Astronomy (9 page)

Susan grabbed her Thompson back from a pair of slack hands. She gave the Walther to Malmagden, who was leaning over, nursing his ribs. He looked surprised. He did not give it back.

An older man stepped into the road, swearing majestically. His young soldiers began sputtering explanations at him, all at once. She could tell by his stride he was some sort of officer, but he’d been out in the field way too long. The man looked from Susan to the boy with the gun in his ear. He thought for a moment, sighed. He slapped the boy about the head, shoved him back toward his friends, and glared at Susan.

“Trust me,” he vowed. “They are the scourge of Eastern Europe.”

Susan nodded: of course. No doubt this was just an off day.

The Russian fished their travel permit out of the dirt. While he read it, he rubbed at a greasy film of beard that covered his jowls.

“You obtained this permit from Marshal Zhukov.” The man spoke in exact English. He
hmmed
to himself. “I radioed a message to the field offices of Marshal Zhukov the last time we were able to break through radio interference. I got no response.” The man looked up at Charley Shrieve. “When you spoke to Marshal Zhukov, did he happen to mention anything about relieving us?”

Shrieve had not, strictly speaking, communicated with the marshal. This seemed a poor time to bring that out. He shrugged, smiled. “Sorry.”

“They’ve misplaced us again.” The Russian wadded up the travel permit in an angry gesture. “They probably don’t even know we’re here.”

“You know,” Susan said. “That’s our permit out of here as well as our permit in.”

The Russian frowned at her in an interested way. “And who would you be? You are American gangster moll?”

“I am an American Foreign Service officer,” she corrected him. Cap
F
, cap
S
.” God, she was tired of explaining to men like this what she was doing in their war.

“You are a spook.” He smiled.

Charley Shrieve stepped forward to smooth things out. He suggested they not discuss background and pedigree. “We’ve all been sent here for the same thing.” He pointed at the glassified plain as it stretched east of the wire perimeter. “Our governments want to know what happened out there.”

“You wish to know what could destroy reservoir?”

“Whatever happened up here might still pose a threat to Soviet citizens.” Susan referred to Heisenberg’s bomb program, to atomic radiation drifting east toward the wheat fields of central Asia.

The Russian could barely contain his amusement. He repeated her remark in Russian. His young brigade laughed as well, in a distinctly unpleasant way.

“Come,” the man said. “Dusk is at hand. You have to get inside the camp, away from the perimeter.”

He barked an order to his charges. They formed up a little honor guard, or maybe a firing squad, and followed the four of them through the concertina wire.

The man was a lieutenant. His name was Illyenov. Yevgeni Illyenov, from Soviet Georgia. He’d fought Panzer tanks with nothing but bottles of gasoline. He had chased them back across the frozen steppes to the Danube River.

Now, while his comrades took what he imagined to be the pleasures of Berlin, Illyenov was guarding a dry lakebed with a bunch of school kids.

He led them past a line of deep-dug trenches already flooded with something that smelled like tar. Past piles of loose mortar rounds and belts for the heavy machine guns. Past a line of broken iron that might have been a
Güterzuglokomotiven
—a freight train engine (except how could that be right when the tracks had run along the shore of the lake? And the shore must have been a quarter of a mile away?).

—Past all that awaited the operational headquarters for the entire Soviet presence at Faulkenberg Reservoir. A wooden truck bed was laid across a stack of empty ammunition cases for use as a table. It was scattered over with papers and tin cups of some chemical-smelling liquid. Here was the dubious phonograph, fed by its small assortment of American show tunes.

A banner proclaiming the glory of the Oktober 15th Brigade flapped in the smoke and breeze of this tremendous campfire. Susan held her hand to her face against the heat. The smoke was even worse. Fresh saplings were being layered into the pile as they arrived. The smoke that rolled off of it was already choking.

Illyenov pointed across the fire to a gang of kids swarming over the tower Susan had seen from the camp entrance.

Whatever its purpose, Illyenov was inordinately proud. He had Charley by the arm. He was telling Charley how they had run across a downed British Lysander coming through Gölwegn Pass. They had scavenged the engine.

“My men thought me crazy. ‘What will Illyenov do with that airplane motor?’ Yes? You learn on battlefield. There is use for everything!”

