Sanctuary (Nomad Book 2)

by Mather, Matthew

  She’d spent one last night in that tent on the ice, then abandoned the camp and sled. The wicked storms of the nights at least brought a merciful layer of soft snow to cover the ice. The tsunami had sloshed water onto the shore, and much of it congealed before it could slip back away into the ocean. The landscape looked beaten, softened into submission by each of the poundings it received.

  Jess felt sympathy for this once beautiful terrain.

  The vibration of the snowmobile’s engine burrowed its way into her bones and brain, each ridge of snow she scaled an agony. Her body was far beyond exhausted. Everything hurt. Her stump, most of all. Perhaps she could just cut it off, her brain giggled, but she couldn’t. It was already cut off. Stop thinking stupid thoughts, keep in the here, stay in the now. Think of Giovanni, of little Hector, slowly freezing to death out there, somewhere.

  Each wave of snow rose up and fell away. The snowmobile raced forward with its three riders. Massarra’s hands were bound together, her legs tied to the chassis of the machine. She sat between Jess and Roger, who brought up the rear. She wasn’t sure he was strong enough to hold on by himself, so Jess had strapped him in as well, tied cord around all three of them. She did her best to hydrate them all before they left, and force-fed them the last of their food.

  Except for one tin of rations.

  That she hid in her parka’s pocket. She was saving that for her last meal, for a quiet moment of prayer. And she did pray to God, to anyone who was listening. She screamed in her mind, funneled the anger and frustration into keeping herself alert. She played whatever mind games her head needed to keep moving forward.

  How far had they drifted?

  Twenty hours?

  That couldn’t be more than a hundred kilometers, could it? They started about a hundred kilometers south of Civitavecchia, when the wave hit them. How far had it carried them, in its roiling madness? She constructed circles within circles on the edge of the boot of Italy’s map in her mind.

  Mile after mile, she urged the machine onward and watching the flat gray sky.

  Would it dim, would night come before she could get there?

  The thought circled in her head, and kept her hand pressed back against the throttle. She kept her eyes on the hills, watching for bandits, watching for avalanches. Each smudge in the sky brought her stomach into her throat—getting caught in a thundersnow, out in the open, would surely kill them. As would some fantastical flying machine from Sanctuary, or some other horror she couldn’t imagine.

  Or a flash in the sky, another meteor.

  Or perhaps just falling through the ice into the frigid waters below.

  Everything in this world wanted to kill her, had already killed her once. She cursed God, threatened Him, begged Him to take her and spare the others.

  But there was no answer.

  Every time she rounded a point of land, she expected to see the low bowl of Civitavecchia, see some evidence of its skeletal remains, but only another blank canvas of undulating snow would be revealed, and even that would disappear into the mist. She cheated as far as she dared, cutting straight across the bays in a straight line, trying to reduce the distance. Far out in each bay, the walls of ice disappeared, and she became alone, a single point of existence in the mist, driving forward through her pain and fear.

  Lost in her head, she almost didn’t see the rubble rising through the snow to her right.

  Easing off the throttle, she angled the snowmobile toward the sloping hills that were gentler now. She couldn’t feel her hands, or her foot. Even the pain in her stump had disappeared. She could barely move. An effort just to steer the handlebars. The hills here looked familiar, but was this the town?

  She squinted to see through the ice-mist, easing the gurgling engine onward.

  “This is it,” whispered a voice behind her.

  Massarra.

  “But, where…” Jess’s voice trailed off.

  If this was Civitavecchia, where was the massive cruise liner in the middle of the city?

  “Washed away.”

  Jess gunned the engine and searched for a way up off the ice onto the seawall. Massarra was right, she had to be. This was the town, but where was the boat? Her stomach knotted painfully. How far did the water carry into the city? She craned her neck around and scanned the horizon, but nothing, just the mist joining up with the ice, an indistinct gray soup.

  Gray.

  It was getting darker. “We have to hurry.”

