Austral

by Paul McAuley

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But you don’t think they will.’

  ‘If they come close enough I can zap their leader, put a good scare into them.’

  But we both knew that wasn’t very likely.

  I took first watch. The moon was a dim smudge behind the cloud cover, barely enough light to make out the shape of the land, so I used the night-vision app of the goggles to keep track of the wolves. Three bright phantoms just out of range of my pistol, watching me watch them. It was almost companionable, like the camps of two groups of travellers heading towards the same destination.

  A cold wind blew out of the west, feathering snow off the knife-edged ridge. I walked up and down to keep warm, trampling a narrow slot in the snow. When the girl volunteered to take over I told her she could stand watch for just an hour, warned her about frostbite. ‘Stay close. Wake me if anything happens.’

  ‘What if they, you know, decide to charge at us?’

  We were two shadows on the pale slope, looking out into the darkness towards the spot where the wolves were laid up.

  ‘They probably won’t,’ I said. ‘But if they do, scream as loud as you can.’

  ‘You could give me the pistol.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I know how to use it. I was trained on a counter-kidnapping course.’

  ‘When you get home you should ask for your money back.’

  I handed over the goggles and wriggled into my sleeping bag and sat with my back against a boulder, listening to the wind and the uneasy movements of the mammoth. If the damn thing panicked it could trample me, knock the skimmer over and send it rolling down the slope …

  I jerked awake when the mammoth bugled a shrill call. Stood in a flare of hasty panic, thinking that the wolves had finally chosen their moment, tangled my feet in my sleeping bag and fell flat on my face. As I pushed to my knees, groping for my pistol, the mammoth bugled again and the girl materialised out of the faint moonlight, pointing past me, past the clump of boulders. On top of the ridge, dark forms were moving against the dark sky. Two mammoths, each carrying a rider, turning one after the other down the slope towards us.

  19

  The mammoth riders, Alya Ross Zappia and Archie Meabe Diez, were husband and wife, employees of a company that managed the forests below the west side of the Herbert Plateau. The two of them grey-haired and weather-beaten, dressed in long leather and fur riding coats over cold weather gear, armed with hunting rifles and accompanied by a pair of elkhounds. Alya, a practical broad-beamed woman, set to examining the injured mammoth while the girl told Archie how we had rescued it from the wolves.

  ‘You won’t have to worry about them any more,’ Archie said, making a show of studying the dark slope through the scope of his rifle. But the wolves had slunk away. They knew when they were outnumbered. They knew better than me, it turned out.

  Mama would have called Alya and Archie half-and-halfs. People who were neither one thing nor the other, spending some of their time in the back country, the rest in a settlement or town. The mammoths they rode and the mammoth we’d saved from the wolves, a three-year-old female named Marguerite, were part of a small herd that carried people and supplies where machines couldn’t go, dragged out felled and dead trees, so on. Alya fed Marguerite with a swatch of compressed hay and treated her wounded leg with nanobiotics and spray bandage, while Archie explained that a small crew of troublemakers had stopped by their settlement yesterday. Asking all kinds of questions, swiping supplies, turning the mammoths loose out of sheer bloody mischief before they left.

  ‘They were looking for a husky woman and a young girl,’ Archie said. Under the fur brim of his hat his shrewd dark eyes reflected sparks of light from the lantern his wife had set on top of a boulder. ‘I can’t help wondering if you might know them.’

  I shot a look at the girl, who so far had kept her word, hadn’t said anything about our circumstances. ‘Was one of them a big man called Mike Mike? Shaved head, neat little chin beard?’

  ‘That’s the fellow,’ Archie said.

  ‘I know his boss slightly,’ I said. ‘Where did he and his friends head off to, when they left your settlement?’

  ‘Down towards the coast. Maybe Charlotte Bay. They didn’t say and we didn’t ask.’

  Archie sketched a rough map in the snow. It seemed that Mike Mike and his crew had circled around the Cayley Valley and Blériot Basin, cutting through Catwalk Pass to the Herbert Plateau and taking the road to the coast. That’s where the foresters’ settlement was located, according to Archie, not far from the old ecopoet tree nursery.

