The Boy on the Bridge

by M. R. Carey

  When the pressure in his head gets to be too much, Greaves sits down quickly on the floor of the lab and hides his face in his hands.

  He can do it. He knows he can.

  He can make a vaccine.

  One by one, he defines the procedural obstacles in his mind and considers how they might be addressed. This will have to be a live vaccine, not even attenuated. And it will be heterotypic, including not just cells from the pathogen but also cells from this child’s spectacularly modified brain. Embed the symbiotic tissue like a seed crystal, to teach a normal human brain how to welcome the invader. How to collaborate instead of resisting.

  But there are thousands of human brains in Beacon. The task will be huge. He calculates the volume of serum that would be required.

  And how it might be obtained.

  Five minutes later, he is still sitting in the same position. Still paralysed by the implications of what he is about to do.

  32

  They’re moving again, back down across the plateau on a roughly south-westerly vector. Foss is up in the turret, and wishing very hard that she was somewhere else.

  All through the day she has been seeing things. Flicks of movement in the furze, the long grass, behind the occasional rock ridge or up on the elbow of a messy tumble of scree. Nothing odd about that, of course. There are plenty of things out there that might be moving. But it doesn’t feel quite random enough: it feels like every time she doesn’t quite see something, it’s the identical something she didn’t quite see last time. There is some trick of tone or colour or velocity that makes her scalp prickle with déjà vu.

  It’s just paranoia. It has to be. Living in a tank will do that to you. Any kind of enclosed space, for that matter. The horizon is too close, and it never moves. Then when you get up in the turret and take a look outside, any movement you do see gets exaggerated. It takes a while to push past that, to get your eye in again.

  But it shouldn’t take all bloody day.

  The afternoon is petering out into tardy, sullen evening. Rosie seems to empathise, slowing more or less to human walking speed. She will be stopping soon, since driving cross-country at night on unknown terrain is outside even Sixsmith’s skill set.

  The sky starts to put its sunset colours on, which is a fine thing to see and distracts Foss from her growing obsession for all of five minutes. But the rapidly cooling air gives her an opportunity to try something new. She takes out the UV glasses. Toggled to N-NORMAL, they are maximally receptive in the 22–33 degrees Celsius range and at distances of less than 100 metres. On that setting, they show Rosie as more or less alone in the endless night. There are a few yellow-green blurs at ground level where small nocturnal mammals are hunting and being hunted. The rest is cold, passive blue.

  Foss is prepared to buy that, but there is one more thing she can do to see what the night has up its sleeve.

  She resets the goggles to E-ENHANCED. In this mode, she can access the headset’s processing software and tweak the resolution to focus on a specific temperature range.

  She goes low. Then lower. Then right to the bottom of the gauge.

  And Jesus Christ almighty, the little bastards are everywhere.

  “What are we talking about?” Fournier asks for about the tenth time. “What exactly are we talking about? Give me facts, Private, not conjecture.”

  Well, I wasn’t a private when I signed up for this job, Foss reflects, and I’m sure as hell not a private now, so clearly you can’t have been talking to me. Accordingly she addresses herself to the colonel and to McQueen.

  They’re all jammed into the crew quarters, elbow to elbow, so there’s no need for her to raise her voice. Everybody is right up in everybody else’s face except for the Robot, who has flattened himself against the latrine door out of pure holy terror of someone accidentally touching him.

  “These things are in the blue,” she says. “Cold-passive. Shaped like people, but if they were people they’d be dead. They don’t show up at all unless you dial the contrast all the way up, and even then they’re so close to background you pretty much only see them when they move. I’d put their core temperature around 13 Celsius.”

  She speaks slowly and clearly. Part of her wants to yell and wave and point, but this is her first official debriefing in her new role and rank and she wants to do it right. Plus, it’s not as if they’re going anywhere. They are dug in for the night now, having lost what was left of the light ten or twenty minutes ago. Bad timing, but it’s not as though Foss could have done what she just did any earlier in the day.

