by Paul McAuley
‘Stand up straight,’ I told the girl. ‘Let them come to you.’
‘Suppose they’re the bad guys.’
‘I’m going to take care of them. Just stand there, you’ll be fine.’
We were on top of an ice ridge, its edges cut by steep snow-packed crevices. I redialled my pistol and slid down one of those crevices, burrowing into the snow and lying quiet and still, a trickle of icy water worming under the collar of my uniform jacket. I couldn’t see the skimmer but I could hear it, the buzz of its motors and the crunch of snow under its skis and drive track. A vibration shivered through my body as it went past, and I sort of swam up through the snow and saw that it had stopped a little way in front of the girl.
She stood tall and slender against the darkening sky. Unflinching. Maybe she was hoping that the skimmer’s riders were her father’s people come to rescue her, or maybe she had some sand in her after all.
The pillion passenger climbed off the skimmer, a big man in a hooded red jacket, clutching a pistol in his gloved fist. The girl raised her hands as he walked towards her, and I jacked up, shedding a cocoon of snow, and fired a burst of taser taglets. As the man fell down, I ran flat out at the skimmer and smashed into the driver. We tumbled over the far side and I straddled him and slammed his head against hard ice until he stopped moving. Rolled off him and aimed my pistol at the passenger as he pushed to his hands and knees, and told him to stay exactly where he was if he wanted to live.
14
I disarmed the passenger and the unconscious driver and threw their cutlery out into the chaos of ice. Cuffed the passenger with loops of memory plastic I found on his belt, snapped a fone blocker around his wrist, and squatted in front of him and told him how things would go.
‘If you answer my questions, I’ll leave your friend untied, so when he comes round he can cut you free. Otherwise, I’ll truss him up just like I’ve trussed you, and leave the pair of you to freeze to death.’
I’d pushed back his hood, pulled off his goggles and scarf. He squinted at me, sullen and defiant, frozen snot crusting his beard.
‘To start with,’ I said, ‘you can tell me how you hooked up with Mayra Iturriaga.’
‘You don’t have to worry about the old woman,’ the passenger said. ‘After that stunt you pulled back at the refuge? She’s gone.’
‘You’re saying what? That rock killed her?’
‘She fell off the cliff, smashed both her legs. Broken legs, out here? She was dead weight. So we put her out of her misery.’
Sue me and send me to hell, but I was glad to hear that the crazy old woman had taken a cold nap, and I haven’t changed my mind since. Two bodies were found buried in the spoil heaps at the mine after all this was over, one of them Oldin Andersen’s, the other a woman missing presumed dead after she didn’t return from a hunting trip. The police reckon that Mayra Iturriaga was responsible for them, that she killed at least six more people out in the back country. Not to mention that she tried to kill me, too. No, the way I look at it, she most definitely got what she deserved.
‘It’s my friends you have to worry about,’ the passenger said, told me that none of them had been hurt bad when I’d dropped that boulder on their heads. A busted wrist, a sprained ankle, some bruises, nothing that would keep them from the hunt. The boulder had taken out one of their skimmers, but they’d found the one I’d taken from the old woman, so call it even. ‘They know we spotted you, they know exactly where you are, and they’re gonna be along any minute.’
‘And who are they, these friends of yours? What do they want?’
‘Sit tight and you’ll find out soon enough.’
‘You aren’t police, that’s for sure. And you aren’t back-country people, either. Not with that fancy gear you’re wearing. So I guess you’re working for Keever Bishop.’
‘You think you’re pretty smart.’
‘I’m not the one tied up.’
‘You got lucky is what it is.’
‘Is Keever part of this little hunting party?’
‘Like I said, wait and see.’
The driver stirred a little when I yanked his arms up behind his back, mumbling a liquid string of nonsense into his fur-trimmed hood. I brandished a loop of plastic, smiled at the passenger. I’d torn the knife wound in my shoulder during the struggle with the driver, it was throbbing something fierce and I could feel a trickle of blood creeping down my flank. That, and the fear that the rest of the crew could be heading towards us, had considerably shortened my temper.
