Red Space

This was a short story for Vox Day’s Anthology Riding the Red Horse, which used to be on Amazon, but which I cannot find today even at Castalia house. Here is the original post by Vox announcing it.

This was at the end of 2014, so the story is nearly 10 years old. You might find some “predictive” concepts concerning Russia and Ukraine interesting given where we are today. I am publishing it here in the full, unedited version, which has never appeared in print or anywhere else before, as the version in the anthology had been quite severely edited and what I though was a central point of the story (the non-fiction element of it) was completely removed.

A recent request for the non-fiction aspect by a good friend reminded me of it and I decided to put it up here in full. Enjoy.

RED SPACE

by G. Filotto

Edited version first published December 2014.

This original and unedited version was written in full in 2014 but is first published here on 2 January 2024

***

$100 Trillion +

Estimated value of the total size of Global Shadow Banking in 2012 (i.e. untraceable funds in the global economy. This being larger than the actual global economy itself, valued at only some $85 Trillion in 2012).

Data taken from “The interrupted power law and the size of shadow banking” by:

 — Prof. Davide Fiaschi, (Dept. of Economic Sciences, University of Pisa) 

— Prof. Imre Kondor (Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Eotvos University, Budapest)

— Dr. Matteo Marsili (Abdus Salam International Centre for Theorethical Physics)

***

Yuri Ivanovich’s had been born just a few days after the American’s Moon landing, and it was now a quarter past midnight on the 6^th of August. In two days it would be Yuri’s 54th birthday. Alexei, the 26 year old that had been assigned as the other half of the two-man team Yuri led, did not know this. 

He did not know it because Yuri had not told him. Yuri did not speak much at all. 

When Alexei had been first assigned to this mission Yuri had insisted very strongly with his superiors that he did not need a young idiot to slow him down. The commander of their section had finally stated that Yuri had a choice: He could take Alexei along and train him, or not go at all. Stone-faced, Yuri had formally accepted Alexei as his partner and left the tent. 

Most Novorossiyan fighters were older men, of Yuri’s age and often older. What they did not have in speed and materiel they more than made up for in orneriness, experience and a bloody-minded determination to stop the National Guardsmen —whom they simply called Nazis— from taking over their land and killing their younger relatives. By teaming up the young with the old, the younger men learnt more from the older ones and kept casualties lower. That was how Alexei had ended up being assigned to Yuri. All he had been told was that he was to help Yuri get to the South-West area of Kiev. Yuri carried a mysterious and punishingly heavy tall backpack, and Alexei carried another one with all their food, clothing, sleeping bags and assorted other items for both of them. 

Alexei had lost his mother and sister in the initial battle for Novorossiya, but somehow he had only been left with a great sadness, not the quiet fire that seemed to burn inside the older man. Over the last three weeks, during which they had hiked, hidden and crawled from the town of Pryluky, to within the outer edge of Kiev, Alexei had come to gradually believe that something must have happened to Yuri —as had to so many of the people who had been living in Eastern Ukraine when the meteorite shower hit in 2020—  and it had changed him into this grim, silent man. 

The meteorite event —or meteorite as it was always spoken, the accent on it making it a suspect word, a word that was now used to intend one thing for another—  had given the Americans the excuse to send in proxy troops for “humanitarian aid”. The securing of strategic corridors by these mercenaries escalated into a protracted if relatively stable low-level border war between Russia and the US-backed Kiev government that called itself the Ukrainian People’s Government. The real war —fourth generation in nature, and thus fragmented and guerilla-like— was mostly between the UPG and the pro-Russian separatists calling themselves Novorossiyans. Currently though, Novorossiya was less than half of its ancient original size. It did not really extend any further West than the banks of the Dnieper River and it lost ground and men steadily, its border changing daily and erratically, even though the losses on their enemies were telling. 

