Simon Morden - The Curve of The Earth

Skids would have been better, but there was hard substrate beneath. He was able to cut the power to the suspensors after allowing the undercarriage to settle properly.

“Here we are: seventy degrees ten minutes thirty-two seconds north, one hundred and forty-eight degrees five minutes fiftyseven seconds west.”

Newcomen huffed. “This place will have been picked clean: all your daughter’s effects are in a locker in Seattle, and anything useful will have gone.”

“So: you don’t know why you’re here.” Petrovitch punched his buckle through. “You’d much rather be chowing down on steak or standing under a shower until it runs cold.”

“It’s all I have left. If you don’t kill me, someone else will.” Newcomen made no effort to get ready to face the outside.

“Not quite. The deal still stands. Do your job: help me find Lucy.”

“But you say even my own countrymen won’t let me live.”

“Surprised as I am to find myself saying this: I’ll try to stop them from killing both you and me. I can’t honestly say how much that promise is worth, but, hey.” Petrovitch lowered the steps into the snow and popped the door. He stood up and began to fasten his parka. “I want to take a look around. There are questions your lot haven’t even thought to ask. I’m guessing the answers might still be lying around.”

His bag yielded two tiny, intensely bright torches. He pocketed the gun, too, then stepped outside into the freezing wind.

The biggest building was a prefab whose main doors had been sealed with binding strips of yellow and black tape: police line, do not cross. The tape riffled and fluttered.

Petrovitch stared at it, and considered what it meant. Eventually Newcomen joined him and shone his torch beam around him.

“It’s not much, is it?” He illuminated each of the weatherbeaten huts, then searched further out. There was nothing but snow and ice.

“In summer, it’s home to forty ecologists, botanists and biologists, plus field trips from the university. In winter, it’s closed, except for the auroral physics people.” Petrovitch dragged at the tape until it snapped. “What were you expecting? Some kind of great white-faced facility with a chain-link fence and patrolling security guards? It’s not Stanford, you know. It’s as much as they can do to keep this place from falling down.”

He pushed the handle on the door, and it creaked open. Inside, it was cold and still. He turned his own torch on and swept it down the corridor, across the notice boards, over the recessed doors that led to dormitories and labs. Everything glittered with frost.

Newcomen walked a little way down the bare boards and, out of habit, tried a light switch. It clicked hollowly.

“So this is where Lucy was when she lost contact.”

“Not exactly. There’s a winter lab a hundred metres off, closer to the aerial farm. All her datafeeds were routed there.” Petrovitch looked around again, but didn’t enter. As if he didn’t want to break the spell, as if looking at her empty room would send her spinning off into oblivion, never to return. “She had all her winter gear on her. Sleeping bag. Food and a stove. Rifle.”

“Rifle?”

“Yeah.” He clicked his torch off and let the red light behind his eyes be his guide. “You’re probably wondering how we got that through customs.”

“Her coat, though. We’ve got that. And boots and-”

“Tourist gear,” said Petrovitch. “I ordered her the same sort of stuff we’re wearing. It’s missing, so I assume she’s still got it all.”

“You knew. You knew all along. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you’d have told Buchannan, and he’d have told Ben and Jerry.”

“You didn’t trust me with the information.”

“I still don’t. Get over it. I’m going to see the physics hut. You can poke about here, see if there’s anything left.”

There was no path as such — probably one would emerge once the snow had melted — but Petrovitch could see the squat shape in the distance, lit from above by a tenuous apple-green curtain that swung lazily in the sky.

It would have been a good night for an experiment. Lucy would be crouching down over her instruments, watching the real-time data stream across the screen, and she’d read the peaks and troughs like a composer looking at a stave and hearing the music. She’d have a cup of builder’s tea in her hands, and she’d reach forward to a panel every so often, to change the amplification of a signal or correct a drift in the driving voltage.

When he tore the police tape away and opened the door, she wasn’t there.

Her equipment was, though. Hand-crafted labels in her tiny, spidery handwriting identified each switch and knob. Inside the grey cases, her signature soldering would be plain.

A bare cable was draped over the desk. The computer it had been attached to had gone. That was something that was in the inventory of things taken to Seattle, yet Petrovitch knew it had never arrived.

He settled into the wheeled chair and turned on his torch.

She would have sat right there, rolling from place to place rather than getting up and walking the two steps to where she needed to be. Just like a kid.

“Michael?”

[Sasha.]

“Talk to me. Tell me something I want to hear.”

[You were right.]

“Good. I was beginning to think I was losing my touch.” He shone his torch at the clocks on the wall: old-school analogue clocks, each face as big as a dinner plate. Four of them, each marked with a plaque: GMT, Alaska Time, Pacific Time, Local Time. The last one read twenty-three minutes and a few seconds past twelve.

[We have made a further analysis of the electrical and electronic disruption experienced in the Deadhorse area. While all the events are essentially simultaneous, within a margin of error, it appears that by ignoring the error and relying on the raw timings alone, a pattern emerges from the data.]

Petrovitch leaned back. “Let me guess. Things get fried earlier in the east than the west.”

[It is a matter of tenths of seconds for some of the intervals. And the main explosion that registers on the seismographs destroys less sensitive electronics back up the range, confusing the data.]

“This is insane.”

[The obvious conclusion is-]

“It’s not obvious at all,” he complained. “But it’s the only conclusion left. Svolochi . Someone beat me to it.”

[Just because we can explain the phenomenon does not mean we can then know everything about it.]

“We need to. Someone put a fusion reactor in space. The Americans shot it down.”

[The Chinese have denied it was theirs.]

“So they say.” He got up and started to pace the tiny room. “I’m still up on fusion. I know people in all the top facilities. How the huy could this have gone under the wire, and then ended up in yebani orbit? We’re talking tonnes. Tens, probably hundreds of tonnes of wire, shielding, all sorts of crap.”

[Yet analysis of Vice Premier Zhao’s conversation with you did not reveal any unusual stress patterns. It is likely that he was telling you the truth. Is it possible that he is not party to this secret?]

“What’s not possible is that the Americans knew and we didn’t. But it has to be the Chinese.” He threw himself back into the chair. “Doesn’t it?”

[Their major facility is at Zhejiang. Analysis of their research yields no evidence of a single instance of a sustained fusion reaction.]

“Of course it doesn’t. I’d know about it, along with the rest of the planet.”

[And if they are not ready to reveal their success?]

“There’s a world of difference between everybody knowing you’ve done it but you’re denying it, and so secret that no one knows you’re even capable of it. I mean, fusion. Yobany stos .”