  It made sense. Mike Mike must have figured out that we’d be heading towards Charlotte Bay, the only town on this stretch of the west coast, was planning to get there before we did.

  ‘City folk,’ Archie said. ‘If they wanted hospitality and help all they had to do was ask, like any civilised human being.’

  According to him, the foresters had had a time of it, rounding up their mammoths. ‘Marguerite is the last. She always was skittish. Bolted out across the plateau, then wandered north instead of coming back home. Bad luck she ran into wolves, but good luck she ran into you.’

  ‘Good luck for her, at least,’ I said.

  I was wary and suspicious, wondering whether the two foresters had recognised us from police alerts or news feeds, wondering what Mike Mike might have told them. But they seemed friendly enough, didn’t ask where we’d come from or where we were going, what kind of trouble we were in. At the time, fool that I was, I thought that it was no more than back-country courtesy.

  Archie broke out supplies and heated up a mushroom stew sharpened with juniper berries and pine needles, and he and his wife sat with the two dogs, watching benevolently as the girl and I ate most of the food, and telling us a little about their work. It wasn’t so different from the work of ecopoets – growing and planting out saplings, thinning new growth and cutting brush, removing trees that showed signs of disease, keeping watch for fires sparked by summer lightning storms, so on. They raised quail, ring-necked pheasants and grey partridge, so that people from the city could shoot them and think they’d bagged wild birds, and in winter worked as guides for sports hunters. They hunted for their larder, too. Their dogs, alert muscular beasts with black and white coats and tightly rolled tails, had been bred to track big game like elk and reindeer, wolves even, and hold them at bay until their owners arrived.

  The girl dozed off while we talked and Alya and Archie turned in soon afterwards, sleeping under a heap of furs close beside their mammoths, but I stayed awake. Drinking tea, walking up and down in the dark. I didn’t entirely trust the foresters, but figured that it couldn’t hurt to ride along with them and score supplies at their settlement. Heading to Charlotte Bay was out of the question now, we’d have to travel further south. To Neko Harbour, say. Or maybe I could find another refuge, hide the girl there while I negotiated with her father. It didn’t seem impossible.

  At first light, we breakfasted on a mess of porridge Archie boiled up, laced with plenty of butter and gritty brown sugar, broke camp, and headed on up towards the Herbert Plateau. The girl and I riding the skimmer, Alya and Archie perched on shaped seats strapped to the shoulders of their mammoths, the stray, Marguerite, trotting between them and the two elkhounds loping along on either side. No sign of the wolves, no sign of anything moving anywhere on the snowy slopes.

  The mammoths and their riders set a good pace, leading us into a steephead valley, climbing past a chute of broken ice at the far end and topping out and heading across the plateau. About an hour into the journey the lump of porridge in my stomach began to revolve and I got the sweats and dry heaves and had to stop the skimmer. After I’d purged, I told the foresters it was probably something I’d eaten yesterday, no reflection on their hospitality. They made no comment, but when I returned to the skimmer the girl volunteered to drive.

  ‘I know how. And if you aren’t feeling well …’

  ‘I
t isn’t an illness,’ I said, with a glare that shut her up, and we went on, picking up an ice road that cut through dunes of blown snow and corrugated fields of sastrugi, skirting the blue eye of a shallow meltwater lake and turning south, running parallel to broken ridges of snow-streaked rock off to the west.

  Towards noon the road climbed to the top of a low rise and I saw a chip of green in the distance and stopped to give it the once-over. The zoom app of the goggles revealed a big faceted structure looming over a scatter of tumbledown outbuildings on a flat-topped hill – the girl told me that it was one of the radar stations built by the Argentine military when the cold war over the continent’s resources had heated up back in the last quarter of the previous century. There was a station just like this one south of O’Higgins, she said, she’d visited it last year.

  ‘They kept watch on three-hundred-and-sixty degrees of sky, could detect incoming aircraft or missiles hundreds of kilometres away. After the crisis passed, they were used to track satellites and orbital debris.’

  ‘Does anyone have a use for them now?’

