Pandemonium (39 page)

“Why did he have to kill them, Nell?” Hender asked.

“To save the people he loves.”

“I see, Nell,” Hender said with a low, faint voice.

They crossed the courtyard to the gate, and Nell reached out to the touch screen control panel on the left side. Glancing at Hender, she cued the gate open a few feet and then stopped it.

Kuzu and Maxim entered, along with a gust of Henders creatures that streaked through before Nell could close the gate.

The flying bugs, ants, and rats that got through immediately homed in on the rotting corpses, tearing and drilling into their flesh.

Kuzu stood in front of the gate, and Maxim, seeming small beside the purple and red sel now, crouched meekly at his side.

01:00:42

Dima righted the Dalek and tilted the controls with exaggerated motions to point it forward as he drove the flying bot at increasing speed before the driving spiger. He reached the fork as he saw the glowing form behind him grow closer in thirty-foot lunges. He took the left tunnel at the fork and pushed the bot forward as fast as it could go, while the spiger loomed huge in the image-stabilized rear view display.

Nastia gripped his arm. “It’s going to catch you!”

“How much time is left on the timer on that window?”

Nastia ran to the window and looked at the red digital readout. “Two minutes and forty-five seconds!”

“Go upstairs!”

“Will you make it?”

“Go!”

“No!”

00:58:51

“Come now,
Shenuday
!” Kuzu said.

“You can escape with us, Kuzu,” Hender said. “We can live with humans. They can live with us!”

“Now you lie, just like them!”

“There are good humans and bad humans! Kuzu!” Hender said. “Just like us.”

“Come!” Kuzu’s voice gunned like an engine, resonating in the courtyard. “This whole world can be ours. You must see it!”

“They saved our lives,” Hender said. “I love them, Kuzu.”

“Love humans?” Kuzu spit. “You make me sick!”

“There is no ‘sels’ or ‘humans,’ Kuzu.” Hender said. “There is only one and one and one. Don’t you remember? How we survived?”

“Remember, yes. I remember your kind never believed. That is why we almost died.” Kuzu trained both his trinocular eyes on Hender:
“Die then!”

Hender turned to Nell. “Run!”

Kuzu turned to open the gate, and Hender leaped onto the larger sel’s back. Gripping all his limbs with his six hands, Hender tried only to thwart and neutralize his fellow sel as long as he could.

Meanwhile, Maxim stared at them, almost in a trance. Kuzu reached back with his upper arms, twisting Hender’s head as he tried to bite into Hender’s stretching neck.

Hender fended off his jaws with a hand that lost two fingers as Kuzu’s jaws clamped closed.

00:54:58

Dima waved the dog whistle through the air as the spiger snapped its jaws just to the left of the Dalek.

“Good!” Nastia cried, clutching his arm.

Dima looped the bot across the arching ceiling to the other side, thirty-five seconds from detonation.

He could not yet see the charges the men had set in the tunnel ahead stretching uphill into the endless gloom. As he rolled the bot in another spiral, the spiger leaped again, gaining another ten feet. The next leap would be enough, and he dodged to the right at the last second and then saw the charges wired across the tunnel’s ceiling. He killed the power and dropped the ROV just as the vertical jaws of the spiger swallowed the Dalek, and the signal went dead.

Dima stood frozen in dread.

“What happened?” Nastia said. “It didn’t work.”

Dima bowed his head, muttering a prayer.

A shock wave rumbled through the ground as the secondary explosion confirmed the target was destroyed. Wiping the sweat from his forehead, Dima turned and squeezed Nastia in a crushing embrace. “We did it!”

He carried her toward the spiral stairs with twenty seconds to spare before the charges on the submerged window ignited and saltwater washed around them.

00:54:01

An explosion rumbled in the bowels of Pobedograd.

Kuzu overpowered Hender, driving him into the ground on his belly. His four hands bunched into a single fist to bring down on Hender’s head.

Maxim moved closer as they struggled. As Kuzu pummeled Hender’s horn with glancing blows, Maxim pulled out his gun. With shaking hands, he pressed the muzzle against Kuzu’s body, and he fired three bullets into the beast that had possessed him.

Kuzu twisted as he looked at Maxim, flushing yellow and red as blue blood spurted across his fur.
“No!”
he roared. He grabbed Maxim’s hand. “I told you, you would be safe with me!”

