AURORA

(АВРОРА)

Sam Kepfield

A tiny titanium steel-encased oasis of air and flesh and blood and life sped through the endless black void above a smaller gray-white cratered wasteland. Its shiny target at first could be distinguished from the other shiny multihued pinpricks of light only on instruments; as the oasis closed the gap, the target took shape.

There were no portholes on the INTERKOSMOS shuttle, deemed by engineers as a component failure waiting to happen and by the bureaucrats as an unnecessary and expensive bourgeois luxury. The interior held only two dozen padded seats, upholstered in the same fluorescent-lit light turquoise as the cabin bulkheads. In a bow to the human need to see outside, an urge not even the New Soviet Man could stifle, a large LCD screen had been placed center of the forward bulkhead. It showed a spindly titanium steel insect growing larger. Underneath sat a small LCD clock that read 15 MAY 2017 0932.

“Beautiful, eh, Stalina?” Col. Grigory Reznikov whispered to his seatmate. Reznikov was a bear of a man, almost too big to be the ace fighter pilot that he was, leonine head with a swept-back shock of brown hair graying at the temples.

His companion frowned quickly at the nickname Reznikov had bestowed on her years ago in pilot training. Col. Zoya Ivanova was The Steel Woman, because a woman in a man’s world, no matter how good, had to be twice as good as the men. And she couldn’t ever show emotion, lest she be thought of as lacking the will to lead. Some things were, she reflected, universal, and whether you were American or Soviet was irrelevant.

She looked the part, had consciously cultivated it, building on her winnings in the genetic lottery. Ivanova stood just a shade under six feet tall, at forty still had the slim, toned, flat-chested build of the former star athlete at Moscow University and triple silver medalist in the 3000, 5000 and 10000 m races in the ’96 Warsaw games (and kept in shape by the rigorous cosmonaut training for ten years). She kept her blond hair cut short, framing her heart-shaped face. The eyes, the eyes gave her the command presence, deep-set and steely blue-gray that cut like a knife.

“It’s—functional. That’s all that matters.”

Reznikov sighed. “No poetry in the soul. How sad that the spirit of Tolstoy and Akhmatova passed you over.”

Ivanova smiled icily. Grisha had the mad, melancholy side that had fired Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. So did she, but Stalina could never let it show. “Time enough for poetry when we arrive at our destination. We’ll be busy enough with the pre-flight for the next two weeks.”

“If all goes well,” Reznikov cautioned. “If not—the Americans—”

“Are irrelevant.”

“Even if they’re first to land?” The USS John F. Kennedy had launched from the Glenn platform in Earth orbit seven months ago and was now halfway to its goal. The Americans were using chemical propulsion. The Soviets, though, had bet it all on a new dual-stage ion drive which would push the SS Sergei Korolev to Mars in a matter of five months, entering orbit two weeks ahead of the Americans. The first Marswalk was scheduled for November 7, 2017—the centenary of the October Revolution.

Stalina gave a smile that wasn’t, in a voice meant mainly for her ears alone. “Especially if they land first.”

Four rows back, Georg Hahn craned his neck into the narrow aisle, watching as the Korolev drew near. Unlike most of the bodies in the seats surrounding him, who were technicians and and mechanics doing last-minute work on the ship, Hahn was a member of the twelve-person Korolev crew. He had been selected as the mission chemist. In theory, it made sense. Soviet and American probes since the late ‘70s had shown that water had run on the Martian surface at one point, and that Mars might still retain water underground. But Hahn was an organic chemist by training, with a minor in plant biology. The official line was that the Soviets had picked an East German to buttress the ties of the world fraternal socialist brotherhood. But unless there were jungle-filled underground caverns a la Edgar Rice Burroughs, his selection made little sense. Hahn sighed inwardly; the Soviet bureaucracy often made little sense.

Just as little sense as his seatmate. The nametag sewn onto her loose-fitting coveralls read ZYSZKOWSKI, a small red-and-white Polish flag above the Soviet flag on her right sleeve. Lt. Katarzyna (Kasia) Zyszkowski was the navigator. In the heyday of the early Soyuz flights of the ‘70s and lunar flights of the ‘90s, it might have made sense. But Soviet computer technology had come a long way since then, and she was essentially a backup to a machine. Zyszkowski was tiny, all of four-foot ten, ninety pounds soaking wet, glossy raven hair cut in a pageboy, big cornflower blue eyes dominating a soft round face. She was tiny, but tough, easily passing the six-month survival course in the Gobi desert that had killed their North Korean geologist, Kim Dong Ju, a nephew of the Beloved Leader. No wonder the damned Poles had been a thorn in the side of the Russian bear for centuries. He’d talked with her enough around the campfires in the Gobi, two outsiders among a largely Russian crew who found a common bond. She had been raised on a communal farm outside of Gdynla, just north of Gdansk. Georg, for good reasons, had let her do most of the talking.

The Korolev filled the viewscreen, and a small light flickered on with a soft ping: FASTEN RESTRAINTS. Hahn tightened his shoulder harness and watched out of the corner of his eye as Kasia did the same, the straps flattening her small breasts hidden by dark blue coveralls.

