Doom Helix

by James Axler

  And that was a very good thing.

  Armed with a tribarrel laser rifle, Auriel was in no mood for curious stares. Mero lay on the brink of death; Dr. Huth had just notified her of that fact via com link. It was a message that she had been expecting—and dreading with all her heart. She had to be there, on-station, when Mero died. Standing witness to a fallen sister was her duty as commander, and her honor as a loyal friend.

  Before Mero had been sedated, between seizures while she was still lucid, Auriel had explained the dire situation to her. That there would be no mercy killing in her case. That she wouldn’t be euthanized like the stickies before the specters hatched out so Dr. Huth could perform analyses he had up until now been denied. Analyses that might be the key to their survival, and that were in fact their last hope for same. Auriel had explained that the fate of all the sisters hung in the balance.

  Ever the stalwart soldier, Mero had responded through clenched teeth, “I would’ve gladly given my life on any of the other worlds to save even one of my sisters. I’m going to die on this one anyway, I know there’s no way around it. This way I might be able to save my sisters. At least my death will have some meaning.”

  Mero’s acceptance of her fate didn’t make it any easier for Auriel to bear. Under the circumstances, what else could Mero have said? The situation was no longer in her control. And even though she loathed Dr. Huth as much as Auriel did, she was never one to whine or complain about a tough assignment. Of all the warriors for Auriel to lose, Mero was the least expendable.

  It had been a profound relief when Dr. Huth had finally rendered her semiconscious, when Auriel didn’t have to keep looking her in the eye.

  As the commander stepped through the mine’s brightly lit entrance, she asked herself for the thousandth time if she was doing the right thing here. For Mero. For the others. Did she have any choice in the matter? Could she trust Dr. Huth not to make a bloody mess of it?

  The options were few; the good options were none.

  Auriel didn’t blame herself for what had happened up to this point. She had inherited a situation that was a tightrope-walking over disaster. But this decision was all on her.

  Unbidden, her mother’s horrific last moments flooded her mind. A recurring flashback that she always did her best to smother. Now she let the tape run in its awful entirety. Auriel had never dreamed she would ever see Dredda, the bedrock of the unit, fall apart so utterly. At first, her disintegration was emotional, due to the pain, then it was physical—and impossibly violent. The lesson Auriel had learned was a hard one, and it struck deep: sisters might well be superbeings, but they were still subject to human doubt and suffering. They were still all too mortal.

  About twenty yards inside the entrance came the first of three newly installed chokepoints. Made of piled, laser-cut blocks of nukeglass, they narrowed the tunnel from both sides so it was just wide enough for a single ore cart to pass down the middle. This created defensible, hardsite emplacements for the sisters who were standing guard belowground. The strategically positioned sets of barricades had become necessary precautions because of the shift in mine operations since Mero had fallen sick. The looming catastrophe of a mass infection had significantly narrowed Auriel’s time window. She and her sisters had to have sufficient fuel to jump realities, and as quickly as possible. Which meant the gloves had to come off. Now two-thirds of the miners toiled underground around the clock. They were allowed just four hours of sleep in every twenty-four, and fed once a day.

  The new bottlenecks didn’t impede the steady flow of radioactive ore to the mobile processor aboveground, but they divided and funneled the slave force, eliminating the possibility that in the close quarters of the mine, with their 40-to-1 advantage in numbers, the laborers could surprise and overwhelm their masters, despite all their advanced weaponry and body armor.

  As Auriel passed through the gap in the barricade, the sister stationed there shifted her tribarrel rifle to her left hand, decloaked her visor and raised a black gauntleted fist in solemn salute.

  There were tears in the sentry’s eyes. Tears she couldn’t brush away because of the battlesuit helmet.

  Auriel felt a twinge of sympathetic pain in her gut. Bright, stabbing pain. Despite their technology, despite their genetic alterations, the sisters weren’t machines. They were mere flesh and blood. They loved. They suffered loss. They grieved. All the sisters had been informed of Mero’s sacrifice; they knew she was dying agonizingly for the cause. That her death was now imminent had been inadvertently broadcast through the com link by that thoughtless bastard Dr. Huth.

