by E. J. Swift
‘Fucking hell, it really is you. How did you get out of that tower?’
‘After you authorized the skadi to blow it up with me inside, you mean?’
‘Is that what I’m here for?’
‘It doesn’t matter how I got out. We’re here to talk about Whitefly. Now promise me, Linus – and remember I know you – promise me you haven’t set us up.’
He looks at her, the incredulity still there.
‘No. I came because I was interested. I gave her – you – my word.’
‘Good.’
‘We can trust him?’ asks Dien.
‘For now.’
‘What the hell are you doing here, this side of the border? We – I thought you were dead!’
‘That doesn’t matter. And don’t tell me anyone grieved for me either, because I won’t believe you. Tell us about Whitefly.’
Linus seems to crumple.
‘How did you find out about Whitefly?’
‘Axel left me some interesting material.’
‘Axel was delusional.’
‘Yes. But what he found was real.’
Linus doesn’t answer.
‘It’s true, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
The word seems to evacuate him, leaving behind a husk. For a moment Adelaide glimpses the man behind the politician: tired, no, exhausted, a man weary of the world and his role within it.
‘How long have you known?’ she asks.
‘Not as long as you seem to think. Dmitri knows, of course – doesn’t bother him. We could be living on the moon for all he cares, as long as it doesn’t affect his precious trading. Our dear father didn’t see fit to induct me into its mysteries until I started pledging support for the west.’ Linus falls into reflection. ‘That changed everything.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
He laughs at that, a brief spark through the weariness. ‘Do you really need to ask? Tell you, the most capricious person in the City? I’d be insane.’
‘I had a right to know. Me and Axel. We both did.’
‘Believe me, you were better off not knowing,’ he says.
‘He’s right about that,’ Dien remarks. ‘We all were. Because now we have to do something about it.’
Linus’s gaze slides to Dien.
‘And what exactly do you propose we do about it? If this comes out I might as well write my own execution order.’
‘That’s why we’re giving you an ultimatum. The Silverfish here, and me.’ Dien nods to Adelaide. ‘Tell him. You’re right, he listens to you, fuck knows why.’
‘We do have evidence,’ she says. ‘And Dien will use it, unless you get the distress signal back out.’
‘Stars above, you are actually insane. How the hell am I supposed to do that?’
‘You’re the only one who can. The Facility, am I right? That’s where Operation Whitefly runs from. Right above my old penthouse. Ironic, really. Some might even say, sadistic.’
‘You were the only person who would never have noticed,’ says Linus.
‘I’ve noticed now. Linus, listen to me. I know you’re not used to this, but I’m serious. Do you remember what you said to me? When you were trying to get me to help Vikram, all that time ago? You said people needed hope. You said there might be life outside the city. It was you who authorized the expedition boat, wasn’t it? Because you knew about this. You were hoping that boat would get out. If an expedition returns, it lets you off the hook. Whitefly could be quietly buried without anyone ever having to know about it. I’m right, aren’t I?’
Something tremors in Linus’s face when she says the words expedition boat. She has hit a nerve. Now’s the time to push her advantage.
‘I heard you on the o’dio,’ she says gently.
‘What if I did authorize it?’ he mutters. ‘Why would I risk everything doing this?’
‘You can’t live with this, Linus. It’s eating away at you. I get it. Me and Dien, we didn’t want to find this out either. I know I used to laugh at you when you said there might be people out there. But I want to know now. I have to know. One way or another, this is coming out.’
Linus shakes his head.
‘I never thought I’d see the day.’
‘What?’
‘You preaching right and wrong at me.’
She smiles serenely.
‘That day has come.’
‘The expedition boat might return,’ he says hopefully. ‘I know it got out.’
‘Have you heard anything?’
‘No. But that doesn’t mean…’ He trails off, and for a moment she has the impression his mind is working, he’s holding something back. Then he slumps in his chair, defeated. ‘No, I haven’t heard anything.’
‘All right.’ Dien jumps to her feet. ‘We need to know when you’re going to do this. How fast can you move?’
