Pandemonium (29 page)

“I see them!” he said, as he limped over.

“Wow!” Sasha said. “Are those
hendros
?”

“Yeah, Sasha!” Geoffrey said. “The good guys. There’s Hender!”

“Kuzu, too,” Nell said.

“Unbelievable!”

She switched on the microphone inside the train station and turned up the sound on the monitor. They heard a snippet of English:
“… train tunnel.”

“Can we talk to them, Sasha?”

“There’s no intercom to the train station.”

Nell looked at Geoffrey urgently. “I have to get to them.”

“You’re not going,” he said.

“Can you walk that far?”

Geoffrey knew she was right.

“It’s now or never,” she said. “You know I have to.”

“Then we should go with you,” Sasha said. “I told you, the tunnel’s haunted, Nell. It’s loaded with ghosts!”

“I’ll go with you,” Geoffrey said. “I can make a splint or something.”

“There’s no time. And it’s just as important that you stay here, with Sasha,” she said. “You have to watch the security cameras. There’s a camera at the end of Stalin’s escape route over his private train platform, right, Sasha?”

“Yes.” Sasha nodded. “Papa put a camera there. But what about the ghosts?” She grabbed Nell’s hand.

Nell called up the camera view on the monitor. “There it is. OK. They have to pass that way.”

“Nell, it’s crazy, damn it!” Geoffrey frowned.

“Keep watch from here. I’ll come back to get you. If they got in, they can get us out, Geoffrey! But that hatch is probably locked from the inside like all the rest. Somebody has to let them in.”

“It’s true,” said Sasha sadly.

Geoffrey shook his head.

“There’s no choice!” Nell said. She grabbed the jug of repellent and started splashing it over herself. “Help me. Please.”

07:34:02

Downstairs, Geoffrey doused Nell with the jug of repellent he had brought from the lab one last time. She taped a flashlight to the muzzle of the machine gun. The weapon still seemed to have a lot of ammunition. “Sweetheart,” he said, his throat tightening. “You better come back.” He hugged her and squeezed her to him.

“I know,” she whispered. “Take care of Sasha.” Then she kissed Sasha. “Take care of Geoffrey.”

“OK. He needs a lot of help! You smell funny.”

Nell and Geoffrey twisted the hatch wheel and opened the door to Stalin’s secret passage, which headed due south. She kissed him hard before she pulled away and shone her Maglite down the barrel-arched corridor stretching downhill in front of her.

“Go fast!” Sasha called.

“I will,” she promised, and she started running, disappearing into the gloom.

Geoffrey pushed the door closed behind her. “Come on, Sasha,” he said. “Let’s go upstairs and help her from the computer, if we can.” He limped toward the spiral stairs as a school of pink bullet-squids rocketed past the underwater window.

Sasha darted ahead of him and pulled on his arm as he lumbered up behind her in agony. “Oh, forget it! I’m running upstairs to check on Nell!”

“Great.” Geoffrey winced as he grunted in pain each time he pushed off his foot.

07:20:18

The insertion team jogged west over the train yard. The Big Dog trotted beside them, and both Talon robot ROVs rolled fifteen yards ahead, shining their floodlights and transmitting video feeds. The dog whistles around their necks enabled Abrams, Dima, and alpha dog Jackson to control the ROVs as they moved forward into the wall of blackness.

“Let’s go a klick down this rail line and set the explosives,” Ferrell said.

“Sounds good,” Abrams said.

“Look for a door in the north wall,” Nastia said. “Stalin may have had a private connection to the train somewhere along this line.”

“That would be nice,” Bear said.

“I think you may be right,” Galia said. “It would have been to a direct line out of here.”

“Keep an eye out for it,” Ferrell said.

“Yeah, we’ll need some other way into the city or this will be a short mission,” Jackson said.

“Stalin planned to build a ten-kilometer tunnel under the Nevelsky Strait to connect mainland Russia to Sakhalin Island,” Nastia said, chattering anxiously as they crossed the train yard.

“Yeah?” said Abrams. He was willing to hear anyone other than by-the-book Ferrell right now.

“Yes,” Nastia said. “Twenty-seven thousand prisoners were sent into the tunnel, but they were too ill-equipped to complete it after thousands of men died trying. Only when Stalin died was the project abandoned, halfway under the Nevelsky Strait.”

“What nice stories you tell,” Dima said with a laugh as he glanced at her.

