19

The desert air carries minuscule, sharp dust particles that find their way everywhere, clogging air filters, abrading the windscreen on the bike, slowly turning his goggle lenses opaque. Out of sheer habit he turns his back to the wind, finishes packing up, then turns and watches the sun rise over the dunes. He should have started earlier, to make most of the relatively chilly pre-dawn, but watching the sunrise is about the only moment of peace the day will afford him.
Few minutes later the sun is up, so it’s time for a final check. He does the walkabout, checking suspension, brake fluid, air filters. GPS boots, finding the signal from what’s left of the constellation. Geiger counter works, its little LED blinking along with ticking.
Bike starts with a touch of the button and he rides north, towards the Baltic Sea.

[just a mental image]

In the black

There never were any missing cosmonauts.

Yes, there was this hoax in the fifties, two journalists from Italy or France have propped their sagging careers with “intercepts” of the shortwave communication between failing orbiter and ground stations. The Iron Curtain was convenient, for once: they could write whatever they wanted, and no one had any data to contradict them. No one, that is, but a handful of people who knew the comm protocols, frequencies, encoding schemes – but who would listen to them? Tales of Soviet spacemen dying in orbit were much sexier. Truth is, all the cosmonauts are accounted for, their lives and deaths known.

All but two.

Savinykh and Dzhanibekov were the fourth and last crew of Salyut 7. The station was launched in 1982, and – like its odd-numbered predecessors – was military and presumably armed. First three crews spent their time relatively uneventfully: as far as we know, there were a few minor emergencies, successfully repaired by crew. Savinykh and Dzhanibekov started their stint on June 6, 1985. They were both experienced, with over a hundred days in space each. Our first indication that something is amiss was the unusual behavior of the next ferry flight, over three months later. The Soyuz with replacement crew didn’t dock with the station; it just hung there, mere hundred metres away. NORAD tracked both craft, but they soon went out of range for visual: for the next eighteen hours or so we had just radar, which could not tell us whether they docked or not. When we could see them again, the station was alone. But, oh well, nobody paid much attention: it could have been simple docking problem, right? The Soviets soon announced another successful crew rotation and everybody moved on. We had our own trouble – Atlantis was up with the payload, this is still classified so don’t ask – and nobody paid attention; after all the Salyut was regular as a clock, ticking its orbits away.

Then, in March, I think, somebody took a breather from looking in awe at the brand new Mir station and noticed that the reentry craft for last crew was still docked to Salyut 7. Somebody else then thought of checking the last Salyut 7 activities and then we finally saw that there was no resupply flights to the station since September.

It seems that this last Soyuz did not dock after all – and later on, nothing didn’t even try.

Next visit to the Salyut was in May 1986, almost a year after the last resupply craft arrived. Two cosmonauts undocked their capsule from the Mir, then flew to Salyut 7. We have no idea what did they see on board – the Russians never said a word about this mission. We have only a handful of facts: the commander of this mission, Leonid Kizim, spent most part of 1984 at this very station and could be safely presumed to be a friend of both Savinykh and Dzhanibekov. Kizim and his copilot Solovyov spent 52 days on Salyut 7. A week after they came back to Mir, Salyut 7 fired its station-keeping engine, and then the docked return craft engine. These two burns took the station to the same graveyard orbit that the radar recon satellites eject their spent nuclear reactors. Solovyov retired soon after this flight, then died a year later. Kizim is still active, he currently keeps the record for most days in orbit – in fact, he’s on the Mir right now. They both were decorated with “Hero of the Soviet Union” medals after their mission.

We haven’t got the slightest idea what happened – why Savinykh and Dzhanibekov stopped the replacement crew from boarding and why didn’t they come back themselves. We don’t know what could Solovyov see there; we don’t know but it destroyed him. We don’t know why the High Command of Strategic Rocket Forces saw fit to put this station at the farthest reachable orbit instead of letting it burn in the atmosphere.

Maybe someday we will find out.

I hope not.

