Peace-2

by Zachery Brasier

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

Sabotage?

That couldn't be the only way. There was no way to make it work. He could go in every day and smash lenses one at a time, but they would simply be rebuilt. He could denounce the Soviet Union, denounce all the work, make a fiery speech to awaken his fellow scientists to the truth. They could go on strike. Then what? They weren't geniuses; they were engineers. The military would find more of their kind and ship them off to Moscow. Redo everything. Nothing would have changed, besides pushing the schedule back a few months. It wouldn't be the first time that had happened in spaceflight, and it wouldn't be the last.

What would be different? Polyus would still be completed and, to him, a prison sentence. Aleksandrov and Slavsky may have gotten grace; Vasily wasn't certain he would. Yulia would be alone. She was brave and strong, but few people could survive such a horrible twist of fate. Her happiness versus his ethical qualms. He couldn't even ask her what she thought.

By the time the Metro train screeched into his stop, he had returned to reality, understanding that the whole thought experiment was an exercise in self-delusion. He wasn't that important. All he had to do was convince himself he was a cog in a machine, drown out the doubt and work until the project was completed.

He could do it. Probably.

Yulia was waiting when he emerged topside. Her thin shirt was hanging loose, and she was holding a bag of food. They kissed and walked over to the park entrance, munching on liver pâté sandwiches.

Yulia recounted her day while they walked through the park's central square, past rows of ornate pavilions built in the 30s, each commemorating the different nationalities and peoples who fell under the Soviet banner. The pavilions were all rendered, by Stalinist decree, in neo-classical style, soaring columns and opulent decorations.

Past that, a section of the park reserved for aerospace technology. Vasily's heart still leapt when he saw the Tupolev trijet and the R-7 rocket, a replica of the design that had launched Gagarin into space.

They walked through the satellite museum; he had to. Yulia continued on with her anecdotes and stories. He stopped her to point out interesting features on the models, never simplifying his explanations.

Stuffed and caught in hazy relaxation, they idly wandered through the woods of the park, finding an empty field where they could stretch out and watch the darkening summer skies.

Eventually, the mosquitoes chased them away.

* * *

Fall came and went, the targeting system was packed and shipped to the steppes. No sabotage, no strikes. His part done, Vasily idly bounced from project to project, lending a hand where he could. He was recovering from the stress and, with Polyus in the hands of the launch technicians, he could absolve himself of the responsibility. At least partially. At least that's what he told himself.

Then a call came. Polyus was in trouble. It was not integrating properly. They needed everybody at Baikonur to troubleshoot the issues. Time was running short.

Winter had descended into a steady-state freeze. New snows only added another stratified layer to the streets, and piles of ice streaked with cigarette ash narrowed the sidewalks. Vasily kissed Yulia goodbye and climbed into a military transport plane.

“Your turn!” Alexei shouted over the din of the engines after endless hours in the windowless pressurized tube. The engineer staggered back through the fuselage while the plane was buffeted in the airstream; the requirements of military aviation did not include a smooth ride. Vasily nodded, waited until Alexei strapped himself into his bucket seat, and undid his own restraints. He gingerly walked forward through the dim fuselage, ducked under the flight deck and crab-walked to the navigator station.

In a quirk of Soviet aviation, the station had a framed glass dome on the front, like an old bomber. The navigator turned around, waved, and rotated his seat so Vasily could shimmy forward. When Vasily did so, he realized that this was the first time he had seen out the front of an airplane while in flight.

He braced himself against the greenhouse framing and watched Kazakhstan unroll below him, flat and foreboding. It was the terrain the Hordes had swept across, meant for nomads and horses and people willing to survive.

Population centers were somewhere in that great expanse of frozen grass, built in defiance of the cold steppe wind. Those populations were now in upheaval. December saw countrywide protests against Gorbachev, and then — despite all the talk of democracy — the Soviet leader called in the troops. Hundreds died. Vasily couldn't stop an irrational worry that a stolen SAM would target his plane as revenge, a one-man khanate directing his anger at the encroachment of his sky.