She shrugged. “They’re my specialty.”

The train yard narrowed to one wide-gauge track and one narrow-gauge track that dipped downhill into a tunnel. The white ceiling was arched with a lining of dingy tiles. Abrams sent Talon-1 about thirty yards ahead and Talon-2 on the other side of the tracks some distance behind them with its night vision camera aimed backwards. They all monitored the rear bot’s display on the visor of their helmet as they moved steadily deeper into the tunnel.

“In 1947,” Nastia continued, if only to fill the senseless void, “Stalin ordered work on the Death Railway of Abkhazia in northern Siberia. It started and ended in the middle of nowhere and cost forty million rubles. It also cost the slave labor of three hundred fifty thousand, and the lives of at least a hundred thousand more. It was never intended to be used. It was built to kill the men who built it. It stretches six hundred kilometers through frozen tundra and forests and can be reached only by helicopter. But that is nothing compared to the White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal, or the gold mines of Kolyma.…”

“OK,” Bear said. “Enough.”

“Yeah, you’re freaking me out now,” Andy agreed.

“Sorry. Someone else talk, then,” she said. “Please!”

“How about some silence?” Abrams suggested.

“That’ll freak me out more,” Andy said.

“Me, too,” Hender said.

They pushed on in uncomfortable silence as nobody could think of anything to say. They hurried due west inside a bubble of light as the tunnel felt like an esophagus swallowing them. The hiss of Abrams’s exosuit, the whizz of the ROV motors, and the buzz of the Big Dog’s servos were magnified inside the tunnel.

Kuzu nudged Hender with an elbow, turning an eye toward him as they each glided on four legs over the ground beside the humans.
“Watch them closely, Shenuday,”
he said softly in his own language.

As they pressed into a seemingly endless darkness, the ROV in front of them carved away the stubborn shadow with its headlights.

“How about another gulag story, Nastia?” Jackson cracked.

“Stay focused, people!” Ferrell snapped. “Let’s not get sloppy.”

“No worries, Capitan,” Abrams drawled.

Nastia noticed a large cement block to the right of the tracks. Above it was a steel hatch in the tunnel wall. “There.” She pointed. “I told you! That door isn’t in the city plan. That must be it!”

“Yes.” Galia nodded. “I think you’re right.…”

“If we could get through that door, would it lead to the palace?” Abrams asked.

“Yes,” Galia said. “Probably.”

Tusya and Dima climbed onto the landing and tried to crank open the dog wheel on the hatch. “No good,” reported Dima.

“Let me try.” Abrams jumped to the top of the landing in the exosuit and gripped the wheel on the door with his bionic arms. The pneumatic muscles quaked as he wheeled the crank, but he couldn’t budge the wheel. “No way. It’s jammed solid.”

“It probably opens only from the inside,” Galia said. “Most of the gates that lead to the palace lock from the inside.”

“We’ll have to try to blow it open or melt through it with incendiaries,” Jackson said.

“That’ll be a hell of a job,” Tusya said dubiously, glancing at Dima.

“Come on,” Ferrell said. “We’ve got a job to do first.”

“Yes, sir,” Dima said, jumping down from the ledge. Abrams jumped down after him, his heavy suit buzzing as it absorbed the landing.

They moved on another fifty yards up the tunnel.

07:20:09

Sasha and Geoffrey sat at Maxim’s desk as they watched the monitors on the wall. Sasha noticed something on the monitor showing the inside of the train station. “Look!”

One of the heavy blast shields that had been lowered against the window was being pushed inward with erratic thrusts.

Geoffrey switched to the camera over the gate of Sector Seven in front of the station.

A giant rogue spiger leaned against the station’s window. With the trebuchet-like force of a mantis shrimp’s strike, it smashed its spiked arms through the glass, jolting the steel shutters. “Oh, crap,” Geoffrey sighed.

Sasha squealed. “It’s a monster!”

“Yes, sweetie, it is.”

The view inside the station showed one heavy shutter being wedged as two seven-foot spikes levered it open.

07:16:21

Three minutes in, running at full speed, Nell saw the first ghosts gleaming on the roof and walls ahead. Their flesh caught the light of her flashlight like cat’s eyes as she sprinted down the tight corridor, too fast for them to react to her as she passed.

She saw a lot more ahead.

07:16:20

Talon-1’s night vision showed a split in the tunnel on the dog whistle’s screen.

