Colony

by Benjamin Cross

  Gergiev waited. “And?”

  “And nothing. No researchers, no equipment, nothing. Just an empty room. I tried the next one and same again. Every single room was empty. Didn’t look like they’d been used in decades. Whole place stank like rat piss and rust. It was worse than your mother’s bedroom.”

  Gergiev grinned and cracked his knuckles but didn’t rise to it. “Must’ve been a decoy deck, fool any pin-headed little dumbfucks that manage to break in down there.”

  Khabensky’s lips pursed. “No, I don’t buy it. That was R-Deck and there was no-one there. I’m telling you, Gergiev. This whole operation looks legit from the surface, but below decks it’s a fucking ghost ship.” He moved his attention back to the cave and peered through his rifle sight. “Creatures I can deal with, but ghosts—”

  A voice crackled into their earpieces: “Listen up, this is Sergeant Marchenko. The Kamov is heading back to pick us up. We’re going back to the ship. Hold your positions until it’s on the ground.”

  From further down the line, Private Tsaritsyn’s voice rang out: “All morning staking out this cave, and I don’t get to kill one stinking dragon?”

  A low ripple of laughter passed along the rank.

  “Feel free to head inside and claim your prize, Tsaritsyn,” Marchenko retorted. “The rest of you don’t know how lucky you are to be getting off this rock. You may not have seen these things, but I have, and once was enough. If the mist comes back, we won’t last five minutes out here.”

  * * *

  Koikov raised a pair of binoculars and peered over at the Albanov. He could see the remaining Kamov lifting off from the helipad. Perhaps when all this was over and the remainder of the team were safely back at base in Moscow, then it would finally be time for him to leave the department.

  As he watched the blur of the Kamov’s rotors lift the aircraft further off the deck, he felt a weight lifting from his own shoulders. In twenty minutes time he and his men would be back on board the Albanov and the nightmare on Harmsworth would be over—

  Without warning, the entire ship was replaced by a gigantic fireball. The roar of an explosion filled his ears. Columns of fire shot up into the air and a cloud of thick black smoke blossomed around the epicentre and rushed outwards in all directions.

  “Jesus Christ!” Koikov yelled, ducking down out of pure reflex.

  In an instant, every last bird had taken off from the Svayataya cliff-face, hollering in fright. They swooped around in their thousands, forming a cloud that engulfed the cliff-top and blotted out the sun. Hundreds careered into one another in mid-air, plummeting stunned onto the rocks below.

  Bleeding from the assault of beaks and talons, Koikov had no choice but to turn and run before the sudden chaos threw him from his feet. He took cover behind a pile of rock, just as a second shockwave hammered into it and caused the ground below to tremor.

  Suddenly, Marchenko’s voice droned in his ear: “Starshyna, what the hell’s going on? We heard an explosion. Starshyna, come in?”

  Koikov kept his head down and waited. Then, when all movement had stopped, and the majority of the startled birds had either flown away or resettled themselves on their cliff-side nests, he climbed back to his feet.

  Ears ringing, numb with shock, he staggered towards the precipice and raised the binoculars to his face once more.

  Where the Albanov had been, chunks of burning debris now lay scattered over a huge area. Dark shapes, charred and indefinable, bobbed on the agitated water, which was discoloured with slicks of burning oil. The air around was hung with a dark semi-circular curtain, a decayed rainbow of thick black smoke.

  “Starshyna, come in… Koikov! Come in! What’s your status?”

  Still staring out in disbelief, Koikov searched for the words to reply. In a quiet voice he said, “The Albanov is gone. I repeat. The Albanov has been destroyed. Rabinovich was on board.”

  There was a long pause at Marchenko’s end before: “What happened?”

  Koikov raised a hand to his throat, heart racing, tongue dry.

  “We just got stranded.”

  Chapter 9

  Survivors

  1

  It was done.

