Free Helix by Eric Brown Page B

original maintenance crew. Might they have succeeded in smuggling a
bomb aboard the ship? How his wife would have laughed at his predicament...
    He
reached out, ran fingers over the touchboard. He shut down the failed primary
AIs, brought up the secondary banks and waited till they’d downloaded
sufficient information to apprise him of current status.
    He
concentrated and felt the patchy data seep into his sensorium.
    “Okay,”
he said. “I have limited secondary capability.”
    Cartwright
glanced across at him, and Hendry thought he saw pathetic relief in the
American’s college-boy blue eyes. “What gives?”
    “We’re
just over five hundred light years from Earth,” he said. As he pronounced the
words, the reality sank in. “Which means... we left Earth around a thousand
years ago.”
    Carrelli
said, “So we must be somewhere near the destination system.”
    Beside
him, Olembe shifted his sweating bulk. “Your secondaries capable of sorting out
this shit and getting us flying again?”
    Hendry
shook his head. “Data stacks only. The flight secondaries are as dead as the
primaries.”
    “Oh,
Jesus,” Cartwright said, almost weeping.
    Hendry
glanced past him, towards the dead wallscreen that should have relayed an image
of deep space, had the telemetry been working. He didn’t know exactly why, but
he would have found a sight of the stars comforting.
    He
concentrated on the erratic data flowing into his head, trying to winnow vital
information from the white noise of the failing system.
    How
long before the starship blew, he wondered, killing him and his colleagues
along with the four thousand peacefully sleeping colonists? And Chrissie...
    How
could it all have gone so wrong?
    Then
he caught something, a line of garbled code he pounced on and deciphered.
“Lisa, you get that?” He hardly dared hope, but the spark sent his pulse
racing. “Last operation before the primaries blew.”
    “Check.
Destination program, based on observed data.” The pilot screwed round in her
sling, smiling at him through her tears.
    Sissy
Kaluchek said, “What? What is it?”
    “We’re
heading for a planetary body,” Hendry said, “approximately a parsec away when
we blew.”
    “Destination
system?” Kaluchek asked.
    Hendry
said, “It must be.”
    “But
is the fucking place habitable?” Olembe snapped.
    Hendry
sifted through the data, a sleet of maddening code like a migraine in his head.
“No way of knowing. Any port in a storm.”
    “Je-sus!”
Olembe shouted, hitting the padding of his station with a fist like a lump
hammer.
    “Got
it!” Cartwright said, swinging in his sling. Again that pathetic note of
relief, foretokening an optimism Hendry found oddly unsettling.
    “Check,”
Lisa said. “We’re coming down fast, too fast. Ship wasn’t built for this kind
of stress. Approaching a gravity well. A big one.”
    Cartwright
screamed, “Atmosphere suits, for Chrissake! Everyone suit up!”
    Kaluchek
dashed back into the lateral corridor and returned seconds later with an
armload of orange crashpacks. She doled them out like a kid at a Christmas
party, the bucketing of the ship not helping the accuracy of her throws. Hendry
retrieved his pack from the floor and pulled on the suit. He activated the
filter and, after the smoke-thick fug of the command unit, felt the cold, clean
air cut up his nasal passage and down his throat.
    “Greg,
hold her steady while I suit up,” Xiang ordered.
    She
squirmed into her suit in seconds, then took control as Cartwright struggled
into his own-suit and resumed his sling,
    Hendry
found the straps and crossed them over his torso, securing himself to his
cradle. Behind him, Kaluchek and Carrelli were frantically grappling with their
own straps.
    He
thought of Chrissie, asleep in her cryo-unit and oblivious to the danger. He
preferred to have it that way, rather than having her with him, facing the very
real possibility of death on an alien world.
    Then
he thought of the