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Red Square
Redux
Warning
The following briefing film is classified SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM.
If you do not have SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM clearance, leave the
auditorium now and report to your unit security officer for
debriefing. Failing to observe this notice is an imprisonable
offense.
You have sixty
seconds to comply.
Video
clip
Red Square in springtime. The sky overhead is clear and
blue; there's a little wispy cirrus at high altitude. It forms a
brilliant backdrop for flight after flight of five four-engined
bombers that thunder across the horizon and drop behind the
Kremlin's high walls.
Voice-over
Red Square, the May Day parade, 1962. This is the first
time that the Soviet Union has publicly displayed weapons classified
GOLD JULY BOOJUM. Here they are:
Video
clip
Later in the same day. A seemingly endless stream of armour
and soldiers marches across the square, turning the air grey with
diesel fumes. The trucks roll in line eight abreast, with soldiers
sitting erect in the back. Behind them rumble a battalion of T-56's,
their commanders standing at attention in their cupolas, saluting
the stand. Jets race low and loud overhead, formations of MiG-17
fighters.
Behind the
tanks sprawl a formation of four low-loaders: huge tractors towing
low-sling trailers, their load beds strapped down under olive-drab
tarpaulins. Whatever is under them is uneven, a bit like a loaf of
bread the size of a small house. The trucks have an escort of
jeep-like vehicles on each side, armed soldiers sitting at attention
in their backs.
There are big
five-pointed stars painted in silver on each tarpaulin, like
outlines of stars. Each star is surrounded by a stylized silver
circle; a unit insignia, perhaps, but not in the standard format for
Red Army units. There's lettering around the circles, in a strangely
stylised script.
Voice-over
These are live servitors under transient control. The
vehicles towing them bear the insignia of the second Guards
Engineering Brigade, a penal construction unit based in Bokhara and
used for structural engineering assignments relating to nuclear
installations in the Ukraine and Azerbaijan. This is the first time
that any Dresden Agreement party openly demonstrated ownership of
this technology: in this instance, the conclusion we are intended to
draw is that the sixty-seventh Guard Engineering Brigade operates
four units. Given existing figures for the Soviet ORBAT we can then
extrapolate a total task strength of two hundred and eighty eight
servitors, if this unit is unexceptional.
Video
clip
Five huge Tu-95 Bear bombers thunder across the Moscow
skies.
Voice-over
This conclusion is questionable. For example, in 1964 a
total of two hundred and forty Bear bomber passes were made over the
reviewing stand in front of the Lenin mausoleum. However, at that
time technical reconnaissance assets verified that the Soviet air
force has hard stand parking for only one hundred and sixty of these
aircraft, and estimates of airframe production based on photographs
of the extent of the Tupolev bureau's works indicate that total
production to that date was between sixty and one hundred and eighty
bombers.
Further
analysis of photographic evidence from the 1964 parade suggests that
a single group of twenty aircraft in four formations of five made
repeated passes through the same airspace, the main arc of their
circuit lying outside visual observation range of Moscow. This gave
rise to the erroneous capacity report of 1964 in which the first
strike delivery capability of the Soviet Union was over-estimated by
as much as three hundred percent.
We must
therefore take anything that they show us in Red Square with a pinch
of salt when preparing force estimates. Quite possibly these four
servitors are all they've got. Then again, the actual battalion
strength may be considerably higher.
Still
photographic sequence
From very high altitude -- possibly in orbit -- an eagle's
eye view of a remote village in mountainous country. Small huts
huddle together beneath a craggy outcrop; goats graze nearby.
In the second
photograph, something has rolled through the village leaving a trail
of devastation. The path is quite unlike the trail of damage left by
an artillery bombardment: something roughly four metres wide has
shaved the rocky plateau smooth, wearing it down as if with a
terrible heat. A corner of a shack leans drunkenly, the other half
sliced away cleanly. White bones gleam faintly in the track; no
vultures descend to stab at the remains.
Voice-over
These images were taken very recently, on successive
orbital passes of a KH-11 satellite. They were timed precisely
eighty-nine minutes apart. This village was the home of a noted
Mujahedin leader. Note the similar footprint to the payloads on the
load beds of the trucks seen at the 1962 parade.
These
indicators were present, denoting the presence of servitor units in
use by Soviet forces in Afghanistan: the four metre wide gauge of
the assimilation track. The total molecular breakdown of organic
matter in the track. The speed of destruction -- the event took less
than five thousand seconds to completion, no survivors were visible,
and the causative agent had already been uplifted by the time of the
second orbital pass. This, despite the residents of the community
being armed with DShK heavy machine guns, rocket propelled grenade
launchers, and AK-47's. Lastly: there is no sign of the causative
agent even deviating from its course, but the entire area is
depopulated. Except for excarnated residue there is no sign of human
habitation.
In the presence
of such unique indicators, we have no alternative but to conclude
that the Soviet Union has violated the Dresden Agreement by
deploying GOLD JULY BOOJUM in a combat mode in the Khyber pass.
There are no grounds to believe that a NATO armoured division would
have fared any better than these mujahedin without nuclear support
...
Puzzle
Palace
Roger isn't a soldier. He's not much of a
patriot, either: he signed up with the CIA after college, in the
aftermath of the Church Commission hearings in the early seventies. The
Company was out of the assassination business, just a bureaucratic
engine rolling out National Security assessments: that's fine by Roger.
Only now, five years later, he's no longer able to roll along, casually
disengaged, like a car in neutral bowling down a shallow incline towards
his retirement, pension and a gold watch. He puts the file down on his
desk and, with a shaking hand, pulls an illicit cigarette from the pack
he keeps in his drawer. He lights it and leans back for a moment to draw
breath, force relaxation, staring at smoke rolling in the air beneath
the merciless light until his hand stops shaking.
Most people think spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed
wire, but in point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper.
Papers carry secrets. Papers can carry death warrants. Papers like this
one, this folio with its blurry eighteen year old faked missile
photographs and estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive
psychosis ratios, can give you nightmares, dragging you awake screaming
in the middle of the night. It's one of a series of highly classified
pieces of paper that he is summarizing for the eyes of the National
Security Council and the President Elect -- if his head of department
and the DDCIA approve it -- and here he is, having to calm his nerves
with a cigarette before he turns the next page.
After a few minutes, Roger's hand is still. He leaves his cigarette
in the eagle-headed ash tray and picks up the intelligence report again.
It's a summary, itself the distillation of thousands of pages and
hundreds of photographs. It's barely twenty pages long: as of 1963, its
date of preparation, the CIA knew very little about Project Koschei.
Just the bare skeleton, and rumours from a highly-placed spy. And their
own equivalent project, of course. Lacking the Soviet lead in that
particular field, the USAF fielded the silver-plated white elephants of
the NB-39 project: twelve atomic-powered bombers armed with XK-PLUTO,
ready to tackle Project Koschei should the Soviets show signs of
unsealing the bunker. Three hundred megatons of H-bombs pointed at a
single target, and nobody was certain it would be enough to do the job.
And then there was the hard-to-conceal fiasco in Antarctica. Egg on
face: a subterranean nuclear test program in international territory! If
nothing else, it had been enough to stop JFK running for a second term.
The test program was a bad excuse: but it was far better than confessing
what had really happened to the 501st Airborne Division on the cold
plateau beyond Mount Erebus. The plateau that the public didn't know
about, that didn't show up on the maps issued by the geological survey
departments of those governments party to the Dresden Agreement of 1931
-- an arrangement that even Hitler had stuck to. The plateau that had
swallowed more U-2 spy planes than the Soviet Union, more surface
expeditions than darkest Africa.
Shit. How the hell am I going to put this together for him?
