Broken Helix

By J.D. Robinson

Bena Fidi Outpost, humanity's most distant colony, has vanished from the surface of Fidi. But the problems begin when it comes back.

 

Stasia is now on the run from Sentinel—the point at the end of the Sovereign Alliance's spearhead. Is the security agency pursuing her to find out what she remembers about the outpost's three-minute disappearance? Or are they trying to silence the survivors?

 

Zara is enduring a series of Sentinel-sponsored interrogations, and faced with questions about the vanishing that she has no answers for. But why is everyone so cagey about the other survivors? And why is Sentinel convinced that she had something to do with the disappearance?

 

Ellie, a freelance news photographer, is on Earth. And that's the problem: only moments ago she was on Bena Post. How did she just cross an unknown number of light-years instantaneously? Why does no one at home remember her leaving? And what are the marks developing under her skin?

 

Three survivors of one unexplained event will face their own personal struggles as they work to piece together what happened to Bena Post before their own bodies and minds betray them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.D. Robinson
• Release date: Nov 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9798224154371

Book preview

1

Stasia Saldivar’s eyes wandered from her handheld panel to the fluorescent strip of blue-green at the horizon. In the gap between the Hab module and Bena Post’s protective regolith shell, one of Fidi’s moons had set the night sky aflame. In stark contrast to the remote outpost’s orthodox drabness, that play of color in the distance was almost inviting. Unfortunately, Fidi’s oxygen-poor atmosphere would have made such a jaunt exceptionally arduous.

Still not getting anything?

Vint Catan’s voice came through the bug in Stasia’s ear, bringing her attention back to the matter at hand. None of the sensors on her panel showed a signal from the chief engineer’s junction block, which meant the new Hab module was about as habitable as a deflated balloon.

Nothing yet, she said. Her oxygen mask made her voice sound muffled, at least to her. Try turning it on?

Oh yeah, why didn’t I think of that?

She smiled. "I swear Sentinel isn’t testing their mods before they ship the units out. Hey!"

Her ladder wobbled, forcing her to wedge herself between the poly-fiber skin of the module and the maintenance duct. A moment later, Pan Bo’s masked face popped up on the other side of the duct like a methane bubble breaching the surface of a Fidi brine bog.

What’s up? Vint asked.

Sorry, nothing, Stasia said. Just my spotter abandoning his post. You were supposed to keep me steady.

Structeum’s greenest engineer shook his head. How I’m supposed to learn if I can’t see what you do? Sure enough, his gnat was documenting the proceedings.

Stasia waved the pest away. Well, you’re not going to see anything on this side if we can’t get the juice flowing.

I thought all modules are wired the same. This should be plug-and-play, a routine operation.

Stasia snickered and tipped her head down at the two men in fatigues posted by the maintenance door. You forget, this is a Sentinel block. They’ve tampered with every system they can lay their sausage fingers on, for whatever secretive thing they’re going to be working on here.

Sausage? Pan’s assistive bug must have tripped up on the idiom-to-Mandarin translation.

Vint’s response interrupted them. Isn’t it early to be indoctrinating your new charge?

Nothing he can’t see with his own eyes, Stasia said. Then, to Pan, All their tampering back at the shop means we have to un-tamper out in the field.

"You know we can hear you, right, skids?"

Stasia was unable to hide a grin as she peered down at the fancy Sentinel helmets, now directed up at her. Sentinel Corps’s epithet for civilian workers was so antiquated as to be endearing. The second-best one, by that measure, was "half-watts."

Some amount of tension between the civ workforce of subcontractors and the private military company was to be expected, of course. But Sentinel would have to learn to get along with its neighbors: Bena Post was in the process of opening itself up to civilian habitation—and even tourism—an initiative commonly referred to as "the influx."

Pan himself had only arrived three days ago, but he already knew enough to ignore the two men. Is it not dangerous to make mods this far out?

