by John Meaney
If Eden continued to commit the country’s budget to defence against world communism, then SIS must benefit. For Rupert to argue against it spoke of serious misgivings.
‘And Nasser has kicked us out of Egypt’ – Gavriela wanted to show she kept in touch – ‘which Mr Eden thinks is about to become a Soviet dominion.’
‘Not if he reads his JIC reports.’ Rupert meant the Joint Intelligence Committee.
For three months, the British army had been massing in Cyprus, getting ready – alongside French regiments – to invade Egypt and retake the Suez Canal Zone.
‘When the Wehrmacht invaded Poland and Belgium,’ said Gavriela, ‘it was pretty clear where the morality lay. If we invade another country, what does that make us?’
Rupert shook his head. ‘It’s a moot point, because Eisenhower won’t allow us to invade. That’s classified, by the way.’
‘Won’t allow us?’ said Gavriela.
‘The American Sixth Fleet is massing in the Mediterranean. If our ships set sail from Cyprus, the Yanks will move to stop it.’ None of this was in the newspapers. ‘On the other hand, in a few weeks’ time,’ Rupert went on, ‘French envoys will call in to Chequers, to see the Chancellor and request that Anglo-French combined forces make a move. We have this from the Deuxième Bureau.’
Gavriela nodded. The information might have come via semi-official channels or from eavesdropping on French intelligence: both were par for the course.
‘But this is in fact an Anglo-French-Israeli initiative,’ continued Rupert. ‘And you and I will have our ears nailed to the wall if we give a hint of knowing that.’ He related the details, and they were explosive: Israel to invade Egypt under secret agreement with Britain and France, after which the combined Anglo-French forces would ‘liberate’ the place while the Israelis withdrew.
‘Do the Cousins know this?’ asked Gavriela, meaning the CIA.
‘Maybe I should ring the Kremlin and ask.’
It was a year since Burgess and Maclean had surfaced at a Soviet press conference. Since then Kim Philby, SIS’s liaison to Washington and tipped to be a future head of service, had denied being the third man; but dirt tended to stick. Internal investigators, Rupert added, were right now tearing the Recruitment Office apart.
‘I’m glad I’m out of it,’ said Gavriela. ‘All that makes the news is defection and failure. The Crabbe thing was a disaster.’
In April, Premier Kruschev and Prime Minister Bulganin had sailed into Portsmouth Harbour aboard the Ordzhonikidze, a Soviet cruiser which had been too tempting a target: the famous wartime diver, Commander Crabbe, had been despatched to fix bugging devices to the hull. When his torn-up body eventually washed ashore, the UK government owned up to the operation.
The official story involved his being caught up in propellers. Not likely.
‘Berlin and the Stopwatch débâcle,’ said Rupert, ‘are more to the point.’
‘In what way? What point exactly?’
Portrait of a spy grandmaster sitting in a dusty room moving pieces across the board, but she was no longer in the game.
‘I mean, dear Gavi, your popping over to Berlin. Let me ask Alfredo to fetch up more coffee, and perhaps a plate of biscuits, before we discuss the details.’
‘No,’ said Gavriela. ‘No coffee, no biscuits, and definitely no Berlin.’
Rupert’s voice went as mild as she had ever heard it.
‘And no curiosity,’ he asked, ‘about the niece you have yet to meet?’
And that was it: game, set and match to the master.
She might have known.
Intercepts from Berlin, earlier in the year, had begun to reveal uranium shipment details – East Germany being currently the largest Soviet provider, while Prime Minister Bulganin’s public announcements had hinted at nuclear tests under way in Siberia. It was all part of Red paranoia regarding Western intent, said Rupert, and Eden’s intransigence over Suez was likely to trigger World War III.
‘We desperately need more info,’ he told Gavriela, ‘but with Stopwatch/Gold all over the papers, our chaps are having to lie low.’
And this, he went on, was where it fitted Gavriela’s personal interest. Normally, a schoolgirl civilian wanting to defect meant nothing to UK interests; but the dissatisfied daughter of a senior KGB officer with responsibility for the security of East Germany’s uranium mines, that was something else.
