The Curve of The Earth

38

Lucy sat behind Petrovitch. Sandwiched between them was the carpet bag: zipped inside it along with all his other kit was the sealskin-wrapped case. He could feel it pressing into his back.

[You are going to run out of land.]

“Yeah, where we’re going, we don’t need land. The sea ice’ll be thick enough.” He squinted down at the controls. “I’m more concerned about running out of fuel. These things burn meths like it’s going out of fashion.”

[Based on the vehicle’s previous performance, you have sufficient for another forty-five kilometres. However, Lucy Petrovitch is an extra load on your engine. This will cut the range to around thirty kilometres unless you lower your speed.]

“How about the chasing pack?”

[There are too many unknowns. Judging from the position of the satellite phones some of them carry, they are travelling faster than you. This might mean they catch you up, or it might mean they empty their fuel tanks before they reach you.]

“And this will all happen in the next ten minutes. Those planes out of Eielson? How are they doing?”

[The ones that attacked Deadhorse are returning to base. They have scrambled two more that were not at combat readiness, but since Eielson is some six hundred and forty kilometres away, those aircraft will not be overhead for another half an hour at least.]

“This isn’t inspiring me with confidence.”

[I can all but guarantee their planes will not find our planes. My chief concern is that they are guided to their target by visual cues given by personnel on the ground.]

“Can you jihad the planes?”

[These are the Wild Weasel variant that are specifically hardened against electronic countermeasures. Sasha, again: just because they are Americans does not mean they are stupid.]

“I’ll take that as a no.” They were close to the sea. Ahead of them was the pressure ridge of ice that had been forced up on to the shore by the tides that still raised and lowered the water that lay beneath. “In fact, if I didn’t know any better, they’ve got us pretty much where they want us.”

[Considering all the resources expended to make sure you were never supposed to get this far, we are technically ahead.]

“Go on, make it worse, why don’t you?”

[As you wish. If you cannot locate suitable access, you will need to carry the snowmobiles over the broken littoral zone to reach the flat pack ice.]

“Yobany stos, stop it.”

Lucy interrupted, speaking over the link even though she had her head against his shoulder blades.

“What are we going to do?” She’d worked it out. Michael had been talking to her at the same time as Petrovitch.

“The obvious thing.” Ahead of them, at the mouth of the river, Avaiq had already throttled down. Thick slabs of bluewhite ice stood cracked and jumbled in front of him, as chaotic as a Victorian graveyard.

Petrovitch pulled up next to him. He tapped Lucy’s hands so he could dismount.

“There’s usually a way through along the sand spit that sticks out into the bay,” said Avaiq, pointing north-east.

“Good,” said Petrovitch. He laid his bag across his seat and unzipped it. He took out the sealskin, and tied it tightly on to the snowmobile’s carry-rack.

“Sam? You can’t,” said Lucy, though she already knew that he could.

“Yeah. I’m doing that thing that fathers do at times like this.” He unclipped the axe and threw it into the snow. “So let’s assume we’ve had the argument, the tears, the rest of it, and it turned out that I was right all along. Go.”

She unslung her carbine and gave it to him.

“Avaiq will see you safely on to the ice. Michael will guide Maddy to you. There is,” and he popped up a map, “a massive iceberg grounded some five k offshore. Make for that.”

Avaiq looked confused. “Aren’t you…?”

“No. No, I’m not. You’re going to drive behind to make absolutely certain that the alien doohickey doesn’t fall off.” Petrovitch threaded his arm through the gun’s strap, picked up the bag and the axe, and started towards the ice ridge. Halfway there, he turned and shouted. “What are you waiting for? Pascha?”

“Sam?” said Lucy over the link.

“We’re not discussing this. You and the artefact go. I stay.”

“I just wanted to say that I love you very much and you’re the best replacement dad a girl could hope for.”

“If I cry, my targeting system won’t work properly.” He kept on walking. “You can say all this as you drive. Probably better that you don’t, though. I don’t need distracting.”

She slid forward to take Petrovitch’s place and opened the throttle. The engine roared, and she drove off, heading east along the coast. Avaiq stared at Petrovitch for a moment, then followed Lucy. The two of them vanished into the fog bank, and he watched the glow of them in infrared fade and wink out.

He looked around. It wasn’t the best place to make a last stand, but he guessed that choosing somewhere appropriate wasn’t a luxury that most people in his position could afford. He climbed up the ice barricade to the top. He could hear motors buzzing away, but the noise seemed to be coming from all around him. That couldn’t be the case, so he slowly turned his head and ran the waveforms through an analyser.

He could discount the two sources behind him. The ones ahead were coming at him in a line, stretched out wide so they could cover the maximum area without losing sight of each other.

