At about 2100 hours, when they come down onto relatively level ground, Sixsmith puts the pedal down hard. This was a plan of the colonel’s: take it slow and steady until dusk and then—conditions allowing—accelerate just as the kids are slowing down. It’s too much to hope that Sixsmith will give them the slip altogether, but if she grabs some distance she can put it to good use.
About an hour later, the colonel flags up a good defensible spot on a scree slope outside of Dunkeld, where they stop and dig in. Properly. Motion sensors, razor-wire barricades, anti-personnel mines, the whole shop. They are maybe five miles from where Birnam Wood made its unexpected visit to Dunsinane castle in the play Macbeth, but there is no danger of that here. Carlisle has picked a spot with no ground cover for half a mile in any direction. Birnam Wood would need to put on a good turn of speed to get past Foss, who is up in the turret with the guns warmed up and ready. Of course, it’s not trees she’s looking to set light to.
The colonel takes the mid-section platform, despite having pulled double-duty the night before.
Tomorrow they’ll find the road again. Tonight they’ll sleep.
Or in Dr. Fournier’s case, catch up on some phone calls. He tries the brigadier’s line again and again. It seems unlikely that she will pick up on the hundredth hail after ignoring the ninety-nine that came before, but he can’t stop himself. He needs to explain to her that they’re coming in. He has done all he can, and all that anyone could expect him to do, but they are coming in. Let the Muster deal with Colonel Carlisle. It’s the Muster, after all, that has a problem with him.
The doctor falls asleep at last, with the radio clutched in his hand.
And wakes to find it whispering, vibrating in his grip.
“Yes!” he yelps, a little too loud. He winces at the sound of his own voice in the brittle silence. Pressing the radio to his lips he murmurs, “It’s me! Fournier!”
“You’ve been trying to reach me, Doctor.” The brigadier’s voice is calm and cold.
“Yes! Since yesterday. There have been some developments. Things have happened that I have to report. We’ve lost Penny and Sealey and Private Phillips in an engagement with—”
“Be quiet.”
Fry stops him dead with those two words. Fournier’s lips continue to move, but without any sound, without any breath.
“I’ll take your report later, if there’s time,” Fry says. “The situation here has become …” There is an audible pause before she continues. “ … unstable. The subversive elements in Beacon have managed to claim some territory and hold on to it. We’re fighting on several fronts, when we ought to be consolidating. Your losses are highly regrettable but I don’t have time right now to hear an itemised account.”
“I—I understand,” Fournier says. He thinks: unstable? What have they done to Beacon? What is happening back there?
Meanwhile, Fry goes on without a break. “So my question for you is this, Dr. Fournier. Can you deliver the Rosalind Franklin to a specific location in a specific time frame?”
Fournier is aghast. “No!” he exclaims. “Definitely not! Brigadier, the chain of command has broken down here. Colonel Carlisle has threatened me. Physically threatened me. He suspects I disabled the radio and he—he’s watching me all the time. He won’t entertain any suggestion from me, not for a moment.”
Silence at the other end of the line, shot through with cycling static.
“All right,” Fry says at last, with grim resignation. “Explain.”
Fournier tries, but does poorly. The events of the previous day sprawl across his mind like debris from a landslide. He struggles to find a through-line, and clearly he doesn’t succeed. Fry seems confused about the children and absolutely uninterested in Colonel Carlisle’s threatening to murder him. She does take the point that they have encountered a new form of hungry and obtained an intact specimen. She congratulates him—perfunctorily—on that achievement, but she doesn’t seem to appreciate what it might mean.
When he tries to explain, the brigadier returns to something he told her during their last conversation.
“You said there was some kind of personal friction between Carlisle and McQueen. Is that still true?”
Fournier is nonplussed. “Well, yes,” he says. “They came close to fighting yesterday. The colonel broke McQueen back down to the ranks, after all. McQueen hasn’t forgiven that.”
“Then let me talk to McQueen.”
Fournier thinks he must have misheard, so he ignores the order and goes back to his main theme. “The specimen is a child. It may have been born to an infected mother, and its brain tissue—”
“Later,” Fry interrupts. “Your salient point is that you have new and pertinent data to bring home. That’s excellent news, and you’ll be rewarded in due course. But it’s for others to examine and interpret. Right now I need you to bring McQueen into the engine room and let me speak to him.”
So he did hear correctly. But after all these months of complete secrecy he finds this shift in operating parameters hard to process. “But then … if McQueen finds out I’ve been reporting to you …”
“As ordered,” the brigadier reminds him. “You’ve done nothing wrong. This is about Beacon’s survival, and there is only one right side in that struggle. Bring him, Dr. Fournier, please. I assume he’s still awake?”
“I think they’re all awake. I can hear them talking. They’re in the crew quarters, most likely playing poker.”
“Then go and fetch him.”
It’s not as easy as it sounds. For once, the colonel is in the mid-section rather than in the cockpit, keeping watch along with Foss, so Fournier has to walk past him on his way to the crew quarters—eyes on the ground, unable to meet his gaze—and will have to walk past him again on his way back.
He needs a plausible cover for a private conversation with the former lieutenant, and he can’t think of anything that will not look suspicious. McQueen is not under his direct command. There just isn’t any reason why he would need to talk to the man about anything that wouldn’t normally route through Carlisle. And they’re all so intent on their endless poker game that McQueen probably won’t even listen to him.
Inspiration strikes in the moment when he walks in on them. A diminished game, with just McQueen, Sixsmith and Akimwe at the table (and Akimwe there in body only, like a propped-up dummy). They don’t look up.
Until Fournier gathers the cards up from the table and holds out his hand for the ones they’re holding.
“What the fuck?” Sixsmith demands, bemused.
“I’m confiscating this deck of cards,” Fournier says. “It’s bad for morale.” And since they’re still keeping tight hold of the cards in their hands he turns and walks away with the bulk of the deck as his prize.