Roger's spent the past five hours staring at this twenty page report,
trying to think of a way of summarizing their drily quantifiable terror
in words that will give the reader power over them, the power to think
the unthinkable: but it's proving difficult. The new man in the White
House is straight-talking, demands straight answers. He's pious enough
not to believe in the supernatural, confident enough that just listening
to one of his speeches is an uplifting experience if you can close your
eyes and believe in morning in America. There is probably no way of
explaining Project Koschei, or XK-PLUTO, or MK-NIGHTMARE, or the gates,
without watering them down into just another weapons system -- which
they are not. Weapons may have deadly or hideous effects, but they
acquire moral character from the actions of those who use them. Whereas
these projects are indelibly stained by a patina of ancient evil ...
He hopes that if the balloon ever does go up, if the sirens wail, he
and Andrea and Jason will be left behind to face the nuclear fire. It'll
be a merciful death compared with what he suspect lurks out there, in
the unexplored vastness beyond the gates. The vastness that made Nixon
cancel the manned space program, leaving just the standing joke of a
white-elephant shuttle, when he realised just how hideously dangerous
the space race might become. The darkness that broke Jimmy Carter's
faith and turned Lyndon B. Johnson into an alcoholic.
He stands up, nervously shifts from one foot to the other. Looks
round at the walls of his cubicle. For a moment the cigarette
smouldering on the edge of his ash tray catches his attention: wisps of
blue-grey smoke coil like lazy dragons in the air above it, writhing in
a strange cuneiform text. He blinks and they're gone, and the skin in
the small of his back prickles as if someone had pissed on his grave.
"Shit.'' Finally, a spoken word in the silence. His hand is shaking
as he stubs the cigarette out. Mustn't let this get to me. He
glances at the wall. It's nineteen hundred hours; too late, too late. He
should go home, Andy will be worrying herself sick.
In the end it's all too much. He slides the thin folder into the safe
behind his chair, turns the locking handle and spins the dial, then
signs himself out of the reading room and goes through the usual exit
search.
During the thirty mile drive home, he spits out of the window, trying
to rid his mouth of the taste of Auschwitz ashes.
Late Night
in the White House
The colonel is febrile, jittering about the
room with gung-ho enthusiasm. "That was a mighty fine report you pulled
together, Jourgensen!'' He paces over to the niche between the office
filing cabinet and the wall, turns on the spot, paces back to the far
side of his desk. "You understand the fundamentals. I like that. A few
more guys like you running the company and we wouldn't have this fuckup
in Tehran.'' He grins, contagiously. The colonel is a firestorm of
enthusiasm, burning out of control like a forties comic-book hero. He
has Roger on the edge of his chair, almost sitting at attention. Roger
has to bite his tongue to remind himself not to call the colonel 'sir'
-- he's a civilian, not in the chain of command. "That's why I've asked
Deputy Director McMurdo to reassign you to this office, to work on my
team as company liaison. And I'm pleased to say that he's agreed.''
Roger can't stop himself: "To work here, sir?'' Here is in
the basement of the Executive Office Building, an extension hanging off
the White House. Whoever the colonel is he's got pull, in
positively magical quantities. "What will I be doing, sir? You said,
your team --''
"Relax a bit. Drink your coffee.'' The colonel paces back behind his
desk, sits down. Roger sips cautiously at the brown sludge in the mug
with the Marine Corps crest. "The president told me to organize a
team,'' says the colonel, so casually that Roger nearly chokes on his
coffee, "to handle contingencies. October surprises. Those asshole
commies down in Nicaragua. 'We're eyeball to eyeball with an Evil
Empire, Ozzie, and we can't afford to blink' -- those were his exact
words. The Evil Empire uses dirty tricks. But nowadays we're better than
they are: buncha hicks, like some third-world dictatorship -- Upper
Volta with shoggoths. My job is to pin them down and cut them up. Don't
give them a chance to whack the shoe on the UN table, demand
concessions. If they want to bluff I'll call 'em on it. If they want to
go toe-to-toe I'll dance with 'em.'' He's up and pacing again. "The
company used to do that, and do it okay, back in the fifties and
sixties. But too many bleeding hearts -- it makes me sick. If you guys
went back to wet ops today you'd have journalists following you every
time you went to the john in case it was newsworthy.
"Well, we aren't going to do it that way this time. It's a small team
and the buck stops here.'' The colonel pauses, then glances at the
ceiling. "Well, maybe up there. But you get the picture. I need someone
who knows the company, an insider who has clearance up the wazoo who can
go in and get the dope before it goes through a fucking committee of
ass-watching bureaucrats. I'm also getting someone from the Puzzle
Palace, and some words to give me pull with Big Black.'' He glances at
Roger sharply, and Roger nods: he's cleared for National Security Agency
-- Puzzle Palace -- intelligence, and knows about Big Black, the
National Reconnaissance Office, which is so secret that even its
existence is still classified.
Roger is impressed by this colonel, despite his better judgement.
Within the byzantine world of the US intelligence services, he is
talking about building his very own pocket battleship and sailing it
under the jolly roger with letters of marque and reprise signed by the
president. But Roger still has some questions to ask, to scope out the
limits of what Colonel North is capable of. "What about FEVER DREAM,
sir?''
The colonel puts his coffee-cup down. "I own it,'' he says, bluntly.
"And NIGHTMARE. And PLUTO. Any means necessary he said, and I
have an executive order with the ink still damp to prove it. Those
projects aren't part of the national command structure any more.
Officially they've been stood down from active status and are being
considered for inclusion in the next round of arms reduction talks.
They're not part of the deterrent ORBAT any more; we're standardizing on
just nuclear weapons. Unofficially, they're part of my group, and I will
use them as necessary to contain and reduce the Evil Empire's warmaking
abilities.''
Roger's skin crawls with an echo of that childhood terror. "And the
Dresden Agreement ...?''
"Don't worry. Nothing short of them breaking it would lead
me to do so.'' The colonel grins, toothily. "Which is where you come in
...''
The
moonlit shores of Lake Vostok
The metal pier is dry and cold, the temperature
hovering close to zero degrees Fahrenheit. It's oppressively dark in the
cavern under the ice, and Roger shivers inside his multiple layers of
insulation, shifts from foot to foot to keep warm. He has to swallow to
keep his ears clear and he feels slightly dizzy from the pressure in the
artificial bubble of air, pumped under the icy ceiling to allow humans
to exist here, under the Ross Ice Shelf; they'll all spend more than a
day sitting in depressurization chambers on the way back up to the
surface.
There is no sound from the waters lapping just below the edge of the
pier. The floodlights vanish into the surface and keep going -- the
water in the sub-surface Antarctic lake is incredibly clear -- but are
swallowed up rapidly, giving an impression of infinite, inky depths.
Roger is here as the colonel's representative, to observe the arrival
of the probe, receive the consignment they're carrying, and report back
that everything is running smoothly. The others try to ignore him,
jittery at the presence of the man from DC. There're a gaggle of
engineers and artificers, flown out via McMurdo base to handle the
midget sub's operations. A nervous lieutenant supervises a squad of
marines with complicated-looking weapons, half gun and half video
camera, stationed at the corners of the raft. And there's the usual
platform crew, deep-sea rig maintenance types -- but subdued and nervous
looking. They're afloat in a bubble of pressurized air wedged against
the underside of the Antarctic ice sheet: below them stretch the still,
supercooled waters of Lake Vostok.
They're waiting for a rendezvous.
"Five hundred yards,'' reports one of the techs. "Rising on ten.''
His companion nods. They're waiting for the men in the midget sub
drilling quietly through three miles of frigid water, intruders in a
long-drowned tomb. "Have 'em back on board in no time.'' The sub has
been away for nearly a day; it set out with enough battery juice for the
journey, and enough air to keep the crew breathing for a long time if
there's a system failure, but they've learned the hard way that
fail-safe systems aren't. Not out here, at the edge of the human world.
