by Simon Morden
“It’s not much, is it?” He illuminated each of the weatherbeaten huts, then searched further out. There was nothing but snow and ice.
“In summer, it’s home to forty ecologists, botanists and biologists, plus field trips from the university. In winter, it’s closed, except for the auroral physics people.” Petrovitch dragged at the tape until it snapped. “What were you expecting? Some kind of great white-faced facility with a chain-link fence and patrolling security guards? It’s not Stanford, you know. It’s as much as they can do to keep this place from falling down.”
He pushed the handle on the door, and it creaked open. Inside, it was cold and still. He turned his own torch on and swept it down the corridor, across the notice boards, over the recessed doors that led to dormitories and labs. Everything glittered with frost.
Newcomen walked a little way down the bare boards and, out of habit, tried a light switch. It clicked hollowly.
“So this is where Lucy was when she lost contact.”
“Not exactly. There’s a winter lab a hundred metres off, closer to the aerial farm. All her datafeeds were routed there.” Petrovitch looked around again, but didn’t enter. As if he didn’t want to break the spell, as if looking at her empty room would send her spinning off into oblivion, never to return. “She had all her winter gear on her. Sleeping bag. Food and a stove. Rifle.”
“Rifle?”
“Yeah.” He clicked his torch off and let the red light behind his eyes be his guide. “You’re probably wondering how we got that through customs.”
“Her coat, though. We’ve got that. And boots and-”
“Tourist gear,” said Petrovitch. “I ordered her the same sort of stuff we’re wearing. It’s missing, so I assume she’s still got it all.”
“You knew. You knew all along. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you’d have told Buchannan, and he’d have told Ben and Jerry.”
“You didn’t trust me with the information.”
“I still don’t. Get over it. I’m going to see the physics hut. You can poke about here, see if there’s anything left.”
There was no path as such — probably one would emerge once the snow had melted — but Petrovitch could see the squat shape in the distance, lit from above by a tenuous apple-green curtain that swung lazily in the sky.
It would have been a good night for an experiment. Lucy would be crouching down over her instruments, watching the real-time data stream across the screen, and she’d read the peaks and troughs like a composer looking at a stave and hearing the music. She’d have a cup of builder’s tea in her hands, and she’d reach forward to a panel every so often, to change the amplification of a signal or correct a drift in the driving voltage.
When he tore the police tape away and opened the door, she wasn’t there.
Her equipment was, though. Hand-crafted labels in her tiny, spidery handwriting identified each switch and knob. Inside the grey cases, her signature soldering would be plain.
A bare cable was draped over the desk. The computer it had been attached to had gone. That was something that was in the inventory of things taken to Seattle, yet Petrovitch knew it had never arrived.
He settled into the wheeled chair and turned on his torch.
She would have sat right there, rolling from place to place rather than getting up and walking the two steps to where she needed to be. Just like a kid.
“Michael?”
[Sasha.]
“Talk to me. Tell me something I want to hear.”
[You were right.]
“Good. I was beginning to think I was losing my touch.” He shone his torch at the clocks on the wall: old-school analogue clocks, each face as big as a dinner plate. Four of them, each marked with a plaque: GMT, Alaska Time, Pacific Time, Local Time. The last one read twenty-three minutes and a few seconds past twelve.
[We have made a further analysis of the electrical and electronic disruption experienced in the Deadhorse area. While all the events are essentially simultaneous, within a margin of error, it appears that by ignoring the error and relying on the raw timings alone, a pattern emerges from the data.]
Petrovitch leaned back. “Let me guess. Things get fried earlier in the east than the west.”
[It is a matter of tenths of seconds for some of the intervals. And the main explosion that registers on the seismographs destroys less sensitive electronics back up the range, confusing the data.]
“This is insane.”
[The obvious conclusion is-]
“It’s not obvious at all,” he complained. “But it’s the only conclusion left. Svolochi. Someone beat me to it.”
[Just because we can explain the phenomenon does not mean we can then know everything about it.]
“We need to. Someone put a fusion reactor in space. The Americans shot it down.”
[The Chinese have denied it was theirs.]
“So they say.” He got up and started to pace the tiny room. “I’m still up on fusion. I know people in all the top facilities. How the huy could this have gone under the wire, and then ended up in yebani orbit? We’re talking tonnes. Tens, probably hundreds of tonnes of wire, shielding, all sorts of crap.”
[Yet analysis of Vice Premier Zhao’s conversation with you did not reveal any unusual stress patterns. It is likely that he was telling you the truth. Is it possible that he is not party to this secret?]
“What’s not possible is that the Americans knew and we didn’t. But it has to be the Chinese.” He threw himself back into the chair. “Doesn’t it?”
[Their major facility is at Zhejiang. Analysis of their research yields no evidence of a single instance of a sustained fusion reaction.]
“Of course it doesn’t. I’d know about it, along with the rest of the planet.”
[And if they are not ready to reveal their success?]
“There’s a world of difference between everybody knowing you’ve done it but you’re denying it, and so secret that no one knows you’re even capable of it. I mean, fusion. Yobany stos.”
