by Warren Fahy
“A power plant?” Jackson whistled.
“What kind?” Ferrell said. “Nuclear?”
“No,” Nastia said. “It’s quite funny. In the 1960s, the Soviets built over one hundred thirty-five robot lighthouses along the Arctic coast of Russia. The long polar night makes navigating those waters extremely dangerous. No one today knows how many or exactly where all of those lighthouses are, but since it was impossible for crews to maintain them in such remote locations, it was decided to power them with nuclear reactors that produce strontium-90. Once they were built, the Soviet work crews just threw the switch and left. They were supposed to be fully autonomous, turning on when the Arctic night arrived and turning off when day returned months later, all while radioing signals to passing ships.”
“The Russian authorities might not know where all of them are, but scavengers have been dismantling those things and hauling off scrap for years,” interjected a small, wiry American with brown hair and wide-set gray eyes around a hawkish nose. He had not spoken until now, and he flung a crumpled juice box between them, dropping it neatly into Dima’s duffel bag just as he was zipping it open. He winked at the surprised Russian.
Captain Ferrell looked at a clipboard. “Let me introduce you to Specialist Steve Abrams, formerly with military intelligence. I hope you’re as good with a grenade, Specialist.”
“I’m better with grenades,” Abrams answered. “If I were two inches taller, I’d be at Disney World right now with a shiny new Super Bowl ring. Instead I’m here with you assholes. Lucky for you. Hey, Bear, bet you twenty dollars I can toss this one-dollar bill in your upper pocket.”
“You’re on, jerk-off.”
“You can’t move.”
“Go ahead, try it, asshole.”
Abrams wadded up a dollar bill and tossed it with a perfect parabola, lobbing the balled-up note into the soldier’s shirt pocket.
“Damn, dude,” Bear said.
Hender and Kuzu were impressed.
“You owe me a double-sawbuck,” Abrams said, turning to Nastia. “Terrorists have been trying to plunder those lighthouses for years now, darlin’, as well as hundreds of other former Soviet sites powered by those nifty little portable nuclear reactors. You see, the Soviets made over five hundred of those damn things. Over a hundred have never been accounted for.”
“Shit.” Dima scowled.
“Yes, but finding them and taking them anywhere would probably kill you,” said Nastia.
“Yeah, sure. Like that’s a deterrent,” Abrams said.
“Death is always a deterrent,” Nastia said. “Since 1991, with help from America, Russian authorities have been trying to locate all the lighthouses so they can replace their reactors with solar-power sources. It is true that some of the reactors were already missing by the time inspectors got there. In 2001, salvagers apparently tried to strip parts from one of the lighthouses. But the men who took them were never found.”
“I rest my case.”
Nastia shrugged, unfazed. “You would know better than I, perhaps. But Siberia is not a pleasant place, especially along the Arctic Coast. And carrying a radioactive cargo would not make the journey any easier.”
“But even the Soviets wouldn’t put a nuclear power plant in an underground city,” Andy said. “Would they?”
“Why not?” Abrams said. “Maybe Maxim Dragolovich has been selling strontium-90 on the black market.”
“Maybe this Henders Island horror story is just a cover,” Jackson concurred. “Maybe they were making a dirty bomb and had an accident down there.”
“But why would they bring in scientists who had visited Henders Island?” Ferrell asked.
“It completes the illusion,” Abrams said.
“Supposedly, the power plant of Pobedograd is geothermal,” Nastia said. “A dry-steam generator.”
Kuzu pinned Jackson’s king.
“Aw!” Jackson groaned.
“Checkmate, Jackson,” Kuzu said.
“Let’s play,” Abrams said, taking the board off Jackson’s knee and setting it up on a crate in front of Kuzu. “OK?”
“OK, Abrams. Play,” Kuzu said.
Abrams winked. “You go first.”
Hender pointed at the map on the floor with a long arm. “Where are Nell and Geoffrey?”
“We don’t know for sure,” Ferrell answered, irked by the well-spoken creature. “We don’t even know if they are still alive. The odds aren’t good. But according to our source, they might be in the palace.” Ferrell pointed at Sector One.
“Where is Maxim?” Kuzu asked.
