Brown, Eric

by Helix [v1. 0] [epub]

  Hendry went on, “It gets even more interesting. Between each one of these turning worlds is a strip of sea, around a thousand miles wide. And according to telemetry, each world is unlike its neighbour in terms of atmosphere, geography, meteorology...”

  He stopped, and the silence stretched. He thought of Chrissie, and how she would have relished the situation they found themselves in now.

  Olembe slapped his rifle. “We’ve wasted enough time talking. Let’s get moving.”

  “One moment,” Carrelli said. She indicated her screen. “I’ve been going through the secondaries’ telemetry. It picked up some images of the planet when we came down. I found this.”

  She pulled at her screen and swung it around so that everyone could see the image.

  Hendry made out a grainy picture of silver-grey land, with a square, blurred shape at its centre. Carrelli magnified the image and the blur resolved.

  It appeared to be the aerial view of a blocky building, foreshortened by the elevated perspective.

  Carrelli said, “It’s the only sign of anythingconstructed on this world.”

  Hendry said, “Where is it?”

  “About two hundred kilometres up-spiral from us.” She looked across at Olembe. “We’ll be heading that way, so why not make it the first port of call?”

  Olembe nodded. “That makes sense. Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it. Keep close. I’ll cover the front, Sissy and Gina the flanks. Joe, you cover our backs.”

  Hendry nodded, aware of the thudding of his heart as he rose and followed Olembe, Carrelli and Kaluchek from the lounge.

  * * * *

  2

  They rode theelevator plate down to the crushed lateral corridor and picked their way through the tortured debris. Hendry had brought along a softscreen, loaded with all the telemetry available from theLovelock’ssmartware matrix.

  He upped the temperature of his atmosphere suit and filled his lungs with cool, clean air. He felt a little dizzy at the prospect of venturing out again. He kept his gaze focused on Sissy Kaluchek’s slim back in the orange atmosphere suit as they approached the end of the corridor.

  Ahead, framed by the jagged perimeter of the corridor’s shredded walls, he made out watery light and a blinding expanse of snow marred by the charred wreckage of the starship.

  Olembe paused, unshouldering his rifle. “You all set?” When he received acknowledgement from the others, he said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

  Olembe stepped onto the ice, followed by Kaluchek and Carrelli. Hendry activated his rifle, followed the others and turned rapidly, stepping backwards and covering the rear with his levelled laser. He had a sudden memory of doing something similar as a boy in the outback, playing a heroic part in the Asian wars of the Fifties.

  In the cold light of day, the damage to theLovelockappeared even more devastating than it had seemed last night. The ship lay in a scatter of fractured sections, highlighted by the barren wastes all around. The only intact part of the ship, other than the hangars, was the leaning wedge of the nose-cone, and that had been excoriated and blackened in the crash-landing.

  Seconds later something caught Hendry’s eye and he drew a sudden breath. To his right, a bright slick in the snow provided the only splash of colour in the otherwise monochrome landscape. Lisa Xiang’s blood had flash-frozen as it spilled across the ice in an eerily symmetrical pattern like a Rorschach blot. He looked for any other sign of her remains, but saw nothing. He found himself wondering at Olembe’s assumption that Lisa’s killer hadn’t eaten her.

  He swung his gaze left, and his laser with it. Approaching the blood, from behind the microwave antenna, was a series of stark asterisks, a hundred divots chipped into the ice where the creature had advanced on pincers like ice picks.

  He was sweating. He felt as if the creature—or more than one of them, who knew?—was watching the frightened huddle of humans, biding its time before making its deadly approach.

  He heard an enraged call in his ear-piece. “Joe! For Chrissake!”

  He turned. The others were ten metres ahead. Olembe had paused for him to catch up. Hendry ran, turned and resumed his rearward guard. They were approximately midway between the nose-cone and the storage hangar, with around another hundred metres to go.

  He flicked his gaze left and right. Beyond the scatter of theLovelock’swreckage, the plain was flat and featureless. It seemed impossible that anything could conceal itself in that horizontal waste, other than if it burrowed into the permafrost. There was one alternative, of course: the creature might be hiding somewhere among the debris of the ship.

  To his right was the low, dark shape of Hangar Three, and he thought back to what he’d found in there. It seemed more than just twelve hours since he’d found Chrissie dead. Maybe some component of his grief, or his denial, was playing tricks with his memories, stringing out his time sense in a subconscious act of self-preservation. He felt tears sting his cheeks and tried to push images of his daughter to a place where they wouldn’t haunt him.

  Just a few weeks ago, subjective time, he was sitting beneath the awning in the starship graveyard, staring out across his vegetable garden...

  He fetched up against something and gasped, then felt a hand slap his shoulder and turned to see Sissy Kaluchek grinning at his funk. They were standing in the shadow of the storage hangar and Olembe was tapping the entry code into the hatch sensor.

  The hatch sighed open and they tumbled inside, Olembe securing the seal behind them. He pulled off his faceplate and grinned. “Round two to the human race.”