  ‘I don’t know about that one,’ the girl said. ‘But the station I visited had been abandoned a long time ago.’

  ‘Doesn’t much look like any kind of place where forestry workers would live, does it?’

  I had an uneasy feeling. I didn’t remember seeing anything like that installation on the journey with Mama, which meant that we’d gone past the road that descended towards the coast.

  Alya and Archie were waiting for us a little way ahead. When we caught up with them Alya looked down from her seat and asked if everything was all right. Her mammoth was dark-haired and hump-shouldered. The curls of its tusks were tipped with caps of wood stained black and fretted with patterns intricate as snowflakes.

  ‘What’s that place ahead?’ I said. ‘Who lives there?’

  My left hand was in the pocket of my jacket, gripping the pistol.

  ‘Just some people we know. We can rest up there. You can find supplies.’

  ‘I thought I could find supplies at your settlement. But we passed the turn-off for that, didn’t we?’

  ‘After those troublemakers came through and took what they wanted, we’re low on what you might need. But you can buy all kinds of stuff up ahead.’

  Alya’s face was, what’s the word? Impassive. Like stone. Impossible to read. Frost stars glittered in her eyelashes, the crown of her fur hat.

  I said, ‘Why am I just now learning this?’

  ‘We thought you wouldn’t want to take the same route as the people looking for you. You come with us, it’s OK.’

  I thought that things were very far from being OK. Had the sick feeling that I’d been led astray by these so-called foresters, that maybe they weren’t who they claimed to be, weren’t from that settlement on the coast road – if it even existed.

  ‘If it’s all right with you, we’ll head on past,’ I said.

  Alya shrugged as if it was no concern of hers. ‘You go where you want. But it’s a long way to anywhere you can get food. And there’s plenty of food right there at the stopping place.’

  ‘We’ll manage,’ I said, still trying to figure out how to play this, and that’s when the girl jumped off the skimmer and ran across the road.

  ‘This woman kidnapped me,’ she said to Alya, speaking quickly, breathlessly, as I came up behind her. ‘I’m the daughter of an important man, he’ll pay a reward for my safe return.’

  She tried to duck away when I gripped her shoulder. I turned her around, gave her a little shove towards the skimmer. ‘We had a deal,’ I said.

  ‘I only agreed because there was no choice. And anyway, you’re a criminal. So it doesn’t matter what I promised. It doesn’t count.’

  ‘You gave your word. Of course it counts.’

  The girl looked at the foresters sitting on their mounts, watching our little show. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please please please take me with you.’

  I pulled out my pistol, holding it by my side, telling Alya and Archie, ‘I saved your mammoth and you shared your food, so I reckon we’re square. You go your way, I’ll go mine, and that’ll be that. But first, you’ll have to give up your rifles. You know, just for insurance. I’ll leave them a couple of kilometres down the way. When I’m gone you can double back and collect them.’

  ‘Is that how you want it?’ Alya said.

  No change in her expression, her calm gaze. Archie sat still and watchful beside her, the flaps of his fur hat tied under his chin, the long barrel of his hunting rifle sticking up behind.

  ‘It’s how it has to be,’ I said.

  ‘You’re making a mistake,’ Archie said.

  ‘Keep quiet, Archie,’ Alya said, without moving her gaze from me.

  ‘We can take the girl, let you go free,’ he said.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you to keep quiet?’

  ‘I made a mistake when I thought you could help us,’ I said. ‘Now, how about you hand over your rifles. You first, Alya. By the barrel, if you please.’

  Neither Alya nor Archie spoke or gave any sign I could see, but the damn dogs leaped up and ran under the belly of Alya’s mammoth, ran straight at me. I managed to jerk up my pistol and shoot one with a taser taglet, and as it yelped and writhed the other slammed into me and bit down on my arm, clamping its jaws just below my elbow. I guess the idea was to make me let go of the pistol, but I pushed against the dog’s weight instead, the claws of its hind legs scratching on the surface of the road as it tried and failed to keep its balance, and as its head was forced up I chopped its throat with the edge of my free hand. It yelped and let go of my arm, and I grabbed it by its collar and hind legs and tossed it straight at Alya.

