’em back on board in no time.” The sub has been away for nearly a day; it set out with enough battery juice for the journey, and enough air to keep the crew breathing for a long time if there’s a system failure, but they’ve learned the hard way that failsafe systems aren’t. Not out here, at the edge of the human world.
“I was afraid the battery load on that cell you replaced would trip an undervoltage isolator, and we’d be here till Hell freezes over,” the sub-driver jokes to his neighbor.
Roger shuffles some more. Looking round, he sees one of the marines cross himself. “Have you heard anything from Gorman or Suslowicz?” he asks quietly.
The lieutenant checks his clipboard. “Not since departure, sir,” he says. “We don’t have comms with the subwhile it’s submerged: too small for ELF, and we don’t want to alert anybody who might be, uh, listening.”
“Indeed.”
The yellow hunchback shape of the midget submarine appears at the edge of the radiance shed by the floodlights. Surface waters undulate, oily, as the sub rises.
“Crew-transfer vehicle sighted,” the driver mutters into his mike. He’s suddenly very busy adjusting trim settings, blowing bottled air into ballast tanks, discussing ullage levels and blade count with his number two. The crane crew are busy too, running their long boom out over the lake.
The sub’s hatch is visible now, bobbing along the top of the water: the lieutenant is suddenly active.
“Jones! Civatti! Stake it out, left and center!” The crane is already swinging the huge lifting hook over the sub, waiting to bring it aboard. “I want eyeballs on the portholes before you crack this thing!” It’s the tenth run-seventh manned-through the eye of the needle on the lake bed, the drowned structure so like an ancient temple, and Roger has a bad feeling about it.We can’t get away with this forever, he reasons.Sooner or later…
The sub comes out of the water like a gigantic yellow bath toy, a cyborg whale designed by a god with a sense of humor. It takes tense minutes to winch it in and maneuver it safely onto the platform. Marines take up position, shining torches in through two of the portholes that bulge myopically from the smooth curve of the sub’s nose. Up on top someone’s talking into a handset plugged into the stubby conning tower; the hatch-locking wheel begins to turn.
“Gorman, sir.” It’s the lieutenant. In the light of the sodium floods everything looks sallow and washed-out; the soldier’s face is the color of damp cardboard, slack with relief.
Roger waits while the submariner-Gorman-clambers unsteadily down from the top deck. He’s a tall, emaciated- looking man, wearing a red thermal suit three sizes too big for him: salt-and-pepper stubble textures his jaw with sandpaper. Right now, he looks like a cholera victim; sallow skin, smell of acrid ketones as his body eats its own protein reserves, a more revolting miasma hovering over him. There’s a slim aluminum briefcase chained to his left wrist, a bracelet of bruises darkening the skin above it. Roger steps forward.
“Sir?” Gorman straightens up for a moment: almost a shadow of military attention. He’s unable to sustain it. “We made the pickup. Here’s the QA sample; the rest is down below. You have the unlocking code?” he asks wearily.
Jourgensen nods. “One. Five. Eight. One. Two. Two. Nine.”
Gorman slowly dials it into a combination lock on the briefcase, lets it fall open and unthreads the chain from his wrist. Floodlights glisten on polythene bags stuffed with white powder, five kilos of high-grade heroin from the hills of Afghanistan; there’s another quarter of a ton packed in boxes in the crew compartment. The lieutenant inspects it, closes the case and passes it to Jourgensen. “Delivery successful, sir.” From the ruins on the high plateau of the Taklamakan desert to American territory in Antarctica, by way of a detour through gates linking alien worlds: gates that nobody knows how to create or destroy except the Predecessors-and they aren’t talking.
“What’s it like through there?” Roger demands, shoulders tense. “What did yousee?”
Up on top, Suslowicz is sitting in the sub’s hatch, half slumping against the crane’s attachment post.