  Despite the miles Ptarmigan had put between himself and the Albanov before detonation, the explosion had been so great that it had rocked the Sea Centaur. He had fallen and struck the side of his head, leaving him bleeding through his hairline, in a daze. The shockwave had also upset the sub’s inertial guidance system and triggered the emergency siren. His nice orderly cabin was now alive with sound and bathed in a chaos of red light. Consciously he fought to get the situation under control. Subconsciously he relished the momentary distraction from the keening of his conscience.

  What the hell have I done? He’d always known that this would be the end result of his actions, and he’d tried to prepare himself through meditation and chant. But now that it was finally here, it was a whole new ballgame. He was no longer just a terrorist subversive. He was a mass murderer. An indiscriminate killer.

  He felt suddenly very alone.

  The siren finally faded out and normal lighting resumed inside the cabin. Forcing himself to focus, Ptarmigan picked up his copy of Ship of Fools and turned to the back page. On its reverse, top corner, there were the two eight-digit codes written in pencil. The first was the coordinate he had followed to the explosives drop. It had taken him to a location just north of Nansen Rocks. The explosive had been contained within a weighted capsule deposited on the sea floor. His hands had rung with sweat as he had extended the Centaur’s pincers and grasped the gleaming cylinder. As he was well aware at the time, it had been a real turning point. He could have secreted it elsewhere on the seabed, called Finback and claimed that it was missing, gone back to his life. This and a hundred other alternatives had paraded before him in that instant. But instead he had retracted the pincers and brought the capsule into the Centaur’s storage chamber just like any other sample.

  A trickle of blood made its way from his hairline to the corner of his eye and he removed his spectacles to wipe at it. Without thinking, he then reclaimed his book and winced as he picked up on the bloody finger-marks now skating across the inside of the back cover.

  “Ah, Jesus!” He tore the cover off in its entirety, slinging it to the floor. The damn book had served its purpose anyway. All he needed now were directions.

  Coordinate number two was for the rendezvous point. He remembered Finback’s instruction. When it is done, make your way there. You may have to wait, but I will have somebody pick you up. Wiping the ends of his fingers, he typed the code into the Centaur’s navigation system and waited while the computer calculated the location. This time the coordinate appeared to lead him to an inland location on the north coast.

  He leant forward and scrutinised the digital mapping arrayed on the screen in front. From memory he knew that this was largely an area of steep bluffs and rock-strewn coves, not exactly the sort of place to land a hi-tech submersible. Was Finback expecting him to get out and swim to shore, for God’s sake? Why the hell hadn’t he done a dummy run? His eyes desperately retraced the lie of the coastline. There must have been something there, a feature that he wasn’t seeing, a cave or deep-water inlet to accommodate the Centaur.

  Without wasting another second, he submerged the sub and set off along the course. He was close. In less than fifteen minutes he would be there, and shortly afterwards one of Finback’s associates would be transporting him to safety.

  As he manoeuvred the Centaur around an underwater shelf, his mind moved on: Ava. Perhaps his one consolation was that he’d managed to transport her off the Albanov before it blew. It had taken some doing. Stealing the ketamine sedative from Lebedev’s office alone had been a nightmare. In fact the whole thing had represented a substantial alteration to his plan that had driven him almost to distraction. But he had gotten there in the
end. And it had been necessary. No matter how hard he had tried to convince himself otherwise, he had fallen for her. There wasn’t a chance in hell that he could’ve gone through with it, any of it, knowing that she was still aboard.

  But even that little glimmer of self-redemption had fallen under a shadow. A shadow with teeth, claws and a real bad attitude. He hadn’t minded saving McJones earlier that morning. Back when he’d still been plain old Dan Peterson. Back when he’d still had time to reconsider. McJones was a good guy; cool and confident in a way that Ptarmigan could only pretend to be. Lebedev was another matter altogether. That miserable bitch! He wished to high heaven she hadn’t let the goddamn creature go. If McJones hadn’t been there then Lord knows what he would’ve done to her if she’d dared touch his controls like that. Yeah, the thing was wounded. Yeah, it was probably none too hot for its run-in with the Centaur’s pincers. But there was something about the sly little bastard that had left a seed of unease germinating deep in Ptarmigan’s gut.