The shuttle docked smoothly, with a barely-noticeable jarring. After a minute, the light shut off and the passengers, assisted by the stewards in front, began floating through the hatch—he’d gotten over calling it a door long ago. Naval terminology had been pounded into their heads all throughout their training, with pushups prescribed as punishment for lapses. Hahn and Kasia retrieved small standard-issue black bags from a compartment in the rear. The bags held personal items to maintain sanity for the two-year trip—all screened by the KGB, naturally.

Once inside, the passengers were herded into a small cabin and issued magnetic boots by a grouchy steward. The boots didn’t ease the queasiness in the gut, but it did keep them from floating around and bumping into sensitive equipment while getting their space legs. Most of the techs had been at Lunagrad for at least one year-long tour, but as experienced cosmonauts would tell it, there was a world of difference between microgravity and one-sixth gee. Hahn couldn’t see Ivanova and Reznikov; they probably had crucial command business.

“I have nothing to do,” Kasia said to him as they strapped on their boots. “The navigation computers are still being programmed. So until our crew briefing at 1500 hours, I’m on my own.”

Hahn looked at one of the techs, an ascetic blond man with a hawk nose and eyes that missed nothing (positively KGB, he thought) and shrugged. We’re never really on our own, he thought but dared not say. “Same here. My equipment isn’t due to be unloaded until the next supply shuttle in two days. I have to supervise the unloading, make sure those damned Kazakhs or Tartars don’t wreck the stuff.”

“What say we explore our home for the next two years?” she suggested. It was as good an idea as any. Bags in tow, they glided through the passageway, bounding around the clumsy dirtsiders. A month of acclimation in the Leonov station in geosynchronous Earth orbit had paid off.

The Korolev was a dumbbell-shaped craft, ungainly and spindly, not like the sleek starships in American TV and movies. The forward spherical tank held water for the mission, and acted as a guard against space debris. In an emergency, a special compartment inside would act as a shelter in a solar flare from gamma radiation.

The three-hundred meter shaft was cylindrical, with shuttle docking amidships. There were seven decks above and seven below, oriented horizontally, meaning that decks were circular with a central corridor. The decks fore of the docking port were control systems, computers and navigation and communications. Those aft were laboratories, recycling, and two for crew quarters. Their cabins were on Deck 9, just below the state-of-the-art gymnasium and sickbay. At the rear sat the Kulikov Ion Drive.

By some fortune of the Gods, Hahn and Kasia had been assigned adjoining cabins. The reasoning no doubt went something like keeping the troublesome Easterners in all one place makes them easier to spy on, logical in light of the Polish incursion in ’80, and the German Unification riots in 2005. Hahn thanked the officially-nonexistent God that he hadn’t been paired again with Rudenko, the main communications officer. Rudenko had the appearance and digestive system of a pig, and had shared a two-man shelter during survival training with Hahn. Rudenko regularly emitted gargantuan farts that smelled of rotting cabbage, forcing Hahn to choose between asphyxiation and hypothermia from an open tent.

The cabins were tiny, six by ten by eight, like a bad Berlin flat. The lighting was low and indirect, the bulkheads painted a soothing light blue (as dictated by psychologists from the Academy of Sciences). Small lockers were set into the walls, floor, and ceiling.

The gear stowed in wall lockers, they set out to explore the ship. The mess hall, where their prepackaged meals would be served, was barely large enough to accommodate the entire crew. It also doubled as a lounge, with a large liquid crystal television screen set on one wall. The gymnasium was well-equipped, and they made a commitment to meet at least three times a week for workouts, which made Hahn’s heart flutter.

The biochemistry lab was on Deck 11, and took up the entire deck. Painted a soft green, low lighting, it could have been in a normal school, or a university. He began mentally assigning his equipment to the shelves and niches in the lab.

“Let’s see what’s on bottom,” she said playfully.

“Engineering,” Hahn said. He had the blueprints of the ship memorized.

“Aren’t you curious about the ion drive?” she asked.

“I’m not an engineer. I’m a biochemist. All I know is it’s supposed to get us to Mars ahead of the Americans, even though we start six months later.” They floated down the brightly-lit tube that served as the ladder for the central hull. The corridor terminated in a green-painted bulkhead with a circular hatch dogged shut. They floated up to it. A small keypad with a card slot was on one side. A red light was set above an arrow labeled UP. And a camera above the light caught their every move. As Hahn was examining the keypad, trying to think if he’d been issued a card to allow access and wondering what sort of secrets would warrant such security, a voice rang out.

“Hey! You two! What are you doing here?” A husky man with a dark crewcut and a crooked nose was moving rapidly hand-over-hand along the railings towards them.

“We’re crew,” Hahn said and introduced themselves as the man drew up to them, a foot away. His dark bushy eyebrows beetled in consternation, his dark eyes glared. BARKOVSKY read his nametag. On his left breast was the sword-and-shield patch of the KGB.

“I don’t care. This area is for authorized personnel only. And that means only Arsov or Kirilenko,” the chief engineer and deputy engineer.

“But we wanted to see the ultimate triumph of Socialist science –“ Kasia began innocently, and Hahn almost believed she meant it.

Barkovsky cut her off. “Unless you’re Arsov in drag, you have ten seconds to leave. If you want to remain crew, that is.” They looked at each other, shrugged, and kicked off towards the fore of the craft. Barkovsky watched them go, then toggled a small button on the palm-sized communicator he produced from a velcroed pocket.

