Pandemonium

MARCH 31





5:49 P.M. MAXIM TIME

Geoffrey, Nell, and Sasha looked through Hell’s Window together, sitting in chairs in front of the banquet table, which they had turned parallel to the long portal. Each night they all took an hour after dinner to observe the world of Pandemonium, a necessary distraction from the mountain of terror pressing down on them as they waited for help that might never come.

Nell had opened the leather-bound book she had found in Stalin’s desk, ruffling its marbled edges. As she leafed through the pages, penned in Cyrillic script, she thought it might be a journal of some kind, with many illustrations that looked like the animals of Pandemonium. On the inside cover of the antique book she now noticed a name and a date: Tpoxum , 1958. “Geoffrey…”

“Yes?”

“What do you think of this?” She showed him the name in the book. “Could this be … Trofim?…”

“Denisovich … Lysenko?” Geoffrey completed the name as he looked closer and compared the strange letters to the name of the famous Ukrainian agricultural scientist. “You could be right!”

All biologists, especially plant biologists like Nell, knew the story of Trofim Lysenko, who rose in the Soviet Union on his unorthodox theories of acquired inheritance before falling when those ideas proved disastrous for Soviet farming. His star had already dimmed by the late 1950s, Nell remembered. “Maybe Stalin sent him here when he fell out of favor.”

Geoffrey scanned the sketches that recorded fantastic species, some of which they had seen today, each looking like something imagined by Jules Verne. “If it is Lysenko’s journal, then he must have been here.”

“Look at his drawings, Sasha,” Nell marveled. On the first page was a cross-hatched pen-and-ink drawing of an oval window with curtains to either side.

Sasha pointed at the drawing. “That’s this window!”

“Yes,” Nell said.

The book’s pages were filled with sketches of species they had not yet seen or even imagined.

“Wow, honey,” Nell suddenly realized. “Look at all the underwater species he’s cataloged here.”

A fuchsia and orange sphere of six-inch tongues rolled over Hell’s Window above and Sasha shouted. “Hey, you guys! Here comes the sushi wagon!”

They both looked up. “Sushi wagon?” Geoffrey asked.

“It’s a sushi bar on wheels! Everything loves the sushi wagon,” she said. “I was wondering when one would show up. Watch!”

The buoy-sized ball rolled down the window like the sticky toys children throw at walls; and when it reached the bottom of the window, gammarids and even aggregators leaped out of nowhere to tear off the sashimi-like tongues of flesh covering the globe’s surface.

“It’s like a giant Volvox,” said Geoffrey, shifting his bound foot that continued to throb with pain. The large ball rolled along the window’s ledge with its vividly hued tongues. “Maybe it’s a colony of creatures that fuse together into these spheres.” Animals were attacking it from all directions.

“Everything’s ripping off pieces of it. How does it survive?” Nell wondered.

“Don’t worry,” Sasha said. “That’s how the sushi wagon makes babies. Dimitri told me that one out of a hundred pieces of sushi has eggs inside that hatch in the stomachs of the animals that eat them. They turn into new sushi balls and burst out!”

“Wow,” Geoffrey said. “Now that’s bad sushi.”

Nell pointed at a milky slug or flatworm that was the size of a throw rug, which glided over the top edge of the window. She rose and examined its ventral surface as it shimmied over the glass. “I think I’ve seen one of those before.”

Geoffrey noticed there were ten S-ing rows of suction cups extending around the giant flatworm’s head. “I’ve definitely seen one of those before,” he said, and he hobbled to his feet and stood closer to the window. “It’s some kind of land octopus.…”

“It’s a ghost!” Sasha cried, clutching Nell’s arm.

“No,” said Nell.

“Look,” Geoffrey countered, pointing at the suction cups.

“Amphipods and mollusks,” Nell said.

“Both ancient groups of animals,” Geoffrey agreed.

“It makes sense,” Nell said. “They must have been isolated for hundreds of millions of years to diverge this radically.”

“But how could this place have existed so long?” Geoffrey shook his head. “That’s what puzzles me.”

