Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  Spencer flew from Heathrow to Moscow, where he had five hours to wait for a connecting flight. He took a cab into the city and spent the time shopping for cold-weather clothing, was back at Domodedovo in time to board the UralAir flight to Yekaterinburg.

  At Yekaterinburg, Koltsovo Airport was still over-run with old 787 cargo conversions belonging to international aid charities working on the relief effort two hundred kilometres or so to the south. Looking out of the window as his flight taxied to the terminal, he could see ranks of heavy-lift airships tethered to the tarmac. The humanitarian catastrophe following the Ufa explosion still hadn’t eased noticeably. Tens of thousands of refugees from the surrounding countryside had upped sticks and marched on Chelyabinsk, where they had set up camp at the city’s airport. They called it ‘Putingrad’ and started to farm between the runways. Nobody could move them, not even the army. Even if they left tomorrow, the airport would be next to useless for years.

  The next two legs of the journey took him to Novosibirsk and then on to Krasnoyarsk, at the eastern edge of Sibir. Looking from the window as the rackety old turboprop made its descent, he saw a snowbound city nestling beside a river surrounded by deep forests. He saw, in the final light of the sunset, tall industrial chimneys expelling solid plumes of vapour or smoke. The plane made a steep turn to line itself up with the runway at Yemelyanovo airport, and he found himself looking almost straight down into the amphitheatre of a football stadium, all lit up and full of people.

  That was, it turned out, all he saw of the old Russian border city. Yemelyanovo was some distance outside town, and he was booked into one of a complex of grim-looking budget hotels beside the airport. He stomped into the foyer in thermal boots, quilted coldsuit and fur-lined parka, to find that the temperature in the hotel had been cranked up to tropical levels.

  Five floors up, he waved his phone at the door of Room 502 and stepped inside. The room was small, stark, utilitarian, the only decoration a single replica ikon on the wall over the bed. The window looked down into a courtyard calf-deep in snow. Two figures, bulky as Kodiak bears in their cold-weather gear, were enthusiastically throwing snowballs at each other in the light of the hotel’s many windows.

  Spencer closed the curtains, put his overnight bag on the floor, and sat on the bed for a few moments, trying to let himself catch up with the journey. He took a container from his pocket, shook out a couple of tablets, dry-swallowed them, and closed his eyes until the fog went away.

  He had a shower, ordered a steak and fries and a green salad from room service, sat eating in front of the entertainment centre watching a local news feed that seemed to consist mainly of stories about football and nationalist marches. Later, he went to the room’s cheap little wardrobe, opened it, and took out the package on the shelf inside. Then he went to bed.

  THE NEXT DAY was a series of hops in prop-driven aircraft of varying decrepitude, to cities with names like Bratsk and Ust-Ilimsk and Erbogachen, like places out of a fantasy novel. The landscape below was a dense carpet of snowy forest divided by winding rivers and the white lines of roads and spotted with frozen lakes. It seemed to go on to the misty uncertain edges of the world.

  There was an hour’s layover at Erbogachen Airport – the last stopover before the Sakha Republic – and the coffee shop where he had a late lunch seemed to be mostly full of ethnic Yakuts with industrial quantities of luggage, many of whom packed themselves on his flight.

  The sun was setting, here in what had once been the Russian Far East, when the plane descended from the cloudbase for its final approach to Mirny. Looking down, Spencer saw a now-familiar scene – dense larch taiga forest, a sprawl of housing blocks festooned with balconies and every kind of aerial created by humanity, a main road running through it all, industrial chimneys pumping out clouds of smoke and vapour, lakes, open-cast mine workings, everything blanketed with snow. Just beyond the city rose an enormous tessellated blister, a startling dome that shone with a green-tinged interior illumination in the dusk.

  Once upon a time, mineral-rich Sakha had produced more than a quarter of the world’s diamonds, and the majority of them had come from here, the great terraced open-cast pit of the Mir Diamond Mine, a hole in the earth almost a mile across and so deep that it caused air currents strong enough to suck helicopters out of the sky overhead.

  The mine had closed in the early years of the century, and after a number of false starts a company had come in – no one knew quite from where, although they were notable, in those cash-strapped days, for having seemingly limitless money – and proceeded to roof over the pit and ‘terraform’ the interior. This was something of a misnomer, as the mine was already on Earth, but it looked good in the corporate materials, and if any of the existing inhabitants of the town were at all disgruntled about the area being compared to an alien world, their sensitivities were soothed by several philanthropic improvements to their infrastructure, including a new hospital and football stadium.

  A courtesy bus took passengers from the airport to what was now the Mirny EcoState. For those who couldn’t be bothered to wipe the condensation off the windows and look out at the grim town which had been built to service the mine, there were paperscreens showing a cheerful documentary about how the world’s second-deepest man-made hole had been transformed into an arcology which was the byword for sustainability. Spencer watched the documentary, with its lively animations about spray-insulation and injection-polymer permafrost stabilisation, and found his mind wandering. He took a tablet.

  The bus pulled up outside a large featureless cube of a building, considerably cleaner and in a better state of repair than the rest of the town, a few metres from the dome. The passengers disembarked and shuffled through the stinging cold to the doors.

