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A Colder War - a novelette by Charles Stross

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A Colder War

a novelette by Charles Stross

Analyst

R oger Jourgensen tilts back in his chair, reading.

He's a fair-haired man, in his mid-thirties: hair razor-cropped, skin pallid

from too much time spent under artificial lights. Spectacles, short-sleeved

white shirt and tie, photographic ID badge on a chain round his neck. He

works in an air-conditioned office with no windows.

The file he is reading frightens him.

Once, when Roger was a young boy, his father took him to an open day at

Nellis AFB, out in the California desert. Sunlight glared brilliantly from

the polished silverplate flanks of the big bombers, sitting in their concrete-

lined dispersal bays behind barriers and blinking radiation monitors. The

brightly coloured streamers flying from their pitot tubes lent them a

strange, almost festive appearance. But they were sleeping nightmares:

once awakened, nobody -- except the flight crew -- could come within a

mile of the nuclear-powered bombers and live.

Looking at the gleaming, bulging pods slung under their wingtip pylons,

Roger had a premature inkling of the fires that waited within, a frigid

terror that echoed the siren wail of the air raid warnings. He'd sucked

nervously on his ice cream and gripped his father's hand tightly while the

band ripped through a cheerful Sousa march, and only forgot his fear

when a flock of Thunderchiefs sliced by overhead and rattled the car

windows for miles around.

He has the same feeling now, as an adult reading this intelligence

assessment, that he had as a child, watching the nuclear powered bombers

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A Colder War - a novelette by Charles Stross

sleeping in their concrete beds.

There's a blurry photograph of a concrete box inside the file, snapped

from above by a high-flying U-2 during the autumn of '61. Three coffin-

shaped lakes, bulking dark and gloomy beneath the arctic sun; a canal

heading west, deep in the Soviet heartland, surrounded by warning

trefoils and armed guards. Deep waters saturated with calcium salts,

concrete coffer-dams lined with gold and lead. A sleeping giant pointed at

NATO, more terrifying than any nuclear weapon.

Project Koschei.

Red Square Redux

Warning

The following briefing film is classified SECRET

GOLD JULY BOOJUM. If you do not have SECRET

GOLD JULY BOOJUM clearance, leave the

auditorium now and report to your unit security

officer for debriefing. Failing to observe this notice

is an imprisonable offense.

You have sixty seconds to comply.

Video clip

Red Square in springtime. The sky overhead is

clear and blue; there's a little wispy cirrus at high

altitude. It forms a brilliant backdrop for flight

after flight of five four-engined bombers that

thunder across the horizon and drop behind the

Kremlin's high walls.

Voice-over

Red Square, the May Day parade, 1962. This is the

first time that the Soviet Union has publicly

displayed weapons classified GOLD JULY BOOJUM.

Here they are:

Video clip

Later in the same day. A seemingly endless stream

of armour and soldiers marches across the square,

turning the air grey with diesel fumes. The trucks

roll in line eight abreast, with soldiers sitting erect

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A Colder War - a novelette by Charles Stross

in the back. Behind them rumble a battalion of T-

56's, their commanders standing at attention in

their cupolas, saluting the stand. Jets race low and

loud overhead, formations of MiG-17 fighters.

Behind the tanks sprawl a formation of four low-

loaders: huge tractors towing low-sling trailers,

their load beds strapped down under olive-drab

tarpaulins. Whatever is under them is uneven, a

bit like a loaf of bread the size of a small house.

The trucks have an escort of jeep-like vehicles on

each side, armed soldiers sitting at attention in

their backs.

There are big five-pointed stars painted in silver on

each tarpaulin, like outlines of stars. Each star is

surrounded by a stylized silver circle; a unit

insignia, perhaps, but not in the standard format

for Red Army units. There's lettering around the

circles, in a strangely stylised script.

Voice-over

These are live servitors under transient control.

The vehicles towing them bear the insignia of the

second Guards Engineering Brigade, a penal

construction unit based in Bokhara and used for

structural engineering assignments relating to

nuclear installations in the Ukraine and Azerbaijan.