‘Her name is Ursula,’ he said. ‘Ursula Shtemenko, and at this stage we don’t know if she’s aware her birth certificate reads Ursula Wolf.’
Up until April, Operation Stopwatch, an SIS brainchild but funded by the CIA who called it Operation Gold, had delivered priceless intelligence. But four days after the Crabbe operation – and before his body appeared – somehow the Soviets had found the secret tunnel between Schönefelder Chaussee and Rudow, filled with telephonic equipment for eavesdropping on KGB signals; and the world’s press went crazy: a propaganda coup for Moscow.
Gavriela wondered if Philby had had anything to do with the tunnel, but knew better than to ask.
‘I’ve photographs of the girl.’ Rupert drew an envelope from inside his jacket, and passed it over. ‘Taken since she made her first enquiry.’
Exactly where that was, Gavriela would find out when she agreed to the operation; but they both knew she was unlikely to back out, having learnt this much. None of the pictures were posed. Clandestine surveillance, then.
‘Identical to my brother Erik, near enough,’ she said. ‘And Ilse?’
There was no need to explain who she meant: Rupert would have briefed himself beforehand on her family, on her brother Erik and on Ilse, the wife whom Erik adored.
‘Passed away six months ago, I’m afraid. Another trigger for Ursula’s current crisis.’
Gavriela leant back against the couch, resting her head on the antimacassar.
‘One more factor for us to take advantage of, is that, Rupert?’
But of course, he had a counter-argument ready, probably cooked up days ago.
‘You think she’s better off with Dmitri Shtemenko as her stepfather?’
Gavriela let out a sigh, and asked him to brief her on the details.
Two hours later she was walking home through a damp grey pea-souper fog, inured by frequent exposure to the airborne tang of sulphur dioxide, wondering why she had agreed to help, while knowing there was no other choice. There was evidence she had worked hard to confirm that Erik had been a slave at Peenemünde, almost certainly starved and worked to death on one of the projects headed by Werner von Braun, now sunning himself in Florida and raking in the big bucks from NASA, never mentioning the doodlebugs and V2 rockets that had devastated British cities, bringing fear and death to civilian adults, children and their pets.
So now there was Ursula Wolf, who called herself Ursula Shtemenko, asking someone on the British Council, at an artists’ event in East Berlin, for help in defecting. Did she really have access to her stepfather’s information? Or did Dmitri plan on using Ursula as leverage against one Gavriela Wolf? He might believe that Gavriela-turned-Gabrielle was an intelligence officer still; and even if he knew she was retired, there were secrets worth pulling from her brain.
What if the real game were Dmitri versus Rupert, while everything else was context?
Berlin beckoned, regardless.
EIGHTEEN
NULAPEIRON, 2604-2605 AD
Realspace, where every one of the countless points of light-against-darkness may be a distant star, an even more distant galaxy, a cluster or an ancient supercluster beyond a cosmic void. The photons that convey this information have travelled for up to thirteen point seven billion years without experiencing the passing of a moment – it is only those photons that reach non-vacuum media, such as human-built windows, that slow down and experience the march of time.
Here floats an Earth like world, large for its type, its purple-grey continents strewn with clouds, showing no sign – save for some near-deserted orbital
s – of the humans carving out a new society in strata below the cheerless surface. They call it Nulapeiron, the name implying boundlessness, with a paradoxical irony typical of the human culture’s designers, for the dwellings are subterranean.
And now a golden ship appears, banded with cobalt blue, polished and magnificent.
We’re here.
Another new world, my love.
Yes.
Rhianna Chiang disengages from her ship, wanting to review her briefing material before descending to the surface; and it is that decision which will account for the deciseconds-long delay reacting to movement on the periphery of her ship’s senses.
In a tenth of a second, everything can change.
Shortly, she will discover that.
Before the disaster occurs, she will have time to display only a first-facet projection of her briefing material:
LANGUAGES: Plentiful.
