Cosmonaut Keep (36 page)

In a way, the second project was easier. I'd already met most of the bugs in the project plan while working through the details for the craft; and the engine itself was a simpler construction, more straightforward and robust, less finicky, than even the stripped-down version of the craft currently taking shape in the fabs. It would require more actual material, including such exotica as black-hole atoms, but it might take less time to actually build. Consulting the interface had become easy and habitual, and that, too, clarified matters and speeded things up.

At the end of the corridor I heard voices. I caught a stanchion and let my bending arms take the strain of my sudden halt. Listening more closely, I could make out two voices speaking in Russian, too low to quite make out and too fast for me to follow. One of them sounded male, the other female. A tab to the station map showed a big storage depot off to the right; although pressurized, most of the handling required in it was robotic, and it didn't seem a likely place for people to be. Especially as one of the depot's features was that it was a big metal box -- a Faraday cage, impervious to electromagnetic radiation, and hence to our spex' comms.

I kicked off again, aiming for the doorway. The door was, for good safety reasons, unlockable. I swung the lever to open it and gave what I thought was a convincing impression of blundering in, arms windmilling as I drifted across several cubic meters of empty air before snagging the upper edge of a lashed-down plastic crate with my foot.

Snugly braced by their feet and backs between rows of crates, side by side and face-to-face, were Aleksandra Chumakova and Grigory Volkov. They looked up at me guiltily, as if I'd caught them in some clandestine assignation, then instantly recovered their composure, covering their confusion with indulgent smiles as I covered my own with more newbie flailing-about.

Aleksandra I'd seen before, leading the opposition at the mass meeting and later speaking for her team at Driver's debriefings. I'd never seen Volkov, but I recognized him at once. His Slavic cheekbones and crew-cut fair hair had made him the most photogenic cosmonaut since Gagarin. The first -- and last -- man on Venus, who'd risked his life for the glory of a landing that was about nothing but glory; and, of course, a CPEU member, one of the Russian hard core, a CP loyalist and E.U. patriot.

"Hi there, Matt," he said, in English with a perfect Voice of America accent. "Are you lost, or have you come here for some peace and quiet?"

Chumakova was fanning a hand by her ear and shaking her head. "I know how it is; sometimes you can't hear yourself think back there."

I grabbed an edge and maneuvered myself into a better position, out of reach and a bit above them.

"Yeah, that's it," I said. "But as it happens I'm very glad I found you."

"Problem in the fab?" said Volkov, shading his spex, then clearing them. "Ah, I see your difficulty. We've been working offline."

My spex had gone offline as soon as I'd entered the room. The only way you
could
work inside this metal sheathing was offline.

"Ah, it's not that kind of problem," I said, making myself more comfortable. "I've been thinking about what you said at the meeting, Aleksandra. You remember, the Baku one?"

"That
circus? I remember it very well."

"Well," I sighed, "you seem to have been right about some things. This so-called information campaign is costing scores of lives back home every day."

Chumakova nodded.
"Of course
people riot when every rumor comes across as a just-cracked state secret!"

"Yes," said Volkov gravely. "Even where the stories are true, they're very misleading when they're taken out of their proper context."

"Provocations," I said. "I've seen what they've done to my own city, Edinburgh. But apart from any, you know, personal concerns, what worries me is that the unrest will actually strengthen the militarists on our side, and the extremists on the American side."

Volkov was nodding and smiling. "Of course, of course," he said. "It's only to be expected that the excesses of the so-called 'left' play into the hands of the right, both in our Party and in the capitalist world. Don't get me wrong, Matt, I totally agreed with exposing the militarist plotters, but this anarchistic campaign is just the kind of excuse the real hard-liners need for a crackdown, and perhaps a foreign adventure ... some confrontation that might be symbolic at first -- the Siberian concessions, perhaps -- but such things can get out of hand, and turn real, and ugly, real fast."

Chumakova gave me a sort of friendly frown. "But Matt," she said, "this is something of a sudden conversion for you, is it not? As I understand it, you are a member of an anarcho-syndicalist union yourself."

