Whatever happened to the Double Helix?

Farbourne

Rear Admiral
The WC1 manual (Claw Marks) makes a reference to the discovery of a new sentient race, nicknaed the "Double Helix", that is apparently technologically on par with the Confederation and the Empire of Kilrah, and that is described as "potentially the most significant alien encounter since the discovery of the Kilrathi".

And....

That's the last we hear about it, unless they show up in some of the novels or fiction that I haven't read.

Are they mentioned anywhere else?

Did they turn out to be nothing? Did they get conquered by someone and cease to be a factor? Or did they just up and go away? Are they still out there on the edge of known space, xenophobically guarding thier borders? Is there any connection between them and the Nephilim (i.e. could they be one of the "Aligned Peoples")? Do we just not know?

From the description in Claw Marks, communicating with them would likely be extremely difficult (they rely on scents and pheremones, I think? which would make ship-to-ship communications extremely difficult, unless they have some way of converting coded radio/electromagnetic signals into scents given off by some sort of communications machine...)
 
They do get a mention in the ICIS manual. Check out the section that discusses the possibilities of who the Nephilim are.

They might be in S*S as well but I don't remember off hand.
 
They also show up in the Secret Ops fiction - Zero specifically refers to them and the filters required to translate datastreams from the DH, and how a certain someone fried his brains because his ideas didn't work out in practice. An example of 'letting others experiment before risking your own neck' when discussing the Nephilim tech scavengers, IIRC.
 
They get a few references in the Prophecy and Secret Ops material -- the ICIS manual mentions that they have no concept of history and the Secret Ops fiction talks about how the actual first contact between humans and Double Helixes went poorly (because of the "language" barrier.)

Beyond that, the implication is that they're just another known race in the Wing Commander universe in 2681 -- the games just don't do a great job of showing us many aliens... but the books say they're out there (the Confederation itself is made up of half a dozen different species...).
 
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