by Robin Triggs
“What about—” I began.
“I say rec room, fifteen minutes. Let’s get this over with. We can mourn after that.”
There was silence for a moment. Then – reluctantly, heavy-breathed – the crew rose and started to trail out of the room.
Chapter Eight
“What about the others?” I looked around the room. No de Villiers. No Fischer. No Weng and no Dmitri. “If we’re going to do this, then everyone should be here.”
Fergie stared at me. He turned to Greigor, standing near the door, and got him to put an intercom call through to the infirmary.
“What about Dmitri?” Mikhail asked.
The Scotsman scowled at him. “He went up to the mine. No external comms. You gonna go get him?”
“Why the hell’s he gone up there? Nobody could expect us to work right now—”
“His way of coping,” Fergie said. His mouth twitched. “You know – you know he liked the commander.”
I looked around the room in the resulting silence. Abidene and Maggie, stiff-backed and white-faced on the sofas, Keegan slumped next to them. Max, Mikhail and Theo at the table. Fergie holding court in the middle of the floor, and me off to the side.
Fergie cleared his throat. “Okay. First thing, I think we need to hear Nordvelt’s account—”
“I’ve told you—”
“Your precise account of what happened this morning. Exactly what happened to de Villiers? What do you know?”
The door slid open and Weng walked elegantly in. She shared her frown with the room, then came to stand near me. I leaned in to her. “Is the doctor okay? Can you leave her unattended?”
She showed me her datapad. “She’s still unconscious. I’m keeping an eye on her – I’ll know if there’s any change.”
“So,” Fergie said. “Nordvelt. What happened this morning?”
I drew myself into a cool place and gave my account of the morning’s events, stumbling only over Fischer’s injury. Then the focus shifted to Weng, but her story didn’t add much to mine.
There was a pause when we’d both finished.
“So we need to know what de Villiers was doing out there in the snow at stupid o’clock,” Keegan said.
“He must have been going to see Fischer,” Maggie said.
“But why outside?”
“How did the doctor know where he was? She can’t just have gone searching for him; that’d be ridiculous.”
“How can anyone freeze to death when they’re suited? He had his mask on, right?” Theo asked.
“All this matters – but not right now,” Max said. “Listen, I want to find these things out as much as you do, I want to know what happened—”
“Everything was going fine before Nordvelt came,” Greigor muttered. “De Villiers told me to watch—”
“I want to know what happened as much as the rest of you,” she repeated, forcing Greigor into silence. “But like Fergie said – we need to sort ourselves out now.”
There was an awkward, uncomfortable silence.
“Technically, now, Nordvelt’s in charge. But…” She trailed off.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I know you won’t have that. I’m happy to—”
“Happy?” Mikhail snapped. “‘Happy’ ain’t a word I’d use at this precise moment in time. Listen to this, boy. As soon as Julia’s awake, we’re gonna have your status revoked. Only reason you’re still in this position’s because we got no one to remove you. But don’t think you’ll be ordering us around or anything, ’cause we ain’t gonna take orders from you.”
I took a deep breath, two, and tried again. “Here’s the situation. We’re stuck here, with no contact with the Company, for another six months. We can’t leave, and no help is going to arrive. The only thing that we can do is to carry on with our jobs.”
They stared at me, all of them. I stood my ground, kept my face a stone mask. All were silent. I could see them judging me, weighing up my youth, my lack of experience. I could see the skepticism, their mistrust. But I had no choice but to go on. To try.
“The doctor, when she’s feeling better, and I will manage the crew – you – together until the night shift is over. But Fischer and I don’t have the knowledge to oversee the mining and drilling operations. So I propose that we are joined by a third person. One of you.” I looked to the table, where all the engineers were gathered.
“Who did you have in mind?” Fergie asked.
“I don’t know you well enough to make that decision. I want you to decide amongst yourselves. I promise I’ll work with whoever you choose.” I stared at Fergie.
There was silence for a moment.
“You’ve nothing to say about the cap’n?” Keegan asked.
“I will be looking into the circumstances of de Villiers’s death.” I felt so pompous, so awkward, formulaic words coming from all the textbooks I’d downloaded. “At the moment we have no reason to believe it was anything other than an accident.”
That was it for Fergie. He couldn’t contain himself anymore. “You?” he snapped. “You’re the prime suspect for all of this – the avalanche and then de Villiers, and Dr. Fischer….” He hesitated. “Things were fine with McCarthy; we had nae trouble here. Not until you arrived.”
“Nevertheless,” I said with a calmness I didn’t feel, “I am head of security. It’s my job to investigate this.”
“And I say no. Why should we trust you? For all we know, you’re just going to fit one of us up, or destroy all the evidence.”
“So what do you suggest?” I snapped. “Do you want to take on the investigation?”
Fergie was taken aback. “Me? Not me. I’m far too busy for that crack. Maybe…” He cast around the room, looking for someone to propose. His eyes slid off everyone, no one seeming to meet with his approval, and he subsided into sullenness.
