by Cynan Jones
‘Switch your gun off, John.’
‘No, sir. I’m good. I just needed to say it. There was a falcon on the roof, sir.’
‘Branner.’
‘I’m fine, sir.’
A flock of pigeons bloomed into the space above the building, the falcon toying lazily amongst them. Twisting and tilting. As if called by Branner.
‘I’m fine, now, sir. I’ve said it.’
One of the pigeons seemed to glint with a copper sheen as the flock disappeared.
Branner went for the scope. Like he could miniaturise himself and climb within it, out of view.
A cool air. Wind sharpening.
The metal smell of his rifle.
He saw the man on the waste ground lift himself and lean back, hold something to the light. Saw it was not a weapon beside the man but a rod of some type. Some scientific thing.
It will be legit, Branner thought. Some survey. Something to do with the Dock.
There was a hiatus. Branner stayed in the scope, watched the man unpack vials, tubes. Reach for the strange rod.
Thought of the calm procedural tone the doctor used this morning, to break the news. His wife would die.
He saw then the younger boy, down on the empty riverbed. Throwing stones at the Overland as it passed above him. The scruffy thick-set mongrel dizzy round the boy’s feet.
Focus, John.
The hospital behind him.
The scene below an object now. A coin through a jeweller’s loupe.
Watch the bridge, he coached himself. Focus on the bridge.
The protest now was filtering. The crowd seeming to pour.
Something microscopic in the fact the smallest tap could send a hundred-and-seventy-grain bullet three-quarters of a mile.
Move your finger just a millimetre and you could end a life; but you cannot save one. Her. Not with the strength of your whole body.
Branner felt himself sliding again, away from the wider world. Into the big hole in his ground, the time ahead without her.
The pull of the chasm.
You need to focus now.
She is fading, you can feel it.
And there is nothing you can do.
Come on, he thought, come on. Happen, something, so I do not have to think of her.
LAKE
After the deafening noise and the cool dark of the pumphouse it took Cora a moment to adjust to the relative quiet and the bright sun.
It seemed impossible that the noise of the gravity loaders deep in the rock could barely be heard from outside. But they gave now only a low thrum.
Cora blinked in the light. Butterflies batted their wings as they sunned themselves on the wall of the pumphouse entrance.
There was the self-contained hum of the hoses as the train took on water.
Above the pumphouse, on the slope of the mountain, the gorse was egg-yolk thick. Pale sheep stood out against the grass.
Beyond the scrub and the scattered rock, the wall of the dam looked medieval. Geometric. Impassive.
It looked somehow far older than the mountain.
On the brow of the slope, like shepherds, were the wolf-grey figures of two guards.
The cloth tacked slightly to the ice as Cora adjusted her grip on the block she had brought from the pumphouse cavern.
They had collected the ice from the reservoir in January, those that were here over Christmas, stood to their waists in frozen shore water, pickaxing away.
They stacked the ice in a fissure in the cavern, on a metal grid so its meltwater could drain. As best they could, diverted the stillicide that slid down the face of the rock.
Now, in late summer, they still had ice.
Remembering was odd in this heat. That January day the first time she noticed Leo properly.
The languid way he wielded the pick. A sort of liquidity to it.
She did not think she was a body person. But. His had surprised her.
All the science here. All the tech. The astonishing engineering of burrowing through ancient rock to connect pipes to the floor of a full reservoir. And to keep their beers cool, it came down to a pickaxe. Not that, in that freezing January, any of them could imagine it would ever be warm again.
The sun though, now, was fierce. The only evidence of last night’s rain a grateful lushness in the leaves.
It was the first night Cora had spent alone for some time and she lay awake listening to it drum on the eco-foil walls of the pod.
The rain had been brief and heavy.
They needed it. The reservoir was low.
Now, the late-morning heat shimmered off the body of the train.
Cora understood the differentials. The load temperatures inside the vacuum wagon; how condensation formed immediately as the tanks filled; how the friction of the travelling train affected its surface temperature.
She felt she knew the train in some ways, as if it was a living thing.
She could not get used to the guns, though. They were as foreign and recent as the guards.
Cora thought of the cold water deep in the reservoir, loosing into the gravity feeders. Saw it, in her mind, as a liquid dark and slumbering, suddenly energised and burst into a white tumbling rush. Something passive and silent abruptly breaching with unbridled noise.
That was her thing. Latent capacities. The potential of a material to change the form of its energy.
Hence this block of ice. Hence this afternoon’s project. Leo did not believe it could be done.
It made more sense to collect the flowers first, but Cora knew that once the train was loaded, the mechs would be in the pumphouse, and she wasn’t in the mood for Ryan. Ryan would know Leo was away.
