”The others can cover us both,” Leskov said. “Those were my friends.”
”Mine, too,” Galyshev said. “Come on, then.”
Side by side, the two men advanced across the maintenance area, stalking as if the boiler room were the lair of some dangerous beast-which, Galyshev thought, it might very well be. He had talked bravely about how there were no monsters out there on the ice, but he knew they weren’t all that far from the old nuclear testing ground on Novaya Zemlya, and visions of horribly mutated polar bears were lurking somewhere in the back of his mind.
Sobchak had said something about higher-than-normal radiation levels back when all this trouble first started, Galyshev remembered that all too well. The scientists all said that the stories of radioactive mutants were nonsense, bad American science fiction-but the scientists had lied before or been wrong before.
And why would any human being hang those corpses up like that? It had to be some sort of beast!
He crept up to one side of the door, while Leskov took a position at the other. Galyshev waved to Leskov to wait, then leaned over and slid one hand through the door, groping for the light switch.
”They’d have an advantage with the light behind -me,” he whispered to Leskov. “I need to see them.”
Leskov nodded.
Galyshev’s fingers found the switch. He tensed, braced himself-then flicked the switch and burst through the door, AK-47 ready.
It took him a moment to understand what he saw.
The door opened on a short passageway, a meter or so long, that led into the main boiler room. That boiler room was not well lit, even with the four ceiling lights on; it was a shadowy place of hissing pipes, black dust, and the orange glow from the burners.
This was the heart of the heating system for the entire complex-here oil was burned to boil water into steam, which was circulated through a network of pipes and radiators to every inhabited portion of Station #12. The oil came straight from the fields, so it was heavy, dirty stuff, and despite the chimneys and blowers soot seeped out into the boiler plant, covering everything with black grit.
The room was sweltering hot, of course, despite the biting cold outside the station. The heat radiated off the main boiler in waves of rippling air. The metal sides of the boiler were too hot to touch, new workers arriving at the station sometimes put themselves in the infirmary with second-degree burns while discovering this.
Galyshev had been working in Assyma for years; he would no more have touched the boiler than he would have thrust his bare hand into live coals.
It took him a moment, therefore, to realize that he really did see three big, man-shaped creatures leaning up against the boiler, their backs pressed tight to the unbearably hot metal.
He couldn’t shoot them, he realized; his fire would hit the boiler. The metal walls were thick, but the boiler was old, and was designed to hold pressure in, not to keep bullets out. It might explode if he shot at it.
These things were unquestionably the killers, though. They held things like spears, there were jagged blades on their wrists…
And they weren’t human at all, he realized. Not only could they press up against metal heated to 120 degrees Celsius without being burned, but they were huge, their skin was yellowish, their nails black and hard and pointed, like claws. They wore strange metal masks that hid their faces completely, while elsewhere much of their inhuman flesh was exposed.
They not only weren’t burned, they seemed to relish the heat.
”My God,” Galyshev said as it sank in just what he was seeing.
The three masked faces turned to look at him. Something moved-not one of the creatures themselves, but something on the shoulder of the one nearest Galyshev, something humped and black that lifted up and pivoted to point at him.
Three red dots roved briefly before settling onto Galyshev’s face.
A weapon, Galyshev realized, and he started to duck, to point his own weapon, but the blue-white fireball tore his head off before he had had time to fully react.
Leskov had not yet looked into the room, though he had been tempted upon seeing how Galyshev was staring; he was holding himself back, staying in reserve, letting Galyshev take the lead here. Galyshev was the superintendent, after all.
Then something flashed blue-white, momentarily blinding Leskov. Galyshev’s AK-47 stuttered briefly as the superintendent’s finger squeezed the trigger in a dying spasm, and when Leskov could see again Galyshev’s headless corpse was falling to the floor.
Leskov let out a wordless scream of rage and fear and swung himself into the doorway, firing wildly.
He never even saw them. He saw a blur, and then felt the hot shocking pain of a blade ripping through his belly, and then Leskov died, falling beside Galyshev, the AK-47 spraying bullets across the boiler-room ceiling as he toppled backward.
On the other side of the maintenance area the others watched in horror. They saw the blue-white flash, saw Galyshev and Leskov fall, but they didn’t see the enemy, didn’t see what had killed the two.
”What happened to them?” Shaporin asked. He raised his voice and shouted, “Who are you? Who’s in there? Why are you doing this?”
No one answered.
”I don’t like this,” Rublev said. “I’m no soldier.
I’m getting out of here.” He began creeping backward up the corridor.
Then there was another blue-white flash, this one tearing across the full width of the maintenance area, and Shaporin crumpled to the concrete, his chest blown apart. Rublev turned and ran.
None of the men ever got a clear look at their attackers; the things moved too fast, the light was poor. A few fired their weapons wildly into the darkness, hoping to hit something, but without effect.
Five more men died before they could even attempt to flee; Rublev was the only one to make it as far as the main corridor. He didn’t turn to see if anyone was pursuing him, didn’t turn to see what had happened to his comrades.
He didn’t see the spear until it had punched through his body. Then he glimpsed the barbed, red-coated blade for only an instant before he died.
Rublev’s body hung limply on the spear for a moment as the creature looked around, scanning the corridor for any further sign of life.
Then it flung the corpse aside and returned to the warmth of the boiler plant.
Chapter 14
James Theodore Ridgely, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had never trusted the Russians, hadn’t trusted them when they called themselves Soviets and preached their Communist bullshit about historic inevitability, and he didn’t trust them now when they called themselves Russians again and talked about the brotherhood of nations.
He didn’t mind if they knew it, either-in fact, he took pride in thinking he was doing his bit to let the Russkies know they weren’t fooling everybody. That might, he thought, help keep them in line.
And someone, going by the intelligence report he’d just received, was sure as hell out of line now. Four hundred percent increase in background radiation in the Assyma region on the Yamal Peninsula? Huge localized rise in temperature? That didn’t happen by itself, or because some factory worker dropped a canister.
He had had to check a map to be sure just where the hell the Yamal Peninsula was. Northwestern Siberia, on the Arctic Ocean-not that you were ever likely to see any open seawater that far north! That was hundreds of miles from the border with the Norwegian part of Lapland, thousands of miles from the Bering Strait.
The middle of fucking nowhere, that’s where the Yamal Peninsula was.
So of course this Assyma place was an oil field. One of the coldest, most barren places on Earth, colder than the North Pole itself, and the Russians were pumping thousands of barrels of high-grade oil out of the ground there.