The Curve of The Earth

37

It was dark inside. The blanket of snow above their heads stopped the heat from escaping as well as it prevented the light from outside penetrating through the blocks of ice that formed the dome of the igloo.

The only illumination came from a single candle in a glass jar, tucked into an alcove carved into the wall. Even the stickthin air hole had an angle in it, in case the glimmering telltale it made gave her away.

Her sleeping bag was on a snow ledge, on a blanket, and the floor was clear apart from two piles of tins and boxes, one for full, and the other for empties. She’d kept it as neat and clean as she could.

“Welcome, be it ever so humble, et cetera.” Lucy untoggled her parka — the kit he’d ordered for himself came from the same place as hers did — and let it swing free. “Sam, how are we getting out of this?”

“Had enough?” He searched the shadows. There was a bundle, long and low and slim, wrapped in a sealskin pelt.

She nodded. “No magic bus this time, either.”

“The cavalry are coming. This is one of the things we could actually plan for. Their air-defence radar shouldn’t pick anything up, and while we can’t do anything about the planes being eyeballed, they’re coming in over the ocean, in a fog bank, maintaining total radio silence. There’s an AWACS platform in the sky that’s about to mysteriously develop a fault. We still might have to bust our way out of here the hard way.” He took an involuntary step towards the sealskin. “Is that it?”

“Yes.” Lucy was momentarily distracted by Avaiq pulling himself in. “When did our lifters leave?”

“About twenty minutes ago. Part of the protocol: I find you, they take off.” His mouth twitched. “One of them will try and make it through, with the others lining up to sacrifice themselves to the missiles and guns they’ll throw our way.”

“Madeleine’s on one of them, isn’t she?”

“Yeah. So’s Tabletop, against all common sense. And Tina.” Petrovitch swallowed. Avaiq stood up next to him, his head almost at the ceiling. “Just discussing our escape plan. It’s a bit crap, but it might just work.”

“A bit crap?”

“Meh. We’ll be fine.” He got down on his knees and ran his gloved hand over the soft seal fur. He thought he should be able to feel something different, but he was disappointed. “May I?”

“You won’t break it, if that’s what you mean,” said Lucy. She got down on the floor next to him and dug her hands under the pelt, pulling both the object and the skin towards them. She unwrapped it almost casually, as if she’d done it a hundred times.

She probably had. But it was Petrovitch’s first.

It looked like a big oval serving dish, curved on both upper and lower surfaces. Its matt grey surface shone dully in the candlelight.

“No space jelly left?”

“It seemed to go from gel to liquid, then evaporate away. I think it was there just to protect this.”

Petrovitch pulled his mittens off and laid them by his side. “By the way.” He opened his bag and pulled out the components of a link. “Present for you.”

“Thanks.” She took it from him and unwrapped the curved computer. After she lifted up the polyester fleece she wore under her parka, there were two more layers after that, and only then her bare skin. “I so need a shower.”

Petrovitch leaned in close enough for his breath to mist the object’s surface. Droplets of water formed on its cold surface, and started to run off. “Low friction.”

“It’s as slippery as soap. I dropped it. Twice.”

“No boom?” He pulled his thin gloves off and added them to the pile.

“No boom.” Lucy readjusted her clothing and took up the earpiece.

Petrovitch ran his bare palm over the object. There was no join, or seal, or button or switch. It appeared completely featureless. He turned it over, with difficulty because it was so hard to hold, and searched the other side. “So I don’t spend time we don’t have wondering, does it open?”

“It opens. Took me long enough to work it out, and then only by accident.” She screwed up one eye as the earpiece clamped on inside her ear. “Hey, Michael.”

She smiled at the response.

On a whim, Petrovitch flicked his eyes to see infrared. It was a completely uniform temperature. He pressed his hand against it, and the heat just leaked away. When he took his hand off again, the whole of it was very slightly warmer.

“Superconductor of heat,” he said. On a whim, he tried ultraviolet. There was nothing. He flipped the object again — it was heavy, but not suspiciously so — and saw, in faintly glowing outlines, a block of symbols in between two largish circles.

“You can’t see UV, can you?”

Lucy frowned. “Well, no. Being completely biological and all.”

