Simon Morden - The Curve of The Earth

“Could have, but didn’t. Get up, man!” Petrovitch dropped his bag, dragged the Inuit on to his feet, and grabbed the handles again. “You’ve shown yourself to be an exceptionally brave and resourceful man. You’ve protected Lucy against every threat for the past week. You only have to keep going for a little longer, and then you can stop. Promise.”

It seemed to be the right thing to say. Avaiq only flinched once when he had to step over the legs and the blood welling out of the shooter. There was a spatter mark on the skirting board, and he looked away sharply.

Then they were back out in the driving wind and snow, the sky luminous with both celestial and earthly fire.

“Can we find our way in this?” Avaiq shouted to Petrovitch.

“Yeah. We can. Hopefully they’ll have more trouble.” Petrovitch stood astride the snowmobile. “Got your own?”

“It’s still in the shop.”

“Then get on, you mad bastard. We have less than six minutes.” He nodded to the back of the seat and pressed his bag on the man. “Put this between us: there’s nothing in there that’ll break. Sit down and hang on.”

[Less than five. The planes are lining up for their first run.]

“Really hang on,” said Petrovitch. He backed up for a metre, then started to accelerate forward, heading between the accommodation block and the next building. Beyond that was the river, frozen hard, snow blowing in sheets across its surface.

There was a small windshield, barely enough to deflect the freezing wind around his body, and certainly not tall enough to hide his face behind. He was blind: but for the overlay of wire shapes and coloured lines, he’d have driven into one of the supply lines that ran to the pipeline proper.

The path he had to follow directed him around the end of the pipe. It meant another minute within Deadhorse.

[The first of the bombs has been released. They are parachutedropped, and will take about ninety seconds to descend to detonation height. Due to the adverse weather conditions, the bomb yield and blast radius will be degraded, but still considerable.]

“Will we make it?” He was going so fast, every rut and crack in the underlying ground felt like a chasm.

[One moment.] The yellow line abruptly changed direction, no longer trying to guide him south-east. Due east now.

“ Chyort .”

He was on the river ice. The valley was so shallow as to provide him and his passenger with no protection at all. Somewhere on the other side was a service road that would be brilliant if he could hit it, because it felt like what was left of his internal organs were being jolted out of what was left of his body.

He kept going, his teeth clenched, his eyes screwed tight shut, relying solely on what Michael could show him.

[Right. Go right.]

He did, and felt, rather than saw, the light. The ground trembled, and a second later came the sound of God clapping his hands: low, sonorous waves of noise that felt like a punch in the gut and just as churning.

It was all but impossible to control the snowmobile at the speed he was going. He wasn’t dead yet, so he cut the speed and glided it to an almost-halt. They were the other side of the river, lost in the snow.

Flashbulbs were going off over the scattered structures of Deadhorse, and the air was stiffening with every explosion of orange-white.

Petrovitch waited for a lull, then asked, “You okay?”

“I guess so.” Avaiq relaxed his death grip for a moment. “Why? Why are they doing this?”

“Because they’re scared. That’s why.”

There was nothing to see but the changing brightness of a wall of snow. Time to finally get the answers he craved.

By the time Petrovitch steered the snowmobile next to Newcomen’s, he was so cold he could barely let go of the handlebars. His fingers had set into claws, and he wondered if he’d lose some to frostbite.

It was only meat, he told himself. Just flesh and bone. Replaceable. Upgradable.

He forced his mouth to work. “Off.”

The snow had eased, temporarily: enough so that he could see the black buildings of the research station against the white of the ground and the grey of the sky.

Behind him, Avaiq backed off the pillion seat and stumbled in an uncompacted drift. He muttered as he tried to regain his balance, failed, and sat down in the powdery snow.

Petrovitch rubbed his mittens against his jawline, turning the hard crust of frost inside his hood into flakes of ice he could inexpertly scoop out.

Avaiq stayed where he was, slumped, defeated.

“I can’t go back, can I?”

“There’s nothing left to go back to. The town’s gone: the pumping stations, the company facilities, the hospital, the airport. There’s nothing left, and by the time the Yanks have shot all the survivors, there’ll be no one to say what happened either. They’ll put it down to a series of massive gas explosions — which, in a way, it was — and rebuild the place a kilometre or two down the coast.”

“I know that,” said Avaiq, looking up at Petrovitch. “What I meant was, I can’t go back.”

“No. You can’t. Sorry. And neither can Newcomen, because I’m probably about to shoot him in the head.” He threw a handful of frost to the ground. “Unless I think it’s too much like hard work. You can claim asylum in Canada. If you don’t think that’s far enough away, you can come and work for the Freezone. We’re always hiring.”

“So. It’s all over.” When Avaiq breathed out, his whole body sagged. “I suppose I shouldn’t regret what I did. But I do.”

“Well, I’m grateful. The whole of the Freezone is. And if it’s any consolation, your fate was sealed the moment you and your friend with the dogs decided to see if the strange European girl needed help.” Petrovitch tried to stand, and ended up in a heap next to Avaiq. “ Chyort . That was what happened, wasn’t it? You were, where? Down by the edge of the sea ice, about ten k north of here? You saw the light in the sky, and you had your camera. Then everything electrical you had stopped working. While you were trying to work out what happened, you saw it fall. The capsule. Where did it land?”

Avaiq frowned. “What d’you mean?” He turned over on to his hands and knees and pointed to the frozen river below the slight rise on which the research station was positioned. The broad, flat valley was pocked with shallow lakes, and the river meandered around and through them on the way to the Arctic Ocean. “Right there. That’s where it came down. I thought you knew.”

One of the lakes had a circular ring of ice on its surface: great jagged plates thrown up by whatever had impacted its centre. In the daylight, it was obvious. It may as well have had a kiosk next to it, selling postcards.

“ Yebat’ kopat .” Petrovitch stood and stared. “How the huy did that get past us?”

[You came here in the dark, and we have no centimetreresolution satellite imaging capacity ourselves.]

“That has got to change.”

Then Newcomen came out of the main doors of the research station. “Petrovitch? I thought…”

“What exactly did you think, Newcomen?” Petrovitch batted the snow away from his chest and dipped inside for his gun. He pulled his mitten off with his teeth and spat it in the direction of his skidoo. “This is Paul Avaiq, by the way. ARCO engineer. Avaiq, meet — albeit briefly — Joseph Newcomen, FBI.”

Petrovitch straightened his arm. Newcomen looked like he might make the draw sign. Slowly and deliberately, he put his hands down by his side.

“Can I ask what I’ve done?”

“What did you tell them? Last night in your room, you had visitors. Didn’t exchange a single word, but they wrote stuff down and held it up to you, and you, in turn, gave them an answer.”