Wireless (5 page)

“What was it like, boss?”

“Hot as hell. Humid, like this. Beautiful women, but lots of dark-skinned comrades who didn’t bathe often enough—all very jolly, but you couldn’t help looking out to sea, over your shoulder. You know there was an American base there, even then? Guantan amo. They don’t have the base now, but they’ve got all the rubble.” For a moment Gagarin looks morose. “Bastards.”

“The Americans.”

“Yes. Shitting on a small defenseless island like that, just because they couldn’t get to us anymore. You remember when they had to hand out iodine tablets to all the kids? That wasn’t Leningrad or Gorky, the fallout plume: it was Havana. I don’t think they wanted to admit just how bad it was.”

Misha sips his tea. “We had a lucky escape.” Morale be damned, it’s acceptable to admit at least that much in front of the CO, in private. Misha’s seen some of the KGB reports on the US nuclear capabilities back then, and his blood runs cold; while Nikita had been wildly bluffing about the Rodina’s nuclear defenses, the Americans had been hiding the true scale of their own arsenal. From themselves as much as the rest of the world.

“Yes. Things were going to the devil back then, no question: if we hadn’t woken up over here, who knows what would have happened? They outgunned us back then. I don’t think they realized.” Gagarin’s dark expression lifts: he glances out of the open porthole—the only one in a private cabin that opens—and smiles. “This isn’t Cuba, though.” The headland rising above the bay tells him that much: no tropical island on Earth supported such weird vegetation. Or such ruins.

“Indeed not. But, what about the ruins?” asks Misha, putting his tea glass down on the map table.

“Yes.” Gagarin leans forward: “I was meaning to talk to you about that. Exploration is certainly in line with our orders, but we are a trifle short of trained archaeologists, aren’t we? Let’s see: we’re 470,000 kilometers from home, six major climatic zones, five continents—it’ll be a long time before we get any settlers out here, won’t it?” He pauses delicately. “Even if the rumors about reform of the penal system are true.”

“It is certainly a dilemma,” Misha agrees amiably, deliberately ignoring the skipper’s last comment. “But we can take some time over it. There’s nobody out here, at least not within range of yesterday’s reconnaissance flight. I’ll vouch for Lieutenant Chekhov’s soundness: he has a solid attitude, that one.”

“I don’t see how we can leave without examining the ruins, but we’ve got limited resources, and in any case, I don’t want to do anything that might get the Academy to slap our wrists. No digging for treasure until the eggheads get here.” Gagarin hums tunelessly for a moment, then slaps his hand on his thigh: “I think we’ll shoot some film for the comrade general secretary’s birthday party. First we’ll secure a perimeter around the beach, give those damned
spetsnaz
a chance to earn all the vodka they’ve been drinking. Then you and I, we can take Primary Science Party Two into the nearest ruins with lights and cameras. Make a visual record, leave the double domes back in Moscow to figure out what we’re looking at and whether it’s worth coming back later with a bunch of archaeologists. What do you say, Misha?”

“I say that’s entirely logical, Comrade General,” says the political officer, nodding to himself.

“That’s so ordered, then. We’ll play it safe, though. Just because we haven’t seen any active settlement patterns, doesn’t mean there’re no aborigines lurking in the forest.”

“Like that last bunch of lizards.” Misha frowns. “Little purple bastards!”

“We’ll make good communists out of them eventually,” Yuri insists. “A toast! To making good communists out of little purple lizard-bastards with blowpipes who shoot political officers in the arse!”

Gagarin grins wickedly, and Gorodin knows when he’s being wound up on purpose and summons a twinkle to his eye as he raises his glass: “And to poisons that don’t work on human beings.”

The following briefing film is classified COLLECTION RUBY. If you do not possess both COLLECTION and RUBY clearances, leave the auditorium and report to the screening security officer immediately. Disclosure to unauthorized personnel is a federal offense punishable by a fine of up to ten thousand dollars and/or imprisonment for up to twenty years. You have thirty seconds to clear the auditorium and report to the screening security officer.

Ocean—the final frontier. For twelve years, since the momentous day when we discovered that we had been removed to this planar world, we have been confronted by the immensity of an ocean that goes on as far as we can see. Confronted also by the prospect of the spread of Communism to uncharted new continents, we have committed ourselves to a strategy of exploration and containment.

An Atlas rocket on the launchpad rises slowly, flames jetting from its tail: it surges past the gantry and disappears into the sky.

A camera mounted in the nose, pointing back along the flank of the rocket. The ground falls behind, blurring into blue distance. Slowly, the sky behind the rocket is turning black: but the land still occupies much of the fish-eye view. The first-stage engine ring tumbles away, leaving the core engine burning with a pale blue flame: now the outline of the California coastline is recognizable. North America shrinks visibly: eventually another, strange outline swims into view, like a cipher in an alien script. The booster burns out and falls behind, and the tumbling camera catches sunlight glinting off the upper-stage Centaur rocket as its engine ignites, thrusting it higher and faster.

We cannot escape.

A meteor streaking across the empty blue bowl of the sky; slowing, deploying parachutes.

In 1962, this rocket would have blasted a two-ton payload all the way into outer space. That was when we lived on a planet that was an oblate sphere. Life on a dinner plate seems to be different: while the gravitational attraction anywhere on the surface is a constant, we can’t get away from it. In fact, anything we fire straight up will come back down again. Not even a nuclear rocket can escape: according to JPL scientist Dan Alderson, escape from a Magellanic disk would require a speed of over one thousand six hundred miles per second. That is because this disk masses many times more than a star—in fact, it has a mass fifty thousand times greater than our own sun.

