Buran
CHAPTER 1
The Man in the Ice
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Novaya Zemlya, Soviet Arctic. 14 March 1961.
The generator coughed twice and died, and Laboratory 9 went
dark.
Dr. Arkady Zimin did not look up from his notebook. He had
stopped needing light some weeks ago, along with sleep and
shaving and most meals, and the letters from his wife, which he
no longer opened. There was a brown tea ring on its cover from
1957 that he had never forgiven himself for.
Outside, the wind went over the ice with a long, rising howl
that never seemed to draw breath. Inside, the only sound was
the steady ticking of the device on the steel table in front of him.
It was the size of a human heart and roughly the shape of one
too, if a heart were cut from blue glass and wound about with
copper wire. Frost crawled across its surface in fine ferns,
melted, and crawled again.
The Polar Heart. Eleven years of his life. Somewhere above
him boots hammered on the metal stairs, and he heard voices,
and understood that Moscow had sent soldiers after all.
"Comrade Zimin!" A fist on the door. "By order of the Central
Committee, Project Kosmonavt is terminated! Step away from
the equipment!"
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Zimin closed the notebook and slipped it inside his coat.
"Terminated," he said quietly, to no one in particular. "They
do like their final words. They are nearly always wrong about
them."
Behind him, the frozen floor began to rise.
It came up the way breath rises on a cold morning, slowly and
then all at once, and it took the shape of a tall pale man with no
feet. Its body was packed snow and blue ice. Its face was a
smooth white mask with two thin slits for eyes, and long icicles
hung from its shoulders like the tassels on an officer's coat.
Where its heart should have been, a red star glowed, faint and
slow.
The scientist called it Buran. Blizzard.
He had been the first man in the Soviet Union to see one of
these things, and the first to give them a name. Sinomity. He had
cobbled the word together from Greek and Russian scraps on a
sleepless night in 1953, in a Leningrad kitchen: the soul that
stands beside you.
The door burst inward and four soldiers came through it with
their rifles up, torch beams swinging across the walls.
"Hands where we can—"
Buran raised one hand and touched the air.
The torch beams did not go out. They stopped, and hung in
the dark like four long bright rods of glass. The snowflakes that
had blown in through the open door hung with them, each one
perfectly still. The soldiers stood mid-step with their mouths
open, and frost was already blooming across their eyes.
Zimin stepped carefully between them, like a man stepping
between statues in a museum.
"You will thaw in a few hours," he told the nearest one, kindly
enough. "When you do, tell them I am dead. It will be true
enough for their purposes."
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He went on down the corridor to the cold chamber at the very
bottom of the laboratory, where a glass cylinder stood tall as a
man, its base packed with coils. He set the Polar Heart into the
cradle at the top. Then he took off his glasses, folded them, and
put them in his pocket.
"Buran," he said, stepping inside. "Hold me."
The Sinomity's arms closed around the cylinder, and the cold
came in like a tide.
The last thing Arkady Zimin thought before the ice took him,
with the stars he had once meant to reach a long way off now,
was this: The future will be ready for me. And if it is not, I will
make it ready.
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Novaya Zemlya. 3 September 2026.
Sixty-five summers passed, each a little warmer than the last.
The ice that had sealed Laboratory 9 began, very slowly, to
weep. Meltwater ran down the old metal stairs and pooled on
the floor of the cold chamber, and found its way, drop by drop,
into the cradle where the Polar Heart sat. On the night of 3
September, the Heart began to tick again.
Tk.
Tk-tk-tk-tk.
Frost burst outward from it in a ring. It raced across the floor
and up the walls, through the corridor and out of the broken
door, and went across the island in a single white breath.
Seabirds roosting on the cliffs dropped out of the sky. A polar
bear asleep on the shore never woke up.
Inside the glass cylinder, a man's eyelids moved. The glass
cracked, then shattered, and Arkady Zimin fell to his knees on
the wet floor, coughing up ice. His hair had been brown when he
went in. It was white now, and his skin had the grey-white look
of a page left too long in a window. When he finally lifted his
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head, his eyes were the colour of a winter sky just before snow.
He laughed. It came out as a wheeze, then a cough, and only
after that as laughing.
"What year," he whispered, "is it?"
Behind him Buran rose from the meltwater, taller now and
sharper at the edges, the red star in its chest burning hot.