‘It’s minus fifteen right now,’ I said. ‘And going to get a lot colder when it gets dark. No problem for me. I’m a husky. The ice is my home. But if I leave both of you tied up, strip off your cold weather gear, do you think you’ll survive until your friends find you?’
The passenger told me to go fuck myself and looked away when I repeated the question. I had to slap him around to get him into a civil frame of mind, and the girl turned and walked off a little way, too genteel and weak-stomached to witness what was necessary for our survival. The bravo snorted blood from his nose, told me that Keever wasn’t in on the hunt, but he was taking a very personal interest in bringing me down, very much wanted to make me pay for having inconvenienced him. I was asking if the passenger’s friends were the only ones chasing us, asking where they were supposed to take us after they caught us, when the girl spoke up, telling me that the skimmer had started talking.
It was a man’s voice, a voice I recognised. Squawking from a little skywave handset hung by a loop from the yoke of the skimmer.
‘Mike Mike,’ I said. ‘What’s up?’
‘As if you don’t know,’ Mike Mike said. ‘I suppose you took down those two fools.’
‘Don’t be too hard on them. They’re out of their depth.’
‘I could say the same about you, Stral. How’s the girl? Have you been taking good care of her?’
‘She’s fine,’ I said, looking at her.
‘Glad to hear it. You know how this is going to play out, don’t you? You know you can’t outrun us.’
‘I know I’m about to steal a skimmer and try my best.’
‘Your best won’t be good enough, I promise you that.’
‘What’s this all about, Mike Mike? Why are you risking your life and liberty with this kidnapping nonsense?’
‘Keever had something going with the girl’s father,’ Mike Mike said. ‘She was supposed to be collateral. You know, to make sure the Honourable Deputy behaved himself. Keever’s pissed at you because you didn’t stick with the script and fucked up his plans. But if you give up the girl right now, he might go easy on you.’
I thought of Keever finding out about you, said, ‘You know he won’t.’
‘All right. Maybe he won’t. But you know he won’t stop looking for you. And how long do you think you can keep the girl alive out here?’
‘I’ve done all right so far. Where is Keever right now? Is he still on the peninsula?’
Mike Mike ignored that. ‘I can’t promise that you’ll be able to walk away from this, Stral. But if you don’t give me any more trouble I’ll make sure Keever doesn’t take it out on the girl. You try to run, though, there won’t be a pretty ending.’
‘That doesn’t sound like much of a deal.’
‘It’s the best I can offer. Wait there, OK? I’ll be along shortly.’
‘See you around, Mike Mike,’ I said, and threw the handset out onto the ice.
I should have crippled or killed those two bravos, but I didn’t. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I never was the kind of monster some make me out to be. No, I left them to be rescued by Mike Mike and took off on the skimmer, the girl riding behind me. I’d shut it down and rebooted it in safe mode, disabling sat-nav and comms and pretty much everything but the manual controls, knew that it might be carrying some kind of hidden tracking device but had to take the risk because I needed to make some distance as quickly as possible.
We cut west
and south in a wide arc, climbing back up to the top of the plateau where the going was easier. My blood was singing with exhilaration. We were still being hunted, but for the moment I had the advantage.
I swung the skimmer around crevasses, jolted over ridges and fields of broken ice, smashed through drifts. At last, with no sign of any pursuit, twilight beginning to stretch out across the land, I stopped and built a snow wall against the light wind and brewed tea. That was when I realised that in the scramble to escape when Mike Mike’s crew pitched up at the refuge I had forgotten to pack the reindeer meat, which I’d left outside so it would stay frozen.
The girl and I shared half the last ration pack and I stripped off my windproof and my uniform jacket to inspect my shoulder. Blood stuck my shirt to my skin, black on the blue cloth, and when I peeled it off the knife cut started bleeding again. I scrubbed it with snow as best I could, held the lips of the wound closed while the girl smoothed on a fresh bandage, and then we set off again.
