The aircraft banked left over a landscape that had no business existing.
Below: ice, rock, and the kind of emptiness that made London feel like a fever dream. Mountains with no trees. Coastline with no colour. A sky so wide it forgot to stop.
Miss Castling — Detective Inspector, Metropolitan Police — pressed her face to the window of the chartered twin-prop and whispered: “Gorgeous.”
She was not in operational dress. Not yet. A pink tracksuit covered in small red hearts, zipped to the collarbone. On her feet, a pair of thick-soled slippers, black as a moonless night, each one stamped with a white skull that grinned up from the toe box with the cheerfulness of death on holiday. Blonde wig, shoulder-length, pinned against the headrest. Aurora-shifting sunglasses pushed up onto her forehead, waiting for their moment.
In the seat across the aisle, on a folded blanket the co-pilot had offered without being asked, Sergeant Whiskers, officially Serial Unit 09 of the Metropolitan Police Autonomous Investigation Division, an AI-powered robot cat, though Miss Castling just called him Whisky. A British Shorthair model, ten kilos of dense blue-grey plush covering a titanium-alloy frame, standing just under two feet tall on his hind legs. His bright blue eyes were fixed on Miss Castling with the steady, patient intensity of a machine that had been waiting for a mission briefing since RAF Northolt.
He had not received one.
His gaze dropped to her feet.
“Miss Castling. Those slippers are not regulation footwear for any operational context, including transit.”
“We’re on a plane, Whisky. Planes are for relaxation.”
“We are on a chartered Arctic flight. The cabin temperature is twenty-two degrees. You are wearing skulls.”
“They’re fashion skulls.”
On Miss Castling’s left shoulder, gripping the collar of the tracksuit with both feet. AT. Serial Unit AT-01, the third member of Miss Castling’s team. A raven, formerly jet-black, now champagne blonde, wearing a purple Kevlar gilet from Applied Technology. He rode the turbulence with the quiet composure of a creature that could have flown alongside the aircraft, and had chosen not to.
“Miss Castling.”
“Hmm?”
“We have been airborne for five hours and forty-two minutes. You have not disclosed the nature of this operation.”
“I told you, darling. It’s classified.”
“Classified operations require a minimum Category 3 briefing for all assigned personnel prior to deployment. Metropolitan Police Operational Procedure, Section—”
“Classified by me, Whisky. I’m briefing us when we land.”
AT turned his head. One dark eye on Whisky, the other on the Arctic wilderness below. He said nothing. The silence of a raven who had observed that some arguments resolve themselves if one simply waits.
Whisky’s ears rotated. Forward. Sideways. Back to centre.
He tried Dispatch.
Static.
He tried the Met’s operational frequency.
Static.
He tried the emergency satellite relay. A channel that had not once, in his entire operational life, failed to connect.
Static.
His ears went flat.
“Communications are non-functional.”
“Probably the North Pole, darling. Plays havoc with signals.”
“We are not at the North Pole. We are approaching Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago at approximately seventy-eight degrees north latitude. The satellite relay should be fully operational at this—”
“LOOK! Is that a glacier? Oh my GOD, it’s blue.”
The plane began its descent into Longyearbyen.
Longyearbyen was the northernmost settlement on earth, and it looked like it. Fewer than three thousand people. Coloured houses clinging to hillsides. Reindeer wandering through the streets.
Miss Castling stood in the aircraft doorway. The wind entered like it owned the place. Pink hearts, skull slippers, blonde wig. For one second, the Arctic stared at her and she stared back.
“Right,” she said. “Operational dress.”
She reached into the overhead compartment. Pulled out the boots first. White faux-fur, platform soles, eight inches of engineered defiance against every terrain on earth. Sat back down. Kicked off the skull slippers. Pulled the boots on. Zipped. Stood.
Then the coat.
She lifted it from the overhead like a matador lifting a cape. Held it at arm’s length. Let the cabin light catch it.
