19 - Superchilled

I knew something was up as soon as I arrived in the basement. They had promised, but I had forgotten; the door had been painted canary yellow. It was quite clearly visible from any point in the vast empty chamber. One’s eye was drawn to it, in fact. There was no way even Blackburn could miss it now.

Not only was the door a disturbing hue, but it had also been wedged open. Any romance our cave might previously have claimed had been laid bare. All that remained was tawdry pornography. A bitter taste rose in my mouth. I descended the stone steps fearing the worst.

Fearing the worst? The worst would have been just fine, given what I actually found there. Corporal Blackburn turned to greet me as I entered. He waved a cheery enough greeting but motioned for me to stay quiet.

‘What’s up?’ I asked him, unnaturally loudly.

‘It’s Nipper,’ he whispered and looked around towards the model on the plinth. It looked perfect in the morning light, clean and untouched as the world in a waking infant’s eyes. I watched and shuddered at Corporal Young lumbering around it, although even his unsophisticated bearing couldn’t ruin the view completely. ‘He’s not happy.’

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘What is there to be unhappy about? Have you actually looked at it?’

‘It looks good to me,’ he sniffed, ‘but I ain’t the expert. Watch Nipper a minute: he knows something ain’t right. Like a bloodhound, he is. Won’t let go once he’s got the scent.’

‘What scent?’ I snapped. The sight of Young poking around inside our masterpiece appalled me. Hands so lumpen had no place in such a work of art. For once I envied Sergeant Magath his blindness. Despite his unnatural powers of observation for somebody so bereft of sight, he was spared the spectacle. My anger boiled over. I stepped forward, with the intention of physically removing Young from the scene. Blackburn stuck out a skinny arm to stop me.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ I snarled at him. He was such a scrawny weed, I could surely have broken him in half. But that was not what was called for. He flicked his eyes one more time at the oaf defiling our inspiration. ‘And what the hell is he doing?’ I added. ‘If he lays a finger on that model, I’ll tear him to pieces.’

Young looked up and approached me. ‘Good morning,’ he said. It was the first time he had ever formally greeted me, or anybody, as far as I was aware.

‘Never mind that,’ I replied. ‘What’s the big idea? What are you doing in the model? It’s not your domain.’

‘Has anybody spoken to you about primed chaperoning?’ he asked.

I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘You’re going to have to explain that to me. Slowly,’ I said.

‘It’s part of the mandate. All deliveries must be accompanied by a suitably armed escort. The danger of bandits is increasing almost daily. There are several models it’s possible to follow in order to ensure the security of the various checkpoints and the interstitial transit events. It depends on the exact requirements, the environment, the resourcing constraints, things like that. We can create a notional paradigm – I have a couple of favourite techniques for that – and correlate it against a model matrix. One of the most important parts, what we absolutely need to be sure about, is that the handover protocols are……..’

‘It’s fine,’ I interrupted. ‘You can stop. Please stop.’ He stopped. It was like heaven had taken me. ‘We have a regime in place. Security forces are recruiting and training the relevant bodies.’

‘Security forces?’ he looked surprised.

‘Who else?’ I asked.

‘Well, of course. Security forces. And are they providing this service specifically for our requirements? Or are you speaking generally?’

‘I try not to speak generally,’ I spat. ‘Lieutenant Mortenson has fully briefed his colleagues and they are providing the service they ought to. This should never have been a requirement of ours, and now we’ve made sure that it’s being dealt with. That’s one of the advantages of having Lieutenant Mortenson on our team.’

Young gazed back over his shoulder towards the model. It had regained its aura once he had stepped clear of it.

‘Why is our door yellow, and why is it propped open?’ I asked him while I still retained some initiative.

‘What is your justification for the use of the superchillers?’ he said without turning back toward me.

‘What?’ I said.

‘The superchillers. Why these ones, specifically?’

