Pandemonium (37 page)

“Mollusks, mostly,” Nell said.

“Then why are they
flying
?” she asked.

“They do that here,” Nell said.

“I don’t like mollusks,” Hender grumbled, running ahead of Nell, Nastia, and Galia. Abrams, Bear, and Dima charged in front.

Nastia noticed something coming up behind them in the visor of her helmet. “Nell!”

Nell looked back and saw an aggregator, rippling like a thirty-foot centipede as it chased them. She noticed that every segment of the beast had an eye on each side.

Nastia screamed.

“Shush!”
Nell said, realizing all creatures down here must have acute hearing.

“It’s moving faster than us!” Nastia yelled. Suddenly, she dived under the row of shelves to the right.

“Nastia!” Nell hissed. She dived under after her, rolling to the other side as six segments broke off the aggregator and followed them.

Hender leaped over the shelves.

Alone behind Abrams and Dima now, Galia saw the many-legged animal behind him. “Something’s coming!”

“Shoot it,” Abrams said, ahead of them.

Nastia raced down the next row in a panic, and Nell had a hard time catching up to her. Hender landed ahead of Nell, nearly invisible now as fear triggered his camouflage.

Galia turned and emptied the Glock they had given him into the head of the creature. It fell, revealing the next head, which ate the first. The rest of the aggregator kept charging toward Galia over the other segments, and he threw the empty gun at it and ran.

Nell noticed the pieces of the aggregator reassemble as it chased them, rowing legs like a galley’s oars. She held the machine gun low to pierce as many of its segments as possible and fired. The three segments in the back broke away and scampered under the shelves on each side. “Keep running!”she said, turning and charging after Hender and Nastia.

Suddenly, Galia screamed from the next row as the lead segment of the aggregator detached and grabbed his pant leg in a bear trap of teeth, slashing his calf through the Dragon Skin armor. He stomped his other foot down on the pale white creature, crushing its outer shell as another leaped forward. Dima fired at it, and it fragmented like a pumpkin as Galia limped forward, his right knee surging with agony with each step.

Dima brought up the rear then. “Keep going, old man,” he said. “I can’t carry you if you fall.” He looked behind them and saw with horror the growing train of the aggregator as more segments joined it. Above, a flock of firebombers, colorless now in the light, drifted over them, their pale tentacles glistening in the artificial sun.

In the next row, behind Nell and Nastia, another long aggregator was forming. And the bulbs of drifting firebombers swooped down, seeming to follow the running people.

Nell fired her gun at the glass flasks lining the shelves behind them. As they exploded, showers of shrapnel spread over the path and blasted into the air.

Seeing what she was doing, Dima followed suit, firing at the giant jars behind them and filling the air with flying blades that pierced the flock of firebombers while covering the ground with slicing shards that stopped the rushing aggregators and gammarids in their tracks.

They reached the northern wall of the farm. “Go left!” Nell shouted, and they all turned west toward the hidden door. Galia’s left leg was covered with blood, but the older man hustled to keep up.

They continued laying down a wall of flying glass beside them as they ran, but as they reached the northwest corner, they saw that they could go no farther. A slope of thousands of tons of fallen rock had buried the door.

“We’re screwed,” Bear said.

“What now?” Abrams said.

A squadron of pale spheres trailing pink tentacles drifted through the breach of Pandemonium above, sinking straight for them.

“More firebombers. Take cover,” Nell said. “They drop stinging cells that can paralyze on contact.”

“Where the hell can we go?” Nastia yelled.

“Over here!” cried a voice.

“Nell!” squealed another voice, behind them.

They turned and saw a large open door in the north wall. Geoffrey and Sasha frantically waved at them in the door.

“Oh, awesome!” Abrams said, running in the limping exoskeleton behind Bear. “Come on!”

As they all turned back, Nastia, Nell, and Hender reached the door first. Geoffrey reached out to hug Nell as Hender pushed him away. “No, Geoffrey!”

Sasha ran out the door with Ivan at her side, waving the others in. “Come on!” she yelled.

“Sasha,” cried Galia as he came behind the others, stumbling. “Dear girl! I’m so happy to see you.” As he hobbled toward her, a large firebomber dipped down above him, streaming its tentacles with their payloads of nematocysts. “I told you I would come back,” he cried.

“Who are you?” she asked.

