Something Coming Through

37. Little Hiccups

Mangala | 22–24 July

Getting out of the terminal’s freight yard turned out to be a lot harder than smuggling themselves aboard an alien spacecraft and riding it across twenty thousand light years to another world under a different star. They’d been told that Dr Hanna Babbel, Karyotech Pharma’s field agent on Mangala, would organise a way of sneaking them out, but after exchanging texts with the woman Henry said that there’d been a couple of little hiccups.

‘First up, Michel didn’t make it. He was involved in a smash on the way to the shuttle. A car shot out of a slip road, clipped his people carrier and spun it into the crash barrier, and sped off. No one was killed, but Michel was bashed up pretty badly. A fractured leg, a broken collarbone, concussion. Local police found the car a couple of hours later. Burned-out. And stolen, needless to say.’

‘Nevers,’ Chloe said, with a dipping feeling.

‘Probably. The son of a bitch is sneakier than I thought.’

‘Michel was supposed to be our guide,’ Fahad said. ‘How will we get to the site now?’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Henry said. ‘Dr Babbel is a native. She knows everything there is to know.’

‘But she isn’t an archaeologist. She can’t help us find what we need to find.’

‘As you keep telling us, your friend will do that. And if we have to dig anything up, I know how to handle a spade. But before we get to that, here’s the other little problem: Dr Babbel says she didn’t have time to sort out a truck that can shift our container. And we can’t walk out because there’s too much activity in the terminal yard. They work around the clock to shift cargo off the shuttle and load it up before it departs.

‘So what we’re going to do,’ Henry said, ‘is sit tight for two days. There’s a big holiday coming up, the annual celebration of the first footfall on the planet. The yard will shut down then, and we can sneak out.’

‘Bullshit,’ Fahad said. ‘We have to get out of here. We have to get going.’

Chloe shared that impatience. The need to get moving. It was a tightness in her belly, a wire in her brain.

Henry said, ‘If yard security or the local police arrest you, how will that help us find what we came here for? Sit tight and stay cool, Fahad. Like my old mum used to say, all good things come to those who wait.’

‘Suppose I leave now?’ Fahad said.

‘I have the code to unlock the hatch. You don’t.’

‘Suppose you tell me what that is,’ Fahad said.

‘Suppose you calm down,’ Henry said, giving Fahad a flat unforgiving look.

Fahad glared back, hands knotted into fists. The two of them like little boys facing off in a playground.

Chloe said, ‘I think both of you should calm down.’

‘That’s it. Take his side,’ Fahad said.

‘I really, really don’t want to spend any more time in this stinky little can with you two. But Henry’s right. We have to sit tight until it’s safe to leave.’

‘Look on the bright side, kid,’ Henry said. ‘We only have to wait two days. It could have been a lot longer. We caught a lucky break with this holiday. Some of the people we smuggled up and out had to wait far longer before they could break out. Two days? It isn’t anything.’

Fahad started to say something, and Henry held up his hand. ‘No more discussion. The Prof paid for this trip; you agreed to go along with her plan. This is part of it.’

Chloe said, ‘If you can send text messages, I bet you can connect to the local internet, too. Give us that, at least.’

‘Good idea,’ Fahad said. ‘We can do some research on the local web.’

Henry held up his phone. ‘All this does is send and receive encrypted text messages via an HF rig in the chassis of the can. No voice transmissions, no email or web browsing…If you want to see what kind of porn Mangala offers, kid, you’ll have to wait until you can buy an actual phone.’

They could look out at the new world through the spyhole camera, at least. A view of stacks of shipping containers mostly, glimpses of men and women in high-vis vests and hard hats, cranes and big forklift trucks. The clanging sounds of containers being shifted, the deep vibrations of heavy vehicles going past. An arc of sky the colour of evening, trains of high thin clouds, unvarying light and shadows. Daylight here lasted as long as the planet’s year, thirty-one days, and the night was another year.

Fahad pulled out his sketch pad and drew the black room, tore off the page, drew it again. And again. He told Chloe that he was beginning to think it was important. ‘We have to find the spires. Where they were. And then we have to find this.’

Henry studied one of the cast-off drawings. ‘If this black room is inside a spire, then what’s inside the black room?’

‘I don’t even know if it’s a room,’ Fahad said.

Henry turned the sketch upside down. ‘Perhaps it’s a view of the inside of Pandora’s box. Or the inside of your head. A mess of tangled lines leading nowhere in particular.’

‘Perhaps it is the kind of thing where each person sees what they want to see,’ Fahad said.

Later, after Henry had drawn the curtain around his couch and gone to sleep, Fahad brought Chloe a cup of tea: a peace offering. They sat together, whispering. Fahad asked her if she trusted Henry.

‘He knows what he’s doing.’

‘I don’t mean can he do his job. I mean can we trust him?’