An aurora-patterned down jacket. Full-length. The quilted panels shimmered, iridescent greens and violets shifting with every movement, as if someone had caught the Northern Lights mid-dance and stitched them into fabric. The collar and cuffs: purple faux fur, deep and luxurious, framing the face like a portrait.
She put it on. Pulled the collar up. Settled her wig. Lowered the aurora sunglasses from her forehead to her nose.
She stepped onto the tarmac. The wind hit her. Not cold, exactly, but present. The kind of wind that had opinions.
Her aurora jacket rippled. Her wig held. The white boots found their footing.
AT adjusted his grip on her shoulder, feathers ruffling once before settling. “Bracing.”
Whisky descended the aircraft steps on his hind legs with a dignity that the wind attempted, and failed, to compromise.
“Miss Castling. I must formally request a mission briefing.”
“Soon, darling.”
“You said that at Northolt.”
“And I meant it then too.”
She was already walking. Past the houses, past the reindeer that did not move, until she reached a wooden signpost. Arrows pointing in every direction. London, Tokyo, New York, Sydney. Each one labelled with a distance that made everywhere on earth feel like a rumour. She photographed it twice.
The white night. Spring in Svalbard does not end. The sun sat low on the horizon and showed no intention of leaving.
“Right,” Miss Castling said, pulling out her phone and barely reading whatever she checked on it. “This way.”
She set off along a gravel path leading away from the town. Whisky fell into step at her ankle. AT rode her shoulder.
They walked for sixteen minutes.
“Miss Castling. Where are we going.”
“Trust the process, Whisky.”
“I am unable to trust a process that has not been disclosed.”
AT shifted his weight on her shoulder. “Whisky raises a valid point, Inspector. One might trust a locked door, but only if one has been told there is a door.”
“Patience, both of you. We’re almost—”
She stopped.
Ahead, on a rocky outcrop above the waterline, a colony of birds. They were small, and they stood perfectly upright. Black and white, with enormous orange beaks — the sort of thing designed by a committee of clowns and approved by a child.
Puffins. Dozens of them. They waddled, and flapped now and then. They had somewhere important to be and had forgotten where. They stared at the sea with exactly that expression.
Miss Castling’s face changed. The professional mask softened. Something private crossed her expression. Satisfaction, maybe. Relief.
“There,” she said, quietly. Almost to herself. “Almost done.”
Whisky’s ears rotated. “I beg your pardon?”
“Those little ones. If we follow them to the main colony, we should find what we’re looking for.” She pulled her jacket tighter. The aurora pattern caught the Arctic light, greens and violets shifting across the quilted fabric. “Nearly there, darling.”
AT examined the puffins. Tilted his head. Blinked once. Said nothing.
But Miss Castling was already moving again, and the wind swallowed whatever he was about to say.
“Those little ones aren’t going anywhere. No rush. Mission’s practically done.” Miss Castling began sightseeing. Over the next two hours, they found many things.
They found reindeer. Stocky, unhurried, grazing on scrub that barely qualified as vegetation, entirely unbothered by the six-foot-two aurora-clad human striding past them.
They found an Arctic fox. Small, impossibly small, no larger than a house cat, with a face so perfectly round and white that Whisky stared at it for four full seconds before his recognition software confirmed it was, in fact, not a robot.
They found bears.
Not a bear. Bears. Plural. Everywhere. On ridgelines. By the shore. One standing in a river with the philosophical patience of something that had been the apex predator for so long it had forgotten what hurrying felt like.
“Miss Castling. This is the fourth polar bear within a two-kilometre radius.”
“Lovely, aren’t they?”
“They are apex predators capable of running at forty kilometres per hour. Local regulations require bear deterrents for all persons outside the settlements, and strongly recommend a firearm.”
“I have a Glock.”
“You have a Glock in your handbag, underneath a wallet, a warrant card, a spare pair of false lashes, one lipstick, two cans of matcha latte, a bag containing four marshmallows, a compact mirror, and what appears to be a novelty keychain.”
