Engineering Infinity (9 page)

Gennady took a deep breath. “Okay.
Why don’t you just tell me what you know? And I’ll do the same?”

“Yes, all right.” The utter
blackness of the night-time steppe had swallowed them; all that was visible was
the double-cone of roadway visible in the car’s headlamps. It barely changed,
moment to moment, giving the drive a timelessness Gennady would, under other
circumstances, have quite enjoyed.

“We data-mine records from the Soviet
era,” began Egorov. “To find out what really went on. It’s lucrative business,
and it supports the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Online.” He tapped his
glasses.

“A few weeks ago, we got a
request for some of the old data - from the Americans. Two requests, actually,
a day apart: one from the search engine company, and the other from the
government. We were naturally curious, so we didn’t say no; but we did a little
digging into the data ourselves. That is, we’d started to, when those men burst
into our offices and confiscated the server. And the backup.”

Gennady looked askance at him. “Really?
Where was this?”

“Um. Seattle. That’s where the
CCCOP is based - only because we’ve been banned in the old country! Russia’s
run by robber barons today, they have no regard for the glory of -”

“Yes, yes. Did you find out what
they were looking for?”

“Yes - which is how I ended up
with these travel companions you saw. They are in the pay of the American CIA.”

“Yes, but why? What does this
have to do with the
Tsarina
?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.
All we found was appropriations for strange things that should never have had
anything to do with a nuclear test. Before the
Tsarina
was set off, there was about a year of heavy construction at the site. Sometimes,
you know, they built fake towns to blow them up and examine the blast damage.
That’s what I thought at first; they ordered thousands of tonnes of concrete,
rebar and asbestos, that sort of thing. But if you look at the records after
the test, there’s no sign of where any of that material
went.”

“They ordered some sort of
agricultural crop from SNOPB,” Gennady ventured. Egorov nodded.

“None of the discrepancies would
ever have been noticed if not for your friend and whatever it is he found. What
was it, anyway?”

A strange suspicion had begun to
form in Gennady’s mind, but it was so unlikely that he shook his head. “I want
to look at the
Tsarina
site,” he said. “Maybe that’ll
tell us.”

Egorov was obviously unsatisfied
with that answer, but he said nothing, merely muttering and trying to get
himself comfortable in the Tata’s bucket seat. After a while, just as the hum
of the dark highway was starting to hypnotize Gennady, Egorov said, “It’s all
gone to Hell, you know.”

“Hmm?”

“Russia. It was hard in the old days,
but at least we had our pride.” He turned to look out the black window. “After
1990, all the life just went out of the place. Lower birth-rate, men drinking
themselves to death by the age of forty... no ambition, no hope. A lost land.”

“You left?”

“Physically, yes.” Egorov darted
a look at Gennady. “You never
leave.
Not a place
like this. For many years now, I’ve struggled with how to bring back Russia’s
old glory - our sense of
pride.
Yet the best I was
ever able to come up with was an online environment. A
game.”
He spat the word contemptuously.

Gennady didn’t reply, but he knew
how Egorov felt. Ukraine had some of the same problems - the lack of direction,
the loss of confidence... It wasn’t getting any better here. He thought of the
blasted steppes they were passing through, rendered unlivable by global
warming. There had been massive forest fires in Siberia this year, and the Gobi
desert was expanding north and west, threatening the Kazaks even as the Caspian
Sea dwindled to nothing.

He thought of SNOPB. “They’re
gone,” he said, “but they left their trash behind.” Toxic, decaying: nuclear
submarines heeled over in the waters off Murmansk, nitrates soaking the soil
around the launch pads of Baikonur. The ghosts of old Soviets prowled this
dark, as radiation in the groundwater, mutations in the forest, poisons in the
all-too-common dust clouds. Gennady had spent his whole adult life cleaning up
the mess, and before yesterday he’d been able to tell himself that it was
working - that all the worst nightmares were from the past. The metastables had
changed that, in one stroke rendering all the old fears laughable in
comparison.

“Get some sleep,” he told Egorov.
“We’re going to be driving all night.”

