He tells them how the explosions generate temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun, but of such brief duration they do not harm the pusher plate. How Proof of Concept is equipped with two thousand bombs of varying power, and the mechanism for selecting the required unit and delivering it to the ejector is based on machinery from an aquavit-bottling factory. That gets a chuckle from the back of the room.
The ministers of the Presidium play it cautiously. They keep their expressions carefully impassive, neutral and unimpressed, but inwardly they are making feverish calculations. Who does well out of this, and who not? How should I react? Whose eye should I catch? What does this mean for me?
Rizhin listens with bored derision to their sceptical questioning and Khyrbysk’s patient answers. So that thing outside is a bomb? No, it is a vessel. It carries a crew of six. How can explosions produce sustained momentum not destruction? It is no different in principle to the operation of the internal combustion engine of the car that brought you here. Is the craft not destroyed in the blast? Will the crew not be killed? I hear there is no air to breathe in space and it is very cold.
Fucking doubters, thinks Rizhin. Do they think I’d have wasted time on a thing that doesn’t fucking work?
But he listens more carefully as Khyrbysk explains how each bomb is like a fruit, the hard seed of atomic explosive packed in a soft enclosing pericarp of angel flesh. The angel flesh, instantly transformed to superheated plasma in the detonation, becomes the propellant that drives against the pusher plate.
‘We call the bombs apricots,’ says Khyrbysk, which gets another laugh and a flurry of scribbling.
Rizhin is deeply gratified by this exploitation of angel flesh. Since Chazia died at Novaya Zima and the cursed Pollandore was destroyed, he’s heard no more from the living angel in the forest. No falling fits. No disgusting invasions of his skull. All the angel flesh across the Vlast has fallen permanently inert, and the bodies of the dead angels are nothing now but gross carcasses, splats on his windshield, and he is moving fast. Even the mudjhiks have died. Nothing more than slumped and ill-formed statuary, Rizhin had them ground to a fine powder and shipped off to Khyrbysk’s secret factories. Yes, even the four that stood perpetual guard at the corners of the old Novozhd’s catafalque.
‘And now,’ Khyrbysk is saying, ‘we will retire to the cosmodrome and watch the launch from a safe distance.’
But there is a brief delay before they can leave. Rizhin must honour the cosmonauts. A string quartet has been rustled up from somewhere, and sits under the shade of a tarpaulin playing jaunty martial music: ‘The Lemon Grove March’.
The cosmonauts, three men and three women, march up onto the makeshift podium and stand in a row, fine and tall and straight in full-dress naval uniform in the roaring blare of the sun. Brisk apple-shining faces. Scrubbed, clear-eyed, military confidence. Rizhin says a few words, and shutters click and movie cameras whirr as he presents each cosmonaut in turn with a promotion and a decoration. Hero of the Vlast First Class with triple ash leaves. The highest military honour there is. The cosmonauts shake Rizhin’s hand firmly. Only one of them, he notices, looks uneasy and doesn’t meet his eye.
‘Nervous, my friend?’ he says.
‘No, my General. The sun is hot, that’s all. I don’t like formal occasions. They make me uncomfortable’
‘Call me brother,’ says Rizhin. ‘Call me friend. You are not afraid, then?’
‘Certainly not. This is our glory and our life’s purpose.’
‘Good fellow. Your names will be remembered. That is why the cameras and all these stuffed shirts have turned out for you.’
On the way back to their cars the dignitaries stare at the stubby red behemoth glowing in the sun: the Vlast Universal Vessel Proof of Concept with its magazine of two thousand apricots, rack upon rack of potent solar fruits.
Rizhin is walking fast, oblivious to the heat, eager to be on the move. Secretary for Agriculture Vladi Broch breaks into a waddling jog to catch up with him. Broch’s face is wet with perspiration. Rizhin flinches with distaste.
‘Triple ash leaves?’ says Broch. ‘If you give them that now, what will you do for them when they come back?’
‘When they come back?’ says Rizhin. ‘No, my friend, there is no provision for coming back. That is not part of the plan.’
‘Ah,’ says Broch. ‘ Oh. I see. Of course. But… so, how long will they last?’
Rizhin shrugs. ‘Who knows?’ He claps Broch on the shoulder. ‘We’ll find that out, won’t we, Vladi Denisovich? That is the method of science. You should get friend Khyrbysk to explain it to you some time.’
5
In the control room at Chaiganur the tannoy broadcasts radio exchanges with the cosmonauts. From the edges of the room the whirring movie cameras follow every move with long probing lenses, hunting for the action, searching for the telling expression.
‘T minus 2000, Proof of Concept. How are you doing?’
All is good, Launch. Very comfortable.
The cosmonaut’s voice grates, over-amplified and crackling.
‘I remind you that after the one-minute readiness is sounded, there will be six minutes before you actually begin to ascend.’
Understood, Launch. Thank you.
The cosmonauts have nothing to do. No function. No control over their vessel unless and until the launch controller flicks the transfer switches. Their windows are blind with heavy steel shutters, which they will take down once they reach orbit.
If they reach orbit.
The last of the ground crew is already three miles away, racing for the safety perimeter in trucks.
And so the cosmonauts wait, trussed on their benches, separated by the thickness of two heavy bulkheads and a storage cavity from a warehouse of atomic bombs. They are sealed for ever inside the nose of Proof of Concept, locked in by many heavy bolts that will never be withdrawn, and the ship beneath them is alive with rumble and vibration, the whine of pumps, the whisper of gas nozzles, the thunk and clank of unseen mechanisms whose operations the cosmonauts barely understand.
The technicians who actually control Proof of Concept are ten miles away inside a low concrete caisson, a half-buried blockhouse built with thick and shallow-sloping outer walls to deflect blast and heat up and over the top of the building. Not quite twenty in number, the technicians occupy a semicircle of steel desks facing inwards towards the launch controller at his lectern. They lean forward into the greenish screens of their cathode readout displays, flicking switches, twisting dials, turning the pages of their typescript manuals. They wear headphones and mutter into their desk microphones. Quiet purposeful conversations. For them this is no different from a hundred test firings: everything is the same except that nothing is the same.
Behind the controller a wide panoramic window of sloping glass gives a view across the flatness of the steppe. The assembled dignitaries and journalists sit in meek rows between the controller and this window on folding chairs, the sun on their backs, not wanting to cause a distraction. In something over thirty minutes they will turn to watch Proof of Concept climbing skyward to begin her journey. They have been issued with black-lensed spectacles for the purpose. For now they clutch them in their laps and observe the technicians, alert for any hint of anxiety in the muted voices. They watch for the flicker of red lamps on consoles, the blare of an alarm, a first indication of disaster. More than one of them wants to see failure today: a grievous humiliation for Director Khyrbysk and his protectors could mean great advantage for them. Others are cold-sweating terrified of the same outcome: if Khyrbysk’s star wanes, theirs will tumble and crash all the way to a hard exile camp or a basement execution cell.