Morley stumbled, screamed, fell down…Adrian was at his side straightaway, helping him up. Two blades shot up out of the ice behind them like metal monsters and flung themselves at the men—in vain, however, for Adrian and Morley were well out of reach.
Hiroshi. The thought still hammered in Charlotte’s mind. The movement she had seen on the spikes, that shimmering silver swarm: she had seen a rougher version of it on Paliuk. Somebody must have built a copy of Hiroshi’s machine, must have developed his creation. But why?
As Charlotte ran—staggering through snowdrifts, slipping over ice, struggling forward—she felt she was caught in a dream of helplessly running and never gaining ground. Hiroshi…What had he told her about what had happened to his machine? He had programmed it to break out of the crate it was being transported in and throw itself into the ocean. Where each and every unit was supposed to fall to pieces. But what if it hadn’t? What if it had somehow stayed…functional? What if it had grown? A machine that could build copies of itself; was it conceivable that a machine like that could change over time, could improve, and adapt? Could evolve in some mechanistic, technological way? But then…how had it gotten here? Why this island, of all places? Something didn’t fit.
Angela screamed. Charlotte spun around, bathed in sweat, at the edge of collapse, and saw an enormous arm rear up out of the ice behind the biologist, flex, and stab straight down toward her like a scorpion’s tail. Angela was lost. She knew it. She raised her arms as though surrender would save her, falling backward in shock as the thing shot down…and then she glided out from under it as though plucked away by an invisible hand. The spike missed her and crashed into the ice, throwing up splinters.
“The life jackets!” Adrian yelled. “We can use them as sleds!” He threw himself down onto his stomach as he spoke, landing on the ice, and then shot away down the glacier at least twice as fast as if he had been running.
Of course. It was all downhill from here. Nevertheless, Charlotte hesitated to copy the others. She stumbled on in desperation until she heard a cracking, splintering sound behind her, horrifyingly near—so near that she dared not even turn around but flung herself forward, landing on her front so hard the air rushed out of her lungs and she sped away. By the time she recovered her senses, she was thumping and sliding down the hill, out of control. Ice and snow sprayed up into her face, her knees smashed repeatedly over ripples in the ice beneath her, and she was entirely at the mercy of gravity.
At least, she thought, I can’t hear those damned things shooting out of the ice anymore. All that Charlotte could hear now was the scraping rush of her own movement down the glacier. She squeezed her eyes almost shut, unable to see anything anyway, and felt the constant stream of ice crystals striking her face. Strangely, she didn’t feel like she was slithering across an ice shield but, rather, as though she were shooting through a white tunnel.
Somebody shouted. Adrian. She couldn’t understand his words. All she heard was that he was repeating them over and over with hideous urgency. All of a sudden the sounds made sense: “Turn around! Legs first! Steer!”
Charlotte opened her eyes wide and lifted her head. Straightaway, she saw what the problem was: she was shooting full tilt down a glacier that would eventually—all too soon—end in the Arctic Ocean. If she didn’t manage to brake in time, or at least steer toward the gap in the cliffs they had climbed up, she would shoot out over the edge of the glacier into the icy water below. Brake? She was going far too fast for that. She put out her arms and shoved her gloved fists against the ice…pathetic. It made no difference at all. She tried with her feet. There was a scratching, scraping sound, but she did not slow down by any meaningful amount. No point even thinking of steering. By now she could see the black sea surging sluggishly below. She didn’t have much time left.
Turn around. Maybe that would help. She tried to struggle into position, shoved a shoe into the ice, and ended up sliding along, full-length sideways, which slowed her down a little. Charlotte flailed helplessly, slid onward, then managed to grab hold of a lump of ice or stone or whatever with one hand and turn herself around. She was still on her stomach, sliding backward. She lifted her head.
There were the shining blades. Dozens of them. Coming for her.
