Outpost (45 page)

The
damp tunnel floor betrayed the thick tread of snowboots. Jane crouched.
Multiple tracks. Big prints, old and new, and a set of smaller feet. Probably
Nikki.

Jane
followed the tracks, flamethrower primed. She triggered puffs of fire at each
junction.

The
slope-shaft led downward into bedrock. The air got colder. The walls sparkled
with pyrite and silica.

Silent
passageways and galleries. She paused every couple of minutes and listened to
hear if she was being followed. No sound but distant tunnel drips, her
breathing, the gentle hiss of the flamethrower igniter flame.

She
leaned against the tunnel wall. A sudden wave of heart- hammering fear. Her
legs felt weak. Every instinct told her to turn and run back to the refinery.
Rampart was floating away, and she was about to be left behind. It wasn't too
late. She could still make it home.

She
closed her eyes for a moment. Giddy with adrenalin. Memories came, vivid and
immediate like a fever dream.

'Courage,
like all personality traits, is essentially a habit,' explained Jane's old
English teacher. Mr Stratford. Young, anxious to think himself inspirational.
It was Jane's turn to read a poem at assembly. Byron. She would have to stand
in front of the entire school. Stand at a lectern during chapel. She was
terrified. 'If you act brave every day, adopt a confident posture, adopt a
confident tone, eventually it becomes innate,' explained

Mr
Wilson. 'Yes, it's phoney. Utterly bogus pretence. But if you fake any trait
long enough it becomes an essential part of you, like your fingerprint. So
there's no point telling yourself not to be scared. You can't control your
thoughts and emotions. But you can control your actions. In the end, we are the
sum of what we do.'

Jane
had spent the past few months trying to save the crew of Rampart. And here she
was. Transformed. Lean. Super- weapon strapped to her back. A stranger to
herself.

Jane
kept walking.

She
used to read books of Chinese philosophy. Bushido. The Samurai code. Her young,
fat days were dominated by fear. She was terrified of school, scared to walk
round town on a busy day. '
Fat bitch.' 'Porker.' 'Cow.'
The world was a war zone. It took
warrior courage to leave the front door.

Samurai
soldiers called themselves dead men. They tied their hair in a ponytail before
each battle to make it easy for their enemies to lift their severed heads as a
trophy. A warrior with no regard for his own life, who flew into battle powered
by careless, suicidal rage, was unbeatable. Negative courage. Give up on yourself,
and you have nothing left to fear. You become invincible.

The
shaft took her further below ground. She felt wind on her face. Maybe there
were other routes to the surface. Air shafts and ancillary exits. Ghost said
there was an old airstrip nearby with an Antonov cargo plane turning to rust.
Maybe there was a connecting passageway.

A
figure stood in the dark up ahead. A man standing sentinel in the middle of the
tunnel. Jane wondered how long he had been alone in the dark.

She
waited for him to make a move. He remained still.

She
crept closer. She shone a flashlight in his face. Officer uniform. Brass
buttons, epaulettes, anchor insignia.

Jet-black
eyes.

The
figure slowly inclined his head to look directly at Jane. He screamed. A long,
unearthly howl. Mouthful of metal spines.

The
scream seemed to last minutes, seemed like it would never end. Jane sparked the
flamethrower and blew the man off his feet and down the tunnel.

She
stepped over the burning figure.

A
shriek from deep within the tunnels. Something, down in the depths of the
bunker, was answering the sailor's call.

The
tunnels played strange music. Gentle, fluted breaths that rose and fell as she
passed through passageways and galleries.

A
vertical shaft to the surface. Ventilation. A massive air-con turbine in the
tunnel roof. Rusted blades.

Snow
had tumbled down the shaft. A high mound of ice blocked Jane's path.

Sustained
blast from the flamethrower. Ice shrivelled, liquefied, steamed.

She
found a sailor sitting against the tunnel wall. Jane trained her flashlight on
his face. Beard. Striped naval tunic. He was weak and emaciated. Metal leaked
from his ears. His eyes glowed red like a cat lit by headlights. He hissed.

Jane
pushed him over and stamped on his head.

She
headed downward, deeper into the fossil layers. Her flashlight lit glittering
mineral veins. Cambrian, pre-Cambrian. That dark and distant epoch when Arctica
was raging volcanism.

She
checked her watch. How far had Rampart drifted from the island? It might
already be four or five kilometres offshore. Might be fifteen or twenty
kilometres distant by the time she reached the surface. She could make it,
though. She could sprint across the ice. She had stamina.

Sudden
flashback. A cross-country run. Bleak fields. Lumbering along an endless, rural
lane. Sweating, sobbing with exhaustion. Long since left behind.

Miss
Gibson, the PE teacher, leaning on a farm gate.

'Come
on, stinky. Make an effort.'

Storage
vaults. Lead doors high as an aircraft hangar.

One
of the doors was ajar. No time to explore. But if the vaults hid infected
passengers from
Hyperion
she
might find her route back to the surface cut off.

She
stood in the giant doorway and shone her flashlight into the darkness.

A
wall of black. A massive propeller. The tail section of an Akula Class nuclear
sub. Black, anechoic hull plates. Rudders. Stern planes. Jagged metal where the
tail had been plasma-cut from the main hull.

The
reactor had evidently been dredged from the ocean bed. Barnacled and streaked
with sediment.

Hard
to comprehend the vast scale of the wreckage.

