.
'My favourite comic book character is John Constantine. When I was young I bought a trench-coat and smoked soft-pack Marlboros just so I could be like him.'
Nikki patted him on the shoulder. He heard the door close and a key turn in the lock.
Jane knocked on the door of Sian's room.
'Sian? Hello? Anyone home?'
No reply. Jane tried the door. It was unlocked. The room was dark, dimly lit by light spilling from the corridor. Sian was curled on her bunk staring at the wall. She was hugging her pillow.
'Sorry to intrude,' said Jane. 'Ghost said we should both come and see the fireworks.'
'What fireworks?'
Jane shrugged. 'Wouldn't say. He's acting all mysterious. Seems pretty excited though. May as well humour the man.'
Sian wearily sat up. She switched on her lamp and winced against the sudden glare. She laced her boots.
Jane wanted to make conversation. No point asking: Are you feeling all right? Are you doing okay? The best she could offer was companionship, small talk.
'We've still got a carton of Hyperion egg concentrate. Want a shitty omelette later?'
'I just want to be quiet for a while, Jane. I don't want much at all.'
Jane knew a little bit about loss. Not much. She hadn't wept at a graveside. But she had a boyfriend at university. Mark. He dumped her for a thinner girl. Dumped her by text. She had to watch them arm-in-arm round campus. Those first few days of heartbreak were hell. Jane walked around with a head full of black. Felt like she was drowning. She stood in the supermarket queue and tried to act casual, tried not to sob and scream. Friends told her the grief would slowly ebb. She would think about him a little less each day. But the knowledge that one day she would leaf through Mark's letters and feel nothing doubled her loss.
'We should head to the canteen later,' said Jane. 'I'll beat you at Monopoly.'
'I'll skip it.'
'No. You're going to play Monopoly. Then you are going to watch me cook an omelette, and then you'll do the washing up, all right? You've got to keep on living.'
Ghost led them to C deck. He lifted a floor hatch.
SAFETY HARNESS TO BE WORN AT ALL TIMES
Blast of winds and ice particles.
They climbed down a ladder and found themselves standing on an inspection walkway slung beneath the rig. Miles of pipes and girders above their heads. Mesh beneath their feet, and a two-hundred-metre drop on to the ice.
Ghost checked his watch.
'Here it comes. Any second now.'
A shudder ran through the refinery, shaking loose icicles and slabs of snow. The pipes above their heads creaked and sang.
'The storage tanks are dry,' he explained. 'But there is plenty of octane-grade distillate in the pipework. I've reversed the injection pumps. The whole system is set to flush itself out.'
Liquid poured from a massive pipe mouth hung beneath the belly of the rig. The retracted seabed umbilicus. It looked like Rampart was taking a piss. A torrent of part-refined fuel. First a spattering stream, then a gush. Thousands of gallons of semi- purified petroleum poured in a thin cascade and splashed across the polar crust.
'Smell that?' said Ghost. 'Pure rocket fuel.' He took a flare pistol from his pocket and slotted a shell into the breech. 'This is going to be good.'
Nikki stood at the shoreline and watched the ocean burn. Flames danced spectral blue. The island was bathed in lavender light. The sea boiled with a gentle hiss, like a long exhalation.
She glimpsed the towers and girders of Rampart above great licks of fire. Melted ice fell from the superstructure in drips and slabs.
The refinery looked like Satan's citadel, a jagged fortress at the centre of hell.
Nikki dropped to her knees. She watched in awe. A giddy moment of heightened awareness. She felt like an astronaut fired at light-speed out of the solar system into uncharted space. Each day brought strange and wonderful vistas, stardust and nebulas, and took her a million miles further from home.
The fire quickly died down and the refinery was lost behind a wall of steam.
Nikki brushed away frozen tears with a gloved hand. She slowly climbed to her feet. She took out her radio.
'Rampart? Rampart, do you copy, over?'
Ghost opened the airlock door. He and Jane quickly pulled on thermal masks as the chamber filled with steam and smoke. They walked out on to the platform lift wreathed in fumes and vapour. They rode the elevator down to the ice.
The polar crust had melted and re-frozen. Their boots splashed in puddles of steaming water.
They looked up and inspected acres of smouldering crossbeams and pipes.
'Looks like the underside of the rig got pretty cooked,' said Ghost.
Petrified drips of steel hung from girders and ran down the blackened legs of the refinery like it was sweating metal.
'How thick is this fucking ice?' asked Jane, grinding her heel into the rippled surface. 'A mile deep? We're at the very edge of the Arctic Circle, the very edge of the polar field.' She stamped. 'This stuff is fresh. It should be wafer thin.'
'Most of the heat went up. It didn't penetrate.'
'I can't take this. Hope dashed every five minutes. It's killing me.'
They heard a metallic creak. They looked up.
'Cooling metal?' speculated Ghost.
'No. Something else.'
A low, mournful moan. A sudden tortured screech. A juddering rumble as the superstructure of the refinery began to flex. It sounded like whale song. A chorus of booms, whistles and shrieks.
'Holy shit,' murmured Jane. 'It's actually happening.'
The ice between their feet split. It sounded like gunfire. Seawater bubbled over their boots.
They ran from a fast-spreading web of cracks and fissures. Puffs of ice-dust. Frothing water. They struggled to keep their balance as they sprinted across a tilting, slow-shattering crust.
