Extinction Event

by Dan Abnett

“After dark, this area isn’t going to be especially safe,” Cutter said. Then he peered around. “Not that it’s especially safe now,” he added.

  “I agree with what Bulov said,” Yushenko called from about twenty metres away. “I’d really rather not spend the night out here.” He was moving around the edge of the impact site to make a visual record of the damage sustained by the standing trees.

  “I don’t think we get a say in it,” Suvova said quietly, staring at Koshkin.

  “As usual,” Bulov muttered. Koshkin ignored the scientists and strode away to instruct the soldiers.

  “So?” Abby said to Cutter.

  “So?” he replied.

  “This is what you were expecting, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Cutter admitted. “It’s like standing in the middle of one of the old photographs Kulik’s team took of the 1908 impact. They didn’t get to it while it was so fresh, though.”

  “Lucky us,” Abby said. “What are we learning, then?”

  “I don’t know,” Cutter answered frankly. “You ever try to figure out a puzzle where you had plenty of clues, and they linked up too well?”

  “What do you mean ‘too well’?” she asked, a confused look on her face.

  “Too obvious. Too crashingly obvious.”

  “Didn’t Sherlock Holmes have some kind of rule about the obvious answer being the... um... obvious one?”

  Cutter grinned and shook his head.

  “It’s just the way it adds up. Tunguska. Impacts. The K-T boundary event. Late Cretaceous dinosaurs. Every time I put those elements together, I get an answer that scares me.”

  “Go on,” Abby prompted.

  He sighed and continued.

  “Somewhere here there’s got to be an anomaly or anomalies that open into the very, very end of the Cretaceous. We know that for a fact, simply by the nature of the creatures we’re encountering. They’re all Late Cretaceous. They’re all examples of the very last types of dinosaur that ever existed. And the end of their existence was caused by just about the biggest impact event in the history of Earth as a living planet.”

  “And it’s happening here,” Abby said. “It’s happening at a place that’s famous for impact events.”

  “Notorious,” Cutter agreed. “The Tunguska strike is special. It’s the biggest one in recorded history. I don’t know how they can be connected. One massive impact sixty-five million years ago, another a century back, and another last night. I don’t know how they can be connected.

  “But, Abby, I also don’t know how they can’t.”

  It was getting darker more quickly, now. Koshkin reappeared in the impact circle with several soldiers in tow, and ordered the scientific team back to the ATVs.

  “I want to get on the radio,” Cutter said to him. “I want to know if Connor’s had any luck rebuilding the ADD. We could use it up here.”

  Koshkin nodded.

  “Where’s Yushenko?” Abby asked.

  “He’s over at the rim,” Suvova replied. “He’s still filming.”

  “No,” Abby said. “He was there five minutes ago. He’s not there now.”

  They all looked around. There was no sign of the gangly botanist. Bulov and Suvova began to trudge back towards the place they’d last seen him, calling his name.

  “If that idiot’s wandered off into the forest...” Koshkin said.

  “He hasn’t,” Abby replied, glaring at the FSB specialist, “because he’s not an idiot.”

  Koshkin didn’t acknowledge that she’d spoken.

  “Find him!” he ordered three of the soldiers. “He’s probably found some kind of fern or moss that’s taken his interest. But we can’t afford to have him go missing.”

  Bulov cried out.

  He’d reached the edge of the impact zone, the spot where they’d all last seen Yushenko. He was holding something up for them to see.

  It was the camcorder. He’d found it on the ground, still running, its strap broken.

  Aside from the device, there was no evidence that Yushenko had ever been there.

  THIRTY-THREE

  “Either being run over by a Torosaurus has made me forget how to build one of these things,” Connor grumbled irritably, “or there’s something funny going on.”

  “Still no luck?” Medyevin asked.

  Connor sat back from the bench, put down his screwdriver, and eased his throbbing arm.

  “There’s something up,” he said. “The signals are totally nuts. I suppose it could be the atmospherics.”

