Austral

by Paul McAuley

  We walked towards the long low-slung machine, the bodyguard and Lola following as I explained how it could pick up a section of decking and roll to the end of an unfinished bridge, supporting itself on unspanned pillars while it dropped the decking in place. I was rapidly exhausting the little knowledge I’d gleaned from a brief conversation with one of the operators, knew that I was getting deeper and deeper into trouble, but felt a fine high recklessness. I told the girl that the girder erector and the rest of the construction machinery were about to be sent down the line to work on the next stretch of the railway, asked her why she hadn’t wanted to ride along with her father, and that was when the bodyguard tried to shut down the conversation, pointedly thanking me for my time and help.

  ‘You want to shoot some pics, don’t you?’ he said to the girl.

  Lola spoke up, startling me. ‘We’ll have to come along with you. All photography within the bounds of the camp requires authorisation.’

  The bodyguard looked as if he was about to argue the point, but the girl said that it was fine. ‘Besides, they can tell me about the machines.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Lola said, staring at me.

  The girl pointed to the tunnel borer, a gleaming cylinder thirty metres long with a gleaming bouquet of big disc cutters at one end and a spoil conveyor at the other. As we set off towards it, Lola touched my arm and leaned in, told me quietly that I was to stay cool and follow her lead.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘See that ute?’

  Off in the distance, hazed by falling snow, the little crew utility vehicle was motoring along the access road, parallel to the double fence of the camp’s southern boundary.

  ‘What are you into, Lola?’

  ‘Keever has sent a couple of his people to collect the girl.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘It was supposed to go down while you were calling out her father and diverting everyone’s attention. But you fucked that up, so now you’re going to help me.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Keever’s people will keep her some place safe, and while the state police are doing everything they can to find her, he can slip away under their radar. She’ll be turned loose as soon as he’s in the clear.’

  ‘And you’re all right with that?’

  Lola gave me a flat frank look, no trace of warmth in it. The way she’d stare at some newb CO, looking for some weakness or peculiarity she could pounce on.

  ‘I need the money,’ she said. ‘And we both know what Keever will do to us if we don’t go through with this, so don’t give me any more grief. When it kicks off, stick up your hands, keep quiet, let the girl be taken away.’

  ‘The bodyguard might have something to say about that.’

  ‘I’ll put down that slick son of a bitch, no worries. And afterwards, when we raise the alarm, I’ll tell you exactly what to say,’ Lola said, and picked up her pace, catching up with the girl, telling her that she could take as many pictures of the tunnel borer as she liked.

  I had one of those moments when you know you should say or do something but embarrassment, fear or whatever holds you back. And then the moment passed. I was still in the middle of Keever’s thing, no way out, and if I didn’t find some way of dealing with it I was done.

  Off in the distance, the train sounded its horn as it eased across the first bridge, its lights and the floodlights on the bridge’s trusses blurred by falling snow. The bodyguard tossed a little saucer-shaped drone into the air, with neat movements of her hands the girl sent it skimming down the length of the tunnel borer, and the ute cut past a string of hopper wagons and pulled up in front of us.

  As two men climbed out the bodyguard stepped forward, Lola close behind, telling him it was a security check, perfectly routine. They were dressed in standard issue cold weather gear, the men, blue down jackets and black watch caps, but one had a non-regulation pigtail and the other wore a pistol at his hip. I was trying to figure out angles as they walked towards us, was wondering if the bodyguard would back me up if I rushed them, when the girl’s drone dropped out of the air. A moment later sirens began to shrill amongst the blocks. The train had halted on the bridge and the floodlights had snapped off and my fone was blinking a red dot, no signal, in the corner of my vision.

  One of the men had drawn his pistol and the other was brandishing a shock stick, yelling at the bodyguard to put his fucking hands in the air. The bodyguard did no such thing. Quicker than it takes to tell it, neat as a ballet dancer, he turned sideways, conjured a little black pistol into his hand, extended his arm, and with cool precision shot them. Shot the one with the pistol square in the forehead, killing him on the spot, shot the other in the knee, and swung around, raising his arm to protect himself, too late, as Lola slapped him upside the head with a rat-tailed sap. The crack of the blow echoed off the flank of the tunnel borer and the bodyguard collapsed, completely unstrung. Lola kicked the pistol out of his hand and turned to me, saw that I’d drawn my shock stick.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, just as I lunged forward.

