Helix Wars (3 page)

“What’s her take on the Builders’ silence?”

Ellis stared through the viewscreen, seeing Maria turn away from him, reluctant to discuss the Liaison Team’s work. “She’s tight-lipped about the whole affair. Official secrets and so on.” He fell silent and Abi, watching him with her big brown eyes, nodded her understanding.

After a while he said, “Doesn’t it make your job more difficult? I mean, with the Builders giving nothing away?”

“It does and it doesn’t. In one way it gives us latitude, allows us to make our own decisions, based on what we think the Builders would desire. In another, it makes us realise that we have to be very, very careful when we make those decisions. It’s humbling, in a way.” She smiled at him. “As is the whole thing about being the Builders’ representatives. I mean, our race screwed up the running of our own planet to the point where we had to leave Earth in order to survive. And then the Builders in their infinite wisdom set us up as Peacekeepers. In a way, it doesn’t make sense.”

“Who are we to fathom the motives of the Builders?”

“Exactly.”

He pointed through the viewscreen. “Look.”

Abi peered down, her shaveskull head touching his shoulder. “Beautiful,” she said.

He magnified the image, and the string of worlds sprang into view, a string of blue and green strips sequencing along the chain. Much of the circuit below was covered in cloud, but here and there great sweeps of land showed through, veined by rivers and marked by great mountain ranges mantled with snow.

Abi said, “How long before touchdown?”

Ellis glanced at the chronometer. “Just over two hours.”

She sighed. “I really should go and compare notes with Dr Travers before we land.”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming.”

“But I’d rather be here, chatting with you.”

“Good. Then leave the good doctor to his own devices. If you’d like a coffee...” He gestured to the unit. “And if you’re making one, I wouldn’t say no.”

They drank hot rich coffee and for the next hour chatted about nothing in particular, and Ellis relished the ease with which he could trade smalltalk with Abi. Any conversation these days with Maria was forced, and more often than not escalated into an argument. The only occasions when they didn’t argue was when Ellis forestalled his wife’s acrimony by terminating the conversation and walking away – a tactic which only served to infuriate Maria even more.

He blinked, irritated at himself for thinking about his wife while Abi was speaking. “I’m sorry?”

“I was just saying,” she said, pointing through the viewscreen, “what’s that?”

He looked down, following the direction of her small forefinger.

Mountain and ravines showed through a rent in the cloud, marked by the brilliant white of snow peaks and glacial flows.

“I don’t see...” he began.

“To the right.”

He made out what looked like a blur of dirty cloud, but when he increased the magnification he could see that the pewter-grey pall was a drift of smoke. Through it, colourful against the monochrome grey and white of mountain rock and snow, orange flame flickered.

“What’s happening down there?” she said.

“Can’t make it out for the cloud cover.”

The cloud parted briefly, and he glimpsed a small town or village. Dwellings were wrecked, some burnt out and charred, others still burning.

“Natural, or hostile?” she asked.

“Impossible to tell.”

Seconds later they had left the conflagration in their wake.

He tapped at his com-console and routed the images of the burning township to the console screen. They watched again in silence.

“I’ll send this back to New Earth,” he said, “and see what they make of it.”

He squirted the package back to headquarters, then brought up a schematic of the fourth circuit on the screen. The shuttle’s position appeared as a flashing dot, passing over a world labelled
Phandra
.

“The world is positioned between D’rayni and Sporell,” Abi said. “It’s non-industrial, its civilisation comparable to Earth circa 1200, or thereabouts. But very, very different.”

He looked at her. “How so?”

“The Phandrans are tiny humanoids, around a metre tall on average.”

He couldn’t help the dig: “Like you, then?”

“Very funny. Not like me at all. Among them, I’d be a giant. They’re elfin, and... sensitive.”

“Sensitive?”

“That’s their official designation on our files,” she said. “It means they have a certain telepathic, or empathetic, capability. They were brought to the Helix over fifteen thousand years ago, but interestingly they retained the knowledge of where they came from, their origins. That’s rare: among the races brought here so long ago, creation myths supplant the truth, especially among pre-industrial peoples who have limited means of recording history.”

“But not among the Phandrans? How come?”

She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Some ethnographers have postulated that it’s to do with their ‘sensitivity’ – that it’s some kind of race memory, handed down from generation to generation. Another odd thing about them is their longevity – or rather their lack of. They live for an average of just twenty New Earth years.”

“Strange.” He would read up on these people when he returned to Carrelliville. “How is it, if they’re pre-industrial, that we’ve had any contact with them at all?”

She looked at him. “You must have heard of what happened to Friday Olembe?”

He opened his mouth in a silent ‘Ah’ of understanding. “Of course. That’s where he washed up.”

“A hundred and ninety years ago, when Carrelliville was established and Olembe was getting itchy feet. He didn’t want to join the nascent Peacekeepers, so he set off in his own ship to explore.”

Ellis had read – first as a child in an old story book, and then in a more detailed account years later – that Olembe’s shuttle had suffered a mechanical failure and he’d ditched into the sea between Phandra and D’rayni. He washed ashore, badly injured, only to be found and nursed back to health by the elfin humanoids.

Days later a rescue mission had been mounted from New Earth, and further contact between humans and Phandrans had been inevitable.

“But since then?” Ellis asked.

“I think the last contact was around fifty years ago, a routine follow up mission to ensure all was well on Phandra. The contact was limited, and brief.”

