by Alex Sapegin
“Are you ready, brother rabbits?” Kerimov asked the main Bandar-log.
Denis stood at attention and barked at the top of his lungs:
“Definitely!”
Their leader’s lips turned up into a sad grin:
“The response is ‘always ready.’4 But what am I talking about? The Pepsi generation’s not familiar with the pioneers. How are the final preparations coming?”
“We can start in thirty minutes.”
A new player came onto the scene:
“Greetings to the whole honest company.”
“Hello, Mr. Gennady,” Olga was the first to greet the newcomer.
“Hello, Petrovich.” Iliya shook the bony hand of the head of the internal guard of the institute, a colleague and old friend of his. They’d started working together back in the eighties and whom he invited to their projects, when, unexpectedly and all of a sudden, big business took an interest in the topic in the person of Bratulev. How the oligarch found out about their secret research wasn’t important. The main thing was, he gave them money to keep them going. “What’s the cause of the delay?”
The old guard looked sternly at the young people, who began to shuffle their legs and lower their eyes.
“Our eagles frittered away all the oil for the diesel engines over the weekend.” Petrovich eyed Denis, calling him out. Denis looked like he had several excuses on the tip of his tongue. “As soon as they’re finished filling up the tank from the fuel tanker, and then we can get started.”
“We recorded every expense in the log,” Remezov just had to put a word in his defense.
“I’d put you down as our greatest expense….” Petrovich snapped. “I’d give you a piece of my mind, but there are children present.” Denis winked at Olga and made a funny face. The girl laughed. “Instead of making faces, why don’t you get to work on the preparations. Mr. Kerimov, a minute.” He and Kerimov stepped aside.
“Why did you bring Olga here?” Petrovich asked the boss from the doorway of Iliya’s office. When it was just the two of them, they could be a lot less formal with one another. Kerimov was a little hesitant to answer. He moved his lips but said nothing. But his colleague and old friend’s sincere expression did not give him a choice. He needed an answer.
“Gennady, you don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to. But Olga has acquired some extrasensory abilities. I want to use them to search for Andy.”
“Yeah… apparently, you’ve been deeply wounded.” Petrovich looked at his friend with compassion. “Do you believe it?”
Kerimov scoffed:
“Absolutely, Petrovich!” His friend looked truly astonished. “Unfortunately…,” Kerimov added quietly. “Let’s drop it for now—you’ll get the chance to see for yourself. But I only ask you one thing: what happens in the room stays in the room. Instruct our monkeys and the old guys.”
“Alright, we’ll see what comes of your little quest,” Petrovich said, and quickly darted back to his post. Bon, whom Olga had left in her father’s office, quietly walked up to the man from behind and poked his nose into his right palm. Petrovich, not expecting to see an enormous dog behind him, jumped back ten feet. Iliya chuckled. “You’re a fool, and your stunts are even more foolish, geeze,” the “old guard” said from behind the half-closed door of the boss’ office and retreated from the room faster than a fly.
Bon wagged his tail guiltily and went to the corner where his mistress had sent him. Kerimov stood up, walked over to the pup and pet him on the head.
“What do you think, old boy? Will it work?” he asked the dog. Instead of answering, Bon licked his chin and beat the floor with his tail a couple of times. “Thanks for the support.”
A disciplined bustle reigned in the room. The operators finished the preliminary testing and awaited the command to launch. Iliya Evgenevich’s eyes went to his daughter. Olga was sitting in his chair and looking with interest at the work of her father’s subordinates. The scientists, upon seeing their leader, ran to their places in accordance with the rules. Remezov gave the usual tired old report on the state of the preparations. Kerimov pulled another chair up to his desk and sat down next to Olga.
“Launch.”
“Launch!” Denis parroted the command.
The lights blinked as usual, and the walls shook. Olga looked at her father, frightened.
“Don’t be afraid,” he smiled at her.
“I’m not.”
