She had wasted her first year in Povenets B chasing theoretical dead ends. Eventually, she had realised she needed help and, with none on offer, she’d created her own. She started talking to the painting. It helped her externalise her thoughts, consider fresh perspectives, vent her frustrations. The painting never talked back. It didn’t need to. It just needed to listen. Until one day, when Valera felt like she was lost and trapped at the same time. She had looked into Stalin’s eyes and heard in her mind, in a voice that wasn’t quite her father’s but wasn’t quite anyone else’s either, the line from The Sign of the Four.

Protecting standard radio communications from interception was relatively straightforward. By encrypting signals across a broad spectrum of channels, constantly hopping between a preset range of bandwidths, messages could be sent between two locations without being jammed or listened in to. This was how all major militaries, intelligence agencies, and the more private of the world’s global corporations kept their conversations secure and their secrets safe.

Unfortunately, this technique didn’t work when it came to getting anything but the most basic messages from the Earth’s surface to orbit and back again. This was because of the scattering effect of the planet’s atmosphere. No matter how many bandwidths were jumped, messages never pierced the atmospheric barrier. Only the most simple signals that were barely a step up from Morse code could pass through.

Valera had convinced herself that the secret to breaking the barrier lay in unlocking some new, undiscovered realm of physics. It was an arrogant idea, and after months of questioning proofs, exploring half-cooked theories, and drafting calculations that didn’t add up, she’d conceded defeat.

That was the day the portrait on her lab wall started talking to her, and she realised that if the answer wasn’t to be found in creating something new, then it must be in doing something different with what she already had.

She broke down the problem into its simplest form. There was a wall in her way, and she needed something to punch through it. She needed a bigger signal.

Zukolev may have been a skinflint when it came to supplies and equipment, but he had furnished Valera with an impressive library. He fed her a regular supply of papers by other Russian scientists, along with some of the latest research by physicists working in America, Britain, Germany, and Sweden, all clandestinely acquired by the GRU. He always handed them over with great ceremony, as if he himself had risked his life to bring them to her. The first few sets of papers had even been translated for Valera, but the efforts were so poor that she’d ended up just asking for the originals. She still struggled with German, but her Swedish was now passable and her English was almost fluent.