The Curve of the Earth

33




Petrovitch rattled the office door, and it swung open. It was little more than a ropy prefab hut dumped in one corner of the hangar, but it had lights and power, and in amongst the pieces of paper thumbtacked to the notice boards and oily bits brought into the warm were fingerprinted mugs and empty plates.

He dumped his bag on one of the debris-strewn tables and sorted through it. There was a replacement for Lucy’s link: a little curved computer with its earpiece, all wrapped in plastic and ready to pass on. There was a singularity bomb, an antigravity sphere, a pencil-thick hi-def video camera, battery packs, more plastique, remote-control units.

And the card reader. He pulled it out and sat it on the table, but was distracted by the sight of a half-cup of cold coffee, its black surface trembling with distant explosions.

He had time enough for a brew.

He found an almost-clean cup on the draining board of the not-completely-plumbed-in sink, and over on a workbench, a bare heating element wired into the wall. It didn’t look entirely safe, but he’d used worse. And there were biscuits in one of the drawers, along with a fistful of coffee sachets.

He poured two of those into the cup, topped it up with water and lowered the heater into it. There was a satisfying blue spark when he turned it on, and the slowly blackening water started to seethe.

The biscuit packet was new: he ripped at one end with his teeth, and extruded the first directly into his mouth. Thereafter he chain-ate them, swallowing one as he started chewing the next.

His coffee boiled. He turned off the element at the wall – another snap of electricity – and carried the mug to the table. He retrieved the envelope again, and this time eased his finger under the gummy flap, easing it open.

Turning it over, he tipped the contents out. A little black rectangle clicked on to the scarred formica. An old-school memory card from a camera: fifteen, maybe even twenty years out of date.

“You have got to be yebani kidding me.”

[Is there a problem?]

Petrovitch held up the card so Michael could see.

[This is frustrating. Your reader does not take that format.]

“No. No, it doesn’t.” He pressed the card to his forehead. “Nothing. Nada.”

[Either you find a suitable data port in your locale, or you will have to solder wires to the contacts and manually interrogate the data. It is likely the information on that card is critical to the success of your mission.]

“Haven’t you got robots to command, rather than stating the yebani obvious?”

[Yes, but they do not require much oversight. A relatively simple iterative search program coupled with an executive order protocol that flags up possible targets for me to consider renders intensive management redundant. One trooper has been disabled by small-arms fire, and another by a mechanical defect. The environment is extreme, and I expect the rate of attrition to be high.]

Petrovitch was already on his feet, inspecting the workstation hiding in the corner. “Just the regular slots.” He spun it around and inspected the back. “Chyort vos’mi.”

He knelt down and systematically worked his way through all the cupboards, then started on the benches. Nothing. And no guarantee that if he found something, it would still work. He was about to break something gratuitously when he saw a couple of bags hanging from hooks behind the door.

He spilled the contents of the first one out on the floor, and sorted through them with his sweeping hands: small bronze coins, loose keys, bits of paper, a couple of pens, a hip flask, a slim notebook with dog-eared pages. The second was heavier; rather than just upending the bag, he plunged his hand between the jaws of the zip and struck figurative gold.

His fingers tightened around a dense cold lump, and he knew by its heft it was tech. He pulled it out: a compact video camera, paint worn out with use, silverwork scratched. It looked ancient, a museum piece. He checked its make and model. It had been new twenty-three years earlier. By rights, it should have been consigned to the bin ages ago.

But once he’d found the on switch, he discovered its battery was half charged up. And there was no memory card in the little slot. He had not just found a suitable bit of hardware to slot his card into, but the original camera it had come from. Whoever owned it worked in that very hangar, repairing things for ARCO.

Petrovitch sent a virtual agent to work through the duty roster, trying to find suitable suspects: while he waited for it to report back, he fished out the memory card, turned it the right way around, and gently eased it into place.

The camera digested its new information, then displayed the updated results. The card was all but full. He found the preview button, checking with an online copy of the original documentation to make sure it was the preview button because he was paranoid about deleting something by accident, then pressed it.

Video had accumulated like coral: it looked like no one had bothered to either download or wipe any image they’d ever taken, and the time stamp on the earliest clips was from two decades ago. But Petrovitch wasn’t bothered about personal memories from the mid twenty-tens, more about what had happened last week.

He scrolled back past the first image to the latest scene. There was something wrong with the file: it should have been a video – but it wouldn’t play, despite his urging.

