Radiant State Read online

  She’d done a good job almost six years before. She’d left the rifle cleaned and wrapped in strips of cotton damp with lubricant, and it had kept well. No damp or grit had reached it. Awkwardly she strips it and cleans and oils each part. The touch and smell of the rifle is as familiar to her as her own body. The wood of the stock is still smooth and dark honey-brown. The magazine and firing mechanism, the telescopic sight rails, the pierced noise-suppressing muzzle and flash guard, all still blue-black steel, are a little scuffed and scratched–she remembers every mark–but there is no sign of corrosion. Only her own broken hands, finger bones snapped and carelessly re-fused, have to relearn their work. Figure it out all over again.

  The Zhodarev STV-04–gas-operated, a short-stroke spring-loaded piston above the barrel, a tilting bolt–weighs eight and a half pounds unloaded and is exactly forty-eight inches long, of which the barrel is twenty-four. Muzzle velocity is two thousand seven hundred feet per second. Effective range with a telescopic sight, one thousand yards. The Zhodarev is not a perfect weapon: it is complex to maintain, a little too heavy, the muzzle flash too bright even with a flash guard; it tends to lift, and the magazine can come loose and fall out. The woman had always wished she had a Vagant. But she knows the Zhodarev intimately. She fitted the muzzle brake herself to counteract the lifting. It is her weapon.

  She reassembles the rifle, lays it aside and checks the rest of the kit. Wrapped in a separate bundle of oiled cotton is the olive-green 4-12 x 40 VP Akilina telescopic sight, rarer and more precious by far than the weapon itself, its graticule adjustable both vertically for range and horizontally for windage. And there are paper packages, still sealed, containing five-round stripper clips of 7.62 x 54mm Vonn & Belloc rimmed cartridges. One hundred and twenty rounds. One combat load. Not really enough for what she needs but it will have to do.

  7

  ‘T minus six hundred, Proof of Concept.’

  Ten minutes to go.

  Engineer-Technician 2nd Class Mikkala Avril settles herself at the familiar console and tries to calm the churning of her mind. She runs again through the routines. The launch controller is making his final tour of workstation checks before launch. Calling on each desk in turn for confirmation of go. Her turn soon. A matter of seconds. She scans the columns of figures again. All displays are showing within normal parameters. Dead on the line.

  She has never actually done this task herself before, not at a real launch, not once, not even under supervision; except for practice exercises, she has always sat at Filipov’s left hand and watched while her principal made the necessary settings and corrections. Even so, she’s ready. She understands the procedures. It’s not that complex. Ever since she joined the Task Number One programme, fresh from graduating top of her year (the first graduating year of the New University of Mathematical Engineering at Berm), she has spent every spare moment in the technical libraries at Kurchatovgrad and Chaiganur studying the classified reports.

  It was Khyrbysk’s policy to encourage technicians on the programme to learn as much and as widely as they could about the project as a whole and not limit themselves to their own area of work. His attitude to access to papers was liberal, and she took maximum advantage, beginning with the chief engineer’s own seminal paper, Feasibility of an Atomic Bomb-Propelled Space Vessel, and working her way along the shelves: A Survey of Shock Absorption Options; Trajectory Walk Caused By Occasional Bomb Misfire; The Capture of Radiation by Angelic Materials; Radiation Spill Around An Impervious Disc; Preliminary Sketch of Life Support For A Crewed Vessel. There weren’t many people at Chaiganur who knew more about the history, physics and engineering of Task Number One than Mikkala Avril.

  She checks the central readout once more. The eight-inch-square display is connected to a von Altmann machine beneath the floor, which will, when called upon, analyse the telemetry from the vessel in flight and calculate any necessary corrective thrust from the banks of small rockets set in the midriff of Proof of Contact. It is her job to send the instructions for those corrections to the rockets themselves. It requires concentration, rapid reflexes, a steady hand. But all she has to do now is confirm readiness.

  Launch is looking at her.

  ‘Guidance Telemetry?’ says Launch, relaxed and neutral.

  And Mikkala Avril freezes.

  Her screen has gone dark.

