Helix (12 page)

They
reached the elevator, pad and rose to the lounge.

Carrelli
was sitting up, talking to Kaluchek. The women had found a stash of brandy and
were holding squeeze tubes to their lips. As the pad lifted him into the
chamber, Hendry pulled down the hood of his atmosphere suit and breathed the
warm air.

Kaluchek
indicated Carrelli. “Look who’s back in the land of the living.”

Carrelli
smiled. “I’m fine. It was nothing. I’ll be okay.”

Hendry
stepped off the pad, followed by Olembe. Silence filled the room like ice.

Kaluchek
stared across at them. “What?” she asked, sensing something.

Carrelli
stood and asked urgently, “Lisa? Where’s Lisa?”

Hendry
shook his head.

Olembe
eased past him, walked down the sloping chamber and grabbed a tube of alcohol
from the storage unit. He took a slug, ignoring the medic.

“Joe,”
Kaluchek said, “where the hell is Lisa?”

Hendry
shook his head, words refusing to form.

Olembe
snapped, “She’s dead.”

Hendry
had never seen a face pantomime such incredulity as Kaluchek’s did then. “Dead?
How—?”

“Her
breathing apparatus failed?” Carrelli said. “The atmosphere
is
deadly?”

Hendry
just shook his head.

“Listen
up,” Olembe said. “We’re not alone on this fucking ball of ice. We were
attacked. Lisa was attacked.”

Kaluchek
raised fingers to her lips. Carrelli said, “What happened?” in barely a
whisper.

Hendry
had second thoughts about the brandy. He took a tube and drank. The liquid
burned a path down his gullet. He fell into a sunken bunker and said,
“Something... it looked like some kind of insect, armed with... I don’t know,
swords of some kind. It came at us faster than—”

Olembe
interrupted. “Lisa approached the thing. She actually moved towards it and
said...” He stopped.

Hendry
finished, in a whisper, “She said that we were from Earth, and we came in
peace.”

“And
then the fucker,” Olembe said, “tore her to pieces.”

Hendry
looked from Carrelli to Kaluchek. Their faces were masks of shock,
blood-drained and open-mouthed. “If it wasn’t for Friday we’d both be dead.”

The
African shook his head. “I acted on instinct. Grabbed a piece of wreckage and
hit the bastard. It gave us time to get back inside.”

Dazed,
as if she hadn’t fully taken in what the men had told her, Kaluchek said, “It
killed Lisa? Where is she? Maybe Gina could—”

“Sissy,”
Olembe said with pained precision, “imagine a samurai on speed, armed with a
dozen scimitars. Lisa didn’t stand a chance.” Olembe paused, then said, “That
isn’t all.”

Hendry’s
throat was sore with the effort of clamping back a sob.

Carrelli
said, “What? What is it, Joe?”

He
shook his head, words impossible.

With
a gentleness Hendry found surprising, Olembe said, “The colonists in Hangar
Three... Joe found them. Chrissie was in Three.”

“They’re
all...?” Carrelli said.

“The
remaining three thousand are okay,” Olembe said.

Carrelli
moved quickly to his side. “Joe, I can give you something. A sedative,
something to take the pain away for a while...”

Hendry
stared at his brandy and shook his head.

She
glanced around at the others. “If you need to be alone, Joe...”

“No.”
It came out faster than he’d intended, but he meant it. Right now, the last
thing he wanted was to be left in the chamber by himself, prey to visions of
the past.

He
took another long drink, felt himself drifting. The conversation went on around
him. He heard the words as if at a great distance.

At
one point, Sissy Kaluchek said, “So... what now? What do we do?”

Olembe
snorted, “There’s precious fucking little we can do, sweetheart. The planet out
there isn’t exactly paradise, and the natives are hostile.”

Kaluchek
stared at him. “You don’t think those
things
can get in here?”

Olembe
looked across at Hendry. “Fuck knows. We’d better arm ourselves.”

