Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘And we’re going to stay that way,’ Madeleine said.

  They looked at each other for a long moment.

  ‘Need some help,’ Paresh said. ‘First aid kit, someone.’

  ‘Got it,’ Angela said. She rose unsteadily to her feet and told her e-i to find the box’s smartdust tag. The dome was a complete mess. Her grid showed her an overlay, with a purple icon pulsing on top of Lulu’s cot. She shoved it aside and picked up the first aid box.

  The side of Omar’s face was bad. His skin was charred, cracking open to show bloody red flesh below. Paresh bumped a painkiller sac on his neck, and started spraying the burn surface with a nuflesh foam.

  Angela started to monitor the camp’s links. Four of the other five domes had responded; all of them were suffering from carbon dioxide build-up; all reporting their grilles were blocked; some of the occupants had already lapsed into unconsciousness. However, with the alarm raised, the entrance curtains were opened, allowing gales of fresh air inside. Without an answer from the sixth dome, Leora Fawkes, who was on duty in biolab-1, went outside with Roarke Kulwinder, the two of them holding on to each other as they forced their way through the blizzard to the dome and unsealed the outer curtain. They found the five people inside – Josh Justic, the pilots Lorelei and Juan-Fernando, Bastian 2North, and Olrg Dorchev – all unconscious but alive.

  By then, Atyeo and Ophelia Troy had gone out to inspect their dome and find out what had gone wrong. They reported that the wind had driven powdery snow into the protective vents on top of the dome, blocking them. No air could get in through the grilles. It was easy enough to clear, but it had to be done by hand – from the outside.

  Medical reports weren’t so promising. Lorelei, Olrg, and Winn Melia, Chris Fiadeiro, Sergeant Raddon, and Forster Wardele were all suffering bad CO2 poisoning; then there was Omar with his ruined face. Dr Coniff wanted her paramedics to check the poisoning cases. She also asked for Omar to be brought to the clinic where she could treat his burns and make sure his eye wasn’t damaged. Elston and Botin arranged for Antrinell and Darwin Sworowski to pull a stretcher like a sledge, which they’d use to take Omar over to the clinic. They’d be escorted by Botin and Gillian Kowalski, who’d return with Chitty and Sakur. The two paramedics would go round the domes, examining the worst poisoning cases.

  That just left the blocked air vents. Elston didn’t want the curtain doors open, that offered no one protection against the ferocious blizzard, and little warning should the monster arrive. His order was for a Legionnaire to pair up with someone from each dome; together they’d go out and clear the vents. They’d monitor how fast the snow built up again, and repeat the clearing process every couple of hours. It wasn’t pleasant, but better than CO2 poisoning or being directly exposed to the brutal elements for however long the blizzard lasted.

  Angela paired up with Paresh. She pulled on her parka in the glacial air which now filled the dome, numb hands taking a long time to zip up the front. She hunted round for her boots, while a weepy Lulu was comforted by Madeleine. The gloves she’d used the day before were still damp, and starting to stiffen as they froze. She righted the heater and turned it back on, holding her hands above it. The moisture started to thaw dripping down onto the orange circle to hiss and boil while chilblains gnawed at her fingers. While she was preparing to go outside again, Madeleine was helping a teary Lulu into her parka. Paresh upped Omar’s painkiller dosage, and wrapped him up in his own sleeping bag.

  Hands began to pull at the bottom of the outside door curtain’s seal.

  ‘Who is that?’ Angela bellowed. Paresh lifted his Heckler carbine and swung it round on the entrance in a single smooth motion.

  ‘Antrinell,’ a voice yelled back over the wind. The curtain seal parted and the wind surged in again. Angela grabbed the base of the heater before it could tip over again, and switched it off to be safe. A blaze of light erupted briefly, silhouetting a figure kneeling on top of the snow mound.

  Antrinell pushed his way into the dome through the gap. Snow stuck to every part of his parka and trousers in clingy strings and gobbets. His helmet-light shone a yellow beam around. ‘Sorry to scare you,’ he said. ‘That damn electrical storm is screwing with our links. Nobody can broadcast anything out there.’

  ‘I’ve never seen lightning like that,’ Angela said.