Across the chamber, a second cylinder he had quite forgotten
about groaned and split. A big man tumbled out of it in a rotted
army greatcoat, gasping, his head shaved and a sniper's rifle
frozen to his back. Zimin knew the face. Sergeant Oleg Rusakov,
his bodyguard, the only soldier in 1961 who had refused to leave
him. A small grey sphere floated up out of the dark behind
Rusakov, like a moon the size of a football, with one long thin
eye.
"Doctor," Rusakov croaked. "Are we... is this the future?"
Zimin got to his feet and picked up the Polar Heart. It pulsed
in his hands, and with every pulse a faint white mist rolled off it
and drifted away on the wind, south, towards the mainland and
the cities.
"Not yet, Oleg," said Zimin. "But we will be soon."
Rusakov tried to stand, slipped on the wet floor, and sat down
again. "My legs don't work, Doctor."
"They will. Give them a minute. Have you got any cigarettes?"
Rusakov felt in his greatcoat and brought out a packet of
Belomorkanal, sodden and sixty-five years old. They both looked
at it for a while.
✦ ✦ ✦
Ten days later, the crew of a Russian research station two
hundred kilometres south stopped answering their radio.
When the rescue helicopter landed, the pilot found the eight
scientists sitting around their breakfast table with their tea still
in the cups. The tea had frozen solid, and so had they, from the
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inside out, with frost growing from their lips in fine white
feathers. A radio on the windowsill was still playing, very faintly,
a Mayak weather report for the Barents Sea.
One of them was alive. A young technician sat in the corner
with his knees pulled up to his chest, shaking, staring at nothing
at all. Behind him, barely there, a figure like a man made of
television static flickered and went out.
"It's in the air," the technician whispered when they carried
him to the helicopter. "It's in the air and it's going south. You
can't stop it. He said you can't stop it."
"Who said?" asked the pilot. "Mind his head, Pasha."
The technician started to laugh, and could not stop.
The doctors in Arkhangelsk would later give the sickness a
name. They called it the White Rot, and by the end of
September it had reached Moscow.
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CHAPTER 2
White Rot
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Moscow. Yaroslavsky Station. 29 September 2026.
"Ticket."
"I have a ticket."
"Then show me the ticket, citizen, and stop waving a sausage
at me."
Lev Sokolov, seventeen years old, apprentice conductor on
the Moscow to Vladivostok line, stood in the doorway of carriage
nine with his arms folded and his hat on crooked. The man on
the platform below was red-faced and sweating and holding, yes,
a sausage, a long dry Krakowska in a paper sleeve.
"The ticket," said Lev, "is not the sausage."
Somebody behind him snorted.
"Katya," said Lev, without turning round.
"I didn't say anything."
"You laughed."
"Laughing isn't saying." His sister leaned round him in the
doorway, fourteen years old, her hair stuffed up under a stolen
Russian Railways cap three sizes too big for her. She grinned
down at the sausage man. "Left pocket, mister. It stuck out when
you bent over. Also you've got mustard on your tie."
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The man checked. It was there, and so was the mustard. He
handed the ticket up, muttering, and stomped past them into the
carriage.
Lev punched it. "You're supposed to be at school."
"School's closed."
"Since when?"
"Since this morning. Everything's closing, Lyova." The grin
went. She nodded down the platform. "Look."
Yaroslavsky Station was always loud and always crowded, full
of shouting and luggage and the smell of diesel and fried pies.
Today it was quieter. Half the kiosks had their shutters down,
and people stood about in small separate groups instead of
crowds, almost all of them in masks. Two police officers in white
suits were working their way slowly along platform four with a
thermometer gun, pointing it at people's foreheads as if they
were taking a register.
On the big screen above the departure board the news was
running with the sound off: a map of Russia, and a white smudge
in the far north spreading down over Arkhangelsk and
Murmansk and Vologda and Yaroslavl like milk soaking into a
tablecloth.
WHITE ROT: STAY CALM. STAY HOME. REPORT
SYMPTOMS.
"It's just flu," said Lev.
"Flu doesn't freeze you."
"That's rumours."
"Mitya's uncle saw it in Vologda. He said a man in his building
went white, Lyova, like a statue, with ice on his eyelashes. In his
mouth."
"Mitya's uncle also says he saw a UFO over his dacha."
"He did see a UFO over his dacha, he's got it on his phone, it's
a bit blurry but—"
"Sokolov!"
