“Very well,” Carlisle says. “What are your orders?”
“Rendezvous at base Hotel Echo, near Bedford, forty-eight hours from now. If you’re going to have trouble making that rendezvous, let me know well in advance.”
“I’m not familiar with Hotel Echo,” Carlisle admits.
“There’s no reason why you should be, Colonel. It doesn’t exist yet. It’s the former RAF Henlow. We’re refitting it as a forward base for tech retrieval runs into Stevenage and Milton Keynes. Take down the coordinates.”
Carlisle does. The brigadier goes on to give him more detailed instructions for the rendezvous. She will arrange for a squad of twenty soldiers to be present, along with three armoured vehicles, all under the command of a Captain Manolis. If they are not present, Carlisle is simply to wait. On no account is he to use the radio, either to speak to the brigadier herself or to attempt to make contact with anyone else at Beacon. When Captain Manolis makes himself known, Carlisle will turn Rosie over to him and ride in a staff car to Beacon, ahead of the rest of the column, for immediate debriefing.
Carlisle believes he knows what debriefing will entail in this context. Despite their revolutionary discovery, the expedition has sustained unacceptable losses and by military logic someone has to be to blame. He will take that blame, while Fournier takes the credit for the new specimen. Possibly this or something like it has been the plan all along, from before they even left Beacon. Possibly the only purpose of the expedition in the brigadier’s mind was to allow Carlisle a public opportunity to fail.
Fry is still talking him through the protocols for the rendezvous. Assuming the absence of hungries, she tells the colonel, he and his people are to exit Rosie first, bringing the specimen with them, and assemble on base Hotel Echo’s main parade ground. Manolis and his squad will then make themselves known, retrieve the specimen and carry out a handover in good order.
Fry asks Carlisle to confirm and accept these orders. He does, but he feels compelled to add something despite Sixsmith’s presence beside him. “You should have trusted me, Geraldine. I’ve never given you any reason to question my loyalty to Beacon or to the Muster.”
“Well,” Fry says. The word hangs by itself for a moment. “Loyalty is just the wheels on the bus, Isaac.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that it keeps things moving but it’s neutral when it comes to the direction they move in.”
The colonel contains a twinge of exasperation. “I believe that’s actually the point I was making. I’ve been neutral to a degree that could fairly be called pathological. Yet you decided you needed eyes on me all the same. Can I ask why that is?”
There is a pause, filled only with static.
“We’ve missed you, Isaac,” the brigadier says. “I look forward to hearing all about your adventures north of the border.”
She cuts the channel.
He knows the answer to his question in any case. Fry is a political animal engaged perpetually in a zero-sum game: she plays it skilfully, in all circumstances, and she has an unerring sense of the cards that other people are holding. As she has consolidated her hold on power, Carlisle has been almost the only Muster officer with the combination of high profile and public approval to challenge her. She has never stopped waiting for him to play out the hand.
The colonel stares out of the forward windscreen. The road opens ahead of them, miraculously clear. They are making good progress for the first time since they rolled out of Invercrae.
But where are they going?
47
In the crew quarters, Dr. Khan is falling.
Her hands are braced against the edge of the sink, her feet firmly planted on the steel plates of Rosie’s floor, but all the same she is in freefall. She has been like this for hours—ever since she spoke to Stephen in the lab—and she still hasn’t hit bottom. Perhaps there is no bottom.
Lieutenant Foss mutters in her sleep. Something about roast chicken. Something about time. Khan plummets through the diffuse froth of the lieutenant’s voice without slowing.
They’re going home, but that’s not real. John is dead, which is just about as real as it gets, but even that is just a fact she has to remind herself of every few minutes, to keep her grieving fresh.
“The road is going to get bumpy,” Sixsmith calls from the cockpit. In the absence of the intracom, she has to rely on her own natural bellow. “There’s a heap of old cars ahead, but they’re mostly just rust and moss. I think they’ll pretty much break apart when we hit them, but you’ll feel a jolt. Hold on tight.”
Khan holds on tight. It makes no difference.
“Rina,” Stephen says at her elbow. “You’d better strap in. The baby …”
The baby. Yes. All right. She slows herself, opens her eyes on a present moment where she desperately wants not to be. A fierceness rises in her, ballasts her. She pulls herself together; brings herself, by the application of her will, to a dead halt—although Rosie rumbles on. The baby needs her to make rational decisions about her own safety, since her safety ensures its own.
She crosses to a chair, hands cradling her swollen belly, sits down, straps in. Stephen takes the seat beside her and checks the straps, making sure that they’re not crossed or twisted and that the inertia reel is running free. Sixsmith’s warning has woken Foss but she just turns over in the bunk and digs in out of sight.
“Lieutenant Foss,” Stephen calls out. “We need to—”
“I’ll take my chances,” Foss grunts.
Rosie shudders and rocks. The deck plates creak. They’re flung from side to side by sudden shifts, lurches, stops and starts. Khan stares straight ahead, braced tight in her chair.
It’s not a cure, Stephen had said. In the lab. When they spoke. When they spoke before. I know what the cure will look like, but I didn’t have the time to make it. All I could do was stabilise you, in a sort of brute force way. The feral children secrete their own neurotransmitters that talk back to the fungus, and now your brain has those chemicals, too. Cordyceps thinks you’re a friend. Cordyceps thinks you’re all part of one big fungal colony.
“But that is a cure,” Khan whispered. In her desperation she had held on to his sleeve, almost touching him, almost invading him. “That’s the definition of a cure, Stephen—a way to keep the pathogen from changing us. It’s what we’ve been looking for all along! It’s enough. Isn’t it enough?”
No.
Yes.
Maybe, if there was enough medicine. But there won’t be. Even for her, he won’t keep making it. He’ll keep her stabilised until the birth, until the life inside her has undocked. That will use up all the serum he has on hand, and he won’t go hunting for fresh ingredients. Not given where they would have to come from.
Which is to say the brains and spinal columns of the feral children.