David Hartwell - Year's Best SF 17

“I’m sorry we couldn’t help you more,” she said. “And apologies for pulling a gun on you. I’m Kyzdygoi,” she added, thrusting out her hand for him to shake.

“Uh, that’s a … pretty name,” said Ambrose as he too shook her hand. “What’s it mean?”

“It means ‘stop giving birth to girls,’ ” said Kyzdygoi with a straight face. “My parents were old school.”

Ambrose opened his mouth and closed it, his grin faltering.

“All right, well, good luck shrinking your Earths,” Gennady told her as they strolled to the plastic-sheet-covered doorway.

As they drove back to Stepnogorsk, Ambrose leaned against the passenger door and looked at Gennady in silence. Finally he said, “You do this for a living?”

“Ah, it’s unreliable. A paycheck here, a paycheck there …”

“No, really. What’s this all about?”

Gennady eyed him. He probably owed the kid an explanation after getting guns drawn on him. “Have you ever heard of metastable explosives?”

“What? No. Wait …” He fumbled for his glasses.

“Never mind that.” Gennady waved at the glasses. “Metastables are basically super-powerful chemical explosives. They’re my new nightmare.”

Ambrose jerked a thumb back at SNOPB. “I thought you were looking for germs.”

“This isn’t about germs, it’s about hydrogen bombs.” Ambrose looked blank. “A hydrogen bomb is a fusion device that’s triggered by high compression and high temperature. Up ’til now, the only thing that could generate those kinds of conditions was an atomic bomb—a plutonium bomb, understand? Plutonium is really hard to refine, and it creates terrible fallout even if you only use a little of it as your fusion trigger.”

“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, the good guys totally lose their 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 crêpes. 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, and 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 metastables. 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 non-disclosure 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.”