Missile Gap

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 death-watch 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 gray expanse between planet-sized land masses 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. Any time 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 kiteborn 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 gray 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 down-draft. The big jet engines guzzle fuel and are usually shut down in cruise flight, used only for take-off 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 gray 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 gray. “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 gasses 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 leap-frog 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 towards 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 twin 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 has vanished along with the radiators and the clear seas—and the light, for it is now fading towards 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 onwards 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 north-east passage, where the submarines cruise on eternal vigilant patrols to defend the frontier of the Rodina.

A thin pre-dawn light stains the icy hilltops gray 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 pre-dawn 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 dawn light 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 they didn’t win.”