  She had unshipped her hunting rifle, was aiming it at me, but it slewed sideways when the dog slammed into her and in that bare moment I fired my pistol again. Not at Alya or Archie, but at the eye of Alya’s mammoth. The taglet must have hurt worse than any hornet’s sting. The animal bellowed and reared up, toppling Alya from her perch, and took off down the road. The other mammoths followed, Archie yelling and gripping the horn of his seat like a rodeo rider, the stray, Marguerite, bringing up the rear.

  Alya lay on her back, dazed by her fall, barely stirring when I kicked the sole of her boot. The dogs growled, but flinched back when I flourished the pistol at them. The bites in my arm were beginning to hurt. Under my weatherproof, the sleeve of my uniform jacket was wet with blood.

  ‘Don’t hurt her,’ the girl said.

  ‘Get on the skimmer before you cause more trouble,’ I said. ‘Go on now.’

  The girl looked at the green building, far away on its flat-topped hill.

  ‘There’s nothing for you there,’ I said. ‘Nothing you want, anyway. Get on the damn skimmer.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Down to the coast. As fast as we can.’

  ‘They were helping us.’

  ‘They tricked us and led us here is what they did. And now I’m going to do my best to get away.’

  I turned back the way we’d come, preferring to face Mike Mike rather than the unknown. But I hadn’t gone very far when the girl cried out and thumped an urgent tattoo on my back. I glanced around, saw skimmers shooting away from the old radar station, and immediately swerved off the ice road. I was hoping to find a hiding place or a way off the plateau between the half-buried hills, but the pursuers were faster, and knew the terrain. As they gained on me a fat little orange cylinder capped with two pairs of props spun down out of the air, effortlessly matching my speeding skimmer. A voice blared from it, telling me to give up, it would go easy if I did, and when I aimed my pistol at the damn thing it fired something that smacked into my shoulder, a sticky ball exploding in a tangle of cords lively as snakes. Whipping around me, tightening, pinning my arms to my sides, yanking my hands from the skimmer’s yoke.

  The skimmer slewed sideways and the girl and I tumbled off, rolling apart in a flurry of snow. By the time I’d struggled t
o my feet the girl was running towards our pursuers. Tripping on an ice ridge, jumping up, running on, no doubt believing that she was being rescued. I shouted after her, but it was no good. People were climbing off the skimmers. Two walked past the girl, heading towards me.

  I struggled against the cords that bound my arms and braced for a fight I knew I couldn’t win.

  20

  The inside of the radar station was as tall and hollow as a decommissioned cathedral. Shafts of light lanced through rips in its walls, splashing on and around a circle of tents and vehicles. Six, seven mammoths staked out along a high line. Dirty snow patching the poured concrete floor, trash scattered everywhere.

  A couple of dozen people, half of them children, turned out to watch as the girl and I were marched into this filthy little camp. One was a husky, a burly boy maybe the girl’s age or a little younger. Our gazes met for a moment as I was hustled past. I was bruised and bleeding, arms bound to my sides by a tangle of cords, leashed by a leather strap looped around my neck and tugged along by one of my captors like a prize animal. Which I guess I kind of was.

  I’d managed to get in a few good kicks when the two bravos had tried to subdue me out on the ice, headbutting one before the other shot me with a beanbag round. When I came back to my senses they’d taken away my cutlery and fastened a bracelet – not one of mine, this one was black rather than prison orange – around one of my wrists, blocking access to my fone. I had a bad feeling that they’d done this kind of thing before, and then I saw that one of the vehicles in the camp, an ancient sno-crawler, was painted with a big mural of an angry skua, wings flared and hooked beak gaping, and knew who they were, knew that I was in serious bad trouble.

  The girl and I were pushed through the flaps of a yurt, the onlookers crowding in behind us. It was warm and close in there, easily twenty degrees Celsius, dimly lit by random sparklights floating under slanting roof poles. The floor was lapped with a deep puddle of dark brown cultured fur, and an old woman sat on a low stool in front of a curtained bed, the hem of her suede skirt brushing the toes of her sturdy mukluks.