They threw themselves on to the platform lift. The ice around them had broken into plates. The plates began to buckle and grind.
Tremors ran through the refinery. They gripped the platform railing for support.
'Feel that?' said Ghost. 'We're actually moving.'
Ghost headed for the canteen. Weeks ago, he rescued a bottle of champagne from Hyperion and set it to chill in a refrigerator hidden behind big blocks of cheese.
'I know Sian is hurting. But I want to celebrate. Maybe that's selfish. Plenty of people have died. But we made it. We're going to live.'
Jane searched for Sian.
Sian wasn't in her cabin.
Jane checked the observation bubble. No one around. She stood at the window and watched the burned-out wreck of Hyperion slowly recede. The current was carrying the refinery south at a brisk walking pace. It was gouging through the ice at six or seven kilometres an hour.
Jane switched on the short-wave radio and turned up the volume. Hiss of static. She sat back and put her feet on the mixing desk.
The rig was moving south. They would pass through shipping lanes and European territorial waters. Maybe she should resume broadcasting a mayday message. Or maybe she should just monitor the airwaves. They had no idea what kind of world they would find when they reached home.
Jane became aware of a faint voice from a console speaker.
'Rampart, do you copy, over?'
She sat forward.
'Kasker Rampart, do you copy, over?'
She grasped the mike. 'Nikki? Nikki, is that you?'
'Hello, Jane. How have you been?'
Jane ran down the stairs two steps at a time. She sprinted down corridors.
She kicked open the kitchen door. She vaulted a counter, scattering pots and mixing pans. She skidded to a halt. She fumbled for keys and unlocked a freezer.
They had been using the freezer as a gun safe.
She checked the breech of the remaining shotgun.
Empty.
She checked ammunition boxes.
Empty.
'Fuck.'
She threw the empty boxes across the room.
She took out her radio.
'Ghost? Ghost, do you copy?'
No reply.
'What's going on?' asked Sian. She sat on a counter in the corner of the kitchen, swinging her legs and eating yogurt.
'I need Ghost. Where is he?'
'No idea.'
Jane slapped the yogurt from her hand and pulled her upright.
'Come with me. Right now.'
They ran down a corridor.
'Let me ask you something,' said Jane. 'I need you to think hard. Punch liked comic books, right? Graphic novels. Did he ever mention his favourite character?'
'No. Not that I remember.'
'Constantine? Did he ever mention John Constantine?'
'Actually, yeah. Some sort of gumshoe tough-guy. He battled demons. There's a poster in his room. Punch bought a trench- coat so he could dress like him. Why do you ask?'
They reached an airlock. Jane grabbed clothing from a rack. Heavy over-trousers. She buckled crampons to the soles of her boots. She zipped an Arctic parka.
'Punch is alive,' said Jane. 'Nikki and Nail have him hostage on the island.'
'Nikki?'
'She's back. Don't ask me how.'
Jane found a toolbox. She slipped a big claw hammer into her coat pocket. She buttoned a diver's knife into the utility pocket of her trousers.
Sian helped Jane shoulder the flamethrower and buckle it to her back.
'He's alive?' asked Sian. 'You're sure?'
'He's out there, and I'm going to bring him back.'
'My God.'
Jane buckled gauntlets.
'We should search for Ghost,' said Sian.
'No time.'
'What does Nikki want?'
'She wants to swap him for food.'
'Give it to her.'
'We don't have time to play games. She's a nut. Unbalanced. She has some kind of sick agenda I bet even she doesn't fully understand. I'm going to find her and I'm going to kill her.'
Jane opened a locker full of fire-fighting equipment and took an axe.
'I'm coming with you,' said Sian.
'No. I need you to lower me on to the ice.'
They heaved open the outer door of the airlock.
They ran across the deck.
'You can operate the freight crane, right?' asked Jane.
'Ivan showed me the controls during the fire.'
'You can raise and lower the hook, right? That's all I need.'
'Yeah. I think so.'
'The refinery is ripping a channel south. There is nothing beneath us but seawater and broken ice. The platform lift is no good. It'll drop me in the ocean. If you lower me in front of the rig I'll have eight or nine seconds to get clear before it runs me down.'
'How will you get back on board?'
'Catch up with the rig. Stand in front of it. You can lift me off the ice with the crane hook before I get squashed like a bug.'
'Bloody risky. It would be a split-second thing.'
They climbed a ladder to the crane platform. The cab hung over the edge of the refinery. There was a window in the floor. They could see the ice two hundred metres below. Sian swivelled the jib with a joystick. The half-tonne hook swung like a pendulum.
'Like I said. Up and down. That's all I need. Just raise and lower the hook.'
'See that?' Sian pointed south. Waves in the far distance. 'Open sea. We lost the zodiac when Hyperion caught fire. Once we pass out of the ice-field you won't be able to get back on board. You'll be marooned.'
'Yeah.'
Sian unbuckled her Casio watch and strapped it round the wrist of Jane's gauntlet.
'Find him, all right? Find him and bring him back.' She set the stopwatch. 'Sixty minutes. That's your turn-around time. Sixty minutes from now you head back to the refinery no matter what, okay?'
She pressed Start.
59:59
The seconds ticked down.