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They both jumped. Old Fyodor Ivanovich, senior conductor of
the Rossiya, came stomping down the corridor, a huge grey bear
of a man with a moustache like a yard broom. He had trained
Lev since Lev was fifteen, which was when their mother died,
and when their father didn't come back from the north.
"Departure in four minutes and your sister is still on my
train."
"I'm leaving," said Katya.
"You said that yesterday."
"Yesterday I meant it less."
Fyodor's moustache twitched. He liked her; everybody liked
Katya, she had a way of making grown men forget why they
were cross. Then he coughed, a short dry cough into his fist, and
when he took his hand away Lev saw frost on the old man's
knuckles, fine and white and feathery, like the patterns on a
window in January. It melted while he watched.
"Fyodor Ivanovich," said Lev slowly. "Your hand."
"What about it?"
"There was—"
"It's cold in here. The heating on nine is broken. I've told them
three times, and do they listen? They send me a form." Fyodor
turned away. "Four minutes. Katya. Off."
✦ ✦ ✦
Katya did not get off.
She hid in the linen cupboard, the way she always did when
she wanted to ride to Vladimir and back, and Lev pretended not
to know, the way he always did, because it was the only time
they got to sit together and play durak and eat dried fish and not
think about the empty flat in Mytishchi. But today he couldn't
keep his mind on the cards. Katya beat him four times running
and didn't even gloat, which was how he knew she was worried
too.
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Somewhere out past Sergiev Posad, the coughing started.
It came from carriage six first, a dry little bark like a fox's,
and then from carriage four. By the time they reached
Aleksandrov, Lev could hear it all along the train, passing up and
down the corridors from one compartment to the next. A woman
in six had ice in her hair. A boy in four had blue lips and kept
saying he was warm, so warm, and trying to take off his coat
while his mother held his arms down.
And Fyodor Ivanovich, senior conductor, thirty-one years on
the railways, sat down very suddenly on the fold-down seat at
the end of carriage nine and did not get up again.
"Fyodor Ivanovich." Lev knelt in front of him. "Hey. Look at
me. Fyodor Ivanovich?"
The old man's eyes were open, and very pale. Frost was
creeping up his moustache, bristle by bristle, the grey going
silver and then white.
"Lyova," he said. His voice had gone thin. "Lyova, listen. Your
papa."
"What? I'll get someone. Katya! Katya, go and get help."
"Your papa was a railway engineer up north. On the Arctic
line. Yes?"
"Yes, but what's that got to do with anything?"
"He wasn't." Fyodor's hand closed on Lev's wrist, hard as a
clamp and freezing. "He didn't build railways. He worked at a
place. A closed city, no name, just a number. He made me
promise I'd never tell you, and I've kept it, I kept it for two years,
but—"
"What place?"
The old man's lips moved and nothing came out. The frost
reached his eyes and filmed them over, the way a puddle skins
with ice overnight, and then he was gone: sitting upright, a
white statue in a blue conductor's uniform, his hand still locked
around Lev's wrist.
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Lev stared at him. "Fyodor Ivanovich. Come on. Bloody hell,
come on."
Then the cold came up through Fyodor's hand and into his
own.
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He didn't remember much after that. Katya screaming his name.
The train stopping in the middle of a birch forest, and men in
white suits with torches walking up the line, and somebody
saying "this one's still warm, take this one". Being carried. A
hospital corridor that smelled of bleach and, faintly, of
somebody's cabbage soup, and a ceiling going past, light and
dark and light again.
And the cold, the deep kind, like being the inside of a stone at
the bottom of a lake, as if there had never been anything warm
in the world and never would be. He lay on a bed and felt it
moving in him, slow and patient, climbing up his arms and legs a
millimetre at a time, and he couldn't move, couldn't even shiver.
Somewhere far away, a voice was singing.
He knew the song. It was the one his mother used to sing
when he was small, about the little grey wolf who comes and
bites children who sleep on the edge of the bed. Katya always
sang it wrong. She changed the wolf into a bear, every time, and
wouldn't be told.
Bayu-bayushki-bayu... don't lie on the edge...
...or the little grey bear will come...
So she was close. She was singing it to him.
The cold reached his chest and touched his heart, and a voice
inside him said No.
It wasn't his own voice. It came from underneath his voice,
deeper and older, like the hum in the rails a long while before
you ever see the train, and it said no flatly and finally, the way
you'd say it to a dog going for your dinner.
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The cold stopped. Then, very slowly, it began to go
backwards.
