Текст книги "Zodiac Station"

Автор книги: Tom Harper

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

Fifty-one

Anderson’s Journal

Emotions erupted I never knew I had. ‘You used our son’s DNA for this?’

It wasn’t the most outlandish thing they’d told me that night. In fact, it made all the sense in the world, a piece that fitted perfectly. None of the rough edges that distinguish a lie. And for all that, it was the hardest thing I was being asked to believe.

She nodded.

‘How?’

‘The cord blood.’

Umbilical-cord blood is rich in stem cells; at birth, you can take a sample and freeze it. We did it for Luke when he was born – Louise insisted, though it cost a thousand pounds we didn’t really have. Imagine if he gets leukaemia, or needs a transplant, and those stem cells are the only thing that can save him, she said. And of course, I agreed. For Luke’s sake.

‘That was for him.’ I felt empty, as if the most precious thing I owned had been snatched from me and dashed to pieces. ‘Not this …’ I didn’t shy away from saying it any more. ‘… this monster.’

I stood. Hurt and anger charged up inside me, years of accumulated friction ready to discharge like a bolt of lightning. I didn’t mind if it killed me. As long as it took her too.

Remember Luke, I told myself. I had to get back to him. For all the menace in the room, the strange unreality, I wasn’t a threat to Pharaoh. He hadn’t broken any laws – there weren’t any on Utgard. If I revealed what he’d done, he’d be hailed as a genius, biology’s Einstein. Or maybe Robert Oppenheimer. As long as I kept calm.

I forced myself to sit, gripping the sides of my chair.

‘So what happens now?’

Pharaoh went to the kitchenette and got a bottle of whisky and a glass from a cupboard. He poured himself a generous measure. Didn’t offer me one.

‘We’re not going to publish in Nature, if that’s what you mean. We won’t make ourselves popular if we announce to the world that seven billion humans have just become obsolete. My company is discreetly patenting some of the more advanced techniques we’ve developed. We’ll feed them into the mainstream gradually, educate public understanding until this process feels as natural, as logical, as giving your kid his shots.’

It was a good spiel. Pharaoh had enough bombast that he almost carried it off – certainly, if I’d been an investor, I’d probably have opened my wallet. But coming from a man as sharp as Pharaoh, it all sounded rather vague. Some of the things he was describing might come to pass, and some might not, but there wasn’t a master plan. He’d done this thing to prove he could. Because he was curious. Because he wanted the power.

‘And me? Do I get pushed down a crevasse too?’

Another tic of irritation. ‘I’ve already told you …’

‘Or will you have your creature do your dirty work?’

‘I’m not a murderer, Thomas. I’m in the business of improving life, not ending it.’

‘What about him? Will you take him to New York, unveil him on Broadway? You’d make the cover of Time, no question.’

‘I think Life would have been more fitting, don’t you? If it was still with us.’ Another chuckle. ‘No. Thomas will stay here. The accelerated development you noticed means he probably only has a few years of life. We’ll observe him, and apply those lessons to the next generation. In that respect, Utgard’s perfect. A quarantine zone with no escape.’

‘And Zodiac? Is he going to pick off the scientists one by one, if he doesn’t like the way they look at him?’ I had to laugh, though it sounded borderline hysterical. ‘Like the fucking Thing.’

This time, I hadn’t heard him coming. The door opened and the creature came back in, dressed to go out in a yellow parka and black ski trousers. For some reason, he had the DAR-X logo sewn on to the sleeve.

‘I told you to go,’ said Pharaoh. The icy voice of a parent who wants you to know his patience has limits.

The creature crossed to the television on the wall and turned it on. You could see his strangeness in every step he took, disproportioned limbs making disproportioned strides.

He’s a machine, I reminded myself. Made of flesh and blood, but still a machine programmed by a computer.