It hung in a cradle of chains from a piece of the Lysander’s airframe. It had been restored to its original aerodynamic housing. The whole thing rolled around on wheels scavenged from one of their trucks.

Torque load was accounted for with a long bar through the axle. Put a kid over here to hold his end up, put a kid over there to hold his end down. Add a couple kids for steerage and ballast, a fifth to mind the fuel and electric lines, and hope that nobody ended up in the fire.

Susan did not press Illyenov on his plans for the motor, sensing they were obscure and Russian. Perhaps difficult to explain to a woman unencumbered by the romance of noisy, dangerous things.

A kid from the Flaming Trench Committee needed Illyenov to look at something. Reluctantly, he excused himself.

Shrieve picked up one of the half-filled cups lying on the table. He held it to his nose. “Christ.” He turned away. His eyes watered.

“Don’t mess with that,” she said. “The Russians call it
vlint
. It’s a bootleg amphetamine they make with cough syrup, gasoline, red phosphorous, and sulfuric acid.”

Shrieve started to laugh. “Go on.” He saw the look on her face and set the cup down, carefully.

Susan’s buddies in the Red Army engineering detachment had marched into Berlin on a highway paved with
vlint
. They told her it gave them their crazy-ass reputation. She suspected the public relations value of certain Soviet crowd-control practices—nailing people to barn doors, for instance—could not be discounted. She kept these opinions to herself, of course. She did not wish them to think her rude.

A flash of light drew her eye up the valley wall. Someone was on the ridge. He was signaling down to his mates with a pocket mirror, tipped back and forth against the firelight. The light of the campfire caught movement all along the ridgeline. Susan counted a squad. So, Illyenov had not given up the high ground.

“They’re preparing for an attack,” Susan guessed.

“We’re thirty miles inside the Soviet sector,” Charley point out.

“The campfire, the airplane engine—it’s some kind of smoke generator. If they’re not using it to hide under, then what are they using it for?”

Malmagden made some disparaging remark about the native intelligence of your mid-Asian ethnics. Shrieve shuffled through the pile of junk between the tin cups.

Here was a ream of newsprint, and a charcoal stick. An artist might have just stepped away for a moment to check his subject from a better angle.

Shrieve flipped through the first couple of sheets. “What do you make of this?”

Each sheet showed the same thing, but from a different angle—a lump-backed thing, crudely drawn, with indications of tentacles. Something on the top might have been a human face, with eyes and wide, leering mouth. The mouth was filled side-to-side with horsy teeth that looked as large as C-Ration cans.

“Reminds me of some of the Armitage transcripts,” she said.

“Is Walter Foley still showing those pictures?”

“Flattened farmhouses and half-eaten cattle? Yeah.”

Shrieve laughed. “He loves that stuff.”

Susan remembered the Dunwich, Massachusetts, primaries—the Dunwich Horror, as her Watermark instructors referred to it. It had been dead over ten years by the time the war started. Her instructors spoke of it in an academic tone.

How did it get into this dimension? How did it acquire these distinctly human attributes? Some woman had become pregnant with it, apparently.

All of her male friends nodded at this speculation with mild interest, hmmm. They got more excited about the future of the forward pass in football. Susan could not shake the image of a woman alone in a cabin somewhere, waiting on some leprous extra-dimensional entity to arrive in a mellow mood.

Susan had nightmares the last eight weeks of her Watermark training.

She looked at Malmagden. “How about it?” she demanded. “You were up here. What about this?”

Malmagden glanced at the drawing pad and then looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

“Hybridizing experiments between humans and Old Ones. That sounds like right up your alley.”

Malmagden demurred. “I am just
polizei
,” he apologized. “I made no such decisions.”

Shrieve took it up as well. “Is this
Das Unternehmen
?” He shook the pad in Malmagden’s face. “Maybe you were up here, making deals with the Old Ones to turn the tide of the war?”

“Yeah, and just to cinch the deal, you threw in somebody’s daughter.” She shoved him maybe a little harder than she meant to. “What about it? You’re usually so chatty. What are you so quiet about suddenly?”

Malmagden had his eyes on the perimeter fence. He hadn’t even heard her. He looked back at her from some middle-distance.

