Tamaruq (35 page)

‘It’s funny. I shouldn’t even be here. I was meant to retire. I always thought I’d get a place in Veerdeland. That’s home. If the place where you are born means home. But I’m here still, in the middle of the desert, thousands of kilometres from civilization. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. As if you’re my conscience. My confessor. Probably because you’re going to kill me. You are going to kill me, aren’t you?’

Ramona looks at her for a long time. Cold, she reminds herself. You’d have to be so very cold. But even through the haze of her fury, the tapestry of the other woman’s thoughts is discernible – the regrets and fears, the days of doubt and those of belief, and other things – memories – the ones that make Davida Kvest laugh or smile or cry.

No, that can’t be right. There wouldn’t be tears. A person who cried could not do this.

She raises the rifle and slides her finger forwards to the trigger. She is shaking.

The scientist lifts her head.

‘I’d like to make a final request, before my execution.’

Ramona does not trust herself to speak. She nods.

‘I’ve kept a diary. I’d like you to hear it.’

‘You don’t deserve that.’

‘Deserve it or not, it’s my request, and you’ll honour it, because you’re the one that came. We don’t always get to choose our burdens. It’s in the drawer. I can get it, or you can.’

‘Where?’

I’ll take it, she thinks. I don’t have to hear it, whatever it is. And I won’t understand it anyway. She’s a Boreal.

The scientist points. Ramona crosses the room, keeping the rifle trained on her. She opens the drawer.

‘You’ll find a small device in a blue and white case.’

Ramona extracts the diary cautiously. She places it in her pocket.

‘Thank you. I can see you’re a woman of your word. I know you’ll listen to it.’

Ramona does not move.

Long seconds pass. She has to act.

‘You are not really a killer, are you?’ says the scientist. ‘But if you don’t shoot me, I will have to press the alarm. If that helps.’

She stands, reaching towards a set of controls on the wall.

With a gasp, Ramona squeezes the trigger.

The scientist flops back into the chair, clutching at her shoulder. Blood spreads between her fingers and begins to soak into the sweater.

‘Up,’ orders Ramona.

The scientist gets clumsily to her feet. Her face is sweating.

Ramona grabs the scientist’s unhurt shoulder and marches the woman in front of her. All at once she is intensely aware of time.

‘We’re going outside.’

As they proceed down the corridor a man puts his head out of another of the offices.

‘Davida, I was after you—’

He sees Davida, bleeding, Ramona behind her, the gun.

‘Fuck—’

Ramona shoots. The shot ricochets. The man scrambles back into his office. Ramona moves faster, pushing the scientist ahead of her. Time, accelerating. Moments later she hears the alarm reverberating throughout the building. The hiss of doors sealing. She calls the lift, cursing with every moment she has to wait. A woman in a white coat appears, running down the corridor towards them. She sees Davida.

‘Don’t move or I’ll kill her!’ Ramona yells.

The woman stops in her tracks, a look of horror etched onto her face.

The lift arrives. Ramona backs into it and jabs the button for the ground floor.

‘Come on, come on!’

‘They’ll lock down my pass,’ says the scientist. ‘You won’t be able to get out.’

‘Shut up.’

She still has the welcome woman’s pass.

At last the lift begins to rise. It seems to take an infinite amount of time to move between the two floors. Ramona tenses, her grip on the scientist’s shoulder tightening. Ground level. The doors slide open.

Three overalled technicians block the way between Ramona and the exit doors. Two of them are holding guns.

‘Move aside or I’ll shoot her!’

She is shouting in Spanish but she has no doubt that they take her meaning. The technicians hesitate.

The scientist begins to speak in her own language.

‘Shut up! Don’t say another word!’

The scientist continues to speak, delivering instructions quickly and incomprehensibly. Ramona lowers the gun and shoots her in the leg. The scientist yelps and doubles over in pain. Ramona hauls her back up. The technicians stare, indecisive, a naivety suddenly clear in their faces. They’ve never had to deal with an attack, she thinks. She pushes the gun against the scientist’s head.

‘Move! That way, all of you!’

They move. She hustles the injured scientist forwards, keeping her body as a shield between herself and the pair with guns. She swipes the welcome woman’s pass against the door. Nothing happens. She grabs the scientist’s pass and swipes that but it too displays a red light.