There’s obviously something very wrong with him. Gorman shakes his head and looks away: the wan light makes the razor-sharp creases on his face stand out, like the crackled and shattered surface of a Jovian moon. Crow’s feet. Wrinkles. Signs of age. Hair the color of moonlight. “It took so long,” he says, almost complaining. Sinks to his knees. “All thattime we’ve been gone…” He leans against the side of the sub, a pale shadow, aged beyond his years. “The sun was sobright. And our radiation detectors…Must have been a solar flare or something.” He doubles over and retches at the edge of the platform.
Roger looks at him for a long, thoughtful minute: Gorman is twenty-five and a fixer for Big Black, early history in the Green Berets. He was in rude good health two days ago, when he set off through the gate to make the pickup. Roger glances at the lieutenant. “I’d better go and tell the Colonel,” he says. A pause. “Get these two back to Recovery and see they’re looked after. I don’t expect we’ll be sending anymore crews through Victor-Tango for a while.”
He turns and walks toward the lift shaft, hands clasped behind his back to keep them from shaking.
Behind him, alien moonlight glimmers across the floor of Lake Vostok, three miles and untold light years from home.
General Lemay Would be Proud Warning:
The following briefing film is classified
S ECRET I NDIGO M ARCH S NIPE . If you do not have S ECRET I NDIGO M ARCH S NIPE clearance, leave the auditoriumnow and report to your unit security officer for debriefing.
Failing to observe this notice is an imprisonable offense.
Video clip:
Shot of huge bomber, rounded gun turrets sprouting like mushrooms from the decaying log of its fuselage, weirdly bulbous engine pods slung too far out toward each wing tip, four turbine tubes clumped around each atomic kernel.
Voice-over: “The Convair B-39 Peacemaker is the most formidable weapon in our Strategic Air Command’s arsenal for peace. Powered by eight nuclear-heated Pratt amp; Whitney NP-4051 turbojets, it circles endlessly above the Arctic ice cap, waiting for the call. This is Item One, the flight training and test bird: twelve other birds await criticality on the ground, for once launched a B-39 can only be landed at the two airfields in Alaska that are equipped to handle them. This one’s been airborne for nine months so far and shows no signs of age.”
Cut to:
A shark the size of a Boeing 727 falls away from the open bomb bay of the monster. Stubby delta wings slice through the air, propelled by a rocket-bright glare.
Voice-over: “A modified Navajo missile-test article for an XK-Pluto payload-dives away from a carrier plane.
Unlike the real thing, this one carries no hydrogen bombs, no direct-cycle fission ramjet to bring retaliatory destruction to the enemy. Travelling at Mach 3 the XK-Pluto will overfly enemy territory, dropping megaton-range bombs until, its payload exhausted, it seeks out and circles a final enemy. Once over the target it will eject its reactor core and rain molten plutonium on the heads of the enemy.
XK-Pluto is a total weapon: every aspect of its design, from the shockwave it creates as it hurtles along at treetop height to the structure of its atomic reactor, is designed to inflict damage.”
Cut to:
Belsen postcards, Auschwitz movies: a holiday in hell.
Voice-over: “Thisis why we need such a weapon.This is what it deters. The abominations first raised by the Third Reich’s Organization Todt, now removed to the Ukraine and deployed in the service of New Soviet Man, as our enemy calls himself.”
Cut to:
A sinister gray concrete slab, the upper surface of a Mayan step pyramid built with East German cement.
Barbed wire, guns. A drained canal slashes north from the base of the pyramid toward the Baltic coastline, a relic of the installation process: this is where it came from. The slave barracks squat beside the pyramid like a horrible memorial to its black-uniformed builders.
Cut to:
The new resting-place: a big, concrete monolith surrounded by three concrete-lined lakes and a canal. It sits in the midst of a Ukraine landscape, flat as a pancake, that stretches forever in all directions.
Voice-over: “This is Project Koschei. The Kremlin’s key to the Gates of Hell…”
Technology Taster “We know they first came here during the Precambrian age.” Professor Gould is busy with his viewgraphs, eyes down, trying not to pay too much attention to his audience. “We have samples of macrofauna,