“Henders Island existed longer,” Nell reminded him. “Back to the pre-Cambrian. One tiny fragment that made it through.”

“Dimitri said the Urals are the oldest mountain range on Earth,” Geoffrey recalled as the opalescent creature rippled rows of suction cups like a kaleidoscopic caterpillar moving down the glass. The creature turned, moving parallel with the bottom of the window, and about three feet from the edge, it stopped. Peeling its lower edge from the glass, the ghostly mollusk lifted the right side of its body outward.

“What is it doing?” Nell breathed.

They watched anxiously.

One of the gammies flitted past on the window ledge beneath it and, with shocking quickness, the creature slapped down and pressed the kicking amphipod against the window.

“Whoa!” Nell said.

What happened next was like a diabolical miracle: the amorphous mollusk stretched down over each jerking leg of the pinned gammarid. Suction cups on its underside clamped into each joint of the gammy’s legs with some kind of beaks.

“They have suckers like colossal squids!” Geoffrey exclaimed.

“They’re more like jaws,” Nell whispered.

After each joint of the animal was vised by the suction clamps, the terrestrial octopus moved its head into position and crunched the amphipod’s neck with knifelike blades that sawed through its nerve cord. All at once, the gammy’s legs went limp.

“Dear God,” Geoffrey muttered.

The paralyzed creature’s legs suddenly pointed forward and then backwards across the window, flexing in unison as the mollusk seemed to be testing its control of the animal’s body like a puppeteer.

“What?” Nell gasped, looking at Geoffrey.

The octopus rolled off the glass, now in full possession of its prey, and grabbed hold of the window ledge with the gammarid’s long legs. The flesh of the octopus changed color before their eyes, matching the amphipod’s checkered yellow-orange-and-white pattern.

“Did that just happen?” Nell asked.

Geoffrey nodded. “It’s like some sort of mimic octopus,” he said.

“What’s a mimic octopus?” Sasha asked.

“The mimic octopus,” he explained, “can fake the shape, color, and motions of more than a dozen creatures. It can make itself look and even move like a lionfish, a flounder, a sea snake, a mantis shrimp, and even brittle stars—animals from completely different branches of life. This animal might be some kind of cousin or crazy uncle of the mimic octopus.”

Nell felt a deep, primal fear as she watched the ghoulish animal move the carcass of the gammarid, testing its control. “That thing attached itself to the gammy like an external muscular system!”

Geoffrey nodded. He stared at the creature, remembering what one of them had done to the guard outside the power plant. He didn’t want to tell them what he had seen, and he didn’t want to scare Sasha. “Octopuses are incredibly smart,” he said.

“An octopus predicted the winner of the World Cup!” Sasha said.

“That’s right.” Geoffrey laughed.

“I hate them!” Sasha said, wrinkling her nose.

“There’s a species of fungus that turns ants into zombies,” Nell said as she stared at the ghost octopus moving the gammy’s limbs in jerky motions now, mimicking the other gammies. “The fungus actually makes the ants cut leaves for the fungus to feed on, all through a strange kind of mind control.”

“Really?” Geoffrey asked. He squeezed her hand. “That’s why I married you.”

A group of gammies leaped past the window now, and the ghostly octopus followed them with its gammy body, joining the herd.

“Is it a parasite?” Geoffrey wondered.

“Maybe it hunts gammarids like a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Nell said.

“Does it kill its prey or just ride it like a bicycle while it’s paralyzed?”

“Or does it do both—and trade gammy bodies for new ones when it’s through, like a predatory hermit crab?”

“Maybe it lays eggs inside the gammy?”

“Why?” she asked.

“It could be the only place its offspring won’t get eaten by other gammies, at least until they gestate. Maybe it moves among them while its eggs hatch and eat the gammarid’s insides, and when the offspring are big enough, they come out to catch a ride of their own. It could be something entirely new, honey.”

“Well,” Nell allowed, “most animals on Earth have many parasites that live in and on their bodies. Nearly a thousand species live only inside the human mouth.”

“Yuck!” said Sasha.