  “That temperature reading is spot-on for hungries,” Sealey says. Foss is grateful. Someone had to play the straight man here.

  “Yeah, but the movement isn’t,” she says. “They were jogging along on either side of us, keeping pace with Rosie but not closing. And they were in formation. Like a kind of a wedge on either side, with one pacemaker and then a bunch of them strung out along a widening line. Does any of that sound like hungries to you?”

  Nobody answers. The colonel takes the goggles and goes to see for himself, leaving everyone in the crew quarters taking turns to open their mouth, find nothing to say and close it again.

  McQueen catches up quickly though, and he ends up in the same place Foss did. “If these are the guys who set up that barricade …”

  “They can’t be,” Akimwe interjects. “We’ve covered forty miles on bad ground since we left the road. Even hungries would have hit the wall by now.”

  Foss begs to differ, but she doesn’t bother to say it. They stopped to go up the mountain, after all. And you hear stories about squads driving for days on end in a jeep or a hummer on good tarmac with a hungry chasing their tail the whole way. It’s a moot point, though. She doesn’t think these are hungries. She has no idea what they are. She didn’t even mention the creepiest part, which is that they’re pint-sized. Human body plan, just way too small.

  Man-eating hobbits? Feral ten-year-olds?

  The colonel comes back from the mid-section and hands the goggles back to her. He is very quiet.

  Foss has to ask. “Did you see them, sir?”

  He shakes his head. “Nothing in sight.”

  “But they’re out there,” Foss blurts. “I didn’t imagine this!”

  “I don’t for a moment believe you did, Foss,” Carlisle says. “I’m assuming they’re still close by, and that they went to ground when we stopped.”

  “Wouldn’t have had to stop if we’d stayed on the road,” Sixsmith says. Her voice has a raw edge to it. Everybody turns to stare at her and she shrugs, defensive but still angry. “I’m sorry, but it’s true. We could have outrun them on asphalt and we could have kept on going through the night if we had to. As it is, we’re stuck here until morning. Assuming they tried to trap us with that barricade, we finessed ourselves into the trap when we ran away from them.”

  Fournier gets to his feet, all on his dignity but also really rattled. To Foss, he looks like he’s standing up to add to his physical size the way a scared cat does. “May I remind you,” he says frigidly, “that going off-road was a decision made by myself and Colonel Carlisle jointly, in response to a real threat.”

  McQueen gives a mirthless chuckle. “Nobody saw a threat apart from you,” he says. “But I imagine that happens to you a lot.”

  Carlisle moves in quickly to shut McQueen down. Ours not to reason why, evidently. “That’s enough, all of you. Foss, is there anything you can add to what you’ve already told us? Numbers? Appearance?”

  “I saw eight of them,” Foss says. There’s no doubt about that: she took the time to count. “But there could easily be more, because like I said they were running in a pretty loose sort of formation. Maybe I was only seeing the ones who were closest to us. There could have been more of them hanging back, or flanking us. I wouldn’t have got much of a reading through the trees.”

  “Were they armed?”

  “I can’t be sure, sir.”

  “Did you get a s
ense of what they look like?”

  Foss could have done without that question but she answers it anyway, knowing that she’s going to sound like an idiot. “They were way below normal adult height. The tallest one I saw was only about four feet or so.” She hesitates for a moment, but there’s no point in holding back details that might be important. “Visible light was poor, obviously. That’s why I went to enhanced thermal. But it looked like some of them were holding things. Weapons, maybe.”

  “Oh my God!” Dr. Penny bleats. She turns to look at Khan. “I told you, Rina. I saw children down by the loch right after the cull. You remember?”

  “Children?” Dr. Fournier’s tone is one of bewilderment tinged with contempt. “We’re not being pursued by children.”

  “I just said they were small,” Foss snaps, all out of patience. “Did you hear me mention children?”

  “Pygmies, then?” Fournier inquires snidely. “It’s a shame you weren’t properly trained in observation.”

