Free The zenith angle by Bruce Sterling

surrendering yourself to a deadly enemy . . . Natalya has a holy, abject quality, very feminine . . . It’s as if she absorbs me . . . I’m bewildered by it, it’s a spiritual calamity . . . I used to rage at her, helplessly, confusedly . . . I love her so much that I can’t even drink anymore . . .”
    Kickoff gestured impatiently at the enormous rifle. Wearied by his duty, the Colonel lowered himself to his elbows and obediently gazed through the black rubber-cupped eyepiece. He had seen night-vision goggles before. Alfa troops had them. But never a device like this. This was fantastic. The rifle’s scope opened up the Chechen evening like the eye of an owl. Now Kickoff was growling into the phone at the embittered woman in America. The American’s corporate sponsors had sent Kickoff here with a huge stack of war toys and no language skills. Kickoff had ventured into the wilds of Chechnya with three little toy robot airplanes, six videocameras, a hundred delicate wind gauges, satellite phones, solar panels, a shatterproof military computer in a camouflaged gunmetal case . . . Kickoff bore a stack of cash, and many discreet documents issued by various oligarchs and moguls. Tyumen Oil and ConocoPhilips, LUKoil and ExxonMobil, Sibneft, Halliburton and ChevronTexaco. The signature of Igor Yusufov of the Energy Ministry was much in evidence in Kickoff’s papers. Alexei Kuznetsov, Thomas DeFanti, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. There was even an importation permit signed by no less a man than Vladimir Putin.
    It was not that Kickoff knew these important men personally, or that they would ever need to know him. However, they seemed to feel some need for the services Kickoff provided. When Kickoff declared that was he not a spy, but an American working legally on contract from civilian companies, he was probably telling the truth.
    The Colonel shifted Kickoff’s weapon on its bipod and trailed the eerie scope across the wrecked and glowing landscape. Repeated bombings had reduced the local storage tanks to fragments of riveted steel. Spindly trees, ten years old, grew from the tortured heaps of black tarmac and bad concrete. The hotter surfaces glowed vividly in the scope’s computer lens. It looked uncanny, surgical, as if the veins of the earth had opened and bled.
    Why was such visual poetry restricted to the mundane work of shooting pipeline thieves?
    The Colonel daintily twiddled a diopter. The crescent Moon grew huge in the rifle’s crosshairs, blooming in a square rush of pixels. Now the Moon looked big and cheese-orange, like a rind of fancy pizza from Moscow’s finest Pizza Hut. Machine analysis worked its magic inside the rifle’s optics. The blazing crescent of the Moon toned down, down, and the vast dark plain between the lunar horns emerged in the Colonel’s vision. This was, thought the Colonel with holy awe, the Moon shining gently back at him in light reflected from the Earth.
    A small red glow winked at him within a lunar crater. The Colonel was pleased; the way that red light splashed brought the Moon’s rounded qualities into startling life. A moment later it occurred to the Colonel that there should not be any lights visible on the Moon. There should be no lights on the Moon at all. After all, it was the Moon.
    A second red light splashed and flickered, this time within another crater. The Colonel pulled his eye from the rubber lens cup and stared at the Moon bare-eyed. To his human gaze, the Moon was a small, distant crescent. The red light was far too faint to see with the naked eye . . . But no, this was an infrared scope. He was seeing heat on the Moon, not light.
    His wondering eye sought the rifle yet again. The red spark was playing steadily, frolicking across the Moon’s surface, a shimmer and a glow.
    The Colonel grabbed the phone. “Please tell Kickoff that I just saw something bizarre on the Moon. Volcanoes, I think.”
    “What? I can’t translate that.”
    “Lunar volcanoes! Red eruptions on