Alexei had noticed the best way to lighten Yuri’s mood was to be practically useful, quiet and efficient. Yuri would not let Alexei even touch the heavy backpack, but when Alexei served their rations at night  —usually cold because Yuri did not want any heat signatures— Yuri would acknowledge the younger man with a nod. It wasn’t exactly a spoken thank you, but Alexei had learnt that men like Yuri were not verbal or demonstrative that way. They processed information, emotions and read other people somatically. It was as close to a spoken word of thanks as he was going to get. 

The heavy backpack Yuri carried had never been opened. It stood tall on his back and was an odd, elongated shape. Yuri only had changes of underwear and a water bottle on the external pockets of it. Whatever else was in the backpack, Alexei had never seen it.

Getting to this location had been an exercise in patience. The closer they got, the slower the progress became. They had reached the outskirts of Kiev in one week, but then it had taken them two more just to circle Kiev and get to the Southern side of the city. Two men with backpacks in the fatigues of the National Guardsmen of the UPG did not necessarily attract any undue attention, and they had managed to move with relative impunity through the back roads and smaller villages and towns. If they had been only a little more overt, they would have been able to arrive at their destination several days earlier, but Yuri had been careful to a point of paranoia that was so intense it actually made Alexei relax about being found out. This was a good thing, because Alexei knew that if captured wearing the enemy’s uniform they would be tortured to death instead of merely shot. Yuri only made them move at dusk, night-time or heavy rain. The last had thankfully only happened rarely, as it was summer. Tonight, if all went well, would see them arrive at their final location. 

They had set up tight against an outer wall of a small dilapidated building on the outskirts of the aeroplane cemetery just South of Kiev’s Zhuliany International Airport. To hide their heat signatures from satellites, they had slept under a thermal-cammo tarp. They used it whenever sleeping in the outdoors, but they had remained awake; sweating silently and almost immobile under it for just over 20 hours now; making sure they would not run into any regular patrols that might be in place this close to the airport. It was sensible of course, but Alexei was bored, hot and uncomfortable, and hoped they would move soon. 

Yuri suddenly whispered one word: “Now.” 

Within three minutes Alexei had folded away their kit and the tarp back into his backpack and was now following Yuri through the darkness. 

It was quiet here, but Alexei knew there would have to be patrols this close to the airport even though they had not seen any. Both he and Yuri wore night vision goggles and moved silently through the underbrush and sparsely wooded area. The unused and derelict storage warehouses of a past era lay abandoned like old toys in a haphazard fashion in the shadowy landscape of pale green that was Alexei’s current view.

Yuri stopped walking and suddenly Alexei’s senses were on red alert. After almost a month of close proximity to Yuri, he had become attuned to the older man’s ways. Alexei’s silenced VSK-94 came up smoothly, pointing just off to the right of Yuri’s back. Yuri had his own VSK-94 up now and with the left hand made a lowering movement. Both men squatted, then lay down in the foot-tall grass. Alexei slid forward as he lay flat so that he had come up level with Yuri.

“Take your goggles off,” said Yuri in a voice so soft Alexei wondered if he’d heard it or imagined it, but he complied, switching the goggles off. He knew that Yuri must have heard or sensed something and night vision goggles can give off a signature to equipment designed to find it in the darkness.

Yuri reached into his left breast pocket and pulled out the therm-fan, popped it open in silence and laid it in front of his face. At three feet in diameter the rough semi-circle shielded Yuri from detection by anything on the far side of the cammo-painted delicate fan. Alexei copied Yuri and opened his own fan, resting its edge close to Yuri’s to make the blockage appear natural. To any sensor that might get pointed their way the silhouette would look like a small bump of topography not unlike an oddly shaped boulder or mound of earth. They lay motionless and silent. He could not tell its colour in the darkness, but the dry grass smelled yellow to Alexei. 

Two minutes later the sound of a vehicle could be heard. A little later the lights of what could have been either a large car or small truck changed the colour of the landscape beyond the fans, but neither man saw the actual vehicle as they remained hidden from it. The menacing sound of the machine moved slowly through the terrain ahead of them, passing no further than twenty or twenty-five metres from them. 

