Spring 2007 (16 page)

“I’ve, uh, I was working part-time in a garage. On my way
through college–I was final year at Toronto, studying structural
engineering, but I haven’t sat the finals. Maddy–Maddy’s a qualified
paramedic.”

The officer fixes her with a stare. “Worked at it?”

“What? Uh, no–I’m freshly qualified.” His abrupt
questioning flusters her.

“Huh.” He makes a cryptic notation against their names
on a long list, a list that spills over the edge of his desk and trails towards
the rough floor. “Next.” He hands the passports back, and a couple of cards,
and points them along to the row of desks.

Someone is already stepping up behind them when Maddy
manages to read the tickets. Hers says TRAINEE NURSE. Robert is staring at his
and saying “no, this is wrong.”

“What is it, Bob?” She looks over his shoulder as
someone jostles him sideways. His card reads LABORER (unskilled); but she
doesn’t have time to read the rest.

Chapter Six:
Captain’s
Log

Yuri Gagarin kicks his shoes off, loosens his tie, and
leans back in his chair. “It’s hotter than fucking Cuba!” he complains.

“You visited Cuba, didn’t you, boss?” His companion,
still standing, pours a glass of iced tea and passes it to the young
colonel-general before drawing one for himself.

“Yeah, thanks Misha.” The former first cosmonaut smiles
tiredly. “Back before the invasion. Have a seat.”

Misha Gorodin is the only man on the ship who doesn’t
have to give a shit whether the captain offers him a seat, but he’s grateful
all the same: a little respect goes a long way, and Gagarin’s sunny disposition
and friendly attitude is a far cry from some of the fuckheads Misha’s been
stuck with in the past. There’s a class of officer who thinks that because
you’re a
zampolit
you’re somehow below them, but Yuri doesn’t do that:
in some ways he’s the ideal New Soviet Man, progress personified. Which makes
life a lot easier, because Yuri is one of the very few naval commanders who
doesn’t have to give a shit what his political officer thinks, and life would
be an awful lot stickier without that grease of respect to make the wheels go
round. Mind you, Yuri is also commander of the only naval warship operated by
the Cosmonaut Corps, which is a branch of the Strategic Rocket Forces, another
howling exception to the usual military protocol. Somehow this posting seems to
be breaking all the rules…

“What was it like, boss?”

“Hot as hell. Humid, like this. Beautiful women but lots
of dark-skinned comrades who didn’t bathe often enough–all very jolly,
but you couldn’t help looking out to sea, over your shoulder. You know there
was an American base there, even then? Guantanamo. They don’t have the base
now, but they’ve got all the rubble.” For a moment Gagarin looks morose.
“Bastards.”

“The Americans.”

“Yes. Shitting on a small defenseless island like that,
just because they couldn’t get to us any more. You remember when they had to
hand out iodine tablets to all the kids? That wasn’t Leningrad or Gorky, the
fallout plume: it was Havana. I don’t think they wanted to admit just how bad
it was.”

Misha sips his tea. “We had a lucky escape.” Morale be
damned, it’s acceptable to admit at least that much in front of the CO, in
private. Misha’s seen some of the KGB reports on the US nuclear capabilities
back then, and his blood runs cold; while Nikita had been wildly bluffing about
the Rodina’s nuclear defenses, the Americans had been hiding the true scale of
their own arsenal. From themselves as much as the rest of the world.

“Yes. Things were going to the devil back then, no
question: if we hadn’t woken up over here, who knows what would have happened?
They out-gunned us back then. I don’t think they realized.” Gagarin’s dark
expression lifts: he glances out of the open porthole–the only one in a
private cabin that opens–and smiles. “This isn’t Cuba, though.” The
headland rising above the bay tells him that much: no tropical island on earth
supported such weird vegetation. Or such ruins.

“Indeed not. But, what about the ruins?” asks Misha,
putting his tea glass down on the map table.