  The bulky figure made a shrugging motion. Behind him, Darwin was pushing his way through the gap. Between the four of them, they managed to manhandle a semi-conscious, moaning Omar outside and onto the waiting stretcher. There was a canopy over half of it to protect his head and torso from the elements. Angela couldn’t see it being much use in these conditions. They had to get him to the doc somehow, though, and it was better than nothing.

  Gillian gave them a small wave as Antrinell and Darwin picked up the harness, and leaned into the gale, walking away with slow short steps. The lightning was flaring constantly, not simple forks but huge dazzling ball lightning blasts that streaked down out of the unseen clouds above like an old-style artillery barrage. They exploded into the ground, firing off long tendrils of electrons that whipped about before expiring.

  ‘Screw this,’ Paresh yelled.

  ‘We have to dig the snow away,’ Angela yelled back. She guessed there was at least a metre on the ground now, with drifts two to three metres high against some surfaces. The irregular blaze of ball lightning bursts showed the vehicles as nothing more than mounds.

  ‘Okay,’ Paresh agreed. ‘Go get something to dig with.’

  Angela crouched down and wiggled through the gap again. It was only fractionally quieter inside the dome, with ice particles churning through the turbulent air. Lulu stared wildly at her, fearful and exhausted from her carbon monoxide fugue.

  ‘We’ve got to dig the snow away from the entrance,’ Angela called out above the noise. ‘We’ll never get the door curtains closed and sealed again until we do.’

  ‘Sure.’ Madeleine nodded. She steadied her kitbag and opened a pouch, taking out a lethal-looking hunting knife. The diamond-coated blade made short work of a cot, cutting it into big squares of plastic.

  ‘Thanks.’ Angela put on her sunglasses as protection from the wind-driven snow, and grabbed one of the squares. She pushed back out into the blizzard. Madeleine stayed inside, flinging great scoops of snow through the gap, half of which would immediately swirl back in. Angela went to work on the snow outside, trying to clear a crude ramp down to the entranceway. Another two days of this and the dome will be completely buried, she thought.

  Madeleine closed the curtain as far as she could, reducing the gap so less snow was blown back inside the dome. After the makeshift shovel flung four or five loads outside, she’d squeeze the seal down another couple of centimetres.

  High-velocity snow stung Angela’s exposed cheeks as she dug. She was forever wiping clogged-up snow from her sunglasses, but she was grateful for the protection they gave her eyes. The feeling from her fingers began to dwindle again. It became as much effort to grip the raggedy plastic as it was to fling its contents into the air. The ball lightning continued its frightening detonations. One must have landed close; she flinched as best she could in such heavy clothes as a vivid tendril of electrons danced directly overhead, grounding out through one of the entombed vehicles.

  Angela had no idea how long it took before Madeleine was eventually closing the seal along the bottom of the curtain. She couldn’t feel her hands, her cheeks had been pummelled insensate. Each breath burned cold down her throat. Ball lightning explosions erupted all around the camp.

  Paresh put his head up against hers. ‘Let’s clear the vents.’

  ‘I can’t feel my hands,’ she shouted back at him.

  ‘Here.’ He shoved the Heckler at her and took the square of cot plastic. Then he started to crawl up the side of the dome. Darkness closed in as the lightning paused.

  Her e-i reported a link open as soon as the lightning faded. ‘How are you doing?’ Elston asked.


  ‘We’ve got the door cleared. Unblocking the vents now.’ No need to tell him she had a weapon in contravention of just about every order governing the expedition. ‘Did Omar make it to the clinic?’

  ‘He’s there. Coniff says he’ll be okay. His eye isn’t damaged, just the tissue round it. Might not look as pretty again without some reconstructive procedures.’

  ‘Have you seen this lightning?’

  ‘Yes.’

  As if to emphasize the point, a violet plasma ball struck the sagging ice-sheathed mess tent, sending petals of electrons banshee-screaming overhead. The blow was too much for the communal centre, hammer-smashing it into the ground amid an eruption of displaced snow. Angela bowed her head against the spume of ice that the wind hurled outward, swaying in the impact. The link dropped out then re-established itself. ‘To hell with this!’ she moaned. When she looked up she could see Paresh pick himself up, and resume his painstaking scraping of the vents. Night closed back in on them. ‘Elston, if one of those lightning balls hits the fuel tanks we’re going to be seriously screwed.’

