Necroscope V: Deadspawn

duty here… armed, of course, as a safeguard against sabotage. We are aware that the Projekt has a history of, er, intruders?'

Luchov nodded. 'Yes, very good.' But he'd scarcely been paying attention. Turning jerkily away from the Tokarevs and pointing towards the glaring sphere of the Gate, he said, 'And do you know what you're on guard against — from that, I mean? Are you sure that if ever it's required, you'll know just exactly when to press the button?'

The other stiffened. He knew his duty well enough. A pity he now found himself in a position where he must take orders from a damned civilian, that's all! He was tempted to answer Luchov in just such terms and from the heart, except it had been made adequately clear to him that the senior scientist was a power in his own right

And so: 'I've acquainted myself with the Projekt's history, certainly, sir,' he said coldly. 'Also, we've watched all of the films. But in any case, the firing sequence may not be initiated except on your instructions.'

'Listen.' Luchov turned more fully towards him, fixed him with a wide-eyed glare and grasped his arm in a trembling claw. That's your brief, yes, but it doesn't say everything. Indeed, it says very little. You've seen the films? Good! But you can't smell them, can you? They can't spring out from the screen and swallow you whole, can they?'

Nodding wildly, and again pointing at the glaring white upper hemisphere of the Gate, he continued hoarsely: 'In there, a curse, a plague, something to make Chernobyl seem of no consequence whatsoever! If it, they, whatever, got out into the world… that's the end, I mean of everything! Mankind joins the dinosaurs, the trilobites, the dodos — gone! So don't get snotty with me when I ask if you know what you're dealing with.'

Pale with barely suppressed anger, the young officer came to attention and his thin mouth cracked open; but Luchov wasn't finished with him, hadn't yet told him the worst. 'Listen,' he said again. 'One week ago a man, or something which was once a man, went through that Gate into whatever lies beyond. When he went the world breathed a sigh of relief — since when it's been holding its breath! We were glad to see the back of him because he was tainted, a carrier. Only now we wonder: how long before he finds his way back here? And if he does, what will he bring with him? Do you follow me so far?'

Something of the colour had returned to the Major's face. He sensed the importance of what the Projekt Direktor was saying, the enormous stresses playing on his mind. 'I follow you so far.' He nodded.

'Very well,' said Luchov, 'and now something which wasn't in your brief. You mentioned our previous problem with intruders. Quite right; we did have this problem; we could have it again. So now I'm going to add to your brief and issue a new order.' He pushed his face closer. 'This one: if I should get taken out — if anything weird or inexplicable should happen to incapacitate me or even, yes, exclude me permanently from the scheme of things — then you're the next in line. Consider yourself appointed, here and now.'

'What?' The officer looked at Luchov's pale, shining face, his hideously scarred skull, and wondered if he was entirely sane. 'You are… appointing me, Projekt Direktor?'

'Indeed I am!' Luchov was vehement. 'As Guardian of the Earth, yes!'

'Guardian of…?'

'Press it!' Luchov whispered, cutting him short. 'If anything should happen to me, press the bloody thing! Don't delay — don't waste time phoning Gorbachev or those mumbling cretins who so poorly serve him — but press the button! Get it over and done with and send your exorcets on a real mission of exorcism, into the world beyond the Gate, before the devil himself comes spewing out of there right into your face! Have you got that?'

The Major took a pace to the rear. His eyes were very wide now, very concerned; and still Luchov held his arm in a steel grasp. 'Sir, I…'

Abruptly Luchov released him, straightened up a little and stiffened his back and shoulders, then glanced away. 'Say nothing.' He gave a curt, almost dismissive nod. 'For the moment, don't say anything at all. But neither must you forget what I said. Don't you dare forget it, that's all!'

