Helix Wars (47 page)

“Where are we?” a woman from the liaison team asked.

The Mahkan replied, “We are within the spine of the Helix, eight thousand kilometres beneath the surface of the world.”

Gonzalez turned and stared behind him, and something in his awed expression prompted Maria to follow his gaze.

The capsule had miraculously retreated into the surface of the spine, leaving no trace, and beyond where it had stood was a... but Maria had no idea what the thing might have been. It was silver-grey and perhaps a kilometre wide, and rose for kilometres to a jagged point like a mountain of coral or a mammoth termite mound. The surface of the growth was indented laterally, rilled, looking almost organic.

“What,” Dan Stewart said, “is that?”

“It is why we have brought you down here,” the Mahkan said. “It is, in the parlance of the Builders, a
chansarray
... or you might call it a Gaia Machine.”

“A Gaia Machine,” Maria echoed, savouring the words.

The Mahkan and his aides set off towards it, and the humans followed. Maria hung back, allowing Dan to get ahead of her.

It was hard to judge the distance of the
chansarray
. Like a mountain, it appeared at first to be closer than it actually was: they walked for ten minutes before they came eventually to its deeply folded surface.

Maria stared up its towering flank, reduced with her companions to the size of ants. While she gazed in wonder, Dan came to her side.

“I can explain,” he whispered, desperation in his voice. “Just give me a chance, Maria. I can explain everything.”

She stared at him, hoping that her expression conveyed the contempt she felt for him, then looked away and examined the surface of the Gaia Machine.

Gonzalez was saying, “You said that this is the reason we came down here...?”

The Mahkan gestured. “Over time, you and your team will study the
chansarray
. Over time, if the Builders are willing, they might commune with you. In the meantime...”

The Mahkan turned and looked at Maria. “Dr Ellenopoulis, if you would care to step forward.”

She stared at the alien, raised a hand to her chest and whispered, “Me?”

“Approach the
chansarray
,” said the Mahkan, “approach the surface and do not stop. When you reach the tegument, you will feel a slight resistance at first, but do not be dissuaded. Continue forward...”

“Me?” she asked again. She stared at him, disbelieving. “But why?”

“All will be explained when you enter the
chansarray
,” said the Mahkan.

Behind her, Dan Stewart said, “And the rest of us?”

The Mahkan said, “The rest of you have not been... requested.”

She could not bring herself to look into Dan’s eyes, then, but she heard the hurt incredulity in his voice as he said, “But we’re the liaison team. She’s merely...”

The Mahkan interrupted. “Dr Ellenopoulis has been requested.”

She stepped forward, hesitated. She stopped, then turned and looked back at the people she was leaving. Dan, his expression one of mingled chagrin and envy, just shook his head.

She smiled, and raised her hand in what might have been a gesture of farewell.

She walked towards the Gaia Machine, reached its surface and, despite what the Mahkan had said, halted instinctively as she came up against its flank. She was reminded of tree bark, but expanded a thousand times, and along with the visual impression came the scent of what might have been pepper. She leaned forward, into the tegument, pressing...

And she felt it resist, then ever so slightly give. She pressed forward with greater force, and then she was passing through the surface of the
chansarray
, being absorbed by it. She gave an instinctive cry of panic as it came to her that she would be unable to breathe, but the fact was that she was now part of the skin of the machine... if machine it was... and she was breathing, though darkness had descended on her vision.

She stepped forward, and suddenly she was flooded with light.

She fell forward, as if suddenly released, and stumbled to a halt.

She was on the surface of a world, or at least that was the impression she received. She was standing on a limitless greensward beneath a clear blue sky, a warm wind playing on her face.

“Welcome,” someone behind her said.

She whirled to face this person, expecting to see the surface through which she had passed – but the greensward extended forever, occupied by a single figure.

The man, a human, was oddly familiar.

He smiled at her.

“Why...?” she managed at last. “Why have you brought me here? And... and who are you?”

He told her who he was, then said, “And you are here, Dr Ellenopoulis, because we would like to make you an offer.”

T
WENTY-
T
HREE
/// T
HE
S
TARSHIP

1

A
S
E
LLIS AND
Kranda followed the president and his entourage along the corridor of the interworld ship, keeping a safe distance, he found himself thinking about Maria. He recalled their last meeting in the park where Ben had died, and not only did that encounter seem distant in time and space, but the memory of it seemed to belong to someone else – it was as if he were an android, programmed with the memories of the person he had been but unable to access the necessary emotions to appreciate fully what he had experienced.

Oddly, he found himself more worried about the Phandran Healer and her safety.
We are about to be invaded by half a million Sporelli troops
, he mused,
and I’m thinking only of Calla.

They walked down the ramp of the interworld ship into the hangar of the starship, and the president and his party were met by half a dozen armoured Sporelli soldiers. They were shorter and bulkier than the Sporelli he had encountered so far, as if evolved on a world of far greater gravity. Their body-suits were as ugly as their starship, sharing something of its seemingly aquatic design.

They were also armed with snub-nosed blasters which they held at the ready.

One of their number stepped forward and spoke to the president, his expression unreadable.

The party from the interworld ship were escorted from the hangar. Ellis and Kranda hung back, and the Mahkan whispered, “We follow?”

Ellis wanted to keep Calla in sight. “We might learn something useful.”