Sleepless

He tosses and turns, another hour wasted on futile attempts to fall asleep. He’s overworked, his whole apartment – if you can call this pigeon-hole an apartment – stinks of a man too tired to clean. After a while he gives up on sleep, stands up and looks through the solitary window. The street below is mostly dark, only the new autonomous lamps are on – the rest is turned off, due to energy conservation measures. Only the ever-watchful cameras benefit of this meagre light; it’s long past curfew, nobody is around at that hour.

He’s not only tired, he’s unnerved. This is normal, of course, this city is full of shell-shocked primates, walking around in a daze of government-sponsored sedatives, doing their pitiful best to not notice. As if the crystal computronium tower just on the outskirts of the city could simply be ignored, all three kilometers of it. As if the monolith plates, slowly drifting across the sky, their composition or purpose unknown, could be unseen. As if you could simply live as if the world did not change at all.

But this man in the window does notice, and the ordinary signs of the extraordinary bother him no more. He learned to live with “the upstarts”, to sift sense out of the cacophony of voices the uploaded present to those that still cling to biology. He endured the thinly veiled sneers of the unbodied, he helped broker the deals that made this city possible – after all they live on the goodwill of the tower, or maybe on dregs of their excess production. What worries him is that the upstarts talk no more. The tower is silent, the computronium dark. Something has changed and he does not know why. His job is to know such things, that’s what the Ministry of Defence of the Provisional National Salvation Council pays him for.

His job is also why I’m here, hidden behind his eyeballs.

You see, I’m the spy. Or maybe he is. Or rather I’m the spyware, he’s the zombie – but I don’t control him, at least not yet – this would give us up. I live in his head, on a bioware built in-situ by a slew of micromachines masquerading as an infection – a stomach flu, I think. A large part of the local population may have this unplanned add-on in their heads – he seems to remember that stomach flu was rather popular this year. This is all conjecture, I cannot access his memories directly.

This is also why I don’t know why I am in this head. A hardcoded program recognised something of interest to us, so it triggered a download of – well, me. But I don’t know what tripped the routine. I have to wait until he sees or hears it again, whatever it was.

In the meantime, we wait out the night, he and I.

16

We thought we’ve got them all.

Alpenfestung proved to be a myth, Byrd and his marines smashed the Neuschwabenland to pieces, and Russians stormed the Werwolfschanze in the Eulengebirge Mountains, burying whatever was in the Riese under tons of rock.

There were unclear reports – some sightings in southern Poland, the ghost rockets over Sweden, of course, but nothing came of it and they soon petered out.

The SS in the Antarctic fought hard, they’ve used everything they had (and boy, was that a lot), we chalked this up to their fanaticism and thought this explains it all. But when we checked the base later on, there were demolished passages, forever sealed by rock and ice, there were blind corridors, some of them with rails that ran straight into a wall. Some said that we missed something important. That all this fighting was a delaying action, buying time for their scientists and politicians. Time for what? No one knew.

Seems that they were right.

There was a new ghost rocket sighting over Baltic Sea last month – we almost had an incident with Russians over it. Candido Godoi had another twin birth, and our Yad Vashem contact swears that the man seen there is Mengele. Two weeks ago RAF managed to intercept one of their planes over the North Sea.

It looks that wherever the Nazis hid, they are back now.

Lost

- Where the hell are we?

He peered out into the gloom. The worst of the storm has passed, but the small fishing boat was hopelessly lost. Gale had blown them east, deep into North Sea and they had no idea where they were. Water must have got into the wiring somewhere, because both GPS and the radio behaved rather erratically. Nevertheless, they were in luck. Many vessels must have been caught in this sudden spell of bad weather, some of them fared much worse than them – as the raving, barely conscious man they fished out of the water a few hours ago could attest. Well, he could if they’d manage to get a coherent sentence out of him anyway.

He tried the radio again.

“The shipping forecast issued by the Met Office at 0130 on Sunday the 31st of December…”

Weather forecast, whatever good it will do them now.

