by M. R. Carey
When he has finished speaking, there is a long silence. To his right and at the periphery of his vision, Private Sixmith’s hands grip the wheel more tightly than is strictly necessary.
“So after seven months of nothing to report,” Brigadier Fry says at last, “you’re now saying that you may have made a definitive breakthrough?” Her tone is clinical, with no trace of enthusiasm or curiosity.
“Yes. Exactly.”
“The timing is interesting, Isaac. I might almost be tempted to say suspicious.”
Carlisle is baffled, both by the words and by the coldly accusing way in which they’re spoken. “Suspicious?” he repeats. “I don’t understand, Brigadier. What is it that you suspect?”
Another silence. “It’s not important,” Fry says at last. “I’ll consider what needs to be done. Keep the radio open on this frequency.”
This last instruction is meaningless, since the little radio lacks a tuner. Lutes might have been able to tweak it onto another frequency using parts from the main cockpit radio, but nobody else on board would have a clue how to do that.
But the dead air from the radio makes it clear that Fry has signed off. Evidently Sixsmith feels free, now, to draw the moral. “So Dr. Fournier has been spying on us all ever since we hit the road.”
“Beacon was at liberty to set up multiple reporting systems,” Carlisle says carefully. Mechanically defending the status quo. Why does he do that? Why has he spent his whole life servicing and sanctioning bad decisions made by people he can only despise? He lets out a breath that turns out to be a sigh.
“Yes,” he admits. “Dr. Fournier has been filing secret reports to the Muster, although he’s meant to be civilian commander. I’ll make an official complaint on our return to Beacon.”
“How about an unofficial smack in the face?” Sixsmith’s tone is tight, and the colonel doesn’t believe she is joking.
“Private,” he says, “it’s not worth risking a reprimand or a dishonourable discharge over—”
Fry’s voice cuts him off. The channel is open again, and might have been all along. “I’ve arranged an escort for you,” the brigadier says without preamble. “It’s of the utmost importance that your specimen is taken back to Beacon for further study, and the Rosalind Franklin alone is too vulnerable to attack.”
“Very well,” Carlisle says. “What are your orders?”
“Rendezvous at base Hotel Echo, near Bedford, forty-eight hours from now. If you’re going to have trouble making that rendezvous, let me know well in advance.”
“I’m not familiar with Hotel Echo,” Carlisle admits.
“There’s no reason why you should be, Colonel. It doesn’t exist yet. It’s the former RAF Henlow. We’re refitting it as a forward base for tech retrieval runs into Stevenage and Milton Keynes. Take down the coordinates.”
Carlisle does. The brigadier goes on to give him more detailed instructions for the rendezvous. She will arrange for a squad of twenty soldiers to be present, along with three armoured vehicles, all under the command of a Captain Manolis. If they are not present, Carlisle is simply to wait. On no account is he to use the radio, either to speak to the brigadier herself or to attempt to make contact with anyone else at Beacon. When Captain Manolis makes himself known, Carlisle will turn Rosie over to him and ride in a staff car to Beacon, ahead of the rest of the column, for immediate debriefing.
Carlisle believes he knows what debriefing will entail in this context. Despite their revolutionary discovery, the expedition has sustained unacceptable losses and by military logic someone has to be to blame. He will take that blame, while Fournier takes the credit for the new specimen. Possibly this or something like it has been the plan all along, from before they even left Beacon. Possibly the only purpose of the expedition in the brigadier’s mind was to allow Carlisle a public opportunity to fail.
Fry is still talking him through the protocols for the rendezvous. Assuming the absence of hungries, she tells the colonel, he and his people are to exit Rosie first, bringing the specimen with them, and assemble on base Hotel Echo’s main parade ground. Manolis and his squad will then make themselves known, retrieve the specimen and carry out a handover in good order.
Fry asks Carlisle to confirm and accept these orders. He does, but he feels compelled to add something despite Sixsmith’s presence beside him. “You should have trusted me, Geraldine. I’ve never given you any reason to question my loyalty to Beacon or to the Muster.”