A bump in the ice below flung her upward for a moment and she spun in the air, landing painfully hard—but on her back. Now she could steer. She rammed her boots into the ice, sending it spraying up in splinters all around her, and changed course. Like riding a luge in the Winter Olympics, except that she had no sled, just this miserable scrap of foam, and the prize was not a gold medal but her life.
She shot into the gap between the cliffs through which they had reached the plateau. It seemed a hundred years ago now. Beyond the gap there was no point in even trying to control the ride. Here, the only forces in play were gravity, inertia, and sheer blind luck. Charlotte tucked her head down between her shoulders and was flung up and tossed left and right, bashed and bruised, spun around. She rammed into rocks, and her parka ripped open. She felt snow in her face, felt pain, then stopped feeling pain and was only falling, ever downward, falling. I’ll probably break my neck, she thought. But even that would be better than being absorbed.
But she didn’t break her neck. She came to in a huge heap of snow and ice and heard someone shouting, “Charlotte! Hey! Are you okay?”
Adrian. That was Adrian shouting. She managed to crawl to her feet. Her head hurt, and she felt it must be bruised all over. She was dizzy. When she looked down to see whether she was indeed standing on her own two feet, possibly even standing upright, she noticed the life jacket had been reduced to scraps and fragments held together by the webbing that had given it its shape. Charlotte looked up. Adrian was standing there, waving his arms wildly. Morley and Angela, so unsteady on their feet that it was painful to watch, were already staggering toward the hut. As though the devil himself were after them.
Ah yes. That was it. Charlotte turned her head and looked up at the gap in the cliffs, trying not to think about how she had come down there hundreds of yards more or less vertically. The devil. But his gleaming silver claws were nowhere to be seen. They had escaped.
“Charlotte!”
Adrian was clambering toward her…why? To drag her along behind him? To help her out of the snowbank? But she was already on her feet. She took a step and felt as though the ground were moving beneath her feet, as though the island were tipping into the sea.
“Come on.”
He reached her, took her by the arm, and supported her with exaggerated care. As though she were a china doll. But she was okay. Just a few scratches. She shook his hands off, unbuckled what was left of the life jacket, and let it fall.
“That was close,” she said and then realized it had been more than close for Leon. She found herself thinking of his Viking mane of dirty blond hair, his eager blue eyes, his impudent smile. Gone, all gone. Absorbed. Devoured.
“Yes,” Adrian said. “Goddamn it all.”
Every step hurt. As though someone had taken a hammer to her while she was unconscious.
“No injuries?” she asked. “As we came down, I mean.”
“You had the wildest ride. You overtook all of us, just shot past—whoosh!” He traced a low flat curve in the air with his hand. “When we got to the bottom, there you were on top of the avalanche.”
“That’s how I feel. Like an avalanche hit me.”
But she could walk. If there was nothing worse waiting for them, she wouldn’t complain.
Morley and Angela had already been in the hut for about five minutes when they arrived. Just as Adrian was reaching for the door, it opened and something big and bulky came out toward them: the boat, fully assembled. Morley and Angela were shoving it outside.
Adrian leapt back. “Hey, have you guys gone completely mad?”
“Goddamn all self-help books!” Morley said, sobbing, as he tugged and p
ushed and shoved. “Do what you’re afraid of. Whoever wrote that had no idea what he was talking about.”
“Fine, sure, but what are you doing?”
“What am I doing?” Morley snapped back. “I want to get off this island.”
“Where to, though?”
“Off the island first, think second!” he yelled like someone who might snap at any moment.
Since there was no way past the looming bulk of rubber and nylon, Adrian and Charlotte helped the two of them to get the dinghy completely out the door and then left them to it.
“Shit,” Adrian said as he opened the door to the living quarters. “I knew Morley would snap at some point.”
He fetched the radio out from under the bed, opened the box, and switched it on. He plugged in the antenna they had stretched out along the ceiling. Outside, they could hear Morley screaming, “No, goddamn it, don’t use the pump! Far too slow. Here, use the compressed-air bottles, this is an emergency.”