  After half a second a short phrase blinks into life: Fail code 393.

  Everything else, all the rows and columns of figures, have disappeared. She has no contact with the ship.

  Fail code 393? It means nothing to her. Heart pumping, hands trembling, she riffles through the code handbook in mounting panic. 349… 382… 397… 402… What the hell is 393?

  There is no 393. Not in the book.

  Launch asks again, impatient now.

  ‘Guidance Telemetry, are we go?’

  Think. Think.

  Faces are turning towards Mikkala Avril. She feels the gaze of Director Khyrbysk on her back. The chief engineer is watching her. Papa Rizhin himself is watching her. She can feel it.

  ‘Guidance Telemetry?’ says the launch controller a third time. ‘What’s happening, Avril?’

  ‘I’ve got a 393, Launch.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘I’m working on it, Launch.’

  Ignore them. Focus only on the immediate need.

  She has no idea what Fail code 393 means. It isn’t in the book, which suggests it’s a core manufacturer’s code, not set up by Task Number One. It might be trivial, only a glitch in the machine. But it could equally be a fundamental system failure that would send Proof of Concept pitching and yawing, tumbling out of the sky to crash and burn.

  It is either/or, and the only way to find out is to switch the machine off and start it up again. And that will take ten minutes.

  ‘Last call, Avril,’ says the launch controller. There is tension in his voice now. The beginning of fear.

  She hesitates.

  It is the epochal moment of the world, and it turns on her.

  If she says go and the guidance systems misfire… No, she will not even think about the consequences of that… But if she calls an abort, Papa Rizhin’s flagship launch will collapse in ignominy in front of the entire Presidium, the ambassadors, the assembled press of the Vlast. It will be days–possibly weeks–before they can try again. And if the abort turns out to be unnecessary, only a twenty-three-year-old inexperienced woman’s cry of panic at an unfamiliar display code…

  She hears her own voice speaking. It sounds too loud. Hoarse and unfamiliar.

  ‘Guidance Telemetry is go, Launch. Go.’

  ‘Thank you, Avril.’

  Launch moves on to the next station.

  With trembling hands, Mikkala Avril powers off her console, counts to ten, and switches it back on. The cathode tubes begin cycling through their ponderous loading routine.

  ‘T minus three hundred, Proof of Concept.’

  Thank you Launch.

  Five minutes. The sugary music cuts out at last. There is a swell of voices and a scraping of chairs as the dignitaries turn to the window and put on their dark glasses.

  ‘Can’t see a bloody thing from here,’ mutters Foreign Minister Sarsin. (The Vlast needs a foreign minister now. So the world turns.) ‘It’s below the fucking horizon.’

  ‘You will see, Minister,’ says Khyrbysk. ‘You will certainly see.’

  An argument breaks out as camera operators try to set up in front of the dignitaries.

  ‘You don’t have to do this. There’s another team on the roof.’

  ‘Something could go wrong up there. We should have back-up footage.’

  Khyrbysk makes angry signs to the press liaison officer to close the disturbance down. He hadn’t wanted the press there at all, or the ambassadors for that matter, but Rizhin insisted. Rizhin is a showman; he wants to astonish the world.

  ‘The risk,’ Khyrbysk had said to him on the telephone. ‘What if it flops?’

&nbs
p; ‘You make it not flop, Yakov. That’s your job.’

  Rizhin needs risk, Khyrbysk realises. He burns risk for fuel. Everything races hot and fast, the engine too powerful for the machine. Parts that burn out are replaced on the move, without stopping. The whole of the New Vlast is Rizhin’s Proof of Concept, his bomb-powered vessel heading for unexplored territories and goals only Rizhin understands.

  The cosmonauts feel the colossal engineering beneath them sliding into life, the coolant pumping round the shock-absorbing pillars, the bomb pickers rattling through the magazines in search of the first charge. Proof of Concept is a behemoth of industrial construction, but it is also very simple.

  Mikkala Avril’s screens come back up with ten seconds to go. Everything is fine: readouts dead on the line. She is so relieved she wants to cry, but she does not allow herself; she is stronger than that and holds it in. She is the heart of the youth of the New Vlast and she is good at her job and she will not fail.

