They reached the airlock, and Felix hit the button. A steel door slid up. Before Pytor stepped in, Felix wrapped his arms around his brother as well as he could, considering the pod his brother carried in addition to his air tank. They exchanged no words; everything that had needed to be said had already been discussed. Felix turned the valve on the oxygen tank, sending oxygen to his brother, then he stepped back. Pytor went into the lock, and Felix hit the bottom, closing the steel door.
Felix turned and walked toward the control to watch his brother conduct the mission.
Pytor flinched as the inner door opened. He knew with that simple opening he was now the walking dead. He laughed once more. He had been the walking dead before he entered here. He stepped through. It was strange; there was dirt under his feet, the former outside of Reactor Four. He walked across the small open space toward the entrance to the control room. The world thought that the entire core and building had been buried under the concrete poured from the helicopters in the weeks after the explosion. But the black triangle had hallowed out a space, refusing to allow the concrete to pass, and when the concrete dried, the entire reactor was in the midst of an open space that made up the Chernobyl gate. Whatever field the triangle had propagated had subsequently disappeared, as the robots had been able to go in.
Pytor knew the rest of the world wanted the other three reactors shut down, the entire place abandoned, but there were two reasons Chernobyl was still in business: one was the desperate need for the power, and the second was the need to monitor this space and the black triangle inside.
Pytor felt his skin tingle, and he wasn’t sure whether that was real or a product of his imagination. Could it be the radiation, slowly seeping through the suit, or could it be the barrier of the gate? If he was indeed inside the gate already. This gate was different from the others for some reason. Pytor had met with Professor Kolkov, the Russian expert on the gates, and the scientist had expressed his own uncertainty about why it was different.
Pytor didn’t care that it was different. He didn’t care about the science, Andrej had been the scientist amount the three brothers, and this thing had killed him. It was a matter of honor, an oath the three had sworn when Andrej had been the first to leave home, they would always be there for each other, and if anything happened to one, the others would revenge. Pytor had had to wait many years, but now he was taking the first step in that revenge. It would be up to Felix to complete it.
Pytor opened the door leading to the control center and stepped in. The skeletons littering the floor were the first things he noticed. He knelt in the center of the room and pulled a bunch of daisies from the top of the pack and placed them there. They had been given to him by Andrej’s widow.
Then he went to the heavy door that led to the reactor core. Slowly he unbolted it and swung it open. He was drenched in sweat, and the inside of the mask was beginning to fog up. Even the oxygen coming from the tank tasted strange.
He stepped into the core and saw the black triangle. Each side was fifteen feet long, and the entire thing was about ten feet high. Its composition was hard to make out, not appearing solid, but the sides were perfectly straight. It was almost as if the triangle was made of a thick, black liquid. Pytor approached and stopped just a few feet short of the side. He knew Felix was watching on the video monitor, so he turned and waved. He reached out with his hand. As the glove touched the black, it felt as if it were going into molasses. He pulled his hand back out and looked at it. No apparent change. With no hesitation, he stepped into the black and was swallowed up.
“The second probe is transmitting,” Ahana announced.
“Linkage?” Nagoya asked as he looked over her shoulder.
“The transmission is propagating,” Ahana said as a red line on the screen began extending slowly toward the dot that represented the probe that had been taken into the Devil’s Sea gate. “Contact,” she said as the line met the dot.
The probes were preprogrammed to run through a variety of tests in contact with each other, and Nagoya stepped back to allow his people to accumulate the data.
Major Pytor Shashenka was kneeling over the probe. He smiled as he saw the readout scroll through various programs, indicating it was working. Then he looked around once more. He was in the center of the triangle, the floor beneath him perfectly smooth, the air full of that thick yellowish gray fog, just as Kilkov had told him areas inside the gates on Earth appeared. He realized this was an anteroom to the real portal. The fog was so thick he couldn’t see the edge of the black triangle across from him.
He could feel the effects of the radiation now. His stomach was churning, his head pounding in pain. He was soaked in sweat. He vomited into his mask, fouling it. Bowing to the inevitable, he removed the mask. He knew he was shortening what little time he had left, but he saw no reason not to.
As the probe continued to work, he got up and walked around. His foot hit something, and he paused. Reaching down, he picked up the object. A bronze helmet with a chinstrap, the metal highly polished, he leather on the chinstrap oiled. A spasm passed through his body, and he collapsed to the floor next to the probe, the leather in his lap.
The air was foul almost oily. Pytor ran a hand across his forehead, wiping the sweat away. He placed the helmet on top of the probe. There were Lain numbers imprinted in the bronzed in the front. He squinted. XXV.
Most strange, he thought before he passed out.
In front of him, a circle of black appeared, eclipsing down to the floor until it was six feet high and three feet wide.
“We’ve got the Chernobyl probe!” Ahana announced. “Through the Devil’s Sea gate,” she added. “So there is a definite connection between the two on the other side.”
“Excellent,” Nagoya said. “Phase two is successful. Now it is time for phase three.”
“Which is?” Ahana wanted to know.
“Going into the gate itself and opening a portal.”
‘How do you propose to do that?” Ahana asked.
Instead of answering, Nagoya asked a question in turn. “What do you think of the physics of the gates now that you have this data?”
“I think the muon emissions are important,” Ahana said, “to understanding the gates.” She had the data gathered from the probes spread out on a large table and was checking it as she spoke.
Nagoya nodded. “Muons are part of the second family of fundamental particles. Most of what we are used to in our world is in the first family, consisting of electrons, up-quarks, and down-quarks. The second family consists of muons, charm quarks, and strange quarks. And all these things are not single points, according to string theory, but rather a tiny one-dimensional loop hat that is vibrating. That gives it several characteristics that allow us to merge relativity and quantum mechanics.”
Ahana considered that. “I understand what you are saying, but we cannot even see particles at that level. We only know they exist because of their effect, as evidence by the tank we are on top of.”
Nagoya nodded. “I know, but you don’t need to see something to manipulate it. Reverse what you just said. We know these basic particles exist because we can study their effect. Then why can’t we use an effect to manipulate the particles?”
He continued, “I think this is what the Shadow is doing and why the muons we detect are not decaying as quickly as we believe they should. Because the Shadow is using the muons and the quarks.” He held up a finger. “Power. That is the key. We know the Shadow likes to draw power from this side, whether it be in the form of radioactivity as it did at Chernobyl, or from the planet itself along the tectonic plates, one of the greatest, if slowest, powers on the planet. I think it uses the fault lines not just before attacking us but to draw power. That is what this is all about. And how many base forms of power are there?” he asked Ahana.