Helix Wars (39 page)

“Uninhabited?”

“I’ll explain everything when we meet at the spaceport,” Dan said. “This is big, Maria.” She smiled at the boyish excitement in his voice. “Can you get your things together and meet me at five? That gives you” – he glanced off-screen – “an hour and a half.” She wondered if she detected, in that line, criticism of her usual tardiness.

“I’m on my way,” she said.

Back at her city centre apartment she packed a case with the usual luggage for a short field-trip, then called a taxi. On the way to the spaceport, a short ride of ten minutes, she wondered what it was that had made Dan so excited. And what, she thought, might his team be doing on an unnamed and uninhabited world?

She passed through the routine identity checks in a few minutes, then joined Dan and the rest of the team in a waiting lounge. A dozen men and women, specialists in various scientific fields, stood around in animated conversation. Something about their collective air of anticipation was unlike the usual pre-field-trip gatherings.

“Director Stewart,” Maria greeted him formally, aware of suspicious eyes on her.

He took her to one side, away from the others, and stood before the window overlooking the port and the ships ranked along the tarmac. “Dan, what’s going on?”

He said in lowered tones, “You recall my telling you about the tame Mahkan? Well, she’s come up with the goods.”

She laughed. “The goods?”

“We think we’ve located the virtual domain of the Builders,” he said.

2

S
ECONDS LATER, BEFORE
she could press him for a fuller explanation, a chime rang through the lounge and a female voice invited them to cross the apron and board the waiting shuttle.

“Find a seat up front,” he whispered to her as they left the terminal building, “and I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

She shouldered her bag and followed him across the hot tarmac to the silver arrowhead of the shuttle. For a second she wondered if Jeff might be the pilot, then recalled he was taking a month’s furlough.

She climbed the steps and moved down the walkway between the seats, lodging her bag on an aisle seat at the front and taking the window seat for herself. She strapped herself in and stared through the slit-screen, watching the pre-flight activity of a dozen men and women as they scurried round the shuttle then backed off as countdown began.

Ten minutes later the shuttle canted on its gantry, and she fell back in her seat and gripped the arm-rests, closing her eyes as the engines roared in a deafening crescendo and the shuttle blasted from the tarmac.

Only after two minutes, with the ground safely diminished to the aspect of an architect’s scale model far below, did she open her eyes and stare out. The lake came into view, and the line of A-frames where she and Jeff had lived for years. The prevailing sense from this high up was that New Earth was a verdant parkland dotted here and there with small townships and settlements, a rural idyll criss-crossed by a few highways and the odd mono-rail.

They climbed, and Carrelliville diminished. Ahead, the sea came into sight, and the resort complex around the Builders’ ziggurat. Fifteen minutes later Maria discerned the broad curve of the barrel-shaped world, the far horizon comprising both land and sea, with the stars of deep space beyond.

She pressed her face to the slit-screen and peered up. Far above she made out the filament of the third circuit, their destination.

A voice came over speakers. “Please return to your seats and fasten seat-belts. Transition in fifteen seconds...”

Maria gripped the arms of her seat and closed her eyes. The ion-drive kicked in, pressing her into her seat and boosting the shuttle away from New Earth.

Dan removed her bag from the seat beside her and sat down. She peered between the seats, ensured that no one could observe them, then kissed him. “Now, would you mind telling me what’s going on here, Director Stewart?”

He recounted the information from their man liaising with the Mahkan engineers. “I was in conference with Governor Reynolds just this morning,” he said, “and he broke the news to me. And something else.” He smiled ruefully, looking much younger than his forty-two years. “All along we –
we
being the human authorities – thought we were playing the tame Mahkan, when in fact...”

“Go on.”

“Well, Reynolds rather thinks it was the other way around. The tame Mahkan was a plant.”

“I don’t get it. Why would the Mahkan plant someone in order to give us what we wanted?”

“It’s Reynolds’ theory that the Mahkan thought it time – for whatever reason – to share this with us, but the Mahkan being the Mahkan, proud and bloody-minded as they are – they couldn’t be seen to give us what we wanted. They, or factions within their power-structure, would lose face that way. So they set up the plant and played us along.” He shrugged. “Which, to be honest, I don’t give a damn about. Just so long as we get what we want.”

“The domain of the Builders,” she echoed his earlier phrase. “All you have to do now is work out a way to communicate with them – if they want to communicate, that is.”

He smiled wryly. “Not a lot to ask, is it?”

She peered through the screen. They were so high now that the entirety of new Earth, from north to south, could be seen far below – along with the seas on either side and the worlds beyond them, stretching away into the hazy distance.

Dan cleared his throat. “I haven’t seen you since you met with Jeff...”

She looked at him. Did she detect apprehension in his expression?

He asked, “How did it go?”

She smiled and squeezed his hand. “I told him about us. I told him it was over between me and him.”

“And,” he asked, “how did he take it?”

“He suspected I was seeing someone, suspected it was you. He took it well, considering. I was dreading meeting him, but he accepted what I said.”

Dan sighed. “I wish Sabine was as accommodating.”

Maria’s heart thumped. “What happened?”

“The agreement we had, that I stay with her one week in four...Well, she isn’t happy with it.”

“Well, that’s tough,” Maria said. “I hope you told her that.”

Dan looked uneasy. “Of course I did, but... She threatened legal proceedings, threatened to break my... infidelity, as she calls it... to the media. I don’t want that.”

