by Robin Triggs
I entered the minehead and almost fell; no longer protected from the wind, I had to take a few stutter-steps to keep my feet.
I took off my mask and let it drop. I looked all around and saw nothing. I didn’t try to wipe away the tears from my eyes.
There was no special place I wanted to be found, no special way I wanted to lie. Here was as good a place as any: a middle point, somewhere my body would be found eventually, not lost in the wilderness forever – but not right on their doorstep. Now I took off my gloves, my fingers becoming numb almost immediately. It made unzipping my suit difficult, but I was in no rush. The cold slipped wraithlike into my chest, down to my belly, my groin.
I removed my boots and lay down on the ice. There was a rail under my shoulder; I shifted a little so my head was propped against it. After a moment’s thought I sat up and tried to write a message in the ice. Just – I didn’t know what. I could make no impression on the surface anyway. I shrugged and lay back. It didn’t matter.
I stared upwards for a moment, then closed my eyes and opened myself to oblivion. Time passed, and steadily I lost the feeling in my fingers, my toes, my legs. I don’t know if I could have moved if I’d tried.
I almost felt content. Almost felt happiness. Death was good. This was the way it should be. My thoughts drifted, my mouth curled into a smile. The worries I always carried with me slowly emptied into the clouds above. Death was kind.
I didn’t hear the sound of the engine until it was almost on me. I should have picked it up earlier; it wasn’t as if there was any other noise to cover it. A half-track. By now I’d become familiar enough with its low, growling voice. I groaned. Not now, no, no, not now. I screwed my eyes tighter shut, to deny the reality. Maybe it wasn’t really there, maybe I was just hallucinating…
I could see light through my eyelids. I wanted to cry, or to shout, or to rage, but…well, there wasn’t any point, and I didn’t have the energy.
“Nordvelt!” A male voice, familiar, but I didn’t want to let myself know whose it was. “Nordvelt, what the fuck’re you doin’?”
Anger, alarm. My moment had passed, I knew it. Why, why had they wasted more of their precious supply of power for someone like me? I’d have wept if I’d had the energy.
“He’s here! I’ve found him!”
More voices. Questions. Words. All assaults, transgressions against me. I didn’t reply, didn’t move. I felt hands upon me. Felt myself raised, lifted, carried.
My moment was gone. My death had been stolen from me.
* * *
I lay on my bed in the basement, unmoving. I’d been shoved back into my warmsuit and buried in a mountain of blankets, but still I felt numb. Couldn’t feel my face. Couldn’t move, didn’t want to move.
I drifted away. Slowly the basement faded from my mind, to be replaced by an office – a meeting room. Bright and well lit. I gazed into the light that poured through the windows. We were high up; birds circled in the sky, and I had to shade my eyes from a low sun that even the self-tinting windows couldn’t filter.
“Mr. Nordvelt. If you’d take a seat?”
I looked around, startled. Around the long conference table, three figures had appeared, and I knew them. Not their names – they were too high up in the hierarchy for me to be given anything but titles. But they were all familiar to me somehow.
I took a seat at the far end of the table, facing them across the vast extent of wood. I was wearing a suit and tie, and they were examining papers and shooting me occasional critical glances. I was sweating.
“Lacks experience,” the woman to the left said, her voice flat and uninterested.
“But never properly tested. The Psych shows a high ceiling. He has potential,” the woman on the right countered.
It was my third time here. One of the series of interviews and tests I’d undergone for a promotion. I didn’t know too much when I applied, only that the post would be in hostile terrain. Details were given slowly, almost reluctantly.
I could not see the faces of my interrogators, not even when the man in the middle stood and beckoned me to him… And the memory skipped, the room shifted and I was strapped to a gurney in something like an infirmary, a laboratory.
“Mr. Nordvelt, you’ve passed all tests so far,” said an unseen man. I didn’t recognize his voice, but I knew it was the person who’d just beckoned to me, the one the other interviewers looked to for leadership. “Now you just need to go through this one last procedure.”
A light came on, and I wasn’t sure if it was shining in my eyes or passing directly to my brain.
“Anders? Anders, wake up!”
I jerked upright in my bed, in the dark basement, and gasped for breath. The sweat was pouring off me as if I had a fever. After the light of my dreams, I found it harder than ever to penetrate the gloom, but I managed to make out Dmitri by my side, his hand on my arm. The rest of the crew were crude shapes in the distance, shadow-wraiths and twisted golems. I blinked and shook my head, beads of sweat falling to the duvet.
“You are okay, yes? You were talking in your sleep,” the big man said. His breath drifted lazily in the cold air.
I tried to speak but all I could force out was a cracked sigh. He passed me water and I felt the fire-warmed, brackish liquid spill down my throat, my chin and chest.
I passed him back the bottle and almost instantly I was asleep again.
* * *
“Are you ready to talk?” Fergie was standing before me, a strange mix of anger and concern on his face.
Hands. I couldn’t help staring at the hands around me, could barely take in anything else: just eight pairs of hands. Hands that were cracked, broken, split; nails falling out; wrinkled, sallow skin. I wasn’t sure how much of this was real, how much was hallucination. It was getting hard now to tell dream from reality.
