(You can find the rtf-file attached at the end of the text.)
Version 1.0
- first release
Version 1.1
- Spelling mistakes
- changed "captain"
Just Peanuts
by Jan Beinersdorf
(jan@tombraidergirl.com)
[ffstory]
Lara woke, and the moment she did, she realised it had been a mistake. The inside of her stomach felt like it was covered with a whole tribe of ants and when she tried to breath it was like breathing fire, although it was as cold as it could possibly be. Her breath made little white clouds in the cold air.
Where the hell was she? She tried to look around. It wasn't long before she realised the ground was moving, and there was a strange noise, a distant rumbling, like the Mongolian hordes fighting the apocalyptic riders. She thought about that and decided, that it would probably be an engine of some kind, but there were other noises, too, that she could not place at the moment.
There was a small round window in this room but it let in only a little bit of light. It was encrusted with ice flowers and for a moment, she thought she could see water. “A ship,” she thought. “I am on a ship.”
She tried to stand up but as she did, she stumbled and fell to the cold steel floor. She hadn't realised that her arms and hands had been tied together. What had happened? Why was she here? The rumbling and rolling noises she heard must be the ship crashing into the waves, and the movement of the ship made her sick. Or did she have that uncomfortable feeling in her belly because of that drug they had given her. For a moment she thought she had to throw up, what – after a moment of uncertainty – she did..
“Drug?” she thought. “What has happened?” She set up and everything around her blurred.
She dreamed of ice and melting water, of thunder, loud and heavy, of two ravens in the sky, and of faces in the snow that were hunting her down a slope. She thought she remembered a piercing sting in her back and then she fell. Her snowboard broke and she dropped, dropped way deep and wasn't even sure she landed. All around was white and grey and light and no shadows, until...
When she woke up again the aching feeling in her stomach had disappeared and was replaced by hunger. The storm had died down and the crashing of the waves had been replaced by a faint creaking sound. Her head felt clear as after a long nights sleep. She was again lying on her back, on the mattress in the corner of the room, that now was flooded with a bright morning light. Though it was almost three in the morning, that at least was what her watch told her. She tried to stand up, more carefully this time, but she only managed to get into a sitting position. Her shackles had been tied professionally. She waited for the last pieces of dizziness to faint and then rolled out of bed. After a while, she was able to carefully stand up by pushing herself up a wall, and so she managed to get a view out of the porthole. All she saw was a white ocean stretching to the far corner of the horizon, and after that a steel blue skies, speckled with some white cirrus clouds and a heavy white sun, pale as the sallow white ice beneath her, just a few degrees over the rim of the world. The creaking sound was the ships hull cutting through the sheets of ice, breaking it up into small floes, which were floating away to the right.
Now she could remember: she had gone to Iceland to find an old and priceless Viking artefact, and as usual, someone else was interested in it, too. But this time she had made a mistake: She had let herself being caught. She had found the artefact, a rather old piece of wood, inscribed with some magical runes, up in the mountains. But her way back had been blocked by a landslide, so she had to take the long route down the glacier. And that's where it had happened, three or four man jumped out of a helicopter and followed her.
She looked around the room and found her backpack lying in the other corner, but it was empty except for some bars of chocolate. “Well”, she thought, “better than nothing”, and so she opened the silver wrapping with her teeth. After she had stuffed the chocolate into her mouth, she examined her backpack further. And as she expected, they had missed the small Swiss army knife hidden in a secret compartment. “Thank you, MacGyver”, she thought grinning, “and people keep telling you can't learn from TV”, and began to cut the shackles.
The ship seemed deserted. It was an old Russian icebreaker, presumably build sometimes in the sixties. It was not very big, but you could feel the power the old engine generated to push the boat into and over the ice that was about one foot thick. “Why are we going so far north? There's nothing here except for... well, nothing.”