Maria tried to keep calm and see things from his perspective. “What does she want?” she asked, ice in her heart.

Dan took her hand. “Status quo. Things as they were. I stay with her and see you occasionally. I know, I know... that’s not what I want, either. But I think, for the time being, that it’d be wise to play it her way. Trust me on this, Maria. I want rid of her, but I have to play this carefully.”

She nodded, a pit of disappointment opening up within her. “Okay,” she said in a small voice.

The bitch
, she thought.

“We’ll wait till we’ve communicated with the Builders, as I’m confident we will. The story will be so big then that she can blow my damned infidelity to the media and it won’t make the slightest splash.”

“And,” Maria said, “if the Builders aren’t willing to play ball?”

He looked into her eyes. “Then I’ll just have to face the brick-bats of the media and put a brave face on my depravity,” he said.

The shuttle had rotated in transit, so that now they were upside-down in relation to New Earth – but the right way up in relation to the circuit they were approaching. “How long before we land?” she asked.

“Another six hours,” Dan said. “Hungry? I’ll fetch you a meal.”

Maria smiled to herself and settled in for the rest of the voyage.

N
INETEEN
/// P
RESIDENT
H
ORRESCU

1

C
ALLA HUDDLED IN
the corner of the flier as it carried her over the sea, away from D’rayni. Two Sporelli soldiers sat opposite, their rifles trained on her, their expressions hostile.

She was still reliving the events of several hours ago, when Jeff Ellis had approached the flier in the medical compound. She had been disbelieving that he had actually managed to find her amidst all the bloodshed and chaos, but somehow he’d located her and attempted to take her from the Sporelli. If only he had come a little earlier, before the officers had selected her to be transported to Sporell.

Frantically, as the big flier had roared into life and lumbered into the night sky, she had probed for Jeff Ellis’s signature, fearful that the Sporelli had found and killed him. She had found it with a cry of joy, a tiny, darting thing like a glow-fly far below, growing ever fainter as the flier rose and he ran for his life pursued by Sporelli troops.

And he had not been alone, but accompanied by someone whose signature had been unreadable to her, a big alien who was obviously his accomplice. She wondered if it was this being who had supplied Jeff Ellis with the device that rendered him all but invisible. It cheered her that he was not alone in this venture, and that with the invisibility device he had a chance of eluding the Sporelli.

She wondered, then, if this was what Diviner Tomar had meant when he said that she and the human would be reunited – for brief seconds only, just long enough to exchange a few words before she was dragged into the flier and he had to flee. But no – for hadn’t Tomar told her that with the human she would help to bring peace to Phandra?

She shifted her position minimally on the hard deck, making herself a little more comfortable. Across the hold, the guards sat up, their guns twitching. They settled down again when it became obvious that she did not intend to attack them.

She probed, but met with only the opaque, unreadable mush of the Sporelli minds.

She thought back over the hours she had spent tending the Sporelli injured. They had suffered many casualties, mainly with terrible burns. First the Sporelli medics had worked on the injured, treating the injuries and stabilising the patients before handing them on to the Phandran Healers for aftercare. In this, she was proud to say, she and her people had been successful. Perhaps seventy per cent of all the troops she had nursed had pulled through, and her skill had not passed unnoticed by her Sporelli overlords.

Just one hour before she was whisked away from the battle-zone, a Sporelli officer drew her to one side and said in halting Phandran, “Your talents are exceptional, Calla-vahn-villa.”

She had stared into his skull-like blue face, his slanting eyes so very alien, and replied, “To heal is our calling. Despite the many differences between our people – the main one being our regard of fellow sentients – there are also many similarities. I heal without consideration of the rectitude of those I treat.”

The officer’s lips had twitched, and he said, “Would you like to be taken away from here, from the war-zone?”

She looked up at him. “To another world?”

His eyes narrowed. “How did you know that?”

“Because it is destined,” she said. “I will travel far, achieve great things. My father told me this, as did Diviner Tomar.”

“You will indeed achieve great things. Our leader, President Horrescu, is ill. Our physicians have done all within their power to keep the great man alive as long as they have. You are a... a last resort. You will be taken to the presidential tower on Sporell aboard the next flier out of here.”

She had smiled to herself at the thought of leaving this world and visiting another – so Diviner Tomar had been right on that score. And the other – that she would be reunited with Jeff Ellis?

It was as she was being led out to the flier that she’d detected, with a sudden thrill, the mental presence of Jeff Ellis not twenty metres away.

Now she closed her eyes and prayed that he had managed to elude the Sporelli soldiers and that they would, some time soon, meet again.

2

S
HE SLEPT FITFULLY
, waking with a jolt much later. She sat up and stared out through the window in the sliding door to her right. A grey dawn was seeping from the north, and they were no longer flying over the ocean. A flat, featureless landscape as grey as the dawn spread out far below. If this was Sporell, then it was a bleak and soulless world. She tried to make out if anything lived down there, but she saw nothing – no grass, no trees or shrubs – and her fleeting probes sensed no signs of Sporelli life.

At one point, she did see a long straight road down below, full of black military vehicles heading for the coast, accompanied by the dull, indecipherable emanations of their alien minds. The convoy appeared to be endless, and she thought of the many Sporelli being sent to their deaths, and the many D’rayni who would perish also. All for what? So that a ruler might extend his power to another world?

A ruler...