Toubec sat at the small white table of her barracks room and opened her dossier pertaining to Mortehoe. It was a flimsy folder and she had studied it several times already, though she had faltered when asked questions relating to the strain of virus discovered at the locality, and didn’t want to be put in the same situation again.
The barracks room was small, airless, and possessed a thin window that let in nothing but grey light through its thick frosted glass. The bed was small and hard, though not uncomfortable, and in the corner of the room was a wardrobe, empty but for her bag that she had unceremoniously dumped at the bottom.
A circular halogen lamp hung from an arm over the desk, and she manoeuvred it to shed more light over the papers.
Her eye brushed over Tranter’s name on the first page, and she considered her temporary partner. So burnt and embittered by the past that he hated anyone who had risen further than he. Everyone, she considered, reflecting that few people had the year-long setback of prison and subsequent shadow on his résumé. He had been unemployable to any department that meant anything, and yet he was one of the old MoD boys. Imaging had probably been down a pawn in middle management, she supposed. Probably he’d been offered it as a stepping stone, though they all knew he would be there until retirement. Who wanted to place someone like him in a position of authority? He’d already shown how he reacted to rejection.
‘God,’ she whispered, ‘how did I get lumbered with him?’
She flipped the page, looking for the details of the new virus, and the numbers that went along with them. She’d always been good with figures and statistics, had always felt they made more sense than words. ‘It’s the language of lucidity.’ She had told her niece, Amile, when asked what the reams of numerical papers she had brought home from work meant.
‘Language of what?’ Amile asked, pulling a face.
‘Look at it,’ Toubec fanned out the papers and lifted Amile to her knee. ‘If you understand what it says then there’s no hiding behind ambiguity or poor description. You can’t get into arguments with numbers the way you can with language. The world would be in a better state if people spoke in binary, believe me.’
‘You’re weird,’ Amile had said, and Toubec’s sister had snatched her up, telling her not to speak to her aunty like that.
Even a five year old had her pegged as a freak. She laughed it off and told her sister not to worry, had thrown her brother-in-law a twisted smirk that exclaimed ‘the things kids say!’ And yet she had returned home that evening and wondered what people who had known her for years must think of her.
Her mother pestered her to meet someone and give her more grandchildren, even junk-mail asked her whether she was doing her part to repopulate, and yet she had always been a loner, never able to keep the interest of any man longer than five minutes, let alone the time it took to convince them they might like to spend their life with her.
That was fine by her though. While her sister was happy to live on government subsidy for the children she bore, Toubec felt destined for the rigours of vocation. She had been an apt student and had been told on several occasions, by teachers and employment agencies alike, that she had a talent for numbers that the defence ministry would snatch up.
It seemed, however, that snatching-up equalled seven laborious years of field work, and in that time she didn’t see a single numerical figure. What she did see was years of toil and suicide. Lots and lots of suicide.
It wasn’t the work so much that drove people to do it; all they were doing after all was clearing the landscape of a century’s growth, a process known as Survey Reclamation. It was the tools they had been given to work with.
The process was simple:
Greenjack’s, named for their lime-coloured immersion suits, took point-duty, filing out in front and testing areas that Dark Lens’ had highlighted as potential spots of contamination. They took more accurate readings and left silver helium balloons in locations that required sanitization before moving ever forward. The landscape, regardless where they went, shimmered like silver fish-scales.
Behind were the Dust Rangers, officers equipped with powder-guns. The barrels some two metres long and requiring both hands to wield it. A second officer carried the bulk of the gun behind, and a third held the large sack of Crenatin Four, the agent provided to decontaminate the land.
Great billowing plumes of purple dust filled the air, settling on flowers, animals, and weeds alike. Eventually the powder burnt through everything, eradicating anything that might be lingering in sap or blood alike.
Behind the Dust Rangers were the Flames, students mostly, or interns, who tailed the entire company setting fire to the land in their wake, and finally the Powder Monkeys, who dusted the scorched earth with a white powder that nourished the soil. Policing all of them were regular army stock, known as Tasiers for the large circular lenses of their gas masks. They were the only division who rarely succumbed to the effects of the earth scorching agent, simply because they were allocated weekly shower privileges, preventing the accumulation of toxins and subsequent manias that were so prevalent throughout the other divisions.