You could say that. Stasia tugged at her mask where it was pinching her jaw. Sentinel requisitioned a custom block a couple dozen suns back, an entirely new construction. Turned out the fab had the lines feeding into the cabinet bottom to top, which Minda Shepard discovered when she tried hooking it up and got her hand blown off. Actually, not to creep you out, but that’s probably why your contract was expedited.

At least Stasia had known what she was signing up for. She and Adi had decided to go for it despite Structeum denying his contract. In the short term, that meant Stasia would be stationed four years on an alien world without her husband, by Earth-standard reckoning. But in the longer term the position would be lucrative enough to set her and Adi up for early retirement back in Sol System.

All she had to do was to get Bena Post ready for the influx, and to deal with Sentinel grunts for one more year while Adi was out there somewhere running through the Strand’s forty-two-pass circuit as a pilot for hire.

Pan, would you mind stepping down for a moment? There had been no word from Vint for several minutes, and there probably wouldn’t be. Not today, at least.

We’re giving up?

No, no. There’re just better ways we can use our time.

He lingered for a moment more before descending his stepladder.

Stasia waved at the nearest of their Sentinel chaperones. Hey there, can you give me a hand up here?

The man’s suspicion was apparent even through his helmet.

Hey, it’s your Hab, she said. If you prefer the intimacy of hot-racking in your leaky temp encampment, that’s your prerogative.

I can help, Pan called up to her.

Not with this. This wasn’t going to go over well with him, was it? He looked small down there. They had sent her a kid. Poor guy.

What’s up? asked a voice in her ear as a helmet rose from behind the duct like a small logo-encrusted moon.

It’s the regulator here, she said, indicating the largest of several components clinging to the junction block. "I don’t know what it thinks it’s doing, but it’s not regulating."

Uh, well, I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m not really a technician, or⁠—

You don’t have to know a thing. Stasia, by the way. She reached over the open conduit housing to shake his hand.

Jerrod. You, uh, need me to do something?

See this? She pointed at a numeric display flashing a series of random digits. The regulator was doing exactly what it ought to do, in fact. Without a signal coming from the remote side, it was simply spitting out the values of random background fluctuations—nothing but noise. This is the manual regulator override.

Means nothing to me.

All I need you to do is match the value you see on this display by entering it on the keypad here.

Vint’s voice came over Stasia’s bug. "Are you pulling your vent cycle thing again? That’s just mean, Stasia."

She ignored him.

There. Plus one-four-three-seven-seven. Get that entered in.

The Sentinel man braced himself with one hand while dutifully punching in the digits with the other. But what’s this for?

Just keep matching the numbers so we don’t trigger a vent cycle.

What’s a vent cycle? He paused, looking up at her as if she had just pulled a gun on him.

"That’s where all the oxygen in the Hab ring is vented out to Fidi. New value, new value!"

"Jesus." He tapped in the digits, the tremor in his hand plain to see.

You’ve got to stay on that, okay, Jerrod? I know you can. She rapped the metal housing twice—such was her confidence.

For how long?

I just need to go check the other end, she said vaguely as she descended her ladder. We’ll be right back.

Pan was waiting for her below, looking anything but amused. Is that really⁠—

Justified? Possibly. She held a finger to her lips. We can get Minda’s opinion about that later. Come on. Let’s go do Vint’s job for him.

"Shénme guǐ a?" said Po, which Stasia’s bug translated a moment later to, What the hell?

Hey, what if I mess up? came Jerrod’s voice from above.

You’ll be fine, she called out as she made her way to the maintenance door. She patted Jerrod’s teammate on the shoulder as she passed him by.

You’re coming right back? he asked.

Sure, she said, turning around as she walked. But don’t worry, your man’s a virtuoso on that keypad.

When their surly chaperones entered their complaint later that day, it would go directly to Vint Catan, who would file it away with the others.

2

It’s something, isn’t it? asked the man sitting at the center of a 360-degree display.

