Missile Gap

Borisovitch, a slight, stoop-shouldered type who looks more like a janitor than a world-famous scientist, shrugs. "We were just talking about going along to the archaeological site, General. Perhaps you'd like to come, too?"

Misha looks over his shoulder at the map: it's drawn in pencil, and there's an awful lot of white space on it, but what they've surveyed so far is disturbingly familiar in outline — familiar enough to have given them all a number of sleepless nights even before they came ashore. Someone has scribbled a dragon coiling in a particularly empty corner of the void.

"How large is the site?" asks Yuri.

"Don't know, sir." Major Suvurov grumps audibly, as if the lack of concrete intelligence on the alien ruins is a personal affront. "We haven't found the end of it yet. But it matches what we know already."

"The aerial survey—" Mikhail coughs, delicately. "If you'd let me have another flight I could tell you more, General. I believe it may be possible to define the city limits narrowly, but the trees make it hard to tell."

"I'd give you the flight if only I had the aviation fuel," Gagarin explains patiently. "A chopper can burn its own weight in fuel in a day of surveying, and we have to haul everything out here from Archangel. In fact, when we go home we're leaving most of our flight-ready aircraft behind, just so that on the next trip out we can carry more fuel."

"I understand." Mikhail doesn't look happy. "As Oleg Ivanovitch says, we don't know how far it reaches. But I think when you see the ruins you'll understand why we need to come back here. Nobody's found anything like this before."

"Old Capitalist Man. " Misha smiles thinly. "I suppose."

"Presumably." Borisovitch shrugs. "Whatever, we need to bring archaeologists. And a mass spectroscope for carbon dating. And other stuff." His face wrinkles unhappily. "They were here back when we would still have been living in caves!"

"Except we weren't," Gagarin says under his breath. Misha pretends not to notice.

By the time they leave the tent, the marines have got the Korolev's two BRDMs ashore. The big balloon-tired armored cars sit on the beach like monstrous amphibians freshly emerged from some primeval sea. Gagarin and Gorodin sit in the back of the second vehicle with the academician and the film crew: the lead BRDM carries their spetsnaz escort team. They maintain a dignified silence as the convoy rumbles and squeaks across the beach, up the gently sloping hillside, and then down towards the valley with the ruins.

The armored cars stop and doors open. Everyone is relieved by the faint breeze that cracks the oven-heat of the interior. Gagarin walks over to the nearest ruin — remnants of a wall, waist-high — and stands, hands on hips, looking across the wasteland.

"Concrete," says Borisovitch, holding up a lump of crumbled not-stone from the foot of the wall for Yuri to see.

"Indeed." Gagarin nods. "Any idea what this was?"

"Not yet." The camera crew is already filming, heading down a broad boulevard between rows of crumbling foundations. "Only the concrete has survived, and it's mostly turned to limestone. This is old."

"Hmm." The First Cosmonaut walks round the stump of wall and steps down to the foundation layer behind it, looking around with interest. "Interior column here, four walls — they're worn down, aren't they? This stuff that looks like a red stain. Rebar? Found any intact ones?"

"Again, not yet sir," says Borisovitch. "We haven't looked everywhere yet, but…"

"Indeed." Gagarin scratches his chin idly. "Am I imagining it or are the walls all lower on that side?" He points north, deeper into the sprawling maze of overgrown rubble.

"You're right sir. No theory for it, though."

"You don't say." Gagarin walks north from the five-sided building's ruin, looks around. "This was a road?"

"Once, sir. It was nine meters wide — there seems to have been derelict ground between the houses, if that's what they were, and the road itself. "

"Nine meters, you say." Gorodin and the academician hurry to follow him as he strikes off, up the road. "Interesting stonework here, don't you think, Misha?"

"Yessir. Interesting stonework."

Gagarin stops abruptly and kneels. "Why is it cracked like this? Hey, there's sand down there. And, um. Glass? Looks like it's melted. Ah, trinitite."

"Sir?"

Borisovitch leans forward. "That's odd."

"What is?" asks Misha, but before he gets a reply both Gagarin and the researcher are up again and off towards another building.

"Look. The north wall." Gagarin's found another chunk of wall, this one a worn stump that's more than a meter high: he looks unhappy.

"Sir? Are you alright?" Misha stares at him. Then he notices the academician is also silent, and looking deeply perturbed. "What's wrong?"

Gagarin extends a finger, points at the wall. "You can just see him if you look close enough. How long would it take to fade, Mikhail? How many years have we missed them by?"