The Year’s Best Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  “So?”

  “So, metastable explosives are powerful enough to trigger hydrogen fusion without the plutonium. They completely sever the connection between nuclear weapons and nuclear industry, which means that once they exist, we good guys totally lose our ability to tell who has the bomb and who doesn’t. Anybody who can get metastables and some tritium gas can build a hydrogen bomb, even some disgruntled loner in his garage.

  “And somebody is building one.”

  Stepnogorsk was fast approaching. The town was mostly a collection of Soviet-era apartment blocks with broad prairie visible past them. Gennady swung them around a corner and they drove through Microdistrict 2 and past the disused Palace of Culture. Up ahead was their hotel … surrounded by the flashing lights of emergency vehicles.

  “Oh,” said Gennady. “A fire?”

  “Pull over. Pull over!” Ambrose braced his hands against the Tata’s low ceiling. Gennady shot him a look, but did as he’d asked.

  “Shit. They’ve found me.”

  “Who? Those are police cars. I’ve been with you every minute since we got here, there’s no way you could have gotten into any trouble.” Gennady shook his head. “No, if it’s anything to do with us, it’s probably Kyzdygoi’s people sending us a message.”

  “Yeah? Then who are those suits with the cops?”

  Gennady thought about it. He could simply walk up to one of the cops and ask, but figured Ambrose would probably have a coronary if he did that.

  “Well … there is one thing we can try. But it’ll cost a lot.”

  “How much?”

  Gennady eyed him. “All right, all right,” said Ambrose. “What do we do?”

  “You just watch.” Gennady put on his glasses and stepped out of the car. As he did, he put through a call to London, where it was still early morning. “Hello? Lisaveta? It’s Gennady. Hi! How are you?”

  He’d brought a binocular attachment for the glasses, which he sometimes used for reading serial numbers on pipes or barrels from a distance. He clipped this on and began scanning the small knot of men who were standing around outside the hotel’s front doors.

  “Listen, Lisa, can I ask you to do something for me? I have some faces I need scanned.… Not even remotely legal, I’m sure.… No, I’m not in trouble! Would I be on the phone to you if I were in trouble? Just—okay. I’m good for it. Here come the images.”

  He relayed the feed from his glasses to Lisa in her flat in London.

  “Who’re you talking to?” asked Ambrose.

  “Old friend. She got me out of Chernobyl intact when I had a little problem with a dragon—Lisa? Got it? Great. Call me back when you’ve done the analysis.”

  He pocketed the glasses and climbed back in the car. “Lisa has Interpol connections, and she’s a fantastic hacker. She’ll run facial recognition on it and hopefully tell us who those people are.”

  Ambrose cringed back in his seat. “So what do we do in the meantime?”

  “We have lunch. How ’bout that French restaurant we passed? The one with the little Eiffel Tower?”

  Despite the clear curbs everywhere, Gennady parked the car at the shopping mall and walked the three blocks to the La France. He didn’t tell Ambrose why, but the American would figure it out: the Tata was traceable through its GPS. Luckily La France was open and they settled in for some decent crepes. Gennady had a nice view of a line of trees west of the town boundary. Occasionally a car drove past.

  Lisa pinged him as they were settling up. “Gennady? I got some hits for you.”

  “Really?” He hadn’t expected her to turn up anything. Gennady’s working assumption was that Ambrose was just being paranoid.

  “Nothing off the cops; they must be local,” she said. “But one guy—the old man—well, it’s daft.”

  He sighed in disappointment, and Ambrose shot him a look. “Go ahead.”

  “His name is Alexei Egorov. He’s premier of a virtual nation called the Soviet Union Online. They started from this project to digitize all the existing paper records of the Soviet era. Once those were online, Egorov and his people started some deep data-mining to construct a virtual Soviet, and then they started inviting the last die-hard Stalinists—or their kids—to join. It’s a virtual country composed of bitter old men who’re nostalgic for the purges. Daft.”

  “Thanks, Lisa. I’ll wire you the fee.”

