Evolution

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?

The stairwell’s concrete, where it was exposed, was stained brown where metal fittings had rusted away. And when Snowy put his weight too close to the edge of a step, the concrete just crumbled. The stairs themselves were barely visible under a tangle of moss, leaves, debris of all kinds. Snowy wasted a little energy trying to clear this stuff off, but found that much of it was actually growing here, out of a layer of mulch over the concrete.

Ignoring the mess, he stepped up and just pushed his way out of the well.

At last he found himself standing on leaf-covered ground. He was panting hard. Evidently the cold sleep had taken more out of him than he had expected. The others followed him, one by one, brushing dead leaves and moss and mulch off their clothes.

The forest was built of tall trees, with low branches, heavy, spreading leaves. Oak, perhaps. Wind rustled, bringing warm air to Snowy’s face. It felt like late spring or early summer. The air smelled fresh, of nothing but forest, green and mulchy.

The Pit was set in the ground, half-concealed by a great concrete lid. But the lid was tilted askew and cracked, and plants were growing out of its surface.

Ahmed had a small black backpack. This contained a clockwork radio transceiver — which, like the pistols, had been stored in oil. Now he turned this on, wound it up, extended its aerial and began to walk around the little clearing.

Both Moon and Bonner looked very young and scared, lost in the green shade.

Sidewise stood by Snowy. Moodily he kicked the concrete carapace. 'It’s amazing the power supply kept going as long as it did.'

Snowy said, 'It’s like we just clambered out of Chernobyl.'

'I don’t think Chernobyl is a problem anymore.'

'What?'

'Snow, just how long do you think we’ve been stuck down that hole?'

Snowy braced himself. 'More than fifty years?'

Sidewise grunted. 'Look around you, pal. Those trees are oak. And look at this.' He led Snowy to a fallen tree. The trunk had snapped off maybe a meter above the ground. Much of the fallen trunk was coated with greenery, and fat, platelike fungi adhered to the upright stub of trunk, like disks stuck into the wood. 'Snow,' said Sidewise, 'you are surrounded by a mature forest. These are old trees. This one got so old it died without being felled. Come on, Snow. You remember those eco classes in training. What happens if you let a forest clearing recover?'

The grasses and herbs would be first to colonize the empty space. Within a year or so there would be Scots pine seedlings, birches, other deciduous trees sprouting from seeds left in the ground, or from stumps. Once there was some protection from the frost, Norway spruce and chestnut might take hold. Then, as conditions changed, different species would compete for light and space. After maybe fifty years, as the recovering forest darkened, the grasses on the floor would make way for shade-tolerant vegetation like bilberry and mosses. And after that, the oaks would return.

Snowy hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to this kind of stuff, at school, during his training, or later. Eco was always too depressing, nothing but lists of dead creatures. But — how long?

Sidewise poked at the grounded trunk. 'Look at these bryophytes — the mosses and liverworts — and the lichens, fungi, insects burrowing away. You know, in our day a sight like this dead trunk was as rare as a wolf.'

'In our day?'

Ahmed had given up his stroll around the clearing. 'Nothing,' he said. 'Not a peep on any frequency. Not even GPS.'

'Maybe the radio’s out,' Moon said.

Ahmed pressed a green button on the set. 'The self-test is okay.'

'Then,' said Bonner, 'what do we do?'

Ahmed straightened up. 'We keep ourselves alive. We get out of this damn forest. And we find somebody to report to.'

Snowy nodded. 'Which way?'

'The maps,' said Bonner immediately.

Their training asserted itself, and they hurried back to the Pit.

The Pit had been equipped with external stores of paper maps, in case of the eventuality that a troop found itself revived like this without external direction or orientation. The maps were supposed to be contained in weatherproof boxes on the exterior of the Pit. The maps would also come with spins — specific instructions. Snowy knew they would all be reassured to find something to tell them what to do, maybe a clue as to what was going on.

But, try as they might, they couldn’t even find a trace of the map boxes. There was nothing but a surface of corroded, crumbling concrete, heavily colonized by mosses and grass.

Sidewise helped with the search, but Snowy could tell that his heart wasn’t in it. He had known the maps wouldn’t be here. Snowy began to feel vaguely scared of Sidewise, because he was so far ahead of the game; he really didn’t want to know what Sidewise had already figured out.

They gave up on the maps. Still Ahmed tried to take a lead, to be decisive, and Snowy admired him for that. Ahmed sniffed the air, looked around, and pointed. 'The land is rising that way. So that’s the way we’ll go. If we’re lucky, we’ll break out of these woods. Agreed?'

He was rewarded by shrugs and nods.

II

There wasn’t much to take from the Pit — nothing but what they could plunder from the dead: all the weapons and ammo they could find, spare clothing, ration packs. They made backpacks from spare flight suits, and loaded up their gear.

They set off in the direction Ahmed had chosen. The sun looked to be setting, and that meant, Snowy thought, that they had to be traveling roughly north. Unless even that had gotten itself screwed up in the years they had lost in the Pit.

The forest was dominated by the great oaks, though they were interspersed with other species like sycamore, Norway maple, and conifers. There were plenty of birds — mostly starlings, it seemed to Snowy — but he was startled to see a rattle of green and yellow wings pass across the sun. Occasionally they saw animals — rabbits, squirrels, small, timid-looking deer, even what looked like a wolf, which had them all fingering their pistols.

After maybe an hour they came to a neat round hole in the ground. It was full of debris, but was obviously man-made. The bit of human design drew them insistently. They gathered around, sipping water from the small vials they carried.

Snowy said to Sidewise, 'Did you see those green birds? They looked like—'

'Budgerigars. The descendants of escaped pets. Why not? There are probably parakeets and parrots too. Some of those deer looked like muntjac to me. Out of zoo stock, maybe. Even some of the trees look like imports — like that turkey oak back there. Like they taught us: Once you disturb the balance of nature, once you start importing species, it never goes back the way it used to be.'

Snowy said, 'There was a wolf.'

'You sure it was a wolf?' Sidewise said sharply. 'Didn’t it look too low, too fast?'

Come to think of it, Sidewise was right. It had looked a little furtive, low-slung. Rodentlike.

Bonner said, 'All right, two-brains, what about this hole in the ground? Somebody’s removed a tree stump here, and done it deliberately.'

'Maybe,' said Sidewise coldly. 'But holes in the ground last a long time. You can still find holes dug by hunter-gatherers tens of thousands of years ago. All this tells us is there hasn’t been another Ice Age yet.'

Ahmed glared at him. 'You aren’t doing much for morale, Sidewise.'

Sidewise shot back, 'And what about my morale? It does me no damn good to ignore what’s blindingly obvious all around us.'

There was a moment of strained silence. For a minute Snowy glimpsed Sidewise’s past, a past he never talked about: the too-brainy kid at school, impatient of the rest, constantly bullied back into line by his fellows.

'Let’s move on,' Bonner said gruffly. Ahmed nodded and led the way.

Soon they came to what looked like a track. It was nothing but a winding ribbon of earth, almost invisible, crooked and devious. But the vegetation here grew a little sparser, and Snowy could feel how the ground did not give under his feet as it did elsewhere. A track, then — and surely a human-made track, not animal, if the ground had been compacted as much as it felt.

They didn’t say anything. Nobody wanted this little bit of hope to be punctured by another lecture from Sidewise. But they all followed the track, walking single file, moving that much more