Burning Chrome (9 page)

‘There will be interrogation, certainly. In certain cases there may be hospitalization. Would you care to suggest, Colonel Korolev, that the Soviet Union is somehow at fault for Kosmograd's failures?'

Korolev was silent.

‘Kosmograd was a dream, Colonel. A dream that failed. Like space. We have no need to be here. We have an entire world to put in order. Moscow is the greatest power in history. We must not allow ourselves to lose the global perspective.'

‘Do you think we can be brushed aside that easily? We are an elite, a highly trained technical elite.'

‘A minority, Colonel, an obsolete minority. What do you contribute, aside from reams of poisonous American trash? The crew here were intended to be workers, not bloated black marketeers trafficking in jazz and pornography.' Yefremov's face was smooth and calm. ‘The crew will return to Baikonur. The weapons are capable of being directed from the ground. You, of course, will remain, and there will be guest cosmonauts: Africans, South Americans. Space still retains a degree of its former prestige for these people.'

Korolev gritted his teeth. ‘What have you done with the boy?'

‘Your Plumber?' The political officer frowned. ‘He has assaulted an officer of the Committee for State Security. He will remain under guard until he can be taken to Baikonur.'

Korolev attempted an unpleasant laugh. ‘Let him go. You'll be in too much trouble yourself to press charges. I'll speak with Marshal Gubarev personally. My rank may be entirely honorary, Yefremov, but I do retain a certain influence.'

The KGB man shrugged. ‘The gun crew are under orders from Baikonur to keep the communications module under lock and key. Their careers depend on it.'

‘Martial law, then?'

‘This isn't Kabul, Colonel. These are difficult times. You have the moral authority here; you should try to set an example.'

‘We shall see,' Korolev said.

Kosmograd swung out of Earth's shadow into raw sunlight. The walls of Korolev's Salyut popped and creaked like a nest of glass bottles. A Salyut's viewports, Korolev thought absently, fingering the broken veins at his temple, were always the first things to go.

Young Grishkin seemed to have the same thought. He drew a tube of caulk from an ankle pocket and began to inspect the seal around the viewport. He was the Plumber's assistant and closest friend.

‘We must now vote,' Korolev said wearily. Eleven of Kosmograd's twenty-four civilian crew members had agreed to attend the meeting, twelve if he counted himself. That left thirteen who were either unwilling to risk involvement or else actively hostile to the idea of a strike.
Yefremov and the six-man gun crew brought the total number of those not present to twenty. ‘We've discussed our demands. All those in favor of the list as it stands –' He raised his good hand. Three others raised theirs. Grishkin, busy at the viewport, stuck out his foot.

Korolev sighed. ‘There are few enough as it is. We'd best have unanimity. Let us hear your objections.'

‘The term
military custody,'
said a biological technician named Korovkin, ‘might be construed as implying that the military, and not the criminal Yefremov, is responsible for the situation.' The man looked acutely uncomfortable. ‘We are in sympathy otherwise but will not sign. We are Party members.' He seemed about to add something but fell silent. ‘My mother,' his wife said quietly, ‘was Jewish.'

Korolev nodded, but he said nothing.

‘This is all criminal foolishness,' said Glushko, the botanist. Neither he nor his wife had voted. ‘Madness. Kosmograd is finished, we all know it, and the sooner home the better. What has this place ever been but a prison?' Free fall disagreed with the man's metabolism; in the absence of gravity, blood tended to congest in his face and neck, making him resemble one of his experimental pumpkins.

‘You are a botanist, Vasili,' his wife said stiffly, ‘while I you will recall, am a Soyuz pilot. Your career is not at stake.'

‘I will
not
support this idiocy!' Glushko gave the bulkhead a savage kick that propelled him from the room. His wife followed, complaining bitterly in the grating undertone crew members learned to employ for private arguments.

‘Five are willing to sign,' Korolev said, ‘out of a civilian crew of twenty-four.'

‘Six,' said Tatjana, the other Soyuz pilot, her dark hair drawn back and held with a braided band of green nylon webbing. ‘You forget the Plumber…'

‘The sun balloons!' cried Grishkin, pointing toward the earth. ‘Look!'

