by Dan Abnett
On the far side of the tent, silent and still, Umarov stared at Connor, and then closed his eyes again.
TWENTY-FOUR
As dawn came up, the pair of ATVs toiled along the forest track in the heavy rain. Thunder grumbled out across the mist-veiled forest. The cab radio began to offer snatches of voices and half-heard words.
As they approached another branch of the river, they saw monsters waiting for them. These monsters were manmade.
“He wasn’t kidding about the tanks,” Cutter said to Abby.
Two massive T-90 main battle tanks were halted on the scarp above the river. They were painted a forest-drab camouflage.
When the ATVs pulled over, Koshkin dismounted and ran across to the tanks to talk to the commanders. Despite the rain, everyone else got out to stretch their legs.
It was cold. Abby shivered. A breeze was stirring the stands of black trees and chasing the mist so that it billowed through the white air overhead like smoke. Every time it shook the rain-heavy branches, extra heavy loads of water showered down out of the canopy.
“Rain this heavy is unusual for the time of year,” Yushenko remarked, turning his collar up.
“I think it’s an aftermath symptom,” Cutter said. “The impact will have thrown a lot of ash and gas up, and also punched the local climate hard. This rainstorm could simply be a consequence of overpressure.”
“The rain tastes of pumice,” Professor Suvova observed, licking her fingertips.
“Rigorous method, Professor,” Bulov snorted, coming up beside her.
“Let’s hope the rain doesn’t also taste of extraterrestrial contamination.”
“Contamination?” Abby asked. She shot Cutter a worried look.
“You’ve seen too many Hollywood movies, Grisha,” Suvova said.
“Not at all,” Bulov insisted.
“Come on,” Yushenko said. “One of the government’s other pet theories is that the erratics in this zone hatched out of eggs brought to Earth by the 1908 meteorite.”
“That these are alien dinosaurs?” Abby asked sarcastically.
“Could be!” Yushenko acknowledged with a mocking shrug of his long, thin arms. “No more unlikely than the idea that they were made for NATO by Steven Spielberg. If it isn’t the damned capitalists, it’s aliens.”
“I’m serious,” Bulov objected, looking wounded. “Radiation. Viruses. Xenobacteria. These are all legitimate concerns.”
“Are they?” Abby asked Cutter.
“No,” he replied firmly. He was lying. Radiation hadn’t even occurred to him. “We could run some checks though, to keep Doctor Bulov happy. Do you have a geiger counter among your equipment?”
“Yes,” Yushenko said. “I’ll get it.” He hauled his gangly body back inside the ATV.
The soldiers riding aboard the other vehicle had also dismounted for a break. A couple of them were smoking. The smell was especially pungent in the cold, pure forest air. Abby saw that one of the troopers was Yuri Torosyan, the good-looking rogue she’d met on the first day.
“Hey, no smoking!” Suvova called across at the soldiers genially.
“Oh, but Professor,” Torosyan answered, speaking English because he knew he had an audience, “the general’s edict doesn’t extend all the way out here, surely?”
“It’s bad for your health,” Cutter called back.
“Oh, but just one cigarette,” Torosyan replied.
“It depends what smells it,” Cutter told him.
Torosyan laughed and carried on smoking. He smiled and waved.
“Hello, Abby!” he called. “Remember me? I am Yuri. Such a nasty day, eh? Be better to be indoors, somewhere warm, eh? What do you say?”
She smiled and waved back.
“In your dreams,” she called cheerily.
“You okay?” Cutter asked her quietly.
“Yeah,” she said. She could handle the wolfish come-ons of Yuri Torosyan, but she was beginning to wish Vols had been assigned to the expedition. Having him around had started to feel reassuring.
“What did you mean when you said it depends what smells it?” she asked, warily.
Cutter shrugged.
“I think Baba Yaga is a big predator, a Carnosaur. The Carnosaurs of this era developed an amazingly acute sense of smell. They hunted by it, more than they used sight or sound. Something that smells as strong as those cigarettes will carry a mighty long way in this environment.”