“Well,” Fry says. The word hangs by itself for a moment. “Loyalty is just the wheels on the bus, Isaac.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that it keeps things moving but it’s neutral when it comes to the direction they move in.”
The colonel contains a twinge of exasperation. “I believe that’s actually the point I was making. I’ve been neutral to a degree that could fairly be called pathological. Yet you decided you needed eyes on me all the same. Can I ask why that is?”
There is a pause, filled only with static.
“We’ve missed you, Isaac,” the brigadier says. “I look forward to hearing all about your adventures north of the border.”
She cuts the channel.
He knows the answer to his question in any case. Fry is a political animal engaged perpetually in a zero-sum game: she plays it skilfully, in all circumstances, and she has an unerring sense of the cards that other people are holding. As she has consolidated her hold on power, Carlisle has been almost the only Muster officer with the combination of high profile and public approval to challenge her. She has never stopped waiting for him to play out the hand.
The colonel stares out of the forward windscreen. The road opens ahead of them, miraculously clear. They are making good progress for the first time since they rolled out of Invercrae.
But where are they going?
47
In the crew quarters, Dr. Khan is falling.
Her hands are braced against the edge of the sink, her feet firmly planted on the steel plates of Rosie’s floor, but all the same she is in freefall. She has been like this for hours—ever since she spoke to Stephen in the lab—and she still hasn’t hit bottom. Perhaps there is no bottom.
Lieutenant Foss mutters in her sleep. Something about roast chicken. Something about time. Khan plummets through the diffuse froth of the lieutenant’s voice without slowing.
They’re going home, but that’s not real. John is dead, which is just about as real as it gets, but even that is just a fact she has to remind herself of every few minutes, to keep her grieving fresh.
“The road is going to get bumpy,” Sixsmith calls from the cockpit. In the absence of the intracom, she has to rely on her own natural bellow. “There’s a heap of old cars ahead, but they’re mostly just rust and moss. I think they’ll pretty much break apart when we hit them, but you’ll feel a jolt. Hold on tight.”
Khan holds on tight. It makes no difference.
“Rina,” Stephen says at her elbow. “You’d better strap in. The baby …”
The baby. Yes. All right. She slows herself, opens her eyes on a present moment where she desperately wants not to be. A fierceness rises in her, ballasts her. She pulls herself together; brings herself, by the application of her will, to a dead halt—although Rosie rumbles on. The baby needs her to make rational decisions about her own safety, since her safety ensures its own.
She crosses to a chair, hands cradling her swollen belly, sits down, straps in. Stephen takes the seat beside her and checks the straps, making sure that they’re not crossed or twisted and that the inertia reel is running free. Sixsmith’s warning has woken Foss but she just turns over in the bunk and digs in out of sight.
“Lieutenant Foss,” Stephen calls out. “We need to—”
“I’ll take my chances,” Foss grunts.
Rosie shudders and rocks. The deck plates creak. They’re flung from side to side by sudden shifts, lurches, stops and starts. Khan stares straight ahead, braced tight in her ch
air.
It’s not a cure, Stephen had said. In the lab. When they spoke. When they spoke before. I know what the cure will look like, but I didn’t have the time to make it. All I could do was stabilise you, in a sort of brute force way. The feral children secrete their own neurotransmitters that talk back to the fungus, and now your brain has those chemicals, too. Cordyceps thinks you’re a friend. Cordyceps thinks you’re all part of one big fungal colony.
“But that is a cure,” Khan whispered. In her desperation she had held on to his sleeve, almost touching him, almost invading him. “That’s the definition of a cure, Stephen—a way to keep the pathogen from changing us. It’s what we’ve been looking for all along! It’s enough. Isn’t it enough?”
No.
Yes.
Maybe, if there was enough medicine. But there won’t be. Even for her, he won’t keep making it. He’ll keep her stabilised until the birth, until the life inside her has undocked. That will use up all the serum he has on hand, and he won’t go hunting for fresh ingredients. Not given where they would have to come from.