That would work to his advantage.

“Tell me as soon as they’re picked up.”

[Due to the nature of the aerial threat, the Freezone units are maintaining complete radio silence. I have instructed Lucy to do the same. Their links are switched off so they do not emit any radiation at all. Confirmation will come as an audiovisual signal, which you will have to confirm.]

“Distress flare, then. Okay.” He checked his pistol, and sorted through his bag for the gifts from the Freezone’s weaponsmiths.

A couple of quantum gravity devices: old school, but still terrible. Three pop-ups, which he would have planted already but he’d run out of time. He had a good arm on him to increase their range. A remote, too. He ought to get that going now.

He worked quickly: it came in almost unrecognisable parts that clipped together around a first-order antigravity sphere. The remote would hover at knee height, and move around with little electric fans. On the bottom was a hook, and on that hook he hung one of the gravity bombs.

He talked to the remote, and it hummed into life, rising from his lap and spinning around once. Then it headed off back towards the land, dipping and lifting as it crossed the ground. It would have probably been better if he’d got hold of some white paint from somewhere, but at the very least it’d be a distraction they’d waste bullets on.

He was set. He zipped up the bag and threw it on to the ice behind him, then got into position for sniping. The noise of motorised vehicles grew loud, and the first dark shapes appeared out of the fog. Three of them, thirty metres apart: not the end of the line, but not the middle of it either. Somewhere on the right flank.

Petrovitch pasted the three targets with crosshairs, and let his onboard computer take over. One, two, three. Explosive rounds, meant for protecting a young woman from predatory polar bears, hit the widely separated men within a second. Each projectile bored into a chest, then detonated. One of the skidoos caught fire as stray chemicals ignited leaking fuel. All three drove on, riderless. The snow-rimed shore was marked with stark red blood and ruined, steaming corpses.

The echo of the explosions and the sudden run-on of the snowmobiles before they crashed into the ice wall ahead of them was not as loud as the silence that followed.

Convention dictated that he change position. But he wasn’t trying to avoid detection. He was actively courting it.

“How long now?”

[Unknown. I am… blind. The Freezone collective are my eyes and ears. To be cut off from any of them is unnatural and wrong.]

“I never thought I’d die this way,” said Petrovitch. “Chyort, I never thought I’d die. The dreams I had. Kept having. I was old and I still didn’t die.”

The engine noises cut off, one by one. “There should be two more to my left, the rest of them over there. They’re not talking to each other.”

[Because they would rightly surmise I could listen in.]

The flames from the burning snowmobile flickered prettily and started to die down.

“They’ll have to overcome me quickly. They have to realise that Lucy is out on the ice, and I’ve stayed behind. So no subtlety.”

He sent the remote rightwards, and picked up the first pop-up. He threw it hard, hard enough that it skittered to the ground only just within his vision, then slid away. That was it; that was all he had to do. Automatics would do the rest.

He launched the other two the other way, towards where he assumed the main force would be attacking from, then took control of the remote.

The image from the fish-eye camera was confusing until he deployed some software to deconvolute it, turning it from a distorted circle into a virtual bubble with him at the centre. He orientated it, and flew it north towards the ice barrier. Cracked ground, heavy with snow, passed underneath, and eventually he found a group of lines — made by two outer runners and a broad, teethed track — that meant someone had passed by.

He turned the remote again, and chased it up the tracks. He’d probably only get one shot at this, so he pushed the fans to their limit. The whine they’d make would be audible, but only if there wasn’t other noise around.

The outline of a snowmobile appeared. And another. And a whole bunch more. They’d parked them together, decided on their tactics, and carried on on foot. They were on their way, and there was nothing Petrovitch could do about that.

He could do something about their transport, though. He flew the remote into the middle of the impromptu car park and activated the bomb.

The camera died instantly. He blinked, taking in the wide expanse of snow and ice, and heard the distinctive sharp crack of plastic and shriek of tortured metal. He was too far away to feel the abrupt change in the direction of down, but imagined it all the same: frozen ground breaking free and rushing up, loose snow and anything resting on it drawn in towards a momentary, vast mass.

The fog bank flickered with more burning fuel.

One of the pop-ups went off. Bright green laser light pulsed and died.

“This is it, then.”

He stood up and snapped off three more rounds, aiming for the ground just beyond what he could see. The explosions turned the fog bright, and there were the shapes of men lit up inside it.

He tagged them, shot two figures on the shore side, and swung around to go for another on the sea side of the ridge.

The second pop-up blew, driving a chemically powered beam of light through the quickly calculated centre of mass of another man. The third burnt another, behind him.