It was fully dark, I was wearing Mayra Iturriaga’s goggles, using their night-vision app, when at last I spotted a way sign set on a solitary flat-topped outcrop. A path descended in tight loops between tumbles of ice and rakes of rock, passed between two rugged bluffs and emerged at the head of a semicircular valley. Another way sign pointed towards raw cliffs looming at the valley’s southern edge. I took a sighting and drove up a gravel slope into a narrow defile.
The refuge was at the end of a steep path choked with tumbled rocks. It wasn’t much. A crescent of stones sprayed with insulation foam that walled off a low ledge, a poured resin floor, a few old traps and cooking utensils hung from hooks screwed into one wall. I set the stove in the centre and brewed up more tea, and the girl and I ate what was left of the ration pack. And that was that. The two bravos who’d come chasing after us hadn’t been carrying any supplies because they were the kind of fools who didn’t realise that you could get into serious trouble when you went off road in the back country. Apart from a few packets of condiments we were all out of food.
I told the girl that it wasn’t a problem, I could forage in the valley come daylight. Told her that the bad guys wouldn’t find us because they wouldn’t know about a little place like this, and in any case they’d expect us to take the easy and direct route straight across the top of the plateau instead of diverting into the dead end of a hanging valley.
She sat quiet for a couple of minutes, knees drawn up to her chin, arms wrapped around her shins, brooding on that. She’d shucked the hood of her bodysuit and her blonde hair shone dull gold in the single sparklight I’d stuck to the low ceiling. The ride had reddened her cheeks, left her lips white and cracked.
At last, she said, ‘The people chasing us, are they really working for Keever Bishop?’
‘We’ve had a long and difficult day. Right now we should get some rest. And if you want, we can talk about it in the morning.’
‘You said I didn’t have to worry about him.’
‘And I was wrong. I admit it. But we got away, and that’s all that matters.’
‘That man on the radio. He said my father was involved with him.’
‘Did he ever mention Keever? Your father.’
‘If he did, would I be asking you about it now?’ the girl said, with a sharp edge to her voice.
‘I guess not. Well, it doesn’t really matter.’
Keever had mentioned something about settling business with Alberto Toomy, back at Kilometre 200, but as far as I was concerned it was a complication I didn’t need.
‘You could use it to blackmail him,’ the girl said.
‘I don’t need to. I have you.’
‘You could cause him some real trouble. Get back at him for what our family did to yours.’
‘That kind of thing never works out,’ I said, thinking of how Mama had tried and failed to cause trouble for Eddie Toomy. ‘And besides, I don’t want anything from your family but the price of a ticket off the peninsula.’
The girl was quiet for a moment, looking past me as she examined something in her head. ‘He left in the middle of the lunch,’ she said.
‘The lunch before the ribbon-cutting ceremony?’
‘He was gone for about an hour. When he came back, he told me that he had been talking with some of the guards about conditions in the camp. He said that the convicts had it too easy, said that he could create a nice little scandal about it. But it might be, mightn’t it, that that was when he met with your friend Keever Bishop.’
‘I guess.’
I was bone-tired and really truly wasn’t interested in any connivance between Keever and Alberto Toomy, but the girl insisted on following her train of thought to the end.
‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘that Daddy was supposed to help with the escape, and he refused?’
‘All I know is that Keever Bishop wanted me to confront your father. To get in his face and cause a fuss. But I didn’t want to play, I got in the middle of that attempt to snatch you, and here we are. Now, enough with the questions and pointless speculation. You need to go outside, shit or take a piss? No? Then get to fucking sleep already.’
We rolled out our sleeping bags either side of the stove. I drifted off while thinking about what had happened and what to do next, where to go, and when I woke it was eight in the morning, about an hour before sunrise. The girl was fast asleep and didn’t stir when I ducked outside, planning to check the weather and forage for food.
It had stopped snowing. The strip of sky above the high rock walls of the defile was a deep pure blue several shades darker than my uniform, and there was just enough light to make out a small shape lying on the shawl of fresh-fallen snow.