In the four centuries that Nulapeiron has been inhabited, deliberate design has prevented single-language monopolies (cf. Whorf Sapir hypothesis and the Web Mand’rin Catastrophe) from jeopardising cognitive Weltanschauung diversity. Only one of the major language groups is fully artificial, the others deriving from recognised Terran antecedents.
ECOSYSTEM: Constrained.
In the lower strata, light and oxygen are provided by force-evolved fluorofungus, which is plentiful. The foundation of habitable-area ecology is imported autotrophic bacteria; in a real sense, the planet’s native lifeforms exist outside the human demesnes and realms, especially upon the surface.
ARCHITECTURE: Deliberate.
The aristocracy’s subterranean palaces in the upper strata are a far cry from the habitation tunnels of the lower strata. Note that various leitmotifs are global, cf. the use of simple hangings to form walls and doorways in dormitory tunnels, contrasted with the wall membranes of well-to-do dwellings; likewise the use of fluorofungus compared to soft-luminescence smartmarble.
EDUCATION: Encouraged.
Despite the deliberate creation of an aristocracy (justified by the Founding Lords with reference to the controversial emergent élites doctrine as being inevitable therefore requiring optimisation), education is available in the poorer (lower) strata, while educational content is monitored and censored. The use of logotropes as femtoscopic drug-like treatments form an approach in contrast to that of the Fulgor education system designed by LuxPrime, and may (among the aristocracy at least) surpass it.
ARISTOCRACY: Powerful.
While the power structures are amenable to normal sociological deconstruction, note that the soi-disant Logic Lords and Ladies almost invariably possess superior intellects by virtue of their intensive training in the all-purpose academic discipline of logosophy.
Ethico cognitive modelling by Admiralty analysts notes that the presence of repressive social elements, including slavery, occasional employment of cyborgs and a pitiless legal system, may be overlooked by future historians if the integration of all academic disciplines (including philosophy-as-science) in logosophy matures as promised.
There are three points of movement. The moment is now.
Ships.
What—?
Zajinet ships.
All briefing notes are forgotten as Rhianna slams downward into emergency trance, the kind that produces physical after-effects due to shocking suddenness, irrelevant unless the Pilot survives; but these vessels are closing fast, and ship-and-Rhianna experience a hull-tingling resonance of powered-up weapon systems: the attack is imminent and movement is necessary now.
They corkscrew away but something tears into their left wing – bastards! – as their own weapons come online, pulsing with build-up – there – and they cut loose with their beams, Rhianna-and-ship; and the first of the attackers explodes – die, you fucker – but the others are swerving and two more beams lance towards them, and the second hits – damn damn damn – as ship and Rhianna fling themselves through another evasion, firing at another of the Zajinets and hitting it – good – and then the last – all dead – but not before more pain blossoms in their hull and then they are—
I love you.
I’ve always loved you.
—falling.
Rhianna has killed the Zajinets, and they have killed her.
She screams as reality explodes and a fragment is flung away – the fragment that is her – tearing her mind so that the smartgel and extruding stubby wings mean nothing, because everything is over.
It happened so very, very fast . . .
Dying now.
But that is not the tragedy.
‘—be all right if we—’
Fragments impinge on the awareness that was human, that was Pilot once.
Man, bearded.
Images like shards.
Hurts . . .
Pain. Oceanic pain.
Beads of computation in sequences, in threads, in damaged processes.
Diagnostic: livelock-free – achieved.
Such agony, the negentropy of working things out, of logic activated.
Diagnostic: deadlock-free – achieved.
Reality flickers.
‘Activating you now.’
Steadies.
‘I am Duke Avernon.’ The bearded man produces acoustic vibration to be parsed and rendered into semantic-analytic components for matching. ‘You’re alive again.’
Tonal analysis estimates likelihood of irony at 27 per cent.
‘It’s been a standard year since the crash, Pilot.’
Self model indicates send-signal capacity is 30:70 vision:speech.
Ambulatory capacity equals zero.