“That’s good.”
The shaking slowly died down. The diesel power stations went into design mode. An exchange began:
“Turn on the visual of the external electromagnetic circuit.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Apply voltage to peripheral devices.”
“Applied, sir. The field is activated.”
“Internal circuit at fifty percent!”
“The accumulators have gone into start-up mode.”
“Flip the polarizers, launch the magnetic set,” Denis commanded.
“They’re flipped. The electromagnetic-blocks have been activated.” People were typing on their keyboards importantly and monitoring the parameters of the controlled stations.
“Turn on the impulse generators and the quantum installation.”
“They’re on, sir. The quantum installation is on.” The walls once again started to shake. Latticed structures mounted on the platform, were covered with a narrow-meshed grid of electrical discharges. Metal bars fell on the windows.
“Begin synchronization…”
“Synchronization at ten percent… Twenty… Twenty-five… Forty percent… Sixty…”
“Establish the exit point.”
“Exit point established.”
“Synchronization at seventy percent… Seventy-five…”
“We have focus.”
“Synchronization of the temporary stream is at ninety percent. Ninety-five… Ninety-nine…” There was a loud click. Olga flinched. Her small palm covered her father’s hand. A virgin taiga appeared on the screen. It was night-time there.
“The apparatus is in observation mode,” Denis reported.
“Good,” Kerimov answered. “Olga?”
Olga, removing her glasses, jumped down from the high seat and walked up to the main screen. The girl was mesmerized by the giant light-blue disk heavily raising its round body over the horizon. It poured silver light onto the treetops. The far-away mountaintops sparkled in the night. The ground was covered in dark shadows.
“What’s with the sound?” Iliya managed to tear his eyes off the epic scenery and ask Oleg.
“A couple of minutes…,” he mumbled, focused on his adjustments. “The ‘window’ is in observation mode. The temporal flows along the internal circuit aren’t completely synchronized. There’s a gap of about one-thousandth of a percent, otherwise they’d be able to see us. But as it is, we’re kind of ‘out of bounds,’ so the sound is coming through with a bit of distortion. I’m adjusting the settings of the filter program… one sec.” His fingers beat at the keyboard with insane speed.
Emitting an embarrassing sound, the speakers came to life. Everyone in the room froze, afraid to breathe and thereby disturb the harmony of the idyllic night-time scene. The sounds coming from the other world flooded the operator’s room. They heard the loud chirps of insects, probably analogs of Earth’s crickets or cicadas. There were the cries and whoops of predators. Something made a “who” sound like an owl. The tree branches rustled in the wind. They could see and even hear pine cones falling to the ground from the high treetops.
“Andy’s here,” Olga said, touching the screen with her hand. “I feel it!” Dozens of eyes glanced at the institute director all at once, then fell on the girl. Iliya instantly sensed their gaze on him and his daughter.
Olga stood in front of the enormous screen. The light pouring out of it enveloped the girl from all sides. Her long light hair seemed to be glowing of its own accord. This cre
ated an ethereal impression, as if a fairy from a fairy tale were hanging in the air against the backdrop of the silver tips of the forest giants and steep round edge of the planet.
“Well I never…,” Denis mumbled from behind his clenched teeth.
Someone’s small involuntary sound broke the all-encompassing awe. People squeaked their chairs; a rumble of whispers rolled through the room.
“Olga.”
“Yes Dad,” she turned from her concentration on the other-worldly image to her father. Her yellow pupils flashed under her long bangs.
“Iliya? What the…,” Petrovich wasn’t the only one in shock and finding some choice profanity to express it. Half the room put forth some sort of expletive upon seeing the girl’s face clearly.
Kerimov ignored the general hum of shock and addressed his daughter:
“Honey, can you feel where Andy might be?”
“I don’t know—where he is,” she said.
“Denis, can we work on the external focus? What observation radius can you get me?”
