Gardens of the Sun (29 page)

‘The R&R Corps or you and Uncle Howard?’

‘It’s kindly the same thing. Uncle Howard is more or less running the resupply warehouses at Bastrop. He wanted you to know there’s an opening if you want one.’

‘Well, you can tell Uncle Howard I appreciate it, but I don’t reckon I’m R&R material. No offence. That’s just how it is.’

‘If you’re thinking of your past history, we can take care of that. And it don’t matter to any of us,’ Billy said, ‘because we’re your family. And family stick together no matter what.’

‘I already have a job.’

‘Not for much longer. Your friends, they’ve survived only because they’ve been bribing people to look the other way. But I hear there’s a crackdown coming. A purge of corrupt officials. You stick with your friends, you might get caught up in it. It’s your choice, cousin, but any time you want you can give me a call,’ Billy said, and pulled a folded slip of paper from the breast pocket of his coveralls and set it on the bar.

Cash said, ‘You’re looking for a pilot?’

‘You bet.’

‘What kind of planes are we talking about?’

April, the Foyn Coast of Graham Land, the Antarctic Peninsula. Winter beginning, the days dying back. The sun nearing the end of its short, low arc across the eastern horizon of the Weddel Sea, falling behind the Brazilian frigate, formerly the Admiral João Nachtergaele, now named for the murdered green saint Oscar Finnegan Ramos. The bristling superstructure of the frigate silhouetted against the bloody flare of the sunset as it sleeked in towards the coast, navigating by radar and GPS, cutting through brash ice and shouldering aside small table bergs.

Night had fallen and the snowy mountains that formed the backbone of the peninsula stood faint and pale against the black and starry sky when the ship heaved to a couple of kilometres from the coast and five big inflatables loaded with shock troopers of the 3rd Special Brigade swept out from its stern well. The troopers wore Kevlar armour over cold-weather gear, hunched with their weapons and equipment against freezing spray as the inflatables slammed across the heavy waves. They entered the mouth of a fjord that hooked inland and saw lights spread along the northern shore. Less than a minute later, smart rounds launched from the frigate’s rail guns screamed overhead, snaking up the contours of the fjord, very low, very fast. The black night detonated in the orange flashes and thunder of high explosives as the rounds struck their targets with pinpoint precision, and the inflatables accelerated towards the shore, where buildings burned above their burning reflections in black water, tossing flames and smoke high into the sky. The inflatables grounded one after the other on a snow-covered strand and troopers jumped out and ran left and right, some towards the labs and the shattered and burning accommodation blocks of the research facility, others towards a house that sat on top of a ridge overlooking the fjord.

Brief firefights erupted in and amongst the lab buildings, but the positions of the defenders were quickly overwhelmed and in less than an hour the surviving scientists, technicians and other support personnel were sitting in rows on the snowy shore in the glare of tall floodlights, hands clasped on top of their heads while troopers moved amongst them and confirmed identities with hand-held DNA readers.

Senior scientists, administrators, and the chief of the station’s security were marched up to the house, where Colonel Frederico Pessanha had established his command post. Its terraces had been blackened by rocket blasts and pocked with bullets and one of its glass walls was shattered. It had begun to snow, dry pellets billowing on knifing gusts of wind, and snow was accumulating in some of the rooms. Colonel Pessanha sat in the living room near a roaring fire fed by broken furniture, drinking brandy and watching his interrogation specialists deal with the prisoners. He was unhappy and half-drunk. It had become clear that someone had leaked news of the raid. The families of the scientists and support personnel had been evacuated to a camp at the head of the fjord, no bodies had been found in the buildings targeted by the smart rounds, and the defenders had been well-armed and had fought from prepared positions. And there was no sign of the man who was in charge of the research station, and none of the prisoners would tell him where he’d gone.

