Simon Morden - The Curve of The Earth

Petrovitch closed his eyes and shook his head. “This isn’t a mistake. This isn’t some rogue FBI cabal going off the reservation. This is meant. You’re holding your opinion despite the evidence, not because of it.”

“I know it looks bad…”

“ Yobany stos , man. When this started off, I thought you couldn’t be bothered to look for Lucy because of her surname. Now I’m attempting to stop the first war to be fought in Low Earth Orbit. And believe me, it may start there, but it won’t end there.” He opened his eyes again. There were lights in the far distance, red signals high off the ground, white ones beneath them. Almost there. “We need to do this, and do it quickly. It’s not just about her any more.”

They flew in low over Deadhorse. It was a town there for one reason only, and that reason was becoming increasingly irrelevant. It was kept going because it was important that it wasn’t abandoned. That was all.

“Ten years ago I gave you the means to produce all the energy you wanted, simply and cheaply. The world’s awash with oil, and yet you’re still up here, doing it the hard way.” Petrovitch circled one of the drill rigs, hidden inside its insulating tower. There was another half a k away, and another beyond that. The whole landscape was punctuated with these strange monoliths, grey and glowing in their arc lights.

“It’s commerce,” said Newcomen. “Part of the strategic reserve, too.”

“It’s not commerce. Do you know how much of a subsidy ARCO get for simply being here?”

“No, I…”

“Ask your link. The guys down at Dawson have their own fermenter that knocks out methanol at cost.” Petrovitch turned the nose of the plane back towards the airport. “It’s stupid to keep on doing the old thing when the new thing is so much better.”

“Don’t you think you lose something when you reject the past?”

“You mean like retrofitting DNA and growing babies in artificial wombs?”

Newcomen was silent, and Petrovitch snorted.

“Compared with you, I’m virtually normal.”

“Just… just land, will you? I’m not in the mood.” Newcomen turned his head away. “I assume there’s things like hot showers and hot food down there?”

“There’s a hotel. The Caribou. It even has cable.”

“And they’re expecting us?”

“We’ve had reservations for days.” The runway lights lined up in two lines, pointing to the horizon. “We’ve a show to put on, and I hate disappointing my public.”

Other airports of comparable size would have had a drift of light aircraft on the apron, but in the far north, the weather was hard on airframes. Instead, there was a row of hangars, each one big enough to hold a wide-bodied jet.

He contacted the tower for permission to land. It was a formality: they weren’t going to say no, and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Everything was converging on this point: none of them had any room for manoeuvre. He almost felt sorry for the spooks, consigned to the near-perpetual darkness. He was guessing that most of them had no idea why they were up in the frozen north. The more of them that knew, the more likely there’d be a leak that’d get picked up by the Freezone’s data miners.

The required permission came, nevertheless, along with a hangar assignment. Petrovitch dropped the plane on to its wheels and steered it towards the opening doors. Inside the hangar, it was bright and full. There were only a couple of bays that were still vacant, all the others taken by functional light transports bearing the ARCO livery.

He applied the brakes when he was within the yellow lines, and cut the power. As the turbines wound down, the heavy gears that closed the external doors cranked into life.

Still Petrovitch sat there, staring at the blank wall in front of him.

Newcomen unbuckled his harness, but Petrovitch wanted to wait for a moment, to savour the tension in the air.

“Can you feel it?” he asked. “It’s here. Everything’s just fallen into place — us, them, Lucy. The game’s ready to begin.”

“This isn’t a game.”

“Yeah, yeah, it is. Just because we’re all going to die doesn’t mean that we’re not playing. Your lot have the advantage: you hold all the cards bar one. But I’ve gambled more on less.”

“At least I’ll die clean and fed, then. But not warm.”

“Don’t be petulant. Perhaps it does suit you, but I don’t have to listen to it.” Petrovitch hit his own buckle and shrugged the straps away. “Believe it or not, it’s actually warmer outside than when we were in Canada. Snow’s due in the next twenty-four hours.”

He called for the door to open and the steps to lower. On the way, he scooped up his bag. He was half expecting a welcoming committee: cold-hearted killers, bright-eyed analysts, pipe-wielding heavies. Waiting to impress on him the importance of his mission, the urgency of it all. Find her, they’d say, you know you want to.

And he did.

But there was no one. They were alone in the hangar, with nothing but cold still air to greet them.

“Isn’t it about now someone says that it’s too quiet?” asked Newcomen. He was fastening his parka unbidden, and Petrovitch thought that there might be some hope for the man.

“Only if they’re in a bad detective movie.”

“And we’re not?”

“Different kind of movie altogether.” Petrovitch’s mouth twitched. “We have to check in, then we’ll do a tour of the sights.” He reached out and patted the fuselage. “Need some more fuel for the bird.”

He trotted to the bottom of the steps, and strode out across the hangar, looking back briefly. His borrowed plane was like a swan compared with the bulky ARCO service models. It was going to be a shame to lose it.

There was a human-sized door inset into the main motoroperated door. He opened it up and stepped outside. It might have been a few degrees warmer, but it was still double-digit cold.

Newcomen closed the door behind him, and they walked together towards the distant buildings. Somewhere under the ice were roads, and maybe they could have arranged a transfer to the hotel, but Petrovitch wanted the time to talk.

“This place will be wired, completely. Anything you say or do will be recorded in half a dozen different ways, right down to the volume, velocity and composition of your farts. Almost everyone you meet — who’s not an Inuit — will be a plant, and then some of them, too. There’s been a wholesale rerostering of ARCO employees: ringers with fake resumes straight out of central casting are in, regular Arctic workers out.”

“Won’t the company’s profits suffer for that?”

“The chairman of ARCO is so thoroughly Reconstructionist, I doubt he’d think twice about making the whole outfit a CIA front.”

“So, what? The whole town’s populated by secret agents?”

“I wouldn’t call it a town, but yeah. That gives us a surprising degree of latitude.”

“How so?”

“Ever seen Westworld ?”

Newcomen frowned. “Don’t think so.”

“Made in the seventies. It’s about a special theme park, populated by robots, that rich people can visit to fulfil all their wanton, hedonistic desires. Fight, kill, have orgies, the lot. End of the day, the staff just clean the robots up and get them ready for the next bunch of tourists.”

“That sounds horrible! Gross, perverted.”

“And it is. The story does have a happy ending: the robots rise up and slaughter the humans.”

“That’s just as bad.”

“This is not a pointless anecdote,” said Petrovitch. “We’re in our own personal Westworld. We can do, more or less, anything we like, and it’s all consequence-free. They might decide to take our guns away if we kill too many of them, but that’s about it. As long as we find Lucy for them, they don’t care.”