They flew on in silence for a while, and he considered Abi and what she’d said earlier. Two or three times in the past year he’d thought about leaving Maria, but always he’d shied away from walking out. Three years ago, after their son’s death, he’d gone through a painful period of intermingled grief and a strange sense of liberation – because a part of him knew that now he had no reason to stay with the woman who, since the birth of their son, had withdrawn into herself and treated him with cold contempt.

In the months after Ben’s death, however, they’d come a little closer, and the thought of leaving her had filled him with yet more guilt.

But now... Now, three years later, they’d weathered their grief and the idea of leaving Maria filled him with an odd surge of hope.

He reached out and laid a hand over hers, his white flesh eclipsing her black, and he was about to say that he’d very much like to see her next week when the communicating hatch flew open.

He didn’t have time to withdraw his hand before Dr Travers inserted his leonine head and stared at them, his gaze lingering on their intertwined fingers.

Ellis quickly removed his hand.

The doctor said, “I was wondering, when you’ve quite finished your tryst in here, if you’d care to discuss work, Ajemba?”

Abi gave Ellis a dazzling smile, then said to Travers, “I was just on my way, Doctor.” She slipped from the couch. “See you later, Jeff.”

He smiled at her, aware of the thumping of his heart and his burning face.

2

A
S THE HATCH
clicked shut behind her, Ellis glanced through the viewscreen. What he saw made him sit up and reach out to magnify the view.

The stark geography presented an arabesque of mountain ridges, and winding through them a wide track. It was not the track that was of interest, however, but what was progressing along it at a snail’s pace.

He counted a dozen small black shapes, alien in design but even so recognisable as military vehicles, bristling with gun barrels of various gauges.

So what was a caravan of tanks, he asked himself, doing in the high sierra of a pre-industrial civilisation?

He recalled the burning township and belatedly made the connection.

He opened communications to the lounge. “I think you’d better get in here, Abi, Doctor Travers.”

The shuttle bucked in the thermals as the mountains raced by beneath. Abi appeared at the hatch, holding onto the sides as the shuttle pitched back and forth. She steadied herself, staggered to the co-pilot’s couch, and fell into it.

Travers appeared in the hatch behind her, gripping the frame and looking displeased at the summons. “Well?”

Ellis pointed at the military convoy on the viewscreen. “I thought Phandra was pre-industrial, Abi?” He stared at her as she bit at her bottom lip. He went on, “I think we have the cause of the destruction back there.”

Travers moved from the hatch and braced himself between the couches, staring at the image of the crawling tanks.

Abi explained about the burning township they’d seen earlier. Travers said, “Okay. Right. We have this cached, I take it? Let’s get out of here and beam it to New Earth.”

Ellis nodded. “I’ve already –” he began.

He never finished the sentence.

Something exploded to the right of the shuttle. He saw an actinic flash which lingered on his retina. The shuttle pitched as if swatted by a giant hand and his ears rang with the deafening cannonade of the explosion. Before he could take evasive action, a missile struck the shuttle. He heard a crunch to his rear and the craft lifted twenty metres as if rammed from below.

Ellis read the com-screen before him: system failure. An alarm blared, shrill and insistent, filling the cabin and deafening him.

“What is it?” Abi yelled.

“Com’s down,” Ellis said.

“Can’t you control this thing?” Travers shouted.

Ellis didn’t waste his breath replying. A peak loomed a couple of hundred metres before them. He leaned back, pulling the column towards him, and the spire of rock flashed beneath the shuttle with metres to spare. Abi sobbed, pulling herself into a foetal ball on the couch.

“What’s happening, Ellis?” Travers called out.

“Limited manoeuvrability, even on manual,” he said. “I’m going for an emergency landing.”

But not in the mountains, he thought. That would be suicide. If he could maintain the shuttle on an even keel, leave the mountains in their wake and find a plain... He recalled the view of the terrain from earlier, how the mountain range petered out to the west, the very direction in which they were heading.

“Travers, there’s a couch behind you. Strap yourself in.”

The doctor crawled across the cabin and hauled himself into the seat. Abi reached across the gap and squeezed Ellis’s thigh, the gesture more desperate than affectionate. She smiled at him, quickly, and he felt a sudden welling of indescribable sadness.

The shuttle was not responding. He tried to ease the craft to the right, to put more space between themselves and a nearby mountain peak, but the lateral control was compromised. The shuttle flew on, as straight as an arrow, missing the peak by fifty metres.

A vast valley opened out before them and Ellis saw that they had left the snow behind and entered a region where vegetation grew – strange trees with tall, thick boles and a tangle of cloud-like foliage that intermeshed with that of their neighbours to create a canopy kilometres wide.

He laughed aloud at the idea of dying in paradise.

“What?” Abi asked with desperation.

He glanced at her. “I’m sorry,” he managed. “I just wanted to say...”

He wanted to say that he would very much like to kiss her, but, before he could articulate the phrase, the shuttle sliced through the haywire tangle of alien foliage and a split-second later impacted with the ground. The cabin was torn apart and something struck Ellis in the chest. He had time to wonder, with surreal curiosity, if he’d suffered a heart attack, and then blackness consumed him.

T
WO
/// D
EATH IN
P
ARADISE

1

H
E OPENED HIS
eyes.

His first reaction was amazement that he was still alive, his second that he must have suffered severe injuries. If the impact hadn’t killed him, then surely his injuries would...