“And
then what?” Kaluchek said.

“Well,”
Olembe grunted, “we can’t get the ship up and running and fly out of here. We
gotta face the fact, we’re stranded, and there won’t be no more starships
coming thisaway, at least not human starships.”

Carrelli
said, “So we give in. Sit here and drink ourselves into oblivion. Is that what
you’re saying?”

The
African turned and stared at her. “You got a better idea?”

Hendry
found himself saying, “We could always go back into cold-sleep, set to wake in
a thousand years...” The prospect was appealing.

Olembe
laughed. “And what good would that do, Joe? We’d wake up, and what would have
changed?”

Hendry
shook his head and took another mouthful of brandy.

“We
haven’t explored the place,” Carrelli said. “We have arms, technology. If this
place has daylight...” she shrugged. “You never know, we might make a go of it
yet.”

“Strike
up a pact with the friendly aboriginals,” Olembe sneered. “Come on, Gina.”

Carrelli
faced down his stare. “I find your attitude very unhelpful,” she said, her
Italian accent suddenly very hard. “We’re facing a bad situation, okay, and all
you can do is give in.”

“Hey,
sweetheart, I ain’t giving in.”

“It
sounds like it to me, Olembe,” Kaluchek said.

Olembe
shrugged. “Look, all this hot airing isn’t gonna solve a thing. Right now it
doesn’t look too good. I’m a realist.”

“So
you’re giving in,” Kaluchek pressed. “You can’t see a way out of this trap,
right?”

Olembe
stood and took a tube of brandy from the wall unit. “As of now, I can’t see a
way out.” He moved up the incline to the far end of the lounge and slumped into
a workstation, frowning at the screen.

Kaluchek
watched him go, shaking her head. “Jerk,” she said under her breath.

Hendry
said, “Go easy on him, Sissy.”

“Why
the hell should I?”

Hendry
shrugged. “He says what he thinks. He doesn’t hold anything back.” He looked
from Kaluchek to Carrelli. “Admit it, he said what we were all thinking, but we
didn’t want to come out with it.”

Kaluchek
shook her head, staring into her brandy. “I don’t give in. No matter what. No
matter how bad things seems. There’s always a way out, an answer.”

Carrelli
backed her up. “We’ll survive. I know we will. All we need is knowledge. We can
do anything if we have a full understanding of the situation we’re in.”

“I
hope you’re right.”

The
medic stood and moved to a vacant workstation. “I’ll try to find out what we
have left in the way of medical supplies.”

Kaluchek
watched her, then looked across at Hendry. “You should really have taken
something from Gina, you know. Alcohol isn’t the answer.”

He
ignored her. They drank in silence and stared out through the viewscreens at
the dark night, the occasional star twinkling through the frigid atmosphere.

Hendry
saw Chrissie lying in the catafalque, beautiful in death. Then the image was
overlaid by the vision of Lisa Xiang, stepping forward, hand raised in peaceful
greeting. He could not banish from his mind’s eye her bloody and futile death.

His
thoughts drifted, back to Earth, to Chrissie.

He
said, at last, “It’s strange...” and stopped there.

“What?”

He
shrugged. “I was reasonably content, back on Earth. I lived alone.” He told her
about the Mars shuttle and the starship graveyard. “I talked to Chrissie every
month or so, saw her every couple of years.” He smiled. “It was enough to know
that she was there, that sooner or later I’d see her again. Then she came, and
told me about the mission. She was going to the stars, leaving me for good. The
painful thing wasn’t so much being on my own, or even the knowledge that I’d
never see her again— though that was bad enough—but not knowing what would
happen to her. She’d live out her life among the stars, thousands of years
after I was dead... and I wouldn’t know a thing about it.” He smiled. “Maybe I
was a typical father. I wanted some control over her life.”

Sissy
smiled and shrugged.

“And
now she’s dead. It seems so damned pointless, so random. Why her? You know
something, I was so looking forward to when she woke up and found me here.”