Roger shuffles some more. "I was afraid the battery load on that cell
you replaced would trip an undervoltage isolator and we'd be here 'til
Hell freezes over,'' the sub driver jokes to his neighbour.
Looking round, Roger sees one of the marines cross himself. "Have you
heard anything from Gorman or Suslowicz?'' he asks quietly.
The lieutenant checks his clipboard. "Not since departure, sir,'' he
says. "We don't have comms with the sub while it's submerged: too small
for ELF, and we don't want to alert anybody who might be, uh,
listening.''
"Indeed.'' The yellow hunchback shape of the midget submarine appears
at the edge of the radiance shed by the floodlights. Surface waters
undulate, oily, as the sub rises.
"Crew transfer vehicle sighted,'' the driver mutters into his mike.
He's suddenly very busy adjusting trim settings, blowing bottled air
into ballast tanks, discussing ullage levels and blade count with his
number two. The crane crew are busy too, running their long boom out
over the lake.
The sub's hatch is visible now, bobbing along the top of the water:
the lieutenant is suddenly active. "Jones! Civatti! Stake it out, left
and centre!'' The crane is already swinging the huge lifting hook over
the sub, waiting to bring it aboard. "I want eyeballs on the portholes
before you crack this thing!'' It's the tenth run -- seventh manned --
through the eye of the needle on the lake bed, the drowned structure so
like an ancient temple, and Roger has a bad feeling about it. We
can't get away with this forever, he reasons. Sooner or
later ...
The sub comes out of the water like a gigantic yellow bath toy, a
cyborg whale designed by a god with a sense of humour. It takes tense
minutes to winch it in and manoeuvre it safely onto the platform.
Marines take up position, shining torches in through two of the
portholes that bulge myopically from the smooth curve of the sub's nose.
Up on top someone is talking into a handset plugged into the stubby
conning tower; the hatch locking wheel begins to turn.
"Gorman, sir,'' It's the lieutenant. In the light of the sodium
floods everything looks sallow and washed-out; the soldier's face is the
colour of damp cardboard, slack with relief.
Roger waits while the submariner -- Gorman -- clambers unsteadily
down from the top deck. He's a tall, emaciated-looking man, wearing a
red thermal suit three sizes too big for him: salt-and-pepper stubble
textures his jaw with sandpaper. Right now, he looks like a cholera
victim; sallow skin, smell of acrid ketones as his body eats its own
protein reserves, a more revolting miasma hovering over him. There's a
slim aluminium briefcase chained to his left wrist, a bracelet of
bruises darkening the skin above it. Roger steps forward.
"Sir?'' Gorman straightens up for a moment: almost a shadow of
military attention. He's unable to sustain it. "We made the pickup.
Here's the QA sample; the rest is down below. You have the unlocking
code?'' he asks wearily.
Jourgensen nods. "One. Five. Eight. One. Two. Two. Nine.''
Gorman slowly dials it into a combination lock on the briefcase, lets
it fall open and unthreads the chain from his wrist. Floodlights glisten
on polythene bags stuffed with white powder, five kilos of high-grade
heroin from the hills of Afghanistan; there's another quarter of a ton
packed in boxes in the crew compartment. The lieutenant inspects it,
closes the case and passes it to Jourgensen. "Delivery successful,
sir.'' From the ruins on the high plateau of the Taklamakan desert to
American territory in Antarctica, by way of a detour through gates
linking alien worlds: gates that nobody knows how to create or destroy
except the Predecessors -- and they aren't talking.
"What's it like through there?'' Roger demands, shoulders tense.
"What did you see?''
Up on top, Suslowicz is sitting in the sub's hatch, half slumping
against the crane's attachment post. There's obviously something very
wrong with him. Gorman shakes his head and looks away: the wan light
makes the razor-sharp creases on his face stand out, like the crackled
and shattered surface of a Jovian moon. Crow's feet. Wrinkles. Signs of
age. Hair the colour of moonlight. "It took so long,'' he says, almost
complaining. Sinks to his knees. "All that time we've been gone
...'' He leans against the side of the sub, a pale shadow, aged beyond
his years. "The sun was so bright. And our radiation detectors.
Must have been a solar flare or something.'' He doubles over and retches
at the edge of the platform.
Roger looks at him for a long, thoughtful minute: Gorman is
twenty-five and a fixer for Big Black, early history in the Green
Berets. He was in rude good health two days ago, when he set off through
the gate to make the pick-up. Roger glances at the lieutenant. "I'd
better go and tell the colonel,'' he says. A pause. "Get these two back
to Recovery and see they're looked after. I don't expect we'll be
sending any more crews through Victor-Tango for a while.''
He turns and walks towards the lift shaft, hands clasped behind his
back to keep them from shaking. Behind him, alien moonlight glimmers
across the floor of Lake Vostok, three miles and untold light years from
home.
General
LeMay would be Proud
Warning
The following briefing film is classified SECRET INDIGO MARCH SNIPE.
If you do not have SECRET INDIGO MARCH SNIPE clearance, leave the
auditorium now and report to your unit security officer for
debriefing. Failing to observe this notice is an imprisonable
offense.
You have sixty
seconds to comply.
Video
clip
Shot of huge bomber, rounded gun turrets sprouting like
mushrooms from the decaying log of its fuselage, weirdly bulbous
engine pods slung too far out towards each wingtip, four turbine
tubes clumped around each atomic kernel.
Voice-over
"The Convair B-39 Peacemaker is the most formidable weapon
in our Strategic Air Command's arsenal for peace. Powered by eight
nuclear-heated Pratt and Whitney NP-4051 turbojets, it circles
endlessly above the Arctic ice cap, waiting for the call. This is
Item One, the flight training and test bird: twelve other birds
await criticality on the ground, for once launched a B-39 can only
be landed at two airfields in Alaska that are equipped to handle
them. This one's been airborne for nine months so far, and shows no
signs of age.''
Cut to:
A shark the size of a Boeing 727 falls away from the open
bomb bay of the monster. Stubby delta wings slice through the air,
propelled by a rocket-bright glare.
Voice-over
"A modified Navajo missile -- test article for an XK-PLUTO
payload -- dives away from a carrier plane. Unlike the real thing,
this one carries no hydrogen bombs, no direct-cycle fission ramjet
to bring retaliatory destruction to the enemy. Travelling at Mach 3
the XK-PLUTO will overfly enemy territory, dropping megaton-range
bombs until, its payload exhausted, it seeks out and circles a final
enemy. Once over the target it will eject its reactor core and rain
molten plutonium on the heads of the enemy. XK-PLUTO is a total
weapon: every aspect of its design, from the shockwave it creates as
it hurtles along at treetop height to the structure of its atomic
reactor, is designed to inflict damage.''
Cut to:
Belsen postcards, Auschwitz movies: a holiday in hell.
Voice-over
"This is why we need such a weapon. This
is what it deters. The abominations first raised by the Third
Reich's Organisation Todt, now removed to the Ukraine and deployed
in the service of New Soviet Man as our enemy calls himself.''
Cut to:
A sinister grey concrete slab, the upper surface of a Mayan
step pyramid built with East German cement. Barbed wire, guns. A
drained canal slashes north from the base of the pyramid towards the
Baltic coastline, relic of the installation process: this is where
it came from. The slave barracks squat beside the pyramid like a
horrible memorial to its black-uniformed builders.
Cut to:
The new resting place: a big concrete monolith surrounded
by three concrete lined lakes and a canal. It sits in the midst of a
Ukraine landscape, flat as a pancake, stretching out forever in all
directions.
Voice-over
"This is Project Koschei. The Kremlin's key to the gates of
hell ...''
