by Chris Ward
The Mortin house came up on the left, a three-storey townhouse separated from the two houses on either side by a polite space wide enough only to remove the term terrace from its description, and to leave it flanked by two vicious wind tunnels that whistled so loud in the dead of winter that you could believe the house was about to be torn off its moorings and whisked away into the snowy hills to the north.
A single light was on in a downstairs window, a tiny glimmer scratching at the thick air-raid curtains that had been hung across the glass.
So, it appeared Isabella had heard the rumours too.
Whether by some sixth sense or a CCTV system that was invisible to Victor’s searching eyes, Isabella must have known he was coming, because she flung the door open and stepped out before he had even turned through the rusty gate at the bottom of her path. She stood there with one hand on the door and the other buried in hair ruffled by the wind like a creature born of storm and snow.
‘What are you still doing here?’ she shouted as soon as he was close enough to hear. ‘Are you crazy? Get out of here before the whole town gets destroyed!’
She reached down, grabbed a handful of ice, and flung it at him. He flinched and stepped aside, holding up a hand to shield his face, and continued making his way towards her. Her gesture might have been for aesthetic purposes, but she tried one more time before giving up and stepping back inside to let him into the house.
As she pulled the door shut behind him, he shook the ice off his jacket and turned around. Before his eyes had even focused, a hard, cold hand cracked him across the side of the face.
‘Who do you think you are, coming here, Victor Mishin?’ She glared at him, her nostrils flaring, little flakes of ice caught in her unruly mop of hair.
To call Isabella wild was akin to calling a mad dog rabid. It was a wholly appropriate description, but only told half the story. She was a product both of her upbringing and her environment, a young woman who in better times and places might achieve greatness in some field or other, or at least become a battalion at the centre of a large and fruitful family. Stuck here in Brevik with her unflinching father and rampant younger siblings, she rebelled in the only way she could, by lambasting any and all who treated her with a modicum of respect.
‘I wanted to see you,’ he said. ‘Just in case, you know.’
‘In case of nuclear war? In case of a second Holocaust? How thoughtful! Why not just write me a letter?’
Victor sighed. ‘We’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘No one wants this place. We don’t even want it.’
‘Speak for yourself! The enemy is coming and you know it. In less than a week I’ll be lying on my back getting systematically raped by a squadron of European Confederation solders. Where will you be then, Victor? Playing with your stupid robots?’
He shrugged. He tried to think of something witty to say, but such comments rarely worked to stem the tide of Isabella’s fury. Instead, he just said, ‘Probably.’
‘Well, it’s all right for some!’
‘I guess it’s all right for you,’ she said, and he sensed her temper starting to level out. ‘You have actual skills. You’ll be assimilated, assigned to build weapons so they can kill even more of us. You’ll probably even get paid.’ Her eyes gave one more flash of ire. ‘Spend it on something good, Victor! Make sure you have a good time in some sleazy bar while I’m getting gang-raped!’
He opened his mouth and waited for a reply to form, but she had already pushed past him and headed for the living room further down the hall. Victor glanced up at the stairs across the entranceway that led up to the second floor, but there was no sign of her brother and sister. Her brother ran with the gangs who terrorised the Lenin District in the southwest part of town just beyond the area where Victor lived, while her sister, not yet fifteen, was rumoured to be making a merry penny in the alleys around the train station. It was clear that despite Isabella’s best efforts, her siblings were following the path assigned to most of the town’s youth, but the merest suggestion that Isabella’s surrogate parenting was proving counterproductive would find him cast out into the snow and ice, the door slammed in his face.
‘I’m so glad you finally came to your senses,’ she was saying as he entered the living room. A fire blazed with welcome heat from a hearth in the far wall, while a heavy pine table in the centre was neatly adorned with cups and saucers and a steaming kettle. Unless she was pre-preparing for possible guests or even refugees, she had to have guessed he was coming. Victor felt a mite of satisfaction knowing that much of her anger had probably diffused itself in the hallway while she waited for him to arrive. Isabella was like a lit fuse; she could briefly flare bright, but her anger never lasted long.
‘I have to say, I wondered if I would ever see you again,’ she said, handing him a cup of steaming tea. Just the aroma of it was enough to make his senses melt. ‘I’ve heard trains are leaving for the east and not coming back. Going anywhere they can. The Baikal Oasis, or even on to Vladivostok. That horrible city must be so full of refugees by now that it’s a surprise our whole country doesn’t tip up and send us all pouring into the Japan Sea.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘I should hope not. I couldn’t live without you.’
Victor didn’t want to point out that she did a fine job of it during their extended periods of estrangement. ‘I’m pretty sure we’ll be safe here,’ he said. ‘That hit on the munitions factory was just strategic. They have nothing to gain by occupying us.’