  Two seconds to go, she remembers to put her dark glasses on. She turns up the brightness on her screen, closes her eyes, presses a black cloth against her face and begins her own interior count. For the first ten bombs it will be too bright to see, and Proof of Concept will be on her own: then Mikkala must open her eyes and be not too dazzled to work.

  Before the chief engineer discovered the properties of angel flesh propellant, what Mikkala was about to do would have been impossible: the bombs’ electromagnetic pulses would have broken all contact between ship and ground. But now the ship’s instruments will sing and chatter as she rises, and be heard.

  The cosmonauts’ cabin shivers with the clang of the first apricot locking into the expulsion chute.

  Launch control is whited out in a flash of illumination that erases the sun.

  Bomp–bomp–bomp. Bigger explosions each time. Brilliant blinding flashes. Slowly at first then faster and faster Proof of Concept rises, riding a crumb trail of detonations, climbing a tower of mushroom clouds.

  The cosmonauts groan as each detonation slams their backs with a brute fist of acceleration. The whole ship judders and creaks and moans like a bathyscaphe under many thousand atmospheres of pressure.

  For the observers in the launch control blockhouse at Chaiganur Test Site 61, the ship itself is lost, the explosion trail hard to watch. The repeated retinal burn forms blue-purple-green jumbling images. Brilliant drifting spectral bruises in the eye. President-Commander Rizhin stands at the window, the hot glare pulsing on his face, an atomic heartbeat.

  I am the fist of history. I am the mile-high man.

  A long time after the light the sound waves come.

  Chapter Two

  … in the deep country

  Where an endless silence reigns.

  Nikolai Nekrasov (1821–78)

  1

  In Papa Rizhin’s world the clocks race forward to the pounding iron-foundry beat, the brakes are off and the New Vlast tears into the wind, riding the rolling wave of continental cataclysm-shock, flung into the future on the impulse-rip of centrifugal snap, taking a piston-blur express ride–six years now and counting and there’s no slowing it yet. But pieces break off and get left behind. Because the past is sticky. Adhesive. Reluctant to let go. The continent is littered with broken shards. Arrested fragments of slower time. Unhealed unforgotten memories and the dead who do not die.

  A house and a village and a lake.

  On a day in the eleventh year of her dislocated life Yeva Cornelius comes gently awake in the first grey light of morning. There is some time yet to go before the rising of the cooler, circumspect, conciliatory sun. Yeva stays quite still on the couch, breathing slowly, watching the curtain stir. Lilac and vines crowd against the house. The room is leaf-scented, leaf-shaded, cool.

  Her hair has been braided again in the night with loving gentleness: she feels the tightness of the intricate knotted plaits against her skull and smells the clean sweet fragrance the domovoi anoints her with while she sleeps. The prickle of tiny decorative twigs. Trinkets of seed and bird shell.

  Take the domovoi’s attention as a mark of favour, Eligiya Kamilova had said. It’s glad there are people again in the house. Leave a little salt and bread by the stove and it won’t trouble us.

  The domovoi laid trails of crumbling earth across the floorboards, long sweeps and spirals along corridors from room to room. Eligiya Kamilova was right: it didn’t want to hurt, not like those in the rye and oat fields–they were bad. Watchful and furtive, they came at you out of the white of noon and raised welts and sore rashes on your skin. Sly thorn scratches that stung and drew beads of blood. But the ones to be really afraid of were the ones that moved around outside in the night. Darkness magnifies. Darkness changes everything.

  Daylight gathers and hardens in the room. Moment by moment the curtain is more visible, rising and collapsing. It’s as if Yeva is moving it with her breath. Experimentally, she holds back the air in her lungs and eyes the curtain to see if it pauses too. Half-convinces herself that it does.

  The atmosphere of a complicated dream is ebbing slowly away. Her mother was in the dream. Her mother was looking for her.