  She recognized a hump of snow as the jetty, near to where she’d fallen under the ice, and raced the snowmobile up it and onto the edge of where the concrete wall had been. Metal beams stuck out of the ground, twisted around each other, with debris piled against them. This had to be it.

  The snowmobile slid to a stop beside the wreckage.

  “Roger, help me.” Jess did her best to jump off the machine, disentangling herself from the ropes she’d used to secure her human cargo.

  The man mumbled something incoherent. She grabbed him by the throat of his parka, shook him awake. His bloodshot eyes opened. “What?”

  “Help me dig.”

  She’d been surprised by Roger when she coaxed him into talking on the radio. How he’d managed to come to his senses enough to be coherent. Must have been the adrenaline that came from realizing that all hope was not lost. At least, not for him. Not yet. She gave him one more look in the eye, decided it was useless, and dropped to her knees.

  One breath, two breaths, Jess pulled some oxygen into her lungs and grabbed the avalanche shovel from the side of the snowmobile. Another of Giovanni’s supplies that was left in the sled. He made them all carry one. Good for digging out of snow, but also good as a weapon.

  It unfolded and snapped together easily.

  She shoved its point into the snow as hard as she could. It wedged maybe a half-foot deep. With all her strength, she pulled away a wedge of snow and raised the shovel over her head and slammed it down again.

  The sky grew dimmer, almost by the minute. She threw the shovel into the snow again, this time hitting ice. It had to be here, please God, it had to be. Shovel up. Shovel down. Pain. Spit dribbled down her face and she wiped it with the back of one gloved hand.

  Someone dropped into the snow next to her. It was Roger, another avalanche shovel in his right hand. He feebly dropped it into the pit she’d started and scraped away some snow. She waited for him to get his hand out of the way and slammed her shovel back down. The ice cracked and she dropped her shovel to begin picking away chunks of frozen snow and ice. She dug into the softer snow beneath.

  And there, an orange flash of plastic.

  Just where she’d left it, lashed to the huge metal moorings on the seawall. The bags she’d emptied out of the Range Rover, the collection of odds and ends of gear she couldn’t imagine any use for. She heaved away chunks of congealed snow. Three bags, four, they were all there. She didn’t have time to dig them out, though, but instead grabbed a length of the cord from the snowmobile and looped it through the bags handles.

  “Get back on,” she told Roger.

  She secured the other end of the rope to itself, started the snowmobile back up. Grinding forward through the snow, it pulled the bags out in a clump behind them. She gunned the engine and headed up to the hangar.

  “Duct tape can fix anything.”

  Roger slapped the Cessna’s wing and showed off his handiwork. Strips of gray tape crisscrossed the leading edge of the airfoil where Rita had blown away chunks with the shotgun. A dozen more gaping wounds still needed to be patched, and he limped down off the crate he balanced on and moved it sideways.

  He looked like a crazed scarecrow.

  Jess did her best to smile encouragement. He was barely recognizable as the man she’d once known; his cheeks sunken, translucent skin flaking away over angry red sores. His clothes hung off him. But there was a manic energy in his eyes. Maybe some of the food and water she’d forced into his mouth in the morning had some effect, but it wa
s probably a sense of finality, some end to the pain.

  Or a mission.

  Or maybe even forgiveness.

  He’d tried to talk to her, tell her how sorry he was, but she didn’t want to hear it.

  A roll of tape hung gingerly in his injured left hand. Jess had first used the tape to attach a wood stick to the sling holding his arm, so he could hang the tape on it. She was busy using another roll of tape to try and fix the harness on her leg. It had almost completely come apart, so she wrapped duct tape around her pasty white thigh, trying not to imagine how much of the soft flesh might come away if she pulled the tape off.

  It just had to hold for a few hours. No more than that.

