Helix (9 page)

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 the
Lovelock
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.”