She realised that she was looking forward to seeing the control room again. She had spent many hours there during her time in the Zone, working among its banks of decaying, rusted computers. The stalkers had used it as a staging post for expeditions deeper into the Sarcophagus, and anyone wanting to enter the reactor proper had little choice but to pass through it. The ‘Mammoth,’ one of the main supports for the weight of the Sarcophagus, had been created by filling the plant’s deaerator corridor with concrete, which had effectively blocked all the other access points on that floor. The question was, with no reason to enter the plant in the first place, where would the missing men have gone once they got that far?
The RIV scrambled over a nest of coiled cables in front of the doorway, and dropped down onto the polished tile floor of Control. The camera’s autofocus took a second to adjust to the sudden open space, but then the bank of obsolete and dilapidated consoles popped into view, curving away from them across the middle of the room. Victoria’s breath caught in her throat as a hulking shadow suddenly lumbered into the light—but it was only Osterberg, shielding his eyes from the glare of the RIV’s lights.
The radio squawked into life again. “There are footprints here,” declared the German, kneeling down to examine the floor. “Someone has been this way recently.”
Victoria squeezed the ‘send’ button and replied. “Good work, Sitting Bull. It’s the busiest room in the building, they could have been made ages ago.”
On the screen, Osterberg shook his head. “I don’t think so. They are barefoot.”
The footprints led to the far door of the control room, but then became indistinguishable in the filth and debris of another corridor. Osterberg called out, his voice echoing disturbingly through the giant mausoleum. Nobody answered.
The RIV kept him company as he walked the corridor and shone his torch into the rooms that led off from it, but Victoria knew they wouldn’t find anyone there. On the right, up ahead, was the doorway that led into the reactor proper.
The driving snow outside was mirrored by a constant shower of dust drifting down from the ceiling, dislodged by subterranean vibrations from the approaching Carapace. In a few more minutes, the west end of the turbine hall would be engulfed by the encroaching arch. In another two hours, the entire reactor would be devoured and the massive concertina doors would draw closed around it.
Fortunately, large areas of the mazelike interior were entirely inaccessible, either blocked by rubble, filled in with concrete to shore up the Sarcophagus, or flooded by radioactive lava. When the reactor core had burned, the fuel rods had liquefied and fused with sand and molten concrete to form a deadly lava, christened ‘corium.’ The resulting white-hot slurry, all 135 tons of it, had burned, melted, and poured its way through the structure, following the paths of least resistance. Large parts of the lower floors had been inundated with it.
In a way, that made the decision about how to proceed easier. Osterberg ordered Yosyp to take the RIV downwards and scout the intensely-radioactive lower levels while he checked the upper ones and worked his way towards the reactor chamber. Victoria protested, alarmed by the idea of him leaving the view of the cameras, but could only relent when he pointed out that the sooner they found Swan’s party, the sooner he could leave.
The snow was coming down so hard now that the reactor was barely visible through it. Victoria could hear the grinding of the two giant winches, but couldn’t see them, either. On the ground it was over a foot deep, which meant that it would be that deep on the roof as well. If it caved in while Osterberg was on the upper floors…
She forced her attention back to the screen, and used the map to guide Yosyp through derelict room after derelict room. Shadows jumped and flickered with every twitch of the control mechanism, until eventually, now that they no longer had to worry about lighting Osterberg’s route, Yosyp killed the LEDs and activated the robot’s infra-red spotlight and camera.
The uncanny green glow of night vision gave the rooms and halls a ghostly aspect, and made the reactor seem unreal, like some sepulchral hallucination. Victoria guided Yosyp around two gigantic heaters that looked like abandoned coffins. In years gone by, they had been used to combat the perpetual condensation inside the Sarcophagus, but they were unpowered and dead now, and water dripped constantly from a dozen places overhead.
The nearest stairwell had been plugged with concrete because the room below was flooded with corium. The rover trundled on. Its driver and navigator sat in silence, their shared tension rising as it rounded each corner. When a bird, one of hundreds that roosted in the ruins, came veering out of the darkness towards the camera, they both jumped. Victoria clutched at the technician’s arm. The bird swerved away at the last second with a flurry of squawks that rang through the pitch-black vault like a burglar alarm.
Victoria released her grip on Yosyp’s sleeve. She was annoyed with herself, both for being thrown into a panic by a bird and for seizing hold of the nearest man, like some cringing maiden. She picked up the radio handset and tried to raise Osterberg, to reassert herself and prove, whether to Yosyp or herself, that she was fully in control.
“Wolfgang? Come in, over.”
The silence began to stretch as they waited for him to respond. Victoria imagined him lying unconscious at the bottom of a flight of stairs, or pinned beneath a collapsed wall. Why couldn’t he just have stayed where they could see him? Eventually though, his muffled voice crackled over the airwaves.
“Jesus Christ, Victoria, you made me jump! What is it?”
“Just checking you’re all right. Don’t go silent on us, you’re on your own in there. Where are you now?”
“Room 505. I thought I heard voices, but I find no sign. I will radio when I move up to the next floor.”
“Okay. I’m going to keep calling if you don’t. Over and out.”
Yosyp guided the RIV into a narrow stairwell, and drove it carefully downwards. The picture on the screen reminded Victoria of footage of sunken ships, motes of dust hanging in the air like plankton. She noticed occasional speckles of noise on the image. The robot’s cameras were radiation hardened, but they were still susceptible to ionisation events, voltage shifts, and other artifacts from the constant radiological attack.
At the bottom of the stairs a short, claustrophobic corridor ended in a T-junction. There was little point in turning left, Victoria knew, as they would only run into more concrete infill. She directed Yosyp to the right, and told him to follow a mass of pipes that ran along the tunnel wall.
The speakers crackled loudly, as if a gust of wind had blown over the microphones, but nothing in the tunnel moved. Victoria glanced at the steadily climbing numbers of the Geiger readout. Anyone who had gone deeper than the point the RIV had reached would have been exposed to a huge, potentially lethal dose of radiation.
There was something lying in the corridor ahead. Yosyp slowed down as they drew closer, panning the camera down to keep it in view. It was a gun: an aggressively-styled rifle, the license-built copy of an Israeli design that was favoured by the VV. It lay in the middle of the deserted hallway like a child’s discarded toy, surrounded by scattered lumps of rubble and cement.
“A gun,” said Yosyp, unnecessarily. Victoria didn’t reply, she just pressed the send button on the radio.
“Wolfgang, come in. We’ve got a gun down here. At least some of them must have come this way.”