The Curve of The Earth sp-4

by Simon Morden

  He talked to the remote, and it hummed into life, rising from his lap and spinning around once. Then it headed off back towards the land, dipping and lifting as it crossed the ground. It would have probably been better if he’d got hold of some white paint from somewhere, but at the very least it’d be a distraction they’d waste bullets on.

  He was set. He zipped up the bag and threw it on to the ice behind him, then got into position for sniping. The noise of motorised vehicles grew loud, and the first dark shapes appeared out of the fog. Three of them, thirty metres apart: not the end of the line, but not the middle of it either. Somewhere on the right flank.

  Petrovitch pasted the three targets with crosshairs, and let his onboard computer take over. One, two, three. Explosive rounds, meant for protecting a young woman from predatory polar bears, hit the widely separated men within a second. Each projectile bored into a chest, then detonated. One of the skidoos caught fire as stray chemicals ignited leaking fuel. All three drove on, riderless. The snow-rimed shore was marked with stark red blood and ruined, steaming corpses.

  The echo of the explosions and the sudden run-on of the snowmobiles before they crashed into the ice wall ahead of them was not as loud as the silence that followed.

  Convention dictated that he change position. But he wasn’t trying to avoid detection. He was actively courting it.

  “How long now?”

  [Unknown. I am… blind. The Freezone collective are my eyes and ears. To be cut off from any of them is unnatural and wrong.]

  “I never thought I’d die this way,” said Petrovitch. “Chyort, I never thought I’d die. The dreams I had. Kept having. I was old and I still didn’t die.”

  The engine noises cut off, one by one. “There should be two more to my left, the rest of them over there. They’re not talking to each other.”

  [Because they would rightly surmise I could listen in.]

  The flames from the burning snowmobile flickered prettily and started to die down.

  “They’ll have to overcome me quickly. They have to realise that Lucy is out on the ice, and I’ve stayed behind. So no subtlety.”

  He sent the remote rightwards, and picked up the first pop-up. He threw it hard, hard enough that it skittered to the ground only just within his vision, then slid away. That was it; that was all he had to do. Automatics would do the rest.

  He launched the other two the other way, towards where he assumed the main force would be attacking from, then took control of the remote.

  The image from the fish-eye camera was confusing until he deployed some software to deconvolute it, turning it from a distorted circle into a virtual bubble with him at the centre. He orientated it, and flew it north towards the ice barrier. Cracked ground, heavy with snow, passed underneath, and eventually he found a group of lines — made by two outer runners and a broad, teethed track — that meant someone had passed by.

  He turned the remote again, and chased it up the tracks. He’d probably only get one shot at this, so he pushed the fans to their limit. The whine they’d make would be audible, but only if there wasn’t other noise around.

  The outline of a snowmobile appeared. And another. And a whole bunch more. They’d parked them together, decided on their tactics, and carried on on foot. They were on their way, and there was nothing Petrovitch could do about that.

  He could do something about their transport, though. He flew the remote into the middle of the impromptu car park and activated the bomb.

  The camera died instantly. He blinked, taking in the wide expanse of snow and ice, and heard the distinctive sharp crack of plastic and shriek of tortured metal. He was too far away to feel the abrupt change in the direction of down, but imagined it all the same: frozen ground breaking free and rushing up, loose snow and anything resting on it drawn in towards a momentary, vast mass.

  The fog bank flickered with more burning fuel.

  One of the pop-ups went off. Bright green laser light pulsed and died.

  “This is it, then.”

  He stood up and snapped off three more rounds, aiming for the ground just beyond what he could see. The explosions turned the fog bright, and there were the shapes of men lit up inside it.

  He tagged them, shot two figures on the shore side, and swung around to go for another on the sea side of the ridge.

  The second pop-up blew, driving a chemically powered beam of light through the quickly calculated centre of mass of another man. The third burnt another, behind him.