“Just what I want to know,” said Dima.
“He may be trapped here in Sector Three,” said Ferrell. “This was the last place Galia Sokolof reported him going. Which brings us to our special guests, Dr. Andrew Beasley, Hender, and Kuzu.” Ferrell nodded at each of them in turn. “The hendros are the only ones with any experience in this theater. They survived for thousands of years among these critters. They’re here to tell us what we’re up against. And what they tell us may well be the difference between life and death down there, so let’s all pay attention.”
“Don’t leave anything out,” Bear said.
Kuzu looked back at him, leaning forward with one iridescent eye that had three stacked pupils. “You survive, maybe,” he said, and his lips spread into a foot-wide smile over three wide upper and lower teeth.
Andy fished his cell phone out of his vest pocket. “Can you take a picture of that map, Hender?”
“OK, Andy.” Hender took the camera and unfolded his two-elbowed arm six feet as he took a picture of the map from directly above it. He handed the camera back to Andy.
“Wow,” Jackson approved.
“Send that image to me, too,” Abrams said, echoed by the rest.
“Sneakernet, not wireless,” Ferrell said.
“Yeah, let’s not bounce that image off a satellite,” Abrams agreed.
“I’ll pass around a memory card,” Andy said, setting his phone on a crate in the middle of the floor. Then he clicked on the projector function and beamed an image from a slideshow he had prepared on a canvas tarp blocking the forward cargo in the C-130.
“What are we looking at here?” Abrams asked.
“Help us, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Jackson snickered.
“Pay attention, Jackson,” Hender admonished.
The ranger’s gum fell out of his mouth.
“Yeah,” Andy said. “Pay attention.”
The first image Andy projected was a still photo of rolling wheel-like bugs. “Disk-ants are small, but they might be the deadliest life we found on the island,” said the biologist. “Their backs are covered with spirals of babies whose backs are covered with spirals of babies, and so on, down to the size of nano-ants, or ‘nants,’ as we call them. They roll on their edge, moving much faster than normal ants, and when they strike, the nants unload from their backs and melt flesh right off their prey’s bones. They can crawl on either side, as well, and hurl themselves through the air like Frisbees.”
“Frisbees?” Dima asked.
“Like Chinese throwing stars,” Andy said.
Hender nodded at the blond-haired Russian soldier. “They’re very bad.”
Dima nodded, chilled. “Da.”
“Each disk-ant is really a whole colony,” Andy continued. “But they travel in packs.” Andy clicked to a shot of three many-legged creatures in midleap, their spiked arms splayed and their round heads gashed with fang-filled smiles. “These are Henders rats: fast-breeding opportunists that eat anything alive. The average Henders rat can leap twenty feet.”
“They don’t look like rats,” Ferrell muttered.
“They’re not,” Andy said. “They’re bioluminescent, nocturnal, and diurnal mammal-like descendants of crustaceans with stripes that flash colors on their heads to confuse prey and predators.”
“It wouldn’t confuse me,” Abrams said. “Or my machine gun.”
Bear laughed. “I hear that,
brother.”
“Don’t run straight,” Kuzu said as he moved his knight to counter Abrams’s bishop.
“Ah,” Ferrell noted. “Good tip from Kuzu, everybody.”
“Zigzag.” Hender nodded.
Andy clicked to the next image of a strange growth covering what looked like a log. With oddly geometric edges, the lichenlike growth was colored green, orange, yellow, red, purple, and white. “This is Henders clover. It’s not dangerous, but everything eats it and it eats everything. Plus it photosynthesizes and makes oxygen. It uses sulfuric acid to eat through just about anything.”
“Run on green,” Kuzu said. “Better.”
“Huh?” Abrams said.
“It’s better to run on green clover,” Hender agreed. “Purple will melt your feet.”
“Gotcha! Thank you.” Jackson looked at the others.
“Go on,” Bear said grimly.
Andy clicked to the next image: a six-legged beast launching off a thick tail with vertical jaws and giant spiked arms.
“Chërt!” Dima cursed.
“What the hell is that thing?” Jackson said.
“A spiger,” Tusya chided. “Where have you been, in a cave?”
The others laughed.
