He hopes they will make it home. He hopes there will be a home for them to go back to. There is reason to hope. Brigadier Fry wouldn’t have been out here in the wilderness making deals with the devil if her coup d’état had been thriving.
The Little Bird peels away. The last the colonel sees of it is the red light at the tail end of its fuselage lifting into the sky like a stray spark from an extinguished bonfire.
Carlisle is a practical man, and a soldier first and foremost. He enters Rosie via the cab, not the airlock, so that he can conduct a proper sweep from aft to stern. He finds no soldiers, no junkers and no children: nobody at all, in fact, except for Dr. Fournier, who is cowering in the lab with his hands still tied to the workbench. When the colonel enters, Fournier starts to babble out a stream of complaints, demands, pleas, questions and explanations, the words falling over each other in his haste to get them out.
Carlisle checks the straps. They have been partially cut through, probably with the scalpel that is lying on the floor a little way away, but the doctor had not made much progress before he dropped the scalpel and it bounced or rolled out of his reach. The straps will hold.
When he sees that the colonel means to leave him there, Dr. Fournier switches tack and starts to threaten. He has friends in Beacon. Friends with power and influence. He has been acting as Brigadier Fry’s personal agent and representative. If he is harmed, if he is treated badly, the brigadier will not be happy.
Fry is dead, Carlisle tells him. If the doctor has any living friends he would be curious to know their names.
He puts the scalpel back in the instrument drawer where it will do no harm. In its place, he presses a full canteen of water into the doctor’s hands. Whatever he eventually decides to do with Fournier, torturing him is not part of the plan.
He goes aft to the cockpit. Along the way, he closes the airlock door.
Driving Rosie isn’t easy for a man with only one functional leg. There are a great many false starts before the colonel manages to get the vehicle turned around and moving away from the carnage. Then he wastes a great deal more time looking for the gate. Eventually he gives up the search and rams straight through the fence, which offers no resistance at all.
He is back on the M1 when dawn comes up, and by noon he is on the outskirts of London. When hungries chase him he does his best to outdistance them. Only as a last resort does he plough them under Rosie’s wheels.
He is looking for a place to stop, but not any particular place. He will not be returning to Beacon, and he has no wish for Rosie to go back there either. He liked her best as an instrument of truth rather than a weapon of war. He will leave her somewhere where she is unlikely to be found by anyone in need of such a weapon. Somewhere in the capital’s endless labyrinth of streets.
When the intransigent spike of the Senate House Library appears in the centre of the forward window, he knows he has reached his destination. He slows to a halt halfway along Malet Street, on the exact spot to which the shadow of the library’s spire points.
He sits a while as the sun sinks down. The shadow swerves away from him, too slowly for him to see the movement: the hour hand of a clock, telling him his time is past.
But clocks are not infallible.
He goes and fetches Dr. Fournier, freeing him from the workbench but keeping him at the point of a gun. When they are both seated side by side in the cockpit, he explains what he is about to do. He does this as a courtesy. To see death coming and be able to look it in the face is part of what human beings gained when they took the path that led them away from the rest of the living kingdoms. Part of what they lost, too, no doubt.
Distressed and terrified, Fournier pleads for his life. But he is indignant, too. He demands to know what he has done to deserve a sentence of death.
“You conspired with Brigadier Fry to lead us into an ambush,” Carlisle says. It seems best to him to keep this brief, and simple. “We were meant to die there. You would have died too, but you didn’t know that. You were willing to sacrifice the whole of Rosie’s crew to your own purposes.”
Fournier’s face flushes red, with anger rather than shame. “I was co-opted!” he says. “Coerced. Nothing I did was by my own choice. Colonel, the brigadier gave me a direct order. And she outranks you. You of all people have to understand—” He falters, lacking the technical vocabulary.
“The chain of command,” Carlisle supplies. “I do, Doctor. Very much so. I’ve always had what might be considered an exaggerated respect for it. But you’re not a soldier and you weren’t bound to obey. You had the luxury of choosing for yourself where your duty lay.”
“No, I didn’t!” Fournier is shrill. “She told me the only way I would be appointed to the mission was if I agreed to do as she said.”
“That,” the colonel points out gently, “is what a choice looks like.” He nods his head out of the window at the Senate House. “I was a student here,” he says. “My degree was in history. I never imagined I’d live to see the end of it.”
Dr. Fournier starts to plead again. He says that with Beacon split down the middle he couldn’t be said to have committed treason, only to have chosen the wrong side. Carlisle listens for a long while, then holds up a hand to stop the logorrhoeic flow. “Doctor, please. I was trying to explain, since you seem to feel you’re being treated harshly. The point of history, the very essence of it as a field of study, is to find correspondences. You look at the past so that you can understand it, and through it you come to a better understanding of your own time. If you’re lucky, sometimes you can even extrapolate to possible futures.”
“I’m not a historian,” Fournier points out.
“No,” Carlisle agrees. “But biology is about correspondences too, surely? You study living things to understand yourself.”
Fournier is looking at him now with wary calculation. “I suppose that’s true,” he says, with no conviction at all.
“There’s no need to humour me, Doctor. You’re welcome to disagree. But it seems to me—am I wrong?—that all living things form a sort of fractal pattern. The same features, the same structures, repeating themselves on different scales and in different configurations. You can’t look at those things for long, surely, without finding yourself reflected in them.”
“I do,” Fournier agrees fulsomely. “I find myself all the time.”
The colonel sighs. The man isn’t listening to him at all. “Well then,” he says wearily.
“Well then what?”
“Well, then you know what you betrayed. Not Beacon. Life. There were two sides and you didn’t choose life. Did you even look at that last set of samples? The ones we brought down from Ben Macdhui?”
Fournier’s face is blank. “No, of course not. When would I have had time?”