She could do without whatever mean little thing he’d do if they met. Whatever sharp little reminder.
He’d got worse since she and Leo had given up trying to pretend things were just casual, and Leo’d moved in with her.
She was still partly surprised. A year ago, she wanted more than anything to transfer to the Ice Dock project. Perhaps, she wondered now, to get away from Ryan. And then this thing with Leo happened. Quite by surprise. And. The idea of playing with icebergs melted away. She was happy.
She left the block of ice in the cloth on the kitchenette table and put on a summer dress.
Then she put on her walking boots.
She felt like her six-year-old self, going outside in the sun in wellies.
As she stepped out, the air suddenly seemed emptied. The sharp calls of the songbirds quiet. Moments later, the sheep began to wheel on the hill. Moan.
A bumblebee circled with an incongruous drone.
Then the faintest sing came to the wire stays of the accommopods, and the valley filled with the sound of the train starting up.
By the time Cora reached the foot of the hill, the sound was no more than a lessening hush, fading towards the city, hundreds of miles away.
Cora’s dress stuck a little to her skin.
Delicate yellow day-flying moths flew amongst the gorse.
There was a heady coconut smell to the flowers. She picked them and dropped them into the bowl. Patient when she pinned her finger. Sometimes felt showered seeds on her skin. Took a while to link the tickle to the spiky, sporadic pops, punctuations in the air, as the flat, mature pea-pods on the bushes burst in the sun.
She gently pinched the part-closed petals together and pulled; took soft buds, the faint hairs between her fingers, like stroking a small animal’s ear.
Below her, in the bowl of the valley, the foil of the accommopods gleamed like mica. The tech buildings looked no bigger than the squat, low boxes of the bumblebee hives she’d passed on her way up the hill.
Every now and then there was a quiet bump of rabbits.
She was at the same time a long way away and very here. Deeply thoughtful, but content.
Her mind went easily from one thing to another. Rested sometimes. Waited. Flitted.
She thought of Leo.
She thought of lunch
.
She thought of raw grated carrot fresh from the nearby farm. The difference the new-farm being here had made. As had the chickens the crew had decided to take on, managing the care by rota and sharing out the eggs. The veg patch they had not quite got to grips with yet.
Thought of how dry the grass was and how she should have put on sun lotion.
And then they were suddenly there.
She jumped. Hard and jolting. A horrible zip through her system.
The two guards stood above her, stepped from the thorn.
Cora felt sick.
She had jumped hard enough to spill gorse around her feet.
She followed the gaze of one of the guards, who looked at the flowers on the ground.
When she looked back, he held her eye.
‘Farm?’ he said.
‘No. I’m with the train. I’m off shift,’ she felt the need to say.
She wished she had her pass. As if it could protect her. As if it could ward them off.
‘What are you doing up here?’ asked the guard.
‘I’m making ice cream,’ said Cora. It made no sense.
The guard stared at the bowl of flowers in her hand. The flowers dropped around her feet.
Her walking boots. Her legs.
‘What do you do with the train?’
‘Thermo.’
The thinner guard reviewed her with strange unbatting eyes. ‘I’ve seen you. I’ve noticed you,’ he said. And it felt as if his eyes rolled into the bowl of her mouth.
Cora felt an animal certainty that there were more men than there really were.
Her dress clung to her sweat. She felt it outline her. Present her.
‘You should not be up here,’ said the first guard.
The locus of her fear changed. To a fear they were going to mete out punishment.
‘There are people. Up here,’ the guard continued. ‘They have intent. It’s why we’re here. You can’t be up here.’
Cora felt the eyes of the thinner guard in the soft shallow of her neck.
‘Have you not read the directives?’
‘Best go back,’ said the first guard.
Cora could not stop the shake. It set the gorse buds rattling in the bowl.
‘We’ll pretend this didn’t happen.’
Her dress stuck to the sweat of her skin.
‘Read the directives.’
The yolks were the colour of a bumblebee’s band. The mix paling and thickening as she beat them with sugar.
The claim there were people up there, out there, on the hill, waiting to attack. Directives. Tear-proof clothes, equipment vests and heavy boots. And guns.
Her adrenalin had morphed into a frustrated anger.
They were not needed here. Everything here had been quiet. Chicken runs. The gleam of eco-foil accommopods. A nearby new-farm and ice stashed in a hill. It was good here.
Now them. The guards had simply been surreal to her.
And now.
As she infused the syrup, the faint smell of gorse got into the kitchenette. As if she was still up there in the thorn.
When she unwrapped the block of ice to break it up, the cloth again clung briefly.
Her dress bunched, strewn now, in the basket for the drywash.