  Hendry gazed around him at the tumbled mess of machinery filling the chamber. The complement of six fliers had come loose from their shackles and bounced around the hangar, not only wrecking themselves but flattening other vehicles and storage units. Four ground-effect trucks were write-offs, though two had come through the crash-landing unscathed.

  For the next hour Hendry and Kaluchek went through the operating systems of the two surviving trucks, big tracked vehicles built to carry a crew of eight, while Olembe and Carrelli checked the trucks’ mechanics. The on-board smartware was in good working order. Hendry spent thirty minutes downloading all the functioning AI programs from the ship’s secondary caches.

  They stocked each truck with canisters of food supplies. Olembe said, “And when we run out... let’s just hope we find something edible on the next world.”

  “And if we run out of fuel?” Kaluchek asked.

  Olembe slapped the flank of the truck with affection. “They run off mini-nuclear piles, and they’re virtually everlasting.”

  “What about when we get to the seas?” Hendry asked.

  “The poor bastards who put the mission together even thought of that, Joe. These beauties are amphibious. Okay,” he looked around at his colleagues, “we’ll split into two teams of two. Any preferences, anyone?”

  Kaluchek said, “No offence, Olembe, but I’ll take Joe.”

  “No offence taken, sweetheart.” He grinned at Carrelli. “It’s you and me, Gina.”

  Olembe would take the first vehicle, Hendry and Kaluchek the second, keeping always within visible distance of each other. At night they’d sleep together in one truck, taking turns to mount an armed guard.

  Kaluchek said, “And how long before we come across a habitable world? Christ, we’ll have to travel a hell of a way to reach anywhere halfway warm.”

  Hendry had performed a few basic calculations back in the lounge. “According to telemetry—and it’s pretty theoretical guesswork, at best—if we take six weeks to cross the face of each world, and calculating a half degree increase in the temperature per world, then it’ll be in the region of five years before we hit a habitable region.”

  Olembe said, “Of course, then we have to find a world that checks out Earth-norm.”

  Carrelli smiled. “We’ve got time, my friend. We have plenty of time. The sleepers are going nowhere.”

  “I’d like to find Eden in my lifetime,” Olembe said. “O
kay, let’s get going.”

  They climbed into the pressure-sealed cabs, Hendry drawing shotgun duty while Kaluchek drove. The engine kicked into life and Kaluchek manoeuvred the truck into line behind Olembe’s. They rolled towards the hangar doors, which eased open as they approached, and passed out into the vapid daylight.

  Hendry peered through the sidescreen at the remains of theLovelock, a pathetic scatter of twisted debris, with only the nose-cone upstanding like an accidental epitaph to the colonists who had died. He averted his gaze from Chrissie’s hangar and looked ahead, across the featureless expanse of the ice-bound plain.

  Overhead, he made out the vast parabola of the tier immediately above theirs, and above that one, even fainter, the next swing of the helix, a tortuous road to the promised land.

  * * * *

  3

  For the firsthour of their journey, Hendry was scrupulous in scanning the expanse of icy wasteland stretching out on either side of their two-truck convoy. A screen set into the padded dashboard relayed the rear view, showing the parallel imprints of the trucks’ wide tracks. Long ago the dark irregularity of the crashed starship had dwindled into the whiteness, its disappearance opening up within Hendry a hollow sense of loss.

  Ahead, the first truck was a dark beetling shape, spraying snow.

  There was no sign of the creature that had killed Lisa. He thought back to the attack, the utter randomness of the event. If not for Olembe’s quick thinking, then he too would have fallen victim to the crazed alien... He shook the vision of Lisa’s spilled blood from his mind’s eye and looked ahead.

  As the minutes passed and it became obvious that there were no alien assailants within kilometres of the trucks, Hendry relaxed his guard, checking their flanks and rear only every few minutes.

  Kaluchek slouched in the driving seat, one hand adjusting the controls from time to time. She was still in her atmosphere suit, but had removed the hood and let her black hair fall to her shoulders. She had the round face of her people, the embedded slit eyes that gave her a look of withdrawn brooding. Since the crash-landing, she and Hendry had found themselves forming a strange bond of tacit understanding, in subtle opposition to Olembe’s machismo and Carrelli’s aura of quiet control. Not for the first time he found himself wondering at Kaluchek’s overt dislike of Friday Olembe.

  He tipped back his head and stared through the truck’s clear canopy. Like this, he had a perfect, three-sixty degree view of the helix. It corkscrewed up above him, its vast arcs getting ever thinner and fainter as it went. For the first time, he realised that each succeeding tier was a little wider than the last, so that the helix described not so much a spring whose arms were equidistant from the sun, but an oblate spiral.

  He stared at the tier directly above and made out the shape of clouds, and occasionally the very faint smudge of what might have been a mountain range. He found himself smiling in awe at the simple magnificence of the construct.