  Auriel picked up her pace. The knots of miners pushing carts in both directions yielded the center of the tunnel to her, either moving out of the way or bringing the carts to a stop so she could walk around them.

  Deeper below ground, past the second chokepoint and under the watchful eye of the sister manning the third, the slaves were hard at work, reducing the massif’s hot spots to portable-sized rubble. Pickaxes in the side seams crashed into walls in a resounding, constant clatter, human chains handed out chunks of ore, and dumped them into the carts lined up on either side of the tunnel. Under the string of widely spaced, overhead lights, the air in the main shaft glittered from the suspended glass dust.

  A tall man with an ax stepped through the sparkling cloud, partially blocking her path. He had a rag mask tied over the lower half of his face, and he was naked to the waist. Behind him stood a diminutive woman with short-cropped auburn hair. She, too, wore a face mask and held a pickax.

  Normally, Auriel didn’t permit the features of individual slaves to even register in her consciousness. Given the certainty and unpleasantness of their fate, any form of contact with them was counterproductive. But she did remember this man with the enormous dragon tattoo on his shoulder. She remembered his little auburn-haired friend as well. And looking at them now she sensed they had some kind of personal connection. Were they lovers? Brother and sister? Or maybe they had just joined forces in the slave camp in order to survive?

  Her visor’s sensors remotely measured Dragon Man’s pulse rate and blood pressure. That information confirmed what Auriel read from his body language: murder was on his mind.

  Her murder.

  From the way the corded muscles in his arms and chest were flexing and twitching, he wanted nothing more than to rear back and clobber her with his pickax. But the futility of a one-on-one attack was giving him pause.

  Seeing his indecision, Auriel knew that the tipping point hadn’t been reached yet. Sometime soon, though, this tattooed slave and all the others would realize that they had nothing to lose by turning on their masters. That they were going to be either worked until they dropped dead, or dragged into the superheated dark and pulled to pieces by packs of stickies.

  At present she had more pressing issues to deal with. Because even in the confines of her battlesuit, Auriel could move so much faster than the male slave who threatened her, he had no chance to step out of the way or deflect the full power of the shoulder strike she delivered to his midchest.

  The stunning blow bowled him off his feet and sent him flying backward, spread-eagled. He slammed into the side of an ore cart with his butt, and tumbled head over heels into the half-full cargo box.

  The display of sudden violence froze the other slaves close by, turning them into masked, glitter-dusted statues.

  Before Auriel could move past the knot of bodies, Dragon Man climbed out of the cart and attacked her, still clutching his ax.

  Her patience long gone, she thumbed the tribarrel’s power button. The compact weapon system came to life instantly, emitting a faint vibration that registered in her fingertips even through the battlesuit’s gauntlets.

  Ax cocked back, Dragon Man closed the distance. Above the rag mask, the whites of his eyes were a shocking pink, enflamed by the mine’s corrosive dust.

  Auriel didn’t particularly want to kill him because she couldn’t afford to lose any more workers at this
critical stage of the operation. But she didn’t want the other slaves to get the idea that their lives had somehow gained value, and that because of that they suddenly wielded a new power to influence events. Bottom line, it was pretty much of a toss-up whether or not she cut loose with the laser rifle.

  “Out of my way or you’re going to die where you stand,” she told him, her voice booming through the battlesuit’s external speaker, the tribarrel aimed rock-steady at his chest. “Move aside or I’ll cook your heart to a cinder.”

  “No, Ronbo, don’t!” the woman cried, throwing down her pickax and stepping between her friend’s chest and the black weapon’s clawlike flash hider.

  A touching display of selfless bravery, but Auriel didn’t allow herself to be moved by it.

  “You do realize that you’re not protecting him from anything,” she informed the woman. “The beam from this weapon will slice through both of you like you’re made out of paper.”

  “I know that,” the woman said, holding her ground.

