They were at a junction, but the corridor leading off from the main hallway was blocked. The ceiling had been demolished by the fire and explosion thirty years before. Victoria knew it well. It led past significant deposits of corium, and was lethally radioactive. The original Complex Expedition had managed to remove enough debris to allow a small robot to travel through and relay photographs, but no human had passed that way since the disaster.
Osterberg answered her, sounding uncharacteristically vague. “Victoria? Is that you?”
“Of course it’s me. Who were you expecting?”
“Strange noises. I cannot find them.”
“No, they’re down here,” repeated Victoria. “We found a gun. Must have belonged to one of the militia who came in with Swan. Listen, we’re at the intersection of 201 and 209. Yosyp, back up and show us that hole.” The RIV turned smartly and reversed until most of the blocked junction was visible on screen. “Yeah, someone’s been digging. You know the robot route through 209 that leads to the steam distribution corridor? It’s been enlarged, I think, so that somebody could fit through it. He left his gun so he could keep his hands free. Wolfgang? Are you copying this, or am I talking to myself?”
“Yes, I will.”
“You will? You will, what?” When he didn’t reply, she continued. “Look, you need to get out of there. You’ve only got twenty minutes. Head back to the control room and radio us when you get there. Okay?”
“Yes, I will.”
“Right.”
Victoria pointed at the computer screen with the radio antenna. “Can the robot fit through there?” she asked, indicating the freshly-excavated tunnel. Yosyp wobbled his hand from side to side and sucked his teeth.
“It will be tight. If I lower the mast it will, but only if it doesn’t get narrower. The signal will degrade until we find the other side.”
“It will stay wide enough for a person to fit through, at least.”
Yosyp looked uncomfortable. “What makes these people crazy? Why break in here? There is nothing in here for them. I think this project is cursed.”
“Maybe.”
“I think it is an experiment. By the VV. They have not told us everything.” He lowered the RIV’s camera mast, and the onscreen perspective dropped as if the robot was sinking through the floor.
Victoria shrugged. “Well, it’s food for thought.”
“THOUGHT FOR FOOD!”
The voice burst from the speakers in a cacophony of microphone static. Victoria leapt to her feet as if electrified, and Yosyp dropped the control unit in shock. A deep, gurgling laugh erupted from the laptop. Hollow and inhuman, it made the hairs on Victoria’s neck and arms prickle with dread. Yosyp scrambled to retrieve the controller, and span the RIVs camera through a full circle as the laughter dissolved into hissing static once again.
“Nothing there! You heard that, right?”
Victoria nodded, and worked to free her tongue from the roof of her suddenly-dry mouth. There were no speakers on the RIV, no way for anyone in the reactor to hear what they were saying—and Yosyp was right, there was in the corridor. So who, or what, had replied to her?
“I don’t like this,” muttered the technician. He was shuddering, and Victoria didn’t think it was entirely due to the cold.
“Get a grip,” she snapped, convincing neither of them. “It must have been interference from the militia comms. Or someone else using our frequency.”
“It came through the microphones.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it. Get the robot in there.”
She picked up the handset again and called Osterberg. “Wolfgang. Come in. Are you on your way back to the control room yet? You have to get out of there, now. Come in!”
There was no response.
The RIV crawled through the collapsed tunnel, steered carefully over lumps of debris and around larger obstructions. The picture on the laptop screen was spattered with white pixels now, and it was beginning to drop frames as the signal deteriorated. Around the rover, Victoria could make out veins of corium that had solidified around broken struts and lumps of cement, like wax running from a candle.
Osterberg continued to ignore her calls. She hoped that was because he was heading full-pelt for the Control Room. Nauseous tension gripped her insides, and the voice from the computer echoed ceaselessly in her head. She fought to bury memories of grinning jaws and staring eyes. No time. Not now, not for that.
After a few minutes of tortuous maneuvering, the RIV finally bumped down a slope of nuclear lava to the slimy floor of the steam distribution corridor. Everywhere that water had dripped or condensed, fungi had sprouted like metastases. They were jet black, tinged green by the infra-red, their cells melanised by intense gamma radiation.
Some of the nearest growths had been crushed, and footprints were clearly visible in their pulverised remains. Victoria swallowed hard and glanced at the Geiger readout. Nearly 36 sieverts. At least one person had passed that way though, and they had been the first in thirty years to do so.
The RIV’s engine echoed in the dank tunnel, sounding like a swarm of flies, the noise seeming to complement the steadily increasing static on the screen. Yosyp moved slowly, following the intermittent trail of footprints and examining them carefully before they were obliterated by the RIV’s tracks.
Victoria could sense the weight of the reactor pressing down on the basement as the robot crawled through it. She glanced across at the building’s exterior. The Carapace was relentlessly consuming it, inch by inch, like a snake ingesting its prey. Even if they located the missing men, there would not be time to lead them out. It was not about that anymore. Now it was a matter of documenting their entombment. Of bearing witness and maybe, by doing so, of re-establishing man’s authority over the benighted and intolerable Sarcophagus.
She traced the RIV’s progress on the map, trying to guess where Swan’s madness was taking them. Every route was marked as blocked apart from one: a narrow, sloping conduit, sclerotic with corium, that led down to the pressure suppression pools. Whoever had been this way must have headed for the deepest and most radioactive part of the reactor.
“Carry on down,” she told Yosyp. “There’s a drainage duct that isn’t blocked, somewhere on the left. It’s the only place they can have gone.”
“I do not think the control signal will go any deeper,” the technician pointed out. “There is too much obstruction for the wireless communication. We will not be able to contact the vehicle.”
“Well, there isn’t time to retrieve it anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. Just go for it.”
The radio handset in Victoria’s lap emitted a sudden fizz of static and she snatched it up, pressing it to her ear as Osterberg’s voice broke through. “…der Temple der Vergessenheit!”
“Wolfgang? Wolfgang, come in!”
“Victoria!” He was breathing hard, as if he had been running. “Get away! Get far away!”
“Wolfgang? What are you talking about? Where are you?”
“Room 939. I can’t find the door.”
“Room 939?” She struggled to refold the map while holding the radio to her ear. “There is no Room 939! Wolfgang, you have to come back down, now! The Turbine Shed exit is going to be sealed. Please, hurry up!”
“It’s dark. I can’t see the walls. How can that be? I cannot find the door.”
“Wolfgang, there is no Room 939! Retrace your steps. You need to come back downstairs.”
“Was kann aus Schatten gewoben werden?”
He sounded confused, like a man in a daze. His voice, though, was clearer and more distinct than it should have been.