The Curve of The Earth (34 page)

Twenty seconds in, the interference started. Another ten, and the information stopped being stored, the electronics overwhelmed by the intense magnetic field passing overhead. He was lucky the portion that remained wasn’t corrupted beyond recognition. Old tech: the camera had simply ceased working, while a newer device would have tried to self-repair, and in failing, junked the file.

Thirty seconds of moving images at twenty-five frames a second. One of those hundreds of pictures was important.

He went through them in twos, flicking from frame to frame,
mapping the differences between each pair, building up a picture of what had happened to that thing that had fallen from space. Breaking up, for sure, with fragments of its skin peeling off and spinning away as it crashed towards the Bering Strait.

The shards burnt bright, briefly, until they were either consumed, or had slowed enough to turn invisible.

That was it. He backed up to the beginning, looking at the size of each piece as it spalled off the main mass. There: fifteen seconds in. With a flare that almost whited out the screen, a piece detached itself. In the next frame, it had gone.

He repeated the three frames, over and over again: before, during and after. Then he sat back and thought about it, clearing the images from his vision and realising that he was still sitting in a hangar, surrounded by broken machinery, and his coffee had gone cold.

[Have you spotted it?]

“Yeah. Anyone else?”

[One group has zeroed in on those particular frames. They are discussing the significance of them currently, and will inevitably reach the conclusion you have.]

“It was a re-entry capsule, under power.” Petrovitch picked up his equipment and stuffed everything back in his bag. “Other bits, when they came off, you can see them for up to five, six frames. This thing? It’s off and gone. That flare? Explosive bolts and rocket fuel.

[This scenario remains highly speculative.]

“Look, we’ve been circling around this idea for a while without actually coming out and saying it straight. This is a secret Chinese Moon mission, using some sort of prototype fusion drive. If it was manned, the astronauts may have had both the opportunity and the means to bail. Nothing else fits.”

[Except there is no evidence of the Chinese having developed a fusion drive.]

“You’re wrong. There is evidence, and we’re looking right at it.”

[No external evidence, then. There is also the question of why. Why would the Americans shoot down a Chinese spaceship, and risk a confrontation that would be in no one’s interest?]

“I don’t know why. Maybe they’re just stupid. Maybe it was an accident.” He thumbed the lock on his bag and swung up his axe. “But seriously. It has to be the Chinese. Who the
huy
else could it be?”

Michael, always ready with an opinion, was silent.

Petrovitch blinked and stared at the wall. “
Huy tebe v’zhopu zamesto ukropu!
”

[Have you worked it out, Sasha?]

“You’re serious. Of course you’re serious.
Chyort. Chyort vos’mi
.” He disconnected the data card from his jerry-rigged reader and held it up to his face. “How long have you known, and when were you going to tell me?”

[The possibility – at an admittedly tiny probability – has been one of the options since the beginning, as have many other extremely unlikely causes, including an evaporating black hole and antimatter collisions. However, the more we learned, the more accurately I could assign probabilities to the various scenarios. Now that we have the final piece of information required to finally choose between them, there is only one that has anything approaching my full confidence.]

“But…” Petrovitch stared at his cold coffee. He didn’t want it any more. He wanted something a lot stronger. There was that hip flask in the first bag he’d emptied, and there’d definitely been something in it. “
Yobany stos
. Zhao said ‘that satellite’.
That satellite was not ours. But wasn’t a satellite. It was aliens.”

[The First Vice Premier was not lying,] said Michael. [He did not know what it was, he still does not know. We do. It is the only possible answer to all the questions we have been asking.]

Petrovitch reeled into a chair, knocking it over. “The re-entry pod?”

[The strewn field of debris would easily encompass the research station. The object moved almost directly overhead. Once ejected, the descent module could have achieved either a controlled landing, or an uncontrolled impact, depending on the mechanical state of its components, its design limits, and whether any automatic systems were functioning at the time. If their technology relied on electrical impulses to transmit information, it would have been unlikely to withstand such intense electromagnetic fields at such short range, no matter how well shielded.]