He would be angry, too, Vasily realized, watching the hypnotic unrolling of uniform land, the crisp horizon separating one empty void from the other.

“We are preparing for the final approach, sir,” the navigator shouted after a few minutes or more. “Go take your seat.”

The launch towers were not visible when Vasily stepped onto the airport tarmac. He and his fellow passengers had to be driven to them. When the towers emerged over the road, Vasily marveled. He had spent his working career in the space program, but had never actually seen launch hardware. There it stood, bracketed by absurdly tall lightning rods.

The car turned away from the towers and, passing dozens of trenchcoated guards, entered a sprawling industrial park. It was also the first time Vasily had seen machine guns carried with the assumption of possible use.

Checkpoints, pat-downs, rule recitations, identification checks, vague threats, and then Vasily saw the Polyus lying on its side in its hanger, held above the ground on supporting brackets that kept it from ever touching the earth.

The scientists walked alongside the hull. Alexei whistled appreciatively at the size of the thing, seeing his work in totality at once. However, the spacecraft was broken. As far as they could tell, the components worked when tested individually but, once they were strung together, the ship fell into a cascading series of failures. The whole couldn't work as well as the parts.

Despite himself, Vasily was impressed. He hadn't gotten so far in aerospace without learning how to appreciate such an object. It was huge, and it looked deadly.

The ship was mostly a long black hull. At one end, there was an object that looked like a piece of furniture wrapped in a crumpled blanket. Wires, solar panels, and antennas stuck out the sides. That was the Functional Cargo Block, derived from a canceled space station resupply vehicle, serving here as the Polyus 's maneuvering engines.

The hull contained all the essential materials, a grab bag of computers, operational weapons, and dummy mass simulators for future systems, chief among these being nuclear space mines. The end of the ship mounted a self-defence autocannon, the laser aperture, and the targeting system Vasily thought of as his, despite being part of a team.

He stopped amidships and caught a distorted reflection of himself in white-painted letters. He craned his neck to read them.

Not Polyus. Mir-2. A trick, to confuse the CIA. Mir, “world,” also “peace.” Homonyms.

The charm wore off. The old fears returned. Now would be the last chance for foolish bravery.

The soldiers at the checkpoints carried automatic rifles. At the business end of the ship, Vasily found himself face to face with the laser system. It looked nothing like a science fiction weapon, where the lasers were styled to resemble guns. Real lasers were mirrors, optically pure and more like a telescope.

There was also the targeting system. Vasily walked over, felt a sense of familiarity as he looked over the lenses and housings, the target designators, and electrical relays. He looked around him, at this final point for his work, the military austerity and inhuman industrialism, last calls before the final clawing into the sky and the inky realm beyond. He was not at home.

He began looking over the primary lens, checking the edges for scrapes or deformations.

“Alright gentlemen, let's get to work!” a voice boomed.

“Power coming on in the spacecraft,” an overhead speaker metallically announced.

A whine filled the facility, the smell of overheated electronics emerged from the hull. Vasily could hear cracking and banging inside, the sounds of the spacecraft powering up, the configuration carefully chosen to sidestep the faulty components.

As he stood near the giant lens, the sounds moved aft, towards him. Without knowing why, he stepped to the side, animal fear moving him away from a predator.

Motors spun in their housings and, with computer precision, driven by commands forgotten in the system, the lens rotated towards him. It happened in a second. What was once a glancing angle became a direct line of sight. The lens moved perfectly; the reflective glass oculus made eye contact.

Standing face to face with himself, Vasily Dolgov stared at the simulacra created by his own engineering.

* * *

The fifteenth of May 1987. Launch day. The Polyus team gathered in the Academy basement. Television transmission was considered too much of a security risk; they would only hear the audio loop. Sitting in rows, the engineers listened and stared at nothing, tracking the launch in their mind's eye through the steady voice of the announcer and their own engineering know-how.