  The on-board processor bleeped suddenly. His destination was only a couple of hundred feet up ahead. He could see the fractured seabed rising up towards the island’s northern shores. As suspected, there didn’t appear to be any kind of natural harbour. The Centaur could always breach and approach the shore as a surface vessel. Shallow water navigation was one of its major design benefits. But there still had to be somewhere to navigate to, other than dry land. And Ptarmigan couldn’t see any-such-where. What’s more, from the pull of the current and the movement of the seabed silts, it seemed as if the surf above was none too friendly. The last thing he needed was to wreck the craft. If, God forbid, Finback turned out not to be on the level, then it would be his only lifeline.

  As he searched the seabed, a winding shadow emerged heading shoreward. A smile of relief passed across his lips. Of course! He’d seen it only once before, pretty much ignoring it as he’d passed by en route to the explosives drop. Now it was everything. It was a fissure in the seabed, a deep trench that appeared to bore straight through the rising bedrock. Probably remnant of some ancient riverbed, it must have led into a concealed deep-water cove.

  “Finback, you piece of work!” he whispered.

  He retracted the Centaur’s fins, allowing her to fit neatly within the narrow confines of the trench, and engaged the deep-dive headlamps. Squadrons of colourful fish broke formation in front of him, shimmering and darting for cover. Multi-coloured flora clinging to the rocks either side billowed around the Centaur’s nose like curtains in a gentle fall breeze, their tendrils trailing deftly over the metal panelling. Shoals of much larger fish passed coolly under the vessel, crustaceans scuttled over the upthrusts of exposed rock, and molluscs, anemones and species that must have been new to science clung to whatever they could.

  As he watched, the head of something resembling a moray eel shot from a crevice, snatched a fish and disappeared once again, bringing him smack back to reality. Before he knew it, his thoughts were with Ava again. He’d had no choice but to leave her, McJones and Lebedev on Harmsworth. He figured that their chances of running into that thing again were probably slim, and their odds of survival would be infinity times higher than if they’d all been on the Albanov at 1300 hours that afternoon. Hell, McJones had already chalked one up, that slick Scottish sonofabitch!

  Even so, Ptarmigan had already decided on one final change of plan. He would go ahead and meet with Finback’s associate. But instead of being whisked away to begin a new life while the world woke up to the news of his tragic death, he would tell whoever it was that Dan Peterson was not going to have died on board the Albanov at all. Instead he was going to have been out researching at the time of the explosion, ending up stranded on the island along with the others. He and the other survivors would await help from the international search and rescue effort, and then he would live out his days with Ava.

  Ptarmigan slowed the craft even further as it passed under a bridge of natural stone, a passage through the base of the cliffs above. He could feel his panic response reasserting itself: What if it’s a dead end? What if there’s a rock-fall? What if—

  “Enough!” he shouted, holding his course.

  Moments later the fissure’s floor dropped away and its sides began to widen out into a natural chamber. Light filtered down into the water once again, broken by the shadows of seals swooping around excitedly above.

  Seals meant air. Sure enough, when he cast his eyes across the sub’s sensors, they were telling him that it was okay to breach.

  He took a deep breath and brought the Centaur up.

  2

  Callum blinked his eyes open. The world was a blur of shades and shadows, which gradually began to sharpen. Darya lay next to him, curled up in a foetal position, out cold. Beyond her lay the unmistakable figure of Ava Lee, also unconscious.

  He reclosed his eyes and tried to remember what had happened. The last thing he recalled was sitting next to Darya, on the floor at the back of the Sea Centaur. Peterson had submerged the sub and they were on their way back to the Albanov so that she could get checked out by the ship’s medics. Wrapped in their thermal blankets, she had pushed her hand into his and leant her head against his shoulder. He had let his head rest on top of hers, closed his eyes and then… nothing. Darkness.

  He reopened his eyes. Pebbles ground together underneath him as he edged himself upright. Surf rolled up the shore towards his feet and a familiar coastline tore away from him in either direction. There was no mistaking where he was, and the growing certainty that it was not a dream brought vomit to the back of his throat.