She jumped behind corner and pressed herself on the wall when she heard the voices and footsteps coming nearer. Careful not to make a sound she listened, the Swiss army knife ready in her hand, as the two went by:
“She's been asleep for more than three days now. I wonder if we put too much of that tranquilizer in her?”
“Don't be silly, Larson. The doc is never wrong calculating the dose.”
“Well, she is a bit skinny, you know.”
Lara frowned. “Skinny, eh?” she thought. “Be careful not to get kicked in the ass by that skinny girl!”
“Don't worry, she'll come around sooner or later. I'll send the doc down later to look after her.”
“Good.”
“At least we will be there in a couple of days. I'll be really relived when she leaves. I've heard stories about that woman...”
“Wouldn't it be faster to go around the ice?”
“He said, time doesn't matter. No one will look for her that far north.”
And then a door shut behind them and she could no longer hear what was being said. She looked around. There was a door at the end of the passage labelled Капитан (Captain). She tested the handle, it was not locked, and so she slipped inside. It was a small room, occupied by a rather worn old desk. There was not much on it, a picture in a frame of a man with a blonde beard, he was holding a woman in his arms, and some maps were lying around, but there was no course plotted on them. Nevertheless, she sat down and took a look at them. What had the man said? They had left Iceland three days ago. And now it was early morning, she thought, hoping to be still in the same time zone, the sun was on the port side of the ship, so they were going east. But first they must have gone north, this much ice in the middle of summer could only be found nearer to the pole, and the storm they'd crossed would have broken the ice, which instead was perfectly smooth.
“Spitzbergen”, she thought, “maybe one of the Franz Josef Land Islands.” She put away the maps and opened the desk drawer. She almost felt pity for the captain, as she took out the artefact and her good old HKs, loaded and ready to be used. “Idiots”, she mumbled.
She must have walked 10 miles at least by now. The ice was tricky, there were holes and pools of fresh water in it, she had to avoid. At least she had something to drink. She was going west, sooner or later she would have to find land. She had taken one of the maps from the desk and then sneaked around the ship for some more time, found a pair of ski and sticks together with her polar coat and her gloves, and finally decided that staying on board would lead only to her being captured again or her shooting all of the crew. She wasn't keen on either. So she jumped overboard and no one noticed. Soon the ship vanished on the horizon, leaving only a tower of dark brown diesel smoke, and even that disappeared after a while.
Now she was alone. There was no sound except for the occasional creaking of the floating ice beneath her feet. After a while, she wasn't sure if it had been a good idea jumping overboard. It was not that she was in immediate danger but the ice was not as thick as she had thought and she had no supplies except for two more bars of chocolate, some bread and cans she found in the galley along with a package of salted peanuts. Not much for a presumably very long walk.
The night fell, except that it did not, because the sun only touched the southern skyline. The ice was harder now. She didn't know if she had been on her feet for two or three days now. Her lips were cracked by the cold air and she could not feel her feet anymore. Nevertheless, she walked on. Or didn't she? It was like in a dream, a terrible nightmare. All around her, it was white, no shape, no point her eyes could fixate on. Once or twice, she thought she heard that helicopter again that dropped these bad guys on her, but she wasn't sure. Every hour or so, she compared her watch with the position of the sun so that she would keep on walking west.
“That's it,” she whispered, anxious not to let too much warmth escape her freezing body, “lost in the arctic. That's it, no one's gonna come and rescue me, no one'll even know where I've died.” She stopped to take a quick glance around. There was nothing new, only ice all around her. She took out the artefact. “If I had a match I'd burn you, stupid thing!” She didn't mean it, or did she?
The door was not locked. Who would have wanted to steal anything here in this wilderness? She did not remember how she found this weather station. She didn't know how long she had been on her way. All she knew was that it must have been a long, long time. She tried to get back some life into her freezing hands after she had taken off the gloves. There was nothing here, but at least she was safe from the snow and the polar bears that had been following her for the last hours and which she had to keep at a distance with a shot in the air once in a while.
