Pandemonium (36 page)

“It stretches a hundred kilometers,” Galia said.

“Wonderful!” Nastia whispered.

“You should see the underwater window in the palace,” Nell said.

“You mean there are stygobites as well as troglobites?” Nastia laughed nervously.

“Hundreds of terrestrial and aquatic species,” Nell said. “Like nothing you’ve ever imagined.”

“OK,” Abrams said. “Is everyone all right? I think my fibula’s broken. I don’t know how that thing did it through this armor, but my calf’s fucked up.”

“Spigers have a trebuchet-like strike, like the mantis shrimp,” Nell said. “A big one could probably shatter that suit like an egg.”

“Glad I didn’t know that till now,” Abrams said.

“Hey, your back’s smoking, Nell!” Dima said.

“Better take that off,” Nastia said. “She was
inside
the spiger’s mouth! You should have seen it.”

Nell’s tunic seemed to be steaming as she pulled it over her head and discarded it. “Wow—must be digestive juices,” she noted. “Thanks.”

“You were
inside
its mouth?” Abrams asked, chuckling. “OK, Rambo. You win.”

“That’s pretty awesome.” Bear nodded.

Dima reached out to shake her hand.

Hender grabbed Dima’s wrist firmly with one of his hands. “No! Nell can’t control the nants. Don’t touch her. OK?”

“Oh, yes.” Dima nodded.
“Spasiba.”

Nastia noticed the purple sheen on Nell’s face and arms, taking a step back.

“How do you feel, Nell?” asked Nastia.

“Like I’m wearing a wetsuit.”

Bear pulled his glove off. “That rat bastard cut my finger off right inside my glove.”

Nastia’s eyes widened as she saw his hand missing his middle finger as Bear pulled his hand out of the bloody glove. She looked at the big man, horrified.

“It’s OK. I’ve got four more.” He grinned, laughing.

“Tape that up, Nastia,” Abrams said, pulling a bag off the XOS suit and fishing out a first aid kit.

“How?” she protested.

“Spray this on his finger.” Abrams handed her a bottle of an antibiotic disinfectant coagulant.

Dima took the bottle from him. “You think she is automatically nurse?” he said.

“I think anybody not doing anything is automatically nurse,” Abrams said. “Whatever. You take care of it, Romeo.”

Dima sprayed the bloody stump of Bear’s finger as the big man gritted his teeth.

Nell noticed Hender’s lower legs and hands were stained blue. “Hender, you’re bleeding.”

“That’s blood?” Abrams asked.

“Yes,” Nell said. “It’s copper-based.”

“You OK, Hender?” Nastia asked.

Hender’s fur was nearly translucent now, faintly projecting what was behind him as it mimicked invisibility. “Yes.” He nodded, bowing his head in exhaustion. The blue bloodstains seemed to fade on Hender’s silvery fur as nants scoured each filament clean.

Outside the bus, rows of stacked shelves holding glass jars and flats of soil stretched north and south from the circular clearing. Nell looked through the skylight at the glowing clouds of hovering shapes drifting through the air. Beams of faint light crisscrossed the cavern’s roof.

“So this is a farm?” Dima asked.

“Yes,” Galia said.

“What do they grow here, mushrooms?” Bear asked.

The sound of scrabbling legs scraped the bus on all sides as dog-sized gammies crawled over the vehicle now.

“Nell!” Nastia pointed at one of the gammarids, which sat in the driver’s chair.

“That one’s dead,” Bear laughed. “We had to kill a few that got in.”

Nastia smirked.

“We should move.” Abrams squirmed as the mass of gammies crowded around the bus. “I don’t like being in the counter of a delicatessen.”

“He’s right,” Bear said. “We better get where we’re going, fast.”

“Nell and Galia—what’s the next move?” Abrams asked. “How the hell are we going to deal with these fricking things now? There’re millions of them out there.”

“There must be a powerful lighting system above us,” Nell said.

“There is,” Galia said. “With the power on, it should light the whole farm.”

She frowned in thought. “Most of these creatures are tuned to very low light.”

“There’s a light switch next to the entrance,” Abrams said. “A huge switch like something out of Frankenstein’s lab.”

Galia nodded. “Yes. I believe that switch does turn on the farm’s lights.”

“So, if we turn it on…” Dima looked at Nell. “What?”

“We will blind many of the species,” Nell said. “At least temporarily.” She looked at the dead gammy sitting in the driver’s seat. Its bullet-riddled body was pale under the cabin lights, its back covered with jutting spikes. Its head was smooth, however, with small, sharp mandibles. “But gammies don’t have eyes.”

