These Tokarevs are weapons; their use will not be experimental but for effect; there is no failsafe. After firing, the system cannot be aborted and we cannot rely on more than sixty seconds before detonation. Which makes a total of six minutes after initiation. The explosion of the device on the far side should have no effect here, but the one in the passage... may be different. It could be that the sheer power of the detonation will drive radioactive gases and debris back through into Perchorsk. Hopefully all such poisons will be contained down here in the vicinity of the core, by which time the place will have been vacated and the exits sealed.'
Klepko straightened up and put his hands on his hips. 'Any questions?' There were none.
'Simulation is computerized.' He relaxed, scratching his nose and offering an apologetic shrug. 'Bit of a letdown, I'm afraid, if you were expecting a fireworks show. Instead it will all happen on the small screen there in black and white, silent and with subtitles. And no special effects!'
His audience laughed.
'Mainly - !' Klepko held up a warning hand to silence them,' - this is to let you see how short a span six minutes really is.' And he pressed a red button on a box seated in front of him on top of his lectern.
Major Byzarnov had seen the simulation before. He wasn't especially interested in that, but he was interested in the expression on Viktor Luchov's face. One of rapt fascination. Byzarnov took two paces backwards onto the perimeter walkway, edged up quietly on the gaunt scientist and coughed quietly in the back of his throat.
Luchov turned his head to stare at the Major. 'You still think this is some kind of game, don't you?' he accused.
'No,' Byzarnov answered, 'and I never did.'
'I note that any order I might give on the use of these weapons is to be "qualified" by you or your 2 I/C. Do you suspect I might order their use frivolously, then?'
'Not at all.' The Major shook his head, only too well aware of several close-typed, folded sheets of paper where they bulked out his pocket: Luchov's current psychological profile as supplied by the Projekt's psychiatrist. And to himself: Insanely, yes, but not frivolously.
Luchov's eyes were suddenly vacant. 'I sometimes feel that I'm being punished,' he said.
'Oh?'
'Yes, for my part in all of this. I mean, I helped build the original Perchorsk. In those days Franz Ayvaz was the Direktor, but he died in the accident and so paid for his part in it. Since when the responsibility has been mine.'
'A heavy enough load for any man.' Byzarnov nodded, moved apart a little, and decided to change the subject. 'I saw you come up from below, before Klepko started on his demonstration. You were... down in the abandoned magmass levels?'
Luchov shuddered, and whispered: 'God, what a mess things are in, down there! So many of them were trapped, sealed in. I opened a cyst. The thing inside it was like... it was an alien mummy. Not rotten or liquid this time, just a grotesque mass of inverted, half-fossilized flesh. Several major organs were visible on the outside, along with a good many curious - I don't know, appendages? - of rubber, plastic, stone and... and... and et cetera.'
Byzarnov felt sorry for him. Luchov had been here too long. But not for much longer, not if Moscow would act quickly on the Major's recommendation. 'It is terrible down there, Viktor,' he agreed. 'And it might be best if you kept out of it.'
Viktor? And Byzarnov's tone of voice: what, pity? Luchov glanced at him, glared at him, abruptly turned away. And over his shoulder, stridently: 'So long as I am Projekt Direktor, Major, I'll come and go as I will!' And then he made away.
Byzarnov approached Klepko. By now the twin dart shapes moving jerkily across the computer screen had popped into oblivion; the simulation was over; Klepko was finishing off: '... will still be filled with toxic exhaust fumes and could well be highly radioactive! But of course we shall all be well out of it.' The Major waited until Klepko had given the dismiss then took him to one side and talked to him briefly, urgently.
About Luchov.
The Necroscope dreamed.
He dreamed of a boy called Harry Keogh who talked to dead people and was their friend, their one light in otherwise universal darkness. He dreamed of the youth's loves and lives, the minds he'd visited, bodies he'd inhabited, places he had known now, in the past and future, and in two worlds. It was a very weird dream and fantastical - more so because it was true - and for all that the Necroscope dreamed about himself, his own life, still it was as if he dreamed of another.
Finally he dreamed of his son, a wolf... except this part was real and not just a memory from another world. And his son came to him, tongue lolling, and said: Father, they're coming!
Harry came awake on the instant, slid from Karen's bed, went swift and sinuous to the window embrasure where he drew aside the drapes. He was wary, kept himself well to one side, was ready to snatch back his hand in a moment if that should be necessary. But it wasn't, for it was sundown. Shadows crept on the mountain divide, usurping the gold from the peaks. Stars at first scarcely visible, came more glowingly alive moment by moment. The darkness was here, and more darkness was coming.
Karen cried out in her sleep, came awake and jerked bolt upright in the tumbled bed. 'Harry!' Her face was ghostly pale - a torn sheet, with a triangle of holes for eyes and mouth - where she gazed all about the room. But then she saw the Necroscope at the window and the holes of her eyes came burning alive. 'They're coming!'
Their scarlet glances met and joined, forming a two-way channel for thoughts which moments ago were sleeping. Harry saw through Karen's eyes into her mind, but he answered her out loud anyway. 'I know,' he said.
She came off the bed naked and flew to him, buried herself in his arms. 'But they're coming!' she sobbed.
'Yes, and we'll fight them,' he growled, his body reacting of its own accord to the feel and smell of her flesh, which was soft, silky, pliable, ripe, musty and wet where his member grew into her.
She trapped him there with muscles that held him fast, and groaned, 'Let's make this the very best one, Harry.'
'Because it might be the last?'
'Just in case,' she grunted, forming barbs within herself to draw him further in. After that -
- It was like never before, leaving them too exhausted to be afraid...
Later, he said: 'What if we lose?'
'Lose?' Karen stood beside him; they leaned together and gazed out through a window in a room facing north, towards the Icelands. As yet there was nothing to be seen and they hadn't expected there would be. But they could feel... something. It radiated from the north like ripples on a lake of pitch: slow, shuddery and black with its evil.
Harry nodded, slowly. 'If we lose, they can only kill me,' he said. And he thought of Johnny Found and the things he had done to his victims. Terrible things. But compared to Shaithis and any other survivors of the old Wamphyri, Johnny Found had been a child, and his imagination sadly lacking.
Karen knew why the Necroscope closed his mind to her: for her own protection. But it was a wasted effort; she knew the Wamphyri much better than he did; nothing Harry was capable of imagining could ever plumb the true depths of Wamphyri cruelty. That was Karen's opinion; which was why she promised him, 'If you die, I die.'
'Oh? And they'll let you die, will they? So easily?'
They can't stop me. On this side of the mountains it is sundown, but beyond Sunside... true death waits there for any vampire. It burns like molten gold in the sky. That's where I'd flee, far across the mountains into the sun. Let them follow me there if they dared, but I wouldn't be afraid. I remember when I was a child and the sun felt good on my skin. I'm sure that in the end, before I died, I could make it feel that way again. I would will it to feel good!'