  The colonel comes in again, saving Dr. Fournier from a short sharp meal of rifle butt. “Please. Let’s deal with the situation on the ground. Since we don’t know the first thing about what we’re facing, we have to assume that their intentions are hostile and prepare accordingly. I want a three-man watch throughout the night. The cockpit, the turret and the mid-section platform. Sixsmith, let’s have the intracom wide open at all points so we’ll all know instantly if there’s a sighting.”

  As Sixsmith heads aft, Foss does the maths. “Sir, a three-man watch—”

  “I know. With a man down, one of us will have to double up. That might as well be me, since I’ve had the least to do today. You and Sixsmith will take second watch. Mr. McQueen, Private Phillips, you’re with me. Dr. Fournier, you and your team had best get some sleep. We’ll move on as soon as there’s adequate light.”

  “With respect, Colonel.” It’s Khan speaking up this time, which shouldn’t come as any surprise since she’s got the biggest mouth of anyone on the science team (Foss hasn’t forgotten that idiot jibe). But she hardly ever makes a peep when the colonel is talking. For some reason he gets a free ride while Khan talks to the rest of the escort like they’re shit on her shoe. Even now she is respectful, almost apologising for disagreeing with him. “I don’t think we should move on. Not right away. I think we need to find out what these things are.”

  She looks around at Fournier, at the rest of the whitecoats. “Don’t we? I mean, look at the facts. If they’re that cold they’re not baseline human. The safe call would have to be hungries—especially if they’ve been keeping pace with us across all this distance. If you were human, trying to maintain that speed, your heart would burst. But hungries don’t use tools, so this doesn’t add up. We have to find out what it is we’ve got here.”

  “I said I didn’t see what they were holding,” Foss points out. Although maybe she did, she just isn’t sure. Until she is, she is more than happy to be disagreeing with Khan.

  Which is mutual, clearly. Khan rounds on her. “The barricade back there was a tool,” she says coldly. “It was meant to break our treads or trap us. That’s why I think we should stop and check this out. If they’re hungries, we need to know how they can make that kind of calculation. Or build structures, for that matter.”

  “We’re not sure that they did,” Sealey objects. “Is there any evidence that these … entities we’re seeing now had anything to do with the ambush back there?”

  “What kind of evidence would you be looking for?” Akimwe says. “Seriously, John, there’s no point in kidding ourselves here. We were targeted long before we met the barricade. As far back as Invercrae. We were attacked there and we had to run. But we didn’t run fast enough and we were followed, from Invercrae to that barricade and from the barricade all the way to here. Or are you saying we’ve somehow run across three separate groups of people who all have unfriendly agendas?”

  “People,” McQueen says, with no particular inflection so you can’t tell if it’s a question or not.

  “You know what I mean.”

  McQueen blows out his cheeks. “Well, I presume you mean what you say. But that’s precisely what you don’t actually know.” He looks from Akimwe to Sealey and then to Carlisle. There’s a real intensity in that look, a challenge. This isn’t just him saying black because the colonel said white. McQueen has got something between his teeth. Finally he nods his head towards Khan. “She’s right. You know bloody well she is. Foss’s bogeys are around four feet tall. Dr. Penny confirms she saw something that fits that profile back at the loch. And they show on the thermals as hungries, not people. I mean Jesus, isn’t looking for oddballs part of the mission statement? I can’t believe any of you are seriously considering walking away from this.”

  The colonel seems about to speak, but he hesitates, weighing his words.

  Dr. Fournier jumps adroitly into the gap. “Yes,” he says quickly. “I can see an argument for stopping here and finding out who or what these things are. For as long as it takes. We should make camp and investigate. Stay here until we’ve got answers.”

  It’s difficult to keep up the calm, judicious tone—difficult to speak the words at all. Really he thinks running away makes much, much more sense, but his brief from the brigadier is to introduce as much delay as he can. Going off-road was a start, but this is better. It could hold them up for days, especially if—as he hopes and prays—there’s nothing out there to be found.

  Two or three other people try to speak at once, but Sixsmith interrupts them all when she returns with the news that the intracom is dead. Her face is grim and angry.