“I don’t sleep much anymore.” But
the old man stopped talking, and just stared ahead. He couldn’t be visiting his
online People’s Republic through his glasses; those IP addresses were blocked
here. But maybe he saw it all anyway - the brave young men in their trucks,
heading to the Semipalatinsk site to witness a nuclear blast. The rail yards
where parts for the giant moon rocket, doomed to explode on the pad, were
mustering... With his gaze fixed firmly on the past, he seemed the perfect
opposite of Ambrose with his American dreams of a new world unburdened by
history, whose red dunes marched to a pure and mysterious horizon.

The first living thing in space
had been the Russian dog Laika. She had died in orbit - had never come home. If
he glanced out at the star-speckled sky, Gennady could almost see her ghost
racing eternally through the heavens, beside the dead dream of planetary
conquest, of flags planted in alien soil and shining domes on the hills of
Mars.

They arrived at the
Tsarina
site at 4:30. Dawn, at this latitude and time of
year. The Semipalatinsk Polygon was bare, flat, blasted scrubland: Mars with
tufts of dead weed. The irony was that it hadn’t been the hundreds of nuclear
bombs set off here that had killed the land; even a decade after the Polygon
was closed, the low rolling hills had been covered with a rich carpet of waving
grass. Instead, it was the savage turn of the climate, completely unpredicted
by the KGB and the CIA, that had killed the steppe.

The road into the Polygon was
narrow blacktop with no real shoulder, no ditches, and no oncoming traffic -
although a set of lights had faded in and out of view in the rearview mirror
all through the drive. Gennady would have missed the turnoff to the
Tsarina
site had his glasses not beeped.

There had been a low wire fence
here at one time, but nobody had kept it up. He drove straight over the fallen
gate, now becoming one with the soil, and up a low rise to the crest of the
water-filled crater. There he parked and got out.

Egorov climbed out too and
stretched cautiously. “Beautiful,” he said, gazing into the epic sunrise. “Is
it radioactive here?”

“Oh, a little... That’s odd.”

“What?”

Gennady had looked at the
satellite view of the site on the way here; it was clear, standing here in
person, that the vertical perspective had lied. “The
Tsarina
was supposed to be an underground test. You usually get some subsidence of the
ground in a circle around the test site. And with the big ground shots, you
would get a crater, like Lake Chagan,” he nodded to the east. “But this... this
is a
hole.”

Egorov spat into it. “It
certainly is.” The walls of the
Tsarina
crater were
sheer and dropped a good fifty feet to black water. The “crater” wasn’t round,
either, but square, and not nearly big enough to be the result of a surface
explosion. If he hadn’t known it was the artefact of a bomb blast, Gennady
would have sworn he was looking at a flooded quarry.

Gennady gathered his equipment
and began combing the grass around the site. After a minute he found some
twisted chunks of concrete and metal, and knelt to inspect them.

Egorov came up behind him. “What
are you looking for?”

“Serial numbers.” He found some
old, greyed stencilling on a half-buried tank made of greenish metal. “You’ll
understand what I’m doing,” he said as he pinched the arm of his glasses to
take a snapshot. “I’m checking our database... Hmpf.”

“What is it?” Egorov shifted from
foot to foot. He was glancing around, as if afraid they might be interrupted.

“This piece came from the smaller
of the installations here. The one the Americans called URDF-3.”

“URDF?” Egorov blinked at him.

“Stands for ‘Unidentified
Research and Development Facility.’ The stuff they built there scared the
Yankees even more than the H-bomb...”

He stood up, frowning, and slowly
turned to look at the entire site. “Something’s been bothering me,” he said as
he walked to the very edge of the giant pit.

“What’s that?” Egorov was hanging
back.

“Ambrose told me he saw a pyramid
on Mars. It said CCCP on its side. That was all; so he knew it was Russian, and
so did Google and the CIA when they found out about it. And you, too. But that’s
all anybody knew. So who made the connection between the pyramid and the
Tsarina
?”

Egorov didn’t reply. Gennady
turned and found that the old man had drawn himself up very straight, and had
levelled a small, nasty-looking pistol at him.

“You didn’t follow us to
Stepnogorsk,” said Gennady. “You were already there.”

“Take off your glasses,” said
Egorov. “Carefully, so I can be sure you’re not snapping another picture.”

As Gennady reached up to comply
he felt the soft soil at the lip of the pit start to crumble. “Ah, can we -”
Too late. He toppled backward, arms flailing.