“Stay close,” Kranda said. “We must work on the assumption that these people might possess technology superior to that of their cousins. We cannot take our invulnerability so far for granted.”

They followed the Sporelli from the hangar and passed down wide corridors illuminated by low green lighting. The ship appeared ancient, its walls and bulkheads dripping with oil and stained with who knew what noxious substances. As they walked, Ellis wondered how long the ship had been in flight from its homeworld. Even if the Sporelli had achieved near-light speed, it would have taken them hundreds of years to reach the Helix. Which meant that the troops, all half-million of them if the president was to be believed, must have spent the journey in some kind of suspended animation or cryogenic state.

He wondered if the bulk of the troops were still in cold storage.

Kranda leaned close to him and whispered, “We have been assuming all along, Jeff, a worst-case scenario.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, the president’s megalomaniacal plans. He wishes to use the might of this Sporelli force to his own ends – but what about the desires of the newcomers? How easily might they accede to the president’s wishes?”

“I understand.”

“To use a human phrase, the newcomers hold all the aces. Superior troop numbers, superior technology – and they have, effectively, the most powerful man on Sporell in their custody.”

“Don’t you think Horrescu will have considered this?”

“I would have thought so, but then who are we to second-guess the thought processes of an alien race? You humans are hard enough to read, and you are a relatively simple race.”

“You’re so complimentary, Kranda.”

“Then again,” the Mahkan went on, “perhaps the president is so far gone in his psychotic power-trip that he thinks all Sporelli, no matter how powerful, will bow to him.”

“We’ll soon find out,” Ellis said.

The Mahkan was silent for a while, then said, “The only course of action, as far as I can see, is to prevent the starship’s arrival at the Helix.”

“That,” Ellis whispered, “might be easier said than done.”

Up ahead, the Sporelli had slowed. Ellis searched among the crowd for Calla, but both the Phandran and her invalid were lost amid the bulkily armoured troops surrounding them.

They passed through an irising doorway into a vast chamber, and Ellis and Kranda hurried to catch up. The portal was in the process of closing as they squeezed through with moments to spare.

Ellis blinked, wondering where they were.

It appeared that they were no longer aboard a starship, but out in the open under the light of a small orange sun. The tiers of an amphitheatre rose on every side, above which a deep blue sky fitted like a lid. The tiny primary was stationed directly overhead.

“Impressive,” the Mahkan whispered at his side.

Ellis looked around him. The amphitheatre was almost empty, perhaps only a few dozen Sporelli dotted about its great curving expanse. He wondered if these people were the engineers and scientists brought from cold sleep to activate the ship at journey’s end.

In the centre of the performance space was a long oval table, and at it sat the stern-faced captain and a dozen of her officers.

They rose as the party from the interworld ship entered the amphitheatre. The captain spoke, evidently inviting them to take a place at the table.

Calla manoeuvred the president forward. Commander Yehn and the remaining security officers seated themselves to either side of Horrescu on the squat chairs surrounding the table.

The armoured Sporelli soldiers took up positions in a bellicose cordon around the performance area. Ellis and Kranda moved to the left of the entrance and stationed themselves before a bulkhead perhaps thirty metres from the gathering.

The captain spoke, and as before the varnika’s translation facility had difficulty with the archaic form of the language, eight-tenths of what she said being undecipherable.

There was no such problem with the president’s replies.

“On behalf of the Sporelli race of the Helix,” Horrescu said, “we welcome you, and rejoice that our people have at last been reunited...”

It went on in this vein for some time, the president spouting platitudes and the captain responding with largely unintelligible replies.

As the dialogue progressed, however, the varnika’s smartcore reprogrammed itself, and was soon furnishing an almost complete translation of the captain’s words.

“Fifty thousand [untranslatable] passed, many of those [untranslatable] in darkness, both literal and metaphorical. We call the time the Sunless Era. Only after much hardship did we rise again, and stories were told of how many of our people were taken by a force more powerful than ourselves. So bizarre were these tales that many disbelieved them... But in time they became a race memory, and, when we achieved star-flight, we looked to distant suns for our captured cousins.”

“And you cannot imagine our joy when we made contact with the emissary ship,” President Horrescu said. “We never forgot the people we had left, the people we feared dead long, long ago. We prospered, in time, from humble beginnings to the heights we have now attained, the rulers of three worlds on the Helix, and soon to be the rulers of many more.”

“You spoke of your triumphs in your last communiqué.”

“The Builders were a great race once, but now no more. We think they became extinct... bequeathing, as it were, the playground of the Helix to those it saved. The races number in their hundreds, we think – perhaps even in their thousands, presided over by an ineffectual race known as the humans; another race, the Mahkans, are the Helix’s engineers. These are a more worthy foe, more technologically accomplished, more aggressive... But no foe at all beside Sporelli might and ambition.”

“You speak of many wonders in this amazing Helix, President Horrescu. Thousands of empty worlds for the taking... Our homeworld, when we left it, was an... [untranslatable] and impoverished place, grossly overpopulated. One of our briefs, on embarking on this mission, was to locate new, habitable worlds where the Sporelli might prosper.”

The president gestured. “Look no further than the Helix,” he said. “Together, with your resources and my own expertise, we can use the Helix to our own ends.”

The captain gave a lop-sided smile. “You paint a picture of riches beyond imagining, guarded only by effete races who would capitulate at the very sight of my armies.”

The president gestured. “I do not exaggerate,” he said.