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Authors: Eric Brown

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BOOK: Helix Wars
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As a child he’d continually called the circuits ‘tiers’. But, as his father had never tired of telling him, how could you have a ‘tier’ in a continuous spiral? One tier phased into another, and who was to say when one tier became the next? He smiled at the memory of his father’s exasperation when trying to drum the concept into him. He’d finally cut the bottom from a plastic bottle and placed it over a lighted candle; then he’d wound a length of plastic-coated wire around the bulbous bottle in a creditable facsimile of the Helix.

“This is the Helix,” his father had said. “Now do you see? There are no tiers or levels as such, just one continuous spiral: four circuits below the sun, and four above, from circuit one at the top down to circuit eight at the bottom. It’s lazy to call these circuits ‘tiers,’ though that’s what a lot of people do call them.”

And to better illustrate the place where humankind now lived, his father had meticulously painted tiny sections of the wire blue and green, to denote the many worlds and seas that were laced on the spiral like rotating beads on a thread. “Not that this is to scale,” Ellis senior had pointed out. “There are thousands of worlds on the Helix, and only a few hundred on this.”

But Ellis had finally understood, and began questioning his father about the Helix, its construction and provenance, right up until his death twenty years ago, when Jeff had been fifteen.

His father – an administrator in local government – had never lived to see his only child join the Peacekeepers as a pilot. He would have been proud, curious as he was about the Helix and frustrated by the humdrum nature of his own chosen profession.

Ten thousand worlds
, Ellis thought to himself now in wonder.
And six thousand of them inhabited by as many alien species.

Most of those species were off-limits to the more technologically advanced races of the Helix, the Mahkan and the Jantisars and others who had attained spaceflight alongside humankind. The Builders, in their wisdom, had proscribed contact between the less developed races and those more advanced: the former had to find their own way on the long path of species evolution, with no influence from outside forces.

Ellis had come into contact with around a dozen alien races, but for the most part – with one exception – that contact had been fleeting and visual only. The exception was when he’d come to the aid of a Mahkanian vessel stranded between the circuits three years ago, an event which had led to the frequent reunions with the alien engineer whose life he’d saved that day.

And his contact with the Mahkanian had made him even more curious about the thousands of other races which dwelled on the Helix. He realised that he was probably just as frustrated in his own profession as his father had been in his.

His thoughts were interrupted by a soft tap on the door between the cockpit and the passenger lounge. The hatch opened and a small faced peeked through.

“Jeff! I thought it was you – saw you through the viewscreen when we were crossing the tarmac. Mind if I join you?”

His heart skipped and he tried to wipe the grin from his face. In the company of Abi Ajemba he was a schoolboy again.

He gestured to the vacant co-pilot’s couch and she slipped into it. She was about five feet tall, as slim as a twelve-year-old schoolboy, and as black as a ripe nightfruit. She’d once told him that her forebears, way back, had hailed from a country in Africa called Ghana. She was in her early thirties, but looked much younger.

“Had to get away from Doc Travers back there. Boring? Arrogant?” She laughed.

“I’ll try not to bore you too much, then.”

“’Sif you could do that,” she said with a shy smile, and looked through the side panel at New Earth passing far below.

He had first met her five years ago while ferrying peacekeeping officials around the Helix, and for some reason they’d hit it off. Conversation flowed with Abi; they had things in common – strict, conservative fathers, and a curiosity about the world their kind had left behind.

Now she glanced at him, smiling. “Still dreaming about Old Earth?”

“Not so much these days. That said... you know, it’s never far away.”

“I wish we had more history files,” Abi said. “Just more information about the place.”

So much had been lost when the colony ship crash-landed on the lowest circuit of the Helix over two hundred years ago. As well as losing a thousand colonists in the impact, countless com-caches and files had been destroyed, irretrievable information about all aspects of the planet they had left. Fortunately, the ship’s vast cache of deep-frozen animal embryos had survived the impact, enabling the colony to populate New Earth with many of the species that had once roamed Old Earth.

Abi screwed her lips into a tight loop. “And I’ll tell you what’s so difficult. Not only not knowing what Earth was like way back – but not knowing what became of it.”

He wanted to reach out and take the tiny woman’s hand, but stopped himself. He was more than just platonically attracted to her, but as ever found himself reluctant to escalate the terms of their relationship.

She went on, hugging herself. “I mean, what happened on Old Earth? Did the rest of humanity die out? Do they still exist – and if so, then in what conditions?”

He looked at her. “You feel guilty?”

She laughed and playfully jabbed his upper arm. “Of course not. Guilt’s your thing, Jeff. Not mine!”

He had confided this to her during one of their post-flight drinks in the terminal bar. He’d got a little drunk and found himself admitting that his default emotion these days – and, if he were to be truthful with himself, in the past too – was guilt. Guilt at not being at his father’s bedside when he died; guilt at the thought that he was living a good life here on the Helix while, for all he knew, the remnants of humankind were scraping an existence on an Earth barely able to sustain life. And guilt, he’d finished drunkenly, at the state of his marriage.

And Abi had reached out and taken his hand, raised it to her lips and kissed it.

Then the guilt had kicked in again and he’d withdrawn his hand, made excuses and fled.

“Just curious,” she said now. “I want to know what’s happening on Old Earth. Whether humanity survived, and in what condition. I mean, it was a hell of a long time ago. Humanity might have recovered, prospered.”

“Or we... they... might have perished.”

She fell silent, watching him, and he busied himself needlessly with the controls.

At last she said, “You’re an odd person, Jeff Ellis. Why all this pessimism?”

He shook his head. He was often surprised at other people’s assessment of him. He did not think of himself as a pessimist.