The supply shuttle arrived a day early, and the navigation computers were up and running at the same time, so Hahn and Kasia missed each other for two days running. His time was spent ordering and cursing at the surly Kazakhs in dark green coveralls who had somehow been approved to handle a hundred million rubles’ worth of spectrometers, optical and electron microscopes and computer hardware. By the end of the day, Hahn wanted to shove them out the airlock. He might as well have had gorillas doing the job. Maybe there had been something to that untermenschen business.

He was heading from the lab at 1800 hours, speeding up the central corridor hoping to catch Kasia in the mess hall or the gym, when he almost plowed into two other people. Only quick handwork on the rungs lining the corridor saved him and them from concussions.

“Terribly sorry,” Hahn said in his university Russian. “I was in a hurry to meet a fellow crewmember.”

“That’s our fault. We should be more careful, since we’ve just gotten here.” The speaker was a man, a fine physical specimen, all of six feet three with corn-silk blond hair, strong jaw and blue eyes. He wore a khaki coverall with the Korolev mission patch on the left breast. Beside him was a woman, identically clad, almost as tall, large-bosomed and long-legged, also blond and blue-eyed. They might have stepped off an old Hitlerjugend poster from the Fatherland. Except—their skin wasn’t the pasty dead-fish white that long-time spacers and luniks acquired. These two had ruddy, tanned complexions, the kind of coloring one only got from hours working in the sun. Like on a farm. And the accent ‫‬‭‮‬‭…

“You’re a member of the crew? How exciting!” The woman said. “To lead us on this glorious mission!” They had the most atrocious Ukrainian accents Hahn had ever heard, completing botching the “w” and “th” sounds, and a dozen years traveling in Soviet scientific circles and society had exposed him to plenty.

“Yes. Georg Hahn. And you are?”

“Pyotr Golubev. And my wife, Tanya.” They shook hands. “We’re from the Ukraine,” he stated the obvious.

“Where?”

“A kolkhoz just west of Kiev—” A familiar harsh voice cut him off.

“Golubev! There you are! With me! This instant!” Barkovsky barked. Golubev turned to the KGB man.

“Sorry. We got lost in the aft section—”

“Quiet!” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That way. And you—” his eyes bored into Hahn—“I’ll deal with you later.” Hahn watched him herd the Golubevs towards the fore of the docking port.

The second oddity occurred an hour later. Barkovsky hadn’t reappeared, Kasia had been neither in the mess hall nor the gym but had taken rations in the navigation computer portion of Deck 3. So Hahn was alone, wandering along the central corridor, headed towards the docking port and ready to get rid of the damned magnetic boots which were unnecessary and damned uncomfortable. They made his feet sweat, and the odor wafting from his socks was going to overpower the air recycler before they broke orbit.

There were several boxes in the small ready room off the docking port, assorted small computer equipment that had arrived on the shuttle, bound for the communications deck. In the waste slot, a crumpled piece of paper had stuck. Hahn’s curiosity got the best of him, and he pulled the paper out with his long fingers and stuffed it in his coverall. Damn the boots, they could wait. He hurried back to his cabin, shut the door, and unfolded the paper. It was an invoice, with numerous items of heavy equipment on it, but one stood out at the top.

He blinked his eyes, rubbed them, read it again. HSCS TS-50 TRACTORS: QTY 10 it still read. Below that, IHC CMBN HARVSTR 25 SER: QTY 3. It could be a code. Or, with the Golubevs, it could be tractors and harvesters—on Mars? How would an internal combustion engine function?

Hahn went to his duffel bag, pressed a catch hidden under the vinyl fabric, and a small corner of the bag popped open. He took a digital camera the size of a matchbox out, laid the paper on the small desk, and pressed the small stud on the top of the camera. He then put the camera back, and stuffed the invoice down the refuse recycle chute. And waited for an opportunity to transmit what he had recorded.

Twelve years earlier, Georg Hahn had died in the Unification Riots that swept East and West Germany. He had been caught on Karl Marx Stadt in Berlin between a squad of Stasi goons and Soviet Spetznatz commandos parachuted into the city to break up the protests that had spun out of control. The AK-74s had clattered for five minutes while the students, academics, bourgeoisie and workers had run for cover or lay bleeding to death on the filthy pavement. Hahn, a twenty-four year old graduate student, had been among the dead, his body interred in a mass grave.

Gone. But not forgotten, at least not by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Berlin bureau, which had counted the late Hahn as an asset, albeit a minor one. The CIA bureau chief saw an opportunity to replace the real Hahn, given more to consuming tankards of beer and chasing large-titted blonde undergraduates under his tutelage with someone more reliable, someone who could advance in scientific circles. Thus did Marcus Giersch, an East Berliner expat who had climbed the Wall with his parents in the brief Russian Spring of ’91, become Georg Hahn. There was a strong physical resemblance, tall, dark blond hair, blue eyes, athletic build (minus a slight beer gut). In the disorder after the riots, Hahn nee Giersch had, at the direction of his handlers, left the university for a job with the Agriculture Ministry and applied for the space program. For eight years he did well. And when Hahn had been announced as the crew chemist for the Mars Mission in the fall of 2015, his handler Orson Melton counted it one of the intelligence coups of the century. Their last briefing, at a ski resort in the Swiss Alps only three months ago, out of the watchful eye of the KGB for a few hours, made it clear.

