Ragnarok 03 - Resonance (9 page)

‘Shut down,' commands Bratko. ‘Immediate shut down.'

The controllers work the system, their movements frantic.

‘No response. Main thruster's still burning.'

‘Shit.'

In the Pilot's control couch, Kian closes his eyes.

‘Pulse engines are go.'

Here the engine roar is muted. Status displays brighten. His ship is straining against the leash. But even with all that happening, his inductive senses can reach beyond the hull, because he is a twin, and he knows when his brother is near.

Dirk is running hard and scared.

‘Control? Come in, control,' says Kian, then switches his focus to the ship. ‘On-board command: shutdown-shutdown-shutdown.'

Nothing. No comms response, no reaction from his ship.

Some processes, once started, cannot be stopped.

*

Dirk's legs are pumping as he runs, filled with adrenaline, red-lining the anaerobic systems of his body because the bomb is concealed within the starboard delta-wing, and there can be only seconds left before –
no!
– a percussive blast slams him to the ground –
Kian! –
but it is the engines, kicking up to a new level of thrust, and the bastard thing has not exploded yet. He is on hands and knees, blood dripping everywhere, and whatever he does he will have to do from here.

It begins as a pulse inside his head, the build-up of energy from the satanin-satanase reaction. An onlooker would see glimmering sparks of gold inside his obsidian eyes, brightening further, vision inoperative as both eyes shine, yellow and lupine; and then he lets rip –
careful
– but keeping control as he senses the device's counter-measures –
there
– and fights them down because detonation is the last thing he wants –
got it
– and the detonator circuits die, but the bastard thing is dangerous still. The next priority is to get it off the ship.

A dorsal hatch opens, and Kian looks out, sees Dirk and senses the situation, and uses his inductive senses to work the ship's systems directly, causing an access hatch to pop open beneath the starboard wing. Working with him, Dirk disables the bomb's electromagnets as he runs forward once more, and is in time to catch the deadly white box as it drops from its hiding place.

Heavy as a bastard.

Up in the control tower, they must have seen something was wrong, because emergency TDVs are hurtling across the runway, strobing orange. Within seconds, the lead vehicle has screeched to a halt.

‘Hey pal, you OK?'

‘Get away!' Dirk swings the heavy bomb – and himself – on board the vehicle's flat bed. ‘Get us the hell away from here!'

‘
Bozhe moi,
you got it!'

The driver spins his TDV on the spot, then accelerates away from the runway, heading for the airbase boundary and the red Mars-like desert beyond.

*

But this was no single-pronged attack. Up in the sky, two shapes are growing larger; and everyone knows that the airspace should be clear when there are UNSA launches scheduled.

Kian slides back into the control seat.

‘Oh, God.'

The brakes come free and his ship begins to roll.

At the boundary the TDV brakes, its thermoacoustic motor whining. The driver calls: ‘You all right up there, pal? If you want, I could—'

But Dirk has already flung the bomb away.

‘Take us back,' he yells. ‘Don't hang around
.'

‘Bozhe moi!'

After the explosion, a black twisting column of smoke crawls up into the sky . . . where two vessels are growing much larger, their target clear.

Kian's ship is still on the runway, accelerating.

The first intruder ship lets rip with an energy beam, missing Kian's ship but ploughing a trench in the runway before it, causing Kian to brake. His ship howls as it pulls off to the side, coming to a halt.

As the enemy ship banks, ready to curve back on a strafing run, the second intruder flies diagonally behind it: two sets of weapon systems on the brink of cutting loose.

Seconds remain, no more.

Then a new vessel bursts out of the sun, shining silver and delta-winged, its graser-gatlings splitting the air, and the paired intruders have no chance.

Both Zajinet ships explode.

Standing beside the TDV, the driver wipes grease from his forehead.

‘And what the Devil was that silver ship?'

Dirk's laugh is shaky but proud.

‘
That
was my mother.'

Roger switched back to overview. The main narrative thread proceeded with the twins' friend Deirdre delivering a massive
kick in the groin to one of the controllers, Solly, who had planted bombs in both ships. A military team disarmed the second bomb. Roger really had to go, but he could not take this crystal with him – no personal possessions were allowed in Tangleknot, plus any item was subject to long examination before being brought inside. He tried to work out the minimum he must experience in order to understand the point.

