Colony

by Benjamin Cross

  Ptarmigan had waited patiently over the last few weeks, maintaining his cover during the day and constructing his devices late into the night. But even now he found himself dogged by the same reservations. Innocent people were going to die as a result of his actions. Whatever the intention, whatever the outcome, that was the reality. He was going to deprive parents of children, destroy families. But then, he consoled himself, it was like Finback had said: Those who die for this cause will have died well.

  Now that the time had finally come, his adrenaline production had gone into overdrive. He turned from the grey swirls churning up against the porthole and seated himself on the rug in the centre of the room. He crossed his legs and placed his hands, sweaty palms upwards, on his knees. He drew a deep breath in through his nose… one… two… three… four… five… and released it through his mouth… one… two… three… four… five…

  He repeated the breathing pattern, feeling his heart rate slow.

  “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo…”

  Ten minutes later, Ptarmigan placed his explosives into a small rucksack, left his cabin and took the stairs down to Deck 1. The only person likely to be up at this hour was Doctor Lebedev. He’d never warmed to Lebedev. In fact, she bugged the shit out of him. She was like the energiser bunny for one thing, up at all hours, never seeming to need sleep. In a word: unpredictable. For another, she seemed to spend half her time in a surly silence and the other half flirting with the goddamn archaeologist. But thankfully she was nowhere to be seen.

  Outside, the mist enveloped him, suffocating his senses. He had heard the others talking about what a strange sensation it was. But, so far, he had managed to avoid being out in it himself, and the sudden realisation that this really was some heavy-duty vapour stopped him in his tracks. It made the skin on his face feel oily, and the cloying bitterness tickled at the back of his throat making him want to cough.

  It’s just mist, he told himself, forcing his mind to refocus. He closed his eyes and listened. There was the sound of the wind and the lapping of the ocean at the side of the ship. Somewhere in the distance there was a groan and a faint splash as the top of another iceberg bit the big blue. But nothing else. No conversation. No footsteps. He carried on around the deckhouse, feeling his way along the railing at the side of the walkway until he reached the door to the observation room.

  He checked his watch. The last shift would’ve left on the hour. The standard operating procedure was for the replacement shift to turn up first. But there was complacency amongst the on-board Special Forces contingent, again, just as Finback had predicted.

  Over the last few weeks he had observed the replacement shift arrive consistently ten to fifteen minutes after the previous shift had departed. No doubt they’d review a portion of the CCTV footage that they had missed and then consider everything to be rosy. After all, what could possibly go wrong out here? Well, tonight Ptarmigan was going to show them and show them good. That extra hand-job they were giving each other when they should have been on duty was going to cost them their lives.

  He punched in the code and entered.

  2

  “Cut the engine!”

  The growling of the outboard gurgled out as Darya released the accelerator and brought the craft to a stop. “What is it?”

  “It’s no use,” Callum replied. “Look.”

  They had barely left the cove, but already visibility was less than half a metre. Harmsworth was gone. The Albanov was gone. The sky itself was gone. It was as if the whole world had shrivelled up and retreated into the canoe. “I say we head back to shore before we lose our bearings completely.”

  “You want for me to turn around now?”

  “If you’re sure you know where you’re going then carry on,” he said, waving his hand through the murk and trying not to sound either sarcastic or on the verge of panic. “Otherwise, yes, I think we should turn around. We haven’t gone that far. We can set up a shelter and wait for it to lift.”

  There was a long silence before the engine roared back to life and the canoe began to turn.

  Mist. Distance meant nothing. They could have been two metres or two miles from the shoreline and the world ahead would have been the same unyielding grey swirl.

  Callum’s eyes were watering. “The sea smoke will find the weak points,” Lungkaju had told him. And he was right. It clung to his face like a mask, and he could feel an intense cold around his wrist and neck lines.

  After a burst of speed, Darya had cut the engine once more and allowed them to drift. “I will let the current take us from here,” she said. “Otherwise we might crash into the rocks.”

  They sat in silence as the canoe rocked and the water stirred around them, barely visible through the billowing grey.

  “Do you hate me?” she asked suddenly.

  The mist swirling past her shoulders made her look ghostlike, as if she were apparating before him. The intense green of her eyes pierced through the vapour and he could see that her cheeks were wet with tears.

  He took her hands in his. “Of course not. Why would I hate you?”

  “For bringing you out here when you should be safe on the ship. Now you are lost and in trouble.”

  He squeezed her still-clenched knuckles and smiled what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Look, I don’t know where I am at the best of times and I’m always in trouble.”

  Her fists began to loosen. “You are always joking.”

  “If only people found me funny.”

  “Can you be serious for a second?”

  He pretended to think about it. “No.”

  Her hands slipped fully into his. He watched as she smoothed her thumbs over the top of his knuckles, then he looked back up into her eyes. “I—”

  There was a sudden impact. The canoe shook as the prow ground against rock.