‘What are you doing?’ Pharaoh demanded. His voice had risen, a note of worry puncturing the confidence, and I suddenly realised that the experiment was ongoing. He was making it up as he went along. Two years and four months. I remember when Luke was that age, how little I knew him compared to now.

The screen went white. At first, I didn’t understand what we were seeing. The contrast was so high, almost monochrome, that everything looked alien and unworldly. White-speckled black, with a thick black mass churning at the bottom of the screen, flowing from a jagged white hole. Ice forming?

A shape at the top of the picture caught my eye. I recognised the familiar peaks that loomed over Zodiac. But then—

I was looking at Zodiac. But not as I’d left it, a few hours earlier. The Platform had been blown open. Black smoke poured out of it. The jagged edges I’d taken for a hole in the ice were pieces of metal, broken struts and bits of roof that had been hacked open like a tin can.

I looked at Pharaoh. He looked as confused as me.

‘What—’

‘I don’t …’

He picked up a remote. He must have indexed the video; in a few seconds, he’d jumped to a different scene. The camera slightly straighter, the Platform intact. I could make out a cluster of snowmobiles in the foreground, a few of the huts further back. The time-stamp in the corner of the screen said 21:57.

Pharaoh restarted the video. After a second, two figures came into view from behind the Platform and headed towards the snowmobile park. Too far and indistinct to make out, but they must be me and Greta.

Greta. Even as a few distant pixels, it hurt to see her there. As we reached the snowmobiles, a third figure stood up among them. He’d been there all along, though I hadn’t noticed him. Quam. I watched us chat for a couple of minutes, then Greta and I walked away. Quam went back to fiddling with the snowmobiles. After another few minutes, I saw a blob that must have been the Sno-Cat crawling up the Lucia glacier in the background.

Pharaoh hit the fast-forward button. The Sno-Cat climbed comically fast, up over the top of the glacier and out of sight.

And then it happened. The centre of the screen flared into a white starburst where the explosion overwhelmed the sensor, smoke leaking from its edges. A second later, the whole picture shook as the shock wave reached the camera and knocked it askew. More explosions, more starbursts. Smoking pieces of metal flew in every direction, cartwheeling over the snow. The Platform’s legs buckled, and the whole rear end collapsed in an eruption of flames and smoke.

‘How …?’

Pharaoh rewound the last few seconds and played it again at normal speed. The doomed Platform reassembled itself; the Sno-Cat hurried backwards down the glacier, reversed, and crawled back up and over the top. Quam came out from behind a hut and walked slowly towards the back of the Platform, under the mess windows. I thought of the others, all the Zodiac staff enjoying Thing Night.

Quam fiddled with something, then extended his right arm, pointing at something in the space. The arm looked wrong, too long for his body, but that was because he was holding something. A flare gun.

The camera was too far away to see him pull the trigger. Just the faintest flash, before the Platform exploded and engulfed Quam. It went up so fast, he must have packed oil drums or something underneath.

I rounded on Pharaoh. ‘Is this something to do with you?’

One look at his face quashed that idea. He looked as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

I’m in the business of improving life, not ending it. I turned to the creature. ‘You?’

The creature shook his head. Unlike the rest of us, he seemed immune to what we’d just played back. Wasn’t even looking at the screen, but staring at one of the Hockneys as if thinking about something completely different. Perhaps he couldn’t comprehend tragedy.

‘I don’t care what you’ve done,’ I told Pharaoh. ‘We need to get back there. If there are survivors …’

‘Of course.’ Pharaoh was still staring at the screen, hypnotised by the carnage. Beside him, Louise looked sick. She slipped her hand into his.

‘Let’s go.’

Fifty-two

Anderson’s Journal

My coat and trousers were hung on a hook in the stairwell, mostly dry, though the coat zipper was still broken. I Velcroed it shut the best I could. The hard edges of the notebook in the inside pocket pressed against my chest.

I noticed again the DAR-X logo stencilled on the creature’s jacket. ‘Where did he get that? Another “overreaction”?’

