Colony by Benjamin Cross (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📗

They cruised on. Every metre between themselves and the island felt like a million miles.

Still hugging on to Callum, Darya pointed to the navigation screen. “Look.”

His gaze moved to the digital map and he smiled.

“Ava, you must come and see,” Darya said.

Ava leant forward, wiping at her eyes, and peered over Callum’s shoulder. Her sudden laughter surprised all three of them.

Cheek to cheek, the survivors watched as the final, pixelated crags of Harmsworth Island crept towards the edge of the monitor and then disappeared from sight.

2

The journey to Nagurskoye sapped the last of Callum’s strength. While Darya and Ava quickly succumbed to sleep, he forced himself to remain awake, clutching the flat, white pebble tightly in his hand. The sub’s auto-guidance system navigated them westwards, weaving in between the islands. Still Callum kept alert. After everything they’d survived, he was determined not to take either the technology or the last few hundred miles of Arctic Ocean for granted.

Hours passed. Fatigue set in. In the silence of the cabin, his joy began to wane and in its place came uncertainty. Harmsworth was behind them. No more creatures. No more Volkov. But there was more to come. As well as survivors, the three of them were now the only remaining witnesses to the loss of a manned icebreaker. And an entire Spetsnaz contingent. People would want answers. Not just any people. Powerful people. Government people. And they would not like the answers. He tried not to think about it. In this remote and unforgiving landscape, survival came at a high price.

Ten miles from Alexandra Land, they received a transmission. Callum roused Darya, who listened intently to the message and then began to reply.

“It is the base,” she reported. “They see us on radar. They want for us to stop and go to the surface, then they send a boat for us.”

On her advice, Callum eased the throttle right back and took them cautiously up.

As the sub’s nose broke through the surface, they emerged into a breathtaking world. The surrounding water was speckled with icebergs. The summer’s warmth had sculpted them into supernatural forms, hunched figures, Celtic swirls and precarious forked spires dripping with melt-water; they glistened as they drifted in their thousands, in eerie silence across the brine.

Beyond them, the southern horizon was studded with islands. A hundred Harmsworths, each with secrets of its own, their glaciated peaks perched on nests of ice-free tundra. And far off to the north, the edges of the northern ice sheet sat patiently, waiting for winter to spread it back across the sounds.

“Isn’t that something,” Ava said.

Callum and Darya kept silent, gazing at the scene before them in awe.

“I guess this is what Dan was fighting for.”

When the frontier boat arrived, the three of them were ordered from the sub at gunpoint. They were then transported the last few miles to the base, with the White Squall in tow.

En route, Darya tried again and again to explain their situation, but the guards were clearly not taking any chances. They kept their mouths closed, their sympathies to themselves, and their weapons trained on the three unknown quantities and their improbable tale.

3 Mainland Russia

Callum awoke. He was lying in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room. The last thing he remembered was leaving the mainland hospital in a people carrier with blacked-out windows. After that, nothing.

The room was obviously under surveillance, because no sooner had the soles of his feet hit the floor, than somebody was at his door. The smartly dressed woman was holding a mug of coffee and a change of clothes, and he gratefully accepted both.

“You are need anything else today, Doctor Ross?”

“Can I speak to my son?”

“Soon. There is meal for you in one hour.”

She smiled briefly and pulled the door closed.

To his right, daylight was streaming in through the frosted windows, blanketing the sofa within the embayment. He moved into its path, took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He welcomed the rays’ warmth, their cleansing effect on his skin. After living with the midnight sun for the last month, he was unnerved to find himself still relishing the kiss of sunlight. By all logic, he should have been craving darkness. But he had the feeling that from now on it was the dark that was going to be a problem for him.

He seated himself at the table in the centre of the room and surveyed the fragmented canvas cityscape on the wall opposite. The shelves around it were set with decorative bottles and other awkward ornaments. Nothing quite fit. Nothing matched. The whole setup was a far cry from the comforting sense of homely that was the obvious intention. Of course, it didn’t help that he could see that the doors and windows were firmly locked.

He took an uncoordinated slurp of coffee, then stood up again and approached the mirror on the back of the bathroom door. He hardly recognised the face staring back at him. The overgrown stubble, which he had last glimpsed in the bottom of his whiskey glass on board the Albanov, had blossomed into a beard. Brindle and lank, it was every bit as unbecoming as his greasy hair. His lips were cracked, the skin on his face was taut and grey, despite being tanned, and his eyes looked sunken. If there had been anyone else with him, he might have attempted a hangover joke, if only to stave off his growing sense of unease. But he was alone in the room, the large, spotless bedsit, wherever it might have been.

A sudden thought occurred to him and he walked over to the pile of clothes at the foot of his bed and rifled through his jacket pockets. Everything was gone. Ngana’bta’s flint blade. The letter for Lungkaju’s daughter. The fossilised tooth. Everything. He felt around his neck for the tooth pendant. But it too was gone. The only thing left was the quartz pebble, which he snatched up in both palms and brought to his chest.

Showered and shaved,