Linus looks at her with bemusement. ‘It’s been a secret for fifty years. What’s the rush?’
‘Why wait?’ Dien counters.
‘I just don’t understand what you’re hoping to achieve.’
‘It has to be broadcast on all the channels,’ says Adelaide. ‘Otherwise there’s no point. Trust me, Linus – get that signal out again, and people will soon be asking questions. And that’s all we need.’
‘Let’s say a week,’ says Dien. ‘Twenty-two hundred – that’s your time. We’ll be listening each night.’
He shrugs.
‘Have it your way. But don’t expect me to come and give you an airlift when the city descends into riots.’
‘We won’t.’
Linus turns to Adelaide.
‘What about you? You’re going to stay here like what – some kind of revolutionary?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you expect me to go back to the Domain and carry on this charade, pretending you’re dead?’
‘It’s a tiny charade in comparison to the one you’ve been enacting.’
‘Our grandfather’s dying,’ Linus says abruptly.
‘I know.’
‘His mind is deteriorating. He talks Siberian half the time now, has me reading old poetry to him. He thinks I’m Axel. He asks for you. You always were his favourite.’ He states it without bitterness or resentment. ‘You should see him.’
‘I can’t do that. I’m sorry. He has to be your responsibility now.’
At the door, Linus pauses. He speaks quietly, without looking at her.
‘I did grieve for you.’
All other plans are put on hold while they wait for Linus to act, and each day that passes without the signal is a day where Dien’s mood worsens. Adelaide spends as much time as she can with the Larssons, eating stew together, soaking in their silent warmth and kindness. But by the final evening of waiting her own composure is as brittle as Dien’s, and in the end the tension is too much and she takes herself away from the apartment, ignoring Dien’s protests.
‘What if it’s early? What if you miss it? Rechnov, I’m talking to you!’
‘Linus is always on time,’ says Adelaide.
She goes outside and walks over the raft racks, her balance easy and certain, as far as the local links will take her. Only a few weeks until midsummer. The days are long and there is a wealth of light, almost too much light; it seems inappropriate, when all their movements are so furtive.
She crouches on the raft rack, watching the soft grey dimples, the ever-moving symmetry of the water. In it, the reflections of the towers sway and muddle. People pass behind her, their footsteps hurried over the raft rack, which bows beneath their weight so the water laps against it and against the oiled toes of her boots, and she knows a moment of lost equilibrium where she might tumble forwards. The moment where she could fall feels more real than all the moments of stillness which precede it. They are on the edge of something.
The purple colour of the sky tells her it’s nearing the hour. She walks back the way she came.
When she enters the apartment Dien is where
she left her, folded in on herself in the chair, legs tucked under her, all of her focus on the o’dio. She doesn’t say a word as Adelaide comes in and sits at the table.
Every few seconds Dien fiddles with the o’dio, but the broadcast remains the same – a late-night show, the broadcaster’s words dropping into the vacuum between them. The minutes tick by. Twenty-two hundred approaches. Adelaide feels her chest tightening like a spring as the seconds tick down.
And pass the hour.
The broadcast does not change.
‘You said your brother is always on time,’ says Dien.
‘He is.’
‘So?’
‘Something’s happened.’
They wait. Adelaide can feel the disappointment welling around her.
Come on, Linus.
‘Maybe he got caught.’ Dien pauses. ‘Or maybe he lied to you. We shouldn’t have trusted him.’
Adelaide can see the rigidity in her body, the strength required for Dien to hold herself up against this defeat, yet another defeat, another card in the deck stacked against her, all the things she can no longer not notice. But this time, the blame is undeniably with Adelaide.
The o’dio gurgles.
Both women tense.
This is the City of Osiris calling to all nations. If you receive this message, know that we are at the mercy of the elements and unable to leave the City. Please send help urgently. I repeat, if you receive this message, please send help.
‘Oh my stars,’ Dien whispers. ‘Oh my actual stars.’
Adelaide looks at the clock.
It’s twenty-two oh-nine.
