Helix Wars by Eric Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

at that second, Kranda’s wrist-com chimed.
    She frowned at the interruption. She accessed the call, intending to tell whoever it was that they should call back later. She assumed it would be one of her old team, Farini or one of the other women, with some procedural question or other.
    She was surprised, and a little shocked, to see the face of her hive-mother’s valet, Khell, staring up out of the tiny screen.
    Kranda looked at the major. “Would you excuse me a moment?”
    The major gestured, and Kranda rose and moved around the dome to a quiet area. “What is it?” she asked, panicked. “Is –”
    “Marran is well,” Khell reassured her. “But she must see you.”
    “Immediately?” Kranda was taken aback. “What’s wrong?” Illness in the family, or an accident?
    “Your Sophan ,” the valet whispered.
    “ Sophan ,” Kranda echoed. “What has happened?”
    “You need to return, right away. Marran has more information.”
    Kranda nodded. “Tell Marran that I will set off immediately.”
    She cut the connection and returned to where the major was patiently waiting.
    “Is everything well?” Lan’malan said. “You look as if you’ve seen your grand-hive-mother’s ghost.”
    “I must return to Mahkan,” she said, only then fully realising what this meant. “On a matter of Sophan .”
    Major Lan’malan listened solicitously as Kranda explained, then nodded her understanding. “It is a matter of Sophan , Yankari-Kranda, and that surpasses all else. Nothing stands in the way of honour.” She smiled. “My theory as to what is happening here will have to wait.”
    Kranda felt ambivalent about that. She knew she had to leave, but at the same time she so much wanted to stay. She said, “You will hold this post open for me?”
    The major smiled. “Of course,” she said.
    Kranda felt a weight of relief. “It might be over very quickly,” she said. “Then again, depending on exactly what it might entail.”
    “I fully understand, Yankari-Kranda. Come, I’ll show you back to the interworld ship.”

 
     
     
     
    3
     
    I It was almost one Mahkana day later when Kranda piloted her flier over the familiar coastline of her homeworld and headed for the central mountains.
    She had not been home since undergoing her last hayanor , fifty days ago. He – as she had been then – had fallen ill while on a routine supervisory field-trip to an arctic world on the eighth circuit, and had requested immediate leave. Rather than seek hospitalisation, and ease his hayanor with the drugs that were so common these days, he had elected to undergo the process of transition in the old-fashioned way, as was expected of his hive-tribe, and see out the change using only the old tried and tested herbal medicines. He had set off with a family servant, with the traditional furs of hayanor to protect him from the bitter cold, and trekked into the mountains. There he had found the family cave, built a fire, and waited.
    Hayanor occurred approximately every five years, and he had quite forgotten the pain of the last transition. Now it leapt upon him like a wild animal, taking his breath away with its savagery, and for three days Kranda had suffered the physical agony of change and the accompanying mental fever-dream, ministered by the loyal servant and soothed by the foul-tasting elixirs made from ground herbs. More than once during the process Kranda had wished he/she’d taken the easier option of hospitalisation.
    Then, miraculously, on the dawn of the third day, with the sun climbing over the southern mountain range and shining directly in through the mouth of the cave, the pain had passed and Kranda was female.
    She had felt whole again, and strong, and it seemed that the man she had been for five years had been a shallow, weak alter ego, and the period of maleness a time of half-life she was glad she had overcome.
    Now she smiled at the recollection of her hayanor and steered her flier over the mountain pass leading