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

final magazine towards the back of the cave, then turned and raced after them.

Chapter 7 Sea Centaur

1

Callum awoke to find himself alone in the shelter. He checked his watch. It was mid-morning. Christ! By now Lungkaju would know that he was missing and may well have raised the alarm. If he had then Volkov would know that he had disobeyed the safety regs and that meant that he was in deep shit. If the guy was as bad as Darya suggested, he might even be kicked off the project. Then what about the ice mummy?

The potential seriousness of the situation dawned suddenly, and he dropped his head into his hands. “Why do I drink that stuff?”

Jonas. Jonas is dead, that’s why! And then Darya had set out to distract him, and man alive had she done a good job! So where the hell was she now?

He crawled out of the hide and scanned around. The air was still and the temperature just above freezing. The mist had cleared and he could see the ledge on which the seal hide stood. It was nestled along the face of a low cliff overlooking the cove. From here he could make out the up-ended canoe, part-way up the beach. The view inland was blocked by the rising relief, but it was unbroken along the coast to the south and beyond to the Albanov. Suddenly the ship looked a hell of a long way away.

“Callum!”

He spun around.

Darya looked weary and dishevelled, and there was an odd look on her face, somewhere between excitement and fear. “You must come and see this!” She grabbed him by the hand and went to take off again, but he pulled her back.

“Are you crazy? We need to get back to the ship or they’ll be sending out a search party. We’ll be off the project.”

Smiling, she squeezed his hand and replied, “Relax. We will go back to the ship and everything will be fine, but first you must see this. Trust me, you will not believe!”

Ten minutes later, they were standing on top of a headland, looking north towards the heights of Svayataya in the distance. Callum recognised the beach immediately below the promontory. It was where they had landed the night before; there in the far corner was the polar bear carcass, unchanged from when he’d seen it last.

Darya crouched behind a rock and pulled him down beside her.

“What exactly am I looking at?”

“Just wait, you will see.”

Callum settled onto his stomach and watched. They passed a few minutes in silence before he said, “About last night—”

“Yes, it was very good,” she replied, pecking him on the cheek, “but look.”

His eyes wandered back towards the carcass. Its pose looked about as undignified as possible, splayed out on its back with its neck twisted around and one forearm draped across its chest. It looked drunk rather than dead. But today there was no riot of gulls fighting to get their beaks into it. Instead it lay eerily still and undisturbed and… Callum removed his sunglasses and blinked.

Its paw had moved. He looked across at Darya. She was watching intently through her binoculars, wearing the same bemused smile. As he squinted back down, the paw seemed to move again. He was about to speak when he felt the binoculars tap against his cheek. He took them and looked back. No sooner had he refocussed than something appeared out of the bear’s armpit. It was a head, small and white, with an elongated snout and two large eyes. It was like no creature he had ever seen before. “What is it?”

She shrugged. “I have been watching them for the last hour and I am starting to think that nobody would know.”

The creature emerged fully from the carcass. It stood for a moment, perched on the side of the bear’s arm, a chunk of meat in its mouth. Then it bounded with great agility down onto the shingle, followed by another two identical animals. With the bear for scale, they only appeared to be half a metre or so in height, and their white coats were murky with dried blood.

“They look like birds,” Callum said. “Ugly ones.”

“This is what I thought,” Darya replied. “They are bipedal, two-legged, like birds. Their coats look more like feathers, though I cannot be sure of this from so far away, and their snouts are long like beaks, but…” She hesitated. “I do not think that they are birds. They do not behave like birds.”

“And they have no wings,” Callum added. “They have little forearms.”

“And the tail is actual tail and not just feathers.”

“You think this might be a new species?”

“I think yes,” she answered. “This might be true.”

They watched as the little creatures leapt in and out of the hole that they had burrowed into the carcass, squabbling over morsels of flesh. Then one of them froze suddenly and sniffed at the air. Its body was held parallel to the ground, its neck and its tail both long and outstretched, its forearms bent at the elbows beneath its chest. It bobbed its head as it strutted a few paces on its muscular hind legs.

“We must get closer,” Darya said suddenly, setting off back towards the hide.

Callum went to argue, then closed his mouth and followed after her.

2

“We must be very quiet now,” Darya whispered, as the canoe approached the far end of the cove. “I do not want to scare them away or I will maybe not see them again.”

Callum dug his paddle in and brought them to a stop twenty metres or so from shore. The current was weaker than it had been the day before, and he was able to keep the craft still while Darya attached a telephoto lens to her camera and began taking shots.

Almost immediately, one of the creatures noticed them and scampered to the water’s edge to inspect. It was quickly joined by the others, and the three stood shoulder to shoulder, staring out towards the canoe.

“I don’t think