Brown, Eric

by Helix [v1. 0] [epub]

  The following morning, at breakfast, he met Bruckner again. The man was just as impeccably attired, and still insisted on wearing his trademark wraparound shades.

  He drank orange juice across the table from Hendry and gave an outline of what the new arrival was to expect over the next few days. He would undergo basic training—nothing that should prove too taxing, given his prior experience in space—along with a regime of physical exercise. Before all that, he would meet his five colleagues in the maintenance team. In a little under a week they would take a shuttle up to the Lovelock, where cryo-technicians would put them under for the long sleep.

  “And you?” Hendry asked as Bruckner was about to rise and leave.

  The official smiled and resumed his seat. “You mean, am I coming along?” He shook his head. “I applied but was rejected. Middle-management hacks are not in high demand for the colony the ESO plans for out there.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Bruckner nodded. “But if you think I’m doing this out of altruism, well...”

  Hendry wondered what possible reward there might be, other than job satisfaction, in working on a project like this.

  Bruckner went on, “This is the low-down, Hendry. Switzerland as a functioning state is dead, kept alive artificially by the ESO. And even our time is finite. We have contingency plans, however; islands north of Denmark, where we’ve started self-sufficient colonies. When theLovelocklaunches and things get too bad here, we plan to evacuate there and try to keep some semblance of culture alive.” He shrugged. “For how long, I don’t know. Put it this way, my wife and I don’t plan to have children. And if that seems cynical... well, you think what it might be like to remain behind.”

  “Touché,” Hendry said.

  After breakfast he was introduced to Sissy Kaluchek and Lisa Xiang, respectively a cryogenics specialist and a pilot. They were in the gym, going through the series of set callisthenics devised by the physio. They broke off to come over, introduce themselves and chat awhile. The rest of the team, they explained, had been passed fit and rewarded with a day off.

  Kaluchek was a tiny Inuit, whose wide dark eyes and high cheekbones—and the fact that she was perhaps fifteen years his junior—reminded him of Chrissie. He liked her immediately, something confiding in her hesitant smile and softly spoken demeanour. Xiang was in her late thirties, a muscular Taiwanese whose forthright manner struck Hendry, after so little human contact for years, as disconcertingly abrasive. “Welcome to the team,” she said in a strong Californian accent. “We call ourselves the second-stringers. I mean, lucky, or what?”

  Kaluchek rolled her eyes. “You call us the second-stringers,” she corrected.

  That evening they sat around a table beside the pool as waiters served them the finest food Hendry had eaten in years, and he met two further members of the team.

  Greg Cartwright was a bright-eyed American pilot, impossibly young, who gave the impression of being overawed by the fact that he’d been being plucked from oblivion and sent to the stars, granted, as it were, a second chance. He chattered happily about the mission, going over the smartware programs with an enthusiasm the others found obviously amusing.

  Friday Olembe, by contrast, was in his late thirties and taciturn—and the little he did say struck Hendry as cynical.

  The African listened to Cartwright enthusing about what they might discover out there, then said, “So even if we do find a habitable planet, what’s the chances of us not messing it up like we did this one?”

  Cartwright opened his mouth to speak, but fell silent as Xiang looked up. “Haven’t you read the mission brief, Olembe?”

  “From beginning to end, boss.” The way he emphasised the last word suggested to Hendry that Olembe had an issue with the Taiwanese woman’s role as team leader.

  “Then you obviously didn’t take in the way we’re going to go about building a new society, did you?”

  Olembe stared at her. “So many words. I heard similar words from the UN about Africa, years back. And we got fucked over royally, even so.”

  Xiang shook her head. “There’s a big difference now. No one else is in control. We are. Our destiny’s in our own hands.”

  The African pulled a face. “Give me a break. You’re beginning to sound just like the mission brief, Xiang.”

  Hendry noticed Kaluchek staring at Olembe with ill-concealed dislike. “And you,” she said, “are full of shit.”

  Olembe was about to reply, but stopped himself as a tall woman walked to the table carrying a tray. She had an oval face, dark hair drawn back, and moved with the poise of a ballerina. She set her tray beside Hendry, nodding to him in greeting and said, “Carrelli, team medic.”

  Xiang said, “If you’re so down on our chances out there, Olembe, why did you accept the position?”

  Everyone around the table turned to look at him. Olembe simply shrugged and said, “You been to Lagos recently?”

  The Italian medic sat back, watching the exchange. She said nothing, but calmly ate her meal. Hendry wondered how much her insularity was a personal characteristic, and how much the consequence of being the sole survivor of the terrorist bomb that had killed her five former team members.

  That night Hendry sat beside the pool, alone. Over the past few years he’d never given much thought to the heavens, other than gazing once or twice at the full moon, and the red spark of Mars on the horizon. Now he stared up at the magnificent spread of the Milky Way and found it impossible to credit that soon—subjectively, at any rate—he would be out there among those burning points of light.

