by Eric Brown
Kat looked dubious. “As much as I don’t get on with the smug git, I find that hard to believe.”
“You must admit, he’s got Miekle wrapped around his little finger. Did you see her last night? She was all over him.”
Kat tipped her head to one side and said, “Anything wrong with that? Don’t tell me that an older woman shouldn’t be enjoying an affair with a young, handsome man like Ward?”
He frowned uneasily. Kat had the disturbing ability to destabilise him—and just when everything had been going so well.
He backpedalled. “Of course not. It’s just that…I don’t know. I can’t see what Ward gets out of the relationship, that’s all.”
Kat laughed and tapped the back of his hand, twice, almost patronisingly. “Some men, Travis, like older women. It’s probably just as simple as that.”
“I don’t know…” He finished his salad, drained his wine, and refilled his glass. When he lifted the bottle to top up Kat’s glass, she covered it with her hand. “Better not. It wouldn’t do to be arrested drunk in charge of the bike, would it?”
He thought of Kat, alone in her dome overlooking the coast that evening: it was her bolthole, her retreat. Over the past year, since she’d bought it, Travis had found himself wondering about Kat and her life out there. She was a very private person. Despite knowing her for almost a decade, he admitted that he knew nothing at all about her private life.
She was staring across the frosted tarmac at the towering shuttle on its gantry.
“Have you noticed the atmosphere around here recently, Travis? Or is it just me?”
“Well, you can’t not be aware of the pre-launch buzz about the place.”
“No, it’s more than that. Not just anticipation—an edginess, an apprehension.” She looked straight at him. “Do you know what I think it is?”
He grinned. “No doubt you’re going to dazzle me with some abstruse psychological truism.”
She laughed. “No truism, just a hunch. I think what we’re feeling in the air is a fear of failure. We’re on the threshold of a new age in the history of humankind—the push to the stars—and so damned much could go very, very wrong. And you know what happens to people when faced with an extinction event—?”
“Isn’t that going a bit far?” he interrupted.
She waved away his objection. “Hear me out, for the sake of argument. So, when faced with extinction, or mass failure, we as a race fall back on the good old tried and tested desire to reproduce.”
He laughed. “So you’re saying that…that the buzz in the air is sexual?”
“Repressed sexual tension, Travis. Don’t you feel it?”
He wondered, for a second, if she were playing with him. Then he decided, going by the intent look in her eyes as she took in her fellow diners, that she was serious.
They ate without speaking for a while. To fill the silence, he said the first thing that came into his head. “So…all prepared for the launch, and after?”
She nodded. “You?”
“Mmm. I’ve had a long time to ready myself for it.”
She was staring at him. She said at last, “You told me, two years back when you were overlooked for a place on the Kon-Tiki, that you were relieved. I did wonder if you were telling the truth, then, and making the best of the decision.”
“Scout’s honour. I was relieved. I’m…I’m essentially conservative, Kat. I like routine, order. The thought of going out there, facing the danger, leaving behind everything I’ve grown up with, everything that’s familiar…To be honest, that would scare me.”
“And now, with the launch imminent? Isn’t there a part of you that wishes you were up there, in suspension, awaiting resuscitation on an alien world?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps a tiny part, okay. The thought of the wonders to be discovered out there, on a new world…The new life forms, alien ecosystems that we can’t even guess at.” He nodded. “Okay, that does intrigue me. The xenobiologists I’ve trained will be heir to wonders I can only dream of. But do you know what, Kat? I can honestly say that I wouldn’t trade places with them.”
“Even though, to employ a cliché, Planet Earth is going to hell in a handcart?”
He sighed and sat back. “There’s so much work to be done here, Kat. And I think I can add something to that work. Teach ecologists, do a little research. I want to be part of the solution. I don’t want to run away. Not that you’re all running away, of course…”
Much of the time he found it hard to think so positively, these days. He would wake in the cold small hours of the night convinced the task was all but hopeless. Society was doomed to collapse and plunge humankind into, at best, a new Dark Age. Everything would be lost.