  “You mean the reception is poor?” the colonel asks her.

  “No, sir, I mean it’s dead. It’s not working at all. Permission to speak to you privately about that.”

  “We can worry about the intracom later,” Fournier says quickly. The less said about that the better, since it was probably him taking that component out of the cockpit radio that killed their internal comms. “Colonel, Dr. Khan has made an excellent point. What we’re seeing here speaks directly to our core mission statement. I believe we have to stop and investigate further.”

  The colonel doesn’t answer at once. When he does, it’s with a heavy emphasis. It almost looks to Fournier as though he’s gritting his teeth. As though he knows how this is going to go, but he feels he has to say his piece anyway. “Going by Foss’s account,” he says, “we don’t know the numerical strength of the opposition we’ll face or how they’re armed. When you talk about investigating further, Doctor, do you envisage my people or yours doing the investigating?”

  “Ask for volunteers,” Dr. Khan suggests. “Nobody has to go who doesn’t want to. And we can keep the engine running.”

  “Rina—” Carlisle begins.

  “I’ll lead a team,” McQueen breaks in. “Happy to.”

  “I’ll go too,” Foss says. “I mean, if that’s the decision, Colonel. I volunteer.”

  “That seems eminently reasonable,” Dr. Fournier says happily. “A team of volunteers.”

  “To do what?” the colonel demands, with strained patience. “To track our pursuers down and bring one back alive for interrogation? Or for medical testing? How does that scenario play out, Doctor?”

  But Fournier can see that the colonel has lost the argument. Everyone else in the room is up for this. The scientists are excited at the prospect of finding something entirely new, and the soldiers are seeing some possible payback for Private Lutes.

  The only one who seems to be less than happy about the situation—apart from Carlisle himself—is Greaves. The boy has a stricken look, and his mouth seems to be moving without any sound as though he’s speaking under his breath.

  Fournier ignores him. “I would expect,” he says, “that this would be like a regular sampling run in most respects. We choose our targets, then we clear and collect.”

  “We?” Foss repeats. “Will you be leading the science team then, Dr. Fournier?”

>   Fournier pretends he hasn’t heard. His presence isn’t needed on sampling runs. Everybody knows that. There’s no point in rehashing old arguments. He looks to the colonel, whose sombre face suggests that he hasn’t yet reached a verdict.

  “If the feeling is that we should do this,” Carlisle says at last, with visible reluctance, “and if that feeling is unanimous apart from me, then I’ll withdraw my objections. If there’s a split vote, then we don’t proceed.”

  “All those in favour,” says McQueen before anyone else can. “Let’s see those hands.” His own is already raised.

  One by one they join him. Khan and Fournier first. Phillips. Sealey. Sixsmith. Penny. Akimwe. Finally, almost apologetically, Foss.

  If the colonel is chagrined at the defeat, he doesn’t let it show in his face. “Very well,” he says. “It’s decided.”

  But something is happening on the other side of the room, and it’s happening to Stephen Greaves. He seems to be building up to a crisis of some kind, moving his weight from one foot to the other as though he’s walking on the spot.

  “Over to you, Lieutenant,” McQueen says to Foss. “But count me in.”

  “I’ll draw up a roster,” Foss says. But everybody’s eyes are shifting to the Robot now. He’s going to say something, for sure. Well, either that or throw up.

  In the event, what he does is to shake his head. He does this with some vigour, like a dog coming up out of a river.

  “Stephen,” Dr. Khan says. “Are you all right?”

  “No,” Greaves says loudly. And then, inexplicably, “It’s not.”

  He has the floor. It’s a rare enough event for him to speak up at all when they’re all together like this, and it’s unheard of for him to raise his voice. Most of the time he keeps his head down and speaks into the breast pocket of his lab coat, as though he keeps a hidden microphone in there.

  “Not what?” Khan coaxes.

  Greaves shakes his head again, even more emphatically than before. McQueen rolls his eyes. “Kid, the grown-ups are—”