The second airlock door opened with a soft hiss as the pressure equalised.
A narrow slit of white light appeared, then the door slid silently to one side. A chill flowed out into the airlock, across the floor, along the walls, and into the room from which Anya Amasova stepped out.
She was no longer the woman in the dark green dress.
The emerald green, the gold frame, the controlled smile for sponsors and officials had vanished. She wore a black woollen jumper, black trousers, flat shoes, gloves and a dark bonnet, beneath which her hair lay strictly concealed. Only her posture remained the same: straight and controlled. She stopped on the threshold.
At first, her gaze did not go to the machines, but to the edges of the room, to cameras, walkways, shadows, emergency exits, cable trays, ventilation ducts and water pipes. Only then did she see the micro-spherical cluster generator. Then the six oscillating rings. Then the white behind them.
Claudia stood in the shadow of a control cabinet and watched her.
Anya walked slowly into the room. She hadn’t put on any protective clothing. That was either courage, haste or arrogance. Claudia thought arrogance was possible in Anya’s case, but not the main reason.
Anya looked at the generator first. She didn’t get too close. Wise. Her gaze swept over the displays, the primary line, the shielding, the tiny vibrations in the casing.
“Not a tidal power station,” she murmured quietly.
Claudia remained silent.
“Not enough space for turbines. Not enough water movement for this load curve. But enough pumps, enough noise and enough of an explanation so that no one asks why water is being drawn from the canals in the middle of Copenhagen.”
She took two more steps forward.
“The tidal power station is a cover… and a bonus.”
Claudia almost nodded, but instead she raised the small radiation meter she’d taken from the equipment room and stepped out of the shadows.
“Not bad,” she said. “For someone without protective gear.”
Anya didn’t jump. That was what Claudia liked about her. She turned just slowly enough to show she wasn’t giving in to the startle.
“Dr Tiedemann.”
“Ms Amasowa.”
“I’d hoped you’d be slower.”
“Many people say that.”
“And are they still alive?”
“Most of them. Science isn’t a sport.”
Anya looked at her. Then at the puck lying on a terminal next to Claudia.
“So you have it.”
“You were looking for it.”
“Who do you work for?”
Claudia raised an eyebrow.
“I was just about to ask you that.”
Anya took half a step closer. “Stromberg has a woman from Hesse with an access key in his cellar. A nuclear physicist who suddenly turns up where a Danish scientist has gone missing. That doesn’t look like a coincidence. In Hesse, the Occupation Council of Belgians, British and Dutch would never allow them to experiment with this kind of technology. You must be working for Stromberg.” Anya began to wonder why Claudia was wearing protective clothing and glanced back at the reactor.
“And Stromberg has a Russian woman in an evening gown who seduces athletes, orders suites and moves through staff corridors as if she’d had the floor plan under her pillow for three weeks. That doesn’t look like a misunderstanding either. You’re not a Red nuclear physicist, otherwise you wouldn’t be walking around here without protective clothing, but Rosatom probably sold Stromberg the thing.”
“I don’t seduce every athlete.”
“Only the useful ones?”
“Only those who have a knack for scientific matters.”
Claudia snorted dryly.
The cold worked its way between them. From the hollow behind the neptunium rings came a fine, white wisp that crept across the floor and broke against Anya’s shoes. Anya noticed it now. Her gaze grew sharper, more precise.
“You don’t work for Stromberg?” she said.
“Neither do you?”
“If you worked for Stromberg, you wouldn’t have been the only one noting down what he’s doing down here.”
Claudia looked at Anya’s empty hands. “And you?”
“If I worked for Stromberg, I would have ordered you to be shot before you asked me a question.”
For a moment they stood facing each other, two women in a room that was too dangerous for both of them and had been built for women who believed danger was a matter of ownership.
Claudia nodded towards the airlock.
“There are protective coats hanging in the supplies area. Dosimeters on the left. Iodine tablets on the right. Gloves by size. Take something! From what I’ve seen so far, the facility is extremely well maintained, but back there, by the glass, there’s a decay pool, so there could well be residual radiation in the room; you shouldn’t take any risks.”
“I don’t have time.”
“You’ll have even less time if you stand around here unprotected and later can’t count how many thyroids you had.”
Anya looked at her.
Claudia looked back.
