Helix (17 page)

He
was about to start the engines when he remembered Kahran with a sickening lurch
in his stomach. “Sereth, where’s Kahran? Check his cabin.”

She
hurried aft, returning seconds later. “He’s not there.”

Ehrin
cursed. “That’s all we need.”

Cannak
had taken a seat. He looked up quickly. “Where is he?”

Ehrin
ignored the Elder and powered up the engines. The dirigible was still moored to
the ground, but he had little time to worry about that. The speed of their lift
would remove the spikes effectively enough.

The
dirigible rose, came up against the pull of the hawsers and strained. Ehrin
accelerated. A hawser snapped, and then a second spike came flying from the
ground and struck the gondola. The ship lurched forward suddenly, freed from
its moorings.

The
gondola swayed, bringing a cry of alarm from Cannak as he attempted to save his
tisane.

Sereth
was beside Ehrin. “Kahran?”

“With
luck he’ll still be in the ziggurat. I’ll come down right outside it and hope
he’s somewhere close by.”

Sereth
pointed through the window. Ahead, the freighter was rising slowly and turning
ponderously on its axis. Below it, Ehrin made out milling tribesmen staring up
the dirigible in fright and consternation.

As
he watched, someone raised a weapon and fired. He saw the quick squib of its
detonation, and a spark flew from the coachwork of the freighter. The dirigible
lost no time and ascended.

Seconds
later the
Expeditor
was racing above the heads of the tribesmen. They
scattered in a melee of snorting zeer, but not before firing on the fleeing
dirigible. The metal of the gondola rang with the impact of their bullets.

If
they were to aim higher and damage the engines or the envelope... Ehrin tried
not to dwell on this as he lofted the dirigible and made out the bulk of the
ziggurat to starboard.

He
set the dirigible on a course around it, hoping that Kahran was still indeed
within the building. If he had ventured out, alerted by the noise of their
departure... Sereth was kneeling on a window seat, pressing her snout against
the window and giving a running commentary. “They’re following the freighter,
Ehrin. The trouble is, the freighter’s following us...”

Ehrin
swore to himself. He had his hands full with directing the dirigible, without
signalling to the freighter to make its own course away from the ziggurat.

He
cut the engines and the
Expeditor
dropped, buffeted by the gales that
raged around the ziggurat. Below, the base block loomed. He set the dirigible
down with a clatter that jarred his bones and set up another protest from the
Elder. The
Expeditor
settled, but without the stabilising hawsers it
swayed in the gale like a child’s balloon.

“Stay
here. I’ll be right back. If he isn’t there...” He had meant to say that if
Kahran was nowhere in sight, then they’d leave without him, but the words stuck
painfully in his throat.

He
dashed to the hatch, hauled it open, and plunged out into the blizzard.

He
was mere yards from the long opening at the base of the ziggurat. He ran
through the raging gale, blinded by snow, and entered the relative calm of the
giant chamber. The wind ceased its keening wail, and he was enveloped in sudden
stillness. He stared up the length of the chamber, sure he’d see Kahran there.

There
was no sign of the old fool.

“Kahran!”
he yelled, his voice echoing eerily from the walls, repeating his cry with
diminished urgency.

He
ran a hundred yards, impelled by desperation. There were no niches in the sloping
walls where Kahran might have been, and the space at the end of the
chamber—where the altar would have been, had this really been some kind of
temple—was open and offered no place of concealment.

Ehrin
turned, calling Kahran’s name again, and knew for certain now that the old man
had left the ziggurat.

He
ran back to the entrance, going over and over his decision to flee the
tribesmen, and wondered if he might have handled the situation any differently.

He
emerged from the ziggurat into the full force of the blizzard, his breath
snatched from his lungs.

To
his right, the
Expeditor
swayed back and forth, only the weight of the
gondola anchoring it to the ice. Even as he watched, the wind dragged it little
by little away from the ziggurat. It was only a matter of time before it
toppled, ripping the envelope.