“Wow. You’re right,” Bear said.

“I thought they were herbivores,” Nell said, examining the mouthparts. “But apparently they’re omnivores.”

“Hmm.” Abrams looked at the giant bug. “How do they get around without eyes?”

“They’re a lot like army ants, which are also blind,” Nell said. “They must follow scent trails.”

“OK,” Abrams said. “Since light won’t affect them, what can we do?”

“I think I know,” Nell said. “We have one ROV left, don’t we?”

“Yeah, Talon-1 is still with us.” Abrams nodded.

“Good. Bring the dead gammies over here and give me a field knife,” Nell said.

“Why?” Dima asked.

“Some ants use glands to lay down a scent trail—one pheromone acts as a primer and another completes the trail-following scent.” Nell sliced open the gammarid’s abdomen and pulled open the exoskeleton, probing with the knife. Two long sacs of fluid led to a nozzlelike orifice at the point of the abdomen. “Here! These must be the scent glands.” Nell blew away a strand of her hair from her face as she cut around the sacs. “I need a rag, or some cotton. Any in the first aid kit?”

“Yeah.” Abrams gave her a wad of cotton from the kit on board.

“We need to rig something on Talon-1 so it can drag a swab behind it.”

“OK. But I don’t see how we can draw enough of them away to make a difference.”

“Cut that other gammy open, Dima, just like I did,” Nell said, pointing to another of the creatures lying on the floor. “Can I borrow your gloves?” she asked Nastia. “I’m afraid I’ll have to throw them away afterwards, unless you want those things chasing you out there.” Nell winked.

“Here,” said Nastia. “They’re yours.”

01:30:07

“What happened?” Geoffrey asked.

“It caved in, Geoffrey,” Sasha said. “Yesterday.”

“What?” Geoffrey said.

“I had to take Ivan for a walk in the ballroom, instead, yesterday. I didn’t tell you ’cause I didn’t want you and Nell to be scared.”

Geoffrey shook his head.

“Sorry, Geoffrey!”

“It’s OK, Sasha.” He bowed his head, covering his face with both hands.

01:29:57

Inside the dormitory, Kuzu found the humans and Hender on Maxim’s laptop through a security camera: They were inside a large vehicle in a wide clearing. Hender had gotten them somewhere else, somehow. If they made it to the palace, they could reach the train tunnel again through the tunnel Nell had taken and possibly set off the charges. But Kuzu saw that they were trapped now by a multitude of weird animals inside the giant cavern of the farm. He turned to Maxim.
“Where?”
his voice crashed like thunder.
“Tell!”

Deep inside, Maxim had reconstituted a small piece of himself as he began to calculate a way to beat this devil.

01:28:50

“OK, Talon-1 can run backwards. It can lower the swab attached to the barrel by aiming the gun down,” Abrams said. “You wanna drive, Nell? Just look in this screen—it’s just like a video game.”

“Yeah, I’d be happy to,” Nell said. “Let’s open the door and send it out.”

Abrams and Dima guarded the door as Bear opened it. Nell toggled the ROV forward from the lowest step onto the ground. They closed the door as a few small gammarids got in, but the men squashed them under their boots.

Slowly, in fits and starts at first, Nell drove the ROV around the bus. “How do I lower the swab?”

“Here,” Abrams said. “Now?”

“Yes.”

He pointed the gun down, and the yardstick taped to the barrel lowered the saturated wad of cotton to the ground.

They watched as Nell drove the Talon to the other side of the bus and then began steering it in a wide circle around the clearing. The fast-moving amphipods began flowing behind the bot as they picked up the scent of the sternal glands.

When Nell had almost completed the circle, she turned the bot into a gradual spiral, ultimately toward the center of the clearing. The gammies emptied off the bus and came from between the rows on either side to follow the powerful scent the bot was dragging. Each time she came around in a clockwise motion, the gammarids filled in an ever-tightening spiral.

“What are you doing?” Nastia asked.

“They’re taking the bait, all right,” Abrams observed. “That’s the damnedest thing I ever saw! Nice driving, by the way.”

“Thanks,” said Nell, sticking her tongue out as she operated the joystick with her thumb.

Hender was nearly invisible with terror as he stood next to the others in front of the window.

Nell finally reached the center of the clearing with the Talon and shut it down, exhaling a long sigh as her shoulders slumped.

“Awesome job,” Abrams said.