“There’s a fork up ahead,” Ferrell said.

They stopped at the fork where the railroad tracks continued to the right with no tracks heading into the tunnel on the left.

“Which way to Moscow, comrade?” Jackson asked Galia.

Galia shook his head, mildly annoyed. “I’ve never been here before. I know that one tunnel is a dead end, and the other goes on. Only Maxim knows how far it goes. I suspect it goes far enough.”

“OK. We’ve got to check both tunnels,” Jackson said. “And we’ll set charges in both.”

“Right,” Ferrell said. “Let’s go at least a klick down each branch before we set charges. Let’s split up. You guys take the mule and go right. That seems to be the main line. This is probably the dead end. Kuzu, Tusya, and Andy, you come with me. We’ll take Talon-1 with us.” Ferrell took one of the backpacks filled with explosives off the mule, and Talon-1 followed him. “Set the charges to go off in eight hours, then meet back here!”

“OK,” Abrams said. “Let’s leave a transponder here so we can communicate by radio.”

“Yeah,” Jackson said, setting down a cylindrical device that popped antennae out, which rotated as he activated it with a button. There was no way communications could penetrate the solid rock walls down here.

“See you guys.” Nastia waved as they followed Jackson into the tunnel on the right with Hender.

“Bye, Hender,” Andy said.

“Bye, Andy! Bye, Kuzu!” Hender said as they separated.

Kuzu emitted a rumbling bass frequency like a tiger’s purr beside Andy as they headed into the tunnel to the left, following Ferrell and Tusya behind the robot into total darkness.

07:12:12

Nell spotted a ghost peeling off the ceiling ahead. It hung down before her, shimmering light in its glistening flesh. She fired the gun at it, almost deafening herself as the sharp reports echoed down the tunnel.

The ghost dropped before her as another flipped down behind it, also dangling from the ceiling.

She fired again, jumping over the first ghost and stepping on one of its suction cups, which bit into the heel of her shoe with a
crunch
. She pulled her foot out of her shoe and lurched forward as she shot two more bullets into the ghost in front of her, aiming at its amorphous head as she felt two punches hit her back. She twisted around to see two thick ropes sticking to her shirt that had been shot from an octopus behind her.

She fell on her knees before the molluscan predator as its amorphous head dropped down from above and faced her. It reeled in its gooey cables that were wrapped against her right arm, pinning the gun against her chest, and began attaching suction cups to her shoulders. She convulsed in desperation and jammed the glowing hot muzzle of the weapon with her left hand into the slug’s mouth from below, the flashlight illuminating its translucent head. The creature’s entire body recoiled, turning white beneath her, and she pulled out of her shirt, wrenching the gun free as she ran down the tunnel.

Ahead of her at least three more ghosts hung from the ceiling to intercept her. The closest curled its snail-head toward her and she aimed the gun between its large black eyes. She fired only once to conserve bullets and her ears as she ran forward, cursing herself for not wearing a bra. In fact, she should have worn multiple layers to slough off the mollusks’ sticky webs. Now, they could attach to her bare skin.

07:12:10

Hender accompanied the others down what appeared to be the main train tunnel heading west from the underground city. Talon-2 rolled thirty-five yards ahead of them. After about two hundred yards, the grade leveled off and went downhill.

“Dead end!” Dima said, watching the ROV’s camera feed.

The others soon saw the ROV light up a concrete wall ahead. As they approached, they saw a memorial inscribed in the wall. Nastia translated it for them:

MAY THE 109 HEROES OF THE

REVOLUTION WHO DIED HERE

REST IN PEACE.

Jackson smirked. “I hate to think how many
that
translates to in real numbers.”

Nastia chuckled dryly. “You’re catching on.”

“Well, it looks like they did our job for us,” Jackson said.

“Ne gruzís’,”
Dima said.

“Da.”
Nastia nodded.

Abrams radioed the other team: “Hey, guys! We hit a dead end. We’re going to head back. We’ll rendezvous at the fork. Over?”

07:07:23

“Right, thanks,” Ferrell acknowledged, turning off the receiver on his helmet radio. “I guess this is the main line,” he said, glancing at the others. He gestured one hand forward, erratically, Kuzu noted. “We’ll pick a spot half a klick farther down the tunnel to set the charges. Let’s try to find a curve first to shelter us from the blast. All right?” Ferrell looked intently at Kuzu.