The theme strongly pointed to one more scene in which a disaffected UNSA intelligence officer called Paula – soon to become Deirdre's long-term lover – related what happened to the captive Solly during interrogation.

Roger jumped into the middle of the scene.

‘They pushed the questioning further than the usual “What's your contact's name?”, “How do you meet up?”, that sort of thing,' Paula tells Deirdre.

The setting is an airfield beneath a grey German sky, and they are standing outside in the rain, having attended a memorial service officially for Ro McNamara, unofficially for her missing son Dirk as well.

Roger paused, realising he had gone too fast. The scene needed background to make sense.

He checked the context summary. Dirk, Kian and Deirdre, some time after the Zajinet attack on the first day of flight, were attacked during an anti-xeno demonstration in Arizona. The mob had thrown petrol-bombs, burning Kian badly, leaving him disfigured and initially close to death. A raging Dirk had let rip with a single, coherent biolaser pulse from both eyes, burning out the eyeballs of the mob, killing dozens, blinding the rest.

Under arrest, he had escaped and fled to mu-space in his ship, exiting directly from inside a hangar: a feat hard enough for modern, latest generation vessels.

As for Ro, she was missing, last seen departing an orbital
called Vachss Station, thought to have flown into a Zajinet ambush.

He resumed the scene featuring the soon-to-be lovers, Paula and Deirdre, mourning for Dirk and Ro, and discussing the interrogation of Solly, the Zajinet agent who had planted bombs aboard the twins' ships.

‘They asked the question' – Paula means the interrogators – ‘that no one's been able to answer: Why do the Zajinets hate humans? Why have they targeted Pilots, specific Pilots?'

‘So why? What's the answer?'

‘Solly said:
“They'll allow the darkness to be born. It will spread across the galaxy, and they won't fight back until billions have perished. I've seen it.”
That's what he said
. “The Zajinets showed me the future, and I've seen it.”
It may sound insane, but Solly believed.' Paula looked bleak. ‘He was in no fit state for joking by that time.'

‘You're using the past tense,' said Deirdre.

‘He did not survive the interrogation. A pre-existing medical condition, they said.'

And that, of course, was the section Ro McNamara had wanted Roger to know about.

They'll allow the darkness to be born.

It provided one hell of a motivation for Zajinets to prevent human expansion into space. Whether it also implied a basis for negotiation, or simply made them enemies for ever, he could not tell.

Why show me this?

You might say that he was the first Pilot who could appreciate the Zajinets' viewpoint. But he thought it might be a little late for such understanding.

En route back to Tangleknot, he stole time for one more cup of daistral, and found that Dirk McNamara no longer occupied top position in the news. Settlements on Deighton,
Berkivan deux and Göthewelt were burning after Zajinet raids, in each case centred on a Sanctuary location.

Whatever Roger's future turned out to be, peacemaker was no longer an option.

SEVENTEEN

EARTH, 1956 AD

Walking back from lunch along Kensington Gore, with Hyde Park stretching away to their right on the other side of the road, the three of them slowed down for a minute – Gavriela and her friends Jane and Keith from Imperial – so that Keith could break off pieces of a Bournville bar. He handed them round, still a treat, two years after rationing had ended.

In the park, mounted officers of the Household Cavalry were taking their horses through drills. The three scientists watched, then walked on.

‘Add this' – Jane waved her chocolate – ‘to travelling by bus instead of walking, and people are going to start getting fat.'

‘Chance would be a fine thing,' said Keith. ‘Do you still feed sugar sandwiches to your son, Gabby?'

‘Not any more.'

‘See?' said Jane. ‘It's starting already.'

‘And smallpox will disappear,' said Keith, ‘communism will fall apart
sua sponte
, and look, is that a pig flying among the clouds?'

Jane touched Gavriela's sleeve.

‘Gabrielle? It looks as if he knows you. That chap on the corner.'

Pinstripe suit and spotlessly brushed black bowler: it was Rupert Forrester, his hair showing grey, his taut patrician face lined like porcelain.

‘I'll see you two later,' Gavriela told her colleagues.

Rupert looked grave as she crossed the street.

‘Gabrielle, how lovely.' He might call her Gavriela at times, but never outdoors or in unsecured premises. ‘Shall we
walk? And perhaps a spot of tea. Or coffee, if we're being cosmopolitan.'