ANTARCTICA
THE CALL COMES just after twenty-two hundred, when Karis is seconds away from bringing down the Bokolu. He’s been hunting the creature for days now; stalking it through the decaying settlements of the outer empires of Tua’pala, along the tortuous path of Ruination Ridge and the dripping black forests on the dark side of the moon, and finally trekking alone across the purple outback, following the creature’s tracks in the dust, smelling its pheromones. Throughout the hunt he has glimpsed the Bokolu a mere five times, but those five were enough to memorize the writhing swish of its tail and the wet click of those gigantic pincers. He’s sweated and bled and lost companions along the way, one of them to the creature’s jaws – he won’t forget those sounds in a hurry. There are times when he has tried to climb inside the Bokolu’s mind, to penetrate the alien rhythms of its thoughts and senses. Times he’s thought he was going mad. And now the Bokolu is in his sights. He has a nano-rifle slung across his body and a submachine gun cradled in his arms. He’s ready.
The Bokolu has seen him. It is looking directly at him.
His heart rate trebles. The sub is heavy.
And then the call comes through. It’s Atrak.
The Bokolu begins to advance.
Seriously? It has to be now?
The call persists. It seems to come from very far away, reaching out to him across the vacuum of space, as though a tether is willowing out from Earth towards Karis on the indigo moon, and when he answers the tether connects to the helmet of his spacesuit with a magnetic snap, jerking him messily, carelessly off-world.
He rips off the sensors and lurches out of the immersive. His head is reeling.
‘Yes?’
They won’t tell him what it is, which means that it’s serious. Ever since the boat got out they’ve been on high alert. He has a bad feeling.
A taxi is already waiting outside his apartment block, the driver standing in the rain to hold open the door for him. Not unattractive, Karis notices. He climbs inside and the taxi jets away at once. Covertly, he checks out the driver in the rear-view mirror and for a few moments allows himself to imagine that this is a different scenario entirely, that he’s out or in the cloud and might introduce himself. The usual disclaimers run through his head – what story can I tell, what occupation, I could tell him I’m from Belgrano, I could tell him I’m from Tolstyi.
‘Late call, Commander?’ asks the driver, catching his eye.
‘Unexpected call.’
He looks away. The bluish lights of the peninsula settlement dapple the streets and splinter through the rain. Karis pushes a sober pill into his mouth, though he hasn’t been drinking. As the woolliness of the immersive fades from his body, the light shining through the rain seems less soft, as if it isn’t rain at all, but the product of some clinical trial or design, like lasers, or a series of silver darts striking against the earth, darts containing messages from an unknown race in another galaxy, or the Bokolu preparing to unleash its revenge.
The team at Special Unit Atrak who monitor the city in the ocean debrief him. It’s a radio signal. They play it back, and when he requests it, play it a second, and then a third time. The four of them sit there in the room where they have dutifully compiled measurements once a week for the past three years (and before then, before he took this post, others did the same; it’s been going on for years, decades even), the room with its computers silently calculating shipping records and energy outputs and wavelengths, all of them now listening to this remote voice and thinking what the fuck? What the actual fuck?
Karis asks them to play it one more time. He asks, for form’s sake, that they have checked all possible avenues that could suggest this is a hoax. Then he sends a meeting request to the home security chief. By midnight, Karis and Maxil Qyn are in the senate house with a security representative holoed in from each of the nine states.
In the senate house the radio signal is played again. There is an unreality to the recording, a sense that it is crossing not only distance but time as well, although the voice itself is clear and confident. Karis fingers the pack of sober pills in his pocket but doesn’t dare take another in front of Qyn.
He is asked for a technical update, and stands up to deliver it, referring to the weekly reports from the past year, reminding them of the shipwreck on the Patagonian coast and the alleged survivor who thus far they haven’t been able to locate. He shows them the holoma sent by the exiled engineer Taeo Ybanez before his death. The representatives are not really interested. They are all defenders and their attention is placed on the immediate: the lingering echo of the voice, the radio, the intruder in the night.
