Skyfall

“The radio waves are the same as the radio waves that are all round us now. They're just stronger; more concentrated. Admittedly if you stood in the right spot they could cook you.” His voice left no doubt as to who it was that needed cooking. “But this is a very remote possibility. The receiving antennae are located in extremely remote surroundings, and there are a great number of automatic controls to stop the broadcasting if any emergency should arise.” Patrick looked across the room, over the reporter's head, and saw Nadya standing against the far wall. “You'll have to excuse me, I'm needed over there. Be sure and tell your readers that Britain's power grid is ideally set up to distribute electricity of this kind. Eventually it will supply all the UK's power needs — incidentally getting rid of all the pollution you get through the burning of irreplaceable coal and oil. Thank you.”

He ducked round the microphone and pushed his way through the crowd, reaching out to take two of the tiny glasses of icy vodka from a tray. She turned as he came up. The remembered face with the transparent, ice-blue eyes with the little tilt at their corners, the hair golden as Ukrainian wheat. She was in uniform, a wide leather belt tight about the long jacket, a row of little medals on ribbons pinned over the swell of her breast.

“Nadya…”

“Welcome to the Soviet Union, Major Winter.” She took one of the glasses and raised it, unsmiling.

“Thank you, Major Kalinina.” He drank it down with a single motion and his eyes never left hers. Her fixed expression did not change. “Nadya, after this thing is over I would like to talk to you---”

“There will be many opportunities for conversation, Major, during our official duties.”

“Damn it, Nadya, you know what I mean. I want to explain…”

“I do know what you mean, Major, and no explanations are needed. If you will excuse me.”

Her voice, like her expression, never altered, but when she turned around her skirt swirled out and dropped back to her polished leather boots, swirling faster perhaps than she had intended. Patrick watched her receding back and smiled. She was still a woman. Maybe she hated him but by God she wasn't indifferent to him.

What had it been, just four months since she had left Houston? After those long, long weeks of training on the Prometheus Flight Deck simulator. At first he had felt like all the other Americans in the program, felt angrier if anything because he would have to fly with her as his copilot. Sure, everyone knew that the Russians had women in their space program, Valentina Tereshkova had been the first and others had come after her. But Prometheus was too big a project for anything but the best — and the Soviets had sent a woman. A political publicity ploy, nothing else. Good old USSR, home of female and racial equality, shining example to capitalistic USA where male fascists cracked the whip over women and the darker races. Maybe that had been the idea behind their choosing Nadya, there was no way to tell, but she had done her job and had done it so well that no one had ever found anything to bitch about. She was too good at what she did. From the very first moment they had met in Houston, she had had Patrick on the defensive….

“Ya orchen rad vctretitsas vamy,” Patrick had said.

“How do you do, Major Winter. You have a very good accent and I am sure when we speak Russian during operations that there will be no problem. But wouldn't it be better if we spoke English now?”

Sure, because your English is perfect and I probably sound like an illiterate coal miner from the Caucasus. But he couldn't be sure of this because she quickly added that she had never been in an English-speaking country before and she hoped he and everyone would permit her to talk with native speakers to perfect her knowledge of the language. Feeling like a very native speaker, he had agreed.

The training had been rough but she had hacked it without getting a hair out of place. Like Patrick, she had first trained to fly fighters, then gone on to be a test pilot. Unlike him she had gone back to school for a degree in orbital navigation. She had flown a number of missions on Soyuz and then on Salyut. At times he felt lucky that he had one more space mission than she had — plus the fact that the last stage of Prometheus was an American design. Or he would have been working as copilot for her. She had even been made a major a month before he had. It was enough to give a normally superior male intense feelings of inferiority.