  Inside, all was quiet and warm, a big airy foyer laid out like the departure gates of an airport. A few people were already queuing to pass through scanners and metal detectors and progress further into the building. Most of the new arrivals, Spencer among them, headed for a set of gates marked ‘Residents,’ although in truth residents and visitors were treated more or less the same – both went through the same document and security checks.

  On the other side of the gates, Spencer stepped into a gents’ restroom, locked himself into a cubicle, stripped naked, and put his clothes into a bag. He took from his overnight bag the package from the hotel room in Krasnoyarsk and peeled back the outer layer. Inside was a pair of polymer gloves. He put them on, then undid the inner layer of the package. Inside were two bags. One was about the size of a large padded envelope. He tore it open carefully and shook out what appeared to be a very large surgical glove. He stretched the neck and stepped into it, and there followed a couple of minutes of contortions made more complicated by the fact that he was trying not to make contact with the outer surface, but finally he was wearing a sort of skin-tight transparent onesie. He pulled the hood over his head; the edges sealed themselves against his face, leaving only his nose and mouth and eyes exposed.

  Quickly now, he opened the other bag – jeans, trainers, a T-shirt and hoodie – dressed, put everything in his overnight bag, pulled the hood up, and left the restroom.

  There was no sense that he was in a foreign country, a pocket nation carved out of the permafrost of the Sakha Republic. He walked down wide corridors floored with hard-wearing carpet and the occasional door marked AUTHORISED ACCESS ONLY in half a dozen obscure languages. It was like being in a very large but rather disappointing office building.

  Finally, though, he emerged from one corridor into a vestibule the size of a tennis court. It was open on one side, and when Spencer stepped out and stood at the railing which ran along the edge he found himself looking across a space so huge that its far side was almost lost in a mist of humidity.

  Craning his neck, he could barely see the great panes of the dome through the glare of the lights strung from it. They hung over an enormous steep-sided amphitheatre, its sides scored with a spiral of broad terraces paved wi
th broad walkways and festooned with hanging plants. Spencer could see crowds of people and bicycles moving along the terraces. The walls of the amphitheatre were set with tens of thousands of windows. The air was warm and humid and it smelled like a jungle. Far below, cupped in the base of the great bowl, was an elliptical lake with a small island in the middle.

  In theory, the Mirny EcoState had been quite a simple proposition. Take a colossal stepped hole in the ground, roof it over with a fullerdome, build apartments and shops and cinemas and theatres into the walls of the hole, landscape the terraces, and install a closed-loop biosphere. Everything is simple, in theory. Before anything could be done, specialised equipment had to be brought in. The single road connecting Mirny with Almazny and Chernyshevsky, the two nearest cities, was useless for the Mirny EcoCompany’s needs, so the airport had to be rebuilt to handle wide-bodied cargo freighters, in temperatures so low that metal tools shattered like glass and the ground had to be thawed with jet engines before any work could be carried out. After that, things only got more difficult.

  Spencer leaned on the railing. A delta-winged microlight was whining like a mosquito across the great open space of the arcology a hundred feet or so below him, navigating the slowly roiling air currents in big slow spirals. A dozen or so parakeets flew past the balcony, squawking loudly.

  He walked down a set of broad steps leading down to the nearest terrace, and walked unhurriedly, stopping to look in shop windows and examine the menus of cafés and restaurants, until he reached a bank of lifts. He took a lift down to the next terrace, walked some more, took another lift.

  The terrace this one opened onto was mostly residential, the walls lined with doors and windowboxes and broad shallow concrete planters full of vegetation. Pausing to make sure he wasn’t being observed, he dumped his overnight bag in one of the planters, hiding it among the foliage. A few metres further on, he stopped at one door, and slipped a mask over the exposed parts of his face. It sealed itself to the material of the isolation suit, trapping skin flakes and all kinds of forensic evidence inside. He waved his phone at the door, and there was a click as it unlocked.

  Inside was cooler, a quiet draft of aircon – the EcoState was so efficiently insulated from the permafrost it was excavated from, mainly to stop it melting its way to the centre of the Earth, that without some kind of cooling system the apartments would have eventually become uninhabitable – and smelled of eco-friendly cleaning materials and floor polish.

  The front door opened into a small receiving room with cupboards and a rack of coats. This led to a flight of stairs up to a large airy living room, sparsely-furnished. He walked through the apartment carefully, looking for signs that someone had carried out a search. The people who had prepared the apartment had left tells – fine layers of dust, hairs spit-glued across door-jambs; basically stuff from twentieth century espionage novels because frankly no one did this kind of thing any more and nobody would notice them – to mark the passage of the unwary, and he was carrying an itemised list of them in his head without quite realising it. He checked the three bedrooms, kitchen, dining room, utility room, and bathroom, and none of the tells seemed to have been disturbed. Only then did he go back downstairs and take the tools from one of the cupboards in the reception room.

