Helix Wars (38 page)

For the next fifteen minutes as the vehicles hurtled along the Helical spine, Kranda and the Sporelli traded fire, occasionally striking their targets but failing – a tribute to Builder technology – to render the cars inoperable.

Then, minutes later, the car ahead slowed and two Sporelli rolled from its protection. At first Kranda thought the soldiers were splitting up in order to attack her – and only then, as the troops climbed to their feet and sprinted towards a silver bullet-shape fifty metres away, did she realise that they had reached the entry to the access chute.

She slowed her own vehicle, leapt and fired, decapitating the first Sporelli soldier. The second dodged his colleague’s flailing bulk, flung himself from another laser beam more by fortune than skill, and leapt through the chute’s sliding hatch. It snapped shut behind him. Kranda cursed and fired off another shot in frustration, but it merely glanced off the metal and hissed into the air.

She considered, for a brief second, following the soldier to the surface and accounting for him there – the Mahkan hunter in her refusing to be bested. But sense came into play and told her that she would be risking everything against unknown factors if she gave in to the primitive urge.

The fact was that the Sporelli knew about the concealed inspection chutes, and nothing she could do now could alter that.

Best to return to Ellis, continue on to Sporell, and successfully complete what they had set out to do.

She returned to her ravaged mono-car, climbed aboard and set off again.

4

J
EFF
E
LLIS WAS
cowering within his fissure, gripping his blaster and peering out fearfully as Kranda crossed from the mono-rail and picked her way through the scattered body parts of the Sporelli. The sight of it didn’t affect her in the slightest.

Kranda halted before the human. “Killed them all?” he asked.

She elected not to reply. She reached out, took Ellis’s hand, and hauled him to his feet. “Come, we leave here.”

They walked to the mono-rail line, and a pristine car flowed up from the deck. They climbed aboard and seconds later were accelerating away from the scene of slaughter, the monolithic Gaia Machine humming to their right.

Ellis said, “You enjoyed that, didn’t you?”

She eyed him. “What? The killing? The slaughter? The vanquishing of those out to kill me?” She thought about it, then said, “I will be honest with you, human, and say that yes, I did. It is... it’s in my blood. I have killed from an early age; I see no wrong in it, in certain situations. And don’t claim, as I’ve heard certain humans say, that a civilised people is one which has evolved past the urge to kill. My people are highly civilised, if by ‘civilised’ you mean having laws to protect those who need protecting, if you mean having rights upholding the sanctity of the individual, if you mean having fine arts and literature. But it also happens that we do not always obey the laws of non-violence laid down by the Builders. Now, there might come a time when my people do just that, but until that time arrives... there will be occasions when we need to defend ourselves, and this was one of them.”

Ellis said, “They were running away.”

She looked past him at the bulk of the Gaia Machine. “They were still a threat,” she said. “I didn’t want them to escape.”

“And were you successful?”

She avoided his gaze and said, “No. One got away.”

Ellis just shook his head, his expression impossible to read.

They travelled in silence for a long time. The Gaia Machine passed into their wake and eventually its pervasive thrumming diminished. The gargantuan perspective of the spine reduced the mono-car to a tiny, insignificant speck.

Ellis closed his eyes, his head lolling sideways. A section of the padding extruded to form a cushion.

Kranda said, “There are sedatives available, for extended journeys.”

Ellis opened his eyes. “How long before we reach the access chute to Sporell?”

Kranda consulted her varnika. “We should reach the upchute in a little less than ten hours.”

“And the sedative?”

Kranda reached out, and a pendant pseudopod descended from the padding above Ellis’s head. “Take a little of the fluid in your mouth, and you will sleep. I’ll wake you when we arrive.”

Ellis moved the tentacle to his mouth and sucked, and a second later his eyes closed.

She asked her varnika how fast they were travelling, and it replied without delay, “
Six thousand kilometres an hour
,” it said.

She smiled to himself. They were travelling so fast and yet there was hardly any sensation of movement. The view fore and aft did not change, and the only sound to be heard was the almost subliminal humming of the speeding vehicle.

She considered her return to Mahkan and the unnamed world where a post in Major Lan’malan’s team awaited her. She wondered if the routine of duty, after this bout of intensive and non-stop action, might prove monotonous and unrewarding. She smiled at the thought: just a week ago she had been relishing the imminent job of assessing the security of the unnamed world’s access chutes, and now she was wondering if the work she had been trained to do for the past twenty years might now seem dull.

First, of course, was the small matter of going among the Sporelli and rescuing the Phandran, which might be the very last action she enjoyed in this life. She banished the thought. The success of the
Sophan
was entirely in her hands, and she would not fail.

She took a mouthful of sedative, then, and in short order was asleep.

5

A
GREY, IRON-HARD
landscape greeted their emergence from the chute.

They were in a range of hills west of the capital city of Kharmand. Behind them, a slab of rock concealed the entrance to the access chute. Ellis was staring at the rock with an expression of puzzlement. He reached out and touched the cold surface.

He turned to Kranda. “How is it done?” he asked. “We stepped through seconds ago, and now...”

“A substance permeable to matter,” she said.

“But only... selected matter?”

“As an engineer, I have embedded biometric codes which access the Builders’ artefacts. Don’t ask me how the technology works. Even we Mahkan do not understand everything constructed by the Builders.”