  * * * *

  TWO /// AGSTARM

  1

  Ehrin Telsa lefthis mother’s mansion and skated along the ice canal between the looming, monolithic buildings that crowded the centre of the city. Agstarn was quiet this early, just after dawn in the second month of deep winter, and few citizens braved the razor winds that sliced down from the surrounding mountains. Those who did venture out wore padding so thick they resembled globular summer fruit. The only creatures that could go abroad without some form of protection were the stolid zeer, great shaggy beasts used by the jockeys to haul carts and taxi-sledges. They plodded slowly along the canals, their breath misting the air like ectoplasm and their manure, dropped prodigally all along their route, melting the ice and creating hazardous potholes.

  Ehrin kept an eye out for these pitfalls, but his thoughts were elsewhere. His mother had died a week earlier, after a long illness, though Ehrin had found it hard to mourn the passing of the woman whose heart had been as hard and unyielding as the glacial ice that surrounded the city in deep winter. It was what she had told him on her deathbed, and his subsequent discovery, that unsettled him now.

  One week ago, hours from death, she had gripped his hand and raised herself with the fanatical strength of the dying and stared into his eyes. “Your father was a strong man, Ehrin. He had principles. But sometimes principles can be your undoing. He defied the Church to his cost...” And here, to Ehrin’s exasperation, and despite his prompting, she had relapsed into a fitful sleep. She regained consciousness only once more, to rant incomprehensibly about vengeful Church militia, before her breath rattled like a ratchet in her throat and her eyes glazed like turned zeer milk.

  During the days that followed, through his mother’s bleak interment in the permafrost of the central cemetery and after, he had dwelt on her words.

  The subtext was that Ehrin’s father had defied the Church on principle, and suffered. But how had he suffered? He had owned the biggest dirigible company in the city, supplying the Church itself with the machines, and had owned a great mansion on Kerekes Boulevard overlooking the winter gardens. He had been a genial, happy man right to the end... He had died test-flying an experimental dirigible when Ehrin was ten, and the loss had affected Ehrin in two ways: he had experienced a physical pain as if something had been torn from the cavity of his chest, and mentally he had resolved to continue his father’s work, to make the Telsa D
irigible Company even bigger and better.

  Late last night, while going through his mother’s hoarded belongings, he had happened upon a sheaf of letters from his father, which she had kept tied with string in a locked chest in the attic.

  The return address of one particular letter had caught his attention and sent his heart racing. He had never known that his father had travelled beyond the confining mountains of Agstarn, but here was an envelope bearing the address of Sorny on the very edge of the western plains—and presumably delivered the two thousand miles to Agstarn by carrier hawk.

  The letter had been surprisingly brief. Dated fifteen years earlier—just months before his father’s death—it was barely a page long and described the living conditions in the town of Sorny, on the edge of the circumferential sea. But more interesting than the litany of hardships his father was undergoing was what he read in the final few lines: “I have neither the space nor the time to describe here the terrible things K and I have seen today. That will have to wait until I’m with you again. With all my love, Rohan...”

  The terrible things... What can his father have meant? Ehrin had gone through the other letters his father had sent from Sorny, had discovered nothing other than the gruelling conditions suffered by the expeditionary force and the locals. Could it be this that his father referred to, the starvation, the attention of wild animals from the ice plains?

  With his father dead, and now his mother, it would appear that the secret had died with them... but for that mention of K.

  Could it be, Ehrin wondered, that the mysterious K was none other than Kahran Shollay, his father’s business partner and now Ehrin’s partner in the Telsa Dirigible Company?

  As he took a sharp bend in the ice canal, heading for the foundry on the edge of town, Ehrin was aware of the letter in his jacket pocket, like a burning coal next to his heart.

  The foundry occupied the last three blocks of a terrace of ancient mills on one of the oldest ice canals in Agstarn. His father had once explained that the foundry had to be positioned on the edge of town so that the dirigibles, once constructed, could be launched without the hindrance of surrounding buildings: the entire west-facing wall at the end of the terrace was a vast sliding door, through which the magnificent dirigibles were inched, with much pomp and fanfare, on the day of their maiden flights.

  It was a dark, dour industrial area, the surrounding stonework stained with the coal dust of centuries. Against this, the bright fires of the foundry showed cheerily through doors and windows along the length of the building. Within the foundry, the tiny figures of workers could be seen going about their business, dwarfed by the smelting ovens, the mammoth crucibles and the rearing skeletons of the partially completed dirigibles.

  Ehrin skated towards the entrance, kicked off his skates and hurried into the fierce heat of the shop floor.