  Petrovitch’s muzzle flashes had given him away, and suddenly the air was full of soft lead and hard ice. Things zipped into his face and punched the surface of his parka. He was bleeding. His leg burned and the finger-sized hole in his trousers spread a dark, wicking stain all around it.

  A lull. Maybe they thought they’d killed him. Again. He came up firing, but this time it was his thigh that refused to take his weight. Another two, three, four dead, and the effect of seeing another human being simply torn apart by the force of the burning gases inside them made the others falter, fall back.

  Petrovitch crouched down in what little cover he could find, wedged between two blocks of sea ice. His face was pressed against one slab. He could see the tiny bubbles of air caught within it, frozen at the moment the water changed.

  He looked up, to the north. Three diffuse stars were fading, sinking to the ocean’s surface. He’d almost missed the signal. Almost, but not quite.

  “She’s been picked up.”

  [There is a problem…] Michael hesitated. [Sasha?]

  They started shooting again. His torso was sort-of-hidden. His legs took another two hits, foot and calf. Different legs. The second struck bone and broke it before leaving his flesh. He clamped down on the pain, all his pains, and it left him cloud-high and floating.

  “Yeah. Kind of busy.”

  He was lying on the last gravity bomb. He picked it up in his left hand, flicked the switch, and threw it in the direction of the North Pole.

  It drew their fire as it rolled along, bouncing over the almost flat ice that covered the ocean. Why they shot at it was anyone’s guess, but before they could destroy it, it destroyed itself.

  The ice buckled and heaved. A fountain of glassy green water burst out and rose like a fountain, before losing shape and splashing back down, pushing shards of thick ice away from the hole. The sea continued to slop up and over for a moment, then retreated, quiet once more.

  The sky darkened.

  Petrovitch took his chance. He’d run out of ideas, time and hope. He was bleeding out. He was dying. Yet directly above him was a descending plane, and he knew his wife was on board, and that she was coming to save him.

  First, he had to save himself.

  The axe.

  He dropped the carbine, wrapped his fingers around the wooden shaft, and threw himself off the ridge of broken ice.

  Now they were shooting at the plane, and the people — his people — were at the doors of the plane shooting back. Not just guns: missiles. No one seemed to be looking in his direction as he crashed on to the solid surface of the sea.

  No one except a lone, slight figure walking in off the sea, pulling the mist along behind her, her right arm clamped tight by complex alien machinery, her left hand supporting her elbow as she raised the device.

  Petrovitch looked up at Lucy just as lightning started to play around her. “Ah, chyort.” Stupidity did run in the family after all.

  Then Newcomen came out of the fog at him, sprinting like he was trying to make a touchdown.

  Petrovitch slammed the axe blade into the ice, and gave the mightiest pull on the haft that he could. He was sliding, sliding over the white ice and towards the hole he’d made, that cut through almost a metre of frozen sea to the cold, dark water below.

  “Too yebani slow, Farm Boy.”

  They hadn’t given Newcomen a gun. If they had, Petrovitch would never have made it. The American dived for his ankles, even as Petrovitch got his fingers into a crack at
the edge of the abyss.

  He pulled himself forward. The block of ice he was on bobbed, and started to tilt.

  “Petrovitch! Don’t you dare take the coward’s way out.” Newcomen lay sprawled on his belly, his hand ineffectually snapping at anything of Petrovitch that might still be in reach. “You’ve done the wrong thing. Exactly the wrong thing.”

  The sky above them was brightening, almost blinding, and Newcomen hadn’t noticed.

  “You have to bring Lucy back.”

  “She is back,” said Petrovitch, and the tablet of ice he was clinging to turned over.

  The water closed over his head, as thick as oil and cold as death.

  He sank down, and watched the circle of light above him flash momentarily blue. His feet slowly struck the gritty sediment of the seabed, and his legs buckled beneath him. The water clouded with both clay and blood, though only a little of both. He found he was barely underwater at all, this close to the shore. He could reach up and touch the underside of the smooth, sculpted ice, if he wanted to.