  6

  I was kneeling on the small of Lola’s back, securing her wrists with zipcuffs, when the man who’d been shot in the knee sat up, clasping his leg and telling me I was a damn fool or some such. I ignored him, scooped up the bodyguard’s pistol, bundled the girl into the ute and scrambled in beside her. A quick glance showed me that the vehicle was set to manual and its AI and comms were borked – much later I was told that it had also been fitted with a device that spoofed its GPS, fooling surveillance systems into thinking it was somewhere else, frustrating attempts to find me. All I knew at the time was those two bravos had been flying under the radar, and that suited me just fine. I didn’t want to be tracked either.

  As I drove towards the camp, flooring the ute’s accelerator, bucking over ramps that crossed the tracks, the girl found her voice, asked me what I thought I was doing.

  There was a question.

  ‘Taking you to a place of safety,’ I said.

  She attempted a commanding tone. ‘You must take me to my father.’

  ‘He’ll catch up with you later.’

  ‘What about Franco? Your friend hurt him …’

  I guessed that Franco was the bodyguard, told the girl that he would be fine, held up a hand when she started to ask another question. ‘We’re in bad trouble,’ I said, ‘but I’m going to take care of it.’

  I overtook a squad in riot gear jogging towards the camp, drove past the guard tower at the corner of the perimeter wire. Two COs were standing at the rail up there, watching the blocks over the sights of their rifles. The roof of one of the blocks was on fire, black smoke blown flat by the snowy wind.

  Keever’s thing had kicked off, he had somehow cut power and comms, and was no doubt making his way through the wire to the transport pool and freedom. And I had my own plan. It had clicked into place after I zapped Lola and saw the girl standing rigid with shock. She was my golden ticket. The way off the peninsula. The way to save myself and save you. I was crazy, I admit it. But I was lucidly crazy. I knew exactly what I had to do and nothing seemed impossible. It was singing in my blood.

  I cut across the parking lot where my girls and I had played basketball a couple of days before, followed the short road to the yard of the transport pool. My heart gave a little kick when I saw that the outer gate was open. Keever had been there. I was sure of it. There and gone. I briefly wondered where he was, if he was in the air or if he was being driven to the coast and a rendezvous with a fast boat. Wherever he was going, I hoped it was a good long way from the peninsula, hoped he would be too busy to think about coming after me.

  The door of the transport office stood open too. I parked the ute beside it, had to use a little force to extract the girl. More or less carrying her inside, where two COs lay jackknifed on the floor, black tape over eyes and mouths, wrists bound to ankles with double zipcuffs. One a woman I didn’t know, the other the grey-haired veteran, Arnie Velasquez, wh
o’d supervised me when I’d done a stint there. Their heads coming up as the girl and I stepped inside, both of them making furious incoherent sounds.

  I marched the girl past them, pushed her through the door to the visitor processing suite. It took less than a minute to find a box of prison-orange bracelets and snap one around her slender wrist. The bracelet squirmed under my fingers as it adjusted its grip. We fitted every visitor with one. They used skin conductance or some such thing to block fones and apps. I stuffed a couple of spares in my pocket and switched off my own fone – switched her off completely, because I knew that police could get inside fones supposedly offline. A swathe of icons popped up and turned red and faded, and that was it, I was on my own. A cannon working single o, as poor dead Bryan would have said.

  The girl was looking left and right, up and down, no doubt hunting for vanished icons and menus. ‘What have you done?’ she said.

  ‘Making sure no one can track you when comms come back on line. You really don’t know who I am, do you?’

  ‘You’re one of the prison guards. Aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m also your cousin,’ I said, the word like a pebble in my mouth. ‘Austral Morales Ferrado. Your grandfather, Edward Toomy? He was my grandfather too. Your father, he’s my uncle.’