‘Why not?' she said.

They found a milk bar close to South Kensington Tube, and took a seat inside near the back. It was mostly empty, and from the way the man behind the counter ignored them after fetching coffee, he was an SIS asset, and never mind that domestic operations were the province of Five. Every service needs local safe houses.

When no other customers remained, Rupert picked up his cup and Gavriela's – ‘This way, old girl' – and led the way out back, up creaking stairs (good for warning of night-time intruders) to a musty-smelling room overlooking an unkempt yard.

She sat on an overstuffed couch, while he took one of the mismatched armchairs.

‘What's happening, Rupert?'

‘The world's falling apart, didn't you know? Ten years ago, we knew who the enemy was. Now there's civil unrest right here.'

‘You mean Teddy Boys ripping up cinema seats.' Showings of
Rock Around the Clock
had erupted in trouble all over the country, causing Gavriela to forbid Carl from going to see the film. ‘I should have thought the real threat to Empire was the state of the pound.'

‘The PM received a confidential briefing from Macmillan,' said Rupert, ‘concluding that there are two root causes to inflation: the commitment to full employment, and our massive defence spending. While Europe's in a golden age.'

‘I took Carl to Paris last year.'

‘So you did.' That was Rupert letting her know that leaving the service did not mean dropping out of sight. ‘And you'll have seen it, Continental cities booming while we have bomb craters still, and prefab houses for the squalid classes.'

‘Oh, Rupert.'

‘French success stemming partly, I should say, from creating
technical institutions along the lines of Imperial.'

‘How remarkably enlightened for a classicist.'

‘I didn't say I
approve
of the necessity.' Rupert crossed his elegant legs. ‘Nor the extinction of Empire, but it's a fact, even if to the PM we're still a great power.'

If Eden continued to commit the country's budget to defence against world communism, then SIS must benefit. For Rupert to argue against it spoke of serious misgivings.

‘And Nasser has kicked us out of Egypt' – Gavriela wanted to show she kept in touch – ‘which Mr Eden thinks is about to become a Soviet dominion.'

‘Not if he reads his JIC reports.' Rupert meant the Joint Intelligence Committee.

For three months, the British army had been massing in Cyprus, getting ready – alongside French regiments – to invade Egypt and retake the Suez Canal Zone.

‘When the Wehrmacht invaded Poland and Belgium,' said Gavriela, ‘it was pretty clear where the morality lay. If
we
invade another country, what does that make us?'

Rupert shook his head. ‘It's a moot point, because Eisenhower won't allow us to invade. That's classified, by the way.'

‘Won't
allow
us?' said Gavriela.

‘The American Sixth Fleet is massing in the Mediterranean. If our ships set sail from Cyprus, the Yanks will move to stop it.' None of this was in the newspapers. ‘On the other hand, in a few weeks' time,' Rupert went on, ‘French envoys will call in to Chequers, to see the Chancellor and request that Anglo-French combined forces make a move. We have this from the Deuxième Bureau.'

Gavriela nodded. The information might have come via semi-official channels or from eavesdropping on French intelligence: both were par for the course.

‘But this is in fact an Anglo-French-
Israeli
initiative,' continued Rupert. ‘And you and I will have our ears nailed to the wall if we give a hint of knowing that.' He related the details, and they were explosive: Israel to invade Egypt under secret
agreement with Britain and France, after which the combined Anglo-French forces would ‘liberate' the place while the Israelis withdrew.

‘Do the Cousins know this?' asked Gavriela, meaning the CIA.

‘Maybe I should ring the Kremlin and ask.'

It was a year since Burgess and Maclean had surfaced at a Soviet press conference. Since then Kim Philby, SIS's liaison to Washington and tipped to be a future head of service, had denied being the third man; but dirt tended to stick. Internal investigators, Rupert added, were right now tearing the Recruitment Office apart.

‘I'm glad I'm out of it,' said Gavriela. ‘All that makes the news is defection and failure. The Crabbe thing was a disaster.'

In April, Premier Kruschev and Prime Minister Bulganin had sailed into Portsmouth Harbour aboard the
Ordzhonikidze
, a Soviet cruiser which had been too tempting a target: the famous wartime diver, Commander Crabbe, had been despatched to fix bugging devices to the hull. When his torn-up body eventually washed ashore, the UK government owned up to the operation.

