The clamshell doors opened overhead, cracking; he heard the noise of the storm, shrieking from the darkness. They dragged him over to the lift.
He tensed, swung round, grabbed at Thone’s collar; saw the man’s face; appalled, full of fear. He felt the man on the other side of him grab at his free arm; he wriggled, got his other arm free from Thone, saw the pistol in the CO’s holster.
He got the gun; he remembered shouting, getting away but falling; he tried to shoot but the gun would not work. Lights flickered on at the far side of the hangar. It’s not loaded! It’s not loaded! Thone shouted to the others. They looked over to the far side of the hangar; there were planes in the way, but there was somebody there, shouting about opening the hangar doors at night with the lights on.
He never saw who shot him. A sledgehammer hit the side of his head and the next thing he saw was the white chair.
The snow boiled wildly beyond the floodlit windows.
He watched it until dawn, remembering and remembering.
‘Talibe; will you send a message to Captain Saaz Insile. Tell him I need to see him, urgently; please send a message to my squadron, will you?’
‘Yes, of course, but first your medication.’
He took her hand in his. ‘No, Talibe; first phone the squadron.’ He winked at her. ‘Please, for me.’
She shook her head. ‘Pest.’ She walked away through the doors.
‘Well, is he coming?’
‘He’s on leave,’ she told him, taking up the clipboard to check off the medication he was receiving.
‘Shit!’ Saaz hadn’t said anything about leave.
‘Captain, tut tut,’ she said, shaking a bottle.
‘The police, Talibe. Call the military police; do it now. This really is urgent.’
‘Medication first, Captain.’
‘Well as soon as I’ve taken it, you promise?’
‘Promise. Open wide.’
‘Aaaah…’
Damn Saaz for being on leave, and damn him twice for not mentioning it. And Thone; the nerve of the man! Coming to see him, to check him out, to see if he remembered.
And what would have happened if he had?
He felt under the pillow again, for the scissor. It was there, cool and sharp.
‘I told them it was urgent; they say they’re on their way,’ Talibe said, coming in, not with the chair this time. She looked at the windows, where the storm still blew. ‘And I’ve to give you something to keep you awake; they want you perky.’
‘I am perky; I am awake!’
‘Quiet, and take these.’
He took them.
He fell asleep clutching the scissor under the pillow, while the whiteness outside the windows went on and on and eventually penetrated the glass, layer by layer, by a process of discrete osmosis, and gravitated naturally to his head, and spun slowly in orbit round him, and joined with the white torus of bandages and dissolved them and unwound them and deposited the remains in one corner of the room where the white chairs gathered, muttering, plotting, and slowly pressed in against his head, tighter and tighter, whirling in the silly snow-flake dance, faster and faster as they came closer and closer until eventually they became the bandage, cold and tight about his fevered head, and – finding the treated wound – slunk in through his skin and his skull, coldly and crisply and crystally into his brain.
Talibe unlocked the ward doors and let the officers in.
‘You sure he’s out?’
‘I gave him twice the usual dose. If he isn’t out he’s dead.’
‘Still got a pulse. You take his arms.’
‘Okay… Hup! Hey: look at this!’
‘Huh.’
‘My fault. I wondered where those had got to. Sorry.’
‘You did fine, kid. You better go. Thanks. This won’t be forgotten.’
‘Okay…’
‘What?’
‘It… it will be quick, yes? Before he wakes up?’
‘Sure. Oh, sure; yeah. He won’t ever know. Won’t feel a thing.’
… And so he awoke in the cold snow, roused by the freezing blast inside him coming to the surface, piercing his skin at every pore, shrieking out.
He woke, and knew he was dying. The blizzard had already numbed one side of his face. One hand was stuck to the hard-packed snow beneath him. He was still in the standard-issue hospital pyjamas. The cold was not cold; it was a stunning sort of pain, eating into him from every direction.
He raised his head, looking around. A few flat metres of snow, in what might have been morning light. The blizzard a little quieter than it had been, but still fierce. The last temperature he’d heard quoted had been ten below, but with the wind-chill, it was much, much worse than that. His head and hands and feet and genitals all ached.
The cold had woken him. It must have. It must have woken him quickly or he would already be dead. They must just have left him. If he could find which way they’d gone, follow them…
He tried to move, but could not. He screamed inside, to produce the most awesome surge of will he had ever attempted… and succeeded only in rolling over, and sitting up.
The effort of it was almost too much; he had to put his hands behind him to steady himself. He felt them both freeze there. He knew he would never stand up.
Talibe… he thought, but the blizzard swept that away in an instant.
Forget Talibe. You’re dying. There are more important things.
He stared into the milky depths of the blizzard as it swept towards and past him, like tiny soft stars all packed and hurrying. His face felt pierced by a million tiny hot needles, but then started to go numb.
To have come all this way, he thought, just to die in somebody else’s war. How silly it all seemed now. Zakalwe, Eleth-iomel, Staberinde; Livueta, Darckense. The names reeled off, were blown away by the sapping cold of the howling wind. He felt his face shrivel, felt the cold burrow through skin and eyeballs to his tongue and teeth and bones.
He ripped one hand away from the snow behind him; the cold already anaesthetising the flayed palm. He opened the jacket of the pyjamas, tore off buttons, and exposed the puckered little mark on his chest over his heart to the cold blast. He put his hand on the ice behind him, and tipped his head up. The bones in his neck seemed to grate, clicking as his head moved, as though the cold was seizing up his joints. ‘Darckense…’ he whispered to the boiling chill of the blizzard.
He saw the woman walking calmly towards him through the storm.
She walked on the surface of the hard-packed snow, dressed in long black boots and a long coat with a furry black collar and cuffs, and she wore a small hat.
Her neck and face were exposed, as were her gloveless hands. She had a long, oval face, and deep dark eyes. She walked easily up to him, and the storm behind her seemed to part at her back, and he felt himself in the lee of something more than just her tall body, and something like warmth seemed to seep through his skin, wherever it faced her.
He closed his eyes. He shook his head, which hurt a little, but he did it all the same. He opened his eyes again.
She was still there.
She had half knelt in front of him, her hands folded on one skirted knee, her face level with his. He peered forward, wrenched one hand free from the snow again (it was numb, but when he brought the hand round, he saw the raw flesh he’d torn from the snow). He tried to touch her face, but she took his hand in one of hers. She was warm. He thought he had never felt such glorious warmth in all his life.
He laughed, as she held his hand and the storm parted round her and her breath clouded the air.
‘Goddamn,’ he said. He knew he sounded groggy with the cold and with the drug. ‘An atheist my entire fucking life, and it turns out the credulous assholes were right all along!’ He wheezed, coughed. ‘Or do you surprise them too by not turning up?’
‘You flatter me, Mr Zakalwe,’ the woman said, in a superbly deep and sexy voice. ‘I am not Death, or some imagined Goddess. I am as real as you…’ She stroked his torn, bleeding palm with one long, strong thumb. ‘If a little warmer.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you’re real,’ he said. ‘I can feel you’re rea…’
His voice faded; he looked behind the woman. There was a huge shape appearing inside the whirling snow. Grey-white like the snow, but a single shade darker, it floated up behind the woman, quiet and huge and steady. The storm seemed to die, just around them.
‘That’s called a twelve person module, Cheradenine,’ the woman said. ‘It’s come to take you away, if you want to be taken away; to the mainland, if you like. Or further afield, away with us if you’d prefer that.’