  Under cover of the hangar, they’d untied Massarra. She didn’t say a word, but took the rifles and stood by the open door. They didn’t bother to try and heat the hangar. It was too big, and they wouldn’t be here for long enough. And anyway, Jess didn’t want to feel her toes. She was sure they were frozen solid. The pain of defrosting them would be intense. Her hands were bad enough, every effort to use her fingers created shooting pain that brought tears to her eyes.

  Jess pulled another length of tape around her leg and cut the strip. Just this effort was enough to get her breathing heavy.

  Sweat beaded on her brow.

  On the ground at her feet she’d spread out what weapons they had left—two rifles, a half-empty box of cartridges, a hunting knife and two of the grenades.

  She looked around the hangar, pausing for a moment. Somehow, it felt like home. They’d spent days here, Giovanni and Hector and her, huddled together. Now she was alone. The spray of blood against the door where Elsa was shot, the pool of blood near the strut of the Cessna where they’d tied up Roger, all of it reminded her of Giovanni.

  When they arrived, one of the first things she did was open the radio and get Massarra to try and reach him. The signal was even weaker, which meant they were traveling in the opposite direction. At least this narrowed the possible search circles. But Giovanni didn’t make any sense. He was delirious.

  There wasn’t much time.

  Finished taping her leg, Jess rolled her pant leg back down and stood to test it. She sat down and opened one of the sacks they’d dragged up from the water’s edge. She pulled out the parachute and inspected it. Still looked intact. Good enough. Her plan depended on a sequence of things going right. She was amazed the plane was untouched. The water hadn’t reached up this high into the hills. But she would have had to come up with some other plan, if none of this was here.

  “You’re crazy, you know that?” Roger said, watching her.

  “Will it fly?”

  He climbed off the crate and inspected his work. “It’ll take off.” He’d already tested the engine, the first thing they did when they came in. It fired up on the first try. Old technology, but reliable. “Just follow the compass heading like I showed you, and keep to at least two thousand—”

  “I know.”

  “Do you want to go over the takeoff sequence again?”

  “Get it outside first. Get the engine going again.”

  “And then what?”

  Jess pulled a blade from the ground next to her. “The hard part.”

  “I’m not sure I can do this.”

  She took a long look at him, then nodded at Massarra, who watched them from the doorway. “I think you’ll be surprised what you can do, Roger, with the right incentive.”

  29

  A GLOWING ORB floated in space. It pulsed from dim to bright and back before coalescing with another. As the orbs merged, the larger grew in size. In the center of the translucent construct a cloud of angry data bees buzzed. Ufuk Erdogmus reached up to calm and ease them into the probability pipeline.

  “Was it Roger Hargate?” he asked.

  “Ninety percent correlation,” replied a disembodied voice. “Subject was under extreme physical stress.”

  “Torture?”

  “Unlikely.”

  “Frequency bands?”

  “Six before the transmission was received. Manual wide spectrum—or an attempt at it.”

  Ufuk collapsed the three-dimensional holograms containing the latest radio intercepts. In front of him, a detailed image of the western coastline of Italy morphed into shape. The map glittered with dots, each one representing some event or some related collection of information. Some of the dots glowed as red orbs, like the ones he’d just collapsed. These represented a probability of the location of Jessica Rollins. Almost all of them predicted she was already dead.

  “And this Iain Radcliff—”

  “The Head of Security at Vivas Romana.” An image of a blond-haired man appeared in space in front of Ufuk, alongside a graphic detailing everything they knew about Radcliff. He scanned it quickly. Born and educated in the United Kingdom; studied Law at Trinity College, Cambridge. Served as an officer in the British Army for eight years, after which he took up positions at several prestigious private global security firms. The type of individual Erdogmus had learned not to underestimate.

  “He has ‘the data’, that’s what he said?”

  “And the laptop.”

  “What’s the probability this is what we’ve been looking for?”

  “I doubt you need me to answer that.”

  Ufuk smiled.

