Pandemonium (26 page)

“Zigzag.” Hender nodded.

Andy clicked to the next image of a strange growth covering what looked like a log. With oddly geometric edges, the lichenlike growth was colored green, orange, yellow, red, purple, and white. “This is Henders clover. It’s not dangerous, but everything eats it and it eats everything. Plus it photosynthesizes and makes oxygen. It uses sulfuric acid to eat through just about anything.”

“Run on green,” Kuzu said. “Better.”

“Huh?” Abrams said.

“It’s better to run on green clover,” Hender agreed. “Purple will melt your feet.”

“Gotcha! Thank you.” Jackson looked at the others.

“Go on,” Bear said grimly.

Andy clicked to the next image: a six-legged beast launching off a thick tail with vertical jaws and giant spiked arms.

“Chërt!”
Dima cursed.

“What the hell is that thing?” Jackson said.

“A spiger,” Tusya chided. “Where have you been, in a cave?”

The others laughed.

“Yes, that’s a spiger,” Andy said. “They grow as big as a pickup truck and can jump thirty-five feet or more and swallow a man whole. I don’t see how they could have gotten live spigers here, but you should see it, just in case. This snapshot was taken by a National Geographic photographer on the machine gun turret of a Humvee in which the famous naturalist Sir Nigel Holscomb rode across Henders Island. The spiger chasing them was roughly the size of the vehicle it’s chasing in the photo.”

“OK, so spigers just kill you,” observed Jackson.

“Yeah,” said Andy. “Pretty much.”

“Looks like a big damn target for an incendiary grenade to me,” Abrams said, throwing a wadded-up Nicorette package at the projected image and hitting the spiger’s mouth dead center.

Kuzu leaned down and whispered into Abrams’s ear chillingly: “You might live, too.”

“OK,” Ferrell said. “What else?”

Andy put the next image up. Curving “tree” trunks bent together like whale ribs along a twisting jungle corridor. “They look like trees,” the biologist said, “but they’re animals. Some of them shoot poisonous bloodsucking darts, others have jaws for bark, and most hang sticky eggs like bait for passing predators.”

“Welcome to the jungle,” Jackson grunted, popping his last square of Nicorette gum.

“What else?” Bear said.

Andy clicked to an image of two flying bugs, one with five wings over ten opposing praying mantis-like claws and a fanged abdomen. “That’s a Henders wasp. They have a brain at both ends, eat with their butts, and inject larvae through a needlelike ovipositor at the same time. Their larvae bore through flesh, seeking out the electrical signals of nerves in order to immobilize their prey with pain.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Bear said.

Andy showed a picture of another buglike species, this one with three wings, three long legs and a drill-bit abdomen. “The drill-worm. Its butt can drill through wood, human flesh, bone, and just about anything else but glass, rock, or steel. Both of these bugs are bioluminescent and highly active, day or night. You don’t want to see either of them without something between you and it.”

“Shit. I’m starting to think we should just set off a dirty bomb down there and call it a day,” said Jackson.

“Me, too,” Dima agreed.

“What is your plan?” Andy asked. “Because this stuff is worse than any WMD. These are weapons of
global
destruction. They’re self-replicating and absolutely lethal to all life on land. If this stuff gets anywhere near us, we’re as good as dead. And if it gets out, it’s the end of the world. Everything on Henders Island evolved to kill in an all-predator ecosystem over hundreds of millions of years. It fights everything that doesn’t kill it first. It never backs down. It always escalates. Not even a mongoose lasted more than a few minutes on Henders Island.”

“Well, we’ve got a few killing machines of our own,” Jackson said, rising.

“Like what?” Nastia said. She looked pale and terrified by Andy’s slideshow.

“Let’s take a look,” Jackson said. “Ferrell, why don’t you give me a hand?”

Ferrell and Jackson pulled up the tarp on which Andy had projected his images and revealed a number of large flats stacked with high-tech equipment.