The visibility outside was practically zero. Only thing he could see from behind the steering wheel were wind blown patches of fog, colored by their own running lights. He doubted that the lookout on the bow could see much more. If they meet a ship now, it’ll run them over without even noticing.

“Humber, Thames…”

He turned his attention to the radio, out of sheer habit – they were most certainly not where they started.

“Southeasterly 5 to 7, occasionally gale 8″

- Gale, don’t you say? – he thought with a sneer.

“Caution veering southwesterly later. Goosebumps, dizzy spells. Still good.”

What. The hell.

This is not a weather forecast.

“Dover, Wight. Southeasterly veering southwesterly 7 or severe gale 9. Head-on impact. Continents collide. Atoms split. Dilated pupils. Elation. Vertigo. Visibility zero.”

He stared at the radio, dumbstruck.

- Skipper! Skipper, there is something ahead!

Through the tear in the fogbank he saw it too – a small island not far ahead. On it, a forest of aerials, with St. Elmo’s fires dancing on them. A black structure stood high on the bank, strobing beacon at the top – impossibly slim, it looked unlike any lighthouse he had ever seen. Through binoculars in his shaking hands, he could just make out the shapes of bunkers, warning notices and beach obstacles littering the waterline.

He barely registered a clatter of pans from belowdecks and shouts of the crew. A man who was barely alive two hours ago was now struggling with two of his men, screaming “Heligoland! Heligoland!” at the top of his lungs and fighting to get on the deck to – swim towards the island? Away from it? He had no way of knowing.

He put down his binoculars next to frantically spinning compass.

“Heligoland. Planet-struck and spellbound. The wreck of matter and the crush of worlds.”

(the text in italics are lyrics to “Heligoland”, by Overseer)

BOMARC

Deep under the mountain a teleprinter chattered, its noise almost lost in the background of many hushed voices, ringing telephones and hurrying steps. Neat rows of capital letters appeared on a sheet of paper, which was then messily torn off and carried to a frowning man in a glass booth overlooking the large control room. Orders were given, klaxons sounded, blast doors were sealed. Grim faced sentries chambered rounds in their religiously cleaned rifles. The frowning man looked at the computer-generated vectors, drawn on the big screens in the control room, then picked up the red telephone handset and made the call.

Many hundreds of miles away from the mountain a small neat park basked in the midday sun, until the calm was ruined by a sudden thundering roar.

A startled family turned their heads: past the trees and greens, past the chainlink fence, paths and roads of a nearby base, a flock of missiles was rising on the thin columns of white smoke.

The boy looked at them with wonder, his mother with fear. The father stood up and brushed the grass off his Air Force uniform, his face unreadable.

- Take the kid and go to your mother. Don’t even think of going back to the city, there’s a green bag in the trunk, everything you need is there. I’ll join you as soon as I can. I gotta run now.
- But…
- No buts, I have to go. The bombers are coming.

Lethe

Numbers station OLX is silent, and has been silent for a long time.

It was known to be Czech, or Czechoslovakian, to be precise – the language was Czech, and it used a ITU callsign: assigned, somewhat hilariously, to Czech News Agency. It used to broadcast regularly, at every hour, the robotic voice repeating its groups with the same precise pronounciation. If the signal propagation was good, the station could be heard all over the Europe, carrying its coded messages to agents on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
After 1989 revolution messages became infrequent and irregular, then regained some order – only to cease in 1997, during the great flood.

Why during the flood?

Why hasn’t it been fixed or replaced? If it was no longer needed, why didn’t they simply take it off the air?

Could it have been forgotten? Could this transmitter simply disappear from institutional memory, its purpose lost in the turmoil inherent in regime change? If this is possible, what else could vanish with it? Regional offices? Whole departments? Spy networks? Could there be orphaned agents, old men in what once was West Germany, dialling their radios to shortwave frequency now alive only with static and random crackle of the ionosphere? Or maybe there is nobody there, never was, the robot voice repeating its “No message” broadcast over and over again, the reels of tape recorder slowly rotating in a long-locked cellar full of dust and forgotten secrets.

