Trinity

by Patrick Morgan

  Hesitantly, she took a step forward. Despite racing hearts, she managed to calm her mind. Fear, she realised, was now a thing she was getting used to. It was not her friend, but it was no longer the enemy. She looked up at the sky, at the sun, higher here than she’d ever seen it. She looked at the greenery around her and the shimmering lake below her.

  She screwed up her eyes and thought of her parents. Her father and what political fallout he was dealing with now Kyra’s treachery was openly known. What grand, drunken, repetitive parties her mother might be flitting between back in the Central District. It all seemed a far distant place from here. This was real though. This was now.

  She drew in a last lungful of the hot, damp air, savouring any aroma, any sensation she could discern from it. She caught the smells of plants and animals, felt the freshness of clear air flowing across her face and cooling her sweat-soaked skin.

  She took it all in and opened her eyes to look upon it all, a last level stare.

  Then she jumped.

  040: Beyond Nastra

  Nastra Research Station, 5,100km East of Skala

  To Roy Jacobs’ astonishment, Katherine and Iain Kane emerged from the rec room in good spirits. Moreover, they were giggling like a pair of adolescents. If he didn’t know Katherine better he would have said she was slightly drunk. Any hostility between the pair had evaporated, for which he felt very relieved.

  He had sat alone outside the rec room for as long as he could bear. The bitterness passing between them was audible through the tin walls, even if the words themselves were not distinct. Feeling uncomfortable, he had wandered back outside to check on JJ and Jayce, who were doing what they could to de-ice the couplings on the remote fuel tank left for them some shifts before. Whoever had delivered it must have done so in a hurry and not covered the connector, which was now frozen solid. For a while, he watched Bren launch the survey drone, flying it up to a height at which it was barely visible. It descended a few turns later, its battery drained prematurely by the biting cold.

  Reluctantly, he returned to the prefab to find the acidity between husband and wife had died down.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Katherine on reaching him. ‘I should have made proper introductions. Roy Jacobs, this is Iain Kane. Iain’s a meteorological scientist and part-time geologist. He did a lot of the early work modelling environmental conditions in Aya. More recently,’ she continued hesitantly, ‘he’s been stationed out here at Nastra.’

  Jacobs stood and again shook hands, more warmly this time, as Katherine made the reciprocal introduction.

  ‘Roy Jacobs was the Chief Engineer on the GVX project and offered, inadvisably, to come along.’

  Iain Kane looked impressed. ‘I remember Katherine mentioning you in the past. You’ve worked together before.’

  ‘Never on anything quite as intense at this,’ Jacobs said modestly. ‘But yeah, we’ve worked together.’

  ‘It’s hard going out here, you have to look after yourself.’

  Jacobs nodded his agreement. ‘You’re out here on your own?’

  ‘Most of the time. It’s been okay actually,’ said Iain, pleasantly surprised. ‘The living space is a little cramped but the work’s interesting. If you’re going out on the ice there’s a whole lot of fascinating stuff, believe me.’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Jacobs, who had imagined the ice to simply be a single open space for as far as the eye could see. He could easily have posed the question in an incredulous tone but that wasn’t his way. Out here, where his understanding of the environment was limited, he preferred not to make naive assumptions and to trust the experience of others. It was a quality Katherine had observed, as had the rest of the crew, most obviously Trish Asher, and they respected him for it.

  ‘Well, for one thing,’ began Iain, warming to his subject, ‘there are small communities out there.’

  ‘You’re joking?’ asked Jacobs, astounded.

  ‘I’m not. Ask Katherine.’ Jacobs looked to her and saw the truth of it in her eyes. ‘They call themselves Inuk, we’ve known about them for a decade now. Not that we’ve learned much, mind you, but they’re out there. The population is denser, if you can call it that… let’s say, less sparse, up to the northeast, where the ground still provides some shelter.’

  He paused a moment and looked a little awkward. ‘What is it?’ asked Katherine, sensing his hesitation.

  ‘I actually saw their figurehead,’ he said, unsure of himself. ‘You remember some time ago there was talk of a wandering hermit they regard as a sort of spiritual leader?’

