Evolution

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?