‘Yes, and has been awake for a couple of days now. It was touch and go for a while, when it came to reviving him, but we’ve already begun an interrogation. Hopefully he can tell us something about just what it is we’re dealing with now.’
‘And the other one? The one who got swallowed up in that pit?’
‘Still under heavy sedation. Obviously it’s the near-future Mitchell we really need answers from. He must have witnessed everything that’s going to happen.’
He gave her a moment to try and absorb everything he’d told her.
‘Listen,’ she said after a moment. ‘About . . . us.’
He raised both eyebrows.
‘I know we’ve been avoiding discussing any plans about the future,’ she said. ‘It’s not like there was ever a right time to talk about it. I wasn’t sure until now, but . . . I’m not going off to the colonies with the rest of you.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I’m staying here.’
He stared at her wordlessly for a moment, before he could summon a response. ‘I don’t understand.’
She took a deep breath, her shoulders rising and then falling. ‘I don’t know if I want to survive what’s coming, knowing I had a part to play in all . . . all of this.’
In the end of the world
, he guessed she meant to say, but couldn’t bring herself to speak the words.
‘You’re serious?’
‘Think of it like the captain going down with the sinking ship after she’s steered it straight into an iceberg, Thomas. I should have listened more to my staff when they warned me not to let those artefacts be brought to Earth until we knew exactly what we were dealing with.’
‘We don’t know that the artefacts are responsible. And you can’t blame yourself for—’
‘Then who do I blame?’ she snapped.
He cleared his throat. ‘There’s no point worrying about what can’t be undone.’
‘If we do follow the rest of them to the colonies, we’ll be cut off from everything we’ve ever known. All of it . . . gone.’ She shuddered. ‘I’d say I can’t even imagine it, but I don’t need to. I’ve
seen
it.’
She stood up then, smoothing her skirt down over her thighs, her movements slow and fluid in the lower gravity. He had a sudden flash of memory from several nights back, of her laughing and then sighing as he kissed her thighs, pulling himself up and on top of her.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Don’t . . .’
She walked over to the door. ‘Don’t even bother trying to convince me, Thomas. I want to see how it ends.’
‘There’s something you need to know,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘About the video message – the warning. You haven’t seen all of it.’
She frowned and let go of the door handle. ‘I haven’t?’
‘I had part of it redacted.’
She regarded him uncertainly. ‘What’s in the bits you took out?’
He got up to fetch himself another drink. He was going to need it to get through this.
‘You are,’ he replied.
Flathead Lake, Montana, 25 January 2235
It took Jeff Cairns nearly six hours to navigate the hire car to his cabin in the Rockies. Early spring rains, bringing the last of the meltwater down from the peaks, had flooded out a bridge and also wiped out a section of road, meaning long detours and one eye kept constantly on the weather feed, throughout his long drive north from Missoula.
As soon as he had left the city limits and the hopper port behind, Jeff took manual control, ignoring the dashboard’s warning that his insurance was void if he didn’t stick to automatic so long as the weather bureau warned of adverse conditions. He took pleasure in the feel of the steering wheel under his hands, despite the periodic squalls of rain that lashed at his windscreen, but after a while the rain faded to a light drizzle and the car altered its configuration, becoming lower and more aerodynamic, and even changing colour according to some pre-programmed algorithm. After a couple of hours, a break in the clouds suddenly appeared, and Jeff soon found himself driving through sunlight of such glorious intensity that it seemed to bore through his eyes to touch against the back of his skull.
He took the off-ramp when the car instructed him to, the roads thereafter becoming gradually steeper, higher and narrower, until finally he followed a series of switchbacks, up the side of a hill above Flathead Lake, to a gravelled driveway fronting a gable-roofed log house.
