Limbus, Inc., Book III

by Jonathan Maberry

  -6-

  Mr. Priest

  Town of Poliske

  Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation

  Kiev Oblast, Ukraine

  Six Years Ago

  The tentacle was desiccated and had clearly been there for years. Time, the severe dryness of the air down here, and the hungry teeth of radiation had stripped it of nearly everything except its vague shape.

  “Can’t be a tentacle,” said Boris firmly, nudging it again with his foot.

  “Why not?” asked Rink, still unwilling to draw closer.

  “It has bones. Listen.” He kicked it again and the dry rattle was clear even through the material of their suits. “What the fuck kind of tentacle has bones? Octopus don’t have bones. Squids neither.”

  “And what the hell would an octopus be doing down here?” asked Hiro.

  “No,” insisted Boris, “I said not an octopus. Too many bones and too…big.”

  The whole section of severed tentacle was at least thirty feet long.

  “Male giant squids can get to be over forty feet long,” said Keppler.

  “It’s not a fucking squid,” yelled Boris. “Enough with squids and octopuses. This thing is something else.”

  “Some kind of snake?” ventured Hiro.

  Boris gave him a pitying look. “You been all over the world,” he said acidly. “You ever see a fucking snake looks like that?”

  Rink touched her throat with her hands. “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “Dead,” said Keppler. “A long time ago.”

  “Then it can’t hurt us, can it?” declared Priest, his patience with all of them wearing thin.

  “No…I mean this was cut off of something else. Something much larger. Where is the rest of the animal?”

  “Dead somewhere, I expect,” said Priest. “Look, all of you—I admit that this is strange, but whatever it is…it’s past-tense, yes? It can’t hurt us anymore than velociraptor bones can stand up and bite a paleontologist. Have some dignity, for God’s sake.”

  No one said a word. After a moment Priest nodded.

  “Come on,” he said, “help me open the door. We need to get inside. We’re almost there.” No one moved. Not even Hiro. They stood staring at the tentacle until Priest gave another gunshot clap of his hands. “Now!”

  They flinched and then inched forward, even Rink, and with great reluctance they steeled themselves, took up positions on one side of the carcass, gripped the lip of the massive door, and pulled. And pulled.

  “It’s stuck,” gasped Keppler. “The hinges are rusted shut.”

  “Then pull harder, yes?”

  They pulled harder. Boris slung his rifle and stepped around to put his shoulder against the inside edge. He screwed up his face and gave a roar like a bear.

  The door moved.

  So did the tentacle. As the gap widened it dropped and rattled. Boris jumped back and brought his gun up.

  “No!” yelled Priest. “Don’t you idiot—it’s the door, it’s just the door.”

  The Russian eyed the length of dead gray flesh. “Der’mó,” he grumbled, but he lowered the gun.

  They tried again. It moved. One stubborn, backbreaking inch at a time. Then it seemed to reach a point of acceptance and swung freely the rest of the way. They stepped back, panting and sweating.

  Priest gave Hiro a light push on the shoulder. “You first.”

  The urban explorer removed a couple of chemical glow-sticks, snapped and shook them, and threw them inside. Then, with Boris close behind, he stepped over the threshold. The others crowded behind him, with Rink bringing up the rear. However as soon as they were all inside, Hiro looked around, saw a heavy tool box and lugged it to the doorway, positioning it so that it would create an even sturdier block against them being trapped.

  “Just in case,” he said, but no one argued against the caution. Certainly not Priest. He wanted to be here, but did not care to linger forever.

  Inside they found more of the old fashioned computers, though most of these were more elaborate and expensive models used for high-level research. There were hundreds of them, big and small, on desks or freestanding. And there were machines of other kinds, design types that Priest had only ever seen in old books. He felt like he was in a museum of computer paleontology. Keppler’s thoughts clearly mirrored his own because she walked along with her fingers trailing over the dusty keyboards and murmured, “Dinosaurs.”