  The girl stared at me for a bare second, then raised a hand as if to tap the air, but her fone was dead, she couldn’t look up the crazy mad husky looming over her, find out if I was telling the truth.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said, sounding small and scared and uncertain.

  ‘A new life. And you’re going to help me get it.’

  Back in the office I opened equipment lockers, pulled out two sets of cold weather gear, a flashlight, a box of foil blankets and the tight roll of a sleeping bag. Working in a hurry, worried that someone could walk in at any second, the two bound COs squirming on the floor behind me, making noise behind their gags.

  Snow boots, one large pair, one small. Ration packs, the squat black cube of a field stove. I shoved everything into a kitbag, steered the girl outside, saw three men in orange coveralls run past and disappear into the falling snow. The doors in the blocks were supposed to lock down when the power went off, but Keever must have sabotaged some or all of them so that he could reach the transport pool. Those three cons had discovered his escape route, and they wouldn’t be the only ones. I wanted more than anything to get out of there, but I knew what cons would do to the COs tied up and helpless, so I locked the girl and the kitbag in the ute, ducked back into the office. Found a pair of scissors and sawed at one of Arnie Velasquez’s zipcuffs, telling him that cons had broken out, he and his pal needed to find a good hiding place. The zipcuff snapped and I shoved the scissors in his hand and ran back outside.

  A muscular bravo in a white vest, orange coveralls pushed down to his waist, was pulling at the ute’s door. Rocking it, banging on the canopy, shouting at the girl to let him in, looking around as I stepped up behind him and zapped him with my shock stick and punched him to the ground. He was bigger than Lola but a lot less trouble. I’d zapped her three times and she’d kept trying to get up and at last I’d had to knock her out with her own sap.

  Two more cons were running across the yard. I swung into the ute and took off, skidding on a patch of slush and nearly smacking sideways into the post of the outer gate, straightening up and turning north.

  The girl said, ‘Did you kill him?’

  It took me a moment to realise what she meant. ‘I put him down is all. The other COs will throw his ass back inside the wire when they find him.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  She was pressed against the door, knees up to her chin, arms wrapped around her shins. Trying to make herself as small as possible. Trying to make herself disappear.

  ‘You’ll see.’

  I hadn’t worked that out yet. I was beginning to realise there were a lot of things I hadn’t worked out.

  There was a space of silence. The girl looked out at the snow blowing through the dark air, snow falling across mudflats and braided channels that stretched towards the sea. At last she said, ‘Are you really my cousin?’

  ‘Yes I am. Really and truly. Didn’t anyone ever tell you about me? My side of the family?’

  The girl looked at me, looked away. ‘I know that my grandfather had a son, before he married. He didn’t say he was … like you.’

  ‘A husky. You can say it. I’m a husky, first generation. My father was a mundane, just like you. An ecopoet. Salix Gabriel Morales, the son of Isabella Schilling Morales and Edward Toomy. Who ran away before my father was born, and never offered us any help when we needed it.’

  ‘Is that why you’re angry?’

  ‘I’m not angry. I’m explaining what this is about. Why I’m going to ask your father to pay what’s owed.’

  ‘I have a special number for emergencies,’ the girl said. ‘If you let me call it, I’ll say that you rescued me. My father, his people, they’ll sort out everything. Any trouble you’re in, they can make it go away. There’ll even be a reward. I’m certain of it. I mean, you saved my life.’

  ‘Fones are down right now. The man who sent those two bravos to snatch you also took out the camp’s comms, part of his escape plan. But don’t worry, I won’t let him get you.’

  ‘If you want money for helping me, you don’t even need to ask my father. I have some.’

  ‘Do you have it here?’

  ‘I can get it.’

  ‘And if I want it, I suppose I’ll have to unlock your fone. Give you a chance to call for help. I don’t think so.’

  Another space of silence. Then the girl said, ‘This is the first time I’ve been in a vehicle that someone drove. I mean actually drove.’

  ‘I guess it’s a day of firsts.’

  ‘You’re pretty good at it.’

