They merely wanted to live as their people had always lived, so they had made themselves useful to the strangers just as he was doing by travelling to the nearest township and collecting artifacts which he could sell when the troglodytes came up from under the ground, which they did every six months or so.
The Yuit was very tired: anxious to see his family again for the entire trip had taken the best part of a week.
Though he would never know it, the accident occurred because of his fatigue and the pace at which he ran the dogs. He did not even see the boulder peeping from the slick ground. The lead dog saw the danger a fraction too late, swerved to avoid the obstacle and swung the sled into an impossible turn. The runners hit the boulder off centre and the driver was thrown hard against a cluster of rocks and ice.
Even with the layers of fur and the big hood he wore, the man broke several bones including his neck. He tried to move but could not even stir for the pain. He lay there in the snow, with the dogs whining and-clustering around him. He made a supreme effort, one last great push through the agony, attempting to get up. This last action killed him and he dropped back onto the ground, a little bundle of fur.
The dogs gathered around him for a while, as though trying to give their master some warmth to revive him.
After ten minutes or so they sat down and waited. Eventually the lead dog would guide them back to the tiny settlement, but for the moment they kept a vigil over their dead master. Nobody could know how this accident and the unsupervised dog team would save another life in the next few hours.
It was quite soon after the sled accident that the Tigre helicopter arrived, bearing its two uninvited guests.
Both British and American analysts had shown an interest in the seemingly defunct Severnaya Station. From the big satellites they had many pictures of the area which the Russians claimed had been taken off the operational list for the past two years. The pictures showed ruin and decay, except for one thing - the huge radio telescope dish that appeared to grow from the ground. The dish had been there for some years, but the pictures seemed to show that it occasionally changed.
The analysts maintained that over a very short period of time the dish had become larger and that it moved now and then. There were sceptics, of course, some of them with a great deal of experience and knowledge.
The latter pointed out that the dish might well move with the wind, and the idea that it had become larger was an optical illusion caused by changes in the weather, and different angles of the sun.
In fact the dish was larger, and it did move at the command of men and women hidden deep in the earth, some thirty feet below the surface, for the Severnaya Station was far from dormant.
The dish, at this very moment, was locked onto a forgotten piece of former Soviet space junk - in reality a fully operational satellite - over the Middle East It was being controlled by a young woman sitting at a work-station in a well-lit, windowless, scrupulously clean, spacious computer room.
There were roughly a dozen such men and women, all working in this section of the complex. Not one of them was over forty years of age and they had been chosen from a list of hundreds of potential computer scientists throughout the Federation of Russian States.
Doors to kitchens, rest rooms, dining and sleeping facilities led off from this technical area, and a thick glass wall divided the scientists from a control room, manned by several men and women in uniform. This second section J’J U y ~ contained a long console replete with digital electronic instruments and switches topped by a vast screen, blank at this moment. Sunk into the wall behind this complex control area, was a brilliant red safe. Next to the safe in scarlet lettering was a notice in Russian which said Locked.
Authorization Code Required, and as an extra precaution, a steel electronic gate secured by steel plates directly in front of the safe.
Out among the lines of computers, the girl manipulating the satellite was tall, slender and dark with high cheek bones and clear brown eyes. What marked this girl, Natalya Simonova, from the other technicians was her neatness and the clothes she wore - a long black skirt and a ~bite shirt covered by a patterned waistcoat. Many of her colleagues wore the untidy, shapeless grunge look, or worse. The man to her right was clad in dirty jeans, a Whited magazine T-shirt and a black leather motorbike jacKet. His hair looked as though it had seen neither shampoo nor comb in a week and his attitude was one of an edgY~ spaced-out cyberpunk. Boris Grishenko was indeed all of these things and tolerated by those who controlled the establishment because he was undoubtedly the most brilliant scientist in the entire complex.
Natalya spoke quietly into the small mike attached to a headset “Rotate right sixty degrees, ascend to one hundred kilometres.
The blinking satellite symbol on her monitor moved at bet bidding.
She smiled as though she had just taught a clever trick to a pet. Her delight was interrupted by a miniacal scream of laughter from Boris.
“I’ve done it.
Defle it..
natalya glanced at her friend, Anna, who was seated at the terminal on her left. Anna rolled her eyes and made a gesture with her hand which meant to show that he was unhinged.
“Natalya, come and see what I’ve done.” He had gone into hyper crazy mode, so she walked over and looked at his set-up. Boris, being Boris, had several screens set up in front of him. “I’m in!” he laughed, a tuneless cackle.
On one screen she saw the Seal of the US Department of Justice.
“Christ, Boris, you’ve hacked into the US Department of Justice?
Do you know what will happen if they trace it? If they trace it to here?”
“Sure, the Chief of Computers’ll call me a genius, move me back to Moscow and give me a million bucks - which is never going to happen..
“They pay us in good hard currency anyway, and to hear you talk sometimes that’s what you get - a million.”
“Ach, we all get the same.
I’d like a chance to spend it sometime instead of being here, living like a ground hog.
“A worm more likely.
“Anyway, the Americans are too stupid to catch me.
They can’t detect viruses on a hard drive, let alone His computer gave a warning beep and the seal dissolved, leaving a message flashing on the screen - UNAUTHORISED ENTRY DETECTED.
“You were saying?” Natalya laughed.
Boris cursed and quickly typed in a command to load a programme of his own. The programme flashed a reminder on his screen - TO SEND SPIKE PRESS ENTER.
He hit the Enter key and the prompt changed to SPIKE SENT.
“Good. Spiked them.
Natalya shook her head. “Boris, just hang up.
“No way.” He turned and looked her straight in the eyes.
“I spiked them, you stupid goose. That programme of mine seizes the phone line of anyone trying to trace me. It jams their modem.
They can’t hang up.” He typed another command which brought up another message: INITIATE SEARCH - ENTER PASSWORD.
“Now what?” from Natalya.
“I enter the password.” He typed ten keys. On the screen the letters were not visible, coming up as a line of black circles.
“Bullets,’ he explained.
“I know what bullets are, Boris.” As he tapped Enter again so a map of the world came up on the screen and a red line began to trace the telephone line, the names of places ribboning out as it passed through major junctions or satellites. From Severnaya it tracked straight to St. Petersburg, across Europe to angle off over the Atlantic to the United States where it crawled quickly to Atlanta, and stopped, leaving a winking red light over the city.