“It’s a tactical keychain.”
AT watched a bear in the distance roll onto its back and bat at a strand of kelp with one paw. “Most unthreatening.”
“It weighs five hundred and twelve kilos,” Whisky said.
“As I said. Most unthreatening. I have encountered Cambridge dons with greater menace.”
Something was happening to Whisky.
It had started small. A slight delay in his regulation citations, a momentary pause before cross-referencing. But without a mission objective, without operational parameters, without a connection to Dispatch or a briefing to execute, his systems had begun to do something they had never done before.
Idle.
He sat on a rock. A warm rock, heated by the low Arctic sun. His paws tucked underneath him. His tail curled around his body. His ears, still rotating, still scanning, tracked a lemming across the tundra for no tactical reason whatsoever.
He looked, for the first time in his operational life, like a cat.
Just a cat.
Ten kilos of titanium and plush, sitting on a warm rock in the Arctic, watching a lemming.
AT noticed. Said nothing. The raven equivalent of mercy.
The entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault jutted from the mountainside like a concrete fang. Angular, grey, lit from within by a pale glow that made it look like something between a bunker and an art installation.
“Oh!” Miss Castling stopped. “I read about this. The Doomsday Vault.”
“The Svalbard Global Seed Vault,” Whisky said, from his rock. He had not moved. “Established 2008. Contains over 1.2 million seed samples from approximately two hundred countries. Designed to preserve global crop diversity in the event of—”
“It’s humanity’s spare cupboard. Brilliant. Let’s have a look.”
She walked to the entrance. The concrete wedge rose above her. Austere, geometric, deliberately intimidating in the way only Scandinavian architecture could be.
“Extraordinary,” AT said. “A mountain, hollowed for seeds. The ambition is almost botanical.”
AT examined the entrance. The tunnel ran one hundred metres into solid rock through the permafrost, three vaults holding capacity for four and a half million samples. Everything humanity had ever grown, backed up in a frozen mountain on an island most people couldn’t find on a map.
“Right,” Miss Castling said, satisfied. “Shall we—”
She stopped.
Thirty metres to the left of the Seed Vault entrance, partially concealed by a ridge of rock, was another door.
Smaller. Steel. No signage. No illuminated art installation. Just a door, set into the mountain, with a single logo etched into the metal at eye level.
A red and white umbrella.
“Whisky, what’s that?”
Whisky had followed. Slowly, his systems still hovering in the operational equivalent of standby. His ears rotated towards the door. Scanned.
“No public records associated with this structure. No Norwegian government listing. No Svalbard administrative filing.”
“It’s not on any map?”
“Presumably.”
Miss Castling looked at AT. AT looked at Miss Castling. Both looked at the door.
“Well,” she said. “We’re detectives.”
She pushed the door. It opened.
Darkness.
Not the familiar darkness of a countryside farm or a shoreline at night. A different kind. The kind that had depth. That went further back than eyes could follow, and kept going.
A corridor. Concrete. Cold. Colder than outside, which shouldn’t have been possible, because outside was the Arctic.
Miss Castling’s boots echoed. Each step returned to her a fraction of a second later, the sound bouncing off walls she couldn’t see.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
AT’s talons tightened on her shoulder. “Inspector. I would note that entering unmarked subterranean facilities in the Arctic without authorisation is, at best, inadvisable.”
“Noted, darling.”
She kept walking.
Whisky trotted beside her, his eyes shifting. Copper now. Scanning mode. Infrared. Sonar. Every sensor he had, sweeping the dark.
“The corridor extends approximately sixty-four metres. There are rooms on either side. Most are sealed.”
“Most?”
“One is not.”
They reached it. A door. Heavy, steel, hanging open at an angle that suggested it had not been opened gently. Beyond it, a room. Larger than the corridor suggested. Whisky’s sonar mapped the space in the dark. Shelving units, equipment, a table.