Galia pulled off his helmet, and an uncharacteristic smile broke over his grim face. “I’m Galia, dear!”

“I hate you!” Sasha shouted.

“OK.” Galia smiled. “I love you, little girl.”

Red sparks showered from the tentacles of the sphere, sprinkling over them. Galia saw the firefall and leaped forward, tackling Sasha, and it felt like molten lava was pouring over his neck and head.

“Get
off
me!” she screamed underneath him.

“You’re safe,
Sashinka
,” Galia whispered. He had landed on his knees and elbows, but now he collapsed with his full weight on top of her. She convulsed under him and screamed even as Abrams reached down with his robot arm and pulled him off, rolling his limp body aside. His eyes were frozen open. “Let’s go, honey!” Abrams barked.

She sprang up, crying, and ran through the door.

Dima ran to Galia, shooting down a number of spheres, the bullets breaking stalactites off the high ceiling in the distance. Galloping down the slope of broken rock from the cave-in above was a giant soldier gammarid mounted by a fantastic ghost octopus with a dazzling coat of orange thorns that elaborated on the gammy’s design. It raced toward him and sprayed two streamers of goo at them.

“Old man!” Dima shouted, trying to rouse Galia, but then he realized that Galia was dead.

Bear leaped through the door, and Dima jumped after him as a rope of goo caught his ankle. Before they could close the door, Dima was pulled backwards and they saw Galia’s body being reeled in by the other rope. They yanked Dima through and the door cut the goo-rope, preventing Dima from Galia’s fate.

“What happened to him?” Sasha bawled. “What happened to Uncle Galia?”

“He’s gone, sweetie,” Abrams said.

“No!” she screamed.

“Sasha,” Geoffrey said. “We’ve got to go now.”

Hender was amazed to see the human child. He had never actually met one this close. The golden hair and blue eyes of the miniature human beguiled him, and he reached out and touched her head as his own fur blazed golden, with bubbling rings of blue and pink.

Sasha looked up and her face wiped clean with awe. “Hender?” she asked. All children on Earth had seen his image.

“Yes, Sasha. Let’s go, OK?” Hender said.

“OK.” Sasha rose from beside Ivan. “Follow me, Hender!”

The others rushed behind Sasha and Ivan as they headed west. They turned north through a tall, arched corridor. At the end, Sasha opened a door into the hallway between the underwater window and the palace foyer.

Turning left, they emerged in the room with the window on their right, its red velvet curtains open and revealing the aquatic half of Pandemonium.

“That’s the hatch to the secret passage,” Nell said, pointing to the left. “Those stairs lead to the gondola.” She pointed to the spiral stairway in the far right corner.

Hender and Nastia stopped before the dark window in awe. Glowing colors and forms surged in schools and waves before them like abstractions in the dark.

“Most are mollusks and arthropods,” Geoffrey said, leaning on his cane. “All are new species. I’m Geoffrey Binswanger, Nell’s husband.” He reached out and clasped Nastia’s hand.

Nastia took his hand without taking her eyes off the window. “Nell’s husband.” She smiled. “You are a lucky man.”

“I know.” Geoffrey turned on the battery of lights with the switch beside the window, illuminating the lake. “It’s saltwater. We think it must be hundreds of millions of years old.”

Hender cringed.

“Hender doesn’t like saltwater,” Nell said, joining them as the soldiers started breaking out their gear behind them. “Saltwater kills species from Henders Island. It’s why they never left.”

Abrams unbuckled himself from the XOS and started pulling packs off its back as Dima and Bear helped him.

Nastia held out her phone as she recorded video through the window in reverence. “The Urals were formed when Baltica, Siberia, and Kazakhstania smashed together to form the supercontinent Laurasia,” Nastia said. “That a cave system from that time could still exist…”

“I know,” Geoffrey said. “It’s unprecedented.”

“No, not unprecedented,” Nastia corrected. “The Jenolan Caves in Australia are three hundred forty million years old. But it is remarkably rare.”

“Saltwater?” Hender asked.

Nell patted one of his “shoulders” reassuringly.

“Why can you touch Hender and not Geoffrey?” Nastia wondered.

“Yes?” Geoffrey asked. “Why is that?”

“I can control nants,” Hender said. “But Nell can’t.”

“Nell?” Geoffrey gasped.

“I didn’t have any body armor, so Hender gave me his.”

