The team can now see the road ahead of them and below them. It’s just a ragged strip of asphalt that’s being torn apart in slow motion by weeds clawing their way through it from underneath. There’s a section about thirty yards long that they cleared by hand, soldiers and scientists together, hacking at the brambles and spear-thistles with machetes. The Rosalind Franklin sits in the middle of the clear space, an armoured mother hen waiting for her chicks to come home.
Her? Khan always falls into the trap of using the female pronoun, and always resents it. It’s only the name of the armoured olive-drab monster that enforces the logic. It also recalls none-too-subtly the quiet dedication of scientists who change the world and earn no glittering prizes. But by any name, Rosie is the bastard child of an articulated lorry and a Chieftain tank. Her front end is adorned with a V-shaped steel battering ram designed to function like a cow-catcher on an ancient steam train. On her roof, a field pounder and a flamethrower share a single broad turret. Inch-thick plate sheathes her sides, and broad black treads her underbelly. There is nothing in this post-lapsarian world that she can’t roll over, burn through or blow the hell apart.
But right now Rosie is base camp, her warrior self disguised as home sweet home. Her airlock is fully extruded from the mid-section, her extension blisters out to their furthest extent almost doubling the interior space. She has outriggers to hold her stable in spite of external pressure coming on any vector, at any speed. She would hold fast against a hurricane; and more to the point, against a massed charge. Thousands of hungries, flinging themselves against Rosie’s flanks in a flood tide of reckless bio-mass, would break and ebb harmlessly.
Have broken. Have ebbed.
McQueen cycles the airlock. He stabs irritably at the keypad, entering the day’s code correctly only on the second try. Mostly, these days, the airlock features in their lives as a pain in the arse. It’s like an over-large shower cubicle rigged up against the mid-section door, flimsy-looking but made of a rigid, robust plastic polymer. Protocol dictates that it stays in place whenever there’s a team out in the field, but it’s pointless. Nobody is afraid at this point that they might bring unsuspected toxins or biological agents into Rosie’s interior. They know what the hungry pathogen is and how it travels, how it infects. The airlock defends against a risk that isn’t present. It’s a gesture, more than anything, a finger impotently raised against the apocalypse.
And it only holds six people, so two cycles are needed to get them all inside. The scientists go in first, with their tissue samples. That’s what the mission is all about, after all. The soldiers wait, facing outwards with rifles at the ready, until the outer door slides open again and they can enter in their turn.
Inside Rosie the same demarcation lines stay in place. The scientists retreat to the lab space, which is at the stern end. The soldiers go to crew quarters up at the front. It’s like some awkward high-school bop where the boys and the girls scuttle off to opposite ends of the school hall and nobody dares to go out on the dance floor. Except that the dance floor in this analogy is the mid-section, which houses nothing except the airlock and the access ladder for the turret.
Khan transfers her tissue samples into cryo. They won’t stay there long, but she’s going to miss out on the coming orgy of fixing, sectioning, staining and slide-mounting. She’s got other places to be.
She’s got to face the inquisition.
Carlisle has gone through into the engine room, even further astern than the lab. According to the book, which for the colonel is a real and vital thing, he has to check in with the civilian commander as soon as he returns from the field—and Dr. Fournier has seized on the engine room, a pathetic, claustrophobic little space, as his office.
Khan asked Carlisle once how he could bear it. A man who has led brigades, having to report and sometimes defer to a neurotic little pencil-pusher. Where is the sense in it? Especially now, in the deafening silence of the cockpit radio, wondering (as every one of them is wondering, all the time) whether Beacon has gone down and their remit has disappeared along with their whole world. Carlisle evaded the question with a joke. Khan can’t remember the punchline now, something about the chain of command not being an actual chain. But yeah, it is. At least if you let the powers-that-be add a padlock to it.
John Sealey is giving her anxious looks but he can’t do any more than that with everyone watching. And they are watching. There just aren’t that many topics of conversation left after more than half a year in the field. Khan is a thrilling enigma to the scientists, probably a source of filthy jokes to the soldiers. She can live with that. She has lived with worse things.
Something else is nagging at her, though, and she’s just about to figure out what it is when the colonel reappears.
“Rina,” he says. “Dr. Fournier would like to see you.”
Of course he would.
“We’re actually pretty busy with this stuff,” Khan says. “Working up the new samples. It’s time-sensitive. Is it possible I could come along in a little while?”
Carlisle shakes his head. “Now, please,” he says. “This won’t take long, but you need to come with me, Dr. Khan.”
Dr. Khan. Such formality. But he’s not freezing her out: he’s giving her a warning. Stay on your toes, don’t relax into this. You’ve still got a lot to lose.
And she doesn’t dispute that.
6
The first time she met Colonel Carlisle, Samrina Khan cordially hated him. She is embarrassed about that now, not least because she is aware of the trope in romantic movies where hate at first sight prefigures an eventual romance. She could no more see the colonel as a potential lover than she could see her own father as one—and when she thinks about it, he resembles her dad in many other ways besides. Strict. Insulated from his own emotions. Fiercely honourable.
But on that first meeting, he reminded her more of Taz, the character from the old Warner cartoons who is a perpetual whirl of objectless fury.
She was in London. The Centre for Synthetic Biology at Imperial College. She was working on an epidemiological model for the hungry disease that would allow the government to predict its spread with greater than 90 per cent accuracy. And the world was way ahead of her, already falling apart.
Fortress America was still standing, just about, or at least still broadcasting. Most of the broadcast content consisted of bullish proclamations about the robustness of the newly relocated federal government, operating out of the Sangre de Cristo range in Southern Colorado. Eleven thousand feet up and enjoying the bracing mountain air! But the southern hemisphere had fallen silent and Europe was rolling up from the east to the west like a cheap carpet. The Channel Tunnel had been filled in with seventy thousand tons of cement, which sounded like a lot but turned out to be too little too late.