Alex answered instead of Denis:
“About three thousand miles. Once you go beyond the specified range, the energy requirement gets significantly larger, and it overloads the system. That’ll close the ‘window.’”
“Alright, three thousand then. Denis, give me sequential displacement from the exit point in all directions for five hundred miles.”
The image zoomed to the right. Rivers and lakes could be seen on the bottom of the screen. Olga stood near the screen and closed her eyes. She completely abandoned the world around her.
“Not that way…” Upon hearing the quiet voice, Denis changed the application load vector, sending the “window” westward. A shiver suddenly ran over the girl’s face, and then, it looked like wind was playing with her hair. They jerked and moved by themselves. “Mr. Denis, keep going.”
“Okay,” he responded, moving the “window” even further westward. Petrovich shook his head behind Remezov. His friend’s idea no longer seemed ludicrous…
“Two thousand miles. Careful, Denis, slow down,” Chuiko said.
“Farther,” Olga still hadn’t opened her eyes. Her hair was fluttering from an otherworldly wind. From contemplating such a picture, buckets of cold shivers ran down the onlookers’ spines. The employees of the institute looked with admiration and horror, first at the director of the institution, then at his daughter, and which there was more of in these stares, even the Most High himself couldn’t say.
Through the “window,” cultivated fields flickered as dark rectangles in the night. They could begin to make out small and large populated areas. The tops of the hills, overgrown with age-old forests, remained in the background. The silver ribbons of rivers shone like so many slithering snakes. Denis lowered the tension. The distance from point zero grew to two and a half thousand miles. Stretching it any further was dangerous. On Sunday they’d run experiments a few times with the “search window.” The border of their maximum viewing range, determined by point zero, never exceeded three thousand miles. Why this was remained to be determined, but as they crossed the invisible border, the electrical energy requirements shot up, the apparatus went into overdrive, and there was an emergency shut down. Olga let them know by a wave of her hand that they should stop moving west. For a few minutes, she turned around in place, still not opening her eyes, swayed from side to side and suddenly jerked her arms.
“That way!” Her thin finger pointed in the direction of the staircase. It was like in that joke about the drunk who got into a taxi and said, “Turn right!” Then, “Where are you going?” “To the right!” “I don’t know where your right is, but follow where I’m pointing!”
Denis shrugged, glanced at the boss and, counting on his intuition, moved the “window” to the south. The image zig-zagged here and there, back and forth for another ten minutes until a city appeared on screen, located at the edge of a wide river and encircled by fortress walls.
Olga froze.
“Here, that’s where Andy is. He’s nearby. I can’t…,” she whispered and collapsed to the floor. In one fell bound the boss leaped over the computer desk and picked his daughter up in his arms. “I’ll lie down for a while, Dad. Don’t take me away,” she protested when her father started to head for his office. He had to obey and let her stay in the operator’s room.
The city Olga had indicated was on fire. The red glow of flames was visible from afar. Denis carefully moved the “window” towards the city walls. The institute employees got up from their seats and crowded around the main screen.
“What’s going on there?”
“Who knows!”
A drumming rumble came from the speakers. Denis switched the angle of observation: in the northern part of the city, against a background of columns of black smoke, they could see bright flashes.
“Den, zoom in on the explosions,” Chuiko expressed everyone’s thoughts.
“Look what’s happening!” one of the employees muttered.
A frenzied massacre was going on in the narrow streets. They couldn’t make out who was fighting against whom.
“Oleg, wake up!”
“One second,” Maksimov sang, adjusting the image for clarity. “How’s that?”
“It’ll do.”
“Oh my…!” People turned their faces from the screen in horror.
Archers on the roofs let out a few arrows into the crowd that was blocking a street. The effect of their shooting was unexpected and shocking for scientists unaccustomed to blood. Most of the arrows produced bright lights upon striking, which lit up strange translucent domes. Two arrows exploded at the very edge of a line of soldiers with white armbands. The first exploded, tearing three shield-bearers to shreds. Bloody scraps, smoking and spinning, flew towards the “window.” Olga turned away. Alex covered his mouth with his hand and ran out of the room, but didn’t make it all the way to the bathroom. Two others followed him; they made it.