Suddenly a bright light shined directly on them, and Alexei’s heart froze. Waiting for the impact of rounds in his upper back, he closed his eyes and prayed. If this is my time to die, then please God, make it quick.

But the vehicle’s occupants must not have seen them, because the light moved past them and eventually away. 

Yuri waited less than a minute. The vehicle’s headlights could still be seen off to their left now, illuminating the dirt road and the grass at its edge, barely a hundred metres away. Yuri had picked up his fan, steadied himself in a low crouch due to the heavy back pack and then had run straight ahead, crossing the track where the vehicle had come nearest to them, but being careful to step into the middle of the track where the grass grew, so as not to leave an obvious footprint. Alexei had panicked a little, thinking he would lose Yuri, but had kept up. Ten minutes later they had reached the outer fence of the plane cemetery and Yuri had begun to dig under the fence with the entrenching tool like a man possessed. Twenty  minutes later the hole under the fence which they had used to squeeze their backpacks through, and then themselves, had been backfilled and the fence remained uncut and intact. Almost an hour later they were inside an old Aeroflot plane close to the South perimeter edge of the airport proper.

For the first time, Yuri allowed them to sleep at night. There would be nothing to do until daytime he said, as it was too dark inside the old plane to do any work, and using lights inside it at night was just stupid, as it would give their position away. They slept, and Alexei did not dream for the first time in weeks.

***

When Werner Von Braun was dying of cancer, he asked me to be his spokesperson, to appear on occasion when he was too ill to speak. I did this.

What was most interesting to me was a repetitive sentence that he said to me over and over again during the approximately four years that I had the opportunity to work for him.

He said the strategy that was being used to educate the public and decision makers was to use scare tactics. That was how we identify an enemy.

The strategy that Werner Von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered the enemy. 

In fact, in 1974, they were the enemy, the identified enemy. We were told that they had “killer satellites”. We were told that they were coming to get us and control us — that they were the “Commies”.

Then terrorists would be identified, and that was soon to follow. 

We heard a lot about terrorism.

Then we were going to identify third-world country “crazies”. We now call them Nations of Concern. But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons.

The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it, 

“Asteroids — against asteroids, we are going to build space-based weapons.”

And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card: 

“And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens, and all of it is a lie.”

[…]

When I went to Russia in the early 70’s I found out that they didn’t have killer satellites, that it was a lie. In fact, the Russian leaders and people wanted peace. They wanted to cooperate with the United States and the people of the world.

Affidavit recorded in December of 2000 by Carol Rosin, corporate manager of aerospace company Fairchild Industries from 1974-77, discussing the weaponisation of space according to Werner Von Braun who after retiring from NASA became a consultant engineer for Fairchild Industries in 1972 — Rosin has testified before Congress about space based weapons on many occasions.

***

In the morning, Yuri was uncharacteristically chatty and he’d used the gas stove to heat up coffee for breakfast. It had been the only time Yuri had served Alexei something since their journey had started.

It had encouraged Alexei to begin gently probing. Mostly as a way to pretend he had not noticed that the mysterious backpack had now been opened, and that Yuri was assembling what looked like rather complex electronics. Though the main part of what he expected was a weapon of some sort, seemed to be composed of a fluted metal tube a foot in diameter split vertically into two halves.

“So are you going to tell me what this mission is really about now?” asked Alexei while sipping his coffee. It was strong. It felt strange to be speaking almost normally during the day, though out of habit, even if hidden inside the shell of an old plane, both men spoke in low whispers.

“Sure.” said Yuri, but then he waited a long time before continuing in a manner that seemed to Alexei to avoid the question entirely.

“I was a physics professor you know?”

Alexei kept quiet. Yuri talking was a bit like having a wild animal walk past you in the forest. You didn’t want to do anything to spook it. “I taught physics,” he said with some finality.

“Which university?” Asked Alexei, hoping to keep the conversation going.

“Vladivostock.”

Alexei was momentarily confused, “But… that’s in Russia…”

“Yes,” said Yuri smiling a little. A melancholic smile. “I am not Ukrainian. I am Russian.”

