by Robin Triggs
Greigor didn’t move. It was only when Max suggested that he help Abi that he stomped off downslope to where Abi had started to shovel away some snow.
I turned to Max. “Why are you bothering to dig out the aerial? I thought it was trash.”
“Recyclable trash. We’ve got the facilities to turn it into something useful again – any metal’s worth recovering. But you didn’t come out here to ask me about that. What’s on your mind?”
My lips were dry. “You must have explosives stored somewhere on the base.”
Her head swung round to stare at me. After a second she reached up to unclip her mask and draw it off. Her eyes were piercing, her mouth set. “Take your mask off, Anders. If we’re going to have this discussion, I want to see your face.”
I did as she asked. Snow melted on my lashes and threatened to refreeze there. “I just want to know what explosives are kept here and what controls are set on their use. And if any are missing.”
Max wasn’t stupid. There were no stupid people here. She looked at me silently and glanced back to the others – without our masks there was no risk of being overheard. “There aren’t many reasons for asking that question,” she said. “You might be head of security, but—”
“But you don’t know me.” Back towards the base, Abi was still scraping away, slowly uncovering distorted metal beams. Beside him the masked Greigor was staring right back at me.
“I think…I’d rather speak to de Villiers before I answer,” Max said.
“De Villiers and I have had something of a disagreement.”
She looked at me again, her expression unreadable. “You know, with what you’re saying, one can’t help but draw certain…inferences.”
“We need to talk, Max,” I went on. “I need to know what’s been going on in Australis. I need to know more about de Villiers. I need to know why Weng hates him. But most of all I need to know if any explosives are unaccounted for.”
She turned to face down towards the base. I mirrored her, staring at the hunched, ugly buildings, indistinct lumps blurred by the thin snow.
“The explosives…” she said.
“Max, I need your help—”
“There’s a charge unaccounted for. We have to give fingerprint ID for every pack removed. But one was taken at twenty past three, and no ID was recorded. I already checked.” She looked round at me but I couldn’t read her expression.
“How is that possible? The lack of fingerprint—”
“I don’t know.”
We stared at each other for a moment before the cold forced us to replace our masks. I drew myself together. “Well, I should get back to—”
“You sure you can’t help us here?”
“There are things I need to be doing—”
“Like what?”
I gave up. She chucked me the shovel she herself had been using, and I caught it neatly in one hand.
“Work with Abi,” she said. “And when that’s done, we need to clear and stack the broken bricks.”
I thought I heard Greigor snicker as I went downslope to join the cook. I just bent my back to the work and urged the oxygen around my bloodstream, hoping some would kick my brain into action.
Chapter Six
De Villiers followed me back to my quarters after dinner. He didn’t bother with knocking, just walked into my private room. I felt a wave of anger at this invasion but I forced it down. It was de Villiers’s way. I was learning that – another assertion of his status. And we had more pressing issues to worry about.
“I’ve put the destruction of the comms building down as an accident,” he said without preamble.
“Despite Weng’s evidence?”
“Everyone makes mistakes. No blame to her. Nowhere is absolutely safe, absolutely stable.” He stood there, hands in pockets, and glanced around the room.
I leaned against the work surface behind me. “But—”
“If it wasn’t an accident, then it was sabotage,” he said. “And I’ve worked with these people long enough—”
“Perhaps they were just waiting for the start of the long night.”
His head jerked up and his eyes flashed as he stared straight at me. “I know this crew. I know everyone here. Intimately. I trust them. I know them all and I trust them. Unless it was you – you’ve no confession for me?” His mouth quirked up and he gave a humorless breath of laughter. “Then it was an accident.”
“What about the missing explosives?”
“I don’t know. I’ll find out.” He looked older, closer to his real age, when his brow creased like that.
“It’s my job to look into that,” I said.
De Villiers sighed and fingered the back of the chair at my desk. “So what’s this, then?” He ran a hand down the spine of my book. “Fancy yourself a detective, do you?”
“It’s just a thing,” I said, trying not to show my discomfort.
“An expensive thing. First edition?”
“Second.”
He seemed to find that funny, mouth again twitching into a smile.
“Why are you trying to stop me from doing my job?” I asked.
“You don’t have a job. You’re just here to make up the numbers.” He spoke as if he were simply stating a fact. “Look, I’ve told you – how many times do you need me to tell you, how many ways? It’s not that I don’t trust you – but I don’t trust you. You’re the unknown quantity—”
“So you’re saying that it was sabotage. This accident idea is bull—”
“I’m not saying anything,” he snapped.
“If it was an accident then let me look into it.”
He met my challenge evenly, sandy brows like a golden sliver above the coming storm. He stared at me and said nothing, cheeks puffing out slightly as he kept his breathing steady.
“So the official line is that it was an accident,” I said, “but you don’t believe that. You still suspect—”
“This conversation is over. You’ve heard me. I expect you to do as you’re told.” I stared at his back, unable to find words, as he turned to the door. “As for me, I’m going to do my job. Even if it kills me, I’m going to do my job. I’m going to keep civilization running for one more day every day. And if that means being paranoid, then I’ll damn well be paranoid, got that?”