  After a few minutes, Hiro stopped and turned to Priest. “Not that I want to downplay how good I am, but man…you don’t even need me for this. I’m used to ruins, but it looks like they built this place to withstand a frigging nuke. If it wasn’t for the, y’know, radiation and all, this place would be safe as Fort Knox. Nothing sketchy at all. Not even a hole in the floor. So far all I’ve done is pick a damn lock. I’m kind of useless on this job.”

  “You know what they say, Hiro,” said Priest with a shrug. “It’s like a condom. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”

  “Great. I’m a rubber. That’ll look terrific on my business card.”

  “Besides,” added Priest, “once we’re done here there are a few other places I want to visit, and some of them will offer challenges more appropriate to your skills, yes?”

  “Sure, dude. Whatever. Long as the check clears.”

  “What are we looking for?” asked Keppler nervously. “This place is enormous.”

  “I know,” said Priest, beginning to walk faster now, moving along one of the walkways between the computers, breaking into a run, “but we’re almost there. It’s got to be here. It has to be.”

  “Stop,” snapped Boris, stepping forward to put himself between the team and something up ahead.

  “What is it?” asked Rink, shrinking back.

  Ahead, only half visible in the dusty gloom, were several humped shapes.

  “Let me look first,” said the soldier, but Priest stopped him.

  “No, it’s okay. I think I know what that is.”

  Without a word of explanation Priest hurried forward, with Boris racing along to stay ahead of him, weapon ready. The others followed and then slowed to a stop as the humped shapes resolved themselves into large medical gurneys upon which machines of various unknown function were attached, wires trailing.

  Rink came up last and then uttered a sharp cry as soon as she saw what was on each bed. The others stood staring in horror. Even Boris gave a strangled cry in gutter Russian.

  There were seven beds.

  Each one was occupied by a person. Or what had once been a person. The bodies were withered, the moisture leeched from leathery skin, their eyes turned to milky kernels of dried rot, their hair nothing more than wisps as thin as spider webs. Electrodes had been drilled into their heads and others were attached at the wrists and heart and a dozen other places. Old-fashioned glass IV bottles hung from poles, the saline long since evaporated. Each body was strapped to the bed, and each had heavy manacles locked around their ankles.

  The presence of seven restrained corpses was not what frightened the team.

  No. It was the condition of each of them that made them stand around in abject horror.

  “My god,” breathed Keppler. “What happened to them?”

  Priest did not answer. Inside his suit his body ran with sweat and a palsy of nervous excitement made his fingers twitch spasmodically.

  The bodies were each twisted into impossible posture, limbs either rigid or twisted into nightmare shapes, backs arched, mouths open in silent, eternal screams.

  “Who are these people?” asked Keppler. She stood staring down at the ankle chains.

  “Dreamers,” said Priest.

  “That’s not funny,” said Rink.

  “It wasn’t meant to be,” he said. “They were part of a special scientific project.”

  “Dreamers?” asked Keppler. “What is that supposed to mean? And…what kind of program?”

  “Have you ever heard of remo
te viewing?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “It’s some kind of ESP nonsense, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a bit more than that,” said Priest. “It’s a complex field of psychic expansion.”

  “Oh for god’s sake,” began Keppler, but Priest stalled her with a sharp look.

  “Do you want to hear this or not?”

  Keppler looked momentarily flustered, then cleared her throat. “I do, actually. Sorry.”

  Priest nodded, then glanced around at the others. “Look, I know there’s a lot of pseudoscience in pop culture, but not all of it is actually fake. There are groups within various governments that had deliberately muddied the waters by encouraging some of the more outrageous speakers in a campaign of obfuscation, essentially letting the crazy ones endanger the credibility of anyone seeking the truth. Because of that, the real truth and any true attempt at public disclosure is lost.”

  Keppler nodded but said nothing. The others merely waited.

  “The hype and nonsense make people think that all of this is just…silly. But it’s not. I know it’s not.”

