Helix Wars (37 page)

A pseudopod extruded from the padding beside Kranda’s hand. “A simple control column. Pressure either back or forth indicates which direction you wish to travel.” She touched the joy-stick once. It retracted quickly from her like the antennae of a slug. “We’ll be setting off in a few seconds. I would say ‘hold on,’ but there really is no need.”

On the interior wall to the front of the carriage, the padding had vanished to reveal a strip viewscreen through which could be seen the Helix’s spinal core.

The mono-car, with an almost imperceptible humming note, accelerated slowly, the padding absorbing the pressure of their forward momentum. Outside, the view remained the same: it was as if they were not moving at all.

Kranda accessed her varnika’s smartcore and said, “Would you believe, Jeff, that we’re travelling at over five hundred kilometres per hour, and accelerating?”

“But we’ve only just set off. It feels as if we’re hardly moving.” The human peered out. “And... and nothing is changing out there.”

She said, “Nothing will change, much, until we approach a Gaia Machine. There’s nothing out there with which to judge our passage. Have patience. We should be passing one in little over an hour.”

Ellis relaxed. His face, cradled in the cupola of the varnika, looked drawn and tired, for all the sleep he’d had on the descent.

“And when we get to Sporell?” he asked.

“We make our way to the presidential tower, the dictator’s residence in Sporelli’s capital city. It’s approximately one hundred kilometres from the closest access chute.” She considered what she knew of the political regime on Sporell. “The system there is a dynastic dictatorship, with power handed down through both the male and female line of a family which has been in power for almost three hundred years. You humans have a term for the political system there: fascism.”

“Sounds a delightful place.”

“They keep their people subjugated through media propaganda, control of all informational outlets, and by employing a network of paid – and blackmailed – informants. The populace knows nothing about other worlds, other ways of life. And, because of this, they are... satisfied, let’s say. Anyway, perhaps in a state where there is no dissent, no opposition, where the dictator – a man in his eighties called Horrescu – has cultivated a personality cult so that he’s regarded as something like a deity...”

Ellis nodded. “And President Horrescu has decided to extend his empire.”

Kranda considered the offensive on Phandra and D’rayni. “There must come a time when, having ruled with absolute power and no opposition for so long, a dictator’s ambitions turn to thoughts of conquest.”

Kranda’s varnika spoke to her. She cocked her head, listening.

“What?” Ellis asked, straining forward against the padding.

“The Sporelli in pursuit,” she said, “have arrived at the core and accessed a mono-carriage.”

Ellis stared behind him, as if he might catch sight of the pursuing troops. “What do we do?”

Kranda twisted in her padding and indicated ahead. “Observe.”

In the distance – quite how far was impossible to tell in the vast perspective of the spine – was the blurred shape of a looming Gaia Machine.

“When we reach it,” she said, “it will provide cover. Then we sit tight and wait.”

She reached up, and the control pseudopod obligingly dropped. The mono-car hummed, slowing little by little, and minutes later came to a stop.

2

T
HEY STEPPED FROM
the mono-car and Kranda watched as it was sucked back into the notch along which it had travelled. A second later no evidence of the vehicle remained.

Ellis was staring up in wonder at the architectural immensity of the Gaia Machine. Kranda empathised with the human’s reaction to his first experience of beholding one of the Builders’ finest artefacts, after the Helix itself. Its grey surface was uneven, deeply fissured with a thousand perpendicular inlets so that it resembled some kind of geological, deep sea formation, a coral reef which rose like a mountain and extended for a kilometre to left and right beside the mono-line. Each fold or fissure in its surface was easily big enough to admit even the bulk of a Mahkan, never mind the slimmer form of a human.

Kranda must have seen a dozen or more Gaia Machines, each one a little different in appearance, but she always felt the same humbling sense of insignificance in their presence. The machines were physically overwhelming, but mentally too they overwhelmed with what they symbolised, working machines many thousands of millennia old which governed the smooth running of ten thousand minutely complex eco-systems, bio-systems, and engineering systems integrated into the one vast precision instrument that was the Helix.

They hurried towards the humming immensity of the edifice, and Ellis reached out and laid a palm against the grey surface.

“It’s warm, Kranda, and it pulses...”

“Some of my people,” Kranda said, “claim that it lives.”

She looked back along the spine, then accessed her varnika’s smartcore and asked it to assess how long it might be before the Sporelli troops made an appearance. Seconds later the voice sounded in her ear-piece. “
They
will arrive at our current position in between fifty and fifty-eight minutes
.”

“Fine,” Kranda said to herself.

Ellis looked at her. “What?”

She told him. He looked back the way they had come. “But...” he began, “I might be missing something, but how will they know which direction we took? The mono-cars were set up to go both ways, no?”

Kranda smiled. “That’s right. But they’re no fools. My guess is that they’ll cover both options and send troops in each direction.” She laughed to herself at the thought.

Ellis peered at her, and she explained, “One group will run straight into our ambush, and the other will go on round and round the Helix until they reach the pole.”

“And then?”

“And then one of my people’s engineering survey teams will be alerted and pick them up.”

“And the other group...?” Ellis said. “Why don’t we just continue until we reach Sporell? We’re ahead of them, and will remain ahead.”

“And run the possibility of their learning that we’re heading for their homeworld? I don’t want our presence on Sporell known to the authorities there. When the Sporelli troops show themselves, Jeff, we attack. Agreed?”

She was gratified to see that this time the human had the good grace and common sense not to object. “Very well.”

She accessed her varnika. “We have over forty-five minutes before they show themselves.” She looked around, assessing the distance from the mono-car line and the best angle of attack. “This way.”