This was paranoia. This was madness. This was terror.
I didn’t know how much time had passed, whether it was the same day, the same week… I sat up on my bed, tried out each muscle in turn. I didn’t even have frostbite. It didn’t seem right. I tried to speak, but the words caught in my throat and it took me a long time to force down my panic. Finally, finally, my breathing slowed. I licked my cracked lips.
“Why’d you do it?” Max asked. She was standing behind Fergie, camouflaged in the ochers and umbers of our existence.
Now I looked around me and saw properly. Everyone was there. Weng on her cot, looking a lot better, a lot more focused. The chessboard was set up on the end of her bed. Greigor, unwatched and unrestrained, scowled at me from his. Maggie was at the table with Dmitri, Keegan and Abi. A deck of cards lay on it, but nobody was playing. Everyone was watching me. Everyone was waiting. And though they were all still, light and shadow kept shifting across their faces, making them grin horribly before casting deep frowns over their faces. A pack of demons waiting to rend my flesh.
“How did you find me?” I croaked.
It was Maggie who answered. “Luck,” she said simply. “If you’d just gone into the wilderness, we’d never have found you.”
I cursed myself for that error. Next time I’d know.
“When Weng returned alone…” Max said, before pausing and shrugging. “We came out to look for you.”
“We thought ye’d arranged some sort of escape – you’d hidden a vehicle or something. Or you were goin’ to kill us all in one fell swoop,” Fergie said with a trace of bitterness.
“So we went out,” Dmitri said, “all of us, and split up to search the complex.”
“What on earth possessed you, Nordvelt? Guilt got the better of you?” Fergie was definitely angry now.
“A desp’rate man,” Greigor hissed. His hair was beginning to fall out. He looked old and vicious.
I shook my head. Opened my mouth to speak but no words would come.
“No’ wort
h risking our lives for,” he muttered.
I shook my head again. “I…I’m sorry.”
“Just tell us why,” Maggie said in a voice halfway between a command and an entreaty.
I swallowed, made myself look in her eyes before turning to Max, then to Fergie, and then to the floor. “I know,” I whispered. “I know who’s behind the sabotage.”
I felt all their eyes on me.
“Who?” Dmitri asked from the table.
I shuddered and took another drink.
“I know who killed de Villiers and Theo,” I said, louder this time.
“Well? Who was it, Nordvelt?” Fergie said, cutting across the echoing of my voice.
I stood, trying to stop myself from shaking. I felt like I was burning up, but I needed the fire. I held out my hands to feel its heat.
“Who was it?” Fergie repeated sharply.
Still I couldn’t just say the words. “Maggie, you know hypnosis, right?” I asked.
There was a moment of silence, which Fergie again broke, this time with a harsh laugh. “Are you for real, Nordvelt? Are you seriously gonna suggest that Maggie hypnotized one of us to…to kill? Man, Greigor’s right, you really are desperate.”
“I couldn’t do anything like that, Anders,” Maggie added, the tremor in her voice such a contrast from Fergie’s bark. “I just couldn’t. I know a few party tricks, that’s all. And I couldn’t stop anyone from knowing they’ve been hypnotized.”
“I know who’s responsible for all that’s…that’s gone wrong here,” I repeated, my voice unstable. “But I can’t prove it. We need a confession. A real confession. Recorded. We need a recorder too.”
“The datapads are all dead—”
“Nordvelt, if you’ve got some crazy theory about the saboteur, then ye can damn well tell us,” Fergie snapped. “Sit down, Maggie – you don’t have to respond to his mad whims. We should all hear who Nordvelt is going to throw the blame at.”
“Just tell us, Anders,” Max said.
For a moment the only sound was of the coals popping and shifting in the brazier.
I swallowed, my throat once again drier than it should by rights have been. “I did it,” I croaked. “It was me. I did all of this.”
* * *
For a moment there was silence. And then, out of the darkness, Fergie began to laugh. It was an oddly mad sound, echoing around the chamber like the wailing of some fantastical beast. He laughed for a long time, longer than reason dictated, as if he’d heard the funniest joke in the world. When he finally subsided, he had to wipe his eyes before he could speak. “Oh, oh Anders, that’s priceless! That’s just priceless. Why bother teasing us with that buildup just to confess to the crimes we already knew you’d committed? Priceless!”
No one else spoke. Weng alone hadn’t changed her expression; the rest of the crew were watching me with puzzled faces.
“Is this your confession, Anders?” Abidene said eventually.
That was a difficult one. I didn’t answer directly. “It is the only explanation that fits,” I said. “Who better than me? I mean…the message sent to de Villiers to lure him out into the waste, the pinhead cameras, the blanked surveillance…who could have done all that easier than me?”
“You’re saying that you did these things,” Maggie said, “so why are you talking as if you still have no idea what actually happened.”
“Because I don’t.” The words poured out of me at last, the fear and frustration boiling from my lips. “I have no memory of any of this.”
“But—”
“I know that Greigor knew of the cameras and you all had the skills – could all have done it, but who was better placed than me?”