“I know how it looks, but at the moment all we have are two incidents that might both be accidents.”
“And the doctor’s injury?” Theo asked. “That an accident too?”
I opened my mouth to defend myself, but Weng beat me to it. “I was there. I saw the incident. I judged it to be accidental,” she said, calm as ever.
“De Villiers didn’t trust him,” Greigor said.
“What?” Theo asked.
Greigor shook his head. “De Villiers, he spoke to me. He didn’t trust Nordvelt.”
“When did he talk to you?” Mikhail asked.
“Yesterday, just before dinner—”
“De Villiers sent for him, that’s true,” Maggie said. “We got a message in the greenhouse. De Villiers sent for Greigor.”
“To tell him something about Nordvelt?” Mikhail’s brow drew up, pulling his cheekbones into even sharper relief.
Greigor hesitated. “Not about that, no. But—”
“He was probably getting a bollocking,” Max said.
Greigor colored. “That’s no’ true. And it’s not important. Important thing, de Villiers said he didn’t trust Nordvelt.”
“What did he say precisely?” I tried not to sound too defensive.
He shrugged and scuffed at the carpet with a foot. “I don’t remember precisely,” he said, retreating back into a mutter. “We said lots of things. He said he didn’t trust you, Nordvelt.”
The resulting silence was broken only by the sound of Greigor’s scraping and of Theo tapping absently on the table.
“I’m prepared to let Anders continue,” Max said eventually.
No one else spoke. Fergie cursed under his breath and stood, shoving his chair back noisily. He seemed of two minds as to whether he should walk out or continue the argument.
“We should have a service for the commander,” Abidene said.
“Or a wake,” Keegan chipped in. “The cap’n’d have liked that.”
&
nbsp; “Okay—” I began, but I was cut off before I could get any further.
“You have no fucking say in this, Nordvelt,” Fergie rounded on me. “Okay, the Company’s been dumb enough to appoint you chief of security, but we knew the commander and you didn’t. You have no fucking say in how we remember him, got that?” he snarled.
I opened my mouth to snap back, then hesitated. He was right. I was the outsider here. This was one thing I could let go. “Okay. Okay. Look, you sort that out between you. I don’t want to piss you off, any of you. Just…just decide on a new chief of operations and let me know by morning, okay?”
“So what do we do now?” Keegan asked.
Fergie sighed. Stress etched him gray and old. “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to join Dmitri up at the mine. We still need that coal. But…but I guess if anyone needs time off, they should take it.”
* * *
Facts. Data. Information. It was time to get something solid, to get the investigation moving. Once the meeting had broken up I caught up with Max, drew her aside – ignoring the vicious looks Greigor was shooting at me.
“I need your help. Are you busy?”
“What do you need?”
“You might find it…unpleasant.”
She smiled grimly. “I’m the janitor. All the unpleasant jobs get passed down to me.”
“Not like this one, I hope.”
She looked at me inquisitively.
“Come with me.”
* * *
The smiles were gone: we stood over the body of de Villiers, on his bed in the infirmary. His eyes were still open but the skin had warmed. Rigor was starting to set in.
Fischer lay unconscious in the adjacent cot. She moved and mumbled in her sleep.
I reached over to close the commander’s eyes.
“What do you want me to do?” Max asked softly.
“I need to know how he died.”
She gave a bitter laugh, almost a bark. “Sorry, sweetheart, but I’m not going to perform an autopsy for you. You need a doctor for that.”
“I need an engineer.” I picked up the mask that I’d set on the bedside table earlier. I gave it to Max. “He was wearing this when we found him. But his skin was frozen. I want you to look at it – and his warmsuit too – and see if they were working when he went outside.”
She took the mask in silence and gave it a cursory once-over. Then she looked back up at me. “We’ll need to get the suit off him.”
I nodded.
It was not a nice job.
“We’ll have to deal with the body, I suppose,” I said when it was done.
Max stood beside me, his warmsuit in her arms. “This hasn’t ever come up before. I don’t know…don’t know what we’ll do.”
“You’ve no storage for – for this sort of thing?” I nodded towards the corpse, now stripped to regular indoor clothes. The loud shirt de Villiers wore had never looked more at odds with his surroundings.
She shook her head. “I guess…I guess we’ll have to take it outside. Put him in one of the storage sheds.”
“Not very…I don’t know…”
She shrugged and looked away, her face hardening. “It’s just a lump of flesh,” she said. “There’s no vermin, no scavengers, to eat it. Barely even any bacteria. It’ll be fine until – until the shift’s over, until it can be moved. Then his wife can have it, do whatever she wants with it.”
I nodded, frown heavy on my face. “Shall we…?”
We left the body and went to the vestibule to suit up. Then we returned and wrestled the commander onto a stretcher. In silence, meeting nobody on the way, we carried him between us.
