looking at a flooded quarry.
Gennady gathered his equipment and began combing the grass around the site. After a minute he found some twisted chunks of concrete and metal, and knelt down to inspect them.
Egorov came up behind him. “What are you looking for?”
“Serial numbers.” He quickly found some old, grayed stenciling on a half-buried tank made of greenish metal. “You’ll understand what I’m doing,” he said as he pinched the arm of his glasses to take a snapshot. “I’m checking our database… Hmpf.”
“What is it?” Egorov shifted from foot to foot. He was glancing around, as if afraid they might be interrupted.
“This piece came from the smaller of the installations here. The one the Americans called URDF-3.”
“URDF?” Egorov blinked at him.
“Stands for ‘Unidentified Research and Development Facility.’ The stuff they built there scared the Yankees even more than the H-bomb…”
He stood up, frowning, and slowly turned to look at the entire site. “Something’s been bothering me,” he said as he walked to the very edge of the giant pit.
“What’s that?” Egorov was hanging back.
“Ambrose told me he saw a pyramid on Mars. It said CCCP on its side. That was all; so he knew it was Russian, and so did Google and the CIA when they found out about it. And you, too.
“But that’s all anybody knew. So who made the connection between the pyramid and the Tsarina?”
Egorov didn’t reply. Gennady turned and found that the old man had drawn himself up very straight, and had leveled a small, nasty-looking pistol at him.
“You didn’t follow us to Stepnogorsk,” said Gennady. “You were already there.”
“Take off your glasses,” said Egorov. “Carefully, so I can be sure you’re not snapping another picture.”
As Gennady reached up to comply he felt the soft soil at the lip of the pit start to crumble. “Ah, can we—” It was too late, he toppled backward, arms flailing.
He had an instant’s choice: roll down the slope, or jump and hope he’d hit the water. He jumped.
The cold hit him so hard that at first he thought he’d been shot. Swearing and gasping, he surfaced, but when he spotted Egorov’s silhouette at the crest of the pit, dove again.
Morning sunlight was just tipping into the water. At first Gennady thought the wall of the pit was casting a dark shadow across the sediment below him. Gradually he realized the truth: there was no bottom to this shaft. At least, none within easy diving distance.
He swam to the opposite side; he couldn’t stay down here, he’d freeze. Defeated, he flung himself out of the freezing water onto hard clay that was probably radioactive. Rolling over, he looked up.
Egorov stood on the lip of the pit. Next to him was a young woman with a rifle in her hands.
Gennady sat up. “Shit.”
Kyzdygoi slung the rifle over her back, then clambered down the slope to the shore. As she picked her way over to Gennady she said, “How much do you know?”
“Everything,” he said between coughs. “I know everything. Where’s Ambrose?”
“He’s safe,” she said. “He’ll be fine.”
Then she waited, rifle cradled. “You’re here,” he said reluctantly, “which tells me that -3 was funded by the Soviets. Your job was never to clean up the Earth—it was to design life support and agricultural systems for a Mars colony.”
Her mouth twitched, but she didn’t laugh. “How could we possibly get to Mars? The sky’s a shooting gallery.”
“… And that would be a problem if you were going up there in a dinky little aluminum can, like cosmonauts always did.” He stood up, joints creaking from the cold. He was starting to shiver deeply and it was hard to speak past his chattering teeth. “B-but if you rode a c-concrete bunker into orbit, you could ignore the shrapnel c- completely. In fact, that would be the only way you could d-do it.”
“Come now. How could something like that ever get off the ground?”
“The same way the Tsarina d-did.” He nodded at the dark surface of the flooded shaft. “The Americans had their P-project Orion. The Soviets had a similar program based at URDF-3. Both had discovered that an object could be just a few meters away from a nuclear explosion, and if it was made of the right materials it wouldn’t be destroyed—it would be shot away like a bullet from a gun. The Americans designed a spaceship that would drop atomic bombs out the back and ride the explosions to orbit. But the Tsarina wasn’t like that… it was just one bomb, and a d-deep shaft, and a pyramid-shaped spaceship to ride that explosion. That design’s something called a
“And who else knows this?”
He hesitated. “N-no one,” he admitted. “I didn’t know until I saw the shaft just now. The p-pyramid was fitted into the mouth of it, right about where we’re s-standing. That’s why this doesn’t look like any other bomb crater on Earth.”
“Let’s go,” she said, gesturing with the rifle. “You’re turning blue.”
“Y-you’re not going t-to sh-shoot me?”
“There’s no need,” she said gently. “In a few days, the whole world will know what we’ve done.”
Gennady finished taping aluminum foil to the trailer’s window. Taking a pushpin from the corkboard by the door, he carefully pricked a single tiny hole in the foil.
It was night, and crickets were chirping outside. Gennady wasn’t tied up—in fact, he was perfectly free to leave—but on his way out the door Egorov had said, “I wouldn’t go outside in the next hour or so. After that… well, wait for the dust to settle.”
They’d driven him about fifty kilometers to the south and into an empty part of the Polygon. When Gennady had asked why this place, Egorov had laughed. “The Soviets set off their bombs here because this was the last empty place on Earth. It’s still the last empty place, and that’s why we’re here.”
There was nothing here but the withered steppe, a hundred or so trucks, vans and buses, and the cranes, tanks and pole-sheds of a temporary construction site.—And, towering over the sheds, a gray concrete pyramid.
“A Verne gun fires its cargo into orbit in a single shot,” Egorov had told Gennady. “It generates thousands of gravities worth of acceleration—enough to turn you into a smear on the floor. That’s why the Soviets couldn’t send any people; they hadn’t figured out how to set off a controlled sequence of little bombs. The Americans never perfected that either. They didn’t have the computational power to do the simulations.
“So they sent everything but the people.
Bulldozers and cranes, fuel tanks, powdered cement, bags of seeds and food, space suits, even a complete, dismantled nuclear reactor: the Tsarina had included everything potential colonists might need on a new world. Its builders knew it had gone up, knew it had gotten to Mars; but they didn’t know where it had landed, or whether it had landed intact.
A day after his visit to the Tsarina site, Gennady had sat outside this trailer with Egorov, Kyzdygoi, and a few other officials of the new Soviet. They’d drunk a few beers and talked about the plan. “When our data-mining turned up the Tsarina’s manifest, it was like a light from heaven,” Egorov had said, his hands opening eloquently in the firelight. “Suddenly we saw what was possible, how to revive our people—all the world’s people—around a new hope, after all hope had gone. Something that would combine Apollo and Trinity into one event, and suddenly both would take on the meaning they always needed to have.”
Egorov had started a crash program to build an Orion rocket. They couldn’t get fissionable materials— Gennady and his people had locked those up tightly and for all time. But the metastables promised a different approach.
“We hoped the Tsarina was on Mars and intact, but we didn’t know for sure, until Ambrose leaked his pictures.”
The new Tsarina would use a series of small, clean fusion blasts to lift off and, at the far end, to land again. Thanks to Ambrose, they knew where the Tsarina was. It didn’t matter that the Americans did too; nobody else had a plan to get there.