  He’d modeled Simon’s conversational interface using his own psychological profile. Simon had evolved into a personal assistant, an artificial intelligence he could call his own, but not the only one he controlled. If the number of people he could bring into Sanctuary had been limited, the number of AIs was unlimited, as was his sizeable army of drones and robotics.

  Maybe that was why the rest of them feared him.

  And they should fear him.

  Ufuk said after a pause: “We’re committed.”

  “Should we reroute resources from North Africa? And Australia? This will trigger—”

  “Do it.”

  “And disengage with African Union forces?”

  Ufuk grabbed the three-dimensional model with both of his hands and spun it around, looked at it from another angle. “Just what are they up to?” he muttered. “Any contact with Saturn yet? With our satellites? With Mars First?”

  “You would know.”

  “Okay…okay…”

  “Sir?”

  “This is it, Simon. We need that data.”

  “They will see this as an act of war.”

  “Then bring everything we’ve got.”

  Jess shivered and tried to pull the blanket around the shoulders of her parka, but the woolen fabric was stiff with blood. Under her gloves, her hands were slick with it as well. The effort was too taxing to bother to clean it off. Massarra and Roger were gone, and she was alone.

  So utterly alone.

  She peered into the gloom surrounding her. Nothing moved. Just deathly quiet. The darkness gathered. No sunset, just the dome of gray around her deepening to black.

  She sat on an upturned crate next to the Cessna, now parked outside the hangar. The temperature had dropped to at least twenty below, but the cold was good. It hardened the layer of ice under the snow, and made the air thicker. Easier to take off in, Roger had assured her, easier to fly in. And she didn’t mind the cold, not anymore. Like Giovanni had said to her, you can get used to it.

  Her foot still had no feeling.

  She was afraid to take the boot off to see what was under there, afraid to smell a gangrenous stench. Black-blue swollen toes, she was sure. She’d already lost one foot, so what was one more? She tried to tell herself this, but she felt considerable affection for her last five toes. Would she never paint a toenail again? And when she took off her hat earlier, for the first time in days, her beautiful blond hair fell out in clumps. She must look awful.

  Stupid thoughts like these crowded her mind.

  She tried to push them away.

  She wanted to curl up into a ball, sit still in the coming night and let the embrace of the frost-world
take her again into that warm dark burrow of forever. But her father’s voice tickled in the back of her mind; seemed to call to her from the mist. Never give up, it whispered. The shame on her family would never be undone, the black mark never erased if she gave up.

  She’d pulled his picture from her pocket—sodden, and smudged almost beyond recognition. She wanted to stare into his eyes, somehow let him see what she was seeing, but he’d never been where she was, had never faced what she faced.

  He was gone. So was Giovanni. So was everyone.

  Utterly alone.

  I am the Nomad, she thought grimly. A lonely black hole bringing death.

  The radio was in front of her. She faced in the direction of Giovanni, by her best guess, and bowed her head, in a prayer to her Mecca, then pulled off one glove and turned the shortwave on. Its switches and dials glowed to life. She let herself breathe. She checked her watch, and clicked the talk button on the microphone. It didn’t matter anymore if someone heard her.

  “Giovanni,” she whispered, and then louder: “Giovanni, do you read me?”

  Static hissed.

  “Giovanni, please, do—”

  “I am here,” answered a tiny voice, hidden deep in the crackle of the static.

  “Thank God,” Jess whispered, gritting her teeth to hold back tears. She didn’t want him to hear her crying. “Has anything—”

  “Ice does not sink.”

  “But I mean…”

  After a long pause: “We are still adrift.”

  She closed her eyes. Exhaled. The effort it took him just to speak seemed immense. “How are you? The boys?”

  “They are well. I am giving them what water I can melt.”

  “Giovanni, you need to—”

  “They are younger, stronger.” He took a deep breath. “Someone wants to speak with you.” Shuffling sounds.

  “Jessica?”

  This time she couldn’t hold them back. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “Hector, come stai?”