The Girl With All The Gifts (30 page)

“Door’s locked,” Sergeant Parks says. “And nobody’s answering.”

“Look at the dust,” Justineau offers. “This thing hasn’t moved in a long, long time.”

“Okay, I think we should take a look inside.”

“No!” Caldwell yelps. “Don’t! Don’t force the door!”

They all turn to look at her, surprised by her vehemence. Even test subject number one stares, her blue-grey eyes solemn and unblinking. “It’s a laboratory!” Caldwell says. “A mobile research facility. If we break the seals, we could compromise whatever’s inside. Samples. Experiments in progress. Anything.”

Sergeant Parks doesn’t look impressed. “You really think that’s an issue right now, Doctor?”

“I don’t know!” Caldwell says, anguished. “But I don’t want to take the chance. Sergeant, this vehicle was sent here to research the pathogen, and it was crewed by some of the finest scientific minds in the world. There’s no telling what they found or what they learned. If you smash your way in, you could do untold damage!”

She physically interposes herself between Parks and the vehicle. But she doesn’t need to. He’s not making any move towards the door.

“Yeah,” he says dourly. “Well, I don’t think it’s going to be an issue. That’s some serious plate on that thing. We’re not getting in there any time soon. Maybe if we found a crowbar, but even then…”

Caldwell thinks hard for a moment, sieving her memory. “You don’t need a crowbar,” she says.

She shows him where the emergency external access crank is hidden, cradled in two brackets underneath Rosie’s left flank, right beside the midsection door. Then, with the crank held awkwardly in her bandaged left hand, she goes down on her knees and gropes under the body of the vehicle, close to the forward wheel arch. She remembers – she thinks she remembers – the position of the socket into which the crank will fit, but it’s not where she expects it to be. After a few minutes of blind rummaging, watched in bemused silence by the others, she finally locates the slot and is able to insert the end of the crank into it. There’s an override control, but it was only meant to be engaged in conditions of actual siege. The vehicle’s designers anticipated a range of situations in which it would be necessary to enter Rosie from the outside without compromising her interior spaces by blasting or forcing a way in.

“How do you know about all this?” Justineau asks her.

“I was attached to the project,” Caldwell reminds her tersely. She’s lying by omission, but she doesn’t blush. The pain of these memories runs much deeper than the embarrassment, and nothing would induce her to explain further.

To reveal that she came out twenty-seventh on the list of possible crew members for Charlie and Rosie. Trained for five months in the operation of the on-board systems, only to be told that she wouldn’t, after all, be required. Twenty-six other biologists and epidemiologists had placed higher up the list – had seemed, to the mission’s managers and overseers, to possess more desirable skills and experience than those Caldwell had to offer. Since the full complement of scientists for both labs was twelve, that didn’t even put her on the list of first alternatives. Charlie and Rosie sailed without her.

Until now, she’d assumed that they’d gone down with all hands – lost in some inner-city fastness, unable to advance or retreat, overwhelmed by hungries or ambushed by junker scavengers. That thought had consoled her a little – not to think that those who’d beaten her had then died for their
lèse majesté
, but because her placing so low on the list had kept her alive.

Of course, that’s only a conceptual stone’s throw from the thought that her survival is a side effect of mediocrity.

Which is nonsense, and will be seen to be nonsense, when she finds the cure. The story of her failing to gain a berth on Charlie or Rosie will be an ironic footnote to history, like Einstein’s alleged bad grades in high-school maths exams.

Only now, the footnote gains an added piquancy. They made this lab for her all along, and they didn’t know it. They sent it here to intercept her journey.

Parks and Gallagher are working the crank, which was too stiff and unyielding to move when Caldwell tried it. The door is sliding back, a half-inch at a time. Stale air leaks out, making Caldwell’s heart beat fast in her chest. The seal is good. Whatever happened here, whatever may have become of Rosie’s crew, her interior environment appears to be sound.

As soon as the gap is wide enough for her to get through, Caldwell steps forward.

Right into Sergeant Parks, who refuses to stand out of her way. “I’m going in first,” he tells her. “Sorry, Doc. I know you’re keen to take a look at this thing, and you will. Just as soon as I check if anyone’s home.”

