Showered and shaved, Callum was escorted down the hallway to another room. He was shown inside and the door was closed behind him. In the centre of the room were a series of desks pushed together to form a refectory-style dining table. Somebody was already seated opposite.
“Darya!”
When she looked up and saw him, a wide smile blossomed on her face and she jumped to her feet. He raced past the table and threw his arms around her. They kissed. He’d forgotten how beautiful she was.
“Are you okay?” He stroked his hand through her hair and let the dark strands trip from the tips of his fingers. “I didn’t know if they’d let me see you.”
“I am fine,” she said. “The doctors come to see me this morning. They think that I should have full movement again.”
He looked down at her cast supported in a sling. She wiggled her fingers.
“That’s wonderful,” he said, still holding her tight. “But where is here?”
She shook her head. “I do not know.”
The door reopened and a third person was escorted in.
“Ava!”
The Canadian looked even thinner than when they had first met on the Albanov, but the colour had at least returned to her cheeks. She burst into tears of joy as she rounded the table towards them, and the three survivors hugged each other.
They seated themselves at the table and began discussing where they thought they were, what they thought might lie ahead. None of them knew anything for certain, but Darya suggested that they were likely to be somewhere near Moscow.
Moments later, they were served with plates of hot food.
“What happens now?” Callum asked.
“Now I think we must explain.”
Ava looked worried. “Do you think they’ll let us go then?”
“This I do not know. I hope, in the end. But I think that we will be here for a long time.”
“I think you’re probably right,” Callum said.
“What do we tell them?” Ava asked.
“The truth,” Darya replied forcefully. “Anything else and they will know.”
“But they’ll never believe us,” Ava said, “about the creatures… or anything. Somebody’s even been through my stuff. They’ve taken anything I could’ve used as evidence.”
“Same here,” Callum said.
“Me too.”
They shared a look.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Callum said at last. “Darya’s right. There’s no point trying to hide anything. We tell them what they want to know as many times as they want to know it and hopefully we’ll get to go home. Besides,” he threw a suspicious glance around the room, searching for the cameras that he knew must be there, “something tells me they’ll be a lot more interested in Peterson.”
4
That same afternoon, the interrogations began. The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, the Ministry of Energy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defence, and the Federal Security Service, not to mention representatives of the G&S Corporation, all took turns examining and cross-examining the survivors individually, probing into their accounts in excruciating detail.
The interviews were draining and repetitive, each conducted by a single po-faced interrogator and, where necessary, an interpreter. After only a few days, Callum had repeated the same story so many times that he’d begun to question it himself.
His description of the Troodon colony raised eyebrows, as did his mention of Ngana’bta. But, as he’d suspected, the main focus of interest had been Dan Peterson, Volkov and the data stick.
“So Mr Peterson alleges that Mr Volkov set him up?” the interpreter said for the hundredth time.
Callum dropped his head into his hands and kneaded his temples. “Again, I can only tell you what Mr… what Dan Peterson told me just before we escaped from the island.”
“Please.”
“He said that Mr Volkov had contacted him under the codename Finback and tasked him with destroying the Albanov, which he did using high explosive.”
“And why would Mr Volkov do this?”
“I don’t know,” Callum replied. “But the way Peterson told it, it was just plain greed. The environmental impact assessment for such a massive project was due to be long and costly, pushing back the construction date by several years and costing a small fortune. And that’s without the cost of any subsequent mitigation measures.”
“And?”
“And so Volkov figured that if he could engineer and then expose an American terror attack at Harmsworth, he could legitimately renounce the Arctic Council requirement for a foreign-led EIA. He could then expel myself and the rest of the team and replace us with one of his choosing.”
“So then there would still be team at Harmsworth.”
“Yes, but this one would be in Volkov’s pocket,” Callum continued. “They’d do the job in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost, saving him millions. Peterson mentioned something about twenty billion rubles minimum.”
The interviewer and interpreter exchanged glances.
“Like I said before, because of the weight of evidence that Volkov could produce on Peterson, he could do all of this with the sympathy and full understanding of the international community, instead of their condemnation. The man was a monster. He tried to kill us, all of us. He didn’t care about the damage he would do to international relations in the Arctic, or to the Arctic itself. He just wanted to make a saving.”
“And what about Stuxnet?”
Callum sighed. “When Peterson was on board the Albanov he uploaded the virus from a simple data stick. Seems he did it without Volkov knowing.”
“And tell us again what is happening to this data stick.”
“He entrusted it to Doctor Lee before destroying the Albanov. It was a precaution, so that it didn’t fall into the wrong hands. Anyway, Ava didn’t know anything about it and neither did myself or Doctor Lebedev. He just hid it in her survival tin. When Volkov shot Peterson and left him for dead, he came after us next. He must’ve worked out that one of us would have the stick.”
“And where is it now?”