Jeff climbed out and walked around, stretching his legs after such a long drive, while his car sidled over to the grassy slope, there sucking up leaves and twigs and any other available biomass. He tucked his hands into the pockets of his down jacket, and gazed down the slope of the wooded hill to where the waters of the lake shimmered gold and silver. The evening was drawing in as the sun dipped down towards the peaks on the far side of the lake, the last of the rain clouds evaporating even as their fading shadows drifted across hills dense with larch and aspen.
When he felt ready, he walked around to the rear of the cabin and checked the mini-tokamak that supplied it with power. He next headed over to a tool shed standing below some trees that grew up the slope behind the cabin, where he stepped inside and cleared away a tarpaulin laid across the floor. Beneath was a metal doorand asp a combination lock. He rotated it in different directions a couple of times until the lid clicked open, then withdrew a foil blister-pack from inside his jacket and placed it inside the safe, before locking it once more.
As he returned to the car to collect his luggage, Jeff accessed his UP and saw there were new messages waiting for him, all left by Olivia. He left them unopened, afraid that, if he did read them, he might make the mistake of calling her back and telling her all the things he’d struggled to keep hidden from her.
He woke with a start not long after dawn. He had been dreaming of Site 17, of walking through the abyssal dark with lights strung along on either side. Farad had been standing in front of him, his face full of alarm, shouting at him silently through his visor.
Jeff got up, his body stiff and sore, and ate a sparse breakfast before driving the rental downhill to where a trail met the road close by the lake. He still retained vivid memories of hiking along this same trail in what now felt like another lifetime. He’d been working on his graduate thesis the first time he’d come here and, although he’d hiked across other parks and trails in the years since, Flathead Lake still held a special place in his heart. The girl he’d brought with him all those years ago was long gone, but he’d come back almost every year since. The bonuses he and Olivia had received for their work on the Jupiter platform had gone towards the down-payment on the cabin, and they had spent several summers there together, before things had soured.
Later hiking trips, whether with other people or on his own, had taught him that particularly intractable problems – whether related to his work in the University of California’s exobiology department or to his intermittent love life – could often be best solved during his traversing of the trails scattered around the lake. On such occasions, the mountains and sky became a great blank canvas for his thoughts, a cosmic whiteboard that left him feeling he understood the way the world worked just a little bit better than before.
But this time was different. This time he didn’t want to think at all. He wanted to become lost in the scent of budding wildflowers, the sight of whitetail deer or the occasional elk picking their way down forest slopes, or amidst the meltwater cascading down those same slopes in the first weeks of spring.
He pushed himself hard for the first half-dozen kilometres, sweating beneath his down jacket, despite the freezing temperatures, his feet chafing painfully inside stiff new hiking boots. And, for a while, it worked; but the first time he stopped to eat a granola bar and take in the view, looking out across a world he could almost imagine was devoid of people, all he could really see was a great pyramidal mass under a starless sky, squatting on an airless plain in a future he would have found unimaginable if he hadn’t already visited it.
He felt, to his bitter annoyance, lonely. So when an unexpected visitor appeared as if out of nowhere, a few days later, he felt pathetically grateful even while he knew the only reason they could possibly be here was to bring him very bad news.
Jeff squinted into the brilliant morning light, beyond the porch, to see the lean figure of Dan Rush, his long, sallow features and weather-beaten skin somehow more appropriate to an ageing cowboy than a materials analyst.
‘Dan?’ Jeff peered at him groggily, his dressing gown clutched around his shoulders, as he’d slept well past midday. ‘What the fuck are you doing out here?’
Dan rocked from foot to foot on the narrow porch, looking at him expectantly, dressed only in a light sports jacket more suited to visiting a bar than the great outdoors. A second hire car was parked near Jeff’s own, where it shuffled closer to the verge and began tearing up the same patch of grass, sucking the biomass deep into its guts prior to converting it to ethanol.
Jeff glanced down and saw that Dan was wearing dress shoes, even less appropriate to the Rockies, at the tail end of winter.
‘Will you just let me in?’ Dan demanded, shoving his hands into his pockets and shivering. ‘It’s cold as hell out here.’
