Deadspawn

That sudden clatter of ru

He went to open the door to the corridor, and heard in the back of his mind, like an echo from his dream: But Viktor, you already know 'what in the world'! Paul Savinkov's telepathic voice, and clear as a bell. Except this time it was no dream!

A hammering at his door, which Luchov opened with hands which were trembling again. He saw his guards, astonishment written in their drawn, tired faces, and a pair of gaunt technicians just this moment arrived here from the core. 'Comrade Direktor!' one of the latter gasped, clawing at his arm. 'Direktor Luchov! I ... I would have telephoned, but the lines are under repair.'

Luchov could see that the technician was stalling; the man was terrified to report what must be reported, because he knew it was unbelievable. And now for the first time there sounded the sharp crack! crack! crack! of distant gunshots. At that, galvanized, Luchov found strength to croak, 'It's not... something from the Gate?'

'No, no! But there are... things!'

Luchov's flesh crawled. 'Things?'

'From under the Gate! From the abandoned magmass regions. And oh God, they are dead things, Comrade Direktor!'

Dead things. The sort of things Harry Keogh would understand, and which understood him only too well. And according to the warnings of a dead man, the worst of it still to come. But hadn't Luchov tried to warn Byzarnov what could happen? And hadn't he advised him to press that damned button right there and then? Of course he had, even knowing at the time that the Major didn't fully understand, and that in any case circumstances didn't warrant it. Also, Byzarnov was a military man and had his orders. Well, circumstances had changed; maybe now he would put his orders aside and take matters into his own hands.

Luchov had experienced and lived through similar disasters before. Now he felt torn two ways: should he make his escape to the upper levels and abandon the Projekt entirely, or should he see what could be done down below? His conscience won. There were men down there after all - just following bloody orders! He headed for the core.

As he ran along the angled, split-level steel ramp through the upper magmass cavern to the steep stairwell leading down to the Gate, the Projekt Direktor heard the first shouts, screams, and more gunshots from the core. The technicians were right behind him; his own men, too, armed with SMGs and a flamethrower. But as he approached the actual shaft where it spilled light from the Gate up into the cavern, so Major Alexei Byzarnov's voice echoed from behind, calling for him to wait. In a moment the Major had caught up.

'I was alerted,' he gasped. The messenger was incoherent. A gibbering idiot! Can you tell me what's going on, Viktor?'

Though Luchov hadn't seen it yet - not with his own eyes - still he had a fair idea what was 'going on'; but there was no way he could explain it to Byzarnov. Far better to let him see it for himself. So that when he answered, 'I don't know what's happening,' his simple lie was in fact a half-truth.

In any case, there was no time for further conversation. For as a renewed burst of screams and gunshots rang out, so the Major grasped Luchov's arm and shouted, 'Then we'd damn well better find out!'

A box of plastic eye-shields lay at the head of the ramp just inside the shaft. Byzarnov, Luchov, and his guards, each man paused to snatch up a pair of tinted lenses before continuing down to the core. There they emerged in a group, spreading out onto a railed platform high in the inward-curving wall. From that vantage point, looking down on the glaring Gate with its reflective perimeter of steel plates, they could take in the entire, unbelievable tableau in all its horror.

Dead men - once-men who had become hideous magmass composites, whose stench was overpowering even up here - were active in the core, coming up through hatches in the fish-scale plates, invading the safety perimeter and the rubber-floored area of the missile-launcher. There were nine of them all told, six of whom had already emerged and moved clear of the currently inactive electrical and acid spray hazard area. But such was their nature that Byzarnov could scarcely take in what he was seeing. Again clutching Luchov's arm, he reeled like a drunkard at the rail of the platform. 'For Christ's sake... what?' he mouthed, his eyes bugging as they swept over the madness down below.

Luchov knew he need not say anything. The Major could see for himself what these things were. Indeed he had seen several of them before, down there in the magmass, when they had been part of the magmass! Some were rotting; others were mummified; none was composed of flesh alone. They were part stone, rubber, metal, plastic, even paper. Some were inverted, with material folded-in which had tried to become homogeneous with them. They were magmass, neither pure nor simple but highly complex: magmass at its nightmarish worst.

One of them, guarding the perimeter walkway, had an open book for a hand. He had been reading a repair manual when the original Perchorsk Incident happened, and the book had become a permanent part of him. Now ... his left forearm mutated into a stiff paper spine at the wrist, with pages fluttering and detaching themselves as he moved. This wasn't the worst of it: the lower half of his trunk had been reversed, so that his feet pointed backwards. Even the plastic frames of his spectacles had warped into his face and bubbled up in crusts of brittle blisters there, while their lenses lay upon his cheeks where first they'd melted, then solidified into tears of optical glass.

And yet he had been one of the ... luckier ones? Shut in by magmass, crushed in the grip of convulsive forces and confined away from the air, he had died instantly and his fleshy parts had later undergone a process of mummification. But when the Perchorsk Incident was over and space-time righted itself, others had been left dead and twisted and isolated out in the open, and their condition had been such that ordinary men just could not bring themselves to tend to them. Fully or partly exposed -occasionally joined to the greater magmass whole or partly encysted within it - they had simply been left to ... degrade, in areas of the Projekt which were then sealed and abandoned. Eventually their human parts had rotted down to deformed skeletons, for even bone had been subject to change, in those awful moments when matter had devolved to its inchoate origins.

Byzarnov saw men who were part machine. He saw a creature with a face composed of a welding torch jutting from a crumpled oxygen cylinder skull. Another was skeletal from the waist down but encysted around the chest and head in glassy stone, like a figure in a half-spacesuit. Spiky magmass crystals were growing out of the fused bone of his legs, and behind the glass of his 'viewplate', his unaltered face was still trapped in an endless scream. Another was legless, a half-man which the magmass warp had equipped at the hips with the wheels of a porter's trolley. He propelled himself with arms which were black where scorched flesh had shrivelled into the bone. The trolley's long wooden handles projected upwards from his shoulders like weird ante

The twisted, mummied hybrids were bad enough; the semimechs were worse; but worst of all were those who were partly liquescent, who but for their magmass parts must simply collapse into stinking ruin.

Byzarnov had almost stopped breathing; he started again with a gasp, said, 'But... how? And what are they doing?' He turned to one of his terrified technicians. 'Why haven't we fried them, or melted them with acid?'

The first one up made it to the defence mechanism,' the man told him. 'He ripped out the wiring. No one lifted a hand to stop him, not then. No one believed...'