What stops it collapsing into a sphere? Nobody knows. Physicists speculate that a fifth force that drove the early expansion of the universe—they call it “quintessence”—has been harnessed by the makers of the disk. But the blunt truth is, nobody knows for sure. Nor do we understand how we came here—how, in the blink of an eye, something beyond our comprehension peeled the Earth’s continents and oceans like a grape and plated them across this alien disk.

A map. The continents of earth are laid out—Americas at one side, Europe and Asia and Africa to their east. Beyond the Indonesian island chain Australia and New Zealand hang lonely on the edge of an abyss of ocean.

The map pans right: strange new continents swim into view, ragged-edged and huge. A few of them are larger than Asia and Africa combined; most of them are smaller.

Geopolitics was changed forever by the Move. While the surface topography of our continents was largely preserved, wedges of foreign material were introduced below the Mohorovicic discontinuity—below the crust—and in the deep ocean floor, to act as spacers. The distances between points separated by deep ocean were, of necessity, changed, and not in our geopolitical favor. While the tactical balance of power after the Move was much as it had been before, the great circle flight paths our strategic missiles were designed for—over the polar ice cap and down into the communist empire—were distorted and stretched, placing the enemy targets outside their range. Meanwhile, although our manned bombers could still reach Moscow with in-flight refueling, the changed map would have forced them to traverse thousands of miles of hostile airspace en route. The Move rendered most of our strategic preparations useless. If the British had been willing to stand firm, we might have prevailed—but in retrospect, what went for us also went for the Soviets, and it is hard to condemn the British for being unwilling to take the full force of the inevitable Soviet bombardment alone.

In retrospect the only reason this was not a complete disaster for us is that the Soviets were caught in the same disarray as ourselves. But the specter of Communism now dominates Western Europe: the supposedly independent nations of the European Union are as much in thrall to Moscow as the client states of the Warsaw Pact. Only the ongoing British State of Emergency offers us any residual geopolitical traction on the red continent, and in the long term we must anticipate that the British, too, will be driven to reach an accommodation with the Soviet Union.

A silvery delta-winged aircraft in flight. Stub wings, pointed nose, and a shortage of windows proclaim it to be an unmanned drone: a single large engine in its tail thrusts it along, exhaust nozzle glowing cherry red. Trackless wastes unwind below it as the viewpoint—a chase plane—carefully climbs over the drone to capture a clear view of the upper fuselage.

The disk is vast—so huge that it defies sanity. Some estimates give it the surface area of more than a billion Earths. Exploration by conventional means is futile: hence the deployment of the NP-101 Perse phone drone, here seen making a proving flight over landmass F-42. The NP-101 is a reconnaissance derivative of the nuclear-powered D-SLAM Pluto missile that forms the backbone of our post-Move deterrent force. It is slower than a strategic D-SLAM, but much more reliable: while D-SLAM is designed for a quick, fiery dash into Soviet territory, the NP-101 is designed to fly long-duration missions that map entire continents. On a typical deployment the NP-101 flies outward at thrice the speed of sound for nearly a month: traveling fifty thousand miles a day, it penetrates a million miles into the unknown before it turns and flies homeward. Its huge mapping cameras record two images every thousand seconds, and its sophisticated digital computer records a variety of data from its sensor suite, allowing us to build up a picture of parts of the disk that our ships would take years or decades to reach. With resolution down to the level of a single nautical mile, the NP-101 program has been a resounding success, allowing us to map whole new worlds that it would take us years to visit in person.

At the end of its mission, the NP-101 drops its final film capsule and flies out into the middle of an uninhabited ocean, to ditch its spent nuclear reactor safely far from home.

A bull’s-eye diagram. The center is a black circle with a star at its heart; around it is a circular platter, of roughly the same proportions as a 45 rpm single.

A rough map of the disk. Here is the area we have explored to date, using the NP-101 program.

(A dot little larger than a sand grain lights up on the face of the single.)

That dot of light is a million kilometers in radius—five times the distance that used to separate our old Earth from its moon. To cross the radius of the disk, an NP-101 would have to fly at Mach 3 for almost ten years. We aren’t even sure exactly where the center of that dot lies on the disk: our highest sounding rocket, the Nova-Orion block two, can barely rise two degrees above the plane of the disk before crashing back again. Here is the scope of our knowledge of our surroundings, derived from the continental-scale mapping cameras carried by Project Orion:

(A salmon pink area almost half an inch in diameter lights up around the red sand grain on the face of the single.)

Of course, cameras at an altitude of a hundred thousand miles can’t look down on new continents and discern signs of communist infiltration; at best they can listen for radio transmissions and perform spectroscopic analyses of the atmospheric gases above distant lands, looking for contaminants characteristic of industrial development such as chlorofluorocarbons and nitrogen oxides.

This leaves us vulnerable to unpleasant surprises. Our long-term strategic analyses imply that we are almost certainly not alone on the disk. In addition to the communists, we must consider the possibility that whoever built this monstrous structure—clearly one of the wonders of the universe—might also live here. We must contemplate their motives for bringing us to this place. And then there are the aboriginal cultures discovered on continents F-29 and F-364, both now placed under quarantine. If some landmasses bear aboriginal inhabitants, we may speculate that they, too, have been transported to the disk in the same manner as ourselves, for some as-yet-unknown purpose. It is possible that they are genuine stone-age dwellers—or that they are the survivors of advanced civilizations that did not survive the transition to this environment. What is the possibility that there exists on the disk one or more advanced alien civilizations that are larger and more powerful than our own? And would we recognize them as such if we saw them? How can we go about estimating the risk of our encountering hostile Little Green Men—now that other worlds are in range of even a well-equipped sailboat, much less the Savannah-class nuclear-powered exploration ships? Astronomers Carl Sagan and Daniel Drake estimate the probability as high—so high, in fact, that they believe there are several such civilizations out there.