The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (34 page)

Gennady finally realized what they’d assumed. “We’re not the mafia,” he said. “We’re just here to inspect the utilities.”

She blinked at him, her features owlish behind the yellow frame of the mask. Ambrose rolled his eyes. “Oh God, what did you
say?”

“American?” Puzzled, she lowered her rifle. In English, she said, “You spoke English.”

“Ah,” said Ambrose, “well—”

“He did,” said Gennady, also in English. “We’re not with the mafia, we’re arms inspectors. I mean, I am. He’s just along for the ride.”

“Arms inspectors?” She guffawed, then looked around herself at the stolid Soviet bunker they were standing in. “What, you thought—”

“We didn’t think anything. Can I lower my hands now?” She thought about it, then nodded. Gennady rolled his neck and then nodded at the ranked plants. “Nice setup. Tomatoes, soy, and those long tanks contain potatoes? But why in here, when you’ve got a thousand kilometers of steppe outside to plant this stuff?”

“We can control the atmosphere in here,” she said. “That’s why the masks: it’s a high CO
₂
environment in here. That’s also why I stopped you in the first place; if you’d just strolled right in, you’d have dropped dead from asphyxia.

“This project’s part of minus three,” she continued. “Have you heard of us?” Both Ambrose and Gennady shook their heads.

“Well, you will.” There was pride in her voice. “You see, right now humanity uses the equivalent of three Earth’s worth of ecological resources. We’re pioneering techniques to reduce that reliance by the same amount.”

“Same amount? To
zero
Earths?” He didn’t hide the incredulity in his voice.

“Eventually, yes. We steal most of what we need from the Earth in the form of ecosystem services. What we need is to figure out how to run a full-fledged industrial civilization as if there were no ecosystem services available to us at all. To live on Earth,” she finished triumphantly, “as if we were living on Mars.”

Ambrose jerked in visible surprise.

“That’s fascinating,” said Gennady. He hadn’t been too nervous while they were pointing guns at him – he’d had that happen before, and in such moments his mind became wonderfully sharp – but now that he might actually be forced to have a conversation with these people, he found his mouth going quite dry. “You can tell me all about it after I’ve finished my measurements.”

“You’re kidding,” she said.

“I’m not kidding at all. Your job may be saving the Earth within the next generation, but mine is saving it this week. And I take it very seriously. I’ve come here to inspect the original fittings of this building, but it looks like you destroyed them, no?”

“Not at all,” she said. “Actually, we used what was here. This bunker’s not like the other ones, you know they had these big cement tanks in them. I’d swear this one was set up exactly like this.”

“Show me.”

For the next half-hour they climbed under the hydroponic tables, behind the makeshift junction boxes mounted near the old power shaft, and atop the sturdier lighting racks. Ambrose went outside, and came back to report that the shipping containers they’d seen were sophisticated CO
₂
scrubbers. The big boxes sucked the gas right out of the atmosphere, and then pumped it through hoses into the bunker.

At last he and the woman climbed down, and Gennady shook his head. “The mystery only deepens,” he said.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t help you more,” she said. “And apologies for pulling a gun on you – I’m Kyzdygoi,” she added, thrusting out her hand for him to shake.

“Uh, that’s a . . . pretty name,” said Ambrose as he too shook her hand. “What’s it mean?”

“It means ‘stop giving birth to girls,’ ” said Kyzdygoi with a straight face. “My parents were old school.”

Ambrose opened his mouth and closed it, his grin faltering.

“All right, well, good luck shrinking your Earths,” Gennady told her as they strolled to the plastic-sheet-covered doorway.

As they drove back to Stepnogorsk, Ambrose leaned against the Tata’s door and looked at Gennady in silence. Finally he said, “You do this for a living?”

“Ah, it’s unreliable. A paycheck here, a paycheck there . . .”

“No, really. What’s this all about?”

Gennady eyed him. He probably owed the kid an explanation after getting guns drawn on him. “Have you ever heard of metastable explosives?”