She moved across the frosted grass and peered down the hillside. She was accustomed to cold, grey worlds – her homeworld being one of them – but whereas Mahkan was a planet of sweeping grandeur and spectacular geography, Sporell was neither. Other than the low hills to the south of Kharmand, the rest of the planet was a flat, featureless place of arable plains extending for thousands of kilometres, the landscape broken only by small towns, villages, and outlying farmsteads.

She indicated the eastern horizon, where a faint glow hung in the sky. “The capital,” she said to Ellis. “President Horrescu resides in the presidential tower, looked after by his medics. Not that the people of Sporell know of his illness. According to them he’s still their glorious leader, in rude health and leading the invasion of their ignoble neighbours. Look.”

The glow above Kharmand intensified, pulsing with polychromatic light. “Up your visual magnification, Jeff.”

Kranda ordered her varnika to zoom in on the city, and made out tiny images in the sky above the horizon. She saw a face, presumably that of Horrescu, and lines of propagandising text too small at this distance for her varnika to translate.

“They beam propaganda onto the underside of the cloudscape,” she said. “On Sporell, the sun never shines.”

Perhaps a kilometre from their position in the hills, a perfectly straight road arrowed from the direction of the capital and vanished towards the western horizon. A convoy of military vehicles chuntered along the road, nose to tail.

“The western coastline is around thirty kilometres in that direction,” she said. “The invasion continues. And look.”

She pointed to a squadron of fliers heading towards the sea that separated Sporell from Phandra.

Ellis was peering towards the lighted city. “How far away is the capital?” he asked.

“A little over a hundred kilometres. It should take us a couple of hours to get there.”

“What’s the local time?”

“Four in the afternoon.”

Ellis looked around him, then up into the sky. “Four in the afternoon and as dull as dawn,” he said.

“We’ll follow the road to the capital, keeping a kilometre this side of it. It’s unlikely that the Sporelli who followed us guessed where we might be heading, but it’s best not to take chances.”

They set off, running from the hills to the flat land below, turning towards the capital before they reached the road and keeping it to their right as they ran. It felt good to be active again, after hours cooped up in first the mono-car and then the upchute. Kranda filled her lungs, breathed out easily. The permafrost crunched, compacting beneath her boots.

They came to the outskirts of the city less than two hours later, an ugly industrial sprawl of warehouses, factories and towering residential blocks. Few citizens were about, and those that did brave the sub-zero temperatures wore long padded overcoats as grey as the colourless skies above.

They passed the encircling industrial zone and came to the heart of the city. Here, no expense had been spared in the erection of vast monolithic buildings situated on wide, treeless boulevards. There was something profoundly dispiriting about the scale of the city, as if even the architecture had been pressed into service to suppress the spirit of its citizens.

Kranda came to a halt and pointed. Beyond the brutalist blocks of stone, perhaps a kilometre away, a slim, rearing tower rose as if intent on piercing the cloudscape.

“The presidential tower.”

Ellis laid a hand on her arm. “One thing, before we set off again.” He hesitated, then said. “Promise me that whatever happens here, we think before we kill, okay? I know it’s a brutal regime, and individual soldiers might be sadistic... but we only take life if we’re threatened.”

She stared at him. “And if the taking of life is necessary to achieve our aim of rescuing your Phandran?”

She could see complex thoughts working themselves out behind the human’s eyes. “In that case... then and only then do we act.”

She inclined her head. “Very well, Jeff, I agree. However, be assured that I always think before I kill.”

Ellis nodded. “Okay, then. Let’s go.”

They ran down a wide boulevard between the soaring city blocks, individual windows dully lighted in the gloom. Minutes later they came to the centre of the city, the vast ring road which encompassed the dark spike of the presidential tower. A little traffic beetled along the ring road, and pedestrians were even scarcer.

Walking now, they approached the tower.

E
IGHTEEN
/// T
HE
D
OMAIN
O
F
T
HE
B
UILDERS

1

M
ARIA SAW HER
last patient of the day, left the lakeside medical complex, and headed for the nearest coffee shop.

She worked four days a week, from nine until three, and she was the first to admit that she had it easy. Compared to her internship at Carrelliville General, ten years ago, this was a sinecure. The reward, she thought, for years of hard work – one of the perks of landing a post with a government body.

She sipped her coffee, stared out across the lake, and realised that she had never felt as happy for a long, long time.

The meeting with Jeff had gone well. She’d felt sick at the thought of the imminent encounter, had almost ended things with him by recording a holo-message telling him all about Dan and her desire to start a new life with him. But Jeff, for all his faults, deserved better than that.

She had expected bitterness and recriminations from him, but he had taken her news with an equanimity which almost earned her respect. Perhaps his experiences of late had changed him, made him reflect on the moribund state of their relationship. She had even, as they’d parted, felt the first stirrings, for a long time, of compassion.

But it was over, done with, and now she was free.

Her wrist-com chimed and she accepted the call. “Dan! What a surprise...” It was the week he should have been spending with his wife; Maria had been counting the days until she next had him all to herself.

“Something’s come up. How do you feel about a shuttle trip to the third circuit?”

She laughed. “But I was only just thinking about the perks of the post,” she said. “Great. Where to, and when?”

“A place we’ve never been to before. Unnamed and uninhabited.”