Jackson tapped each item with reverence through plastic wrapping as he ran down their inventory: “AA-12 fully automatic combat shotguns with detachable thirty-two-round polymer drum magazines, each with a forty-meter range. Based on what we’re hearing, I’m definitely packing one of these puppies. Right here we have a crate of M84 flashbangs, which produce a one-million-candlelight flash and a 180-decibel bang. Yell ‘fire in the hole’ when you throw one and make sure to cover your ears and eyes. Right here we have M7A2 riot-control tear gas grenades and AN-M14 thermite incendiaries that burn at four thousand degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature on the surface of the sun. They burn underwater, too. And these right here are some good old-fashioned M67 fragmentation grenades. Plus an assortment of even nastier stink bombs with assorted internationally banned contents.”

Andy pointed to a humanoid erector set that looked like a collapsed Transformer in the center of the flat. “What’s that?”

“That, my friend, is the latest Sarcos Raytheon XOS Exoskeleton,” Jackson said.

“No shit?” Bear grunted.

Kuzu was distracted by Abrams’s sacrificing his queen as the small, wiry human stood up to get a closer look at the battle gear.

“Who’s going to be the Terminator?” Tusya said.

“I am,” Abrams said. “I’m the reason it’s here, actually. And I’m the only one trained to use it.”

“Well, then, Iron Man, tell us what it can do,” Ferrell said.

“It comes with full body-armor like something out of
Star Wars,
too.” Abrams winked at Kuzu, leaving his queen in danger as he approached the mountain of equipment. “When suited up in this thing, a man can lift two hundred pounds with each arm, punch through brick walls, and run at twelve miles per hour for ninety minutes before changing batteries.
Heh, heh.
It’s more fun than a new Rush album.”

Kuzu took Abrams’s queen.

“Well, well,” Abrams said, bending down to take Kuzu’s knight with a pawn that was now one move from queening.

Kuzu’s fur flushed violet. Abrams had disguised offense inside a seemingly reckless defense, Kuzu noted, learning from him.

“Well, you won’t be the only robot down there,” Jackson said, resting his hand on some cylindrical shapes under the shrink-wrap. “These babies right here are Dalek combat robots, flying Crock-Pots with four landing legs. They can hover or cruise at twenty miles an hour, automatically turn around corners, and feed back reconnaissance. And we’ve got the latest crawling bugs, too. These little knights in shining armor are Talon SWORDS, robot rovers with M249 SAW machine guns, which fire a thousand rounds per minute. They can climb stairs, travel over sand, snow, water, and debris while transmitting video back in color, black-and-white, infrared, or night vision. Best of all, we’ve trained these hounds to heel and follow us wherever we go.” Jackson walked around to the other side of the swaddled flat of equipment. He raised his arm in a flourish. “Last, but not least, we brought the Big Dog.” He patted the plastic-covered shape. “The latest quadrupedal all-terrain cargo robot. Wait’ll you see her.” Jackson lifted what looked like a video game controller hanging from a cord around his neck. “All these bots follow this dog whistle, which also signals commands.”

“I want a dog whistle,” Abrams said.

Dima nodded. “Me, too.”

“All right, that can be arranged,” Jackson said. “But I’m the alpha dog.”

“There’s an alpha dog override function I’ll show you how to use on your own dog whistles,” Ferrell said.

“But only if the alpha dog says it’s OK,” Jackson said.

“Or dies,” Ferrell said.

“That’s good,” Tusya said.

“That brings us to body armor,” Jackson said. “We’ve got the best in the world, Dragon Skin. It’s made of laminated silicon-carbide ceramic and titanium matrices overlapping like dragon scales covered with Kevlar. We all have full suits that cover wrists and necks, with helmets whose exterior microphones transmit sound to the ears and whose radios transmit our voices to each other. Our helmets also have rearview visor display. Since we’ll mostly be communicating with our helmet radios, we have to remember to keep them switched on, folks. We have a large supply of oxygen canisters on hand in case the gas in the cave becomes unbreathable. These species may be more evolved for battle than we are, but we’ve got technology, folks. I guarantee they’ve never come up against what we’re bringing to the fight.”

“We want Russian body armor,” Dima said.

“Kirasa!” Tusya insisted.

“Boys, I know you’re proud of your country,” said Jackson. “And I’ll give you a lot of credit for that. But compared to what we’ve got here, Kirasa armor is crap. No offense.”

Dima spit.

“We’ll do it your way this time,” Tusya said.

Kuzu marveled at the amazing devices the humans had made to compensate for their physical frailty.

“Checkmate, my friend,” said Abrams.