Strange things had been going on, Melton told him. The choice to build the Korolev in lunar orbit was the starting point. Sure, the Russians had Lunagrad on Farside, a couple dozen klicks from the 500-inch telescope at Tsiolkovsky crater, and the cost of smelting lunar ore and pushing it up a gravity well that was one-sixth that of Earth’s made economic sense. But the security around the lunar farside was tighter than usual. The workers sent there at the start of the Korolev project weren’t rotated back—a decision that could be fatal, owing to bone density loss and prolonged radiation exposure. Hahn saw nothing out of the ordinary for a society that used prisoners of war to clear minefields.

The launch schedules were hectic, Melton said, more than expected for a craft the size of the Korolev. Hahn had no explanation for that. Neither could he explain the sudden quietude from some of the USSR’s top physicists at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Kurchatov Institute, working in propulsion, M-theory and quantum mechanics. Grigory Romanov, Lev Parshin, Semyon Kirilenko, and others, all stopped publishing about the same time in late 2013, hadn’t been seen since. Melton murmured something about Heinlein and Manhattan, then went on.

Same with certain Soviet bureaucrats, who had quietly slipped from view. Not disgraced, else there would have been some indication from the moles planted throughout the KGB. Not sent to Kolyma, the worst of the Siberian labor camps. Just gone underground. Likewise, a half dozen KGB majors and colonels, just gone. Maybe a quiet purge by Yuri Maslov, Party Chairman since 2011, now consolidating his hold on power by getting rid of Yermolov loyalists. Maybe not.

And an odd tidbit. A group of agronomists and students from Kansas State University had, in one of the periodic good-will-exchange initiatives pressed throughout the years, been turned abruptly away from a tour of a kolkhoz in the Ukraine, touted as one of the USSR’s best, a model of collective agriculture, and nervously sent on a detour to a middling state farm in Byelorussia. Agents later reported the Ukrainian farm was empty, weeds growing in untilled fields. Hahn now wondered if Pyotr and Tanya Goubev had been shanghaied from that kolkhoz.

Melton wasn’t sure what to make of it. The CIA feared that the Soviets were bracing for an imagined American nuclear first strike. Such paranoia was a persistent thread in Soviet intelligence history, and reports to every chairman since Stalin down through Maslov had fed those conspiratorial fears. Or maybe the Soviets were planning a first strike of their own, preserving the cream of Soviet society—labor, science, agriculture—for the aftermath, holding them in a huge space colony until the radiation subsided, and the post-holocaust world would be at least ready for World Socialism.

In Hahn’s mind, the CIA was just as deluded as the KGB. There were still plenty of Reagan hard-liners lurking in the American intelligence community, though the confrontational approach had been discredited by subsequent administrations. Ukranian farmers, tractors, KGB goons with free run of the ship. Hahn began formulating a theory, but found too many holes, too many ifs, too many odd loose ends.

He kept it to himself, though, for the next week, setting up his microscopes, computers and refrigeration equipment, installing software, running trials with known samples, making sure it all worked. It did, flawlessly, as well it should have —most of it had been purchased from the West Germans. Revanchists, maybe latent Hitlerites, but they made some damned good optical equipment. And the American software was better than anything the Soviets could produce. He saw Kasia at the mess hall several times, but Barkovksy was always there, and he didn’t want the KGB thinking he and Kasia were spies.

Late one night, around 2300 hours, he was awake and reading from the small West German-built Gutenberg computer reader. He’d brought two dozen chips, each holding about fifty thousand pages—enough space on one disk for those endless dreary Russian novels, he mused. There were the approved works, but tucked into another hidden pocket in his bag were other chips with unapproved material. Western sci-fi, which the real Hahn had never cared for but Giersch had fallen in love with as a boy in Milwaukee. And banned works, like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Milovan Djilas’s The New Class, a reassessment of communism from the Prague Spring era that alone could have him imprisoned at the least. He was halfway through Camus when there was a faint rap at his door.

He unstrapped the sleeping bag, pushed off towards the hatch, opened it. Kasia stood there, eyes suggesting an invitation, and he motioned her in.

“I’ve been so busy lately, I thought I should come by and apologize. I didn’t want you to think I was leading you on our first day up here.”

“That’s alright,” Hahn said. He wore a pair of shorts, nothing more. They’d been in close quarters during survival training, which had taken care of most modesty. He still remembered washing in a cold stream that ran through the mountains ringing the Gobi, three months into training, seeing her lithe body under a waterfall, grime gone and scrubbed fresh and clean and pink and wanting her more than ever.

She hooked her slippers into one of the rungs placed about the cabin. Like him, she’d ditched the magnetic boots, disdaining them as a dirtsider curse. “I’ve been so busy setting up the navigation software, and running tests.”

“What sort of tests?”

“The usual, like orbital insertion, maneuvers to the moons.” The Korolev was set to rendezvous with both Phobos and Deimos while the ground crew was on the surface, and survey both bodies for possible use as bases of operations. “But other things, too, like routes out of the plane of the ecliptic—”

Hahn put his a finger to his lips, hushed her. He went to the small digital music player he’d brought—another miracle of American technology—and nudged the buttons on it. Prokofiev issued from the small Bosch speakers. They began speaking in a whisper, and Hahn floated close to Kasia, almost holding her, her mouth next to his ears. He could smell a trace of flowery perfume—Western decadence, she couldn’t have worn it to work, she’d gone to her cabin first and dabbed it on for him. He felt his ears and cheeks flush, his throat catch.