  “How do you know?” asked Hiro.

  “I have been briefed by people in the know,” said Priest, but did not explain further.

  The truth was that Oscar Bell was working with a science group hidden within the murky black budget waters of the Department of Defense. Bell’s genius son, Prospero, had been trying to build a dimensional gateway which he called a God Machine, but which had proved to be deeply flawed. Some of the side-effects of those design errors, however, turned out to have a variety of uses, particularly for the espionage community. One of them was to greatly enhance psychic abilities in select people. Bell leased the technology to the military so they could research and weaponize it. This research fell under the umbrella of the Gateway Project that even the president and congress did not know about.

  For years, however, the research limped along, hitting roadblocks at every turn. The problem, it was discovered, rested with the main device Prospero had designed. He called it a “God Machine.” Other equally brilliant and equally mad scientists had attempted similar devices over the years. Nicola Tesla called his version an Orpheus Gate. Only recently Prospero Bell informed his father that in order to regulate the power of the God Machine he needed a code that had been carefully hidden in the pages of several ancient texts.

  How these ancient books could connect with a sophisticated scientific device was something even Oscar Bell had not been able to coax out of his son. Not in any reliable way. Bell’s son tried to convince his father that those texts were filled with knowledge and secrets brought to Earth billions of years ago by alien races.

  “My son is maybe the smartest person alive on this planet right now,” Bell had once told Priest, “but he’s a grade-A fucking whackjob. He thinks he’s an alien from another dimension and he’s building that goddamn machine to try and go home.”

  Mad or not, Bell was willing to spend many millions to have Priest locate those books. The Unlearnable Truths. And the shadowy administrators of Gateway were hunting for them, too. They wanted to close Bell out of the project loop and take the God Machine and all of its useful side-effects away from the industrialist. True to their nature, they were doing it on the sly. They thought Bell didn’t know that Gateway agents were already in the field. Bell was very smart and very connected.

  And he had Mr. Priest.

  Priest considered sharing some of this with his team, but he did not want to let them in on everything. There were parts of this that Priest did not even share with Bell. This was bigger than Bell thought, and bigger than anyone at Gateway knew. Priest had not yet decided how he wanted to use all of what he had so far discovered, and all of what he intended to find.

  “What does it matter to you?” he asked calmly. “Either you accept my word or you don’t.” When Hiro said nothing else, Priest continued. “First, you have to understand that the military has been experimenting with this for years. Decades. Since before World War II. The American military, the Chinese, the Brits, and a few others. Maybe everyone’s government, to one degree or another. Hitler’s Thule Society was definitely looking into psychic phenomena. So were the Russians. Remember I told you that this place was built in the twenties? That’s what I mean. This isn’t anything new, but a lot of time, money, and effort has gone in to keeping it off the public radar, or making what leaks out appear to be crazy bullshit.”

  They all nodded.

  “The research really intensified during the Cold War. Advances in computer and satellite technology boosted that along. Actually some of those advances came about because problems needed to be solved relative to projects like this. The space race was tied to this, too, but that’s another story. We’ll get to that later, I promise.” Priest touched the desiccated cheek of one of the dead dreamers. “This facility was originally built to investigate, develop, and weaponize tactical psychic potential.”

  “Right,” said Hiro, “but what the hell is remote viewing?”

  “Remote viewing,” said Priest, “is the attempt to project the consciousness to another place in order to observe things. The goal is to create a new level of espionage that does not require the actual physical presence of a person. Just the consciousness.”

  Hiro laughed. “You’re shitting me.”

  “I’m not, actually,” said Priest. “Not even a little. Imagine the potential. Being able to send your best spies across miles, past guards and walls and locked doors. No secret would ever be safe.”

  “God,” said Rink.

  “This line of research has had a lot of names over the years. The phrase ‘remote viewing’ was actually coined in the ‘70s by two physicists at Stanford—Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff—but everyone was working on it long before that. The Russians called it ‘remote control’, because it was always their intention to do more than look.”