  The tools were in two cases, each about large enough to hold a big power drill. He took them upstairs and opened them on the living room coffee table. Inside, nested in foam, were items which at first glance would have seemed more or less incomprehensible to a casual observer.

  Spencer went over to the window and looked out. On this floor, he was above head-height of residents passing by on the terrace. He knelt down until his head was more or less level with the top of the coffee table and looked again. The terraces wound around the inside of the old pit in a huge gentle spiral, covered in vegetation. From where he was kneeling, Spencer could see all the way across the great open space to the other side of the spiral, maybe ten or fifteen metres lower than his position. He took a monocular from one of the cases and focused on a certain spot along the opposite terrace, where a number of people seemed to be congregating. He took out his phone and checked the time. He was on schedule, to within a minute or so. A lot of time and effort had been taken to make sure he was here, in this place, at this time, but the things in his head, the things he had been told in London, didn’t allow him to think about that. He wasn’t even aware that he had been told anything. This was this and that was that, and he was doing it because he was doing it.

  He went back to the table and started to remove the tools from their cases, laying them out on the coffee table and making sure everything was there because once he had gone on a job and a certain component had been missing and he’d had to pull the entire operation. Not his fault, of course, and he didn’t even think about the consequences for anyone else, because he wasn’t wired for it.

  And it wasn’t going to happen this time. Everything was here. He started unhurriedly snapping components together, making sure each piece fitted and functioned before moving on to the next one. As he worked, a rifle took shape on the coffee table.

  Although only bits of it looked like a rifle. It had a barrel almost two metres long, wound in a mathematically-precise spiral with three kilometres of fine wire and studded with connector blocks. The breech was the size of a cigarette packet and there was no butt, just a pistol grip. Mounted on top of the breech was a sniperscope the size of a restaurant peppergrinder, the big ones that waiters pester you with when you’re trying to eat your pasta. The whole thing was connected to a hydrogen-cell car battery and set on a small bipod.

  Spencer checked his phone again, went to the window, unlocked it, and slid it sideways a fraction. He went back to the rifle and sighted through the scope, went back to the window and slid it open a fraction more, checked again.

  He knelt down at the end of the coffee table, took hold of the pistol grip, and lifted the rifle until it balanced perfectly on the bipod. The scope was a beautiful thing, right at the limit of modern non-digital optics. Looking through it, he could see the little crowd of people on the opposite terrace as if they were standing just outside the window. There were what appeared to be dignitaries in formal suits, and larger, stouter men and women who could only have been security operatives of some kind. Some of the people in the group were wearing indefinably old-fashioned clothing – tweeds, knitted ties, waistcoats – and looking about them with the air of Third Worlders visiting New York or a Westerner seeing Shinjuku at night for the first time. Spencer’s heartbeat and breathing began to slow. The view through the scope became the entire world. A great calm suffused him, the only real calm he ever experienced.

  He saw, in the crowd, a face he recognised, and his brain performed a calculation, based on the flocks of parakeets and the microlight flying past the window and the air currents he had felt on his face as he stood outside the apartment, which would have taken a supercomputer a week to complete. He channelled pure force, felt it rising from the floor and flowing through him. He ceased even to exist on a sentient level.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  The coilgun accelerated the round, a fragment of depleted uranium the size of a kernel of corn enclosed in a treated fibre sabot, to a muzzle velocity three times the speed of sound. Venting and suppressors rendered the report no louder than a sneeze. Through the scope, he saw the face he recognised contort suddenly, then drop out of view.

  Then he was moving. He had no instructions to clean up after himself; someone else would do that, if it was necessary. He closed the window, went back downstairs, out of the front door, locked it behind him. Back along the terrace to the lift, collecting his bag as he went, no sign of alarm on this side of the arcology, the scene on the other side too far away for any sound to reach him.

  In the lift, he plucked the mask from his face and put it in his pocket.

  Next level, still no alarms. Nor on the next. Spencer went back through the security checks on a different
set of documents to the ones he had entered with. It was five minutes since the shot; he felt no hurry or agitation, even when he had to queue to get through the gate.

  Everything had been timed exquisitely. There was an airport bus waiting outside. He was one of the last to get on, and moments later the doors closed and the vehicle moved off.

  At the airport, he had just enough time to lock himself in one of the toilets and strip off his outer clothes and the isolation suit. He bundled the suit up and put it in the toilet, cracked an ampoule of enzyme over it and watched it dissolve. When it was gone – it only took a minute – he flushed the toilet, dressed in his travelling clothes, put the clothes he’d worn in the arcology in his bag, and was in time to board his flight.

  There followed an increasing blur of airport arrival and departure lounges. At some point he disposed of the clothes he’d worn in Mirny.

  Changing planes at Krasnoyarsk, he felt things start to slip away and then reassemble themselves into a long, tiring and not very successful business trip. He was going to get paid anyway, but he worried what his employers would think.

  Preoccupied with this thought, he failed to pay any attention to the person who stepped right up to him in the middle of the departure lounge and shone a tiny, very bright light in his eyes. The light stuttered; he could almost hear it, a rapid irregular clicking somewhere deep down inside his head, and he suddenly didn’t feel like doing anything but standing still.