“The plane of the ecliptic. The solar system’s equator. Going up and down instead of out. And they have me reviewing star charts.”

Hahn thought that over. He spoke very carefully next. “Does that strike you as odd?”

Kasia pursed her lips and nodded, her hair bouncing around her face. “Yes. And the KGB—I never remember hearing about them in the pre-flight briefings.”

“Maybe a security force. They’ll be gone before we depart.”

“Possibly.”

“I found something else a couple of days ago.” Her eyes widened. He told her about the Golubevs, and the invoice.

Kasia was just as puzzled as he was.

“Is the Korolev really a space colony?” she asked. “Are they going to start a war down there?” She looked tiny, so young and so afraid. They’d heard all the war scares before, Poland in ’80, Yugoslavia in ’91, the German riots of ’05, the failed Georgian breakaway in 2012. All had produced considerable saber-rattling, but nothing more. The world they could see on the viewscreens (portholes again judged a bourgeois design luxury on the Korolev) was peaceful. The worst was a brush-fire war in Afghanistan, where the Red Army was currently tied down chasing Muslim fanatics. The Soviets had tried to pacify the Stone-Age country for four decades, ever since the palace coup in ’79 that had negated the need for an invasion, and that had quieted it down for a time. But in 2001 a group of religious fanatics, led by a six-foot self-styled cleric, had began conducting terrorist raids into the southernmost Muslim-dominated Soviet Republics. Finally, in 2010, the Red Army had invaded in force. Seven years on, the Soviets were no further along than the British Armies broken on the back of the Hindu Kush. And that damned Kim in North Korea, who ought to have been shot for nearly starting a war in 2002 on the peninsula, was making noises about a nuclear program again. There were rumblings in the Caribbean, now that the Castros and Ortega had gone to their rewards, and in the Pacific. And China, with its experiments in capitalism, ideological rifts, and billion-plus population, was always a problem.

The superpowers had grudgingly learned to adapt to coexistence, first with Nixon and détente, then Carter, who had almost succeeded in softening the West against the Soviets. But Carter had been replaced, albeit narrowly, by that cowboy buffoon Reagan, who in turn had given way after one term to eight years of Gary Hart, who had abandoned Reagan’s Buck Rogers-style space laser program. The current administration, in its first tentative months, was headed by a moderate Republican, formerly governor of Indiana. This was the face of peaceful coexistence, as it had been for five decades. Nuclear war was not in the offing.

Hahn radiated stolid Germanness, even though as Giersch he was an expatriate. Not romantic, not a poet, but one who given a problem would methodically work it through and find a solution. Kasia looked at him for strength now, the cornflower eyes fixed on his, and her arms went around his neck, her lips to his. They were soft, sweet, tasting of cherries (flavored lipstick? How bourgeois! But how delicious!). Hahn felt his member stirring, and the briefness of his shorts quickly let her feel it, too. She gently pushed him back, reached up to the zipper on her dark blue coverall with the Soviet and Polish flags and half a dozen other patches, and pulled it down. She wore no bra underneath—no need to in microgravity, even if her breasts had been more developed—and pulled it down past her hips, which were clad in the tiniest shred of black cloth Hahn had seen in years. “Victoria’s Secret,” she whispered with a flash of white teeth, then the coverall was down, the panties were down, and his shorts were off. Hahn was gratified to find that Kasia had eschewed the Western practice of pubic depilation, which made grown Western women look like those damned plastic dolls they showered their girl children with. He took her hand, pulled her to him, spun her 180° slowly, so her head faced his feet and her knees were on his shoulders, and inhaled her musky scent, then felt her warm wetness around him bobbing up and down. The last twelve years, the double life, had made him ultra-cautious about affairs of the heart and the penis.

He would receive a Hero of the Soviet Union medal on his return, maybe an Order of Lenin. But this—this was its own reward, far beyond any scrap of cloth or piece of metal.

Departure was set for June 6, 2017. The Western media was aflutter, the 24-hour news channels spinning incredible and ill-informed theories, desperate to fill air time. The Soviet control on the press, TASS and PRAVDA and newscasts, had at least one advantage in shutting out the pointless chattering and clucking. There was some questioning about how the Kulikov Drive could push a craft the size of the Korolev all the way to Mars in just under five months. Even with the two-stage ion system, some Western scientists were saying it didn’t add up. Which of course fueled Western-style conspiracy theories.

Three days before departure, Hahn discovered the truth. Or thought he did.

He was in the lab, as usual, desultorily fiddling with his instruments, scanning exobiology journals loaded into chips. He’d made one transmission of his information to Melton, a carrier signal on a message to an old colleague (and CIA mole) in the Agriculture Ministry.

