“So the… biomechs are still in there?” McKay eyed the pod uncomfortably.
“We’re about to find out,” Lambert told him. He pointed to a series of wires running from the pod’s diameter to a small control box held by Sandra Cerrano. “She’s about to pop the sucker open.”
“I would advise everyone,” Cerrano said, raising the control box, “to move back against the wall.”
They’d hardly had time to attempt to follow her direction when she hit the control and the explosive bolts that ringed the pod ignited with a series of sharp bangs that made Jason’s ears pop. A hiss of carbon dioxide escaped from the pod’s innards as it split down the middle like a coconut, the halves floating apart until they came up against the netting that was stretched over the opposite sides of the bay.
McKay tensed as an armored shape drifted out of one of the hemispheres, but it hovered motionless between the pod halves, limp and lifeless. Cerrano and Munfimi moved eagerly toward the pod, joined a bit more hesitantly by the others. Munfimi, a slim, lanky man with eyes that seemed to be too large for his head, approached the ejected Invader trooper; while Cerrano inspected the inside of the pod.
“What’s the stuff covering the outside?” Jason asked the Spaceflight Safety investigator, trying not to come too close to the armored troop while Munfimi worked at the fastenings of its armor.
“Styrofoam, believe it or not,” the woman told him. “Simple and cheap, but very efficient—it’s nonreflective to radar or laser sensors. Unless you had a telescope trained on the thing, you’d never see it.”
“Another anomaly,” Shannon said, watching Munfimi pull the helmet off the biomech. The corpse was perfectly preserved, its black eyes staring into nothingness. “Aside from the genetic engineering used to produce the biomechs, every piece of technology we’ve seen so far is retro.”
“Especially the weapons,” Lambert commented, prying the assault rifle from the trooper’s harness and turning the bullpup-configuration firearm over in his hands. “I’ve shot a lot of antique pieces, but this…” He popped out the magazine and scowled at the brass-cased rounds within. “Jeez, brass cases, steel-core bullets—nobody’s used this shit for the last hundred years.”
“
Jason turned from the edge of the pod, staring at her curiously.
“What is it?” he asked her.
“I
“Those were heady times,” Kovalev said, his voice almost wistful. “My grandfather was an engineer for Premier Antonov’s space program—he escaped to the U.S. just days before the nuclear exchange. He used to put me and my brothers to bed at night with tales of the rise of the Protectorate.” He looked each of them in the eye. “I know that Antonov is seen as a dictator nowadays, but at the time, he was seen by the poor and powerless of Eastern Europe as a savior, coming forward to lead Mother Russia back to her days of glory. And, for a time, he did. He got us back into space, reaching to the asteroid belt and bringing back precious mineral resources. Had he not become foolishly involved with the Chinese Conflict, history might have treated him much differently. Even today, among the survivors, the tales are told that Premier Antonov did not die in the bombardment, but escaped with his most loyal troops in the Protectorate’s remaining spaceships to hide somewhere in the asteroid belt.”
“That’s where I’ve seen this gun before.” Gunny Lambert looked up from the Invader rifle, only half-listening to Kovalev’s reminiscence. “I shot one of these puppies at Camp Perry—it’s an old Russian Kalashnikov AKL-99 automatic rifle…” He stopped in midsentence, suddenly aware of what he’d just said, and his head snapped up, eyes wide.
Shannon looked from him to Kovalev and back again, and Jason’s gaze danced back and forth between all three of them.
“Pardon me,” Sandra Cerrano spoke up from the drop pod, “but just what the hell are you talking about?”
“It adds up,” Shannon admitted. “The biomechs were created from human DNA by someone or something. They had to get the material somewhere. They obtained or copied their weapons and equipment from the same place they got the genetic material—from survivors of the Russian Protectorate who escaped to the Belt during the nuclear exchange.”
“But that’s just a rumor,” Kovalev protested. “A legend.”
“I think we have dramatic proof right here,” Shannon pointed out, “that it was based on fact.”
There was a moment of stunned silence as the impact of her statement sunk home.
Gunny Lambert finally chuckled, still looking at the rifle. “Well, the xenobiologists are sure gonna be pissed.”
Jason shook his head. “That can’t be all there is to it. Even if you’re right—even if some of the Russians did escape to the Belt, and even if they were somehow captured by some alien intelligence who used them to produce these biomechs, why wait a hundred years to make a move? Why copy the Russian technology if they could get as close to us as the Belt? Why not just snatch a modern cargo hauler and use that technology?”
“He’s right,” Kovalev agreed. “I can believe that the DNA and the weapons came from Antonov’s ships, but that is not the whole story. If you are right about everything else you say…” He frowned, as taciturn as Jason had seen him. “There was another rumor my grandfather heard in the days before the War. He never really believed it, but its spread was severely discouraged—men and women who told it disappeared—so he did not forget it.” His face contorted, as if he didn’t want to continue. “The first mission to the asteroid belt, there was much publicity surrounding it. It was more of a political statement than a scientific expedition—Mother Russia regaining her ascendancy and all that. There was much embarrassment when contact was lost with the two ships. Officially they were listed as lost, but my grandfather heard from a woman involved with the training that she saw one of the men who was on one of the ships.” Kovalev’s heavy breathing had sent him floating off to one side and he came up against the far wall unprepared, grunting as he grasped for a handhold.
“Sorry,” he said, wincing. “This woman said she saw the man being rushed from a landing shuttle to a security vehicle. She asked around with a friend she knew who was the local intelligence officer. He had heard something—he said one of the ships had come back. The crew said they had… fallen? Fallen through a hole in space somewhere in the asteroid belt. Both ships had gone through this hole, but only they had arrived on the other side.”
“A hole in space?” Cerrano repeated dubiously. “As a physicist, don’t you find that a bit hard to swallow?”
“As a physicist, Ms. Cerrano,” Kovalev said, staring at her, his good-natured long-windedness quashed by the eerie atmosphere which had descended upon the occupants of the bay, “I know about such possibilities as singularities, wormholes and many things I would find ‘hard to swallow.’ But many of them exist, nonetheless.”
“This gateway,” Shannon asked him. “It was supposed to lead to another solar system?”
“My grandfather’s colleague assumed so, but she disappeared before she could tell him anything else.”
“So let me get this straight.” Jason held up a hand, face screwed up in consternation. “You’re saying that over a hundred years ago, a Russian spaceship stumbled upon some kind of gate somewhere in the asteroid belt that transported them to another star system. They came back, but before anything could be done about it, the Sino-Russian War breaks out and Antonov took a ship and went back through that hole. Then, somewhere on the other side, something got hold of him and his crew and his technology, a century later, and decided to use it to invade a colony world to loot a few computers?”
“Yes, that’s the troubling part.” Munfimi agreed. “Even assuming the other details are true, which is quite a leap—forgive me, Dr. Kovalev—then we still fall upon the question, why attack Aphrodite? If they needed resupply, why not simply continue to hijack our ships, as they obviously have been? They must surely have expended more resources attacking this colony than they recouped in their occupation.”
“Yeah,” Lambert agreed. “And after we blew the spaceport, they didn’t even try to reestablish a beachhead —they just pulled out. What’s with that?”