Alexei didn’t know what to say to that and while he weighed options to try and keep Yuri telling him more, Yuri apparently decided to continue speaking of his own accord.

“My brother… he married a Ukrainian woman. They met online, if you would believe it. I argued with him. With all the trouble in East Ukraine he could not find a girl in Vladivostok?” Another melancholic smile and a pause. Alexei was starting to get the impression Yuri would talk even if he were alone now.  

“But he fell in love. And he moved there. To Donetsk. To fucking Donetsk.” Yuri’s voice went strangely high at the end and he suddenly looked sharply down, as if he was trying to fix something troublesome in the basket-ball sized shielded component he was working on between his legs. Or as if he was trying to avert his eyes from Alexei.

“He married her. Irina was her name. She was very beautiful. Much younger than him. I initially thought she might be after him for money, but I only thought that until I met her. It was at their wedding and it was the first time I met her, but I knew straight away. My brother had been right and it was me who was mistaken. He must have found the last angel on Earth.” Something fell from Yuri’s face and splashed on the metal component he was busy tightening screws inside of with his multi-tool. It is hot, thought Alexei strangely. Maybe he should help Yuri if the old man was already sweating.

“They had a boy in 2015. Ivan. He was beautiful like his mother and happy and funny like his father.” Yuri stopped suddenly and looked up at Alexei. In this moment Alexei realised that it had not been sweat. Yuri was crying. Tears were flowing freely from both eyes, but Yuri seemed completely oblivious of them and instead the steel behind his pale eyes seemed impassable. “I am not just saying this because he was my nephew. You understand?! You understand? He really was beautiful. Special.” The intensity of Yuri’s words told Alexei all he had wanted to know about Yuri’s past and now he wished he didn’t know it. 

“Yes, of course, Yuri Ivanovich,” said Alexei quickly, using the full name as a sign of respect. Of careful attention. He wanted Yuri to know he knew. He understood, and he did. He really did and he wanted nothing more than for Yuri to stop telling his story. “I understand, I believe you. I believe you.” Alexei really did. 

Yuri looked back down at his work, wiped his eyes unselfconsciously with his left hand and carried on working and talking at the same time.

“When the meteorite hit,” he said the word with a venom that scared Alexei, “I was visiting. I had just left their home to go get some cake. I wanted to spoil little Ivan that evening. He loved cake. Chocolate cake. It was his favourite. I heard it of course. Everyone heard it first, which is strange isn’t it. It doesn’t make sense. You should see the flash first, but everyone who was there says the same thing. The noise came first. Then the light. I didn’t even fall to the floor.” Yuri was just streaming his words now, not looking up, not pausing. And Alexei wished he didn’t have to hear any of them, but he did. He heard every one of them.

“The building in front of me got hit right in the middle of the roof. It looked like some giant animal that has been shot, and a few moments later the whole thing started to collapse sideways. I just stood there. Thinking of Ivan, frozen to the spot. My knees felt weak, but I don’t know if from fear or the ground shaking, but I didn’t fall. I turned and ran back to the house, but it was gone. It was just smoke and fire and rubble.” Yuri stopped talking for a while and Alexei opened his eyes; realising only now that they had been closed; a way of trying to shut out Yuri’s words. But the silence had made him open them again and now he saw Yuri was sobbing silently. His head down and his body jerking in silence. Tears splashed on the metal cover of the component he was working on. 

“I… I never had kids… divorced three times. Too cantankerous a man they said. Too impossible. Too precise, too focused in my work. But I didn’t care. Ivan was my nephew, but he was enough.” Yuri’s voice was breaking now, and Alexei, who had come to think of this man as being made of granite felt his own tears begin to flow down his face. There was a long pause, then Yuri tightened on himself and let out a small mewling sound of pain, trying to keep in a hurt that had destroyed him for the last three years.

“I found his arm. I found Ivan’s little arm. That’s all I could find.” Yuri’s sobbing could be heard now. And Alexei could not take it any more, he put down his coffee and went to kneel next to the older man and hugged him.