The ship gave a small shudder, and a muffled bang reverberated through the bulkheads. Hahn went into the corridor, and the intercom had been switched on. He heard a controlled panic in the male voice, speaking in clipped Russian; it was Reznikov. Ivanova replied; the static garbled it, but it sounded like her suit had been holed, losing air quick, feeder line ruptured, Yefremov’s (who? There was no Yefremov on the roster) suit holed and he was drifting from the ship …

Hahn darted to the hatch, launched himself up towards the docking port. He’d been through the safety drills dozens of times as part of the cosmonaut training. There was a suit locker across from the small ready room. He jerked it open and pulled a suit off with his name sewn on the breast and painted on the helmet. Custom made, German-engineered, worth a million rubles, he slid off his coverall, wiggled into the suit. Kasia appeared from above, saw him.

“Ivanova’s outside,” she said.

“I know. Help me.” She fell to assisting him, checking the seals on his gloves and the helmet, then stood back as he entered the airlock and cycled it. The outside door opened, and Hahn pulled down the visor shade to shield his eyes from the unfiltered sunlight. He took a small hand-held thruster from a rack on the bulkhead, and lazily pushed off into the cosmos.

He turned his head fore and saw nothing but the huge gleaming sphere that held the water and fuel. He turned aft. There was a stream of something pouring from an open access panel. Ivanova, near the ship, threw a wrench in the opposite direction from the ship, giving her a push to the Korolev. He saw her reach for a handhold. Yefremov was spinning slowly about twenty yards out, oxygen jetting from his suit. But he didn’t see them, really see them, because his attention was focused beyond.

What he should have seen was a rectangular box that held the ion drive, a hundred and fifty yards down. What he actually saw was, positioned at roughly the same distance, six enormous cylinders with conical tops, arrayed around the central core of the ship. Some were unbroken surfaces, but on three of them he could see portholes, blue light gleaming from within. And silhouetted in the portholes (Portholes?) …

People.

Ukrainian farmers, maybe? KGB, no?

And in the diamond-speckled infinity above him, five more ships, just like the Korolev. Huge, long affairs, with the sphere fore and the cargo containers near midships, but in between the cargo containers and the ion drive, another strange module, an egg-shaped affair.

He stared at the sight for long moments, not hearing his suit comm crackle and hiss. Finally, Ivanova’s voice roused him. “Grisha! Over here, quick! The circuits spiked and overloaded on the quantum drive, blew the whole panel out while we were replacing the boards. But Yefremov is still alive!” Yefremov? Again, who the hell was Yefremov? Grisha—had to be a nickname for Reznikov; the two had been MiG pilots during the Afghan war and lived to tell about it, swapping stories over campfires in the Gobi that Hahn half-listened to while lusting for Kasia, or communications deputy Ksenia Linkova, or Minh Nyugen, the Vietnamese M.D. (who, he later deduced, shared his interest in Kasia).

Wordlessly, he aimed the thruster back, and pressed the trigger. Jets of propellant sprayed from the tiny nozzles, froze into sparkling ice droplets, and he moved towards the aft.
He stared at the cargo containers, wondering which one held ten Japanese tractors, until he came abreast of Yefremov. The suit puncture was on his right arm and leg. Hahn slowly reached out and pressed a small red button by the arm and then knee joints, which would increase pressure and seal the punctured areas. He might lose the limbs, but he’d be alive. He then gently turned Yefremov around, checked the air levels—down to 20%, bad but now that the suit was sealed, survivable, turned up the oxygen mixture a bit, then wrapped his arm around Yefremov’s waist and triggered the thruster.

As he neared the ship, he saw Ivanova standing on the spidery girderwork that surrounded the central shaft. “Good work, Gri—” she halted abruptly, saw the name painted on his helmet, with the small DDR flag. “What the hell are you doing out here?” There was steel in her voice alright.

“Rescuing Yefremov,” Hahn said blandly. “Whoever he might be. I don’t recall seeing him on the roster.”

“Sta—Colonel Ivanova,” Reznikov’s voice sputtered over the comm line. He saw Reznikov emerge from the airlock aft. “Is Yefremov still—”

“Da,” she replied curtly, as Reznikov drew abreast. “And we have a problem.” Hahn could see nothing but two golden visors staring at him, making calculations.

They hauled Yefremov into the airlock, cycled through. Dr. Nyugen was there with a gurney and a medikit. She unlatched his helmet; Yefremov’s face was white with shock. He was about fifty, sallow complexion with a wispy beard, looking nothing like a cosmonaut. More like a professor.

There were also two KGB men waiting to escort Hahn to his quarters. Barkovsky was not, thankfully, one of them. He caught sight of Kasia as he followed one of the young strapping KGB men down the central corridor. Her eyes were like Wedgewood saucers, but he nodded gravely to calm her. She bit her lower lip and nodded, gave a tiny wave.

The KGB locked him in his room, no visitors. But he could still smell the flowery scent from the previous night. Muffled passion to the beat of Tchaikovsky had followed a couple of saucy jokes about a German invasion of Poland, from her mouth, not his. He and Kasia were getting the hang of sex in microgravity, and had he known they would couple so frequently and enthusiastically, he would have downloaded the Kama Sutra. As it was, they were writing their own, twenty-first century version. Maybe a samizdat version in the future, when—if—they returned?

But first to return. First to find out his fate. It was not long in coming. He had been reading in his bunk for several hours, trying to erase a vision of a white G-string from his memory, when there was the rap of angry authority at his hatch, which was then dogged open without his leave.