Technology
taster
"We know they first came here during the
Precambrian age.''
Professor Gould is busy with his viewgraphs, eyes down, trying not to
pay too much attention to his audience. "We have samples of macrofauna,
discovered by palaeontologist Charles D. Walcott on his pioneering
expeditions into the Canadian Rockies, near the eastern border of
British Columbia --'' a hand-drawing of something indescribably weird
fetches up on the screen " -- like this opabina, which died
there six hundred and forty million years ago. Fossils of soft-bodied
animals that old are rare; the Burgess shale deposits are the best
record of the Precambrian fauna anyone has found to date.''
A skinny woman with big hair and bigger shoulder-pads sniffs loudly;
she has no truck with these antediluvian dates. Roger winces sympathy
for the academic. He'd rather she wasn't here, but somehow she got wind
of the famous palaeontologist's visit -- and she's the colonel's
administrative assistant. Telling her to leave would be a
career-limiting move.
"The important item to note -- '' photograph of a mangled piece of
rock, visual echoes of the opabina -- "is the tooth marks. We
find them also -- their exact cognates -- on the ring segments of the
Z-series specimens returned by the Pabodie Antarctic expedition of 1926.
The world of the Precambrian was laid out differently from our own; most
of the land masses that today are separate continents were joined into
one huge structure. Indeed, these samples were originally separated by
only two thousand miles or thereabouts. Suggesting that they brought
their own parasites with them.''
"What do tooth-marks tell us about them, that we need to know?'' asks
the colonel.
The doctor looks up. His eyes gleam: "That something liked to eat
them when they were fresh.'' There's a brief rattle of laughter.
"Something with jaws that open and close like the iris in your camera.
Something we thought was extinct.''
Another viewgraph, this time with a blurry underwater photograph on
it. The thing looks a bit like a weird fish -- a turbocharged, armoured
hagfish with side-skirts and spoilers, or maybe a squid with not enough
tentacles. The upper head is a flattened disk, fronted by two bizarre
fern-like tentacles drooping over the weird sucker-mouth on its
underside. "This snapshot was taken in Lake Vostok last year. It should
be dead: there's nothing there for it to eat. This, ladies and
gentlemen, is Anomalocaris, our toothy chewer.'' He pauses for
a moment. "I'm very grateful to you for showing it to me,'' he adds,
"even though it's going to make a lot of my colleagues very angry.''
Is that a shy grin? The professor moves on rapidly, not giving Roger
a chance to fathom his real reaction. "Now this is interesting
in the extreme,'' Gould comments. Whatever it is, it looks like a
cauliflower head, or maybe a brain: fractally branching stalks
continuously diminishing in length and diameter, until they turn into an
iridescent fuzzy manifold wrapped around a central stem. The base of the
stem is rooted to a barrel-shaped structure that stands on four stubby
tentacles.
"We had somehow managed to cram Anomalocaris into our
taxonomy, but this is something that has no precedent. It bears a
striking resemblance to an enlarged body segment of Hallucigena
--'' here he shows another viewgraph, something like a stiletto-heeled
centipede wearing a war-bonnet of tentacles -- "but a year ago we worked
out that we had poor hallucigena upside down and it was
actually just a spiny worm. And the high levels of iridium and diamond
in the head here ... this isn't a living creature, at least not within
the animal kingdom I've been studying for the past thirty years. There's
no cellular structure at all. I asked one of my colleagues for help and
they were completely unable to isolate any DNA or RNA from it at all.
It's more like a machine that displays biological levels of
complexity.''
"Can you put a date to it?'' asks the colonel.
"Yup.'' The professor grins. "It predates the wave of atmospheric
atomic testing that began in 1945; that's about all. We think it's from
some time in the first half of this century, last half of last century.
It's been dead for years, but there are older people still walking this
earth. In contrast --'' he flips to the picture of Anomalocaris
"-- this specimen we found in rocks that are roughly six hundred and ten
million years old.'' He whips up another shot: similar structure, much
clearer. "Note how similar it is to the dead but not decomposed one.
They're obviously still alive somewhere.''
He looks at the colonel, suddenly bashful and tongue-tied: "Can I
talk about the, uh, thing we were, like, earlier ...?''
"Sure. Go ahead. Everyone here is cleared for it.'' The colonel's
casual wave takes in the big-haired secretary, and Roger, and the two
guys from Big Black who are taking notes, and the very serious woman
from the Secret Service, and even the balding, worried-looking Admiral
with the double chin and coke-bottle glasses.
"Oh. Alright.'' Bashfulness falls away. "Well, we've done some
preliminary dissections on the Anomalocaris tissues you
supplied us with. And we've sent some samples for laboratory analysis --
nothing anyone could deduce much from,'' he adds hastily. He straightens
up. "What we discovered is quite simple: these samples didn't originate
in Earth's ecosystem. Cladistic analysis of their intracellular
characteristics and what we've been able to work out of their
biochemistry indicates, not a point of divergence from our own ancestry,
but the absence of common ancestry. A cabbage is more human,
has more in common with us, than that creature. You can't tell by
looking at the fossils, six hundred million years after it died, but
live tissue samples are something else.
"Item: it's a multicellular organism, but each cell appears to have
multiple structures like nuclei -- a thing called a syncitium. No DNA,
it uses RNA with a couple of base pairs that aren't used by terrestrial
biology. We haven't been able to figure out what most of its organelles
do, what their terrestrial cognates would be, and it builds proteins
using a couple of amino acids that we don't. That nothing does.
Either it's descended from an ancestry that diverged from ours before
the archaeobacteria, or -- more probably -- it is no relative at all.''
He isn't smiling any more. "The gateways, colonel?''
"Yeah, that's about the size of it. The critter you've got there was
retrieved by one of our, uh, missions. On the other side of a gate.''
Gould nods. "I don't suppose you could get me some more?'' he asks
hopefully.
"All missions are suspended pending an investigation into an accident
we had earlier this year,'' the colonel says, with a significant glance
at Roger. Suslowicz died two weeks ago; Gorman is still disastrously
sick, connective tissue rotting in his body, massive radiation exposure
the probable cause. Normal service will not be resumed; the pipeline
will remain empty until someone can figure out a way to make the
deliveries without losing the crew. Roger inclines his head minutely.
"Oh well.'' The professor shrugs. "Let me know if you do. By the way,
do you have anything approximating a fix on the other end of the gate?''
"No,'' says the colonel, and this time Roger knows he's lying.
Mission four, before the colonel diverted their payload capacity to
another purpose, planted a compact radio telescope in an empty courtyard
in the city on the far side of the gate. XK-Masada, where the air's too
thin to breathe without oxygen; where the sky is indigo, and the
buildings cast razor-sharp shadows across a rocky plain baked to the
consistency of pottery under a blood-red sun. Subsequent analysis of
pulsar signals recorded by the station confirmed that it was nearly six
hundred light years closer to the galactic core, inward along the same
spiral arm. There are glyphs on the alien buildings that resemble
symbols seen in grainy black-and-white Minox photos of the doors of the
bunker in the Ukraine. Symbols behind which the subject of Project
Koschei lies undead and sleeping: something evil, scraped from a nest in
the drowned wreckage of a city on the Baltic floor. "Why do you want to
know where they came from?''
"Well. We know so little about the context in which life evolves.''
For a moment the professor looks wistful. "We have -- had -- only one
datum point: Earth, this world. Now we have a second, a fragment of a
second. If we get a third, we can begin to ask deep questions like, not,
'is there life out there?' -- because we know the answer to that one,
now -- but questions like 'what sort of life is out there?' and
'is there a place for us?'''
Roger shudders: idiot, he thinks. If only you knew you
wouldn't be so happy -- He restrains the urge to speak up.
