Philip Hemplow

SARCOPHAGUS

It was a dismal afternoon.

A blustery wind swept around Heathrow, and rain glittered in the runway lights as 747s and A320s lumbered awkwardly into the darkening London sky. Inside the gigantic terminal building, Victoria watched water trace bronchiolar patterns on the darkening glass of the VIP lounge.

Swan was on his phone again, reciting acronyms and glib, corporate gerunds to someone in New York. The American was young, 31 or 32, and wore his overpriced suit and supercilious attitude like armour. Victoria tried not to listen to him, or to anticipate sitting next to him for the next five hours.

In the distance she could see the glowing frown that was Wembley’s illuminated arch. Malcolm would already be on his way there with his stupid friends. England vs Ireland. Or Iceland, or possibly Israel—she couldn’t remember. He was probably already dropping his aitches, telling Les and Fat Frank his grievances in the vile, mockney accent he adopted whenever the football came on. She thought about phoning him but decided against it. She would call him from Ukraine. That way she could use the cost of the call as an excuse to hang up if he restarted their argument. Or she could just not ring him at all.

Swan finished his call and flung himself theatrically into a chair behind her. “Okay,” he began, rubbing his face vigorously to signify how complicated and important his conversation had been. “Osterberg missed the midday teleconference, but the board didn’t like what they heard from whoever they did talk to. They’ve decided we’ve got actionable compliance issues and they’ve empowered me—us—to action any staffing solutions we feel are necessary.”

“Meaning what?” asked Victoria.

“Meaning that when we get there, Osterberg gets stood down. We’ll have to keep him on site—he’s the only person qualified to play the chief safety role, and the contract says the government has to sign-off on any changes to the nuclear safety guy—but we’re taking charge. He gets to advise, I guess, but everything goes through us. We’re going to bring this home, baby, in time for Christmas!”

“You don’t think we should hear his side of the story first?” suggested Victoria. “He’s a medical doctor and a qualified nuclear engineer. We aren’t either.”

Swan was already tapping away at his Blackberry. “There are other engineers on site. He’s had his chance. He’s 19 weeks behind schedule. Won’t even tell us why! I tell you, that crap wouldn’t fly if this was an American company. You seen the penalty clauses in this contract? Three weeks from now, if they get activated, the share price is gonna shit the fucking bed.”

He tossed a pellet of chewing gum into his mouth without offering her any, and put the phone back to his ear.

“We pull this off, there’s gonna be some major fucking gratitude,” he assured her while he waited for his call to connect. “I’m talking promotions, bonuses, a seat on the board, even.”

A seat. Singular. There was no way Octra were going to put this juvenile bullshitter on the board of directors, no matter how proactive and incentivised and holistic he was. Then again, they weren’t going to give a seat to a 38-year-old woman either, she reminded herself bitterly. She had a PhD and an MBA, had overseen the construction of two brand new nuclear piles, answered questions from parliamentary select committees, and worked twelve hours every day to bring her projects in on-time and under-budget. However, she didn’t play golf, she hadn’t gone to school with half the Cabinet and no-one, least of all the President of France, knew her father. She had more chance of getting on the moon than of getting on the board.

“When we get there, we take Osterberg right out of the loop,” continued Swan, staring at her while he chewed his gum with his mouth open. “I’ve got a mandate to interface with the project teams directly, do what it takes to get them back on schedule.”

“And I’m there to do what?” Victoria met his stare and folded her arms.

“Keep Osterberg out of my way, for a start. You know him, right? Well, you’re good cop, I’m bad cop. You’re meant to liaise with the government as well, keep them from getting antsy. Maybe get them to pull the police off the site, that might be a good start.”

“The police?”

“Place is crawling with police at the moment. Militia types. Internal Troops or something.”

“The VV? Why?”

Swan’s phone call was finally answered and he resumed jabbering into the handset without answering her question. Victoria curled her lip and went back to the window.

Interior Troops. The Vnutrisni Viys'ka. She’d seen them on parade the last time she was in Kiev, four years before, their smart blue uniforms immaculate, assault rifles clasped to their chests. She remembered Osterberg’s pawlike hand resting on her shoulder as they looked for his stepson among the marching ranks, the ground trembling as armoured personnel carriers rumbled past. The VV were not just police; they were a gendarmerie with fighting vehicles and machine guns. They took their orders directly from the office of the President, like a republican guard. Nuclear security was part of their brief—but who had called them in to the Zone?

She wondered what had happened to Osterberg. The Wolfgang Osterberg she knew was a walking stereotype of German meticulousness and efficiency. His engineering teams worshipped him, followed his orders to the letter. Now the rumour was that he had lost nine men, the Carapace project was falling apart, and he wasn’t even answering the phone.

The last time she had seen him was at Fukushima I. The two of them had been sent to the quake-stricken plant, ostensibly to offer their help with containing the multiple meltdowns, but with a brief to find potential cleanup contracts for Octra in the aftermath. Osterberg had been his usual, energised self: arguing with the TEPCO engineers, NISA, the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission, and even his translator; leading a team that inserted remote submersibles into the reactor basement, and personally repairing damaged electronics. And yet, the sense of humour she’d remembered had been absent. At the time, she’d put it down to the stress of Fukushima, but maybe it was something else.

Swan snapped his fingers to get her attention, as if she was a waitress or a beagle. He was standing up, still drawling into the phone. Victoria glared at him. He was just the kind of man who would snap his fingers at a waitress. He slung his carry-on bag over his shoulder and pointed upwards, drawing her attention to the flight being announced over the PA system. It was theirs. British Airways to Borispol. She was going back.

* * *

With his Blackberry and laptop in Flight Mode, Swan was fidgety and distracted. After some perfunctory attempts at small talk he buried himself in a book that promised to teach him Sun Tzu’s strategies for successful business administration.

Victoria gazed into the darkness beyond the cabin window and thought back to the eleven months she had spent in the Zone with Osterberg and the other ‘stalkers’—the ironic nickname that the technicians of the Complex Expedition had adopted. Days spent mapping the interior of Reactor Number 4, collecting metallurgical samples, piloting robots into areas that were too hot with radiation for their protective suits. Nights spent drinking vodka—officially forbidden—with the work crews, singing, and arguing, and playing cards. She had been just another member of the team. There were no glass ceilings in the Zone of Alienation. Eleven months she had gone without shaving her legs or armpits. The thought made her cringe now, but no one in the Zone had cared.

Wolfgang Osterberg had treated her like a favoured daughter: patiently correcting her mathematics, teaching her how to spot structural dangers, and teaching her how to cheat at cribbage. She smiled wistfully as she remembered the moments of panic. Hurried retreats as Geiger counters suddenly spiked. Blindly groping in pitch blackness for dropped flashlights. Rushing to pour neutron-dampening salts on fuel deposits that threatened sudden criticality. The Sarcophagus was a dangerous place.

It was a long time ago now. Octra had recalled her to the U.K. to supervise the recomissioning of an old Magnox site, one of numerous contracts the Anglo-French consortium had won as the cost of oil soared. She had advised on the construction of new reactors, led the way on project safety, and learned how to survive in the world of business. She no longer had to worry about inhaling radionuclides, or ceilings collapsing on her head. Danger came in e-mail form now, in budget meetings and performance metrics. She was surprised by how much she was looking forward to being back in the Zone.

Malcolm had protested, for form’s sake as much as anything. She was going away on business and wouldn’t be be back until Christmas. That was a grievance he could bank. Truth be told, she was looking forward to being away from him for a few weeks. Their relationship had probably exceeded its half life. While he had been poor and overworked he had made an effort to be pleasant, enjoying the nice house, the big TV, and the holidays that her exorbitant salary made possible. Now that he was earning decent money himself, he had become self-centred and churlish. She wondered how sad she would be if he left her. Not very. Maybe she would do it—break up with him. When she got back. Or after Christmas. After all, no-one wanted to be alone at Christmas.

* * *

She fell asleep without meaning to, and was woken by her ears popping as the plane made its final descent towards Borispol. The flight had left her feeling cramped and grimy, but the sudden blast of wintry air when the exit door swung open brought her round in an instant.

Octra’s chartered Mi-8 was waiting for them, rotors idling. One of the pilots was there to take them through an expedited Customs check and then straight to the helicopter. Victoria and Swan were the only passengers in its enormous, cigar-shaped hold, and as soon as they were aboard the groan of the gas turbines became a deep-throated, harmonic roar. With a staccato thunder of beating blades the Hip pounced into the air and lurched around to face North. A brief moment of vertigo and it slid forwards, cutting easily through the night.

It took twenty minutes to reach the border of the Zone of Alienation, 30km from Chernobyl. Swan squirmed visibly when the pilot announced that they had crossed it. Victoria smirked. It was his first time in the Zone. Radiation paranoia would be a constant distraction for him. In his imagination gamma rays would be lancing through his organs, hypervelocity electrons splintering his DNA. Every twinge, every headache would be the sensation of tumours blooming in his guts and brain, every moment of jetlag the first sign of radiation sickness. He would be fine once he was back on the ground with a reassuring dosimeter clipped to his lapel.

Victoria scanned the darkness beyond the Hip’s large, porthole windows. She was looking for the lights that marked the reactor site, the capital of this little nuclear enclave. The strumming of the rotors modulated as the chopper began to slow and descend, and the pilot turned onto his final approach.

There it was.

The reactor was only visible as a constellation of red aircraft-warning beacons, but the floodlit Carapace next to it was unmissable. Thirty thousand tonnes of steel and polycarbonate, bristling with scaffolding and cranes, and surrounded by construction vehicles. It described a brilliant, semicircular arc through the darkness, one that glowed with hot, halogen light. One end of it was walled off, the other black and open, ready to swallow the poisonous powerplant whole.

A foundation of solid concrete ran 200 metres from the base of the arch to the reactor building. The arch itself straddled twin train tracks, down which it would eventually inch to its only destination, to engulf the buckled and collapsing shell of the original Sarcophagus. Giant, corrugated doors would roll across the entrance, sealing the nuclear nightmare away forever.

The last time Victoria had been here, they were still working on the foundations. Back then they had called it the ‘New Safe Confinement’, but over time Octra’s name for the project—Carapace—had proven catchier. Now it looked complete, ready to become the world’s largest moving structure. She had seen hundreds of photographs of the work in progress since then, but somehow they had failed to prepare her for the sheer, intimidating mass of the thing.

The Hip flew on, heading for the centre of Prypiat, a few miles to the north. When Victoria had first stayed in the Zone, Osterberg’s stalkers had been based in Chernobyl itself, further away and to the south. The sheer scale of the Carapace project had prompted their relocation to Prypiat. In the shadow of the famous ferris wheel, a veritable travelling funfair of Octra workers lived in pressurised tents, working four weeks on, one week off. Generator trucks, satellite dishes, and radio masts competed for space with decontamination showers and mobile laboratories. The scientists from the technical centre now queued for food alongside construction workers, forklift drivers, electricians, and engineers. There were contractors and subcontractors from all over the world, a dozen languages spoken between them.

The helicopter sank to the ground around the corner from the Octra camp in another large plaza. After taxiing forward a few yards it settled into place, like a giant, paleozoic dragonfly ready to deposit its eggs. The airframe seemed to sag as the pilot decoupled the rotor blades and cut the turbines. Instantly, the uncanny silence of Prypiat began to reassert itself.

As Victoria and Swan clambered out into the icy, Baltic night, figures detached themselves from the shadows and ran towards them, guns and ammunition rattling with each step. They waited beyond the sweep of the gradually decelerating rotor disk, cigarette tips glowing in the darkness.

Behind them, Victoria could make out the jutting, rhinocerine prows of armoured personnel carriers. Relics, like the helicopter, and the hotel behind them, of the long, cold decades of Soviet rule. So, she thought, it was true. The VV were occupying Prypiat.

They were hailed in brisk Ukrainian that sounded more like a challenge than a greeting. Victoria racked her brain for the correct introduction, trying to remember the smattering of Ukrainian and Russian she had picked up during her stay in the Zone.

She needn’t have bothered. Now that he was back on terra firma, Swan had rediscovered his managerial arrogance. He strode forward, brandishing his Octra personnel card like an FBI agent taking charge of a crime scene.

“Swan: Executive Manager, New Jersey office. We’re here to see Osterberg: Dr Osterberg. Do you know where he is?”

A soldier with lieutenant insignia snatched the ID from his hand, scrutinised it with suspicion, and walked away with it, muttering into a walkie-talkie. The other guards casually eyeballed them, hands straying towards batons and pistol holsters with disturbing regularity.

Swan bridled, but before he could create a scene, the lieutenant sauntered back and thrust his ID at him with a guttural “go on.”

The American replied with the exaggerated enunciation of an interpreter for the deaf. “Well, thank you. Os-ter-berg. Where? You know where Os-ter-berg?”

Shielding his cigarette lighter from the wind, the lieutenant jerked an irritable thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the Octra camp, and turned away.

“Right. Come on, Dr Cox,” barked Swan. “We’ll find him quicker on our own, clearly. God damned socialists!” He marched ahead without waiting for her, past the row of troops and across the square.

The dilapidated hotel in front of them was framed by a smouldering halo from the mast-mounted floodlights beyond. Victoria could already see some of the outlying habitations: low, interconnected inflatables that looked like fat, plastic grubs attracted to the glow. The wheels of her suitcase struggled to cope with the cracked and overgrown paving of the plaza, and despite the cold she was soon flushed with the effort of dragging it. Swan, meanwhile, was wrestling with his laptop, briefcase and suitcase, all while trying to insert a Bluetooth earpiece.

They rounded the corner of the ruined hotel and saw the full sprawl of the encampment. It looked deserted. The only things that moved were the moths buffeting the floodlights, and dead leaves that skittered between tents and vehicles, scratching at the concrete as they danced along the ground. Victoria checked her watch. It was eleven o’clock. Late, but not late enough for everyone to be in bed.

Swan muttered huffily about professionalism and ‘leadership behaviours,’ and began picking his way towards the centre of the camp, looking for a path between the clustered structures. Victoria followed at a distance, wishing he wasn’t there.

In front of them towered the iconic ferris wheel, silhouetted against the clouds: one of Prypiat’s many sacred sites. Its rusting gondolas gave ghostly creaks and groans as they were pushed by the stiffening breeze. Behind it, leafless trees clawed ceaselessly at the dark sky. By day a forlorn and poignant sight, at night it seemed menacing and somehow accusatory.

In front of it was a freestanding marquee, open at the sides. Victoria guessed that it was a dining area and general assembly point. Light spilled from it and, above the muttering of generators and the ambient tone of the floodlights, she could hear raised voices. People were talking over one another in English and Ukrainian, interrupting other speakers and jeering contemptuously. It sounded like an argument that was ready to go nova.

Before they could reach the marquee the shouting match seemed to reach its conclusion, and Victoria and Swan suddenly found themselves caught up in a flood of sullen-looking men streaming in the opposite direction. They were forced to stop and wait for the sudden exodus to push past them, the men sharing cigarettes and muttering to one another as they went. Their faces were tired and angry, and they glared at the two new arrivals with open hostility as they pushed past.

When they were finally able to reach the tent, it was almost empty. Victoria had been right: it seemed to be a dining area. Trestle tables stood on the bare concrete of the plaza, illumination provided by daisy chains of L.E.D. bulbs that dangled from the roof. At the far end were heated food trolleys, and wheeled racks for dirty plates and trays. Standing by these, drawing fingertips through his thick, grey hair as he conferred with an anxious-looking, younger man, was Wolfgang Osterberg.

Even while she was trundling towards him with her suitcase, Victoria was shocked by how much older and more tired he looked. The man she remembered had the broad-shoulders of a blacksmith, with powerful arms, a barrel chest, and a big, solid gut. He was still large, but his posture slumped as if the weight of the world was pressing down on him, and, as he turned and noticed them approaching, the look in his eyes before he recognised her was almost hunted.

The change in his expression when he did identify her, though, was gratifying. His face crinkled into a broad smile, and he threw his arms wide in greeting. “Victoria! I hardly dared to hope! Ah well, our troubles are at an end!”

Before she could reply, Swan thrust himself in front of her. “Dr Osterberg, I presume.” The line was clearly prepared. “Adam Swan, New Jersey office. The Board sent me to get this project back on track. I assume you’ve had an e-mail.”

“I assume I have,” replied Osterberg, barely glancing at him as he squeezed both of Victoria’s hands in affectionate greeting. “How are you, Fraülein?” He cast his eyes over her trouser suit and furled his eyebrows quizzically. “No longer wearing the dungarees, I see!”

“I’m going to need a status report, Doctor,” interrupted Swan. “Stat. I have to report back to Johann. That’s Johann Koller, the Board secretary.”

Osterberg gave him an annoyed look. “This is Serhiy,” he said, nodding towards the exhausted-looking, bespectacled scientist he had been talking to when they arrived. “He has a doctorate in nuclear engineering. Serhiy will give you your status report, won’t you, Serhiy?”

Serhiy nodded unhappily. Swan turned on him and began to assault him with questions, while Osterberg took Victoria gently by the arm and led her back towards the door of the tent.

“So, our friends at Octra are growing anxious, are they?” he murmured, once they were out of earshot. “It is not a surprise.”

“What’s going on, Wolfgang?” asked Victoria, as they stepped out into the frigid night. “The Carapace looks ready. What’s the hold-up? And why are the VV all over the place? Is Fedir with them?”

