Adam Baker - Outpost

He lay on the floor of a bare room. The strip-light flickered. The walls were concrete. The ceiling was concrete. The floor was cold, green tiles. He guessed he was in the bunker.

He tried to roll. He tried to wriggle his hands free. He felt blood trickle into his palms.

The door opened. Small snowboots. Blue Ventile trousers. He lashed out with his legs. Someone kicked him in the face. He spat blood. He looked up. Nikki stood over him. She crouched and checked his cuffs.

‘Where am I?’

‘Where do you think you are?’ asked Nikki, calm and pleasant.

‘What the fuck is going on? Are you going to let me go, or what?’

‘An exchange,’ said Nikki. ‘I’m going to trade you for food and fuel.’

‘Food for what? Where are you heading?’

‘I wouldn’t worry too much about that.’

‘Where’s your boyfriend? Where’s Nail?’

‘He’s around.’

‘Cut me loose.’

‘Not yet.’

‘Go fuck yourself, Nikki.’

‘You want to get out of here, don’t you?’

‘You’re lying. Food and fuel. Bullshit. I don’t know what you are planning, but it’s not going to work.’

‘Jane will need proof of life. Tell me something only Sian would know.’

‘Help me up.’

‘No.’

‘Come on. I need a shit.’

‘So shit.’

‘I’m bleeding.’

‘So bleed.’

‘Go fuck yourself, Nikki. Seriously.’

Nikki left. The heavy door slammed. A key turned in a lock. Footsteps diminished down a passageway.

Punch squirmed across the floor to the wall. He tried to stand. Maybe he could ambush Nikki next time she walked through the door. Knock her out with a vicious headbutt. Get her on the floor and kneel on her throat. She would almost certainly have a knife in her pocket. He could free himself, and find his way back to Rampart.

He lost balance. He toppled to the floor. He hit his head and shoulder. He lay and stared at the wall. He felt hopeless and defeated.

Nikki returned an hour later. She crouched beside him. Punch didn’t look up.

Proof of life.

‘My favourite comic book character is John Constantine. When I was young I bought a trench-coat and smoked soft-pack Marlboros just so I could be like him.’

Nikki patted him on the shoulder. He heard the door close and a key turn in the lock.

Jane knocked on the door of Sian’s room.

‘Sian? Hello? Anyone home?’

No reply. Jane tried the door. It was unlocked. The room was dark, dimly lit by light spilling from the corridor. Sian was curled on her bunk staring at the wall. She was hugging her pillow.

‘Sorry to intrude,’ said Jane. ‘Ghost said we should both come and see the fireworks.’

‘What fireworks?’

Jane shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t say. He’s acting all mysterious. Seems pretty excited though. May as well humour the man.’

Sian wearily sat up. She switched on her lamp and winced against the sudden glare. She laced her boots.

Jane wanted to make conversation. No point asking: Are you feeling all right? Are you doing okay? The best she could offer was companionship, small talk.

‘We’ve still got a carton of Hyperion egg concentrate. Want a shitty omelette later?’

‘I just want to be quiet for a while, Jane. I don’t want much at all.’

Jane knew a little bit about loss. Not much. She hadn’t wept at a graveside. But she had a boyfriend at university. Mark. He dumped her for a thinner girl. Dumped her by text. She had to watch them arm-in-arm round campus. Those first few days of heartbreak were hell. Jane walked around with a head full of black. Felt like she was drowning. She stood in the supermarket queue and tried to act casual, tried not to sob and scream. Friends told her the grief would slowly ebb. She would think about him a little less each day. But the knowledge that one day she would leaf through Mark’s letters and feel nothing doubled her loss.

‘We should head to the canteen later,’ said Jane. ‘I’ll beat you at Monopoly.’

‘I’ll skip it.’

‘No. You’re going to play Monopoly. Then you are going to watch me cook an omelette, and then you’ll do the washing up, all right? You’ve got to keep on living.’

Ghost led them to C deck. He lifted a floor hatch.

Blast of winds and ice particles.

They climbed down a ladder and found themselves standing on an inspection walkway slung beneath the rig. Miles of pipes and girders above their heads. Mesh beneath their feet, and a two-hundred-metre drop on to the ice.

Ghost checked his watch.

‘Here it comes. Any second now.’

A shudder ran through the refinery, shaking loose icicles and slabs of snow. The pipes above their heads creaked and sang.

‘The storage tanks are dry,’ he explained. ‘But there is plenty of octane-grade distillate in the pipework. I’ve reversed the injection pumps. The whole system is set to flush itself out.’

Liquid poured from a massive pipe mouth hung beneath the belly of the rig. The retracted seabed umbilicus. It looked like Rampart was taking a piss. A torrent of part-refined fuel. First a spattering stream, then a gush. Thousands of gallons of semi-purified petroleum poured in a thin cascade and splashed across the polar crust.

‘Smell that?’ said Ghost. ‘Pure rocket fuel.’ He took a flare pistol from his pocket and slotted a shell into the breech. ‘This is going to be good.’

Nikki stood at the shoreline and watched the ocean burn. Flames danced spectral blue. The island was bathed in lavender light. The sea boiled with a gentle hiss, like a long exhalation.

She glimpsed the towers and girders of Rampart above great licks of fire. Melted ice fell from the superstructure in drips and slabs.

The refinery looked like Satan’s citadel, a jagged fortress at the centre of hell.

Nikki dropped to her knees. She watched in awe. A giddy moment of heightened awareness. She felt like an astronaut fired at light-speed out of the solar system into uncharted space. Each day brought strange and wonderful vistas, stardust and nebulas, and took her a million miles further from home.

The fire quickly died down and the refinery was lost behind a wall of steam.

Nikki brushed away frozen tears with a gloved hand. She slowly climbed to her feet. She took out her radio.

‘Rampart? Rampart, do you copy, over?’

Ghost opened the airlock door. He and Jane quickly pulled on thermal masks as the chamber filled with steam and smoke. They walked out on to the platform lift wreathed in fumes and vapour. They rode the elevator down to the ice.

The polar crust had melted and re-frozen. Their boots splashed in puddles of steaming water.

They looked up and inspected acres of smouldering crossbeams and pipes.

‘Looks like the underside of the rig got pretty cooked,’ said Ghost.

Petrified drips of steel hung from girders and ran down the blackened legs of the refinery like it was sweating metal.

‘How thick is this fucking ice?’ asked Jane, grinding her heel into the rippled surface. ‘A mile deep? We’re at the very edge of the Arctic Circle, the very edge of the polar field.’ She stamped. ‘This stuff is fresh. It should be wafer thin.’

‘Most of the heat went up. It didn’t penetrate.’

‘I can’t take this. Hope dashed every five minutes. It’s killing me.’

They heard a metallic creak. They looked up.

‘Cooling metal?’ speculated Ghost.

‘No. Something else.’

A low, mournful moan. A sudden tortured screech. A juddering rumble as the superstructure of the refinery began to flex. It sounded like whale song. A chorus of booms, whistles and shrieks.

‘Holy shit,’ murmured Jane. ‘It’s actually happening.’