‘You! Open this door!’

‘He can’t,’ says the scientist. Her body is slack, the full weight of it leaning against Ramona’s chest. She is losing blood from the leg wound fast. Bright red footprints track the carpet behind them. ‘He doesn’t have those privileges.’

The others begin to press forwards, scenting an advantage. Frantic, Ramona slaps the pass again. It has to work. It has to—

The door moves aside suddenly.

Her mother is standing on the other side, holding the handgun which Ramona entrusted to her. Ramona drags the scientist through and Inés swipes the door shut again at once.

‘How did you—?’

‘Get to the plane,’ says her mother sharply. They back out of the final set of doors into the courtyard. A blast of desert light and heat hits her. Two security guards are lying prone on the ground. One has had his throat sawn open. Another is sprawled with his legs at odd angles to his body. There is blood, a lot of it, in pools all over the courtyard. The bodies of the pilots have been pushed from the aircraft. One of them has had his stomach ripped open and the intestines glisten wetly under the blazing light. The handler lies beside them. A few metres away is the woman Ramona first shot with the dartgun, now face down with a knife in her back.

Ramona releases the scientist, who falls groaning to the ground.

‘Quick, Ma, the plane—’

Her mother raises the handgun. She considers the scientist for a moment.

‘Ma!’

Inés pulls the trigger. She turns and walks calmly ahead of her daughter. Ramona stares at her in shock.

‘Move,’ says Inés sharply.

They run to the plane, Inés now gasping for breath, Ramona helping her along. Ramona pushes her up the steps and pulls the door shut with a bang. She is aware of the prisoners, sat together, trauma monopolizing their faces, the blood all over their hands, their clothes, one of them – the youngest girl, the teenager – still clutching a knife. She climbs into the cockpit, pushing aside the welling horror which now threatens to swamp her. She has to stay calm. Look at the controls. It’s an aeroplane. Here’s the console. Here, look. Different but familiar, just like
Colibrí
. Let your muscles remember. Don’t use your brain.

Whatever you do, don’t think.

The plane hums into life. Her hands grip the controls and settle. She steers the aircraft around. The wheels bump over something – someone. Ramona points the aircraft the way they came and rolls forwards, building up speed.

She has done this a hundred times before.

The aircraft lifts into the sky and the compound falls away behind them. Ramona focuses on the yoke, the blinking console. The horizon.

The device given to her by the scientist fits into the palm of her hand. When she curls her fingers about it there are shallow dimples where her fingertips rest. She presses at random until she feels a slight warmth in the device. Abruptly, the scientist’s voice begins speaking, filling the cockpit with its guttural, foreign syllables.

‘I can’t understand you anyway,’ says Ramona aloud. ‘For fuck’s sake.’

The recording pauses, and then a robotic voice says: ‘Language detected: Español.’

‘Yes,’ says Ramona uncertainly.

There is a pause. She senses the machine thinking, and wants to hurl it from her, hurl the scientist out of her head, along with everything else she has seen today. The voice that continues speaking is not the scientist’s own, but it is now using a language that Ramona understands. The translated speech is dehumanized, without cadence or differentiation in tone, and there are times when the structure of the sentences sounds unnatural. But she understands it. She listens for a few sentences.

I’ll switch it off in a minute.

Any minute now. After this.

March 2392

I start this diary at a crossroads, a point of uncertainty in my life – on the brink of a journey, you might say. Oh, for fuck’s sake, that sounds pretentious already. The fact is, I don’t know where the next few months – or longer – may take me. And this is unusual, because I always know what I’m doing and where I’m going.

These musings are something of an experiment, then. The last time I recorded my thoughts I was in the knowledge schools. It’s safe to say education and I had our differences. Here in Veerdeland we are supposed to revere it, knowledge that is, but that’s done nothing to eradicate a culture of bullying as old as time. Sadly I was too smart to be ignored. That was the story then and I suppose it is the same story now, although I’m not yet sure what, at the age of forty-seven, lies ahead of me now. Back then I just wanted to get the hell away. I wanted to be somewhere where a thirst for knowledge was appreciated.