She was referring to his stepson: the young man they had watched march through Kiev with his brothers-in-arms four years before. Osterberg shook his head, pausing to light one of his ludicrously-expensive Ziganov cigarettes. Victoria suddenly found herself enveloped in a haze of comfortably familiar-smelling, cherry-scented smoke. “No” he replied. “No, Fedir is at university in Luhansk now. Studying ‘Business,’ unfortunately. Perhaps he would have gone into science or law if I could have introduced him to your travelling companion.”

“Who, Swan? Oh, he’s just an arrogant kid. I’m sure Fedir isn’t like him.”

“It is to be hoped not. But they sent you, as well, to sugar the pill!” he beamed. “So, are you here to save me?”

“Save you? How do I do that, then? Save you from what?”

The German sighed, expelling a long stream of smoke. “Save me from this bloody place, Victoria. Save me from this bloody place.”

* * *

“We have had some setbacks, it is true,” Osterberg allowed, leaning forward and planting his elbows on the table. “We have done our best to work around them, but setbacks happen.”

They were back inside the dining shelter, at a table now festooned with network and power cables as Swan reconnected himself to the virtual world. He had turned up his nose at the reheated varenyky dumplings that had been produced for their supper, contenting himself with gnawing on a piece of bread. Victoria, on the other hand, had fallen on them ravenously, luxuriating in the nostalgia evoked by salo and sour cabbage.

“Setbacks?” sneered Swan. “Doctor, I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s the understatement of the year! Your man here”—he waved in the direction of the hapless Serhiy—“tells me you’ve got strikes going on. People missing—people dead! And you’re nineteen weeks behind schedule. Nineteen! That’s more than just setbacks; that’s a total competency shortfall.”

“Just take us through it, Wolfgang,” said Victoria hurriedly. “Just start at the beginning.”

“Yeah, and make it good,” threatened Swan.

Osterberg scowled at him like a lion bedeviled by an irritating cub. When he replied, he addressed himself to Victoria. “The beginning? Well, to begin with, the company didn’t budget enough time or money to allow for problems in the project. I told them this! I told them as soon as they brought me in. They have underspent on materials and equipment. We have had endless technical failures and compatibility issues, and accidents that have put men in the hospital. Two died. Suicide.”

“Suicide?” interrupted Victoria.

“We think so. One jumped from the apex of the Carapace. Another was electrocuted, which may have been an accident. Many other workers have abandoned the project, gone home, refused to work.”

“Well, that shit stops now!” declared Swan. “Spread the word. Any Octra employee who doesn’t report for work gets shitcanned. Any contractor who isn’t holding their end up gets sued for breach of contract.”

“We can’t complete the Carapace without people,” pointed out Victoria.

“Screw ‘em! There are ten thousand contractors fresh back from Afghanistan looking for work. We’ll bring in who we need.”

“There’s the issue of expertise—” began Osterberg, but Swan interrupted.

“Just let ‘em know! I’m not here to play nursemaid to a load of lazy, communist Eurotrash! They shape up or they ship the fuck out! There’s a reason we hire non-union, and its so we don’t have to put up with this kind of shit. What I want to know is: what’s left to do? How long before we can sign off on this thing and take the money?”

“That happens when I am satisfied that the site is safe and secure,” said Osterberg haughtily. “Not one second before. I am responsible for the safety of the reactor, and only I decide when it is finished.”

“Okay, so what’s stopping you?” Swan wanted to know. “Thing’s built. Let’s just roll it down that train track, get home for Christmas.”

The burly German gave him a withering look. “It is not as simple as just ‘roll it down the track.’ There is work that must be completed first. Fireproofing inside the reactor: important, dangerous work—lots of radiation. Parts of the original Sarcophagus and a large part of the ventilation building are still to be dismantled as well, before the Carapace can move into place. The cranes and other pieces of superstructure we have mounted on the roof will have to come down. The computer system inside the Carapace needs to be checked and double-checked, and triple-checked! All of which you would know if you had paid any attention to this project for the last five years!”

His voice had risen to a bullish crescendo and he had risen to his feet, looming over Swan. Victoria had never seen him really lose his temper before, had never seen him lose control. She couldn’t help being slightly impressed that Swan seemed completely unfazed by it.

“Hey!” he exclaimed, jabbing a finger aggressively at the German. “The buck stops with you, bud! Maybe if you’d been more goal-oriented, I wouldn’t have had to fly over here and wipe this project’s ass! Now, get real. It’s solutions o’clock, so let’s get granular. Your workers here, they all have a project completion bonus written into their contracts. Am I right?”

“Typical! Here comes Octra, trying to solve problems with its chequebook!” spat Osterberg, looking to Victoria for support.

“First thing tomorrow,” continued Swan, ignoring him, “we tell them—I tell them—that if this thing isn’t wrapped up by Christmas, they aren’t getting it. It’s discretionary, I checked.” He ticked points off on his fingers. “Anyone who walks off this project is going to see us in court. I’m bringing in another twenty guys for you as well, from a contractor in Turkey… or Morocco, or some shit—wherever. Point is, there’s twenty of them and we can have them here the day after tomorrow.”

“Oh, really?” sneered Osterberg. “And these ‘twenty guys,’ they have experience in nuclear engineering? They have been approved to work in the Zone by the Ukrainian security services?”

“You can leave that shit to me. Even if they just push wheelbarrows or drive trucks, it frees up someone else. That’s twenty over your headcount, so no more excuses. This is me handing you an exit strategy. Seems to me this project has been coasting for a long time, so now we have to get out of our comfort zone—do more with less.”

“You’re mad,” said Osterberg, after staring at him in silence for a moment. “This is a nuclear reactor!”

“No, doctor, this is an investment,” replied Swan without missing a beat. “And I’m here to protect that investment. Set up a meeting with everyone for tomorrow morning. And now, I’d like to see where I’m sleeping. This jetlag is a bitch.”

Victoria offered a silent prayer of gratitude. With Swan gone, she could try to mollify Wolfgang a bit. She knew that if the Carapace was late, and Octra needed a scapegoat, they would annihilate the German’s reputation to save their own. Swan might be an arsehole, but they had no choice but to work with him.

Osterberg sent Serhiy to escort Swan through the maze of pressurised habitats to his sleeping quarters. Once they were gone, Victoria did her best to placate him, assuring him that her end-of-project report would vindicate the doctor and castigate the American.

“You don’t know what it’s been like, Victoria,” Osterberg told her, lighting another cigarette. “Since the construction crews arrived, we have had nothing but problems. At first I thought it was sabotage, had to be. Brand new steel, unused, cracking with metal fatigue. Two men hospitalised by Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever—they survived, thank God—four hospitalised with psychosis. Eleven who just walked out of here in the middle of the night and never came back. Men downing tools, refusing to work, hallucinating, fighting—it has been chaos. Utter chaos.”

“No radiation illness though,” observed Victoria.

“No,” came the sharp reply. “I look after my men, you know that. No, these contractors just can’t handle the Zone. The stress, the living conditions, the silence—not like us, eh Victoria? You, me, Serhiy—we old stalkers, we can handle it.”

“Absolutely,” agreed Victoria gently. “We’ll sort it out.”

“You know, it doesn’t matter if this project is done late, as long as it is done right. You know? Screw Octra. Screw their profits. They don’t matter to me at all. What matters is the Carapace. Getting it finished and making sure that once it is in place it stays there. Permanently.”

“Don’t let Swan hear you talking like that,” advised Victoria. “Octra’s all he’s got.” She stood up. “If you look up ‘company man’ in the dictionary, you’ll see his picture.”

Osterberg grunted. “If I look up dorftrottel in the dictionary, I will see his picture, too. Are you going to bed?”

“I am if I can find it. Any idea where it is?”

Osterberg shrugged. “Serhiy will have organised something. Serhiy!”

The nervous technician appeared in the shelter’s doorway as his name was called, and stood there polishing his spectacles while Victoria said goodnight to her mentor. She felt bad to be leaving him on his own. As she left, she looked back. He remained seated, his hulking form hunched over the table. He seemed to be listening intently—but Victoria could hear nothing except for the leaves, muttering in the breeze.

* * *

Serhiy led her back through the encampment towards the ruins of the hotel. He even fidgeted while walking, Victoria noticed. She tried to strike up a conversation with him, to put him at his ease.

“So, Serhiy, how long have you been with Wolfgang? I don’t remember you from when I was here before.”

“Three years. Before that I work at Zhovti Vody, where I am born.”

Victoria nodded, signalling that she was familiar with the notorious name. The prairie town of Zhovti Vody was the site of another latent nuclear horror: a Cold War uranium mill that still broadcast cancer through the local population and filled their homes with invisible radon gas. In 2003 the government had finally ordered environmental restoration work there. She guessed that was how Serhiy had cut his teeth, before being recruited into the Zone of Alienation.

“Right. So, how does Chernobyl compare to Zhovti Vody?” she asked, to avoid the conversation drying up.

Serhiy shuddered. “Do you know what is the meaning of Chernobyl?” he asked. “Do you know why it has this name?”

“Not really. I seem to remember someone telling me it means ‘Wormwood.’”

“Tak. In English you call it ‘Wormwood.’”

“A lot of Americans got excited after the disaster, because Wormwood is mentioned in the Book of Revelation or something. They thought the Rapture had arrived.”

“Tak.” Serhiy stopped walking and closed his eyes, summoning the verse from memory and repeating it in heavily-accented English. “And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon a third of the rivers, and upon the springs of water; and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and a third of the waters became bitter; and many people had died of the waters, because they were made bitter.”

“Wow,” said Victoria, privately wondering if he was about to start proselytising. “Good memory.”

“My parents make me learn English by reading the Bible,” explained Serhiy, shyly. “Wormwood is meaning a demon star that fall to Earth. Bitter is poison.”

“Yes. I prefer a dry white myself,” quipped Victoria, hoping that he would start walking again so she could get some privacy and some sleep.

“The third trumpet of the angels. Then darkness and the angel of woe,” muttered Serhiy. He fell silent, seemingly lost in a Biblical reverie.

Victoria rolled her eyes. It was late and she was tired. She didn’t need this. It was also freezing cold. Fortunately, he shook himself out of his fugue before too many moments had passed. “You will be pleased to wait here? Just one minute,” he assured her, his voice a flat monotone. Before she could reply he was gone, jogging away across the decaying concrete.

Victoria groaned with frustration. All she wanted was to use the loo and go to bed. Maybe she would log in to the site’s Wi-Fi and e-mail Malcolm before she went to sleep. Maybe she wouldn’t. In fact, no, why should she be the one to extend an olive branch? Screw him. The house was in her name; he could sod off if he wanted to. He would have gone out drinking with Les and Fat Frank after the match. Victoria wondered if he had gone around introducing himself to girls as ‘newly single,’ the way he had introduced himself to her. He could be cheating on her right now, for all she knew. There was a grim satisfaction to be found in how little the thought bothered her.

An engine grumbled to life, sounding excessively loud in the hushed stillness of the night. Victoria shielded her eyes as a pair of headlights flared. It must be one of the Russian SUVs that Octra used on site. Was Serhiy planning to drive her to her tent? There had to have been a misunderstanding of some kind.

The vehicle plunged forwards, accelerating towards her. Dazzled, Victoria turned away to face the derelict hotel. Blinking away after-images, she found herself squinting at the empty windows, the building’s grimy, ruined interior suddenly revealed in the blue-white rays of the car’s xenon headlights. There, in the middle of some anonymous room, at the foot of a flight of crumbling stairs, she saw a figure.

Black robes. Faceless. One arm raised, pointing straight at her.

A shoulder crashed into her midriff, winding her and lifting her off her feet. Victoria’s arms flailed reflexively as she was carried backwards by the impact. Her small suitcase flew from her grasp, thumping heavily against the cold concrete at the same time as her head. A moment later, the black SUV thundered past, still accelerating, right over the spot where she had been standing seconds before.

There was a jarring crash as it slammed head-on into the wall of the hotel, crumpling instantly like an imploding submarine, but punching halfway into the building’s interior nonetheless. Splinters of glass flew in every direction, tinkling melodically to the ground, while the SUV’s horn brayed like a dying boar. Giant chunks of brickwork began to rain down, and then a huge slab of wall around the point of impact completely collapsed. Victoria gave a strangled shriek as the car’s roof was staved in, stamped almost flat by giant blocks of tumbling masonry.

The stocky VV lieutenant who had sprung out of the night to shove her to safety was already on his feet and running towards the wreck, holding one arm in front of his eyes to protect them from the tempest of dust that whirled around the crash. Victoria wanted to scream at him to get back—lumps of brick were still sloughing away from the hotel like Tetris blocks—but she could not find her voice.

When she tried to stand up, her legs seemed to have turned to jelly. Arms caught her as she staggered, more VV troops surrounding her as their lieutenant tried to see inside the wrecked vehicle. People were emerging from tents all over the site, staring open-mouthed at the carnage.

“Gott im Himmel, what happened?” Wolfgang Osterberg elbowed his way through the platoon of troops and seized Victoria by the shoulders. “Where is Serhiy? Are you all right?”

Victoria nodded mutely. Her tongue felt like a sponge and her mouth was dry. She struggled to make words come. “I don’t know where Serhiy is. I think he’s in the car. He tried to run me over.”

“Run you over? Serhiy? Are you sure?”

She nodded weakly. “I think so.”

He stared at her, concerned, then patted the top of her head with one giant hand. “Also. Come with me. Come on. We must get you inside.”

He picked up her suitcase, and supported her with his other arm, leading her away from the crash. Behind them, the lieutenant barked orders at his men and began rattling commands into his radio. They sprang into action with commendable swiftness, and by the time Osterberg had found the tent reserved for Victoria, a gigantic, eight-wheeled ‘Guardian’ troop carrier was wrenching the destroyed SUV free of rubble using lengths of thick chain.

As they stepped into the cramped, rubber airlock at the entrance to the pressurised tent, Swan hopped crossly out of the one opposite. “What in the hell is all this commotion?” he demanded to know.

“Go back to bed, Mr Swan,” advised Osterberg. “Everything is under control.”

“The hell it is!” replied Swan, but stepped back into his tent anyway. “Don’t keep her up all night, Doc,” he leered before pulling the door closed. “She’s got work to do tomorrow.”

Osterberg did not dignify him with an answer, just closed the outer door and opened the inner one, bundling Victoria into the claustrophobic interior. He guided her to a small camp bed and then squeezed his bulk about the little chamber, turning on the space heater and moving it closer to her, while she sat and shivered with cold and unmetabolised adrenaline.

“Is he dead?” asked Victoria, almost inaudibly.

“Anyone in that car is dead, yes,” replied Osterberg, flicking on a small bedside light and sitting down next to her. The bed flexed threateningly under his weight, but held.

“I don’t understand—we were just talking.”

“It’s not you, Vicky, it’s this place. These flashes of madness have affected many of the men. The violence is indiscriminate.”

He draped a heavy arm over her shoulder. Victoria could smell his sweat, the cigarette smoke on his shirt, and the vodka on his breath. Not pleasant odours, but strangely comforting. She began to slump as the tension left her body.

“He was talking about this place, about Chernobyl, and about the Bible. Wormwood. The Book of Revelation.”

“Ah, yes. Serhiy was very devout. But a good scientist.”

“Not a good driver, though,” sniffed Victoria, and tried to laugh. She hesitated. “I—I thought I saw someone else.”

“Someone else? Who?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see their face. Standing in the hotel. Very tall. Right before it happened.”

“A man in black robes?” guessed Osterberg.

“That’s right. How did you know?”

Osterberg sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “He has been seen before. At the start, some of the men reported seeing him while they were working inside the reactor. They began refusing to go inside Unit 4. When equipment began failing and accidents happened, it was one of the reasons I thought we had a saboteur. The black-robed man kept showing up. Three metres tall, so they say.”

“Have you seen him?”

“No. It is just one of the stories that circulates, Victoria. Then the other men hear it and—mass hysteria. You remember the stories about the Kaptar? It is the same.”

“I’m not hysterical, Wolfgang!” snapped Victoria. “There was a big bastard in a black robe in that building, right when Serhiy drove at me… I think. Oh, God, I don’t know.”

Osterberg patted her reassuringly on the shoulder, and stood up. “You should sleep,” he advised her. “You have had a shock. You are tired. Would you like something to help you?”

Victoria shook her head. “No. I’ll be all right.” She pointed at an opaque, rubber cylinder built into the wall of the cramped little chamber. “Is that a shower? Is it hot?”

“Yes, hot water on tap. As long as the tanker is not empty. We are not quite the Excelsior, but we do allow ourselves that small indulgence. Come and find me when you wake up. I will take you to see the Carapace.”

He left her to settle in. According to the clock on her phone it was already past one a.m. The zip-up, rubber shower cubicle smelled somewhat foisty, and the water pressure was low, but it was steaming hot and pleasantly soothing. When, reluctantly, she stepped out of it, the tent seemed unpleasantly frigid, and she scuttled into bed as soon as she could, squirming into the sleeping bag she had brought with her.

It felt gritty. Residual sand, she realised, from her camping trip to Dorset with Malcolm the summer before. She had opted for a campsite so that they could have a holiday that might not make him feel inadequate for relying on her to pay for it. That was back when he was still unemployed: before she’d ceased to care about hurting his feelings, but significantly after he had ceased to care about hers.

She didn’t want to think about that, but she didn’t want to think about the SUV racing towards her, either. Or about its roof collapsing under a ton of rubble. And definitely not about the cowled figure she had seen standing in the hotel. That she thought she had seen. The trick of the light. The trick of the shadows.