“Yes, that’s a spiger,” Andy said. “They grow as big as a pickup truck and can jump thirty-five feet or more and swallow a man whole. I don’t see how they could have gotten live spigers here, but you should see it, just in case. This snapshot was taken by a National Geographic photographer on the machine gun turret of a Humvee in which the famous naturalist Sir Nigel Holscomb rode across Henders Island. The spiger chasing them was roughly the size of the vehicle it’s chasing in the photo.”
“OK, so spigers just kill you,” observed Jackson.
“Yeah,” said Andy. “Pretty much.”
“Looks like a big damn target for an incendiary grenade to me,” Abrams said, throwing a wadded-up Nicorette package at the projected image and hitting the spiger’s mouth dead center.
Kuzu leaned down and whispered into Abrams’s ear chillingly: “You might live, too.”
“OK,” Ferrell said. “What else?”
Andy put the next image up. Curving “tree” trunks bent together like whale ribs along a twisting jungle corridor. “They look like trees,” the biologist said, “but they’re animals. Some of them shoot poisonous bloodsucking darts, others have jaws for bark, and most hang sticky eggs like bait for passing predators.”
“Welcome to the jungle,” Jackson grunted, popping his last square of Nicorette gum.
“What else?” Bear said.
Andy clicked to an image of two flying bugs, one with five wings over ten opposing praying mantis-like claws and a fanged abdomen. “That’s a Henders wasp. They have a brain at both ends, eat with their butts, and inject larvae through a needlelike ovipositor at the same time. Their larvae bore through flesh, seeking out the electrical signals of nerves in order to immobilize their prey with pain.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Bear said.
Andy showed a picture of another buglike species, this one with three wings, three long legs and a drill-bit abdomen. “The drill-worm. Its butt can drill through wood, human flesh, bone, and just about anything else but glass, rock, or steel. Both of these bugs are bioluminescent and highly active, day or night. You don’t want to see either of them without something between you and it.”
“Shit. I’m starting to think we should just set off a dirty bomb down there and call it a day,” said Jackson.
“Me, too,” Dima agreed.
“What is your plan?” Andy asked. “Because this stuff is worse than any WMD. These are weapons of global destruction. They’re self-replicating and absolutely lethal to all life on land. If this stuff gets anywhere near us, we’re as good as dead. And if it gets out, it’s the end of the world. Everything on Henders Island evolved to kill in an all-predator ecosystem over hundreds of millions of years. It fights everything that doesn’t kill it first. It never backs down. It always escalates. Not even a mongoose lasted more than a few minutes on Henders Island.”
“Well, we’ve got a few killing machines of our own,” Jackson said, rising.
“Like what?” Nastia said. She looked pale and terrified by Andy’s slideshow.
“Let’s take a look,” Jackson said. “Ferrell, why don’t you give me a hand?”
Ferrell and Jackson pulled up the tarp on which Andy had projected his images and revealed a number of large flats stacked with high-tech equipment.
Jackson tapped each item with reverence through plastic wrapping as he ran down their inventory: “AA-12 fully automatic combat shotguns with detachable thirty-two-round polymer drum magazines, each with a forty-meter range. Based on what we’re hearing, I’m definitely packing one of these puppies. Right here we have a crate of M84 flashbangs, which produce a one-million-candlelight flash and a 180-decibel bang. Yell ‘fire in the hole’ when you throw one and make sure to cover your ears and eyes. Right here we have M7A2 riot-control tear gas grenades and AN-M14 thermite incendiaries that burn at four thousand degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature on the surface of the sun. They burn underwater, too. And these right here are some good old-fashioned M67 fragmentation grenades. Plus an assortment of even nastier stink bombs with assorted internationally banned contents.”
Andy pointed to a humanoid erector set that looked like a collapsed Transformer in the center of the flat. “What’s that?”
“That, my friend, is the latest Sarcos Raytheon XOS Exoskeleton,” Jackson said.
“No shit?” Bear grunted.
Kuzu was distracted by Abrams’s sacrificing his queen as the small, wiry human stood up to get a closer look at the battle gear.
“Who’s going to be the Terminator?” Tusya said.
“I am,” Abrams said. “I’m the reason it’s here, actually. And I’m the only one trained to use it.”