  He glowered at Ambrose. “Tell me about Soviet Union.”

  “I’m not supposed to—”

  “Oh come on. Who said that? Whoever they are, they’re on the far side of the planet right now, they can’t help you. They put you with me, but I can’t help you either if I don’t know what’s going on.”

  Ambrose’s lips thinned to a white line. He leaned forward. “It’s big,” he said.

  “Can’t be bigger than my mestatables. Tell me: what did you see on Mars?”

  Ambrose hesitated. Then he blurted, “A pyramid.”

  Silence.

  “Really, a pyramid,” Ambrose insisted. “Big sucker, gray, I think most of it was buried in the permafrost. It was the only thing sticking up for miles. This was on the Northern plains, where there’s ice just under the surface. The whole area around it … well, it was like a frozen splash, if you know what I mean. Almost a crater.”

  This was just getting more and more disappointing. “And why is Soviet Union Online after you?”

  “Because the pyramid had Russian writing on it. Just four letters, in red: CCCP.”

  The next silence went on for a while, and was punctuated only by the sound of other diners grumbling about local carbon prices.

  “I leaked some photos before Google came after me with their nondisclosure agreements,” Ambrose explained. “I guess the Soviets have Internet search-bots constantly searching for certain things, and they picked up on my posts before Google was able to take them down. I got a couple of threatening phone calls from men with thick Slavic accents. Then they tried to kidnap me.”

  “No!”

  Ambrose grimaced. “Well, they weren’t very good at it. It was four guys, all of them must have been in their eighties, they tried to bundle me into a black van. I ran away and they just stood there yelling curses at me in Russian. One of them threw his cane at me.” He rubbed his ankle.

  “And you took them seriously?”

  “I did when the FBI showed up and told me I had to pack up and go with them. That’s when I ran to the U.N. I didn’t believe that ‘witness protection’ crap the Feds tried to feed me. The U.N. people told me that the Soviets’ data-mining is actually really good. They keep turning up embarrassing and incriminating information about what people and governments got up to back in the days of the Cold War. They use what they know to influence people.”

  “That’s bizarre.” He thought about it. “Think they bought off the police here?”

  “Or somebody. They want to know about the pyramid. But only Google, and the Feds, and I know where it is. And NASA’s already patched that part of the Mars panoramas with fake data.”

  Disappointment had turned to a deep sense of surprise. For Gennady, being surprised usually meant that something awful was about to happen, so he said, “We need to get you out of town.”

  Ambrose brightened. “I have an idea. Let’s go back to SNOPB. I looked up these minus-three people, they’re eco-radicals but at least they don’t seem to be lunatics.”

  “Hmmph. You just think Kyzdygoi’s ‘hot.’” Ambrose grinned and shrugged.

  “Okay.—But we’re not driving, because the car can be tracked. You walk there. It’s only a few kilometers. I’ll deal with the authorities and these ‘Soviets,’ and once I’ve sent them on their way we’ll meet up. You’ve got my number.”

  Ambrose had evidently never taken a walk in the country before. After Gennady convinced him he would survive it, they parted outside La France, and Gennady watched him walk away, sneakers flapping. He shook his head and strolled back to the Tata.

  Five men w
ere waiting for him. Two were policemen, and three wore business attire. One of these was an old, bald man in a faded olive-green suit. He wore augmented reality glasses, and there was a discrete red pin on his lapel in the shape of the old Soviet flag.

  Gennady made a show of pushing his own glasses back on his nose and walked forward, hand out. As the cops started to reach for their Tasers, Gennady said, “Mr. Egorov! Gennady Malianov, IAEA. You’ll forgive me if I record and upload this conversation to headquarters?” He tapped the frame of his glasses and turned to the other suits. “I didn’t catch your names?”

  The suits frowned; the policemen hesitated; Egorov, however, put out his hand and Gennady shook it firmly. He could feel the old man’s bones shift in his grip, but Egorov didn’t grimace. Instead he said, “Where’s your companion?”