Maxil Qyn begins the formalities. The radio wavelength is broadcasting as far as Antarctica, which means it will also have reached Patagonia. There is little they can do to contain it now, not with immediate effect. They are left with a number of possibilities. Qyn presents each one in her usual crisp, pragmatic manner.
Scenario one: they do nothing.
Scenario two: they infiltrate the city of Osiris, deactivate the radio signal, and seek to contain the situation by surreptitious means. (Qyn does not use the word surreptitious, but the implication is clear.)
Scenario three: they action a total obliteration of Osiris.
The next few hours are spent in mapping and debating the theoretical consequences of these three scenarios. The representatives of the nine states weave around the issues. They are cautious with their words, their phraseology, but Karis is an analyst by trade, good at reading between lines, and what it comes down to is this:
To do nothing is effectively to issue an open invitation to the Boreals, who can be counted upon to reclaim the lost city at the earliest opportunity. Osiris was a Boreal enterprise; the northern states built it. They might have lied to the world about why they built it, but the fact remains – the city is a piece of equity. In one swoop, they will have regained their military base, and they and their new-age plagues will be one step away from the Republic’s shores. (No one in the room doubts the capacity of the Boreals to subdue the Osirian population.)
To infiltrate the city may buy the Republic some time, but the end result will be the same. The Boreals will come to investigate, and take the city.
To obliterate the city will prevent the Boreals from claiming Osiris as a military base, and also increases the chances of deniability w
ith regards to the Republic’s monitoring of the city for the past fifty years. Such an action convenes both the Nuuk Treaty and the human rights convention, and would not be popular with the public, who will find out eventually, they always do – but it is likely to prevent further bloodshed down the line. An immediate cost for a longer-term gain.
Karis listens and is surprised when Maxil Qyn turns to him and says, ‘Io. Thoughts?’
The others turn to look at him, waiting, a sudden quiet in the room. The fact that they are not physically present doesn’t make it any better. He feels like a specimen.
‘You’re talking about genocide,’ says Karis.
‘Genocide’s an ugly word,’ says Qyn, unblinking. ‘We’re talking about the protection of the Republic.’
Karis looks at the chief, wondering, as he has wondered plenty of times before, what exactly is the driving force behind that steely veneer. Little is known about Qyn’s private life. She has a partner, who appears sometimes at official receptions, but no children. In her office there are no photographs, no paintings, no artefacts of culture or anything to signify personal taste. In their to-date limited dealings, Karis has found her stern but not unfair, and yet she must have made decisions over the years, decisions whose outcomes must by necessity be harsh, unhappy decisions where there are no true winners. Or she would not be in the position she is in today. So is it simple patriotism that motivates her, or something more complex?
‘I think there’s more to investigate before we make a decision,’ says Karis. ‘And I don’t think aggressive action will play well with the public.’
‘We’ll deal with the public if we have to,’ says Qyn. Karis doesn’t doubt it, but he also thinks Qyn would rather avoid a scandal if she can. ‘What is there to investigate?’
‘Patagonia,’ he says firmly. There are nods of agreement from around the table. ‘The Osirian shipwreck.’
‘That’s one man,’ says Qyn. ‘And we’ve already sent agents to recover him. In light of this new development, that order will be revised to termination.’
‘I think we should get him alive,’ says Karis. He is thinking out loud, and with the focus of the room upon him, he can feel beads of sweat breaking out across his forehead. Of all the people sitting in this room, he is the misfit. How is it possible to explain to these people, these veterans of Antarctican wellbeing and security, that his place at this table is more to do with accident than it is to do with choice? Monitoring secret cities is not a vocation, it’s something he fell into, because he was good at it, because he has an eye for analysis, because his predecessor got pregnant and there was no one in their division who had the same expertise, no one but Karis, and because he liked the allure of a life lived behind the secrets act – the mystery he could wrap around himself like a cloak, before it became heavy and cumbersome, before the novelty wore off and he realized slowly that his life was in stagnation. For years he has watched numbers and filed reports. Special Unit Atrak has never been challenging: it’s just a job. A dead-end job.