What
was the radiation count in the vault? Rust pools on the chamber floor. The
interment was incomplete. The wreckage should be buried in salt and sealed in
lead. Instead, the reactor chamber was exposed to open air.

She
hurried onward.

School
days.

The
chapel. Jane walking up the aisle, trying not to waddle, trying not to shake.
She stood at the lectern. She looked at the blazered congregation. Rose, the
gum-smacking class bitch, sitting in the back pew with her smirking, sneering
gang.

Jane
took paper from her pocket and unfolded the poem. She cleared her throat,
blushed as the cough was amplified throughout the chapel.

She
adjusted the mike position.

She
stared, mesmerised, into the foam bulb of the microphone.

She
froze. She couldn't speak. And she knew, in a giddy rush of heightened
awareness, that she would relive this memory her entire life. The sounds, the
textures. The shame would be seared into her like the pavement burn-shadow of a
Hiroshima pedestrian.

She
stared at the mike. She could see, in the periphery of her vision, ranks of
schoolgirls staring at her. They started to fidget. They started to giggle.

Wherever
she went, whatever she did, part of her would be trapped in this moment. A fat
girl, clutching the lectern, paralysed with fear.

Jane's
flashlight started to fail.

She
hurried down tunnels shored with steel props. She passed evidence of
interrupted excavation. Uncleared rubble. Discarded tools. Dormant diggers.

She
saw something move in the darkness up ahead. A white figure stepped away from
the tunnel wall.

'Hello?'
called Jane. 'Are you on your own, or did you come with friends?'

The
spectral figure didn't move.

Jane
rested her flashlight on a ledge. She triggered the igniter flame. Quiet hiss
of gas. She strode forward.

'All
right then, babycakes,' she muttered to herself. 'Let's dance.'

The
man shuffled towards her. A chef. He had bottles and jars taped to his chest
like he was wearing some kind of suicide vest.

The
chef tore a pickle jar from his chest and smashed it on his forehead. Kerosene.
Jane backed away. He held a lighter in his left hand. He struck it. Jane ran.
The blast threw her down the tunnel. Big dent in the SCUBA tanks. She got to
her feet and retrieved her torch. The tunnel was blocked by a wall of fire.

Jane
covered her face and ran through the blaze. Her boots caught alight. She
stamped out the flames.

Ignition.
Motor roar, amplified by the tunnel walls. Dazzling headbeams.

Jane
shielded her eyes. Gear change. Escalating roar. Headbeams approaching.

Jane
squinted into the glare. The serrated teeth of a digger scoop heading her way. She
hugged the left tunnel wall. The digger drove straight at her. She dived clear
at the last moment. The scoop dug into the tunnel wall, bringing down rock.

She
glimpsed heavy caterpillar tread, and a hunched, misshapen figure in the yellow
cab.

The
digger backed up. Jane hugged the right tunnel wall. The digger drove at her.
Dumb enough to fall for the same trick.

Jane
dived clear. The scoop dug into the tunnel wall. Rockfall. The digger pinned by
boulders, engine house partially crushed.

Jane
got a good look at the driver. Two dinner-suited passengers fused together like
Siamese twins. The digger tried to reverse. The damaged engine coughed and
revved. Gouts of smoke from the exhaust. Caterpillar tread ground and span.

Jane
fried the cab. The twin drivers were consumed in a typhoon of flame.

The
jet of flame stuttered and died. Jane took off the SCUBA tanks and shook them.
Empty. She left the spent flamethrower by the burning digger.

White
tiles. Shower heads.

Some
kind of decontamination area.

Lockers.
Rubber radiation suits hung on pegs like human skin left to tan. Ghoulish,
skull-eyed gas hoods.

The
passage led to a bare chamber. Bloody letters:

WELCOME HOME, JANE

Dried
blood drips. Black flakes.

Nikki
knew she was coming. The guys in the tunnels, the men melded to the digger, had
just been entertainment. Nikki knew Jane would make it to Level Zero, and
prepared a welcome.

Jane
heard a scratching sound behind her. Another fuel-soaked crewman trying to
spark a Zippo. She snatched the claw hammer from her pocket and shattered his
head. She crouched over his body. She ripped a kerosene bottle from his chest
and slipped it into her coat pocket.

White
tiles. Shower heads.

The
school changing rooms. Hiss of water. Thick steam. Five girls jeering, chanting,
screaming. '
Stinky
bitch. Stinky bitch.'
Pelting
their victim with soap. A small, Asian girl cowering fully clothed in the
corner of the communal shower. Jane among her tormentors. '
Stinky bitch.'
A shameful memory. A reminder
that Jane wasn't always a righteous victim. Sometimes cowardice made her join
the herd.

There
was a steel lid in the floor like the turret hatch of a tank.

She
heaved the hatch aside. A deep, vertical shaft. Flickering light at the bottom.

She
checked her watch.

17:25

'You're
nothing special,' she told herself. 'You're not a hero. You've been a coward
and a victim all your life. But plenty of others would turn and run right now.
The girls who made your schooldays hell. That jeering, hateful crowd that drove
you to the ends of the earth. None of them would have the courage to walk into
this bunker and battle their way to the lowest levels.'

We
are what we do.

She
could be riding Rampart home. Instead she walked into hell to rescue a friend.

She
climbed into the shaft and gripped the wall-rungs. She recited Byron as she
began to descend.

I had a dream which was not
all a dream.

The bright sun was
extinguish'd, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the
eternal space.

And men forgot their
passions in the dread

Of this desolation; and all
hearts

Were chill'd into a selfish
prayer for light
.