Trask grabbed his arm. “Jake, I know this may sound stupid, but right now she’s safer with them. She won’t come to any harm from that rabble in Perchorsk, that’s for sure. They don’t know what they’re up against. But we do, and it’s our one advantage. So don’t blow it now.”
“And anyway,” said Turchin, “you have other things to do.”
Jake and Trask looked at him, and Trask said, “The bomb?”
“Indeed, the bomb.” Turchin nodded. “The way I see it, just about every ex-convict in the complex will be dropping whatever he was doing and hurrying to defend the place—to defend himself! So if you want to destroy the core, the entire Perchorsk complex, now is the time to put the bomb down there. We should at least plant the thing before the Wamphyri get inside. After that…then it will be a matter of timing.”
“Timing?” said Jake.
“Of course,” said Turchin. “You will want to allow yourself time to get Liz out of there before the explosion.”
“And before Malinari and the others reach the Gate.” Trask nodded.
But Jake said, “You’ve got it backwards. No one’s going to even touch that timer until Liz and my baby are out of it!”
“Liz and your—?” Trask’s jaw fell open.
“Don’t ask me,” Jake told him.
“Whatever you say,” Trask answered. “Anyway, what you said about getting Liz out of there first: that’s understood.”
“Well, okay,” the Necroscope growled. And then, after pausing to calm himself: “I remember the layout in the core, every coordinate. The Gate is surrounded by a Saturn’s-ring concourse of overlapping steel plates like fish-scale armour. But beneath the plates, in the bowl of the core directly below the Gate…well, I don’t think there’ll be anyone down there. It isn’t the sort of place where anyone in his right mind would ever want to go. Unless they’ve got around to filling in the magmass, there are moulds down there—twisted human figures in the magmass—that don’t bear looking at.”
“That would be the perfect location,” said Turchin. “But I haven’t yet shown you how to set the timer. I should come back with you to E-Branch HQ.”
But Jake shook his head. “No,” he said, “that won’t be necessary. You see, Gustav, I’m not going to be setting the timer. You are.”
“Me?” Turchin was taken completely by surprise. “Why me?”
“Because you’re more interested in destroying your enemies than closing the Gate, that’s why. And if it’s murder pure and simple that we’re talking about, I’m not your hired assassin.”
And after a moment: “Is that really what you think of me?” said Turchin. “Do I come over as badly as all that?”
“What difference does it make?” said Jake. “If we’re talking dirty work here you’ll be doing your own, and if we aren’t you’ll be doing everyone a favour. So what it boils down to is this: are you a member of this team or aren’t you?”
“I’m here, am I not?” Turchin stood as tall as he could.
The Necroscope nodded. “And you’ll be there in the complex, in harm’s way with the rest of us. So is it yes or no, because if it’s no I’ll take you out of here right now, back to Moscow, and from now on we’ll know who we’re dealing with. Or not dealing with. Think it over, Gustav. For it’s like you told me not so long ago: if we’re lucky and there is a tomorrow, we’re all going to need all the friends we can get.”
But Turchin didn’t need to think it over. “If you position that bomb,” he said grimly, “then when the time comes, I shall prime it. As for my qualifications as a member of this team—you haven’t seen what I’ve seen.” Tapping a finger on the plastic casing of his nite-lite binoculars, he handed them to Jake and continued: “Those figures climbing the road up the side of the ravine, unless I am very much mistaken they are Igor Gurevich and Maxim Aliyev. In which case I must assume that Nikolai Korolev died in the blast when that door was destroyed, and these two are running for their lives while they still can. So tell me, Jake, since I no longer have any enemies left in Perchorsk, how can I be planning to murder them there?”
The Necroscope nodded again, smiled slowly, and handed the nite-lites back unused. “Okay,” he said, “but don’t go looking for an apology. Let’s just say I’m very glad I was wrong about you on this one. That’s this one. As for how you got this far: well, I can’t say I’ve been much impressed by your methods.”