Adrian turned the dial and passed Charlotte the microphone. She squatted down on the floor in front of the transmitter and talked without pausing to choose her words. “SOS. SOS. Rogachevo base, this is Saradkov. This is an emergency. Can you hear us?”
She let go of the “Transmit” button and listened. Nothing. Just an ear-splitting howl of static, a cacophony of crackling and chirruping as though a swarm of electric locusts were flying toward them.
“They’re jamming the wavelength,” Adrian said, standing over her. “The damn things are jamming us.” He jutted out his jaw in grim determination. “Try again. As many times as you can. Try all the frequencies.”
Charlotte switched over to the emergency band and tried in English. “Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is Saradkov Island.” She bent imploringly over the microphone. “Can anybody hear us? This is an emergency. Our lives are in danger. This is Saradkov Island calling, coordinates: 80 degrees, 49 minutes north—”
“Oh my God!” Adrian yelled. “Look at that!”
Charlotte stopped. She saw the sheer terror in his face; he was looking out the window in the back wall. She stood up. Something was pouring down the side of the mountain, shimmering silver, slow and inexorable as lava but giving off a cold light.
And whatever it was, it was making straight for the hut.
4
“Let’s get out of here,” Adrian gasped.
They got moving. They had to take the radio with them, that much was obvious. Charlotte switched it off and took out the jack to the antenna, shut the lid, and snapped the hasps. Meanwhile, Adrian hurried to the corners of the room and tore down the antenna itself, rolling it up in his hand. He shoved it in his jacket pocket. “Move.”
A quick glance through the window revealed the shimmering silver monstrosity was already damn close. Charlotte leapt to her feet, and they raced out the door. As they ran, Adrian took the radio case from her.
“The boat wasn’t such a stupid idea after all,” he said, gasping for breath.
The boat was in the water by now, fully inflated. Morley was coming up the beach toward them and stopped in shock when he saw them running. “We still need petrol,” he called.
“Too late,” Adrian called back. “Quick, into the boat.”
“But the tank’s nearly—”
“Forget it!”
Morley was about to say something else, but something must have happened behind them just then that made him shut up. A look of abject terror appeared on his face. Charlotte spun round. The silver flood had reached the hut—which collapsed in upon itself as though built of dust and scattered before the wind.
There was no need to say another word. They ran, jumping over the rocks, stumbling but not quite falling, faster than any of them had ever run before in their lives. Angela had been busy fixing the outboard onto the boat, but now she scrambled to push it down to the water. They climbed in, the women first, then Morley; Adrian shoved the dinghy off from the shore and leapt onboard after it. Morley started the motor, turned the prow out to sea, and took them out several hundred yards from the island.
“That’s far enough for now,” Adrian said, squatting down by a large bag that was sutured into the dinghy wall. When he opened it, Charlotte saw that it contained various bits of survival gear, including a small telescope. “We’ve got to be able to see what’s happening on the island.”
Morley cut the motor. “Tank’s almost empty. Shit. We should have filled it first thing, then—”
“Then what? We could have made it to Ushakova Island? Across eighty miles of open sea? I doubt it.” Adrian zipped the survival bag closed and raised the telescope. “The hut’s gone. Like it had never been there.”
He passed the telescope to Angela, who reached for it with shaking hands.
“Let’s try it one more time,” he told Charlotte. “The emergency call.”
Charlotte was fighting back sheer panic. Angela and Morley hadn’t had time to fit the folding slats that normally served as a deck into the bottom of the dinghy. There really was nothing between them and the icy water but the fabric of the boat. Her knees were freezing cold, and it terrified her to feel the boat bottom shift beneath her with every wave. She concentrated on the radio. Open the lid. Throw the main switch. Wait until the green light glows. Adrian took the antenna from his pocket and plugged in the jack. But it was hopeless, just as before. If anything, the jamming signal had grown stronger.
