"It's better than nothing."

Dima gazed out the window at the hellish world there. "I don't know about that."

01:10:10.

Abrams and Nastia opened the hatch and he fired in tight circles down the passageway. The rounds scarred the walls, floor, and ceiling as they raked the tunnel. He targeted ghosts as they peeled off in the distance, blasting them to calamari as they dropped to the floor. Leaving nothing to chance, he used all but a few ammo magazines to clear the Dalek's path as Nastia plugged her ears.

Bear returned with Sasha after setting charges on the crystal walls of her bedroom. Sasha immediately ran with Ivan upstairs to get away from the loud noise of the gunfire, and Bear began rigging the underwater window with Semtex.

01:07:34.

Hender stepped off the stairs into Stalin's conservatory and ran to look at the video monitors over Maxim's desk.

Geoffrey limped behind him.

"Oh, nooo!" Hender quailed.

"What?" Geoffrey panted, hobbling forward with Stalin's cane.

"Where is this one?" Hender pointed at the screen on the wall.

Geoffrey moved closer to look: a limo barreled past the gate of Sector Three. It turned right into Sector Two, heading north-toward the palace. "Oh, no," he agreed.

Hender said. "Kuzu."

"But he can't get through that gate. It's locked. Right, Sasha?"

Sasha was just coming up behind them with Ivan. "Right. Papa never guessed my password. He doesn't know the door code." She folded her arms and glared at the limousine on the monitor.

01:07:19.

"Here goes."

Abrams set the bot down in the secret passage and started it with the dog whistle. It hummed like a giant Henders wasp as it levitated. An accelerometer inside the remote transmitted tilt and trajectory commands to the flying bot as Abrams sent it forward. With the Dalek's forward camera, Abrams could see the tunnel on the screen of the dog whistle as it cruised at twenty miles per hour, equally distanced from the ceiling, floor, and walls.

"Amazing!" said Nastia.

"Yeah, it's cool," Abrams said, pursing his lips as he focused.

Bear finished setting three charges on the window. "I set the charges in that girl's room to go off in twenty minutes."

"Good. Set the charges on the window to go off in ten minutes," Abrams said. "I set the charge on the Dalek to go off in nine minutes, but that's more than I'll need."

"Roger. Ten minutes it is."

"Did you open that door to the foyer?"

"Shit, I forgot!" Bear set the timer on the detonator and trotted down the corridor to wheel open the hatch at the end. "Woo!" he yelled back. "Somethin' died out here, man." He came back into the room and looked over Abrams's shoulder. "That's pungent. Hey, I hope that spiger's still stuck in the side tunnel. Remember?"

"I was just thinking about that." Abrams frowned as he started dodging the first ghosts peeling off the walls and ceiling the Dalek passed.

01:05:40.

"We need Abrams to go out there and start the engine," Dima said. "Those gammies are too crazy, and he's got the best body armor."

"Maybe we should shut the lights off and turn them on just before we head out to the gondola," Nell said. "That will temporarily blind the aggregators and firebombers, at least."

"But not those freaking gammies," Dima said.

She nodded. "Probably not them."

"I'll get Abrams." Dima jumped down the stairs.

"I'll check the security monitors," said Nell, right behind him.

01:03:04.

Abrams accidentally turned the Dalek off as it sped down the passageway, and it came down in a controlled landing. "Damn it!" He restarted it, mashing the button and getting it going again as a ghost dropped down behind it and blew sticky trails that fell just out of the propellers' circumference. "That was close!"

The Dalek dropped a signal relay as Abrams tipped the controls forward, pushing it faster down the stone artery toward the railroad tunnel. Up ahead, he saw the spiger backing out of the side tunnel, one of its hind legs trying to pry it free. Abrams steered the Dalek toward the wall, and the bot's radar sensed the collision and corrected its flight path, curving it perfectly around the spiger's thrashing leg.

"Nice move!" Bear said, shuddering.

Abrams could see the open hatch and piloted the Dalek through, rising in a barrel roll as he dropped another signal relay and veered to the right down the train tunnel.

"Good luck, man!" Bear grabbed another demolition pack and headed upstairs, passing Dima on the way down.

"How is he doing?" Dima asked. "We need him upstairs."

Bear shook his head. "He's busy."

Dima approached Abrams. "How long till you get there? We need you to get the gondola's motor running."

"OK. I'm in the tunnel now. You wanna do this?" Abrams asked. "My hands are tired."

"It doesn't look too hard."

"Just set it down when you spot the charges in the tunnel. The fork should be coming up ahead. Just remember to go left. Here!" He handed Dima the dog whistle. "Do I need the XOS?"

"Whoa," Dima said as he tilted the Dalek too far and its avoidance system repelled it from the wall.