How to answer him? With a smile, which might be misinterpreted? With words? But Luchov had advised him to say nothing, and anyway the Major had no words. Perhaps it were better if he simply forgot the whole incident. Except Luchov had warned him about that, too. And anyway, would it be a wise move: to forget that this possibly dangerous man was in charge here? And in so doing, to forget what he was in charge of…

Saving the Major from further embarrassment and possibly worse, a hatch in the fish-scale plates clanged back on its hinges and a maintenance engineer came up from below. Staggering a little as he stood up in the glare of the Gate, he wrenched breathing apparatus from his pale damp face and put on plastic goggles. Then he reached out a groping hand, as if seeking support, and staggered again.

Luchov recognized him, went to him at once with the Major following on behind. 'Felix Szalny?' The Projekt Direktor took the man's arm, steadied him. 'Is it you, Felix?' (He could be familiar when he thought the situation required it.) 'But you look like you saw a ghost!'

The coveralled maintenance man, small, balding, smudged with grime, nodded. He blinked his eyes rapidly and glanced back towards the open hatch. 'The next best thing, anyway, Direktor,' he muttered almost to himself, wiping cold sweat from his brow with a rag.

'What is it?' Luchov felt the short hairs rising at the back of his neck, which they were wont to do all too often in this place. 'Something below?'

'Down there, in one of the sealed shafts which was part of the original complex, yes,' Szalny answered. 'I was checking a wormhole hotspot. Curiously, the radiation has decreased almost to background; it's no longer dangerous, anyway. So I opened up the seal and… and entered. Eventually the wormhole came out into the old abandoned reactor maintenance level. In there… I found magmass, of course.'

'Ah!' Luchov knew what had happened. Or thought he did. 'There were bodies!'

'Bodies, yes,' Szalny answered, nodding. 'That was part of it, at least. They'd been roasted, inverted, transformed. Some were half-in, half-out of the magmass, like mummies wrapped in warped rock, rubber and plastic. And even after all these long years of entombment, Lord, still I fancied I could hear their screams!'

Luchov was well able to picture it. He had been a scientist here in Perchorsk when the hideous accident happened; he still bore the scars, both upon his seared parchment skull and more permanently in his mind, which was why he now shuddered. 'It's as well you came up out of there,' he said. 'Later you can take a team down and clean the place out, but for now…'

'I… I tripped over something.' Szalny was still dazed, still talking almost to himself, because as yet he hadn't told it all. 'Something crumbled into dust where I stepped on it, so that I stumbled and crashed against a cyst — which immediately shattered!'

The young Major touched Luchov's elbow, but this time very carefully. 'Did he say something about a cyst?'

The Direktor glanced at him. 'Oh, and are you interested?' And without waiting for an answer, nodding grimly, he continued, 'Then you must see it for yourself.'

He called over a private soldier and sent him hurrying off on an errand. And while they waited: 'Can we borrow a couple of these radiation tags from your staff here?' And then to Szalny: 'Felix, I want you to go and sit in one of those chairs on the perimeter.' And finally, to a second soldier: 'You there — go and get this man a mug of hot tea. And hurry!'

Luchov and the Major clipped radiation hazard tags to their clothing; the first soldier returned with a pair of gas masks; slinging these over their shoulders, the pair descended through the steel hatch into the lower half of the chamber. Down there, the Gate glared on them from where it hung suspended, weightless in the centre of spherical space.

Reaching the bottom of the steel ladder, Luchov stepped carefully down between the gaping mouths of circular shafts cutting at all angles into the giant stone bowl of the floor. These were 'wormholes': energy channels which had been eaten through the solid granite in the first seconds of the Perchorsk accident, when previously rigid matter had taken on the consistency of dough. 'Watch how you go,' he called up to the young officer. 'And give a wide berth to wormholes with their radiation seals intact. They're still a little hot. Of course, you'd know all about that sort of thing, wouldn't you?' He set out to negotiate the perfectly smooth cold stone floor, following corrugated rubber 'steps' which had been laid down to provide for a firmer tread.

And climbing away from the hub, they were soon obliged to use iron rungs where these had been grafted