James P. Hogan (51 page)

“Sounds good,” Kyrenko said. “So what odds should I bet on our zapping every American lasersat with the first salvo?”

The general smiled faintly. “Oh, pretty good, I’d say.”

“And the morale of the crew?”

“Just waiting to go for it.”

Kyrenko nodded. “Good. Carry on.” He watched as the general went back into the armored fire-control center from which the hub batteries would be directed. Inside, through the opening next to the massive door that would be closed before the action commenced, he could see technicians and operators busy at their rows of consoles, And that was merely the inner defense. The space between the inner and outer skins held a layer of pulverized moonrock several feet thick at the strongpoints.

That completed the hub part of the inspection. Kyrenko turned to Lt. General Churenev, his principal aide, who was standing with the party of officers waiting behind. “Everything looks fine here. Let’s move on down.”

They bobbed and pulled themselves across the deck and entered the elevator waiting at the top of one of the shafts from the Turgenev spoke. The doors closed, and moments later they were descending toward the ring. The outer tube of the spoke was armored, too; but since it was more exposed than the hardened battle stations at the hub and various locations around the rim, it would not be used while combat conditions prevailed. Once hostilities commenced, the garrison at the hub would be sealed in there for the duration.

At Turgenev they came out of the elevator into the main concourse of the skeleton that had once been the Government Building and crossed the dusty, derelict space to come out onto the raised terrace bordering the main square, where two staff cars were waiting. All was darkness, broken only by pools of light from the floodlamps set up at ground level by the military. The lines of reflecting slats in the roof had been closed to prevent their directing hostile laserfire into the interior. Kyrenko halted with his party, and stood for a while staring out at the black, empty shapes of the deserted ghost city. On the far side, the bones of what had been Internal Security Headquarters stood silhouetted against one of the lamps, picked clean by an army-engineer squad collecting materials for a piece of last-minute improvised construction. A row of groundcars stood silent and abandoned in the shadows beneath.

“It’s hard to imagine it the way it was,” Churenev commented. “With light, color, people, children…”

Kyrenko nodded distantly. “The day has come at last, Oleg. For a hundred years we have been treated like lepers. The capitalists sent Lenin back from Switzerland because they thought his Revolution would destroy Russia. When that failed, they set up Hitler and the Nazis, and sent them against us, but we destroyed them. Then they encircled us with guns and bases and missile sites, as if we were a disease that had to be contained. They spread lies, waiting… thinking they could wear us down by siege. But they forgot the Mongols, Napoleon, Hitler – how many times Russia has come back to bury those who thought they had destroyed her. And so it will be again. They say we are on the verge of collapse. But soon they will learn.” He turned his head. “Am I not right?”

Churenev sighed. “If that is how it must be…”

The party descended the steps to the square, climbed into the cars, and left Turgenev. For a little over a quarter mile they drove through a desolation of bare metal terraces and piles of rotting vegetation that had been one of the agricultural sectors. In fact, only the crops along the valley center, lining the route along which visitors had been taken, had ever been real. The wheat, sorghum, vegetables, and rice terraces higher up the sides, which foreign observers had admired so enthusiastically from afar – apart from one showpiece section that they climbed laboriously to inspect more closely for themselves – had been planted with plastic imitations.

They came to Agricultural Station 3 and parked outside the waste-recycling plant that consisted mainly of dummy tanks, pipes, and reactor vessels. Its processing capacity was only a fraction of the publicized value – for the simple reason that there had never been that much waste to process. The field marshal and his aides walked through an opening in the side of an armored enclosure and entered the space that the public plans described as “Materials Storage.” The commander of Battle Station 4, free-electron-laser emplacement, was waiting with his senior officers.

The party moved through the bays of windings and superconducting magnets, the linac tunnel, and the control room. Accelerator potentials and field frequencies had been tuned to take out the West’s communications and instrumentation satellites, checks were positive, and there were no problems to report. Emergency generators, local backup life-support systems, and escape chute down to the armored ring-transit tunnel were all operational. The men were in good shape.

