Adam Baker - Outpost

Jane looked for Sian.

‘I think she went outside,’ said Ghost.

Airlock 52. A winking red corridor light. An alert that the exterior door had been left open.

Jane put on her coat and stepped outside. She saw Sian standing at the end of a walkway. She was leaning over a railing, looking down at the ice far below.

Weeks ago, when Jane was fat and hopeless, she had leaned over a similar section of railing and willed herself to jump into the sea. She wondered if Sian was, at that moment, thinking of flinging herself from the refinery. Sian leaned further forward.

‘Hey,’ said Jane, reaching for the only words that might cut through Sian’s despair. ‘Come on, girl. We need your help.’

They walked to the pump house. Ghost twisted wire round the terminals of each initiator.

‘I taped up the windows,’ he said. ‘We should probably stand back from the glass. I’m not sure how big a bang this is going to be.’

They stood facing each other. ‘Want to say a prayer?’

‘No,’ said Jane.

‘Everybody ready?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Okay. Here we go. Three. Two. One.’

Nikki pressed her ear to the bunker door. No wind noise.

She dug a crash helmet from a pile of snowmobile components heaped by the tunnel wall. She opened the bunker door. Two infected passengers stood with their backs to her, looking out to sea. She swung the helmet and smashed their skulls.

Nikki climbed crags. She crouched on high ground. She surveyed the refinery through binoculars. The fog had cleared. Rampart was lit by weak twilight, a dawn that would never break.

She adjusted focus.

‘You see?’ said the voice of Nikki’s dead boyfriend. ‘ They’ve cut away the stairs and ladders. There is no way to get aboard .’

‘I could climb the cables.’

‘Too steep. Too smooth .’

‘I could fetch rope. I could grapple a railing.’

‘Too high. You would never manage the climb .’

‘There has to be a way.’

She switched to infrared. The frozen steel superstructure of the refinery betrayed no heat signature except for Accommodation Module A. The module glowed weak orange. Someone had switched on the heating.

She scanned walkways and gantries. A red dot. Zoom in. A glowing stick figure, walking slow, looking down as if they were following a trail.

‘Those bastards hold all the cards. They’ve got food, they’ve got heat and they’ve got guns .’

‘They are my responsibility. That’s why I came back. I have to save them. I have to save them from themselves.’

Nikki was halfway back to the bunker when she heard the explosion. A deep, rumbling roar like thunder. She ran to the shoreline. Two of the refinery’s great anchor cables were gone. The ice beneath the rig was shattered.

Nikki uncapped her binoculars. They were still set for infrared. The corner coupling burned crimson. Reset. Focus, re-focus. Mushroom clouds of smoke hanging over each coupling.

The third cable hung slack. A moment later the lock-pin broke loose of the coupling, and the cable dropped. It smashed through the ice crust and threw up a geyser of seawater.

‘Clever said Alan. ‘ Can you see what they are trying to do?’

‘My God,’ said Nikki. ‘They want to float the rig free.’

‘Yes.’

‘Will it work?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘They keep trying. Despite it all, they never give up.’

‘ They must never leave the island. You understand that, yes? They belong here with us .’

Ghost replaced the platform lift fuse.

He and Jane rode the platform lift down to the ice. Jane walked out on to the polar crust. She circled the great wall of steel.

‘Why the fuck is this thing not moving?’

‘The rig is ice-locked,’ said Ghost. ‘We’re stuck until the Arctic shelf melts and breaks up. We won’t see our first full sunrise for three weeks. Then it will take another month or two for the ice to thaw and break up. Our food won’t last that long.’

‘How about thermite grenades? Any left? Any at all? They’d melt the ice in seconds.’ ‘No.’

‘Explosives? Demolition charges from the bunker? Is there anything left? Anything at all?’

‘No. Nothing.’

‘Fuck. This thing weighs a million tonnes. Imagine the inertia. The momentum it would build up. If we could get it to shift a single centimetre it would keep going. It would be unstoppable. A juggernaut. It would plough through everything in its path.’

Jane sat on the platform lift. She pulled off a gauntlet and drew a smiley face on the frosted deck plate with her finger. ‘If only there was some way we could give it a push.’ Ghost looked out across the ice to the white horizon. ‘Got it,’ he yelled. ‘Come on.’

He ran to the lift and pressed Up. The platform juddered to life. It began to ascend.

‘Do you have the combination to Rawlins’s safe?’ he asked. ‘I found it in his address book.’

‘Go to his office. Look in the safe. There should be a couple of red keys in a plastic box, okay? Bring them to the pump house.’

Jane found the pump house ankle-deep in scrunched paper. Ghost sat at a desk rifling through box files and binders. He leafed through sheet after sheet and threw them aside.

Jane picked up a fistful of paper. System flow charts. Input/output schematics. Reciprocating compressors. Heavy octane filtration.

‘What are you looking for?’

‘I did a little work in here a few months back. A guy showed me something. Trying to find the damn thing.’

‘What does it look like?’

‘It’s a red sheet of paper.’

Jane leafed through files.

‘Yeah, baby,’ said Ghost, triumphantly waving a red laminated checklist.

She glimpsed DANGER in big letters at the top of the page.

‘What the hell is that?’

Ghost didn’t reply. He spun his chair across the room to the console, kicking box files aside.

The pump room windows had shattered when the demolitions charges blew. Ghost wiped snow and broken glass from the screens and consoles. He cranked isolator breakers to On. The pump consoles lit up and winked expectant green.

He jabbed the main touch-screen plan of the refinery and set each system flag from Off to amber Standby.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘The treaters are back on-line. The super-heaters. The draw-pumps. Did you find the box?’

‘Yeah.’

‘There should be two keys inside.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And an envelope.’

Jane read out authorisation codes. Ghost typed. The screen in front of him flashed red.

The final code was Rawlins’s employee number. Only he had sufficient high-level access to stop or re-start the refining process.

Jane read his employee number from an old payslip.

Ghost slotted keys into the main console.

‘We need to turn both keys at the same time.’

‘Are we launching a missile?’ asked Jane.

‘Remember Chernobyl? A couple of bored technicians nearly incinerated Europe. This is the biggest Merox treater in the world, give or take. Press the wrong button and we could pollute the entire western hemisphere.’

They turned the keys.

The screen began a ten-minute countdown.

‘Why the countdown?’ asked Jane.

‘Because we are asking the refinery to do something epically stupid and it wants us to reconsider.’

Punch woke. He struggled to open his eyes. A cut in his forehead. Lashes glued shut by clotted blood.

Punch was bound hand and foot. His arms were tied behind his back by nylon cord. The cord cut his wrists like wire. He twisted his hands to restore circulation.