“Yes.” Gagarin leans forward: “I was meaning to talk to
you about that. Exploration is certainly in line with our orders, but we are a
trifle short of trained archaeologists, aren’t we? Let’s see: we’re four
hundred and seventy thousand kilometers from home, six major climactic zones,
five continents–it’ll be a long time before we get any settlers out here,
won’t it?” He pauses delicately. “Even if the rumors about reform of the penal
system are true.”

“It is certainly a dilemma,” Misha agrees amiably,
deliberately ignoring the skipper’s last comment. “But we can take some time
over it. There’s nobody out here, at least not within range of yesterday’s
reconnaissance flight. I’ll vouch for lieutenant Chekhov’s soundness: he has a
solid attitude, that one.”

“I don’t see how we can leave without examining the
ruins, but we’ve got limited resources and in any case I don’t want to do
anything that might get the Academy to slap our wrists. No digging for treasure
until the egg-heads get here.” Gagarin hums tunelessly for a moment, then slaps
his hand on his thigh: “I think we’ll shoot some film for the comrade general
secretary’s birthday party. First we’ll secure a perimeter around the beach,
give those damned spetsnaz a chance to earn all the vodka they’ve been
drinking. Then you and I, we can take Primary Science Party Two into the
nearest ruins with lights and cameras. Make a visual record, leave the
double-domes back in Moscow to figure out what we’re looking at and whether
it’s worth coming back later with a bunch of archaeologists. What do you say,
Misha?”

“I say that’s entirely logical, comrade general,” says
the political officer, nodding to himself.

“That’s so ordered, then. We’ll play it safe, though.
Just because we haven’t seen any active settlement patterns, doesn’t mean
there’re no aborigines lurking in the forest.”

“Like that last bunch of lizards.” Misha frowns. “Little
purple bastards!”

“We’ll make good communists out of them eventually,”
Yuri insists. “A toast! To making good communists out of little purple
lizard-bastards with blowpipes who shoot political officers in the arse!”

Gagarin grins wickedly and Gorodin knows when he’s being
wound up on purpose and summons a twinkle to his eye as he raises his glass:
“And to poisons that don’t work on human beings.”

Chapter Seven:
Discography

Warning:

The following briefing film is classified COLLECTION
RUBY. If you do not possess both COLLECTION and RUBY clearances, leave the
auditorium and report to the screening security officer immediately. Disclosure
to unauthorized personnel is a federal offense punishable by a fine of up to
ten thousand dollars and/or imprisonment for up to twenty years. You have
thirty seconds to clear the auditorium and report to the screening security
officer.

Voice-over:

Ocean–the final frontier. For twelve years, since
the momentous day when we discovered that we had been removed to this planar
world, we have been confronted by the immensity of an ocean that goes on as far
as we can see. Confronted also by the prospect of the spread of Communism to
uncharted new continents, we have committed ourselves to a strategy of
exploration and containment.

Film clip:

An Atlas rocket on the launch pad rises slowly, flames
jetting from its tail: it surges past the gantry and disappears into the sky.

Cut to:

A camera mounted in the nose, pointing back along the
flank of the rocket. The ground falls behind, blurring into blue distance.
Slowly, the sky behind the rocket is turning black: but the land still occupies
much of the fisheye view. The first stage engine ring tumbles away, leaving the
core engine burning with a pale blue flame: now the outline of the California
coastline is recognizable. North America shrinks visibly: eventually another,
strange outline swims into view, like a cipher in an alien script. The booster
burns out and falls behind, and the tumbling camera catches sunlight glinting
off the upper-stage Centaur rocket as its engine ignites, thrusting it higher
and faster.

Voice-over:

We cannot escape.

Cut to:

A meteor streaking across the empty blue bowl of the
sky; slowing, deploying parachutes.