And then he’d awake to a spectacular sunrise and the prospect of teaching a new, eager class of ecologists…and the future didn’t seem so bleak, for a while.
“So you’ll be okay, after the launch?” Kat asked.
Her concern cheered him. “I think I’ll be fine. But if I’m not, if I feel that sense of dislocation, then I’ll know where to find you.”
She smiled at him, then spoilt it all by asking, “And Daniel? How do you think he’ll hold up?”
“Daniel?” He shrugged. “You know Daniel—all bluster and bravado. It’s hard to know what he’s really thinking, and feeling.”
“But you’ve known him far longer than I have, Travis.”
He shrugged again, irritated by her interest in the South African. He wanted to ask her why she was asking, but couldn’t bring himself to phrase the question without betraying his jealousy.
“Daniel is complex,” he said. “He’s…he’s a very egocentric person, in many ways. He doesn’t like being second best, which is what he is. He’s good—he’s very good, as a…a workhorse. But I think I’m right in saying that he lacks originality.” He shrugged again. “I think he’ll be fine after the launch, with plenty of work to do, and someone to lead him.”
She tipped her head, regarding him. “Someone like me?”
He almost winced. “He’s not in your league, Kat. Not that he’d admit as much.”
Kat nodded. “That’s very perceptive,” she said, and for a second he glowed in the light of her approbation, until he realised that that her tone implied that she had never assumed he possessed the facility for such insight.
She hesitated, and he knew what was coming. “Travis…you knew that woman in admin, didn’t you? The redhead Daniel saw for a while?”
He was aware that he was colouring. “What about her?”
“I’ve heard rumours.”
He shook his head. “That’s all they were, Kat. Rumours. Lies. He ended it, that’s true, but she didn’t like that and started gossiping.”
“So the stories have no foundation…?”
“None at all.”
He took refuge in a mouthful of wine. It would be the easiest thing in the world, and in an underhand way it would suit his purpose, if he implied to Kat that there might be a grain of truth in the stories that Daniel DeVries had on more than one occasion assaulted Hannah Langham.
But if he did that, how the hell could he look his friend in the eye, ever again? Daniel DeVries was many things, but he wasn’t a woman-beater.
He said, “Why the sudden interest in Daniel’s old flame?” and wished he didn’t sound so needy, even to himself.
Kat shrugged. “Why not? I need to know who I’m working with. We’ll be running this project together for the next three years, at least. I need to know where I stand with people.”
He nodded, drained his glass and refilled it. “Well, Daniel might not be perfect, but I’m sure he’d never…”
She smiled. “Okay, point taken,” and Travis wondered if she’d seen through his dissimulation.
She was looking across the room, and he transferred his attention to what was happening up on the screen—and wished he hadn’t. Ute was being interviewed, again, her words scrolling across the foot of the picture. She didn’
t look any older than she had ten years ago: thin-faced and pretty in a pinched, elfin kind of way.
“You said last night that you’d had a fling with that woman.”
He looked at her. “That’s right. Why are you smiling?”
“According to Daniel, it was a bit more than just a fling.”
His face burned; damn Daniel.
He shrugged uneasily. “We were together for six months or so. It was never that serious. I…I was interested in her work. She was a geologist, working with NetwerkEnergie trying to clean up the Med. I did a little freelance research work for her. But she was spending more and more of her time on her activism…”
“And you ended the affair?”
He nodded, but it hadn’t been like that at all. He’d been on her side, championing her when she turned against her employers—whistle-blowing the fact that the multinational corporation’s environmental work was nothing but a sham—and sticking with her through thick and thin when NetwerkEnergie tried to drag her through the courts. After that, Ute had been radicalised, joining the Allianz and working to bring actions against corporations like Exxon and Rosneft. For a while, Travis had even considered working with her, throwing up his responsible position at Cambridge and joining Allianz.
