by Robin Triggs
I had nothing else to say. I thanked her and we both got up. I went back to my room, and Fischer went to the vestibule to get suited up for her smoke.
Chapter Fourteen
I slept badly again. I was getting sick of it; something was wrong and I needed it sorted. I resolved to talk to Fischer – she had, after all, done a good enough job with my body. My aches had faded overnight, and I barely needed the fresh wound-packs I stuck to my shins and the back of my left hand. My legs were fatigued but bore me well enough; I made my day’s plans as I walked out into the corridors. It was time to check the pinhead cameras I’d set around the base.
First, though, I went to the canteen for something to eat, and then to the rec room, where I walked straight into another problem.
Max and Fergie were standing in the middle of the room, snarling at each other like stray dogs. Dmitri was with them; he just looked miserable. Keegan sat on one of the sofas with Fischer, while Greigor, once again finding a way to escape the greenhouse, was alone at the table.
“So you want to let us just – just die of cold?” Max was saying passionately. “You’re not gonna let us do anything to save ourselves, just—”
“And what the hell do you want me to do about it?” Fergie shot back. “You want me to magic the oil well whole again? Hell, why don’t I bring de Villiers and Theo back from the dead while I’m at it?”
The door swung shut behind me.
“What the hell do you want, Nordvelt?”
Max didn’t even look at me. Instead she put a hand on Fergie’s shoulder to pull his attention back to her. At the contact, he spun back and knocked her hand away with his wrist.
“Get the fuck off me,” he shouted.
“Just shut up and listen—”
“I—”
“We have to shut down all nonessential activities!” she snapped.
“Everything we do here is essential! We’ve got to think of more than just us. What about the people who need us back in—”
“Enough,” I said firmly. “One of you – calmly, without getting carried away – please tell me what the problem is.”
“We’re all going to die, that’s the problem,” Keegan muttered to the room at large.
Max finally stopped glaring at Fergie long enough to answer me. “The oil. The generator’s pretty much full at the moment, but at the rate we’re going we only have a month’s power, maximum. I’ve looked into it, done the calculations – I’ve made a list and checked it twice. If we don’t do something, we’ll all freeze long before help arrives.” She broke for a look at Fergie. “It’s no use having a month of full operations if we then spend the rest of the night shift being dead!”
“I’m not even bloody arguing! I’m just saying that we should keep the mines working – and anyway, if you’re so bloody clever—”
“Okay, that’s enough!” I snapped. “We’ve a problem. We need solutions, not bickering.”
“And who are you to tell us what to do?” Keegan snarked from his seat.
“Yeah, Nordvelt,” Greigor spat, “we don’ take orders from a murderer.”
I ground my teeth, glared at him but got only defiance.
“We’ve still got the oil tanks,” Dmitri said into the resulting silence. “Can we draw fuel from there?”
“Maybe Mikhail could, but he’s in no position to help,” Max said. “He knew – he knows – much more about that side of things than I do. I’ll look into it, but I don’t think there’ll be more than a few days’ worth of fuel in there.”
“Okay,” I said. “Whether or not you want to take orders from me, you two need to go and think. Fergie, work out a way of rationing energy use – if we keep the mine open, then you need power from somewhere, right? Max, you work out a way of refueling the generator. Please.”
Max stared at Fergie; the Scotsman stared at me. For a long time we stood there, and at any second I expected him to refuse. But in the absence of a workable alternative he had little choice. After giving us one last look, as if to demonstrate that he was leaving on his terms, not ours, he turned to the door and left. Max followed a moment later – just long enough for the Scotsman to have cleared the corridor ahead. Greigor went to follow, but Max rounded on him in the doorway. “I don’t know where you’re going, you little worm,” she snapped. “I didn’t hear your name mentioned. Get the hell away from me!”
Greigor stared sullenly at the floor. “I was jus’ going to Maggie.”
“I miss the commander,” Dmitri said when they’d gone. “He’d know what to do.”
