Brown, Eric

by Helix [v1. 0] [epub]

  Kahran was silent for a while. At least he said, “You asked me, months ago, if I’d care to accompany you on the journey.”

  “And you refused, claiming age and infirmity.”

  Kahran fixed him with his grey eyes. “Well, claiming the prerogative of the old, I’ve changed my mind. If the offer is still open, I would like to come along. I don’t like to think of you alone with the likes of Cannak.”

  Ehrin was of a mind to protest that he could handle himself in any situation, but said instead, “Of course it’s still open, you old fool.”

  “To think, Velkor Cannak, after all these years,” Kahran said, his eyes misting as he recollected the past. He looked up. “It should,” he said, “prove an interesting expedition.”

  * * * *

  THREE /// ICE WORLD

  1

  The Lovelock began to disintegrate while cruising at just under the speed of light. An explosion sheared the main drive from the starboard sponson and seconds later the port drive blew. The starship hurtled through the emptiness of space, breaking up and shedding a hail of debris in its wake.

  Hendry was dreaming about Chrissie when he came awake. He called her name, experiencing an aching, elusive sense of loss.

  The crystal cover of the cryo-catafalque lifted above him and he sat up quickly, overtaken by a swift dizziness. His last memory was of the smiling tech who’d put him under, and it came to him that the woman, and everyone else he’d known on Earth, would have been dead for generations now.

  He thought of Bruckner and wondered if the dapper German ever made it to the ESO island sanctuary north of Denmark.

  Only then did the wailing alarms and the shriek of the stressed superstructure penetrate his consciousness. Stuttering halogens blitzed his vision and across the aisle the sloping panel of the V-shaped cryo-hive had collapsed, revealing thrashing cables and banks of smouldering circuitry.

  His stomach flipped. He wanted to vomit, but his last meal had been digested—and its remains cleaned from his system—centuries ago.

  Further along the aisle he made out dark figures, their movements jerky in the failing strip lighting. Friday Olembe carried his bulk like a drunken quarterback, barging the corridor walls in a zigzag lurch towards the command unit. Behind him was the tiny bird-like figure of Lisa Xiang, tottering to keep her feet.

  The ship bucked and pitched. Hendry gripped the cold frame of the catafalque and rocked back into its padded cushions.

  “Joe! Let’s move it!” Sissy Kaluchek was already on her feet, punching Hendry’s shoulder as she passed. In her wake was Gina Carrelli, and Hendry was amazed by the expression on her face. She was calm, for pity’s sake. The ship was breaking up around them, Christ knew how many light years from Earth, and the Italian medic wore a look as beatific as a nun on judgement day.

  He hauled himself upright, rolled with the yaw of theLovelock and launched himself in the direction of his colleagues.

  He was the last into the cramped confines of the command unit, choking on the reek of burned-out electrics. Through the smoke and the jittery half-light he made out Greg Cartwright, already in the co-pilot’s sling, telemetry needles locating the bare skin of his arms and burying themselves under his flesh. As Hendry watched, swaying on the threshold, Lisa Xiang swung herself into the pilot’s sling. A dozen hypodermics arrowed towards her and seconds later she was integrated with the shipboard matrix, eyes rolling and whitening as she snapped out a litany of diagnostics.

  “Slowing,” she said. “Main drives ruptured. Running on auxiliaries. Greg?”

  “Copy. Sweet Jesus, how did this happen? Joe, AI status? Joe, for Chrissake!”

  Hendry moved himself, squeezing past Olembe at his station. He slipped into his cradle and slapped a series of dangling leads onto the receptor sites across his skull. He closed his eyes and concentrated, but achieved only a staccato integration with what remained of the ship’s smartware matrix.

  He felt as if half of his own senses were missing, a loss almost physical in its pain. His awareness should have been flooded with information from all quarters, a virtual schematic inside his head showing him the status of the starship. Instead, vast areas were dark blanks, and what did get through was scrambled, unintelligible.

  He called out, “Primary AIs down, getting nothing here.”

  He glanced at Kaluchek and Carrelli. Kaluchek, as the cryonics engineer, could do nothing in the command unit. Carrelli too was surplus to immediate requirements. They hung on to the pressure seal of the entrance, swaying like workaday commuters. Kaluchek at least looked scared, whereas Carrelli was still damnably calm.

  “Friday?” Cartwright said.

  The African engineer grunted. “Like the lady said, main drives blown. Auxiliaries running the show. For now.” He glanced at the screen bobbing on its boom before him. “Thirty per cent efficiency, and falling. They been hit by whatever knocked out the main drives.”

  “Any guesses what that was?” Carrelli asked.

  “No way of knowing. Malfunction, sabotage? Who knows?”

  Sabotage, Hendry wondered. The Fujiyama mob had got to know about the project and killed five of the original maintenance crew. Might they have succeeded in smuggling a bomb aboard the ship? How his wife would have laughed at his predicament...

  He reached out, ran fingers over the touchboard. He shut down the failed primary AIs, brought up the secondary banks and waited till they’d downloaded sufficient information to apprise him of current status.