Just like the Kaptar, that was what Wolfgang had said. She remembered the stories. The Kaptar—the `Snowman of Chernobyl’. A feral beast with glowing red eyes and jet black fur, that walked like a man and killed like a wolf. The myth was not unique to the Zone of Alienation. Most of the ex-Soviet nuclear testing sites had their own Kaptar, by one name or another. Almasty. Abnuaaya. Bekk-Bokk. Voita. Savage, black Neanderthals that prowled the irradiated wildernesses, and the imaginations of the credulous. Some said they were inventions of the security forces, intended to scare people away from radioactive sites. Maybe that’s what she had seen, the Kaptar. Or maybe it had been a member of the VV wearing some kind of obsolescent, Soviet NBC smock.

The latter idea was reassuring, and Victoria tried to keep it foremost in her mind as she lay in the dark, listening to the quiet chugging of the habitat’s compressor.

* * *

She woke from dark dreams of coalescence and accretion to the sound of rain battering against the plastic tent. It was tempting to just roll over and go back to sleep, but she was not, she reminded herself, on holiday. After she had washed and cleaned her teeth, the suit she had worn the day before went into her suitcase, and out came corduroy trousers, a fleece, and a cardigan as thick as a slice of bread. Steel-toed shoes, a leather jacket and her dosimeter—still reading normal—completed the ensemble.

The insulating qualities of the rubberised tent had led her to underestimate the ferocity of the rain. The sky was leaden, weeping fat droplets that burst like pustules on the concrete. Victoria tucked her hair inside her jacket to protect it, and ran towards the dining shelter.

Men in hard hats were busy shoring up the walls of the hotel, bracing the edges of the hole torn by the SUV, making it safe. Of the wrecked car itself there was no sign, and she was grateful for that.

The dining shelter was once again full of men, but this morning’s sermon was being given by Adam Swan. Oblivious to the fact that most of the workers couldn’t speak English—particularly not Swan’s brand of it—he was, as promised, laying it on the line to them.

“You all need to align yourselves to this action plan!” he cried as Victoria slipped into the tent. Osterberg was nowhere to be seen. “Because I’m empowering you to take ownership of your roles in this project. You have an idea how we can leverage our assets more efficiently? Great! Come see me; wanna hear it. I’m not afraid to take a look under the hood—but don’t lose focus! Your number one priority is to optimise progress on our deliverables. Now, that might mean changing our processes—working smarter, adding value, doing more with less—or maybe it means pulling double shifts, putting in extra hours. You get what I’m saying?”

The men looked unimpressed, fidgety, distracted. Victoria found herself envying the ones who didn’t understand English. “I’m changing meal times,” continued Swan, pointing to a piece of paper pinned to the wall over the day’s menu. “Breakfast is an hour earlier and dinner is an hour later. That way, you can work an extra two hours in the day without worrying about missing food. You see? That’s the kind of creative approach we need. Gotta think outside the box, come at the solution from every angle. Remember: the paradigm is not the objective! Now, get out there and do what you do best. Let’s make today the start of the fightback! Home by Christmas! Home by Christmas!”

He carried on chanting “home by Christmas” as the men filed silently out. Victoria squeezed past them to the front of the room and began picking through the remains of breakfast. Swan joined her. “Well, I think they got the message,” he murmured, looking pleased with himself. Victoria ignored the invitation to compliment his motivational abilities, and slopped cold coffee into a cup.

“Where’s Wolfgang?” she demanded.

“Dr Osterberg is sulking,” came the smug reply. “Said he was going to talk with those soldiers, get them to move their tank or something. He also said someone tried to run you down last night. That true?”

“Pretty much.”

“Yeah, well, it’s good you’re okay, I guess. Bad enough we have another accident on the books.”

Victoria stared at him. He hadn’t shaved, she suddenly noticed, and he had dark rings under his eyes. Had he slept in his clothes? He was wearing the same awful, contrast-collar shirt as the day before, and his suit was uncharacteristically crumpled. Maybe he hadn’t slept at all.

“It wasn’t an accident, Swan. He tried to kill me,” she pointed out. Swan curled his lip dismissively.

“Maybe. But he died in an accident, that’s the main thing. And it’s not as if it’s the first on this project. And it’s your friend Osterberg who’s responsible for safety, remember.”

“Oh come on! It wasn’t his fault, he had nothing to do with it. It was Serhiy driving the car. Serhiy. You remember him? You met him last night. You talked to him. Maybe you tipped him over the edge!” Victoria was being deliberately provocative, but Swan just shrugged.

“That guy? Wow. I guess we can add ‘not putting psychos in positions of responsibility’ to the list of things your Doctor needs to learn, huh?”

Victoria banged her coffee mug back onto the table, resisting the urge to throw it over the American. That was as much of an allowance as she was willing to make, though. She wasn’t going to stand there and listen to him bad-mouth her friend. Leaving Swan alone in the dining shelter, she stormed out into the rain to find Osterberg.

An engineer scuttling between habitations pointed towards the Carapace when she asked him for the project director’s location. In decent weather it would have been an easy walk to get there, but, even though the rain had eased off, Victoria kept her head down and made a beeline for the hard-standing where the SUV fleet was parked.

The cars were UAZ Patriots. Black, with small Octra logos stamped on the fuel caps. They were left unlocked, with the keys in the ignition. There was not much fear of car thieves in the Zone of Alienation. Victoria shucked her coat and spent some time adjusting the seat and mirrors before summoning the engine to life.

Even with power steering, the car felt heavy as she turned it towards the overgrown road that led to Unit 4. She tried not to imagine that weight slamming into her body, throwing her to the ground and rolling over her. Her scalp prickled and she pursed her lips as the events of the previous night spooled past her mind’s eye. Realising that she was still driving at a crawl across the plaza, she jabbed angrily at the accelerator, spurring the car to 20mph and piloting it into a narrow channel between the leafless birch trees.

She leaned forwards in the seat, peering past the metronomic batting of the windscreen wipers and doing her best to follow the track carved out by a daily procession of Octra vehicles. After a couple of hundred metres it joined a road that ran past the tiny harbour, where rotting ships slumped in the water, then followed the shore of the gigantic, man-made lake once used to cool the power plant.

The only other vehicles she saw were the occasional skeletons of cars and buses, left rusting at the sides of the road, many of them looted of their engines and electrical components. In Prypiat, it was always 1986. It was impossible to forget where you were.

The ruined power plant was a couple of miles away. When the road eventually turned south it came into view through the haze of rain, like a picture emerging from static. Vast and dark; a seventy metre tall cathedral of the nuclear.

Robotic cranes sprouted from the roof. They were used to dismantle parts of the structure, preparing it for the arrival of the Carapace, like parasites consuming their host. They were conspicuously new, in sharp contrast to the decay that was spreading through the building beneath them. The concrete was stained. Railings, fire escapes, and scaffolding were soft with rust. The urgency behind the Carapace project was immediately apparent.

Just for a few moments, as she gazed at it, the crudely tiered architecture of the reactor building seemed to become the image of a gigantic step pyramid. Mesoamerican? Maybe Egyptian. Its flanks were overgrown with vines—or was that seaweed? No—a click of the mental kaleidoscope, and it was just the reactor building again.

Another of the giant BTR personnel carriers was parked across the road ahead, bolstering the old vehicle checkpoint with its armoured bulk. VV troops in waterproof plastic ponchos leaned against it, watching her approach. The reactor was to the left of the road, and the site where finishing touches were being applied to the Carapace was on the right. Victoria parked the Patriot before the checkpoint, where a selection of other Octra cars were already beached at the side of the road. As she approached on foot, she wondered whether the VV would let her through—but, apart from some almost-insultingly perfunctory ogling, they showed no interest in her at all.

Passing the APC, she turned her back on Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Unit 4, and stopped for a moment to appreciate the miracle of engineering that was the Carapace.

A perfect arch, one hundred metres high, it looked as though it belonged on the surface of Mars. Its tubular steel framework supported hundreds of gigantic composite panels, laminated with polycarbonate, giving the whole thing an almost featureless exterior on which human eyes struggled to focus. The inside was a different matter though.

Three powerful cranes hung suspended from beams that ran the full 150m length of the hangar. Nicknamed Athos, Porthos and Aramis, they had been custom built by Octra. Each was equipped with hydrocutters, plasma arcs, and diamond-tipped saws, with which to tear the Sarcophagus apart. Cameras, floodlights, HEPA vacuums, radiation counters, and myriad other instruments studded the walls and roof. The doors that would eventually close over the memory of Reactor 4 hung, concertinaed, on either side of the entrance.

The giant cavern echoed with the high pressure hiss of industrial sprayguns, used to apply flame-retardant chemicals to the wall at the far end, but in truth most of the workers were deployed elsewhere: either assembling the powerful winches that would be used to maneuvre the Carapace into position, or inside Unit 4 itself. Victoria looked around for Osterberg, but it wasn’t until she heard his voice booming somewhere overhead that she managed to pinpoint his location.

A brightly-lit metal cabin was mounted against the north wall of the hangar, 15 metres above the ground. According to the blueprints, it would store the servers and computer systems necessary to monitor and control the environment inside the completed Carapace. Osterberg’s voice was coming from within. Victoria jumped into the portable scissor lift parked below and rode it up to the cabin, hoping that the reinforced structure would be able to support her in addition to Osterberg’s considerable bulk.

The German poked his head out of the cabin at the sound of the lift. “Victoria! You are here. Where is your hard hat? This is still a construction site. Here, wear mine.” As the lift brought her within reach, he deposited a yellow helmet, stamped with the Octra logo, on her head. “There. You slept well?” he enquired, helping her off the platform, and ushering her into the control room.

“Well enough,” replied Victoria. “What are you up to?”

By way of reply, Osterberg reached behind a Blade cabinet and wheeled a man in a deskchair into sight, ignoring his protestations. “Victoria, this is Yosyp. He is supposed to be very good with computers, but today we are having problems. Is that not right, Yosyp?”

Yosyp looked annoyed. He was a skinny young man, mid-twenties perhaps, with a gaunt face that tapered to a sharp little chin. His eyes were dark and rather cruel, his hair cropped short and plastered with gel.

“They were fine yesterday!” he retorted in thickly-accented English . “Absolutely damned fine! Today they are full of crap!”

“What’s full of crap?” asked Victoria, crossing the cabin so she could see the six flatscreen monitors against the far wall. They were all displaying blue-screen error messages.

“The installs,” replied Yosyp, in pained tones. “Brand new arrays. Yesterday I load the operating systems onto them. Today I come to them and find nothing but bugs.”

“Last time they stopped working after a week,” explained Osterberg. “We thought maybe it was the cheap hardware that Octra was providing, so Yosyp bought some new things—top of the line, no expense spared. This, it seems, has failed even more quickly.”

“Look, I show you,” announced Yosyp bitterly, cycling the power to the mainframe. The blue screens turned black, and the computer emitted a short frenzy of beeps, signalling POST errors. Green text began to scroll quickly down the screens as the machine identified a boot device and tried to load the operating system—but the technical details and hexadecimal addresses were soon lost in a cascade of gibberish, as random words, characters, and values flooded the display.

“You see?” spat Yosyp. “It will just keep saying this nonsense now. On and on, until it crashes again.”

Victoria leaned forward and tried to catch some of the words that were scrolling endlessly down the monitors. Some were English; most were in languages she couldn’t recognise. She saw 1000 MASKS repeated over ten consecutive lines before it was bumped off-screen by endless dyslexic variations on the words DARK and PHAROAH. These, in turn, were quickly supplanted by unrecognisable syllables—either foreign or just nonsensical—and long strings of random numbers.

“Oh my,” murmured Victoria. “That is not a happy computer.”

“You see?” repeated Yosyp. “How am I supposed to debug this? It will not even let me log in. Yesterday, I tell you, it was fine.”

“Could it be a computer virus?” suggested Osterberg, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I know, I know, you used all-new components. Even so, could it?”

“This is not a virus,” declared Yosyp. “Nothing has even been run on this hardware. It must be this place. Environmental. Radiation.”

“There is no radiation in here, Yosyp,” Osterberg chided him. “Even if there were, it would not do this to your computer.”

“It has to be environmental,” insisted the pasty Russian. “First the other array, now this one. Not a coincidence, you must agree!”

“If that is the case, why are we seeing exactly the same dreck on this machine that we saw on the old one? Look. Look at that! ‘LENG’! L. E. N. G. What is the chance that those four letters keep coming up on both computers if the problem is environmental? And you talk to me about coincidence! The problem is with the computers.”

Yosyp grimaced and tapped the spacebar of his keyboard repeatedly in frustration. For a few moments the three of them just watched the endless succession of ASCII characters continue to fill screen after screen.

“It is corrupted,” declared Yosyp. “It is as if all the order to the data is gone. Now, instead of carrying information, it is just junk. It can only be a problem with the embedded encryption engine. I will need to speak to someone at IBM.”

“How long would that take to fix?” Osterberg wanted to know.

“It was all working fine before,” reiterated Yosyp defensively. “We tested it many times. It worked. We loaded it onto the mainframe and it worked. Then it stopped, so we reloaded it and it worked again, and now it stops working! I bet you if I go and load it onto another machine somewhere else, all the software will work fine. It is this place. The radiation causes bitflips, and the scrubber is not catching them.”

Osterberg snorted but said nothing. A small red light on the mainframe cabinet began blinking to indicate that the case was overheating. The cooling fans were already in overdrive, and roaring. The scrolling grid of random characters ground to a halt as the screens locked up, occasional coherent words visible in the code like shapes in a Magic Eye picture. Victoria leaned forward, trying to make some sense of them.

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Before she could reach the end, the rising temperature activated the automatic cutout, killing the power supply to the mainframe. The screens went blank and the roar of the fans died rapidly to nothing. Yosyp threw his hands up in the air.

“See? She overheats again. We can forget it!”

“Yosyp!” Osterberg’s voice was stern. “Concentrate on how we mend it. It is just a problem. It has a solution. You want to speak to somebody at IBM, you said.”

“Wolfgang, this is a big problem. Something is wrong with the chips, or something in this place is screwing with it. I cannot just make a magic solution for you.”

“You try your best,” replied the German, laying a reassuring hand on the frustrated technician’s shoulder. “That is all we ask. Okay? Yes?” Yosyp gave a demonstrative sigh, then nodded resignedly. “Okay then, we leave you now. Anything you need we can get, remember. I will talk to you later.”

“Good luck, Yosyp,” added Victoria, trying to buoy the defeated programmer’s spirits as Osterberg led the way to the exit. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

“Come, Victoria,” called Osterberg. “Let me show you around our Carapace. Is it big enough for you, do you think?”

He ushered her out with one last concerned look at Yosyp, sending her down in the lift first. It was designed for two people, but not when they were the size of Osterberg.

Victoria waited at ground level while the bucket wobbled back to the computer centre. She should have brought her camera, she thought. It would be a shame not to have photographs of the final stages of the project to which she had, after all, devoted a significant amount of time and effort in the early days. It occurred to her that there was a camera on her phone. It wasn’t great, especially at landscapes, but it was better than nothing.

It was gloomy in the Carapace. She pulled the phone from her pocket anyway, snapping a couple of shots of the computer centre first, then panning around to take shots of the entrance, the far wall and the overhead gantries.

She waited for the lens to autofocus on a row of flatbed trucks that were completely dwarfed by the soaring vault around them. As she did so, one of the shadows on the screen of her phone detached itself from the rest, standing separate and shockingly clear at the edge of the frame as she reflexively pushed the shutter button.

She snatched the phone away from her face and stared anxiously across the giant hangar, looking for what she thought she had seen—but finding nothing. The contents of her stomach suddenly lurched. A second gastric spasm made her jacknife—swaying, hands on knees—as a stream of watery vomit pulsed from her mouth and splattered onto the concrete between her feet.

It subsided quickly, leaving her gasping for breath. The attack had taken her completely by surprise, which soon gave way to embarassment as she felt Osterberg’s presence behind her.

Nausea gone, she stood up again and turned to face him. As she did so, the room careened past her eyes in an uncontrollable blur. Osterberg managed to grab her wrist, but was too late to prevent her from crumpling unconscious to the floor.

* * *

She came round to find the German doctor’s thick fingers pressed to her throat, measuring her pulse. When she tried to sit up, he pushed gently against her shoulder and told her not to move.

“Take a minute. Do you have any pain?”

Victoria performed a quick review of her body parts. She felt sluggish, and the ground was cold against her back, but she wasn’t in any pain. The helmet Osterberg had made her wear had at least protected her head.

“What happened there?” she groaned. “How long was I out?”

“Only for a minute,” replied Osterberg. “You had vomiting, do you remember? Your blood pressure is quite low. No fever, though.”

“I just stood up too fast, Wolfgang. Can I get up now?”

The doctor shrugged and helped her to her feet, holding her arm until he was sure she wasn’t going to sink back to the ground. “No more walking around for you this morning,” he told her. “I will drive you back to camp; you rest there. I have to take some blood from you, check your sugar and electrolytes—no argument! After lunch, if you feel well, you can see our work here.”

Victoria felt sheepish, but was still slightly nauseous. If she was honest, the idea of lying on her bed in the warmth for a few hours was quite appealing.

Wolfgang walked her to the car, racking the driver’s seat back to accommodate his extra girth, and reclining the passenger seat so that Victoria could lay almost prone. He cast frequent, concerned glances at her as he drove, but said very little. Victoria stayed quiet, too, and spent the journey gazing at the screen of her mobile phone—and the photograph of the suggestive shadow, that she could have sworn had turned and started moving towards her.