Which is to say the brains and spinal columns of the feral children.
He won’t commit murder for her.
When he told her that, and when she realised that her life as a human being was measurable in days or perhaps in hours, she felt herself fall. She fell away from him and Rosie and her stolid, helpless self, from everything that demanded an answer out of her.
Such a luxury. Such a mountain of self-pity. She hates herself for having that traitor inside her, that coward. She is back now. In the driving seat, whatever that might mean. She will see this through for the baby’s sake, given that as of now she has no sake of her own.
It helps to think of herself as a vessel. Like Rosie. Carrying a precious cargo over rough terrain, heading for a harbour where most likely—having served her purpose—she will be mothballed and dismantled. There is no shame in that. No stigma in being dead once you’ve done everything you needed to do. She has this payload to deliver. She needs to keep her armour up until the job is finished.
A sudden clenching of her stomach promises that the job will be finished soon.
What if she outed him? Shouted out Stephen’s secret to the rest of the crew? McQueen would get the recipe out of him at the point of a bayonet, squeeze him like a sponge. The world would be saved.
But no. It wouldn’t. The treatment seems to require regular top-ups, like the Td toxoid vaccine for tetanus. Khan glimpses a future in which the feral children are caught, brought to maturity, bred in pens the way pigs and sheep used to be before the Breakdown. Farmed for their nerve tissue.
How many lives is my life worth? she wonders, dazed and sickened. She can’t do the maths. While the baby is still inside her, she won’t even try.
But she’ll keep her mouth shut, as they rush towards separation. What happens after that will depend on who she is when they get there.
48
Night falls and they keep on moving. Slowly, with circumspection, but always pushing forward. It’s a calculated risk. The road is wide and flat and they can see a long way out in front of them. This far north the obstacles are few, and since Sixsmith has charted them on their way up she is unlikely to be surprised.
With the first hint of dawn, she accelerates again. Rosie attains her ponderous top speed and eats up the miles. Hungries see them and give chase—not the children, just the regular kind—but mostly they don’t get close. When they do, Rosie ploughs them under with a barely perceptible bump.
They are still two days out of Beacon by anybody’s reckoning, but they’re not heading for Beacon now. If they keep to this speed, they’ve got one more day, one more night. They’ll make it to the rendezvous sometime around sun-up tomorrow. There has been talk of helicopter gunships. They will ride home in style, leaving Rosie behind them like a steel rind, a shed skin.
That thought causes Lieutenant Foss a twinge of melancholy, but in every other respect the news is good. She has had more than enough of the field. She wants a hot bath, a sweaty fuck (these thoughts are not coming in any kind of logical sequence) and above all the feeling that if she lets her guard down nothing will take a bite out of her. This is what she’s living for now, and it’s close enough that the pleasant fantasies she is indulging feel like promises to herself that she can actually keep.
Looking around her, though, she’s not seeing the same enthusiasm. Okay, the whitecoats are in mourning. She gets that, and she respects it. But the colonel isn’t saying a word to anyone, Sixsmith is sullen and even McQueen has closed up tighter than a nun’s hope chest.
She finds him in the mid-section, making ammunition. It’s something she does herself, but she has never seen him take an interest. The RIH cartridges and vintage Lapua Magnums that Beacon uses as standard issue seem to suit him well enough, and he hasn’t seemed impressed by her highly technical arguments about long-range stopping power versus short-range accuracy. Now he’s sitting there on the floor with a non-electric press and a Lee Challenger reloader (she is pretty sure it’s hers), cleaning out spent primers with the quiet intensity of a monk flicking through the best bits of his rosary.
“You pick your times,” Foss says, nudging his shoulder with her knee. “What do you think you’re going to be shooting?”
“You never know,” McQueen says. He doesn’t look up from his work.
Foss leans back against the turret rail and watches the landscape roll on by. She feels a strong determination to squeeze a companionable moment out of this. “Remember that time on the way up when we got stuck in the mud and had to hammer the front winch into the fucking asphalt because there was nothing else to tie it to?”