  He concentrated and felt the patchy data seep into his sensorium.

  “Okay,” he said. “I have limited secondary capability.”

  Cartwright glanced across at him, and Hendry thought he saw pathetic relief in the American’s college-boy blue eyes. “What gives?”

  “We’re just over five hundred light years from Earth,” he said. As he pronounced the words, the reality sank in. “Which means... we left Earth around a thousand years ago.”

  Carrelli said, “So we must be somewhere near the destination system.”

  Beside him, Olembe shifted his sweating bulk. “Your secondaries capable of sorting out this shit and getting us flying again?”

  Hendry shook his head. “Data stacks only. The flight secondaries are as dead as the primaries.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Cartwright said, almost weeping.

  Hendry glanced past him, towards the dead wallscreen that should have relayed an image of deep space, had the telemetry been working. He didn’t know exactly why, but he would have found a sight of the stars comforting.

  He concentrated on the erratic data flowing into his head, trying to winnow vital information from the white noise of the failing system.

  How long before the starship blew, he wondered, killing him and his colleagues along with the four thousand peacefully sleeping colonists? And Chrissie...

  How could it all have gone so wrong?

  Then he caught something, a line of garbled code he pounced on and deciphered. “Lisa, you get that?” He hardly dared hope, but the spark sent his pulse racing. “Last operation before the primaries blew.”

  “Check. Destination program, based on observed data.” The pilot screwed round in her sling, smiling at him through her tears.

  Sissy Kaluchek said, “What? What is it?”

  “We’re heading for a planetary body,” Hendry said, “approximately a parsec away when we blew.”

  “Destination system?” Kaluchek asked.

  Hendry said, “It must be.”

  “But is the fucking place habitable?” Olembe snapped.

  Hendry sifted through the data, a sleet of maddening code like a migraine in his head. “No way of knowing. Any port in a storm.”

  “Je-sus!” Olembe shouted, hitting the padding of his station with a fist like a lump hammer.

  “Got it!” Cartwright said, swinging in his sling. Again that pathetic note of relief, foretokening an optimism Hendry found oddly unsettling.

  “Check,” Lisa said. �
��We’re coming down fast, too fast. Ship wasn’t built for this kind of stress. Approaching a gravity well. A big one.”

  Cartwright screamed, “Atmosphere suits, for Chrissake! Everyone suit up!”

  Kaluchek dashed back into the lateral corridor and returned seconds later with an armload of orange crashpacks. She doled them out like a kid at a Christmas party, the bucketing of the ship not helping the accuracy of her throws. Hendry retrieved his pack from the floor and pulled on the suit. He activated the filter and, after the smoke-thick fug of the command unit, felt the cold, clean air cut up his nasal passage and down his throat.

  “Greg, hold her steady while I suit up,” Xiang ordered.

  She squirmed into her suit in seconds, then took control as Cartwright struggled into his own-suit and resumed his sling,

  Hendry found the straps and crossed them over his torso, securing himself to his cradle. Behind him, Kaluchek and Carrelli were frantically grappling with their own straps.

  He thought of Chrissie, asleep in her cryo-unit and oblivious to the danger. He preferred to have it that way, rather than having her with him, facing the very real possibility of death on an alien world.

  Then he thought of the blow-out, the destruction of the main drive, and something went very cold within his chest as it came to him that whatever destroyed the engines might also have accounted for the cold-sleep hangars.

  He closed his eyes, feeling hot tears squeeze out and down his cheeks, and tried to sort through the storm of garbled data for some record of the sleep units.

  “Hitting the upper atmosphere in ten seconds and counting,” Lisa Xiang reported.

  “Here it comes,” Cartwright said.

  Hendry opened his eyes and found himself laughing. How many times had he and his team practised this emergency manoeuvre during that week in Berne, with Lisa and Greg battling ersatz Heaviside storms in the simulator? And afterwards, in the bar, Greg buying the beers, all bright blue eyes and ginger buzz-cut. He’d bragged about his success in that loud college boy way that Hendry had found oddly endearing.

  The image flashed through his mind’s eye, and then was gone, ripped away by the reality of the drop and the fact that even now Chrissie might be dead somewhere way back in deep space.

  The Lovelock tipped suddenly, precariously nose down. Something screamed behind Hendry, and his first thought was that it was Carrelli, losing her sangfroid. But the noise went on and on, and he knew it was the ship; some tortured lateral spar bending in a way not envisaged in the blueprints. Added to that was a constant, underlying thrum and intermittent explosions as bits of the ship were sheared off by the stresses.

  He found himself drenched in sweat and knew that fear was only partly responsible. The heat in the unit was climbing steadily as they plunged through the planet’s upper atmosphere. What would get them first, he wondered? Asphyxiation as the ship blew apart or cremation as the ceramic tegument lost its integrity and turned the unit into an oven?

  Cartwright was swearing steadily as he wrestled with the controls, and beside him Xiang kept up a running commentary to herself in Mandarin.