  “Wait,” said Hiro, “if this is supposed to be a spy program, then why are these guys chained to their beds?”

  “Ah,” said Priest, “that’s because the attempts to explore remote viewing had a few, um, unexpected side effects, and some of those were quite dangerous. Some of the test subjects experienced psychological damage. Some shut down and went into comas. A few died. Well, quite a few, really. My guess is that these people were ‘volunteers’ from a gulag.”

  “’Volunteers’?”

  “Figure of speech, yes? If you were in a Soviet gulag and someone said volunteer for this or we shoot you, what would you do? Oh, don’t look so shocked. Using prisoners for medical experiments happens everywhere, including in your own country. Don’t you ever watch the History Channel?”

  Hiro played his flashlight over the faces of the dead. “What the Christ happened to them? Did the Chernobyl radiation do this?”

  “No,” said Keppler. “I don’t think so. There’s no sign of lesions. I think they may have been dead before the accident.”

  Rink crossed herself. “They look so scared,” she said in a tiny voice.

  Priest said, “Have you ever noticed that people make the same faces when they’re in ecstasy as they do when they’re in pain?”

  Everyone stared at him.

  “What?” Priest asked, genuinely surprised that they missed his point.

  “Enough of this bullshit,” growled Boris. “Is this what we came all this way to find? A bunch of dead people?”

  “No,” said Priest. He looked past them and saw the edge of something peeking out from around a corner. He began walking toward it and then broke into a run.

  The others hurried to catch up. “Priest! What is it? What are we looking for?” called Keppler.

  They rounded the corner and everyone stopped on a dime. Stopped and stared.

  “That,” breathed Priest.

  They stood before a massive arch that rose thirty feet above them, and was made from metal inset with hundreds of dials and meters. Heavy cables hung from sockets and snaked along the floor. Nearby, monstrous con
densers and generators rested on steel skids. Inside the arch was a flat panel of featureless gray, but as Hiro played his flashlight beam over the rim of the arch the beams flashed with intense reflected light.

  “What the hell is that?” asked Boris, pointing to a row of huge faceted crystals socketed into the metal skin of the arch framework.

  They all approached with great caution and greater wonder.

  “Jesus,” breathed Keppler, touching one of the crystals, “that looks like a ruby.”

  “Can’t be,” said Boris, shaking his head. “It’s too big. Has to be fifty karats.”

  “Fifty-six point one-one-eight,” said Priest.

  Every head snapped around in his direction.

  “What did you say?” asked Keppler.

  “Every stone is exactly the same size. Ruby, garnet, emerald, sapphire, diamond. Each one is fifty-six point one-one-eight karats.”

  Boris cursed in Russian and English. Hiro was panting. Rink looked totally dazed.

  “That can’t be true,” insisted Keppler. “Do you know how much that would have cost?”

  “To the ruble,” said Priest, nodding. “This project went a long way toward helping to bankrupt the Soviet Union.”

  “But why?” breathed Keppler. “Why throw so much money away on decoration? It’s madness.”

  “It’s science,” corrected Priest. “These stones are used to regulate very specific frequencies of power. They’re part of the device’s failsafe system. Without them this whole facility would have been in real trouble when they shut down the power at Chernobyl.”

  “Looks pretty troubled to me,” muttered Keppler. “From what I can see they had to abandon this place in a hurry. And there’s that tentacle.”

  “It’s not a fucking tentacle,” growled Boris, but everyone ignored him.

  Priest smiled. “Believe me when I tell you, that if any of those crystals had been missing or damaged while this gate was active, then there would have been a disaster here a great deal worse than Chernobyl.”

  Despite his comment, the team clustered around the stones. Priest could almost taste their hunger for the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gems. Radiation notwithstanding, they could each get massively wealthy and, big as they were, those stones could be carried out in three backpacks. Like the ones on the backs of Boris, Keppler, and Hiro.