When she reached her lab, Valera checked that her equipment hadn’t been tampered with overnight. It wasn’t beyond Zukolev to go snooping when she wasn’t there and try to uncover some piece of information she hadn’t included in her latest official report. Unfortunately for him, he wouldn’t find anything useful if he did. Valera wasn’t stupid. She didn’t keep notes. Everything she did, every experiment she tried, and every discovery she made was locked up in her head. And only a fraction of it made it into her official reports.

The travelling wave amplifier and rake receiver were both exactly as she’d left them. So she fired them up, encoded a test signal, and sent it. There was some slight degradation of individual signals, but the rake receiver easily reconstructed the full message. She encoded another signal, and threw in a couple of random problems of her own. This one came through perfectly. Then, just to be sure, she spent an hour taking the amplifier and the receiver apart and putting them back together again, and sent one more message. When this one was captured without any issues, she leaned back and burst out laughing. Then she stood in front of the portrait of Stalin, looked it square in the eyes, and shouted, ‘The truth is all that’s left!’

She’d really done it. She’d solved the impossible problem, and given herself and Ledjo a way to escape Povenets B.

She ran down the corridor to her research block’s one communal telephone to call Zukolev’s office and deliver the news that would finally free her of him. But before she reached the phone it flew past her, blasted off the wall by a massive shockwave. A split second later she was hurled off her feet, slammed into the floor, and knocked out as the ceiling collapsed on top of her.

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Valera didn’t know how long she was unconscious for, but she came to with her ears ringing and her chest pinned under a huge chunk of plaster. The wall where the phone had hung was in pieces, the wooden beams that had been holding it up exposed and buckled.

She knew only one thing in Povenets B could have caused this much damage. The power plant.

She pulled herself up, causing a loud creak to echo through the wrecked building, and crept backwards, away from the collapsed wall towards the staircase at the opposite end of the corridor. She didn’t look into her lab as she passed it. She knew she’d only see her equipment destroyed and her library in ruins.