Rising

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‘Seatbelts, please’, announced the pilot as BA879N smashed through a plate glass sky. ‘We’ll be landing at Pulkovo in five minutes.’ Professor Tom Hunter felt a rush of anticipation as the plane glided over the Gulf of Finland, cutting across Krasnoe Selo, bearing down on a city that Hitler once decided ‘to level, make uninhabitable, and relieve us of the necessity of having to feed the population through the winter.’

From his window seat, the much-maligned Thomas Hunter, PhD of London squinted at a chequerboard of flooded fields through electrostatic twilight. A vast empty land, the Ulyanka, slashed by railway lines, stretched tight and taught like bowstrings ready to fire. Highways edged by gas pipes, tall residential blocks, and belching chimney stacks tarnished a beautiful Baltic sunset. Sitting targets, he surmised, for the militant sects now harassing the Motherland.

Ears popped as the 747 went into freefall, wings wafting down through air pockets, drifting on water vapour, wheels locking in place with the gratifying grind of hydraulics. Reports of the Great Migration and the Third Chechen War were still fresh in his mind as the lights of the control tower came into view. They hung like a necklace of septic pustules around the tattered Federation flag, luminous orange circles intersected by the insect silhouettes of ground staff running back and forth, shadow people from an Orwellian novel.

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