Tracking facial analytic vectors now. Mood-model reference Avernon constructed.
Smile arc Δθ ≈ 11.7˚
Intent.Interpretation = tactic::rapport attempt.
‘I don’t know your name, Pilot,’ Duke Avernon continues. ‘What is it? You can speak, by the way.’
OutstreamConnection.status = 100 per cent confirmed
Internal.Ident.Label = Rhianna_Chiang
Internal.Ident.Label.status = unsatisfactory
‘I’ve had to reconstruct . . . Well, everything, Pilot. But this is life, trust me. Now tell me your name.’
The thing that was Rhianna Chiang tests its output channel.
‘Nnnname . . .’
‘All right, if you need time. Let me show you what you look like. Here’s a mirror holo.’
ImageField.hasAttribute(contains face) = true
Eye-like mouth-like components present OK.
Remainder is [Adjectival.Query(Topology.Similar) = splayed]; attitude is vertical.
‘Ah, so I won’t need to reinitialise you this time. Very good.’
It is no longer Rhianna; no longer Pilot; no longer human, the construct embedded in the wall.
Self.Status =
Self.Status =
Self.Status =
timeouttimeouttimeouttimeou—
ThreadEndInterrupt
Self.Status = pending
‘My.’
Let n:Name = Concept.heuristicMatch(‘one who knows’)
‘Name.’
Result n = null
Retry n = Concept.heuristicMatch(‘one who knows’, RadixContext.ancestor_languages)
‘Is . . .’
Internal.Ident.setLabel(n)
Self.Status = activated
‘ . . .Kenna.’
Two thousand eight hundred milliseconds pass.
‘Repeat that, please.’
SpeechBuffer.replay( )
‘My. Name. Is. Kenna.’
NINETEEN
LUNA, 601000 AD
Kenna sat between the empty high-backed seat reserved for Ulfr – unoccupied these past hundred millennia – and the one occupied by Sharp, his crystalline antlers shimmering with reflected light. Before them hung a many-dimensioned strategy model, which from time to time they altered, and returned to meditating on. Meanwhile, at the far end of the hall, Roger and Gavriela were wielding re
fined crystal blades, testing new designs, their cuts leaving glimmers of gamma radiation in the vacuum.
Only zero-point energy could affect the darkness directly, but there were many aspects to warfare, and more than one kind of enemy.
It was an ordinary lunar day, until the moment a sapphire blue glow began to manifest near the geometric centre of the hall. Kenna dismissed the model and strode forward, while Roger and Gavriela stood with blades ready. Sharp remained where he was.
A crystal humanoid stepped out of the light.
No one moved.
The newcomer’s face rippled in something like a smile.
—Fascinating. I’m so glad I returned to the old solar system. Nearly passed right by, you know.
Once upon a time, this base had been hidden. Now its great buttresses and many balconies glinted against the lunar landscape. Being open necessarily meant being defensible, and so their fortress was; but Kenna believed the stranger was no enemy.
—Greetings, sir. My name is Kenna.
—And greetings to yourself. How very interesting. You have modern forms, not too different from my own, yet you are individually very old, every one of you. Archaic, even.
Call it a form of first contact.
For so long, they had cast their plans and made their preparations without dealing with wider humanity and their descendants. Ragnarökkr could, if necessary, be fought in the future using only resources from the past and the things that Kenna and the others constructed; but what if they could find allies among the newer peoples?
She was about to say as much when the newcomer added:
—Ancestral humans and Haxigoji. Brachiating primates. And you still use names?
Kenna felt something akin to a stab of rage, immediately deconstructed and brought under control. This New Man sneered out of fear, his superiority an illusion. The blades, she thought, made him uneasy.
—If you had a name, sir, what would it be?
The man stared at the shields and weapons decorating the hall, then back at her.
—Why, then. Call me Magni.
Kenna bowed her head. He had processed the linguistic/cultural history implied by her name very fast indeed, given how ancient that knowledge was: the tongue known as Norræna was over half a million years dead.
