She reassembles the rifle, lays it aside and checks the rest of the kit. Wrapped in a separate bundle of oiled cotton is the olive-green 4-12 x 40 VP Akilina telescopic sight, rarer and more precious by far than the weapon itself, its graticule adjustable both vertically for range and horizontally for windage. And there are paper packages, still sealed, containing five-round stripper clips of 7.62 x 54mm Vonn & Belloc rimmed cartridges. One hundred and twenty rounds. One combat load. Not really enough for what she needs but it will have to do.
7
‘T minus six hundred, Proof of Concept.’
Ten minutes to go.
Engineer-Technician 2nd Class Mikkala Avril settles herself at the familiar console and tries to calm the churning of her mind. She runs again through the routines. The launch controller is making his final tour of workstation checks before launch. Calling on each desk in turn for confirmation of go. Her turn soon. A matter of seconds. She scans the columns of figures again. All displays are showing within normal parameters. Dead on the line.
She has never actually done this task herself before, not at a real launch, not once, not even under supervision; except for practice exercises, she has always sat at Filipov’s left hand and watched while her principal made the necessary settings and corrections. Even so, she’s ready. She understands the procedures. It’s not that complex. Ever since she joined the Task Number One programme, fresh from graduating top of her year (the first graduating year of the New University of Mathematical Engineering at Berm), she has spent every spare moment in the technical libraries at Kurchatovgrad and Chaiganur studying the classified reports.
It was Khyrbysk’s policy to encourage technicians on the programme to learn as much and as widely as they could about the project as a whole and not limit themselves to their own area of work. His attitude to access to papers was liberal, and she took maximum advantage, beginning with the chief engineer’s own seminal paper, Feasibility of an Atomic Bomb-Propelled Space Vessel, and working her way along the shelves: A Survey of Shock Absorption Options; Trajectory Walk Caused By Occasional Bomb Misfire; The Capture of Radiation by Angelic Materials; Radiation Spill Around An Impervious Disc; Preliminary Sketch of Life Support For A Crewed Vessel. There weren’t many people at Chaiganur who knew more about the history, physics and engineering of Task Number One than Mikkala Avril.
She checks the central readout once more. The eight-inch-square display is connected to a von Altmann machine beneath the floor, which will, when called upon, analyse the telemetry from the vessel in flight and calculate any necessary corrective thrust from the banks of small rockets set in the midriff of Proof of Contact. It is her job to send the instructions for those corrections to the rockets themselves. It requires concentration, rapid reflexes, a steady hand. But all she has to do now is confirm readiness.
Launch is looking at her.
‘Guidance Telemetry?’ says Launch, relaxed and neutral.
And Mikkala Avril freezes.
Her screen has gone dark.
After half a second a short phrase blinks into life: Fail code 393.
Everything else, all the rows and columns of figures, have disappeared. She has no contact with the ship.
Fail code 393? It means nothing to her. Heart pumping, hands trembling, she riffles through the code handbook in mounting panic. 349… 382… 397… 402… What the hell is 393?
There is no 393. Not in the book.
Launch asks again, impatient now.
‘Guidance Telemetry, are we go?’
Think. Think.
Faces are turning towards Mikkala Avril. She feels the gaze of Director Khyrbysk on her back. The chief engineer is watching her. Papa Rizhin himself is watching her. She can feel it.
‘Guidance Telemetry?’ says the launch controller a third time. ‘What’s happening, Avril?’
‘I’ve got a 393, Launch.’
‘What is that?’
‘I’m working on it, Launch.’
Ignore them. Focus only on the immediate need.
She has no idea what Fail code 393 means. It isn’t in the book, which suggests it’s a core manufacturer’s code, not set up by Task Number One. It might be trivial, only a glitch in the machine. But it could equally be a fundamental system failure that would send Proof of Concept pitching and yawing, tumbling out of the sky to crash and burn.
It is either/or, and the only way to find out is to switch the machine off and start it up again. And that will take ten minutes.
‘Last call, Avril,’ says the launch controller. There is tension in his voice now. The beginning of fear.
She hesitates.
It is the epochal moment of the world, and it turns on her.
If she says go and the guidance systems misfire… No, she will not even think about the consequences of that… But if she calls an abort, Papa Rizhin’s flagship launch will collapse in ignominy in front of the entire Presidium, the ambassadors, the assembled press of the Vlast. It will be days–possibly weeks–before they can try again. And if the abort turns out to be unnecessary, only a twenty-three-year-old inexperienced woman’s cry of panic at an unfamiliar display code…
She hears her own voice speaking. It sounds too loud. Hoarse and unfamiliar.
‘Guidance Telemetry is go, Launch. Go.’
‘Thank you, Avril.’
Launch moves on to the next station.
With trembling hands, Mikkala Avril powers off her console, counts to ten, and switches it back on. The cathode tubes begin cycling through their ponderous loading routine.
‘T minus three hundred, Proof of Concept.’
Thank you Launch.
Five minutes. The sugary music cuts out at last. There is a swell of voices and a scraping of chairs as the dignitaries turn to the window and put on their dark glasses.
‘Can’t see a bloody thing from here,’ mutters Foreign Minister Sarsin. (The Vlast needs a foreign minister now. So the world turns.) ‘It’s below the fucking horizon.’
‘You will see, Minister,’ says Khyrbysk. ‘You will certainly see.’
An argument breaks out as camera operators try to set up in front of the dignitaries.
‘You don’t have to do this. There’s another team on the roof.’
‘Something could go wrong up there. We should have back-up footage.’
Khyrbysk makes angry signs to the press liaison officer to close the disturbance down. He hadn’t wanted the press there at all, or the ambassadors for that matter, but Rizhin insisted. Rizhin is a showman; he wants to astonish the world.
‘The risk,’ Khyrbysk had said to him on the telephone. ‘What if it flops?’
‘You make it not flop, Yakov. That’s your job.’
Rizhin needs risk, Khyrbysk realises. He burns risk for fuel. Everything races hot and fast, the engine too powerful for the machine. Parts that burn out are replaced on the move, without stopping. The whole of the New Vlast is Rizhin’s Proof of Concept, his bomb-powered vessel heading for unexplored territories and goals only Rizhin understands.
The cosmonauts feel the colossal engineering beneath them sliding into life, the coolant pumping round the shock-absorbing pillars, the bomb pickers rattling through the magazines in search of the first charge. Proof of Concept is a behemoth of industrial construction, but it is also very simple.