“Very good, General,” Kyrenko approved. “First-rate. So, we will meet in Washington, eh?”

“Yes, sir – to help burn down the Pentagon.” Everyone laughed.

Kyrenko turned to Churenev and the others. “Very well, gentlemen. That completes the tour. My compliments to all of you. Let us return to HQ.”

They reembarked in their vehicles and drove the remaining distance to Novyi Kazan, climbing the ramp by the emptied reservoir to the main entrance. On the way in, Kyrenko stopped in the upper-level communications room to send a signal to Moscow. It read:
ANVIL
AT
BATTLE
READINESS
,
CONDITION
ORANGE
1.
ALL
UNITS
OPERATIONAL
.
COUNTDOWN
STATUS
TO
PLAN
IS
CONFIRMED
.

Then he continued on down into the hardened zone containing the command center from which he and his staff would direct and coordinate all the battle stations. It was a place that had never been included in the official tours. On the publicly released plans, however, it was described as a detention and rehabilitation facility. Its name was Zamork.

The speeches were over, but the main square in Turgenev was still alive with people when Paula came out from the main concourse of the Government Building, accompanied by Major Uskayev, the captain, and two guards. The sight of a woman in a plain green tunic under armed escort contrasted with the colorful, holidaylike atmosphere that had taken over, and heads turned to watch them curiously as they crossed the terrace outside the main doors and descended the steps to the square, where a security-police van was waiting.

As the van entered an underpass, changed direction, and emerged again to negotiate the tortuous route out of the town, Paula saw that the bridges and pedestrian ways were bustling with people. Many of them were acting like tourists, rubbernecking at the sights and posing for pictures – no doubt recent arrivals out viewing their new home, she thought. On the edge of town they passed a large, open area of grass, where teams of children in white and red outfits were putting final touches to their gymnastics routines for the celebrations. For a moment the brightly lit tunnel of the colony’s valley curved upward before them, with the green and yellow arms of the agricultural terraces spreading upward on either side, and then the van entered another tunnel to descend from town-center level to the valley floor.

The agricultural sector looked presentable again after the heroic efforts that had gone into saving its face – not to mention those of the Soviet leaders – and terraces of grain, fruit, and vegetables, and pastures with reasonably contented-looking cows lined the route beneath the inverted blue-yellow skybow all the way past Agricultural Station 3 to Novyi Kazan. Here, they exited from the throughway by the reservoir, where a couple of boats were out sailing, and ascended the ramp to the gate in front of the surface buildings of Zamork. They passed through the checkpoint into the outer yard, where they disembarked from the van and entered the Administration Building.

A few minutes later, Paula came out on her own through the rear guardpost into the surface-level compound. In talking the situation over, she had agreed with Olga and Protbornov that the best chance of succeeding with Earnshaw lay in sustaining an appearance of everything’s being normal, which meant he couldn’t be allowed to know that the Russians were involved. Obviously the days of the elaborate clandestine operation that had run from B-3 were now over. But before they intervened to close it down, the authorities would permit it to serve this one final purpose.

Istamel was reading on his bunk in Hut 8 when Paula arrived, Seeing from her face that something urgent was afoot, he got up and went over to the cassette player. For some time now, the occupants of Hut 8 and the regular visitors to it had been recording assorted conversation, usually arranged to be as boring as possible, between different individuals for occasions like these. Istamel selected one that featured just the two of them talking interminably about medieval Turkish poetry, dropped it into the player, and connected the output into the microphone circuit. That way the conversation would correlate with who had been seen entering the hut, if it happened to be under observation.

Paula had decided during the drive from Turgenev that there wasn’t time to go through the whole thing again to let Istamel know what had happened. Besides, the whole ploy was to tell Earnshaw only that Olga had sent a message alerting the West to receive the laser signal, and to make him believe everything beyond that was normal. Istamel would play his part better if that was as much as he knew, too – and he could find out when she told Earnshaw. “I have to go down to the Crypt immediately,” she said, “Do you know if Lew is there?”