  “Get out of my way, Ti,” Ronbo snarled. He was bleeding from a nasty two-inch cut on his left temple. When he tried to move her with his free arm, the little woman locked her legs, and lowered her center of gravity, and despite the disparity in size wouldn’t be budged.

  Auriel knew at most the pair had another four days of exposure before the rad sickness took hold and killed them. With any luck long before then, the sisters would have safely jumped to another replica Earth.

  “I’m going to let you two live,” she told them, “but only if you get out of my way, now.”

  Whirling, little Ti pushed Ronbo backward with both hands, then caught hold of and trapped the arm that was still wielding the ax.

  Auriel walked past them and as she did so, the other miners averted their eyes and hurriedly resumed their labor so they wouldn’t incur her wrath. She followed the main tunnel to the helix and took the spiral ramp down to the bottom level, and the entrance to the cramped corridor that housed the row of experimental cells.

  The shrill, animal sounds echoing down the burrow made her skin on her neck crawl, but she knew they weren’t from Mero’s death throes. Mero was too weak at this point to cry out. At the far end of the corridor, beyond the force field, wild stickies danced and leaped about in apparent celebration. The noise was them mimicking—and mocking—her sister’s suffering.

  A battlesuit-clad Dr. Huth stood in front of Mero’s cell, fidgeting nervously with a hand scanner.

  The intervening cells were empty but for drifts of ash and pieces of charred long bones, the remnants of Huth’s still-born experiments.

  When Auriel looked into the cell and saw the state of her friend, a galvanic shock shot through her. Mero lay on her back. Like the late-phase infected stickies, she was pinned to the floor by a boulder of massive, jutting belly. The skin of her stomach looked shiny, like an overinflated balloon; it had already begun to split, lengthwise, from the tremendous internal pressure. And worst of all, Auriel could see full grown specters moving under her tight skin, sliding back and forth, pulsating in near-unison. Though Mero was unconscious, her eyelids were open and her eyes grotesquely bulged from their sockets. Mero’s face and lips had turned a dusky blue.

  Her mother’s face looked like that, right before the end.

  “She can’t breathe,” Auriel said to Dr. Huth. “She’s suffocating.”

  “The specters have compressed her lungs and are squeezing down on her brain stem as well,” the whitecoat said dispassionately. “I’ve observed this same series of events in my other test subjects. It’s part of the entities’ ingenious hatching process. Slack muscle is much easier to delaminate and split than contracted muscle.”

  “This is unspeakable…”

  “Any second now,” Dr. Huth cautioned, his voice quavering with anticipation.

  There was still time to change the course of events, Auriel told herself. To end this. To destroy the wretched, evil things that were killing her sister.

  She reached for the incineration switch set in the tunnel wall. She flipped open the protective cover, and her hand hovered over the red burn toggle. Before she could act, flesh and blood exploded.

  It rocked Auriel back on her heels. There was no impact from flying matter; she was jolted by surprise and shock. Red liquid splashed the inside of the force field that blocked the cell entrance.

  Mero’s substance dripped ceiling to floor.

  No longer able to contain his excitement, Dr. Huth fairly squealed, “Infrared mode! Infrared mode!”

  Auriel used the helmet’s GRI to shift her visor view.

  The bright arterial-red curtain instantly turned brilliant chartreuse.

  A fraction of a second later the force field shrugged off the liquid insult, and what Auriel saw inside the narrow cell dizzied her. Dozens of lime-green specters, like flying eels, whipped around and around the walls and ceiling. They moved in a churning blur, elongating themselves into thin threads, reversing directions, searching every square inch of the cell for a way out. Or for something they could kill. Their frenzy and their ravening hunger were palpable.

  Under the frantic light show, Auriel could see what they had done to poor Mero. She was blown virtually in two, a ghastly, gaping wound from throat to groin, from hip to hip, from armpit to armpit, the stubs of her shattered ribs sticking out. Though Mero’s pain was clearly over, frozen on her dead face was a look of astonishment and horror.

