Permafrost

Permafrost by Alastair Reynolds




After I shot Vikram we put our things in the car and drove to the airstrip. Antti was nervous the whole way, knuckles white on the steering wheel, tendons standing out in his neck, eyes searching the road ahead of us. When we arrived at the site he insisted on driving around the perimeter road twice, peering through the security fencing at the hangars, buildings and civilian aircraft.

“You think he’s here?”

“More that I want to make sure he isn’t.” He drove on, leaning forward in his seat, twitchy and anxious as a curb-crawler. “I liked Miguel, I really did. I never wanted it to come to this.”

I thought about what we had to do this morning.

“In fairness, you also liked Vikram.”

“That took a little time. We didn’t click, the two of us, to start with. But that was a long while ago.”

“And now?”

“I wish there’d been some other way; any other way.” He slowed, steering us onto a side road that led into the private part of the airstrip, at the other end from the low white passenger terminal. “Look, what you had to do back there . . .”

I thought of Vikram, of how he’d followed me out into the field beyond the farm, fully aware of what was coming. I’d taken the artificial larynx with me, just in case there was something he wanted to say at the end. But when I offered it to him he only shook his head, his cataract-clouded eyes seeming to look right through me, out to the grey Russian skies over the farm.

It had taken one shot. The sound of it had echoed back off the buildings. Crows had lifted from a copse of trees nearby, wheeling and cawing in the sky before settling back down, as if a killing was only a minor disturbance in their daily routine.

Afterward, Antti had come out with a spade. We couldn’t just leave Vikram lying there in the field.

It hadn’t taken long to bury him.

“One of us had to do it,” I answered now, wondering if a speck on my sleeve was blood or just dirt from the field.

Antti slowed the car. We went through a security gate and flashed our identification. The guard was on familiar terms with Antti and barely glanced at his credentials. I drew only slightly more interest. “Trusting this old dog to take you up, Miss . . .” He squinted at my name. “Dinova?”

“Tatiana’s an old colleague of mine from Novosibirsk,” Antti said, shrugging good-humouredly. “Been promising her a spin in the Denali for at least two years.”

“Picked a lovely day for it,” the guard said, lifting his gaze to the low cloud ceiling.

“Clearer north,” Antti said, with a breezy indifference. “Got to maintain my instrument hours, haven’t I?”

The guard waved us on. We drove through the gate to the private compound where the light aircraft were stabled. The Denali was a powerful single-engine type, a sleek Cessna with Russian registration and markings. We unloaded our bags and provisions, as well as the airtight alloy case that held the seeds. Antti stowed the items in the rear of the passenger compartment, securing them with elastic webbing. Then he walked around the aircraft, checking its external condition.

“Will this get us all the way?” I asked.

“If they’ve fuelled it like I requested.”

“Otherwise?”

“We’ll need to make an intermediate stop, before or after the Ural Mountains. It’s not as if I can file an accurate flight plan. My main worry is landing conditions, once we get near the inlet.” He helped me aboard the aircraft, putting me in the seat immediately to the left of the pilot’s position. My eyes swept the dials and screens, the ranks of old-fashioned switches and knobs. There were dual controls, but none of it meant much to me. “Sit tight, while I go and fake some paperwork.”

“And if I see Miguel?”

Covering himself, Antti reached into his leather jacket and extracted the Makarov semiautomatic pistol I’d already used once today. He had already given me a good description of Miguel.

“Make it count, if you have to use it. Whatever Miguel says or does, it’s not to be trusted.”

He stepped off the plane and went off in the direction of the offices serving the private compound.

Could you do it, if you had to?

I brought the automatic out from under my jacket, just enough to see a flash of steel.

Why not? I did it to Vikram.

I was glad to see Antti coming back. He had his jacket zipped tight, his arm pressed hard against his side, as if he was carrying a tranche of documents under the jacket. Paperwork, maybe, for when we got to the north. He stooped down to pull away the chocks under the Denali. He got in and started the engine without a word, bringing it to a loud, humming intensity. The propeller was a blur. Almost immediately we were moving off. I didn’t need to know much about flying to understand that there was a sequence of procedures, safety checks and so on, that we were ignoring completely.

“Is everything . . .”

The engine noise swelled. It was too loud to talk, and he hadn’t shown me how to use the earphones. I leaned back, trusting that he knew what he was doing. We rumbled onto the strip, gathering momentum. It only took a few seconds to build up to takeoff speed, and then we were up in the air, ascending steeply and curving to the north. Soon the clouds swallowed us. Eventually Antti got us onto something like a level, steady course, ploughing through that grey nothingness. He reduced the power, adjusted our trim and tapped a few commands into the GPS device mounted above the instrumentation.

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