  He placed a hand on Darya’s shoulder. Her skin was reassuringly flesh-coloured, her expression serene. She was somehow fully clothed once again, as was he, and he could see that her breathing was deep and regular.

  He shook her gently, and she groaned and opened her eyes a crack. Her face took on a look of pure confusion as she attempted to sit up. “What happened?” Her voice was croaky with sleep. “Where are we?”

  “Harmsworth.”

  Her confusion turned to alarm. Her body stiffened. “Harmsworth? Those things—”

  “Try and relax,” he said. “There aren’t any just now, but try and keep your voice down.”

  “But what if they come back?” she half-whispered.

  Callum was about to admit that he had no idea what they would do if one of the creatures suddenly turned up uninvited, when Darya noticed Ava lying beside her.

  “Ava?” She looked back to Callum as if for an explanation, then staggered to her feet.

  Lying next to Ava on the shingle was a hunting rifle. It was similar to the ones Lungkaju and the other security guides carried. Callum walked around her and picked it up.

  “Can you use?” Darya asked.

  “I’m no marksman,” he replied, running his hand over the wooden stock. He fumbled around, eventually managing to open the breach. “It’s loaded.”

  “How many bullets?”

  “A couple, but…” He bent down and seized a handful of loose rounds that had been placed in a pile next to Ava’s head. “There are maybe a dozen or so more here.” His mind racing with a thousand questions, he stuffed the spare bullets into his pocket and slung the rifle strap over his shoulder.

  Darya had knelt down beside Ava and was attempting to rouse her. She responded with the same grogginess and confusion that they’d all experienced. When it had worn off, the two of them helped her slowly to her feet. She squinted in the light and clung to Darya’s shoulder. “So you’ve no idea what in the hell we’re doing here either?”

  “Afraid not,” Callum answered. “Can you remember anything at all?”

  “Last thing I remember is talking to Dan.”

  Callum and Darya exchanged glances. “Peterson?”

  “The one and only.”

  “Can you remember where you were?”

  Ava’s lips pursed
as if she wasn’t clear why it was any of Callum’s business. “Yeah, sure. He was trying to impress me with that damn submarine of his again. Honestly, the number of times he’s tried to get me to go out in it, and I just keep on telling him, ‘Dan, some people are seadogs, some people are landlubbers, you’re evidently a dog and you’re barking up the wrong lubber!’” She laughed at her own joke, then added, “Hell, I haven’t felt this spaced out since my freshman year.”

  It struck Callum that she would have no knowledge of the creatures that had almost killed him and Darya only hours before. To her, being out on Harmsworth was no more or less treacherous than it had been at any other time, regardless of how she got there. She had no idea the danger they were in.

  Darya seemed to share his thoughts. “Ava, earlier this morning we were attacked by some kind of animals. I think that they are new species.”

  The remains of Ava’s smile disappeared. “Animals? What animals? Where?”

  “Close to here,” Callum said.

  “Well, that’s awful! When… I mean, what happened?”

  They recounted the story of their encounter, including their rescue by Peterson. Ava listened intently, her gaze remaining stony throughout. Then, after a long silence, a smile broke across her lips. “Okay, I get it. It’s international wind-up-the-Canadian day. Well done you two, you got me! I take it Dan’s in on this as well?”

  “No,” Callum said, more forcibly, “this is no wind-up. I wish to hell that it was, Ava, but it’s true. Every word.”

  Brow furrowed, she looked from Callum to Darya. Both wore the same unyielding expression. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but instead of words, a jet of vomit rushed out and splattered over the shingle. Darya placed an arm around her as she bent over and clasped her knees. “I’m sorry,” she said, still hacking. “It’s all… I’m just—”

  “It’s okay,” Callum said. “Trust me, if there was anything in my stomach I’d join you.” He turned to Darya. “One rifle and a handful of bullets aren’t gonna be much use if we run into any more of those things out here.”