New York director of the International Atomic Energy Agency. She was Gennady’s boss for this new and—so far— annoyingly vague contract. “There just wasn’t time to explain why we were sending him with you to Kazakhstan,” she added.
“So explain now.” He was pacing in the grass in front of the best hotel his IAEA stipend could afford. It was evening and the crickets were waking up; to the west, fantastically huge clouds had piled up, their tops still lit golden as the rest of the sky faded into mauve. It was cooling off already.
“Right… Well, first of all, it seems he really is being chased by the Russians, but not by the country. It’s the
“So, let me get this straight,” said Gennady heavily. “Poor Ambrose is being chased by Soviet agents. He ran to the U.N. rather than the FBI, and to keep him safe you decided to transport him to the one place in the world that is free of Soviet influence. Which is Russia.”
“Exactly,” said Frankl brightly. “And you’re escorting him because your contract is taking you there anyway. No other reason.”
“No, no, it’s fine. Just tell me what the hell I’m supposed to be looking for at SNOPB. The place was a God- damned anthrax factory. I’m a radiation specialist.”
He heard Frankl take a deep breath, and then she said, “Two years ago, an unknown person or persons hacked into a Los Alamos server and stole the formula for an experimental metastable explosive. Now we have a paper trail and e-mails that have convinced us that a metastable bomb is being built. You know what this means?”
Gennady leaned against the wall of the hotel, suddenly feeling sick. “The genie is finally out of the bottle.”
“If it’s true, Gennady, then everything we’ve worked for has come to naught. Because as of now, anybody in the world who wants a nuclear bomb can make one.”
He didn’t know what to say, so he just stared out at the steppe, thinking about a world where hydrogen bombs were as easy to get as TNT. His whole life’s work would be rendered pointless—and all arms treaties, the painstaking work of generations to put the nuclear nightmare back in its bottle. The nuclear threat had been containable when it was limited to governments and terrorists—but now, the threat was from
Eleanor’s distant voice snapped him back to attention. “Here’s the thing, Gennady: we don’t know very much about this group that’s building the metastable weapon. By luck we’ve managed to decrypt a few e-mails from one party, so we know a tiny bit—a minimal bit—about the design of the bomb. It seems to be based on one of the biggest of the weapons ever tested at Semipalatinsk—its code name was
“The Tsarina?” Gennady whistled softly. “That was a major, major test. Underground, done in 1968. Ten megatonnes—lifted the whole prairie two meters and dropped it. Killed about a thousand cattle from the ground shock. Scared the hell out of the Americans, too.”
“Yes, and we’ve discovered that some of the Tsarina’s components were made at the Stepnogorsk Scientific Experimental and Production Base. In Building 242.”
“But SNOPB was a biological facility, not nuclear. How can this possibly be connected?”
“We don’t know how, yet. Listen, Gennady, I know it’s a thin lead. After you’re done at the SNOPB, I want you to drive out to Semipalatinsk and investigate the Tsarina site.”
“Hmmph.” Part of Gennady was deeply annoyed. Part was relieved that he wouldn’t be dealing with any IAEA or Russian nuclear staff in the near future. Truth to tell, stalking around the Kazaki grasslands was a lot more appealing than dealing with the political shit-storm that would hit when this all went public.
But speaking of people… He glanced up at the hotel’s one lighted window. With a grimace he pocketed his augmented reality glasses and went up to the room.
Ambrose was sprawled on one of the narrow beds. He had the TV on and was watching a Siberian ski- adventure infomercial. “Well?” he said as Gennady sat on the other bed and dragged his shoes off.
“Tour of secret Soviet anthrax factory. Tomorrow, after Egg McMuffins.”
“Yay,” said Ambrose with apparent feeling. “Do I get to wear a hazmat suit?”
“Not this time.” Gennady lay back, then saw that Ambrose was staring at him with an alarmed look on his face. “Is fine,” he said, waggling one hand at the boy. “Only one underground bunker we’re interested in, and they probably never used it. The place never went into full production, you know.”
“Meaning it only made a few hundred pounds of anthrax per day instead of the full ton it was designed for! I should feel reassured?”
Gennady stared at the uneven ceiling. “Is an adventure.” He must be tired, his English was slipping.
“This sucks.” Ambrose crossed his arms and glowered at the TV.
Gennady thought for a while. “So what did you do to piss off Google so much? Drive the rover off a cliff?” Ambrose didn’t answer, and Gennady sat up. “You found something. On Mars.”
“No, that’s ridiculous,” said Ambrose. “That’s not it at all.”
“Huh.” Gennady lay down again. “Still, I think I’d enjoy it. Even if it wasn’t in real time… driving on Mars. That would be cool.”
“That sucked too.”
“Really? I would have thought it would be fun, seeing all those places emerge from low-res satellite into full hi-res three-d.”
But Ambrose shook his head. “That’s not how it worked. That’s the point. I couldn’t believe my luck when I won the contest, you know? I thought it’d be like being the first man on Mars, only I wouldn’t have to leave my living room. But the whole point of the rover was to go into terrain that hadn’t been photographed from the ground before. And with the time-delay on signals to Mars, I wasn’t steering it in real time. I’d drive in fast-forward mode over low-res pink hills that looked worse than a forty-year-old video game, then upload the drive sequence and log off. The rover’d get the commands twenty minutes later and drive overnight, then download the results. By that time it was the next day and I had to enter the next path. Rarely had time to even look at where we’d actually gone the day before.”
Gennady considered. “A bit disappointing. But still—more than most people ever get.”
“More than anyone else will ever get.” Ambrose scowled. “That’s what was so awful about it. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh?” Gennady arched an eyebrow. “We who grew up in the old Soviet Union know a little about disappointment.”
Ambrose looked mightily uncomfortable. “I grew up in Washington. Capital of the world! But my dad went from job to job, we were pretty poor. So every day I could see what you
“Important?”
He shrugged. “Something like that. NASA used to tell us they were just about to go to Mars, any day now, and I wanted that. I dreamed about homesteading on Mars.” He looked defensive; but Gennady understood the romance of it. He just nodded.
“Then when I was twelve the Pakistani-Indian war happened and they blew up each other’s satellites. All that debris from the explosions is going to be up there for centuries! You can’t get a manned spacecraft through that cloud, it’s like shrapnel. Hell, they haven’t even cleared low Earth orbit to restart the orbital tourist industry. I’ll never get to
Gennady scowled at the ceiling. “I hope you’re wrong.”
“Welcome to the life of the last man to drive on Mars.” Ambrose dragged the tufted covers back from the bed. “Instead of space, I get a hotel in Kazakhstan. Now let me sleep. It’s about a billion o’clock in the morning, my time.”
He was soon snoring, but Gennady’s alarm over the prospect of a metastable bomb had him fully awake. He put on his AR glasses and reviewed the terrain around SNOPB, but much of the satellite footage was old and probably out of date. Ambrose was right: nobody was putting up satellites these days if they could help it.
Little had probably changed at the old factory, though, and it was a simple enough place. Planning where to