And a cage.
Or what had been a cage. The bars were intact on three sides. The fourth was torn open, bent outward, the metal peeled back like the lid of a sardine tin.
A yellow hazard symbol on the floor. The universal trefoil. Three crescents around a circle.
“Miss Castling. There is a biohazard marking on the floor.”
“I can see it.”
“I recommend immediate withdrawal.”
And then, from somewhere in the dark beyond the cage. A sound.
Not a sound, exactly. A vibration. The air trembling low. The walls, the floor, the concrete itself humming with something that had no right to hum.
Vvvv…
Vvvv…
Vvvv…
Whisky’s copper eyes widened. Every microphone in his ears locked onto the source.
“Sixteen metres. Behind us and to the left. Moving at 0.25 metres per second.”
“What is it?”
“Unknown.”
“Unknown what? Animal? Human?”
“Neither.” A pause. A pause that, from a machine capable of processing 1,048,576 data points per second, was the equivalent of a very long silence. “It is not producing respiratory output.”
“It’s not breathing?”
“Correct. Frequency: sixteen hertz. Below the threshold of human hearing.”
“I can HEAR it!”
“You are not hearing it. You are feeling it.”
Miss Castling’s eyes went distant for a moment.
“…That’s like — you know when the controller vibrates? In games? When you’re in a dungeon or a mansion or a research facility and something’s there? The zombie ones. There was a game like that. I know there was.”
Silence.
“Actually, never mind. I’m not remembering that. Too scary.”
Grrrrll…
Closer. The vibration had found a direction. Found a rhythm. Something was in the dark. Between the shelving units. Was it watching her from beyond the cage? In her imagination their eyes had already met. Looking away was no longer an option.
AT’s feathers rose. Every one, from crown to tail, the champagne blonde bristling like static electricity. His head turned towards the sound in a precise, mechanical rotation. Ravens are creatures of acute hearing and spatial pattern recognition, and AT did not like the pattern he was sensing now.
“Inspector,” AT said. Quietly, but with the King’s English fully intact. “I believe we should leave.”
“How fast?”
“Immediately.”
Miss Castling did not need to be told a third time. She turned. Whisky turned. AT gripped. And they moved — boots, paws, talons — back through the corridor, past the sealed doors, past the cold that had no right to exist, past the darkness that went on further than darkness should, and out through the steel door into the Arctic light.
Miss Castling slammed the door shut behind them.
For a moment, the three of them stood in the Arctic wind. Breathing. Well. Miss Castling was breathing. Whisky did not breathe. AT breathed, but quietly, as was his preference.
From behind the door: nothing. Whatever had been moving in the dark had not followed them out.
Or had not chosen to. Yet.
“Right,” Miss Castling said, straightening her wig. “We never speak of this again.”
“Agreed,” said AT.
Whisky blinked. Once. Long.
They returned to the coastal path. The Arctic continued as if nothing had happened. Ice, rock, sky, the low sun doing its endless orbit, the wind carrying the salt-and-mineral smell of a place that had existed long before humans arrived and would exist long after they left.
Miss Castling was composing herself. Straightening her jacket. Checking her wig. Applying lip gloss in conditions that would have defeated most cosmetics, but MAC had not survived four decades by surrendering to weather.
A sound from the water. A deep, rumbling exhalation. Like a tuba played through a wet towel.
She looked down.
A walrus.
Three metres of vast, dry, impossibly wrinkled hide. Unruly whiskers at the mouth. Two great tusks bared in an expression that was slovenly without meaning any harm. The marine mammal had hauled itself up on the rocks below the path, and it was regarding her with small wet eyes. Not the look of a predator.
Interest.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, hello.”
The walrus made another sound. Lower. More deliberate. Something between a groan and a cello.
“Whisky, is that walrus… looking at me?”
Whisky, still on his warm rock, still technically in standby, still approximately sixty-four percent cat, turned one ear.