“What? No. Wait . . .” He fumbled for his glasses.

“Never mind that.” Gennady waved at the glasses. “Metastables are basically super-powerful chemical explosives. They’re my new nightmare.”

Ambrose jerked a thumb back at SNOPB. “I thought you were looking for germs.”

“This isn’t about germs, it’s about hydrogen bombs.” Ambrose looked blank. “A hydrogen bomb is a fusion device that’s triggered by high compression and high temperature. Up till now, the only thing that could generate those kinds of conditions was an atomic bomb – a
plutonium
bomb, understand? Plutonium is really hard to refine, and it creates terrible fallout even if you only use a little of it as your fusion trigger.”

“So?”

“So, metastable explosives are powerful enough to trigger hydrogen fusion without the plutonium. They completely sever the connection between nuclear weapons and nuclear industry, which means that once they exist, we good guys totally lose our ability to tell who has the bomb and who doesn’t.
Anybody
who can get metastables and some tritium gas can build a hydrogen bomb, even some disgruntled loner in his garage.

“And somebody
is
building one.”

Stepnogorsk was fast approaching. The town was mostly a collection of Soviet-era apartment blocks with broad prairie visible past them. Gennady swung them around a corner and they drove through Microdistrict 2 and past the disused Palace of Culture. Up ahead was their hotel . . . surrounded by the flashing lights of emergency vehicles.

“Oh,” said Gennady. “A fire?”

“Pull over. Pull over!” Ambrose braced his hands against the Tata’s low ceiling. Gennady shot him a look, but did as he’d asked.

“Shit. They’ve found me.”

“Who? Those are police cars. I’ve been with you every minute since we got here, there’s no way you could have gotten into any trouble.” Gennady shook his head. “No, if it’s anything to do with us, it’s probably Kyzdygoi’s people sending us a message.”

“Yeah? Then who are those suits with the cops?”

Gennady thought about it. He could simply walk up to one of the cops and ask, but figured Ambrose would probably have a coronary if he did that.

“Well . . . there is one thing we can try. But it’ll cost a lot.”

“How much?”

Gennady eyed him. “All right, all right,” said Ambrose. “What do we do?”

“You just watch.” Gennady put on his glasses and stepped out of the car. As he did, he put through a call to London, where it was still early morning. “Hello? Lisaveta? It’s Gennady. Hi! How are you?”

He’d brought a binocular attachment for the glasses, which he sometimes used for reading serial numbers on pipes or barrels from a distance. He clipped this on and began scanning the small knot of men who were standing around outside the hotel’s front doors.

“Listen, Lisa, can I ask you to do something for me? I have some faces I need scanned. . . . Not even remotely legal, I’m sure. . . . No, I’m not in trouble! Would I be on the phone to you if I were in trouble? Just—okay. I’m good for it. Here come the images.”

He relayed the feed from his glasses to Lisa in her flat in London.

“Who’re you talking to?” asked Ambrose.

“Old friend. She got me out of Chernobyl intact when I had a little problem with a dragon—Lisa? Got it? Great. Call me back when you’ve done the analysis.”

He pocketed the glasses and climbed back in the car. “Lisa has Interpol connections, and she’s a fantastic hacker. She’ll run facial recognition on it and hopefully tell us who those people are.”

Ambrose cringed back in his seat. “So what do we do in the meantime?”

“We have lunch. How ’bout that French restaurant we passed? The one with the little Eiffel Tower?”

Despite the clear curbs everywhere, Gennady parked the car at the shopping mall and walked the three blocks to the La France. He didn’t tell Ambrose why, but the American would figure it out: the Tata was traceable through its GPS. Luckily La France was open and they settled in for some decent crepes. Gennady had a nice view of a line of trees west of the town boundary. Occasionally a car drove past.

Lisa pinged him as they were settling up. “Gennady? I got some hits for you.”

“Really?” He hadn’t expected her to turn up anything. Gennady’s working assumption was that Ambrose was just being paranoid.