“Bacteria, viruses, fungi, and single-celled microbes outnumber cells in the human body by ten to one, and there are ten trillion cells in the human body. We’re all walking ecosystems.”

“But I’ve never seen this kind of relationship before. Yes, each of us is an ecosystem that makes up one superindividual,” agreed Geoffrey. “But have you ever seen a parasite that climbed on board and turned its vegetarian host into a hunting machine?” Geoffrey asked.

“Yes,” Nell said. “We turned horses into hunters and engines of war.”

“Oh.” He nodded. “Right.”

“That’s why you married me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You guys!” Sasha shouted, rolling her eyes. “You make me sick when you do that! Look!”

A giant gammarid the size of a lion scrabbled on six long legs over an outcrop ten yards below the window.

“A soldier gammy!” Geoffrey whispered.

“It’s like the monster in my apartment in New York when I was an undergraduate,” Nell said.

“Huh?” Sasha wondered.

“I killed a roach that big with a butcher knife one night, I swear.”

“Oh, Nell,” Sasha said. “That’s not true!”

The soldier gammarid flexed giant mandibles and was covered with spikes pointing laterally in each direction. It was surrounded by much smaller specimens with smaller mandibles that scrabbled underneath it. Then Geoffrey noticed the rippling muscles on the soldier’s back. “It’s a ghost!”

The possessed gammarid suddenly attacked the smaller amphipods around it with its zombie legs and mandibles, controlled by the mollusk on its back, which fed them into the gammy’s mouth.

“Well, that answers it,” Nell said. “They’re predators that probably lay eggs inside their prey and feed the brood when it hatches inside the exoskeleton.”

“Parasite-predators,” Geoffrey said.

“Parators?” Nell suggested. “Parasites that parrot their prey.”

“Perfect.” Geoffrey nodded.

“You guys like naming things, too!” Sasha said. “I still call them ghosts.”

“That’s actually a really good name, Sasha,” Nell said. “Ghost octopus.” She shuddered. “You were right. This place is haunted.”

With a violent flash of light, they were left in sudden, silent darkness before the glowing creatures of Pandemonium.

Sasha screamed.

“The power went out!” Nell whispered.

Geoffrey looked around, waiting.

After a beat, they heard an engine kick-start and chug somewhere below. The lights came back on, at less than half strength.

“The emergency generator,” Geoffrey said.


6:04 A.M.

Maxim continued to key in passwords Sasha may have used to access the door controls. He could try only five before he was locked out and had to wait half an hour before trying again.

The stuffy dormitory was strewn with empty cans of tuna and pineapple, their subsistence for these last days. They had kept watch through the city’s cameras, surveying the city and the train station for any sign of entry by humans.

Suddenly, the lights went out.

“Chief!” shouted one of his guards.

“They cut off our power,” said Dimitri.

A generator kicked on, throbbing distantly through the floors below, and the lights came back on.

“They’re here,” Maxim said, grimly.


6:05 A.M.

Nastia spoke through her headset to the others inside the noisy helicopter as they approached Mount Kazar.

“Cold War American complexes like Mount Weather and NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain are dwarfed by the projects of the former Soviet Union,” Nastia explained to Ferrell and Jackson, who stood with her behind the cockpit. “Five percent of the population in each republic of the USSR was provided with subsurface accommodations in the event of disaster, though few such facilities were ever finished or adequately supplied.” She fired off factoids nervously as they choppered up the snow-patched slopes.

“Hey, let me guess. Did you write a book about this?” Jackson said.

Nastia turned to him seriously and then laughed. “Yes. It’s called The Underground History of Planet Earth.”

“I’ll be sure to buy it at Barnes and Noble, ma’am.” He winked. “I must say, you’re very pretty for a bookworm. No offense, there, Dima.”

Dima had, in fact, tensed as Jackson flirted with Nastia. He tensed more as Nastia noticed it now.

“You’re very smart for a soldier,” she replied wryly. “No offense.”

“I know,” Jackson replied.

“All right, we’re touching down, folks,” Ferrell announced sharply.