  “You mean that American? No idea. We shared a hotel room because it was cheaper, but then we parted ways this morning.”

  Egorov took his hand back, and pressed his bruised knuckles against his hip. “You’ve no idea where he is?”

  “None.”

  “What’re you doing here?” asked one of the cops.

  “Inspecting SNOPB,” he said. Gennady didn’t have to fake his confidence here; he felt well armored by his affiliation to Frankl’s people. “My credentials are online, if there’s some sort of issue here?”

  “No issue,” muttered Egorov. He turned away, and as he did a discrete icon lit up in the corner of Gennady’s heads-up display. Egorov had sent him a text message.

  He hadn’t been massaging his hand on his flank; he’d been texting through his pants. Gennady had left the server in his glasses open, so it would have been easy for Egorov to ping it and find his address.

  In among all the other odd occurrences of the past couple of days, this one didn’t stand out. But as Gennady watched Egorov and his policemen retreat, he realized that his assumption that Egorov had been in charge might be wrong. Who were those other two suits?

  He waited for Egorov’s party to drive away, then got in the Tata and opened the email.

  It said, Mt tnght Pavin Inn, rstrnt wshrm. Cm aln.

  Gennady puzzled over those last two words for a while. Then he got it. “Come alone!” Ah. He should have known.

  Shaking his head, he pulled out of the lot and headed back to the hotel to check out. After loading his bag, and Ambrose’s, into the Tata, he hit the road back to SNOPB. Nobody followed him, but that meant nothing since they could track him through the car’s transponder if they wanted. It hardly mattered; he was supposed to be inspecting the old anthrax factory, so where else would he be going?

  Ambrose’d had enough time to get to SNOPB by now, but Gennady kept one eye on the fields next to the road just in case. He saw nobody, and fully expected to find the American waiting outside Building 242 as he pulled up.

  As he stepped out of the Tata he nearly twisted his ankle in a deep rut. There were fresh tire tracks and shattered bits of old asphalt all over the place; he was sure he hadn’t seen them this morning.

  “Hello?” He walked down the ramp into the sudden dark of the bunker. Did he have the right building? It was completely dark here.

  Wires drooled from overhead conduits; hydroponic trays lay jumbled in the corner, and strange-smelling liquids were pooled on the floor. -3 had pulled out, and in a hurry.

  He cursed, but suppressed an urge to run back to the car. He had no idea where they’d gone, and they had a head start on him. The main question was, had they left before or after Ambrose showed up?

  The answer lay in the yellow grass near where -3’s vehicles had been parked that morning. Gennady knelt down and picked up a familiar pair of augmented reality glasses. Ambrose would not have left these behind willingly.

  Gennady swore, and now he did run to the Tata.

  * * *

  The restaurant at the Pavin Inn was made up to look like the interiors of a row of yurts. This gave diners some privacy as most of them had private little chambers under wood-ribbed ceilings; it also broke up the eyelines to the place’s front door, making it easy for Gennady to slip past the two men in suits who’d been with Egorov in the parking lot. He entered the men’s room to find Egorov pacing in front of the urinal trough.

  “What’s this all about?” demanded Gennady—but Egorov made a shushing motion and grabbed a trash can. As he upended it under the bathroom’s narrow window, he said, “First you must get me out of here!”

  “What? Why?”

  Egorov tried to climb onto the upended can, but his knees and hips weren’t flexible enough. Finally Gennady relented and went to help him. As he boosted the old comrade, Egorov said, “I am a prisoner of these people! They work for the Americans.” He practically spat the name. He perched precariously on the can and began tugging at the latch to the window. “They have seized our database! All the Soviet records … including what we know about the Tsarina.”

  Gennady coughed. Then he said, “I’ll bring the car around.”

  He helped Egorov through the window then, after making sure no one was looking, left through the hotel’s front door. The unmistakable silhouette of Egorov was limping into the parking lot. Gennady followed him and, as he unlocked the Tata, he said, “I’ve disabled the GPS tracking in this car. It’s a rental; I’m going to drop it off in Semey, which is six hundred kilometers from here. Are you sure you’re up to a drive like that?”

