Most of the Pit’s instruments were dead. But there had been a backup mechanical clock that had drawn on a trickle of thermal energy from deep roots planted in the earth below. Before they submitted to the cold sleep they had all been shown the clock’s working — the cogs made of diamond that would never wear out, the dials that spanned the unthinkable time of fifty years, and so on. It had been a not-so-subtle psychological ploy to reassure them that no matter how long they were in the ground, no matter what became of the outside world, no matter what else failed in the Pit, they would know the date.
But now Snowy saw that the clock’s hands had jammed against the end of their dials.
Snowy thought of his wife, Clara. She had been pregnant when he had gone into cold sleep. Fifty years? The kid would be born, grown, with kids of its own. Maybe even grandkids. No. He rejected the thought. It made no sense; you couldn’t have a human life with a gap of fifty years in the middle of it.
But Sidewise was still talking. “At least fifty years,” he said relentlessly. “How long do you think it would take for Barking’s body to mummify like that, for all our clothes to rot away?” That was the trouble with Sidewise, Snowy thought. He was never shy of saying what everybody else didn’t even want to think about.
“Enough,” Ahmed snapped. He was short, stocky, squat. “Barking is dead. I’m senior here. I’m in charge.” He glared around at them. “Everyone happy with that?”
Moon and Bonner seemed to have withdrawn into themselves. Sidewise was smiling oddly, as if he knew a secret he wasn’t sharing.
Snowy shrugged. He knew Ahmed had served as a watch chief — the navy equivalent of a sergeant major. Snowy thought of him as competent, oddly thoughtful, but inexperienced. And, incidentally, not popular enough for a nickname. But there wasn’t anybody better qualified here, regardless of rank. “I suggest you get on with it, sir.”
Ahmed gave him a look of gratitude. “All right. Here’s the deal. We’ve had no tally. In fact, no contact from the outside. I can’t even tell how long since we last got a contact of any sort. Too many of the systems are down.”
Moon said, “So we don’t know what’s happening out there?”
Snowy said briskly, “Tell us what we do.”
“We get out of here. We don’t need protective gear. Enough of the external sensors are working to tell us that.”
That was a relief, Snowy thought. He wouldn’t have welcomed relying for protection on his NBC suit — nuclear-biological-chemical — if it had been subject to the same ferocious aging as his other clothes.
Ahmed hauled a steel trunk out from under one of the bunks. Inside were pistols, Walther PPKs, each packed in a plastic bag filled with oil. “I checked one already. We can test fire them outside.” He handed them around.
Snowy cracked the bag, wiped clean his pistol on crumbling bits of sheet, and tucked its reassuring mass into his belt. He rummaged through more of his surviving kit: helmets, life jackets, survival vests — a pilot’s equipment. The plastic components seemed more or less intact, but the cloth and rubber had failed. He took what he thought he would need. He regretted leaving behind his helmet, his venerable bone-dome, even if it was painted United Nations blue. Still, he somehow doubted he would be doing much flying today one way or another.
They clustered before the exit. The door to the facility was heavy, round-edged, and airtight, and operated by a wheel; it was like a submarine’s hatch. Ahmed began to break its seals.
They were all shitting themselves, Snowy realized, even if none of them wanted to show it to the rest.
“So what do you think we’ll find?” whispered Sidewise. “Russians? Chinese? Bomb craters, two-headed kids? Everybody wearing monkey masks, like Planet of the Apes?”
“Fuck off, Side, you twat.”
With an uncompromising motion Ahmed turned the wheel. The last seal broke with a crack. The door swung back.
Green light flooded in.
Cryobiology was actually a venerable industry.
The key to its utility was that far below the freezing point of water, molecules slowed the frenetic pace that permitted chemical reactions to proceed. So red blood cells could be stored for a decade or more. You could freeze, thaw, and reuse corneas, organ tissue, neural tissue. You could even freeze embryos. The cold was as much an enemy as an ally, of course; expanding crystals of ice had an unpleasant habit of destroying cell walls. So the medicos infused tissues with cryoprotective agents like glycerol and dimethyl sulfoxide.
Still, freezing and reviving a complex mature organism — such as a hundred kilograms of blasphemous Royal Navy pilot — presented more of a challenge. In Snowy’s body there were many different types of cells, each requiring a different freeze-thaw profile. In the end, a little subtle genetic engineering had done the trick. Snowy’s cells had been given the ability to manufacture natural antifreeze — in fact, glycoproteins, a trick borrowed from some species of polar fish — and the freezing was regulated at the level of the cells themselves.
Obviously it had worked. Snowy had come out of the process alive and functioning. After half an hour he barely felt a thing.
Of course he had been intended to come out fighting.
Officially this unit was under the command of UNPROFOR, the UN Protection Force. But everybody knew that was only a cover. The strategy had become known as sowing dragon’s teeth. As the intensity of global conflict had rapidly increased, post-Rabaul, new forms of deterrence had been devised. The idea was that it would be futile for any power to attempt an invasion if it knew that the ground was salted with groups of highly trained military personnel, fresh and fully equipped, ready to resume the battle. From these scattered teeth the dragon would regrow. That was the theory.
There were drawbacks, of course. The cold sleep process itself brought a risk of injury or fatality (but low, not 75 percent). And you never knew where you would be stationed; the freezing had been done at huge central depots, the subjects transported and deposited, all unconscious, at selected sites around the country, even abroad. But Snowy had known that his unit of Navy flyers would be kept together, which was more than reassuring.
And there were worse assignments. The tour of duty was limited to two years. For sure it was safer than being posted on a carrier to one of the world’s oceanic hellholes, the Adriatic or the Baltic or the South China Sea. In all, it was odd but it was just another posting.
Snowy had been happy to go along with it, even though it meant being locked away from his wife. He had expected to come out of the hole healthy and happy, a lot richer with the back pay he hadn’t been able to spend. Or, failing that, the grimmer possibility would be that he would have to come out fighting. But that was what he was trained for. Even then, he had expected to emerge into the middle of an ongoing high-tech war, to find a chain of command, everything basically functioning, to find something to fly. That was why they had salted away pilots in the first place. He hadn’t expected that they would be cracking the door cut off from any chain of command, completely ignorant of conditions outside — ignorant even of where he was. But that was what he faced.
Snowy took the lead. He stepped through the hatch.
Beyond the hatch, a stairwell was cut into concrete. The well led up to a rectangle of bright green light: leaves, traces of blue-white sky beyond. A forest?
The stairwell’s concrete, where it was exposed, was stained brown where metal fittings had rusted away. And when Snowy put his weight too close to the edge of a step, the concrete just crumbled. The stairs themselves were barely visible under a tangle of moss, leaves, debris of all kinds. Snowy wasted a little energy trying to clear this stuff off, but found that much of it was actually growing here, out of a layer of mulch over the concrete.