The olive drab CH-47 Chinook set down like a locust on a field beside a knoll on Mount Kazar’s foothills. The government official sitting up front pointed to a hatch that resembled a closed eyelid. A cracked concrete ramp led down to the rusty hatch.

“That’s the entrance you will use to get into the city,” said the Kaziristani official in the helicopter. “We cut off power a few minutes ago.”

“It’s a large elevator,” shouted Galia, “which drops down to the main subway line into the city!”

“Does it work without power?” Abrams asked.

“The cable powering the elevator is still live,” said the official. “We will open this door only once more, if you make it back here before eight hours. After eight hours, we are sealing this exit with concrete. We are taking a chance we don’t want to take right now by leaving this entrance open. You understand? Many are wondering why we are letting you do this. But we need to make sure the train tunnel is sealed. If you are not back in eight hours, you will not be able to get out. Ever.”

“Yes, sir, we understand,” Jackson said. “Just be ready to open it any time before eight hours. Right?”

“Of course. But the clock starts as soon as you go in.”

Jackson pursed his lips and looked at Abrams. “We got it. And also please remember we’re doing you a favor. We’ll seal that tunnel. And you won’t ever have to thank us, whether we make it back or not.”

The Kaziristani heard him. “Yes. And you will still have eight hours. No more. And I promise, whether you make it back or not, I will thank you, if you seal that tunnel.”


6:31 A.M.

The men unloaded their gear from three helicopters onto the foothills of Mount Kazar, which were dusted with yellow and blue wildflowers.

The soldiers inspected and loaded their weapons and stowed additional ammunition, battery packs, and other equipment on the Big Dog, which Jackson now activated outside the mine entrance.

The robot sprang to uncanny life as it balanced on four mammalian legs. The others continued to load parcels onto the robot’s back as it reacted to each payload like a pack mule, shifting its four feet as it absorbed the weight and maintained its balance.

“This thing is freaking me out,” Bear said.

“Isn’t it awesome?” Jackson said.

The Big Dog could, in fact, carry a half-ton payload. It was, for all its futuristic strangeness, part of a long and established lineage of mechanical mules employed by the army since World War II.

Ferrell helped Andy get into his Dragon Skin body armor on the slope of Mount Kazar. Jackson helped the Russians and Galia get zipped up, as well. Abrams snapped himself into armor that resembled a medieval knight crossed with a comic book superhero. He then climbed into the exoskeleton and buckled himself in, rising to eight feet as he walked to the entrance of the mine.

Andy watched him move in the XOS, with effortless grace and balance that reacted precisely to the motions of his own body. Abrams winked at Andy as he ran around in a quick circle on the grass with ease despite the weight of the machine. The robotic muscles made only a whisper of noise inside the hydraulic actuators. He helped load the last heavy boxes of ammo, explosives, and batteries onto the mule, each arm lifting two hundred pounds with only ten pounds of pressure.

“God almighty.” Jackson almost drooled. “That thing rocks.”

The Kaziristani officials looked at each other with wide eyes.

Kuzu pursed his lips, glancing at Hender. “Humans,” he muttered.

Ferrell produced a plastic jug. “This is a synthesized version of a pheromone that Henders animals spray as a warning signal.” Ferrell tipped some onto his hand and rubbed it over himself. “It’s supposed to be a good repellent.” He offered it to Hender and Kuzu, who smelled it and declined.

The others now poured some from the jug and splashed it over their armored bodies.

“All right, everybody. We’ve got eight hours. Let’s not waste any of it. The first stop is the train tunnel. We set our explosives and move on. Hender and Kuzu, if we meet up with any critters down there, don’t be shy about giving us advice on how to fight them. OK?”

“How to fight them?” Kuzu asked, and he seemed to laugh as his crest resonated with a deep snorting sound.

“Kill the big one,” Hender said, “and run.”

They all looked at one another, wondering if Hender was joking.

“They’ll turn on the biggest animal that goes down,” Andy said. “Otherwise, they’ll probably keep attacking.” The scientist tried to breathe calmly in and out through his helmet’s air filter. “Also, keep changing directions, never travel in a straight line, and don’t ever stop.”