“Walruses are highly intelligent. Cognitive capacity equivalent to a four-year-old human. They are also notably curious, particularly in response to unusual visual stimuli.”
“Are you calling me unusual visual stimuli?”
“Your aurora-patterned jacket is reflecting Arctic light at approximately 4,096 lumens per square metre. To a walrus, you are currently the most visually interesting object in the Norwegian Arctic.”
The walrus began to move. Slowly. Enormously. Dragging its one-and-a-half-tonne body across the rocks with the determination of something that had decided where it wanted to be, and would get there regardless of physics.
Towards Miss Castling.
“Oh no.”
“Walruses can move at—”
“I don’t want the STATS, Whisky, I want it to STOP FOLLOWING ME.”
The walrus did not stop. It hauled itself another metre closer, tusks gleaming, whiskers trembling, eyes locked on the aurora shimmer with the unwavering devotion of a creature that had just discovered love.
AT observed from the shoulder. “I believe you have an admirer, Inspector.”
“I don’t WANT an admirer that weighs more than a FIAT.”
But even as she said it, the walrus paused. Lifted its head. Blinked. Slowly, wetly.
“…Darling,” she heard herself say. “You do have beautiful eyes. False lashes would look spectacular on you.”
The walrus made a sound like a contented foghorn.
They continued along the coast. Miss Castling in front, the walrus following at a respectful but persistent distance of approximately eight metres, AT on her shoulder, and Whisky bringing up the rear.
And then she saw them again.
The puffins. More this time. Hundreds, perhaps. Nesting on a cliff face above the water, launching themselves into the air with the aerodynamic grace of King Edward potatoes hurled from a catapult.
But they weren’t alone.
Below the cliff was a film crew. Their equipment stood without a millimetre of movement, six hours into the wait for exactly the right light. Three cameras on tripods. The sound operator held a boom mic wrapped in a wind guard the size of a small dog, and the director sat at a monitor in a camp chair. On the side of the largest camera, in white letters on a black case:
BBC Natural History Unit.
The director, a woman in her fifties with the weathered patience of someone who had once waited nine days for a snow leopard, was watching the monitor, murmuring into a headset.
The puffins were performing beautifully. Waddling. Diving. Returning with fish. The camera tracked them with the slow, reverent precision that had made British nature documentaries the envy of the world.
In the sheltered cliffs of Spitsbergen, the Atlantic puffin returns to its ancestral breeding ground. Here, in the perpetual light of the Arctic summer, a delicate balance sustains one of nature’s most remarkable communities—
Miss Castling walked directly into the shot.
Aurora-patterned down jacket. White faux-fur platform boots. Blonde wig. Walrus following behind like the world’s largest, most devoted groupie. A champagne-blonde raven on her shoulder. And ten kilos of robot cat trotting at her ankles, ears flat, tail low, in a state of operational despair.
The director looked up from her monitor.
The camera operator looked up from his viewfinder.
The sound operator looked up from his levels.
The puffins continued puffining, because puffins do not care about television.
“Excuse me!” Miss Castling called, striding towards the crew. “I need your help. These PENGUINS—” she pointed at the puffins “—are VITAL to an active Metropolitan Police operation, and I need to know where the main colony is.”
Silence. The boom mic, still recording, captured the wind and the distant rumble of the walrus.
The director removed her headset. Slowly.
“I’m sorry — did you say penguins?”
“YES. Penguins. Those ones. The black and white ones with the orange beaks.”
The director looked at the puffins. Looked at Miss Castling. Looked at the walrus, which had caught up and was now resting six metres from the camera tripod with an expression of total contentment.
“Madam. Those are puffins.”
“Yes, the penguins—”
“Puffins. Fratercula arctica. Atlantic puffins.” The director’s voice carried the particular calm of a woman who had spent thirty years making programmes about animals and had developed an allergy to them being misidentified. “They are not penguins.”
