"There're no locks on those?" Jackson said.

"They're very heavy," Galia said. "Nothing will get through."

"Let's go," Ferrell said. "The first thing we gotta do is seal the tunnel."

"Stalin often had secret ways to enter and exit," Nastia said. "There may be a secret passage to the train tunnel from the palace."

"You are quite right," Galia said. "There are many secret routes. Nobody knows them all."

"OK," Jackson said. "Keep an eye out for one along the way."

07:35:27.

In the dark conservatory, lit only by the luminescent creatures in the window, Nell noticed movement on the monitor that showed the train station in Sector Seven. "Honey!" she yelled.

07:35:28.

Geoffrey gazed through the window upstairs at the steel gondola that was caked with rainbow fire like the encrusted hull of a boat. The gondola had a 1950s sleek and rounded shape pointing in both directions. It hung from cables dusted with rainbow fire that were strung over the lake to a towering stalagmite on the jagged island in the lake. No doubt Stalin had planned this as another escape route, but had he carried it to completion? He must have exposed hundreds of people to fatal danger in order to build it. The state of the gondola did not look promising. A large, antique diesel engine on the landing apparently pulled the cable car over the lake. Had Maxim refurbished it? Canisters of fuel stacked in front of it looked new.

Suddenly, he realized Nell was calling him, and Geoffrey hopped down the spiral stairs. Just before the bottom, he slipped, crashing on the floor knee-first. "Ow, fuck!" he groaned, just as Sasha arrived from downstairs with Ivan.

"Dear, be careful," Nell said. "Use the cane!"

"Yes," he agreed, propping himself up with Stalin's cane.

"Someone's in Sector Seven!" Nell's pulse raced as a number of people entered in heavy armor, wearing helmets and carrying weapons. A quadrupedal robot trotted behind the people into the station like a reindeer loaded with packs. The bizarre bot moved with surprising animality though it appeared to lack a head. Then, to her amazement, she saw Hender and Kuzu enter the frame of the screen. "Honey!" she yelled.

"I see them!" he said, as he limped over.

"Wow!" Sasha said. "Are those hendros?"

"Yeah, Sasha!" Geoffrey said. "The good guys. There's Hender!"

"Kuzu, too," Nell said.

"Unbelievable!"

She switched on the microphone inside the train station and turned up the sound on the monitor. They heard a snippet of English: "... train tunnel."

"Can we talk to them, Sasha?"

"There's no intercom to the train station."

Nell looked at Geoffrey urgently. "I have to get to them."

"You're not going," he said.

"Can you walk that far?"

Geoffrey knew she was right.

"It's now or never," she said. "You know I have to."

"Then we should go with you," Sasha said. "I told you, the tunnel's haunted, Nell. It's loaded with ghosts!"

"I'll go with you," Geoffrey said. "I can make a splint or something."

"There's no time. And it's just as important that you stay here, with Sasha," she said. "You have to watch the security cameras. There's a camera at the end of Stalin's escape route over his private train platform, right, Sasha?"

"Yes." Sasha nodded. "Papa put a camera there. But what about the ghosts?" She grabbed Nell's hand.

Nell called up the camera view on the monitor. "There it is. OK. They have to pass that way."

"Nell, it's crazy, damn it!" Geoffrey frowned.

"Keep watch from here. I'll come back to get you. If they got in, they can get us out, Geoffrey! But that hatch is probably locked from the inside like all the rest. Somebody has to let them in."

"It's true," said Sasha sadly.

Geoffrey shook his head.

"There's no choice!" Nell said. She grabbed the jug of repellent and started splashing it over herself. "Help me. Please."

07:34:02.

Downstairs, Geoffrey doused Nell with the jug of repellent he had brought from the lab one last time. She taped a flashlight to the muzzle of the machine gun. The weapon still seemed to have a lot of ammunition. "Sweetheart," he said, his throat tightening. "You better come back." He hugged her and squeezed her to him.

"I know," she whispered. "Take care of Sasha." Then she kissed Sasha. "Take care of Geoffrey."

"OK. He needs a lot of help! You smell funny."

Nell and Geoffrey twisted the hatch wheel and opened the door to Stalin's secret passage, which headed due south. She kissed him hard before she pulled away and shone her Maglite down the barrel-arched corridor stretching downhill in front of her.

"Go fast!" Sasha called.

"I will," she promised, and she started running, disappearing into the gloom.

Geoffrey pushed the door closed behind her. "Come on, Sasha," he said. "Let's go upstairs and help her from the computer, if we can." He limped toward the spiral stairs as a school of pink bullet-squids rocketed past the underwater window.

Sasha darted ahead of him and pulled on his arm as he lumbered up behind her in agony. "Oh, forget it! I'm running upstairs to check on Nell!"

"Great." Geoffrey winced as he grunted in pain each time he pushed off his foot.

07:20:18.

The insertion team jogged west over the train yard. The Big Dog trotted beside them, and both Talon robot ROVs rolled fifteen yards ahead, shining their floodlights and transmitting video feeds. The dog whistles around their necks enabled Abrams, Dima, and alpha dog Jackson to control the ROVs as they moved forward into the wall of blackness.

"Let's go a klick down this rail line and set the explosives," Ferrell said.

