“Shut down engines three through fourteen,” Gagarin orders once he regains enough control to keep the shakes out of his voice. “Take us back down to thirty meters, lieutenant. Meteorology, what’s our situation like?”
“Arctic or worse, comrade general.” The meteorologist, a hatchet-faced woman from Minsk, shakes her head. “Air temperature outside is thirty below, pressure is high.” The rain and hail has vanished along with the radiators and the clear seas—and the light, for it is now fading towards nightfall.
“Hah. Misha, what do you think?”
“I think we’ve found our way into the freezer, sir. Permission to put the towed array back up?”
Gagarin squints into the darkness. “Lieutenant, keep us at two hundred steady. Misha, yes, get the towed array back out again. We need to see where we’re going.”
The next three hours are simultaneously boring and fraught. It’s darker and colder than a Moscow apartment in winter during a power cut; the sea below is ice from horizon to horizon, cracking and groaning and splintering in a vast expanding V-shape behind the Korolev’s pressure wake. The spectral ruins of the Milky Way galaxy stretch overhead, reddened and stirred by alien influences. Misha supervises the relaunch of the towed array, then hands over to Major Suvurov before stiffly standing and going below to the unquiet bunk room. Gagarin sticks to a quarter-hourly routine of reports, making sure that he knows what everyone is doing. Bridge crew come and go for their regular station changes. It is routine, and deadly with it. Then: “Sir, I have a return. Permission to report?”
“Go ahead.” Gagarin nods to the navigator. “Where?”
“Bearing zero—it’s horizon to horizon—there’s a crest rising up to ten meters above the surface. Looks like landfall, range one sixty and closing. Uh, there’s a gap and a more distant landfall at thirty-five degrees, peak rising to two hundred meters.”
“That’s some cliff.” Gagarin frowns. He feels drained, his brain hazy with the effort of making continual decisions after six hours in the hot seat and more than two days of this thumping roaring progression. He glances round. Major? Please summon Colonel Gorodin. Helm, come about to zero thirty-five. We’ll take a look at the gap and see if it’s a natural inlet. If this is a continental mass we might as well take a look before we press on for home.”
For the next hour they drive onwards into the night, bleeding off speed and painting in the gaps in the radar map of the coastline. It’s a bleak frontier, inhumanly cold, with a high interior plateau. There are indeed two headlands, promontories jutting into the coast from either side of a broad, deep bay. Hills rise from one of the promontories and across the bay. Something about it strikes Gagarin as strangely familiar, if only he could place it. Another echo of Earth? But it’s too cold by far, a deep Antarctic chill. And he’s not familiar with the coastline of Zemlya, the myriad inlets off the north-east passage, where the submarines cruise on eternal vigilant patrols to defend the frontier of the Rodina.
A thin pre-dawn light stains the icy hilltops gray as the Korolev cruises slowly between the headlands—several kilometers apart—and into the wide open bay beyond. Gagarin raises his binoculars and scans the distant coastline. There are structures, straight lines! “Another ruined civilization?” he asks quietly.
“Maybe, sir. Think anyone could survive in this weather?” The temperature has dropped another ten degrees in the pre-dawn chill, although the ekranoplan is kept warm by the outflow of its two Kuznetsov aviation reactors.
“Hah.”
Gagarin begins to sweep the northern coast when Major Suvurov stands up. “Sir! Over there!”
“Where?” Gagarin glances at him. Suvurov is quivering with anger, or shock, or something else. He, too, has his binoculars out.
“Over there! On the southern hillside.”
“Where—” He brings his binoculars to bear as the dawn light spills across the shattered stump of an immense skyscraper.
There is a hillside behind it, a jagged rift where the land has risen up a hundred meters. It reeks of antiquity, emphasized by the carvings in the headland. Here is what the expedition has been looking for all along, the evidence that they are not alone.
“My God,” Misha swears, shocked into politically incorrect language.
“Marx,” says Gagarin, studying the craggy features of the nearest head. “I’ve seen this before, this sort of thing. The Americans have a memorial like it. Mount Rushmore, they call it.”
“Don’t you mean Easter Island?” asks Misha. “Sculptures left by a vanished people…”
“Nonsense! Look there, isn’t that Lenin? And Stalin, of course.” Even though the famous moustache is cracked and half of it has fallen away from the cliff. “But who’s that next to them?”
Gagarin brings his binoculars to focus on the fourth head. Somehow it looks far less weathered than the others, as if added as an afterthought, perhaps some kind of insane statement about the mental health of its vanished builders. Both antennae have long since broken off, and one of the mandibles is damaged, but the eyeless face is still recognizably unhuman. The insectile head stares eyelessly out across the frozen ocean, an enigma on the edge of a devastated island continent. “I think we’ve found the brother socialists,” he mutters to Misha, his voice pitched low so that it won’t carry over the background noise on the flight deck. “And you know what? Something tells me they didn’t win.”
Anthropic Error
As the summer dry season grinds on, Maddy finds herself spending more time at John’s home-cum-laboratory, doing the cleaning and cooking for herself in addition to maintaining the lab books and feeding the live specimens. During her afternoons visiting in the hospital she helps him write up his reports. Losing his right hand has hit John hard: he’s teaching himself to write again but his handwriting is slow and childish.
She finds putting in extra hours at the lab preferable to the empty and uncomfortable silences back in the two-bedroom prefab she shares with Bob. Bob is away on fieldtrips to outlying ranches and quarries half the time and working late the other half. At least, he says he’s working late. Maddy has her suspicions. He gets angry if she isn’t around to cook, and she gets angry right back at him when he expects her to clean, and they’ve stopped having sex. Their relationship is in fact going downhill rapidly, drying up and withering away in the arid continental heat, until going to work in John’s living room, among the cages and glass vivaria and books feels like taking refuge. She took to spending more time there, working late for real, and when Bob is away she sleeps on the wicker settee in the dining room.
One day, more than a month later than expected, Dr. Smythe finally decides that John is well enough to go home. Embarrassingly, she’s not there on the afternoon when he’s finally discharged. Instead, she’s in the living room, typing up a report on a sub-species of the turtle tree and its known parasites, when the screen door bangs and the front door opens. “Maddy?”