"Oh, I haven't changed my views," I said. "I know they're not the same as the Party's. You know how it is -- in my line of work you get your nose rubbed constantly in the few areas where U.S. tech is still ahead of our own. It's impossible not to be a bit critical of official policy."

"That's very understandable," said Volkov. He took his spex off and smiled wryly. "We know how you must feel. A good worker appreciates good tools."

"Exactly," I said. "But, well, it's good to talk over a few worries with people who, you know ... "

They both nodded and smiled at that. Like many Russians, they were unshakeably convinced that most sound, ordinary working people were basically loyal to the socialist brotherlands, even if some of them did vote for parties other than the Party or go to church or dye their eyes in funny colors.

But Chumakova persisted in her caution, still sounding me out.

"You seem to have plenty to talk about with your Yank pilot," she said. "Of course, that is your affair, so to speak. And according to the newsfeeds, you had some kind of relationship with the American spy."

"Yes," I said, squirming a bit, "I feel very guilty about Jadey. Not because of Camila, she's ... a friend, and you needn't worry about her, she doesn't have a political bone in her body."

"As I'm sure you would know," said Volkov.

We laughed.

"So why do you feel guilty," Volkov went on, "if you are not being moralistic about it?"

"It's ... Well, I suppose it
is
moral, or maybe political. Jadey Ericson is in jail because of me. Not just because she was arrested while I got away -- and you must remember, we had good reason to be afraid at that time -- but because she's being held on trumped-up charges. There's already a warrant out for me -- contempt of court because I didn't come in as a witness -- and I can't help wondering if she isn't going to be used at some point to put pressure on me."

"To do what?"

I shrugged. "I don't know; that's what worries me. Anyway, I've been assured the Reform faction is doing what it can to get her out, so for the moment I can't afford to antagonize Paul."

"Lemieux is in the Reform faction?" Volkov asked.

"Oh, sure," I said. "I didn't know he kept that a secret. Shit. Don't let him know I told you!"

"No, no, of course not," said Volkov.

"Aha!" said Chumakova. "So
that's
why Driver's made such a big deal about that bastard Weber."

"Who?" I asked.

"The Trotskyite MEP, the one who was arrested -- "

"Oh, yeah, right. I remember, but -- I'm sorry, I don't see the connection."

"The Reform faction are a bunch of Trotskyites, basically -- rights posing as lefts," said Volkov, with the confidence of a man confirming a long-held prejudice. "Look at how they renamed the station:
The Darker the Night the Brighter the Star.
After a book about Trotsky! Ridiculous."

"It does seem to have annoyed a lot of people," I said. "After all, Marshall Titov was a real Soviet space hero."

"First space-walk, yes," said Chumakova, with a sidelong glance at Volkov. "They can't take that away from us."

"No," I said. "They can't. And we can still do some great things here."

"We already are," said Chumakova. "First Contact, my God! And building an anti-gravity vehicle! What the Yanks would have given for that."

I pushed up and rolled over.

"Ah well, screw the politics, the project's still worth doing. I better be getting back to it before Driver gives me an earful. Catch you later."

"Yeah, see you soon," said Volkov, as I sailed to the door. Urgent messages blinked up as soon as my head passed the jamb.

"Where the fuck have you been?"

I clipped my belt to the webbing and resettled my spex.

"Ah, I just needed to get away for a while," I told Avakian. "Sometimes it just feels a bit crowded in the living-quarters."

"Yeah, I guess some people find that," he said, in a tolerant but uncomprehending tone. "You gotta watch it, man, maybe get some meds."

"No, I'll be fine now," I said. "Now I know there's places on the station where you can't be reached."

"Well, don't go to them without letting someone know," he said.

"Okay, okay, it was a bit irresponsible; I'll let you know in future. Now, where were we?"

"Have a look at this," said Avakian.

We patched in to a shared space.

"Oh wow," I said.