She took a look around. A weather station. Unmanned. She took out her knife again and used it as a screw driver to get the box open that was labelled Grønlands Metereologisk Institut. Inside was the automated transmitter. After taking a short break to remember what she knew about radio transmitters and eat the last remaining peanuts she cut two wires and started sending an SOS.
There it stood. Harmless, caged in a box of plexiglass, illuminated by a halogen spot. The new highlight of the exhibit. One of the oldest relicts of the early years of the colonisation of Iceland. And she had found it, lost it, taken it back and carried it 150 miles through the nothingness of the north polar sea. The boys at the meteorological institute had been a bit sour that one of their weather stations suddenly began sending shorts and longs, but as they realized, what exactly it was they saw, they knew what to do.
The boat with her kidnappers was never found. Whatever its port of destination might have been, it was presumably not one of those that were watched. At first no one would believe here, no one could jump off an icebreaker and wander 150 Miles over the sea and be so lucky as to find a weather station. But she explained to them that it wasn't that hard at all: Watching the sun on her way and noticing the moment of her deepest point made it possible to calculate her approximate position. And the weather station was charted in the map she took from the captains room. There was no magic in it even though some of the people she told the story said that the artefact must have watched over her. The newspapers were hot on the story and wrote all kinds of things about her and the rune tablet. And now it stood there, for the first time open to the public. Did she betray it by giving it to the National Museum? She had to smile and she was happy her lips finally had stopped hurting when she did this.
“It's impressive, isn't it, Miss Croft?” A man had joined her while she was deep in thought. She looked him up and down but didn't recognize him.
“Do I know you?”
“No, I don't think so”, he said with a slight Nordic accent.
That moment the light went out and some screams could be heard, along the sound of breaking glass right where she stood.
“What the hell...” She could hear the man beside her rushing away. “Now!” she yelled into the micro that was placed in one of the buttons of her blouse, while she drew her weapons. Around her torches lit up and several men dressed in black suits followed the thief. She had expected something like that to happen and the police had agreed. There were guards everywhere; most of the visitors of the opening had been replaced with security officers.
But something was fishy. The man on her side had run straight for the door and would probably be in custody already. Everybody had followed him, so there was only she and the regular visitors left in the exhibition hall.
“It was a trick”, she thought. It took a while for her to adapt to the darkness. But then, out of the corner of her eyes she saw a movement towards one of the emergency exits that wasn't guarded anymore. She aimed but there were too many people running around in the dark, so she had to act quickly. She jumped over the now broken exhibition box and ran after him.
Outside it was dark, but the darkness was broken by a street lamp standing right where the emergency exit was.
“Stop!” she yelled. “Stop, or I'll shoot!”
The figure in the dark halted and put its hands up. Her instincts had been right, and now again it wasn't failing either. Afterwards she could not remember if she had seen the weapon, but he drew it and she shot. As he fell, the weapon sled over the concrete.
“I've walked 150 miles through the wilderness for that piece of wood and no one is going to take it away from me that easily!”
The man coughed. He wasn't hit very badly, just a shot in the shoulder. Lara called for an ambulance through her micro. Then she sat down by the man and for the first time she could see his face. It wasn't the one who talked to her, that the police caught at the entrance. This man had a blonde beard and long blonde hair. It was the man from the picture in the captain's cabin.
“You! I've seen your picture on that ship! Who are you? What do you want this artefact for?” she asked.
“It belongs to me! It... it was carved by... by my ancestors!” With these words, he blacked out.
“The police identified him as a member of a group that wants to restore the Nordic gods as a religion”, the news reporter told everyone that wanted to hear it. “They thought of the runes as a magic spell to bring back Thor, the god of thunder, to power.”
Lara turned away from the TV. Her flight was called and she had to get going. Before she left the lounge, she took a package of peanuts from the display.
“You never know when theses come in handy”, she told the clerk behind the desk and left for the planes.[/ffstory]