“I’m going to have to do this the hard way after all. Can you make sure I’m not disturbed?”

[The Americans have retreated to an ARCO drilling facility some two kilometres distant. I have set up a perimeter to keep them away from the settlement, but they appear content to stay where they are. I have lost seven teletroopers due to mechanical failure, another three to enemy action. Of the remaining twenty-two, only fifteen are fully operational. However, it is the sterilisation they have ordered that concerns me.]

Petrovitch stumbled into the table in front of him, spilling his coffee and dislodging one of the biscuits so that it rolled on to the floor. “St… what?”

[A flight of planes from Eielson has been delayed due to the weather. Delayed, but not postponed.]

“How long do I have?”

[Perhaps as much as twenty minutes.]

“Yebat’ kopat’.” He went back to his bag. Right down at the bottom was a tube of conducting glue.

[Pin values for the data card.] An image hovered in front of him.

“Thanks.”

[You will need to supply two point seven volts to pin four.]

“Yeah. I know.”

[Pin three is ground. These two must be connected first.]

“Michael. Shut the huy up.” He filleted his reader, extruding the wires in a fan. “I was doing this before you were born.”

[I am only twelve.]

“Precisely my point.” He stripped the sleeving off each wire with his teeth. “You don’t even have opposable thumbs.”

Petrovitch remotely accessed the reader’s set-up screen, and assigned the correct values to the wires. He cleared a space on the workbench with a sweep of his arm and set out the reader, its bundle of wires and the card. Bending low, he cranked up the magnification on his eyes, and started to stick each wire to each metal contact in turn.

“Yes? No?”

[One moment.]

“I don’t have a yebani moment. They’re going to bomb the town flat in less than fifteen minutes and I need to know if this card tells me Lucy’s in the line of fire.”

The light on the reader flicked from steady green to blinking yellow.

[Interesting. The most recent file is incomplete: I will recreate the end-of-file data. Done. The file is ready to play. We have analysts standing by.]

Petrovitch blinked, and suddenly it was night.

Night, but not dark. A streamer of burning light tore through the sky, east to west, shedding pieces as it went. In the raw data, the camera jerked and shook, but he could correct for that, keeping the main incandescent mass in the centre of the frame, while bits calved off and flashed with their own energy.

It wasn’t quiet. Two voices exchanged opinions on the meteor: one was the camera operator, distinct and loud. The other was quieter but more excitable, standing a little way off. They talked in Inupiat and English, swapping between the two when the vocabulary in one became stretched. Behind both men was the distant grumble of air being superheated and torn aside, and the yowl and yip of husky dogs.

The speed of the thing meant that the image sometimes went dark. Then the lens was hurriedly re-aimed and the white-orange glare would fill the little screen once more.

Twenty seconds in, the interference started. Another ten, and the information stopped being stored, the electronics overwhelmed by the intense magnetic field passing overhead. He was lucky the portion that remained wasn’t corrupted beyond recognition. Old tech: the camera had simply ceased working, while a newer device would have tried to self-repair, and in failing, junked the file.

Thirty seconds of moving images at twenty-five frames a second. One of those hundreds of pictures was important.

He went through them in twos, flicking from frame to frame, mapping the differences between each pair, building up a picture of what had happened to that thing that had fallen from space. Breaking up, for sure, with fragments of its skin peeling off and spinning away as it crashed towards the Bering Strait.

The shards burnt bright, briefly, until they were either consumed, or had slowed enough to turn invisible.

That was it. He backed up to the beginning, looking at the size of each piece as it spalled off the main mass. There: fifteen seconds in. With a flare that almost whited out the screen, a piece detached itself. In the next frame, it had gone.

He repeated the three frames, over and over again: before, during and after. Then he sat back and thought about it, clearing the images from his vision and realising that he was still sitting in a hangar, surrounded by broken machinery, and his coffee had gone cold.

[Have you spotted it?]

“Yeah. Anyone else?”

[One group has zeroed in on those particular frames. They are discussing the significance of them currently, and will inevitably reach the conclusion you have.]

“It was a re-entry capsule, under power.” Petrovitch picked up his equipment and stuffed everything back in his bag. “Other bits, when they came off, you can see them for up to five, six frames. This thing? It’s off and gone. That flare? Explosive bolts and rocket fuel.

[This scenario remains highly speculative.]