  “Could be,” Medyevin agreed. He glanced up at one of the windows of the medical shack. Rain was beating heavily off the canvas roof, and the yard of the camp outside was swathed in grim mist. Much of the time it was pouring straight down, but occasional gusts of wind threw it sideways and shook the tents. The weather had been rolling in all day, and the advent of night seemed to signal an out-and-out storm.

  “The radios have been playing up since whatever it was happened last night,” he continued. “And one of the patrols this afternoon reported seeing lightning, uhm, clinging like rook’s nests in the tops of some trees.”

  “Ball lightning?” Connor asked.

  “Like that — what is it called? — St. Elbow’s fire.”

  “Elmo,” Connor corrected.

  “Sorry,” Medyevin said.

  “I like elbow better,” Connor said, and he smiled.

  “What is wrong with your elbow?” Antila asked, wandering in from the triage room with blood on her latex gloves.

  “Nothing,” Connor said.

  “I should know of any new symptoms you are experiencing,” she insisted.

  “We were talking about something else entirely.”

  Antila sniffed, her expression doubtful, and started to look for a fresh packet of swabs. That afternoon, three soldiers out on patrol had been hurt when their 4x4 had rolled, trying to swerve around a Hadrosaur that had appeared out of the rain in front of them. She was patching them up in triage, and they were complaining loudly as she stitched their lacerations. One of them kept calling for a drink to soothe his pain.

  “Speaking of the radio,” Connor said, peering into the exposed innards of his half-built ADD, “anything from Abby and the professor?”

  Medyevin shook his head.

  “They should be back by now,” Connor said uneasily.

  “They will not be back tonight,” Antila assured him. “Not now. It is too dark. They must have made camp.”

  “That’s not good,” Connor said.

  “It is what it is,” Antila replied, and she went back into the triage area.

  “I think maybe it’s time for some more coffee, and maybe a plate of supper,” Medyevin suggested. “What do you think?”

  “Sounds good,” Connor agreed, nodding. “This might work better on a full stomach. See if you can get me some of that stew with the pieces of sausage in it.”

  “That wasn’t sausage,” Medyevin replied.

  “Yeah, well, don’t spoil it.”

  Medyevin grinned and got to his feet. “I’ll be back in five minutes,” he said, and he dashed out into the rain.

  Connor waited for a moment, and then scooted his chair over to the end of the bench where the laptop sat.

  He opened it, and got to work. Though he didn’t expect much, he was keen to discover if there had been any response to his efforts of that morning. He was also hoping to send another message, maybe even set up some kind of mailbox that would keep sending the same message automatically.

  He’d been working steadily for a few minutes when he glanced up and found Umarov staring right at him.

  Connor jumped.

  “Jeez!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t know you were awake...”

  Lying on his cot, Umarov continued to stare at him. His face was drawn with pain, and he was as motionless as he had been when he was unconscious, but there was a fierce light in his eyes.

  “I’m not doing anything!” Connor cried. “Honestly! Nothing at
all! Nada! Nothing! Zip! Stop staring at me like that!”

  Umarov didn’t even seem to blink.

  “I was just playing,” Connor admitted. “I was just playing with it. Okay, I was fooling around, and I may or may not have considered sending a message, but you can’t blame me for that, can you? I mean, you would, in my position, wouldn’t you?”

  Slowly, Umarov nodded.

  “Exactly,” Connor said. “Who wouldn’t? I tell you what: we’ll just forget it, shall we? You and me? No harm, no foul? I’ll leave it alone. I won’t touch it again. Look, I’m shutting it down, right? I’m closing it?”

  Connor quit the aps and closed the laptop.

  “See? All good? No harm done. You and me — tight. Okay?”

  Umarov stared at him a little longer, and then settled his head back on his pillow, closed his eyes, and appeared to drift away out of consciousness again.

  Rubbing his sore arm, Connor sat back in his chair and exhaled loudly.

  Too close. Way, way too close.