  He looked Katherine straight in the eye and she returned the stare with a questioning curiosity. ‘You met her?’

  ‘Him actually. No, not met exactly, I did see him though. Trust me, once you’ve set eyes on someone like that you’re unlikely to forget the experience.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Katherine, fascinated.

  ‘He’s tall. Very tall. You’ll think I’m nuts, but his skin is dark, like it’s been dyed or something. He was wearing thick robes and a hood, but I could just make out the face underneath. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ He hesitated again, and both Katherine and Jacobs waited for him to continue. ‘The strangest thing was his eyes. The pupils were split or atrophied or something. They looked more like the eyes of a cat than a person.’

  Katherine looked at Jacobs, then back to Iain. ‘I don’t think you’re nuts, Iain. This is a long story, and I don’t know all the details myself, but Megan, with a man called Tyler Olson, encountered someone who fits a similar description.’

  ‘Megan?’ asked Iain with a mixture of affection and amazement. ‘Where?’

  ‘Skala. Somewhere in the coolant tunnels deep under the city. There’s too much to tell now, but maybe you should ask her about it when you get back.’ She stopped herself short of saying ‘home’. ‘So this figurehead, you said he was a hermit?’

  ‘That’s what the Inuk say, and I’ve no reason to doubt them. I got the impression he only appears occasionally, and always from the east. Out to the east there is only ice, although that in itself is very interesting.’

  ‘The ice is interesting?’ Katherine narrowed her eyes, hearing the inflection change in his voice as he found surer ground.

  ‘I’ve been spending a lot of time on the ice this past cycle, while the moon’s been high for a few shifts. I’ve been drilling and assessing the core samples. Something’s come up that I wasn’t expecting.’

  He faltered a moment, as if deciding whether to continue or not. When he did so it was in a hesitant, almost disbelieving tone. ‘There’s water under it, Katherine. I mean a lot of water, and it’s moving.’

  ‘Moving?’ she asked, astonished. ‘Like a river you mean?’

  ‘Something like that, yes.’ He paused again while Katherine processed the information. It meant little to Jacobs, who had no training in any sort of geology, but it was clearly significant to her. ‘There’s something else, it’s really strange though.’

  ‘Go on,’ she urged, intrigued. ‘Nothing could be stranger than the goings-on in Skala in the last cycle, believe me.’

  ‘I don’t know, it’s pretty weird. Here’s the thing. The water below the ice, the water that’s flowing… It’s loaded with sodium chloride. And I mean loaded.’

  Katherine’s brow furrowed. ‘Salt? There’s salt in the water?’

  ‘And bromine, lots of bromine. I told you it was weird.’

  ‘That could tell us a lot,’ she said, trying to grapple with things Jacobs could only begin to imagine.

  Iain took a deep breath before he spoke again. ‘Anyway, I don’t know what ROOT is proposing, but on recent experience I’d suggest turning northeast and keeping to the edge of the ice. The further north you go the thicker the ice becomes, according to the trend in the measurements I’ve taken. That’s going to be important, with a vehicle that size.’ He looked out of the window across to the hulking form of GVX, the fuel line now attached to its underbelly.

&nb
sp; ‘It’s fitted with a sonar probe,’ said Jacobs thoughtfully. ‘It can measure ice thickness, to try to prevent cave-ins over crevasses and the like. It’s not that accurate measuring ice over loose snow, but we might get better results with ice over water. The difference between solid and liquid should be more defined.’

  ‘That will definitely be useful,’ Iain agreed. ‘What about data? You’re sending it back, right? Are you going to relay it through here?’

  ‘I think that’s the only realistic option,’ Katherine agreed. Looking uncomfortable, she added, ‘Could you relay it over this frequency only?’ She pulled out a prepared note, written shifts before, and offered it to him. On it was a sequence of five numbers with a decimal point before the last.

  ‘Sure,’ said Iain, regarding the scrap of paper with perplexity.

  ‘It’s Nara Falla’s private frequency. I don’t want to explain too much, but the data should go to her and her only, if that’s okay?’

  ‘I know exactly what it is,’ said Iain, to Katherine’s visible surprise. ‘I broadcast on that frequency pretty much every shift.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Katherine.