“Well, then, Iron Man, tell us what it can do,” Ferrell said.
“It comes with full body-armor like something out of Star Wars, too.” Abrams winked at Kuzu, leaving his queen in danger as he approached the mountain of equipment. “When suited up in this thing, a man can lift two hundred pounds with each arm, punch through brick walls, and run at twelve miles per hour for ninety minutes before changing batteries. Heh, heh. It’s more fun than a new Rush album.”
Kuzu took Abrams’s queen.
“Well, well,” Abrams said, bending down to take Kuzu’s knight with a pawn that was now one move from queening.
Kuzu’s fur flushed violet. Abrams had disguised offense inside a seemingly reckless defense, Kuzu noted, learning from him.
“Well, you won’t be the only robot down there,” Jackson said, resting his hand on some cylindrical shapes under the shrink-wrap. “These babies right here are Dalek combat robots, flying Crock-Pots with four landing legs. They can hover or cruise at twenty miles an hour, automatically turn around corners, and feed back reconnaissance. And we’ve got the latest crawling bugs, too. These little knights in shining armor are Talon SWORDS, robot rovers with M249 SAW machine guns, which fire a thousand rounds per minute. They can climb stairs, travel over sand, snow, water, and debris while transmitting video back in color, black-and-white, infrared, or night vision. Best of all, we’ve trained these hounds to heel and follow us wherever we go.” Jackson walked around to the other side of the swaddled flat of equipment. He raised his arm in a flourish. “Last, but not least, we brought the Big Dog.” He patted the plastic-covered shape. “The latest quadrupedal all-terrain cargo robot. Wait’ll you see her.” Jackson lifted what looked like a video game controller hanging from a cord around his neck. “All these bots follow this dog whistle, which also signals commands.”
“I want a dog whistle,” Abrams said.
Dima nodded. “Me, too.”
“All right, that can be arranged,” Jackson said. “But I’m the alpha dog.”
“There’s an alpha dog override function I’ll show you how to us
e on your own dog whistles,” Ferrell said.
“But only if the alpha dog says it’s OK,” Jackson said.
“Or dies,” Ferrell said.
“That’s good,” Tusya said.
“That brings us to body armor,” Jackson said. “We’ve got the best in the world, Dragon Skin. It’s made of laminated silicon-carbide ceramic and titanium matrices overlapping like dragon scales covered with Kevlar. We all have full suits that cover wrists and necks, with helmets whose exterior microphones transmit sound to the ears and whose radios transmit our voices to each other. Our helmets also have rearview visor display. Since we’ll mostly be communicating with our helmet radios, we have to remember to keep them switched on, folks. We have a large supply of oxygen canisters on hand in case the gas in the cave becomes unbreathable. These species may be more evolved for battle than we are, but we’ve got technology, folks. I guarantee they’ve never come up against what we’re bringing to the fight.”
“We want Russian body armor,” Dima said.
“Kirasa!” Tusya insisted.
“Boys, I know you’re proud of your country,” said Jackson. “And I’ll give you a lot of credit for that. But compared to what we’ve got here, Kirasa armor is crap. No offense.”
Dima spit.
“We’ll do it your way this time,” Tusya said.
Kuzu marveled at the amazing devices the humans had made to compensate for their physical frailty.
“Checkmate, my friend,” said Abrams.
Kuzu looked down. The human had trapped his king with a second queened pawn. The hendro nodded, impressed. “Thank you, Abrams.”
Abrams marked the creature’s dignified defeat warily.
Nastia sat beside Andy. “What are you doing here?” she asked the skinny biologist whose shaggy blond hair and thick glasses marked him as a civilian.
Andy frowned, already asking himself the same thing. “I’m here with the hendros. I’m the first human they ever met. And my friends, Nell and Geoffrey, are trapped inside.”
“I think you’re crazy,” she said.
“What are you doing here?”
She laughed. “I’m an expert in underground Soviet installations. And, also … Well, my grandfather died in this city. Trofim Lysenko sent a letter to my grandmother. He told her he had met my grandfather, who was a mining engineer, inside a great city under a mountain. I think this is the place he was talking about.”