“As I told you before, I’ve no idea. Last I saw of it, Volkov put it in his pocket. The last I saw of Volkov, he was fleeing into a tunnel beneath the southern end of the Hjalmar Ridge. It’s like a maze down there. If he hasn’t been killed already, then I wouldn’t be surprised if he was still wandering around in the dark.”
There was a brief silence while the interviewer and the interpreter exchanged a few words in Russian. All Callum knew was that they didn’t swear.
Then: “So Mr Peterson alleges that Mr Volkov set him up?”
5
Edinburgh, Scotland
Callum awoke. It was 4:30am. His chest was tight and painful. His sheets were soaked with sweat. He sat up and threw his legs over the side of the bed. With one hand clasping at his chest, he flailed the other around him, scrabbling for a weapon. “There’s something in here.”
“Solnishko, there is nothing,” Darya said. She pulled herself up from where she lay next to him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “It is okay. It is just bad dreams again.”
“No, there’s something,” he shouted. His heart was pounding. He could hear the terror in his own voice. “Something…” He pointed to the far side of the room. “Look! In the corner…”
“It is just bad dreams,” she repeated, kissing the back of his neck. “Just bad dreams.”
It was maddening. How could she be so calm? Her voice seemed miles away and her fingers stroking through his hair barely registered.
“But…” He felt the kisses on his nape grow bolder. He focussed on the thing in the corner, draped in shadow. Gradually the face vanished, the eyes shrivelling away until they were nothing but knots in the wood of the wardrobe door.
>
Breathing heavily, he reached up and placed a hand over Darya’s. She was right. There was nothing with them in the room.
It had been three months since the two of them, and Ava, had at last been released from Russian custody and thrust back into their former lives.
“Anything from Ava?” he asked. The last he’d heard, she had gone back to Alaska where, despite their warnings, she had gone ahead and published a paper on the discovery of the living fossil Troodon Avaleensis. With no hard evidence, it had been unanimously renounced as crackpot by the palaeontological community and had effectively ended her career. Within weeks of returning, she had been forced to accept a face-saving redundancy package from the university. This had included a generous subsidy towards private psychiatric treatment, which all concerned had insisted upon, besides Ava herself. Since then, Callum’s contact with her had dwindled from daily to weekly to now, when he wasn’t certain when, or even if, he would hear from her again.
“Nothing,” Darya replied. “You know that she lives with her brother?”
Callum nodded. “In Toronto.”
“I think that she does not sleep well either.”
He took a deep breath, still trying to shake the nightmare. They were getting worse, more vivid, more intense than ever since he had returned home. It was as if the greater the distance he put between himself and that awful place, the stronger its hold. Harmsworth was stalking him, head bowed, eyes wide, mouth full of razor-sharp memories.
“At least you can run from the real ones,” he whispered.
Darya shifted behind him and began massaging his shoulders. Her hands were soft and he could smell the reassuring warmth of her skin. Of the three of them, she had suffered the worst physically, but she seemed to be dealing with the psychological aftermath well. She had the nightmares too, but then she also had a steadiness about her that Callum had to admire. Credentials intact, she had resigned her post at the Russian Academy in Novosibirsk and been granted a visa endorsed by the Royal Society. She was now living with Callum and working with Scottish Natural Heritage on a pioneering new climate change project.
He would never tell her, but night after night she would slide from his grip. As he hung over the precipice, straining to hold on to her, she would plunge down into the magma. She would stare up at him, her green eyes flashing, screaming as the liquid fire ate into her skin. And when only her head was left, it would twist impossibly on the surface of the molten current, still crying out for help.
Some nights he would fall after her, his stomach turning, clawing at his own face with the pain of her imagined loss. On others, the magma would congeal before him and shatter into a bed of shingle. The disembodied head would become Peterson’s, the harpoon emerging from below his chin. The Texan’s eyes would roll forward in their sockets and he would hold Callum’s gaze. Then his hand would shoot up and close around his throat. Harmsworth is my creation, McJones! You got that? My creation!
“The worst ones aren’t about the creatures,” Callum said.
Her fingers stopped caressing his skin. “Not for me either. I see the people. I see Dan, I see Volkov, I see Starshyna Koikov, I see Lungkaju… all of them, all of their faces…” She paused. “The creatures, they are only background, in the shadows.”
“Behind the faces,” Callum added.
She let out a long sigh. “Perhaps in our stomachs we understand these animals better.”
“Than ourselves?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I look at these creatures and I know why they do what they do to me, but then I look at the people and I am no longer very sure. I think that it is this that is real nightmare for me.”
Callum sat quietly, digesting her words.
At length she pulled him down next to her on the bed and hugged onto him. “You have your interview tomorrow, then we take Jamie to Loch Ness. It is busy day, solnishko, so you should rest while you can.”