She said, “We’ve known each other... how long, now?”

“Five years, a little more?”

“Five years, three months and two days, to be precise.”

He looked at her, surprised.

“I was thinking about you the other day, thinking back... It’s a long time.” She paused, then said, “And you know, in all that time you’ve never mentioned Ben. Or rather you have, once, when you were drunk.”

Something closed up in his chest, tightened around the knot of pain in there. He said, “I don’t recall that.”

She reached out and touched his hand, her fingers hot. “You were very, very drunk, Jeff. Otherwise, I would never have known.”

He had no desire to talk about his son, to Abi or to anyone. He’d never even discussed with Maria what had happened that day.

Abi’s hand still connected them, warming. The seconds ticked by as they raced above the surface of New Earth. Her thumb moved across the back of his hand, stroking with an insistent, urgent rhythm.

She said, “Things still bad with Maria?”

He swallowed, made himself look at her. He nodded, and wondered if, with that single gesture, he was enabling a course of events which would eventually cause him to feel an even greater burden of guilt.

She almost whispered, “Just to say, I’m always there, Jeff. You know where I am if you need someone, okay?”

He looked away, stared through the viewscreen, at once apprehensive but, he had to admit, also excited. He nodded for a long time, until he realised that the action must look foolish, and forced himself to smile and reply, “Thanks. Yes. I know where you are.”

He wondered if, once the flight was over and they returned to Carrelliville, he would be able to go through with it and call on Abi... or if he’d attempt yet again to make things better with Maria, for all the good that would do.

She stretched, and with that simple gesture broke the tension in the cabin. He glanced at her chest, at the outline of her small breasts beneath the red material of her Peacekeepers’ uniform, and then looked away quickly as she said, “I’m looking forward to getting some furlough. I seem to have been doing nothing but work for the past month.”

“Busy time?” he said for want of anything better to say.

“When I’m not on a routine field trip, and there have been plenty of those these days, I’m sitting in front of a com making reports that no one will ever read. The files are shunted up to head office, where some fat-cat bureaucrat will ignore whatever recommendations I’ve made.”

“Tough. Ever thought of quitting?”

She grinned. “What? And miss travelling the Helix, seeing planets I’d never normally see, meeting bizarre and exotic life-forms? You kidding? I might gripe, but allow a girl a little gripe time, okay?”

He smiled.

“You know what?” she said. “I don’t know how most of the people dirtside can bear it. I mean, to see all the worlds stacked up there, swirling away above their heads, and know that they’ll never visit them. Must be so frustrating.”

“You’re lucky.”

“And you too, Mr Shuttle Pilot.”

He shrugged. “I’m no more than a glorified taxi driver. I ferry VIPs like you all over the place, and then I end up in a dull terminal building... That’s if I’m even allowed off the shuttle.”

She cocked her head, regarding him. “Maybe one day I’ll be able to get you along as my aide.”

He laughed. “Well, if you could...”

“I’ll consider it a mission, Jeff. Of course, chances are it’d be an overnight stay...”

He felt himself colouring and he covered his embarrassment with, “And today? D’rayni? I’ve heard it’s not that pleasant: cold, icy, ugly...”

“I’ve never been there before. This is a contact follow-up mission. The D’rayni are pre-spaceflight, but five years ago they contacted us. We made an initial peacekeeping mission to D’rayni then, letting them know who we are, what we’re doing here.”

“Do you know if the D’rayni recall their arrival on the Helix?”

She shook her head. “It happened over five thousand years ago, Jeff. They were stone age-equivalent. They had a lot of nature-god myths, but evolved out of them. And just a few years ago they learned the truth, from us, for the first time.”

He smiled. “Some responsibility you have.”

“And I’m very aware of that responsibility every minute of every day.”

“What’s the world like geographically?”

“Mountainous, oxygen-rich, and heavy in metals, which is how the D’rayni succeeded with such a rapid industrial revolution. Had their world been one along – Phandra, which is metal-light – they would still be hunter-gatherers, or at least pre-industrial.”

“What do they look like?”

“Squat, thuggish-looking humanoids. Quite threatening the first time you set eyes on them, but as gentle as lambs.”

“They sound interesting.”

She nodded. “They petitioned to expand their territory down-spiral – or at least asked our original peacekeeping mission if they might occupy an uninhabited neighbouring world. Of course we said we’d consult the Builders.”

“Even though the Builders have been incommunicado for almost two hundred years...”

She smiled. “The D’rayni don’t know that. The line we’re taking is that expansion is frowned upon, as who knows when any neighbouring world might be needed.”

Ellis was silent for a time, then said, “I wonder why the Builders clammed up after their initial contact with us?”

She shrugged her slight shoulders. “Who knows. They’re a law unto themselves. They’re almost...”

He glanced at her. “Go on. Almost?”

“I was going to say almost godlike.”

He laughed. “Don’t tell me that you’re a cultist!”

She feigned to punch him. “No way. I’m a hardened rationalist, and you know that. But it’s easy to see the Builders’ superior science as supernatural.”

There had been a fad, a few years ago among the youth of Carrelliville and beyond, which promulgated the belief that the Builders were deities who not only brought ailing species to the Helix, but had created them in the first place. The notion had soon been quashed, though Ellis knew that some people privately harboured not dissimilar beliefs.

Abi said, “Doesn’t your wife work for the Builder Liaison Team?”

He nodded. “She’s a doctor. Every few months they make a field-trip to the coast and tap on the side of the Builders’ ziggurat.”

“A pretty sophisticated tap, by all accounts.”

“Okay, the Liaison Team analyses microwaves and radio waves emanating from the ziggurat, or some such.”

BOOK: Helix Wars
11.37Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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