Kosmograd was above the coast of California now, clean shorelines, intensely green fields, vast decaying cities whose names rang with a strange magic. High above a fleece of stratocumulus floated five solar balloons, mirrored geodesic spheres tethered by power lines; they had been a cheaper substitute for a grandiose American plan to build solar-powered satellites. The things worked, Korolev supposed, because for the last decade he'd watched them multiply.

‘And they say that people live in those things?' Systems Officer Stoiko had joined Grishkin at the viewport.

Korolev remembered the pathetic flurry of strange American energy schemes in the wake of the Treaty of Vienna. With the Soviet Union firmly in control of the world's oil flow, the Americans had seemed willing to try anything. Then the Kansas meltdown had permanently soured them on reactors. For more than three decades they'd been gradually sliding into isolationism and industral decline.
Space,
he thought ruefully,
they should have gone into space
. He'd never understood the strange paralysis of will that had seemed to grip their brilliant early efforts. Or perhaps it was simply a failure of imagination, of vision.
You see, Americans,
he said silently,
you really should have tried to join us here in our glorious future, here in Kosmograd
.

‘Who would want to live in something like that?' Stoiko asked, punching Grishkin's shoulder and laughing with the quiet energy of desperation.

‘You're joking,' said Yefremov. ‘Surely we're all in enough trouble as it is.'

‘We're not joking, Political Officer Yefremov, and these are our demands.' The five dissidents had crowded into the Salyut the man shared with Valentina, backing him against the aft screen. The screen was decorated with a meticulously airbrushed photograph of the premier, who was waving from the back of a tractor. Valentina, Korolev knew, would be in the museum now with Romanenko, making the straps creak. The colonel wondered how Romanenko so regularly managed to avoid his duty shifts in the gun room.

Yefremov shrugged. He glanced down the list of demands. ‘The Plumber must remain in custody. I have direct orders. As for the rest of this document –'

‘You are guilty of unauthorized use of psychiatric drugs!' Grishkin shouted.

‘That was entirely a private matter,' said Yefremov calmly.

‘A criminal act,' said Tatjana.

‘Pilot Tatjana, we both know that Grishkin here is the station's most active
samisdata
pirate! We are all criminals, don't you see? That's the beauty of our system, isn't it?' His sudden, twisted smile was shockingly cynical. ‘Kosmograd is not the
Potemkin,
and you are not revolutionaries. And you
demand
to communicate with Marshal Gubarev? He is in custody at Baikonur. And you
demand
to communicate with the minister of technology? The minister is leading the purge.' With a decisive gesture he ripped the printout to pieces, scraps of yellow flimsy scattering in free fall like slow-motion butterflies.

On the ninth day of the strike, Korolev met with Grishkin and Stoiko in the Salyut that Grishkin would ordinarily have shared with the Plumber.

For forty years the inhabitants of Kosmograd had fought an antiseptic war against mold and mildew. Dust, grease, and vapor wouldn't settle in free fall, and spore lurked everywhere – padding, in clothing, in the ventilation ducts. In the warm, moist petri-dish atmosphere, they spread like oil slicks. Now there was a reek of dry rot in the air, overlaid with ominous whiffs of burning insulation.

Korolev's sleep had been broken by the hollow thud of a departing Soyuz lander, Glushko and his wife, he supposed. During the past forty-eight hours, Yefremov had supervised the evacuation of the crew members who had refused to join the strike. The gun crew kept to the gun room and their barracks ring, where they still held Nikita the Plumber.

Grishkin's Salyut had become strike headquarters. None of the male strikers had shaved, and Stoiko had contracted a staph infection that spread across his forearms in angry welts. Surrounded by lurid pinups from American television, they ressembled some degenerate trio of pornographers. The lights were dim; Kosmograd ran on half-power. ‘With the others gone,' Stoiko said, ‘our hand is strengthened.'

Grishkin groaned. His nostrils were festooned with white streamers of surgical cotton. He was convinced that Yefremov would try to break the strike with beta-carboline aerosols. The cotton plugs were just one symptom of the general level of strain and paranoia. Before the evacuation order had come from Baikonur, one of the technicians had taken to playing Tchaikovsky's
1812 Overture
at shattering volume for hours on end. And Glushko had chased his wife, naked, bruised, and screaming, up and down the length of Kosmograd. Stoiko had accessed the KGB man's files and Bychkov's psychiatric records;
meters of yellow printout curled through the corridors in flabby spirals, rippling in the current from the ventilators.

