by M. R. Carey
Akimwe assures the colonel that there are no bones broken. Carlisle’s glance goes down to Khan’s abdomen. “The baby seems to be fine too,” Akimwe says. “It has a very strong pulse.”
“Good,” Carlisle says gruffly. “I’m glad of it. All of you, stay in here. Full lockdown. We’ll assess the situation and then we’ll tell you where we stand.”
He kneels and squeezes Khan’s hand, just for a moment. “I’m relieved you weren’t hurt,” he says.
“Me too,” Khan mutters. She tries to smile but the effect is far from convincing.
The colonel leaves her there, after instructing Dr. Akimwe to see her safely back to her seat and strap her in. “Take care of Mr. Greaves too,” he adds.
“Do you have any suggestions as to how I might do that?” Akimwe inquires politely.
Carlisle doesn’t, so says nothing. He refreshes his e-blocker, noting with approval that McQueen and Phillips are doing the same. Then with the two men at his back he opens the mid-section door and steps out.
Into a raw, clear afternoon. Mist lies on the ground, but from knees on up there’s good line of sight. Perhaps there are hidden attackers snaking through the long grass on their bellies. If so, their snaking skills are commendable and they have found a way to fit grass blades with silencers.
Notwithstanding this, Carlisle elects not to speak. He signals to McQueen to cover him and Phillips while they check the treads and the underside of the vehicle.
Once again they feel the absence of Private Lutes, who knew Rosie’s skin like his own. They are able to verify that they haven’t blown a tread and that there is no visible damage to the chassis. Confident now that they are alone, Carlisle brings Sixsmith out from the cockpit to join them. As the most competent engineer out of the five of them, she is best qualified to make a full visual inspection of the tread connects. The colonel also orders her to check the rear-mounted air vents. The vents are high enough off the road that it’s unlikely they would have been touched, but he doesn’t want to neglect something so crucial to their survival.
Everything is fine, or seems to be.
“Was that an ambush?” McQueen demands. From the crew quarters, he wasn’t able to see a thing when they actually rolled over the obstacle, which is clearly a sore point.
“There was definitely a built barricade,” Carlisle says, sticking to what he knows. “Branches. Stones. Some sharpened stakes.”
“Stakes?” McQueen is incredulous.
Carlisle sketches in the air. “Lengths of wood about four to six feet long, split at one end and with glass shards wedged into the fork.”
“It was an ambush,” Sixsmith says flatly. “You need to see this.”
On Rosie’s rear right flank there are shallow scratch marks, scoring the olive-drab paint. Below them, a small soot-blackened ellipse shows where someone tried to set a fire. The four of them stare at these baffling signs as though they’re trying to read them like runes.
“Last night?” McQueen demands at last.
“Has to be,” Sixsmith says. “We were A-one at Lloyd’s after we got out of Invercrae. I went over every inch.”
“Why didn’t this show in the MAC checks?” the colonel demands.
Sixsmith shoots him a hunted look. He has impugned her and she feels it, especially after running right into the barricade. “Sir, the MAC is about moving parts. We don’t go over the armour.”
McQueen is still focused on the invisible enemy—the crucial point here. “So someone got through the motion sensors and the traps and had a go at us?”
“Yeah, but with penknives,” Phillips says, with a nervous laugh. “Penknives and a cook-up. Who tries to stab a tank?”
McQueen is not amused. He scans the empty horizon, scowling like a demon. “Who tries to stab a tank?” he repeats. “The same people who went up against us in Invercrae yesterday with slingshots. The same people who killed Lutes with fucking kitchenware. They’ve followed us.”
Carlisle shakes his head. He has considered this, but it seems entirely implausible to him. “And got ahead of us? On this road? How, Mr. McQueen? No, if this was an ambush, it was laid for someone else. Someone who’s not riding inside four inches of steel and ceramic laminate.”
But there is another possibility, he allows in his own mind. It could be someone who saw them coming and preposterously underestimated them. If he and his team had stepped out to inspect the treads on the spot, would woad-painted savages have run out of the trees to attack them with spears and clubs?