“
Go to
hell!”
Maxim roared at the monster, condemning himself at the same time. And he knew that he had, in that moment, saved himself, too, somehow.

Another explosion reverberated.

Reeling from his wounds, Kuzu gripped Maxim, and the nants now turned. Maxim’s skin burned as his entire body was covered in blood. He screamed as the bones on his wrists appeared before his eyes. With a last effort, he squeezed the gun in his right hand three more times, firing the bullets into Kuzu before they collapsed together on the cobblestones of the courtyard.

Hender ran to Nell, who had waited on the steps for him. Another terrible explosion rolled through the ground beneath them, sending stalactite spears down from the ceiling.

Kuzu crawled toward the gate as he coughed blue blood. And lying on his side, he reached out with one long arm and touched the control panel, opening the gate wide.

A flood of Henders creatures stormed into the courtyard as water swept down the steps of the palace.

“Climb on my back,” Nell said, and Hender jumped on as the wave of water flowed around Nell’s legs. She carried Hender, who was much lighter than she’d expected, to the foyer and onto the staircase on the left, where Hender jumped off and both rushed up the steps. Two spigers and a column of rats raced behind them, skirting the saltwater pouring into the foyer from the left and lunging up the staircase opposite them. Nell and Hender reached the top first and ran straight back to the open hatch of the conservatory as a riot of gammies gushed out.

Hender grabbed Nell then and leaped through the hatch into the conservatory, reaching out two long arms and grabbing onto the chandelier. He swung to the next one with his long unfolding arms, past the shattered window as the creatures of Pandemonium stormed over the floor below them led by a giant soldier gammarid ridden by a ghost octopus that sprayed its sticky ropes at the spiger charging straight for it.

As the monsters locked in mortal combat, Hender and Nell reached the glass vestibule of the spiral staircase at the far corner. And as all hell broke loose around them, they hurtled up the stairs.

00:52:45

As the vast lake of Pandemonium drained into the palace, roaring down the passageway to the railroad tunnel and flooding through the gate into Sector Two, the burning water came up to Kuzu’s chest like acid. He saw a giant gammarid come down the stairs of the palace and spew its webs over the spiked arms of a leaping spiger. Then Kuzu saw the green glow of Henders wasps and drill-worms colliding with swarms of glowing orange orbs and tentacled balls in the air. For a moment, Kuzu was gratified, for he thought surely his world would prevail. And then, to his surprise, Kuzu died.

00:52:02

Nell and Hender reached the gondola station, and looking through the window, they saw the others already inside the swaying tram car as Abrams poured a last drum of fuel into the engine’s intake. Abrams waved them in.

Four or five gammarids skittered through the crack as Nell opened the door. Hender jumped, but instinctively reached out with four hands, swatting the squat, spiky creatures to the ground.

Nell turned the battery of bright lights on and off rapidly on the gondola deck. “Come on!”

They leaped through the hatch and crossed the momentarily cleared landing. The others opened the gondola’s door quickly to let them in. Below the gondola’s landing, they saw a great migration as creatures were funneling through the shattered window below.

Abrams, still on top of the gondola’s engine, hooked the battery cables to his last XOS battery and depressed the ignition plunger on the side. He primed, choked, and gunned the great engine until it finally turned over, coughing but running and then clearing its throat like a dragon before roaring to life. The heavy diesel motor had been well designed to run after sitting dormant. Slamming the hood, Abrams jumped down, unstrapped the XOS suit, and ran to the lever that engaged the bull wheel. “Here goes!” he muttered, throwing the latch.

The gondola moved out over the lake as he ran and jumped through the door as they closed it behind him.

The dangling tram glided down the cable into Pandemonium.

00:51:24

They silently watched the diaphanous apparitions and phantoms glimmering in the dark around them, praying that the tenuous thread from which they hung would not give way. They heard a cacophony of clicking sounds as sonar-sensing creatures avoided colliding with the gondola. Below they could see two fonts of air bubbles roiling the lake near the shore where water swirled down into the underwater breaches.

Abrams sat down on the bench that circled the tram’s interior, breathing heavily as he slumped in his stiff suit and petted Ivan. He cracked open the armor over his leg. His calf was swollen and bruised.