He must have heard Zara’s sharp intake of breath as she entered the front office of Conor Cox, Bena Post’s head of operations. The stately chamber’s projection-panel walls depicted a fully immersive horizon-to-horizon view of the untamed brine bogs of Fidi, with the multi-domed sprawl of Bena Post itself in the foreground.

It most certainly is something, Zara said to the illuminated executive assistant, himself a part of the theater. And sure, the excessive display was impressive, despite being a gross misallocation of resources. It was pure spectacle, of course—the surest sign that humanity’s most distant colony was being readied for presentation to a wider audience.

And to the media.

In transforming Conor Cox’s office into an extravagant window on Fidi, its designers had pulled out all the stops. The alien scenery would impress during the press conferences to come.

Conor’s assistant seemed to appreciate her answer, and he swiped away the section of display between them to give her his full attention. As she approached, she noted his engraved name plate, which read Connor Quick.

Is everyone in this office named Connor?

Mine has the extra N, he said, a practiced response.

Right, said Zara. Well, as you may recall from our chat just yesterday… Pause, no response. I’m Zara Farhad with Terraday Relay.

Excellent. And how may I be of service, Ms. Farhad?

Unbelievable. The man was surrounded by data, yet her exclusive with the head of ops seemed beyond his ability to recall, let alone to schedule.

Over the past five months—or whatever goes for months here—I’ve been conducting a series of interviews…

Connor was already nodding. Yes, now I remember.

And so naturally I was hoping to sit down with the N-deprived Conor, since he is, in fact, the head of operations.

Unfortunately—

I’ve already put in a number of requests.

Yes, and I appreciate that, but⁠—

I leave in less than a month, see, and our head of ops is the only official I haven’t interviewed. Just around the executive assistant’s desk was a wooden door, or at least it looked like wood. Whatever it was, it was closed. Was the man in there now? Was he listening to this ridiculous exchange? She looked back at Connor. Wouldn’t you find it a rather conspicuous gap to see profiles of every decision-making official and luminary at Bena Post save for its own head of ops?

No, I get that, he said, shifting in his chair. It’s just…Mr. Cox isn’t physically here. And I understand your confusion, Ms. Farhad⁠—

Not confused.

But Mr. Cox is probably the busiest person at the base. If you simply reschedule⁠—

How can the man be so elusive? she asked, leaning on the modest shelf that comprised the assistant’s physical desk. This isn’t the prime minister we’re talking about. He knows I’m here. At this rate I might have better luck submitting my questions to the man’s engram agent and hoping for the best.

Actually, that’s⁠—

"No, that’s a terrible idea, Mr. Quick. I was being facetious. Face-to-face is how I conduct my interviews. My readers want to see faces put to the names. This is Terraday Relay we’re talking about."

Right, and I⁠—

"So that’s quite a number of people across several systems, all wondering where Conor One-N Cox is hiding."

Connor must have realized he was gripping his armrests, and his face grew flush as he pulled the calendar up on his display, then dismissed it again after the briefest glance.

Zara squinted at him. Shall I put you down as ‘no comment,’ then?

Gathering his wits, the man cleared his throat, then regarded her steadily. Have you, by chance, had the opportunity to admire our bug farm?

Zara only just managed to hold her protest as the executive assistant’s question sank in. With a slow nod, Zara retraced her steps toward the door. Mr. Quick, you are a gem.

Oh, I know.

If Bena Post’s Bioremediation Lab wasn’t the heart of the outpost, it might well be its stomach. Known colloquially as the bug farm, Zara’s press credentials granted her special access to the otherwise restricted area, located within Bena Post’s Environmental Control and Life Support Wing.

She made her way past lab equipment dwarfed by vast obelisk-like tanks and sealed glass coffins translucent with condensation. As she had written in her last post, Bena Post’s main non-exportable product was pollution, as with any closed ecological system. Here, she had learned, engineered microbes such as bacteria, algae, and fungi produced enzymes that helped convert pollutants back into usable resources. It also fed back into Bena Post’s regenerative agriculture system, without which the outpost would never have survived in the days before explorers discovered the circuitous route back to Earth.