“It’s the difference between East and West,” Turchin shrugged, and grinned in that foxy way of his. “It’s ‘Politics,’ my young friend. But I think you’ll find the end will justify the means.”
Jake didn’t answer, but without more ado conjured a Möbius door and disappeared into it. A few loose flakes of snow where he’d been standing were picked up and swirled in the vacuum of his departure.
And Trask said, “Gustav, we’re hundreds of miles from anywhere, and I’m already feeling the cold. Your old chums Aliyev and Gurevich can’t possibly make it. So it looks like it’s all worked out for you.”
“I know,” Turchin answered grimly. “They are doomed to die anyway, but not by my hand. I laid them a trail to follow, yes, but they didn’t have to take it. I didn’t bring those men here, Ben. Greed and their lust for power did that.”
“Aye,” the Old Lidesci grunted. “And that’s something that holds true for both worlds, probably for all worlds. For those are exactly the same things that brought the Wamphyri here.”
Paul Garvey nodded and said, “And now they’re desperate to get out of here, no less than Gurevich and Aliyev.”
“Desperation, yes,” said the precog. “That’s about all you can expect from them from now on. There’s only one way back to Starside and they know it, and it’s a defended route at that.”
“That’s true,” said Millie, “but look—they’re going for it anyway. And God help anyone who gets in their way…!”
From the back of the service bay, fifteen guns were trained on the open space at the entrance where one door had been torn to bits and the other stood half open. The blazing brazier, amazingly untouched by all that had happened, burned red as before, its fiery heart a marker at the far end of a seeming tunnel of darkness.
There came the rumbling growl of a snowplough’s engine…at which six of the fifteen slipped away unnoticed deeper into the complex in search of places to hide. Or perhaps Karl Galich—lone survivor of the three bosses, dazed and bloodied from a gash in his forehead though he was—was nevertheless aware of their cowardice. For now he raised his voice in a harsh warning: “Any man who runs without a fight answers to me. But his answer won’t matter, because I’ll kill him anyway! So stand and fight, you worthless bastards! And remember this: these bloody special forces—whoever they are, and no matter how good they seem to be—they’re only human. They’re just men, like you and me.” He had no way of knowing how very wrong he was.
The rumbling grew louder, began echoing through the cavern, and preceded by a two-foot-deep, rolling bank of mist, the snowplough appeared as a silhouette against the silvery-grey oblong of the entrance. Jolting and shuddering—clattering where its caterpillar tracks lifted it up over various mounds of metallic debris, and flattening several less solid obstructions, including some that squirted—it advanced through the mist and bore down on the brazier in a cloud of stinking blue exhaust smoke.
“Use the brazier to gauge the distance and get your range.” Galich’s voice was hoarse with rage now, and perhaps something of fear. “When those coals are spilled, let that be your signal to open fire.”
“Useless!” someone shouted back. “A waste of good lead. The plough’s blade is up!”
Galich cursed and yelled back, “Then use the stanchions and cavern walls if you have to, and go for ricochets. But whatever you do, don’t even think of surrendering. We’ve seen what they can do, these mothers. They play really rough, and they aren’t the kind who take prisoners.”
The brazier toppled and was crumpled under, scattering red-hot coal
s like a flood of rubies across the cavern’s floor. And Perchorsk’s defenders opened fire.
A hail of bullets struck sparks off the snowplough’s raised blade; others whined viciously where they took chips out of the cavern walls or scarred the stanchions that supported the roof. But the snowplough came clattering on, neither slowing down nor deviating a single inch from its course—its unstoppable collision course with flesh and blood. And:
“We’re out of here!” Galich gasped, when there was nothing left to say or do except retreat or die. But only seven out of the nine made it into the complex, while the other two left it just a little too late and went down screaming under the snowplough’s bloodied tracks.