“Nothing off the cops; they must be local,” she said. “But one guy – the old man – well, it’s daft.”

He sighed in disappointment, and Ambrose shot him a look. “Go ahead.”

“His name is Alexei Egorov. He’s premier of a virtual nation called the Soviet Union Online. They started from this project to digitize all the existing paper records of the Soviet era. Once those were online, Egorov and his people started some deep data-mining to construct a virtual Soviet, and then they started inviting the last die-hard Stalinists – or their kids – to join. It’s a virtual country composed of bitter old men who’re nostalgic for the purges. Daft.”

“Thanks, Lisa. I’ll wire you the fee.”

He glowered at Ambrose. “Tell me about Soviet Union.”

“I’m not supposed to—”

“Oh come on. Who said that? Whoever they are, they’re on the far side of the planet right now, they can’t help you. They put you with me, but I can’t help you either if I don’t know what’s going on.”

Ambrose’s lips thinned to a white line. He leaned forward. “It’s big,” he said.

“Can’t be bigger than my metastables. Tell me: what did you see on Mars?”

Ambrose hesitated. Then he blurted, “A pyramid.”

Silence.

“Really, a pyramid,” Ambrose insisted. “Big sucker, gray, I think most of it was buried in the permafrost. It was the only thing sticking up for miles. This was on the Northern plains, where there’s ice just under the surface. The whole area around it . . . well, it was like a frozen splash, if you know what I mean. Almost a crater.”

This was just getting more and more disappointing. “And why is Soviet Union Online after you?”

“Because the pyramid had Russian writing on it. Just four letters, in red: CCCP.”

The next silence went on for a while, and was punctuated only by the sound of other diners grumbling about local carbon prices.

“I leaked some photos before Google came after me with their nondisclosure agreements,” Ambrose explained. “I guess the Soviets have Internet search-bots constantly searching for certain things, and they picked up on my posts before Google was able to take them down. I got a couple of threatening phone calls from men with thick Slavic accents. Then they tried to kidnap me.”

“No!”

Ambrose grimaced. “Well, they weren’t very good at it. It was four guys, all of them must have been in their eighties, they tried to bundle me into a black van. I ran away and they just stood there yelling curses at me in Russian. One of them threw his cane at me.” He rubbed his ankle.

“And you took them seriously?”

“I did when the FBI showed up and told me I had to pack up and go with them. That’s when I ran to the UN. I didn’t believe that ‘witness protection’ crap the Feds tried to feed me. The UN people told me that the Soviets’ data-mining is actually really good. They keep turning up embarrassing and incriminating information about what people and governments got up to back in the days of the Cold War. They use what they know to influence people.”

“That’s bizarre.” He thought about it. “Think they bought off the police here?”

“Or somebody. They want to know about the pyramid. But only Google, and the Feds, and I know where it is. And NASA’s already patched that part of the Mars panoramas with fake data.”

Disappointment had turned to a deep sense of surprise. For Gennady, being surprised usually meant that something awful was about to happen, so he said, “We need to get you out of town.”

Ambrose brightened. “I have an idea. Let’s go back to SNOPB. I looked up these minus-three people, they’re eco-radicals but at least they don’t seem to be lunatics.”

“Hmmph. You just think Kyzdygoi’s ‘hot’.” Ambrose grinned and shrugged.

“Okay. But we’re not driving, because the car can be tracked.
You
walk there. It’s only a few kilometers. I’ll deal with the authorities and these ‘Soviets,’ and once I’ve sent them on their way we’ll meet up. You’ve got my number.”

Ambrose had evidently never taken a walk in the country before. After Gennady convinced him he would survive it, they parted outside La France, and Gennady watched him walk away, sneakers flapping. He shook his head and strolled back to the Tata.

Five men were waiting for him. Two were policemen, and three wore business attire. One of these was an old, bald man in a faded olive-green suit. He wore augmented reality glasses, and there was a discreet red pin on his lapel in the shape of the old Soviet flag.