May I help you?

The woman in the bunny suit pulled off her hood and tucked it under an arm, glancing down at Zara’s badge. Coveralls and lab coats were de rigueur within the lab’s walls, making Zara’s plain attire conspicuous.

I’m scheduled to interview Conor Cox, and I was—oh… She spotted the man standing at the other end of the lab. He appeared to be talking to two people in Sentinel fatigues. Zara pointed at him. I’ll leave you to it, she said, and scurried away from the lab worker.

As she edged closer to the trio, Zara recognized Rémy Lambrou, Sentinel’s joint interface control officer. She had interviewed him early on—just a week or so after her arrival—about the unique difficulties in coordinating intelligence among various outpost stakeholders when the communication delay from Fidi to Earth to Fidi was nearly three weeks. The third person—a woman with close-cropped hair and military-hewn posture—was unfamiliar to her. A visitor from Canopy Station, perhaps?

"We owe someone an explanation," Rémy was saying to the head of operations, doing his best to keep his voice just under the even whoosh of machinery.

"We? No, Rémy, because this is beyond your purview," Conor said, somehow managing to sound frazzled and imperious at once.

What had she missed? Zara cursed her luck—if she hadn’t taken a detour to the director’s office, she might have gotten here early enough to catch more context.

She sidled closer, trying to be discreet.

Look, everything we do here is under the aegis of the joint chiefs, Conor was saying. If you have any objections about the day-to-day, feel free to enter them into the suggestion box. But this wonky-cog routine of yours, I have zero time for.

Cog? the woman scoffed.

So we should just look the other way? Rémy asked.

If you’d remembered your mandate, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Look, the influx is imminent—you’re both aware of that, right? That’s what everyone’s excited about. So be excited, and focus on the immediate. I’ll loop you in on the extracurriculars the moment I think you may be of use.

Just then, Conor looked her way, and to Zara’s surprise, flashed her a grin worthy of an old friend. As the two Sentinel employees sized Zara up, the head of operations was already on his way over to her. He might as well have been lunging for a life raft. Zara had come just in time.

You weren’t looking for me, by chance?

Today must be my lucky day, Zara said, making a show of launching her gnat with a flick of her finger. At the sight of that, the two Sentinel reps made a beeline for the lab’s outer door. On the record?

The question made him blink. Sorry, who are you with?

So he didn’t remember. His attention was on the context-collecting agent hovering just over Zara’s left shoulder. He had just used her as an excuse to get out of that conversation. Well, so be it if it worked in her favor.

You have me at a disadvantage, he said.

She offered her hand. Zara Farhad for Terraday Relay. We were introduced five months ago, Earth-standard reckoning. At the inauguration?

The ribbon-cutting ceremony had seen prospective patrons—those wealthy or foolish enough to make the two-and-a-half-month trip from Sol System—getting their names inscribed on the molded biocrete walls of Bena Post’s landing bay. The Sovereign Alliance had hoped the commemoration would encourage additional private investment, but for the most part, the well-heeled looky-loos had taken their wealth with them back to Sol, and Sentinel had been more than willing to fill that void.

Sorry, he said, taking her hand. If we talked that day⁠—

Oh, no, she said with a wave of her hand. It was just an introduction, with the promise of a future conversation.

"An interview."

An interview, yes. At a later date.

He was a stickler.

Zara glanced at the doors. I hope I, ah, didn’t interrupt anything just then?

He waved her question away. My colleagues have grown somewhat stir-crazy. They mistake routine for boredom and start looking to fill a void. Anyway, it’s not uncommon, as you might imagine. You’ve been here long enough to see that, no doubt.

Of course he wouldn’t volunteer anything unseemly. She would have to be more direct with him.

Anyway, Conor said, it’s been a hectic few months, so… Here, if this is going to be a proper interview, let’s find a place to sit.

Behind the racks of equipment were several stools, currently unoccupied. As they took their seats across from each other, Zara tried one more time.

Your Sentinel friends definitely sounded worked up about something specific. What did they mean about owing someone an explanation?