“All right. Good advice,” Ferrell said. “Is everyone’s helmet mike working? Everyone can hear each other? Bear?”

“Affirmative.”

“Abrams?”

“Check.”

“Dima?”

“Da.”

“Tusya?”

“Yes.”

“Jackson?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Nastia?”

“What am I doing here?”

“Andy?”

“Yes!”

“Galia?”

“I hear you.”

“Can you hendros hear us?”

“Yes!” they both answered.

“OK. Good. We don’t want the speaker volume to be too loud. Everyone set it on three and turn up the microphone ears to nine,” Ferrell said. “And turn your rearview display on.”

“Yeah, we definitely need to know what’s coming at us from both directions,” Andy said. “Many Henders species have two brains and two sets of eyes.”

“I can’t process that much data very effectively,” Abrams said. “I’ve only got one brain.”

“Together we have a lot of brains. Shout out if you see anything approaching according to the hands on a clock. Six o’clock for something behind us, twelve o’clock for something in front. Everyone put the rearview on your visor display now. Let’s open the door!” said Ferrell.

Men stood ready with flamethrowers as the Kaziristanis tried to crank the huge wheel on the hatch, but it was stuck.

“Move aside,” Abrams said as he gripped the wheel with two metal hands and easily turned the dog wheel in a steady squeaking rotation “hand” over “hand.” Then he pulled open the wide door that was big enough for a semi truck to drive through.

Inside, the light of the headless mule revealed a tunnel to another door.

“A double hatch,” Jackson said.

“They were afraid of radiation,” Galia said.

“These doors are probably lead-lined,” said Nastia.

“Yes,” Galia said.

“Good,” Ferrell said. “Come on.”

The mechanical mule followed Jackson in, and the others followed. The men outside shut the door behind them and cranked the wheel closed.

Ferrell instructed everyone to start the stopwatch function on their watches at eight hours. They counted down together, and on his mark the seconds began dissolving the zeros.

07:59:58

Abrams slid open the second door, which opened to a huge elevator. They filed in and Galia pointed out the actuator. Ferrell depressed the switch, and the lift sank into the earth.

07:58:02

They reached the bottom and pushed open the wide doors. They found themselves in a barrel-vaulted subway tunnel running north, according to their wrist compasses, which were the only global positioning devices they would have from now on. They turned left and proceeded north down the tunnel.

After a quarter mile they came to a bronze plaque on the wall that Nastia translated with a dry flourish:

ALL HAIL OUR VALOROUS 1,609 FALLEN COMRADES WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES TO THE GLORIOUS SOVIET STATE TO BUILD THIS CITY UNDER ORDER OF PREMIER JOSEPH STALIN.

“That’s a lie,” Nastia said. “Seventy thousand men died constructing this city, at least.”

Hender was amazed.

Kuzu silently scanned everything around them in the dark as they walked, an arrow nocked in his three-handed bow.

“According to official records, the city was abandoned when Stalin died,” Nastia said, glancing at Dima and Kuzu.

“The locals believe the workers left because they struck Hell,” Galia said. “They believe the ghosts of the men who died here still haunt the city.”

“What do you believe?” she asked.

“I have seen worse things than ghosts down here.”

“Do you believe in ghosts, Nastia?” Abrams asked as he gracefully pranced along in the XOS suit next to the subway track.

“No,” said the geologist, looking around as she imagined her grandfather being taken down this tunnel.

“How far are we from the station, Galia?” Ferrell asked.

“It’s not far now. Around the next bend, we should see it.”

As they came around a slight bend, the headlight of the mule illuminated a small building with a pillar-lined platform. In front of the station was an abandoned subway car. Railroad tracks headed west, to their left, disappearing into a lightless void. To the right of the station was a steel gate large enough for trucks to pass.

“From inside that station, you can see across a river to the city,” said Galia.

“All right. Let’s take a look,” said Ferrell.