“There’s nothing to link me with this. There’s no evidence.”
“You said it yourself. Only you or I could have done this easily. And I know the rest of the crew.”
“So you suspect me.”
“I’d be a fool not to, right?”
He left with the last word, letting the door swing shut behind him.
* * *
De Villiers had the motive. I wanted to scream at him, to force the fight and make him…well, just make him understand my anger. But it’d only taken me a few days to learn how that’d go down. So I pulled on some more suitable clothing and went to the gym. The best way to work the mind was to feed the muscles. Sweat out the emotions, leave the brain pure and uncluttered.
The base gym was small but had the standard equipment. I spent a few minutes checking out the machines before I went on the treadmill and started to run. It felt good. I hadn’t really been aware of how limited my exercises had been over the last week, how few muscles I’d been using. Initially I shambled along at only a few miles an hour; after a while I was beginning to stretch my legs and feeling relief in motion. Back in the blocks, I’d gone to the municipal gymnasium every two days: running on the pavements was not encouraged, although I did that too. On the bad nights.
I was just thinking about moving on to the weights when the door opened and Dmitri came in.
I hadn’t really spoken to Dmitri yet. I knew him by sight, and I knew him to be a mining expert from Ukraine, but that was about all. I wiped the sweat from my forehead
and said hello as I sat back on a multigym to do some arm and chest exercises.
He looked at me suspiciously from below a short, dark fringe and settled himself on another multigym facing me. “Anders,” he said as he got into position, his accent heavy. He was a big man, strong and with an inch or two on me. His muscles were well defined.
I placed my arms behind the pads and tested the resistance. Someone was used to using a lot of weight. I twisted to reduce the amount I was lifting, and when I looked back, I saw that the Ukrainian was still watching me. I ignored him and started on my exercises. After a second he began as well, using a much heavier weight-set than me.
For a minute or so we worked without talking, the only sounds the rising and falling of weights and our breathing. But he didn’t once take his eyes off me. When he did speak it was without a break in his workout. “Why destroy the comms building?”
So much for de Villiers’s declaration that it was an accident. “I didn’t.”
He grunted and continued working the machine.
After another few seconds I paused to increase my load. “What do you think of the commander?” I asked as I restarted.
“He is a good miner,” Dmitri replied. Then he too paused to add more weight.
“You work with him often?”
“He comes a lot to the minehead. Talks with me and Fergie.”
“Weng hates him.”
He pulled a face, then shook sweat off his brow. “Not my business. Not yours either.”
“D’you know why?”
“Not my business,” he repeated. But he didn’t seem offended by my questions. I felt like he was taking my measure, like he was trying to make up his mind about me. “You’re not lifting much,” he added.
“I’m out of practice. Don’t want to pull a muscle.” My breath was coming in great gulps now, my speech becoming more and more staccato. Still, he was challenging me, and I felt the need to prove myself. I paused again, wiped my face with my shirt and increased the weight once more. Now I had to strain for every repetition.
Dmitri grinned at me. “You a strong man? You think you can take this much?” It was his turn to increase the difficulty; now he was lifting almost the entire block of weights.
I shook my head. “I know my limits.”
“You are a clever man.” Dmitri was suffering too. I could see it in his face; every pull caused him to crease up, to grimace wildly. “You clever, what did cause…the avalanche…if not you?”
“Don’t know,” I gasped. “But…de Villiers…says it was an accident.” That was me. I was done. I let the weights fall for the last time – I tried to do it gently, but my strength failed me and with a loud clang they came to rest. I sat there, leaning back in my seat and breathing heavily as Dmitri grinned. My arms burned as the big man did a few more reps before he, too, set down his weights. He managed to do it with perfect control, with barely a clink as the weights settled back into place.
“Maybe we arm-wrestle sometime? You want to spar?” he said.
I looked at his biceps. “I don’t think…I’d have a chance,” I managed, my breath still labored.
He shrugged and got to his feet. “Leg lifts now,” he said as he adjusted the multigym for a different set of exercises. “You?”
I shook my head. “I’ve done enough. Tomorrow, maybe.”
Dmitri sat back on the bench and hooked his ankles around a padded bar. He nodded at me. “Until then, Mr. Nordvelt.”
* * *
When I woke I felt like I hadn’t slept at all, my mind fogged with a whiteness that was all-enveloping; only gradually did my surroundings solidify. My bed, my room…and my computer. For the second night running, I’d been awakened by a priority message. The alarm cut through me, setting my teeth on edge, but still I couldn’t move. My muscles just wouldn’t obey me.
Eventually, I managed to roll onto the floor, the duvet that had been twisted around me absorbing my fall and trapping sweat against my skin. I crawled over to the desk and used the chair to help me climb to my feet. I canceled the alarm and breathed a sigh of relief as silence fell. Wobbling slightly, I checked the time: thirteen minutes past six. I slumped into the chair and wiped sleep from my eyes before opening the message.