" 'Wow,' fuck indeed," said Avakian. "I've done it. Well, to be honest, we've done it, but I just realized that what I've just done had actually finished it, and I wanted you to be the first to see it."

It was the engine. Only in VR, of course, but it meant that the entire production process had been run through successfully in simulation. It gleamed on its smoothly integrated pedestal like an anvil from another dimension, or a mounted rocket-motor from some museum of the far future. I'd seen the sketches, the 3-D diagrams in the plan, but this was different: a hyperreal rendering of how it would look when built. It was about four meters long, less than a meter across at its widest diameter, and its maximum height was about two meters. I could reach out and touch it, and I did.

"Thanks, Armen," I said. "What a sight."

"Yeah," he said. "Fundamentally it's a weirder sight than the craft. See the four small holes in the corners of the base? I reckon what you're supposed to do with it is fucking
bolt it to the floor.
Just one little problem though."

"Control system?" I hazarded, thinking:
Not again!

"As in, there ain't one."

"Wait a minute," I said. "There is on the plan."

I rummaged the pages up. "There, that plate -- it's obviously a control system, it's covered with switches, even if we can't use it without -- "

"Yeah, take a look at how that turned out."

He rotated the view and zoomed on a completely featureless blank rectangle on the pediment.

"Shit."

"For all we know," he went on, "that could be a goddamn name-plate, and what looked like switches in the plan could be just the equivalent of a company name engraved in brass."

"Okay," I said, "there's no reason the aliens would have given it to us like this. Maybe if we take the question to the interface, they'll come up with something we can use."

It took us the rest of that day to formulate the query. What it came up with was not an answer, but a picture and a set of coordinates on three axes, which pinpointed to the nearest centimeter a place within the interior of the asteroid.

"I reckon they're telling us to go and get the answer there," I said.

"You first," said Avakian.

"Oh hell," I said generously. "There must be somebody here who'd be a lot better than me at getting around in the big picture."

"I wasn't talking about that," said Avakian. "I meant you can be the first to tell Driver."

Driver was too tired to explode. He didn't even seem particularly annoyed.

"We never expected to actually test the big engine straightaway," he said. "It's the craft that's something we can hope to actually use. Even an unusable but unarguably real version of the engine would be enough to get people excited. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's great you've got this far, and you can see if you can sort out this control-system problem if you like, but don't let it delay the other stuff."

"Okay," I said, relieved and a bit disappointed.

"Tomorrow's the big day," he said. "We shift the little engine from the fabs to the receiving-bay, and then maneuver it into the
Blasphemous.
That'll require some EVA. Mikhail, how are your boys and girls?"

Telesnikov, physically present, gave him a thumbs-up.

"We're ready to go," he said. "In fact, we're quite keen on doing the whole shift as an EVA -- take it out of the fab's door and lug it around to the
Blasphemous
directly, instead of maneuvering through the corridors. It'd be more straightforward, for one thing, and for another, we know the engine can handle vacuum -- it's in vacuum already in the fab -- but we don't know how it'll cope with exposure to biologicals."

"That's not a bad idea," said Driver.

Telesnikov grinned. "Yeah, it's so obvious I wish I'd thought of it myself."

"Who did think of it?" I asked.

"Grigory Volkov."

I swallowed hard.

"Uh, can we just discuss this further for a minute?"

Driver raised his eyebrows. "A minute."

"Okay," I said, "I know I'm not an expert on space-working, but I do know that machine we've built as well as anyone can without understanding it, and I'd swear it's totally robust against biological contamination. I mean, come on, every moving part is sealed. The control systems are our own kit, and we know how tough that is. Whereas, uh, no offense to your team, Mikhail, but the longer something's being handled in EVA the bigger the chance of an accident. One slip and we could send the thing spinning off into space and lose it for good."

Telesnikov waved a hand.

"It'll be in a mesh, tethered all the way," he said. "There's no question of its being unsafe."

"Ropes can break," I said.

"Not these ropes," said Telesnikov. He gave me a reassuring grin. "NASA spec. And we have the most experienced EVA operator in the Solar System -- as far as we know!"