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

He dropped the handset back into his pocket and slid the document back onto his desk.

His gaze moved to the knife. The handle was made of solid black birch with a gold-plated metal butt, and a gold-plated, S-shaped hand guard. The admittedly brutal-looking six-inch blade was also black, with serrations along the lower part and a narrow clip point. He wrapped his fingers around the handle and gently lifted it off the lacquered surface. After thirty years, it was like a fifth limb; the feel of the weapon – the grip, the weight, the balance, even the difference in temperature between the wood and the steel – was as familiar to him as the sound of his own voice.

He jumped suddenly to his feet, simultaneously tossing the knife a short distance into the air. He caught it with practised ease, spun it across the back of his hand and then flipped it several times on end as he reached out with his other hand and reclaimed the email. With a fluent sweep of the blade, he sliced the paper in two and let the two halves drift back down onto his desk. Then he flipped the knife one last time, caught it by the back of the blade, turned and propelled it into the wall behind him.

The knife slammed into the cork throwing board with a loud thunk that shook the adjacent lamp housing and drew a satisfying rattle from the glass. He walked over and eased the blade free. As he did so, the photograph that had been pinned to the centre came unstuck and spiralled to the floor.

Finback watched its progress as it fluttered downwards and settled onto the carpet.

Staring up at him was Ptarmigan, his dumb, unsuspecting face precisely cloven.

Chapter 3 Ice Mummy

1 Harmsworth Island, Russian Arctic

Nothing could have prepared Callum for the sense of isolation he felt on Harmsworth. If it hadn’t been for the slow, steady trudging of Lungkaju day after day, and occasional distant glimpses of the Albanov, he could easily have imagined himself the only man on earth. He struggled to understand it. He was no stranger to remoteness. Bleak Hebridean landscapes had been on his doorstep his entire life, and his job had taken him to the frozen tundras of Scandinavia and mainland Russia many times. But this was different. It was the deep stillness here. The intense quiet. Inland, away from the lapping of the waves and the groaning of the remnant icebergs, there was no movement. No sound. Not even time intruded on the vast, desolate sweeps of tormented rock. A place for ghosts, Callum thought. If ever there was one.

He checked the mapping on his GPS tablet. After two weeks, he and Lungkaju were still in the south of the island. On paper it had looked so simple. But in practice the terrain was slowing progress to a crawl. Beyond the shingle-strewn beaches, scoured into gentle inclines by the timeless clawing of the surf, the inland valleys were wide, steep and unforgiving. The rock appeared solid, but in reality it comprised overlying crusts of loose, pitted stone, always brittle, often slick with ice or moisture, which shifted unpredictably with the weight of every pace. The successive valleys rose and fell like rippling dunes, from light grey eructations to banks of pewter and charcoal scree. Angular upright and recumbent boulders huddled on the valley sides, barring the way ahead, their faces weathered flat and dimly glowing in the unrelenting radiance of the midnight sun.

It had started as a curiosity. On his first night aboard the Albanov, Callum hadn’t minded being woken by the laser beam of sunlight that had somehow penetrated a chink in his cabin blind. As the clock turned 01:16, he had thrown the blind up and looked with wonder out across the deck and the ice-flecked ocean beyond, still bathed in the same intense, white light as when his head had first hit the pillow. But after a few days, as the sun persisted, circling and circling the sky overhead without ever setting, the relentless light had become an issue. It was surreal to the point of disorientation. It was constant to the point of distraction. The medics had warned the entire team to expect two things: sunburn and mood swings, and within days they had all been struck down with both.

By the end of the first week, they had also each come face to face with the mist.

“This is very common at this time of year,” Lungkaju had said, as it descended rapidly and unexpectedly for the first time. “Do not panic, please, Doctor Ross.”

Don’t panic, Callum had thought. It was an inconvenience, for sure, but why would he panic over a bit of mist? He had then watched with a mixture of awe and deepening unease as the rocks around him thinned, fractured and finally disappeared behind a suffocating pall of grey. He’d expected tough terrain. But the severity and regularity of the mists on Harmsworth had taken him entirely by surprise. The reduced visibility was one thing, but the freezing sea smoke, as Lungkaju called it, was something more, a far cry from the fingers of atmospheric haar that rolled in off the North Sea from time to time and hugged the lowland coast of Aberdeenshire.

This mist, the sea smoke, carried a strange scent, a bitterness that clung to his nostrils, stung his eyes and left him with a dry mouth. It didn’t hug, drift or drape. It billowed and pulsated. There was nothing picturesque about it. Nothing redeeming. At times the proximity and constant motion of the vapour induced a sense of suffocation, and a queasiness that Callum could only liken to the travel sickness he’d suffered with as a child. At other times sound was amplified and distorted into distant wails and shrieks; the world would come alive with echoes, and dark shadows would flicker in and out of being like spectres in the