“How are you?” Dima asked.

“Hell, Jack Youngblood played the Super Bowl with a broken leg.” Abrams grinned and snapped the armor back on. “How much time before our eight hours is up and they drop a nuke in this place?”

Bear looked at his watch. “About fifty minutes.”

“It’s like fireworks out there,” Nastia observed.

“Yeah,” Geoffrey said. “Those floating jellyfish shower bioluminescence over the man-of-wars.”

“Why?” Nastia asked.

“Maybe to attract larger predators,” he said. “Deep-sea organisms do the same thing to turn the table on their enemies.”

“Ah!” Nastia gripped the holds on the gondola with white-knuckled hands, shivering.

Dima put his arm around her shoulders.

Abrams looked out of the window behind them. “So far, so good,” he said.

Nastia noticed a large, glowing sea serpent swimming on the lake below. It broke into pieces that attacked a large squidlike creature illuminated by blue and green sparkles of light.

“Aggregators,” Nell said. “They swim, too.”

“Oh! They’re dreadful! What are those huge eight-pointed stars?” Nastia asked, pointing at a shape under the water that opened like a giant water lily.

“A mega-medusae,” Nell said. “Here.” She handed Nastia a leather-bound book from her pack. “Trofim Lysenko’s journal. Why don’t you take it? He describes dozens of Pandemonium species.”

Nastia took the book. “Thank you! So he
was
here! Does he mention my grandfather? Boris Kurolesov?”

Nell smiled. “I don’t know. We can’t read it.”

Nastia held it to her breast and sighed. She looked excitedly back out the window. “What are mega-medusae?”

“They live on the bottom of the lake,” Geoffrey said.

“We think it’s a medusa that is devoted to producing several kinds of offspring, some of which attack predators lured by the chum it releases from time to time. Her children sting and paralyze meals for her, which sink into her maw,” Nell said.

“Nell spotted one that must be thirty-five feet wide,” Geoffrey said.

“Incredible!” whispered Nastia, videoing as much as she could now with her phone as the gondola reached its lowest point over the lake and began climbing higher.

Hender looked with wide eyes in all directions, holding on to the gondola with all six hands. The idea of dangling over saltwater was terrifying enough without the water being filled with horrible monsters.

“What’s that stuff glowing on the ceiling?” Abrams said.

The entire roof and walls of the cavern, as well as patches on the surface of the lake, glimmered emerald, turquoise, crimson, and green.

“Rainbowfire,” Nastia said. “Right, Nell?”

“Yes,” Nell said. “We think it’s related to foxfire, a glowing fungus that grows on rotting wood in forests. Otherwise known as will-o’-the-wisp or fairy fire. The glow is caused by an oxidizing reaction of luciferase with luciferin that emits light.”

“Aristotle was first to describe it, I think,” Nastia said, using her night vision glasses to scan the growth that seemed to burn like embers all over the cavern walls. “In Mark Twain’s book
Huckleberry Finn,
Huck and Tom use foxfire to light their way while digging a tunnel.” She smiled.

“It seems to be the base of the food chain here,” Geoffrey said. “That and the patches of growth on the surface of the lake.”

“Maybe that’s why so many species glow!” Nastia said.

Ivan whined and jumped up, standing over Sasha’s lap and barking out the window. Sasha sat next to Hender, resting her head against the shifting patterns of his fur that soothed her sadness. “What are these flying things that look like butterflies?” Sasha asked, pointing a finger at one that had stuck on the window next to her head. It looked like a pink balloon with wide transparent wings around a deflating bladder of flesh. Three fangs gnawed at the glass in its amorphous mouth.

“I call them nudibats, Sash,” Nell said. “I think they’re some kind of flying nudibranch-like mollusk that uses a heat-producing chemical reaction to fill an air sac and rise like little hot air balloons.”

Nastia videoed them with her phone.

“This place is crazy,” Bear said. “Where the hell are we going? Does anybody know?”

As he said it, the gondola rocked, jarring them forward and backwards as it passed the first pulley, which hung from a structure fixed to a giant stalagmite on the island. They started sinking lower again on the other side, deeper into the haunted darkness.

“You say this cave is a hundred kilometers long?” Nastia said.

“That’s what Maxim said,” Geoffrey replied.