And then he’d been head-hunted by Project Kon-Tiki, and had been reacquainted with Kat, now Professor Katherine Manning…
“You must have shared her beliefs, at one time?” Kat said perceptively, still watching the screen.
Carefully, he said, “Certain factions of the Allianz talk a lot of sense. Their views are based on sound science. It’s a pity they’ve been infiltrated by anarchists.”
She nodded, and allowed a silence to develop, before saying, “Daniel tells me that there’s been no one since her”—she nodded at the screen—“since Ute.”
He felt a bolus of emotion in his throat, almost choking him. Was he reading her correctly? Was this merely Kat the psychologist, evincing interest in a fellow human, or something more meaningful?
He moved his hand across the table, towards Kat’s. “No one that meant anything,” he said.
She moved her hand, reaching for her wine glass and draining it, then smiled at him.
“Well, I suppose we’ve all being too damned busy for anything like that,” she said almost offhandedly.
He swallowed, marshalled his next words, and said, “I don’t know about you, but it’s been too long. I was wondering…” He reached out, took her fingers. “That place in Ely I mentioned last week. I could book a table for tomorrow evening.”
She let him down gently, but he could see in the tight expression around her mouth that his advance had piqued her. “I’m afraid I’m far too busy for dinner, Travis.” She pulled her hand away, smiling. “Look, I’d better be off. I’d like to get to the coast before it gets dark.”
She stood, pulled her leather jacket from the back of the seat, and strode from the bistro.
“Shit…” he said, leaning back and screwing his eyes shut.
He walked across to the big window and looked down at the small figure of Kat trudging across the snow-dusted parking lot to where she’d left her bike. A short time later, he saw her straddling her Yamaha and powering towards the main gate. He watched her pass through the security check, then accelerate along the die-straight road between the massed protestors.
“Shit, shit, shit!”
KAT
SHE HEADED NORTH.
She rode at speed from Lakenheath, accelerating along the road on the raised levee between the shimmering, frosted floodplains on either side.
It was good to get away from the base from time to time, away from the tensions and intrigues that were building before the launch. She would spend the night at her dome on the coast, with a bottle of wine and a microwaved meal, listening to music and relaxing—before immersing herself in the super-heated cauldron of the base again in the morning.
Christ, but Travis’s latest move had come from left field. They’d been friends for so long that their relationship was more like that between sister and brother, freewheeling and platonic. She knew he’d had a thing for her back at uni, but she’d let him down easily right at the start, telling him that she liked Travis as a friend, but no more. She assumed he’d got over his crush.
His advance back there, coming as it did so soon after Daniel’s inept come-on…What was happening? Her suggestion to Travis that the sexual tension at the base was in some way linked to the zeitgeist had been only half-serious—but perhaps she’d been onto something?
She slowed down, the better to appreciate the view. The sky was big here, almost overpowering, and milky-grey with the threat of snow. The land was flat and almost featureless for as far as the eye could see, a great patchwork of silvered floodplains and reclaimed farmland—a futile last stand against the irrevocable rise of the sea levels. A few miles ahead was the grey smudge of a pine forest, beyond which was the new, reformed coastline which had almost reached her dome: how long before her bolthole tumbled into the sea?
The thought depressed her. The loss of her dome was just a symbol for something much greater.
She accelerated towards the forest, wondering if in technology there lay salvation.
Project Kon-Tiki, the mission to seed the stars, was a valid reaction to what was happening here on Earth. And it wasn’t as if, contrary to what the Allianz claimed, all the technological eggs were being placed in one basket. Plenty of funding was being pumped into other ground-breaking sciences these days. There was hope, despite what some of the naysayers prophesied.