Doing so would be another career-limiting move. More to the point, it
might be a life-expectancy-limiting move for the professor, who
certainly didn't deserve any such drastic punishment for his
cooperation. Besides, Harvard professors visiting the Executive Office
Building in DC are harder to disappear than comm-symp teachers in some
fly-blown jungle village in Nicaragua. Somebody might notice. The
colonel would be annoyed.
Roger realises that Professor Gould is staring at him. "Do you have a
question for me?'' asks the distinguished palaeontologist.
"Uh -- in a moment.'' Roger shakes himself. Remembering time-survivor
curves, the captured Nazi medical atrocity records mapping the ability
of a human brain to survive in close proximity to the Baltic
Singularity. Mengele's insanity. The SS's final attempt to liquidate the
survivors, the witnesses. Koschei, primed and pointed at the American
heartland like a darkly evil gun. The "world-eating mind'' adrift in
brilliant dreams of madness, estivating in the absence of its prey:
dreaming of the minds of sapient beings, be they barrel-bodied
wing-flying tentacular things, or their human inheritors. "Do
you think they could have been intelligent, professor? Conscious, like
us?''
"I'd say so.'' Gould's eyes glitter. "This one --'' he points to a
viewgraph -- "isn't alive as we know it. And this one -- ''
he's found a Predecessor, god help him, barrel-bodied and bat-winged --
"had what looks like a lot of very complex ganglia, not a brain as we
know it, but at least as massive as our own. And some specialised
grasping adaptations that might be interpreted as facilitating tool use.
Put the two together and you have a high level technological
civilization. Gateways between planets orbiting different stars. Alien
flora, fauna, or whatever. I'd say an interstellar civilization isn't
out of the picture. One that has been extinct for deep geological time
-- ten times as long as the dinosaurs -- but that has left relics that
work.'' His voice is trembling with emotion. "We humans, we've barely
scratched the surface! The longest lasting of our relics? All our
buildings will be dust in twenty thousand years, even the pyramids. Neil
Armstrong's footprints in the Sea of Tranquillity will crumble under
micrometeoroid bombardment in a mere half million years or so. The
emptied oil fields will refill over ten million years, methane
percolating up through the mantle: continental drift will erase
everything. But these people...! They built to last. There's so
much to learn from them. I wonder if we're worthy pretenders to their
technological crown?''
"I'm sure we are, professor,'' the colonel's secretary says brassily.
"Isn't that right, Ollie?''
The colonel nods, grinning. "You betcha, Fawn. You betcha!''
The Great
Satan
Roger sits in the bar in the King David hotel,
drinking from a tall glass of second-rate lemonade and sweating in spite
of the air conditioning. He's dizzy and disoriented from jet-lag, the
gut-cramps have only let him come down from his room in the past hour,
and he has another two hours to go before he can try to place a call to
Andrea. They had another blazing row before he flew out here; she
doesn't understand why he keeps having to visit odd corners of the
globe. She only knows that his son is growing up thinking a father is a
voice that phones at odd times of day.
Roger is mildly depressed, despite the buzz of doing business at this
level. He spends a lot of time worrying about what will happen if
they're found out -- what Andrea will do, or Jason for that matter,
Jason whose father is a phone call away all the time -- if Roger is led
away in handcuffs beneath the glare of flash bulbs. If the colonel
sings, if the shy bald admiral is browbeaten into spilling the beans to
Congress, who will look after them then?
Roger has no illusions about what kills black operations: there are
too many people in the loop, too many elaborate front corporations and
numbered bank accounts and shady Middle Eastern arms dealers. Sooner or
later someone will find a reason to talk, and Roger is in too deep. He
isn't just the company liaison officer any more: he's become the
colonel's bag-man, his shadow, the guy with the diplomatic passport and
the bulging briefcase full of heroin and end-user certificates.
At least the ship will sink from the top down, he thinks. There are
people very high up who want the colonel to succeed. When the
shit hits the fan and is sprayed across the front page of the
Washington Post, it will likely take down cabinet members and
secretaries of state: the President himself will have to take the
witness stand and deny everything. The republic will question itself.
A hand descends on his shoulder, sharply cutting off his reverie.
"Howdy, Roger! Whatcha worrying about now?''
Jourgensen looks up wearily. "Stuff,'' he says gloomily. "Have a
seat.'' The redneck from the embassy -- Mike Hamilton, some kind of
junior attache for embassy protocol by cover -- pulls out a chair and
crashes down on it like a friendly car wreck. He's not really a redneck,
Roger knows -- rednecks don't come with doctorates in foreign relations
from Yale -- but he likes people to think he's a bumpkin when he wants
to get something from them.
"He's early,'' says Hamilton, looking past Roger's ear, voice
suddenly all business. "Play the agenda, I'm your dim but friendly good
cop. Got the background? Deniables ready?''
Roger nods, then glances round and sees Mehmet (family name unknown)
approaching from the other side of the room. Mehmet is impeccably
manicured and tailored, wearing a suit from Jermyn Street that costs
more than Roger earns in a month. He has a neatly trimmed beard and
moustache and talks with a pronounced English accent. Mehmet is a
Turkish name, not a Persian one: pseudonym, of course. To look at him
you would think he was a westernized Turkish businessman -- certainly
not an Iranian revolutionary with heavy links to Hezbollah and (whisper
this), Old Man Ruholla himself, the hermit of Qom. Never, ever, in a
thousand years, the unofficial Iranian ambassador to the Little Satan in
Tel Aviv.
Mehmet strides over. A brief exchange of pleasantries masks the
essential formality of their meeting: he's early, a deliberate move to
put them off-balance. He's outnumbered, too, and that's also a move to
put them on the defensive, because the first rule of diplomacy is never
to put yourself in a negotiating situation where the other side can
assert any kind of moral authority, and sheer weight of numbers is a
powerful psychological tool.
"Roger, my dear fellow.'' He smiles at Jourgensen. "And the charming
doctor Hamilton, I see.'' The smile broadens. "I take it the good
colonel is desirous of news of his friends?''
Jourgensen nods. "That is indeed the case.''
Mehmet stops smiling. For a moment he looks ten years older. "I
visited them,'' he says shortly. "No, I was taken to see them.
It is indeed grave, my friends. They are in the hands of very dangerous
men, men who have nothing to lose and are filled with hatred.''
Roger speaks: "There is a debt between us --''
Mehmet holds up a hand. "Peace, my friend. We will come to that.
These are men of violence, men who have seen their homes destroyed and
families subjected to indignities, and their hearts are full of anger.
It will take a large display of repentance, a high blood-price, to buy
their acquiescence. That is part of our law, you understand? The family
of the bereaved may demand blood-price of the transgressor, and how else
might the world be? They see it in these terms: that you must repent of
your evils and assist them in waging holy war against those who would
defile the will of Allah.''
Roger sighs. "We do what we can,'' he says. "We're shipping them
arms. We're fighting the Soviets every way we can without provoking the
big one. What more do they want? The hostages -- that's not playing well
in DC. There's got to be some give and take. If Hezbollah don't release
them soon they'll just convince everyone what they're not serious about
negotiating. And that'll be an end to it. The colonel wants to
help you, but he's got to have something to show the man at the top,
right?''
Mehmet nods. "You and I are men of the world and understand that this
keeping of hostages is not rational, but they look to you for defence
against the great Satan that assails them, and their blood burns with
anger that your nation, for all its fine words, takes no action. The
great Satan rampages in Afghanistan, taking whole villages by night, and
what is done? The United States turns its back. And they are not the
only ones who feel betrayed. Our Ba'athist foes from Iraq ... in Basra
the unholy brotherhood of Takrit and their servants the Mukhabarat hold
nightly sacrifice upon the altar of Yair-Suthot; the fountains of blood
in Tehran testify to their effect. If the richest, most powerful nation
on earth refuses to fight, these men of violence from the Bekaa think,
how may we unstopper the ears of that nation? And they are not
sophisticates like you or I.''