Then Anya turned without a word and walked towards the materials area. Claudia followed her to the airlock, without taking her eyes off the puck. In the antechamber, Anya pulled on a grey protective coat, fastened a dosimeter and took a packet of iodine tablets from the box.
“Just to be on the safe side,” said Claudia.
“I thought you were a scientist.”
“That’s exactly why. You can never be too safe.”
Anya put the tablets in her pocket. “You really aren’t here for Stromberg.”
“No.”
“Then why?”
Claudia pulled a second pair of gloves from the shelf and tossed them to her.
“Energy efficiency. Reprocessing. And Danish nuclear waste.”
Anya caught the gloves. “That’s a remarkably ugly trinity.”
“Hesse has no money for pretty trinities. My power station in Winden has its back against the wall economically. Demolition, refurbishment or closure. Three expert reports, five committees, nine offended engineers and a duchy that doesn’t know whether it wants modern energy or just wants to avoid modern bills. Belgians eat chocolate, the Dutch eat fish and the British chew cassava, but no one allows us to modernise. I need the waste, partly because I get paid to dispose of it, partly because I carefully reprocess it and convert what’s still possible in our reactors. An increase in efficiency would mean more output for the same input.”
“So you buy waste.”
“I buy usable scraps. Denmark calls it disposal. Stromberg calls it ocean conservation. I call it material, if it’s clean enough.”
“And if it isn’t?”
“Then I write a report stating as much. Winden has plenty of caves in the forest. Nobody asks questions, and Wiesbaden is far enough away.”
Anya slipped on her gloves. “Not very heroic.”
“Heroism is a form of poor budget planning that I can’t afford. And certainly not as the female director of a nuclear power station.”
Anya smiled almost imperceptibly.
They went back into the reactor room.
The generator hummed quietly, almost elegantly. Anya stopped in front of it again. Closer this time. Claudia stepped up beside her.
“Microsphere cluster generator,” said Claudia. “Compact. Ceramically shielded. Extremely stable load. Do you see the temperature readings?”
Anya leaned over the display. “That’s impossible.”
“No. Unfortunately not. It’s just very expensive, very precise and very well hidden.”
“How efficient?”
“Fabulous.”
Anya looked at her.
“That’s not a technical term.”
“No. But it’s shorter than my actual reaction.”
She pointed at the display.
“The conversion efficiency is so high that at first I suspected fraud. Then I saw the cooling circuits. Then the shielding. And then those strange rings. This isn’t a sham. It’s a working technological marvel.”
Anya looked at the generator, and for the first time there was genuine admiration on her face. The admiration of a woman who recognised technical power and immediately translated it into plans.
“The USSR wants to push for efficient tidal energy use in the next Five-Year Plan,” she said. “Coastal facilities, harbour storage, decentralised supply networks. We’re looking for pioneering projects worldwide. Officially, we’re attending conferences. Unofficially, we’re checking where there’s something to buy or take away. And this thing with the rings cools the reactor?”
“On the contrary: the reactor supplies the electricity to open this portal using the neptunium rings: a window into the Ice Age. Stromberg doesn’t produce cold by cooling and dissipating waste heat; it takes the cold that was the norm here in Copenhagen thousands of years ago and brings it into the present.”
Anya walked round the generator. “With the efficiency of this micro-spherical reactor alone, you could stabilise island grids. Polar research stations. Port facilities. Submarines?”
“Careful.”
“I’m just thinking out loud.”
“You’ve been thinking ahead.”
“That’s what I live for.”
Claudia looked at the second device.
“The generator isn’t the main problem.”
Anya followed her gaze.
The six neptunium rings continued to oscillate in the hollow. Each ring shifted in its own rhythm, as if wrestling with a force that was invisible. In the centre lay the white piece of the Ice Age, an impossible fragment of snow, wind and ancient cold.
Anya stepped closer.
This time there was no admiration on her face.
Only focus.
“What is that?”
“A portal.”
Anya looked at her.
“You’re saying that too quickly.”
“I’ve been analysing it for a while.”
Claudia walked over to the terminal and pointed at the displays.
“Six Neptunium rings. Phase anchors. Oscillating to keep the opening stable. The generator supplies the impulse and keeps the control system running smoothly. The system doesn’t draw cold from the water. It draws it from a time window.”
“From which time?”
“The Pleistocene. The Ice Age.”
