Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(14)
Five floors up, he waved his phone at the door of Room 502 and stepped inside. The room was small, stark, utilitarian, the only decoration a single replica ikon on the wall over the bed. The window looked down into a courtyard calf-deep in snow. Two figures, bulky as Kodiak bears in their cold-weather gear, were enthusiastically throwing snowballs at each other in the light of the hotel’s many windows.
Spencer closed the curtains, put his overnight bag on the floor, and sat on the bed for a few moments, trying to let himself catch up with the journey. He took a container from his pocket, shook out a couple of tablets, dry-swallowed them, and closed his eyes until the fog went away.
He had a shower, ordered a steak and fries and a green salad from room service, sat eating in front of the entertainment centre watching a local news feed that seemed to consist mainly of stories about football and nationalist marches. Later, he went to the room’s cheap little wardrobe, opened it, and took out the package on the shelf inside. Then he went to bed.
THE NEXT DAY was a series of hops in prop-driven aircraft of varying decrepitude, to cities with names like Bratsk and Ust-Ilimsk and Erbogachen, like places out of a fantasy novel. The landscape below was a dense carpet of snowy forest divided by winding rivers and the white lines of roads and spotted with frozen lakes. It seemed to go on to the misty uncertain edges of the world.
There was an hour’s layover at Erbogachen Airport – the last stopover before the Sakha Republic – and the coffee shop where he had a late lunch seemed to be mostly full of ethnic Yakuts with industrial quantities of luggage, many of whom packed themselves on his flight.
The sun was setting, here in what had once been the Russian Far East, when the plane descended from the cloudbase for its final approach to Mirny. Looking down, Spencer saw a now-familiar scene – dense larch taiga forest, a sprawl of housing blocks festooned with balconies and every kind of aerial created by humanity, a main road running through it all, industrial chimneys pumping out clouds of smoke and vapour, lakes, open-cast mine workings, everything blanketed with snow. Just beyond the city rose an enormous tessellated blister, a startling dome that shone with a green-tinged interior illumination in the dusk.
Once upon a time, mineral-rich Sakha had produced more than a quarter of the world’s diamonds, and the majority of them had come from here, the great terraced open-cast pit of the Mir Diamond Mine, a hole in the earth almost a mile across and so deep that it caused air currents strong enough to suck helicopters out of the sky overhead.
The mine had closed in the early years of the century, and after a number of false starts a company had come in – no one knew quite from where, although they were notable, in those cash-strapped days, for having seemingly limitless money – and proceeded to roof over the pit and ‘terraform’ the interior. This was something of a misnomer, as the mine was already on Earth, but it looked good in the corporate materials, and if any of the existing inhabitants of the town were at all disgruntled about the area being compared to an alien world, their sensitivities were soothed by several philanthropic improvements to their infrastructure, including a new hospital and football stadium.
A courtesy bus took passengers from the airport to what was now the Mirny EcoState. For those who couldn’t be bothered to wipe the condensation off the windows and look out at the grim town which had been built to service the mine, there were paperscreens showing a cheerful documentary about how the world’s second-deepest man-made hole had been transformed into an arcology which was the byword for sustainability. Spencer watched the documentary, with its lively animations about spray-insulation and injection-polymer permafrost stabilisation, and found his mind wandering. He took a tablet.
The bus pulled up outside a large featureless cube of a building, considerably cleaner and in a better state of repair than the rest of the town, a few metres from the dome. The passengers disembarked and shuffled through the stinging cold to the doors.
Inside, all was quiet and warm, a big airy foyer laid out like the departure gates of an airport. A few people were already queuing to pass through scanners and metal detectors and progress further into the building. Most of the new arrivals, Spencer among them, headed for a set of gates marked ‘Residents,’ although in truth residents and visitors were treated more or less the same – both went through the same document and security checks.
On the other side of the gates, Spencer stepped into a gents’ restroom, locked himself into a cubicle, stripped naked, and put his clothes into a bag. He took from his overnight bag the package from the hotel room in Krasnoyarsk and peeled back the outer layer. Inside was a pair of polymer gloves. He put them on, then undid the inner layer of the package. Inside were two bags. One was about the size of a large padded envelope. He tore it open carefully and shook out what appeared to be a very large surgical glove. He stretched the neck and stepped into it, and there followed a couple of minutes of contortions made more complicated by the fact that he was trying not to make contact with the outer surface, but finally he was wearing a sort of skin-tight transparent onesie. He pulled the hood over his head; the edges sealed themselves against his face, leaving only his nose and mouth and eyes exposed.
Quickly now, he opened the other bag – jeans, trainers, a T-shirt and hoodie – dressed, put everything in his overnight bag, pulled the hood up, and left the restroom.
There was no sense that he was in a foreign country, a pocket nation carved out of the permafrost of the Sakha Republic. He walked down wide corridors floored with hard-wearing carpet and the occasional door marked AUTHORISED ACCESS ONLY in half a dozen obscure languages. It was like being in a very large but rather disappointing office building.