Christopher Cartwright
Code to Extinction
Prologue
They buried his mother under a bruised sunset of purple, red and ochre.
It had taken the better part of a week to dig the grave. A task made strenuous and painstakingly slow by the ground’s constant state of permafrost. Through a process of lighting a bonfire, letting it burn for hours and then shifting the coals to the side, they were able to dig, inch by inch into the soil until the hole was finally big enough to hold the crude hewn coffin. When it was all done, they all went inside his father’s log hut, and he was left all alone.
Ilya Yezhov stared at the raised mound of soil and snow where his mother now lay. It seemed like the pitiful evidence of a wretched life. His solemn blue-gray eyes, almost silver in the shade of the horizon, remained dry, but his throat felt the unfamiliar thickness of grief choking him. She was the only one who’d ever been kind to him and he would miss her. Oymyakon was a hard place to live, and his family had been dominated by hard men.
It was one of the coldest permanently inhabited locations on Earth.
Nestled into the bend of the Indigirka River, the village of Oymyakon translated to the words, non-freezing-water, in reference to a section of the river warmed by thermal pools where the fish spent the winter. Despite the local thermal pools, the village endured an extreme subarctic climate, competing with the town of Verkhoyansk for the title of coldest inhabited place on Earth. In 1933, the town recorded a temperature of minus ninety degrees Fahrenheit, the lowest officially recorded temperature in the Northern Hemisphere. Locked between the Verkhoyasnk Range in the north and the Stanovoy Range in the south — both peaking at nearly ten thousand feet — Oymyakon remained covered in snow all year round. In summer, days lasted twenty-one hours, and in winter, they were less than three.
Jobs were in short supply, with most of the five hundred odd villagers subsisting on reindeer-herding, hunting and ice-fishing for survival. Ilya’s father was an exception. He labored in a diamond mine in neighboring Yakutsk, staying there to work for up to two months at a time, before coming home for a week, as he had recently, to help bury their mother. Tomorrow morning, he would leave them again.
Besides the obvious issues of remoteness, the cold itself forced the village to be a simple place with few conveniences. Cars were hard to start with frozen axle grease and fuel tanks, unused pipes could freeze within five hours, and batteries lose life at an alarming speed. Block heaters were used when the vehicles were turned off to keep the engines from freezing permanently. Electronics, including GPS, fail at anything below minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit. Thick fur coats, and multiple layers were a must, even to step outside for a few minutes.
His eyes swept the snow-covered landscape. The Indigirka River ran in a gradually southeastern direction. Frozen solid, large chunks of ice nearly ten feet high met the edge of the river, where natural hot water springs warmed the water until it flowed at a trickle. White mountains rose nearly to an altitude of 3,600 feet on opposite sides of the river, causing cold air to pool in the valley below, with Oymyakon freezing at its center. A road of ice ran parallel to the river, and a thick forest of pine continued from the road to the bottom third of the mountains on either side of the river. The trees were twisted and dwarfed as their roots were unable to penetrate the permafrost. On the outside, the entire place looked wicked and cruel in its stark emptiness. A world God had forgotten.
But that was just an illusion.
In summer, the taiga forest, densely populated with stunted spruces, firs, pines and larch, provided a floor of grass, moss and lichen, where berries and mushrooms grew and reindeer flourished. In the nearby rivers, fish were plentiful. Below the inhospitable surface, the land was well endowed with raw materials. The soil contained large reserves of oil, gas, coal, diamonds, gold, silver, tin, tungsten and many other valuable gemstones. The nearby region of Sakha where his father worked produced ninety-nine percent of all Russian diamonds and over twenty-five percent of the diamonds mined in the world.
One day, he smiled, he would be rich — but first he would need to live that long.
At the age of twelve, with a diet of fish and reindeer, he was barely able to meet subsistence for nine months of the year. Ilya’s growth had been stunted. A fact worsened by his older brother, Demyan, who at the age of fourteen had already reached puberty and was well on his way to becoming a strong man like his father.
And like his father, Demyan was quick to enter a fight and even faster to end it. They were only two years apart, but Ilya had never won a battle. One day, he swore, he would catch up, and when that happened he would be the toughest man in Oymyakon — then he would teach his big brother a lesson he’d never forget.
“Ilya!” Demyan shouted. “Come inside before you freeze to death.”
He smiled. Until that day, he would answer to his brother. “Yes, Demyan.”
“Yes, Demyan.” Resolve burned in his hazel eyes. Until that day, he would answer to his brother.
Ilya glanced at the pitiful remains of his mother’s life and turned to go inside. He promised himself that his life wouldn’t end here, his body lying sadly buried in a pathetically shallow grave. No, he would make something of his life. He would be different. He would be a rich and powerful man, feared by everyone around him.
“Goodbye mother,” he murmured, then he turned and left.
It was late in the winter. The sun was starting to make its presence known on the edge of the horizon for short periods each day, after nearly four months of nearly permanent darkness. At three a.m. the sun was still far from rising.
Demyan Yezhov listened as his father prepared to leave the house in silence. They’d said their goodbyes last night. His father was due to return to the diamond mines in Yakutsk. It was dangerous work, but the money it provided made it worth it. Their risk of starvation without the income it provided was much greater than the chances of a mine disaster.
Through dark eyes — almost black with gold flakes, he watched his father leave.
It would be the last time he’d see him for the next month. Ever since he could remember, he’d been secretly waking so he could watch him walk out the door. It was somehow stranger this time around, now that his mother was gone. Demyan was head of the house — although that was a strong word for the small ten by ten-foot log hut they called their home — and now they were on their own.
It wasn’t lost on him that in the harsh environment of Oymyakon any failure on his part would easily lead to their starvation or freezing to death well before his father came home. His father had grown up in the tough snow-filled lands, and accepted death with the rare equanimity of a man with a strong belief in a future already written — his boys would survive, or they wouldn’t.
He grinned. This one would survive, even if he had to kill a neighboring household to do it. Demyan was less confident of his little brother’s survival. The kid was a runt. Tenacious and filled with a raw underlying violence in his eyes. If he made it to adulthood, his little brother would end up becoming an underground mine manager, like his dad — in a position of power over a lot of weaker men. He’d probably end up hurting a lot of people in the process. Demyan held his breath as he thought about it. His brother would most likely end up hurting the hell out of him, if he lived that long.
But they’d both have to live that long. His mind returned to the task at hand.
He’d promised his little brother he’d take him fishing today, in the new lake. Previously unfished, it was said to be full. Despite their differences, he’d never really wanted to hurt his little brother. He knew the kid had taken their mother’s death the worst out of the whole family. She was probably the only person who’d ever shown him any kindness.