Remnant 4

 Crevasse

The ground began to rise very quickly as Orla Diallo moved further away from the shadow of the green container. She didn’t look back, even when she thought she heard the low whine of a vehicle. On she trudged, her head bowed into her chest. She had the sense that liquids were leaking from all across her body.

“We’re nothing but leaky hydraulic machines,” she remembered Donnelly saying. “That, and a set of levers that finally creak to a halt and jam into odd positions.”

She was blowing hard, any reserves of fitness and strength drained from her by the infection and burned off by the fever. Cysts were bursting at skin level and that meant they were bursting inside. She was a set of volcanos, exploding and spewing.

Yet one foot found its way past the other, lifting high out of the snow in goose steps that took her up the slope of the hill on the eastern edge of Inishtrahull. She knew the col was well behind her. She didn't look back, but she could picture the low, grey expanse of the data centre, the green jewel of the military container and the black wart of the Trans-Receive Hub.

Once she fell onto her knees. Once only. And she used the fall to lift her face to the sky, her target, and relish the blue arc above her.

All the drugs had worn off, so now there was pain. Pain so scorching, searing and widespread that she could not place it or hold herself against it. As she got up again, and planked her feet, she cursed quietly that she, Orla Diallo, lieutenant in an elite corps, descended from hardy desert nomads, famed for her strength and intelligence, would end her days, her life’s mission, in this white desert, on this small hill in the far north-east of her country, far from the bounty of her family and the tropical warmth of her father’s gaze.

She marched on, Donnelly’s face etched in the snow crystals in front of her, leading her on, each step an ordeal, each move a wrench and a tear, a gush and a bursting of her innards. Her breath croaked out of her. Her heart filled her chest like an old, wrinkled balloon.

The ground grew steep. She was near the summit of the hill. Thin, mainly shallow crevasses began to appear in the snow, running across her ragged path. She found herself climbing down, then climbing up again as the crevasses grew steeper. Rocks appeared, outcroppings from the hill.

She raised her head from the snow, keen to take her bearings, keen to see the summit, where she would rest, then, tumbling gently, a sack of grain falling off the back of a lorry, she went head first into a crevasse and lay there, crumpled and breathless.