Adam Baker - Outpost

There was a steel lid in the floor like the turret hatch of a tank.

She heaved the hatch aside. A deep, vertical shaft. Flickering light at the bottom.

She checked her watch.

‘You’re nothing special,’ she told herself. ‘You’re not a hero. You’ve been a coward and a victim all your life. But plenty of others would turn and run right now. The girls who made your schooldays hell. That jeering, hateful crowd that drove you to the ends of the earth. None of them would have the courage to walk into this bunker and battle their way to the lowest levels.’

We are what we do.

She could be riding Rampart home. Instead she walked into hell to rescue a friend.

She climbed into the shaft and gripped the wall-rungs. She recited Byron as she began to descend.

Approaching footsteps. Dancing flashlight beam.

Nikki grasped Nail by the ankle and dragged him down the tunnel. She was half Nail’s body weight, but possessed a maniac’s super-strength. He sobbed and begged. His fingers raked concrete. Punch could hear Nail pleading as he was dragged away down the corridor. Echoing screams.

Punch adjusted his grip on the sharpened coin. He cut as fast as he could. The cord binding his wrists had started to fray.

Nikki returned and untied him from the girder. She dragged him down the tunnel. He didn’t scream. Whatever horror Nikki planned for him, he resolved his last words would be ‘Fuck you.’

There was an office chair in the middle of the tunnel. Nikki tied him to the chair and pushed him down the tunnel.

‘Where are we going?’ demanded Punch.

‘To meet the family.’

Nikki kicked open double doors and propelled Punch into some kind of operations centre.

The room was rippled with liquid metal like melted candle wax. Hyperion passengers were melded to the walls and ceiling like flies trapped in a web.

Hyperion crewmen stood sentry round the walls. Drones. Worker bees. Officers in brass-button uniform. Deckhands in striped tunics.

A figure at the centre of the room. A body lying in state. A Russian cosmonaut in a scorched pressure suit, part cooked by thermite but still intact. Canvas hanging in charred strips, under-suit ribbed with cooling tubes. The helmet visor was raised. Metal tendrils snaked from inside the enamel helmet, hung from the table, wound across the floor and fused with the wall.

Nikki parked Punch at the back of the room. He craned to see past Nail. A figure tied to a chair.

Ghost.

They both leaned forward so they could talk. Nail sat between them, sobbing.

‘How the hell did you get here, Gee?’

‘I came across the ice,’ said Ghost. ‘I came to help Jane. They caught me in the tunnels. Two of them. Thought they would kill me for sure, but they dragged me down here. It was like they had orders.’

‘Are you okay? Are you infected?’

‘I’m all right.’

A wall screen pulsed static. A figure was fused to the screen.

‘Who’s that?’

‘I think it’s Rye,’ said Ghost. ‘What’s left of her.’

‘Thought she was long dead.’

‘She was on Hyperion all the time we were living it up. She was down below with the passengers. Guess she survived the fire.’

Nail kept sobbing.

‘Nail. Hey, Nail.’

Nail didn’t look up.

‘Forget him,’ said Ghost. ‘He’s lost it.’

‘Have you got your knife?’

‘She took it.’

‘I can’t get my hands free.’

‘Jane is around here some place,’ said Ghost. ‘The best we can do is stall for time.’

Jane checked her watch. The final seconds.

Turn-around time. If she wanted to save her own skin, she should forget Punch and head for Rampart before it drifted beyond reach. Take a guaranteed ride back home.

She unbuckled the watch and threw it away. Fuck it.

Jane stood at the end of a corridor. She guessed the lower levels of the nuclear waste repository hid some kind of doomsday, continuation-of-government facility built during the cold war. A minor synapse of the Soviet command structure. Perhaps regional control for the submarine fleet.

She passed a communal shower.

She passed a powerhouse. Three rusted diesel generators. The generators appeared dead. She laid a hand on the metal housing. Cold. No vibration. Output dials smashed, needles at zero. So why were the lights on? The ceiling strip-lights pulsed like a slow heartbeat. She wondered if something had infiltrated the ducts and conduits. Perhaps the bunker itself was somehow alive and sentient.

She glanced into a side office. A pin-board map faded sepia. Canada, Norway and Alaska, the rest of the Arctic Circle. The stand-off zone. The theatre of war. Chart coordinates of the Soviet armada, the bomber fleet, patrolling the frontier, waiting for the order to attack.

An infected crewman from Hyperion stood in the corner of the room beneath a mildewed portrait of Lenin straddling the Arctic Ocean like a colossus. The semi-decomposed figure stood sentry like he was waiting for instructions.

Scattered equipment on the floor. New stuff. Tin mugs. Balled socks. Russian Playboy. Jane kicked through the litter. She kept her eyes on the infected crewman in case he made a move. He remained still, lit by intermittent, flickering light.

Jane thought about the infected crewmen she encountered in the upper levels of the complex. They wouldn’t have the intelligence or dexterity to improvise a suicide vest. Something was manipulating them, using them as a defence perimeter. Nikki? Had she got them trained like dogs? Sit, heel, beg.

Jane quietly backed out of the room. The rotted sentinel watched her leave but made no move to follow.

Something was aware Jane had entered the lowest levels of the bunker and was content to let her walk deeper into the subterranean complex.

Nikki wandered around the ops centre, hands in her pockets, casual confidence, like she ran the place. No sign of infection.

‘What’s the deal, Nikki?’ demanded Ghost. ‘Are we lunch, or what?’

Nikki turned to face him. Mild surprise, like she had forgotten he was there.

‘Believe it or not,’ she said, ‘I’m doing my best to help you.’

She was mild, good-humoured, utterly insane.

‘That’s nice.’

‘Jane will be here any minute,’ said Nikki, glancing at a Hyperion officer as if she expected him to provide confirmation. ‘I’m anxious to speak to her.’

‘We blew the anchor cables, Nikki. Rampart is floating free. It’s caught in the current. It’s heading south. We can all go home. You can come too. But we have to leave right now. We don’t have time to fuck around. It’s drifting out of range.’

Nikki shook her head and smiled.

‘They bombed the cities. Nuked them. I saw it myself, when I sailed south. I saw the sky lit up. I saw the world on fire. There’s nothing beyond the horizon, Rajesh. Europe has been wiped clean. America too, as far as I know. We are the last people on earth, and this is our home.’

‘You can’t be sure.’

‘Embrace it. It’s evolution. We are the next stage, the next level. Open your eyes. We are on the cusp of something wonderful.’

Nikki took gloves from her pocket and pulled them on. She stood over the dead cosmonaut. She reached inside the helmet and snapped a rivulet of metal. She examined it.