This is the first time that any Dresden Agreement

party openly demonstrated ownership of this

technology: in this instance, the conclusion we are

intended to draw is that the sixty-seventh Guard

Engineering Brigade operates four units. Given

existing figures for the Soviet ORBAT we can then

extrapolate a total task strength of two hundred

and eighty eight servitors, if this unit is

unexceptional.

Video clip

Five huge Tu-95 Bear bombers thunder across the

Moscow skies.

Voice-over

This conclusion is questionable. For example, in

1964 a total of two hundred and forty Bear bomber

passes were made over the reviewing stand in

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A Colder War - a novelette by Charles Stross

front of the Lenin mausoleum. However, at that

time technical reconnaissance assets verified that

the Soviet air force has hard stand parking for only

one hundred and sixty of these aircraft, and

estimates of airframe production based on

photographs of the extent of the Tupolev bureau's

works indicate that total production to that date

was between sixty and one hundred and eighty

bombers.

Further analysis of photographic evidence from the

1964 parade suggests that a single group of

twenty aircraft in four formations of five made

repeated passes through the same airspace, the

main arc of their circuit lying outside visual

observation range of Moscow. This gave rise to the

erroneous capacity report of 1964 in which the first

strike delivery capability of the Soviet Union was

over-estimated by as much as three hundred

percent.

We must therefore take anything that they show

us in Red Square with a pinch of salt when

preparing force estimates. Quite possibly these

four servitors are all they've got. Then again, the

actual battalion strength may be considerably

higher.

Still photographic sequence

From very high altitude -- possibly in orbit -- an

eagle's eye view of a remote village in

mountainous country. Small huts huddle together

beneath a craggy outcrop; goats graze nearby.

In the second photograph, something has rolled

through the village leaving a trail of devastation.

The path is quite unlike the trail of damage left by

an artillery bombardment: something roughly four

metres wide has shaved the rocky plateau smooth,

wearing it down as if with a terrible heat. A corner

of a shack leans drunkenly, the other half sliced

away cleanly. White bones gleam faintly in the

track; no vultures descend to stab at the remains.

Voice-over

These images were taken very recently, on

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A Colder War - a novelette by Charles Stross

successive orbital passes of a KH-11 satellite. They

were timed precisely eighty-nine minutes apart.

This village was the home of a noted Mujahedin

leader. Note the similar footprint to the payloads

on the load beds of the trucks seen at the 1962

parade.

These indicators were present, denoting the

presence of servitor units in use by Soviet forces in

Afghanistan: the four metre wide gauge of the

assimilation track. The total molecular breakdown

of organic matter in the track. The speed of

destruction -- the event took less than five

thousand seconds to completion, no survivors were

visible, and the causative agent had already been

uplifted by the time of the second orbital pass.

This, despite the residents of the community being

armed with DShK heavy machine guns, rocket

propelled grenade launchers, and AK-47's. Lastly:

there is no sign of the causative agent even

deviating from its course, but the entire area is

depopulated. Except for excarnated residue there

is no sign of human habitation.

In the presence of such unique indicators, we have

no alternative but to conclude that the Soviet

Union has violated the Dresden Agreement by

deploying GOLD JULY BOOJUM in a combat mode

in the Khyber pass. There are no grounds to

believe that a NATO armoured division would have

fared any better than these mujahedin without

nuclear support ...

Puzzle Palace

R oger isn't a soldier. He's not much of a patriot, either: he signed up with

the CIA after college, in the aftermath of the Church Commission

hearings in the early seventies. The Company was out of the assassination

business, just a bureaucratic engine rolling out National Security

assessments: that's fine by Roger. Only now, five years later, he's no

longer able to roll along, casually disengaged, like a car in neutral

bowling down a shallow incline towards his retirement, pension and a

gold watch. He puts the file down on his desk and, with a shaking hand,

pulls an illicit cigarette from the pack he keeps in his drawer. He lights it

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Stross Charles - A Colder War.pdf

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