He
peered into the blizzard, but saw neither the freighter not the pursuing
tribesmen.

He
was about to run for the skyship, all hope gone, when he heard a feeble cry to
his right. It came again. “Ehrin? Is that you?”

His
heart leaping, he peered into the raging storm.

A
figure emerged, dragging his bulky camera. “Ehrin! You should have seen it!
Amazing! I caught it all—just minutes ago!” He emerged from the snow, beaming
like an idiot, tears streaming from his rheumy eyes.

Suddenly,
beyond Kahran and the bobbing shape of the
Expeditor,
Ehrin made out the
swelling envelope of the freighter. Below it, charging towards them in a
stampede of snorting zeer were the tribesmen.

Ehrin
grabbed Kahran without ceremony and, almost pulling him off his feet, dragged
the oldster towards the dirigible, the legs of his tripod clattering across the
iron-hard tundra.

“You
should have seen it!” Kahran was saying.

Only
then, as they approached the open hatch of the dirigible, did Kahran perceive
the danger. The tribesmen were a hundred yards away and closing. For a second,
Kahran’s eyes registered shock, before Ehrin yanked him inside and slammed shut
the hatch.

He
ran to the pedestal, powered up the engines, and yelled
for everyone to
hang on as they surged into the air, the gondola swinging wildly as the engines
screamed in protest and carried them ever further from the plain and the
pursuing tribesmen.

Sereth
came to him and buried her face in his chest, while Cannak gripped a handrail
with a shocked expression. Kahran was seated on the floor, his short legs
sticking out before him as he cradled the precious bulk of his camera.

Ehrin,
despite the fear still sluicing through his system, or perhaps because of it,
laughed as he stared at the oldster.

He
oriented the dirigible, found the freighter to starboard and signalled for it
to follow. Down below, the tribesmen were lost to sight in the concealing
snowstorm.

Kahran
looked up at him. “I was leaving the ziggurat when it happened, Ehrin. I heard
a sound, louder even than the wind. I looked up. What I saw...” He shook his
head and stared across at Elder Cannak. “How can your religion explain this,
Elder? I saw a great column sweep through the air, a silver tentacle wider than
any city block, and miss the summit of the ziggurat by yards.” He patted the
timber cabinet of his camera. “I have it here, Ehrin. Proof of what I saw.
Whatever it might have been...”

Ehrin
looked at Sereth. “The tribesmen’s arm of God,” she murmured.

He
adjusted the steering, and the
Expeditor
headed west at speed.

They stood before
the
long viewscreen and stared up into the morning sky.

High
overhead, forty-five degrees above the horizon, was what looked like a thin,
cloud-shrouded ribbon. Hendry followed its progress to the west and saw that it
described a vast parabola through the sky, curving down until it was lost to
sight to the left of where the
Lovelock
had crash-landed.

Sissy
Kaluchek peered, then pointed like an excited child. “There! There’s another
one above the first, but still beneath the sun.”

Hendry
strained his vision and saw that she was right. Another ribbon, or tier, curved
high above the original. As he tracked its course through the sky, he saw that
it joined the first in what appeared to be a vast celestial spiral.

“It’s
like a great spring wound around the sun,” he said. “We haven’t landed on a
planet—we’ve landed on a... a helix.”

“The
lowest tier of a helix,” Olembe said.

“Or
the highest,” Kaluchek put in. “Depends on how you look at it.”

Olembe
shrugged dismissively. “Whatever. But there’s something I don’t get,” he said.
“ESO told us we were heading for a planet in the Ophiuchi system, right? They
said nothing about a helix.”

“Maybe
they didn’t know about it?” Kaluchek said.

“Yeah,
right,” Olembe said. “Think about it. That thing out there is massive. How much
light would it reflect from the sun? My guess is enough to make the sun, when
seen from Earth, look far too bright for its spectral type. They would have
noticed that back on Earth, believe me.”