‘We both made a deal with Dr Morange,’ Chloe said. ‘And we both believe that she would keep to it, or we wouldn’t be here.’

‘But the thing is, she’s not here to make sure the bargain is kept. And if Mr Harris thinks that what I need to do will get in the way of what he has to do…You see?’

There it was again. His unappeasable need to avenge his father’s death. Henry had told him that when this was all over, after they’d found whatever it was that Ugly Chicken wanted them to find, he could go to the local police and tell them everything he knew. And when Fahad had shrugged, said that the English police had already let him down and the police on Mangala probably wouldn’t be any different, and besides, they’d probably arrest him, for being some kind of illegal immigrant, Henry had said that the Prof would make sure the bad guys stood up in court for what they’d done. ‘If the police blow you off, she’ll hire lawyers, private investigators. Whatever it takes.’

Fahad said now, to Chloe, ‘Besides the question of trust, I have doubts about this so-called plan. Dr Morange promises to help, but it turns out that she cannot protect Michel, and this Dr Babbel person cannot even organise a truck. And now we have to sit here and hope we aren’t found…’

‘It’s just a little hiccup,’ Chloe said. ‘And what you want to do, you can’t do it on your own.’

‘I am not crazy or foolish. I know what the people my father worked for are like. And even if I did not care about my own life, I must think of Rana. Who I had to leave behind, like a hostage. So don’t worry, okay? I’m not going to do something dumb. But the people who killed my father, they’re going to pay for it. I won’t give that up.’

His bristling toughness and naive vulnerability turned Chloe’s heart. Like Neil, like her, he’d had to grow up fast.

She said, ‘You need Henry and you don’t like it. But don’t forget that he needs you, too. If he could find this place without your help, you wouldn’t be here. Me neither. We’ll do the one thing, and then the other. I’ll make sure that Henry sticks to the deal. That’s why you asked me to come, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but was that me, or was it Ugly Chicken? And did you agree to come because you wanted to, or because he wanted you to?’

‘The scientists couldn’t find him in my head, so I guess it’s me.’

‘Just because they couldn’t find him doesn’t mean he isn’t there,’ Fahad said. ‘I thought I was using him to get what I want. That it was like a deal we had made. He used me; I used him. But now I’m beginning to wonder if you can bargain with something so old and clever and strange.’

Chloe asked him if he felt any different, now he was wearing the bead.

Fahad shook his head. ‘But that’s okay. Rana says that he’d been asleep when she found him, that she woke him up. Dr Morange told me that it was possible that he became imprinted on her. Like chicks — the first thing they see after they hatch, they think it’s their mother because that’s what they expect to see first. And if it’s something else, a person, a dog, they follow them around anyway. Or it could be that he was able to make a direct connection with Rana, her nervous system, her brain, because she wore him against her skin. She showed me, the doctor, differences in our brain scans, said that if I wore the bead all the time it was possible that he’d find a way to speak to me, too. She’s very smart, but even she doesn’t really know anything about him. Just guesses. I wonder what else he has done, how much he has changed me…But how could I ever know? How can I know which thoughts are mine, and which aren’t?’

The poor kid.

Chloe said, ‘One thing we do know, he’s making us itchy and impatient. Eager to get going, now we’ve brought him home. Angry and frustrated because of this delay.’

Fahad smiled. ‘So I should be patient, because it is a way of resisting him.’

‘I think we should make this thing our thing. We should do it because we want to do it.’

Fahad said, ‘Do you think he affects Henry, too?’

It was a good question. Chloe hadn’t thought about it before. Henry was a stubborn old geezer, practical, direct. She imagined that even his dreams were austere. Technical drawings of machine parts, battle plans with clashing arrows.

The day crawled by. Fahad retreated into his video games again. Henry woke up, did a hundred push-ups using his left arm, a hundred using his right. Chloe found it hard to sleep. The constant noise and vibration of heavy machinery outside; her thoughts racing around and around the same grooves.

The next morning, Henry used his phone and said that they would be out in a few hours. A little later he said, ‘Hear that?’

Fahad frowned. ‘I don’t hear anything.’

‘Exactly. The shift is over. It’s the holiday. Everyone in the city will be partying.’

They had already packed their go bags. They ate a last meal, tidied up and checked that they’d left nothing behind that could identify themselves. Henry tore up Fahad’s drawings and fed the pieces into the toilet.

And then there was nothing left to do but wait. At last, Henry’s phone beeped. He punched the code into the hatch’s lock, turned the wheel, swung it open. The cardboard cartons had shifted and toppled during the voyage; they had to restack them to clear a path to the doors of the container. Henry inserted a thin strip of aluminium in the gap between the doors, worked it up to the top and twisted, worked it to the bottom and twisted again. Something gave with a metallic snap, and Henry put his shoulder to one of the doors.

Cold air blew in, the air of another world. It smelled of iron and electricity.