Colony by Benjamin Cross (best way to read books .TXT) 📕

1

It was done.

Despite the miles Ptarmigan had put between himself and the Albanov before detonation, the explosion had been so great that it had rocked the Sea Centaur. He had fallen and struck the side of his head, leaving him bleeding through his hairline, in a daze. The shockwave had also upset the sub’s inertial guidance system and triggered the emergency siren. His nice orderly cabin was now alive with sound and bathed in a chaos of red light. Consciously he fought to get the situation under control. Subconsciously he relished the momentary distraction from the keening of his conscience.

What the hell have I done? He’d always known that this would be the end result of his actions, and he’d tried to prepare himself through meditation and chant. But now that it was finally here, it was a whole new ballgame. He was no longer just a terrorist subversive. He was a mass murderer. An indiscriminate killer.

He felt suddenly very alone.

The siren finally faded out and normal lighting resumed inside the cabin. Forcing himself to focus, Ptarmigan picked up his copy of Ship of Fools and turned to the back page. On its reverse, top corner, there were the two eight-digit codes written in pencil. The first was the coordinate he had followed to the explosives drop. It had taken him to a location just north of Nansen Rocks. The explosive had been contained within a weighted capsule deposited on the sea floor. His hands had rung with sweat as he had extended the Centaur’s pincers and grasped the gleaming cylinder. As he was well aware at the time, it had been a real turning point. He could have secreted it elsewhere on the seabed, called Finback and claimed that it was missing, gone back to his life. This and a hundred other alternatives had paraded before him in that instant. But instead he had retracted the pincers and brought the capsule into the Centaur’s storage chamber just like any other sample.

A trickle of blood made its way from his hairline to the corner of his eye and he removed his spectacles to wipe at it. Without thinking, he then reclaimed his book and winced as he picked up on the bloody finger-marks now skating across the inside of the back cover.

“Ah, Jesus!” He tore the cover off in its entirety, slinging it to the floor. The damn book had served its purpose anyway. All he needed now were directions.

Coordinate number two was for the rendezvous point. He remembered Finback’s instruction. When it is done, make your way there. You may have to wait, but I will have somebody pick you up. Wiping the ends of his fingers, he typed the code into the Centaur’s navigation system and waited while the computer calculated the location. This time the coordinate appeared to lead him to an inland location on the north coast.

He leant forward and scrutinised the digital mapping arrayed on the screen in front. From memory he knew that this was largely an area of steep bluffs and rock-strewn coves, not exactly the sort of place to land a hi-tech submersible. Was Finback expecting him to get out and swim to shore, for God’s sake? Why the hell hadn’t he done a dummy run? His eyes desperately retraced the lie of the coastline. There must have been something there, a feature that he wasn’t seeing, a cave or deep-water inlet to accommodate the Centaur.

Without wasting another second, he submerged the sub and set off along the course. He was close. In less than fifteen minutes he would be there, and shortly afterwards one of Finback’s associates would be transporting him to safety.

As he manoeuvred the Centaur around an underwater shelf, his mind moved on: Ava. Perhaps his one consolation was that he’d managed to transport her off the Albanov before it blew. It had taken some doing. Stealing the ketamine sedative from Lebedev’s office alone had been a nightmare. In fact the whole thing had represented a substantial alteration to his plan that had driven him almost to distraction. But he had gotten there in the end. And it had been necessary. No matter how hard he had tried to convince himself otherwise, he had fallen for her. There wasn’t a chance in hell that he could’ve gone through with it, any of it, knowing that she was still aboard.

But even that little glimmer of self-redemption had fallen under a shadow. A shadow with teeth, claws and a real bad attitude. He hadn’t minded saving McJones earlier that morning. Back when he’d still been plain old Dan Peterson. Back when he’d still had time to reconsider. McJones was a good guy; cool and confident in a way that Ptarmigan could only pretend to be. Lebedev was another matter altogether. That miserable bitch! He wished to high heaven she hadn’t let the goddamn creature go. If McJones hadn’t been there then Lord knows what he would’ve done to her if she’d dared touch his controls like that. Yeah, the thing was wounded. Yeah, it was probably none too hot for its run-in with the Centaur’s pincers. But there was something about the sly little bastard that had left a seed of unease germinating deep in Ptarmigan’s gut.

The on-board processor bleeped suddenly. His destination was only a couple of hundred feet up ahead. He could see the fractured seabed rising up towards the island’s northern shores. As suspected, there didn’t appear to be any kind of natural harbour. The Centaur could always breach and approach the shore as a surface vessel. Shallow water navigation was one of its major design benefits. But there still had to be somewhere to navigate to, other than dry land. And Ptarmigan couldn’t see any-such-where. What’s more, from the pull of the current and the movement of the seabed silts, it seemed as if the surf above was none too friendly. The last thing he needed was to wreck the craft. If, God forbid, Finback turned out