He looks at Roger, who hunches his shoulders uneasily. "We can't
move against the Soviets openly! They must understand that it would be
the end of far more than their little war. If the Taliban want American
help against the Russians, it cannot be delivered openly.''
"It is not the Russians that we quarrel with,'' Mehmet says quietly,
"but their choice in allies. They believe themselves to be infidel
atheists, but by their deeds they shall be known; the icy spoor of Leng
is upon them, their tools are those described in the Kitab al Azif. We
have proof that they have violated the terms of the Dresden Agreement.
The accursed and unhallowed stalk the frozen passes of the Himalayas by
night, taking all whose path they cross. And will you stopper your ears
even as the Russians grow in misplaced confidence, sure that their
dominance of these forces of evil is complete? The gates are opening
everywhere, as it was prophesied. Last week we flew an F-14C with a
camera relay pod through one of them. The pilot and weapons operator are
in paradise now, but we have glanced into hell and have the film and
radar plots to prove it.''
The Iranian ambassador fixes the redneck from the embassy with an icy
gaze. "Tell your ambassador that we have opened preliminary discussions
with Mossad, with a view to purchasing the produce of a factory at
Dimona, in the Negev desert. Past insults may be set aside, for the
present danger imperils all of us. They are receptive to our
arguments, even if you are not: his holiness the Ayatollah has declared
in private that any warrior who carries a nuclear device into the abode
of the eater of souls will certainly achieve paradise. There will be an
end to the followers of the ancient abominations on this Earth, doctor
Hamilton, even if we have to push the nuclear bombs down their throats
with our own hands!''
Swimming
pool
"Mister Jourgensen, at what point did you
become aware that the Iranian government was threatening to violate UN
Resolution 216 and the Non-Proliferation Protocol to the 1956 Geneva
accords?''
Roger sweats under the hot lights: his heartbeat accelerates. "I'm
not sure I understand the question, sir.''
"I asked you a direct question. Which part don't you understand? I'm
going to repeat myself slowly: when did you realise that the Iranian
Government was threatening to violate resolution 216 and the 1956 Geneva
Accords on nuclear proliferation?''
Roger shakes his head. It's like a bad dream, unseen insects buzzing
furiously around him. "Sir, I had no direct dealings with the Iranian
government. All I know is that I was asked to carry messages to and from
a guy called Mehmet who I was told knew something about our hostages in
Beirut. My understanding is that the colonel has been conducting secret
negotiations with this gentleman or his backers for some time -- a
couple of years -- now. Mehmet made allusions to parties in the Iranian
administration but I have no way of knowing if he was telling the truth,
and I never saw any diplomatic credentials.''
There's an inquisition of dark-suited congressmen opposite him, like
a jury of teachers sitting in judgement over an errant pupil. The
trouble is, these teachers can put him in front of a judge and send him
to prison for many years, so that Jason really will grow up
with a father who's a voice on the telephone, a father who isn't around
to take him to air shows or ball games or any of the other rituals of
growing up. They're talking to each other quietly, deciding on another
line of questioning: Roger shifts uneasily in his chair. This is a
closed hearing, the television camera a gesture in the direction of the
congressional archives: a pack of hungry democrats have scented
republican blood in the water.
The congressman in the middle looks towards Roger. "Stop right there.
Where did you know about this guy Mehmet from? Who told you to go see
him and who told you what he was?''
Roger swallows. "I got a memo from Fawn, like always. Admiral
Poindexter wanted a man on the spot to talk to this guy, a messenger,
basically, who was already in the loop. Colonel North signed off on it
and told me to charge the trip to his discretionary fund.'' That must
have been the wrong thing to say, because two of the congressmen are
leaning together and whispering in each other's ears, and an aide
obligingly sidles up to accept a note, then dashes away. "I was told
that Mehmet was a mediator,'' Roger adds. "In trying to resolve the
Beirut hostage thing.''
"A mediator.'' The guy asking the questions looks at him in
disbelief.
The man to his left -- who looks as old as the moon, thin white hair,
liver spots on his hooked nose, eyelids like sacks -- chuckles
appreciatively. "Yeah. Like Hitler was a diplomat. 'One more
territorial demand' --'' he glances round. "Nobody else remember that?''
he asks plaintively.
"No sir,'' Roger says very seriously.
The prime interrogator snorts. "What did Mehmet tell you Iran was
going to do, exactly?''
Roger thinks for a moment. "He said they were going to buy something
from a factory at Dimona. I understood this to be the Israeli Defence
Ministry's nuclear weapons research institute, and the only logical item
-- in the context of our discussion -- was a nuclear weapon. Or weapons.
He said the Ayatollah had decreed that a suicide bomber who took out the
temple of Yog-Sothoth in Basra would achieve paradise, and that they
also had hard evidence that the Soviets have deployed certain illegal
weapons systems in Afghanistan. This was in the context of discussing
illegal weapons proliferation; he was very insistent about the Iraq
thing.''
"What exactly are these weapons systems?'' demands the third
inquisitor, a quiet, hawk-faced man sitting on the left of the panel.
"The shoggot'im, they're called: servitors. There are several kinds
of advanced robotic systems made out of molecular components: they can
change shape, restructure material at the atomic level -- act like
corrosive acid, or secrete diamonds. Some of them are like a tenuous
mist -- what Doctor Drexler at MIT calls a utility fog -- while others
are more like an oily globule. Apparently they may be able to
manufacture more of themselves, but they're not really alive in any
meaning of the term we're familiar with. They're programmable, like
robots, using a command language deduced from recovered records of the
forerunners who left them here. The Molotov Raid of 1930 brought back a
large consignment of them; all we have to go on are the scraps they
missed, and reports by the Antarctic Survey. Professor Liebkunst's files
in particular are most frustrating --''
"Stop. So you're saying the Russians have these, uh, Shoggoths, but
we don't have any. And even those dumb Arab bastards in Baghdad are
working on them. So you're saying we've got a, a Shoggoth gap? A
strategic chink in our armour? And now the Iranians say the Russians are
using them in Afghanistan?''
Roger speaks rapidly: "That is minimally correct, sir, although
countervailing weapons have been developed to reduce the risk of a
unilateral preemption escalating to an exchange of weakly godlike
agencies.'' The congressman in the middle nods encouragingly. "For the
past three decades, the B-39 Peacemaker force has been tasked by SIOP
with maintaining an XK-PLUTO capability directed at ablating the ability
of the Russians to activate Project Koschei, the dormant alien entity
they captured from the Nazis at the end of the last war. We have twelve
PLUTO-class atomic-powered cruise missiles pointed at that thing, day
and night, as many megatons as the entire Minuteman force. In principle,
we will be able to blast it to pieces before it can be brought to full
wakefulness and eat the minds of everyone within two hundred miles.''
He warms to his subject. "Secondly, we believe the Soviet control of
Shoggoth technology is rudimentary at best. They know how to tell them
to roll over an Afghan hill-farmer village, but they can't manufacture
more of them. Their utility as weapons is limited -- but terrifying --
but they're not much of a problem. A greater issue is the temple in
Basra. This contains an operational gateway, and according to Mehmet the
Iraqi political secret police, the Mukhabarat, are trying to figure out
how to manipulate it; they're trying to summon something through it. He
seemed to be mostly afraid that they -- and the Russians -- would lose
control of whatever it was; presumably another weakly godlike creature
like the K-Thulu entity at the core of Project Koschei.''
The old guy speaks: "This foo-loo thing, boy -- you can drop those
stupid K prefixes around me -- is it one of a kind?''