  He tried to slow his racing pulse. Medyevin would be back any moment. He didn’t want to look guilty.

  But I guess it’s too late for that, he mused. I’ve been busted.

  The shack door squeaked open on its hinges. Connor looked up, expecting the palaeontologist.

  A man had come in out of the rain. He wasn’t particularly tall, but he gave the impression of being astonishingly fit. He had a wide, boxer’s nose and his hair was so fair, his eyebrows were virtually invisible, as if he’d had it all shaved off.

  He was wearing a set of black BDUs.

  “Evening,” Connor said warily.

  The man wiped raindrops off his face, and walked over to the bench where Connor was working.

  “We haven’t met,” Connor said. “I’m Connor.”

  “You think we don’t network our computers?” the man asked in heavily accented — but precise — English.

  “Sorry?” Connor responded, hardly breathing. “What are you talking about?”

  “You think we don’t network?” the man repeated. “You think we don’t monitor user activity?”

  Connor realised it was a good time to shut up.

  “Koshkin said it was a mistake to let any of you have access to communication equipment. The radios. The laptop. He was right to be concerned, wasn’t he?”

  “You’re KGB, aren’t you?” Connor asked in spite of himself.

  “It’s FSB,” the man corrected. “Federal Security.”

  “They said there were three of you here.”

  “I was out in the zone, supervising the patrols,” the man said, “while Koshkin and Umarov ran things here. Then I heard Umarov had been hurt, so I came back in. Just in time, it seems.”

  “Have you got a name?” Connor asked.

  “Shvachko,” Antila said from the doorway. She glared across the room at the FSB specialist.

  “Your presence here is not required, medical officer,” Shvachko told her. “Go and get on with your work.”

  “The infirmary is my command area,” Antila replied. “This man is my patient. I will not have you harassing my patients.”

  “Go away now, Natacha,” Shvachko said.

  Antila stared at him for a moment, as if weighing her options. Reluctantly, she withdrew back into the triage area.

  Shvachko turned to look at Connor.

  “You think we’re idiots, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Connor replied. “And I don’t think anything of the sort.”

  “Yes you do, it’s written on your face. The primitive Ruskies, with their funny fur hats and their borscht and their Volga boatman’s song. You think we’re backward idiots. No sophistication, no modern technology...”

  “Really,” Connor said, “you’re imagining stuff that’s not in my head at all.” He was beginning to sweat. There was something terribly menacing about the specialist, a quality not even the brutish Koshkin possessed. Connor had never felt so threatened by someone who was putting himself down.

  “I can see it. I’ve seen it before. Your kind. It didn’t occur to you that we would notice you using the system.”

  “Far from it,” Connor replied. Might as well come clean. “I just thought it was worth a try. And I thought I’d done a decent job of covering my traces.”

  Shvachko nodded.

  “Well, at least you’re not insulting me by denying it. And you hid it well. You might have got away with one try. But to try again, just now? That wasn’t a smart move.”

  Connor swallowed.

  “On a scale of one to ten, how much am I going to regret it?”

  Shvachko scratched behind his ear thoughtfully.

  “This is a state of national emergency, and I have full and binding emergency powers. I can shoot you right there in that chair if I want, and dump your body in the woods for the wolves.”

  “That’s not...” Connor said, very quietly. “That’s not quite how I was planning to spend the rest of my day.”

  “There is one little factor in your favour,” Shvachko told him. “We’re in the middle of Sibir. The Krasnoyarsk Krai. Even if someone — your friends back home in the West, anyone — had recieved your little call for help, it wouldn’t matter. No one would ever come and find you here.”

  “Good point,” Connor agreed. There was a slight break in his voice. “Silly of me to even try. No harm done, then, eh?”

  Medyevin returned to the infirmary hut. He was carrying a tray of food and drinks covered with a soaking-wet tea cloth.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, looking warily at Shvachko.

  “We’re just getting to know one another,” Shvachko said.

  Medyevin hesitated in the doorway, the tray in his hands.