Long after midnight, Colonel Pessanha had two senior scientists and the chief of security brought before him. He made them strip off their clothes and kneel naked and shivering on the white carpet, by now tracked everywhere by the dirty boots of soldiers, and he asked them who had told them about the raid, when their boss had left, where he was hiding. They told him that they didn’t know who had tipped them off, that their boss had left two days ago, that he had not told anyone where he was going. Colonel Pessanha drew his pistol and shot the scientists in the head, one after the other, then stood over the chief of security and screwed the muzzle of his pistol into the man’s forehead and asked the same three questions again. The chief of security’s torso was covered in reddening weals, and his nose was broken and one eye was swollen shut, but he fixed Colonel Pessanha with his good eye and gave him the same answers as before.

‘My men will bring your families here tomorrow,’ Colonel Pessanha said. ‘They can go free or they can die here. Your choice.’

‘Colonel, he didn’t tell me where he was going and I didn’t ask. Put yourself in his position. Ask yourself what you would have done. It would have been the same.’

‘How did he leave? By boat or helicopter? On foot?’

‘I think he left on foot.’

‘You think? You did not see him leave?’

‘He left in the night. He did not take any of the boats and his helicopter is still on the pad. So, yes, I think he went on foot.’

‘I have heard that he did not leave alone. Is that true?’

‘He took two of my men with him.’

‘You are their commanding officer. Why didn’t they tell you where they were going?’

‘I am in charge of security, Colonel. I am not in command. No, they did not tell me where they were going. Because I asked them not to tell me.’

‘You have lived here a long time.’

‘Eleven years.’

‘You know the land.’

‘Of course.’

‘You’ve hiked in it. Explored it.’

‘As often as I could.’

‘Where would you go, if you wanted to hide?’

‘It really isn’t possible to hike along the coast. There are too many inlets and fjords. Anyone leaving here by land would have to go up into the mountains.’

‘That’s where he went, eh? A place you know. A cabin. A bunker.’

‘I don’t know where he went. Kill me now, it won’t make any difference.’

‘Kill you? No. Not yet. One of your children perhaps. The youngest is five, I believe. Shall I have her brought here?’

The chief of security cursed Colonel Pessanha until his voice gave out.

‘Are you done?’ Colonel Pessanha said. ‘Well then, think carefully. The man I want is no longer your boss. You no longer owe him loyalty. To your family, yes. To him, no. Where did he go?’

‘I don’t know. Truly. I don’t.’

Colonel Pessanha turned to the captain who had conducted the interrogations. ‘These are the same answers the others gave?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Confirmed with the MRI cap?’

‘If they know anything else, they’ve buried it deep.’

‘Then maybe it’s the truth. Why not?’

Colonel Pessanha ordered a guard to unlock the chief of security’s handcuffs, gave the man a blanket to wrap around himself, sat him in one of the big chairs in front of the fireplace, and poured a glass of brandy and handed it to him.

‘You were a soldier before this,’ he told the man. ‘We’ll talk, one soldier to another. You asked me what I would have done if I had been your boss. Let me tell you. I would not have run away. I would have stayed with my people. I would have fought alongside them. But your boss - he’s a coward who ran and left you in the shit. You and your families. You fought well. I respect that. But your boss does not deserve your loyalty.’

‘We fought only because you attacked us,’ the chief of security said. ‘Because you ignored our messages when we offered to surrender. You were knocking at an open door, Colonel. If you had come here peacefully, we would have surrendered peacefully.’

‘Put yourself in my position. I am in charge of an operation to shut down a research station operated by a criminal gang who are committing every kind of anti-evolutionary crime and vile perversion against God and Gaia. Making monsters, chimeras of animals and human children. I receive from them a message of surrender. Can I trust it? Can I believe that I can simply walk into this place and not be ambushed? Of course not.’

The chief of security drained his brandy glass with a defiant gesture. ‘We are both soldiers but it seems that we are different kinds of men,’ he said, and they were his last words.

The glass bounced on the white carpet in the echo of the gunshot that killed him. Colonel Pessanha stepped past the body in the chair to the smashed glass wall and looked out at the black night, absent-mindedly fingering the spray of blood on his black and white camo tunic. A steady wind had got up, blowing flurries of snow across the ruined terrace, whining over jagged edges of broken glass.