“This way,” one of the KGB men, a hawk-nosed swarthy young man—Armenian, maybe—said. He herded Hahn up through the central corridor, all the way up to Deck 2. Deck 1 was the bridge. Deck 2 held the survey instruments, plus a small conference room. The KGB man motioned for him to go inside the conference room.

Inside, in a circle around a polished wood table—a psychological luxury—sat Ivanova, Reznikov, Barkovsky, and Kasia.
“Sit down,” Reznikov commanded. Hahn hooked his slippers into rungs under a small padded seat. “You have caused us quite a bit of trouble, Dr. Hahn. As well as Lt. Zyszkowski. At least according to Maj. Barkovsky.” Barkovsky merely glowered at Hahn.

“You’ve seen the outside of the Korolev,” Ivanova said. “Something we’ve tried to prevent, for reasons that are known only to myself, Colonel Reznikov and Major Barkovsky.”

“And the other ships,” Reznikov said. “The Lenin, the Tsiolkovsky, the Gagarin, the Leonov, and the Volkov. The Korolev is the flagship.”

“It makes sense now,” Hahn said evenly. Just like the damned Soviets and their gigantomania, from hydroelectric dams to apartment blocks, bigger meant better. “It all fell into place. That’s why they’re built in lunar orbit, no ground-based earth telescopes can get close, any satellites get shot down. That’s why the quarantine of the workers at Lunagrad. What was it the Americans said? ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships?’ And no portholes on the shuttles, or on the Korolev, just viewscreens.”

“Shots of models,” Bakovsky said gruffly. “Done with Hollywood studio technology. They thought they were making a movie.” He chuckled, dry and raspy.

“And those Ukrainian farmers I met. They’re—what? Laborers? Breeding stock? Both?”

“Both,” Ivanova met his gaze with her steely eyes.

“Which is why you need a biochemist along – not to test any Martian dandelions, but to grow hydroponic crops?”

“Possibly,” Ivanova said tersely, evasively, gaze unwavering.

“So it’s a war? Or—”

“We’re not coming back from Mars,” Kasia said timidly. “At least not all of us are. We’re colonizing it. The Americans might make it there before us—the ion drive doesn’t add up, it’s not that powerful, but it doesn’t matter. But we’ll be there. And we’ll stay, long after the Americans have planted their flag, packed up and gone back home.”

Ivanova’s smile was Siberia in January. “You’re correct, Lt. Zyszkowski. Not completely, but it will do for now. In any event, the secret would have come out in three days anyway, you would have known, but the Party leadership desires that this remain under cover until we are underway. No communications with the outside world, not even a chance of third-party contact, so you both are confined to your quarters until then. You will have KGB escorts. It may interfere in your nocturnal activities,” and Kasia blushed at that, though she never blushed at the most coarse requests he had made but had gladly complied and added her own, “but once we are underway, that may change. And when we reach our destination, no more escorts. And your activities will most definitely be encouraged.” The smile thawed to Siberia in March, and they were dismissed.

Departure day came as scheduled, and shuttles docked and undocked, ferrying last-minute supplies (Seeds? Frozen livestock embryos?) to the Korolev and her fleet, and carrying away nonessential personnel. Twelve hundred hours GMT was zero hour, and Hahn waited it out in his cabin. The thought that at least Kasia was next door, that they weren’t being kicked off the Korolev and hustled to Kolyma or some lesser Gulag warmed his soul a little, with visions of black lace dancing in his mind.

When the ion engines lit, he had to be told via the intercom countdown. Low thrust, an almost imperceptible push against the bulkhead, and the first Mars colony was on its way.

In interim, he found time to start seed samples from some of the packs sent to the Korolev, recorded progress, something the biologists on Mir and other stations had done countless times before. It was dull living, made exciting only by the twice or thrice daily encounters with Kasia, under Barkovsky’s watchful eyes, in the mess hall. Or better, the gymnasium, watching her pant on a treadmill, strain on the weights, sweating heavily from the exertion. Forget the slinky black evening dress and pearls, Hahn told himself. A healthy woman in gray gym shorts and an American sports bra stoked his libido like nothing else.

In the tiny sauna, after one workout, she had whispered something to him in German. “We’re going up. Not out. It’s wrong.”

So they weren’t going to Mars. But–where? Kasia didn’t know.

On September 5, 2017, the Korolev and the fleet were thirty three million miles from earth, on a heading 90 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. An announcement by Col. Ivanova was set for 1200 hours, advance notices given. All hands were expected to be in the messhall, watching the viewscreens. Curiosity, whispered rumors of their route and cargo, assured attendance. Ivanova, like a good ship’s captain, was aware of the scuttlebutt. All riddles, she promised, would be answered.

So at noon GMT, Hahn found himself sitting next to Kasia in the mess hall with the rest of the crew, Barkovsky, Reznikov, Tranh, Linkova, and the three geologists Feodor Novikov, Ludmilla Baranov, and Lev Pokrovsky. “Anything new on our course?” he whispered.

“Yes. The ships are breaking away.” The viewscreen crackled and hissed to life. It was tuned to CNN, which in itself caused a stir. Western, especially American, broadcasting was tightly restricted. The anchorwoman, a beautiful African-American with an oval face and straight chin-length hairdo in a low-cut white blouse with red jacket, was speaking. Reznikov stood and shouted for quiet, resembling a Russian bear roaring. He got silence instantly.

