ASIM issue 55 Read online

  In spite of his age and weariness, in spite of all that he had done and seen, Joseph Stalin could not help but feel the flames of excitement in his breast. Well, hopefully it was just excitement. After his last heart attack they had told him, or rather suggested, very mildly, that he might need to think about cutting back to one serving each day of his favourite lamb stew. He wiggled his fingers, marvelling at how old his hands looked, how skeletal and heavily veined. Inside he still felt like a twenty-year-old revolutionary. But his body was failing him, he knew. That was why he was so excited and intrigued by the possibilities of today. Since the reactionary Kolhammer forces had emerged from the Gordian knot of history at the Battle of Midway, Joseph Stalin had lived every day with the knowledge that he had limited time to set history right, to secure the revolution, and his place in it. Perhaps today they would come one crucial step closer to doing that.

  “Two minutes, Vozdh,” said Beria, surprising him.

  Where had the time gone? Stalin shook his head, disgusted. He had been daydreaming again. He leaned forward to peer out through the armoured glass. A nameless valley fell away from them hundreds of feet below, disappearing into the haze. Ten miles away hundreds of obsolete tanks and trucks, many of them salvaged from the battlefields of the Great Patriotic War, waited on the valley floor. He was aware of increased tension behind him as the technicians hurried through their last-minute procedures. Literally the last minute procedures. The countdown clock had reached sixty seconds. Beria really had nothing to do, setting himself to annoy everyone with his pestering and interference as he did it.

  “Leave them alone, Lavrenty Pavlovich,” Stalin ordered. “Let them do their duty.”

  Chastened, the NKVD man and chief engineer—pah, that was a laugh—of the Functional Projects Bureau quit bustling around and hovering at the shoulders of his senior men. He opened and closed the cover on his flexipad a number of times, before setting it down on a steel workbench and shuffling over to stand beside Stalin.

  “There is nothing left to do but wait,” he said.

  “Then we shall wait,” said the Vozdh.

  The final countdown was strangely disappointing. A disembodied voice on the public address system took them through the last few seconds. “Three … two … one … launch,” but of course there were no rockets to roar and set the earth to shaking beneath their feet.

  “How long?” asked Stalin. Beria seemed unnaturally pleased to have a question he could answer promptly.

  “Less than two minutes,” he said with confidence. “These are the small, tactical rods we are testing today. They will launch from low orbit and accelerate to nine thousand metres per second.”

  Stalin scowled at him, stealing some of that confidence away.

  “And we are safe here in this bunker?”

  “Oh yes,” said Beria, with apparent relief. “We would not dare test the largest of the rods like this. They are designed to reduce mountains, such as this, to smoking craters.”

  “Like Tunguska?” Stalin said. Beria hesitated, as though it were a trick question, which in a way it was. The scientists and engineers—real scientists and real engineers, unlike Beria—had briefed him well at the start of this project. They had to. It was a massive investment of the state’s resources, and one which drew money and men away from one of Stalin’s pet projects, the electronic storage of human memory and consciousness. His gaze faltered for a moment, slipping away from Beria to stare at the back of his old, liver-spotted hands again. It was so unfair but this body would fail him soon. There was so much left to be done.

  “Vozdh?”

  “Pah! Do not bother,” said Stalin, worried that his mind had wandered again. “I know about Tunguska. I know how it was different. The rock from space, a giant snowball they told me, it exploded in the air. These rods will not.”

  “No,” said Beria. “Look.” He bent his knees and leaned forward, pointing towards the viewing aperture, even though the giant screens hanging above it afforded a grand, God-like view of the entire valley.

  The dictator peered out through the armoured glass slit but found himself watching the screens too. They had split into windows to display the video feeds from a dozen cameras scattered up and down the valley. None of the hundreds of armoured vehicles, the tanks and trucks and APCs were moving. They sat baking under the late, summer sun. Stalin opened his mouth to say something as he thought he spotted a flight of birds sweeping across the scene, but before he could form the words, bright white streaks of light speared down from the sky. He saw the flash of impact through the armoured glass just a moment before the very planet heaved and rumbled in shock. His mouth dropped open in surprise as the roaring noise of impact and detonation reached deep inside the bunker. There was little and less to see on the screens, which didn’t so much blank out as ‘whiteout’. He squinted involuntarily before turning his attention back to the viewing port. Beria too had bent over again to look through it, as other men and women, some in uniform and some in coveralls and lab coats did the same. A few flinched away, as an enormous fireball raced up the valley towards them. Stalin thought he could make out the pressure wave that preceded it, flattening the sea of grass and a few small saplings that stood between the foot of the mountain bunker and the point of impact.

  Then heavy steel shutters slammed down, blocking off even that view. A few people jumped. But not the supreme leader of the Soviet people. He closed his eyes and imagined the sun, warm on his face, and bright even through his eyelids.

  Editor’s note: John Birmingham’s Axis of Time series continues from this point with Stalin’s Hammer: Rome (forthcoming from Momentum Books).