Somewhere at the back of her mind, she was aware this was a question her subject wouldn’t answer. But the look on his face—like she had just asked him which child he loved more—made the asking worth it. It was probably a bad habit.

"Suffice to say, they’re not really big picture types. He’d recovered quickly, to his credit. Look, you’re no doubt aware that there’s a kind of ad hoc frontier mentality that sets in when you’re so far from home. We have a lot of stakeholders here—and not so much structure…or infrastructure—so when the dog with the biggest bark is a private military contractor, everything starts to look like conflict in the making. Frankly, that’s where a head of operations lives. So sometimes, yes, that makes me the bad guy. The buck stops here. But the only way we’re going to be ready for the coming influx—the commercial influx—is to be more rigorous, more deliberate about how we go about growing Bena Fidi Outpost. Now is not the time to bend rules, just because…"

Something crossed the man’s face, and he left his thought hanging as he gave his head a single shake. There was somewhere he just wasn’t willing to go. At least not yet. In the interim, the sudden silence made the fans of the environmental control systems sound like a flood.

Zara had done her level best to stay out of Sentinel’s way. It wasn’t difficult. At the moment, Bena Post’s population consisted of a skeleton crew of just 130 people, mainly lab technicians, civil engineers, and farmers. Overseeing the whole operation, Sentinel Corps had been enlisted to protect the interests of the Sovereign Alliance. As the acting local authority, they also issued rules and directives and provided regular reports to their off-world masters. At least, that had been the idea.

It’s fascinating, isn’t it?

Zara looked at him. Sorry? Maybe he had mistaken her rumination for wonder, but at the moment, the tantalizing whiff of concealed brinkmanship held far more allure than the machineries of life support.

This is all a delicate dance, he said, as if he had just found majesty in the machinery. "It’s a dance that’s largely invisible to us, though. We could spend an entire stint here without thinking about phytoremediation, or microbial remediation, or about how we harness enzymes to detoxify xenobiotic compounds—moreover, how we must do these things to ensure our own survival."

Zara tried to steer the conversation back. So tell me what this means to the head of operations. Conor Cox was clearly a true believer, and that was where the best interviews were born. The trick to telling that story was finding the intersection between human interest and pure escapism.

Superficially it sounds exotic. Take…the concept of growing algae in a tank, giving the dead algae to methanogenic bacteria, etcetera. Now, that’s just a small piece of the puzzle, and it already sounds like something foreign. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. If you look at it more closely, this isn’t just lab equipment. This is us.

Explain that.

Just that. These machines are our organs, externalized. These are the processes we need to sustain our lives.

Could you say that about any ecosystem? Is everything we keep near us essentially us?

Not everything, no. He sat back on his stool. "No, some things are most definitely not us."

Zara took a moment to let his words hang in the air, to become an inflection point. The air in the lab was in constant circulation, as if it were breathing.

Speaking of us, she said, plucking a card from her waistband, let’s talk about you for a moment.

Now his eyes were back on the gnat. My work is more interesting than I am, I assure you.

But the people back home—by which I mean Sol System—they want to know who these individuals are who would come all this way, to sacrifice so much, to risk so much.

Oh… He pursed his lips. But it’s less of a sacrifice than it was, isn’t it?

Let’s explore that for a moment, she said, pulling out her card and scanning the notes she’d taken. You arrived here on Fidi twenty years ago, by Earth-standard reckoning, in 2121.

That’s right.

"Six years before the return path was discovered, in 2127."

Zara remembered that year well. She had been working at a stringer for federated news syndicate Press+Link, grinding out stories on Nairobi’s nanomedicine revolution, when she had heard the news. A segmented drone had discovered the disjointed path from the Iruva System back to Sol by traversing a series of forty Strand anomalies.