* * *

Half an hour of lying on her bed was all she could stand before she began to feel guilty and useless. She was fine, she told herself. A moment of postural hypotension, that was all it had been. Sitting up, she opened her laptop and logged into the site’s wireless network to check e-mails. She could at least do that. Later, she would find out what progress had been made on upgrading the reactor’s dust-suppression system, or offer to test the sensors that had been installed for it—anything that would make her feel useful again.

The local network relied on a satellite connection. It was slow and unreliable, the e-mails trickling into her inbox at snail’s pace. The first one to download was marked as ‘spam’. She was about to delete it when the subject line caught her eye.

(Unknown Sender) SPECIAL OFFER! Invite the Disruptor: Crawling, Crawling Chaos. Honour the messenger for he is come!

Crawling chaos. The same cryptic nonsense that had infected the Carapace mainframe. Victoria couldn’t repress a shudder, or ignore the feeling that something unfathomable was happening in the Zone. Something too big and nebulous to see properly; something that was just glimpsed in the corner of the eye. It felt as though they were laboratory rats, unable to see beyond the confines of their maze while hidden hands manipulated them towards the centre.

On the other hand, it could be the result of a virus. Maybe the ‘crawling chaos’ drivel was the signature of some new species of computer malware. If so, she should show it Yosyp. It might help him to diagnose the problems with the Carapace system. Despite the risk, the impulse to click on it was surprisingly strong, and she was about to do so when a second e-mail came through. Somewhat to her surprise, it was from Malcolm. Instantly forgetting about the spam, she clicked on that one instead.

hows it going? do u know if ur back for xmas yet? ive booked a place with les and frank in majorca so we can spend xmas out there. if u want to come as well i need to know soon though cos there will be a topup fee. fuck turkey and sprouts, xmas on the beach!!! thsi girl les is seeing is coming as well so its not like u would be the only girl. place looks great in the picture its right by the beach and only 50 metres from the pub! right gotta go. talk to you soon.

She read it three times, her disbelief turning to disdain and then anger as she did so. She already knew the message for what it really was: an ultimatum. Even if she could, he knew there was not a chance in Hell that she would agree to spend Christmas with his idiot friends in bloody Magaluf. He would wait for her to reject the invitation, then use that as evidence that they were “growing apart” or that “it wasn’t meant to be,” or whatever other hackneyed platitude would enable him to break up with her without the sting of guilt. Some people could be read like books; Malcolm could be read like a very thin comic.

What angered her the most wasn’t the implication, the threat of breaking up—she was an adult, and hardly enamoured with the state of their relationship—it was the lack of respect. Treating her like some kind of problem to be ‘handled,’ as he dumbly fumbled for a way out. Well, screw him.

She typed for half an hour, listing his inadequacies and failings, and telling him where he could shove his turgid, Balearic Christmas. After two years of biting her tongue, it felt good to be jettisoning so much ballast. All the times she’d indulged his immaturity and priggish ways, tiptoed around his vanity and ego; all the times she’d feigned enthusiasm for his wretched dee-jaying; all those times were over.

Dragging the pointer to the ‘send’ button, she paused. If she clicked, that would be it. One push of her finger to terminate their withering relationship. He would be gone by the time she got back, and she’d return to an empty flat. An empty flat and an almost-empty life.

Oddly, she couldn’t imagine what Malcolm’s immediate reaction to the e-mail would be. Would he be astonished? Furious? Dismissive? Self-pitying? All four, probably. Maybe, though, it was a bit too pathetic to just lance the boil with an e-mail. It was the kind of thing he’d do, sure—but was she just trying to pre-empt him? Perhaps she should have it out with him, face-to-face. Perhaps that was the dignified thing to do.

Typing it had been cathartic. She skimmed through it again, wincing at some of her more viperish words. It might still come in useful, she decided. No need to send it there and then. She saved it to the Drafts folder instead.

* * *

After lunch Victoria was determined to get involved in some hands-on work, but Osterberg persuaded her to stay in the dining shelter and revise the schedule for dismantling at-risk portions of the reactor roof. A lot of it was guesswork on her part, estimating the performance of the cranes mounted up there and the effectiveness of the radiation shielding in their cabs. In the end she produced two: one conservative and one optimistic, based on the amount of exposure the available workers could sustain.

She was still working when darkness fell across the site and the crews began to troop in for their evening meal. Before she could get some food herself, Swan appeared and hauled her off to a teleconference with London, New York and Paris. He was still wearing the same clothes, and still didn’t appear to have slept. His hair was sticking up and his speech was pressured to the point of near-incoherence—even more so than usual. He blamed jetlag, but Victoria began to worry that the manic look in his eyes was due to more than that.

There was one advantage to his frenzied state, which was that she barely had to speak during the call. Swan talked enough for both of them, his sentences getting lost in dead-end alleys of management argot, buzzwords running into each other with the urgency of his need to be understood. Victoria stayed quiet and watched the names drop off Swan’s laptop screen as people on the call hung up without saying goodbye, until eventually there was only some hapless project accountant listening. At that point she left the communications prefab and went in search of nourishment.

Osterberg came looking for her while she was prodding moodily at a big pot of kapusta, trying to find any chunks of sausage that had eluded the work crews. He waited until she had finished serving herself and taken a seat before starting to talk, with forced joviality.

“So, Victoria, would you first like the good news or the bad news?”

Victoria gave him a baleful look. She wasn’t in the mood for games. “To be honest, Wolfgang, I don’t care. Just give me the important news.”

“The important news. Right.” Osterberg glanced over his shoulder to make sure they were alone, and leaned across the table towards her. “You remember I took a blood sample from you this morning?”

“I remember.”

“I had one of the men drive it over to Vektor—we have an arrangement with the Occupational Health office at the waste storage facility—and gave him a list of tests I wished them to run.”

“What are you telling me? That my blood’s screwy?”

Osterberg raised his hands defensively. “No, not at all. Everything within the reference ranges—your CBC was fine. Nothing to worry about.”

“Right. Good, then.”

“I asked them to run an hCG test as well. I just had a hunch. And, well, the levels are elevated. Over 40,000.”

“hCG? That’s…”

“Human chorionic gonadotrophin. If you make me guess, I would say you are about four weeks. Pregnant.”

Victoria stared at him. “You’re kidding! You ran a pregnancy test on me without telling me? Wolfgang!”

The German shook his head vigorously. “I just wanted to be sure. I am responsible for safety here, but I did not want to worry you if it was unnecessary. Victoria, you have to go home. You can’t stay in the Zone, not while you are pregnant. Think of the risks!”

Victoria turned back to her meal. “What was the good news?” she asked, taking a mouthful of cabbage.

“I’m sorry?”

“What was the good news? You said you had good news.”

Osterberg looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, lamely. “I rather hoped that was the good news.”

* * *

She had never had a row with Osterberg before, but when he started to insist that he would recall the Hip and have her flown out of there that night she lost her temper. It was none of his damned business if she was pregnant, and he might as well forget about the radiation risks because she would be having an abortion anyway. She didn’t want Malcolm’s bloody baby. The man was a walking midlife crisis whose qualifications for fatherhood ended at the level of basic biology, and were pretty minimal even then. If she was going to have a baby it would be on her own terms and in her own time. Anyone who disagreed could get back to the nineteenth century.

After a couple of minutes, Osterberg threw up his hands in resignation and agreed not to send for the helicopter. Victoria turned on her heel and left the dining shelter, pushing past a patrol of skulking VV troops who had been attracted by the noise of their confrontation. Finding her way back to her tent and sealing herself inside it, she flung herself onto the cot and tried to calm down.

She knew exactly when it had happened. Their anniversary, the month before. She had instigated it—because sex on an anniversary was something that couples did, right? She snorted at her own idiocy. Could she really be that much less naïve only four weeks later? At least she wasn’t telling herself that a baby was all they needed to make their relationship work. At least not that.

She ran her hands over her belly, imagining the tiny aggregation of cells nestled against her uterus, blindly dividing, condensing into life. A boy or a girl? Or just a problem, she reminded herself, turning out the light and rolling onto her side to get some sleep.

What she really needed was someone to talk to about it. Ordinarily Wolfang Osterberg would be her ideal confidant, but she was determined to stay angry at him. She tried talking to the darkness of the tent instead, offering her anxieties to whatever spirits moved about the Zone at night—but soon stopped for fear that they might answer.

* * *

The next morning she woke up determined to go in immediate search of Osterberg, so that she could negotiate a truce and her right to stay until the project was completed. A surge of nausea delayed her, and forced her to spend fifteen minutes retching into one of the chemical toilets. Eventually, feeling little better but with an empty stomach, she emerged and hunted him to the communications shelter, where he was trying to explain the weather to Adam Swan.

Swan looked ill. His collar was dark with grime, and the face above it was a mask of exhaustion, its texture granulated by blocked pores and dead cells. When Victoria entered, he was shouting hypomanically about snow while Osterberg tried to reason with him.

“Snow isn’t an excuse for poor project management, buddy! If a bit of snow is all it takes to de-incentivise your team, it’s your fault for not managing the expectation gradient! It’s just a challenge! Give the guys hats, or gloves—whatever they need to do the job. ‘Cos I’ll have ‘em out there nailing this thing down come Hell or high water!”

“Mr Swan, please,” implored Osterberg. “You are not listening to me. The problem is not with the men. That is not what I am saying.”

“You’re damn right the problem isn’t with the men!” agreed Swan, spittle flying. “It’s with you! I know you want this project to fail. I know you want to undermine me—set me up so it looks like it’s my fault when things go wrong. It’s all very obvious to me. It won’t work though! Because my will is stronger than yours! I have infinite will, in fact! Infinite will!”

“Will you please shut up and let me speak!” demanded Osterburg, drawing himself up to his full, imposing height. Swan shrank back, watching him warily with bloodshot eyes.

“You are panicking about the wrong things, Mr Swan,” continued the German. “The men are not the issue. The snow is the issue. Starting 48 hours from now, up to one metre of snow is going to fall. More, where it drifts against the structure. It is an old roof, on a damaged building. It will not take the weight. Do you understand? It will collapse.”

“Are you serious?” interrupted Victoria, aghast. “I mean, are you sure?”

Osterberg turned to her, his old, grey eyes serious and sad. “There is not enough support. It was already in bad shape and there was more damage caused when we removed the chimney stack. Thirty tons of wet snow will be too much. The storm already collapsed the roof of a supermarket in Smolensk, and now it is coming this way.”

He watched as the consequences occurred to her in rapid succession. A plume of fallout. A caesium snowstorm whirling south across the landscape, towards Kiev. The interior of the Sarcophagus filling with airborne, radioactive dust. The re-contamination of the Zone of Alienation. International panic, economic chaos.

“We knew this was a possibility,” continued Osterberg, examining his nails. “After all, it is why we built the Carapace in the first place.”

“Exactly!” cried Swan, pointing a trembling finger at the doctor. “It’s perfect! We move that baby into position, save the world, beat our deadline! They can’t say we had a choice here, it was the snow! Everyone gets paid!”

“We can’t move the Carapace into position—it isn’t ready,” replied Osterberg testily.

“We might not have a choice,” pointed out Victoria.

“We physically can’t! The winches still do not have power! There is still superstructure to dismantle. The computers and environmental systems still are not working… and once we have moved it, it will never move again. We cannot simply go back inside and carry on working on it.”

“Bullshit!” screeched Swan. “Two days! You said we have two days. Get all that shit up and running in two days! Twenty-four hour shifts, round the clock, for everyone! This is an emergency! Do you understand what that means? An emergency? Very, very important! I’m going to ring the board and tell them! This is our chance to shine, people! Get the men together!”

He pushed past them and plunged out of the shelter, stabbing at buttons on his Blackberry. Victoria grimaced at Osterberg, her anger at him suddenly forgotten.

“Should we be worried about him?” she asked. “He doesn’t seem well. I don’t think he can take it.”

Osterberg shrugged. “Probably, but I have told the men just to ignore him. Right now, we have bigger problems. The Carapace will not be ready in two days. There are weeks of work to do. You know, another one of the men disappeared during the night: walked out of the camp, has not come back.”

“Okay, so what’s the alternative? How can we protect the reactor? Because I don’t want to be here when that roof falls in.”

He sighed heavily and looked her in the eye. “I don’t want you to be here even if the roof doesn’t fall in. No, don’t start to argue again. Just think; you need to take this seriously. Do you ever want to have a child? How old are you now? Nearly forty? I’m not going to say that this is your last chance, but it might be your best.”

Victoria bridled. “Damn it, Wolfgang, I thought we went over this. I. Don’t. Want. Malcolm’s. Bloody. Baby. Even if I did, my dosimeter is well in the green. Besides, it’s not even a foetus yet. If it does get damaged at this point, it will just spontaneously abort—which saves me a visit to the doctor.”

“Why are you talking about it as Malcolm’s baby? It is your baby, Victoria. Yours.”

“That’s right, it’s mine; not yours, so just leave it. How can I walk away now? If I see the reactor collapsing on the evening news… how would you like knowing that you just ran away and didn’t stay or try to help? I’m staying. If you try and throw me off, Octra will just throw you off instead.”

Osterberg shook his head sadly. “Well, if you cannot see sense, I must impose it. You stay until the blizzard arrives, no longer—wait, I have not finished. You leave when the snow comes. You stay away from the reactor and the Carapace site. Outside the camp, you carry a Geiger counter. And nothing stupid, like going into the Red Forest or to the old vehicle park. And you let me test your hCG again. I want to be sure the embryo is implanted correctly.”

“What am I supposed to do if I can’t even visit the site?” Victoria wanted to know. “A bit of light dusting? Iron your shirts, maybe? Come off it.”

“No discussion. Herr Swan would call it a ‘deal-breaker.’ The first thing you can do is to go over my figures—the weight of the snowfall and the strength of the roof. It won’t hold, but I would like a second opinion. We need to tell the Ukrainians as well.”

“We need to tell Octra. They can tell the government. Did you talk to the ICC yet?”

“I phoned them, unofficially.”

“It’ll be all round Kiev already then. Let me deal with that,” offered Victoria. “You try to find a way to stop that roof caving in.”

“We can’t deploy the Carapace, Victoria. It’s not going to be ready. If we move it in without the internal systems working, we will never be able to complete the deconstruction of the old Sarcophagus.” Osterberg looked genuinely upset. He had brought the project all the way from the drawing board to near-completion, had lived in the camp for months at a time without seeing his family. The idea of his creation being rushed into position unfinished clouded his expression, and perhaps his judgement, thought Victoria.

“I don’t think we’re going to have a choice, Wolfgang,” she told him. “Everyone remembers 1986. The Ukrainians will insist, and Octra will go along with it to avoid paying their penalty clauses. Besides, what else can we do? We can’t stop it snowing.”

“No,” sighed Osterberg. “No, I suppose not.”

“Anyway,” continued Victoria, trying to buck him up, “if the Pyramid can save the country from another dose of radiation, you’ll be a hero!”

Osterberg visibly winced. “I just want to build the Carapace we were meant to build, Victoria,” he sighed. “I’m not interested in being a pharoah.”

Victoria frowned and corrected him. “Hero. You said ‘pharoah.’”

Osterberg stared at her. “You said ‘pyramid.’”

* * *

She pored over the German’s equations and formulae for an hour, trying to find a flaw that might allow the reactor roof to survive the oncoming snow, knowing there wouldn’t be one. Her knowledge of engineering didn’t really extend to structures and mechanical stresses, but she could just about follow his reasoning when he talked her through it. Fifty centimetres of snow would easily be enough to warp the remaining lateral supports. The Sarcophagus, hastily constructed as a temporary measure three decades before, bolted to blast-damaged and deteriorating concrete, would finally start to collapse. The reactor’s interior would be exposed to the elements once more.

Fortunately, Octra’s impenetrable shield of secretaries and personal assistants meant that she did not have to break the bad news directly to anyone senior at the company. She left messages for half the members of the Board of Directors, the legal department, and her own boss, then followed them up with e-mails. Osterberg was finally persuaded to prioritise getting power to the winches that would haul the Carapace into place. If he could do that, and they could find a way to safely tear down the remaining bits of obstructing concrete and metalwork, it might at least be possible to move it into position when the snow began to fall.

Leaving the communications shelter in search of coffee, she saw Swan standing in the square, near the gaping hole Serhiy had left in the wall of the hotel. He was in his shirtsleeves, soaked by the light drizzle that had been falling all morning, laughing hysterically into his phone.

Reluctantly, Victoria changed course and splashed across the wet concrete towards him. She should at least make sure that he wasn’t going to die of hypothermia. He looked like a refugee, standing forlornly in the rain, his lurid shirt rippling in the stiff, December breeze. Or an escapee, she corrected herself as she heard his maniacal giggling. At least the rain might be rinsing some of the sweat out of his shirt. He must have brought clean clothes with him, surely?

As she approached, she began to hear the words he was hissing into his Blackberry, and her skin crawled.

“I serve the messenger! The messenger of the Board. The Board of Directors of the whole universe! I understand. He talks to me because he trusts me. I’m on the inside of the outside, it’s the ultimate partnership. I understand everything! It’s the only true business: the real commodity. Everything else is just lies, and shit, and shit, and lies! I see that now! Do you see? Of course you do! Adam Swan knows the truth. Adam Swan is a man of vision! A man who understands the take-home message!”

She was standing beside him before he noticed her. He took the phone away from his ear, and all-but snarled at her. “What do you want, Cox?”

Victoria didn’t reply. Her attention was fixed on the phone. Its screen was black. It wasn’t even switched on.