“He wasn’t some fucking god,” Fischer said. “He was – he was…” She trailed off and shook her head.
The Ukrainian looked so miserable, trapped inside his own world. I thought back to what Fischer had said: Dmitri adored him, poor lamb.
I wanted to say something but I wasn’t sure what. Especially not in front of the others.
“My God,” Fischer said after a moment’s silence. “We’re falling apart here. This is a nightmare.” She was fiddling with a roll-up; her smoking materials were scattered on the arm of her chair. She looked up at me with a black smile. “Take a picture, Anders. Might as well take a photograph, because this is gonna be the last time we see each other like this. It’ll be warmsuits for the rest of the shift, inside and out.”
“Only if we can keep them charged,” Keegan said. “If not, there ain’t anything that’ll stop us freezing.”
* * *
I’d planted the pinheads in all the public areas of the barracks. Each had a memory of about a week; only a day or two left before they started to overwrite themselves. Independent of the official base CCTV system, they should – must – give me the answers. Or at least narrow down the suspects.
My resolve left me as soon as I found the first one, the one I’d hidden in the vestibule. It took me a second to remember precisely where I’d set the thing, but there it was, nestling on top of a bank of lockers. It wasn’t quite how I’d left it.
It had been moved – somebody had turned it around so it was now facing the wall.
I cursed. My first thought was that I’d just set it up incorrectly, but…but surely I couldn’t have made such a simple mistake. I took it anyway. Then I proceeded through the barracks, taking the cameras from corridors, from the stairwell, working my way back to my rooms.
Most of them seemed to have been interfered with, moved so that they were pointing at nothing. This wasn’t my mistake, not all of them – not possible. Someone had found them and deliberately sabotaged my efforts. But that just raised a new barrage of questions.
How could anyone have known to look for them? Was the murderer so paranoid as to check every room in minute detail? I mean, they weren’t invisible, but they were made to be discreet and I’d planted them carefully, doing my best to make them unobtrusive. Had someone been watching me? Had they followed me around as I set them up, or hacked into the CCTV net? I glanced up at the camera as I entered my office. Never had it seemed so invasive.
Although I knew it was a lost cause, I plugged the first pinhead into my compscreen and scrolled back through the footage – to the night the oil rig had been destroyed. And there it was: a gloved hand, reaching over the lens before the camera was gently turned to face the wall. A few cameras hadn’t been altered – the quiet corridors, the workshop – but they told me nothing of interest. In the rest – well, sometimes I saw fingers, once a suited arm, and a few times only the camera’s movement. In those gloves it was impossible to tell anything at all, even gender.
Only the last camera showed anything else. This one had covered the doorways to the crew’s private rooms. I’d set it up so that no one could leave their room without my seeing. I’d had high hopes for that one.
It showed nothing at all. Its memory had been completely wiped.
* * *
“The co
mmander and me – we were close, Anders.” Behind me Dmitri lowered the weights with a clink; there was a pause, and then I heard a gasp of effort as he resumed with a larger load.
I kept running on the treadmill, facing the bare gray wall of the gymnasium. “I’m sorry,” I wheezed.
“He told me things. Whilst Fergie was out of the way, de Villiers and I would talk over a coffee. This is up at the mine, you see.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.” He paused again, and when he spoke again, his voice was full of the effort of his exercise. “He didn’t trust you.”
“He said that?”
“Of course he didn’t,” Dmitri snapped. He set down his weights and I didn’t hear him take them up again. “You think that’s what a man does, just goes to his colleagues and says, ‘Hey, that new guy – I don’t trust him’? No. I could see he was worried, that’s what I could see. I saw his face as he stared into the distance. I knew him well, Anders. I know when he’s worried.”
My shoulder blades were itching. I slowed down the mat, stepped off the treadmill and turned to face the Ukrainian. He was sitting up on his bench and glaring at me, blue vest sweat-soaked and his face flushed and angry.
