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

“Come and help me,” she replied, heading for the vehicle bays.

Callum followed her to the end compartment. The tambour door rattled as she slid it up to reveal one of the two Czilim hovercrafts that Mr Volkov had mentioned on the tour. Callum had seen them on more than one occasion over the last couple of weeks, patrolling around the island manned with Spetsnaz.

“You’re not serious?”

“No, not that,” she replied, with her half-smile half-frown, “that.”

He followed the line of her finger to the roof above the hovercraft. There, upside down, hung a wooden canoe. It looked to be at least four metres long, and it was suspended from the ceiling by a system of elastic cables.

Callum turned to her. “Okay, now you really are joking! I haven’t been in one of those things since I was a lad.”

“Then the distraction begins now.”

“But can you even… I mean, do you know how to—”

“Of course. It is not difficult.”

“But we’re supposed to have a guide with us,” he said, casting around for new excuses. “What if we run into a bear?”

“Hah!” She laughed. “Please to trust me. The most dangerous animals on that island will be you and me. And besides,” she reached back over her shoulder and patted the top of her rucksack, “I have my bear spray.”

5

The sea was like a millpond, calm and still. With a little guidance, Callum soon got into the rhythm of paddling, and with every stroke the island seemed to grow. The canoe was surprisingly nifty, dodging in and out of the remnant ice, skirting around the larger chunks that glistened and rocked like buoys from side to side.

As the exertion burnt away the alcohol from his system, it was replaced by the feeling of intense jet-lag that came with continued exposure to the midnight sun. Light-lag, Peterson had called it at dinner one night. “Anyone else feel like there’s a goddamn balloon inside their skull?”

When they were only a few hundred metres from shore, they turned and began to follow the lie of the east coast northwards. There was no breeze. The current was gentle but insistent, urging them towards the shoreline and forcing them to maintain momentum.

“How deep is the water here?” Callum asked.

“It is shallow,” Darya replied. “Perhaps only fifty metres.”

When Callum and his brother had paddled across Loch Ness as children, the water had been over four times deeper. Yet it had felt no more than a shallow pool. This was different. Fifty metres or not, it was fifty metres of Arctic Ocean. He focussed on paddling. “Are you going to tell me where we’re headed?”

“You’ll see.”

They continued on in silence, with nothing but the sound of the oars patting into the water to either side.

There was a sudden splash and something broke the surface up ahead. Callum stopped paddling. Scanning around, he thought he could make out a confusion of shadows, mostly dark, some pale, all clustered in the same area. But as the canoe drifted closer, they melted into the depths.

“We have arrived,” Darya said.

Callum was about to ask where exactly they had arrived, when a brownish-white spiral, two metres long, pierced the water to his left and scraped across the prow. He dropped his paddle in shock, almost causing the canoe to capsize as instinct drove him up onto his feet. “Did you see that?”

“Sit down!” Darya yelled. “Do you want us to go over? It is a narwhal. They will not harm you.”

Callum dropped back onto his seat and watched as the horn re-emerged, joined by another four, five, six. As if choreographed, the creatures dove together and then resurfaced, their horns aloft.

Fear turned quickly to wonder as more and more of the porpoise-like creatures revealed themselves. Each of their horns was a different shade and size, and there must have been twenty or thirty now piercing the air around the canoe.

“They are beautiful, aren’t they?” Darya called out.

“They’re fantastic,” Callum answered. He reached out to stroke one of the passing horns, trilling his fingers across the grooves before it pulled away.

“Some people think that this is where the myth of the unicorn is coming from,” Darya said.

“Yes, I’ve heard this one,” he replied. “Norse seafarers would hunt them and sell their horns, then the connection with the sea would become lost over time and inland communities developed the unicorn myth to explain them.” He peered over the side and watched the dumpy, mottled-marble shadows gliding beneath them. “It’s not surprising,” he added. “Most landlubbers would never have seen the ocean in their entire life, let alone a narwhal.”

“They are tusks, not horns,” Darya said. “A narwhal’s tusk is just an elongated tooth. Sometimes they will even grow two, one from each incisor.”

“I’ve heard something about this too. Lungkaju was telling me an old Nganasan myth, and the hero’s ski poles were made from a double-tusk narwhal. I’d imagine they’re pretty rare?”

“Extremely rare. I have seen it only once before, and I have studied the narwhal now for many years.”

There was a loud slap as one of the creatures, small enough to still be a youngster, smashed its tail down beside Callum and showered him as if on purpose.

“This is a young female,” Darya said. “She is very playful. She must like you.”

Callum wiped the freezing spray from his face. “No, I have that effect on all the girls. Only, they usually throw the water from a glass.”

She laughed. “We are lucky. The narwhal can be shy animal and usually there are not so many together at once. Three different pods are together here to feed. During winter they live out in the deep water a long way from shore. They only move to the shallow water here in summer. These three pods have maybe made the same migration to Harmsworth for many, many years now, and they will stay here until the ice starts to form again.” She pointed to a particularly large narwhal, much paler than the