  When he answered, he spoke with an air of reluctance or resignation that immediately put her on edge. ‘Like I said, there are a lot of weird things going on up here. There’s the water, the indigenous tribes and a whole bunch of other stuff. The Inuk talk about lights in the sky way up to the north. I thought it was nonsense, but I’ve seen it for myself. Nara and I felt we should wait until we understood more about the environment out here before we spring it all on the Council.’

  ‘You mean on me?’ said Katherine indignantly.

  ‘I knew you’d take it badly,’ he said with a shake of his head. ‘You have so much going on with Aya and all that shit. You barely had time for me, so if I had come to you with all this stuff back in Skala what would have happened?’

  Katherine looked at the floor. Jacobs saw shame traced across the soft lines of her face. ‘I would have sent you away, said I was too busy.’

  ‘Yes you would,’ Iain agreed. ‘And there is another reason,’ he added. ‘We wanted to keep Ratha out of it for now. And Erin, if I’m honest. There is something going on between Erin and Ratha that I don’t understand. Sometimes it’s like the two of them are operating in concert with each other.’

  Katherine frowned. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It’s hard to explain exactly. When one zigs, the other zags, I don’t know. One will overtly support say, a field expedition she doesn’t want, while the other will undermine it.’

  ‘That’s pretty normal,’ Katherine interjected. ‘We’re all squabbling for funding.’

  ‘On the face of it, yes, I agree with you. But it’s the regularity with which it happens that I started to notice. Nara had picked up on the same thing, and we started making a record between us. This is going back cycles before I left to come here. In fact I could date it almost exactly back to when HEX came online. Maybe that’s coincidental, who knows?’

  ‘It sounds to me,’ said Jacobs after a pregnant pause, ‘like whatever the situation is, or is not, we should send as much data as we can back to Nara directly. I think that’s what you agreed anyway, isn’t it, Katherine?’

  ‘It is,’ said Katherine, who was amazed and a little confused that Jacobs would have any knowledge of this confidential agreement. In that moment, she felt inexplicably separate from the two men, who watched her closely. They didn’t know each other – Jacobs had no idea she was even married until a rotation or two before – but they seemed to share a common and very strong bond, a loyalty to Nara Falla.

  The three of them fell silent for a few moments, before Katherine drew in a breath and suggested they see how the refuelling was going. The two men agreed and all three began fighting on boots and coats to head back into the dim, pinkish glow of the moonlight.

  A few rotations later, Jayce Baker and Joanna Joyce had the refuelling complete and fresh food stores on-board. To JJ, who did the bulk of the heavy lifting, replacement of only a quarter-cycle’s worth of sachets didn’t seem worth the effort, but it was always better to be prepared than not. Katherine had slept fitfully in her bunk, fighting with the conflict of exactly how estranged she was from her own husband. In the end, her bunk seemed a safer option than the prefab and she knew Iain wouldn’t protest.

  He had hung around, though, talking briefly with each member of the crew and looking over GVX. He resisted the urge to take a look inside, partly to give Katherine some space and partly because he felt that the two of them should not be together with ROOT present. At one time, the IDC had taken an interest in their private lives, causing the first of many fallings-out. For her part, Katherine was in no doubt ROOT knew Iain was at Nastra. After all, he could access GVX’s external cameras. But, if he had any view on the situation, he was keeping it to himself for now.

  At a loose end and unable to sleep, Jacobs spent the next few rotations with Nastra’s sole inhabitant. The engineer found the scientist to be engaging, knowledgeable and, despite his early misgivings, likeable. Among other things, the two discussed the communications relay system in detail before Katherine finally re-emerged onto the snow.

  ‘So this is goodbye again,’ said Iain, as Jacobs returned to ascend the ladder to the galley. ‘I’m pleased to at least do it face to face this time.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she said, and meant it. ‘I’m sorry about everything. Will you be here when we get back?’

  ‘I don’t know. How long will it take?’

  Katherine sighed. ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Then ‘maybe’ is the best I can tell you.’

  ‘Well, I hope you’re here. Even if it is all over.’