"Sounds good," Abrams said.

"Look for a door in the north wall," Nastia said. "Stalin may have had a private connection to the train somewhere along this line."

"That would be nice," Bear said.

"I think you may be right," Galia said. "It would have been to a direct line out of here."

"Keep an eye out for it," Ferrell said.

"Yeah, we'll need some other way into the city or this will be a short mission," Jackson said.

"Stalin planned to build a ten-kilometer tunnel under the Nevelsky Strait to connect mainland Russia to Sakhalin Island," Nastia said, chattering anxiously as they crossed the train yard.

"Yeah?" said Abrams. He was willing to hear anyone other than by-the-book Ferrell right now.

"Yes," Nastia said. "Twenty-seven thousand prisoners were sent into the tunnel, but they were too ill-equipped to complete it after thousands of men died trying. Only when Stalin died was the project abandoned, halfway under the Nevelsky Strait."

"What nice stories you tell," Dima said with a laugh as he glanced at her.

She shrugged. "They're my specialty."

The train yard narrowed to one wide-gauge track and one narrow-gauge track that dipped downhill into a tunnel. The white ceiling was arched with a lining of dingy tiles. Abrams sent Talon-1 about thirty yards ahead and Talon-2 on the other side of the tracks some distance behind them with its night vision camera aimed backwards. They all monitored the rear bot's display on the visor of their helmet as they moved steadily deeper into the tunnel.

"In 1947," Nastia continued, if only to fill the senseless void, "Stalin ordered work on the Death Railway of Abkhazia in northern Siberia. It started and ended in the middle of nowhere and cost forty million rubles. It also cost the slave labor of three hundred fifty thousand, and the lives of at least a hundred thousand more. It was never intended to be used. It was built to kill the men who built it. It stretches six hundred kilometers through frozen tundra and forests and can be reached only by helicopter. But that is nothing compared to the White SeaBaltic Sea Canal, or the gold mines of Kolyma...."

"OK," Bear said. "Enough."

"Yeah, you're freaking me out now," Andy agreed.

"Sorry. Someone else talk, then," she said. "Please!"

"How about some silence?" Abrams suggested.

"That'll freak me out more," Andy said.

"Me, too," Hender said.

They pushed on in uncomfortable silence as nobody could think of anything to say. They hurried due west inside a bubble of light as the tunnel felt like an esophagus swallowing them. The hiss of Abrams's exosuit, the whizz of the ROV motors, and the buzz of the Big Dog's servos were magnified inside the tunnel.

Kuzu nudged Hender with an elbow, turning an eye toward him as they each glided on four legs over the ground beside the humans. "Watch them closely, Shenuday," he said softly in his own language.

As they pressed into a seemingly endless darkness, the ROV in front of them carved away the stubborn shadow with its headlights.

"How about another gulag story, Nastia?" Jackson cracked.

"Stay focused, people!" Ferrell snapped. "Let's not get sloppy."

"No worries, Capitan," Abrams drawled.

Nastia noticed a large cement block to the right of the tracks. Above it was a steel hatch in the tunnel wall. "There." She pointed. "I told you! That door isn't in the city plan. That must be it!"

"Yes." Galia nodded. "I think you're right...."

"If we could get through that door, would it lead to the palace?" Abrams asked.

"Yes," Galia said. "Probably."

Tusya and Dima climbed onto the landing and tried to crank open the dog wheel on the hatch. "No good," reported Dima.

"Let me try." Abrams jumped to the top of the landing in the exosuit and gripped the wheel on the door with his bionic arms. The pneumatic muscles quaked as he wheeled the crank, but he couldn't budge the wheel. "No way. It's jammed solid."

"It probably opens only from the inside," Galia said. "Most of the gates that lead to the palace lock from the inside."

"We'll have to try to blow it open or melt through it with incendiaries," Jackson said.

"That'll be a hell of a job," Tusya said dubiously, glancing at Dima.

"Come on," Ferrell said. "We've got a job to do first."

"Yes, sir," Dima said, jumping down from the ledge. Abrams jumped down after him, his heavy suit buzzing as it absorbed the landing.

They moved on another fifty yards up the tunnel.

07:20:09.

Sasha and Geoffrey sat at Maxim's desk as they watched the monitors on the wall. Sasha noticed something on the monitor showing the inside of the train station. "Look!"

One of the heavy blast shields that had been lowered against the window was being pushed inward with erratic thrusts.

Geoffrey switched to the camera over the gate of Sector Seven in front of the station.

A giant rogue spiger leaned against the station's window. With the trebuchet-like force of a mantis shrimp's strike, it smashed its spiked arms through the glass, jolting the steel shutters. "Oh, crap," Geoffrey sighed.

Sasha squealed. "It's a monster!"

"Yes, sweetie, it is."

The view inside the station showed one heavy shutter being wedged as two seven-foot spikes levered it open.

07:16:21.

Three minutes in, running at full speed, Nell saw the first ghosts gleaming on the roof and walls ahead. Their flesh caught the light of her flashlight like cat's eyes as she sprinted down the tight corridor, too fast for them to react to her as she passed.

She saw a lot more ahead.

07:16:20.

Talon-1's night vision showed a split in the tunnel on the dog whistle's screen.