Again the only sound was the crackling of the flames. Max leaned forward to put another lump of coal into the brazier. Everyone was looking at me, waiting for me. But the only words I could reach sounded so weak in my mind, so clumsy and pathetic, that I couldn’t bring myself to speak.
I looked around the room. Shadows cloaked the basement, the firelight flickering dangerously. I cleared my throat again. “McCarthy,” I said. “It was supposed to be him.”
“You’re blaming your predecessor?” Dmitri said, a confused look on his face.
“It may’ve escaped your notice, but he was long gone before anything started going wrong,” Fergie added.
“Are you not listening?” I said, frustration bursting from me. “I said it was supposed to have been him. You told me – all of you, at some point, have told me that he couldn’t sleep, that he had headaches. It’s why he left, for God’s sake. He sleepwalked – Weng, you told me that. It should have been him.”
“Why don’t you start from the beginning?” Max asked, a hint of steel in her quiet voice.
“I’m trying to,” I said. “Look, I was recruited from the same Company office as McCarthy. Greigor found that out in his snooping. The same people interviewed us, I’m sure of that. It was all in the personal files. McCarthy didn’t work out, so they had to hire someone else. McCarthy was an old military man; maybe he had the right sort of training to resist—”
“You’re saying that you were brainwashed into committing these murders,” Maggie interrupted. I should have known that she would get there first.
“I don’t know what was done,” I said to her. “Brainwashing, posthypnotic suggestion – whatever you want to call it. The only thing that makes sense is that McCarthy, and then I, were programmed to destroy Australis.
“McCarthy was too strong,” I said, my voice barely more than a whisper. “And so they got me. Weak, inexperienced – I wonder how surprised de Villiers was to find that they’d appointed someone as raw as me…”
“Why would anyone at the Company want to destroy Australis?” Keegan asked. “I mean, it’s their investment. Why on earth would they want to do that?”
“It would have to be an infiltrator, or a group of infiltrators working to damage the Company from within,” I said, staring into the flames.
“Oh, more and more plausible,” Fergie muttered.
“From where?” Keegan asked. “The United Nations?”
“I think so,” I said. “I can’t think of any other group with the resources and know-how to carry out such an operation.”
“I’m still wondering how you’re goin’ to prove it, Nordvelt.”
“Look, it’s the only rational explanation,” I said, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice. “Think about it. Everything that’s happened since – since—”
“Since you arrived.”
“—has been an attack on the station itself.” I took another sip of water, tried to wash the coal dust from my mouth. “First of all there was the destruction of the comms building. That was evidently done to isolate Australis, to prevent us from alerting Tierra and to give the saboteur—”
“You.”
“—the opportunity to destroy the base without the Company knowing what was happening. Whoever did that was able to shut down the surveillance cameras and gain access to explosives without leaving a trace. I know Max could have done that, and me. We know Greigor could – anyone else?”
“I never—”
“I could.” To my surprise it was Weng who cut Greigor off, her tone sharp enough to shut him up.
“Maybe I could too – I’m not sure,” Dmitri added hesitantly.
“What is this? ‘Let’s all incriminate ourselves’ day?” Keegan said.
“I could probably have done it too,” Maggie said, ignoring the interjection.
“Then de Villiers was killed. I still don’t know precisely why – either because as commander he was an obvious way to damage Australis as a whole, or for personal reasons. I know I didn’t particularly like him. It was also a good way to throw the investigation off course – so many people here had reason to resent him. Look, th
ere are certain things the attacks have in common—”
Maggie cut me off. “And you think that it was originally planned that McCarthy was to do all this?”
I nodded. “Yes. Yes, I do. Listen. The attacks were all either carried out or arranged at night. That’s one thing.”
“That doesn’t prove—”
“Secondly, I think it’s true – you’ll know better than me – that a person cannot be made to do something that is totally against their nature, even under hypnosis. You can’t make a man commit suicide, for example. I don’t know if I could have attacked de Villiers directly. The murders were committed through sabotage because that was the only way my psyche could have brought me to carry them out.”
“I’m still waiting to hear the proof for all this. I’m still waitin’ for the proof that you didn’t know exactly what you were doing all along and this isn’t some desperate – really, really desperate – attempt to pass the blame along,” Fergie said.
I ignored him. “The destruction of the oil well was an obvious way to damage the Company’s interests. Theo’s death—” I swallowed, hesitated. “Theo’s death was just collateral damage.” No one spoke. Still all eyes were on me. I felt small and alone. “And then Fischer told us that she could run basic Psych tests. I have no idea if that could have detected the killer in me, but my subconscious obviously didn’t want to take the risk of being discovered. Or maybe it was planning her removal anyway.”
“So I was just ‘collateral damage’ too?” Keegan asked.
“How come nothing showed in the most recent Psych you took?” Maggie asked.
“I…the last Psych I took was after my final interview for this job.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I tried to remember, staring into the flickering brazier. “The…it was different, the last one. I don’t remember it clearly – I know no one remembers the actual process, all the sensory stimuli, but…I don’t remember the room, the doctors…”
“But you’re sure it happened.”
“Yes. Yes, I’m sure.”