[And sitting here, in this room, Lucy Petrovitch worked it out.]
They were both silent, man and machine.
“Why did she run?”
[I do not know.]
Petrovitch slammed his fist on the desk. It was his right hand. If he’d used his left, he’d have reduced the thing to matchwood. “Every time. Every time it looks like we’re getting close, we find we’re really moving further away.”
[And now Joseph Newcomen is wondering what is delaying you.]
“Bring him down here. I want a second pair of eyes.”
He met the American at the door of the hut. Newcomen’s torch caused the snow to glow.
“Turn it off. I want to try something.”
“Will it involve you putting a gun to my head again?”
“No. I haven’t got an audience out here, and I don’t do it for my own personal pleasure anyway.”
Newcomen laboured at the switch until it clicked. Once again it was just the ground and the sky. The aurora flowed overhead, obscuring the stars as it washed across them.
“We have to think like her,” said Petrovitch. “Do you think you can do that?”
“I can try,” said Newcomen, even though his whole body seemed repelled at the idea of imagining himself a twenty-something foreign-born woman. “I don’t know how good I’ll be at it.”
“You’re sitting in that hut. No windows, no indication of what’s going on outside except what’s on your instruments. Then quickly, without warning, your readings go off the scale. Almost before you can react, everything dies. The lights go off, your computer stops, the screen goes blank. Most importantly, your link dies.” Petrovitch knew what that would do to him. For Lucy it was less immediately catastrophic, but all the same, it would have been a surprising and bewildering experience. “What would you do?”
“The power’s gone. I’d find a torch.”
“Yeah, maybe. You try it, and you get noth
ing. Candle? Storm lantern?” He couldn’t remember seeing one, but he was forgetting something. “The next moment it sounds like God’s knocking to come in.”
“Then I go for the door. I open it and step outside.”
“It’s not dark any more. There’s a fireball, up in the sky, towards the west. You watch it boil away. The light fades and you’re left in the dark again.” Petrovitch stared at the horizon. Deadhorse was invisible. “Why? Why spend time putting things in a rucksack and then leaving the obvious place of safety?”
“Did she think she was under attack? That a war had started?” Newcomen spun slowly around. “How would she know which way to go?”
“She knew the night sky like the back of her hand. With or without a compass, she’d be able to navigate just fine.” Petrovitch grunted with frustration. “I thought coming here would make all the difference: that by seeing what she’d seen, I’d get some clue about where she’s gone.”
“And it hasn’t?”
“No.” He blew out the stale air from his lungs. “Let’s close up here for now. Go and get some food and some rest. Start early tomorrow and see where that gets us.”
Petrovitch turned his own torch on and trudged back to the main cluster of buildings, and the plane parked behind it.
“Did you find anything in the dormitory?” he asked Newcomen.
“Nothing. Stripped clean. They’ve taken the mattress she slept on. I… didn’t expect that.” He kicked at the snow. “It wasn’t part of our investigation.”
“Of course it wasn’t. Your investigation isn’t the important one.” Petrovitch took one last look around. The wind was picking up further. Ice crystals were starting to blow across the snowscape, eroding the footprints they’d made, and there was a line deeper than black to the south-west. It would have been a night just like this, clear but with a storm coming, when Lucy had set out, alone and in the dark.
That was important. It would have limited her choices, told her how far she could go before she needed to seek shelter.
Except there was no shelter to find. No trees, no rocks, no buildings that weren’t ARCO-owned and thoroughly searched by now. An igloo would have been all but impossible without a saw or shovel. Could she have found one? Did she take it with her?
“It’s twenty k to Deadhorse from here,” he said out loud.
“Sorry?”
“Twenty k. She knew that if she stayed where she was, she’d be trapped by the storm, for days. What if she walked back to Deadhorse?”
Newcomen shivered at the thought. “That’s a long way.”
“This is the girl who walked the entire length of the Shannon, source to sea, just because she could. The distance is nothing; it’s whether she could have made it before the weather closed in.”
“They must have turned Deadhorse upside down looking for her already.”
“Doesn’t mean they would have found her. It’s a demonstrable fact that they haven’t.”
“Because she’s not there.”
“Where else could she be? Seriously, think about it. It’s the only place to go for a hundred k. Even in a place that small, there has to be somewhere to hide.”
“Look, Doctor…”
Petrovitch eyed Newcomen balefully.
“Petrovitch. This just won’t wash. If she was in Deadhorse all this time, someone would have found her — noticed food going missing, stuff like that.”
“So she has an accomplice.” Petrovitch snorted. “She can be very persuasive. I should know.”
Newcomen looked away. “I wouldn’t know about that.”
“This: this is the whole reason I’m here. To find her, because I can work out what she would have done. We’re getting somewhere, Newcomen. At last.”
“And then we all die. Swell.”
“Stop your complaining and get up those steps. Dinner’s on me.”
29
Petrovitch slotted the plane back into the same hangar bay they’d left, and it was like they’d never been away. Everything was as cold and still as before. The only difference was the creaking noises made by the building’s superstructure as it flexed in the wind.
“I’m going to refuel now, save time in the morning. Besides,” he said, peering through the windscreen, “you never know when a quick getaway might be needed.”