So named for their ribbonlike presentation, a team of Japanese astronomers had first discovered the Strand in 2096, just beyond the Kuiper Belt. On closer examination, what had appeared to be a wrinkle in space-time was revealed to be a true window-like view into another universe. But while wormholes as traversable doorways had been theorized for more than a century, the Strand promised instantaneous point-to-point travel with one fatal hitch: it offered only one-way transit.

Chinese asteroid mining company XiaoFei discovered this in 2108, when they slipped a drone probe through the Strand known as Sol Pass, only to watch as it meandered about on the far side, seemingly unable to find its way back through. The next probe sent through—this time under the supervision of the Sovereign Alliance—was outfitted with a visual communication array. Now the probe could show observers exactly why it was destined to die on the destination side: no return passage existed there.

Astronomers estimated the Strand pass led to a point located in the inner Norma arm of the Milky Way, and dubbed it Norma Point. But, spurred by what was arguably humanity’s greatest discovery, the scientific community wasn’t content to accept that the Sol Pass anomaly was without siblings. Where there was one Strand pass, there must be, statistically speaking, countless other Strand passes. Thus, in 2110, the SA authorized the release of a swarm of multistage cartographic drones.

Half a generation later, the Strand’s forty-two-pass Grand Circuit had been fully mapped, and by 2130, the initiative had already begun to transform Bena Fidi Colony to Bena Fidi Outpost.

So, Mr. Cox, Zara continued, here’s what strikes me about your story. It’s that you were a lifer, by choice. You came here when there was no way home. And you’re one of the few lifers who remains here in Bena Post.

With the floodgates about to open, Zara’s exclusive couldn’t be more well-timed. Public interest in Iruva System’s second planet, Iruva-C, called Fidi, was second only to the interest in those who would leave Sol behind for life on the frontier. Or, as Zara herself had described it in her last headline, The Human Side of the Fidi Influx.

You make it sound like a matter of destiny, Conor said, when really it’s about a sense of purpose.

Not everyone with a purpose leaves everything behind to pursue it. Zara had been counting the days until her trip through the forty Strand passes between Iruva and Sol. I mean, it’s one thing to be a lifer by choice, but now you do have a choice.

And I’m doing what I need to do. Here.

You have no plans to go back home now that you can?

This is my home.

He didn’t blink or look away. A true believer to the core.

So tell me, what is it you’d like to accomplish here?

He took a breath as he considered the question. There are more than forty Strand passes that we know of, he said, squinting through his thoughts. But Iruva is the only habitable system we’ve discovered.

So far.

"Which is kind of what I’m getting at. This is what humanity is, I mean. I believe we keep pushing to keep growing. To me that’s key to who we are, and who we will become."

Which is what?

He shook his head. Something greater than we are.

3

I can’t believe we’re still doing this, Stasia said as she scanned the Structeum manifest freshly arrived from Ooraa Pass that morning, straight from the mining colony on the Kuiper Belt asteroid Multultu.

Communiques through the forty Strand passes between Sol and Iruva had to endure a twenty-day trip, while any corrections to the order would take just thirteen hours through two Strand passes. Such was the disparity of living in a universe with one-way portals—communication only traveled backward, but physical travel could only move forward. Stasia didn’t know if it was poetic, exactly, but something about it appealed to her engineering side. There was something to be said for only moving forward. After all, that was what had brought her to Fidi’s lone outpost to begin with.

What’s up? Vint asked, rolling his chair up behind her. Everything there?

Same as always. She showed him her panel. Aluminum, polyhexaphene, and enough TPE to turn your neurons to applesauce. We’ll keep the fabmats fat and happy for another few months.

You had me at applesauce.

My point being, Stasia said, this stuff needs to be automated, seriously. Bena Post’s opening for business, and we’re still… Ugh, I feel like a drone trawling through inventory.

He sat up, recalibrating himself for Serious Stasia, as he called her. I hear you, and it’s going to happen.

They have systems for this.

I know.

This stuff could be grown instead of fabbed, so let Bena Post build itself out. We can’t be here to hold its hand the whole time, not with Sentinel to babysit on top of⁠—

"I know."

She looked at him. The older man