No, of course not. It has only been ten years since civilisation fell apart. People don’t devolve to the stone age in a single decade. In any case, Phillips did a thorough scan with the thermal goggles and saw nobody in the woods beside the road. Even if you were to accept the hypothesis that this could have been done by savages, there would still seem to be a logical contradiction in the idea of savages who set an ambush and then wander off to pick flowers.
Despite his orders, Dr. Fournier emerges from Rosie, exiting via the cab rather than through the mid-section door. Unused to the high running board, he almost slips and falls. He is very flustered as he crosses to join them, indignation and belligerence clearly visible on his face. Something else is there too, disguised and half-effaced under these banner-headline emotions. Carlisle puts it down to fear. It is understandable for the doctor to be afraid, and to want to hide it. There is no reason as far as he knows to believe that Fournier has anything else to hide.
Fournier is trembling uncontrollably, and his stomach churns with nausea. He has just disabled the radio in Rosie’s cab. The circuit board he pried out of it is sitting in his pocket now, along with the Allen key he used to detach the radio’s fascia from the console and get access to its innards.
All the while he was working, he was in full view of the colonel and his soldiers. They could have turned at any point and seen him, and then come back to the cockpit to find out what he was doing there. It was, quite simply, the bravest thing he has ever done, and he is amazed at himself. He was amazed even as he was doing it, to find that he was capable of such reckless courage.
Now he is suffering the reaction, surplus adrenalin making his body rebel against his conscious will like an unbroken horse. There is no way that he can come across as his normal self, so he lets the soldiers see that he is out of control. They will mistake it for cowardice, but that’s fine. For once, their lack of respect for him will work in his favour.
“Is it too much to ask that you brief me on what just happened?” he asks Carlisle. The pitch of his voice wavers. Good. Let it.
“We hit a roadblock, Doctor,” the colonel explains. “We took no harm, and we can be on our way again.”
Which is very good news under the circumstances, but flushed with the success of his recent exploits Fournier senses an opportunity to make it even better. The brigadier’s orders to him were to see that Rosie was delayed: this looks like a perfect justification for a delay, and if there is no actual danger then so much the better. He demands details, and more details on top of those. As civilian commander, he announces with calculated shrillness, he has a right to know.
The colonel visibly contains his impatience. He gives Fournier a full and circumstantial run-down of recent events and speculations. The rest of the escort stand in the tall, sodden grass swapping glances of contempt and disbelief.
As he listens, Fournier considers how best to play this situation—how long a standstill he can negotiate. “We can’t go on until we can be absolutely certain there’s no danger,” he says when the colonel is done with his report. “I refuse to submit my crew to any unnecessary risk.”
On Fournier’s left-hand side but not out of his line of sight, one of the soldiers, Sixsmith, shakes her head in wonder.
“Doctor, the only sensible response is to keep going,” the colonel says levelly. “If there is a threat, the best thing we can do is outrun it.”
“I absolutely disagree,” Fournier says. “We have no idea what
we might be running into. Rosie should stay right here while your men reconnoitre further up the road and ascertain whether there’s anything else in our way.”
“And if there is?” Carlisle’s voice is stiff with the effort of being polite. “We’ll still be making the same decision, which is either to plough through or to go around. It does no good to have these soldiers expose themselves on foot to hazards that Rosie is well equipped to deal with. You can see we took no damage.”
Fournier digs in. He really doesn’t have any choice, and he can’t afford to lose the argument. “This trap could be the first of many. To sound us out. Test our resources. So they can hit us harder next time. We can’t assume that because there was no damage done this time there’s no threat. In fact they could be deliberately encouraging us to underestimate their capabilities.”
The colonel raises both hands to indicate the emptiness all around. “Who,” he asks, “are they?”
Fournier is aware of the risk he is taking, the very real dangers he is inviting. If whoever set the barricade did mean it for them, then moving on quickly minimises the window for further ambushes. Standing here and arguing widens it. But he has a job to do. The fate of Beacon is in his hands, and it outweighs the fates of these individuals. Even his own fate, although he shies away from that thought. He wants very much to believe that the real threat is small, even while he talks it up into a crisis.