“We haven’t seen it, though,” Abby said. “I mean, we both know what you’re talking about. You won’t even say the name.”
Cutter grinned self-consciously. He wiped raindrops off the end of his nose.
“Tyrannosaurus. There I said it,” he countered. “But you’re right, it feels like tempting fate just uttering the word.”
“We haven’t even seen a glimpse,” Abby pointed out. “I thought they were supposed to be big and heavy and stompy?”
“Hollywood movies again,” he said. “We’re learning here. Baba Yaga seems to be a real ambush predator. Quiet, methodical, patient. It stays hidden; it stalks. It makes perfect sense. You think about other apex predators — the tiger, for example, or the polar bear, or the Great White. Their greatest weapons, ultimately, are cunning and surprise. Baba Yaga could be looking right at us as we speak, choosing her moment.”
Abby looked apprehensively at the black, dank forest.
“Thanks for that,” she said.
Yushenko had re-emerged from the ATV, and was testing the geiger counter he’d located. Once he was sure it was in working order, he handed it to Bulov.
“Here you go,” he said. “If it puts your mind at rest.”
Abby watched the two men.
“Is radiation really an issue?” she asked Cutter. He shook his head.
“Not here, yet, but we should keep checking as we approach the impact site. It could become a problem.”
Yushenko had also fetched the video camera, and he began filming again.
“Get that thing out of my face,” Bulov snapped at him.
There was a sudden, loud, sputtering roar. It made Abby jump and even took Cutter off-guard. The tanks had started their engines. Their exhausts throbbed and rattled. Koshkin hurried back over to the ATVs.
“The impact site has been located,” he said. “It’s about eight kilometres north of here.”
“You’ve got people on the ground?” Cutter asked.
“No,” Koshkin said. As if on cue, there was another new, loud noise. The threatening shape of a helicopter gunship chattered overhead, heading south. It was low enough for them to see the gleam of daylight off its canopy and the sinister bulk of its chin turret.
“Air cover spotted it,” Koshkin continued. “There’s quite a large area of disruption, and the impact seems to have spooked some panic movement in the herds of erratics. So we will advance from here with an escort.”
“The tanks?” Cutter asked.
The Russian nodded.
“Let’s hope we don’t need them,” he said.
TWENTY-FIVE
Nick Cutter was saying something to her, but Jenny couldn’t quite hear him. Then she realised that she couldn’t hear him because he wasn’t actually there.
She sat up and looked around. It was true. He really wasn’t there.
No one was.
Her office was empty, and she could see through the half-open door into the empty hallway outside. Apart from the sigh of air-con and the soft murmur of electronics, the ARC was entirely quiet.
Jenny got up. It was the second time since Cutter and the others had vanished that she’d slept on the couch in her office instead of going home, and she knew it was a bad idea. Anyone responsible for public relations knew better than to sleep in their clothes. She didn’t have anything fresh to wear, and she needed to wake herself up with a shower, and a proper cup of coffee from her expensive espresso maker, instead of a cup of instant-caffeine-headache from the vending machine in the mess.
She looked
at her watch. It was just before five in the morning. She could go home, spend an hour or two getting her head together, and then come back in for the start of the day.
She picked up her handbag and shoes and walked out into the hall, wandered in her stocking feet down the midline of the ARC complex. Most of the offices and labs were dark, or lurked in gloom with their lights dimmed. Little coloured LEDs twinkled out of the twilight. The main hallway lighting was on, stark and white and hard, like a hospital. She heard trays and boxes thumping around in the mess as the first-shift staff unloaded produce from the delivery truck and got ready for breakfast.
The air-con hissed like a distant sea. Apart from her, walking along with her shoes in her hand, the only movement was the gentle twitch of the paper strips that dangled in front of the ventilation ducts.
