Helix Wars (36 page)

There was little else to do, in the circumstances, so Ellis obeyed Kranda’s instructions and kept his objections to himself. They were hammering along a narrowing corridor of rock, the clatter of their boots echoing back off the walls. Behind them, Sporelli cries of anticipated victory made his blood run cold.

Kranda came to an abrupt halt and Ellis almost slammed into her.

They had come to a dead end. Before them, the corridor terminated in a flat wall of rock.

“Wonderful,” Ellis gasped. “Where now?”

He looked behind him, seeing only darkness but hearing the stentorian cries of the pursuing troops.

Kranda laughed. “Are all humans so pessimistic, Jeff?

“Only when the occasion arises,” he said. “Well done on getting us captured, by the way.”

“Human, cease your complaints.”

Ellis turned at the sound of a footfall just metres away. A flashlight showed in the gloom, dazzling him. The Sporelli soldier called out a single word, which his varnika translated as, “Stop!” He thought about using his weapon but feared provoking return fire.

Instead he raised his hands, despair welling within him.

He was about to step forward and exhort the soldier not to fire when a hand gripped his upper arm and yanked him backwards. He fell, crying out in alarm, seemingly
through
the very surface of the rock that had barred their way.

He hit the ground hard, and when he opened his eyes he was no longer in the rock-enclosed corridor.

He blinked, blinded by a silver light. Kranda had deactivated her shield and was crouching over him. She pulled up the melted material of his trouser leg and inspected his calf, drawing her lips back. “A superficial burn. I will attend to it in time.”

Ellis looked around, disbelieving. They were in a perfectly cylindrical silver chamber, three metres wide and three high. Kranda stood and played her hand over a sensor on the wall, and Ellis felt the gut-wrenching sensation of plummeting at speed.

“Where the hell are we?” he asked.

Kranda helped him to his feet. “We are in an access chute,” she said, “one of a dozen built into the fabric of every world on the Helix. And now we are descending to the very core of the world.”

Torn between laughter and tears of relief, and aware of his extreme tiredness, Ellis reached out and gripped Kranda’s hand. “I never doubted you for a second, Mahkan.”

Kranda snorted. “Thank you, human,” she said.

S
EVENTEEN
/// I
N
T
HE
S
PINE

1

T
HEY DROPPED ALMOST
eight thousand kilometres in just over ten hours.

Kranda broke out the chamber’s medical kit and treated the minor burn on Ellis’s left leg, then attended to the burn on her right arm that extended from her shoulder to her wrist. The laser had melted her thermal suit, but the spar of her varnika had taken the brunt of the blast. She covered the wound with synthi-flesh and swallowed a handful of painkillers.

One hour into the descent, Kranda was alerted by her varnika. Its smartcore had integrated with the chamber’s security system and its androgynous voice informed her, “
The access security has been breached. You are being followed.
”

She thought:
How far are they behind us?

“
Approximately one hour
.”

Very well. Keep me updated
.

She sat back, considering her options.

For the duration of the descent, Ellis slept. They had deactivated the visual shields on entering the chamber, and now Kranda sat against the curving steel wall of the chamber and stared at the sleeping human.

Ellis had once told her that he was of average height for a human, but he still appeared small in her eyes. Humans possessed little physical strength compared with their Mahkan equivalents, and even their mental fortitude seemed lacking. And yet... and yet Jeff Ellis had saved her life; he had risked his own safety, his life even, and crossed to her stricken shuttle and rescued her. Again, on Phandra, he had contravened his ethos of non-violence and killed the Sporelli soldier and saved her life for a second time.

They had been together, in close contact, for over a day now, but still the human remained alien, his mind-set odd and unknowable to Kranda. She did not understand his stance on violence where violence was merited. She wondered, sometimes, if Ellis himself really knew with certainty what his position was. He had led an easy, cosseted life as a shuttle pilot for the human Peacekeepers, had never had to face the fundamental questions of existence, had never had to fight for survival and so come to some understanding of the value of his own life. When you understood the worth of one’s existence, when one faced down a wild coyti and fought it to the death, the encounter taught one something about life and death and the preciousness of existence.

She slept for a few hours, and when she awoke the chamber was slowing in its descent.

The ring of white light that encompassed the chamber – starting at the top when they’d entered the chamber and progressing down as they dropped – had almost reached the bottom.

Kranda gently roused Ellis, watching his confusion as he sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Where the hell...?”

“We have just arrived at the very centre of D’rayni, Jeff.”

Ellis looked alarmed. “The Sporelli! They were –”

“We left them on the surface. But... They must have blasted through the barrier and are following.”

Ellis ran a hand over his face and through his hair. “I remember the rock wall, the Sporelli entering the cave...” He looked down at the medi-seal on his ankle.

Kranda said, “I’ve fixed it. You’re fine now.”

Ellis looked at her arm. “You?”

“This is nothing. I’ll be fine.”

Ellis shook his head. “The barrier... how did you open the rock?”

“My varnika transmitted the entry code. Unfortunately the Sporelli saw where we went.”

“You said we’re at the centre of D’rayni?” Ellis sounded awed.

“Almost there,” she said, indicating the light that was settling at the foot of the chamber. The plummeting sensation ceased as the chamber gradually slowed, then stopped. Kranda stood, helping Ellis to his feet, and faced the sliding door.

It hissed open to reveal a vista that never failed to stir her sense of wonder.

She glanced at the human, eager to watch his reaction. If she still experienced awe at the sight, then Ellis would be stunned.

