Helix by Eric Brown Read Free Book Online

business
had taken him from the shop floor, even from the drawing office, and tethered
him to his father’s desk, which he had lately abandoned for the more
comfortable haven of his armchair. His younger self would have snorted in
contempt.
    He
watched the occasional dirigible float over the city, proud that the majority
of the ships were of his own, or his father’s design. There was another airship
company in Agstarn, run by an old rival of his father’s, but their ships were
inferior products, “Full of stale farts and bad technology,” as his father had
joked on more than one occasion.
    He
looked across the dim room, to the desk on which stood the black and white
photograph of Rohan Telsa. He was dressed in a severe full-length summer coat,
high white collar and stove-pipe hat, but the formal dress did nothing to
quench the fire of geniality in the old man’s eyes.
    Ehrin,
surprisingly, found himself choked with emotion. His father had died fifteen
years ago, and he thought he had overcome his grief. Perhaps he was weeping for
his mother, for the loss of both his parents, for the fact that he was now
alone in the world. How proud his father would have been of him, and how they
would have discussed their latest airships long into the early hours.
    He
chastised himself for his self-pity: he was not alone at all, for he had
Sereth, his fiancée—and how she would have remonstrated with him at his display
of piteous emotion.
    He
heard the door creak, followed by a discreet clearing of an old throat.
    “Kahran,
come in.” He turned and watched the old man, bent almost double now, advance
across the threadbare carpet. Ehrin indicated the second armchair, and beside
it the decanter of spirit, and Kahran smiled at the invitation.
    How
age had ambushed his father’s business partner, folding his spine and greying
the fur of his face. His breath came in laboured wheezes as he took his seat
and carefully poured himself a tot of spirit.
    “To
the Company,” he said, and raised his glass high. Three fingers of his gnarled
right hand were without nails, stumps that appeared obscenely naked. Ehrin
recalled that his father’s hands also bore testimony to his days on the shop
floor of the foundry—doing the manual work that Ehrin, as the scion of the
Telsa family, had been spared.
    Ehrin
smiled and said, “To the Company,” and wondered at asking Kahran about his
father’s letter—and about what his mother had told him on her deathbed: that
his father had defied the Church to his cost.
    He
was wondering how to frame the question when Kahran said, “When are you
expecting the word, Ehrin?”
    The
question caught him unawares for a second, until realisation came: recent
events, his mother’s death and the discovery of the letter, had pushed from his
mind the tender his company had put in to prospect the plains to the west of
the central mountains.
    “Today,”
he replied, “if indeed today is the thirty-third.”
    Kahran’s
thin smile hyphenated his sunken cheeks. “It is...” He paused, then said, “And
if you win the tender?”
    “If we win the tender,” he corrected the old man gently. “Why, what do you
think? We will go ourselves, on the adventure of a lifetime, and make the
company even richer and greater than ever.”
    Old
grey eyes watched him with a hint of censure. “And for ever be in the talons of
the Church.”
    Ehrin
shook his head. “The Church runs everything, rules everything, knows
everything, Kahran. There’s no getting away from that. Whatever we do, we are inextricably
bound with the Church.”
    Kahran
looked away. “How your father would hate to hear you speaking thus,” he said
with bitterness.
    “I’m
being realistic, Kahran. Perhaps it was different in my father’s younger days.
Perhaps the Church has gained in power over the past decades. The fact remains,
I’m no pious worshipper at their totalitarian altar. I despise their methods as
much as you do, but I’m in business and