The corpse of a hare clad in its white winter coat, a bright splash of blood on its muzzle.
15
‘If it’s a gift,’ the girl said, ‘who left it there?’
‘I don’t know. Elves, maybe.’
‘Seriously.’
‘Seriously, I really don’t know.’
‘It could be the owner of that drone,’ the girl said. ‘The one that snatched the other drone out of the sky?’
I’d been wondering the same thing. And I’d also been wondering if that predator drone could have come from the work camp, if Paz and Sage had hijacked it and were using it to keep watch over the girl and me. I mean, I knew it wasn’t very likely, but it wasn’t very likely that some random stranger would take pity on me either, and the idea that Paz and Sage had knocked out Mike Mike’s drone, that the gift of the hare was another sign that they were trying to help me in any way they could, all for one, one for all kind of thing, had revived my hope that I’d somehow make this mess come good. But I wasn’t about to tell the girl about my friends, so I said that it was just as likely that the hare had been left by a passing trapper who’d seen our plight, or by a hermit who lived somewhere round about.
The girl glanced at the entrance of the shelter, as if she expected, what’s the word, an apparition wearing furs and necklaces of teeth to stoop through. ‘Why would they leave it and sneak away? Wouldn’t they want to at least say hello?’
‘People who live out here don’t have much use for other people,’ I said. ‘That’s why they live out here. Now pay attention while I butcher this fine animal. It’s the kind of thing you need to know how to do if you’re going to survive in the back country.’
The hare’s limp body was stretched on the floor between us, patches of grey on its belly where its winter colouring hadn’t fully come in and now never would. I used Mayra Iturriaga’s knife to slice circles in the skin around its forelimbs and its throat, and the girl made a choked little noise when I stripped off its fur and skin like a bloody jacket, looked away when I slit open its belly.
‘I’m not going to eat any of that,’ she said. ‘I won’t.’
‘Think of it as fuel. Fuel to keep you warm against the cold. Fuel to keep you going.’
‘I’ll manage.’
She had a stubborn look that was b
ecoming all too familiar.
‘There’s no point sticking to a principle if it could hurt you,’ I said.
‘There’s no point giving up a principle because it’s the easy thing to do.’
It wasn’t a bad retort, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.
‘Put on your gear,’ I said. ‘We’ll go look for grass and leaves.’
It was cold and still. No footprints in the snow except our own, no tracks but those left by our skimmer. Low clouds sagging in the sky. Nothing moving up there. Nothing I could see, anyway. But I hoped, how I hoped, that someone, Paz and Sage or a kindly stranger, was watching over us.
Kicking snow and truffling around, I found a patch of spongy grey lichen, what some call reindeer moss. Back in the shelter I stuffed a couple of handfuls into the little food printer and finished butchering the hare. I ate its heart and liver raw, amused by the girl’s disgust, and seared strips of meat and the hind legs on the stove. The sizzle of cooking flesh filled the little shelter with blue grease smoke and a smell that sprang saliva in my mouth. While the girl doggedly chewed wafers the colour and texture of wet cardboard that had been spat out by the printer, I wolfed down hare meat and cracked long bones to get at the marrow, and believed that I could feel my cells plumping up with fat and protein.
Stupidly cheerful, I changed the bandage on my shoulder, packed up camp, and chivvied the girl onto the back of the skimmer. I couldn’t leave her in the shelter because it was too rudimentary and too exposed, and there was the very real risk that Keever’s people would follow our tracks across the plateau into the valley. No, we had to keep moving until we found a place of safety, and we weren’t that far, now, from a little town name of Charlotte Bay where Mama and I had rested up during our trek. One of my grandmother’s friends – Alicia Whangapirita, I believe I’ve mentioned her before – had helped us out back then, and I was wondering if she might help me now. Might even help me ransom the girl. And if she wouldn’t or couldn’t, I’d steal supplies, maybe even steal a boat, and find a place somewhere along the coast where I could ransom the girl before heading south to the people smugglers.