Anya said nothing.
Claudia continued her explanation, more matter-of-factly than it felt. “The portal isn’t a passage in the romantic sense. Not simply a door for people. It’s a thermal access point. A temperature gradient over time. Stromberg imports the cold rather than generating it.”
Anya walked slowly along the transparent screen. Her breath became visible.
“And Lind?”
“Subject displacement. That’s what the system calls it.”
“You mean he was sucked back into the Ice Age?”
“I mean, someone built a machine that treats a human who tried to switch it off as an error message.”
Anya stopped.
Then she no longer looked at the portal as if it were a miracle.
She looked at it as if it were a weapon.
Claudia noticed the change immediately.
“What do you think now?”
Anya spoke slowly. “If you don’t generate cold but import it, the energy expenditure goes towards stabilisation and control.”
“Yes.”
“If this generator is powerful enough to supply the ice rink, the hotel and the gigantic palace with electricity, the system can be mobilised.”
“Probably, but what are you getting at?”
Anya pointed at the displays. “How quickly can it cool water?”
“This? Quickly enough to keep an ice hockey arena cool with ridiculous ease.”
“I don’t mean the arena.”
“Cold for air-conditioning the hotel’s cold stores and rooms, as well as the cold water? That’s not even a fraction of its potential output.”
Anya looked towards the white opening. “An enemy ship in confined waters. A cold current beneath the keel. Sudden ice formation on the hull and propellers. You don’t even have to sink it. You render it manoeuvrable. It’s worse for submarines.”
“When water freezes, it expands! That would be highly risky, even with salt water, which has a lower freezing point.”
“Exactly. Expansion, pressure, structural stress. Ice on valves, sensors, hatches. If the cold is severe enough, you don’t just crush the machinery. You force the environment itself to carry out the attack.”
Claudia looked at the rings.
“Or you block a waterway.”
Anya nodded. Now she spoke faster, as the thought took shape. “The Sound. The Bosphorus. The Suez entrances. The Panama Canal. The Strait of Hormuz. The Strait of Malacca.”
Claudia looked at her sharply.
“Malacca?”
“If the efficiency is right, yes. You wouldn’t have to freeze the entire strait. It’s enough to make one section impassable, short enough for a crisis, long enough for blackmail.”
“That’s madness.”
“No,” said Anya. “That’s strategic. Madness is just the word people use when they don’t like the fact that someone else has done the maths first.”
Claudia stepped back from the terminal.
“This machine will take on a whole new meaning the moment any general, admiral or planning council sees it.”
“Or an intelligence service?”
Anya looked at her.
“Yes, an intelligence service too.”
The word hung between them like a shared diagnosis.
Claudia took the puck from the terminal and put it back in the inside pocket of her protective coat.
Anya noticed.
“I need that.”
“So do I.”
“For the Soviet Union.”
“For Hesse.”
Anya didn’t smile. “Do you really believe that all you have to do is report something like this, and then the world will see sense?”
“No. I believe that if you don’t report something like this at all, it will go mad faster. If I hand the data over to the World Energy Organisation instead of secretly implementing it in Winden, trust in our sincerity will grow. And perhaps the occupation will end someday. Or at least the artificial energy shortage.”
A short, dry sound came from the loudspeakers above the airlock. Both women fell silent.
A new line appeared on the terminal.
SECONDARY AUTHORISATION SUCCESSFUL
ACCESS TRACK: ACTIVE
Anya looked towards the airlock.
Claudia followed her gaze.
“Have you brought anyone with you?”
“No.”
“Neither have I.”
The six rings were now oscillating fast enough to make the frost on the railing crackle.
Anya pulled her protective cloak tighter around herself.
“Then we should decide whether to continue suspecting one another or to work together to prevent anyone else from using this door.”
Claudia looked at the generator. Then at the portal. Then at Anya.
“I’ll continue to suspect you.”
“Fine.”
“But I’ll work with you for now.”
“Even better.”
A mechanical unlocking sound came from the airlock.
Claudia took a spanner from a tool holder. Anya saw this and pulled a small pistol from under her jumper, as elegantly and naturally as if it were part of her evening wear.
Claudia looked at the weapon.
“Is that your scientific method?”
“More efficient than a spanner.”
The door began to open.
Behind the two women, the Ice Age continued to breathe into the wall.