  Her mother looks for her always, every day. She will have come back to the apartment and found it not there because of the bomb. But somebody will have told her the soldiers took them away, her and her sister, and put them on the train, and she will look for them. Only she won’t know that Eligiya Kamilova took them off the train again, that Eligiya did something with her hands and broke the door of the train and took them into the night and the snow, and they ran away. Her mother won’t know that.

  Everywhere they go, Eligiya Kamilova leaves behind messages and notes so her mother can know they have been there and where they are going next. But her mother might not get the messages. She might not know who to ask. Eligiya posted letters to their old address but her mother can’t go back to that house, not ever, because the soldiers sent everyone away. Some stranger will have read those letters. Or they’ll be in a pile in a big post office room in Mirgorod. Or burned.

  They walked south through the winter, Yeva and her sister Galina and Eligiya Kamilova, keeping off the roads and out of the villages, staying in the trees and the snow. The cold was like a dark glittering blade, but Eligiya was a hunter in the woods: she didn’t talk much but she knew how to trap, how to make a warm place, how to build a fire in the night that didn’t show light and a barricade of thorns against the wolves. Sometimes she slipped away to a village and came back with something they needed. Sometimes she found a hut or a farm where the people would let them sleep, maybe in a barn.

  Yeva remembered every night. Every single night.

  Her sister Galina was sick for a long time but she didn’t die, and in the first days of spring the three of them came out of the trees, following a black stream flecked with brown foam, and found the house in the middle of a wide field of waist-high grass: a big square house of yellow weatherboards under a low grey roof, the glass in the many windows mostly broken. They waded over to it, leaving a trodden wake in the grass that buzzed and clattered with insects. Eligiya Kamilova went up under the porch and broke open the door, just like she had opened the door of the train. A wide staircase climbed up into shadow, and on the bare boards of the entrance hall was a pile of leaves and moss. Twigs laid out around it in patterns like the letters of a strange alphabet. Eligiya stepped round it carefully.

  ‘Don’t disturb it,’ she said. ‘Be careful not to touch that at all.’

  There were pieces of furniture in some of the rooms. Mostly they’d had their upholstery ripped open, the stuffing pulled out and carried off for nests. There were chalky splashes of bird mess in the corners and streaks of it down the curtains. In the kitchen there were lamps, and oilcloth spread on the table.

  ‘Are we going to stay here?’ said Galina. ‘For a while?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Eligiya Kamilova.

  Yeva knew that Galina needed to rest, to stop moving for a long while, to be
strong again.

  Eligiya Kamilova hadn’t give them any choice when she opened the door of the train and took them away into the trees and made them walk. It all happened too quickly to even think about until after it was done. But if they’d stayed on the train and gone where it was taking them, their mother would have known where they were and she could have come there to get them. Eligiya said the train was going to a bad place, a cruel terrible place, and no one ever came home from there, but she didn’t even know what the terrible place was called, and Yeva wasn’t scared of being in terrible places.

  Every day she remembered the bomb. It always jumped her when she was thinking of something else. It wasn’t like a memory. Memories change until you don’t remember the actual thing any more; you remember the remembering. But of the time when the bomb fell nothing was forgotten and nothing was changed. When it jumped her it was like opening the same page of a book again and again, and the words were always all there, and always the same: Yeva’s life hammered open like a bomb-broken building, the insides scattered and left exposed to ruinous elemental fire and rain.

  Part of her stopped moving forward when the bomb came. Part of her got stuck in that piece of time for ever, always back there, always smelling the dust and burning, always looking down at Aunt Lyudmila squashed flat, always going down the stairs that used to be inside but were outside now, with nothing to hold on to. Part of her stayed back there, and only part of her was left to carry on. Now was a shadow remnant life of numbed and lesser feeling. Now was only aftermath. Aftermath.

  That day when they first found the yellow house in the grass they didn’t stay there but after looking it over they walked on down the stony dry track into the village. Long before they reached the village fields, Yeva could taste the tang of raw damp earth and animal dung in the air. Rooks chattered, squabbled and wheeled across the wide flatness of black soil just turned, thick and heavy and gleaming blue like metal. In the distance women were stooping and crouching at their work. They wore long red or green skirts, and their hair was wrapped in lengths of white cloth.