Free Helix by Eric Brown Page A

quickly,
overtaken by a swift dizziness. His last memory was of the smiling tech who’d
put him under, and it came to him that the woman, and everyone else he’d known
on Earth, would have been dead for generations now.
    He
thought of Bruckner and wondered if the dapper German ever made it to the ESO
island sanctuary north of Denmark.
    Only
then did the wailing alarms and the shriek of the stressed superstructure
penetrate his consciousness. Stuttering halogens blitzed his vision and across
the aisle the sloping panel of the V-shaped cryo-hive had collapsed, revealing
thrashing cables and banks of smouldering circuitry.
    His
stomach flipped. He wanted to vomit, but his last meal had been digested—and
its remains cleaned from his system—centuries ago.
    Further
along the aisle he made out dark figures, their movements jerky in the failing
strip lighting. Friday Olembe carried his bulk like a drunken quarterback,
barging the corridor walls in a zigzag lurch towards the command unit. Behind
him was the tiny bird-like figure of Lisa Xiang, tottering to keep her feet.
    The
ship bucked and pitched. Hendry gripped the cold frame of the catafalque and
rocked back into its padded cushions.
    “Joe!
Let’s move it!” Sissy Kaluchek was already on her feet, punching Hendry’s
shoulder as she passed. In her wake was Gina Carrelli, and Hendry was amazed by
the expression on her face. She was calm, for pity’s sake. The ship was
breaking up around them, Christ knew how many light years from Earth, and the
Italian medic wore a look as beatific as a nun on judgement day.
    He
hauled himself upright, rolled with the yaw of the Lovelock and launched
himself in the direction of his colleagues.
    He
was the last into the cramped confines of the command unit, choking on the reek
of burned-out electrics. Through the smoke and the jittery half-light he made
out Greg Cartwright, already in the co-pilot’s sling, telemetry needles
locating the bare skin of his arms and burying themselves under his flesh. As
Hendry watched, swaying on the threshold, Lisa Xiang swung herself into the
pilot’s sling. A dozen hypodermics arrowed towards her and seconds later she
was integrated with the shipboard matrix, eyes rolling and whitening as she
snapped out a litany of diagnostics.
    “Slowing,”
she said. “Main drives ruptured. Running on auxiliaries. Greg?”
    “Copy.
Sweet Jesus, how did this happen? Joe, AI status? Joe, for Chrissake!”
    Hendry
moved himself, squeezing past Olembe at his station. He slipped into his cradle
and slapped a series of dangling leads onto the receptor sites across his
skull. He closed his eyes and concentrated, but achieved only a staccato
integration with what remained of the ship’s smartware matrix.
    He
felt as if half of his own senses were missing, a loss almost physical in its
pain. His awareness should have been flooded with information from all
quarters, a virtual schematic inside his head showing him the status of the
starship. Instead, vast areas were dark blanks, and what did get through was
scrambled, unintelligible.
    He
called out, “Primary AIs down, getting nothing here.”
    He
glanced at Kaluchek and Carrelli. Kaluchek, as the cryonics engineer, could do
nothing in the command unit. Carrelli too was surplus to immediate
requirements. They hung on to the pressure seal of the entrance, swaying like
workaday commuters. Kaluchek at least looked scared, whereas Carrelli was still
damnably calm.
    “Friday?”
Cartwright said.
    The
African engineer grunted. “Like the lady said, main drives blown. Auxiliaries
running the show. For now.” He glanced at the screen bobbing on its boom before
him. “Thirty per cent efficiency, and falling. They been hit by whatever
knocked out the main drives.”
    “Any
guesses what that was?” Carrelli asked.
    “No
way of knowing. Malfunction, sabotage? Who knows?”
    Sabotage,
Hendry wondered. The Fujiyama mob had got to know about the project and killed
five of the