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  The Wrong Righters: Zero-G

  …Simon Messingham

  Right and Wrong are things. They have direction, ordained by points of the compass.

  Wrongness is everywhere. Right must be restored. The Wrong Righters have been assigned.

  * * *

  The air before me fizzed. It blurred and wobbled. I materialised.

  “The Wrong Righters are within.” My words were factual and efficient and precise. As ever.

  The spaceship hold was moist and stale like a great industrial cathedral. The darkness was punctuated by gleaming pipes and thick chains; the silence spotted by dripping water, clinking metal and the throb of powerful engines. “The cargo deck of a type N155 space freighter. A star-spanning ore refinery.”

  “In space.” North’s booming tones echoed around the metallic deck. “Hello?”

  North always does this at the start of a new mission. He calls it making his presence felt. I call it showing off. I’ve reported him; I’ve had words; but do they listen?

  North is my partner. He too is a Wrong Righter. We have nothing in common. Not one thing.

  “I sense—” I began to say.

  “Sixty-eight trillion billion light years from their Outer
Rim.”

  I raised a hand. I didn’t lose my temper. “We have completed that part. North, you must be quiet now.” I looked around. “I sense Wrong.”

  North favours rough clothing: a boiler suit, donkey jacket and heavy boots. He tops this off with a woolly hat. Light years from my carefully tailored suit and expensive brogue shoes. I have style.

  “What wrong you sense?” he asked. North’s voice, as you probably already have worked out, is coarse and heavily accented. Unlike myself he fails to avail himself of the many classes in elocution freely available back at base.

  He looked around, clearly disturbed. “I sense an old adversary: the Naughty Rhymer? The Emotion Indulgers?”

  I inspected the riveted metal floor. Or at least I tried. As my hand met the surface, I began to rise into the air. “North. North. Help.” I grabbed a metal mooring ring and hung upside down. I wasn’t panicked, you understand.

  North took a step toward me and the force sent him flying upwards. He windmilled his meaty arms. “South. Floating. Am floating.” He tumbled over and over until he banged his head on the beams of the high ceiling. “South. Have banged head.”

  “I can see that,” I said. “Now what do we do?”

  Air-compression pumps hissed and a hatch in a wall swung upwards. A shaft of light shone theatrically into the dark cargo bay. A shadow blocked the light.

  “Who’s there?” came a female voice.

  “There is no gravity,” said North.

  “Of course not, guys,” said Warrant Officer Ridley. “We’re in space.”

  * * *

  So the presence of a Strong Feisty Female confirmed this was a real mission after all. North nodded at me in recognition as we swam after Lieutenant Ridley down the brightly lit corridor of A-Deck. Ridley was SF Female all right. There was no mistaking. She had all the qualities. We didn’t even need to consult our Bibles—that book of procedures all Wrong Righters carry hidden.

  Ridley’s presence as SF female was reassuring. The template was simple: sexy but self-sufficient. ‘Badass’ as North would crudely put it. (And he frequently did.) A universal constant; keeping existence balanced. Very rarely did anything permanently bad happen to them and they were as hard as rock.

  “Welcome aboard the Conrad,” she said. “Come meet the crew.” She pressed a button to open a hatch and hauled herself capably into the next chamber.

  The kitchen was a bright cosy nest. Unlike the cavernous cargo deck, this section was warm and inviting. The walls were covered with tacked up posters of girls and sport stars. A table dominated the centre and bottles and plates and cutlery hung in the air over its surface.

  Various crewmembers of the Conrad floated around, up, over and below in a way I found rather disturbing.

  They were upbeat, this crew, but they were tired too. Bags under the eyes; sagging in their funky lived-in uniforms. All except one stocky man in blue overalls: the Science Officer. He looked as fresh as a daisy, with twinkling blue eyes. I liked and trusted him immediately. He stared at us.

  The dark-ringleted Ridley upturned a coffee pot and we all watched as the liquid floated up into a cup. She twisted a lid onto that cup. “Here you go.” She tossed the cup to a grateful North.

  A man drifted up between my legs. He was bearded and casual. Far too casual for my liking.

  I gave the man my best superior look. “Please don’t do that again.”

  The bearded man made a ‘W’ shape with his fingers as he drifted. “Whatever. I’m the Captain by the way. How the hell did you get aboard?”

  Here we go again, I thought. Time for the old routine. I gave them a benevolent smile. “Okay. We’re the rescue party.”

  The crew chuckled. The Captain’s furry eyebrows raised in amusement. “Rescue party?”

  “We are!”

  “We don’t need rescuing,” said the Science Officer. He gave me a sympathetic, resigned shrug. We understood each other.

  “We heard there was trouble.”

  “On the spaceship?” The question was asked by a bemused Navigator; a petite and rather nervous woman. Uh-oh. North would … too late.

  Very seriously, North floated to the Navigator. He put a fatherly arm around her shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’m here.” He looked at me. I knew that glint in his eye was mockery. “South. Tell them.”