The official story involved his being caught up in propellers. Not likely.

‘Berlin and the Stopwatch débâcle,' said Rupert, ‘are more to the point.'

‘In what way? What point exactly?'

Portrait of a spy grandmaster sitting in a dusty room moving pieces across the board, but she was no longer in the game.

‘I mean, dear Gavi, your popping over to Berlin. Let me ask Alfredo to fetch up more coffee, and perhaps a plate of biscuits, before we discuss the details.'

‘No,' said Gavriela. ‘No coffee, no biscuits, and definitely no Berlin.'

Rupert's voice went as mild as she had ever heard it.

‘And no curiosity,' he asked, ‘about the niece you have yet to meet?'

And that was it: game, set and match to the master.

She might have known.

Intercepts from Berlin, earlier in the year, had begun to reveal uranium shipment details – East Germany being currently the largest Soviet provider, while Prime Minister Bulganin's public announcements had hinted at nuclear tests under way in Siberia. It was all part of Red paranoia regarding Western intent, said Rupert, and Eden's intransigence over Suez was likely to trigger World War III.

‘We desperately need more info,' he told Gavriela, ‘but with Stopwatch/Gold all over the papers, our chaps are having to lie low.'

And this, he went on, was where it fitted Gavriela's personal interest. Normally, a schoolgirl civilian wanting to defect meant nothing to UK interests; but the dissatisfied daughter of a senior KGB officer with responsibility for the security of East Germany's uranium mines, that was something else.

‘Her name is Ursula,' he said. ‘Ursula Shtemenko, and at this stage we don't know if she's aware her birth certificate reads Ursula Wolf.'

Up until April, Operation Stopwatch, an SIS brainchild but funded by the CIA who called it Operation Gold, had delivered priceless intelligence. But four days after the Crabbe operation – and before his body appeared – somehow the Soviets had found the secret tunnel between Schönefelder Chaussee and Rudow, filled with telephonic equipment for eavesdropping on KGB signals; and the world's press went crazy: a propaganda coup for Moscow.

Gavriela wondered if Philby had had anything to do with the tunnel, but knew better than to ask.

‘I've photographs of the girl.' Rupert drew an envelope from inside his jacket, and passed it over. ‘Taken since she made her first enquiry.'

Exactly where that was, Gavriela would find out when she agreed to the operation; but they both knew she was unlikely
to back out, having learnt this much. None of the pictures were posed. Clandestine surveillance, then.

‘Identical to my brother Erik, near enough,' she said. ‘And Ilse?'

There was no need to explain who she meant: Rupert would have briefed himself beforehand on her family, on her brother Erik and on Ilse, the wife whom Erik adored.

‘Passed away six months ago, I'm afraid. Another trigger for Ursula's current crisis.'

Gavriela leant back against the couch, resting her head on the antimacassar.

‘One more factor for us to take advantage of, is that, Rupert?'

But of course, he had a counter-argument ready, probably cooked up days ago.

‘You think she's better off with Dmitri Shtemenko as her stepfather?'

Gavriela let out a sigh, and asked him to brief her on the details.

Two hours later she was walking home through a damp grey pea-souper fog, inured by frequent exposure to the airborne tang of sulphur dioxide, wondering why she had agreed to help, while knowing there was no other choice. There was evidence she had worked hard to confirm that Erik had been a slave at Peenemünde, almost certainly starved and worked to death on one of the projects headed by Werner von Braun, now sunning himself in Florida and raking in the big bucks from NASA, never mentioning the doodlebugs and V2 rockets that had devastated British cities, bringing fear and death to civilian adults, children and their pets.

So now there was Ursula Wolf, who called herself Ursula Shtemenko, asking someone on the British Council, at an artists' event in East Berlin, for help in defecting. Did she really have access to her stepfather's information? Or did Dmitri plan on using Ursula as leverage against one Gavriela Wolf? He might believe that Gavriela-turned-Gabrielle was an
intelligence officer still; and even if he knew she was retired, there were secrets worth pulling from her brain.

What if the real game were Dmitri versus Rupert, while everything else was context?

Berlin beckoned, regardless.