  He let his heart race. Near-frozen blood coursed through his constricting veins, from his skin to his core. Still conscious, still thinking, even though everything else was shutting down.

  [Sasha.]

  “My turn for the long sleep now.”

  [One moment. Help is coming.]

  “If they get me out now, I’ll die for sure. This way…”

  [Sasha.]

  He disabled the security locks on his heart, and readied himself. The pressure on his lungs was growing, and he bled the air out in a thin stream of bubbles that danced like quicksilver on their way up.

  He was empty. He knew he had to breathe in, to make it right. He would, just not yet. He deliberately slowed his heart right down, to almost a stop. He was blacking out, embalmed by the Arctic water, lit by the unnatural sky.

  [Sasha?]

  39

  He was patient, and he waited. He was aware of the waiting, and at the same time unaware of just how long that waiting was. One moment it was interminable, an eternity. The next, a blink, the moment between breaths. Both were the same.

  He was nowhere, either. Or somewhere. It was dark — no, not dark, just not there. Then it was light, and he was in a white landscape with no features, no beginning, no end. Again, it was both.

  There was nothing to do but wait. He’d chosen this path. He’d choose it again. No point in feeling anything like anger, denial, despair. He’d been right to do what he’d done. Time ran on like a shinkansen or crawled like a slug.

  He couldn’t feel or see or smell or hear. He thought to himself that it was very odd: when Michael had slept, he’d dreamed of a whole universe. Empires that spanned entire galaxies had been born within his imagination. Those same empires had withered and died there, too. Yet Petrovitch seemed to be stuck in this trance, where all moments met and collapsed into timelessness.

  But now he could remember that thought. That put it in the past. Unless it had always been in the past, and he had only just remembered it now. Or he had forgotten it a million times, and was surprising himself anew with the memory.

  Metaphysics had never been his strong point. If he had had a throat, and lungs, he would have growled.

  A tear, a rip, a sharp dragging sensation that felt like half his head coming away. It faded, and it left a row of numbers behind. They clicked over in a steady progression. One was followed by two.

  A chequered pattern appeared. Lines. Circles. Colours.

  A reboot. That was what was happening. He was rebooting. That information was coming from his eyes.

  He’d annoyed himself alive.

  Everything was happening in a rush: he was being lifted, thrown up in the air, then falling and landing with such a crack that the abruptness shocked him.

  He was in a room. A ward. In a hospital. There were other beds, other patients. There was a ceiling, and ceiling lights, and another really bright burning light that was being shone directly into his right eye.

  He tried to jerk his head away. Not only could he not, the light travelled the short distance across his face to burn out some of the receptors in his left eye as well.

  He wanted to tell the light to go away. He couldn’t talk either. There was a snake in his mouth.

  That would be stupid. Snakes didn’t do that. It had to be a tube. A tube attached to a ventilator that was hissing away on a trolley next to him. He could just make out the shape of it, but as he couldn’t move his eyes, he wasn’t sure.

  The light receded. It belong to a man in blue scrubs who put it away in his top pocket. He shook his head, walked out of view, and away.

  Another figure appeared. As he bent down and peered at Petrovitch, his mop of black hair fell forward over his face.

  [It worked, then.]

  The voice echoed in his head. He answered the same way. “I don’t know yet. Why can’t I move? Or feel anything?”

  Michael stood in the middle of the bed, his waist projecting above the sheets. He raised a speculative eyebrow. [Considering you have been dead for thirty-three hours, a lengthy recovery is to be expected.]

  “Thirty-three? Okay. Best comeback since Lazarus.”

  Michael’s avatar walked through the rest of the bed and affected to look at the equipment surrounding him. The heart monitor registered zero beats, as it ought, and no blood pressure, which it ought not. [Did you dream?] he asked.

  “No. I thought I would. I just… was.”

  [Should I tell the others you are awake?]

