The old woman leaned back in her chair with a smile that was unmistakably smug, knowing now that she had Victoria on the hook—had penetrated her shield of feigned indifference. She drew the silence out, to make sure Victoria knew it, too.
“I have lived a long life,” she answered, eventually. “As a girl, I watched men kill, and die. As a teacher, I watched the cruel games of children, watched them learn to hate. In old age, I saw my own grandson become a criminal and monster. It is good to know that the gods do not care about righteousness, as we find ourselves incapable of it.
“Their messenger, mighty Czernobog, for whom this place is named, descended from the stars long before man awoke. To him, our history is one short season. He measures time not by the setting of the sun, but by the drift of stars! A millennium ago, a new star shone in the sky and the messenger was gone. The Christians tore his places down and proclaimed their pale Messiah king. Where did he go? Who can say. Perhaps to some other corner of this doomed world. Perhaps to hidden Leng. Perhaps frozen in an unending moment, or answering the summons of the gods. Maybe he found us wanting, unworthy of his revelations. Maybe we have called him back!”
“Or maybe it’s a load of nonsense,” suggested Victoria, rising not-quite-steadily to her feet. “Maybe you’ve got a friend with a pack of dogs and a mask. Maybe I should be on my way.”
The old woman’s smirk became a sneer. “Run then, English woman! You can run from truth, but not from fate! The Black God is rising!”
Victoria ignored her and addressed the grandson. “Will you show me the way back to the road, please?”
“Tak. Come, I will drive you to your camp,” he replied, sounding relieved.
The old woman struggled to her feet as they left the room, pointing a gnarled finger after them and shouting rhapsodically: “Listen! Listen for the laughter of the Black God! Hear the obscenities of Creation!”
“Yeah, you too,” muttered Victoria as the door swung closed behind them.
Burian had a thirty year old Volga parked in a small barn, its bodywork a leopard print of rust. Only one of the headlights worked, but the engine turned over at the second time of asking and they were soon lurching down the rough track that led back to the road.
Burian chattered away, apologising for his grandmother’s behaviour and rubbing nervously at the scar on his forehead. Victoria stayed silent, watching the trees for any sign of movement. Now that they were back outside, in the dark, her bravado had evaporated. The old woman’s stories had disturbed her. Dark pharoahs. Black gods. Pyramids and temples. The message on the radio. The messages on the computers. The thing in the woods. Something was very wrong. She felt surrounded by secrets.
The trees to the side of the road soon gave way to the shattered buildings of Prypiat. Once the lights of the camp were visible between them, Burian pulled over to the side of the road. There was a VV checkpoint ahead, and he was not willing to approach it. Victoria ignored his apologies and climbed from the car, thanking him perfunctorily and marching off into the night, still barefoot from her flight through the woods.
In the distance, the floodlights around the Carapace were reflected off the base layer of low, swirling clouds. The crews were working through the night again. Maybe their sense of duty in the face of a snowstorm apocalypse was driving them on. Or maybe the VV were forcing them to work at gunpoint.
She headed straight for her tent, resisting the temptation to sink onto the cot. If she once lay down she would never get back up. Instead, she stripped off her stained and ruined suit and got in the shower, wincing as the hot, plastic-scented water ran over her cuts and grazes. Blood trickled from her throbbing feet as they slowly thawed, blood vessels dilating in the sudden warmth. She stayed in the shower until it was so filled with steam that she could barely breathe, washing away her smeared makeup and wondering if she should just go straight to bed.
She couldn’t. She had to find Wolfgang, find out what was going on. With any luck, he would have got the winches working. Maybe the Carapace was already on the move. She had to at least check in.
Clean, comfortable clothes made her feel better. She turned on her laptop while she dressed, and opened her e-mail inbox. Scores of spam messages cascaded down the screen, familiar and ominous words standing out among their subject headings. Nyarlathotep. Crawling chaos. The burning eye. She held down the power button to crash the computer, and slammed it closed.
Stepping out into the darkness of the almost-deserted camp, she managed to flag down a small Ural truck that was delivering mineral-fibre fireproofing to the reactor site. The two Moroccan men in the cab didn’t speak English or Ukrainian, but she managed to convey her need to get to the Carapace well enough to secure a lift. They dropped her off at the checkpoint, and turned off towards the dark hulk of Reactor 4 while she walked the last few hundred yards towards the Carapace.
The huge dome glowed like a hot filament in the darkness. Floodlights, headlights, and flashlights smouldered beneath the white fuselage, their beams reflected and concentrated by the curved walls. Men in safety harnesses were climbing around the cranes that ran along the roof, shouting to each other and clattering tools. The giant hangar seemed to be in use as a staging post for expeditions into the reactor. Teams of men were struggling into protective equipment and climbing into SUVs marked with radiation symbols instead of Octra logos. Victoria stood aside as one came speeding past, driving down the concrete slipway towards the Sarcophagus.
Wolfgang Osterberg was directing the action, alternately giving orders to unhappy-looking engineers in radiation suits, barking into a radio, and shouting instructions to the men climbing around, a hundred metres above. Even at Fukushima, Victoria had never seen the phlegmatic German looking so stressed. Seeing her approach, he stopped haranguing his men and puffed out his cheeks in a sigh of relief.
“Victoria! I thought you’d never get back. This is sheer madness. Everything that can go wrong is going wrong!”
Despite the freezing temperature, his face was flushed and his beard damp with sweat. Victoria unzipped his thick, quilted jacket so that he could cool down.
“My car broke down. It’s back on the main road. I got chased by dogs,” she explained.
“Dogs? Mein Gott! You are unhurt, though?”
“I’m fine. What’s going on here?”
Osterberg was only too happy to share his burdens. “The computer system still is not operational. Yosyp says it must be a virus, that somehow it is in the e-mail and the phones now as well. However, that does not matter because now the cranes are kaput! All three of them have broken. They were working perfectly, you know that.”
“I know.”
“Without the cranes, we will not be able to complete demolition once the Carapace is in place. One of our top design goals! Without safe deconstruction of the Sarcophagus, the Carapace is nothing but a sticking plaster. Tens of millions of Euros those cranes cost. Now they do not respond to anything!”
Victoria frowned, but tried to conceal her rising alarm. “What about the reactor?” she asked. “What’s the situation there?”
Osterberg blew through his lips. “There is no time for fireproofing. I have told them to spray the structural supports with fibre plaster in the low-risk areas, but it will do little. We have dismantled our equipment from the roof, and the winches are in position—but they still have no power. I have sent the helicopter to collect heavy power cable. We did not have enough to join them to the supply.”