* * *

She didn’t have time to worry about her apparently-unravelling colleague for long. By the time she had eaten some bread and a bowl of okroshka, the e-mails had started flooding onto her phone; then came the calls.

An hour later her schedule for the afternoon was already full. Conference calls with Octra, in which most of the talking was done by lawyers. Back-channel conversations with her contacts at the IAEA. Frantic discussion about the chances of a criticality excursion if the reactor’s fuel mass came into contact with melted snow. At five pm she was due to explain the situation, in person, to the Ukrainians. A meeting with a melange of government agencies had been arranged, and she was to put herself at their disposal.

The assorted generals and deputy ministers had no intention of entering the Zone of Alienation, of course. They were descending on the Radioecology Training Centre in nearby Slavutych instead, a discreet distance from the capital, and away from nosing journalists. Victoria unpacked her trouser suit and got Osterberg to issue her with a travel pass. Slavutych was on the other side of the lake, which meant workers commuting there from the Zone had two choices: they could either drive for four hours around the southern end of the water and back up the east shore, or they could go northeast, across the southernmost tip of Belarus, shaving three hours off the journey. The pass would enable her to bypass Customs when she reached the Belarusian border. She dropped a Geiger counter onto the passenger seat as well. The Ukrainian traffic police were notoriously officious, eager to find infractions wherever they could. A Geiger counter ticking away inside a car from Chernobyl ought to be enough to give them pause.

Despite Osterberg’s imprecations to avoid the place, she made a detour to Reactor Number 4 and sat in the car with the engine idling, facing off against a pair of armoured personnel carriers that blocked the road. The sun was setting, already lost behind the thick clouds around the horizon as the sky darkened rapidly to night. Floodlights bolted to a large crane bathed the reactor roof in stark, white light, making it glow like a bonfire in the dusk, enabling the men up there to carry on labouring well into the night. The sight reminded Victoria of eye witness accounts from the 1986 disaster, of the air above the plant glowing as it was ionised by leaking radiation. The light then had been blue, the wintry, auroral blue of ionised nitrogen. Above it, they said, the dust had been red, reflecting back the angry flickering of the graphite fire raging below.

There were other accounts, too. The story of the ‘black bird of Chernobyl’ was widely known. Witnesses had claimed that a black, headless man, with twenty-foot wings, and burning red eyes on his chest, had been seen at the plant in the days before the disaster, then escaped in the explosion. Most of those witnesses were now dead, their genomes shredded by the lethal rays, but they had spoken of the beast swooping and gliding through thunderheads of nuclear dust above the burning plant. Those who had seen it, and lived, claimed to have suffered petrifying nightmares and sinister, inexplicable telephone calls in the aftermath.

It was all bunk, Victoria reminded herself, putting the Patriot back into gear and pulling a U-turn. She’d spent months in the Zone, and she’d never seen a birdman or a Kaptar. The ‘black bird’ had been a stork, the nightmares were post-traumatic stress, and the phone calls—if they had happened—were probably from some Soviet authority trying to manage the coverup. Myths and ghost stories were just peoples’ way of sublimating the true horror. Years ago one of Osterberg’s students had told her that the ‘black bird’ was just an appropriation of a much older story, about a giant headless crow that had slaughtered a military unit during the Crimean war. The tale had unearthed itself from the collective unconscious and done the rounds again.

In her rearview mirror the reactor looked like a stadium hosting a rock concert, its location marked by the eerie corona of light; or like the site of a Black Mass, steeped in unearthly energy. The glow spread down the flanks of the pyramid from the plinth at its apex. The flight of steps leading down from it was a barcode of light and shadow. At its base, the entrance to the thing’s hidden interior was visible as an arch of complete blackness, flanked by ornamental pillars. Mercifully, the giant hieracosphinxes that crouched in front of the temple complex were mere silhouettes; just the suggestion of a threat.

Victoria blinked and looked in the mirror again. No pyramid. No sphinxes. Just the reactor and the APCs and, further away, the hungry maw of the Carapace.

She found that even though she was nervous about the forthcoming meeting she was looking forward to her sixty mile drive. Getting out of the Zone would be a relief, even if it was only for a few hours. Keeping one eye on the road ahead, she fiddled with the radio until she found the World Service. After being sequestered in the exclusion zone she had no idea what might have been going on in the outside world—but the news report failed to hold her attention.

She tried to concentrate on the meeting ahead, and the traps that the civil servants, the lawyers, and the politicians might lay for her. Be noncomittal, she told herself. Guarantee nothing. Just give the facts. Don’t speak for Octra, just speak for yourself.

She tried to rehearse some answers to the most obvious questions that she could be asked, but her attention kept wandering. Names kept intruding on her thoughts. It was a few minutes before she realised that she was semi-consciously evaluating baby names, and forced herself to stop. Biological imperatives be damned. She didn’t have room in her life for a baby. She didn’t have room in her flat for a baby. It would mean turning her study into another bedroom. Although she could always move her desk into the living room, by the bookshelf. No, she reminded herself angrily, she couldn’t—because she wasn’t going to have Malcolm’s baby.

She stepped on the accelerator, driving faster so that she would be forced to concentrate on nothing but the road ahead.

* * *

The meeting went much as she expected. The public servants and politicians were planning for the worst, but only insofar as making sure their departments didn’t catch the blame for any catastrophe. Victoria answered their questions through an interpreter, and watched the power games play out. A few of the representatives were keen to transfer responsibility for on-site decision making to the VV, but the VV commander in the room angrily resisted the idea. Everyone was in favour of just hauling the Carapace into position unfinished, and finding some way to upgrade it later. There was a lot of faux-sincere talk about ‘not repeating the mistakes of the past’ which got everyone in the room nodding and trying to look sombre.

After a couple of hours they seemed to run out of platitudes and plots, and sent for their drivers. Victoria escaped before any of them could corner her, one-on-one, and got her SUV out of the car park before the exit was clogged by government cars.

Driving back through Belarus, she was surprised by how reluctant she was to return to the Zone. She had little doubt that the Carapace would work, that it would protect the reactor from the snow. Osterberg would find a way to dismantle the remaining obstructions and get the winches online in time, and all would be well—she was certain. Why, then, did she feel so apprehensive?

Maybe because but for the reflexes of a passing VV lieutenant she would have been smeared all over a derelict hotel by a suicidal maniac, she reminded herself. She was probably carrying some post-traumatic stress, and who could blame her? The pointing figure in the hotel rose unbidden in her mind, but she forced it away again. Post-traumatic stress.

The UAZ ate up the miles with ease. To either side of the road, the marshlands of Southern Belarus glinted in the moonlight, a wasteland of dead water and scraggy, leafless trees. Somewhere, hundreds of kilometres away to her right, would be the cold front that was sweeping down on Ukraine, smothering the land in snow like a knife smearing butter over bread.

She crossed the border without incident and headed south, past a VV checkpoint and back into the familiar desolation of the Zone. As she approached the outskirts of Prypiat, the dashboard clock ticked over to 21:00 and the radio announced the news headlines. Victoria had already heard them half an hour before, and half an hour before that, and reached down to switch it off—but her hand froze when the announcer calmly mentioned her by name.

“BBC News with Jonathan Wheatley. Dr Victoria Cox will submit to the Dark Pharoah in his temple of entropy. The god that crawls approaches the throne. His eye is opened; the mind of man departs. Dark science reigns in the time of the messenger—let the year of suicides begin.”

The lights went out.

* * *

Dashboard, headlights, even—thankfully—the lights on the radio console simultaneously died, and the Patriot’s engine fell silent. Victoria pressed the accelerator all the way to the floor without meeting any resistance. Her mouth suddenly dry, she twisted the key in the ignition again and again as the car coasted to a halt.

It was absolutely silent. The night seemed to be holding its breath. Every system, every component of the UAZ seemed to have died at once. The starter motor, the electrics, even the windscreen wipers were unresponsive. Victoria swore loudly, holding back the quiet with a lengthy deprecation of Russian engineering. And, of course, her phone had no signal. She swore at that, too.

She knew where she was, more or less. The turn-off to the centre of Prypiat was a couple of miles further down the road. There was not much chance of another vehicle passing her, not before morning, which meant that her only option was going to be to walk it. The interior of the car was only going to get colder now. At least walking would keep her warm.

She gathered her belongings and opened the door of the SUV. Why did this have to happen on the day she was wearing her stupid, impractical suit? It was bad enough that she had to walk two miles of decaying tarmac in slingback pumps. It would be even worse with winter gnawing at her through flimsy, loose-fitting trousers. She shrugged on her anorak and zipped it up to the neck, then, with one last, despairing look at the SUV, she hunched her shoulders and started walking.

Although she didn’t want to, she found herself thinking about the newsreader’s dark predictions. Had she really heard that? More post-traumatic stress? No, she knew what she had heard. Which meant either that she was going mad, or a World Service headline writer was going mad, or something else was happening that she didn’t understand. Didn’t want to understand. Maybe someone was trying to make her believe that she was mad. She remembered the stories about the ‘black bird of Chernobyl,’ and how the witnesses claimed to have received menacing telephone calls after seeing the thing. Maybe someone was hoping that she’d report hearing voices, making herself a convenient scapegoat if the worst came to pass at the reactor. They probably had the technology to do that these days.

The road meandered through dense woodland, and trees and bushes to either side whispered darkly in the stiff, northerly breeze. Shrouded by drifting cirrus, the moon looked like a veiled skull and did little to relieve the darkness. Victoria resorted to using her phone to light the road ahead, its dim glow just about sufficient to disclose anything that might send her over on her ankle.

Periodically a slight rustling in the undergrowth would stop suddenly at her approach, as some unseen rodent froze and waited for her to pass by. Since its virtual desertion by humanity, the Zone had become a haven for wildlife and a source of fascination to radioecologists. The skeletons of elk, bears, and wild boar littered the post-apocalyptic countryside, and lynx and wolves prowled the corridors of abandoned buildings. Albinism and deformity were relatively common among the animal populations, but, despite this, Nature was reclaiming the place, filling the vacant niches. Reinfecting the Zone with life.

Victoria was almost glad of the cold, because her feet rapidly became too numb to feel much of the discomfort her shoes were inflicting. The rhythmic clip-clopping of her heels sounded absurd on the unlit road. She wished they were quieter. The way the sound broadcast her presence made her feel like a fly, tapping on the threads of a web.

The Dark Pharoah in his temple of entropy.

Osterberg had said pharoah. The gibberish spewed out by the Carapace mainframe had mentioned black gods and crawling chaos. She kept seeing pyramids. Had she dreamed of pyramids? She couldn’t remember. And, of course, she kept seeing—something. The dark-robed figure before Serhiy’s crash. The shadow in the Carapace.

It was nonsense. She’d spent months on end in the Zone before now without getting the heebie-jeebies like this. Osterberg had been there for years, most of that time without encountering any of the problems that were dogging the project now. Yes, the place was eerie and sometimes dangerous, and yes, the snow front bearing down on them was a genuine emergency—but that was all. Nothing had changed. Nothing new was going on.

Her thoughts were derailed by a low, menacing growl that seemed to swell from the night itself. She gave an involuntary squeak and stumbled to a halt, flashing her phone around wildly to find the source. In front of her the feeble light gleamed back from what could only be a pair of eyes. Low down, the eyes of an animal or a crouching person.

Her mouth was dry. There weren’t any animals in the Zone that growled and couldn’t easily outrun her. She should have just stayed in the car until morning. What had she been thinking? Keeping her weight on her toes, ready to spring away, she slowly lowered herself into a crouch, so that the thing in front of her would be silhouetted against the horizon.

She could see the shape of its head now, maybe five metres away from her. It looked like a large dog, sitting in the middle of the road. Victoria was not reassured.

Rabies was rife among the dogs and wolves of the Zone. Only a few years before, six people had been attacked by a rabid wolf trying to enter the Sarcophagus. Even the uninfected animals were dangerous: aggressive and perpetually hungry.

The one in front of her barked loudly, startling birds from the nearby trees, and then commenced a continuous, terrible snarling. Victoria fought to retain her composure, and slowly slipped off her shoes.

There was a commotion in the bushes at the side of the road, and then the clacking of claws on tarmac as two more emaciated hounds joined the one in front of her. A moment later there was a fourth, that started to circle around the faint halo of light from her phone, looking to flank her. She had to move. Now.

The only possible refuge was in the trees. Maybe she could get to one and climb it—but it had to be now, before any possible escape route was cut off. A fifth dark shadow joined the pack, and several of them began to bark.

Victoria fought the impulse to run. If she turned and ran, they would be on her in seconds. They seemed to be wary of the light, so she kept the phone pointed at them, for all her hand was shaking. Maybe it looked like a giant, glowing eye to them, or perhaps it just dazzled them enough to make them apprehensive of what might be behind it, but they seemed reluctant to approach. As a sixth feral came bounding out of the forest, Victoria knew their reticence would not last long.

Trying to move quickly and quietly, but without taking her eyes off the pacing canines, she moved to the side of the road and backed into the undergrowth, biting her lip as thorns and splinters scratched at her bare feet. The tangle of plants pushed back, but with a determined shove she managed to force her way through to the relatively unobstructed forest floor.

The pack leader trotted to the place where she had been standing and sniffed the ground. The others circled, growling, waiting for the signal to give chase.

Victoria looked around desperately, hoping to see a branch she could use to pull herself to safety. The trees were all birch and Scots pine, straight and slender with no low boughs. All she could do was try to put them between herself and the dogs. Twigs cracked beneath her feet as she started walking, backwards, as quickly as she could. The pack leader was nosing at the undergrowth through which she had retreated. Victoria breathed deeply, panting, filling her lungs for flight. As she did so, a sudden storm-surge of fresh adrenaline coursed through her body, and instinct took the initiative.

As the lead hound raised its head and howled gleefully, signalling the start of the hunt, she flung her phone back towards the road. It flashed like a tumbling satellite, falling end-over-end towards the dogs. Before it hit the ground, she was running.

Shadows solidified into tree tunks in front of her and she veered around them, arms windmilling to keep her upright. Her feet were slashed by stones and splinters, but terror obliterated the pain. Behind her there was an angry commotion as the dogs forced their way through and over the roadside thicket and came scampering after her through the underwood.

As she careened drunkenly around obstructions that loomed suddenly out of the darkness, she thought she saw a faint, steady point of light in the distance. There it was again—but it was so far away! Then it was lost, between the trees. At the last possible moment, Victoria managed to bring her hands up to prevent herself from slamming headlong into another stout trunk. She pushed off it in a new direction, heart pounding and mouth dry, a small sob escaping her throat. There was the light again, artificial and wholesome, but very much further away than the dogs sounded. She ran towards it anyway, trying to find enough breath to scream for help.

Suddenly the light was gone, blotted out as a vast figure stepped out between two trees directly ahead of her: a towering, hooded shadow that spread it’s arms in benediction as she ran towards it. It raised its head, and she caught a glimpse of long, curved teeth, parting in greeting.

Victoria squealed and changed direction again, her eyes welling with tears. To her left, she caught a glimpse of a dark shape streaking between the trees—one of the dogs, maneuvering to cut her off. She could barely see where she was going now, the forest just a shimmering shadow through the tears. All she knew was that the tenebrous spectre was somewhere behind her now, and that she would rather take her chances with the dogs.

A low branch caught her a sharp blow above the eye and brought her up short. Stunned, she grabbed at it to prevent herself from falling over. The pounding of paws behind her gave her no time to think. She leapt, springing off the trunk of the tree to haul herself onto the branch. The dog, about to spring at her neck, was left with no choice but to skid to a halt in the leaf litter. Foam flew from its champing jaws as it reared up against the trunk, desperate to reach her.

There was another branch she could step to that was higher. From there, she heaved herself up onto a main limb and worked herself into a cleft of the trunk, a good twelve feet from the ground. She was lucky! The pine must have been young when the reactor melted down. Radiation had interfered with its growth signalling, causing it to retain its bare, lower branches even as a mature tree.

The woods rang with barking as dogs threw themselves against the trunk of the tree and scrabbled at it with their claws. Much to her relief, they seemed unable to scale it. As she began to get her breath back she almost laughed, but a surge of pain in her bloodied feet choked it to a whimper. She could feel blood dripping down her cheek, too, running from the cut on her forehead.

The dogs suddenly fell silent and skulked backwards to lie in a ring around the tree. Victoria watched them warily. Was that it? Were they just going to wait for her to ripen and fall? Was she going to have to spend the whole night up a tree?

They were quivering, she noticed. Their bodies cringed, heads down, throats bared in submission. Then she heard it, too. The ponderous tread of something approaching through the woods, dried twigs crunching beneath its feet.

Nausea and vertigo made her clutch the trunk more tightly, her fear rising by octaves with each leaden, advancing footstep. “No, no, no.” She murmured the word over and over as the impossible shadow lurched into view. More than a shadow, in fact, something all too corporeal, that scuffed dirt into the air with every halting step.

The dogs began to whine piteously as the thing crossed their circle. Nine feet tall, at least. Cadaverously thin, its tattered black robes rippling in the breeze. The air in the glade was filled with the stench of dog, overpoweringly strong and growing stronger as the terrible apparition took another pace towards the tree. Victoria clapped a hand over her mouth and nose to block the odour, and to stifle the scream she could feel building in her throat. As the thing raised its head and its hood fell back, she lost control and let out a screech of abject, psychotic horror.

Panicked and confused, she shinned further up the trunk, bark scraping against her skin and clothes as she climbed as far as possible from the beast beneath. Under the cowl, glaring at her with three black, pearlescent eyes—breath steaming, jaws running with slaver—was the head of a monstrous hound.