He felt it retreat down his arms and out through his fingertips
and his feet. It took a weight off him as it went, a heaviness that
had been sitting on his chest his whole life without his ever
noticing, and as that lifted he felt a second heartbeat for the first
time, slower than his own and heavy as iron, thudding in the
space just behind his ribs.
Tdum.
Tdum.
Lev Sokolov opened his eyes.
He was in a hospital ward, long and grey, with twenty beds.
Eighteen of them held white statues under white sheets. The
nineteenth was empty, its sheets thrown back, and on the floor
beside it there was a Russian Railways cap, three sizes too big.
At the far end of the ward the double doors were still swinging,
and Lev was already trying to get his legs over the side of the
bed.
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CHAPTER 3
Vostok
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Lev hit the double doors at a run.
His legs shouldn't have worked, given that ten minutes ago
he'd been ice from the waist down, but they carried him, and the
iron heartbeat behind his ribs thudded harder with every step,
tdum, tdum, faster and faster, until it was the only thing he
could hear.
The corridor beyond was long and empty, lit by tubes that
flickered and buzzed, and at the far end two orderlies in white
suits were wheeling a trolley through a fire door. On the trolley
was a small shape under a grey blanket. A hand hung off the
edge, a girl's hand with chewed nails and a friendship bracelet
of red and black thread. He'd made her that bracelet for her
birthday. She'd said it was ugly and had never once taken it off.
"KATYA!"
The orderlies didn't look back. The fire door banged shut
behind them.
Lev hit it with his shoulder and burst out onto a loading bay
into the freezing night, sleet slanting through the yellow
floodlights. There was a white van with no markings and its back
doors open, three trolleys already inside, and the orderlies were
lifting Katya's in to join them. Beside the van, holding a tartan
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umbrella, stood a woman.
She was perhaps forty, in a neat grey coat, with a grey bob
and round glasses. She looked like a schoolteacher, or the kind
of doctor who tells you very kindly that this is going to hurt. She
watched Lev come skidding across the wet concrete with polite
interest.
"Oh," she said. "Another one. How lovely."
"Get away from my sister!"
"Your sister?" She tilted her head and looked at Katya's
trolley, then back at Lev, and her eyebrows rose a little above
the rims of her glasses. "Ah. Sokolov. Of course. That would
account for the readings. It runs in the family, then."
"What runs in the—"
"Dr. Irina Belova." A small, correct nod. "Formerly of the
Institute of Cryobiology in Novosibirsk. Currently employed by a
gentleman who would very much like to meet you one day.
Today, I'm afraid, you are a complication. And I was always
taught," she said, lifting her right hand, fingers together, to the
edge of her eyebrow in a crisp military salute, "to remove
complications."
A figure unfolded behind her. It was the colour of an old tin
toy, a woman's shape, slim and stiff as a soldier on parade, with
a peaked cap and white gloves and a face that was only a smooth
brass plate engraved with a single red star. When Belova
saluted, so did it. It was saluting the floodlight above Lev's head.
The floodlight exploded.
The blast threw Lev flat. Glass and sparks came down around
him and hissed in the sleet, and his ears rang, and somewhere
behind the bins a Lada's alarm started whooping on and off.
"Salyut," said Belova, as though introducing a colleague at a
conference. "Anything I salute, I destroy. It's rather
old-fashioned, I know. I was raised to respect tradition."
She saluted the concrete under Lev's hand.
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He rolled, and the ground where he'd been lying went up in a
fountain of grit. He scrambled up and ran at her because he
couldn't think of anything else to do, and she sighed and saluted
the drainpipe next to him, and it burst, and a lump of iron the
size of a fist caught him in the ribs and spun him round and
down onto his knees.
He coughed. There was blood on the concrete, more than he'd
expected.
"You can't fight me, Sokolov. You don't even know what you
are." Belova stepped closer, keeping her umbrella perfectly
level. "You've been awake for, what, five minutes? Your Sinomity
is barely born. It hasn't the strength to stand up yet. Look at
you, crawling about like a—"
"What," said Lev, "is a bloody Sinomity?"
Belova paused. Then she laughed, a bright surprised sound,
as if he'd said something clever at a dinner party.
"Oh, that is precious. They didn't even tell you. No, of course
they didn't." She began to raise her hand towards him. "Never
mind. It won't matter in a moment."
Behind Lev's ribs the iron heart went TDUM, and out of his
shadow on the wet concrete a tall dark shape stood up.