“Look, we’ve been circling around this idea for a while without actually coming out and saying it straight. This is a secret Chinese Moon mission, using some sort of prototype fusion drive. If it was manned, the astronauts may have had both the opportunity and the means to bail. Nothing else fits.”

[Except there is no evidence of the Chinese having developed a fusion drive.]

“You’re wrong. There is evidence, and we’re looking right at it.”

[No external evidence, then. There is also the question of why. Why would the Americans shoot down a Chinese spaceship, and risk a confrontation that would be in no one’s interest?]

“I don’t know why. Maybe they’re just stupid. Maybe it was an accident.” He thumbed the lock on his bag and swung up his axe. “But seriously. It has to be the Chinese. Who the huy else could it be?”

Michael, always ready with an opinion, was silent.

Petrovitch blinked and stared at the wall. “Huy tebe v’zhopu zamesto ukropu!”

[Have you worked it out, Sasha?]

“You’re serious. Of course you’re serious. Chyort. Chyort vos’mi.” He disconnected the data card from his jerry-rigged reader and held it up to his face. “How long have you known, and when were you going to tell me?”

[The possibility – at an admittedly tiny probability – has been one of the options since the beginning, as have many other extremely unlikely causes, including an evaporating black hole and antimatter collisions. However, the more we learned, the more accurately I could assign probabilities to the various scenarios. Now that we have the final piece of information required to finally choose between them, there is only one that has anything approaching my full confidence.]

“But…” Petrovitch stared at his cold coffee. He didn’t want it any more. He wanted something a lot stronger. There was that hip flask in the first bag he’d emptied, and there’d definitely been something in it. “Yobany stos. Zhao said ‘that satellite’. That satellite was not ours. But wasn’t a satellite. It was aliens.”

[The First Vice Premier was not lying,] said Michael. [He did not know what it was, he still does not know. We do. It is the only possible answer to all the questions we have been asking.]

Petrovitch reeled into a chair, knocking it over. “The re-entry pod?”

[The strewn field of debris would easily encompass the research station. The object moved almost directly overhead. Once ejected, the descent module could have achieved either a controlled landing, or an uncontrolled impact, depending on the mechanical state of its components, its design limits, and whether any automatic systems were functioning at the time. If their technology relied on electrical impulses to transmit information, it would have been unlikely to withstand such intense electromagnetic fields at such short range, no matter how well shielded.]

“It came down near Lucy. She either saw it fall, or heard it, or felt it.” He struggled past the fallen chair to the table with the emptied bags. “She would have gone out to take a look.”

[Again, this is likely. It is the explanation why she subsequently disappeared. It is the explanation why the Americans want to find her before she can say what she saw.]

“What did she find when she got there? Did it look like something we’d make, or something else? Was there a door, or a hatch? Did she force it open, or did they come out?” Petrovitch’s hand trembled as he unscrewed the top of the hip flask. The fumes were sharp, almost without flavour. Vodka, then: how appropriate.

[I do not know, Sasha. They may not have survived the descent.]

“What did they look like? Like us, or… not at all?” He tilted his wrist and drank deep. He needed it, needed it badly. “Yobany stos, Michael. We have to find Lucy.”

[That is why you are in Deadhorse.]

“Yeah.” The clock ticked over another second, then another. “Whose camera is this anyway?”

[This repair centre is run by an engineer called Paul Avaiq. It is most likely to be his.]

“Tell me you haven’t killed him.”

[Not purposely, no. I have made every effort only to target those personnel who have been swapped in recently. I have even erred on the side of caution, which has contributed to a loss of our assets.]

“But we’ve just torn the town apart. What if he’s run with the other Yanks?”

[I will search for him. Meanwhile, we have sufficient information to at least find out where Avaiq was when he took the video, to within a manageable margin of error, by comparing it with the known behaviour of the craft.]

“Dog team,” said Petrovitch.

[Explain.]

“Balvan! Mudak! Ship crosses the sky, explodes, trashes electrical and electronic systems at will. Starter coils for skidoos and four-wheel drives, the ARCO planes? They’re not turned off: they’re all dead. Everything they have has either been brought in since or repaired. So how do you cross the snow if everything mechanical is fried?”

[By using a dog-pulled sled.]

“There was the sound of dogs on the clip. We should’ve been looking from the very start for someone who runs a dog team.” Petrovitch gulped the last of the vodka, and threw the flask on the floor. He picked up his bag and limped through the hangar and out into the pre-dawn light.