I looked around. I felt sure I knew the answer, but the question had thrown me. The place was actually quite full. Mortenson was eating some breakfast. It looked like dry muesli. The act of eating it appeared almost ascetic. None of the others was eating. They were, however, all expecting a response from me. Magath and Scharf appeared untroubled, which gave me confidence.

‘Is there an alternative?’ I began. ‘As far as I’m aware there’s only one producer of that particular product. What are you getting at?’

‘Not any more,’ his face remained totally deadpan. He genuinely cared about nothing at all.

‘Are you telling me,’ I stared hard at him, trying to provoke at least the tiniest reaction, ‘that there is a competing product?’

‘Not spoken to Daniel Pine recently?’ he asked.

‘Last night,’ I admitted. I had spoken to Daniel, our timelock man, at some length, mostly about legalised forms of polygamy we knew to be in practice around the world.

‘Then you’ll know that they’ve moved into that market too, now.’ I looked at Magath and Scharf again. They were sporting small smiles which, for all I knew, could have belonged anywhere on the spectrum from knowing to uneasy. I ran through last night’s conversations as quickly and in as much detail as I could. There had been plenty of champagne and the details could have been clearer.

I had something: it was nothing Daniel had said himself, but a conversation I had had with Bernard. Another old fishing net had washed up on the disused slipway just in front of the restaurant, and he needed my help bringing it up to the shop. He wanted to hang it behind the bar with the others. He asked about a man he had seen earlier, prior to my arrival, deep in conference with Daniel. He didn’t want to bother our friend directly, since he had seemed, he wasn’t sure exactly how to put it, agitated, vexed, and increasingly so, by the direction the discussion was taking. Not a single word had made it as far as Bernard’s ears, but he was a reader of subtext, even from a distance, and there was no doubt in his mind: Daniel had been the subject of quite a squeezing. Bernard also had no idea of the identity of the man behind the pressure, but he gave such a detailed description of appearance and manner that it could only be one person: Colonel Watson had ventured to the port. It was unlike him to stray so far from home.

Why the unnatural interest in Daniel? Watson would normally leave a subject matter expert like that to me, or at least to Corporal Young. There had to be something in what Bernard had witnessed.

‘Has this come from Colonel Watson?’ I asked Young. ‘Is this his question?’

‘Colonel Watson wants what we all do,’ he said, totally disingenuously. ‘And that’s the right solution. This isn’t the time to be making mistakes. We have to be completely sure we’ve covered every eventuality.’

‘Are you still planning on running the testing in Vaurania?’ I said.

‘That’s on hold for now,’ he stared straight at me as if he believed every word he was uttering. ‘I’m having to play Tom Sleep, keep him at arm’s length. He’s constantly on at me to finalise the arrangements, but I’m not ready for that right now. We have other priorities, including this matter of the superchiller function itself.’

His disgraceful ignorance of the world around him, whilst becoming more and more familiar, managed to strike the same nerves in me as ever. I could barely control my ire. I physically stepped away from Young and breathed slowly. I stopped in front of the model on the plinth. It calmed me, just a touch.

‘Look at this!’ I turned towards Young and Blackburn; my arms laid wide open my entire soul; my eyes pleaded with them. Just a sliver, just a modicum of recognition was all I needed. ‘Can you not acknowledge its perfection? How can you sit there and tell me it could possibly be flawed? Just look at it a while. What we have here is manna to anybody who has ever worried about the future of this planet. It’s like a dream, a delirious episode. Nobody would have thought this possible even a few months ago. When you stand this close you can almost taste how consummate it is. It’s impossible to surpass. You can see that, right? Even you. Tell me you can see that.’

‘Once again, an incorrect emotion,’ I physically gave a start at the sound of Norris’ voice. I hadn’t realised he was with us. I turned to find the origin of the sound and there he was, emerging from one of the darker recesses of the rock. He hadn’t yet finished morphing himself into a recognisable human form. The spectacle was quite violently disagreeable. ‘The correct reaction would be hatred. Indignity and incredulity are easily defeated.’