  ‘I think it probably is, don’t you?’ he asked as gently as he could. There was no malice in his voice, just a little sympathy for both of them.

  Katherine looked into the distance and nodded. ‘I guess it probably is,’ she said.

  Turning back to him, to the surprise of them both, she embraced him. Not as a wife to a husband but as a friend to a friend, as it had been when they had first met.

  ‘Goodbye, Iain.’

  ‘Take care, Katherine. Best of luck. Go find Kyra.’

  She nodded and turned back towards GVX. She felt like her body was three times its normal weight as she climbed the ladder, but she forced herself not to look back, not to turn and run to him. Reaching the platform, it took all her mental strength to push the button to close the outer door behind her, but somehow she managed, and felt a little better.

  *

  For the first time in several exhausting shifts there was a sense of anticipation in the galley. It seemed the crew had realised that, although they had left Skala thousands of kilometres behind them, it was only now that they were truly about to get going, leaving humanity as they knew it and venturing into the unknown.

  Katherine pulled on her jumpsuit and adjusted the fit carefully, feeling a rising sense of occasion. Asher buckled herself in, her black hair pulled tight against her scalp into a ponytail, as Myra scrolled through ROOT’s data with more vigour than uninteresting straight lines deserved. Bren was redistributing food sachets into organised boxes, while JJ and Jayce jointly discussed some minor technical point. At the very rear, the faint glow of ROOT’s chassis seemed brighter than usual from his bulkhead interface.

  Her feelings of loss and remorse gave way to excitement and trepidation, as she turned and made her way into the cockpit. Roy Jacobs was already flicking through checklists and making preparations for their departure. She deftly swung herself into her seat, a motion now second nature in contrast to her clumsy first attempts back in the arid hangar of SVA. She settled her arms reverently into the splints and began to run through her own, now familiar checks.

  ‘Five-cylinder running disabled,’ said Jacobs from beside her, and the V10s surged as each picked up onto ten cylinders. ‘Retracting chassis and locking in torque converts.’

  ‘Al
l systems nominal, Jayce?’ asked Katherine wryly.

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ came Jayce’s even voice over the com system.

  ‘Are we ready?’ she asked Jacobs.

  ‘Ready as we’ll ever be,’ he replied, and grinned.

  ‘Here we go then,’ she said, pulling her splints back to throttle up.

  The V10s roared, filling their exhausts with that shrill howl that sounded even more dramatic out here in the cold than it had back in Skala. A moment later they started to roll. Instinctively, Katherine looked across Jacobs and out towards the settlement. For a fleeting moment she saw Iain walking away from them, one arm raised and waving. Then he was gone.

  Katherine accelerated away vigorously, in an intoxicating world of her own. As the speed built, it felt as if she were shedding her skin, peeling back dead layers and discarding the withered husks to reveal the purer soul at her core. Every cloaked lie and half-truth was cast off, no longer a part of her. Her failed marriage; the pressure of politics; a career awarded her on the strength of good timing and a stupid accident as a bereaved teenager; the estranged and confusing relationship with her father and half-sisters; and Ratha, who, out here where the world seemed simpler and clearer, she suddenly didn’t trust. She was free of Ratha as well.

  Settling GVX into a steady eighty kilometres per rotation cruise, she disabled the drive to the front four wheels, hearing the V10s’ revolutions per rotation drop in compensation for the reduced load.

  ‘From here on it’s an economy run,’ she said to Jacobs. ‘I’ve set a target ‘plate angle’ of eight degrees for the rearward hydraulic drives and zero for the front. I guess we’re about to find out how far we can eke out a full load of fuel.’

  ‘It’ll do better than you think,’ said Jacobs with pride. ‘I’ll start the mulchers in a rotation.’

  Acclimatising to the pace, she allowed her mind to turn to her purpose, finding Kyra. How far ahead her sister was she had no way of telling. Her co-driver sat beside her in silence, alert but introspective. For a while he made occasional adjustments to their fuel economy settings, before eventually giving in to the laws of diminishing returns. She was glad he was with her; his easy dependability kept her grounded. In that respect he reminded her of Nara, which triggered a memory from their last moments in SVA.