Isabella dashed around the table and ran up to him, taking his hands and holding them against his chest. Up close it was easier to see the humanity behind the feral exterior; her eyes shone with both hope and fear.
‘How can you be sure?’
The truth was that he couldn’t. All he could do was spout wild speculation in the hope of reassuring her. ‘I was at a council meeting before I came here. There’s nothing to suggest that the airstrike was any more than a one-off.’
‘I hope you’re right, Victor. I’m so terrified. Can you stay with me tonight?’
There was nowhere Isabella was wilder than in the bedroom, where her internal fury made for sessions of lovemaking that left Victor breathless for days afterwards, but today he shook his head. ‘Nothing would make me happier, but I have work to do,’ he said.
She pushed away from him. ‘You’d turn down time with me to go and wire some rich bastard’s fuse box? You swine, Victor. Get out!’
He’d expected such a reaction and was already moving towards the door. As her open palms swiped at him, he backed away until he could turn and jerk open the front door without opening himself up to attack. As he stood there on the threshold with the wild winter billowing at his back, he lifted a hand and blew her a kiss. ‘I’ll be back soon with more news.’
‘Get out!’
The slamming door missed his fingers by inches, and as he stumbled backwards Victor was lucky not to slip and fall, twisting himself into a staggering pirouette and regaining his footing before the rocks hidden under the ice greeted his face. Behind him, he heard Isabella shouting something on the other side of the door, but whether it was directed at him or some other unseen person, he couldn’t tell.
Their meeting had gone better than expected. A request for protection and an offer of sex certainly outdid the threats of death and the waving kitchen knife he had expected.
Despite the threat of impending war, the day was looking up.
3
Secrets and Messages
The second robot was some kind of surveillance machine, built to burrow through deep snow to stealthily approach its target, then capture visuals and sound using a periscope-like instrument that could rise up through the top of the snow, then transmit the data back to a source computer.
It was crude and awkward, the kind of thing a university scientist nerd might build to spy on his cheating girlfriend. It looked stupid, had a fragile, ungainly shape, and didn’t even work.
Kuro
u thought it was a masterpiece.
As he picked it apart one circuit board at a time, He tried not to think about the multi-billion-dollar fortune that was just out of his reach. He had once travelled the world surrounded by state-of-the-art machinery to which even governments had no access, with an endless source of funds available from anywhere at any time. People said money couldn’t buy everything, but the fallacy of that assumption depended on your circumstances. When you were in control you could buy yourself a plateau that stood higher than the law. When you lost control all that excessive wealth did was tie a beacon around your neck that brought your enemies running.
He was hunted by someone even more dangerous than him. If he tried to access his money, he would be found.
The only thing that was more important than money was power, and right now Kurou had none.
All he had was a room full of junkyard electronics, and the awe of a young man who thought he was a god. It would have to be enough.
The security robot’s A.I. component was too complex for his crude computer systems to access, but he was able to figure out its role. It was primitive, something that technological development had far surpassed in the last couple of decades, but gave the robot the ability to made its own decisions based on its target’s actions, be them to continue to observe or to make a subtle retreat. It had no weapons systems, but there was a data wiping function that would activate when the machine was captured or tampered with. The inventor was obviously an amateur, because Kurou’s interference would have triggered it had he not been careful to check for such a device first.
Now he had full access to the data collected by the robot so far, but it was pretty boring stuff. It had been sent to spy on the inventor’s neighbours, returning pointless statistical information about meal times, pre-sleep rituals, the duration of usage of lighting and heating systems, and other inane information of no use to anyone. Everything stank of experimentation, that the inventor had built this machine on a whim with no idea what he really wanted to do with it.
Kurou had found it in the place he had requested along with a couple of pages of notes written in formal Russian that had pushed his understanding of the language to its limits. The inventor’s tone was one of overzealousness, a burgeoning enthusiasm for his work, but at the same time lacked direction. Kurou quickly realised that rather than some incumbent member of the science community, he had discovered a hobbyist who had no idea how progressive his creations were. Of course, compared to what Kurou called innovative they were simple and crude, but for someone growing up in this throwback nowhere town at the end of the world they were startlingly impressive.
Kurou needed to know more, so he modified the surveillance robot as best he could and set it to work.
Spying on its creator.
Victor waited three days and then he went out to the abandoned café on the edge of town to see if his broken robot had been returned.
As he ducked through the partly collapsed entrance, he was disappointed to see that the single remaining table was bare. He glanced behind him, afraid he had been suckered into a trap, but there was no one there. He headed back towards the entrance and then noticed a piece of paper held down by a rock in the lee of the wall, out of the way of the icy snow gusting in through the entrance. Victor snatched it up and read it over with a wild grin on his face.