“I am sorry tovarisch, I am sorry. I am sorry my friend. I am sorry,” said Alexei, as he squeezed the old man, now seemingly much older than Alexei had ever seen him.

***

Russia and the U.S. unite: Former enemies sign agreement to work on nuclear weapons to tackle the danger of ASTEROIDS

Daily Mail online headline — Published: 16 October 2013 by Victoria Woollaston. Emphasised capitals are as in the original.

***

The same day he had found Ivan’s little arm, Yuri had buried it in the rubble of where his brother’s home had been and then gone straight back to Russia. He spent a year diverting all the funds he could from his department into his pet project. He had equipment machined, and the key component —the power cell he had conceived in secret— built and tested. It was the size of an orange and he built three. One he took with him, one he stored in a bank vault along with its construction details, leaving specific instructions with his lawyer concerning who to give access to it, and the third he packaged with all the relevant documentation and left with a friend, telling him he’d give him a call at some point in the future, and when he did, to take the whole lot to a guy he used to know in the FSB. Then he headed back to Novorossiya with his equipment. The border was permeable if you paid the soldiers enough, and Yuri had paid them more than enough. He didn’t need money anymore. It was summer. He had taken his customary two months leave from the university.

He had needed logistic help to get into Ukraine though, and he’d had to get in touch with the resistance movement. They had helped deliver him and Alexei to Pryluky, less than 200 kilometres from his objective. He had explained to them he could install a piece of equipment near the airport that would gather all communications and retransmit them without giving away its location. They had sent Alexei along to help the older man carry the heavy equipment, but mostly so that Alexei could learn from him how to infiltrate behind enemy lines. They thought Yuri was some special forces trained, grizzled old Spetsnaz so did not ask too many questions. Russia provided weaponry and expertise in certain things, but never officially and the Novorossiyans accepted this without fuss. But Yuri was no Spetsnaz. He had been a keen hunter and hiker until his forties, then had stopped hunting, but had still hiked in the mountains whenever he could. He had not wanted Alexei along, but truthfully he would not have got this far on his own. The young man was useful and kind and carried all their food and equipment without complaint.

***

The Russian Space Forces (also knowns as VKS, from the Russian — Kosmicheskie Voyska Rossii) were created on August 10, 1992. Commander-in-Chief of the VKS is Col. Gen. Vladimir Ivanov, who was also CINC of the predecessor organization, Ministry of Defense Space Units (1982-1991), since 1989.

Information gathered from www.globalsecurity.org

***

By nightfall the equipment had been assembled and Alexei noted it looked like some kind of cannon. The solid metal barrel was fluted and its two halves were now held together by dark rings of solid metal. The basketball sized control component, which sat at one end of the barrel had drive motors in it and was also the attachment point of a thin but very rigid tripod, that could be locked in place. A touch screen tablet was hardwired to this control component. By simply pointing the tablet’s camera at a target so that it was visible on the screen and then selecting the target by tapping on it with a finger or stylus, the motors would activate and the barrel would point at whatever the operator had tapped on the screen. Another tap on the red button hardwired on the edge of the tablet would activate the weapon.

But Alexei was not sure what kind of weapon it was, because it seemed to have no ammunition. Unless it was already loaded in the basketball-sized control component that made up one end of the weapon, but if so it made no sense as the bore of the cannon was about the size of an orange and no more than one or two such projectiles would fit inside the shielded casing that housed the drive motors of the targeting mechanism. 

Throughout the day they had heard numerous planes land and take off, but no one had come near their derelict plane, nor had they seen any people from the various porthole windows. Zhuliany Airport was perhaps not as busy as it had been in the past, but Kiev had been pacified long ago and the separatists had not managed to make any kind of impact on the regime that had been first installed in Ukraine back in 2014.

When night came, Yuri had gone out alone to scout for a better location. Later, they moved the whole cannon, which took both of them to move it now that it was assembled, into another plane. It was a much smaller military plane and cramped and rusted, but you could see the airstrip from it and Yuri set the cannon up so it was pointing at it from one of the large tears in the fuselage of the old military plane that was their new hideout.