I had to give it to him: he could summon up emotions in others at will. Emotions within his repertoire, of course, and hatred was one of his specialities. I hated him with every bone in my body.

‘Corporal Young is correct, as usual,’ he continued, as if he didn’t care how much I hated him. ‘We have to know we’re right, and we have to be able to prove it to anybody who asks. There’s a fight to be had here, and we’re the ones who have to make it happen.’

‘You mean I am the one, I presume?’ I sneered at him. His face dropped into some kind of a smile, which I took to mean I was indeed the one.

As usual in such a situation, I turned to my trusted team. ‘Sergeant Magath,’ I called across the charged air in the cave, ‘what do you know about an equivalent or competing product in the superchiller space? It’s not something I recall ever discussing. Is there such a thing?’

Magath carefully put down what looked like the backbone of a large rat and gave me his full attention. ‘I’m not totally sure how to answer that question. Would you like to ask another one?’ he suggested.

‘No, I don’t think I would. I quite like the question, and I’d be grateful if you could answer it,’ I hated it when he began in defensive mode. It didn’t suit him.

‘OK, well, you asked for it,’ he sat up very straight indeed. ‘The answer is no, and yes.’ I rolled my eyes. He must have heard them roll. ‘Sorry,’ he added. ‘And, more than that, the no in that answer is probably more of a yes. I just label it as no because it’s a very negative yes, so more of a no really. The second yes might be a no, too. It’s never easy to be totally sure, especially with products like this. Although really it’s a yes, I’d say.’

‘Is there a competitor or not?’ I hissed.

‘There is a competitor,’ he admitted, finally. ‘And that’s the whole point. There is a competitor, and we’ve always known there was a competitor, and we’ve compared the two, and the comparison highlights the fact that there really isn’t a competitor. Or, if there is, it certainly isn’t this one.’

‘You’ve performed a comparison?’

‘Yes, of course. The superchiller is massively superior. It’s hardly even valid to compare the two, although people appear to keep asking me to do exactly that. I question the validity of raising the issue now. I would consider the whole discussion an enormous waste of time.’

‘Your comparison was over 18 months ago,’ Norris somehow projected the words beautifully, despite his mouth moving all wrong. ‘I’ve considered the entire study. It was fine, in itself, but it’s ancient history now.’

He had a point. A year and a half in this industry was the equivalent of a geological age. I continued to train my attention on Magath, and Mortenson next to him. They were in the hotseat as far as this discussion was concerned, and I was not about to let them off the hook.

‘He’s got the makings of a point,’ Mortenson sighed. ‘We all know that the superchiller is the correct product, and the comparison backed that up beyond argument. Problem is, in the meantime, the timelock bunch have further developed their offering. It happens. And it might just compete now.’

‘Are you serious?’ I spluttered. ‘Are you telling me we’ve taken so long over this that they might have a better option than the superchiller?’

‘It’s possible,’ he nodded, ‘although nobody thinks so.’ Nobody thought so. They were all at least one step ahead of me, who had not even considered the possibility. ‘While the product has gone through at least three more releases since our exercise, it’s still not their core area of expertise. They managed to poach one of the superchiller team who had made a few enemies in Vaurania and had been encouraged to relocate, but really he can’t do much up against the bunch of specialists he left behind. And here’s the rub, one more time: because nobody has ever used the superchillers like we want to, there’s no evidence to support any sort of decision-making. We might be 99 per cent sure that the superchiller is the correct solution and that the timelock guys simply can’t compete, but we’ll never be able to prove it.’

The whole situation sounded maddeningly familiar. I turned my back on my team for a minute and closed my eyes.

‘How do you want us to do this, Captain?’ I asked Norris. ‘What is it you want to know, exactly? What data do you want to see? How do we compare two products which have never seen the light of day?’

‘I don’t care,’ his whole body shrugged in a convulsion of ecstasy. ‘Do whatever you need. Set up a fist fight if that’s what it takes. Just come back with an answer that you can stand by.’

They left. Norris and Young and Blackburn. My recourse to argument disappeared through the yellow door with them. It was probably for the best.