“It came down near Lucy. She either saw it fall, or heard it, or felt it.” He struggled past the fallen chair to the table with the emptied bags. “She would have gone out to take a look.”

[Again, this is likely. It is the explanation why she subsequently disappeared. It is the explanation why the Americans want to find her before she can say what she saw.]

“What did she find when she got there? Did it look like something we’d make, or something else? Was there a door, or a hatch? Did she force it open, or did they come out?” Petrovitch’s hand trembled as he unscrewed the top of the hip flask. The fumes were sharp, almost without flavour. Vodka, then: how appropriate.

[I do not know, Sasha. They may not have survived the descent.]

“What did they look like? Like us, or… not at all?” He tilted his wrist and drank deep. He needed it, needed it badly. “
Yobany stos
, Michael. We have to find Lucy.”

[That is why you are in Deadhorse.]

“Yeah.” The clock ticked over another second, then another. “Whose camera is this anyway?”

[This repair centre is run by an engineer called Paul Avaiq. It is most likely to be his.]

“Tell me you haven’t killed him.”

[Not purposely, no. I have made every effort only to target those personnel who have been swapped in recently. I have even erred on the side of caution, which has contributed to a loss of our assets.]

“But we’ve just torn the town apart. What if he’s run with the other Yanks?”

[I will search for him. Meanwhile, we have sufficient information to at least find out where Avaiq was when he took the video, to within a manageable margin of error, by comparing it with the known behaviour of the craft.]

“Dog team,” said Petrovitch.

[Explain.]

“
Balvan! Mudak!
Ship crosses the sky, explodes, trashes electrical and electronic systems at will. Starter coils for skidoos and four-wheel drives, the ARCO planes? They’re not turned off: they’re all dead. Everything they have has either been brought in since or repaired. So how do you cross the snow if everything mechanical is fried?”

[By using a dog-pulled sled.]

“There was the sound of dogs on the clip. We should’ve been looking from the very start for someone who runs a dog team.” Petrovitch gulped the last of the vodka, and threw the flask on the floor. He picked up his bag and limped through the hangar and out into the pre-dawn light.

The sky was invisible behind a storm of snow. Petrovitch spat out a mouthful and turned his head out of the wind.

“I can’t see a
yebani
thing.”

[You must hurry. Only with Paul Avaiq will you stand a chance of finding Lucy in time.]

“Give me a map and find me some transport.”

A wire-frame model of Deadhorse popped up in his vision. Buildings, teletroopers, roads, all marked out in the overlay, even if everything was lost in the whiteout. His path was shown by a thick yellow line on the ground. Eyes down, he started to follow it.

It led off to his left, towards the faint burning mass of Ben and Jerry’s ruined control centre. “We can’t make too many more mistakes.” Petrovitch turned into the wind, and was all but blind. “What are they going to drop?”

[Fuel-air explosives to destroy the solid structures. The second wave will use napalm and phosphorus. Conventional explosives
will be more or less undetectable to the global seismology network, and there will be no telltale fission products on the wind.]

Petrovitch kept on walking, head down, following the line at his feet. Just ahead was a building on fire, the snow hissing as it touched the flames, and before it, a skidoo.

Petrovitch reached out and heaved the white-coated body off the seat and on to the ground. The single shot had punctured the man’s back, and he’d slumped over at the controls. He’d bled out over the left-hand side of the cowling, and it had mostly frozen already. Mostly.

[Does it disturb you?]

Petrovitch bungeed his bag to the carry-rack and sat astride the vehicle. “What? That he’s dead, or that the seat’s a little sticky?”

[Human disgust responses seem to be abnormally absent from your psyche.]

“Hardly news.” The magnetic key was missing, and he spent a few extra moments he didn’t have dismounting, rolling the body over, and patting down its pockets. “It’s meat. Nothing more.”

He came up with a key ring and a coded plastic card. He got back on, and pressed it to the ignition. The lights came on, and the fuel cell started pushing power to the turbines. The path changed direction, pointing towards where Michael hoped Avaiq would be.