But the way had narrowed down, and Malinari was too slow in finding neutral and the brakes, so that the plough slewed sideways when it hit a wall and jerked to a halt. But no harm done, for by then all that remained of the defenders was the sound of their running footsteps, beating a hasty retreat through Perchorsk’s many mazy corridors…
Jake dragged the trolley with its lethal load out of the Möbius Continuum onto the glass-smooth rock at the bottom of the core. The core was a perfect sphere eaten out of the bedrock when the Perchorsk Experiment went disastrously wrong and an atomic pile devoured itself. A bubble with a diameter of forty-two or -three metres, it had been all that remained of the pile, of the equipment surrounding it, and of the physicists who operated it. The core, and at its core the Perchorsk Gate: a second, far smaller sphere of blinding white light—a gravity-defying singularity, its outer surface an event horizon—suspended in midair dead centre of the bubble.
And slicing into the core’s curved, smoothly polished floor and walls at every imaginable angle—drilled through the solid bedrock in the instant of implosion—scores of precisely circular shafts or energy channels, like wormhole escape routes for the alien forces that had been trapped here.
Now, being at the bottom of the bubble, in the bowl of the core, the Necroscope felt the blinding light almost like a physical weight on the back of his neck and looked up at its enigmatic source: the lower hemisphere of the Gate. It glared like a cosmic lightbulb—like the sun itself—but light without heat.
Even wearing sunglasses, still Jake shuttered his eyes and looked away. Blinding, yes, but the Gate’s dazzle was the least of his problems. For with Harry Keogh’s memories of this place, Jake also knew that if he tried to use the Möbius Continuum too close to the singularity it would create a completely ungovernable conflict of alien energies. When Harry had first come here he had done just that…and the resultant backlash had hurled him immeasurable light-years out into space! Then, only the long-dead August Ferdinand Möbius himself had been able to guide him home again.
Jake wasn’t about to duplicate Harry’s mistake, but already he knew how close he had come. For even in the act of conjuring his door prior to exiting the Continuum, he had sensed it fighting him, seen its instability, how it warped and fluctuated in the Gate’s invisible force-fields.
This close, then, and no closer…
And now another problem. The trolley was heavy and the bomb it carried even more so, and despite the Necroscope’s newfound expertise and Harry Keogh’s memories, still he’d failed to arrive dead centre of the bowl. And finding their level, the trolley’s wheels turned on the curved floor, and one of them tilted into a wormhole. At that the trolley jammed into immobility…but its clatter had been heard up above.
In the ominous silence of the core, the sound rang out with crystal clarity, its metallic echoes bouncing from the wormhole-riddled walls…likewise the harsh voices that reached down to Jake from above the fish-scale plates:
“What was that? Did you hear that?” The Necroscope couldn’t be sure what was said for it was in Russian, but he could certainly guess. And he froze where he crouched beside the trolley. At which there came another voice, a deadspeak voice that startled him, because now of all times the teeming dead weren’t much given to speaking to him:
Necroscope? Is that you, Harry? It seems like an age, and I really thought that you must be dead, too. A girl’s voice—and Jake “recognized” it at once: Penny, an innocent, some poor kid who got too close to the original Necroscope at the wrong time, and ended up down here. Jake “remembered” her, and felt a lump in his throat. But Harry’s emotions, not his.
No, he told her. Necroscope, yes. Harry, no. Harry was—I don’t know—my mentor? Me, I’m just Jake, Jake Cutter. But at least you were right about one thing: Harry’s been gone from us a long time. Most of him, anyway.
And from up above, where for a while there’d been a breathless silence: “Rats,” someone said. “It could only be rats. The fucking place is crawling with them!” Only this time, recognizing Jake’s confusion, Penny “heard” the words through the Necroscope’s ears and translated them for him.
You know Russian? he said.
I have lots of friends here, she answered. It’s how we pass the time. I’ve learned lots of things, Harry…er, Jake.
But Russian?
Physics, too, Penny told him. It’s really amazing how death focuses your concentration.
I’ll take your word for that, said Jake. And then, unintenionally thoughtless: You were pretty stuck on Harry, right?