“You missed the writing.”

“There’s writing?” She went back into the bag for her screen. “Show me.”

Michael fed her real-time images — barring the lag of transmitting the feed up to a satellite and beaming it back down again — so that she could see what Petrovitch saw.

“How was I supposed to know?” She moved her finger over the surface. It obscured some of the angular symbols. “I’ve been in the dark for eighteen hours a day.”

Lucy held up the screen so Avaiq could see. He took the little rectangle in his hands and stared. “Doesn’t look like any letters I’ve ever seen before.”

“I think you’ll find,” said Lucy, “that’s only to be expected, given where this is supposed to have come from.”

“And those circles? That’s where you put your hands.”

“Which would have made it obvious from the start.”

Petrovitch rubbed his palms on his trousers. “Do I say a magic word or something? Abracadabra?”

“What do you think?” said Lucy.

“Just checking.” He put one palm on the glowing disc on the left, then his other on the right. Nothing happened for long enough to allow him to raise an eyebrow and glance at Lucy.

Then the writing faded, and a crack appeared down the centre line of the object; simultaneously, another fissure ran around the whole circumference. The object started to split apart, two halves of the lid folding upwards.

Inside was…

“Yobany stos.”

“That’s what we thought.”

It looked exactly like an alien weapon should. It had a black barrel, surrounded by a split four-piece blued metal shield that ran its length. The grip was designed for something that didn’t have an opposable thumb, and was embedded inside the device, so that the user would have the shield covering their forearm.

It was held in the case in a tightly fitting surround that was almost invisible. “Is that an aerogel?” asked Petrovitch, poking it.

“Only you could be more interested in the packing than the cargo.” Lucy reached out and picked up the device. It resisted for a moment, then popped free.

She held it in both hands and presented it to him.

Petrovitch’s mouth was suddenly dry. “This, this is stupid.”

“When has that ever stopped you?” She proffered it again.

“It looks like a yebani ray gun!”

“We know. That’s why we hid it.”

“Why are aliens we’ve never met sending us hardware like this?”

Lucy finally forced the thing on him. “I’ve had nothing to do but think of possible answers to that question. Lying here in the dark, with it just there at my feet.”

He hefted it, checking its weight. It didn’t seem particularly dense, but it was strong and rigid. The material it was made from — he daren’t call it metal, even though that was what it closely resembled — was cold to the touch.

He peered down the barrel. There was no hint of a mechanism inside.

“I take it you haven’t…”

“We don’t even know if it is a weapon. It could be anything at all. And if it is, using it could be a sign that we should all die.”

“Or that if we don’t, we’re all doomed.”

“Or it could perform some sort of ceremonial function, like giving gifts of whisky and rifles. What if it needs bullets, or a power pack, or a password, or we’ve accidentally left the second part of it in the pod, or there was a second pod that burnt up or fell out to sea?”

“Yeah, okay. I get the idea.”

“I’ve got all these things floating around in my head, and I don’t dare find out which one is true.”

Petrovitch pointed the barrel downwards and looked at the other end. There was a bulb-like grip, with five thick grooves running down it. It looked like a lemon squeezer with fewer teeth. He could put it in the palm of his hand and close his fingers around it. Whether anyone who didn’t have a cybernetic arm could then support the weight of it was just one question amongst many.

“I haven’t tried to hold it in what looks like the proper way. There are metal surfaces at the far end of the grip. In the absence of anything else to press, those could be the controls.” Lucy pointed out the smooth mirrored insets at the base of the grip, barely visible through the gap in the shield sections.

“I’m holding something from another planet. Another solar system. Something that travelled trillions of kilometres to get here. Imagine the astrogation needed. All that information, all that technology, gone in a instant.” Petrovitch looked up at Lucy. “A starship. And we shot it down.”

“Shot it down?” Lucy’s eyebrows rose.

“SkyShield.” He was tempted just to reach into the device and wrap his fingers around the smooth ridges of the grip. “Railgunned it out of the sky. Even though it was the Americans who did it, do you honestly think that whoever sent this will notice the difference between all our squabbling little factions? We could be in deep shit here. Nova bombs, relativistic kill vehicles, von Neumann swarms. This thing.”