They climbed onto the marble platform and entered the subway station through a doorless arch, the mule gamely following up the steps behind them, along with their two tank-treaded Talons. Through the reinforced windows, they could see mostly pitch-blackness; but when they turned off the robots’ lights and their flashlights, they could see glowing clouds swarming in the distance, outlining the negative shapes of buildings and a central tower that touched the capacious cavern’s ceiling.

“My God,” Nastia said. “That chamber must be larger than the Big Room in the Carlsbad Caverns of New Mexico, maybe bigger than the Sarawak Chamber in Borneo…”

Hender looked through the window and recognized what he saw across the river. “Very bad.”

“Yeah, what’s that glowing stuff out there?” Jackson said.

“Henders species are equally active at night,” Andy said, recognizing them even from this distance by their color. “And many of them are bioluminescent. Those glowing clouds are swarms.”

“He did it,” muttered Galia.

“Damn,” Abrams said.

Some of the green lights had linked together in spirals like floating nucleotides, twinkling over the black river. “Those long chains are Henders wasps,” Andy said. “They link together when mating.”

“Awesome, they’re mating,” Jackson said.

“Talk about an assembly line,” Abrams said.

“Yeah,” Andy said.

“Very bad,” said Hender.

“Sector Six is breached,” Galia said, and he hunched over in grief. “There were five thousand people living there.”

“God Almighty,” Ferrell muttered.

“Hender, can you get us through there?” Abrams asked.

“No.”

“OK. So what should we do?” Andy said.

“We’ll need to find another route,” Galia said.

A swarm of light that looked like a giant phantom soared over the bridge toward the station.

“This station is sealed, right?” Dima asked.

“Yes,” Galia said. “But we should pull down these shutters.” He pointed at the blast doors hooked against the ceiling. “The shields are lined with lead and should be too heavy for anything to push open when they’re lowered.”

“Get her done, man,” Jackson said.

Since they had the highest reach, the hendros and Abrams reached up. Unfolding their lower legs, the hendros stretched out their arms to unlatch the metal shutters from the ceiling. All three of the steel panels swung down on low-geared hinging mechanisms, booming softly against the window frames.

“There’re no locks on those?” Jackson said.

“They’re very heavy,” Galia said. “Nothing will get through.”

“Let’s go,” Ferrell said. “The first thing we gotta do is seal the tunnel.”

“Stalin often had secret ways to enter and exit,” Nastia said. “There may be a secret passage to the train tunnel from the palace.”

“You are quite right,” Galia said. “There are many secret routes. Nobody knows them all.”

“OK,” Jackson said. “Keep an eye out for one along the way.”

07:35:27

In the dark conservatory, lit only by the luminescent creatures in the window, Nell noticed movement on the monitor that showed the train station in Sector Seven. “Honey!” she yelled.

07:35:28

Geoffrey gazed through the window upstairs at the steel gondola that was caked with rainbow fire like the encrusted hull of a boat. The gondola had a 1950s sleek and rounded shape pointing in both directions. It hung from cables dusted with rainbow fire that were strung over the lake to a towering stalagmite on the jagged island in the lake. No doubt Stalin had planned this as another escape route, but had he carried it to completion? He must have exposed hundreds of people to fatal danger in order to build it. The state of the gondola did not look promising. A large, antique diesel engine on the landing apparently pulled the cable car over the lake. Had Maxim refurbished it? Canisters of fuel stacked in front of it looked new.

Suddenly, he realized Nell was calling him, and Geoffrey hopped down the spiral stairs. Just before the bottom, he slipped, crashing on the floor knee-first. “Ow, f*ck!” he groaned, just as Sasha arrived from downstairs with Ivan.

“Dear, be careful,” Nell said. “Use the cane!”

“Yes,” he agreed, propping himself up with Stalin’s cane.

“Someone’s in Sector Seven!” Nell’s pulse raced as a number of people entered in heavy armor, wearing helmets and carrying weapons. A quadrupedal robot trotted behind the people into the station like a reindeer loaded with packs. The bizarre bot moved with surprising animality though it appeared to lack a head. Then, to her amazement, she saw Hender and Kuzu enter the frame of the screen. “Honey!” she yelled.

“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.”