They moved around the Gaia Machine until she found a suitable fissure. She slipped into it, then peered out. From its concealment, she had a perfect line of sight along the mono-car line. With the increased magnification provided by her varnika, she would see the approach of the Sporelli car long before its arrival.

She indicated a neighbouring rill in the flank of the Machine. “Conceal yourself in there. We fire when the car draws level with us, understood? I’ll give the command.”

“We have a phrase for such a rout,” Ellis said. “Shooting at sitting ducks.”

Kranda repeated the phrase, worked out what it meant, and realised that it was the human’s way of voicing his objection. “We could always let the car carry on past us,” she said, “and deign not to attack...”

Ellis was staring at her. “Why not?” he said at last. “We could give them an hour and then continue on our way. They’d be ahead of us then, and when we get to Sporell...”

Kranda interrupted. “Because what if they stopped, decided they’d gone far enough, elected to turn back and came across us coming directly at them? No, Jeff, I’d rather we account for them with as little possible risk to ourselves.”

She had no intention of admitting that Ellis had a point – that they could easily allow the Sporelli to pass them by... The chances that they would stop and turn back, and so happen upon her and Ellis, were remote.

But then Kranda recalled the image of the dead Phandran villager, murdered through the Sporelli use of the guran, and she told herself that she could take no risks when facing a foe as merciless as the Sporelli. To her way of looking at things, they deserved to die. She had allowed the Sporelli troops at the holding station to live, and had regretted the lapse.

Ellis retreated into his appointed fissure, knelt and activated his varnika’s shield. She had no means of knowing whether he had drawn one of his weapons.

3

K
RANDA PRESSED HERSELF
into her fissure, drew her laser and peered out. She upped her visual magnification and sighted along the mono-car rail. Her varnika reported that the enemy would come into visual range in between thirty seconds and one minute twenty-five seconds.

She tensed, waiting.

Thirty seconds later, she made out a growing irregularity in the distance. She decreased her magnification as it approached, opened communications with Ellis and whispered, “They’re on their way. Twenty seconds and counting. On my count of three, we open fire, okay?”

“Okay, Kranda.” The human’s voice sounded tiny in her ear-piece.

She readied her blaster, feeling the thud of her heart. She was seven again, and hunting coyti with her hive-mother. She felt the same sense of delicious exhilaration, the same awareness of potential danger.

She was in charge of events. Her fate was in her own hands, now.

The mono-car approached. She made out small, pale-blue Sporelli heads through the strip viewscreen at the front of the vehicle.

In a matter of seconds it would be drawing level.

“Okay, Jeff, any second now...”

She had expected the mono-car to continue on past the Gaia Machine, but had failed to consider the possibility that the Sporelli, like herself, possessed a sense of wonder. The mono-car drew to a halt and stopped fifty metres from where Kranda and Ellis were concealed.

Three Sporelli soldiers stepped from the vehicle and walked slowly, in obvious amazement, towards the pulsing Machine. At least six others, Kranda estimated visually, remained within the mono-car.

“Okay,” she whispered to Ellis. “After three, you take out the car. I’ll take the approaching troops.”

She switched her laser to her firing hand and said, “One... two... three!”

She fired, taking out two of the troops instantly but missing the third. He rolled with the athleticism of a gymnast and came up firing.

Kranda ducked back into the cover of the fissure. Ellis had fired, as instructed, but the sound of the returning fire from the Sporelli suggested his shots had failed to destroy the mono-car. Kranda peered from the fissure and made out the vehicle retreating at speed, a scorch mark scored across its flank where Ellis’s blaster had merely winged it.

The third Sporelli soldier was on his belly, firing wildly in their approximate direction. She wondered if the soldier with the heat-seeker was still within the mono-car.

She leapt out, saying to Ellis via the com-link, “Stay put. Whatever you do, don’t move from here. I’ll be back when I’ve...”

She dodged a lancing laser beam that the sniper had fired towards the Machine. It impacted with the surface, glancing off harmlessly. Kranda roared and bore down on the soldier, firing all the time. Her laser tore him in two at the waist, his torso rolling away surreally while his legs beat a macabre tattoo on the deck.

The retreating mono-car was a hundred metres away and accelerating.

She approached the mono-line and, activated by her presence, a mono-car emerged from the notch. She leapt inside and touched the controls before the padding had time to encapsulate her. There was an agonising delay before the padding cosseted her and the vehicle was allowed to move off.

Seconds later she was in pursuit. She leaned forward, thrusting away the attention of the padding, aimed her blaster and punched a smoking hole in the front viewscreen. The pulse hurtled towards the mono-car in front, missing by a fraction. She grinned to herself – she had almost accounted for the vehicle with an accidental shot. That augured well for a successful outcome.

Not that the retreating Sporelli troops were giving up without a fight. Bright blue laser fire lanced from their mono-car, striking the front end of her vehicle and streaking off into the air. Their second shot was luckier, finding the hole in the viewscreen and missing Kranda’s head by centimetres.

She laid down a barrage of return fire, striking the car and ripping through a section of its rear carapace. She aimed for the viewscreen, hitting it on her third attempt. A billow of acrid smoke obscured the view for a split second, and when it cleared she saw that their mono-car was still travelling. She increased her visual magnification, made out blood sprayed across what remained of the rear viewscreen, and knew that she’d accounted for more of the bastards.

But Sporelli troops remained alive in there, or else the mono-car would have come to a halt. In fact it appeared to be accelerating. She fired again, missing the vehicle as it drew away. She reached out, found the pseudopod, and pushed hard; her speed rose with it.