Ironheart (14 page)

‘Ah, indeed. Well, quite simply, I wish to do you a favour, young man,’ he said, rubbing his forehead again. ‘I understand you are seeking the whereabouts of a particular
tech-mine and that certain persons may have absconded with this information?’

‘What did you say?’ said Sid, staring blankly.

‘You want to find Ironheart and those pirates who know where it is,’ said the stranger. Sid’s face didn’t flicker. That much of the story was common knowledge in the rig
yard. The man was starting to annoy him.

‘Perhaps you may be interested to know,’ he continued, ‘that India Bentley has information about the location of Ironheart embedded in a small pendant made by her
father.’

Sid snorted. ‘So how does that help me? That little witch is halfway over the mountains by now.’

The stranger rubbed his forehead again. ‘Because the pendant is one of a pair. And I have the other one.’ He held up a small, grey lozenge of metal, hanging by a leather thong. It
was inscribed on one side with the name ‘Bella’. ‘It took me a little while to realize its significance but, believe me, you’re going to want this when you find out what it
is.’

Sid put his hand out for the twirling piece of metal but the stranger pulled it back quickly. ‘Not so fast, young sir,’ he said with a chilling smile. ‘The previous owner was
not happy to give this up and it was not come by without some significant difficulty on my part.’ He paused. ‘I expect some recompense for my time and trouble.’

Sid scowled and resisted the urge to reach for his gun. The pendant would have been easy enough to make and he had no reason to trust this soft-bellied fool. On the other hand, if the story was
true then it might be a way for him to get back into his Pa’s good books. ‘What d’you want for it?’ he said.

The stranger touched his forehead again nervously. Sid could see now that he had a large red weal between his eyes. ‘Oh, very little in the scheme of things, young sir,’ he said
smoothly. ‘A mere trifle. Perhaps we could go somewhere a bit warmer to talk about it?’

Sid thought for a moment and then nodded. ‘All right then, mister, we’ll talk. But I better like what you got to say.’

The stranger nodded enthusiastically. ‘Oh, but you will, you will,’ he said. ‘And please, do call me Thaddeus.’

Two days out of Salekhard, life aboard
The Beautiful Game
had fallen into a regular routine. The crew had stopped arguing among themselves and went about their jobs
like they were part of the machinery. The rig itself was like nothing India had ever seen before. She spent much of her time in the engineering section, fascinated by the network of polished brass
pipes, oil-slicked pistons and flickering gauges that lined the walls. Pieter tolerated her endless questions and he allowed her to use the big grease gun to lubricate the bearings, provided she
didn’t touch anything else, and especially not the large red valves that directed cold water around the engines. ‘You shut off the coolant in a baby like this,’ he told her,
‘then the whole thing’s gonna blow apart in ten minutes flat, for sure.’ But what she liked best was the cockpit. Although she was not allowed through the door, she stood on the
threshold and admired the way that Tashar commanded the machine, coaxing the controls and feeding power to the tracks with a delicate touch of the throttles. India thought that, next to being a
tech-hunter, driving an ice rig was probably the coolest job going.

Since the rescue, Rat had taken to following Calculus around like a puppy, asking endless questions about his technical schematics that the android answered with unfailing patience. As they
talked in low voices, India wiped condensation from the windows with her sleeve and watched as the rig rolled steadily eastwards along wide forest trails. The land in all directions was covered in
unmarked, crystal-white powder that softened the hills and transformed the trees into strange white shapes.

As darkness fell on the third day they pulled into a sheltered location and Bulldog prepared to secure the rig for the night. When India discovered he was going outside she pestered him to let
her go with him until he gave in. So, a short while later, swathed in thick woollen under-layers and a borrowed deerskin coat, she waited impatiently for Bulldog to crack the seal on the external
door.

As the hatch swung open, the outside silence rushed in to fill the little room and India stepped over the threshold into a cold and alien world. She shivered as the frozen air found the tiniest
chinks in her clothing with needle-sharp fingers and recalled a time when she and Bella had played in the snow in London. She marvelled at the ice formations and the delicate frost patterns growing
on the steel handrails. But when she slipped off her mitten to touch them, Bulldog yelled at her.

‘Don’t touch the metal without your gloves on! Your skin will freeze to it in a second and then there’s only one way to get you off.’

‘Which is?’

‘You get a friend to pee on you.’ He chuckled. ‘Of course it helps if it’s a
good
friend.’

India looked at the handrail and then slipped her glove back on. She didn’t think she wanted that sort of help from anyone on board
The Beautiful Game.

It was nearly dark when Bulldog had finished lashing down the equipment. He turned on the flood lamps and they stood for a moment, staring at the flakes falling thickly in the lights of the rig.
India was struck by the intensity of the silence that came from a thousand miles of nothingness shrouded in thick snow.

‘We’d better go in,’ he said. ‘You need to be careful out here, hypothermia creeps up on you and you don’t even notice. The first sign is when you stop feeling cold and
the tiredness takes hold of you. I knew a guy, got too cold one night and lay down to sleep on the roof of his rig. By the time the crew found him they had to chip him off with a
crowbar.’

Inside, Tashar was poring over the navigation charts on the mess-room table. ‘Fuel is down to thirty per cent, Captain, and we’ll need to refuel at Gorki Station. Don’t you
think it’s about time you told us where we’re going?’

Bulldog turned to India and Calculus. ‘I reckon you’ve had plenty of time to work on that pendant by now. So let’s hear that message.’

India handed the pendant to Calculus, who laid it carefully on the table. ‘This is a solid-state storage device,’ he began. ‘A microchip. It holds John Bentley’s secret
journal relating to Ironheart. As we hoped, the first part of the journal describes how to find Ironheart. It contains a map reference and a single word, “Nentu”.’