* * *
I need a little more time to make my modifications. I also need more equipment. I would greatly appreciate it if you could provide me with the following items:
* * *
What followed was a modest list of items ranging from computer equipment to power tools. Several model numbers were specified, all of which were long out of date, as if the stranger had been living off the grid for quite some time. The wish list had a very childlike air about it, reminding Victor of his first forays into scientific experimentation as an adolescent with a chemistry set borrowed from school, where every puff of smoke or spark of light was a revelation. The note could have come from his own younger self.
Victor wasn’t sure he could provide everything without going up to the secret place. He hadn’t planned on going up there again until spring, because at this time of year the road would be waist-deep in snow and the entrance so well hidden that it would be a trial to find it at all, let alone get inside.
The few visitors that passed through the town—usually in transit to somewhere else—often felt like the winter was never-ending, but from April through to September there was a significant thaw. Permafrost was common higher up in the hills, even around some of the mines, but the town itself became a veritable oasis of moderate warmth. Some evenings Victor didn’t even need to build a fire. Once the snow came though, anywhere not regularly plowed quickly became inaccessible.
Victor didn’t know if the city council knew about the secret place. It was possible that they did, but he had never seen anyone up there. If he made a request for a team to clear the trail of snow, however, the secret place would no longer be secret, and whatever dreams he had had for its contents would be lost.
His mysterious benefactor would have to make do with what Victor could find in his own basement. Hopefully it would be enough, but even as he got home and began to rummage through drawers and cupboards, Victor began to worry that the stranger might be angered by his inability to cope with the requests. What if he gave up on Victor altogether and decided to leave or find someone else? Perhaps the road up into the hills that led past the trail to the secret place was worth the risk. The mining companies often ploughed the roads privately, not waiting for the council to get to it. If he left early tomorrow he could make it up and back before dark if it wasn’t snowed in. But, spending the night there didn’t bear thinking about, and if he got caught halfway when night fell….
He left the goods he could find in the old café on the way to his afternoon work assignment. A factory that built car bodyworks had been experiencing trouble with its alarm systems, and Victor was commissioned to fix them. The alarms had been heard going off in the middle of the night, even when the security teams found no sign of any intruders. After inspecting the computer programs set up to control the system, Victor found some kind of downloaded virus that was disrupting the timing, making the alarms fire at random times. The virus had caused a number of fuses to blow, which was making the problem worse.
He gave the management an estimate of three days to fix it, and quoted them a price. After a little negotiation, a deal was struck and Victor headed home to collect the tools he needed. It crossed his mind that an assistant might prove useful, and wondered if a work assignment might draw out his mysterious benefactor. He took a detour out to the café, thinking to leave a note.
The café stood a hundred metres from the entrance ramp to the main highway that passed Brevik on its southern side. At this time of year traffic was always sparse, but as Victor reached the café he saw the lights of a number of vehicles in convoy making the turn off towards the town.
They were Russian military, old Soviet vehicles that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a museum. One was riddled with gunshots and another had a broken windscreen partly covered with a clear tarpaulin.
Overhead, the grey skies seemed to carry more dread than usual as the line of vehicles limped along through the snow, heading for the town centre. Victor ducked inside the café door as they passed, afraid to be seen. Through the side windows he caught glimpses of grim-faced military officers, their expressions carrying the weight of a far distant war that was slowly, inexorably drawing closer. As he watched the vehicles disappearing into the gloom, their tracks already being filled by fresh snow, he couldn’t shake a feeling that today marked a threshold, that from here onwards things would be different.
Inside the café, he found another note, this one with a request that surprised him.
4
Knives, blood, and wolves
Leov rolled the knife across his palms as he waited for the drug to take effect. Amazing it was, he
thought, that in a place where it was so hard to find basic necessities like food or work, narcotics were as abundant as fruit on the autumn trees in the Baikal Oasis Zone.
He had never liked his job until the day after it ended, when he realised there would be no more money coming. Forty-three years old, he had lived his entire adult life in a series of dormitories owned by his employer, Navakov Deep Shaft Operations. The explosion that had killed thirty of his colleagues and rendered the mine unsafe for further excavations had also ended a neatly rounded twenty-five years’ employment.
He had been added to a waiting list for vacancies at other companies, but with his days open to a boredom he hadn’t known existed, he had followed the river down into the same addictions that had swallowed many of his former colleagues. Only yesterday he had shared a crack pipe with his former foreman, and then woken freezing next to the man’s stiff body, the crust of blood around his nose frozen into a pluming ice flower that had lifted off his face as it contracted like a hand waving goodbye.
The knife, a coating of rust parting around the blade edge where he had sharpened it on the edge of a broken porcelain bowl, had come from the bins at the back of one of the bars near the train station, discarded because the wooden handle had split down the middle. Leov had wrapped a piece of cloth around it to make it easier to grip when he decided the time was right to use it. As he felt his senses beginning to dull, he knew he was close.