Open-mouthed, staring, he stepped out and looked about him. “I don’t believe it...” he whispered.

Kranda recalled her first experience of the Helix’s spiral spine. She had been brought down by her superior, and he had warned her that she would experience a certain sensory disequilibrium at what she was about to behold. “You will have seen nothing on this scale, Kranda. Your optical apparatus will have little with which to compare what you are about to witness. The central mountains of Mahkana are vast, but the tubular spine of the Helix would contain them with much space to spare.”

Now she said, “The spine itself is two hundred kilometres in diameter. The Helix, from the very apex to the bottom, is a little over two hundred million kilometres long.”

Ellis staggered forward and stared around him.

He turned a bewildered face towards Kranda. “This... this winds all the way through the middle of every world of the Helix?”

“Through the core of every world and every sea. It is, if you like, the skeleton of the Helix.”

Ellis shook his head and whispered something under his breath.

The elevator had deposited them on the inner surface of the spine. To left and right, the white expanse of the floor extended for as far as the eye could see, its curve incremental and indiscernible. So high overhead was the far side of the spine – two hundred kilometres away – that it appeared a milky blur that defied the visual senses; sometimes it appeared illimitably distant, at others it seemed as if she might reach out and touch the surface.

Ellis murmured, “We’re like... like ants in a...” He laughed. “I can’t think of anything big enough... a drum?” he said. “Ten thousand drums laid end to end without their skins?”

He turned round suddenly and stared at the silver capsule they had just stepped from. “But we were travelling downwards,” he said, “and yet we’re standing on the bottom of...”

Kranda smiled. “The spine possesses its own gravity field, Jeff. Just before the chamber reached the ‘bottom,’ it flipped so that we’d not land on our heads.”

“I never gave a thought to what was down here,” Ellis said.

“You probably wouldn’t, unless you were an engineer.”

“I always knew the construction of the Helix was a wonder of the universe, but now I can appreciate the true feat of the Builders.”

“The walls of the spine are over ten kilometres thick,” she said, “and are impenetrable.”

Ellis laughed aloud, and the puny sound was lost in the vastness of the spine. “But why
so
big?” he asked.

“It makes engineering sense,” she said. “The core has to be so vast, so thick, in order to take the incredible stresses placed on the spine by the rotation of ten thousand worlds. And the hollow chamber of the core has to be of so vast a diameter to be able to contain the colossal machines down here.”

“Machines?” he echoed.

Kranda thought about it. How to explain the concepts of Builder technology to someone from a race whose own science and technology was so rudimentary?

She said, “They are... computers which even we, the Mahkan, are only now coming in some small way to understand. We might be the Engineers, the race the Builders chose to look after the structural integrity of the Helix, but there are many things even we do not understand. We maintain the physicality of the structure, attend to the day-to-day engineering problems, but we think that these ‘machines,’ for want of a better term, integrate and co-ordinate the thousand different systems that function to keep the Helix running.” She paused then went on, “In fact, it was a human, one of your own colony founders, who coined a term for the machines when our engineers opened up the core to your ancestors. Friday Olembe called them ‘Gaia Machines.’”

Ellis looked around, something almost comically childlike in his apparent eagerness to see one of these colossi. “Where are they?”

“They are stationed at regular intervals along the spine,” she said, “one every two worlds. We will pass one on our journey to Sporell.”

“The journey?” Ellis said, staring at her. “But how...?”

She gestured across the smooth surface of the core. There was no curve beneath their feet, of course. The decking, for want of a better word, was formed from white tiles five metres square, and Kranda always had the feeling, whenever she came down here, that she was a puny token on a vast game board.

She crossed the tiles towards a ruler-straight slit in the deck, perhaps the width of her leg. As she approached, a silver form flowed from the slit like mercury.

Beside her, Ellis gasped and stepped back. “Kranda?”

She laughed and gestured towards the silver vehicle, now fully formed before them.

“We travel by the mono-car,” she said. “If, that is, you still wish to rescue your alien friend?”

Ellis nodded. “Now,” he said, “more than ever.”

Kranda stared at the small human, a being who had in his short life to date experienced very few of the true hardships of existence, until lately... and now he was still willing to risk his life to save the tiny alien who had saved him.

They might not have
Sophan
ingrained in their cultural psyche, she thought, but the same idea worked on them at an individual level.

She said, “Or I could take you back to New Earth, a slightly longer journey, admittedly.”

Ellis smiled. “You don’t really think I’d take you up on that, do you, after all Calla did for me?”

“Of course not, human. But I thought I should ask. Come, we shall make our way to Sporell.”

They approached the mono-car and Kranda palmed a sensor beside its sliding hatch. They climbed inside, Ellis exhibiting surprise as the padded jade green walls pulsed towards them. Kranda eased him forward. “Don’t be worried. This is for our own safety. We’ll be reaching speeds in excess of Mach ten.”

She steered the human towards the wall and gave instructions. “Find a position comfortable to you and relax. The padding will form itself around you, supporting you. Watch.”

She eased herself into the green foam-like substance and sat down facing Ellis. The padding accepted her, flowing around her. Seconds later she was encased in the padding with only her shoulders, arms and head showing.

Smiling uncertainly, Ellis followed suit, laughing in surprise as he was absorbed into the vehicle’s walls.

“The Builders thought of everything. Not only does the padding provide safety from the incredible acceleration, it also means that beings of all shapes and sizes – who might succeed the Mahkan as engineers – can use the system with ease.”