Soothed by the sound of her voice, he settled his head back down onto the pillow. The interview was at the Edinburgh University Archaeology Department. It was for a part-time role, which he could tell would be largely administrative. Career-wise, it was a colossal step backwards, especially as Clive had offered to promote him to Jonas’s old position if he’d stayed in Aberdeen. But, if nothing else, the last few months had taught him a thing or two about sacrifice.
He lay in bed for a while, eyes closed, searching for sleep. But it was too far beyond him. He waited until Darya had drifted back, then he got up and quietly made his way downstairs. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat in silence at the kitchen table, sifting through the job specification for his interview.
There was a sudden thud as the Daily Herald dropped through his letter box, and he grabbed it and sat back down. As he scanned groggily over the front page, his eyes widened:
RUSSIA WITHOUT GAS. Millions of homes across Russia, Europe and Asia are without gas as the state-owned Unified Gas Supply System (UGSS) goes into shutdown. There has been no official word on the cause of the systems failure, but analysts suggest that it may be the result of a crippling cyber-attack…
6
Loch Ness, Scottish Highlands
Doctor Callum Ross selected a flat, white pebble from the shores of Loch Ness. He brushed the silt away and held it in the flat of his palm. He dug his other hand into his pocket and produced the pebble Jamie had given him as a gift, on the same shore, four long months previously. He compared them. The two pale, sub-circular discs of water-worn stone were virtually identical. But to Callum, what they were, and what they represented, couldn’t have been more different.
“Here you are, son,” he said, offering up the new pebble.
The boy threw another suspicious look at Darya, who stood watching them from the top of the beach. Then, in his own time, he walked over and took the pebble. He turned it over and weighed it in his palm.
It was hard for Callum to believe that they were back at Dores Beach, the place where Jonas had first broached the subject of Harmsworth Island. In contrast to the heat of that fateful summer afternoon, it was now cool and breezy. Winter held sway over the loch; only a handful of dog walkers plied the beach around them and the tables in the Dores Inn beer garden were all but empty.
Jamie crouched down and did a few practice skims. He reared back as if to go, then he stopped. “Are you going away again?”
Since arriving home, the process of rebuilding his relationship with Jamie had been an understandably slow one. The nightly video calls that he had promised while aboard the Albanov had ended suddenly and without explanation. What was an eight-year-old supposed to think other than that his loser of a dad had lost interest? Again. And even though there was a good reason for the break in contact, there was nothing Callum could really say; as Darya had pointed out, the truth would either put the boy in counselling or freak his mother out so badly that she’d stop them from seeing each other altogether. For the time being then, the best thing that he could do was simply be there, be patient and let time do its thing. Just give to him time.
He walked over, knelt down and wrapped his arms around the boy. “Not without you,” he replied. “But you and I are going to go places together.”
“Where?” Jamie asked.
“Oh, faraway places. Timbuktu. Australia. Perhaps even the moon, if you’re interested?”
“And the North Pole!” Jamie said. “Can we go to the North Pole?”
Callum did his best to maintain a smile. After a brief silence he gestured towards the skimmer in the boy’s hand. “Come on, let’s see what you’ve got.”
Jamie turned back towards the loch, took a final practice skim and then spun the pebble out ahead of him. It dipped down onto the surface, leapt up high, impacted and leapt again, before tripping along and disappearing into the silty water.
“Eight, nine, ten, eleven!” they shouted together.
“Go on, Jamie!”
Jamie beamed and jumped up and down with excitement. “World record! World record!”
“Aye, it is, son. Definitely a new world record.”
They took it in turns to skim a few more, before heading back up the beach to Darya. Then, together, the three of them began walking north along the shore.
“You are very good with him,” Darya said, taking Callum’s hand. “You are good father.”
He smiled at her. “I guess only time will tell.”
As they walked, the sun began to set. Besides the moon, only a few dark smudges of cloud sat bold against the purple sky above. The water glistened and the surrounding peaks were tinged with a pale light. Hand in hand, they watched as Jamie ran ahead of them, kicking at the shingle and sending it tumbling towards the edge of the ancient loch.
“Do you think that you will ever tell him?” she asked. “About what happened on Harmsworth?”
Inside his pocket, Callum’s hand tightened around the pebble and he withdrew it once again. Releasing Darya’s hand, he strode the short distance down the beach, and looked from her to Jamie.
It’s just a stone, Dad.
Then he crouched down and slung it with all his might out across the water.
The pebble skipped along the surface, above the shadows and the silt, and through the moon’s reflection, before vanishing forever from sight.
As the string of ripples faded, Callum returned to Darya’s side and took her hand once more.
“One day,” he said. “One day I’ll tell him everything. If he’ll listen.”
Then they carried on along the shore.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Richard and Louise Lorne, Andrew Needle, Karen Summers and Tom Morley, for taking the time to review early drafts of Colony and provide their invaluable insight.
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