“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 colour 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 aluminium 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 you see?”
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 colour of moonlight. “It took so long,” he says, almost complaining. Sinks to his knees. “All that time we’ve been gone…” He leans against the side of the sub, a pale shadow, aged beyond his years. “The sun was so bright. 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 pick-up. 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 any more crews through Victor-Tango for a while.”
He turns and walks towards 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 SECRET INDIGO MARCH SNIPE. If you do not have SECRET INDIGO MARCH SNIPE clearance, leave the auditorium now and report to your unit security officer for debriefing. Failing to observe this notice is an imprisonable offense.
You have sixty seconds to comply.
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 towards each wingtip, 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 and 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 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
“This is why we need such a weapon. This is what it deters. The abominations first raised by the Third Reich’s Organisation Todt, now removed to the Ukraine and deployed in the service of New Soviet Man as our enemy calls himself.”
Cut to:
A sinister grey 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 towards the Baltic coastline, 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, stretching out 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, discovered by palaeontologist Charles D. Walcott on his pioneering expeditions into the Canadian Rockies, near the eastern border of British Columbia—” a hand-drawing of something indescribably weird fetches up on the screen “—like this opabina, which died there six hundred and forty million years ago. Fossils of soft-bodied animals that old are rare; the Burgess shale deposits are the best record of the Precambrian fauna anyone has found to date.”
A skinny woman with big hair and bigger shoulder-pads sniffs loudly; she has no truck with these antediluvian dates. Roger winces sympathy for the academic. He’d rather she wasn’t here, but somehow she got wind of the famous palaeontologist’s visit—and she’s the colonel’s administrative assistant. Telling her to leave would be a career-limiting move.
“The important item to note—” photograph of a mangled piece of rock, visual echoes of the opabina—“is the tooth marks. We find them also—their exact cognates—on the ring segments of the Z-series specimens returned by the Pabodie Antarctic expedition of 1926. The world of the Precambrian was laid out differently from our own; most of the land masses that today are separate continents were joined into one huge structure. Indeed, these samples were originally separated by only two thousand miles or thereabouts. Suggesting that they brought their own parasites with them.”