Petrovitch’s muzzle flashes had given him away, and suddenly the air was full of soft lead and hard ice. Things zipped into his face and punched the surface of his parka. He was bleeding. His leg burned and the finger-sized hole in his trousers spread a dark, wicking stain all around it.

A lull. Maybe they thought they’d killed him. Again. He came up firing, but this time it was his thigh that refused to take his weight. Another two, three, four dead, and the effect of seeing another human being simply torn apart by the force of the burning gases inside them made the others falter, fall back.

Petrovitch crouched down in what little cover he could find, wedged between two blocks of sea ice. His face was pressed against one slab. He could see the tiny bubbles of air caught within it, frozen at the moment the water changed.

He looked up, to the north. Three diffuse stars were fading, sinking to the ocean’s surface. He’d almost missed the signal. Almost, but not quite.

“She’s been picked up.”

[There is a problem…] Michael hesitated. [Sasha?]

They started shooting again. His torso was sort-of-hidden. His legs took another two hits, foot and calf. Different legs. The second struck bone and broke it before leaving his flesh. He clamped down on the pain, all his pains, and it left him cloud-high and floating.

“Yeah. Kind of busy.”

He was lying on the last gravity bomb. He picked it up in his left hand, flicked the switch, and threw it in the direction of the North Pole.

It drew their fire as it rolled along, bouncing over the almost flat ice that covered the ocean. Why they shot at it was anyone’s guess, but before they could destroy it, it destroyed itself.

The ice buckled and heaved. A fountain of glassy green water burst out and rose like a fountain, before losing shape and splashing back down, pushing shards of thick ice away from the hole. The sea continued to slop up and over for a moment, then retreated, quiet once more.

The sky darkened.

Petrovitch took his chance. He’d run out of ideas, time and hope. He was bleeding out. He was dying. Yet directly above him was a descending plane, and he knew his wife was on board, and that she was coming to save him.

First, he had to save himself.

The axe.

He dropped the carbine, wrapped his fingers around the wooden shaft, and threw himself off the ridge of broken ice.

Now they were shooting at the plane, and the people — his people — were at the doors of the plane shooting back. Not just guns: missiles. No one seemed to be looking in his direction as he crashed on to the solid surface of the sea.

No one except a lone, slight figure walking in off the sea, pulling the mist along behind her, her right arm clamped tight by complex alien machinery, her left hand supporting her elbow as she raised the device.

Petrovitch looked up at Lucy just as lightning started to play around her. “Ah, chyort.” Stupidity did run in the family after all.

Then Newcomen came out of the fog at him, sprinting like he was trying to make a touchdown.

Petrovitch slammed the axe blade into the ice, and gave the mightiest pull on the haft that he could. He was sliding, sliding over the white ice and towards the hole he’d made, that cut through almost a metre of frozen sea to the cold, dark water below.

“Too yebani slow, Farm Boy.”

They hadn’t given Newcomen a gun. If they had, Petrovitch would never have made it. The American dived for his ankles, even as Petrovitch got his fingers into a crack at the edge of the abyss.

He pulled himself forward. The block of ice he was on bobbed, and started to tilt.

“Petrovitch! Don’t you dare take the coward’s way out.” Newcomen lay sprawled on his belly, his hand ineffectually snapping at anything of Petrovitch that might still be in reach. “You’ve done the wrong thing. Exactly the wrong thing.”

The sky above them was brightening, almost blinding, and Newcomen hadn’t noticed.

“You have to bring Lucy back.”

“She is back,” said Petrovitch, and the tablet of ice he was clinging to turned over.

The water closed over his head, as thick as oil and cold as death.

He sank down, and watched the circle of light above him flash momentarily blue. His feet slowly struck the gritty sediment of the seabed, and his legs buckled beneath him. The water clouded with both clay and blood, though only a little of both. He found he was barely underwater at all, this close to the shore. He could reach up and touch the underside of the smooth, sculpted ice, if he wanted to.

He let his heart race. Near-frozen blood coursed through his constricting veins, from his skin to his core. Still conscious, still thinking, even though everything else was shutting down.

[Sasha.]

“My turn for the long sleep now.”

[One moment. Help is coming.]

“If they get me out now, I’ll die for sure. This way…”

[Sasha.]

He disabled the security locks on his heart, and readied himself. The pressure on his lungs was growing, and he bled the air out in a thin stream of bubbles that danced like quicksilver on their way up.

He was empty. He knew he had to breathe in, to make it right. He would, just not yet. He deliberately slowed his heart right down, to almost a stop. He was blacking out, embalmed by the Arctic water, lit by the unnatural sky.

[Sasha?]