  Kaluchek looked across at him and said, “So... what do you make of the rest of the team?”

  He smiled. “Who in particular?”

  “Carrelli first.”

  He shrugged. “I can’t work her out. She gives nothing away. Even back in Berne she was inscrutable. I just put it down to her having lost five friends in the bombing. What do you think?”

  Kaluchek considered. “She’s a tough one, Joe. Did you see her back there? We were shitting ourselves, and she was as cool as ice. Did you get to know her at all during training?”

  “We exchanged small-talk, but she never gave anything away. I don’t even know if she had a partner, kids. You talk to her?”

  “I tried, but got nowhere. I got the impression she was watching us, trying to work us out, our group dynamic.”

  “An amateur psychologist,” he began.

  “I don’t think there’s anything amateur about her, Joe. I think as well as being a medic, she’s a shrink. Think about it—it’d make sense to have a trained psychologist along. And have you noticed how placatory she is, how she’s defused a few tense situations since we hit this lump of ice?”

  He smiled. “You don’t miss a trick, do you?”

  “What do you think I did as a kid, isolated in bug-fuck nowhere, Iceville, but watch people and try to work out how they ticked?”

  He was tempted to ask Kaluchek what she made of him, and why she’d chosen to partner him ahead of any of the others, but thought better of it.

  Instead he said, “And Olembe? Why don’t you like him.”

  She smiled. “That obvious, is it?” She paused, thinking about it. “Look, I know things about Olembe’s past that I don’t like...”

  He looked at her. “Such as?”

  She shook her head. “Later, Joe. Okay?”

  He nodded and fell silent. He remembered with a stab of guilt to check the surrounding land for marauding extraterrestrials. The ice was a blinding empty sheet on all sides.

  A few minutes later Kaluchek said, “Hey, you know, if you need to talk at any time, about what happened back there, your daughter and all...”

  He nodded quickly. “Sure, I’ll remember that. But I’m fine, really.” Even as he said the words, he realised what a ridiculous statement it was.

  He was saved further embarrassment by the sharp tone of the truck’s communicator. Olembe’s voice filled the cab. “Hey, Joe, Sissy, you seen what’s up ahead?”

  Hendry took up the receiver, at the same time scanning the wastes ahead of the first truck. “What is it?”

  “Two o’clock, about three kilometres away. Check it out on your mag-screen and get back to me.”

  Kaluchek was already thumbing the controls.

  The central section of the viewscreen opaqued for a second, then cleared. Revealed within its rectangle was the magnified image of what Olembe had spotted.

  “What the hell?” Hendry began.

  “Looks like a city to me,” Kaluchek said under her breath. “A city made of ice.”

  Hendry made out a series of silver pyramids and minarets scintillating in the weak sunlight. Kaluchek was right. It looked like a city, not constructed from metal and glass but from the only available material, a low skyline of blocks hewn from the ice and erected to form a sanctuary from the sub-zero temperatures that lashed the land.

  Hendry reached for the receiver. “Olembe, we’ve got it. What do you think?”

  The African grunted a laugh. “What do I think? I think we should leave well alone. You not seen them?”

  Hendry’s heart lurched. “Seen what?”

  “Our friends, the homicidal aliens. They’re teeming around to the right of the central minaret.”

  Kaluchek adjusted the controls and zoomed in on the ice-tower. In its shadow was a crowd of angular, skittering extraterrestrials. There were perhaps a hundred of them and they appeared to be armed like the first one they had encountered.

  Armed, he thought—or were those flashing blades merely a part of their biological armature? He wondered what they were doing, massing there before the minaret—observing some rally, a religious ritual? Or perhaps gathering for attack?

  Ahead, Olembe’s truck veered left, taking a detour away from the alien city. Kaluchek followed.

  “You think they’ve seen us?” Hendry asked.

  “If they have, they’re showing no indication of giving chase,” Kaluchek said.

  Hendry gripped his laser, wondering how effective his weapon might be against a horde of sword-wielding berserkers. He peered through the sidescreen as the minutes ticked by and they moved ever further from the city.

  “Five kay, Joe. I think we’re okay this time.”

  He nodded, breathing a little easier. The material of his gloves was soaked with sweat.

  Kaluchek relaxed visibly. “You know, chances are that we’ll encounter other races on our way up-spiral. Let’s hope that they’re not all as unfriendly as those bastards.”

  He didn’t reply, but considered the journey ahead, and the possibility that th
ey might indeed encounter other alien life forms.

  This moved him to consider Chrissie, and how she would have faced this opportunity with elation. As a teenager she had been obsessed with the idea of extraterrestrial life, filling her computer with images of aliens she had created herself.

  He was still dreaming of his daughter when the communicator sounded again.

  “We’re about three kilometres from the building Gina found,” Olembe said, “and look. Ahead, ten o’clock.” He cut the connection. Olembe’s truck was making a slow left turn, its tracks spraying snow.

  Kaluchek followed suit and Hendry peered through the viewscreen.