Until rising water shorted out the batteries.

12

They got him at 90 000 feet.

They were almost at the edge of space – the fighters were barely responsive at this altitude, in the air too thin to provide much resistance to control surfaces. Both pilots knew that neither the speed nor the altitude were sustainable, but all they had to do was get a lock for the missiles and fire them – then they could try to descend safely.
The contrail was just a suggestion, but no matter – the interceptors had this strange target on their own radars now. There was a flash, and the leading plane spawned two barely visible smoke trails. A split second later the wingman heard the warbling tone – his own missiles got the lock. Push of a button and they were off.

- This is Acorn Leader, missiles are away.

Both planes dived, back to safer altitudes, back to thicker air. In the distance, an explosion bloomed.

- Starlight, this is Acorn Leader, he’s hit.
- Bang up job, Acorn. Descend to FL 700 and… – the ground controller’s voice trailed off.
- Acorn, descend and standby.

A few moments of silence, then -

- Acorn Leader, your new heading is 187, flight level 700, move in to the target and inspect the damage.

They turned, both pilots scanning the skies.
There it was – a smoke trail. The target was still airworthy, if only barely. It was most definitely hit, losing altitude and no longer moving at ludicrous speed. Closing in wasn’t hard now, but the flight leader was wary: if its defensive armament was on par with performance, they could be in for a nasty surprise.

- Starlight, this is Acorn Leader, I have visual on the target. It’s a – a plane of model unknown to me, painted in what resembles an anti-flash white scheme. It resembles an elongated triangle, with wings barely present. I see no cockpit nor windows. The damage is visible on the front of a left, uh, winglet? It seems to have lost most of its thrust and is losing altitude fast. It might make it to Shetlands, but just barely.
- Roger that. Acorn, can any of you make out any markings?
- Standby Starlight. Yes, there seems to be something on the tail fin, it’s…

There was a long silence.

- Starlight, this is Acorn Leader. I can see the markings on the craft.
- Understood. Acorn, the vector to your tanker is 273…
- Starlight, about these markings, it has -
- We understand, Acorn Two. The vector to your tanker is 273, flight level 420. Get to it or you’re both swimming home.
- Roger that, Starlight.

Both interceptors changed course again, speeding to meet the fuel-heavy Victor again.

Behind them, the mortally wounded plane was fighting for altitude, the swastika on its tail fin barely visible.

11

The second fighter detached its probe from refuelling drogue. There was a small cloud of jet fuel vapour, which vanished as soon as it appeared. The pilot carefully moved his plane away from sluggish Victor tanker, then joined his flight leader, who finished refuelling few minutes earlier. Their Lightnings were excellent interceptors, fast and agile, but they had very short legs – especially with rocket engines installed in the space usually taken by additional ventral tank.

If flight leader knew what was the deal with the unusual load-out, he wasn’t telling. The Napier rocket motors were no longer in production: the Lightning could reach and sustain Mach 2, which was more than sufficient to intercept any Soviet bomber in service. The auxiliary rocket stated mission – boosting the plane for high-altitude supersonic bomber interception – was moot, because there was no bomber the Lightning could not catch.

But there they were, high above North Atlantic, with even less fuel than usual and a deadweight package where the fuel tank should be.

- Acorn Leader, climb to flight level 500, your new heading is 15.

There was no answer from the leading plane, but it banked slightly and started the climb, with the wingman following suit.

The intercept vector seemed weird. Heading was OK, but 50 000 feet was unusual – Soviet Tu-95s, their usual customers, had a service ceiling of 45 000 or so. Nevertheless, they climbed.

When ground control spoke again the pilot could only boggle.

- Acorn Leader, bogie, range one hundred, flight level, uh – flight level 680, climb and prepare to intercept.
- This is Acorn Leader, please repeat.

So the boss was puzzled too.