Victoria stared at it, terrified, uncomprehending, paralysed by the insanity of what she was seeing. Faced by a thing she had never imagined to exist, an unrehearsed horror for which nothing in life had prepared her, she regressed to a state of infantile stupefaction and froze, like a mouse in the shadow of a snake.

She was dimly aware of the stink of musk and rotten meat that rose from the thing, as long, whiplike fingers coiled around the lower branches and lifted it towards her. Its three eyes stared vacantly upwards, its black jaws wide apart and steaming, and drawing closer. She could hear the dogs below barking rhythmically and in unison, joined in celebration of the superior predator’s ascent.

Even as dread closed like a fist around her amygdala and her consciousness began to fade, she knew that the sight before her was not real. Knew that the dog-headed, Anubian being was only a disguise, a Gestalt: reality’s attempt to render a thing that did not fit the world.

As the yawning jaws stretched and quivered, a succession of dull cracks echoed through the woods. They sounded like gunfire. Someone was shooting. Victoria lost her grip on the tree and fell. She was unconscious even before she hit the forest floor.

* * *

When she came to she was too scared to open her eyes. Her bloodstream was still thick with adrenaline, her skin still damp with sweat. There was a fiery pain in her shoulders, and she was moving. Bouncing, her head lolling around as she continued to feign unconsciousness. Was she in a car? Reluctantly, she opened her eyes.

Not a car: a wheelbarrow. She was being pushed through the forest in a large wheelbarrow, her legs dangling off the front of it. Who, then, was pushing her? She tilted her head back.

A grim-faced man, his stubbled cheeks inflated with effort, was leaning into the task of forcing the overloaded cart through the detritus of the forest floor. He looked down and gave her a curt nod. “Pryvit.” His voice was clipped, his concentration focussed on pushing the barrow without spilling her onto the ground. “Nearly there,” he assured her, as an afterthought.

‘Nearly where?’ wondered Victoria, but she was still too traumatised to ask. He seemed to know what he was doing—and he didn’t have the head of a dog. Had that really happened? She could still feel gritty particles of bark on her scraped hands, could still taste the appalling animal stench that had emanated from the haunter of the woods. It had happened, there was no doubt.

She wondered who her chauffeur was. He wasn’t from Octra, she was certain of that. A frayed rifle-sling cut across his thick, black bodywarmer, and the barrel of a Fort hunting carbine protruded over his shoulder. He could only be one of the samosely, the civilians who eked out a living in the Zone. Many of them had lived there before the events of 1986, returning illegally after the State confiscated their homes. Others were scavengers and hermits who had migrated to the Zone in the years since, for impenetrable reasons of their own. They kept low profiles and lived solitary, impoverished lives in the ruins, choosing the dangers of radiation over the problems of the outside world.

The trees began to thin out and the going became easier as they reached the far side of the wood. The samosely was pushing her towards a house, Victoria realised: a derelict farmhouse with an electric bulb glowing above the door. She remembered the light she had seen while running through the forest, the one she had tried to reach. Her saviour—as she presumed him—must have left it on to guide him home from his evening’s hunt.

She began to feel stupid, being wheeled along like a prize marrow, and the edge of the barrow was digging painfully into the backs of her knees. She flapped her arm to signal the man to stop pushing. “Let me get out,” she muttered, her voice thick and drunken-sounding.

“It is just there, we are nearly there,” the man assured her, but he slowed to a halt anyway and raised the handles, pouring her onto her feet.

Her joints screamed as she straightened up, bones and muscles registering protests at their ongoing abuse. For a few seconds her vision swam alarmingly, until her circulatory system kicked into a higher gear, better suited to standing. Her left shoulder felt tight, stiffened like cooked meat. She guessed that she must have landed on it after her dive from the tree. It was uncomfortable but she could move it. No breakage or dislocation.

The man stood close, ready to catch her if she should fall. When it became clear that she wouldn’t, he took hold of the barrow again and began to lead the way towards the crumbling farmhouse. “Come indoors,” he said over his shoulder. “It is warm.”

Victoria followed slowly. She still felt faint, and began to wonder if she had made a mistake by insisting on walking. With a start she noticed a large, dark smear on the sleeve of her coat. She rubbed at it with her fingers. As they passed into the arc of light from the bulb above the door, she saw that they came away red. Was she bleeding? No. The wheelbarrow was coated in a dark, gory emulsion that had rubbed off on her clothes. It must have been used by the samosely for transporting the carcasses of his nightly kills, she guessed. Tonight he had bagged her instead.

He walked straight into the house without waiting for her, leaving the door open. Victoria hesitated for a few moments before following. She did not feel entirely comfortable walking into his home. No one knew where she was. She didn’t know where she was. On the other hand, the hunter hadn’t attempted to harm her and had, presumably, saved her from the dogs. The dogs. She did not want to go back into the woods and risk another encounter with those dogs. Swallowing her trepidation, she crossed the threshold.

It was like travelling back in time. Victoria found herself standing in a small parlour that had seemingly not been altered since the early 1980s. Blocky, utilitarian slabs of Soviet upholstery were placed around the room, drably clashing with stained, sky-blue wallpaper and garish rugs, that had been mounted on the wall in the inexplicable fashion of communism’s terminal decade.

The samosely pulled off his bodywarmer and dropped it on a lurid green sofa. He was younger than Victoria had supposed, probably thirty rather than forty, with a face that was lined by stress and emotion rather than age. His fringe was grown long to hide a dramatic-looking scar on his forehead. It looked like a chemical burn.

“You are thirsty?” called the man, pushing through another door that opened into a dingy kitchen.

“Yes. Thankyou,” replied Victoria, hoping to be offered water rather than vodka. She followed him through.

The kitchen was more obviously lived-in than the parlour. The ceiling was covered by ominous damp patches, and dirt was ingrained between the tiles of the floor, but it was basically clean. Two dead hares hung over the sink, waiting to be skinned. Victoria wondered how much radiation was stored in their tissues, and decided to decline any offers of food.

Her host decanted water from a plastic bottle into a cheap, beveled glass and offered it to her. She wondered briefly about where it had been collected, but pushed the thought away and drank. It was warm, but fresh. She finished it in one long draught, and then sank gratefully into a creaking chair at the kitchen table.

“You are from Prypiat?” asked the man, refilling her glass. “From the camp there, yes?”

Victoria nodded tiredly. “Yes. My car broke down. I was chased by dogs.”

“I saw. You are hiding in a tree. I think I scare you when I fire my gun, and you fall. I shoot some dogs, the rest run away. Are you hurt?”

“Did you see it?” Victoria demanded to know, raising her head. “Did you see the thing in the tree?”

“Thing in tree? No. Only you I see in tree—but it is dark, and I am not near. What is in tree?”

“Nothing,” sighed Victoria. “You wouldn’t believe me. I don’t believe me.”

“Your hand shake,” observed the man. He reached into a cupboard, producing a bottle and two more glasses. “You need drink!”

Ignoring her protestations, he sloshed two large measures of vodka into the glasses and pushed one across the table to her. “Drink! This is Chernobyl! A little vodka keeps away the radiation. Za zdorovie!” He drained his glass and gestured at her until she did the same. The cheap spirit scoured her throat, dripping into her stomach and instantly dissolving the knot of tension she hadn’t realised was there. It felt good. She was pregnant though, she remembered. Probably shouldn’t drink any more.

“I have seen the building you have been making” began her host, but he was interrupted by the creaking of the kitchen door. A bony hand clutched at it, trembling with effort, and an impossibly small and frail-looking old woman hobbled slowly into the room. She was swaddled in innumerable layers of frayed and tattered fabric; the remnants of nightshirts, and jumpers, and scarves, and gowns.

The man sighed and went to help her. “My grandmother,” he explained over his shoulder. “This is her home. She should be in bed!”

“Why do you speak English?” the old woman demanded to know, batting away his hands as he tried to steady her. “Stupid boy! Who is here?” She peered in Victoria’s direction. Victoria stared back, not liking the shrewd, calculating look on the babushka’s face.

“So, an American girl. From the camp?”

The question was addressed to her grandson, though her eyes never left Victoria’s face. Victoria answered anyway. “British, actually.”

The old woman snorted and sat down heavily at the table. “American, British, what is the difference? You come, you crawl on this dead town like flies on a corpse. What do you want with us, child?”

The woman’s grandson answered before Victoria could. “She was chased by dogs in the woods, baba. I bring her here to be safe.”

The old woman’s lip curled. “You bring her here to be safe. So very kind! What have you told her? Have you told her why they put you into prison? Have you told her what they wrote on your head?”

“No, baba. It is not—”

“You see, child, Burian’s mind is corrupted.” The crone leaned forwards, her eyes glittering. “The other prisoners marked his flesh as a warning to the world. When he came home to me, he burned the words away with metal. Didn’t you, Burian?”

Her grandson mumbled something indistinct, avoiding eye contact, head down. “Now he hides here, so that people do not look on his shame.”

Victoria regarded the old woman coldly. “Yes, well,” she replied, her tone sweetly patronising. “You don’t need to be afraid. I’m not going to take him away from you.”

The woman cackled. “Afraid? I have no use for fear, child. I have lived in this place all my life. This place that eats fear.” She paused, seeing something in Victoria’s eyes. “What have you seen, I wonder?” Her eyes searched Victoria’s face. “Tell me, girl! What have you seen tonight?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” snapped Victoria, shifting under the babushka’s stare.

“You saw him: the Black God, he haunts your eyes! Did he fly against the moon? Did you hear his voice on the wind? In the trees? Did he call to you?”

Her small, malevolent eyes were eager now, unblinking. She reached forward and seized hold of Victoria’s wrist with a clawlike hand. Victoria snatched it away.

“Let go of me!” she exclaimed, with too much shrillness.

The man, Burian, took hold of his grandmother’s chair and pulled it backwards so that Victoria was out of her reach. “Bud’ laska, baba! Vybachte, she has bad ideas,” he apologised, rolling his eyes.

“Stupid boy, be quiet! The girl has seen! She knows! But perhaps she does not understand what she has seen… perhaps she must be told.”

Victoria recoiled as the old woman struggled to her feet, ignoring her grandson’s feeble protestations, and began to shuffle, leaning heavily on the table, towards her.

“Tell me girl, what have you seen? His temple, burning in the night? His presence in dark places?”

Victoria felt flecks of spit land on her face as the woman drew closer, chattering excitedly. “Have you seen his face? Felt his teeth in your soul?”

She was panting with the exertion of moving and talking. Victoria stood up and moved away. “I have literally no idea what you’re talking about,” she informed the witch, with the exaggerated enunciation of the courteously aggrieved. “I have to leave. Thanks for the drink.”

“Now you have seen him, there can be no peace for you! No peace!” cried the old woman, before a fit of violent, tubercular coughing robbed her of breath. Her grandson hurried around the table and guided her to the chair Victoria had just vacated. She sank into it with a groan, and clutched his arm for a long time. When she spoke again, she sounded old and tired.

“You do not understand, child. The young do not understand,” she whispered.

“What don’t we understand?” Victoria demanded to know, fighting a sudden wave of sympathy for the frail, old crone.

“The darkness.” Her voice was calmer now, hoarse with coughing. “Sit, girl–do not be afraid. Sit, and tell me: have you ever heard men say shchob tebe chorny bog ubif?”

She looked up at Victoria with ancient, grey eyes that swam with a lifetime’s pain and hardship. How old was this woman? Old enough to have lived more than two thirds of her life in a Soviet, guessed Victoria. Maybe even to remember the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. She found herself sitting down at the table again.

“Shchob tebe chorny bog ubif?” Victoria repeated. “No. What is that? Something about destruction.” Burian tilted the vodka bottle towards her and she nodded wearily, holding the glass steady while he poured.

“It is an old, old curse in our language,” replied the babushka. “‘May the black god smite thee.’ Men speak it now in jest—but how many of them know why? Do you know why?”

“I really don’t,” Victoria assured her, rubbing tiredly at her eyes. She wondered whether this little samosely hovel had a telephone. She should ask.

“Over a thousand years ago the Christians came, with their Jewish god and their arrogant priests, their masochist saints and boot-licking apostles. They promised and threatened, with a child’s vision of heaven and hell. Seduced us with the promise of a god’s love for mere men. Over centuries, the people, weak and stupid, forgot their old beliefs and knelt before the cross. Old names and old ways were put aside. How much easier to bless yourself, and pray to heaven, than to tremble with fear before the Black God—Czernobog!”

“Czernobog?” queried Victoria.

“The thousand forms of Czernobog!” declared the old witch. “Teacher and seer. Tormentor. Devourer. Ageless and undying, he listens to the stars, sleeping or wandering as the dead gods require. He is but a shadow. A messenger condemned to spread a gospel of despair. In ancient times learned men gathered at his temples, seeking wisdom—but the revelations of Czernobog drove them mad! He taught them to hear the voices of the stars, and they were sucked into deep oceans of misery. Lost in wonder and fear, their thoughts and their lives became the Black God’s food.

“Well the Chernolian tribesmen knew and feared mighty Czernobog! When he left his temple they knew he would return, and that they would recognise his coming. They waited like whipped dogs for the return of the master; for signs of his cruelty seeping from the shadows. For just the echo of a whisper in a corner of their dreams.”

Victoria closed her eyes and drained her glass of vodka. So, the old woman was some kind of mad, pagan, Slav-supremacist. Spending thirty years living in the Zone of Alienation could probably do that to you. Her grandson, sitting opposite, grinned apologetically at Victoria, rolling his eyes like an imbecile. Victoria decided to interrupt the old woman’s narrative.

“Right, so if this Czernobog was so well known, how come everyone got converted to Christianity instead of the other way around?”

The grandmother’s eyes gleamed. She leaned closer.

“Would you dare to know the mind of the messenger of chaos?” she hissed. “The Black God rises and departs as it pleases the Old Ones. He cares not for the worship of men! To him we are dull creatures. We are fuel. Lured by mystery and fear to Czernobog, who sucks order from our minds like marrow from a bone. He departed, leaving us to ripen on the bough. Now he has returned, melting back into the world. He haunts new temples now, mocking our vanity from the shadows.”

“I can live with having my vanity mocked,” replied Victoria, trying to sound offhand. She wasn’t sure what was more unnerving—the old woman’s fairy story or the relish with which she told it—but she was determined not to give her the satisfaction of reacting to it. “So, this Czernobog character was here, in Ukraine, then he went away, and now he’s back. Is that right?”

The old woman laughed indulgently. “In Ukraine? Yes, child, mighty Czernobog was here in Ukraine. In Egypt, men hailed the Dark Pharoah, Nyarlathotep. In Persia he was Angra Mainyu. In Babylon, Aciel. In Ireland, Balor of the evil eye. To the Guanchetos he was red-eyed Guayota. His terrible pyramids have been built by Nile and Amazon, and on nameless lands older than both. The Black God does not discriminate between creeds or species of man any more than men distinguish the inhabitants of an anthill.”

Nyarlathotep. Pyramids. Pharoahs. The old woman’s words tumbled through Victoria’s mind. The messages on the computer and the radio, the e-mail—what was happening here? How could this old hag know what had been happening in the camp?

“So why now?” she demanded. “Why do you think that all these old myths”—she emphasized the word—“are suddenly coming true now?”

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.”

That, at least, sounded promising. Once the giant winches had power, they would ease the Carapace down the railway tracks to dock with the reactor. The 200 metre journey would take five hours, with Wolfgang watching the winch gauges like a hawk for any sign of torque.

“Where’s Swan?” It suddenly occurred to Victoria that the American was conspicuous by his absence. She would have expected him to be busily interfering, countermanding Osterberg’s instructions and generally being obnoxious.

“He is sleeping,” replied Osterberg, with a grim smile.

“Thank God for that. I think he was cracking up.”

“I gave him four milligrams of lorazepam. That will keep him asleep for a few hours, then he should sleep naturally until morning.”

“I’m amazed he took them,” admitted Victoria. “He wasn’t being very agreeable last time I saw him.”

“He didn’t have much choice. I got two of the men to hold him down, and injected it into his buttock.” Osterberg lit a cigarette, challenging her with his eyes.

“You medicated him against his will?” Victoria was incredulous. “Can you even do that?”

“Of course. I am a doctor and he needed it. And he was a problem: he was upsetting the men. Babbling about pyramids and demons and legends. When he wakes up, the helicopter must fly him to Kiev so he can be treated properly. And you must go with him.”

“I’ll go to Kiev once the Carapace is in position and the Geiger counters are in the green, Wolfgang. It’s my job to be here.”

“Victoria, please.” Osterberg clamped a hand on her shoulder. “This is not a place to be making decisions. Give yourself a choice. Look after yourself. Go back to London, then decide what to do.”

“You’re talking about me being pregnant, right?” Victoria could feel her anger rising again. “Wolfgang, it’s got nothing to do with you. Okay, I might keep it. I probably won’t. I might have lost it already, it’s far too early to say. I might give it up for adoption. Or maybe I’ll give up all this crap, and move to a pretty little market town in the country, and be a single mother, and join the PTA and the WI, and spend all day watching television and making jam—but none of those things are going to happen before this place is secure, and I can walk away with a clean conscience.”

“And if we can’t move it in time? If the storm hits, and the roof collapses, and we have a big cloud of radioactive schmutz everywhere? What then, Victoria? What if the uranium flashes to critical?”

“Then it will still be my job to be here. Let’s just make sure it doesn’t come to that, right? All right?”