  I wondered if she had been trained for situations like this, trained to be friendly and co-operative with kidnappers, or if it was just the kind of polite, empty conversation that fills the idle hours of the rich.

  ‘I had a good teacher,’ I said.

  Way back when on Deception Island Mama had let me tootle around in an ancient jeep because the ability to drive was, according to her, one of the essential survivalist skills. I knew that I’d need everything she’d taught me in the coming days, was starting to put together what I had to do, where I had to go.

  It was a little past 1700 now, growing dark, the weather settling in. A constant hail of white pellets, the kind of snow called graupel, rattled on the ute’s canopy. Visibility was down to a couple of hundred metres and I was driving as fast as I dared, wondering how much time I had before the girl’s disappearance was discovered. Before the bodyguard, Lola and the wounded bravo were found and questioned. Before what I’d done came out. Before the demon or whatever it was that had taken down the prison’s security system was isolated, and the drones and hounds were booted and let loose on my ass. The snow and darkness would help to obscure my trail, but not by much.

  I wasn’t frightened, though. I was elated. I was free and I was on the move and nothing seemed impossible.

  About halfway to the quarry I made a decision and turned off the road and bumped down a stony slope and headed across country, running roughly parallel to the course of the Eliason River. Years ago, Mama had made me memorise the locations of the old ecopoet refuges. There was one up on the edge of the Detroit Plateau, about twenty kilometres to the south and west. We could hole up there for the night, and when I’d worked out the necessary details I’d call the girl’s father and tell him what he had to pay me if he wanted to see her again. I wasn’t going to ask for much. Just enough for my fare and a new identity. And then I could leave the girl behind and make my way south to Square Bay and the people smugglers. It wasn’t far. Over on the other coast, some two hundred and fifty kilometres to the south. I could drive there, or steal a damn boat. I could fucking walk if I had to.

  It all seemed so simple, there at the b
eginning. Little did I know, et cetera.

  I was driving over flat terrain cracked into big polygonal plates and lightly covered in snow. House-sized boulders, erratics dumped by retreating ice, were dotted about like a giant’s game of marbles. Off to the left, a line of trees intermittently visible through gusts of snow marked the course of the river. More trees thickened ahead, and quite soon I was driving through the fringes of the forest, wallowing up and down low ridges, swerving left or right as trees smashed out of the darkness. Crooked spires no more than ten or twelve metres high, bent and warped by snow and ice and wind. I remembered hiking with Mama through a forest just like it the summer we escaped, remembered columns of dusty sunlight slanting between pine trees, moss and ferns thick on the ground. A green cathedral that seemed as old as the world, planted out by ecopoets just fifty years before.

  It was almost completely dark now. I had switched to night-vision mode, a ghostly blue-and-white view patched from the ute’s forward cameras. I couldn’t use my fone to navigate because it might betray my position, but the ute had a simple compass and by aiming roughly south-west I soon found the river.

  It was broad and shallow, trees growing right up to its edge. The ute jacked up when we hit the water and I drove slowly and steadily, the water never rising higher than the door sills. We crossed a crescent of sand and gravel on the far side, and before we re-entered the forest I glimpsed a high spur rising above the trees in the snowy dark and hoped it was Weasel Hill, one of the high rocky ridges that clawed the edge of the basin. I could see the route in my head. Cross the Pyke River, follow the contour line to the western end of the Albone Valley, find the old ecopoet road that ran alongside the remnant of a glacier to the edge of the Detroit Plateau and the refuge.

  The girl sat beside me, silent and somewhat sullen. Resigned to her fate, I hoped, rather than plotting trouble.

  The Pyke River ran fast and strong, white water glimmering in the dark where it broke around rocks and slalomed down rapids. I drove upstream until I found what looked like a good crossing place, bumped the ute down irregular steps of bare rock, and drove straight into the water. The sturdy little vehicle surged onto a pebble shoal and dipped down into the water on the far side, pushing a crest of white water ahead of it. I could see the far bank through the falling snow, and then the ute hit some kind of sinkhole or crevice and slewed sideways and slammed to a halt.