He had an instant’s choice: roll
down the slope, or jump and hope he’d hit the water. He jumped.

The cold hit him so hard that at
first he thought he’d been shot. Swearing and gasping, he surfaced, but when he
spotted Egorov’s silhouette at the crest of the pit, he dove again.

Morning sunlight was just tipping
into the water. At first Gennady thought the wall of the pit was casting a dark
shadow across the sediment below him. Gradually he realized the truth: there
was no bottom to this shaft. At least, none within easy diving depth.

He swam to the opposite side; he
couldn’t stay down here, he’d freeze. Defeated, he flung himself out of the
freezing water onto hard clay that was probably radioactive. Rolling over, he
looked up.

Egorov stood on the lip of the
pit. Next to him was a young woman with a rifle in her hands.

Gennady sat up. “Shit.”

Kyzdygoi slung the rifle over her
back and clambered down the slope to the shore. As she picked her way over to
Gennady she asked, “How much do you know?”

“Everything,” he said between
coughs. “I know everything. Where’s Ambrose?”

“He’s safe,” she said. “He’ll be
fine.” Then she waited, rifle cradled.

“You’re here,” he said
reluctantly, “which tells me that Minus Three was funded by the Soviets. Your
job was never to clean up the Earth - it was to design life support and
agricultural systems for a Mars colony.”

Her mouth twitched, but she didn’t
laugh. “How could we possibly get to Mars? The sky’s a shooting gallery.”

“...And that would be a problem
if you were going up there in a dinky little aluminium can, like cosmonauts
always did.” He stood up, joints creaking from the cold. He was starting to
shiver deeply and it was hard to speak past his chattering teeth. “B-but if you
rode a c-concrete bunker into orbit, you could ignore the shrapnel
c-completely. In fact, that would be the only way you could d-do it.”

“Come now. How could something
like that ever get off the ground?”

“The same way the
Tsarina
d-did.” He nodded at the dark surface of the
flooded shaft. “The Americans had their P-project Orion. The Soviets had a
similar program based at URDF-3. Both had discovered that an object could be
just a few meters away from a nuclear explosion, and if it was made of the
right materials it wouldn’t be destroyed - it would be shot away like a bullet
from a gun. The Americans designed a spaceship that would drop atomic bombs out
the back and ride the explosions to orbit. But the
Tsarina
wasn’t like that... it was just one bomb, and a d-deep shaft, and a
pyramid-shaped spaceship to ride that explosion. A ‘Verne gun.’“

“And who else knows this?”

He hesitated. “N-no one,” he
admitted. “I didn’t know until I saw the shaft just now. The p-pyramid was
fitted into the mouth of it, right about where we’re s-standing. That’s why
this doesn’t look like any other bomb crater on Earth.”

“Let’s go,” she said, gesturing
with the rifle. “You’re turning blue.”

“Y-you’re not going t-to sh-shoot
me?”

“There’s no need,” she said
gently. “In a few days, the whole world will know what we’ve done.”

Gennady finished taping aluminium
foil to the trailer’s window. Taking a push-pin from the cork board by the
door, he carefully pricked a single tiny hole in the foil.

It was night, and crickets were
chirping outside. Gennady wasn’t tied up - in fact, he was perfectly free to
leave - but on his way out the door Egorov had said, “I wouldn’t go outside in
the next hour or so. After that... well, wait for the dust to settle.”

They’d driven him about fifty
kilometres to the south and into an empty part of the Polygon. When Gennady had
asked why this place, Egorov had laughed. “The Soviets set off their bombs here
because this was the last empty place on Earth. It’s still the last empty
place, and that’s why we’re here.”

There was nothing here but the
withered steppe, a hundred or so trucks, vans and buses, and the cranes, tanks
and pole-sheds of a temporary construction site. And, towering over the sheds,
a grey concrete pyramid.

“A Verne gun fires its cargo into
orbit in a single shot,” Egorov had told Gennady. “It generates thousands of
gravities worth of acceleration - enough to turn you into a smear on the floor.
That’s why the Soviets couldn’t send any people; they hadn’t figured out how to
set off a controlled sequence of little bombs. The Americans never perfected
that either. They didn’t have the computational power to do the simulations.