Vasily bit at his finger nails, breaking the edges into ragged chunks, as he imagined the Energia rocket and its black shard of pointed metal strapped to its back. Eventually, they'd use the rocket to launch their space shuttle, the Buran, the Soviet cousin to the American STS. Not today, though. Today, he'd get to see his work completed, and the world the worse off because of it.

His nerves further frayed as the count ground down to its final values. Alexei smiled when he caught Vasily's eye, the wild, off-kilter grin of a spacecraft engineer on launch day.

The ceiling lights seemed too yellow.

They announced ignition and then zero with calm precision. Far away, twenty combustion chambers filled with flames. The conflagration pushed the Energia and its secretive payload off the pad and towards the sky. The engineers cheered when they were told the tower was cleared. Vasily imagined the climb of the vehicle, how slow it must be, how tenuous it must have looked despite the fire and roar, the dirty black smoke and the pitching through the air.

His heart dropped with each success. He needed a launch failure, something to make up for his weakness.

Maximum dynamic pressure was no saviour, the design bureau had built it well. The strap-on boosters burned out in turn, disconnected from the core stage and began their slow descent back to Earth. Perfectly. The engines on the core stage kept pushing up through the sky, delivering Polyus to its designated orbit. Successfully.

Payload separation. A round of applause. The knife of a vehicle was in space. Vasily imagined the black blending into the endless night, the mocking subterfuge of Mir-2 boldly sunlit and glowing, written on the expanse.

The sharp nose split asunder, revealing the Functional Cargo Block and its engines. Ground control commanded the ship to fire its thrusters, starting a slow yaw to turn the lasers pointing forward, posigrade on the orbital track, and the main engine facing backwards. All that remained was one big thrust, the FCB engine pushing the ship forwards, faster, and upwards.

The first yaw callout released more cheers. Control's voice ticket off the numbers as Polyus rotated. The team got the rhythm. They chanted together. Thirty degrees. Ninety degrees. The spacecraft was sideways relative to its flight path. One-twenty. Then, the expected number, one hundred and eighty. The engines were facing in the right direction, ready for the final boost.

There was a pause. Then the voice from the steppes, emotion audible for the first time, announced two hundred and rising. Stunned silence filled the basement. The ship was yawing back around, engines facing back towards their original direction.

“No!” Alexei yelled at three-sixty. But it was too late. The computer had taken over and, thinking it had done everything correctly, fired off the main engine while it pointed forward, canceling out in a second all the work of the Energia.

Polyus started falling back to Earth.

Later, Vasily would remember the silence as, one by one, the engineers filed out under a hiss from the speakers. He walked out of the Academy and descended into the Metro, his feet carrying him through rote paths. A turquoise train beckoned him in. He hadn't processed the time he waited.

Emptiness as he rode. The train rattled and turned, letting him off at a transfer station where another car welcomed him to its brown seats. He didn't register the next station announcement, only subconsciously processing the phonemes as they commanded him to depart and catch the last train of his ride.

Topside, he began collecting himself. Parents were walking their children to the old hunting grounds, briefly recusing themselves from the daily task of tracking the news, of wondering whether anything being done in the halls of government would actually work. The first windows of dusk were illuminated.

Somewhere in the sky the trace gases of Polyus were spreading through the mesosphere, minor readings for future atmospheric scientists to detect if the molecules didn't evaporate into space first.

It was done; the weapon was destroyed. Something had prevailed. Not him. An ultimate system, perhaps.

Yulia was waiting. Despite official secrecy, she had been able to piece together the clues that morning: a nicer shirt, a stretched worry on his face, She knew it was a launch day. Vasily fell to the couch. She handed him a lit cigarette. Shakily, he took a drag then broke. It started at his chin, moved up his neck, and reached his eyes. He wept as he had never wept before, great surges of emotion as the glowing cigarette burned down.

Yulia crouched next to him, waiting for the first waves to subside, and started running her hand through his thinning hair. “It's alright, my love,” she whispered. “I'm sure you didn't do anything.”