Don’t. Don’t let it spoil it. She talked to herself. They were just doing their job. They just surprised you.
But it was done.
When she went out later, the block of ice sat melting slowly into the border at the edge of the path. The bowl of glaceous egg whites in the fridge reminded her it was her night to close up the chickens.
She’d got angrier. The way, when she’d turned to look from the foot of the hill, she saw them, sat as if for a picnic, watching her through their rifle sights.
Nothing happened, she kept telling herself that.
You were being silly.
But it had spoiled it. She was sure her anger would taint the eggs and sugar.
Had dumped the mixture in the waste.
Thrown the block of ice into the flowers, where it still sat resisting the sun. Melting stubbornly.
Leo’ll still be a while, she told herself. There’s still time. He’ll be a while before he’s home.
He was worried about his parents. They lived right by the coast, and the land was falling away. They would not move.
There’s still enough ice.
Use his solar drill to break it up, with one of the chisel fittings. Or his fossil hammer. Like a mini pickaxe.
She’d expected clothes, and big shoes, and perhaps a favourite mug to find their way into her place; but chiefly he’d filled the place with tools. And unexpected curious things. The tiny red and white lighthouse he had treasured since a child. An architect’s scale model of a section of the water pipeline his father had worked on years ago. Bags of salt his parents sent, that they scraped from their desalinator. That she had intended to scatter on the ice. To speed the melt and heat transfer.
She pictured how beads of condensation would form around the outside of the aluminium bowl, as it did against the body of the train.
He will be tired. And you could give him hand-made ice cream. From ice he pickaxed from a reservoir.
There’s still time, she said to herself. Come on. Be brighter. They just surprised you. Close the chickens first.
The hens were bunched on perches. After the dry day, there was a faint ammonia smell.
With the sun dropped, it was colder than Cora had expected. There were goosebumps on her skin.
The sheep out on the hill looked like dull patches of dropped paper. A minerally white like the inside of the eggshells.
Cora thought of the reservoir. The deep prehistoric patience of the water hung there in the hill above.
Felt a sudden increased chill. The landscape darkening away into the twilight. The dam like some strange impassive eyelid in the mountain.
Then she heard the click. Snap.
The hens bridled. Unfurled, and clucked quietly, quick gulps they swallowed in their neck.
There, with impossible solidity, was a figure. A face, dark with mask, that bore into Cora, and she felt her centre drop out, as the door of the run banged, and she was caged, with the crack of the latch, rocking.
And someone was there. Loomed. Gloved fingers curled around the wire, the black absence of a face; began to shake the run. And talk. And tell her.
We’ll take the train. We’ll take the train. We’re going to take the train.
Then he was gone, into the night.
SOUND
The calf gave a confused hiss, and lowing, then dipped slightly as if it would bury into the water.
When the second harpoon hit, thumping its flank a second later, it seemed to groan somewhere deep within itself. A contained sound of suffering such that it was impossible not to believe the thing understood. That it was young and had a sense of the freedom and scale before it, and that this was now done.
The men in the small boats some twenty metres away braced because they knew the harpoon could put such sudden energy into the calf that it could fly at them, and that men were killed that way. Either from the direct strike or by being upturned. All they had between them and the freezing water was the five metres of Hypalon-coated polyester.
There were three men in each boat.
After the initial cowering, barely noticeable in normal time, the men recovered. All of this happened in a matter of moments. They drove the boats away, the twisted-steel harpoon lines, awkward and heavy, playing out behind.
The water was so flat it felt thick, and they – the only disturbance in it – seemed more to plough than to float through its surface. They went slowly.
The sound of the motors snapped in the air as if some communication took place between the boats.
They used modified old D-class RIBs, with big fifty-horsepower outboards. The outboards were disproportionate on the back of the inflatables but balanced by the heavy harpoon gun in the prow, and to an extent the
weight of the wire lines.
At the hundred-metre knot the Lead Man called a stop.
There was still a chance the calf could blast at them and they had to suppress their instinct to put distance down quickly. But the most dangerous thing was done.
Each of the crew tried to divine what state the calf was in, watching it as if they could ascertain intention.
The boats wallowed.
The tock of their idling motors beat out into the open space. Somehow, the noise seemed to confirm the potential for profound quiet here. This sat too in the men, beneath the thoughts they were having, their estimations of remuneration. The fact one of them was madly hungry.
‘Ready the anchor,’ the Lead Man said.
‘Four hundred,’ the harpooner said, and the Lead Man nodded. He looked to the other boat. A hand went up in answer.
The red coats they wore were extremely bright with the sun so clear.
The Lead Man held his thumb and finger in the air before him in a backward C, as if he could squeeze the calf and lift it from the water.