  Hendry tried to access the failing AIs, but banks were going down by the second, and what remained made little sense.

  Xiang called out, “Five hundred metres and falling fast. We’re nearly there. This is it. Hold on back there. It’s going to be one hell of a—”

  The impact seemed to go on forever. They hit something—that much was obvious from the rending scream of a million tonnes of starship fetching up against something just as implacable. Hendry was anticipating an explosion that would end it all, but as the Lovelock planed across the planet’s surface the scream continued, punctuated by a series of concussive detonations as the auxiliary engines blew one by one.

  Then the lighting failed and darkness like he’d never experienced before added to the terror. The ship hit something and flipped. Hendry was ripped from his webbing and felt himself falling. Someone screamed, the cry close to his head. He struck a surface with his shoulder, painfully. There was a deafening explosion, and instantly the searing heat was sucked out of the unit to be replaced by a bone-numbing cold.

  Seconds later, miraculously, the Lovelock came to a halt and silence filled the unit. Except, he realised as the seconds elapsed, the silence had been only relative. He heard the ticking of contracting metal, the uneven breaths and curses of his colleagues.

  The command unit had come to rest the right way up. Hendry was folded upside-down beneath one of the pilot’s slings, his weight resting painfully on his bruised left shoulder. In the darkness he attempted to right himself, the operation hindered by shards of bulkhead that had punched through the fabric of the unit like so many deadly blades.

  He felt something warm pouring onto his chest, imagined some hydraulic leak dousing him with flammable oil and shuffled backwards to get out of the way.

  “Okay,” he called out. “Okay, so we’re down. Everyone okay? Sissy?”

  He felt his heart lurch as a second elapsed, before the Inuit said weakly, “Here. I’m fine. A little shook up.”

  “Lisa?”

  To Hendry’s right, Lisa Xiang said, “Here. I’m fine.”

  “Gina?” he said. “You okay, Gina?”

  It was Sissy who replied. “She’s right here, beside me. She’s unconscious, but I think she’s okay.”

  “Olembe?”

  “Here. I’ll live.”

  “Greg?” Hendry said next. “Greg, you did a great job getting us down. Are you okay?”

  A silence greeted his words, followed by the sound of someone moving around in the rear of the unit. Kaluchek said, “I’m trying to find the emergency power supply, get the lighting up and running.”

  Hendry reached up and felt the fluid coating his chest. It was coagulating in the intense cold. He lifted the same hand, towards the source of the drip, and came up against the underside of the pilot’s sling, split like the rind of a ripe fruit.

  Kaluchek succeeded in rigging up the emergency lighting. Actinic brightness flickered, blinding Hendry and filling the unit with a harsh glare that picked out the wreckage in stark detail.

  A jagged section of the ship’s outer skin had imploded, slicing the co-pilot’s sling in two and with it Greg Cartwright. Hendry looked away, his stomach turning. It wasn’t only blood that had leaked. He scraped the mess off his chest, retching.

  Lisa Xiang was staring at Cartwright. “He brought us down. Without him I wouldn’t have been able...”

  Hendry gripped her hand, silencing her. Through the rip in the nose-cone of the ship he made out darkness, and distant stars, and what looked like a plain of ice glittering silver in the spill of the emergency lighting.

  He looked back along the length of the unit and saw Olembe and Kaluchek, just staring in silence at the remains of their dead colleague. He found the expression on their faces oddly more moving than the lifeless body in the bisected sling.

  Olembe was the first to react. “Okay, let’s move it!” He hoisted himself out of his station and helped Kaluchek drag the unconscious Carrelli from the unit.

  Shivering, suddenly aware of the intense cold, Hendry upped the temperature of his atmosphere suit and extricated himself from the tangled wreckage, following Xiang out of the unit and along the twisted corridor. They passed through the cryo-hive and into an elevator, then rode up to the crew lounge situated on the brow of the starship. Sunken sofa bunkers dotted the floor, and on three sides rectangular viewscreens would have looked out over the ice plain, but for the titanium shutters that had maintained the chamber’s structural integrity during the voyage.

  Olembe powered up the lighting and Hendry crossed to the forward viewscreen, leaning back to compensate for the pitch of the floor. He palmed the controls and to his surprise the shutters inched open, revealing an inky darkness relieved by a sparse pointillism of scattered stars.

  He stood and stared. Something about the arrangement of the distant points of light, the unfamil
iarity of the constellations, brought home to him the fact of their isolation.

  He peered down the brow of the ship. From this vantage point, little of the destruction of the Lovelock could be seen. He tried not to think of the hangars which contained Chrissie and the other colonists.

  While Kaluchek broke out a medikit and attended to Carrelli, Olembe swung himself into a workstation to assess the extent of the AIs’ failure. Hendry slipped into the station next to the African and attached the leads to his skull. He closed his eyes. At a quick guess, ninety-five per cent of the ship’s smartware was down, and the rest was firing fitfully.

  He tried to assess the damage to the hangars. The program routed to the cryogenic system was inoperable.