Year's Best SF 17

Gennady puzzled over those last two words for a while. Then he got it. “Come alone!” Ah. He should have known.

Shaking his head, he pulled out of the lot and headed back to the hotel to check out. After loading his bag, and Ambrose’s, into the Tata, he hit the road back to SNOPB. Nobody followed him, but that meant nothing since they could track him through the car’s transponder if they wanted. It hardly mattered; he was supposed to be inspecting the old anthrax factory, so where else would he be going?

Ambrose’d had enough time to get to SNOPB by now, but Gennady kept one eye on the fields next to the road just in case. He saw nobody, and fully expected to find the American waiting outside Building 242 as he pulled up.

As he stepped out of the Tata he nearly twisted his ankle in a deep rut. There were fresh tire tracks and shattered bits of old asphalt all over the place. He was sure he hadn’t seen them this morning.

“Hello?” He walked down the ramp into the sudden dark of the bunker. Did he have the right building? It was completely dark here.

Wires drooled from overhead conduits; hydroponic trays lay jumbled in the corner, and strange-smelling liquids were pooled on the floor. Minus Three had pulled out, and in a hurry.

He cursed, but suppressed an urge to run back to the car. He had no idea where they’d gone, and they had a head-start on him. The main question was, had they left before or after Ambrose showed up?

The answer lay in the yellow grass near where Minus Three’s vehicles had been parked that morning. Gennady knelt and picked up a familiar pair of augmented reality glasses. Ambrose would not have left these behind willingly.

Gennady swore, and now he did run to the Tata.

The restaurant at the Pavin Inn was made up to look like the interiors of a row of yurts. This gave diners some privacy as most of them had private little chambers under wood-ribbed ceilings; it also broke up the eye-lines to the place’s front door, making it easy for Gennady to slip past the two men in suits who’d been with Egorov in the parking lot. He entered the men’s room to find Egorov pacing in front of the urinal trough.

“What’s this all about?” demanded Gennady—but Egorov made a shushing motion and grabbed a trash can. As he upended it under the bathroom’s narrow window, he said, “First you must get me out of here.”

“What? Why?”

Egorov tried to climb onto the upended can, but his knees failed him and finally Gennady relented and went to help him. As he boosted the old comrade, Egorov said, “I am a prisoner of these people! They work for the Americans.” He practically spat the word. He perched precariously on the can and began tugging at the latch to the window. “They have seized our database! All the Soviet records … including what we know about the Tsarina.”

Gennady coughed. Then he said, “I’ll bring the car around.”

He helped Egorov through the window and, after making sure no one was looking, left through the hotel’s front door. Egorov’s unmistakable silhouette was limping into the parking lot. Gennady followed him and, unlocking the Tata, said, “I’ve disabled the GPS tracking in this car. It’s a rental; I’m going to drop it off in Semey, six hundred kilometres from here. Are you sure you’re up to a drive like that?”

The old man’s eyes glinted under yellow street light. “Never thought I’d get a chance to see the steppes again. Let’s go!”

Gennady felt a ridiculous surge of adrenaline as they bumped out of the parking lot. Only two other cars were on the road, and endless blackness swallowed the landscape beyond the edge of town. It was a simple matter to swing onto the highway and leave Stepnogorsk behind—but it felt like a car chase.

“Ha ha!” Egorov craned his neck to look back at the dwindling town lights. “Semey, eh? You’re going to Semipalatinsk, aren’t you?”

“To look at the Tsarina site, yes. Whose side does that put me on?”

“Sides?” Egorov crossed his arms and glared out the windshield. “I don’t know about sides.”

“It was an honest question.”

“I believe you. But I don’t know. Except for them,” he added, jabbing a thumb back at the town. “I know they’re bad guys.”

“Why? And why are they interested in Ambrose?”

“Same reason we are. Because of what he saw.”

Gennady took a deep breath. “Okay. Why don’t you just tell me what you know? And I’ll do the same?”

“Yes, all right.” The utter blackness of the night-time steppe had swallowed them; all that was visible was the double-cone of roadway visible in the car’s headlamps. It barely changed, moment to moment, giving the drive a timelessness Gennady would, under other circumstances, have quite enjoyed.

“We data-mine records from the Soviet era,” began Egorov. “To find out what really went on. It’s lucrative business, and it supports the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Online.” He tapped his glasses.

“A few weeks ago, we got a request for some of the old data—from the Americans. Two requests, actually, a day apart: one from the search engine company, and the other from the government. We were naturally curious, so we didn’t say no; but we did a little digging into the data ourselves. That is, we’d started to, when those men burst into our offices and confiscated the server. And the backup.”

Gennady looked askance at him. “Really? Where was this?”

“Um. Seattle. That’s where the CCCOP is based—only because we’ve been banned in the old country! Russia’s run by robber barons today, they have no regard for the glory of—”

“Yes, yes. Did you find out what they were looking for?”

“Yes—which is how I ended up with these travel companions you saw. They are in the pay of the American CIA.”

“Yes, but why? What does this have to do with the Tsarina?”

“I was hoping you could tell me. All we found was appropriations for strange things that should never have had anything to do with a nuclear test. Before the Tsarina was set off, there was about a year of heavy construction at the site. Sometimes, you know, they built fake towns to blow them up and examine the blast damage. That’s what I thought at first; they ordered thousands of tonnes of concrete, rebar and asbestos, that sort of thing. But if you look at the records after the test, there’s no sign of where any of that material went.”

“They ordered some sort of agricultural crop from SNOPB,” Gennady ventured. Egorov nodded.

“None of the discrepancies would ever have been noticed if not for your friend and whatever it is he found. What was it, anyway?”

A strange suspicion had begun to form in Gennady’s mind, but it was so unlikely that he shook his head. “I want to look at the Tsarina site,” he said. “Maybe that’ll tell us.”

Egorov was obviously unsatisfied with that answer, but he said nothing, merely muttering and trying to get himself comfortable in the Tata’s bucket seat. After a while, just as the hum of the dark highway was starting to hypnotize Gennady, Egorov said, “It’s all gone to Hell, you know.”

“Hmm?”

“Russia. It was hard in the old days, but at least we had our pride.” He turned to look out the black window. “After 1990, all the life just went out of the place. Lower birth-rate, men drinking themselves to death by the age of forty … no ambition, no hope. A lost land.”

“You left?”

“Physically, yes.” Egorov darted a look at Gennady. “You never leave. Not a place like this. For many years now, I’ve struggled with how to bring back Russia’s old glory—our sense of pride. Yet the best I was ever able to come up with was an online environment. A game.” He spat the word contemptuously.

Gennady didn’t reply, but he knew how Egorov felt. Ukraine had some of the same problems—the lack of direction, the loss of confidence … It wasn’t getting any better here. He thought of the blasted steppes they were passing through, rendered unlivable by global warming. There had been massive forest fires in Siberia this year, and the Gobi desert was expanding north and west, threatening the Kazaks even as the Caspian Sea dwindled to nothing.

He thought of SNOPB. “They’re gone,” he said, “but they left their trash behind.” Toxic, decaying: nuclear submarines heeled over in the waters off Murmansk, nitrates soaking the soil around the launch pads of Baikonur.