The process of Survey Reclamation was simple, and yet the progression was always pitifully slow.
It had been reputed for years that Crenatin Four was a hallucinogen, one that would give officers, from Powder Monkey to Greenjack, the direst of waking nightmares. It was agreed, after much debate and little research - by the company that produced the toxin - that there were hallucinogenic properties to the product, but nothing that a sturdy gas mask wouldn’t counter. Indeed, the reports of delusions petered out for some time, maybe even a year – the year Toubec had signed up – before the serious delirium began.
Further testing, testing that wouldn’t happen for another four years due to a stalwart belief in the first report, showed that it was a build-up of Crenatin Four in the skin that caused its victims to suffer acute and incurable depression. Those four years were terrible ones for anyone who worked in the field, whether they suffered the effects of Crenatin Four or not.
Toubec had never succumbed to it, never suffered depression for the toxin, though she had felt its cold grip after seeing half her colleagues take their own life in the space of a week, and hundreds more who died before Crenatin Four was withdrawn.
She had resolved then to fight her way out of field work. Push her way through Flame, Dust Ranger and Greenjack, the acrid smell of Crenatin Four and corpses her daily perfume, until she was safely in a musty office in Birmingham reading through pages of numbers.
She had made it, finally. The room she had wound up in hadn’t been musty, it had been loud with the rattling of ill-fitted pipework, and a radio with a broken sound-dial stuck on full. The biting stench of raw sewage clung to the atmosphere from a burst duct outside her building, though it was better than the horror she had trained in. Had her office been inside the burst main it would have been preferable to her years in fieldwork, and now she found herself back in the past, about to head into contaminated land with a man who was brash and reckless, and who had already gotten one officer killed.
She thought again of her niece and smiled. She smiled at the thought of telling her sister she had met someone, an undergraduate studying law.
‘Get out of here,’ her sister had punched her lightly on the arm.
She had met Michael some weeks after her promotion from field commission. It had been a casual meeting, a friend of a friend. Toubec had found little in common with those she had grown up with – most had taken advantage of the small fortune that could be accrued by becoming a government baby factory, though she had found a common interest with Michael, who was researching the legal ramifications of the Crenatin Four scandal.
He was handsome and engaging, and she managed to hold his interest for longer than five minutes. She actually held it all the way back to her flat, all through the night and the following day. She continued to hold it, four years later, much to her disbelief, and yet, she felt as though she wa
s holding him back.
He had finished university and completed a subsequent Master’s degree, and joined a firm in the north of the city. He was settled, and could think about things like marriage and children. She, on the other hand, constantly expected to be kicked out the door and replaced. Turnover was high in Analysis, what with people vying to get out of the field, the same as she had. Employers knew it, and used it to control their staff. She had to prove she was crucial to the running of Analysis before she could allow herself the freedom of a normal life. And yet, she thought, looking around the small cold barrack room, look how easily they had demoted her. It had taken no more than thirty seconds to tell her she was being posted to Stone Hill, and if she protested she would find herself back on field commission permanently.
She heard laughter outside of her room and suspected, from the timbre of their merriment, that some of the infantry had travelled into the local village to drink.
She idly thought of Michael and one of the first cases during his apprenticeship: a squaddie hauled over the coals for fighting in a nightclub. Michael had told her that it happened constantly, that it was rare to find a town near a border that wasn’t a hive of altercations between locals and visiting military on leave.
She wondered if any of the privates returning tonight had drawn blood or raised their fists in anger. They advanced, stumbling, down the corridor outside, their elbows scraping across the walls as they hooted and shushed one another.
She stiffened as they neared her door, then sighed relief as they continued to their rooms.
Turning down to the dossier on the table, she closed it and retrieved a sheet of paper from the desk drawer. She missed Michael, and would write him a letter and let him know she was safe and well, and suffering the most interminable of commissions.
Chapter Nineteen.
South-easterly wind.
Ten knots.