  ‘I know. But there’s nothing we can do about it now. Olrg told me they’re lightning resistant anyway.’

  ‘This son of a bitch isn’t lightning, it’s like we’re under attack. How long is this going to last?’

  ‘I don’t know. We lost contact with the e-Ray hours ago. Before that, the weather radar showed the cloudmass stretching back a long way. The AAV team reckoned another ten hours.’

  ‘Ten more hours of this son of a bitch? No fucking way!’

  ‘I know. Can you see Sakur and Kowalski? They left Justic’s dome five minutes ago. They were heading for Atyeo’s dome to check on Raddon and Forster.’

  ‘I can barely see my own hands in this.’

  ‘Okay, well—’

  The double alarm flung red icons into Angela’s grid. One was from Mohammed, an intruder alert. The other . . . ‘Shit!’ Angela snarled. Tork Ericson’s bodymesh was calling for help. Medical data showed his life signs were decreasing rapidly, blood pressure dropping, heart running wild. She focused on the heart read-out, if it was still pumping . . .

  ‘You getting this?’ she demanded.

  ‘It’s here,’ Elston said. ‘It’s attacking us.’

  ‘Can you see anything?’ Paresh asked as he slithered back down the side of the dome.

  Angela turned to look in the direction of Mohammed’s bodymesh emission, matching up her poor vision with the grid display. She ripped her sunglasses off. Another lightning ball streaked down behind her, its indigo flare turning the snow to scintillating comet dust. In the fleeting moment of illumination she could see all the domes. Several of them had people nearby, bulky snow-encrusted figures like herself and Paresh. They all looked the same. As the lightning braids whipped about through the air she saw one of the figures lying on the ground. Her grid navigation profiling told her it was Tork. Tork who was staining the snow with dark blood gushing out of his ripped throat. Tork who had Mohammed standing over him, crying out in shock and anguish at the carnage. And behind them was another figure, just as tall and featureless as everyone else, but one that had no bodymesh coding in the grid. A figure moving off into the blizzard. Seemingly unaffected by the terrible wind and snow.

  ‘Mohammed,’ Angela yelled. ‘Behind you.’ She cursed her stiff fingers in their useless layers of cumbersome fabric as she tried to knock the Heckler’s safety off.

  The tangle of lightning bolts fizzled out, plunging the camp back into darkness. Somehow, she managed to snag her ice-hardened gloves on the safety, which snicked off. She brought the carbine up, using her grid to align it on the point she’d last seen the monster. Waiting— Her frigid finger hooked round the trigger. Waiting— Cursing as her e-i was denied access to the Heckler’s targeting systems because she didn’t have the codes. Waiting—

  ‘Paresh, let me have access—’

  The storm spat a seething ball of gentian plasma into the ground over towards the administration Qwik-Kabin. Angela knew she only had a second as the ball bloomed into a corona of churning electrons. The panorama flashed into existence once again. Tork sprawled on the snow. Mohammed looming above him, his own Heckler raised, swinging round uncertainly as he searched for the murderer, slim intense ruby laser beam cutting through the thick snow. And the monster itself, just visible as it strode off into the howling whiteout without hesitation.

  Angela pulled back on the trigger. Holding herself against the kicking weapon, keeping the aim flat. Hearing the roar of the bullets leaving the flaring muzzle. The lightning withered and died. And she knew she hadn’t hit the monster. It was still walking away, unaffected by the bullets strafing the air around it. ‘Motherfucker!’

  Mohammed was firing now as well. She could hear his carbine coughing above the wind-yowl. Straining eyes seeing the blue-white pulse of muzzle flame. Even the targeting laser was there, trying the penetrate the snow.

  Useless, she knew, all useless. It had gone. Slipped back to wherever it hid so perfectly from them. Until next time.

  *

  The blizzard lasted for a further seven hours. Angela and Paresh went outside another three times to clear the vents on the top of the dome. Each time the snow was higher against the dome walls, so each time they first had to shovel snow away from the entrance to get out.