She thought of her clone, the perfect, unblemished replica of herself she’d watched come to consciousness that morning…
Starship Kon-Tiki would travel at sub-lightspeed for almost a hundred years before arriving at its destination, the Earth-norm world of Newhaven, 19 Draconis II. By then, by the time her clone was roused from cold-sleep in orbit above the new world, she, the Kat Manning here on Earth, would be long dead…And the world? What would remain of the world she knew in a hundred years from now?
She slowed down as the road entered the pine plantation. The tarmac surface, shaded from the feeble afternoon sun, was still rimed with frost and treacherous. There was a crystalline, scintillating beauty about the forest in winter, and here and there skeins of water flashed through the massed trunks.
She slowed again. Fifty yards ahead, something lay in the road. A long arcing skid mark terminated in a motorbike fallen on its side, and beyond it the leathered figure of its inert rider lying face down beside the road.
She slowed and braked beyond the bike, her heart pumping. Her first-aid was rusty, and she feared what she might find. She dismounted and ran towards the figure, pulling off her helmet.
Kneeling beside the motorcyclist, she reached out to touch his shoulder. At first glance he—or she—seemed unharmed. “Can you hear me?” she said. “I’ll get help…”
She was raising her carpal implant to her lips when she sensed, rather than saw, another presence behind her. She turned, briefly—even now—clinging to the belief that help had arrived, another passer-by.
Idiot! How could she have been so foolish? They’d all been warned about the need for heightened personal security, after the Bonn attack.
She ducked and ran, dodging an arm that tried to grab her. Her mind raced. Would she be able to get to her bike quickly enough to get away?
She heard footsteps behind her, but couldn’t guess how much of a lead she had.
She’d almost reached her bike when her feet went from under her—whether she’d been tripped or simply the combination of her panicked momentum and the icy surface had got the better of her, she couldn’t tell.
She hit the ground hard, knocking the air from her lungs. Even so, she managed to twist, push herself to her knees. She could almost reach out and touch her bike.
She heard a hissing sound, smelt something sweetly chemical in the air. She saw a figure looming, and some kind of canister
directed at her face. Then blackness crept in from the corners of her vision and she passed out.
¤¤¤
She came to her senses slowly, rising through waves of nausea.
Her first reaction was incredulity that someone had done this to her, then anger. Oddly, she felt no fear.
She was lying on a bare mattress in a small, square room, with blankets piled on top of her.
The room had an industrial look, and certainly wasn’t a bedroom. The walls were bare brick, with exposed girders supporting a peaked, carbon-fibre roof. There was one small window at the end of the room, and bars had been attached to the outside wall, so even if she smashed the glass she wouldn’t be able to escape.
So…this place had been especially chosen, and adapted, to house her. And the way she’d been lured: this was no random kidnapping by some psychotic, but an abduction carefully planned by two or more people. What did that tell her?
She tried to access her carpal implant, but it was dead: of course it was.
She rose unsteadily to her feet, fighting off waves of dizziness, and moved to the barred window.
She rubbed a porthole in the frost on the glass with her gloved fingers and peered out. The building sat on a concrete island in a flood plain, surrounded by rusting pipe-work and old electrical generators. So this was an old, decommissioned pumping station, one of a dozen installed across north Norfolk more than fifty years ago before becoming redundant with the encroachment of the North Sea.
There was no catch on the window, so she was unable to open it and test the solidity of the bars. She could always break the glass, but that would only make it even colder in here, and she didn’t want to freeze to death. Judging by the thickness of the bars, her captors weren’t messing about. They meant her to stay put.
In the wall opposite the window was a solid timber door. She crossed to it and turned the handle, but the door didn’t budge. Frustrated, she gave it a kick.
She returned to the window and moved from side to side, attempting to widen her line of sight. But all she made out was a limitless expanse of water and, in the distance, a fringe of reeds and woodland. She might be anywhere along the stretch of northern coastline. From far away she heard the high, failing grace note of curlews; their cries reminded her of her dome amid the marshlands, and the quiet, relaxing evening she had promised herself.