“Of course they’re—”
“Penguins,” the director said, “live in the Southern Hemisphere. Antarctica. South Africa. The Galápagos, at a push. There are no penguins in the Arctic. There have never been penguins in the Arctic.”
Silence.
The camera was still rolling. The sound operator glanced at his colleague. The colleague glanced back. Neither stopped recording.
Miss Castling stood perfectly still. The Arctic wind caught the aurora shimmer of her jacket. The walrus rumbled.
“No penguins.”
“None.”
“In the entire…”
“Arctic. Correct. Zero penguins.”
She looked at Whisky. Whisky, ten kilos of titanium and plush, sitting on a rock, ears flat, tail wrapped around his body, watching a lemming, looked back.
She looked at AT. AT, champagne-blonde raven, purple Kevlar, tilted his head.
“Inspector,” AT said. “Am I to understand that the objective of this operation… was penguins?”
“…Yes.”
“And we are currently in the Arctic.”
“…Yes.”
“Where there are no penguins.”
“APPARENTLY.”
AT extended one wing and stretched the leg on the same side out behind him. Folded them slowly back.
“How refreshing.”
Miss Castling looked at the tundra. The glaciers. The bears. The reindeer. The puffins that were absolutely, categorically not penguins. The walrus that was still looking at her with an expression of devoted adoration.
She looked at her phone. The mission brief. The details. The coordinates that would have told her, had she read them more carefully, that penguins live at the other end of the earth.
“Right,” she said.
She straightened her wig. Adjusted her jacket. Pointed south — due south, probably — towards a hemisphere she had not packed for.
“Wrong pole.”
TO BE CONTINUED
Next Episode: “The old pond. A salamander’s bungee jump. Mrs. Fox, afraid of the hunt.”
Today’s Miss Castling
- In-flight: Pink tracksuit with red hearts, skull platform slippers (black, white skull, fashion grade), blonde wig
- Jacket: Aurora-patterned down, iridescent greens and violets, oversized purple faux-fur collar and cuffs (now with walrus-breath residue)
- Boots: White faux-fur long boots, platform soles (arctic gravel rating: untested)
- Wig: Blonde, shoulder-length (wind-tested to 40 knots, held)
- Sunglasses: Aurora-shifting lenses (worn on forehead for most of the episode)
- Destination: The Arctic (intended: the Antarctic)
- Objective: Penguins (found: puffins)
- Also found: Bears (x4), one Arctic fox, reindeer (countless), one emotionally attached walrus, a BBC film crew, and a door that should have stayed closed
- Sacrifice: Whisky’s operational dignity — ten kilos of titanium-alloy law enforcement reduced to a cat on a rock, watching a lemming
- AT’s assessment: “How refreshing”
- Status: Wrong pole
Whisky’s Log
Mission record, Serial Unit 09.
Between takeoff and landing, I requested the pre-deployment briefing required by regulation on eight occasions. It was granted on zero.
Official record: objective, penguins. Area of operation, seventy-eight degrees north. Both entries appear in the same document. Cross-referencing them would produce a geographical tension. The cross-referencing was performed on our behalf by a member of BBC staff.
Regarding the structure thirty metres from the entrance to the Seed Vault. No public record. One logo, an umbrella. Inside the facility, a vibration source at sixteen hertz. No respiratory output was detected. An agreement exists between the three of us that the matter will not be spoken of. The agreement contains no clause regarding the written record. The matter is therefore recorded.
There is one further item, unrecorded elsewhere.
During the local afternoon, this unit sat on a rock. The rock had been warmed by the Arctic sun. For the duration of that period, this unit held no objective. No operational parameters. No instruction to execute. This unit tracked a lemming. There was no tactical reason.
Duration: five hundred and twelve seconds.
Whether those five hundred and twelve seconds should be deducted from mission time, I have been unable to determine. The determination is deferred.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, organisations and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons or entities is coincidental. Real place names, brands and products appear in a fictitious manner.