‘Think what their testimony will be doing to us ground-side,' muttered Grishkin. ‘We won't even get a trial. Straight to the
psikuska
.' The sinister nickname for the political hospitals seemed to galvanize the boy with dread. Korolev picked apathetically at a viscous pudding of chlorella.

Stoiko snatched a drifting scroll of printout and read aloud. ‘Paranoia with a tendency to overesteem ideas! Revisionist fantasies hostile to the social system!' He crumpled the paper. ‘If we could seize the communications module, we could tie into an American comsat and dump the whole thing in their laps. Perhaps that would show Moscow something about our hostility!'

Korolev dug a stranded fruit fly from his algae pudding. Its two pairs of wings and bifurcated thorax were mute testimony to Kosmograd's high radiation levels. The insects had escaped from some forgotten experiment; generations of them had infested the station for decades. ‘The Americans have no interest in us,' Korolev said. ‘Moscow can no longer be embarrassed by such revelations.'

‘Except when the grain shipments are due,' Grishkin said.

‘America needs to sell as badly as we need to buy.' Korolev grimly spooned more chlorella into his mouth, chewed mechanically, and swallowed. ‘The Americans couldn't reach us even if they desired to. Canaveral is in ruins.'

‘We're low on fuel,' Stoiko said.

‘We can take it from the remaining landers,' Korolev said.

‘Then how in hell would we get back
down?'
Grishkin's
fists trembled. ‘Even in Siberia, there are trees, trees; the sky! To hell with it! Let it fall to pieces! Let it fall and burn!'

Korolev's pudding spattered across the bulkhead.

‘Oh, Christ,' Grishkin said, ‘I'm sorry, Colonel. I know you can't go back.'

When he entered the museum, he found Pilot Tatjana suspended before that hateful painting of the Mars Landing, her cheeks slick with tears.

‘Do you know, Colonel, they have a bust of you at Baikonur? In bronze. I used to pass it on my way to lectures.' Her eyes were red-rimmed with sleeplessness.

‘There are always busts. Academies need them.' He smiled and took her hand.

‘What was it like that day?' She still stared at the painting.

‘I hardly remember. I've seen the tapes so often, now I remember them instead. My memories of Mars are any schoolchild's.' He smiled for her again. ‘But it was not like this bad painting. In spite of everything, I'm still certain of that.'

“Why has it all gone this way, Colonel? Why is it ending now? When I was small I saw all this on television. Our future in space was forever –'

‘Perhaps the Americans were right. The Japanese sent machines instead, robots to build their orbital factories. Lunar mining failed for us, but we thought there would at least be a permanent research facility of some kind. It all had to do with purse strings, I suppose. With men who sit at desks and make decisions.'

‘Here is their final decision with regard to Kosmograd.' She passed him a folded scrap of flimsy. ‘I found this in the printout of Yefremov's orders from Moscow. They'll
allow the station's orbit to decay over the next three months.'

He found that now he too was staring fixedly at the painting he loathed. ‘It hardly matters anymore,' he heard himself say.

And then she was weeping bitterly, her face pressed hard against Korolev's crippled shoulder. ‘But I have a plan, Tatjana,' he said, stroking her hair. ‘You must listen.'

He glanced at his old Rolex. They were over eastern Siberia. He remembered how the Swiss ambassador had presented him with the watch in an enormous vaulted room in the Grand Kremlin Palace.

It was time to begin.

He drifted out of his Salyut into the docking sphere, batting at a length of printout that tried to coil around his head.

He could still work quickly and efficiently with his good hand. He was smiling as he freed a large oxygen bottle from its webbing straps. Bracing himself against a handhold, he flung the bottle across the sphere with all his strength. It rebounded harmlessly with a harsh clang. He went after it, caught it, and hurled it again.

Then he hit the decompression alalrm.

Dust spurted from speakers as a Klaxon began to wail. Triggered by the alarm, the docking bays slammed shut with a wheeze of hydraulics. Korolev's ears popped. He sneezed, then went after the bottle again.