Oh, yes! she answered. Harry was taking me to a world where we’d have a great high house under a tumbling moon. He would be the Lord and I’d be his Lady. But…I wasn’t paying attention to the things he said. This is where he lost me—or I lost him—but it wasn’t Harry’s fault. I’ve often wondered if he cried for me, wondered if he was able to.
And knowing that Penny would feel it in his deadspeak, Jake nodded and said, He was able to. For a little while, anyway…
While overhead:
“Bloody big rats,” said the first voice dubiously, “to make a racket like that! Anyway, what the hell’s going on? We should have been relieved by now. What happened to the power? The fans have stopped, and now the lights in the tunnel are out. I don’t like any of this.”
“Like I’ve been trying to tell you,” said the second voice, “it has to be the rats. Maybe they’ve chewed through a cable or something.”
“And that noise down there in the bowl? Rats?”
“Could be,” said the other. “Down in those wormholes there are cysts with meat in them still, all turned to leather where they’re completely enclosed. And every time a cyst cracks open or gets gnawed through, it’s like: hey, you furry, four-legged comrades! A free lunch!” Then, tired of the subject: “Look, if you’re so fucking worried about it why don’t you go down there and check it out for yourself?”
“What, are you crazy?” the answer came back. “I don’t even like being here, never mind down there! But perhaps I’d better go take a look through the hatch. Just a quick look.”
Jake unfroze, prepared himself to drag the trolley free of the wormhole and through a Möbius door. But at the last minute there came the tinny, bicycle-bell ringing of an antique field telephone. And: “Now what?” said the one who had been going to come and have a look.
“Better answer it,” said the other. “Maybe someone’s going to tell us what’s happening up there.”
Jake heard footsteps on the perimeter walkway, a low, muttered conversation…then a shout as the telephone was slammed down in its cradle. “Hey! We’re out of here. It sounds like all hell has broken loose, and every available man is defending the complex.”
“What? Defending Perchorsk? Against what?”
“What, am I fucking psychic? Move your arse, comrade!” Then the sound of booted feet hammering on the walkway, their echoes fading into the distance…
Penny, said Jake, as he carefully disengaged from the trolley and saw that it was safe and wouldn’t tilt any further. I’m going now. But before I do I just think I’d better tell you and your Russian friends that if things work out there’ll be a hell of a big bang down here. I mean—
—We know what you mean, she cut in. It’s been in your mind a
ll along. As for these physicists: they’re not at all unhappy. It seems they’re finally going to find out what it’s like to be at the centre of a nuclear explosion! And who can say, if there are places beyond—better places—maybe this will help speed us on our way. And maybe I’ll find Harry there. Goodbye, Jake, and good luck.
Jake climbed rungs to a hatch, got up onto the walkway and took a look at the core. It was much as he “recalled” it except there’d been three Katushev cannons upon a time. Now there were only two and a stripped-down frame whose parts had been cannibalized to service the ones that were still working. Their squat ugly muzzles were pointing at the Gate, of course. Jake assumed that after that warrior-creature had come through from Starside the guns had quickly been put back in working order, and Perchorsk’s ex-convicts had kept them manned twenty-four hours a day from that time on.
But aware of the seconds and minutes ticking by, the Necroscope had no more time for any further observations. Trask and the others were waiting for him, and Liz (oh, Liz! Please, God keep her safe!) was still in the clutches of the Wamphyri…
Back on the ledge under the overhang, Trask breathed a sigh of relief when Jake stepped out of the Möbius Continuum and said, “Okay, I’ve positioned the bomb. What’s next?”
“Right,” Trask answered. “The way I see it, we have to lay our ambush down in the lower levels, on the approach routes to the core. Gustav, you’ll be located with the bomb. You’ll have to be there anyway in order to prime the thing—which you’ll do as soon as we’ve got Liz out of the way.”
In a hurry now, he turned back to the Necroscope. “When we last saw Liz, Szwart had her. So he’s all yours. It could even be that he has a little respect for you. He knows what you can do and was there when you wrecked his garden. But I need someone—a volunteer—to go along with you, because I can’t help feeling that Szwart will be our most difficult target.”