  The old man’s eyes glinted under yellow streetlight. “Never thought I’d get a chance to see the steppes again. Let’s go!”

  Gennady felt a ridiculous surge of adrenaline as they bumped out of the parking lot. Two cars were on the road, and endless blackness swallowed the landscape beyond the edge of town. It was a simple matter to swing onto the highway and leave Stepnogorsk behind—but it felt like a car chase.

  “Ha ha!” Egorov craned his neck to look back at the dwindling town lights. “Semey, eh? You’re going to Semipalatinsk, aren’t you?”

  “To look at the Tsarina site, yes. Whose side does that put me on?”

  “Sides?” Egorov crossed his arms and glared out the windshield. “I don’t know about sides.”

  “It was an honest question.”

  “I believe you. But I don’t know. Except for them,” he added, jabbing a thumb back at the town. “I know they’re bad guys.”

  “Why? And why are they interested in Ambrose?”

  “Same reason we are. Because of what he saw.”

  Gennady took a deep breath. “Okay. Why don’t you just tell me what you know? And I’ll do the same?”

  “Yes, all right.” The utter blackness of the nighttime steppe had swallowed them; all that was visible was the double-cone of roadway visible in the car’s headlamps. It barely changed, moment to moment, giving the drive a timelessness Gennady would, under other circumstances, have quite enjoyed.

  “We data-mine records from the Soviet era,” began Egorov. “To find out what really went on. It’s lucrative business, and it supports the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Online.” He tapped his glasses.

  “Well, a few weeks ago, we got a request for some of the old data—from the Americans. Two requests, actually, a day apart: one from the search engine company, and the other from the government. We were naturally curious, so we didn’t say no; but we did a little digging into the data ourselves.—That is, we’d started to, when those young, grim men burst into our offices and confiscated the server. And the backup.”

  Gennady looked askance at him. “Really? Where was this?”

  “Um. Seattle. That’s where the CCCOP is based—only because we’ve been banned in the old country! Russia’s run by robber barons today, they have no regard for the glory of—”

  “Yes yes. Did you find out what they were looking for?”

  “Yes—which is how I ended up with these travel companions you saw. They are in the pay of the American CIA.”

  “Yes, but why? What does this have to do with the Tsarina?”

  “I
was hoping you could tell me. All we found was appropriations for strange things that should never have had anything to do with a nuclear test. Before the Tsarina was set off, there was about a year of heavy construction at the site. Sometimes, you know, they built fake towns to blow them up and examine the blast damage. That’s what I thought at first; they ordered thousands of tonnes of concrete, rebar and asbestos, that sort of thing. But if you look at the records after the test, there’s no sign of where any of that material went.”

  “They ordered some sort of agricultural crop from SNOPB,” Gennady ventured. Egorov nodded.

  “None of the discrepancies would ever have been noticed if not for your friend and whatever it is he found. What was it, anyway?”

  A strange suspicion had begun to form in Gennady’s mind, but it was so unlikely that he shook his head. “I want to look at the Tsarina site,” he said. “Maybe that’ll tell us.”

  Egorov was obviously unsatisfied with that answer, but he said nothing, merely muttering and trying to get himself comfortable in the Tata’s bucket seat. After a while, just as the hum of the dark highway was starting to hypnotize Gennady, Egorov said, “It’s all gone to Hell, you know.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Russia. It was hard in the old days, but at least we had our pride.” He turned to look out the black window. “After 1990, all the life just went out of the place. Lower birth-rate, men drinking themselves to death by the age of forty … no ambition, no hope. A lost land.”

  “You left?”

  “Physically, yes.” Egorov darted a look at Gennady. “You never leave. Not a place like this. For many years now, I’ve struggled with how to bring back Russia’s old glory—our sense of pride. Yet the best I was ever able to come up with was an online environment. A game.” He spat the word contemptuously.