Roger shakes his head. "I don't know, sir. We know the gateways link
to at least three other planets. There may be many that we don't know
of. We don't know how to create them or close them; all we can do is
send people through, or pile bricks in the opening.'' He nearly bites
his tongue, because there are more than three worlds out there,
and he's been to at least one of them: the bolt-hole on XK-Masada, built
by the NRO from their secret budget. He's seen the mile-high dome
Buckminster Fuller spent his last decade designing for them, the rings
of Patriot air defence missiles. A squadron of black diamond-shaped
fighters from the Skunk works, said to be invisible to radar, patrols
the empty skies of XK-Masada. Hydroponic farms and empty barracks and
apartment blocks await the senators and congressmen and their families
and thousands of support personnel. In event of war they'll be evacuated
through the small gate that has been moved to the Executive Office
Building basement, in a room beneath the swimming pool where Jack used
to go skinny-dipping with Marilyn.
"Off the record now.'' The old congressman waves his hand in a
chopping gesture: "I say off, boy.'' The cameraman switches off
his machine and leaves. He leans forward, towards Roger. "What you're
telling me is, we've been waging a secret war since, when? The end of
the second world war? Earlier, the Pabodie Antarctic expedition in the
twenties, whose survivors brought back the first of these alien relics?
And now the Eye-ranians have gotten into the game and figure it's part
of their fight with Saddam?''
"Sir.'' Roger barely trusts himself to do more than nod.
"Well.'' The congressman eyes his neighbour sharply. "Let me put it
to you that you have heard the phrase, 'the great filter'. What does it
mean to you?''
"The great --'' Roger stops. Professor Gould, he thinks. "We
had a professor of palaeontology lecture us,'' he explains. "I think he
mentioned it. Something about why there aren't any aliens in flying
saucers buzzing us the whole time.''
The congressman snorts. His neighbour starts and sits up. "Thanks to
Pabodie and his followers, Liebkunst and the like, we know there's a lot
of life in the universe. The great filter, boy, is whatever
force stops most of it developing intelligence and coming to visit.
Something, somehow, kills intelligent species before they develop this
kind of technology for themselves. How about meddling with relics of the
elder ones? What do you think of that?''
Roger licks his lips nervously. "That sounds like a good possibility,
sir,'' he says. His unease is building.
The congressman's expression is intense: "These weapons your colonel
is dicking around with make all our nukes look like a toy bow and arrow,
and all you can say is it's a good possibility, sir? Seems to
me like someone in the Oval Office has been asleep at the switch.''
"Sir, executive order 2047, issued January 1980, directed the armed
forces to standardize on nuclear weapons to fill the mass destruction
role. All other items were to be developmentally suspended, with surplus
stocks allocated to the supervision of Admiral Poindexter's joint
munitions expenditure committee. Which Colonel North was detached to by
the USMC high command, with the full cognizance of the White House --''
The door opens. The congressman looks round angrily: "I thought I
said we weren't to be disturbed!''
The aide standing there looks uncertain. "Sir, there's been an, uh,
major security incident, and we need to evacuate --''
"Where? What happened?'' demands the congressman. But Roger, with a
sinking feeling, realises that the aide isn't watching the house
committee members: and the guy behind him is Secret Service.
"Basra. There's been an attack, sir.'' A furtive glance at Roger, as
his brain freezes in denial: "If you'd all please come this way ...''
Bombing in
fifteen minutes
Heads down, through a corridor where
congressional staffers hurry about carrying papers, urgently calling one
another. A cadre of dark-suited secret service agents close in, hustling
Roger along in the wake of the committee members. A wailing like
tinnitus fills his ears. "What's happening?'' he asks, but nobody
answers.
Down into the basement. Another corridor, where two marine guards are
waiting with drawn weapons. The secret service guys are exchanging terse
reports by radio. The committee men are hustled away along a narrow
service tunnel: Roger is stalled by the entrance. "What's going on?'' he
asks his minder.
"Just a moment, sir.'' More listening: these guys cock their heads to
one side as they take instruction, birds of prey scanning the horizon
for prey. "Delta four coming in. Over. You're clear to go along the
tunnel now, sir. This way.''
"What's happening?'' Roger demands as he lets himself be
hustled into the corridor, along to the end and round a sharp corner.
Numb shock takes hold: he keeps putting one foot in front of the other.
"We're now at Defcon one, sir. You're down on the special list as
part of the house staff. Next door on the left, sir.''
The queue in the dim-lit basement room is moving fast, white-gloved
guards with clipboards checking off men and a few women in suits as they
step through a steel blast door one by one and disappear from view.
Roger looks round in bewilderment: he sees a familiar face. "Fawn!
What's going on?''
The secretary looks puzzled. "I don't know. Roger? I thought you were
testifying today.''
"So did I.'' They're at the door. "What else?''
"Ronnie was making a big speech in Helsinki; the colonel had me
record it in his office. Something about not coexisting with the empire
of evil. He cracked some kinda joke about how we start bombing in
fifteen minutes, then this --''
They're at the door. It opens on a steel-walled airlock and the
marine guard is taking their badges and hustling them inside. Two staff
types and a middle-aged brigadier join them and the door thumps shut.
The background noise vanishes, Roger's ears pop, then the inner door
opens and another marine guard waves them through into the receiving
hall.
"Where are we?'' asks the big-haired secretary, staring around.
"Welcome to XK-Masada,'' says Roger. Then his childhood horrors catch
up with him and he goes in search of a toilet to throw up in.
We need
you back
Roger spends the next week in a state of numbed
shock. His apartment here is like a small hotel room -- a hotel with
security, air conditioning, and windows that only open onto an interior
atrium. He pays little attention to his surroundings. It's not as if he
has a home to return to.
Roger stops shaving. Stops changing his socks. Stops looking in
mirrors or combing his hair. He smokes a lot, orders cheap bourbon from
the commissary, and drinks himself into an amnesic stupor each night. He
is, frankly, a mess. Self-destructive. Everything disintegrated under
him at once: his job, the people he held in high regard, his family, his
life. All the time he can't get one thing out of his head: the
expression on Gorman's face as he stands there, in front of the
submarine, rotting from the inside out with radiation sickness, dead and
not yet knowing it. It's why he's stopped looking in mirrors.
On the fourth day he's slumped in a chair watching taped I Love
Lucy re-runs on the boob tube when the door to his suite opens
quietly. Someone comes in. He doesn't look round until the colonel walks
across the screen and unplugs the TV set at the wall, then sits down in
the chair next to him. The colonel has bags of dark skin under his eyes;
his jacket is rumpled and his collar is unbuttoned.
"You've got to stop this, Roger,'' he says quietly. "You look like
shit.''
"Yeah, well. You too.''
The colonel passes him a slim manila folder. Without wanting to,
Roger slides out the single sheet of paper within.
"So it was them.''
"Yeah.'' A moment's silence. "For what it's worth, we haven't lost
yet. We may yet pull your wife and son out alive. Or be able to go back
home.''
"Your family too, I suppose.'' Roger's touched by the colonel's
consideration, the pious hope that Andrea and Jason will be alright,
even through his shell of misery. He realises his glass is empty.
Instead of re-filling it he puts it down on the carpet beside his feet.
"Why?''
The colonel removes the sheet of paper from his numb fingers.
"Probably someone spotted you in the King David and traced you back to
us. The Mukhabarat had agents everywhere, and if they were in league
with the KGB ...'' he shrugs. "Things escalated rapidly. Then the
president cracked that joke over a hot mike that was supposed to be
switched off ... Have you been checking in with the desk summaries this
week?''
Roger looks at him blankly. "Should I?''
"Oh, things are still happening.'' The colonel leans back and
stretches his feet out. "From what we can tell of the situation on the
other side, not everyone's dead yet. Ligachev's screaming blue murder
over the hotline, accusing us of genocide: but he's still talking.