Voice-over:

In 1962, this rocket would have blasted a two-ton
payload all the way into outer space. That was when we lived on a planet that
was an oblate sphere. Life on a dinner-plate seems to be different: while the
gravitational attraction anywhere on the surface is a constant, we can’t get
away from it. In fact, anything we fire straight up will come back down again.
Not even a nuclear rocket can escape: according to JPL scientist Dan Alderson,
escape from a Magellanic disk would require a speed of over one thousand six
hundred miles per second. That is because this disk masses many times more than
a star–in fact, it has a mass fifty thousand times greater than our own
sun.

What stops it collapsing into a sphere? Nobody knows.
Physicists speculate that a fifth force that drove the early expansion of the
universe–they call it ‘quintessence’–has been harnessed by the
makers of the disk. But the blunt truth is, nobody knows for sure. Nor do we
understand how we came here–how, in the blink of an eye, something beyond
our comprehension peeled the earth’s continents and oceans like a grape and
plated them across this alien disk.

Cut to:

A map. The continents of earth are laid out–Americas
at one side, Europe and Asia and Africa to their east. Beyond the Indonesian
island chain Australia and New Zealand hang lonely on the edge of an abyss of
ocean.

The map pans right: strange new continents swim into
view, ragged-edged and huge. A few of them are larger than Asia and Africa
combined; most of them are smaller.

Voice-over:

Geopolitics was changed forever by the Move. While the
surface topography of our continents was largely preserved, wedges of foreign
material were introduced below the Mohorovicik discontinuity–below the
crust–and in the deep ocean floor, to act as spacers. The distances
between points separated by deep ocean were, of necessity, changed, and not in
our geopolitical favor. While the tactical balance of power after the Move was
much as it had been before, the great circle flight paths our strategic
missiles were designed for–over the polar ice cap and down into the
Communist empire–were distorted and stretched, placing the enemy targets
outside their range. Meanwhile, although our manned bombers could still reach
Moscow with in-flight refueling, the changed map would have forced them to
traverse thousands of miles of hostile airspace en route. The Move rendered
most of our strategic preparations useless. If the British had been willing to
stand firm, we might have prevailed–but in retrospect, what went for us
also went for the Soviets, and it is hard to condemn the British for being
unwilling to take the full force of the inevitable Soviet bombardment alone.

In retrospect the only reason this was not a complete
disaster for us is that the Soviets were caught in the same disarray as
ourselves. But the specter of Communism now dominates western Europe: the
supposedly independent nations of the European Union are as much in thrall to
Moscow as the client states of the Warsaw Pact. Only the on-going British State
of Emergency offers us any residual geopolitical traction on the red continent,
and in the long term we must anticipate that the British, too, will be driven
to reach an accommodation with the Soviet Union.

Cut to:

A silvery delta-winged aircraft in flight. Stub wings,
pointed nose, and a shortage of windows proclaim it to be an unmanned drone: a
single large engine in its tail thrusts it along, exhaust nozzle glowing cherry-red.
Trackless wastes unwind below it as the viewpoint–a chase
plane–carefully climbs over the drone to capture a clear view of the
upper fuselage.

Voice-over:

The disk is vast–so huge that it defies sanity.
Some estimates give it the surface area of more than a billion earths.
Exploration by conventional means is futile: hence the deployment of the NP-101
Persephone drone, here seen making a proving flight over land mass F-42. The
NP-101 is a reconnaissance derivative of the nuclear-powered D-SLAM Pluto
missile that forms the backbone of our post-Move deterrent force. It is slower
than a strategic D-SLAM, but much more reliable: while D-SLAM is designed for a
quick, fiery dash into Soviet territory, the NP-101 is designed to fly long
duration missions that map entire continents. On a typical deployment the
NP-101 flies outward at thrice the speed of sound for nearly a month: traveling
fifty thousand miles a day, it penetrates a million miles into the unknown
before it turns and flies homeward. Its huge mapping cameras record two images
every thousand seconds, and its sophisticated digital computer records a
variety of data from its sensor suite, allowing us to build up a picture of
parts of the disk that our ships would take years or decades to reach. With
resolution down to the level of a single nautical mile, the NP-101 program has
been a resounding success, allowing us to map whole new worlds that it would
take us years to visit in person.