'What? Uh, no — I'm freshly qualified.' His abrupt questioning flusters her.
'Huh.' He makes a cryptic notation against their names on a long list, a list that spills over the edge of his desk and trails towards the rough floor. 'Next.' He hands the passports back, and a couple of cards, and points them along to the row of desks.
Someone is already stepping up behind them when Maddy manages to read the tickets. Hers says TRAINEE NURSE. Robert is staring at his and saying 'no, this is wrong.'
'What is it, Bob?' She looks over his shoulder as someone jostles him sideways. His card reads LABORER (unskilled); but she doesn't have time to read the rest.
Chapter Six: Captain's Log
Yuri Gagarin kicks his shoes off, loosens his tie, and leans back in his chair. 'It's hotter than fucking Cuba !' he complains.
'You visited Cuba, didn't you, boss?' His companion, still standing, pours a glass of iced tea and passes it to the young colonel-general before drawing one for himself.
'Yeah, thanks Misha.' The former first cosmonaut smiles tiredly. 'Back before the invasion. Have a seat.'
Misha Gorodin is the only man on the ship who doesn't have to give a shit whether the captain offers him a seat, but he's grateful all the same: a little respect goes a long way, and Gagarin's sunny disposition and friendly attitude is a far cry from some of the fuckheads Misha's been stuck with in the past. There's a class of officer who thinks that because you're a zampolit you're somehow below them, but Yuri doesn't do that: in some ways he's the ideal New Soviet Man, progress personified. Which makes life a lot easier, because Yuri is one of the very few naval commanders who doesn't have to give a shit what his political officer thinks, and life would be an awful lot stickier without that grease of respect to make the wheels go round. Mind you, Yuri is also commander of the only naval warship operated by the Cosmonaut Corps, which is a branch of the Strategic Rocket Forces, another howling exception to the usual military protocol. Somehow this posting seems to be breaking all the rules…
'What was it like, boss?'
'Hot as hell. Humid, like this. Beautiful women but lots of dark-skinned comrades who didn't bathe often enough — all very jolly, but you couldn't help looking out to sea, over your shoulder. You know there was an American base there, even then? Guantanamo. They don't have the base now, but they've got all the rubble.' For a moment Gagarin looks morose. 'Bastards.'
'The Americans.'
'Yes. Shitting on a small defenseless island like that, just because they couldn't get to us any more. You remember when they had to hand out iodine tablets to all the kids? That wasn't Leningrad or Gorky, the fallout plume: it was Havana. I don't think they wanted to admit just how bad it was.'
Misha sips his tea. 'We had a lucky escape.' Morale be damned, it's acceptable to admit at least that much in front of the CO, in private. Misha's seen some of the KGB reports on the US nuclear capabilities back then, and his blood runs cold; while Nikita had been wildly bluffing about the Rodina's nuclear defenses, the Americans had been hiding the true scale of their own arsenal. From themselves as much as the rest of the world.
'Yes. Things were going to the devil back then, no question: if we hadn't woken up over here, who knows what would have happened? They out-gunned us back then. I don't think they realized.' Gagarin's dark expression lifts: he glances out of the open porthole — the only one in a private cabin that opens — and smiles. 'This isn't Cuba, though.' The headland rising above the bay tells him that much: no tropical island on earth supported such weird vegetation. Or such ruins.
'Indeed not. But, what about the ruins?' asks Misha, putting his tea glass down on the map table.
'Yes.' Gagarin leans forward: 'I was meaning to talk to you about that. Exploration is certainly in line with our orders, but we are a trifle short of trained archaeologists, aren't we? Let's see: we're four hundred and seventy thousand kilometers from home, six major climactic zones, five continents — it'll be a long time before we get any settlers out here, won't it?' He pauses delicately. 'Even if the rumors about reform of the penal system are true.'
'It is certainly a dilemma,' Misha agrees amiably, deliberately ignoring the skipper's last comment. 'But we can take some time over it. There's nobody out here, at least not within range of yesterday's reconnaissance flight. I'll vouch for Lieutenant Chekhov's soundness: he has a solid attitude, that one.'