Jeff pressed the fingers of one hand into the corners of his eyes before stepping to one side, waving for Dan to come in.
Dan headed straight for the fire that Jeff had left smouldering overnight in the hearth. He leaned over it with his collar pulled up, still shivering, rubbing his hands vigorously before the naked heat. He glanced briefly at the dozen beer bottles piled up on a table next to the couch, but elected to say nothing.
‘I’ve got coffee on the go,’ Jeff mumbled, head still throbbing from his night of drinking and channel-surfing. ‘You want some?’
Dan glanced at him and nodded, before returning his attention to the hearth.
Jeff checked the filter had finished dripping the last of the Arabica into a pot, and nuked a packet of frozen waffles while he was at it. Given the long drive to the cabin, he guessed Dan probably hadn’t eaten any breakfast. He then grabbed a couple of mugs and put them on a tray, along with the coffee and waffles. By the time he returned to the living room, Dan had pulled a chair up next to the hearth, and sat there staring contemplatively into the flames.
They ate in silence at first, Jeff watching Dan plough his way through most of the waffles. He seemed twitchy as a bird, tension visible in the set of his jaw and the way he kept massaging his hands in the rare moments they weren’t holding either food or coffee.
‘How did you find me out here?’ Jeff finally asked. ‘I don’t remember telling anyone where I’d be.’
‘We did agree to stay in touch, right?’ said Dan.
‘Yes, but that’s not the same as telling each other where we’d be. Why didn’t you just get in touch the way we agreed, rather than actually hauling your ass all the way out here?’
‘Your ex-wife in Vermont told me where to find you,’ Dan replied. ‘She told me she thought you’d been acting strangely and that, if you’d gone anywhere at all, it was probably here.’
Jeff groaned and leaned back, closing his eyes for a moment. ‘How did you find her?’
‘I met her one time when she came down to Orlando to meet you, remember?’ Dan replied. ‘Right after you got back together with her, and you’d already mentioned she lived in Jacksonville. There’s only one Olivia Jury there. I told her I badly needed to get hold of you.’ He looked around the room. ‘So why did you decide to come all the way out here?’
‘I’ve been hiding in case someone figured out we’d hacked the Tau Ceti databases. I got tired of sleeping in motels and thought I might as well hole up here as anywhere else, at least until I heard from Farad.’
‘And you didn’t bring Olivia with you?’
‘I thought I’d be putting her in danger if I did.’
‘You haven’t told her anything?’
‘No.’ Jeff shook his head. ‘You still haven’t told me why you’re here.’
Dan chewed his food for several long seconds, as he gazed into the flames. ‘I came to tell you Lucy’s dead.’
Jeff stared at him, his hangover suddenly forgotten. He remembered the sight of her crouching by the pit next to Dan, in the moments before they found Mitchell.
‘Police found her in her car in a motel parking lot.’ Dan finally looked back up. ‘She’d been on her way to Miami.’ He took a sip of his coffee and finally met Jeff’s eye. ‘Officially it was a heart attack, but she’d called me the day before and told me she was certain she was being followed. She wanted to know if I’d noticed anything like that myself.’
‘That’s . . . that’s dreadful.’
‘Terrible,’ Dan agreed. ‘And particularly worrying since Lou Winston also appears to have vanished. First thing I did after hearing about Lucy was try to get hold of him. Turns out he has a place on one of those floating platforms just offshore from New Orleans, but his family reported him missing more than a day ago.’
Jeff felt like a cavity had been hollowed out inside his chest. ‘They know about the files, right? And now they’re coming after us.’
Dan shook his head, his expression bleak. ‘Don’t be so certain that’s the reason. I tried to get hold of people from the other sci-eval teams, people who’re supposed to be back home by now, and nobody knows where they are. My guess is Hanover or somebody higher up the food chain – Fowler, maybe, or Borusov – figured the civilian staff were too much of a security risk to be allowed to live.’