- Acorn Leader, I repeat, range, uh, sixty, flight level 680, climb and prepare to intercept. Um, be advised, there will be no contrail.

What? Almost seventy thousand feet and in unpowered flight? What was that thing? Despite a heated flight suit, he felt a chill.

In front and above them, a contrail appeared.

- Starlight, this is Acorn Leader, bogie just powered up, I think he sees us.

- Acorn Leader, range to target 45 miles, flight level 700, intercept and engage, you are weapons free.

There was a moment of stunned silence, then -

- Roger that, Starlight, engaging. Acorn Two, fire up the package.

The wingman flipped a few switches and the rocket motor under the fuselage whined to life. His Lightning surged forward and up. On gouts of flame they climbed into rapidly darkening sky.

10

Do you know this joke about some things being so classified that they had to invent a new classification level and then make it classified?

First, nobody uses a simple classification levels anymore, second, it’s really, really not funny once you get transferred here.

From the day one this had the stink of a dead-end job. You learn to recognise it pretty early in this line of work: it’s the smell of dusty file folders, with an acrid undertone of old paper. If you can smell cigarettes, like from an ancient ashtray, you know that you are in the deep, that you’ve meandered your way into some forgotten corner of institutional memory. This stink is pervasive and lingering, everybody uses it to spot and avoid archive drones (well, the smell and the rapid blinking of the eyes not used to daylight). I used to do it, now I’m the one that gets avoided.

I have been transferred here after the great Iraqi WMD fiasco. Officially they had me promoted, then sent here to pore over old case files. I feel like Mulder here. I’m trying to shake this feeling, but it’s really, really hard when you have shelves upon shelves of F2 (or “Fucking Forteana”) to look at.

Most of this is crap. Lights above bases. Bass rumblings in the deep desert at night. Weirdly shaped contrails (a few of these have an Air Force reference case files numbers, with the “Case Closed” stamp – that gave me a chuckle).

But there are a few things in here that gave me a chill.

Exhibit A is a stubby, strange looking plane, somewhat similar to HL-10 that NASA tested in the sixties. It has been discovered sometime in 1965, in stable orbit. The inclination did not put it on the launch trajectory from either Baikonur, Plesetsk or Kapustin Yar, so this caused a bit of a stir – the Soviets had a facility we knew nothing of, or a vehicle more capable than Gemini or any of the planned Apollo modes. Six months after detection it was still up, so the Air Force and NASA put a Gemini up to have a close look. Details of this mission are somewhere else, all I have here is a few photos. The craft looks, for a lack of a better word, abandoned: the payload bay doors are open and there is an umbilical snaking out – but there is no cosmonaut at the end of it. From what I can see on the photos, the cockpit looks much too modern for the sixties. But the most upsetting thing is easy to miss: on the rudder there is a small flag and it’s not the red one with hammer and sickle. It’s the white-blue-red one, with “Rossiya” in Cyrillic underneath it.

It has been retrieved – as far as I can tell, the Space Shuttle was built for this mission. I don’t know what Air Force got from this little spaceplane, but I don’t think that the neutron bombs and Pershing redeployments in the eighties were unconnected with it.

Exhibit B is an ordinary quality tourist photo, from an ordinary digital point-and-click camera. Attached EXIF data analysis says it was taken three months ago in Atlantic City and sets the probability of photo tampering as very low. The smiling pair of twentysomethings in foreground is irrelevant – but in the background there is a low, grey silhouette of a warship. It is close enough that you can just make out the tactical number on the bow – “DE173″.

It’s USS Eldridge. Sold to Greece in 1951 and scrapped in 1999. Said to participate in so-called “Philadelphia Experiment”, which was repeatedly debunked as a hoax. The loons say that this “experiment” was about “tactical invisibility by means of phase shifting”, whatever this is supposed to mean, and its side effects included time and space travel (and gruesome fatalities).

Is there a connection? Am I going crazy? Could this really be a promotion and not pretend-work for the sidelined analyst?

Could this be real?