'I don't see how we can leave without examining the ruins, but we've got limited resources and in any case I don't want to do anything that might get the Academy to slap our wrists. No digging for treasure until the egg-heads get here.' Gagarin hums tunelessly for a moment, then slaps his hand on his thigh: 'I think we'll shoot some film for the comrade general secretary's birthday party. First we'll secure a perimeter around the beach, give those damned spetsnaz a chance to earn all the vodka they've been drinking. Then you and I, we can take Primary Science Party Two into the nearest ruins with lights and cameras. Make a visual record, leave the double-domes back in Moscow to figure out what we're looking at and whether it's worth coming back later with a bunch of archaeologists. What do you say, Misha?'
'I say that's entirely logical, comrade general,' says the political officer, nodding to himself.
'That's so ordered, then. We'll play it safe, though. Just because we haven't seen any active settlement patterns, doesn't mean there're no aborigines lurking in the forest.'
'Like that last bunch of lizards.' Misha frowns. 'Little purple bastards!'
'We'll make good communists out of them eventually,' Yuri insists. 'A toast! To making good communists out of little purple lizard-bastards with blowpipes who shoot political officers in the arse!'
Gagarin grins wickedly and Gorodin knows when he's being wound up on purpose and summons a twinkle to his eye as he raises his glass: 'And to poisons that don't work on human beings.'
Chapter Seven: Discography
Warning:
The following briefing film is classified COLLECTION RUBY. If you do not possess both COLLECTION and RUBY clearances, leave the auditorium and report to the screening security officer immediately. Disclosure to unauthorized personnel is a federal offense punishable by a fine of up to ten thousand dollars and/or imprisonment for up to twenty years. You have thirty seconds to clear the auditorium and report to the screening security officer.
Voice-over:
Ocean — the final frontier. For twelve years, since the momentous day when we discovered that we had been removed to this planar world, we have been confronted by the immensity of an ocean that goes on as far as we can see. Confronted also by the prospect of the spread of Communism to uncharted new continents, we have committed ourselves to a strategy of exploration and containment.
Film clip:
An Atlas rocket on the launch pad rises slowly, flames jetting from its tail: it surges past the gantry and disappears into the sky.
Cut to:
A camera mounted in the nose, pointing back along the flank of the rocket. The ground falls behind, blurring into blue distance. Slowly, the sky behind the rocket is turning black: but the land still occupies much of the fisheye view. The first stage engine ring tumbles away, leaving the core engine burning with a pale blue flame: now the outline of the California coastline is recognizable. North America shrinks visibly: eventually another, strange outline swims into view, like a cipher in an alien script. The booster burns out and falls behind, and the tumbling camera catches sunlight glinting off the upper-stage Centaur rocket as its engine ignites, thrusting it higher and faster.
Voice-over:
We cannot escape.
Cut to:
A meteor streaking across the empty blue bowl of the sky; slowing, deploying parachutes.
Voice-over:
In 1962, this rocket would have blasted a two-ton payload all the way into outer space. That was when we lived on a planet that was an oblate sphere. Life on a dinner-plate seems to be different: while the gravitational attraction anywhere on the surface is a constant, we can't get away from it. In fact, anything we fire straight up will come back down again. Not even a nuclear rocket can escape: according to JPL scientist Dan Alderson, escape from a Magellanic disk would require a speed of over one thousand six hundred miles per second. That is because this disk masses many times more than a star — in fact, it has a mass fifty thousand times greater than our own sun.
What stops it collapsing into a sphere? Nobody knows. Physicists speculate that a fifth force that drove the early expansion of the universe — they call it 'quintessence' — has been harnessed by the makers of the disk. But the blunt truth is, nobody knows for sure. Nor do we understand how we came here — how, in the blink of an eye, something beyond our comprehension peeled the earth's continents and oceans like a grape and plated them across this alien disk.
Cut to:
A map. The continents of earth are laid out — Americas at one side, Europe and Asia and Africa to their east. Beyond the Indonesian island chain Australia and New Zealand hang lonely on the edge of an abyss of ocean.
The map pans right: strange new continents swim into view, ragged-edged and huge. A few of them are larger than Asia and Africa combined; most of them are smaller.
Voice-over:
Geopolitics was changed forever by the Move. While the surface topography of our continents was largely preserved, wedges of foreign material were introduced below the Mohorovicik discontinuity — below the crust — and in the deep ocean floor, to act as spacers. The distances between points separated by deep ocean were, of necessity, changed, and not in our geopolitical favor. While the tactical balance of power after the Move was much as it had been before, the great circle flight paths