  He was sweating within seconds, perspiration running into his eyes and creating an impressionistic blur of half-naked workers toiling in hellish conditions. He tore off his padded jacket and climbed the wooden steps that gave on to the office area. Kahran was not at his desk this morning, and Ehrin wondered if he had fallen ill again. Approaching one hundred, Kahran was stubbornly proud of his health and fitness, though of late he had succumbed to a succession of viral infections. Ehrin had been unable to tell the old man to slow down, take it easy: Telsa Dirigibles was Kahran’s life. While most men of his age had retired gracefully, Kahran refused to let up and came into work nine days of the week.

  Ehrin passed through the offices and came to a second flight of stairs, which gave access to the long attic that for five years, since coming of age and inheriting the company, Ehrin had made his home. It was crammed with overstuffed armchairs and sofas, and lined with rickety bookshelves; many of the old tomes had been his fathers, dry engineering treatises alongside more readable accounts of adventures in the eastern and western plains.

  A semicircular window looked out over the outskirts of the city and the towering peaks of the western mountains. Before it Ehrin had placed his favourite armchair, in which he spent most of his working day going over paperwork, checking blueprints and poring over the order books.

  He smiled at the irony. As a boy he had dreamed of adventure, fancied himself as an explorer blazing a trail in one of his father’s skyships, opening up the land to east and west... Instead, he had become an engineer, and not even a hands-on engineer at that; the responsibilities of running the family business had taken him from the shop floor, even from the drawing office, and tethered him to his father’s desk, which he had lately abandoned for the more comfortable haven of his armchair. His younger self would have snorted in contempt.

  He watched the occasional dirigible float over the city, proud that the majority of the ships were of his own, or his father’s design. There was another airship company in Agstarn, run by an old rival of his father’s, but their ships were inferior products, “Full of stale farts and bad technology,” as his father had joked on more than one occasion.

  He looked across the dim room, to the desk on which stood the black and white photograph of Rohan Telsa. He was dressed in a severe full-length summer coat, high white collar and stove-pipe hat, but the formal dress did nothing to quench the fire of geniality in the old man’s eyes.

  Ehrin, surprisingly, found himself choked with emotion. His father had died fifteen years ago, and he thought he had overcome his grief. Perhaps he was weeping for his mother, for the loss of both his parents, for the fact that he was now alone in the world. How proud his father would have been of him, and how they would have discussed their latest airships long into the early hours.

  He chastised himself for his self-pity: he was not alone at all, for he had Sereth, his fiancée—and how she would have remonstrated with him at his display of piteous emotion.

  He heard the door creak, followed by a discreet clearing of an old throat.

  “Kahran, come in.” He turned and watched the old man, bent almost double now, advance across the threadbare carpet. Ehrin indicated the second armchair, and beside it the decanter of spirit, and Kahran smiled at the invitation.

  How age had ambushed his father’s business partner, folding his spine and greying the fur of his face. His breath came in laboured wheezes as he took his seat and carefully poured himself a tot of spirit.

  “To the Company,” he said, and raised his glass high. Three fingers of his gnarled right hand were without nails, stumps that appeared obscenely naked. Ehrin recalled that his father’s hands also bore testimony to his days on the shop floor of the foundry—doing the manual work that Ehrin, as the scion of the Telsa family, had been spared.

  Ehrin smiled and said, “To the Company,” and wondered at asking Kahran about his father’s letter—and about what his mother had told him on her deathbed: that his father had defied the Church to his cost.

  He was wondering how to frame the question when Kahran said, “When are you expecting the word, Ehrin?”

  The question caught him unawares for a second, until realisation came: recent events, his mother’s death and the discovery of the letter, had pushed from his mind the tender his company had put in to prospect the plains to the west of the central mountains.

  “Today,” he replied, “if indeed today is the thirty-third.”

  Kahran’s thin smile hyphenated his sunken cheeks. “It is...” He paused, then said, “And if you win the tender?”

  “If we win the tender,” he corrected the old man gently. “Why, what do you think? We will go ourselves, on the adventure of a lifetime, and make the company even richer and greater than ever.”

  Old grey eyes watched him with a hint of censure. “And for ever be in the talons of the Church.”

  Ehrin shook his head. “The Church runs everything, rules everything, knows everything, Kahran. There’s no getting away from that. Whatever we do, we are inextricably bound with the Church.”

  Kahran looked away. “How your father would hate to hear you speaking t
hus,” he said with bitterness.

  “I’m being realistic, Kahran. Perhaps it was different in my father’s younger days. Perhaps the Church has gained in power over the past decades. The fact remains, I’m no pious worshipper at their totalitarian altar. I despise their methods as much as you do, but I’m in business and responsible for the livelihood of hundreds of workers, and if the Church sees fit to commission the expedition...” His shrug eloquently completed his statement.

  “You’ll take the commission, submit to the dictates of the Prelate, no matter what burdensome stipulations they impose upon the company?”

  “Now you impute that which is not yet stated,” Ehrin began. “What stipulations?”

  The old man shrugged. “The Church will guide with a draconian hand, as is their way. They will demand an exorbitant share of the profits, or dictate exactly where you might prospect, and where is out of bounds.”