Simon Morden - The Curve of The Earth

And the card reader. He pulled it out and sat it on the table, but was distracted by the sight of a half-cup of cold coffee, its black surface trembling with distant explosions.

He had time enough for a brew.

He found an almost-clean cup on the draining board of the not-completely-plumbed-in sink, and over on a workbench, a bare heating element wired into the wall. It didn’t look entirely safe, but he’d used worse. And there were biscuits in one of the drawers, along with a fistful of coffee sachets.

He poured two of those into the cup, topped it up with water and lowered the heater into it. There was a satisfying blue spark when he turned it on, and the slowly blackening water started to seethe.

The biscuit packet was new: he ripped at one end with his teeth, and extruded the first directly into his mouth. Thereafter he chain-ate them, swallowing one as he started chewing the next.

His coffee boiled. He turned off the element at the wall — another snap of electricity — and carried the mug to the table. He retrieved the envelope again, and this time eased his finger under the gummy flap, easing it open.

Turning it over, he tipped the contents out. A little black rectangle clicked on to the scarred formica. An old-school memory card from a camera: fifteen, maybe even twenty years out of date.

“You have got to be yebani kidding me.”

[Is there a problem?]

Petrovitch held up the card so Michael could see.

[This is frustrating. Your reader does not take that format.]

“No. No, it doesn’t.” He pressed the card to his forehead. “Nothing. Nada.”

[Either you find a suitable data port in your locale, or you will have to solder wires to the contacts and manually interrogate the data. It is likely the information on that card is critical to the success of your mission.]

“Haven’t you got robots to command, rather than stating the yebani obvious?”

[Yes, but they do not require much oversight. A relatively simple iterative search program coupled with an executive order protocol that flags up possible targets for me to consider renders intensive management redundant. One trooper has been disabled by small-arms fire, and another by a mechanical defect. The environment is extreme, and I expect the rate of attrition to be high.]

Petrovitch was already on his feet, inspecting the workstation hiding in the corner. “Just the regular slots.” He spun it around and inspected the back. “ Chyort vos’mi .”

He knelt down and systematically worked his way through all the cupboards, then started on the benches. Nothing. And no guarantee that if he found something, it would still work. He was about to break something gratuitously when he saw a couple of bags hanging from hooks behind the door.

He spilled the contents of the first one out on the floor, and sorted through them with his sweeping hands: small bronze coins, loose keys, bits of paper, a couple of pens, a hip flask, a slim notebook with dog-eared pages. The second was heavier; rather than just upending the bag, he plunged his hand between the jaws of the zip and struck figurative gold.

His fingers tightened around a dense cold lump, and he knew by its heft it was tech. He pulled it out: a compact video camera, paint worn out with use, silverwork scratched. It looked ancient, a museum piece. He checked its make and model. It had been new twenty-three years earlier. By rights, it should have been consigned to the bin ages ago.

But once he’d found the on switch, he discovered its battery was half charged up. And there was no memory card in the little slot. He had not just found a suitable bit of hardware to slot his card into, but the original camera it had come from. Whoever owned it worked in that very hangar, repairing things for ARCO.

Petrovitch sent a virtual agent to work through the duty roster, trying to find suitable suspects: while he waited for it to report back, he fished out the memory card, turned it the right way around, and gently eased it into place.

The camera digested its new information, then displayed the updated results. The card was all but full. He found the preview button, checking with an online copy of the original documentation to make sure it was the preview button because he was paranoid about deleting something by accident, then pressed it.

Video had accumulated like coral: it looked like no one had bothered to either download or wipe any image they’d ever taken, and the time stamp on the earliest clips was from two decades ago. But Petrovitch wasn’t bothered about personal memories from the mid twenty-tens, more about what had happened last week.

He scrolled back past the first image to the latest scene. There was something wrong with the file: it should have been a video — but it wouldn’t play, despite his urging.

“I’m going to have to do this the hard way after all. Can you make sure I’m not disturbed?”

[The Americans have retreated to an ARCO drilling facility some two kilometres distant. I have set up a perimeter to keep them away from the settlement, but they appear content to stay where they are. I have lost seven teletroopers due to mechanical failure, another three to enemy action. Of the remaining twenty-two, only fifteen are fully operational. However, it is the sterilisation they have ordered that concerns me.]

Petrovitch stumbled into the table in front of him, spilling his coffee and dislodging one of the biscuits so that it rolled on to the floor. “St… what?”

[A flight of planes from Eielson has been delayed due to the weather. Delayed, but not postponed.]

“How long do I have?”

[Perhaps as much as twenty minutes.]

“ Yebat’ kopat’ .” He went back to his bag. Right down at the bottom was a tube of conducting glue.

[Pin values for the data card.] An image hovered in front of him.

“Thanks.”

[You will need to supply two point seven volts to pin four.]

“Yeah. I know.”

[Pin three is ground. These two must be connected first.]

“Michael. Shut the huy up.” He filleted his reader, extruding the wires in a fan. “I was doing this before you were born.”

[I am only twelve.]

“Precisely my point.” He stripped the sleeving off each wire with his teeth. “You don’t even have opposable thumbs.”

Petrovitch remotely accessed the reader’s set-up screen, and assigned the correct values to the wires. He cleared a space on the workbench with a sweep of his arm and set out the reader, its bundle of wires and the card. Bending low, he cranked up the magnification on his eyes, and started to stick each wire to each metal contact in turn.

“Yes? No?”

[One moment.]

“I don’t have a yebani moment. They’re going to bomb the town flat in less than fifteen minutes and I need to know if this card tells me Lucy’s in the line of fire.”

The light on the reader flicked from steady green to blinking yellow.

[Interesting. The most recent file is incomplete: I will recreate the end-of-file data. Done. The file is ready to play. We have analysts standing by.]

Petrovitch blinked, and suddenly it was night.

Night, but not dark. A streamer of burning light tore through the sky, east to west, shedding pieces as it went. In the raw data, the camera jerked and shook, but he could correct for that, keeping the main incandescent mass in the centre of the frame, while bits calved off and flashed with their own energy.

It wasn’t quiet. Two voices exchanged opinions on the meteor: one was the camera operator, distinct and loud. The other was quieter but more excitable, standing a little way off. They talked in Inupiat and English, swapping between the two when the vocabulary in one became stretched. Behind both men was the distant grumble of air being superheated and torn aside, and the yowl and yip of husky dogs.