A tight look from Pharaoh told me I was on the money. ‘An unfortunate encounter last September.’

They suited up, and led me down a long corridor lined with corrugated plastic to a heavy door in a concrete wall. Pharaoh unlocked it, stepped through some small sort of vestibule that smelled of sawdust, and out through another door. Daylight hit me, and I wondered what time it was. How many hours had passed in the tunnels, in the mine, listening to Pharaoh speak? It must be at least mid-morning. I’d gone through the night without sleep or food, and I felt it. I found my sunglasses in my coat pocket and put them on.

We were at the top of a narrow mountain valley, looking down at a cluster of tin-roofed buildings joined together by chutes and covered walkways.

‘Vitangelsk?’ I guessed. I’d only ever seen it on the map.

‘Mine Eight.’

We skidded down the slope, following soft tracks in the snow. At the bottom of the complex we came to a large building jacked up on stilts. It seemed to be the terminus for some sort of cable car or chairlift. In the space underneath, hidden behind sheets of rusting corrugated iron, Pharaoh pulled tarpaulins off two gleaming snowmobiles.

‘Get on.’

All I remember about the ride is the cold. No spare helmet or goggles – they never expected guests – so I had to keep my head down and clench my eyes shut. With the zip broken, I could only Velcro my jacket shut and keep close to Pharaoh. He kept his rifle in a sort of holster attached to the saddle – I could probably have reached it, if I’d wanted. But what would have been the point? We were beyond that.

Any hope that the video might have been a fake, some warped practical joke, died ten miles from Zodiac. Pharaoh paused at the top of a rise; I opened my eyes, and saw a column of oily smoke polluting the sky. We went on; the wind cut my eyes and made me weep, but I couldn’t stop looking at it. Wishing it would disappear.

We came down the Lucia glacier and saw the whole horror show. The Platform had blown open like a ruptured artery; several of the nearby huts had burned, and some of the further ones had been torn apart by shrapnel. You could see bare rock where the fire had melted away the ice around the Platform. The snow that survived was black and cratered with wreckage.

No chance to get into the Platform. Fires still burned inside; even as we dismounted the snowmobiles, another strut gave out and collapsed in a shower of sparks and screaming metal. We could feel the heat twenty metres away. No one could have survived.

Louise voiced the obvious question. ‘Why?’

I thought of the video, Quam taking the gun from his holster and calmly putting a flare into a pile of high explosives and oil drums. I remembered that night I met him in the corridor, the dead look in his eyes. This island’s trying to kill us. Was it the pressure that had got to him? The endless funding threats; the egos and the sniping; something in his personal life?

I think it was this place. Surrounded by nothing, his mind had expanded so fast it shattered, like brittle ice drawn from a deep hole.

We wandered around the base, opening doors and checking the cabooses for survivors. If only, I kept saying to myself. If only Greta and I had stopped Quam when we had the chance. If only we’d guessed. If we hadn’t rushed off to the Helbreen.

If we hadn’t gone to the Helbreen, we’d have been on the Platform and we’d be dead. That’s the truth.

The mag hut was far enough from the Platform that it had survived unscathed. I drifted towards it and peered in the door. The machines had stopped. All I smelled inside was dust and darkness.

But there was something else. A sound, a shadow, a sense of movement at the back of the room. It was too dark to see. I took off my sunglasses, but the contrast was so stark it made no difference. Could there be survivors? And if there were, did I want to give them away to Pharaoh? I hesitated on the threshold.

A shout spun me back around. Fifty metres away, Fridge stood in the open doorway of Star Command. His hair was wild and burnt away in patches; smoke smudged his cheeks. He leaned on a ski pole, but the pole was too short for his height so he listed like a drunk. His right leg hung bent at a painfully unnatural angle. I couldn’t understand what he was shouting.