‘I never heard of a place called Nentu,’ said Tashar.

‘Nentu was the name of the Great Shaman of the North,’ said Pieter. ‘A famous wise woman who lived in these parts two hundred years ago. Could this have something to do with
her?’

‘I don’t see how,’ said Bulldog. ‘Where’s the map reference?’

‘It’s a point about one hundred and fifty miles along the upper reaches of this river valley,’ said Calculus, pointing to a spot on the chart. ‘It’s very
remote.’

The crew exchanged nervous glances.

‘We know that place,’ said Tashar darkly. ‘It’s in the dead country.’

‘Nobody ever goes there, Captain,’ said Rat, wide-eyed. ‘The nomads say it’s a bad place.’

‘Well what better place to hide something you don’t want found?’ said Bulldog. ‘What’s the second part of the message?’

‘It’s an inventory of what John Bentley found at Ironheart,’ said Calculus.

He paused.

‘Well don’t keep us in suspense,’ said Pieter. ‘What’s there?’

Calculus glanced at India. She nodded encouragingly. ‘Treasure,’ he said. ‘Gold, jewels, old-tech. It’s all there for the taking.’

The pirates’ eyes gleamed. Pieter and Rat grinned and punched each other on the shoulder, and Bulldog smiled thoughtfully.

‘So once we find this place,’ said Bulldog, ‘how do we get in?’

Calculus shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Mr Bentley left no instructions for getting in.’

Everyone looked crestfallen.

‘So basically,’ said Tashar, ‘we have to drive to the middle of nowhere to find this place, and then hope they left the key under the mat?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘My
God, I preferred it when we just went rigging. By the time we get back to the southern fields we’ll have lost six weeks of drilling time. That’s half the season gone and money out of
our pockets on a wild moose chase.’

Bulldog folded the maps. ‘This is no
goose
chase, Tashar,’ he said. ‘This is the best chance we’ll ever have to make it rich. Trust me, my ears never lie and
this lead on Ironheart is hot. We’ll press on as planned and, when we find it, then we’ll figure out how we’re going to get in. Perhaps John Bentley left some other clues that we
haven’t found yet.’

The meeting ended and Bulldog and Tashar began to plot the following day’s course. While Rat and Calculus disappeared into Engineering for another technical chat, India helped Pieter to
prepare the evening meal.

‘If you want to be indispensable on a rig,’ he said, expertly dicing some onions, ‘then learn how to cook. Every rigger I ever met eats like a starved bear, even the
women.’

India laughed. The longer she spent on board
The Beautiful Game,
the more the crew seemed to be like a large and badly behaved family. ‘Do you have any children of your own,
Pieter?’ she asked.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Four boys and they all want to be riggers like their dad.’ He smiled proudly. ‘But my wife’s not so keen, especially when I have to travel
this far east. She believes too many of the old stories about this place.’

‘What stories?’

So as they worked, he told her ghost stories about the haunted places where the forest shadows would suck the life from a man’s body if you accidentally stepped into them. He told her
about the crews who caught glimpses of something behind them in the mirror and were driven mad with the thought that they were not alone.

He scraped the vegetables into the sauce and turned down the heat. ‘Once, when I was a junior crewman on the
Snow Maiden,
we came across another rig rolling across the ice. We
signalled them to stop but they didn’t even slow down.’ He shivered. ‘When we finally got on board, every man was still at his post, stone dead, but their eyes were wide and
staring as though they had seen the gates of hell.’

‘Where was that?’ said India, fearing she already knew the answer.

‘That rig had rolled straight out of the Valley of Death.’ He fell silent, but when he saw her worried expression he gave her abroad grin. ‘Hey, don’t mind me,’ he
said. ‘Riggers are just like sailors. They drink too much vodka and they start to see mermaids.’

They both laughed, but India shivered, as though something cold had touched her heart.

That night, her dreams returned.

She was riding the back of a great eagle, rising into the air on winds as cold as a blade. She gasped at the colours of the land as she soared over blue-pink mountains with
peaks that seemed to float on the air like ghost ships. Then the bird plunged into the shadow of icy ravines, skimming the surface of the lakes and twisting through steep-sided valleys lined with
green-black spruce dressed in their winter snows. She clung to the eagle’s back, exhilarated by the powerful pulse of its muscles and breathing in the smell of the high nesting places that
lingered in its feathers.

‘They will leave you alone here,’ it said, ‘but you must not give up. Already the bringer-of death rises in the East. If you stop now then it will be forever winter in this
land.’

‘But what should I do?’ she said.

You must feel for the spirit in the earth and it will lead you to me,’ said the eagle.

And as it spoke, her senses stretched out into the landscape and she could feel the frozen river running through her blood.

‘How will I know you?’

‘By the sign of the shamanyou will know me,’ said the eagle. It turned to look at her and she saw that it had one eye of blue and one of brown.

She woke in a sweat and couldn’t get back to sleep. There could be no doubt now, the further east she went, the stronger the dreams were becoming. She couldn’t
escape the feeling that they were not her dreams at all, but that they belonged to someone else entirely.

The next morning was crisp and sun-washed and all thoughts of ghosts and spirits were banished by the smell of frying meat and eggs coming from the galley. After a relatively
good-humoured breakfast, Tashar started the main engines and they got under way. It would be less than a day’s journey to Gorki Station.

They turned off the main trail and headed south along a winding river. In the summer the area would have been impassable marshland but now, at the start of winter, the ground was hard frozen and
easy going. What caused Bulldog more concern were the lakes. They had not yet become what he called ‘iron-hard’: frozen to a depth of a foot or more and able to take the weight of
The Beautiful Game
when it made the crossing to Gorki Station. India realized that the prospect of crossing the ice was worrying him deeply.