The second arrow hit the wall of a building. A shower of crushed brick flew in all directions. People screamed heartrendingly. A whole host of cracks quickly spread through the wall; the upper part of the wall collapsed onto the crowd. The noise of the battle could not drown out the crackling of bones and the dying screams of those who were crushed under the main piece of the collapsed building wall. Olga buried her face in her father’s chest.
“Don’t look.” His wide palm covered his child’s eyes.
Vera, the commercial director’s secretary, actually fainted. “What in the world was she doing here?” Kerimov thought. Paul Chuiko got sick in the corner of the room.
A little closer to the “window,” a two-story house collapsed like a house of cards. Several guys in full-length robes had launched strange globes at it that arose from nowhere. The street was covered with dust.
“Magicians, may they be cursed,” Denis expressed the common opinion.
Through the dusty air they could perceive the outline of a tall man with swords in both hands. The swordsman punctured the translucent dome over the mages with his body and went on a killing spree. The employees of the institute went pale as “Snow White” and watched slack-jawed as the unfortunate mages’ heads were separated from their shoulders and fell to the ground.
The battle picked up with renewed force. Bearded men in horned helmets appeared from behind the barricades and obstacles blocking the paths to a large building, similar to a barracks.
“Woah, Vikings! I’m sure of it! Those look like Vikings!” Vasily Lukyanenko cried, the senior technician and a big history buff.
The position of the men with the white armbands worsened, but then something happened at the beginning of the street. The fighting crowd swayed to one side. A few swordsmen, denoted by the rags on their arms, hacked the defensive barrier down and ran towards the scorched ruins from the other side of the city. The rest of the fighters, who broke through the encirclement, came rushing after them.
; Denis sent the “window” after the people who were retreating. He had already forgotten the goal of today’s search, and he wasn’t the only one. The whole crowd of institute employees was glued to the screen, however painful it was to look, waiting to see how the battle would end.
The road was clear. Not a single person stood in the retreating crowd’s way. The inhabitants of the city were huddled in secluded nooks; pale shadows of faces flashed several times in the windows.
The armed crowd moved towards a small fortress near which a dozen singed houses were emitting hot flames. Some of the houses were destroyed down to their foundations. Piles of bricks were the only thing remaining to tell the world that a house once stood here. Corpses lay on the pavement in motionless black blotches. The closer you got to the fortress, the more of them there were.
“The accumulators of the external circuit are running low on power,” Maksimov checked the indicators and announced, “We have about ten or fifteen minutes left.”
“Don’t interrupt!” Petrovich scolded him.
When the retreating people were about two hundred and fifty yards from the fortress, a lone warrior stepped onto their path, dressed in plain clothing, a leather vest and a helmet that half hid his face.
“Yeck, another magician! They’re as plentiful as dirt there,” one of the “old guys” spat, when a bow and quiver materialized in the guy’s hands.
Denis carefully moved the “window” towards the new mage and fit him in the screen in such a way that they could see both him and the crowd that approached him. The mage fitted his bowstring on the bow and prepared to fire.
Thud, thud, thud, the bowstring sang, its song intermingling with its loud clicks against the bone wrist guard on the guy’s left hand. Two people were struck and fell under the feet of the crowd running behind them. A swordsman who was running ahead of the others knocked all the arrows fired at him to the side.
“Tanavidau Targ,” the mage said quietly, then followed it with some foul language—in their native tongue. Kerimov broke into a cold sweat. “Targ,” the warrior added, when the swordsman repulsed two more arrows. The rest of his shots were aimed at others. Three more people fell under the tromping feet of the living wave. His bow disappeared, and he grabbed a sword from thin air.