The adrenalin that flooded his system after his act of espionage in the cockpit has at last begun to ebb. In a more measured voice, he draws his line in the sand. “Driving on into more roadblocks and ambushes is not an option, Colonel. If you refuse to carry out proper reconnaissance, we’ll have to take other counter-measures. We have a vehicle that was specifically designed to function off-road. I suggest we use that capability.”
“What the actual fuck?” Private Sixsmith says, making no effort to lower her voice.
The colonel puts a thin veneer over the same sentiment. “We’ll lose time, Doctor. A great deal of time. The going will be harder and we’ll have to stop earlier when the light gets poor. And the slower we travel, of course, the easier it is for any potential saboteurs to follow us. Are you sure this is what you want to do?”
“Entirely,” Fournier says.
“Permission to speak, sir,” Private Sixsmith says. Carlisle nods. “Going overland all the way means taking longer, and that’s got knock-ons. We’ll run out of water unless we restock. But what I’m wondering is what happens if we blow a tread?”
“You’re qualified to deal with that, aren’t you?” Fournier demands.
“I’ve done it as a drill, Dr. Fournier. But I’m not Brendan Lutes. If we get into serious trouble, I’ll take twice as long and I’ll do half the job. It probably won’t happen, but I thought you should know going in. These hills all around, these are the Cairngorms. Off-road means uphill, and it will get pretty steep pretty quick. If we land in trouble in there, we might not be able to pull ourselves out again.”
Carlisle nods. “Thank you, Private. I appreciate your honesty.”
Fournier doesn’t appreciate it all, but the word Cairngorms has triggered a memory and now he teases it out. An ace in the hole, or at least an argument that he can win. “There’s another reason why I was considering a detour at this point,” he says, trying to look like a man who has thought deeply about this and is not just flailing around at random. “The cache we missed on the way up is very close to here, on Ben Macdhui. If we leave the road and go east, overland, we’ll hit it within a day.”
The idea lands like a dead fish. Everyone is looking at him as if he has just suggested that they camp out in the open and watch the stars.
“Doctor, it was your decision to omit that cache in the first place,” Carlisle points out brusquely. “You argued that it would be too difficult to reach. I don’t really see how our situation is any more favourable now. If anything—”
“I always held open the possibility of retrieving it on the return journey,” Fournier breaks in. “And now, with no findings of any consequence to report, it’s our last chance to find significant data.”
“Why should this lot be more significant than the other ninety-nine?” McQueen demands. Sixsmith and Phillips exchange a glance of amused contempt which they make no effort to disguise. But the colonel says nothing. Clearly the mission statement still has some sway over him. Fournier has picked the right lever.
“The road is straight all the way from here to the Firth,” he presses. “One highway, going south. If we stick to it, we give these people a very easy target. They can set their ambushes at any point they like and we’ll roll right into them. Overland is slower but safer, and it gives us an opportunity to retrieve the cache.”
Carlisle nods at last, prompting angry mutters from the soldiers. “Very well,” he says. “We’ll go overland. As far as Ben Macdhui, at least. Private Sixsmith, you’ll keep the speed low and stick to level ground wherever possible.”
“Level ground? Ben Macdhui is a bloody mountain,” McQueen points out. “Sir, I volunteer to scout the road ahead and see if it’s safe.”
“Thank you for the offer, Private McQueen,” the colonel says. “Your concerns are noted, but for now we’ll do as the doctor suggests. We’ll find the cache, and then we’ll re-join the road at the Forth estuary. Hopefully we’ll only lose a day.”
“Dismiss,” Dr. Fournier says, which is pure wishful thinking brought on by having won his point. The soldiers wait, seemingly deaf. Even McQueen doesn’t move until Carlisle gives the nod. He may hate the colonel, Fournier reflects sourly, but to take orders from a civilian? Clearly he hates that idea even more.
The new regime in Beacon will have its downside for a thinking man with no military background. Fortunately, his own status will be secure. He will have proved his allegiance beyond doubt.
