Permafrost(37)

I bent down and collected the seed case, taking my first decisive step away from the wreckage.

In the same moment, not too far away, I glanced around, suddenly disoriented. The Vaymyr was about five hundred metres from me, but an intervening ridge screened the lower part of its hull from me, as well as any clue as to what had happened to the other evacuees. My footprints led away from me, skirting around the nose of the ridge. I remembered nothing of that walk; nothing beyond the point when I was still inside the icebreaker. Had I been sleepwalking all the while, my mind downstream while my body got on with keeping me alive?

Another twitch.

Beyond the ridge, the Vaymyr gave a shimmer and contracted to about half its former size. The rest of the cordon had diminished as well, including the Admiral Nerva. It was like a lens trick, a sudden shift from close-up to wide-angle. Now I was much farther away—a kilometre, at least.

Can you see that?

Yes. What happened? What’s happening?

I think we made a mistake with the coordinates, the last digit or so. We can’t have been far off, but it’s enough to change things. The project’s shifting, moving around, trying to find some new equilibrium.

The words were barely out of my mouth when a soundless white flash lifted from the Admiral Nerva, more like a sharp exhalation than an explosion. The flash was followed by a fountain of debris, large pieces of deck and hull flung hundreds of metres into the air, and then a rising cloud, and then the sound wave of the initial blast, Cho’s reactor accident.

“Well done, Cho,” I said, aloud this time.

Was he a good man?

Yes—he was. A very good man. He made great sacrifices, as well as great mistakes, but all along he was only ever trying to make things better. Right until the end.

The debris was starting to come down. The larger chunks fell within the perimeter of the cordon, but some smaller items were travelling farther, sending thuds through the ice with each impact. Now I watched as flames licked up from the ruined deck of the Admiral Nerva, rippling in the distortion of a heat mirage.

My vision slipped, becoming double. Double tracts of ice, double rocks, double hills, the more distant things nearly fused, but the nearer ones split apart, like a pair of stereoscopic images of the same scene, but taken from slightly different angles.

I turned back to face the ships of Permafrost. I’d gained some elevation by then and could see almost the complete cordon, including the lower parts of the Vaymyr and the other ancillary craft.

Soot filled the sky. The Admiral Nerva was fully ablaze now, a beacon set alight at the middle of the cordon. It formed an oblong orange mass, belching smoke and flames into the air. The superstructure was a tower of fire. The connecting bridges were either burning or had already collapsed. The outer ships were dark forms superimposed on this brightness, like iron screens stationed around a hearth. Sooner or later the flames would touch them as well, I was certain. The ice might begin to melt, allowing the ships to refloat, but it would be much too late for any of them to escape, assuming they were still capable of independent navigation. I did not think that likely. I think they had been brought here to serve one purpose and then sink slowly into the ice. If they succeeded, the world would have no further use for such behemoths. If they failed, the same consideration applied.

People were still fleeing the outer ships, leaving by doors cut into the hulls at the same level as the ice, or making their way down swaying ladders and rope bridges. A hurried, penguinlike exodus of engineers and scientists and support staff, hundreds of them, spilling away from the cordon in all directions. Some of them must have ignored the initial evacuation order, delaying the moment when they abandoned the great work.

Some large explosion erupted from the side of the carrier. A brainlike mass of molten sparks billowed skyward. Another followed, muffled because it came from deep within the hull, but unquestionably the most powerful so far. The entire bulk of the carrier shuddered, and I felt a ghost of that shudder pass through the ice beneath me, as one hundred thousand tonnes of metal and fuel shivered against its imprisoning hold.

The landscape turned double again, then snapped back to sharpness.

Tatiana?

She came through faintly, it seemed to me—as if the two of us had moved from adjoining rooms to some farther separation.

Still here. But I feel like we’re drifting apart.

I paused to rest my hands against my thighs, feeling myself close to exhaustion. How far had I come? Scarcely a kilometre, if that. Double vision again. The landscape, spatially and temporally displaced. Two kinds of coldness, two distinct varieties of tiredness—each severe but one much deeper and more profound than the other.

We’re seeing nearly the same view . . . means we can’t be far from each other. Can you go on?

For a while.

The glimpses came less frequently, and with less duration, more like strobe-flashes than prolonged episodes of shared perception. The Brothers were gone now, but while they had been with us, and willing to assist our efforts rather than hinder them, they had played a vital role in defeating paradox noise. Now we were at the mercy of the simpler algorithms executing in the backup computers, and they were much less successful at maintaining contact.

Do you see that rock ahead of us, Val, like a shark’s head jutting out of the ice?

It was a boulder the size of a car, with an eyelike pock and an angled fissure down the length of it that made it resemble a grinning shark.