Kuzu looked down. The human had trapped his king with a second queened pawn. The hendro nodded, impressed. “Thank you, Abrams.”

Abrams marked the creature’s dignified defeat warily.

Nastia sat beside Andy. “What are you doing here?” she asked the skinny biologist whose shaggy blond hair and thick glasses marked him as a civilian.

Andy frowned, already asking himself the same thing. “I’m here with the hendros. I’m the first human they ever met. And my friends, Nell and Geoffrey, are trapped inside.”

“I think you’re crazy,” she said.

“What are you doing here?”

She laughed. “I’m an expert in underground Soviet installations. And, also … Well, my grandfather died in this city. Trofim Lysenko sent a letter to my grandmother. He told her he had met my grandfather, who was a mining engineer, inside a great city under a mountain. I think this is the place he was talking about.”

“You’re crazier than I am.”

“You’re probably right.”

“
The
Trofim Lysenko?” Andy asked.

“Yes. He also said that there were monsters inside the city,” Nastia said.

“Like what?”

“Well … he said that my grandfather was attacked by a ghost.”

“Oh,” Andy shrugged. “Ghosts I can handle.”

Kuzu retrieved his bow from below his seat as he examined his weapon.

Bear noticed him and brought his bow over to compare with Kuzu’s, which was a three-armed bow, made to be loaded with a fourth arm. With all his might, Bear could only half bend it. Kuzu was pleased to find that Bear’s arrows could equally work with his bow, and especially pleased when Bear offered him a dozen of the aluminum shafts.

Hender approached Kuzu and spoke to him in his own language.
“Do you still think humans mean us harm?”

Kuzu replied,
“They want to kill off everything else from our world.”

“They? There is no ‘they,’ Kuzu,”
Hender said in a buzzing rebuke.
“Remember? There is only one. And one. And one. No ‘they!’”

Kuzu let loose a long, rumbling laugh, his chest compressing like bagpipes.
“
That
is how you win, Shenuday,”
he said.
“I learn from you.”

“This is not chess, Kuzu,”
Hender said.

“Oh, yes, it is.”

9:11 P.M.

They arrived in the town of Gursk by helicopter, landing on a children’s football field in the pouring rain.

Three waiting cars conveyed them to a small hotel, where they had twenty minutes to deposit their luggage and freshen up. The sels occupied the room adjoining Nastia and Andy’s room. Andy overheard them arguing, in Kuzu’s language mixed with English. They had been given a room together, which was a mistake and one that the small hotel seemed unable to rectify despite Andy’s efforts.

Twenty minutes later, the sels and humans met downstairs in a private dining room, where they were joined by Kaziristani officials and a man who introduced himself as Galia Sokolof. He was the man who would be their guide into the city.

“How could your government allow terrorists to take over this facility?” Andy asked the officials tactlessly.

Galia answered, to the consternation of the Kaziristanis. “The government of Kaziristan sold the city of Pobedograd to Maxim Dragolovich for 380,000 American dollars in the year 2001 in a perfectly legal transaction. He is not a terrorist.”

“We sold salvaging license to company whose stated intent was to scrap city for steel,” snapped one of the officials, butting out his cigarette in an ashtray on the table and shooting a look at Galia.

“I won’t argue,” Galia said, closing his eyes and waving a hand.

“Well, it sounds like a bargain for a whole city,” Andy said.

“It’s not unusual,” Nastia said. “Many of these underground facilities from the Cold War have been sold for bargain basement prices by local authorities. Nobody has much use for them. In Moscow, the underground is so extensive and secret that some people even live there, in places the government does not even know about. An entire subculture of people are devoted to exploring and mapping these places,” she said. “Of course, I am not involved with such individuals.”

“Of course,” said Dima. “That would be illegal.”

The Kaziristani official continued. “There is only one way left into the mine. We have already sealed all other entrances with explosives and concrete, including all the city’s ventilation shafts on Mount Kazar.”

“Are you sure?” Andy asked.

“We are sure. And we were going to seal off the last entrance, too, before we got word that we must let your team in. We will do so, but with these conditions: You are to set timed explosives in the train tunnel heading west from the city. No one seems to know how far that tunnel goes. And you will have eight hours from the time you enter to complete your mission before we seal the entrance. Is that understood?”

The Russians looked at one another across the table and the Americans looked at one another, as well.