He looked at her, terrified as he noticed the purple sheen of the nants coating her skin. “Are you OK? Is she safe, Hender?”

“Yes,” Hender said.

“I’m OK,” Nell said, shaking her head in amazement.

“That’s good … so you got your symbiants back, Hender?”

“Yes!” Hender said, flushing green and blue with pleasure.

“But why don’t they attack Nell?”

“They think she’s my child,” Hender said. “I’m pregnant, Geoffrey.”

Geoffrey opened his mouth. “Oh! Congratulations.”

“OK,” Hender said.

“Hey,” Abrams said. “Why can’t we unleash hell on those monsters? I mean, if there’s another window upstairs, why couldn’t we just blow it up and open the gates? Then they could duke it out down here.”

“That’s actually not a terrible idea, Abrams,” Geoffrey said. “Using one ecosystem against the other—”

“And if we blow the windows down here, too—” Nell suggested.

“Saltwater!” Geoffrey agreed.

“Brilliant,” Nastia said. “An Augean stables solution.”

“What’s that?” Dima asked.

“The Fifth Labor of Hercules,” Abrams said, impressed. “King Augeas commanded Hercules to clean out his stables, which he knew was impossible, but Hercules diverted two rivers into the stables and got the job done.”

“Right,” Nastia said. “That’s very good.”

“Thanks,” Abrams said. “We have enough explosives. If that lake is big enough, we could flood the whole damned city.”

“It’s big enough,” Geoffrey said.

“It probably wouldn’t drain more than a few feet and still flood Pobedograd,” Nell said. “So long as we plug the drain.”

Abrams nodded. “We’re working on that right now.” He reached up to one of the two snare drum-sized robots strapped onto the rack of the exosuit. He unclipped the ROV and set it on the floor before them on its four legs. “The Dalek combat robot.”

“Do you know how to work it?” Bear asked.

“Jackson said the dog whistle operates all of these, didn’t he?” Dima said.

“Yeah, it’s easy,” Abrams said.

“Can that make it through the tunnel with all those ghosts in there?” Bear asked.

“It can go twenty miles per hour, which may be fast enough to get by them.”

“How can we transmit radio signals to it through solid rock?” Geoffrey questioned, dubious.

“It drops a trail of remote signal relays—it should have, let’s see—” Abrams counted the detachable transponders on board the device. “—five. I should be able to set them to deploy every five hundred yards or so. That should be enough.” Abrams raised his eyebrows at them. “Let’s wake it up!”

He pressed the select button on the dog whistle, scrolled down to
DALEK-1
and pushed
START
. Two rotors popped out of the unit and whirred in different directions, lifting the bot off the floor. It stopped before hitting the ceiling as though repelled by an invisible cushion and then hovered with a loud, high-pitched whine.

“Let’s see if the cameras work!” Dima shouted.

“Yeah, I see you!” Abrams yelled.

“OK, set it down. Maybe we can put a charge on it,” Dima said.

“Not one big enough to seal that tunnel,” Bear said.

“No. But big enough to detonate the charges already set in the tunnel,” Abrams said.

“If they were set,” Bear glanced sideways at Hender.

“Kuzu wouldn’t lie,” Hender said.

“He
did
lie,” Abrams said. “He said one of those octopus-things killed the other guys and then later he said Ferrell did it. One of those was a lie, Hender.”

“He would not lie to me,” Hender said sadly.

“Oh, great,” Bear said. “Kuzu is two moves from checkmating the entire human race, man! How do we know this one isn’t in on it?”

“I’m not Kuzu,” Hender said.

“Presuming he’s not,” Abrams said, “even if they didn’t set the charges, there’s a full pack of sixteen charges in that tunnel. If we can reach it and detonate the Dalek next to it, that should do the trick.”

“Da,”
Dima said. “We have to try!”

“We’ll set a charge on the Dalek to go off in, say, seven minutes,” Abrams said, punching in the number. “That should give me enough time to find the charges in the tunnel and park this thing right there.”

“Sounds good,” Dima said.

“How can you steer it through the tunnel?” Nastia asked.

“Just like a video game.” Abrams pulled the dog whistle from around his neck. “I just point it where I want to go. It’s got wall avoidance sensors built in, so it can’t crash—theoretically.”

“Let’s do it,” Dima said.

“Hoo-ya,” Bear said.

“You guys rig the charges,” Nell said. “I’m going upstairs to check out the gondola.”