  Auriel spun on her heel and seized hold of the whitecoat’s battlesuit around the throat. “What have you done?” she demanded, shaking him about inside the armor like a marble in a can. “What have we done?”

  “It was necessary,” Dr. Huth assured her.

  “If they ever get out…”

  Dr. Huth finished the sentence for her: “We will have to jump realities again, and very, very quickly.”

  In disgust, Auriel shoved him away. She stared at the captive, lime-green whirlwind. “Will they replicate while sealed up in there?” she said. “Will there be even more of them soon?”

  “That’s one of the things I hope to find out,” Dr. Huth told her. “Understanding and breaking their cycle of reproduction could be a way to eliminate them. I also need to analyze the before-and-after data to see what, if anything, was taken from Mero upon the instant of her death.”

  “And if nothing was taken? Then what?”

  “Then I have to start over fresh, with a new set of hypotheses, rejecting the premises I’ve employed so far. Premises that were based on a detailed understanding of the mechanisms of earthly biology. Ultimately though, I may even have to reject the application of biology to this problem.”

  “You’ve lost me, Dr. Huth,” Auriel said with impatience.

  “From the beginning,” he went on, “I have been proceeding on the assumption that these entities bear some faint resemblance to ourselves. That they process some kind of raw material for the energy to power themselves. That they reproduce with some variant of or alternative mechanism comparable to our DNA. That they grow in the same sense other living creatures do—from a few cells to many, from simple to complex internal function. So far, I’ve been unable to find evidence to support any of those assumptions.”

  “If all of those assumptions are wrong,” Auriel said, “what are you going to replace them with?”

  “I have to think in a completely different direction,” Dr. Huth said. “And I have already begun that process. For example, the endospores we have identified as alien may not be these creatures’ eggs after all.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can find nothing inside their protective shells. No genetic material. No DNA. No RNA. They aren’t bacterial. They aren’t viral. They aren’t, in any sense I can understand, alive. Nor do they seem to have the capacity of ever becoming alive.”

  “Then how are they connected to the specters?” Auriel asked. “What purpose do they serve?”

  “They may not be connected at all. Their presence could m
erely be coincidental. They could be unrelated artifacts.”

  “Then we are left with nothing.”

  “Not quite,” Dr. Huth said. “I first assumed the spores were living entities like the bacteria we are familiar with, but constructed of compounds of metallic silica instead of carbon. It is also possible that they are much simpler than that, in structure and in function.”

  “Simpler?”

  “It has occurred to me that the spores’ relationship to the specters may have more to do with direction than point of origin.”

  “Spit it out, Dr. Huth.”

  “They could be some kind of microscopic tracking or targeting devices.”

  “That makes no sense to me at all,” Auriel said in exasperation. “Where are the new clutches of specters coming from, if not from inside the spores? How are they getting inside their victims?”

  “Those are the questions I need to answer.”

  “And you had better do it fast,” Auriel warned him.

  As she turned to leave, a skewering pain doubled her over and dropped her to her knees. It was like being run through with a lance. Burning, tearing pain.

  “Are you all right?” Dr. Huth said, hurrying to kneel beside her.

  For a moment she couldn’t answer him. She had no air. Then as the initial wave of agony subsided, she felt it—the same sensation she’d felt before. Only this time it wasn’t a faint wriggling, a vague twitching. This was no muscle spasm. This was no sympathetic fantasy. There was something inside her, something alive and it was moving, crawling around in her belly, pushing aside her organs, poking around blindly, curiously, indifferent to the excruciating pain it caused her.

  “What is it?” Dr. Huth said. “What’s wrong?”

  A second locus of pain, this one much higher, blossomed just under her heart. Electric pain spread across her chest and shot down the insides of both arms. The vagus nerve, was her panicked thought. It was nudging on her vagus nerve. As the paralyzing intensity of the ache slowly subsided, there was a sliding pressure across the front of her right lung. When she inhaled she could feel the hard outline of the intruder, she could feel it slither, momentarily trapped between her lung and chest wall.