***

“What was the most exciting thing you saw?” I ask.

“I found a list of officers’ names,” he claims, “under the heading ‘Non-Terrestrial Officers’.”

“Non-Terrestrial Officers?” I say.

“Yeah, I looked it up,” says Gary, “and it’s nowhere. It doesn’t mean little green men. What I think it means is not earth-based. I found a list of ‘fleet-to-fleet transfers’, and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren’t US navy ships.”

Gary McKinnon — Hacker who who was accused in 2002 of perpetrating the “biggest military computer hack of all time,” being interviewed in The Guardian by Jon Ronson. Appears in the 9 July 2005 online edition. Titled: Game Over.

***

“Are you going to blow up a plane Yuri Ivanovich?” asked Alexei the next morning when he awoke. Yuri had been sitting with his back to him, looking through the scope on his VKS-94 at the planes coming and going.

Yuri turned to look at Alexei and spoke calmly, friendly for the first time that Alexei could recall.

“Do you know what happened with the meteorite Alexei?”

“Some people say it was the Americans. I mean it was too convenient. It had to be the Americans.”

“Yes. Yes it was the Americans. But not just them. It’s the bankers you see?”

Alexei kept quiet, waiting. 

“For longer than you have been alive, in fact, longer than I have been alive too, some very rich, very powerful, very corrupt people have been keeping the rest of humanity in ignorance. I have known this at least since I was your age. It would take too long to tell you how I found out, but the point is, these people, they never suffer. Maybe the most powerful no longer even live on Earth.”

Alexei was not so shocked at this statement, the view of Alternative 3 had been around a long time, but he had never really given it too much thought and he doubted an elite that lived on the Moon, or maybe Mars, made much sense, but he carried on listening to Yuri.

“They run things here, make wars and so on, just to continue their agenda of becoming more powerful and creating space-based weapons systems, and who knows what else. But the point is we die and suffer here because of them. No one ever gets to them.”

“So you are going to blow up a plane with one of them in it? Is that why we are here today?”

Yuri smiled at him. “You are a smart young man Alexei. Today is my birthday, you know?”

“Is it really your birthday?”

“Yes tovarisch, it really is. Would you do me a favour?”

Alexei was suddenly scared. “What?”

“Would you leave all the food and water here and take your bag and one of the therm-tarps and your sleeping bag and then get out of here. Go back home. Use the same ways we used to get here. It should be easier to get away. I am not Spetsnaz you know? I am just a physics professor. If I could get here, you can get back. Go home. Go to your family or what is left of it. Get away and survive. And tell people about me only after you hear what happened here. Not before. Promise me you will keep quiet about me until you are back in Donetsk.”

“But Yuri, we are a team…” the older man interrupted him by raising a hand.

Yuri took out a tiny video-recorder from his pocket and switched it on, then he handed it to Alexei, who understood and held it mutely, filming what effectively was Yuri’s confession.

“Alexei, I lied to them. The Novorossiyan commanders. I am not here to put any transmitter in place. I am here to fire a charged power-source of steel and titanium that travels at seventeen kilometres per second at a plane full of mass-murdering assholes. I am not going back.”

“That…that cannon…” Alexei looked into the tiny screen at the back of the solid-state recorder and could see that the weapon was also in the frame, if slightly behind Yuri.

“Yes. It is a rail-gun. But the whole thing, even if it falls into their hands, it will tell them nothing. The power source is the bullet. It’s the size of an orange and uses some of the same principles of antigravity technology to get a massive surge of electric energy, it powers the whole system and fires itself out of it at the same time. Because of the speed, and the electric overcharge, when it hits something it will release a pulse of energy that reduces the air next to it to a plasma state. The electric charge flows through it at almost lightspeed and the explosion it will cause will leave nothing but a crater of considerable size. I will then put a grenade down the barrel of this thing and try to get away, but I know I will not get far.” He paused a moment before continuing.