I still don’t know if I heard the shot. If I did, I thought it was just another pop from the burning Platform. I’d started to run to Fridge. He’d seen me and turned, dragging himself towards me, still shouting. Then he suddenly fell backwards. I thought he’d dropped his stick, or skidded on a patch of ice. It was only when I knelt beside him that I saw the hole in his jacket. Round as a ten-pence piece, straight over the heart, blood pumping out through the hole.

I took off my hat and pressed it over the hole, trying to staunch the bleeding. It wouldn’t work. I tried anyway. Holding it in place, I looked up. The creature stood about ten metres away, rifle in hand. No emotion on his face.

‘What have you done?’

Pharaoh looked as stricken as me. He ran over and grabbed the gun by its barrel, twisting it out of the creature’s hands. He must have let it go. Pharaoh threw the gun on to the snow and stared up at his creation. There were tears in his eyes. They rolled down his cheeks and froze in his beard.

‘What have you done?’ he repeated.

Overshadowed by the creature, Pharaoh didn’t look like the unstoppable tyrant I’d always known. He’d grown small, an old man whom time had caught up.

‘Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man?’ said the creature.

Pharaoh squinted up at him. ‘What?’

He said it again. Shreds of black smoke blew around his face.

‘Where did you learn that?’

‘Careful.’ Louise had backed away. I didn’t know who she was speaking to. ‘Don’t do anything—’

My hat was soaked through. I pulled off my neck-warmer and laid it on top. A drop of blood squeezed out from the hat and trickled down on to the Zodiac badge.

‘I made you,’ Pharaoh said. A trace of the old arrogance, holding out against a changing tide. ‘You owe me everything. Every cell in your being.’

‘And you? Does a father owe his son nothing, except the fact of his existence?’

Pharaoh took a step back. ‘I’m not your father, Thomas.’

‘What, then? A god?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Why are you talking like this?’ said Louise.

‘My master? Am I your slave?’

‘Of course not. You’re—’

Whatever life might be, it goes in an instant. One moment, Pharaoh was living, a being of infinite capacities. The next – nothing. Those big, disproportionate arms he’d created reached out and clutched him in an embrace. One arm went around his head, the other held his shoulders fast. Almost as if he was trying to comfort him.

One arm moved; the other didn’t. The neck cracked. Pharaoh slumped to the ground.

Louise screamed. I was too far away. Thomas picked up the rifle where Pharaoh had thrown it, aimed and fired. Blood sprayed from her neck and fell on the snow like rain as she twisted away and fell hard. Her body jerked as a second shot went into her.

I moved towards her, but a hand on my shoulder spun me back. He held me there, his fingers digging into my collarbone.

‘Come with me.’

Fifty-three

Anderson’s Journal

I struggled, of course, but I hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten in hours, and he had the strength of the damned. It wasn’t a fair fight. When I was down, he pulled open my jacket to take it off me – that really would have been the end. Then he saw the broken zip and thought better of it. He stuffed me in a sleeping bag, wound it up with rope, and tied me on the sled behind the snowmobile, packed in with the survival gear.

Strapped down, I could only twist my head and watch as he carried the bodies to the gulch and dropped them in. Pharaoh, Louise, Fridge; one, two, three. When he came to Fridge, the creature stripped off his yellow coat and put on Fridge’s red Zodiac jacket. Fridge was big enough it just about fitted him.

He walked past and disappeared from my field of vision. The sledge rocked as he mounted the snowmobile. The engine coughed into life; I gagged as exhaust fumes blew over my face.

The smoking hulk of Zodiac Station slid by out of sight. I felt a see-saw bump as we crossed the shoreline. Then we headed out on to the ice.