  “Give me a minute first.” He tried to blink. It wasn’t happening. The heart thing worried him, though. “Is that machine connected? Hang on. I think I need to spin up.”

  [Your core temperature is still below normal. In fully human patients, therapeutic hypothermia protocols suggest restarting the heart only when thawing is complete. Please go slowly: I am standing by to record the results of this experiment for posterity.]

  “So I’m still clinically dead?”

  [I believe the diagnosis is mostly dead. Which was the effect you were trying to achieve, after all.]

  “I’ll take it to a quarter-revolutions, then.”

  Michael peered down at Petrovitch again. [Welcome back.]

  “Yeah. I haven’t been dead for years. Can’t say I miss it.” He willed his heart controls into virtual being, and examined the interface carefully. “Here goes.”

  He slowly nudged the controls forward, and everything started tingling. All sorts of electronic alarms sounded around him, and he was suddenly surrounded by a flurry of medical personnel shouting obscure cant at each other.

  On Petrovitch’s part, he ignored them because it felt like he was being eaten alive by ants. Pain from one or other part of his body he could deal with. The whole of him? It was tempting just to slow his heart down again, but he wasn’t quite done with the meat. Not yet. Not today.

  He was cold, unspeakably, indescribably cold. He hadn’t realised just how cool they’d kept him, how carefully they were defrosting him. But Michael hadn’t gainsaid his course of action, and he trusted his friend wouldn’t let him do something that might actually kill him, properly this time.

  “Dr Petrovitch?” It was that madman with his torch again. This time, though, his irises closed to pinpoints when it was aimed at him. “Blink if you can hear me.”

  “Of course I can hear you, you balvan. Now get this yebani tube out of my gullet before I vomit into my lungs.” That was what he wanted to say. Instead, he blinked, slowly and obviously.

  “You’ve woken up early. We need to warm you up carefully, so bear with us.” A nurse impaled the canula set in his forearm with a syringe, and squirted the contents into his sluggish bloodstream.

  He immediately felt himself slipping away again. “Michael? Is this okay? Am I doing it right?”

  Michael’s avatar appeared behind the technician who was turning up the heating elements for the pads he was lying between. [You realise the reason they know what your core tem
perature is is because you’ve a probe in your anus?]

  “Terrific. I have wires up my zhopu, and I feel like crap.”

  [You feel like crap because you are alive, Sasha. I have given the medical team all the information they need to effect your successful recovery and, unsurprisingly, they have previous experience of this procedure. Let them do their jobs.]

  The pain continued to flay his skin, but at least he could move his eyes now, and he let his gaze wander. At the far end of the ward, behind the locked double doors, he could see a face pressed against the glass. Madeleine’s.

  “What happened after I went under the ice?” [There was, inevitably, a firefight, in which one of our lifters crashed and Lucy used the alien weapon to disintegrate parts of Alaska.]

  “Disintegrate?”

  [Whilst we have not been able to conduct experiments under laboratory conditions, the device appears to produce a beam that disrupts matter at a molecular level. Energetically.]

  “Is she…?”

  [Lucy Petrovitch is well. The designers were thoughtful enough to include shielding to protect the user. She is currently in the local police station under armed guard. Tabletop is with her. She will come to no harm.]

  “So how long was I under the ice for?”

  [Twenty-nine minutes and seventeen seconds. You drifted, and they had to make a new hole in the ice. You floated past, eventually.]

  Madeleine’s expression was set firmly to neutral as she watched. Her arms were above her head, resting on the top of the door frame. Perhaps she’d run out of emotion after pulling her drowned husband out of the frozen sea, and the faint scowl she wore was the only remnant of her grief.

  “She knew what I was trying to do, right? That I would have bled out otherwise?”

  [Knowing that you had to and watching you do it are, I understand, two very different concepts. One is of the mind. The other is of the heart. She was distraught. She had to be stopped from diving in after you.] Michael walked through the techie to Petrovitch’s bedside. [Another thing. Your leg.]