RUSHMORE
The Korolev is huge for a flying machine but pretty
small in nautical terms. Yuri is mostly happy about this. He’s a
fighter jock at heart, and he can’t stand Navy bullshit. Still,
it’s a far cry from the MiG-17s he qualified in. It doesn’t have a
cockpit, or even a flight deck—it has a bridge, like a ship, with the pilots, flight
engineers, navigators, and observers sitting in a horseshoe around
the captain’s chair. When it’s thumping across the sea barely ten
meters above the wave tops at nearly five hundred kilometers per
hour, it rattles and shakes until the crew’s vision blurs. The big
reactor-powered turbines in the tail pods roar, and the neutron
detectors on the turquoise radiation bulkhead behind them tick like
demented deathwatch beetles: the rest of the crew are huddled down
below in the nose, with as much shielding between them and the
engine rooms as possible. It’s a white-knuckle ride, and Yuri has
difficulty resisting the urge to curl his hands into fists because
whenever he loses concentration his gut instincts are telling him
to grab the stick and pull up. The ocean is no aviator’s friend,
and skimming across this infinite grey expanse between planet-sized
landmasses forces Gagarin to confront the fact that he is not, by
instinct, a sailor.
They’re two days
outbound from the new-old North America, forty thousand kilometers
closer to home and still weeks away even though they’re cutting the
corner on their parabolic exploration track. The fatigue is getting
to him as he takes his seat next to Misha—who is visibly wilting
from his twelve-hour shift at the con—and straps himself in.
“Anything to report?” he asks.
“I don’t like the
look of the ocean ahead,” says Misha. He nods at the navigation
station to Gagarin’s left: Shaw, the Irish ensign, sees him and
salutes.
“Permission to
report, sir?” Gagarin nods. “We’re coming up on a thermocline
boundary suggestive of another radiator wall, this time surrounding
uncharted seas. Dead reckoning says we’re on course for home, but
we haven’t charted this route, and the surface waters are getting
much cooler. Anytime now we should be spotting the radiators, and
then we’re going to have to start keeping a weather eye
out.”
Gagarin sighs:
exploring new uncharted oceans seemed almost romantic at first, but
now it’s a dangerous but routine task. “You have kept the towed
array at altitude?” he asks.
“Yes, sir,” Misha
responds. The towed array is basically a kite-borne radar, tugged
along behind the Korolev on the end of
a kilometer of steel cable to give them some warning of obstacles
ahead. “Nothing showing—”
Right on cue, one of
the radar operators raises a hand and waves three
fingers.
“—Correction,
radiators ahoy, range three hundred, bearing . . . Okay, let’s see
it.”
“Maintain course,”
Gagarin announces. “Let’s throttle back to two hundred once we
clear the radiators, until we know what we’re running into.” He
leans over to his left, watching over Shaw’s shoulder.
The next hour is
unpleasantly interesting. As they near the radiator fins, the water
and the air above it cool down. The denser air helps the
Korolev generate lift, which is good,
but they need it, which is bad. The sky turns grey and murky, and
rain falls in continuous sheets that hammer across the armored
bridge windows like machine-gun fire. The ride becomes gusty as
well as bumpy, until Gagarin orders two of the nose turbines
started just in case they hit a downdraft. The big jet engines
guzzle fuel and are usually shut down in cruise flight, used only
for takeoff runs and extraordinary situations. But punching through
a cold front and a winter storm isn’t flying as usual as far as
Gagarin’s concerned, and the one nightmare all ekranoplan drivers
face is running into a monster ocean wave nose first at cruise
speed.
Presently the
navigators identify a path between two radiator fins, and Gagarin
authorizes it. He’s beginning to relax as the huge monoliths loom
out of the grey clouds ahead when one of the sharp-eyed pilots
shouts: “Icebergs!”
“Fucking hell.”
Gagarin sits bolt upright. “Start all boost engines! Bring up full
power on both reactors! Lower flaps to nine degrees and get us the
hell out of this!” He turns to Shaw, his face grey. “Bring the
towed array aboard, now.”
“Shit.” Misha starts
flipping switches on his console, which doubles as damage control
central. “Icebergs?”
The huge
ground-effect ship lurches and roars as the third pilot starts
bleeding hot exhaust gases from the running turbines to start the
other twelve engines. They’ve probably got less than six hours’
fuel left, and it takes fifteen minutes on all engines to get off
the water, but Gagarin’s not going to risk meeting an iceberg
head-on in ground-effect. The ekranoplan can function as a huge,
lumbering, ungainly seaplane if it has to; but it doesn’t have the
engine power to do so on reactors alone, or to leapfrog floating
mountains of ice. And hitting an iceberg isn’t on Gagarin’s to-do
list.
The rain sluices
across the roof of the bridge, and now the sky is louring and dark,
the huge walls of the radiator slabs bulking in twilight to either
side. The rain is freezing, supercooled droplets that smear the
Korolev’s wings with a lethal sheen of
ice. “Where are the leading-edge heaters?” Gagarin asks. “Come
on!”
“Working, sir,” calls
the number four pilot. Moments later the treacherous rain turns to
hailstones, rattling and booming but fundamentally unlikely to
stick to the flight surfaces and build up weight until it flips the
ship over. “I think we’re going to—”
A white and ghostly
wall comes into view in the distance, hammering toward the bridge
windows like a runaway freight train. Gagarin’s stomach lurches.
“Pull up, pull up!” The first and second pilots are struggling with
the hydraulically boosted controls as the Korolev’s nose pitches up almost ten degrees, right
out of ground-effect. “Come on!”
They make
it.
The iceberg slams out
of the darkness of the storm and the sea like the edge of the
world; fifty meters high and as massive as mountains, it has lodged
against the aperture between the radiator fins. Billions of tons of
pack ice has stopped dead in the water, creaking and groaning with
the strain as it butts up against the infinite. The Korolev skids over the leading edge of the iceberg,
her keel barely clearing it by ten meters, and continues to climb
laboriously into the darkening sky. The blazing eyes of her
reactors burn slick scars into the ice below. Then they’re into the
open water beyond the radiator fins, and although the sea below
them is an expanse of whiteness, they are also clear of icy
mountains.
“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 have vanished along with the
radiators and the clear seas—and the light, for it is now fading
toward 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 onward 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 northeast passage, where the submarines cruise on eternal
vigilant patrols to defend the frontier of the Rodina.
A thin predawn light
stains the icy hilltops grey 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 predawn 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 dawnlight 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 we didn’t want to.”