  Callum dipped his paddle into the water. It felt thick, more like soup than brine, but as he moved the oar around he realised that it was strands of kelp tangling around the blade. He pushed down through them and hit the underlying shingle.

  “It’s the shoreline.” He lowered a leg carefully over the side, feeling the bite of the icy water at his shin. Then he waited as Darya clambered after him, and together they dragged the canoe back out of the surf.

  The scattering of pebbles underfoot, and the crackle of driftwood, told him that they were on a beach. Otherwise, they might have been anywhere on earth. The world beyond was nothing but a ghostly glow.

  “Should we call for help?” Darya asked. “I am wearing my wristband.” She pulled back the sleeve on her jacket and exposed her emergency locator.

  Callum’s gut reaction was to say: Yes, for God’s sake press the button and get us the hell out of here! But his feet were back on dry land and his initial sense of panic was beginning to wane. “If you want to call then that’s okay.”

  “But you do not?”

  “The way I see it, we’re both okay, we know where we are… sort of. I don’t think we actually qualify as needing help. Not just yet. Do we?”

  She smiled. “I see. You mean you would prefer that nobody knows you ignore the rules and go for midnight boat trip without an escort?”

  He cleared his throat. “If possible.”

  “This is fine. I would prefer it this way also.”

  “Then we wait it out,” Callum said. “Me and Lungkaju have been caught out a couple of times. You just have to sit tight and wait.”

  “So you are pro then?”

  “I wouldn’t say pro exactly. But I know there’s no need to panic. If we’re lucky, we’ll be out of here in a couple of hours.”

  “In this case follow me. I know a place where we can shelter.”

  “You know where we are?”

  She bent down and stroked her fingers across a patch of yellow-green moss. “There
is only one place on Harmsworth where I have seen this species in this colour. This is Konrad Cove. There is a ledge not far away, where I have seal hide. Come on, we will be safe there.”

  She set off inland at her usual athletic pace.

  “Konrad Cove, of course it is,” Callum whispered to himself. Then he crunched after her up the shore.

  3

  The observation room was cluttered and dark. As anticipated, it was also empty. Two high-backed chairs faced a wall crammed with security camera screens and protruding wires, below which sat a large console. Rows of recordable laser disc drives topped with blinking red lights, one for each on-board camera, flanked a central control unit.

  Ptarmigan wasted no time tapping into the operating programme and resetting the record parameters as planned. He also inserted a data stick into the main drive and uploaded two new programmes. One of them had been agreed with Finback. He smiled. The other… that was a little something that he’d cooked up himself.

  He checked his watch. He had four minutes, five max, before he could expect the belated guard change. A bleep sounded from the console as it accepted his alterations. Next he searched out the cameras that had tracked his movements already that evening. One by one, fingers working furiously, he searched back to the relevant sections and deleted his Oscar-winning performances. Using the first of the uploaded software programmes, he then stitched the footage back together as best he could. Finished, he reset the screen the way it had been left and made his way to the door.

  It was a rush job. The crudeness of it was already busting his balls. But he consoled himself with the knowledge that it would serve. By the time any eagle-eyed jobsworth had picked up on the rough edges, the whole vessel would be on the bottom of the ocean anyhow. With this thought, he cracked open the door and exited.

  Retracing his steps around the side of the deckhouse, he could hear the sound of low conversation as the two replacement guards approached the room from the other direction. Moving as fast as he could, he now made his way along the deck, past the funnel to another restricted entrance.

  He listened for company.

  Nothing.

  He punched in the code and slipped inside.

  The ship’s engine room was arranged around three inter-dependent platforms. Ptarmigan entered onto the upper platform. Though he knew the layout by heart, he was still taken aback by the sheer scale of the room. It was cavernous. To his right, stretching off into the distance, were a row of workshops and spare-part repositories stacked with tools, workbenches and crates filled with metal components. Beyond this sat the enormous electrical main motherboard and control panel. To his left he scanned his eyes across the central exhaust manifold, the oil settling, service and storage tanks, and the mind-boggling array of pipes that formed the hydrophore pump system for supplying the ship’s water. In the far corner sat the sewage plant, next to which were the incinerator and a spare propeller and tail shaft, poised like monumental works of modern art sculpture.

  The first cluster of security cameras was mounted high up, besides the ceiling crane terminus. Even though nearly all of them seemed to be pointing directly at him, Ptarmigan was confident that he was out of shot. His security programme updates had turned his entire route into a temporary blind spot. To avoid suspicion he had needed to keep the camera coverage as comprehensive as possible, meaning that, as blind spots went, it was pretty narrow. More of a periphery spot. Not a toe could stray from the carefully planned route. There was also a rigid schedule to stick to, with the cameras programmed to resume full coverage behind him.

  Having oriented himself, he followed around the hot well and expansion tanks, careful to stick as close to the railings as possible, and descended the next staircase. Before setting foot from the bottom step he waited, watching as the seconds ticked away on his wrist. Then, precisely on schedule, he stepped onto the walkway.

