"Yes. There can be no question."
"Fine. Put that in your report. I'm going to look around some more."
But before Remo could act on his decision, a wrenching scream pierced the dry desert air from the other side of the flat silicon pancake that had been the BioBubble.
"Sounds like Bulla! " Tom Pulse said tightly.
Chapter 6
When the butter-colored official telephone jangled discordantly, Major-General lyona Stankevitch picked it up without thinking.
The butter-colored direct line to the Kremlin was forever ringing these days, what with rumors of plots and putsches and coups in the offing. Most were spurious. After all, who would want Russia in its present state?
"Da?" said Major-General Stankevitch.
"General, there is a report out of the United States that a space-research dome was reduced to molten metal in the dead of night."
"Yes?"
"There is talk of lightning. But according to our best scientists, no lightning could produce this catastrophe."
"Yes?" repeated the general, vaguely bored. Who cared what happened in the faraway U.S. when Mother Russia was crumbling like old black bread?
"There are two schools of thinking here. That the Americans are testing a new superweapon of destructive power, or that some unidentified power is testing it on US. targets, and Washington will naturally blame this event upon us."
"Why would they do that?"
"It is the historic reality of the relationship between the two superpowers."
The general started to point out that Russia-he refused to say Commonwealth of Independent States-was no longer a superpower. But if the leadership insisted upon clinging to dashed illusions, who was the director of the former KGBnow known as the FSK, or the Federal Security Service-to tell him otherwise?
"I see your point," said the general politely.
"That idiot Zhirinovsky is on NTV, warning that the Americans now have the dreaded Elipticon."
"There is no Elipticon. Zhirinovsky made up this conceit to frighten the credulous West."
"And now he is trying to frighten the East by ascribing its awesome power to Pentagon warmongers."
Stankevitch sighed. He hated the old, stale phrases. They suggested an inability to face geopolitical realities. "What would you have me do?"
"Search your files. Try to discover what this weapon might be and who controls it."
"Search my files?"
"It is a first step. Once I have your report, we will issue a directive for action."
Shrugging, the general hung up the butter-colored handset and buzzed his secretary.
"Have all available clerks search all available records for a weapon of destructive power."
"We have no weapons on file," the dull-witted secretary said stonily.
"I meant for intelligence on such a device," MajorGeneral Stankevitch returned tightly.
"Then why did you not say this in the first place?" The secretary harrumphed, disconnecting.
Settling back in his seat, Major-General Stankevitch closed his Slavic green eyes to the lowly state to which he had sunk. If the clock could only be turned back, he could have the dull, impertinent secretary stood before a firing squad and the answers to his inquiry would be on his desk before the body thudded to the bloodstained brick.
But this was late-twentieth-century Russia, harried and abused by former satellites, NATO forces encroaching on her near abroad, her Black Sea fleet operating out of what now amounted to a foreign port, her major cities overrun by gangsters and capitalists, her aging babushkas supplementing meager pensions by selling their own medicines on street corners, while indolent teenagers guzzled Coca-Cola instead of homemade KVASS, which could hardly be found anymore, and grew fat on greasy fast food, and male life expectancy fell to third-world levels.
He leaned back in his creaky chair and napped to relieve the tedium of his position. Outside in the former Dzerzhinsky Square, now Lubyanka Ploschad, traffic hummed and blared in a monotonous cacophony. One thing at least had not changed. The soothing sounds of Moscow.
The answer came by midafternoon in the form of a manila folder stamped Cosmic Secret. To be Stored Forever.
Accepting the folder, Major General Stankevitch frowned. "Cosmic Secret" was the old classification for the utmost secret possible.
Untying the fading red ribbon that sealed the folder from all but the most elevated eyes, he pulled out the sheaf of papers.
At the name Zemyatin, Stankevitch's eyes lost their bored look.
Field Marshal Alexi Zemyatin was the grand old man of the Soviet Republic. He had been with Lenin. He was loved by Stalin. Khrushchev trusted him. As did Brezhnev. Andropov. And on down to the lastgasp Chernenko regime.
He was a tactical and strategic genius who had disappeared off the face of the earth some eleven years ago under circumstances that suggested CIA involvement-except that the CIA would never have dared to liquidate him. Personally Stankevitch had suspected the historical criminal Gorbachev of the foul deed.
The report detailed an incident that had taken place when Major-General Stankevitch was but a lowly KGB captain. He remembered hearing vague rumors. A Russian missile battery had been neutralized by an unknown agency. This was suppressed at the time, only coming out later. It was the later rumors that Stankevitch had overheard.
This report in his hands explained the incident.
An American superweapon had concentrated terrible energies, incapacitating the electronics of the missile battery. Many died horribly from hard radiation of unknown origin.
World War III had nearly resulted. Only a cooperative effort by the USA and USSR-seeing these four initials made a lump of nostalgia rise in Stankevitch's throat-had averted global conflagration.
The file ended with a disclaimer:
Should such a weapon ever be unleashed upon Soviet soil again, an immediate retaliatory strike must be implemented without consultation or delay.
The words stared at Major-General Stankevitch like a cold horror.
Under current FSK rules, he was duty bound to report this to the Kremlin.
On the other hand, if he did, some dunderheaded bureaucrat might actually implement it, triggering a US. counterstrike-or was it a countercounterstrike?-with the greatly shrunken and defanged Russia doubtless coming out a poor, smoking second.
Swallowing hard, Major-General Stankevitch weighed his duty to the Motherland against his desire to live out his normal life span.
In the end, self-preservation won out. The directive clearly specified action if such a weapon were directed against the USSR. It was not. It was directed against the US. Those two missing initials, Stankevitch grimly reflected, spelled the difference between the world going on happily or becoming a charred ball of charcoal.
The thought then crossed his mind. What if the Americans train this weapon upon us next?
Within five minutes, he formulated his response.
The directive clearly said the USSR. There was no more USSR. Only a CIS, and Major-General Stankevitch decided he now loved those inelegant and weak-sounding initials.
"I am a citizen of the CIS," he said. "I love being a citizen of the CIS. The Americans will never attack the CIS. What is there to gain? We have nothing anymore."
When he had recited these reassuring words over and over like a mantra until they lowered his blood pressure, MajorGeneral Stankevitch picked up the butter-hued official phone and pressed the Cyrillic letter K.
"Report," an officious voice said.
"We have found nothing."
"This is unfortunate."
"Perhaps," Stankevitch said guardedly.
"It may be that the KGB files in question were sold to the highest bidder during the chaos of the breakup."
"I do not think so," said Major-General Stankevitch sincerely, cold sweat breaking out on his brow. For he himself had sold some of those very files, as had many of his underlings. But photocopies only. He had no wish to be shot as a traitor to the motherland, now very much in her elderly phase of life.