Significant Figures
March 5, 2026
They had sent him to the Siberia office.
Not literally. But Agent Volnyk’s temporary reassignment was almost certainly a permanent demotion for an “appalling lapse of judgment.”
He sat in the cold interior of his state-issued car, wiped the fog from the windscreen, and watched his assignment through her apartment window. Comrade Svetlova was an electrical engineer, and a woman of routine, not ambition. Volnyk knew nothing about engineering, but every career eventually ends in politics and securing the favor of the State. Instead, the old woman spent day after day hunched over a tiny desk in a tiny lab on campus doing … engineering, Volnyk supposed, while spending nights tinkering with her gadgets in her apartment. What a waste of a career. For both of them: He could have been escorting dignitaries or uncovering Western espionage. Instead, like a pervert, he watched a tiny woman prepare for bed.
He finished his daily report and glanced up, expecting darkness.
She stood at the window, silhouetted against bright yellow wallpaper, one hand clutching at her curtain.
Staring at him.
He sat in the midnight shadow; her room was blazing. There was no way she could see him.
But she could see him.
When the light finally flicked off, Volnyk exhaled.
---
The KGB hadn’t even issued Volnyk a gun. Instead, they had generously given him a printer: a one-way handheld device that frequently vomited unhelpful and confusing orders on a timer. Just as he was getting ready to brace the frigid night, his printer buzzed and snipped a tiny slip of paper into the passenger seat. It read, “Alignment required.”
He muttered, “I know.”
Volnyk slipped out of his car and hurried across the road to a dark alley, watching over his shoulder in case someone was following him. If there was ever proof that his posting was meaningless, it was the stack of daily reports in the locked box, uncollected and growing damp.
When he returned to his car, he spied a short figure trudging through the snow toward the bus stop.
---
Svetlova worked in a lab on the campus, overlooked by the radio telescope. The Vostok Observatory was the pride of the Soviet Union and proof of its engineering and technical accomplishments. As far as Volnyk knew, the entire campus supported the observatory.
Agent Volnyk parked in the lot and followed Comrade Svetlova, keeping to the shadows. The campus buildings were dark. Faint street lamps illuminated the narrow spaces between them. Svetlova kept glancing over her shoulder, switching directions, doubling back through a maze of stone walkways. Volnyk matched her pace at a distance.
She turned a corner.
Volnyk followed only seconds behind—and skidded to a stop. The lane beyond was empty.
Panic gripped him. To lose another assignment like this …
Maybe Comrade Svetlova was doubling back to her lab. Or, if she was engaged in espionage, then her meeting place could be anywhere on campus. The local party official might know. Or maybe—
He felt the hairs on his neck stand on end. He turned around.
The Vostok loomed over him like a judge. Its hundred-meter-wide dish cut a dark black ellipse out of the night sky, illuminated only by a dozen blinking red lights around the rim. It tended to make people a little odd.
Comrade Svetlova wasn’t cleared for the Observatory.
But that was where she’d be.
---
The only entrance to the observatory was a service door locked with a glowing yellow keypad. Volnyk also lacked clearance for the Observatory.
But just as he considered looking for some sort of pry bar, his printer buzzed. A slip fell into his waiting palm, a string of twelve digits.
The code unlocked the service door.
He gawked at the printer.
---
The inside of the observatory was mostly empty space, with a metal skeleton supporting the aiming mechanism in the middle. It felt like trespassing in a mausoleum. Every step Volnyk took echoed through the hollow shell. His heart was beating loud enough that Svetlova could probably hear it, wherever she was. He groped around in the dark, listening for breathing, or footsteps, or the sounds of a desperate engineer sneaking up behind a clueless agent and—
Instead, Volnyk heard the roar of a diesel engine coming to life, and a screech of metal on metal. The floor rumbled, and dust trickled down from the ceiling.
The observatory was moving.
Across the chamber, a staircase led upward. Forget caution. He sprinted as the structure groaned around him. At the top: the control room.
He burst through the door and met Comrade Svetlova face to face.
Up close, she looked alien—eyes wide, teeth bared, scrambling back against a control panel. Above her, a bank of glowing nixie tubes, showing a list of twelve digits.
The same twelve digits as his code.
He lurched forward and shoved her out of the way.
“It’s too late!” she shouted. “You can’t stop it!”
Volnyk started punching controls at random. “How do I shut it down? Are you transmitting?”
“It’s a radio telescope, you fool. It’s a receiver!”
“Receiving what? Are you working for the Americans?”
She laughed, wild and sharp, and raised her hand.
A gun?
No. One of her gadgets. Another printer.
The control on the wall beeped.
Both devices buzzed and spat identical slips into their owners’ palms.
Like mirror images, Volnyk and Svetlova each read their slip.
They said, simply, “Kill the traitor.”