‘He’s gone,’ he said at last. ‘We’ll look at satellite surveillance, of course, but it won’t tell us anything. You could hide an army in those mountains. This will not please my father, but there it is. Have we secured the other buildings?’

‘Yes, sir,’ the captain said. ‘It looks like they scrubbed all their records.’

‘Only to be expected. Bring in the specialists. They have a day to recover anything useful. We’ll ship the prisoners out at dawn, and when the specialists are finished we will raze this place to the ground.’

‘And their families, sir?’

‘Fuck, I forgot.’ Colonel Pessanha pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, closed his eyes. ‘Send out drones right now, and check their disposition. We’ll confront them at dawn, issue orders to surrender. Even better, we’ll get one of the scientists to do it. Tell him we’ll kill them all if he doesn’t cooperate. We’ll take everyone back, turn them over to the Peixotos. Let them work out how to punish these people for their crimes. After all, this mess, this unholy research, it’s all the fault of their famous gene wizard.’

Sri Hong-Owen was walking a transect of the rim forest early one morning, collecting hand crabs for a population survey, when Euclides Peixoto called her out of the blue. He told her that there’d been a little trouble she should know about, back on Earth, and read out a brief official announcement about a successful action against a nest of criminals in Antarctica who had been in flagrant breach of the new regulations controlling scientific research. Survivors had been arrested and transported to Tierra del Fuego; their laboratories had been destroyed.

‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news but there it is,’ Euclides said, not sounding sorry at all.

‘Alder. Is he one of the survivors?’

Sri was standing knee-deep in a ferny glade amongst tall sugar pines, a long pole fitted with a loop of smart wire in one hand, a catch net containing a big hand crab in the other, her spex showing Euclides Peixoto’s face in a window of virtual light. Shock had scooped her hollow. She felt as cold and weightless as a ghost. She felt as if she was about to fall off the face of the world.

Euclides said, ‘I understand your son ran away before the fireworks began.’

‘Then he’s alive.’

‘The soldiers looking for him think so.’

‘How many people were killed? Do you have a list of casualties?’

‘I can’t tell you offhand, but it looks like the place was very thoroughly trashed,’ Euclides said, and put up an inset showing an aerial view of the station, buildings burned-out in splashes of black along the snowy shoreline of the fjord.

It was bad, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Sri’s shock was fading, displaced by cool calm anger. She could have told Euclides Peixoto that innovations produced by the scientists in her Antarctic fastness had, over the years, earned his family more than ten billion reals, that their work had not been illegal in Greater Brazil until the new regulatory bill had been passed two months ago, and because it was not now nor had it ever been illegal in Antarctica the attack was a violation of at least three different international treaties. But nothing she could say would unmake the raid or help Alder, and if Euclides was hoping that she would break down or lose her temper, she wasn’t about to give him any kind of satisfaction.

‘OSS will probably want to talk to you,’ Euclides said. ‘It would save everyone a lot of trouble if you could give them some advice about where your son might be hiding.’

‘You can tell them I don’t have the first idea where to find him,’ Sri said. She pulled off her spex and sat down amongst the ferns, absent-mindedly watching the hand crab pick at the knotted mesh of the catch net with its strong black nails as she thought things through.

After Arvam Peixoto had been recalled to Earth, the garden habitat where he’d made his headquarters had fallen vacant - Euclides Peixoto had chosen to live in Paris, and the Air Defence Force had reassigned Arvam’s people elsewhere. So Sri had moved in, setting up laboratories in a wing of the mansion, building a string of small tents containing experimental biomes on the icy plain south of the habitat’s dome, planting fields of novel vacuum organisms. The hand crabs were the first of her experiments in bodymorph design, scuttling creatures with a bony carapace, four multi-jointed ‘fingers’ and a peglike ‘thumb’, and a cluster of simple compound eyes over a mouth equipped with flaps and feelers. A hundred days ago, she had released a batch into the forest that circled the rim of the habitat’s tent and they had multiplied and spread with gratifying speed - the crab in the catch net was a fat and healthy specimen with a beard of translucent nymphs budding beneath its busy mouthparts.