“The
fact is,” Hendry said, “that no one noticed it, not the ESO, nor earlier
astronomers. Why the hell not?”

Olembe
said, “There is one answer. The light from Zeta Ophiuchi takes just over five
hundred years to reach Earth, okay? So maybe this thing was...
built
less than five hundred years ago.”

“Built?”
Kaluchek echoed. “You mean that thing... this helix... didn’t evolve
naturally?”

Olembe
laughed. “Get real. It’d defy all the cosmological laws known to man. Something
as complex as the helix just couldn’t
accrete.”

The
only sounds in the lounge were the steady bleeps emitted by the workstations.

“And
if it was built,” Olembe went on, “then it was built for a reason.” He laughed.
“Looks to me like we’ve stumbled on one of the wonders of the universe.”

They
stared out through the viewscreen at the spiral display.

Olembe
said, “Okay, so there’s a possibility we just might get out of this mess alive.
But we’ll have to leave the ship, move up that damned spiral till we come to a
warmer region. Joe, get on a station and see if telemetry can tell us anything
about this place.”

Hendry
left the viewscreen and slipped into a seat, attached the monitors to his head
and attempted to access the relevant systems.

Olembe
said, “I’ll be back in a second.”

“Where
you going?” Kaluchek asked.

“Breaking
out the weapons,” he said as he hurried from the chamber.

Hendry
patched through to the limited telemetry recordings made by the
Lovelock
during the crash-landing, then directed the scopes towards the spiral high
above.

Carrelli
slipped into her own station, head bent as she worked. Sissy Kaluchek remained
before the viewscreen, staring at the helix in the sky.

A
minute later everyone looked up when Olembe pushed into the lounge carrying an
armload of laser rifles. Hendry pulled the leads from his skull, watching the
African hand out the weapons. Sissy Kaluchek grimaced at the rifle thrust into
her hands. “I’ve never fired one of these things before,” she said.

“Dead
easy,” Olembe said. “Press the red activate pad and point it in the general
direction of the enemy. They’re heat-seeking.”

“And
what if the things that killed Lisa are coldblooded?” Hendry asked.

The
African grinned. “Good point. In that case, just make sure you hose the laser
around plenty.”

Kaluchek
looked across at Hendry and pulled a sarcastic thanks-a-bunch face. Hendry
smiled in sympathy.

Carrelli
accepted the laser as if accustomed to the idea of toting around a deadly weapon.
She checked the charge and nodded, laying it across her thighs with all the
ease of a bored mercenary.

Hendry
took his laser and propped it beside the console, something about the sleek
black weapon making him uneasy. The rifle was a physical reminder that, if they
were to leave the wreck of the
Lovelock,
they would first have to
venture outside and make their way to the storage hangar.

Kaluchek
said, “What about the colonists?”

Olembe
moved to a workstation and began typing. “I’ll set up a revival program for the
back-up team in Hangar One. They’ll be awoken in a year, if we haven’t returned
by then. I’ll download what’s happened, where we’re heading.”

“A
year?” Kaluchek said. “Will they be okay? I mean—”

The
African laughed. “They’ve been under for a thousand years. One more won’t do
them any harm.”

She
stared at him with ill-disguised loathing. “I wasn’t thinking about a systems
failure,” she said, “but whether or not the things that got Lisa might find
some way in.”

“My
theory, for what it’s worth,” Olembe said, “is that the thing killed Lisa out
of some territorial imperative. We invaded its territory, and it responded.”

“You
make it sound like some kind of primitive,” Kaluchek said.

“It’s
weaponry wasn’t exactly sophisticated. A bunch of swords and lightning speed.
It didn’t eat Lisa, and it hasn’t tried to get in here for us—so I guess it
doesn’t see us as a potential food source. So it probably wouldn’t assume the
hangar is full of frozen protein snacks.”