“… again, breaking news out of Moscow at this hour, where General Secretary Yuri Maslov is making a special unscheduled presentation to the Supreme Soviet. We will go live, as soon as our Moscow link is—yes, it is up. Ladies and gentlemen, Soviet Party Chairman Yuri Maslov.”

The camera cut to the huge hall, cream-colored curtains behind a huge hanging head of Lenin in profile set on a furling red flag, Maslov at the podium surrounded by the elderly Politburo members. Maslov was, for a Soviet leader, young, at fifty-three, a handsome Slavic face and wavy dark hair, so unlike the peasant-ugly Krushchev and Brezhnev, attired in a fashionable Western dark suit and red silk tie. Behind him stood a huge LCD screen that was blank at the moment.

“—achievements in Soviet space science are many, from the launch of Sputnik to the flight of Gagarin, to the first steps of Nikolayev on the moon, the path to the future of world socialism has always run through the cosmos.

“And today is no exception. You have heard of the Sergei Korolev.” A shot of the Korolev—the Potemkin Korolev, Hahn thought – flashed on the screen. “You have not heard the full story. And you have not heard of her sister ships, five in all.” A true shot of the fleet, taken from the Korolev, appeared. “Not a capitalist galley, sailing the cosmos hoping to find natives to enslave and riches to plunder. No—a fleet, that goes in the spirit of Socialist brotherhood, the spirit of mankind, for the betterment of all and the exploitation of none,” except for those poor bastards stuck at Lunagrad dying of radiation poisoning, Hahn again thought sourly, but who's counting. Probably Kazakhs, and they don't matter.

“The destination? Not Mars,” Maslov said, and the audience on Earth and on the fleet gasped. “We have chosen the long path. The brave men and women of the Soviet Space Fleet have left our back yard and are venturing fearlessly into the cosmos beyond. This is how.” A diagram of an engine appeared on the screen behind Maslov. Hahn understood none of it, and about half of Maslov’s explanation, that of quantum mechanics and folding space—which accounted for all those scientists gone to ground.

“It is the first true stardrive,” Maslov said quietly, the hall silent as Lenin’s tomb. “Our fleet sails not to the planets, but to the stars.” A 3-D star map blinked on. “Small experimental probes were used to test the drive beginning in 2013, and to map nearby solar systems. A dozen stars within fifty light-years from Sol have Earth-type planets that can support human life. We have selected 61 Cygni, 70 Ophiuchi, Alpha Centauri, 82 Eridani, Delta Pavonis, Tau Ceti for colonization.” Murmuring and shouts broke out in the hall, and Maslov held up his hands to quiet the audience.

Hahn was dumbstruck. Now it all made sense. Farmers to colonize the steppes of the new worlds. Missing politicians to run the colonies. And a biochemist to analyze soil and native plant samples, find what was edible and guard against crop failure and starvation.
“I now present the commander of the fleet, General Zoya Ivanova.” So. A promotion, too. Which only figured. Captains don’t command fleets.

Ivanova’s face flashed on the screen, she spoke after a short delay. “Greetings, comrades. We will soon engage the quantum drive, which will take each ship to its intended destination almost instantaneously. The next two months will be spent in travel to the planets. The flagship will make orbit around the fourth planet of 61 Cygni. A century after the vision of Karl Marx found its expression in the October Revolution, bringing the first Communist state into existence, we shall plant the Soviet flag on six new worlds. The Americans,” she said with contempt, “can have Mars. We shall have the stars.” An external shot showed the gleaming white of the Korolev’s forward control instrument package mounted atop the fuel sphere, and a small waldo holding a greenish bottle. The waldo moved, the bottle shattered. “I christen thee Aurora,” Ivanova’s voice rang out. Aurora, the ship which had mutinied and touched off the October Revolution, her namesake now taking Soviet Socialism to the stars. Ivanova came back on the screen, with a genuine look of elation on her face for the first time in two years, and then her face faded, Maslov’s returned, as the Hall erupted in thunderous applause and shouts, and Maslov stood, fist outthrust, and shouted “Forward the Revolution to the Galaxy!” as the hall dissolved into raucous chaos.

At which point CNN cut away, and the mess hall erupted in thunderous applause and deafening cheers. It drowned out CNN, which now featured a series of American and Western faces, male and female, young and old, but all the faces carried a stunned look. A few segued into red-faced fury, some into wistful depression.

Reznikov stood again, raised his arms, began singing in Russian. “Arise, you branded by a curse / You whole world of the starving and enslaved!” After the first line, the rest of the crew joined in the Internationale.

Hahn was still too stunned at first, as the rowdy, eager chorus sounded around him. He could forget about transmitting now, no need. No means. But at least his secret identity ought to be safe. For now.

He turned, looked at Kasia. Her face turned up to his, her eyes aglow. Her lips raised, then parted, then she began laughing, and singing along.

Maybe, Hahn thought, just maybe 61 Cygni wouldn’t be so bad after all. The KGB wouldn’t, couldn’t, be everywhere, could it? And now he and Kasia had not a city or a cramped spaceship or environment dome, but a whole world together. He joined lustily in the Internationale.

A whole world.

A whole universe, if they wanted.