29
Private Sixsmith turns Rosie through a tight arc and cuts her loose. With no buildings to worry about, she is quick and confident, almost showy. There is barely a jolt as they leave the asphalt for the wild green yonder.
Phillips is back up in the turret. The mid-section platform is empty now, since the bumps and shocks of their overland progress make standing up more of a challenge. Dr. Fournier is in the engine room, the colonel and Sixsmith in the cockpit. Everybody else is sitting in the crew quarters.
Everybody except for Dr. Khan, who has retired to her bunk. The excuse she gave was that she was still feeling woozy after her fall, but she flashed John Sealey a look as she retreated—if a sideways removal of less than two yards counts as a retreat. Now she’s waiting for him to take the hint.
Waiting with the curtains closed, and with a caldera of tears boiling inside her. She feels a surge of undirected anger. She never cries. The worst thing about all this is that she has lost control enough to feel she might cry.
Almost. Almost the worst thing.
Poor Stephen! He was so helpless when she fell. Earlier, when he saw her mixing up some emergency medication for herself, he was right there with a chemical solution to her chemical problem. But when he saw her hurt, he was paralysed.
No sign of John. All he has to do is say he’s crashing early with a good book (one of the three on board). He must have seen her give the high sign. But he doesn’t come. Does he know what she wants to say to him? Is he staying away in order to stop this box from being opened?
Not going to work, John. It’s coming, ready or not.
“Anyone feel like a game?” McQueen’s voice, faux-casual. He lives for his poker, and the worse his mood gets, the more he needs his fix. There are murmurs of assent from Foss, Akimwe and Penny. A flat no from Stephen. Then John’s voice, the weariness just as studied as McQueen’s nonchalance. “Count me out. I think I’ll read.”
She hears him cross to the bunks. The metallic rattle of his feet on the boost-step, then a creak as he settles. She’s waiting for one more sound, but it doesn’t come. He’s taking his time. Playing it cool.
&nb
sp; “Dealer’s choice,” McQueen says. Akimwe declares that his choice is Oxford stud with a high-low split. As the bidding starts, there is (at last!) a muted swish of fabric. Sealey’s curtain being drawn across.
“Goodnight, John-boy,” Foss calls.
“Goodnight, Calamity Jane,” Sealey replies, which causes Akimwe to giggle like a schoolboy.
John waits a good five minutes before rolling his mattress back and removing the top slat. His face appears in the gap directly above Khan, peering down. He is instantly alarmed by the sight of her red-rimmed eyes. “Hey,” he says, his voice a murmur designed to stay within the bunks. “You okay?”
Khan shakes her head.
John finishes the excavation and leans down to join her, insofar as that’s possible. To close the gap, at any rate. In a crazy way, the risk is less because they’re doing this by day and on the move. The engine noise will help to cover any sounds they make, and nobody else is likely to head for the bunks any time soon.
Tentatively, with due regard to the narrow space, the crazy angle and her fragility, he puts his arms around her. He doesn’t ask any questions, just waits for her to talk.
Which she does. She has held it in long enough, and to hell with stiff upper lips.
“When we were running for cover in Invercrae, I got a contraction,” she says. She talks into his chest to mute the sound. Also so he doesn’t have to look at her flushed, out-of-control face. “When it didn’t come back, I thought it must just have been a stomach-ache, but this morning I got three in the space of an hour. I’ve been dosing myself up with home-made tocolytics. Magnesium sulphate at first, then Stephen told me there was nifedipine in the med kit. I’m fine now, but I’d lay ten to one odds I’m going to drop this payload before we get anywhere near Beacon.”
There’s a long silence. His arms tighten around her just a little, transmitting reassurance. “Okay,” he says at last. “So you have the baby in Rosie. It’s okay, Rina. We can make the lab sterile, and you’re surrounded by biologists. We know how it works. Plus Lucien’s got masses of first-aid training. Penny too, I think. You’ll be as safe here as anywhere else. Safer, even. You name me another maternity ward that’s got its own flamethrower.”