The blizzard had blown itself out. With powerful lights illuminating the courtyard, the journey was almost comically simple. We laid de Villiers down without ceremony, set neatly against a row of frozen machine parts, and stared down at his body.
We walked back to the infirmary, collected the dead man’s warmsuit and mask and took them to the workshop. Neither of us spoke until we got there.
The workshop was clearly someone’s private domain and – judging by the confidence in her movements, the very aura of belonging that she radiated – that someone was Max.
She was an artist, a sculptor; I saw that immediately. Amid the workbenches, a maze of installations had been set up. Human-size figures built all from scrap metal; dead robots, a mix of wires and cables and nails and sheet steel, stared at me, light bulbs for eyes. Masks hung on the walls: tribal designs made from the same materials, silver and copper, gray and gold and green. They put me in mind of Mayan grotesques – the pagan gods of an android pantheon. Spare parts littered all surfaces, and a gas ax was propped into the corner, near a service lift designed to carry heavy kit down to the basement. Although part of the barracks, this room had its own outer door, big enough to drive vehicles straight inside. I shivered in the cool air, wondering how much of this mess was being recycled as art and how much was Max’s official ‘work pending’.
I stood open-mouthed as Max hung de Villiers’s face mask over one of the robot heads – that was an image I was sure to have nightmares about.
“This is all your work?” I managed.
She nodded, suddenly coy. “Just a hobby. They’re not finished.”
“They’re fantastic,” I breathed. “But – all this metal, do you not have to—”
“Yeah. They’ll all be destroyed, melted down before we leave here.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
She shrugged, gave me an etched smile. “Call me Siva. Goddess of creation and destruction.” She cleared her throat and changed the subject. “I’ll check the suit over when I get a moment. Leave it on the bench there.”
I did as she said and turned to look at her. She stared back as if weighing something up in her mind.
“You look exhausted,” she said.
I managed a weak smile. “It’s been a long morning. I’ve lost all track of time. What is it, midday?”
“Just gone eleven.”
“God.”
I watched as she took up a tool from her bench and ran it through her fingers. She seemed oblivious to the dirt and oil that were staining her skin. She looked at me from the corners of her deep eyes, and once again I was struck by her simple beauty.
“What happened out there, Anders?” she asked, voice echoing in the cold workshop.
“I’ve told you all I know.”
“But what about what you think?”
“I think you know that too. After all, why else would I come to you?”
She regarded me. “So why were you really sent here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was something said in Tierra? Did something come out in McCarthy’s debrief?”
“They sent me because you needed a security chief. That’s all I know.”
“There weren’t any hints of…trouble?”
“You tell me. You were here; I wasn’t.”
“There wasn’t any trouble. Only—”
“What?”
“Just Weng and the commander.” Her face went rigid when she spoke of de Villiers, her eyes fixed straight ahead. “And—”
“And what?”
“Oh, nothing. Just little arguments – the ones that always come up, you know? About politics and personalities.”
I thought of Abi and Maggie talking in the kitchen, criticizing the Company. I was wondering how best to push for details, but she got the next question in first.
“Why you? Why were you picked for this post?”
I shrugged. “No special reason, not that I know of.”
“Was anything said to you in your last Psych?”
“My last Psych…” I couldn’t remember when my last Psych was. Strange, when the earlier ones were so clear
in the memory – the battery of tests, images flashing before your eyes, a fraction of a second whilst the most subconscious responses were measured, measured, measured. “No, nothing was said. Sorry. I’ve no idea why I was sent here except that – you know, the normal way, application, interviews, tests…”
She seemed happy enough with my answer, turning away and breaking eye contact.
“What about you?” I asked.
“What about me?”
“How’d you come to be here? What’s your story?”
“Aw, that story’s old and dull, you know? Raised in Kinshasa, fell in love with machines when I was still just a kid. I traveled as widely as possible, to India and China, then Italy, stealing skills and ideas wherever I found myself.” She shrugged. “And I wound up here. That’s all there is.”
“Why did you come here?”
“I told you, I love to travel and I love to learn. And I love a challenge.” She shrugged. “This was an opportunity, a great opportunity, and I love – I was loving it…”
“You got on well with the rest of the crew? With…with de Villiers?”
“Aw, come on Anders, let’s not go back there. Can we just – just forget about that for now?”
She looked tired, then, older, skin tight on her bones. “Okay,” I said quietly.
“Tell me,” she began, “I mean, it’s a stupid question, but how are you getting on here?”
I managed a weak smile. “I’ve not been sleeping well.” Not what she meant, maybe, but the first thing that came to mind.
“McCarthy didn’t sleep either. Used to complain about headaches.”
“I’ve not had headaches – not yet, at least.”
There was silence as we both seemed to be struggling for something to say, not wanting the conversation to end, not wanting to have to get back to the nightmare that this assignment had become. Both knowing we had no choice.
Sharing one last smile I left Max to her work and slipped back into cold corridors.
Chapter Nine