his chest, while Cannak gripped a handrail with a shocked expression. Kahran was
seated on the floor, his short legs sticking out before him as he cradled the precious bulk of his camera.

  Ehrin, despite the fear still sluicing through his system, or perhaps because of it, laughed as he stared at the oldster.

  He oriented the dirigible, found the freighter to starboard and signalled for it to follow. Down below, the tribesmen were lost to sight in the concealing snowstorm.

  Kahran looked up at him. “I was leaving the ziggurat when it happened, Ehrin. I heard a sound, louder even than the wind. I looked up. What I saw...” He shook his head and stared across at Elder Cannak. “How can your religion explain this, Elder? I saw a great column sweep through the air, a silver tentacle wider than any city block, and miss the summit of the ziggurat by yards.” He patted the timber cabinet of his camera. “I have it here, Ehrin. Proof of what I saw. Whatever it might have been...”

  Ehrin looked at Sereth. “The tribesmen’s arm of God,” she murmured.

  He adjusted the steering, and the Expeditor headed west at speed.

  * * * *

  FIVE /// THE ZIGGURAT

  1

  They stood before the long viewscreen and stared up into the morning sky.

  High overhead, forty-five degrees above the horizon, was what looked like a thin, cloud-shrouded ribbon. Hendry followed its progress to the west and saw that it described a vast parabola through the sky, curving down until it was lost to sight to the left of where the Lovelock had crash-landed.

  Sissy Kaluchek peered, then pointed like an excited child. “There! There’s another one above the first, but still beneath the sun.”

  Hendry strained his vision and saw that she was right. Another ribbon, or tier, curved high above the original. As he tracked its course through the sky, he saw that it joined the first in what appeared to be a vast celestial spiral.

  “It’s like a great spring wound around the sun,” he said. “We haven’t landed on a planet—we’ve landed on a... a helix.”

  “The lowest tier of a helix,” Olembe said.

  “Or the highest,” Kaluchek put in. “Depends on how you look at it.”

  Olembe shrugged dismissively. “Whatever. But there’s something I don’t get,” he said. “ESO told us we were heading for a planet in the Ophiuchi system, right? They said nothing about a helix.”

  “Maybe they didn’t know about it?” Kaluchek said.

  “Yeah, right,” Olembe said. “Think about it. That thing out there is massive. How much light would it reflect from the sun? My guess is enough to make the sun, when seen from Earth, look far too bright for its spectral type. They would have noticed that back on Earth, believe me.”

  “The fact is,” Hendry said, “that no one noticed it, not the ESO, nor earlier astronomers. Why the hell not?”

  Olembe said, “There is one answer. The light from Zeta Ophiuchi takes just over five hundred years to reach Earth, okay? So maybe this thing was... builtless than five hundred years ago.”

  “Built?” Kaluchek echoed. “You mean that thing... this helix... didn’t evolve naturally?”

  Olembe laughed. “Get real. It’d defy all the cosmological laws known to man. Something as complex as the helix just couldn’taccrete.”

  The only sounds in the lounge were the steady bleeps emitted by the workstations.

  “And if it was built,” Olembe went on, “then it was built for a reason.” He laughed. “Looks to me like we’ve stumbled on one of the wonders of the universe.”

  They stared out through the viewscreen at the spiral display.

  Olembe said, “Okay, so there’s a possibility we just might get out of this mess alive. But we’ll have to leave the ship, move up that damned spiral till we come to a warmer region. Joe, get on a station and see if telemetry can tell us anything about this place.”

  Hendry left the viewscreen and slipped into a seat, attached the monitors to his head and attempted to access the relevant systems.

  Olembe said, “I’ll be back in a second.”

  “Where you going?” Kaluchek asked.

  “Breaking out the weapons,” he said as he hurried from the chamber.

  Hendry patched through to the limited telemetry recordings made by the Lovelockduring the crash-landing, then directed the scopes towards the spiral high above.

  Carrelli slipped into her own station, head bent as she worked. Sissy Kaluchek remained before the viewscreen, staring at the helix in the sky.

  A minute later everyone looked up when Olembe pushed into the lounge carrying an armload of laser rifles. Hendry pulled the leads from his skull, watching the African hand out the weapons. Sissy Kaluchek grimaced at the rifle thrust into her hands. “I’ve never fired one of these things before,” she said.

  “Dead easy,” Olembe said. “Press the red activate pad and point it in the general direction of the enemy. They’re heat-seeking.”

  “And what if the things that killed Lisa are coldblooded?” Hendry asked.

  The African grinned. “Good point. In that case, just make sure you hose the laser around plenty.”

  Kaluchek looked across at Hendry and pulled a sarcastic thanks-a-bunch face. Hendry smiled in sympathy.

  Carrelli accepted the laser as if accustomed to the idea of toting around a deadly weapon. She checked the charge and nodded, laying it across her thighs with all the ease of a bored mercenary.

  Hendry took his laser and propped it beside the console, something about the sleek black weapon making him uneasy. The rifle was a physical reminder that, if they were to leave the wreck of the Lovelock, they would first have to venture outside and make their way to the storage hangar.

  Kaluchek said, “What about the colonists?”

  Olembe moved to a workstation and began typing. “I’ll set up a revival program for the back-up team in Hangar One. They’ll be awoken in a year, if we haven’t returned by then. I’ll download what’s happened, where we’re heading.”

  “A year?” Kaluchek said. “Will they be okay? I mean—”

  The African laughed. “They’ve been under for a thousand years. One more won’t do them any harm.”

  She stared at him with ill-disguised loathing. “I wasn’t thinking about a systems failure,” she said, “but whether or not the things that got Lisa might find some way in.”

  “My theory, for what it’s worth,” Olembe said, “is that the thing killed Lisa out of some territorial imperative. We invaded its territory, and it responded.”

  “You make it sound like some kind of primitive,” Kaluchek said.

  “It’s weaponry wasn’t exactly sophisticated. A bunch of swords and lightning speed. It didn’t eat Lisa, and it hasn’t tried to get in here for us—so I guess it doesn’t see us as a potential food source. So it probably wouldn’t assume the hangar is full of frozen protein snacks.”

  “Christ,” Kaluchek said, turning away.

  Hendry said, “We’ll come back, get the colonists, make sure Greg and Lisa have decent burials.” And Chrissie, too, he thought.

  Olembe nodded. “Amen to that.” He looked around the group, business-like. “Okay, Joe. What you found?”

  Hendry regarded the screen before him. “I patched into the ship’s limited observational telemetry system and programmed it to scan the helix.”

  “And?”

  “Its findings are pretty basic, but still amazing.” He looked at the three faces staring at him. “Okay, it worked out that there are four twists of the helix below the sun, and four above. We’re on the bottom tier, farthest from the sun, which accounts for the Arctic conditions outside.”

  “If the helix has eight tiers,” Kaluchek said in awe, “then the thing must be massive.”

  “Vast,” Hendry said. “According to the data, there’s sufficient landmass in the entire helix to contain over ten thousand planets the size of Earth.”

  Kaluchek was shaking her head. “But how does that work? If it’s one continuous strip of land all the way up and around...” she gestured outside, at the faint sun r
iding high in the sky, “then how do you account for the fact that the sun roseabout an hour ago?”

  Hendry nodded. “This is where it gets even more amazing. Each curving tier is made up of thousands of individual worlds—only they aren’t spheroids like planets as we know them. They’re more like barrels, or a better analogy would be like beads on a rosary, each world turning not on a vertical axis, but on a horizontal axis.”

  Kaluchek just shook her head, staring at him.