  “Bring that over and put it down,” Shvachko said. “I need to make a radio check with Koshkin, and he’s asked for an update on the device you’re constructing.”

  “We’re not there yet,” Connor said. “There are some problems.”

  “What kind of problems?” Shvachko asked.

  “Atmospherics, we think,” Medyevin explained.

  Shvachko nodded. “I’ll tell him so.”

  “We might have something by the morning,” Medyevin added.

  Shvachko walked to the door. Pausing, he turned and spoke.

  “I’ll check in in the morning, then. Doctor?”

  “Yes?” Medyevin said.

  “Don’t let him use the radio unless it’s part of the work you’re doing. Don’t let him touch the laptop at all.”

  “Okay,” Medyevin said, looking puzzled.

  “I mean it, Doctor.”

  “Okay,” Medyevin said more emphatically.

  Shvachko went out into the rain and the dusk.

  Connor breathed out.

  “Why did you tell him we’d have something by the morning?” he asked Medyevin. “He’ll kill us when we don’t.”

  “Because he scares me,” Medyevin said. “It’s all I could think to say. He... that man. You think Koshkin’s bad. Shvachko is a real psycho.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “I don’t understand how he could just vanish,” Abby said. “We were all there. We were right there. How could we not notice he was gone until he was gone?”

  Cutter shook his head. Yushenko’s disappearance had really upset her.

  “Try not to think about it,” he said, putting his arm around her.

  “Something took him, didn’t it?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “So why didn’t we see it? It must have been big. It must have been right there.”

  “We didn’t see it because it was fast,” Cutter said.

  Night had fallen, and the soldiers had rigged up canvas shelters around the ATVs, a short distance into the forest and away from the smouldering impact site. Fires and lamps had been lit, and moths were whirling in out of the darkness and the drizzle. The T-90s were monstrous silhouettes in the dark beyond the limits of the firelight. A slow wi
nd was creaking the trees around the site.

  Abby could smell food cooking over the camp stove. She could hear the huddles of soldiers chatting, laughing and complaining.

  “But why him?” Abby persisted. “Why not any of us?”

  “Yushenko cut his hand during the stampede, remember,” Suvova explained, bringing them cups of coffee from the stove.

  “He was bleeding. It could smell him,” Abby finished in a small voice.

  “It could smell all of us, but Yushenko was the most appealing. Or he had the strongest odour,” Suvova added.

  “I don’t think it was just that,” Cutter said. “He was away from the group. He was close to the trees. It was an opportunity.”

  He was about to say something else when Koshkin approached.

  “I’ve been on to advance,” he said. “Your boy is still working on the detector. It’s not finished. He is complaining about atmospherics, apparently.” His expression in the dim glow of the lamps said that he wasn’t convinced.

  “Are you still having problems with the radios?” Cutter responded.

  “Yes. On and off,” Koshkin replied. “It’s been a little worse since nightfall, actually.”

  “Then it’s atmospherics, almost certainly,” Cutter told him. “Connor doesn’t lie.”

  Behind them, Bulov let out a cry of surprise and horror. They all turned to look at him, and the huddles of soldiers fell silent. Bulov looked up at Suvova. For all that he and Yushenko had liked to bicker, they had clearly been close friends, and Yushenko’s disappearance had shaken him.

  “Grisha?” Suvova asked. “What’s the matter?”

  Bulov held Yushenko’s camcorder out to her with trembling hands.

  “I was just playing back the footage he took,” he said.

  Professor Suvova realised what she was being offered. She hesitated, reluctant to accept it. Cutter took the camera out of Bulov’s hand. He adjusted the flip-out screen and pressed rewind for a moment. Then he selected play.

  The flip-out screen cast a luminous glow like a magic lantern into Cutter’s cupped hands as the footage began to play. He watched jerky, handheld tracks of the impact site as they had seen it that afternoon. The view panned across to show him, Suvova, and then Bulov in the smouldering circle. Then Abby was on-screen for a moment, throwing a little wave and a grin.