“I’m
sorry, Joe.”

He
stared at his brandy. “She was so fired up about the mission. She believed in
this project. She wanted to build a world out here that worked, that didn’t
repeat the mistakes we made on Earth.”

Sissy
said, “We’ll do it, Joe. Somehow, we’ll—”

He
said, bitterly, “Perhaps it’s just as well she didn’t survive. I mean, what are
our chances—?”

“That’s
grief talking, Joe. We’ll pull through.”

A
while later he said, “Did you leave anyone on Earth?”

She
shrugged, looked uncomfortable. “Not really. I split up with a guy a year
before I was selected for the mission.”

“Parents?”

“Mom
left when I was ten, ran off with some guy. Dad died a few years later. I had a
sister I never saw. My kid brother... we
did
get along. He was killed in
the cholera epidemic that swept through Canada a few years ago.” She laughed,
unexpectedly.

“What?”

“Listen
to me. A ‘few years ago’! All that happened
hundreds
of years ago!” She
stopped, then said, “Wonder what happened to Earth? Do you think anyone
survived?”

He
thought about Old Smith, the people he’d lived with on the commune, Bruckner
and all the other admin staff at the ESO... long dead and forgotten. Well,
almost forgotten.

“If
humanity did survive... a thousand years is a long time... who knows what might
have happened. Maybe some groups did struggle through, build a better place.”

She
looked at him. “But you doubt it, right?”

He
grunted. “Yes, I doubt it. We’d wrecked the planet. Left a nice mess for the
generations who followed, if any did.”

He
looked across at her, her brown eyes reminding him so much of Chrissie. “Who do
you blame, Joe?”

“Blame?
You mean the politicians of the twentieth, early twenty-first century? The
industrialists?” He shook his head. “They were just human, and greedy. They’d
inherited systems and infrastructures it was almost impossible to change and
break out of. I don’t blame anyone.”

“Human
and greedy? We’re human and greedy, Joe. Does that mean there’s no hope?”

“I
had the same conversation with Chrissie. Do we carry with us the seeds of our
own destruction? She had faith in the ultimate success of the project. We were
starting from scratch, we’d learn from our mistakes.”

“I
think I would have liked Chrissie,” Kaluchek said. She sipped her drink,
staring across the room. Hendry took another tube of brandy. He lay back in the
bunker and thought about his last meeting with Chrissie, the pain he’d felt
when he’d said goodbye.

He
slept eventually, and dreamed, and in his dreams Chrissie was five again, and
they were playing snakes and ladders, Chrissie bewailing her luck when she
landed on a snake...

He
woke up suddenly, cut to the core by the realisation of his daughter’s death.
He sat up. Sissy was comatose across the bunker from him, sprawled out with a
brandy tube clutched possessively to her chest. Carrelli was curled in a far
bunker, quietly sleeping. At the far end of the lounge, Olembe sat hunched over
a screen.

Chrissie
was dead: all his time with her was in the past, now. The future he’d
envisioned, with his daughter a major part in it, would remain nothing but a
dream.

He
looked up, and only then did he realise that it was no longer night-time beyond
the viewscreen. While he’d slept, daylight had come to the planet. A weak,
watery daylight, granted, but nevertheless a light that perhaps betokened some
small measure of hope.

He
stood and crossed to the viewscreen, realising as he did so that he would be
the first human being to witness sunrise on an alien world. He looked out
across a vast white-blue ice plain, as smooth a regular as the surface of a
mirror. He scanned the horizon, looking for the sun—then lifted his gaze.

Zeta
Ophiuchi was a small point high in the sky, almost directly overhead. He tried
to work out the physics of so rapid a sunrise, and then gave up.

Then
he saw something, but couldn’t quite work out what he was looking at. He had
never seen anything like it before, and it was as if his brain was having
difficulty processing the unfamiliar data relayed by his staring eyes.