I can’t write much about the journey. While it was happening, it felt like one long moment stretching for eternity – and then when we stopped it seemed to have gone in a flash. Hours, I don’t know how many, navigating the sea ice: bouncing over cracks and ridges, backing up when an obstacle blocked our way, trying again. Once I opened my eyes and saw dark water rushing beside us, as if we were taking a scenic drive along a lake. The snowmobile heeled over on the slope, and for a terrifying second I thought we’d tumble in. Mostly, I kept my eyes shut, my head burrowed in the sleeping bag to keep off the wind and the fumes. Pressing myself flat against the sledge to minimise myself. Dematerialise. Bumping and jarring as the sledge whiplashed on the rugged ice. The knots that seemed so tight weren’t tight enough to stop me bouncing, bruising me deep into my bones. I waited for us to drop off the edge of the world.

And then we stopped. It felt sudden, though everything feels sudden when you have no control. The engine cut out and the silence hit me like a brick. Just wind and whiteness.

He dismounted, opened the engine cover and fiddled with the drive belt, the same way I’d seen Greta do it when we’d towed Hagger’s snowmobile home. Then he went round to the back and pushed. The machine slid obediently over the snow, towards a break in the ice a few metres away. It splashed into the water, breaking the sugary crust that had already begun to form, and sank. Was I next?

He unloaded the sledge. The skis, the stove, the ration box and the tent. A strange replay of that first night with Greta, when we’d camped out and been found by DAR-X. Except tonight, the role of Martin Hagger (deceased) will be played by Thomas Anderson. The first of that name.

He put up the tent. He unstrapped me and carried me inside, like a bear bringing his meal back to the cave. I rubbed my arms inside the sleeping bag to get blood back where the cords had numbed them, while he melted ice over the stove. He thrust the metal cup against my lips, his clumsy hands spilling it over my face. The water was so hot I choked, but I forced it down. I had to get my strength back. The snowmobile was gone. The nearest settlement was probably Svalbard – or maybe Nord Station, on the tip of Greenland. Hundreds of kilometres.

‘Why are you doing this?’ I whispered.

‘You are my salvation.’

He poured water into one of the orange meal packs and handed it to me. No spoon. I slurped it down. The pack said it was chicken with pesto, almost the most far-fetched thing I’d heard that day.

I swallowed it all and asked for another.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked. Genuinely curious, like a parent weaning a child.

‘It’s better than nothing.’

He squatted on the floor of the tent, watching me with those brown eyes that looked so much like Luke’s.

He’s fascinated by the idea that he has a biological twin.

I’ll kill him, I promised myself. If I had to wrestle him into the water myself, drown us both under the ice, I’d find the strength.

‘You keep a diary.’ Not a question. ‘I’ve watched you writing it. Through the windows.’

What else did he know about me? All the time I’d spent at Zodiac, searching everywhere for answers, and really it was me who’d been under the microscope. Writhing like a worm.

‘I left it on the Platform,’ I lied.

‘You have a bulge under your coat, over your left breast.’

I undid the Velcro holding my coat together and extracted my journal. Damp, where I’d fallen in the underground stream, but the Gore-Tex had mostly kept it safe. I handed it over.

Play along, play along. I told myself my chance would come.

He gave me another meal while he read the first pages of the journal. When I’d swallowed it down, I asked, ‘What’s next?’

‘There is a coastguard ship forty kilometres from here.’

‘That’s a long way without a snowmobile.’

‘I am impassive to cold.’

He had a strange way of speaking, this outsize man-child. Stiff and earnest, like someone attempting a foreign language. With only Pharaoh and Louise to talk to all his life, he must have learned most of his English from books. Old ones, by the sound of it.

He went back to the journal. Inside the bag, I felt my pockets for any sort of weapon. A penknife, a screwdriver. Even a carabiner might do. I had nothing except a Bic pen.

Thomas looked up. ‘Do you know what life is, Thomas? Is it the same as existing?’

‘I’m not a philosopher.’

‘Are you aware of endoliths? Single-celled organisms that inhabit the pores in between individual grains of rock, kilometres underground. They absorb nutrients from the rock itself; they obtain their energy from the heat of the earth. It requires all their resources simply to stay alive. Once every hundred years or so, they divide. One cell becomes two. And science says that is life.’

