by Warren Fahy
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 th
e 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.
“It must follow a vertical fault line, like Son Doong Cave in Vietnam,” Nastia said, squeezing Dima’s hand with excitement.
Suddenly, a group of what looked like large jellyfish floated up around them. The purple and white balloons were four feet wide and trailing red tentacles covered with deflated orange and pink nudibats.
“Those things bob up and down all the time,” Geoffrey said. “When their bladders flare light, they head back up again, sometimes in groups.”
Up ahead, they could see a steel tower on the far side of the island. It was bent to one side and seemed on the verge of toppling over into the lake. The tram car dropped another ten feet and bounced, swinging back and forth from the cable.
“That pier up ahead looks pretty sketchy,” Abrams said.
“Maxim said one of them was partially collapsed,” said Nell.
“Terrific,” Bear said.
“Let’s bail out some stuff and lighten the load,” Abrams suggested.
They started throwing the few packs they had brought with them, keeping only a few pistols and grenades, some rope, duct tape, the first aid kit, a machine gun, batteries, and flashlights. The rest went overboard as explosions of bioluminescence splashed and spread on the water where the gear struck the surface of the lake.
The tower that carried the cable’s pulley bent closer to the sea as they climbed closer, and they all gasped. Then, about fifty yards from the tower, they stopped. The tram rocked and pitched as it tried to push forward.
“Something’s blocking the cable from passing through the pulley!” Geoffrey said.
“Oh, man. This could strip the gears of the bullwheel,” Abrams said.
“Give me your knife, Bear,” Hender said.
Bear gave him his knife, and Hender put it in his belly pack as he opened the door and climbed onto the roof.
“Hey, you’re missing two fingers,” Bear said.
“That’s OK, Bear. I’ve got twenty-eight more.”
They watched as Hender cartwheeled hand-over-hand beneath the cable with all six of his hands.
“Wow!” Dima said.
“I wish I could do that!” Sasha said, and Ivan wagged his tail, barking next to her.
Nastia held Dima’s hand as they watched nervously.
Hender’s fur turned almost black with terror as he tried to camouflage, knowing that a menagerie of hungry monsters thrived in the saltwater lake below. Hender kept two hands on the cable at all times as the pylon ahead creaked and dipped lower and lower. He reached the pulley on the bent pier that was caked with fungus and pulled out the three knives he had stashed in his belly pack. Mats of growth and crushed ghost-flesh, which must have been riding on the cable, had jammed into the pulley, gumming up the works. He held on to the tower over the pulley with three legs as he cut and loosened the clogged flesh in the wheel with all three knives, his hands moving like a Cuisinart.
“He had an elevator back home,” Nell explained, watching anxiously. “It had a pulley, too.”
“God, maybe he knows what to do?” Geoffrey wondered.
“Really?” Dima glanced at Nastia with raised eyebrows.
Suddenly, the cable moved and sheared off the debris as the car jolted forward.
“He did it!” Abrams said. “Awesome!”
They cheered inside the lift as it lurched and started moving, lower and lower toward the bent tower.
“Well, where is he?” Nastia asked.
“Maybe he’s going to jump on the roof as we pass,” Abrams said.
The water was only about sixty feet below them and the gondola was still sinking. Only then did they see the huge ghost octopus that had been riding on the bottom of the gondola as it slid up over the windows.
“Oh, Damn it,” Abrams said. “Get up there and shoot that thing!”
“I’ll go,” said Bear.
“Don’t shoot us through the roof,” Dima said.
“Angle your shots!” Abrams called as Bear climbed through the window to the roof.
“Copy that!” Bear said.
The ghost slid up one side as Bear climbed up the other, and they reached the top at the same time. Bear fired at the ghost, grazing it as it slipped back down, covering the window with its waving rows of suction cups. Bear ducked as they passed under the pylon and Hender jumped from the tower onto the roof in front of him.
They held on as the gondola jostled. The tower and pulley wheel passed over them and the gondola dipped down on the other side to about thirty feet from the surface of the lake. They came within twenty feet before it finally started climbing higher.
“Hi, Bear.” Hender waved as the tram car finally lifted from the water. “Thank you!”
Bear pointed his gun at Hender, his face twisted with pain. “Yeah, I’m sorry,” he said. “But you were part of the mission.”
“What?” Hender said. “Why?”
“I guess humans just aren’t ready to share this planet!”
Bear aimed his pistol at the middle of Hender’s large forehead.
As a rope of white goo snagged the soldier’s outstretched arm, another stuck to the side of his head. Both streams came from the oral papillae of a ghost that now rose up and, with a vigorous pull, reeled in its sticky ropes, tipping the tall soldier on the roof as he fired his weapon into the darkness. As Bear’s feet slipped, he plummeted behind the gondola, his heavy weight ripping the ghost off the side of the tram with him. The soldier howled all the way down before he plunged into the lake, still attached to the ghost, directly over the opening maw of a mega-medusa, which reached out its eight glowing arms from the bottom as its stinging offspring wrapped glowing chains around them both and paralyzed their mother’s food.
Hender climbed down the
gondola and cautiously crawled through the partially opened door, his fur drained of color.
“What happened?” Abrams shouted.
Hender was silent, trembling, and he skulked into the corner by Nell, blending into the wall. His eyes were swiveling rapidly at each of them. “Don’t kill me,” he said with a warbling voice.
“We won’t, Hender!” Nell said, squeezing two of his trembling hands.
“Damn!” Abrams frowned. “What the hell happened?”
A shower of green sparks surrounded the gondola as a flock of nudibats passed around them.
“Another fire alarm?” Nastia asked.
“They could have mistaken us for a predator,” Geoffrey said.
“What happened, Hender?” Nell said.
“Bear … tried to kill me!”
The others looked at one another.
“Shit!” Abrams said. “No offense, but it’s a little hard to believe.…”
“You fucking Americans,” Dima sneered. “It’s not too hard to believe.”
“OK!” Geoffrey said. “Let’s not start that! We won’t kill you, Hender. I promise you, we’re in this together!” He reached out a hand and took one of Hender’s hands.
“Da,” said Dima, taking another of his hands.
Sasha took one of his hands then, too. “We love you, Hender!” she shouted.
“Yes!” Nastia said, and she held yet another of his hands as Abrams and Nell took his remaining hands in theirs.
“We’re in this together, Hender,” Geoffrey said.
“We won’t lie to you,” Nell said. “Will we?”
“No!” everyone answered.
“OK,” Hender’s voice quailed.
“Fuck!” yelled Abrams. “Look!”
Dima pointed. “What is that?”
They all saw a giant pink and yellow blimp drop down on a collision course toward them as it filled the windows on the right side of the gondola. Feathery fans waved around its mouth as it collected the pink and orange nudibats like a whale filtering krill in its baleen. As the buoyant leviathan closed in, it opened its mouth and swallowed the gondola whole, dragging on it as it moved over the cable toward the next pulley, which hung from long cables attached to the roof of the cavern.