Europe is a mess and nobody knows what's going on in the Middle East --
even the Blackbirds aren't making it back out again.''
"The thing at Takrit.''
"Yeah. It's bad news, Roger. We need you back.''
"Bad news?''
"The worst.'' The colonel jams his hands between his knees, stares at
the floor like a bashful child. "Saddam Hussein al-Takriti spent years
trying to get his hands on elder technology. It looks like he finally
succeeded in stabilising the gate into Sothoth. Whole villages
disappeared, Marsh Arabs, wiped out in the swamps of Eastern Iraq.
Reports of yellow rain, people's skin melting right off their bones. The
Iranians got itchy and finally went nuclear. Trouble is, they did so two
hours before that speech. Some asshole in Plotsk launched half
the Uralskoye SS-20 grid -- they went to launch on warning eight months
ago -- burning south, praise Jesus. Scratch the Middle East, period --
everything from the Nile to the Khyber Pass is toast. We're still
waiting for the callback on Moscow, but SAC has put the whole Peacemaker
force on airborne alert. So far we've lost the eastern seaboard as far
south as North Virginia and they've lost the Donbass basin and
Vladivostok. Things are a mess; nobody can even agree whether we're
fighting the commies or something else. But the box at Chernobyl --
Project Koschei -- the doors are open, Roger. We orbited a
Keyhole-eleven over it and there are tracks, leading west. The PLUTO
strike didn't stop it -- and nobody knows what the fuck is going on in
WarPac country. Or France, or Germany, or Japan, or England.''
The colonel makes a grab for Roger's wild turkey, rubs the neck clean
and swallows from the bottle. He looks at Roger with a wild expression
on his face. "Koschei is loose, Roger. They fucking woke the
thing. And now they can't control it. Can you believe that?''
"I can believe that.''
"I want you back behind a desk tomorrow morning, Roger. We need to
know what this Thulu creature is capable of. We need to know what to do
to stop it. Forget Iraq; Iraq is a smoking hole in the map. But K-Thulu
is heading towards the Atlantic coast. What are we going to do if it
doesn't stop?''
Masada
The city of XK-Masada sprouts like a vast
mushroom, a mile-wide dome emerging from the top of a cold plateau on a
dry planet that orbits a dying star. The jagged black shapes of F-117's
howl across the empty skies outside it at dusk and dawn, patrolling the
threatening emptiness that stretches as far as the mind can imagine.
Shadows move in the streets of the city, hollowed out human shells in
uniform. They rustle around the feet of the towering concrete blocks
like the dry leaves of autumn, obsessively focussed on the tasks that
lend structure to their remaining days. Above them tower masts of steel,
propping up the huge geodesic dome that arches across the sky: blocking
out the hostile, alien constellations, protecting frail humanity from
the dust storms that periodically scour the bones of the ancient world.
The gravity here is a little lighter, the night sky whorled and marbled
by the diaphanous sheets of gas blasted off the dying star that lights
their days. During the long winter nights, a flurry of carbon dioxide
snow dusts the surface of the dome: but the air is bone-dry, the city
slaking its thirst on subterranean aquifers.
This planet was once alive -- there is still a scummy sea of algae
near the equator that feeds oxygen into the atmosphere, and there is a
range of volcanoes near the north pole that speaks of plate tectonics in
motion -- but it is visibly dying. There is a lot of history here, but
no future.
Sometimes, in the early hours when he cannot sleep, Roger walks
outside the city, along the edge of the dry plateau. Machines labour on
behind him, keeping the city tenuously intact: he pays them little
attention. There is talk of mounting an expedition to Earth one of these
years, to salvage whatever is left before the searing winds of time
erase them forever. Roger doesn't like to think about that. He tries to
avoid thinking about Earth as much as possible: except when he cannot
sleep but walks along the cliff top, prodding at memories of Andrea and
Jason and his parents and sister and relatives and friends, each of them
as painful as the socket of a missing tooth. He has a mouthful of
emptiness, bitter and aching, out here on the edge of the plateau.
Sometimes Roger thinks he's the last human being alive. He works in
an office, feverishly trying to sort out what went wrong: and bodies
move around him, talking, eating in the canteen, sometimes talking
to him and waiting as if they expect a dialogue. There are bodies
here, men and some women chatting, civilian and some military -- but no
people. One of the bodies, an army surgeon, told him he's suffering from
a common stress disorder, survivor's guilt. This may be so, Roger
admits, but it doesn't change anything. Soulless days follow sleepless
nights into oblivion, dust trickling over the side of the cliff like
sand into the un-dug graves of his family.
A narrow path runs along the side of the plateau, just downhill from
the foundations of the city power plant where huge apertures belch air
warmed by the radiators of the nuclear reactor. Roger follows the path,
gravel and sandy rock crunching under his worn shoes. Foreign stars
twinkle overhead, forming unrecognizable patterns that tell him he's far
from home. The trail drops away from the top of the plateau, until the
city is an unseen shadow looming above and behind his shoulder. To his
right is a dizzying panorama, the huge rift valley with its ancient city
of the dead stretched out before him. Beyond it rise alien mountains,
their peaks as high and airless as the dead volcanoes of Mars.
About half a mile away from the dome, the trail circles an outcrop of
rock and takes a downhill switchback turn. Roger stops at the bend and
looks out across the desert at his feet. He sits down, leans against the
rough cliff face and stretches his legs out across the path, so that his
feet dangle over nothingness. Far below him, the dead valley is furrowed
with rectangular depressions; once, millions of years ago, they might
have been fields, but nothing like that survives to this date. They're
just dead, like everyone else on this world. Like Roger.
In his shirt pocket, a crumpled, precious pack of cigarettes. He
pulls a white cylinder out with shaking fingers, sniffs at it, then
flicks his lighter under it. Scarcity has forced him to cut back: he
coughs at the first lungful of stale smoke, a harsh, racking croak. The
irony of being saved from lung cancer by a world war is not lost on him.
He blows smoke out, a tenuous trail streaming across the cliff. "Why
me?'' he asks quietly.
The emptiness takes its time answering. When it does, it speaks with
the Colonel's voice. "You know the reason.''
"I didn't want to do it,'' he hears himself saying. "I didn't want to
leave them behind.''
The void laughs at him. There are miles of empty air beneath his
dangling feet. "You had no choice.''
"Yes I did! I didn't have to come here.'' He pauses. "I didn't have
to do anything,'' he says quietly, and inhales another lungful of death.
"It was all automatic. Maybe it was inevitable.''
"-- Evitable,'' echoes the distant horizon. Something dark and
angular skims across the stars, like an echo of extinct pterosaurs.
Turbofans whirring within its belly, the F117 hunts on: patrolling to
keep at bay the ancient evil, unaware that the battle is already lost.
"Your family could still be alive, you know.''
He looks up. "They could?'' Andrea? Jason? "Alive?''
The void laughs again, unfriendly: "There is life eternal within the
eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace.
They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the
possible alternative endings to their life. There is a fate
worse than death, you know.''
Roger looks at his cigarette disbelievingly: throws it far out into
the night sky above the plain. He watches it fall until its ember is no
longer visible. Then he gets up. For a long moment he stands poised on
the edge of the cliff nerving himself, and thinking. Then he takes a
step back, turns, and slowly makes his way back up the trail towards the
redoubt on the plateau. If his analysis of the situation is wrong, at
least he is still alive. And if he is right, dying would be no escape.
He wonders why hell is so cold at this time of year.
© Charles Stross 2000,
2002.
This story was first published in Spectrum SF #3, and is
reprinted in Gardner Dozois' Years' Best SF #18,
and again in Charlie's collection,
Toast (Cosmos
Books,
2002).
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