‘Technically.’

He seemed to want more. ‘You know you are alive. From the day you were born, you never doubted it. I lack that comfort. I feel I am alive, but all I know is what is inside me. How do you feel?’

‘Pretty rubbish, to be honest.’

He didn’t smile. I never saw him smile. Was that one of the untidy genes Pharaoh snipped out of his genome? Can you be human, if you can’t smile?

‘I think,’ he said solemnly, ‘life is taking your chances.’

* * *

He read. I lay there, waiting for my chance. But it’s hard to launch yourself out of a sleeping bag. Every time I moved, he was on to me quick as a cat.

I tried to force myself to stay awake. I wondered about Greta. Did she get out, after all? Did she make it back to Zodiac? Did she come down the hill thinking she’d was safe, euphoric with success, only to find a smoking ruin? Would she die of cold or starvation before the rescue party came? If they came. Perhaps it was better to imagine she’d died in the cave, snuffed out in a second by a million tons of ice settling.

I thought about Luke. I imagined the creature escaping, making his way to Cambridge. Looking for his twin. I thought about finding him in my home, and what I would do to him then.

But even the imagination fails in the end. Robert Frost was wrong: desire, hatred, the hot-blooded emotions – they’re no match for the cold. The world will end in ice. I began to drift. Each time my eyes opened, there he was, sitting beside me reading the journal. More than once, I saw him mouthing phrases, repeating them to himself as if studying for an exam. Sometimes he asked me questions. ‘What is the Overlook Hotel? Who is Willard Price? What is a Dalek?’

And then I woke and he was gone. I scrambled out of the bag and crawled outside, just in time to see him clipping himself into the skis he’d taken from the emergency sled. He looked ridiculously large on them, like a circus elephant on a bike.

‘I’m coming back,’ he told me.

I didn’t believe him. I threw myself at him, but he simply pushed off on his sticks and glided away into the fog. I couldn’t chase; I didn’t even have boots on.

I crawled back into the tent. He’d left me the journal, at least, and I had a pen in my pocket. I picked it up and started to write.

USCGC Terra Nova

‘Captain?’

Sitting at the chart table in the wheelhouse, Franklin closed the book and looked up. Nearly at the end, only a couple of paragraphs left.

‘Ice is giving out,’ Santiago reported. ‘We should hit open water soon. Longyearbyen in seventeen hours.’

‘Good.’ Franklin pulled off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. ‘How about Anderson?’

‘You mean the real Slim Shady?’

‘The one who got away.’

‘Nada. Pilot says if you want him flying bigger circles, he’ll need more fuel. And overtime.’ Santiago hesitated. ‘He also said you should give him a quarter and take him to Foxwoods. You’ll get better odds.’

Franklin rested his hands on the journal and stared out the window.

What the hell is out there?

‘Call in the helo and wrap it up. No one can survive this place for long.’

‘What about Anderson, sir? The one we do have.’

‘What about him?’

‘Do you think he’ll live?’

A line from an old movie ran through Franklin’s head. He had to smile.

‘Who does?’

Anderson’s Journal – Final Entry

Writing in a hurry, numb fingers clutching pen. All alone. Scribbling.

He’s gone out, he may be some time. Said he’d bring help – rescue – think he lied. Knows that much about being human.

He’s gone to the ship. Thomas Anderson, sole survivor of Zodiac Station. They’ll take him to England. Home. He’ll have a life.

Life means taking your chances.

I thought I would have one. Maybe I did. Missed it.

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice …

On the rocks.

We took risks, we knew we took them. Things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint.

I wish to register a complaint.

I love you, Luke.

Sounds from the ice. Groaning, throbbing, like a living thing. Breaking up? Almost like an engine. Footsteps. A bear?

Here I am. A speck of life adrift on the ocean, huddled for survival on my frozen raft. Clinging to hope, until the ice melts.