She headed towards the main control chamber, intending to check with the night-shift staff who were manning the ADD watch stations, but as she passed Cutter’s laboratory, she hesitated.
The door was open. Jenny stepped inside and switched on the lights. It seemed no one had disturbed anything. It was as if Cutter had just stepped out for a moment. The benches were cluttered with papers covered in sketches of his theoretical models, graphs and notes.
Cutter had tried to explain the purpose of the graphs several times. It wasn’t that she couldn’t follow what he was saying — it was more like he wasn’t sure of the theories he was pioneering.
His most recent idea dominated one wall. Various pieces of graph paper were stuck together haphazardly. It showed — with the help of little annotated labels made out of scraps of paper and pieces of Post-it notes — the pathway of the anomalies they had tracked and recorded so far. It was a map of creation, a map of time as much as of space. It was a map of a secret universe that brushed against the one she lived in, and hid in the shadows cast by her daylight. She ran a fingertip along one curved, annotated line. According to the labels at either end, its twisted path linked the Middle Permian to a July afternoon in 2007.
She wondered where on the map Cutter was.
“Jenny?”
She jumped.
“You scared me!”
“I’m sorry,” Hemple said. He was standing in the lab doorway. “I was up at the security station, and I saw the lights come on down here. I didn’t know you were still in the building.”
Jenny breathed deeply.
“No harm done,” she said with a smile. She looked at Hemple. “Nothing still, I take it?”
He shook his head.
She walked over to the door.
“I’m heading home for a few hours,” she told him. He held the door open for her, and stood aside as she came out of the lab and paused to switch the lights off.
Then she switched them back on again.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
Jenny went back into the lab. As she’d turned off the lights, she’d seen something in the dark. Something that hadn’t been there when she’d entered the lab five minutes before.
“Jenny?”
The monitor of Cutter’s main PC had woken up. The drifting screen saver of William Stout drawings had gone, and the screen had become Cutter’s desktop. A small, bright icon was rotating in the centre of the screen. Jenny bent down over the PC, and fished the mouse out from under a pile of notebooks and baled wire.
You’ve got mail.
She double-clicked the icon. Hemple was right beside her.
The message box opened on-screen. It contained a string of numerals and two words.
“That’s a set of GPS coordinates,” Hemple said immediately.
“Are you sure?” she asked. She looked at him and saw the expression on his face. “Sorry. Of course you’re sure.”
“Cutter sent this,” Hemple said.
“You’re saying that because...?”
“Because we change code names regularly and randomly,” Hemple said, “but I know he knows this one.”
She looked at the message box. The two words were Bone Idol.
TWENTY-SIX
“So he’s communicated?” Lester asked. Despite the early hour, and the fact that he’d been rushed to the ARC by an urgent call, he seemed very alert.
“We think it’s probably Connor, actually,” Jenny said. “He’s the e-whiz.”
“Is that a real word?” Lester asked her. “Because if it is, I might have to write to The Times decrying the deterioration of the English language. Again.”
They were striding side by side across the main chamber of the ARC. The morning staff had come on early, and there was a steady bustle of activity. Bright columns of data flickered across the huge main screens. Jenny led her boss down the bright access corridor into one of the briefing rooms that looked out onto the main chamber through a thick window plate.
“The message has come via a tortuous route,” she explained. “We’re still trying to unpick it. It was a very non-standard means of getting a message out. It was concealed, and then attached to something that wasn’t meant to be used as a mail carrier.” She shrugged. “Basically, it’s quite ingenious.”
Lester crossed his arms and looked at her.
“And you’d need to be somebody like Connor Temple to manage it?”
“Exactly,” she acknowledged.
Technicians were clustered around a monitor in the briefing room. The message box was on display. Lester uncrossed his arms and peered at it.
“Bone Idol?”
Jenny smiled.
“It’s alpha team’s code name for Cutter.”
Lester thought about that.
“Do we all have code names?” he asked.
“We do,” Jenny confirmed.