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He felt it before he saw it, a weight at his back, heavy and warm
as an engine block left running. The air shoved outward. Sleet
blew sideways.
Belova's hand stopped halfway to her eyebrow.
It was two heads taller than Lev, built of dark steel that was
scratched and riveted and flaking old black paint, with broad
heavy shoulders and long thick arms, and its knuckles were
coupling hooks. It wore what looked like a conductor's long coat,
except the coat was made of iron plates that clanked faintly
when it moved. Its face was a smooth visor with one horizontal
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slit, and behind the slit burned a steady white light, the kind of
light you see coming at you down a tunnel at night. On its chest
was a five-pointed star. Not red. White.
It looked down at Lev, and Lev looked up at it, and in a way he
could never explain afterwards he knew its name, as though
someone had written it on the inside of his skull a long time ago
and he'd only now switched the light on.
"Vostok," he whispered.
East. The first ship that ever carried a man into space.
"Interesting," said Belova, and saluted.
Lev didn't think. He threw his hand up, and Vostok's went up
with it, and the steel palm met the empty air in front of him at
the exact moment the explosion arrived.
It should have torn him apart. Instead he felt it, through
Vostok's hand, the way you feel a football smack into your palm:
a great rushing shove of heat and force coming at him. And
without knowing how, he turned it, the way you throw the points
on a railway line and send a whole train off down a different
track.
The blast swerved up and left in a ball of orange fire and
slammed into the side of the white van. The van rocked on its
wheels and its windows blew in, and the orderlies yelled and
dived for the ground.
Lev stared at his own hand.
"Oh," said Belova softly. "Oh, now that is worth writing down."
"Don't you touch her," said Lev. He was panting, and
everything hurt. "Don't you bloody touch her."
"Momentum." Her eyes were bright behind her glasses. "You
redirected it. That is your function. You take an object in motion
and you alter its direction. Do you know how rare a clean kinetic
ability is? Fewer than one in two hundred of the cases I've
catalogued. He's going to be thrilled."
"Who? Who's going to be thrilled?"
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"Mind the glass," said Belova, which wasn't an answer. She
was already backing towards the van. Lev went after her, and a
heavy weight hit the back of his knees like a sack of wet sand
and sent him sprawling.
It was a dog, a big grey and white husky, filthy and thin, with
frost still clinging in patches to its fur and one ear ragged at the
tip. It stood over him and growled past him at Belova, and for a
split second Lev saw a second shape beside it: a tiny flickering
dog the size of a toy, made of tinfoil and starlight, sitting up on
its haunches with its nose in the air. Then it was gone.
In the van, Katya's trolley had rolled against the side wall and
the blanket had slipped. Her face was white and frosted and her
eyes were half open, and they found his. He saw her lips move.
He couldn't hear her over the car alarm, but he'd been reading
his sister's lips since she was three.
Lyova. Don't follow me.
Belova slammed the van doors. The engine roared and the van
tore off across the loading bay, clipped the barrier hard enough
to snap the arm off, and swung out into the road with one back
light flickering and its indicator still blinking, for some reason,
as it turned left towards the ring road.
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Lev lay on the wet concrete and didn't get up.
The husky sniffed his face, then lay down next to him, heavily,
as if it had been doing that for years. Vostok had faded, but he
could still feel it standing just behind his ribs, waiting.
"Don't follow me," Lev said to the sky. "What's that supposed
to mean, Katya?"
"It means," said a voice, "that she knew where they were
taking her. And that she knew perfectly well you would follow
regardless."
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An old man was standing at the top of the loading-bay steps.
He was small and thin, with a close-trimmed white beard and a
camel coat that had been expensive forty years ago, and he
leaned on a walking stick. Three silver balls the size of plums
circled slowly round his head, each with a single unblinking eye,
and all three eyes were on Lev.
"Are you with her?" said Lev. "With that woman?"
"With Dr. Belova? Good God, no." The old man looked faintly
insulted. "My name is Gennady Arkadyevich Marchenko.
Sixty-five years ago I had the honour, if that is the word for it, of
helping to put the man responsible for all of this to sleep, and I
have come to the conclusion, rather late in life, that it falls to me
to help somebody wake him up and finish the matter for good."
He limped down the steps one at a time and held out his hand.
"Get up, Sokolov. They will be back for you within the hour,
and you are not ready. Also, you are lying in a puddle."
Thank you for starting my story <3