“What is that monster?” Angela asked, lowering the telescope.
“It’s a machine,” Charlotte answered. “A kind of machine.”
“A machine that eats people?”
“Machines do what they were built to do. They don’t care what that is.”
Adrian was staring at Charlotte. “What makes you think so? That it’s a machine?”
I think that this machine, or a previous model, once served me a cup of coffee. Could she even say such a thing—here, now—after everything that had just happened? Impossible. Besides, it wasn’t true. It hadn’t served her coffee; it had knitted her a scarf. But she could hardly say that either. It would have sounded like the onset of madness.
“It looks like a machine to me,” was all Charlotte said.
Morley took the telescope from Angela. “It’s got to be enormous, the way it sent those limbs after us,” he said. “It must have taken over the whole island…But whatever destroyed the hut wasn’t just an arm or a pincer or what the hell. It looks like something actually flowed down the mountainside.”
“A machine made up of many small parts all working together,” Charlotte added. “That’s what it looked like to me.” Small parts, minuscule. Hiroshi had spent the last six years building machines made of no more than a few atoms. That’s what it had looked like. Minuscule. What if somebody had beaten him to it?
Morley put down the telescope. “This is terrifying. There’s no way we can go back to that island. We have no idea what might be waiting for us.” He looked around and then stared at the dinghy as though seeing it for the first time and gulped. “But what are we going to do? There’s no fuel left, we’ve got no food, no water…”
A ghastly silence fell.
“We have to keep trying to make an emergency broadcast,” Adrian declared. “They might stop jamming the airwaves at some point.” They could hear clearly from the tone of his voice that even he thought it was a long shot.
Angela cleared her throat. “We made our last routine report the day before yesterday,” she said, counting on her fingers. “That means that Rogachevo will be expecting our next report in five days. Let’s say they start to worry once they haven’t heard from us for seven days—that means we have to last a week.”
“A week!” Morley yelped. “In this tub?”
“People have lasted longer when shipwrecked.”
“But not in the Arctic Ocean.” Morley rubbed at his legs. “I’m already
freezing.”
A week? Charlotte, too, realized that it was insanely optimistic to think the four of them could stay alive that long in this cockleshell of a boat. The simple fact they had nothing to drink meant certain death. She said nothing, though.
“May I?” she asked, putting her hand out to Morley.
He passed her the telescope. “Go on. I get sick if I look through it for too long.”
Charlotte had trouble holding the telescope steady. The boat wobbled beneath her and there was nothing to hold on to. The island looked utterly innocuous once more. If she hadn’t known there had been a hut standing there only a short while ago, she would never have thought anything out of the ordinary had happened. She would almost rather have seen ominous machines stomping around. To see the island looking so apparently harmless gave her the queasy feeling they had overreacted. Had the threat passed? Were they bobbing up and down on the cold waves for no reason at all? Or—and this thought was far worse—could they see nothing because the threat was brewing somewhere else entirely, somewhere they couldn’t see at all? Charlotte saw in her mind’s eye a forest of huge blades growing up out of the seabed toward their boat. She lowered the telescope and passed it to Adrian. Morley was lying down on his back, his mouth wide open, breathing frantically in and out and shivering—either from fear, or cold, or both. Charlotte could hardly tell the two feelings apart herself any longer.
She leaned against the inflated side of the boat, her back to the island, and stared up at the sky. The image of Leon dwindling away before her eyes would not leave her head, the way he was sucked dry—shriveling, shrinking smaller and smaller—and there was nothing at all they could have done.
She closed her eyes and wondered whether it would hurt to die.
She came to with a start when somebody shook her shoulder. Adrian.
“Was I asleep?” she asked muzzily, holding her head. It hurt. The fall, of course.
“You even snored,” Adrian said. “It’s five in the morning. Angela and I shared the watch.”
Lord of All Things Page 44