[I can try and stop the planes. They will be more difficult to interfere with than missiles, but I can attempt to hack the GPS signals: they will be flying on instruments and I should be able to fool them into missing Deadhorse completely.]

“Maybe. But we don’t know where Lucy is. Tearing up a random piece of tundra might be exactly the wrong choice.”

[Then you have less than ten minutes to find Avaiq and Lucy and get to a safe distance.] Michael paused. [That is not long.]

Petrovitch glanced at the controls, worked out what they all did, and dragged on the accelerator. The tracks at the back bit into the soft surface and dug in until they reached the hard, compacted ice below. The machine lurched forward, and he had to hang on.

“I’m going as fast as I can.”

The snow shovelled itself at his face at twice the speed now, so it became a freezing, stinging blizzard. He drove flat out until his route indicated a hard left; he throttled back in order to take the turn, then opened it up again. He was the only vehicle moving. Even the teletroopers, the ones that couldn’t make it to the edge of town, were still.

“Who’s left here?”

[Those who have not fled with the security forces will probably be hiding. The buildings are well insulated. The teletroopers’ infrared capabilities cannot see through the walls.]

Petrovitch turned right on to the road that would take him past the hotel. He glanced up to see it properly on fire, orange flames pulled ragged by the wind. “I think we should warn them to get out. Can we do that?”

[Door-to-door searches for survivors are time-consuming. I can announce the impending air strike like this:]

Every teletrooper blared out: “Warning. Warning. Warning. Residents and workers of Deadhorse. An air attack on your settlement is imminent. Evacuate immediately. The Freezone guarantees the teletroopers will not harm you. You have nine minutes.”

[The cellphone network has been disabled, although I am detecting several satellite phone signals. I will contact them personally and assure them of our good intentions.]

The glowing yellow road lurched abruptly right again, and terminated at the foot of a two-storey building that loomed out of the snow so fast Petrovitch thought he might not be able to stop in time.

He hung the back out, and slid around in an almost perfect circle, ending up nose on to the wall. “Yeah. I bet you I couldn’t do that twice.”

The teletrooper at the crossroads lumbered around. One leg was stiff, immovable. “Warning. Warning. Warning.”

Petrovitch pitched himself off the snowmobile, picked up the bag and his gun, and dragged his foot all the way to the door.

“You have eight minutes,” called the teletrooper.

“I know I’ve got
yebani
eight minutes.” He rattled the handle, found it locked, and kicked out at the wooden frame. It splintered. He went back for another go. The lock gave and the door slapped back on its hinges.

He was in a corridor which went left and right. There were stairs at either end, and in between door after door. If he had to check each one, he was going to be incinerated along with everyone else.

He filled his lungs with cold air. “Avaiq! Paul Avaiq! It’s Petrovitch.”

The sound of his voice trailed away, to no response.

“
Pizdets
. Why is nothing ever simple? Which room is he supposed to be in?”

[First floor, two-one-two. Go left.]

He was halfway down the corridor when a figure appeared at the far end. “Dr Petrovitch?”

“Yeah. Paul Avaiq?”

Petrovitch stopped, because he was tired, and behind his tiredness, everything hurt.

Avaiq was dressed for the outside, parka already fastened, hood down to reveal his sallow face and short black hair. He hurried towards Petrovitch. “You took your time.”

“
Yobany stos
, man, I think I was pretty smart considering how little I had to go on.” They were nose to nose. Avaiq was fractionally smaller.

“Those things out there are saying—”

“I know what they’re saying. I got them to say it. The Yanks are going to bomb the crap out of Deadhorse, then cremate what’s left. Where’s Lucy?”

“She’s not here.”

“Then where the
huy
is she? And how about the other… others?”

“What? No.” Avaiq was agitated, almost vibrating with tension. “It’s not—”

“Explain on the way.” With both gun and bag, Petrovitch had no free hand to grab hold of Avaiq’s collar and propel him to the door.

“Where are we going?”

Petrovitch growled. “Do you know where Lucy is?”

Avaiq steadied his nerve. “Yes.”

“Then what are we waiting for? In seven minutes’ time, this place will be matchwood.”