‘We’re going to have to get Tom and Daniel in here, aren’t we?’ I suggested to Magath.

‘I believe that Lieutenant Mortenson is already organising that,’ he nodded toward his colleague, who nodded back, in confirmation. At the very least we were all in this together.

The two men were with us in The Bunker within the half hour. Neither one of them was in the slightest bit comfortable with the situation. Tom, as he had explained the night before, under very different circumstances, was ready to move on his taskforce of big-brains. His company had totally bought into our testing plan and were planning the next phase of their growth on the back of it. For doubts to be raised at this point made him extremely uneasy. Daniel simply could not be bothered. He knew his product was inferior, even with 18 months of further development. He was looking forward to learning even more from the implementation on which he thought we were about to embark. It really would have been much better all round if we continued as planned. He had said as much to Colonel Watson. But his opinion counted for nothing: his superiors wanted to participate in the fight.

In reality, they were both growing tired of pandering to our ever-changing demands, and I didn’t blame them. As the night drew on, I appreciated their position more and more.

The comparison exercise was far from straightforward. It never is when you already know the answer you need. We all knew that the superchiller was the only viable option, but illustrating that beyond reasonable doubt was quite another matter. We had agreed not to stop until the story was watertight, but we soon found ourselves swimming against the tide of extreme fatigue and flailing in whirlpools of logic. Over and over I returned to some question we had already nailed down, but from a different angle, and opened it up once more. Magath fell asleep regularly, and nobody noticed until he was addressed directly. The man never snored, his head never dipped, his breathing didn’t change a bit.

We could never have got there without Daniel. To have an insider, somebody who knew all the weaknesses of his own product, on our side was vital. He released any number of trade secrets that night, but his sacrifices were all in the name of justice and progress. By the time the morning sunlight dribbled through the light tubes, I had formulated quite a convincing tale. Only Corporal Farbrace had stayed conscious with me the entire time. He was genuinely thrilled by the whole charade. I found myself really quite dependent on his imbecile simplicity and refusal to understand the world around him. I loved him for that, and wondered if there was any way back to real life for me now.

Norris and his crew returned. They were discussing the breakfast they had just demolished. I was starving, and too strung out even to feel any irritation at their arrival.

‘Look at this, boys,’ Norris chuckled. He had a point: we were a total shambles. Mortenson and Scharf were top-and-tailing on the smallest plinth. Magath was motionless but upright. Small’s head was in his lap. She was snoring like a foghorn. Daniel was awake but catatonic. I dreaded to think how the night’s exertions had left my appearance. ‘Have you not slept?’ he grinned.

‘Not much,’ I semi-admitted. ‘We’ve been examining the relative merits of the competing superchiller technologies,’ I continued. ‘I believe I’ve got a compelling solution that will stand up to scrutiny. I can have it fully written up by this afternoon.’

‘That’s good,’ Norris rubbed his nose from one side of his face to the other. ‘But you won’t have time to do that. We’re wanted.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. I was not in the mood for any of his dubious meetings and had already resolved to refuse any invitations, and stay and document our nocturnal discussion before it faded in my memory.

‘Major-General Pfister in an hour,’ he said, calmly. ‘Surely you haven’t forgotten?’

‘Pfister? Today?’ I croaked.

‘Not just today. Right now!’ he could barely conceal his glee. ‘We’re setting off to HQ, get a good seat. We were going to pick you lot up, but it looks like you’ve got a bit of grooming to do. We’ll see you up there. And it’s not a meeting I’d recommend being late for.’ He turned and left.

Corporal Blackburn stayed a second and looked me over with a shake of his head.

‘What’s up, Roy?’ I asked him. ‘Am I a state? I haven’t seen a mirror for a while. Wasn’t on my priority list.’

‘I dunno where to start, chief,’ he spoke with great candour, as always. ‘Good luck. Oh, and like the big man said, do NOT be late.’

[Coming next: 20 - Major-General Pfister]