  ‘That’s going to be a real problem,’ Madeleine said after their second excursion. ‘There’s got to be a lot of weight piling up out there.’ She gave the ice-bedecked walls a thoughtful glance. Even with the heater on continually, the hoar frost remained. The pile of snow that had come washing in when they opened the door curtain to flush out the CO2 was still squatting on the floor, with tiny rivulets of water trickling down its sides, looking like a miniature ice volcano. As it slowly melted across the floor panels it refroze, producing a sheet of ice that made walking round inside tricky.

  Ophelia Troy had redesigned the roof vents to stop them snow-clogging again. She and Karizma Wadhai were now working on schematics for a tunnel-like entrance to proof the domes against further blizzards, turning them into true igloos.

  ‘Once we’ve dug the microfacturing shack out,’ Paresh grumbled at the ringlinked news. After Tork’s slaying, Elston was constantly sending round information he considered good for morale. Checks on everyone’s status and location were also made every ten minutes.

  ‘To do that they’ve got to design and print a spade,’ Angela said.

  Madeleine grinned. ‘But to print a spade they’ve got to get into the shack.’

  The three of them knocked their tea mugs together in salute.

  ‘Won’t the bulldozers be able to shove the snow away?’ a puzzled Lulu asked. The poor girl had become despondent since Tork had been killed, saying very little as she huddled up inside her sleeping bag. The others often heard her sobbing when she rolled over to face the dome wall.

  ‘Yeah,’ Paresh agreed kindly. ‘They’ll be able to help us a lot. Don’t worry. If we can survive a night like this one, we can survive anything.’ He paused as another lightning ball hit the ground somewhere outside. It was technically dawn now, and the atmosphere’s bombardment was definitely easing off.

  ‘Can’t we, like, use the helicopters to get out of here?’ Lulu asked.

  ‘They don’t have the range to get us to Sarvar,’ Angela said sympathetically.

  ‘But the runway is covered in snow – planes can’t use it.’

  ‘There are versions of the Daedalus that are ski equipped,’ Paresh said. ‘I’ve seen them when we were training in Northern Russia a couple of years back.’

  ‘Oh.’ Lulu rolled over again.

  The wind eased off considerably by mid-morning, taking with it the last tatters of cloud. With only wisps of moribund cirro-stratus congregating high above, the pink light from Sirius shone down on the beleaguered camp. Dome curtain doors were opened, and people emerged into a rubicund arctic landscape. The first few days of snow had come to rest on the jungle’s tree
s and bushes and vines, giving them a bulbous white coat. It had looked odd, bizarre even, but they were still recognizably encircled by the jungle. Now, the lavish vegetation was buried below massive snowdrifts. The taller trees – the bullwhips and vamp-spires, and metacoyas – remained standing resolute above the undulating white carpet, but they were encased in coats of remarkably clear ice five to ten centimetres thick. Captured beneath the rippled crystalline surface, dead leaves which hadn’t fallen remained encased, a threadbare celadon fringe along the bigger boughs and branches.

  Above the frigid, blitzed winterland, the aurora borealis streamers had returned in force. Curving rivers of phosphorescence snaked their languid way across St Libra’s high sky, casting eerie colour tones across the ground.

  Angela stood outside the dome that had sheltered her and nearly killed her. Only the top half remained uncovered, though even that had a white crust of snow. Around her the snow fields glowed violet as if they were carrying an electric charge, a tone which shifted to the glowing aquamarine blue of the Caribbean Sea, before melding to a green as deep as the jungle they covered. The sequence varied as the silent, random ripples of light swayed across the sky. But the iridescence was always there, always adding its own spectral sparkle to the glittering snow.

  Camp Wukang’s personnel moved as if toxed, trauma victims mumbling inanities to each other. For the first time, Angela began to appreciate Elston. He was the one invigorating everyone, striding round in person, letting them all see he cared that each one of the personnel had endured and survived. Issuing orders, explaining how they were going to get through the rest of this challenge.

  The bulldozers were the priority for the ground vehicle engineering team. They were clearly going to have to do something about the astonishing quantity of snow that had fallen. Elston had spent several hours that morning in a conference link with his department heads, planning his next steps.