Osterberg was quiet for a moment, his expression unreadable, then he laughed ruefully. “You are a stubborn bloody woman, Dr Cox,” he informed her. “It is your best attribute, and very irritating. Yosyp has some coffee in the server room. It seems the kettle is the only thing in there that still works, shall we—"

He was interrupted by a squall of shouts from the workmen high above. They looked up, and Victoria’s hand flew to her mouth.

One of the men had torn off his safety harness and was wrapping it around his neck, screaming, as the others scrambled towards him along the narrow roof beams. Victoria felt her stomach flip as he tugged it tight and then, before the others could get to him, rolled off into space.

A sickening crack echoed around the gigantic vault as his cervical vertebrae snapped. There were shocked shouts from the other workers. The hanged man was not struggling, his limbs splayed and rigid as he swayed hideously beneath the girder.

Victoria felt suddenly weak and hypoglycaemic—had to fight to stop her knees from buckling. She would have liked to sink to the ground and perhaps weep, but a glance at Osterberg told her that she was going to have to be stronger than that. Someone was going to have to take charge, and the German was in no state to do it. Ashen-faced, his mouth moved silently as he tried to blink away the sight of the swinging body above. His hands clenched and unclenched hopelessly, and when he turned to Victoria his eyes expressed nothing but defeat.

He mumbled something, but she didn’t catch it. Holding his arm, she leaned closer.

“Still alive” he repeated. “He’s—still alive.”

* * *

Victoria did her best to supervise the workers as they retrieved the hanged man and hauled him back to the comparative safety of the scaffold, giving them directions by walkie-talkie. It took nearly two hours to safely convey him back to ground level and into the back of a VV troop carrier. Osterberg was right, he was still alive, but only barely. A perfunctory pinprick test suggested that he would never move voluntarily again.

Once the APC had roared off into the night, presumably taking him to a hospital, she went to find Osterberg. She had sent him to the server room to stay warm. The attempted suicide of another worker had seemingly been one tragedy too many—had been enough to break him. In all the years she had known him she had never seen that look of surrender on his face. It was already haunting her. Fighting her own despondency and exhaustion, she rode the scissor lift up to the little hut and let herself in.

Osterberg was staring at his reflection in a dead computer screen. Yosyp, the computer engineer, was there, too, playing a game on some kind of handheld console. Both of them were silent. Victoria could tell that Osterberg wasn’t going to respond to cajoling or pep-talks. She decided to round on Yosyp instead, as the easier target. Maybe that would elicit a reaction from Osterberg, something she could work with.

“Shouldn’t you be working on fixing these computers, rather than playing games?” she suggested, glaring down at the Ukrainian. He glanced at her, then went back to playing.

“They cannot be fixed. So, I play game.”

“Well, then, why didn’t you get new parts? New computers? I’m sure Dr Osterberg made clear how vital they are, so why are you just sitting on your damned arse?”

“Please, Victoria,” sighed Osterberg, closing his eyes.

Yosyp bridled, but carried on stubbornly pushing sticks and buttons on the handheld. “I did get all new parts. New parts break down, too. All the programming torn to shreds, turned into junk. I have told Dr Osterberg I think it is a specialist virus, like ones the Americans use on Iranian nuclear equipment.”

“I don’t know anything about that. You’re talking about sabotage?”

“I think someone does not want our computers to work, yes.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous. And it’s a lazy answer. You’ve got the rest of the night to try to get them working, so I suggest that you do whatever you can. And, if you’ve already tried everything—try it again! Dr Osterberg, I’d like to update you on the injured man’s condition. Can we please go downstairs? Wolfgang!” She stood, silently demanding a response until his head finally turned towards her. “Can we talk a walk, please?”

Osterberg nodded reluctantly and hauled himself to his feet. He suddenly looked so very old, so drained, that she had to stop herself from going to help him up. Maybe that was what happened. Maybe one day you just crossed a threshold and became old. Gave up, surrendered to entropy—and why not? Why not just damn all the distractions and all the sophistry, and face the darkness with a grin? Let the abyss take a good, long look. Stare past the mirror, and just erode away into the emptiness. No more stress. No more ticking clocks. No more worrying what any of it was for…

“Victoria.” Osterberg’s hand on her shoulder jerked her out of her reverie. “Let us go, then.” He shuffled ahead of her back towards the lift, while behind them, Yosyp returned his full attention to his game.

Victoria began talking as soon as they were both back at ground level, determined to re-engage the gears of her mentor’s stalled determination.

“You were right about the jumper—Melnyk. He was still alive,” she began. “They managed to get him back onto the support before he asphyxiated. Quadraplegic though, for now at least. The VV took him away. I’d have gone with them but, you know… tonight we have bigger fish to fry, right?”

Osterberg didn’t respond, just plodded along beside her in silence. He was starting to annoy her now. He wasn’t a man that she expected to wallow in pity.

“The helicopter is back. I sent the men to unload the cables you wanted, rather than sending them back up to work on the cranes.”

She got a noncommittal grunt by way of response.

“I met someone tonight who thinks that all our problems are caused by old legends coming true,” she told him, while he fished in his coat pocket for cigarettes. “It made me wonder.”

She left the sentence hanging, until eventually, his cigarette lit, he took the bait. “Made you wonder what?”

“It made me wonder if maybe Yosyp’s actually right.” She tried to sound offhand, and carefully looked straight ahead while she spoke. “You read about all these armies and intelligence agencies using psychological warfare against people. Then, here you have all these stories circulating: mysterious figures in black, strange messages on the computers, the dogs that chased me tonight, and the VV all over the place as well. Maybe someone really doesn’t want the Carapace completed.”

Osterberg shrugged. “It seems rather pointless,” he offered.

“I suppose.” Victoria kicked at a loose pebble, sending it skidding down the concrete runway towards the reactor. “Unless it was one of Octra’s competitors.”

“I don’t think a conspiracy can make a snowstorm,” added Osterberg.

“There is that.”

They stopped walking and stood in the pool of light at the Carapace mouth, gazing out at the darkness beyond. Victoria forced herself to wonder where Malcolm was, and what he was doing. Drinking beer and watching television, probably, or playing online poker. She could imagine it easily enough, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

She knew that her brain was still working feverishly to accommodate her experience in the woods. Behind the scenes, while she walked and talked and tried to worry about other things, her subconscious mind was churning—trying to parse the red eyes and snapping jaws in a way that would leave her sane. She got the unpleasant feeling that she would see them again in her dreams.

A single snowflake drifted through the light, wandering uncertainly but steadily down until it kissed the concrete at their feet. They watched it in silence, and waited for the rest.

* * *

Osterberg’s radio crackled into life a few minutes later, with a steady fall of snow in progress, bringing the news that Octra head office were on the phone and demanding to speak to Victoria.

She took his car and drove back to camp through the gathering blizzard. Visibility was almost zero, and moving through the hypnotic storm of flakes felt like travelling through a computer’s screensaver. She had never seen it fall so thickly or so fast, but at least concentrating on following the road kept her from dwelling on what might, or might not, be lurking in the trees. By the time she reached the communications shelter, the stark geometry of Prypiat was already softened by a cold, white fleece.

The conference call lasted an hour and a half, and mainly consisted of people expressing their disappointment that it would be impossible to have television crews filming the Carapace as it moved into position. Listening to them was exhausting, and Victoria found her eyes slumping shut. None of them seemed ready to admit the possibility that the Carapace might not move, that the roof might cave, and that a smog of fallout could rise again, like the ghost of 1986.

While they discussed media strategies and news cycles, Victoria stroked her rumbling belly and tried to stay awake. She was starving. When had she last eaten anything? Before she drove to Slavutych to meet the Ukrainians, as best she could remember. It was nearly two in the morning now. No wonder she was hungry. Still, in a few hours the morning sickness would probably kick in again, which would put a stop to that.

When the conference finally wound down and she stepped out of the comms shelter, she was shocked by the volume of snow that had fallen while she’d been inside. A pristine carpet, four inches deep, crumped beneath her boots as she trudged towards the dining shelter, and still it fell. The ferris wheel’s rusting frame was limned with white, making it look like the biggest snowflake of all.

Rummaging through cupboards in the deserted kitchen, she found a box of Ukrainian wheat flakes and a bowl. There was only UHT milk, but she was too hungry to care. At least the folate in the cereal would be good for the foetus. The foetus. She tried to remind herself that she didn’t care about the foetus, but whether it was hormones, or tiredness, or Osterberg’s insistent nagging, it was getting harder to treat it with indifference. She kept catching herself unnecessarily checking her dosimeter, thinking too much about the connotations of peoples’ names, rehearsing how she’d tell her father he would be a grandfather. Just in case she decided that she wanted to have a baby.

Maybe she should just toss a coin for it. That way at least she could consider the matter settled. Her appetite suddenly gone, she pushed the bowl away and put her coat and hat back on. She could ask Malcolm for his opinion, but there didn’t seem much point. It wasn’t as if she particularly cared what he thought, and asking one child to decide the fate of another seemed pretty perverse.

Outside again, the only sound was the faint, almost imperceptible whisper of settling snow. She hoped that someone was clearing the rails down which the Carapace would have to move. As it was, it would be quicker to walk back to the reactor site than to try and drive there, even in a 4x4.

She wrapped her scarf tight around her throat and started scuffing through the snow towards the road. Osterberg and his men should have the heavy-duty cables unloaded by now. Hopefully they were already connecting the winches to the power supply, because the way the snow was piling up she had no confidence that the reactor roof would even survive until morning.

If it did, she decided—if they managed to get the Carapace into position, if catastrophe was averted—she would keep the baby.

A ridiculous, wanton decision, and one that took her by surprise, but the hell with it. It felt right. She would work from home more, or give it all up and do some consulting, whatever. The point was that the die had been cast, and it felt right. And, if the Carapace failed, if a criticality excursion irradiated the Zone with high-energy neutrons, and a cloud of poisonous dust rolled South south across the wheat fields of Ukraine—well, if that happened, everything else would probably be academic anyway.

It was a relief to have arrived at a decision, and to have asserted control over something amidst the anarchy and confusion of the moment. She wouldn’t tell Osterberg her decision, it wouldn’t be fair. Perhaps Wolfgang would be a good name, if they came through this and it was a boy. Or maybe Czernobog.

She froze, physically, in mid-stride. Where had that come from? She tried to bury the idea instantly, mentally reciting a litany of ordinary, pedestrian, unexceptional names, and pushing it to the back of her mind, but the thought could not be unthought.

The sight of a shadowy figure darting across the road ahead made her breath catch in her throat—but it was okay, it was the figure of a man. Not nine feet tall, not cowled: just a man. Others followed, bent double and looking furtively around. She counted nine of them, vanishing one by one into the woods on the other side of the road. Beyond those woods was open ground, and if they carried on in the direction they had been running, they would arrive at the Carapace, and the reactor.

It could have just been the VV, she reminded herself, on some patrol or other. Except that they hadn’t been carrying guns. Also, she was pretty sure she recognised the figure that had been leading them—and Adam Swan wasn’t in the VV

* * *

Before she could reach the reactor site, her radio began to crackle non-stop, as both Osterberg and the VV commander tried to draw her into a bitter and incoherent argument they were having. Between the static and the cursing she couldn’t tell what had happened, only that it seemed to revolve around something Swan had done.

When a VV troop carrier came rumbling down the road towards her, it’s giant, partially deflated tyres carving easily through the snow, she blocked its path and got the commander on the radio to put it at her disposal. The crew obediently opened a small hatch in the side, and she was pulled into a cramped cabin full of scowling guardsmen and given a seat by the door. The whole vehicle vibrated madly as the driver gunned the engine. Victoria clung tightly to a small handle in the bulkhead as he swung it offroad to drive back towards the reactor site.

She couldn’t hear her walkie-talkie over the roar of the engine, so she turned it off and concentrated on not inhaling too much of the sour fug of sweat, grease and flatus that filled the compartment. Fortunately, it was only a few minutes before the APC rolled to a halt at the rear of the reactor.

She ducked out of the powered hatchway as soon as it opened, shielding her eyes against the steadily falling snow. They had parked next to one of the two giant winches that would pull the Carapace. The winch housing was twice as long as the APC, and twice as tall, and it was already in operation, rumbling and whining as it strained. Inside it, giant metal teeth gripped onto steel cables as thick as her leg, drawing all 30,000 tonnes of the structure down the rails to its resting place.

Osterberg and the VV commander were standing next to it, shouting at one another in Ukrainian. Guardsmen and workers stood around, looking tense and waiting for orders. Victoria pushed past them, wondering what the hell was going on. Osterberg rounded on her as soon as he saw her.

"…i ya vidpovidalniy za bezpeku, chort zabyrai! Geh zum Teufel! Victoria! Tell him! This psychopath wants to position the Carapace while there are men still in the reactor!”

“What?” Victoria stared at them both. Osterberg was beside himself with anger. The VV captain just glowered and didn’t respond. “Why are there still men in the reactor? Wolfgang, we have to get it moving, now! Look at the snow!”

Osterberg grimaced, and swiped at the air in frustration. “Your lunatic friend, Swan! He led eleven men inside, without protection! They are still in there somewhere!”

Victoria shook her head, trying to clear it. “Swan? What the hell is he thinking? We have to get them out!”

“They have no radios. They could be anywhere inside! God knows what they are doing. If they’ve gone walking into hotspots, they probably already have fatal doses.”

“Which is why it does not matter if we shut them in,” interjected the captain in crisp, barely-accented English. “They are dead, anyway.”

“They might not be! Maniac!” Osterberg jabbed a forefinger into the Ukrainian’s chest. “You would leave a madman, unsupervised, in a building full of radioactive materials? Is that what you call security?”

“My orders are to ensure that the reactor is walled away. If they are in there, they are not coming out.”

“Two of them are your men! They are VV! You wish your own men to die?”

Victoria interrupted, physically placing herself between the two of them. “Wait, Wolfgang! Quiet! How long will it take to move the Carapace?”

Osterberg sniffed. “It is already moving. With these winches, it will be in place by eight a.m. unless we stop it now. Maybe nine.”

“We can’t stop it,” insisted Victoria. “Not unless this bloody blizzard stops first. So that gives us five hours. We can go in and try to find them. Bring them out.”

“Nobody goes inside!” barked the captain. “This is as close as is permitted.”

“It’s a bit sodding late for that, Captain.”

“You have twelve people in there,” added Osterberg. “Twelve people who may be dying while we stand here. Your men have protective suits—I can lead them safely in there. They will be safe with me.”

The captain closed his eyes and shook his head imperiously. “Nobody else is to go inside. I have my orders.”

Victoria heard Osterberg draw a sharp breath, and knew that he was about to explode with rage. She interrupted quickly, before he could.

“Remotes! We’ll send in one of the robots, then. Strap a radio to it and send it in to find them.”

“What if they are somewhere the robots cannot get to? What if they are up in the roof space? How will you find them in there? What if they are not together? The building is huge! We have not even mapped it all. They could be anywhere.”

“Well then, they’re fucked, Wolfgang, aren’t they?” snapped Victoria. “If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.”

“I have a better idea. This… strutting puppet can stand aside and let us do our job!”

As he spoke a shower of snow fell from the roof of the Sarcophagus, accompanied by an ominous and unmistakeable creak.

“Great idea, Wolfgang,” retorted Victoria. “Unfortunately, I don’t think we have any more time to discuss it. Do you?”

* * *

It took a full hour for Victoria and Yosyp to assemble one of the modular Remote Inspection Vehicles and prep it for insertion. They worked feverishly under a lean-to shelter against the wall of one of the reactor’s countless outbuildings. The shelter’s canvas roof already bulged downwards beneath a growing weight of snow. Osterberg continued arguing with the captain until an alarm on one of the winches began to sound. The Carapace’s wheels were slipping, introducing torsion and threatening to tear the structure apart as it advanced. From then on he remained at the controls, micromanaging the leviathan’s progress.

The RIV’s chassis was sleek, black, and plastered with radiation decals. Four fully-articulated caterpillar tracks enabled it to scramble easily over rubble, and navigate staircases. Powerful pincers could clear debris or retrieve samples, and a central turret bristled with video cameras, microphones, spotlights, and infra-red illuminators. While Yosyp ran a cursory test of the electronic systems, Victoria found a space among the hardware clutter to tape a walkie-talkie to the undercarriage.

The wind had picked up, driving the snow at them now as if it was trying to bury them alive. The VV had shepherded the work crews back to camp, a column of SUVs and trucks following in the tyre tracks of a personnel carrier. Osterberg had a couple of men helping him monitor the winches, under the watchful of eye of the VV captain and his troops, but otherwise they were alone.

With his laptop plugged into the RF antenna that controlled the robot, Yosyp checked its steering and motor functions, driving it around the shelter in short, controlled bursts of movement. His checks complete, he looked to Victoria for permission to dispatch it and, when she nodded, accelerated it into the snow.

Looking over Yosyp’s shoulder, Victoria watched the video feed bounce around madly as the RIV scudded across the floodlit snowfield, its motor buzzing like an electrical saw. The most direct route to the interior was through one of the many gaping holes in the Sarcophagus itself. Victoria guided Yosyp towards two warped metal panels at ground level, already rehearsing the most efficient route it could take through the reactor once they got it inside.

“Concentrate on the low risk areas,” advised a voice from behind her. It was Osterberg. He had left the winch controls and was pulling on a protective smock and gloves. “Head upstairs, and I will go downstairs.”

“What are you doing?” hissed Victoria, looking around wildly for the VV commander, only to see him lecturing his troops on the other side of the winch, a hundred feet away. “You heard what they said. They’ll shoot you if you try to go inside!”