[Do you still want to sell half of it to the Chinese?]

Petrovitch blew out a deep breath, and Lucy pulled a face.

“You wanted to do what?”

“It was an idea I had. We still might have to do it, if it means getting out of here alive.”

Avaiq stamped his foot. “I want to be in on this conversation. If it concerns me, I want a say.”

“Yeah. Sorry.” Petrovitch stroked the smooth line of one of the shield panels. “There are people coming to rescue us. Whether or not they can is out of my hands, and is trusting a lot to luck. I wanted to make sure we had a bargaining chip if it came down to a stand-off, and one way would be to sell a share of this to someone with the clout to make the Yanks hold back.”

“You can’t,” said Lucy.

“I know I can’t. But apparently you can. It’s yours. You found it. You get to decide what happens to it.” He reluctantly held it out to her, and she took it from him, cradling it in her arms.

“Is that actually true?” asked Avaiq.

“Apparently. Our tame lawyer reckons that according to Alaskan state law, it’s legally Lucy’s. I don’t think that’ll bother the US government one bit, considering they just levelled Deadhorse.”

Lucy blinked. “They did?”

“Yeah.”

“Is there anything else I should know?” she asked, her voice rising.

He shifted guiltily. “Probably.” He really hoped Michael wouldn’t tell her about Jason Fyfe. Not just yet.

She gave him a hard stare, but thankfully didn’t ask any more questions. “There’s always the UN. That way the Chinese have an interest in it, and so does everyone else. Including the Americans.”

“If you hand it over to UNESCO, you’ll never see it again. I doubt if anyone else will, either. No one will be allowed to touch it because the arguing will go on for decades.” Petrovitch flipped over so he could sit down and stretch his leg. “You’ve realised that this thing is what the aliens considered most important.”

“Duh. Getting this to us was the whole point of the mission.”

“I wonder if there was a pilot. Or pilots.”

Lucy started to say something, then stopped. “I was about to say, we’ll never know. But that’s not actually true, is it?”

“No. No, it’s not. One day I’ll ask them.”

Avaiq coughed. “Can you two keep your minds on how we’re going to save our skins? I’m just a mechanic. I fix stuff. I’m not like you.”

Petrovitch rubbed at his face. “Okay. Our lot are about thirty minutes away. We can be back in Canada, if we go in a straight line, in less than three quarters of an hour after that. We’ve got to cover our arses for an hour and a bit. Any suggestions?”

[There is always the Attack faction. My efforts would be partial, and the effect here would be limited. It would also serve to antagonise the Americans further.]

Both Petrovitch and Lucy shook their heads.

[I am also picking up satellite-bound transmissions from the research station. It is likely that Joseph Newcomen is now in the custody of other US agents.]

“Who?” mouthed Lucy.

“Later,” said Petrovitch. “He doesn’t know where we are.”

[He knows which direction you were heading. They will follow your tracks along the river, and then they will find the vehicles. Then they will find you, no matter how well hidden Lucy’s shelter is.]

Lucy kicked him. “I hide out in the middle of nowhere for over a week, and within minutes of you turning up…”

“I should have been more careful,” said Petrovitch. “I should have shot him.”

“What are you talking about?” Avaiq’s temper was stirring.

“They’ve got Newcomen. That means we’re going to have company.” Petrovitch leaned forward and pressed his fingers into his damaged ankle, feeling for the muscles and ligaments. “About the same time as our lot turn up, so will they.”

“Okay,” said Lucy. She suddenly launched into a flurry of activity, pushing the weapon thing back into its case and slapping her hands on the two halves of the open lid. “The cold might have made you stupid, but not me. I suggest we run for it rather than wait for certain death. Less futile, slightly healthier.”

The artefact’s lid folded back down, and the join became a crack, a line, then vanished. She wrapped it up in the sealskin and slid it towards the entrance, then started buttoning up her parka.

“She’s right, of course,” said Petrovitch.

“Of course I’m right.” She pulled on her mittens and gave herself a shake. Clearly, she was missing something. She lifted up her sleeping bag, swept her hand under it, and came out with a ceramic carbine. “Ready. Let’s go.”