“Do I have a code name?”
“Yes,” Hemple said, striding into the briefing room and joining them at the monitor. He was dressed in full alpha team kit, and an automatic pistol was buckled at his hip. “We’ve locked up the GPS coordinates.”
“Show me,” Lester commanded. Hemple shooed the technicians aside and called up a new screen on the monitor.
“Oh my God,” Jenny murmured. “If we know where they are, we can go and get them.”
“Don’t get too excited,” Hemple said. The screen image was a satellite map, overlaid with indicator graphics.
Lester turned his head to one side, studying the map.
“I give up. Where is it?”
“It’s a tributary of the Podkamennaya or Lower Stony Tunguska River in the Krasnoyarsk Krai,” Hemple replied.
“Really?” Lester raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that near Leatherhead?”
“It’s Siberia,” Hemple informed him.
Lester looked at Jenny.
“Oh that Podkamennaya Tunguska.”
“Siberia?” Jenny repeated, shock making her voice squeak slightly. Hemple nodded.
“Well, that’s rather spoiled everything, hasn’t it?” Lester said. “Inserting anybody into the Russian Federation is going to be pretty well im-possible, let alone an armed retrieval team. The Russians are oddly sensitive about things like that.”
“Rules can always be bent,” Jenny said, struggling to recover herself. “The Foreign Office could —”
“Please try to live in the real world,” Lester interrupted impatiently. “This is a whole new ball game. The Foreign Office is not going to authorise — even clandestinely — what would amount to a military invasion of Russian Federal territory, and the Russians would hardly tolerate it even if the FO did authorise it. And even if those two gigantic and insurmountable problems weren’t enough,” he continued, “this is one of the most remote and inhospitable locations on the planet.”
“Then it should be done covertly,” Jenny said. She wasn’t going to let it go.
“I’m sorry,” Hemple said. “It’s just not doable. The only practical way to insert would be by air, and even if we found a friendly airfield to fly out of, we’d be up in Russian airspace for hours before we were on the fix.”
“You c
an fly really low, under the radar,” Jenny insisted. “I know. I’ve seen it in films.”
“It doesn’t quite work like that, not on this scale,” Hemple responded gently, “and not over these kinds of distances. With this kind of operational range, there would be refuelling issues and —”
“Are you saying that after all this,” Jenny said, “we know exactly where they are, and we can’t go and get them?”
“I’m afraid,” Lester said, “that’s precisely what we’re saying.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
The rain grew heavier, as if it were coming down under pressure. They crossed the branch of the river, meltwater from the mountains frothing around the high-axled wheels of the vehicles, and rolled north.
The T-90 battle tanks led the way, rumbling seismically. The throaty judder of their exhausts echoed off the weird acoustics of the tree trunks around them.
The terrain climbed a little, and then flattened out. The heavy rain seemed to be thickening the mist. Once or twice they glimpsed the helicopter gunship passing overhead, chopping the air with its huge rotors, appearing and then disappearing through gaps in the tree canopy.
After about an hour, the tree cover began to thin rapidly, and they drove out of the forest and into a markedly different landscape. The ground was covered in loose stone, like a beach of grey pebbles. A shallow tributary of the Tunguska, just a babbling stream, ran through the stone bed, mostly invisible as it splashed between and beneath the stones. On one side, imposing stands of spruce and larch picketed the broad stone bank. On the other, promontories of rock rose in jagged, sharp cliffs to form the walls of a gorge above the tributary. This natural cleft looked to be about a quarter of a kilometre wide.
The ATVs followed the tanks out across the stone bed. The wheels and tracks began to rattle and clatter loudly, and loose pebbles spat up like bullets, ricocheting off mudguards and sponsons. In the lead ATV, Cutter and Abby could hear stones banging off the vehicle’s underside and clattering into the wheel arches.
Overhead, the cloud cover blew like chalk dust, and the sky desperately tried to be pale blue.
