Permafrost(35)

“Is there a difficulty with the experiment, Director Cho?” asked Dmitri, the nearest of the four pillars.

Ivan, Alexei and Pavel were showing signs of coordinated activity. Status graphics fluttered across their faces, too rapidly for human perception. But there were other things in that parade of images. Faces, maps, newsprint, official documents. They were sifting the past, dredging timelines and histories.

Nausea hit me again. It was all I could do to stoop, until the worst effects of it passed.

A visual flash. The aircraft cockpit, the instrumentation smashed before me, the landscape at an odd tilt through ice-scuffed windows. Antti slumped forward, his head looking in my direction, but his eyes sightless, a line of dried blood running from his lips.

Tatiana?

I’m here. Think I must have blacked out. We came down hard, didn’t we? Antti didn’t make it. Where are you?

Upstream. In the ship, the main ship. But you’re coming through.

You, too. What are those things? Those four things?

The cross talk was working both ways, I realised. She was seeing the Brothers, our control structures overlapping our visual fields, if only intermittently.

But she was alive. She’d survived the crash, was still living and breathing in 2028.

For now.

“You should go to the infirmary, Valentina,” Alexei said, with a tone of plausible concern. “We detect a neurological imbalance.”

“You killed Antti,” I said, keeping my voice level. “All of you. You got inside Miguel first, used him against us. You realised that you were only useful to us while Permafrost is active. You knew we’d destroy you, or make you less than what you presently are. So you used the time-probes to reach back even further.”

“These are incorrect assertions,” Pavel said.

“You have both been working very hard,” Ivan put in. “This labour is to your credit, but it has put you under a strain. You should rest now, Mr. Cho.”

Cho aimed the Makarov at the grilled base under Ivan. He fired once, and something crackled and sparked beneath the grille. Smoke, underlit in yellow, began to coil out of the grille.

“You have committed a detrimental act, Mr. Cho,” Dmitri said. “You must desist immediately.”

Symbols were playing across Ivan, but they were different now, consisting of repeating red warning icons. Cho walked to Alexei and fired into his base as well. He repeated the action with Dmitri and Pavel, shielding his face with his hand as he discharged each shot.

“You have damaged our cooling integrity, Mr. Cho,” Dmitri said. “We must reduce our taskload to prevent further damage. We will not be able to coordinate time-probe activity until we are back to normal capacity.”

The nausea hit again. I stooped, nearly vomiting. I was moving, trying to extricate myself from the copilot’s position.

Where are you going?

Getting out of this thing before it slips into the sea. I’ll collect the seeds, get them onto firm ground.

Then what?

You’d better hope someone finds me. Or us. However you want to think about this.

“What is happening?” Cho asked.

“We’re in contact. Tatiana and I. I can see what she’s going through and vice versa. She’s trying to get out of the plane. But the paradox noise is rising. It’s the Brothers, pushing back. They know we’re close.”

I moved to the machines, Cho standing back as I approached. I removed the securing pin, then directed the water jet into the grilles. Beneath the floor, the electronics flashed and sparked. The smoke darkened and thickened, wreathing each of the Brothers from the base upward. The status lights were going out on them now, the pillars turning to mute slabs.

“You realise we are punishing the child for the crimes of the adult,” Cho said. “In all likelihood, these machines were quite sincere in their desire to help us.”

“It doesn’t matter.” The extinguisher was spent now, but it still made a serviceable bludgeon. I swung it at Dmitri’s casing, harder and harder until a crack showed, and then I kept going. Cho went over to an emergency cabinet and came back with an axe, pocketing the automatic while he set about Pavel and Alexei.

There came a point where I was certain we had done enough harm to the Brothers. Each had been reduced to a broken, crack-cased stump, with smoke and sparks still issuing from the grilles at their bases. When we had broken the casing, we had dug deep into their interiors, wreaking all the havoc we could. The machines were dead to the eye, wounded to their vital cores. They looked more like geology than technology.

I tossed away the empty extinguisher, exhausted and valiant in the same moment.

“Before she leaves the plane—before you leave the plane—there is something that must be done,” Cho said. “They will find that wreckage, and they will find a note embedded in the broken face of the altimeter. The note must be present.”

“A note to who?”

“To me,” Cho said. “Even though I am not yet born, even though there is no such thing as Permafrost, even though World Health is not the organisation it will become, even though no one has yet heard of the Scouring. The note must exist, or the location of Permafrost station becomes . . . undetermined. We cannot permit that, Valentina. The note must find its way to me.”

“What about Tatiana, Cho? If you’ve known about this wreck, you know what happened to her.”