“Forget that,” Malmagden paid little attention to the drawing pad. “That is not important.” He stared out east at the far side of the crater. He pulled at his lip. His eyes were bright with fear. “Something is not right,” he said. “Something is missing from here.”

Susan leaned toward Shrieve, wincing in disbelief. “What did he say?”

“He said this isn’t important,” Shrieve repeated. “He said that zomethink iss missink.”

She took back her Walther. “Your spleen is going to be missing in a minute.” Time to remind this guy who wore the handcuffs.

Malmagden barely noticed. “The Artifact,” he said. “The—you know.” He waved impatiently at the empty eastern sky. “You showed me a photograph of it.”

Took her a moment to realize what Malmagden was talking about. He was talking about the monolith they had dug out of the eastern face of the valley.

“It’s gone,” she said. “So what? The entire lake is gone.”

“The entire lake was merely water. Please.” He leaned forward to take her eye. “This is more important than these questions you are asking me. This is more important than you know.”

Shrieve frowned at her. “What is he talking about?”

Susan shook her head. Suddenly she wasn’t sure. She was sure that the fear in Malmagden’s eyes was genuine. That bothered her. Men like Malmagden are supposed to be pitiless and unshakable.

“What happens if we leave the compound?” she asked Charley.

“Maybe Illyenov shoots us as American spies. Maybe”—Shrieve nodded at the drawing pad—“we run into Sparky here. Who knows?”

Susan glanced back at the remnants of the Oktober Brigade. Something far up the western slope of the valley transfixed their attention. They stood silently behind the concertina wire. Their eyes were on the blue-white pool of a searchlight as it rolled over the bare earth beyond the perimeter. Susan had never seen a group of kids so focused.

She nodded toward the back of the compound. There was a hole in the wire. Beyond it, the lake bottom lay blasted smooth beneath a bomber’s moon.

“We came up here to see the Faulkenberg weapons lab,” she said. “Let’s go have a look.”

They pushed Malmagden through the wire. He stared around at the mirror-smooth crater, wide-eyed with awe.

“This means nothing to you, does it?” He looked at her and laughed, a choking sound of horror and awe. “This is just a great hole in the ground to you, yes? But once, over there”— he pointed to the smooth eastern curve of the bowl—“it was the most advanced laboratory in the world.” He looked away. He could not speak.

On the far side of the wire, they stepped on something that crunched like hard candy. Susan picked a chunk of it out of the sand.

“Glass,” she said. They were standing on a sea of glassified sand. It rippled out from a center point in concentric rings, like a pond’s surface frozen moments after being hit by a stone. No doubt the glass had covered the entire lakebed before the Russians had arrived. It still coated the area east of their outpost.

She tested one of the glass waves. The crests were thick enough to support the weight of a 119-, or 119-and-seven-eighths-, pound woman. The troughs were brittle and thin and showed signs of recent crossing.

The frequency of these waves grew shorter as they walked toward the eastern rim of the crater. The glass itself darkened and changed color. It was green at the perimeter, black as obsidian as they followed Malmagden to the epicenter of the blast.

He pointed far up the nearest wall of the crater. “My men.”

An army of shadow soldiers stood at alert above the line where the glass gave way to pale rock. Whatever seared their images to the limestone had been of sufficient intensity to delineate their silhouettes in stark detail. Susan could see attitudes of tension in the images. Their heads were turned, as if they had been tracking some sound or movement coming from the left.

Malmagden stared at the wall with his palm over his mouth. He whispered something in German, maybe he asked,
What have I done?

Susan searched in her heart for pity, found only a flat, hard plain not dissimilar to the one they traversed.

“What do your ghouls say about moral ambiguity now?” she asked him.

Malmagden looked at her, his eyes so mixed with emotions they seemed flat as mirrors.

Shrieve took Malmagden by the shoulder. “Show me where this artifact was supposed to be.” He ignored Susan’s bad looks.

Malmagden needed just a moment to orient himself. “It is right above you, yes?” He pointed. Just to their left was a gap among the limestone cliffs. Susan had seen it from the top of the road, but the very size of it had hidden it away in the landscape. Only as Malmagden pointed it out did she get an idea of the scale the weapons laboratory had worked at.