The white arc of liquid fell like a molten Niagara into the wide trench they had dug for the water from the bubbler pool and began to thunder down towards the sand-bottomed drainage lake. With the bright curve of it imprinted on the backs of his streaming eyeballs, Gogol staggered back to crouch behind the flimsy structure of the communications hut once again. The thunder of the burning core began to diminish, only to be replaced by a different, hissing thunder, further away.
After a length of time he was never able to measure, Gogol blinked some of the brightness out of his eyes and opened them, to perceive a world clouded in white as though a billion spiders had been busily spinning webs over everything. The sight was enough to start Gogol choking as though the webs were smothering him; it was only when the coughing really began to shake him that the general realised that the spiders’ webs were real. They were mist. No, not mist. Steam. Water vapour at the very least. And he knew where it had come from.
He staggered to the tank and beat against the side of it until the commander thrust her head up out of her trap door. ‘Take me down to the drainage pond,’ he yelled. The commander’s head disappeared, and the tank’s motor fired up.
Like Ivan Baranov and the majority of professional Russian soldiers of his generation, Gogol had seen active service in Afghanistan. He had served in strategy and intelligence, but he still knew how to ride a tank. He climbed onto the back of this one and rode it down to the outwash of the channel whose mouth lay under the sluice of the bubbler pool beneath the core of reactor Number Four. The banks of the pond were swathed in thick, foul-smelling fog which had a nasty way of reflecting the tank’s battery of headlights. Gogol was no fool; he knew it was almost certain death to breathe the radiation-laden water vapour, but truth to tell, he didn’t really care. He had to know whether or not the plan had worked. That was the most important thing, certainly more important than the life of one general officer.
He climbed down as soon as the tank stopped and staggered forward to the bank of the drainage pool. He used his hands to beat aside the clouds of steam which still billowed around him as though he was in the hot room of a Turkish bath. The edge of the water came as something of a surprise. He had expected vegetation — rushes, sedge. There was nothing. One moment he was on land, the next he was surrounded by water. No sooner had he registered the fact than his feet slipped out from beneath him and he found himself sitting down up to his waist in warm liquid. The water vapour thinned sufficiently for him to see that the water was unnaturally clear. In the light from the tank, he was able to make out the occasional water-borne detaiclass="underline" perch, exploded and half poached, hanging upside down as though they had been savaged by miniature sharks; a duck, with all its feathers gone, caught in the act of taking off and boiled.
Dazed and dying, the general slopped himself over onto all fours and looked straight down. No; more than looked. Stared.
On all fours like a dog, General Gogol gazed straight down through the limpid water of the drainage pond which had been cleared, almost distilled, by the process of boiling. The headlights from the tank glimmered off the still surface of the water and he found himself looking down through two feet of liquid onto a fathomless sheet of black ice. There was no mistake. The bed of the drainage pool was clear and crystalline, apparently frozen down to the depths of the earth. He could almost see his reflection in the dark heart of it.
His palms and knees seemed to catch fire abruptly and his face had the oddest sensation, as though he was staring down into a furnace, and he realised that the strange obsidian crystal beneath the shallow water was not ice after all.
It was glass.
CONVERGENCE
ARCTIC OCEAN, 1986
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their future history…
Chapter Three
Captain Alexeii Borodin looked past the ghostly outline of his reflection up along the streaming, rust-red weather deck of the Leonid Brezhnev towards the steel-grey convergence of the Arctic Ocean and the Polar overcast dead ahead. He felt the forward movement of his command lose the sedate steadiness which had characterised it during the last few hours, as she began to nose out of the coastal ice and into the open sea. On the starboard quarter to his right, the massive icebreaker Novgorod was already speeding away round the curve of the Kolskiy Poluostrov coast down towards the White Sea, her lights jewel bright against the smoke-grey background, until the fleeting squall drew its dull curtain across the scene and the ship disappeared behind it.
‘I’ve got a lot of static, but I can just make out that Novgorod says “Goodbye and good luck”, Captain,’ announced the radio operator, popping his head out of the shack like a badger from its set.
‘What’s his hurry?’ Borodin grumbled, more to himself than to anyone else on the bridge.
‘He’s going to open up the approaches to Archangel. I thought you knew, Comrade Captain,’ answered political officer Fydor Sholokov.
Borodin looked across at the big bull of a Georgian. With his stubble hair and walrus moustache, Sholokov clearly, if unfashionably, modelled himself on the late Comrade Stalin. Not much imagination there, thought the captain. He had a literal mind, too. A perfect Party man. A dinosaur.
‘There’s more to it than that,’ Borodin persisted. ‘Think about it. He’s been treating us as though we have the plague since we pulled out of Murmansk behind him. “Don’t come to slow ahead until I tell you, Brezhnev. Sail the course I signal to you, Brezhnev. Don’t get too close to my lily-white stern, Brezhnev.” ‘
‘Did he actually say that? Lily-white stern?’ Sholokov was really offended. Borodin felt a stirring of affection. Then he felt sick as Leonid Brezhnev pulled free of the long white line of the coastal ice and slid down the back of the first big dark sea. Even though the freighter was on the edge of the winter ice she still rode the black water uneasily. Borodin was surprised to find the sea so lively, though the squalls were vicious and clearly the outrunners of an easterly storm. He had overseen enough of the loading in Murmansk to know that the cargo could not have been better stowed but still he found the manner his command was riding the swell a little disquieting. It was as though the ship had sentience and a will of her own; as though she was scared. As though she would rather be turning round and going back home.
‘Sail due north,’ he said to the helmsman. ‘Come to three-quarters ahead and keep an eye out for ice.’
She was on her own now, like a young son left suddenly to his own devices by an overbearing parent. Borodin had not enjoyed being bullied by the captain of the Novgorod during the hours the pair of them had bashed a channel out through the Barents Sea. But now that the massive icebreaker was gone, he suddenly felt almost lonely. Especially as he knew exactly why the pristine, state of the art icebreaker had wanted the battered old freighter to stay well clear of her skirts. It wasn’t just a social matter; someone had told the icebreaker’s captain what the freighter’s cargo was.