“Mr. Nordvelt.” It was Weng – voice only, her certain, precise English clear over the airwaves. “There is a situation. Meet me in the vestibule.”
“Weng?”
“There is an emergency. Come to the vestibule immediately.”
She cut communication. I spent a few seconds staring at a blank screen in bewilderment before I dragged some clothes together and hurried out.
* * *
“What’s going on?” I strode up to Weng, who was fully suited but for her mask. She stood straight-backed as she pulled her hair into a ponytail.
“It’s the commander,” she said with barely a glance in my direction. She turned to enter the vestibule.
“What’s happened?” I followed her inside and she passed me my warmsuit.
“I received a call from Dr. Fischer at five-forty this morning. She was…upset.”
“And—”
“Something has happened to the commander. Hurry up. Let me help you.”
I slipped off my boots and, as quick as I could, pulled on my suit. Although her face showed nothing, I could tell Weng was impatient. She opened my locker and pulled out my mask and snowshoes, laid them neatly beside me as I stepped into the suit and pulled it up over my shoulders. “Can’t you tell me anything? What’s happened to de Villiers?” I asked, tense.
“I am unsure. As I understand, the commander was supposed to meet Fischer this morning.” The slightest flicker ran across her face and was gone. “He didn’t arrive, so she went looking for him. I got a call at four minutes past six. I called you shortly after.”
“Why call me?” I pulled the mask over my face and began to wrestle on the gloves. “I mean, you’re medical second, but—”
“You’re chief of security, are you not?”
“You think this is a security—”
“And we may need a little muscle. Are you ready? There’s a blizzard blowing. We’ll take the heavy torches.”
She hadn’t been joking about the snow. It was borne by a strong wind, a gale, coming from the northwest, and was driving almost horizontally. I cursed as I was buffeted, almost losing my feet despite the heavy treads on my boots. But Weng didn’t seem at all fazed. Maybe she was just too focused to notice.
“He’s over here,” she called, heading towards the garage. I followed as best I could, the beam from my torch illuminating her back and a blanket of snow and little else. A few times she disappeared in the whiteout.
Weng hurried past the garage and on to a building I couldn’t immediately identify. It looked like a concrete shed, much smaller than any of the buildings I’d been in so far. Too small to be anything but a storeroom unless it concealed more underground. I scrambled to keep up, but I needn’t have worried. She went to a corner of the building and stopped, glancing back to check I was behind her. “Hurry up, Nordvelt,” she said.
I reached the corner and followed her gaze. A figure lay slumped on the ground, motionless in the lee of the building. Another crouched by it, but straightened as soon as she detected the torch beam shining over her. “Weng? Quickly, quickly – who’s that?”
“I brought Nordvelt,” Weng said as she strode over to the pair.
“Nordvelt?” It must have been my imagination, but I thought she shivered a little as she looked at me. “We – we need to get him inside. Quickly!”
The shock, the fear – I was numbed. My reactions were automatic. Fischer and Weng had the training; they knew if anything could be done. I had to look into the circumstances. I stared blankly into the snow, torchlight too feeble in the black-and-white world in which we were standing. I don’t know
what I was looking for: footprints, maybe, or some sort of a struggle.
Fancy yourself a detective, do you? de Villiers had said.
I could see nothing, just snow and ice churned up by the doctor’s boots.
“What happened?” I asked.
Neither of them answered. “Can we move him?” Weng asked Fischer.
“We can’t leave him here. God, he—” Her voice cracked. “He’s so cold.” The doctor was crying, I realized, behind her mask.
“What happened?” I asked again. I stood over the two medics.
“He— you sent a message— you know—”
“That doesn’t matter right now,” Weng cut in. “We need to get him to the infirmary.”
“Yes— we need— can you carry him?”
“Nordvelt will.”
“Not him—”
“Nordvelt, come here,” Weng snapped.
Why was I so sure he was dead? Was it not possible that there was still warmth in there somewhere? It was only hours since I’d last seen him.
“We’ve got to get him inside, get him warm…” Fischer’s voice broke again.
“It’s—” I stopped. It’s too late, I had been about to say. But she was the doctor; this was her domain. I only had instinct, horror, the total stillness of the figure on the ground. She had the right of it. Best do as she said and get it inside. It. The corpse. Commander Anton de Villiers, deceased.
I must be wrong, he must be alive – we must get him inside.
If any clues were to be found here, they were buried beneath the snow.
I took a deep breath and crouched down to get a grip on his shoulders.
Chapter Seven
The commander had been a big man: broad-shouldered and strong, well-muscled. It was a struggle to get him back to the barracks, and we left deep grooves in the freshly fallen snow as we dragged him, deadweight, between us.
Fischer kept insisting that she saw him move or heard him breathe. Even though the masks filtered out the worst noise of the gale, there wasn’t a chance in hell that she heard anything as slight as a gasp.