“You thought that was because of me?”
“Who else would want to take away his command?”
“I wasn’t here to do anything like that – and what about Weng?”
He waved away her name. “If she was going to do anything, she’d have done it before you came.”
I thought of saying that she’d thought I’d been sent here because of her, but I kept quiet.
“Anyway, he only changed when he’d spoken with you – after the barbecue on the equinox.”
“He changed?”
Dmitri glared at me but didn’t respond.
“Any idea what he was afraid of?” I asked as my breathing slowly returned to normal after the exercise.
“Are you playing the fool with me?”
I thought back to that meeting with the commander. “He was afraid I’d report him for all the violations he’d allowed on base.”
“I knew you were a clever man.”
I ignored the sarcasm. “But that only gave de Villiers a motive for destroying the comms building.”
“What? He wouldn’t—” He paused and began again. “This base was his child. It’d never even occur to him to do anything that didn’t help it grow.”
“Why are you telling me all this? What do you want?”
He stood, slowly, and took a pace towards me. I stood my ground. He was a big man, certainly, muscles taut from his workout.
“I just wanted to warn you,” he said. “I just wanted to say. I liked Anton – liked him a lot. And if I ever find out that you had a hand in his death – well, my friend, I will hurt you.”
* * *
Maybe I was going insane. Maybe none of this was happening at all. Maybe I was dreaming, delusional, dangerous.
I felt so self-contained, so self-possessed. That wasn’t right. That couldn’t be right. It wasn’t normal, surely, to be the eye of the storm: to be the one stable element around which the universe spun (and all the universe had once been compressed smaller than a single atom… Boom!). No, it wasn’t right. All I’d learned – all the isolation of my childhood, both before and after my parents were taken from me; all the times I’d stood alone through my teenage years and into adulthood, imperturbable, cold, uncaring. That was my coping mechanism, and that was my madness.
I paced my room over and over and over again, distractions buzzing at the edges of my mind. Like moths, the thoughts touched their winter wings against me, spun away before they could be seized.
This place. This bare gray prison. Soon to be my graveyard, the graveyard of us all – I needed sleep. I needed sunlight. I needed a path but I could see nothing but walls each way I turned.
I took a deep breath and made myself stand still. In front of my compscreen, I reached out to touch the smooth lacquer of my puzzle box, the worn skin of my book. I accessed my memcard – ignoring the message that hacker had left on my compscreen – and put on the music my mother had sung when I was a baby. I let it fill the room, then turned away and forced myself to focus.
None of the attacks had occurred directly. They had all been carried out through sabotage and by using explosives – that was the MO so far. Did that have significance? The culprit could have been physically weak and didn’t dare to attack their victim directly. That might implicate Weng, or Maggie.
I thought of Max and her statues. Maybe she’d programmed a robot to carry out the attacks.
The attacks had occurred at night – or at least had been set up at night. The oil rig blew in the morning, but the explosives must have been planted the night before.
I frowned and absently traced the scar on my forehead.
The motive: well, I was in no doubt that a man like de Villiers could provoke murderous feelings. But the other incidents couldn’t have been simply to cover up a personal attack. I didn’t buy that. No, the real target was the Company. The crew were just collateral damage.
I couldn’t stay still for long. I needed to be doing something, needed my displacement activity. I went to the combi-maker and put on a coffee. Then I went back to the compscreen and tapped in random words, desperately trying to figure out de Villiers’s password. If I could only access the crew’s personal logs – what better place to start looking for clues? But I got nowhere. No shortcuts for me.
If this was a targeted assault on the Company, then I should be looking for an agent of the United Nations. Bad feeling between the two organizations went back years – all about power, of course. As the Company’s influence grew, the UN’s waned. I couldn’t even imagine what politicking went on to get approval for Australis’s construction.