  The central platform was as crowded with machinery as the upper and just as silent at this hour. The main generators loomed large at the far end. In the gloom, Ptarmigan could also pick out the auxiliary alternators, the oil heater and purifier system, and the row of large, vertical canisters that comprised the main, auxiliary and emergency air bottles. It was all exactly as it had been on the plans. Growing in confidence, he slipped between the dehumidifier system and the fresh water generator, kept towards the edge of the room and descended the next staircase.

  On the lower platform, he checked his watch once more. He took a deep breath. His hands were clammy and shaking. Sweat lined his brow in the humidity. But so far, so good. And he was on schedule.

  In the centre of the platform was the main engine, a mass of pipes, cylinders and cables, surrounded by a moat-like cofferdam. The rest of the far end of the platform was taken up with the seawater, oil, lube, bilge and sludge pumps. To his left, the entire aft area was beset with rows of tanks.

  “Bin-fucking-go!” he whispered to himself, already searching out the bunker fuel tanks. The three large metal containers were painted green and their sides were adorned with international warning symbols above lists of white-painted bunkering instructions translated into numerous languages.

  Ptarmigan dropped the rucksack from his shoulders and unzipped it. To an outsider, the charges would have looked like everyday bathroom items: two toothpaste tubes, two shaving foam cans and two deodorant bottles. Of course, they were just casings. The six canisters no longer contained toothpaste, shaving foam or deodorant spray, but enough concentrated explosive to blast through the lining of the tanks, ignite the considerable quantities of diesel within them, create an atomic particle explosion and blow the Albanov clean in half. Ptarmigan’s heart raced at the thought of the raw, concentrated power in his hands.

  Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, Nam Myoho…

  The explosives drop had been at the exact coordinates supplied by Finback, and he had retrieved it no problem only the day after the inductions. God knows how the guy had got it there in the first place. The going rate for somebody to fly to Franz Josef Land just to make a drop-off must have been astronomical. But still, there it had been. And now here it was, signed, sealed and about to be decisively delivered.

  Having worked quickly to attach the charges, two to the base of each tank, he made a final check then stood back and checked his watch. He counted exactly seventeen seconds and then set off back the way he’d come. Everything was now in place. In a few hours’ time that bastard Volkov and his cronies, the G&S Corporation, every other thieving, raping gas conglomerate in the world would get the wake-up call of a lifetime. If they wanted to sink their teeth into the Arctic so bad, then they’d better be ready. Because, with a little help from Ptarmigan, this was one ecosystem that would sure as hell bite back.

  Chapter 6

  Caves

  1

  Koikov flicked the end of his papirosa and watched it disappear into the mist. Just being back on the island was bad enough. A search and rescue in zero visibility was the last thing he needed.

  The emergency locator signal had been picked up early that morning. It belonged to one of the science club, the Einstein lookalike Doctor Semyonov. God knew how long it had been transmitting for, but it had quickly been established that nobody had seen old Einstein or his guide now for over twenty-four hours.

  He rubbed at his scar. “Marchenko! What’s the story?”

  Marchenko peered at the GPS tracker. A red dot flashed in arrhythmic pulses across the screen. “Signal keeps cutting out and shifting.”

  “What the hell does that mean? More interference?”

  “No, Starshyna. My other sat signals are unaffected at present.”

  “What then?”

  “I’d say that unless Doctor Semyonov’s invented himself a teleporter, then he’s taken shelter in a cave.”

  A cave. Koikov’s pulse quickened.

  “It’s the worst thing he could’ve done,
” Marchenko continued. “There’s no line of sight between him and the satellite.”

  “Shit!” Koikov reaffirmed his low-visibility visor to reveal a landscape of contrasting shades. It was undoubtedly a useful piece of kit, giving him exceptional visibility through the murk. But the weight of it was distracting, and the constant fading in and out of the combined heat and ambient light signatures made him feel queasy.

  “That’s our boy,” Marchenko said, his voice tinged with excitement.

  Koikov looked over to see Marchenko’s gangly aura standing right next to him and pointing ahead. Through the visor, he looked like some kind of computer game character. Koikov hated computer games. He wasn’t that keen on Marchenko. He was a pussy. Not a hard bone in his body.

  Koikov followed the line of his outstretched arm. A hundred metres up ahead there did appear to be the mouth of a large cave. His pulse picked up again. He scanned back to see the rest of the rescue team advancing up the incline, their colour signatures growing bolder against the barren rock.

  “Old Einstein better be in serious trouble,” he said, striding on towards the cave. “Let’s get him and get the hell out of here.”

  Standing at the mouth of the cave, Marchenko turned to Koikov. “That’s one hell of a stench. I reckon the doctor could be dead already.”

  Koikov nodded. “Or it could be something else.”

  “Like what?”

  Koikov held a hand to his radio collar. “Private Yudina.”

  “Starshyna?”

  “On me.”