  The crew of the Conrad stared at me. And I couldn’t think of anything to say. “It’s perfectly simple,” said North. The crew turned back to him. Their expressions turned from amused suspicion to pleasant expectation. No one ever looks at me like that. Human beings are so stupid. Show them a pleasing face and they’ll believe anything. Apparently North has a pleasing face. Amazing what good looks can do. It’s not fair.

  “Was it the distress signal?” asked Ridley. Her tone was concerned. More confirmation of her SF Female status: she took events very seriously.

  “Yes,” said North. “Your distress signal. The one you sent.”

  “The distress signal we received, you mean.”

  “Yes,” said North. “The distress signal you received. From the ship.”

  “From the planet,” said Ridley.

  “Planet,” said North. “Yes. Planet.”

  The Captain performed a little somersault. “Hey, guys,” he said. “You want to see our alien?”

  * * *

  The Engineering double act of big black dude and his mate the rat-faced white trash grated on my nerves. I won’t deny it. They leaned insolently against the hanging chains and smoked and generally looked quite tough and not bothered. Not surprisingly, North got on with them very well. He accepted a cigarette from the rat-faced man’s pack; in blatant defiance of the Wrong Righters’ no-smoking policy. “No sweat,” grinned the big black guy.

  “Right,” echoed the rat-faced one in his stained Hawaiian shirt.

  This pair, they were cocky but they were also scared. They kept glancing upwards; not entirely confident in their confidence.

  Blobs swirled around them in the gravity-less cargo bay. They were big streaky blobs of white mucous or some such xenomorphic excretion. I rubbed my smart brogues against the rear calf of my trousers to wipe off one particularly unpleasant blob.

  Up in the gloom, in its floating metal cage, a living nightmare thrashed helplessly. I caught glimpses of dripping fangs, whirring insectoid limbs and a hard black beetle-like carapace.

  “A fascinating creature,” stated the Science Officer. “A miracle of evolution.”

  “Yeah, we had trouble at first; when it sneaked on board,” said the Captain. The crew nodded sadly. In the presence of the creature, they weren’t quite so smiling and happy.

  “Poor old Crisp,” said the Navigator. “It, you know, it grew inside him.” She began to sob.

  “Really?” said North, feigning concern. He was keeping that fatherly arm around the fragile young woman. “Must have been awful. You’re really brave, you know.”

  I looked up at the snarling star beast. “How did you catch it?”

  The Engineer popped a beer. Liquid streamed up and into his mouth. “Easy,” he muttered through foam. “It couldn’t deal with Zero-G. Bigger it grew the less it could do. Got stuck in the air ducts. Every time it tried to hide it floated into our scanner range. We always knew its location.”

  The crew nodded at the memory. They were a close team now. For all their brave faces, this had been an ordeal.

  “The perfect organism,” said the Science Officer.

  Yeah right, I thought. We’ll see about that.

  Ridley enlightened us. “Company policy means we all have Level Two Zero-G certificates. The alien could never catch us.” She nodded to the Science Officer. “Bash invented this electric prod thing. We floated right around the thing and drove it like a rogue sheep. Barker and Pret built a cage out of spare parts and bam. We had it.”

  “You gonna kill it, right?” asked North. Up above, the creature squirmed helplessly, as if understanding the conversation.

  “No ne
ed,” said Ridley. “Bash has convinced us to take it back to Earth and study it. As soon as we work out how to get it into a hypersleep chamber. The Company will probably give us a really big bonus for this baby.”

  Science officer Bash rubbed his fingers together. “Money,” he mouthed.

  The Captain nodded. “Bash reckons they’ll want it for their bio-weapons division. Whatever that is.”

  “Besides,” said the Engineer, “I don’t think we can kill it.”

  Above, the creature shrieked its anger.

  “No doubt,” I said. “North, we must speak.”

  * * *

  North and I huddled in the ship’s toilet. It was a brightly lit, designer-scuzzy chamber full of retro computer lights and old magazines. The toilet was also the only place we could get away from the crew. Best of all, the toilet had handles. At last I could get some relief from the dratted motion sickness.

  “Definitely got an easy gig here,” said North. He was studying a light-hearted in-flight stellar travel fiction magazine. Tossing the volume spinning away, he stated: “I say we hang about for a convincing amount of time then report back as a glowing success. Let head office think we Righted the appropriate Wrong. Then sit back and take the glory. You know?” North dragged on his cigarette and sniffed in contentment. End of conversation.

  I stared at my excuse for a partner. Where did he get these ideas? What brain-warped genius at Compass thought we would be effective together? Six seasons, six tours and I still hadn’t got used to North’s utter disdain for his duty. The first chance to skive and he was off. Often in a crapper and always with a ciggie and a magazine.

  “We do nothing. That how we roll, yeah?” North asked with more hope than conviction.

  “There is a Wrongness here; even you should see it.”

  “Never.” North laughed. “They’re about to go into hypersleep and wake up in a year’s time very, very rich.”