“But you, Alexei, you can get away if you go now. You need to. Show the commanders this video. Put it online. Let people know why I did this. I did it for my little nephew Ivan. Who you murdering assholes killed with an orbital bombardment of rocks just to continue perpetrating the ongoing wars on this planet and keeping us penned in and herded like sheep, and dependant on a completely obsolete means of energy: Fossil fuels.

Well. Watch this. Watch what happens when you finally piss off a man who can use the new technology and who can reach out and touch one of your own. And know this. This is only the beginning. We are coming for you. Millions have died over the ages, but now it’s your turn. It will be you and your children, in your palaces and your fenced off mansions and maybe even in your off-planet bases. Because wherever there is someone who has had a loved one die because of you, you have the potential for this. And I have just made sure as many people as possible will be able to do just that. Reach out and touch you. The same way you touched my little Ivan. My name is Yuri Ivanovich, and I killed the people who died at Zhuliany Airport in the explosion. It was not an accident. And it was not a meteorite. It was me. And a rail gun I built just for this.”

Yuri’s face changed then and the fire seemed to go out of his eyes.

“Please Alexei, give me my birthday present and go now. Stay alive and make sure that video comes out after you hear about what I did here. You will hear about it.”

Alexei switched off the recorder. 

They spoke more the rest of the day. Just the two of them, and then when nightfall came Alexei finally left. He hugged Yuri before he did. He also had a change of clothes in his pack and he would ditch everything as soon as he was beyond the airport cemetery and into Kiev proper. He would avoid the curfews and patrols and he would get back to Donetsk. He didn’t know how exactly, but he would. And he would survive. He was sure of that.

***

Biden Senior was always up early and always had the news on before seven. He didn’t really listen to it so much as have it on in the background, but then he heard the presenter, an attractive talking head, mention Zhuliany and he started to listen.

His Senator son, and also retired chairman of Gazprom, was travelling with the Secretary of State to Kiev today. That is yesterday, they would have landed a short while ago, that was probably the news item. The war in Ukraine was ending soon and it was time to allow the next phase, the reparations and rebuilding to begin… but then he noticed the line scrolling at the bottom of the screen and he jerked for the remote, spilling his coffee in doing so and raising the volume even as the reality of it hit him in the heart.

“… huge explosion, seems to have devastated not just the senatorial flight, but there are reports of damage extending almost two kilometres away. National Guardsmen of the Ukrainian People’s Government have cordoned off the area and journalists are not being allowed anywhere near the airport. We now go live to Kiev, where our correspondent Mark is able to see smoke from his hotel window…”

Biden Senior did not hear the rest, his rheumy eyes were fixed on the text scrolling at the bottom of the screen.

… Senator Biden and Secretary of State Marion Floss presumed dead after massive explosion at Kiev’s International Airport … Oval Office releases statement saying it is too early to say if this was an act of war …

***

Three months later

Yuri’s video never made it on YouTube. Alexei had survived but his superiors had explained that if they released the video Novorossiya would be wiped off the face of the Earth. Once he understood the ramifications Alexei agreed and considered himself lucky that they had limited to merely deleting the video and not silencing him too; permanently.

***

Trevor Newman was a very successful trader. His bets in the market had made him rich and he was only 29, yet he seemed unaffected by his wealth. He also had no traceable history. He had superficial, close acquaintances and a string of meaningless temporary relationships. He also had a suite booked at the Hay-Adams Hotel. His trunks had been delivered personally to his room by his private butler in the morning, shortly after Trevor had checked in. Now, he locked the room’s door, then set to work. 

An hour later the equipment was assembled and he lined it up. He activated the timer on the bomb that would take out the entire top floor of the hotel first. It began counting down from three minutes. Then, before he activated the main equipment he had assembled earlier, he inserted the orange-sized power source, and he went to open the window. He could just see the White House beyond the tree tops. It lined up with the rail-gun perfectly. 

***

Author’s Note: The Sections in italics are not fiction.

Tags: red space, the kurgan

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