Helix (18 page)

“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
riding high in the sky, “then how do you account for the fact that the sun
rose
about 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.

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 anything
constructed
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.

They rode the
elevator
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 the
Lovelock’s
smartware 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 the
Lovelock
appeared 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 the
Lovelock’s
wreckage, 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. “Okay, 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 the
Lovelock,
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.

For the first
hour 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.