“It came down near Lucy. She either saw it fall, or heard it, or felt it.” He struggled past the fallen chair to the table with the emptied bags. “She would have gone out to take a look.”

[Again, this is likely. It is the explanation why she subsequently disappeared. It is the explanation why the Americans want to find her before she can say what she saw.]

“What did she find when she got there? Did it look like something we’d make, or something else? Was there a door, or a hatch? Did she force it open, or did they come out?” Petrovitch’s hand trembled as he unscrewed the top of the hip flask. The fumes were sharp, almost without flavour. Vodka, then: how appropriate.

[I do not know, Sasha. They may not have survived the descent.]

“What did they look like? Like us, or… not at all?” He tilted his wrist and drank deep. He needed it, needed it badly. “Yobany stos, Michael. We have to find Lucy.”

[That is why you are in Deadhorse.]

“Yeah.” The clock ticked over another second, then another. “Whose camera is this anyway?”

[This repair centre is run by an engineer called Paul Avaiq. It is most likely to be his.]

“Tell me you haven’t killed him.”

[Not purposely, no. I have made every effort only to target those personnel who have been swapped in recently. I have even erred on the side of caution, which has contributed to a loss of our assets.]

“But we’ve just torn the town apart. What if he’s run with the other Yanks?”

[I will search for him. Meanwhile, we have sufficient information to at least find out where Avaiq was when he took the video, to within a manageable margin of error, by comparing it with the known behaviour of the craft.]

“Dog team,” said Petrovitch.

[Explain.]

“Balvan! Mudak! Ship crosses the sky, explodes, trashes electrical and electronic systems at will. Starter coils for skidoos and four-wheel drives, the ARCO planes? They’re not turned off: they’re all dead. Everything they have has either been brought in since or repaired. So how do you cross the snow if everything mechanical is fried?”

[By using a dog-pulled sled.]

“There was the sound of dogs on the clip. We should’ve been looking from the very start for someone who runs a dog team.” Petrovitch gulped the last of the vodka, and threw the flask on the floor. He picked up his bag and limped through the hangar and out into the pre-dawn light.

34

The sky was invisible behind a storm of snow. Petrovitch spat out a mouthful and turned his head out of the wind.

“I can’t see a yebani thing.”

[You must hurry. Only with Paul Avaiq will you stand a chance of finding Lucy in time.]

“Give me a map and find me some transport.”

A wire-frame model of Deadhorse popped up in his vision. Buildings, teletroopers, roads, all marked out in the overlay, even if everything was lost in the whiteout. His path was shown by a thick yellow line on the ground. Eyes down, he started to follow it.

It led off to his left, towards the faint burning mass of Ben and Jerry’s ruined control centre. “We can’t make too many more mistakes.” Petrovitch turned into the wind, and was all but blind. “What are they going to drop?”

[Fuel-air explosives to destroy the solid structures. The second wave will use napalm and phosphorus. Conventional explosives will be more or less undetectable to the global seismology network, and there will be no telltale fission products on the wind.]

Petrovitch kept on walking, head down, following the line at his feet. Just ahead was a building on fire, the snow hissing as it touched the flames, and before it, a skidoo.

Petrovitch reached out and heaved the white-coated body off the seat and on to the ground. The single shot had punctured the man’s back, and he’d slumped over at the controls. He’d bled out over the left-hand side of the cowling, and it had mostly frozen already. Mostly.

[Does it disturb you?]

Petrovitch bungeed his bag to the carry-rack and sat astride the vehicle. “What? That he’s dead, or that the seat’s a little sticky?”

[Human disgust responses seem to be abnormally absent from your psyche.]

“Hardly news.” The magnetic key was missing, and he spent a few extra moments he didn’t have dismounting, rolling the body over, and patting down its pockets. “It’s meat. Nothing more.”

He came up with a key ring and a coded plastic card. He got back on, and pressed it to the ignition. The lights came on, and the fuel cell started pushing power to the turbines. The path changed direction, pointing towards where Michael hoped Avaiq would be.

[I can try and stop the planes. They will be more difficult to interfere with than missiles, but I can attempt to hack the GPS signals: they will be flying on instruments and I should be able to fool them into missing Deadhorse completely.]

“Maybe. But we don’t know where Lucy is. Tearing up a random piece of tundra might be exactly the wrong choice.”

[Then you have less than ten minutes to find Avaiq and Lucy and get to a safe distance.] Michael paused. [That is not long.]

Petrovitch glanced at the controls, worked out what they all did, and dragged on the accelerator. The tracks at the back bit into the soft surface and dug in until they reached the hard, compacted ice below. The machine lurched forward, and he had to hang on.

“I’m going as fast as I can.”

The snow shovelled itself at his face at twice the speed now, so it became a freezing, stinging blizzard. He drove flat out until his route indicated a hard left; he throttled back in order to take the turn, then opened it up again. He was the only vehicle moving. Even the teletroopers, the ones that couldn’t make it to the edge of town, were still.

“Who’s left here?”

[Those who have not fled with the security forces will probably be hiding. The buildings are well insulated. The teletroopers’ infrared capabilities cannot see through the walls.]

Petrovitch turned right on to the road that would take him past the hotel. He glanced up to see it properly on fire, orange flames pulled ragged by the wind. “I think we should warn them to get out. Can we do that?”

[Door-to-door searches for survivors are time-consuming. I can announce the impending air strike like this:]

Every teletrooper blared out: “Warning. Warning. Warning. Residents and workers of Deadhorse. An air attack on your settlement is imminent. Evacuate immediately. The Freezone guarantees the teletroopers will not harm you. You have nine minutes.”

[The cellphone network has been disabled, although I am detecting several satellite phone signals. I will contact them personally and assure them of our good intentions.]

The glowing yellow road lurched abruptly right again, and terminated at the foot of a two-storey building that loomed out of the snow so fast Petrovitch thought he might not be able to stop in time.

He hung the back out, and slid around in an almost perfect circle, ending up nose on to the wall. “Yeah. I bet you I couldn’t do that twice.”

The teletrooper at the crossroads lumbered around. One leg was stiff, immovable. “Warning. Warning. Warning.”

Petrovitch pitched himself off the snowmobile, picked up the bag and his gun, and dragged his foot all the way to the door.

“You have eight minutes,” called the teletrooper.

“I know I’ve got yebani eight minutes.” He rattled the handle, found it locked, and kicked out at the wooden frame. It splintered. He went back for another go. The lock gave and the door slapped back on its hinges.

He was in a corridor which went left and right. There were stairs at either end, and in between door after door. If he had to check each one, he was going to be incinerated along with everyone else.