Gammarids north and south continued to emerge from the rows of the farm to join the circle, climbing on top of one another into the vortex and piling into a higher and higher mountain as they reached the dead end at the center the spiral.

“OK! That should keep them occupied,” Nastia said.

“For how long?” Bear asked, incredulous.

“If they’re anything like ants, as long as they live.” Nell said. “When army ants get locked into death circles, they keep on going until they starve.”

“No shit,” Abrams said, laughing as the widening mass of amphipods rotated in front of them, like a glowing galaxy.

“Now what?” Bear asked.

“We turn on the lights and then run to the northwest corner. There’s a secret entrance there, not far from the palace,” said Nell.

“There is?” asked Galia, surprised.

“Sasha showed it to me,” Nell said.

“Right on,” Abrams said, climbing into the XOS suit. “Then what?”

“There may be more ghost octopuses in the tunnel,” Nell said.

“I hate them.” Hender shuddered.

“OK. We’ll take care of them when we get there. We should be able to blast our way through. It’s not far to the palace.”

“Great plan, Nell. Dima, Bear, and I will turn the lights on and be right back,” Abrams said. “When we come back this way, you get out and follow us north between those benches. Got it? Suit up. I’ll go first,” Abrams said.

“No, no,” Dima protested. “Bear and I should go first and fire at whatever we see. You can hold our ammo bag.”

“That’s more like it,” Bear said, unloading the eighty-pound bag from his back.

“All right,” Abrams said, taking the duffel bag of ammo easily on one robotic forearm. “But let’s save some for any ghosts that might be in the tunnel.”

Abrams set the arms to steady-carry the load in front of him and freed his own arms to carry an AK-47. “OK, everyone out of the way, I’m coming through.” Abrams power-walked toward the bus door, his XOS suit dangling bags and equipment and cradling the ammo packs. Bear and Dima pulled the door open and he jumped out ahead of them.

01:26:12

Kuzu watched the humans inside the bus on Maxim’s laptop. He showed the city’s map on the screen of his phone to Maxim. “Where?”

As the creature used a common phone, Maxim realized he was not some hallucination or mythological creature. He realized it must be one of the famous hendropods. How or why it was here was a mystery to him. Maxim shivered and felt the nants that coated his flesh rippling as they shifted. His skin felt pleasantly numb, thick, and somehow impervious. Then his captor touched his chest and in an instant turned his shield into a layer of acid that burned his flesh. Maxim quickly indicated Sector 5 on the map.

“Where they go?”

Maxim pointed to Sector One. “The palace,” he groaned, too readily.

“Why?”

“I don’t know!” Maxim sighed in agony, reaching under the mattress of his bed and grasping the loaded Beretta he had hidden there.

Kuzu looked at him quizzically, then extended a hand, exuding the ameliorating pheromone that prevented the nants from devouring the human’s flesh. The sel decided that the human was not deceiving him. Kuzu looked back at the screen as three of the humans burst out of the vehicle, running toward the camera.

01:25:59

Bear, Dima, and Abrams ran the fifty-yard dash to the gate.

Down the road behind them rushed gammies like Pac-Mans coming out from between the rows of benches and funneling into the road. But they were not nearly so abundant as they had been before.

As Dima reached the switch beside the gate, a horse-sized soldier gammarid charged at him from the right. Abrams fired at the animal. Dima, oblivious, jumped the last two yards as smaller gammarids raced down the wall and crawled over his feet. He grabbed the switch with both hands, pulled it down through squealing corrosion, and slammed it against the wall.

Even the humans were blinded by the sudden swell of light that filled the cavern as the lattice glowed white hot above.

Dima kicked the amphipods off his legs as he bolted behind the others. The creatures that had been following them scattered, trampling one another as they sought shelter from the blazing sunlike heat generated by the lights.

01:24:27

Kuzu saw the humans running toward the bus and noticed Hender and the others bursting out of its door to meet them. They all turned north.

01:23:10

They ran in single file up one of the rows. Each row of growing benches was a pyramid of shelves rising eight feet, many of them holding two-hundred-gallon glass flasks designed for growing algae. Nell looked above at the floating carnival of creatures that were crashing blindly into one another in the blazing light. Some of the buoy-sized man-of-wars rose too close to the crisscrossing beams on the ceiling and burst as they were fried by the heat. Thankfully, at least, the avenue they raced down was clear of gammies at the moment. Nastia looked up, awestruck, as a flock of globular orange butterflies drifted above them, making clicking noises. “What are these things in the air?” she wondered aloud.