I took a mouthful of overhot coffee. Ran my hand over the smooth surface of my puzzle box. Thought of de Villiers. Felt a moment of envy for the man’s charisma, his vitality. He was still present in the base in a way I’d never be.
I closed my eyes and pushed those thoughts aside. Be cold. Be heartless. Be stone. I’d learned this a long time ago.
First had come the destruction of the comms building. Then de Villiers’s death. Finally the nightmare of flame and thick, thick smoke and steel melting in an insane heat as the oil rig burned…and the hideous sight of Mikhail’s deformed body. Now, as it all came back to me, my imagination added the reek of burned flesh that my coldsuit had spared me at the time.
Be cold. Be heartless. Be stone. More coffee helped.
Before the explosion someone had again deactivated the surveillance cameras. They had also found every one of the extra pinheads that I had planted, and made sure they weren’t going to show me anything. The explosive store, the vehicle depot, the journey to the oil rig, the delicate task of priming the bomb – it all added up to a calm and deliberate act of murder.
If all this was a plot against the Company it was working. Millions and millions had already been spent on setting up Australis; millions more would be required to rebuild the well. In the spring, the crawler would arrive, hauling the huge tracked oil tankers and expecting to carry all the crude back to civilization. There’d be nothing for them to take. Nor would there be as much coal or iron as planned. The total cost to the Company would be in the billions. Maybe it would be enough to cause the whole Australis project to be canceled.
And that was narrow thinking. I couldn’t even begin to imagine the human cost, the lights going out across South America. This was a high cost, high reward endeavor: start with a small crew pioneering this new life and work out practical ways round whatever problems were thrown up. I’d seen projections for the next phase of development – a crew four times the size, the mineworkings extending many more miles beneath the ice sheet. A chance to ease the pressure on the paper-thin veneer of civilization.
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Maggie had told me that she’d argued with the commander about the Company. And that Fergie and Abi had taken her side. Of course, that was just one person’s word, but I remembered that Fergie had joked about sabotage on the day I arrived – and he’d certainly been quick enough to point the finger at me. I resolved to get deeper into all three of them and work out whether I could seriously consider any of them suspects.
The audio file ran to its conclusion. The resulting silence seemed to fill the room, hanging far heavier than the music had. I shivered and started the recording back from the beginning.
Max had all the technical skills to carry out the attacks. Without even breaking into a sweat. She knew it all – how to manipulate the surveillance system, how to prime the timers on the explosives. But…
The truth was that I was fond of her. I liked her company. I’d already relied on her expertise. I…I trusted her. Besides, every member of the crew was smart enough to learn the little bits of technical know-how they’d have needed to do all this. But I couldn’t afford to discount her. Not based on something as fallible as my own opinion.
Greigor. Now he was a shifty little bugger. Full of adolescent bitterness and resentment – and you could tell the others saw it too. He was ignored and patronized, and that provided him with a motive. There was a certain theatricality behind the attacks: the practical necessities of destruction paired with a wannabe artist’s escalation of horror. I could see Greigor thinking of himself as an original creator of terror while actually only recycling tired clichés.
But he was just too pathetic, too amateurish for me to take seriously as a suspect. I wanted to give him a good slap, but I just couldn’t – quite – see him as a killer.
Fischer was the only person whom I felt I could definitely eliminate from consideration. I’d seen her with de Villiers, when we’d dragged his body into the infirmary. I’d seen her tears.
And what did this leave me with? No one and nothing. I leaned back in my chair and stared blankly at my compscreen. Nothing. I was no closer to finding the culprit, and I could not think of a single thing to do to get closer. My hopes were pinned on Fischer’s cut-price Psych. Retesting all the crew might – it must – provide the answer. Because I had no reason to think that the saboteur had finished their work. As far as I knew, they’d go on until every single person was dead, Australis confined to a footnote in Company history. Or maybe they’d done enough already – operations were suspended, after all. The rig was destroyed. And who’d want to spend the rest of the night shift with only ghosts for company?