“You really do think she’s here, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I do. Someone’s hiding her. Sooner or later they’ll find out I’ve arrived, and that’ll be when the fun and games really start.”
“It’ll have to be someone they’ve not replaced. Can you get a list?”
“Sure, but so can you. We can’t go around just interrogating people — they won’t want to die — but we need to be alert for subtle signs.”
“You. Subtle?” Newcomen raised his eyebrows.
“Past’ zebej,” said Petrovitch, but there was no force behind his words. “Whoever it is is risking their life to protect Lucy. They’ll be terrified of discovery, of giving themselves away, of just breathing out of turn. Yet they’ll have to maintain the pretence that nothing is wrong, every second of every day. That’s bravery for you, Newcomen. Yajtza bigger than the Moon.”
Newcomen was very still for a while, then he got up abruptly and went to the door, poking at the release mechanism until it responded.
[Be careful, Sasha.]
“Yeah, well. I’ve tried being nice, I’ve tried indoctrination, I’ve tried appealing to his better instincts. All I’m left with is shame.”
[He is conflicted. He is torn between doing his duty to the country that is actively betraying him, and returning Lucy Petrovitch unharmed to the Freezone.]
“We both know which way he’s going to jump. His instincts will make the mudak side with Uncle Sam, even though they’re going to kill him with no more thought than they’d spend over swatting a fly.”
[He may yet surprise you.]
“Which is the only thing keeping him alive. I don’t need a bomb next to his heart any more. Up here, I could shoot him in what passes for daylight in front of a dozen witnesses, and all the response I’d get would be ‘Where’s the girl?’ ”
[As you have adequately demonstrated. Although the probabilities have shifted, my analysis indicates he is still a significantly positive factor when measuring possible outcomes.]
Petrovitch heard Newcomen’s footsteps ping down the metallic steps, and the cold began to seep into the cockpit. “If you mean having him around is keeping me alert and angry, sure. I still reckon I can maintain the required level of rage all on my own.”
[He raises your chances of success from zero to almost zero. That might be the best anyone can offer.]
“Then I’ll suppose I’ll have to take it.” He roused himself. “This isn’t getting fuel in the tank.”
Petrovitch dressed for the outside again, and went in search of the bowser. Up here, in the high Arctic, no one was going to do it for him. Everyone was expected to be capable, or have someone with them who was. Winter was no place for tourists.
The electric cart that pulled the tank of fuel was stored away from the aircraft — of course it was, because anything else would have been stupid — so he had to trek to a separate building and wheel it back. He’d got there, nodded at Maintenance Guy, who wasn’t on his roll call of genuine people, and was halfway back when Newcomen ran up to him, breathless and shaking.
He looked around for a fire. There wasn’t one. Yet.
“Yeah, when you calm down, that sweat’s going to freeze hard.”
Newcomen gasped and blew. “Come and see.” He leant down and braced his hands against his knees.
Petrovitch looked around at the several thousand litres of fuel he was towing. “It’s going to have to wait.”
“But… you have to come now.”
“Yeah. Your priorities are not my priorities. I’m going to refuel the plane, then I’ll come. It’ll wait, right?”
Still shaking, Newcomen looked around at one of the othe
r hangars. “You don’t understand.”
Petrovitch followed the direction of Newcomen’s gaze. There was nothing to differentiate that building from the ones either side. Something inside, then. He had a pretty good idea what.
“Seriously. I want to keep the plane topped up, for all sorts of reasons, and I won’t be deflected from that by some wild goose chase they’ve dreamed up for me.” He thumbed the button on the handle, and the bowser swayed and sloshed its way towards its destination.
Newcomen, agitated and upset, trailed along behind. He watched Petrovitch wheel the tanker into place, then wrestle with the hoses until he was satisfied with his connections.
“I could do this quicker if you helped.”
“I wouldn’t know how.”
“And learning is against your religion?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Uh-huh.” He got the fuel pumping, and watched for leaks.
“I’m going to be dead soon. Why do I need to know how to put aviation fuel in an aeroplane?”
“If not curiosity, what about necessity? It’s the mother of invention.” The mechanical counter clicked over — gallons and parts thereof — as the pump whirred. “So, what have you found? Scary?”
“I’ve seen them on the news, and at the movies. That one at the airport. They’ve always been on my side before.”
“And now they’re not. Maybe next time-”
“If there is a next time.”
“Next time, you’ll have a little more empathy with their victims.” He checked the counter. He didn’t want to overfill, but he needed enough for what he’d planned, and maybe a little more for emergencies. Not that the whole situation wasn’t a big bag of pizdets anyway. “How many were there?”
“I don’t know. The hangar door was closing as I walked past. The guards with them stood in the way and made it difficult for me.”
“More than one, though.”
“Three, at least.”
“Uplink stuff? Relay station? The jockeys themselves?”
“I, I don’t think so.”
Petrovitch glanced at the counter again. A little more. “Yeah, those guys will be in some warehouse in Nevada, getting hyped up on battle drugs and heavy rock. No one’s going to put their meat on the line: way too valuable to lose.”