“He should be, I was there earlier and left him with Razz and Albrecht. They seemed busy. Where’s Olga? I thought you’d both be back together.”

“A lot has happened. Look, it’s too much to explain now. Come back down and hear it with the others.”

Istamel nodded and asked no more. They went through to the shower and opened the hatch in the cubicle floor. Istamel went down first, and Paula followed, closing the hatch over them. They came out of the roof where the ladder ended, threaded their way through the machinery compartment, and crossed the girder bridge to the outside of the elevator shaft. Paula had been over this route many times now, and the traverse across the shaft to the recess on the far side no longer troubled her. On the next two crossings after her first introduction by Peter Sargent, she had balanced with the help of a handrope that was stowed nearby to be temporarily strung across if needed, but now she could manage without. Istamel still used the rope, which inwardly gave her a certain satisfaction. They completed the descent, left the shaft through the maintenance hatch at the lower level, and made their way between the lines of tanks toward the Crypt, taking care not to trigger Rashazzi’s alarm system on the way. As they came within sight of the Crypt’s lights, they caught the sound of raised voices arguing excitedly. That in itself was unusual. Paula pursed her mouth determinedly and steeled herself for the coming confrontation.

Earnshaw was with Rashazzi and Haber, as Istamel had said. In addition, Koh had appeared. They were standing around the large table, which was strewn with pieces of paper, and they continued gesticulating and making sketches even while Paula and Istamel were climbing down into the workspace, as if unaware of their approach. Then Earnshaw turned his head to acknowledge their presence, and the others fell silent.

It wasn’t a time for observing niceties, Paula drew up facing the group and moved her arm in a brief gesture that took in the whole of the workshop and its contents. “All of this can wait for a while” she told them. “I’ve just come from Turgenev. Olga is there, sending off a message. It’s an important message. A lot of things have been happening that you don’t know about down here.” Haber motioned to one of the sheets of paper that he and the others had been talking over and started to say something, but Paula cut him off with a wave of her hand. “We received a message from Tycoon this morning which said, in effect, that the West believes the Soviets are about to launch a first strike. I mean, they’re not fooling. This is
it
!”

Istamel was staring at her incredulously. “But you never mentioned anything about this…”

“There wasn’t time up there. I’m mentioning it now.”

“But what did it say? Why should they think the Russians would attack now, with all their leaders here? It doesn’t —”

“That’s the whole point,” Paula said. “They don’t believe the Russian leaders are here. They’re suspicious that the TV broadcasts going out might be recordings – in other words, a deception concocted to cover a strike. Anyhow, Olga and I have already sent a signal back confirming that the leaders are up here. That was as much as we could do right away. But we don’t think it’s enough. What we want you to —”

“Shut up.” Earnshaw’s voice wasn’t loud, but it carried such an unexpected whiplike snap that Paula did shut up. He acknowledged with a nod. “Now, run that by me again.” Paula was too taken aback to reply. He said it for her. “Our side has reasons for thinking the Soviets might be about to strike if their leaders aren’t really up in
Tereshkova
– is that right? But you know it’s all a mistake, because the leaders really are here. And that’s what you’ve told Tycoon.”

Paula nodded and returned a puzzled look. When he didn’t respond immediately, she collected herself together again and got back into stride. “We did what we could, but the signal only had my validation code. I’m not sure that would carry enough weight in Washington. To really convince them…” Her voice trailed away as she saw that Earnshaw and the two scientists were not listening, but exchanging ominous looks among themselves. Koh had backed inconspicuously into the shadows, but Paula’s confusion just at that moment was such that she didn’t notice.

“It fits,” Earnshaw murmured. “They’ve put them all down a big hole, somewhere out of the way. Jesus, they
are
about to launch a strike. They’re on their countdown right now!”