McQueen tamps another primer down, decants powder into the Challenger’s narrow hopper. “What about it?”
“Nothing. I’m just looking forward to never doing it again, that’s all.”
No response.
“What are you looking forward to?” Foss prompts.
He looks up at her now, his eyes cold. “Some peace and quiet,” he says.
Foss can take a hint. “Fine,” she says. “Enjoy.” She leaves him to his home-mades, which frankly are not up to the standard of hers. He is sloppy with the calipers and uneven with the powder.
The crew quarters feel uncomfortably empty, like a jawline with some fresh, raw gaps between the teeth. Khan is lying down, her pale face shiny with sweat. The Robot is soaking a towel at the sink, which he carries across to her. She is clutching her big belly and muttering to herself under her breath. Counting, it sounds like. Foss puts two and two together and gets a total of holy shit!
“You’re kidding me,” she says. “It’s coming? It’s coming now?”
“Soon,” Greaves says, giving Foss a quick, anguished glance. “The contractions are fifteen minutes apart.” Khan says nothing. Her eyes are open and she’s staring at the ceiling. She is deep inside herself somewhere, barely aware of her surroundings.
“Okay,” Foss says. But what the hell does that mean? Should she do something, or just let this run its course? What’s the significance of fifteen minutes apart? How long does that give them?
The last question is the pertinent one. “Khan,” she says, “are you about to drop? Give me an ETA, for the love of Christ.”
“It could be a few hours yet,” the Robot tells her. “When she’s fully dilated, the contractions will come a lot faster. And probably her waters will break.” Still nothing from Khan, not even a look.
Foss turns her attention back to Greaves. “Can you do the necessary?” she asks him. The Robot! She can’t believe the words that are coming out of her mouth. But what’s the alternative? Somehow she can’t imagine either Fournier or McQueen telling Khan to bear down—and the colonel and Sixsmith have other fish to fry. It’s going to be the two of them, God help them, and Foss has no idea which of them will turn out to be the better qualified. She’s pretty sure Greaves has never touched a woman in his life, but he sounds like he’s go
t the theory all down. They’ll just have to do the best they can.
She sticks around in the crew quarters, out of a general sense that Zero Hour won’t be long in coming. To pass the time she plays patience. McQueen has her loader, and in any case she’s stacked up all the ammo she needs.
About an hour into this vigil Khan starts to thrash and snarl. It’s not a symptom of imminent childbirth that Foss has ever heard of. The doctor sounds fucking alarming, no doubt about it. But Greaves runs to the lab and comes back a minute or so later with a hypo, which he empties into Khan’s arm, and she quietens down again.
“What was that?” Foss asks. She expects a one-word answer—painkiller, maybe, or sedative, or maybe some medical word she won’t understand. But the Robot doesn’t answer at all. He gives a low moan, as though he’s in pain, and rocks on the spot, from one foot to the other.
“Shit!” Foss exclaims. “Greaves …”
“Hold back the symptoms,” the Robot moans. His face flushes and his hands flutter in the air, describing some complicated, abstract shape. “The progression. It’s a suppressant. Palliative. Palliative care. Not … It’s not a cure.”
“Okay,” Foss says, softly softly. A cure for pregnancy? She’d love to see what that might look like. “I withdraw the question. Don’t sweat it.”
“Thank you,” Greaves mutters, his shoulders sagging a little. He actually looks relieved, as though her saying that was a real concession.
Foss changes the subject, for his sake. “Hey, should I boil some water? Is that a thing?”
“I’ve already sterilised the lab,” Greaves says, eyes intently down as though he’s checking that the deck plates are still there. “We don’t need water.”
“Okay then,” Foss agrees. “All good.”
And they’re all good for about three hours or so after that. It’s actually quite peaceful in the crew quarters. Foss playing endless games of patience, lost in the algorithmic flow like it’s a Zen meditation, and Khan pumping air through her teeth in a rhythm that accelerates and then falls back again and again like the tide hitting the base of a cliff.