Caldwell starts to state her reasons for believing that Rosie will be empty, but the sergeant isn’t listening. He’s already gone inside. Private Gallagher stands by the door and watches her warily, clearly afraid that she’ll try to barge past him.

But she doesn’t. If she’s right, there’s no risk, but for the same reason no real need for hurry. And if she’s wrong, if the vehicle has been breached somehow, then the sergeant will certainly deal more effectively with anything that’s inside than she could hope to do. Common sense dictates that she wait for him to complete his search.

But she almost convulses with impatience. This gift is intended for her, and for no one else. There’s nobody else who can use what’s in there. What
might
be in there, she corrects herself. After so many years, there’s no telling what could have happened to the precious equipment in Rosie’s labs. After all, what conceivable disaster would have taken out the crew without harming anything around them? The most likely explanation for the sealed door and undamaged exterior is that one or more of the crew became infected while on board. She imagines them running amok through the lab, in a feeding frenzy, toppling delicate imaging frames and centrifuges, trampling on Petri dishes full of carefully incubated samples.

Sergeant Parks emerges, shaking his head. Caldwell is so wrapped up in these disaster scenarios that she takes that for a verdict. She cries out and runs for the door, where Parks steadies her with a hand on her shoulder. “It’s fine, Doc. All clear. Only body is in the driving seat, and he seems to have shot himself. But before we go in there, tell me something – because this thing is way outside of my experience. Is there anything in there I should know about? Anything that could be dangerous?”

“Nothing,” Caldwell says, but then – the punctilious scientist – she amends that. “Nothing I’m aware of. Let me look around, and I’ll give you a definitive answer.”

Parks steps aside and she goes in, feeling herself trembling, trying to hide it.

The lab has everything. Everything.

At the far end, facing her, is something she’s only ever seen in photographs, but she knows what it is, and what it does, and how it does it.

It’s an ATLUM. An automated lathe ultramicrotome.

It’s the holy grail.

Rosalind Franklin seems to thrill Dr Caldwell and Sergeant Parks, no doubt for different reasons, but Helen Justineau’s first impressions are negative. It’s cold as hell, it echoes like a tomb, and it smells like embalming fluid. And she can see from Melanie’s face that Melanie is even less enthusiastic.

Of course, they’ve both got recent and unhappy memories of laboratories, especially laboratories with Caroline Caldwell in them. And that’s what Rosie, as Caldwell calls this thing, really is – a lab on wheels. Only it’s got sleeping berths and a kitchen, so it’s also a gigantic motor home. And it’s got flame-throwers and turret guns, so it’s also a tank. There’s something for everyone.

In fact, it’s almost big enough to cross time zones. The lab is amidships and takes up nearly half the available space. In front of it and behind it there are weapons stations where two gunners can stand back to back and look out to either side of the vehicle through slit windows like the embrasures in a medieval castle. Each of these stations can be sealed off from the lab by a bulkhead door. Further aft, there’s something like an engine room. Forward, there are crew quarters, with a dozen wall-mounted cot beds and two chemical toilets, the kitchen space, and then the cockpit, which has a pedestal gun of the same calibre as the Humvee’s and about as many controls as a passenger jet.

Justineau and Melanie stand in the forward weapons station and watch the activity around them, momentarily disconnected from it.

Caldwell is checking equipment in the lab space. She’s got a manifest in her hand – it was on the wall of the lab, closest to the door – and she’s using it to find specific pieces of equipment, which she then checks for damage. Her expression is rapt, furiously intense. She seems completely oblivious of everyone else’s presence.

Parks and Gallagher have gone forward, past the crew quarters, into the cockpit. They’re wrestling with something there – presumably the body Parks mentioned. After a while, they carry it through, wrapped in a blanket. It trails a complex raft of unpleasant smells, but they’re mercifully old and faint.

“Forward doors are locked,” Parks grunts. “Can’t open them without power, it looks like. And power’s what we haven’t got.”

They take it out through the midsection door, which is the one they came in through. Justineau notes that there’s a complicated arrangement of steel armatures and plastic sheets on the inside of the door. She suspects that what she’s looking at is a foldaway airlock. In a cupboard right next to it she finds six sealed environment suits, the helmets huge and cylindrical with a narrow visor, like the heads of robots in a 1950s movie. The people who designed this thing really did think of everything.