“I would appreciate it if you could stop them from doing that,” replied the German, with a mirthless smile. “I have to find those men. There are twelve lives at stake.”

“Thirteen, if you go in as well!”

“I will be fine.”

“What if you get stuck, and you can’t get out before the place is sealed?”

Osterberg cupped her cheek fondly with one giant gloved hand. “Not possible. We Germans do not die ironic deaths.”

Ignoring her protestations he pulled the respirator mask down onto his face and lifted the elasticated hood over his hair. Then, with a squeeze of her shoulder, he was gone, jogging towards the reactor through the snow.

One of the VV guards noticed him before he was halfway there and alerted the captain with a shout. Victoria watched the captain’s face cloud with anger, saw the guards raise their weapons—and found herself rushing through the snow to put her body between their gunsights and her friend.

“Hold on! Don’t be bloody… stupid!” she panted, while the captain yelled at the departing German. “Just—wait a minute, Captain! He’s spent more time in that reactor than any man alive. There’s no point in stopping him now. Are you listening?”

She stopped in front of them, waving her arms to distract them and stop them taking aim. For a moment she wondered how she had ended up staring down the barrels of a dozen rifles, in a blizzard, in Ukraine. Maybe they would just shoot her, and then Osterberg. She tried not to think about that.

“He’s got responsibility for this place. He only wants to see if he can bring any of his people back out. And yours! Your people, too! Just let him do it.” She sounded braver than she felt.

A quick glance over her shoulder confirmed that Osterberg had almost reached the Sarcophagus, barely visible now through the pelting whiteness. Beyond him, the Carapace was a giant, creeping shadow that became sharper and more distinct as it inched forwards, preparing to eclipse Chernobyl reactor number 4.

The captain was glaring, teeth clenched. His men kept their guns trained, and waited obediently for the order to fire. Osterberg reached the breach in the reactor wall and squeezed inside, and the RIV followed him like an obedient dog.

Victoria exhaled softly, and offered up a silent prayer of thanks. When Osterberg came back out, she might just shoot him herself. Why could he not just stick to the plan? Though she had been nearly as stubborn, she reminded herself, when he’d demanded she leave the site.

“Your friend is a stupid bastard!” the VV captain spat, an angry tic pulling at his mouth. “If he returns he will be arrested, I can promise you that! Does he mean to just leave these winches to run out of control?”

“His men can manage the winches,” replied Victoria, hoping as she said it that she was right. “All they have to do is adjust the cable tension to balance the load. Anyway, what will you be doing to help?”

She realised she had crossed a line as soon as she said it, and quickly turned around to walk away. He called after her angrily.

“Treasure your ignorance, Doctor! It might just save your life!”

* * *

Fighting tiredness and cold, Victoria stumbled back to the shelter of the lean-to. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to go to Majorca for Christmas, after all. It might at least help her feet thaw out. Behind her, the captain set about redeploying his brigade of armoured vehicles, sending them charging around in the snow, presumably in accordance with some kind of tactical doctrine. The ground continued to vibrate even after they had gone, and it was a moment before Victoria realised that it was the approach of the steadily creeping Carapace that was causing it.

Yosyp was glued to the screen of his laptop, nudging the RIV forwards with minute movements of the thumbstick on the control unit. Hunched forwards, staring slack-jawed at the screen, he reminded her of Malcolm playing his tiresome video games. She sat down next to him on the crate the RIV had been stored in, and tried to work out what was happening onscreen.

The robot seemed to be navigating a narrow corridor, one half of which was screened off with plastic sheeting. Wires drooped along the wall, but no current ran through them anymore. All power to the Sarcophagus had been shut off when the Carapace started moving. Yosyp was relying on a pair of bright LED bulbs to see where he was going, although he was probably using those rather than the infra-red camera purely for Osterberg’s benefit.

As she watched, the German pushed past the body of the RIV in his bulky protection suit. He bumped against one of the microphones, drawing an aggressive crackle from the laptop speakers, and briefly drowning out the tocking of the on-board Geiger counter. Victoria watched him on camera, raising his radio to his mouth, but still jumped when the handset in front of her burst into life.

“Yosyp? Come in, Yosyp.”

Victoria grabbed the radio before Yosyp could, and thumbed the ‘send’ button. “It’s Victoria. Yosyp is driving. That was a bloody foolish thing you just did, Wolfgang! You could have been shot! I could have been shot!”

His voice was muffled by the respirator, and she had to strain to make out his reply. “I think not. One of the sentries told me that their rifles are loaded with blanks. They do not trust the men to carry live ammunition so close to the Sarcophagus. Tell Yosyp that there is a ladder here. I will climb the ladder but the robot cannot. You know where we are?”

“Somewhere near room 190, looks like, on the right of the turbine hall.”

“Ja, that is right. I will check the turbine hall. You and the robot go to the control room. I will meet you there.”

“Be careful, Wolfgang,” begged Victoria, but he didn’t reply, putting the radio away so that his hands were free to climb the ladder.

Yosyp accelerated the RIV around him, the sound of its motors whining through the laptop speakers as he let it pick up speed. Victoria laid a cautionary hand on his arm. “Slowly, Yosyp! You’re kicking up dust. There’s enough radioactive crap in the air already. Just go gently.” He slowed obediently to a crawl, moving through the gloomy interior at walking pace. “There’s a flight of stairs beyond the next doorway,” continued Victoria, refolding a map of the Sarcophagus to show the area they were navigating. “Head for the next floor up.”

The RIV’s oversized, articulated tracks could handle even steep stairs without too much difficulty, but climbing them was painfully slow compared to going down them. Discarded fireproofing equipment and bits of bent and broken stair rail threatened to snag the chassis, making navigation even more treacherous. Yosyp stared at the screen with intense concentration, grimacing silently as he eased the ungainly machine up to the next storey.

The grinding of the robot’s motor echoed eerily through the deserted corridors, returning to the microphones as a persistent, ghostly hum. Creaking noises came from high above as the Sarcophagus roof slowly buckled under tonnes of snow, and Victoria began to worry anew that it might collapse before Osterberg emerged.

Eventually, despite a few hiatuses, the RIV reached top of the stairs. Yosyp gave the camera a dizzying, valedictory spin through 360 degrees, and then looked to Victoria for directions. “Go straight ahead,” she told him. “Through rooms 316 and 317. The control room is on the other side.”

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.”

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.

“Wolfgang, have you taken your mask off? Put it back on! Come on, don’t go breathing that crap!”

“Das dreifaltig brennende Auge kann mit Aas nichts anfangen.”

“God damn it!” spat Victoria, turning to Yosyp. “Turn the bot around, we have to send it upstairs to find Wolfgang. Damn it all, I warned him this would happen!”

“I cannot,” replied the technician gravely, taking his hands off the controls.

“We’ll get him out the long way, through the breach in 201. That gives us more time. What are you waiting for?”

“I do not have control of the robot. It is not responding to input.”

Victoria stared at him. “Then why is it still moving?”

Yosyp shook his head. “I cannot know.”

They watched the screen in numb confusion as the RIV executed a perfect 90 degree turn and began a smooth descent of the drainage duct that led to the suppression pools.

“What in the hell…”

“Somebody must have hacked it somehow, and stolen control of it,” suggested Yosyp, sounding unconvinced. “The VV must be behind it.”

“I don’t think so,” murmured Victoria.

At the bottom of the channel was a pool of viscous, black water. The robot splashed into it without hesitation, turned abruptly and forged ahead, ducking its mast to pass below a cluster of pipes. It turned again, and followed the pipes down a steep gully until it reached the bottom of the first pressure pool.

The basement was sectioned into twelve connected ponds that could be isolated as needed. When the reactor had been functioning, they were used for venting excess heat. In an emergency, the water could be injected straight into the core to bleed off energy—but the explosion in 1986 had left no time for that.

The pools had been drained after the meltdown, in an attempt to prevent radioactivity being leached from the fuel that had percolated down to them. However, the Sarcophagus had its own hydrological microclimate, and rainwater and condensation inevitably trickled down to the lowest point, creating a shallow lake of rotten bilge. The out-of-control robot rolled into the water, sending out a delta wave of ripples which rebounded off the giant concrete walls to either side.

The flickering image on the laptop screen showed vast stalagmites and pillars of corium, a surreal alternative architecture that overlaid the crumbling concrete and broken tiles of the basement. The Geiger readout was over 50 sieverts now, and still climbing. The RIV approached a flattened island of corium that jutted from the water, steered smartly around the obstruction and continued on its way, still with no input from Yosyp. Reaching the central channel that divided the ponds, it made an abrupt left turn and headed down it as if drawn by a tractor beam.

“I don’t think we should watch this,” said Yosyp, chewing his lip nervously. “This is wrong.”

Victoria knew what he meant. They were not exploring anymore. Whatever they saw now was being revealed to them, deliberately, and she doubted that it was intended to benefit them at all.

She picked up the radio again. “Wolfgang! Please come in. Have you found the way back down yet? If you can hear this, you need to head for the exit through 201. Do you remember where that is? The turbine hall is sealed now. You have to hurry!”

The voice that replied was clear and undistorted, and it was not Wolfgang Osterberg’s. Not any human’s. Resonant and hungry, it spoke to some ancient and forgotten part of her, and drew it down into a maelstrom of panic and despair.

“Worship me, Victoria Cox. Celebrate the lobotomy of mankind. Utter the words of darkness, and turn your world from grey to black.”

The words lanced through her mind, seeking out hidden, primitive receptors and plunging her into madness. She flung the handset into the snow, sinking to her knees and clawing at Yosyp as he gripped her shoulders. She couldn’t hear her own screams, or Yosyp shouting at her. All she could hear was the voice eating at her core.

“The ancient prisons crumble. The dreamer will no longer be denied. Man fulfils his purpose in the funeral of flesh. STEP INTO MY SHADOW!”

And she wanted to. In that instant she wanted nothing more than to let the Black God fillet her mind, her thoughts and memories going to nourish the remorseless, ageless abominations he served. She rolled onto her side as tired human instincts grappled with the promise of oblivion. She wanted nothing more than to go—and yet some tiny part of her clung stubbornly to the mundane. Gazing up at the laptop screen, she saw howling, twisted faces sliding past the remote’s camera. Inhuman, nuclear gargoyles, somehow sculpted from the lethal corium, formed a grotesque procession of bared teeth and gleaming, sightless eyes. The camera slowly swivelled, revealing the last pressure pool and the fate of Swan and the others.

There, in the deepest, most radioactive chamber of this alien henge, kneeling in obeisance among soaring, metallic statues, were the missing men: dead. Some of their corpses had toppled forwards and some backwards, but all were on their knees. Their bodies formed a circle, and in the centre of it stood a lone figure. Tall. Robed. Jet-black against the green background of infra-red, it beckoned to the camera with wormlike fingers.

“Step into my shadow. Now.”

The world seemed to splinter before her eyes, become some insubstantial thing. She could still see the shelter, the laptop, the reactor, the Carapace—but they seemed to be nothing more than a shimmering mirage, like a badly-focussed image projected on a wall. Beyond them, at some infinite yet insignificant distance, her gaze was met by the impassive stare of an unblinking, unearthly eye. Glowing with fire, its triple iris pulsed with madness and cruelty, and her mental defences crumbled before its sight.

As her will departed, fragmentary images flickered through Victoria’s capsizing mind. Wolfgang Osterberg, her friend—gone now, lost and alone in the nightmare of the Sarcophagus. Malcolm, her unlovable lover—not nearly enough to save her. The tiny life inside her. Her embryo. Her child.

Even against her will, her conscience rallied. A belated rush of maternal instincts forced themselves to her attention; feelings and impulses that were hardwired just as deeply as the urge to submit to this agent of chaos. They would not let her serve this ancient deity when she had to serve her child. She couldn’t. He could take her, but he didn’t get to take her baby. She would not be cast into oblivion. Not without saying goodbye.

The irresistible evolutionary instinct took over, shutting out the commands in her head and tearing her gaze from the computer screen. A few feet away she could see Yosyp, silhouetted against the dawn, frenziedly dashing his face against the wall of the outbuilding abutting the lean-to. Victoria watched until he crumpled to the ground, then closed her eyes and passed into unconsciousness.

* * *

…Therefore please accept this e-mail as formal notice of my intention to resign the position of Nuclear Safety Liaison forthwith.

Victoria did not hesitate before pressing ‘Send.’ She had typed the message on her phone, while drips of water from the branches overhead beaded the screen. It beeped, to let her know the message had been sent, and then again to tell her she had a new text message. It was from Malcolm, again. She deleted it.

It was two weeks since her return from the Zone. The VV had found her lying in the snow where she had fallen, and had brought her round just in time to see the giant louvre doors of the Carapace close forever. The bodies of thirteen men had been locked away inside it: a baker’s dozen of involuntary apostles to the force that stirred within.

Yosyp had been lying nearby, haemorrhaging onto the snow and into his brain. He had died half an hour later, resisting every attempt at resuscitation. They had medevac’d Victoria, despite her protestations: bundled her into the Hip and flown her back to Kiev. Given a private room in the hospital there, she had slept for the rest of the day, slipping out that night and heading straight for the airport.

Since her return to the UK, she had avoided everyone—made easier by the fact that Malcolm was away in Majorca now, having his budget Christmas in the sun. For Victoria, left alone in her flat, the days had passed in abstract. Long days, and longer nights, punctuated by bad dreams, flashbacks, and crying.

The decision to resign from her job had been taken that morning, as the result of a radio news bulletin that she had heard in the taxi to the station. She had found herself avoiding the radio and television since her experiences in the Zone, so it was the first time she had been exposed to the news. The inappropriately and insincerely upbeat newsreader had recited details of a massive cult suicide at the Fukushima powerplant in Japan, punching straight through the fragile wall of denial that Victoria had begun erecting in her mind.

That had put paid to any doubts that had lingered regarding the appointment she was about to have. She was early, having caught the first train of the day into central London, and, finding herself near Brompton cemetery, had settled on a bench among the graves and mausolea to draft her resignation e-mail.

She checked her watch. It was nearly nine o’clock now. She had taken the first appointment of the day, choosing this expensive, private clinic because it could offer her one sooner than the local NHS one. There would be an ultrasound, of course, and an interview—gently probing questions, alternatives suggested—but she was prepared for that. Then they would give her mifepristone, to block the hormones that were sustaining her pregnancy. In a couple of days, she would take a second drug, misoprostol, to induce abortion.

She wondered if Wolfgang would have been able to understand. He had encouraged her to keep the baby so strenuously, seeing that it was right for her even before she could herself—but that had been before. Before the world was revealed as a factory, a machine, churning out emotions and intellects to be tapped by hideous, primordial gods. Now when she looked about her at the tombs, and the grass, and the trees weeping with rain, she saw a prison. A cell, with walls of coldness and darkness and gravity. A sarcophagus.

She stood up and walked unsteadily back towards the iron gates of the cemetery. It was time for her appointment. The embryo inside her was six weeks old. Neurogenesis would be well under way, the rudiments of a brain starting to form as cells differentiated and migrated. She would not bring it into this world to be mocked and devoured by tyrannical, alien intellects. She would spare it that. With its destiny in her hands, and the knowledge she had, there could be no choice. She would save it from the darkness before it could see the light.

She felt too numb to cry as she crossed the road to the clinic. She walked with her eyes down, and stared at the ground with fierce concentration—because she knew that in the shadows of the cemetery would be a black-robed figure, beckoning to her and waiting.

Author’s Note

Thank you for choosing to read Sarcophagus. I hope that you enjoyed it reading it, and that you feel your investment in it was rewarded. As always, honest reviews and ratings by readers remain the only real source of legitimacy for independently published writers, and are always appreciated. I would also like to express my thanks to my editor, Toni Rakestraw, for her invaluable insights and patient corrections, and to Jordan Saia, who’s cover illustration has once again blown me away.

In case you have been left with any residual curiosity about the technology and folklore incorporated into this story, I would also like to take this opportunity to provide some context.

While the ‘Carapace’ in this book draws heavily on the proposed design for the real New Safe Confinement for Chernobyl, I have taken some distinct liberties with it for storytelling purposes. I should also make clear that ‘Octra’ is a completely fictitious consortium, and not meant to represent any company that might be involved in that project.

Czernobog, the Black God, is the name of an actual Slavic deity, about whom very little is known and much controversy seems to exist. I am far from the first writer to have used him, but he is probably best known today as the demonic entity in the ‘Night On Bald Mountain’ segment of Disney’s Fantasia.

The Kaptar and other cryptids alluded to in the text are also not original to this story, but exist as part of the modern nuclear folklore of Eastern Europe and Russia. Similarly, the `Black Bird of Chernobyl’ and the stories surrounding it are something that I imported rather than created from scratch.

Finally, I think that it would be in very poor taste to set a story in and around the Chernobyl reactor and not take a moment to pay tribute to the many people who sacrificed their health, and, in too many cases, their lives, to mitigate against the worst effects of the 1986 disaster. Amid the uncertainty and secrecy that still surrounds aspects of the aftermath, the exact extent of their sacrifice may never be clear – but their courage can hardly be questioned.

P.Hemplow, 03/06/12

Copyright

copyright 2012 by Philip Hemplow

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronical or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system without prior written permission of the author. Your support of author’s rights is appreciated.

All characters in this story are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cover art by Jordan Saia http://www.jordansaia.com

Content

Philip Hemplow
SARCOPHAGUS

Author’s Note

Copyright