I stumbled across those self-indulgent old journals on a vacation between advanced semesters and I deleted them, all of them. Looking back, do I wish I’d saved them? Is there any point in retaining bad memories? Does it really build character, as people like to say? I’m not so sure. I can’t say I miss that naive, zealous young girl. I like to think I wear the last few decades well.

I haven’t even said my name – not that anyone will ever hear this but me. I’m not used to keeping a personal account. The records I keep are notations, observations, scientific discourse, theories, and occasionally breakthroughs. So here we go: my name is Davida Akycha Kvest, and I’m a senior microbiologist and virologist for the Jeysson Group. Well, don’t be modest about it, Davida, tell the truth – that’s what you’re here to do. I run the department of microbiology and virology. We have the best team in Veerdeland. I’d go so far as to say the best in the Boreal States. And me – I’m at the top of my game. Which, I suppose, is why I’m in the position I’m in now.

I was approached at a convention in Nuuk and until that moment I hadn’t thought about going anywhere. I’m happy at Jeysson. I love my work, it’s challenging and rewarding – a rare enough combination. Why would I move? But within this one conversation, the prospect of
going somewhere
moved from an undreamt-of notion to a genuine possibility, and I realized I still had – I still have – an itching. In my sphere there’s always more to interrogate, not to mention all we have to recover from before the Blackout. A virus is the smartest thing in the universe, smarter than us by far, even when it is engineered by
homo sapiens
. A digression: I can’t pretend that I – like so many others – haven’t spent idle hours wondering who exactly was responsible for releasing the Blackout virus. Was it a nation, a splinter group, a religious zealot, an Earth child? Who would have had the resources to engineer death on such a colossal scale? Who wanted us back in the dark ages? And was that always the intended outcome, or did it go wrong? More importantly, perhaps, who would have had the balls?

We can ask these questions – and I have, and the theories are multiple and fascinating. But in the end it’s history.

Anyway, I’m digressing. The point about a virus is, you learn to respect its prowess. You even come to admire it for its resilience. And you always remember that when placed against it, you are insignificant.

The man who approached me in Nuuk was small and one of the palest people I’ve ever seen, and he looked nervous.

He said, ‘We have a proposition for you.’

Classic, really. There was nothing to identify who ‘we’ was. Not then, and not in the interviews that followed. All I know is I’m going west, to Alaska, to work on a government-level project which goes by the name of Tamaruq. Classified, of course. It’s not military – I have my ethics and I made it clear I wouldn’t be involved in any kind of weaponry development, although I hope – I do believe – the Boreal States wouldn’t be so foolhardy as to risk a second Blackout. Not with the world in the shape it’s in – I mean, even virtual’s a problematic word these days. We all know about the illegal implant ops out there – this is the problem with criminalization: sooner or later whatever it is falls into the hands of an elite, and rarely for a good purpose.

We have more worthy work to do than that.

The posting will be quite an upheaval from my life here in Qaanaaq, but I’ve been to the Alaskan territories a number of times before – a few conventions and summits, and once on vacation. My English is good enough. I don’t suppose they’ll speak any Scandi, although the mystery man hinted that Tamaruq are an international bunch.

I’ll find out soon enough. Tomorrow, we transfer from the capital out west. Travelling by zeppelin, very fancy. There’s a calm-wind window coming up.

I’ve a good idea what this is about. In all honesty, there’s only one thing that would compel me to leave Jeysson, but – I don’t want to count newts before they hatch.

Last week I had leaving drinks with the team. They said kind things. Claimed they’d struggle without me – not true. I’d had my qualms about leaving, especially halfway through a study, but at that moment I thought, they’ll be just fine, and maybe without me clipping their wings they’ll fly. I knew then I’d made the right decision.

Anyway, I told them, it’s only six months. Officially, I’m on sabbatical.

March 2392

The last few hours of the flight they restricted us – me and my minder, the same ghostly man – to a windowless cabin. But I could tell we were going much further than had been implied in the brief. I wasn’t anxious, but it did reinforce my suspicions – what kind of project would take such pains to conceal its whereabouts and more importantly its purpose? When the zeppelin set down there was no escaping the fact that we were in the middle of a desert. Nothing but sand as far as I could see, not even a buckled old Neon highway to give a clue to our geographical location. I said to my minder, this is old American territory, isn’t it? He wouldn’t confirm it but he didn’t say no either.