But apparently that didn’t help the people who rode in it.

Justineau puts a hand on Melanie’s arm, and Melanie jumps almost a foot into the air. The extreme reaction makes Justineau start back in her turn.

“Sorry,” she says.

“It’s all right,” Melanie mutters, looking up at her. The girl’s blue eyes are wide and fathomless. Normally her emotions are all on the surface, but now, underneath the nerves and the general unhappiness, there are depths that Justineau doesn’t know how to interpret.

“We probably won’t stay here long,” she reassures the girl.

But she hears the hollowness in the words. She doesn’t know.

When Parks and Gallagher come back, they talk with Dr Caldwell in hushed, quick tones. Then Gallagher goes into the crew quarters, while Parks walks all the way through to the back of the vehicle.

Curious, Justineau follows him to the engine room.

Where Parks is taking the inspection plate off what looks like a sizeable electrical generator. He prods around inside it for a while, looking thoughtful. Then he starts opening the lockers on the walls, one at a time, and inspecting their contents. The first one has got about a thousand tools in it, neatly mounted in racks. The next contains spools of wire, metal components wrapped in greased muslin, boxes of various sizes bearing long index numbers. The third has manuals, which Parks flicks through with frowning concentration.

“You thinking you can get this working again?” Justineau asks him.

“Maybe,” Parks says. “It’s not like I’m an expert, but I can probably make shift. They’ve written these fix-it books for idiots. I can read idiot well enough.”

“Might take a while.”

“Probably. But Christ, this thing’s got more firepower than most armies. Hundred-and-fifty-five-millimetre field guns. Flame-throwers. It’s got to be worth trying, right?”

Justineau turns, intending to tell Melanie that they might be staying here longer than expected – but Melanie is already there, standing right behind her.

“I need to talk to Sergeant Parks,” she says.

Parks looks up from the manuals, his face impassive. “We got something to talk about?” he demands.

“Yes,” Melanie says. She turns to Justineau again. “In private.”

It takes a moment for Justineau to realise that she’s been dismissed. “Okay,” she says, trying to sound indifferent. “I’ll go help Gallagher do whatever he’s doing.”

She leaves them to it. She can’t imagine what Melanie might have to say to Parks that she doesn’t want an audience for, and that uncertainty translates very readily into unease. Parks may have become relaxed about the leash, but Justineau knows he still sees Melanie essentially as a smart but dangerous animal – all the more dangerous for being smart. She needs to watch what she says around him, as much as what she does. She needs Justineau watching her back, constantly.

Gallagher is doing more or less the same thing that Dr Caldwell is doing, which is inventorying supplies – but he’s doing it in the crew quarters, and he’s already finishing up when Justineau gets there. He shows her the last cupboard he opened. It contains a CD player and two racks of music CDs. Justineau feels memories prickle into stereophonic life as she scans the titles, which are – to say the least – an eclectic mix. Simon and Garfunkel. The Beatles. Pink Floyd. Frank Zappa. Fairport Convention. The Spinners. Fleetwood Mac. 10CC. Eurythmics. Madness. Queen. The Strokes. Snoop Dogg. The Spice Girls.

“You ever hear any of this stuff?” Justineau asks Gallagher.

“A little bit here and there,” he tells her, wistfulness in his voice. The only sound system on the base was the one hooked up to the cell block, that played wall-to-wall classical. One or two of the base personnel had digital music players and hand-operated chargers that worked by turning a wheel, but these priceless heirlooms were obsessively guarded by their owners.

“You think there’s any way we can play them?” Gallagher asks now.

Justineau has no idea. “If Parks gets the generator going, this thing will probably go live at the same time everything else does. It’s been shielded from the weather in here – apart from temperature changes. There certainly isn’t any damp, which would have been the worst thing. If the fuse didn’t blow and the circuit boards are sound, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t play. Don’t get your hopes up too high, Private, but you might get dinner and a show tonight.”

Gallagher looks suddenly cast down. “I don’t think so,” he says glumly.