"You sure you can do it?" Nastia asked.

"Da. Can you get up the stairs in that suit?" asked Dima.

"Hell, yes!" Abrams said, strapping in and firing up the exoskeleton. He charged up the stairs, taking them two at a time as they shook and swayed inside the glass vestibule.

Nastia watched Dima steering the bot. "Sasha should do it," she said, cringing. "Kids are good at this sort of thing!"

"Don't worry! I can do it. It's actually kind of easy.... Ahh!"

01:02:27.

Hender saw Bear enter the conservatory from the room below. Abrams passed him in the XOS suit, heading upstairs. Bear immediately started pulling out charges from a demolition pack and spacing them across Hell's Window. "Better get upstairs, you guys," he said. "Abrams is getting the gondola going."

"Kuzu's at the front gate!" Geoffrey said.

"Oh, shit," Bear said, turning.

The others watched the monitor as the sel got out of the limousine with Maxim in front of the gate to Sector 1.

"Papa!" Sasha shouted angrily.

01:02:12.

As the Dalek flew down the train tunnel, Dima noticed something glowing in the bot's minimized rearview cam. He maximized the rear view and saw the spiger burst out of the secret passage and bound down the tunnel after the Dalek like a Labrador.

Dima tilted the controls and his whole body forward to pick up the bot's speed in front of the leaping giant, whose one remaining eye was better than two human eyes as it bounded down the tunnel like a dog chasing a squirrel with trinocular vision.

01:01:01.

Hender noticed that, outside the gate to Sector One, Kuzu was doing the same thing that Bear was doing. "Kuzu!" He pointed.

Nell saw that the sel was setting explosives on the gate. "He's setting charges."

"How does he know how?" Bear asked.

"He's smart!" Geoffrey said.

"You better go upstairs and help Abrams, Bear," Nell said.

"OK, but you better hurry. You've got six minutes to get your asses up there." Bear set the detonator on the window and ran upstairs.

Nell turned up the volume as Kuzu approached the camera outside the gate. He rose up, his face before the camera, one baleful eye staring into it with three stacked pupils. Then he spoke, in his own language: "Shueenair Shenuday, come now with me. We will make this world our own. We will be remembered by all sels, forever."

"Let me meet you at the gate," Hender responded in Kuzu's language. "Nell can unlock it. Let us talk, Kuzu."

"Yes. Open. Good idea, brother."

Hender gripped Nell's hand, and she felt the symbiants tingle on her skin. "Will you help me, Nell?"

"How?"

"Come with me to talk with Kuzu."

"Sasha, you better go upstairs now, honey," Nell said.

"I'm scared!" Sasha cried. "What about Papa?"

"Sasha," Hender said to her, his fur illuminating lavender and green.

Sasha stared at Hender, mesmerized.

"Go upstairs now, OK? We will help him," Hender said.

Maxim appeared on the screen now behind Kuzu, looking up with huge, tragic eyes into the camera, and Sasha saw him. "You didn't guess the password, Papa!" she shouted, weeping, running to the screen.

Maxim's eyes were kind suddenly, and he smiled, finally seeing it. "I love Sasha," he said. "That's the password, Sashinka. Isn't it?"

Tears spilled down her cheeks. "You guessed it!" she shouted.

"Go with them, Sasha," Maxim said. "Go with them now, Sashinka."

"OK, Papa!"

"Hender and Nell will meet you at the door, Kuzu," Geoffrey said.

"Good," Kuzu said. "Come now!"

01:00:44.

"All right. I'm going out there and am gonna take a look at that big bad engine." Abrams put his helmet on and cranked the dog wheel. He and Bear pulled the hatch open. As it swung inward, Abrams went through and Bear shut the door behind him. Bear stomped on a gammy.

Through the window on the platform, Bear saw Abrams check the fuel drums. Gammarids flowed like roaches onto the platform around his feet and crawled over him, moving in short, nervous bursts. But they could not bite through the hard-shelled body armor. Abrams lifted the hood on the large diesel engine and scanned it for the fuel intake and carburetor, shaking his head. He reached down into the engine.

Bear saw Abrams give a thumbs-up and jump down. Grabbing a heavy drum of fuel, he uncapped it and tipped it into an intake tube. He emptied it and threw it aside, opening another. He was crawling with bugs, small and monstrously large, as he tipped the drum with the robot arms. With his own arm free, Abrams pulled a pistol from his shoulder harness and fired five times at the platform, killing five gammies for the rest to feed on.

01:00:43.

Nell led Hender down the stairs outside the conservatory, leaving the hatch open behind them.

"Dead," Hender said as they smelled decaying flesh.

As they crossed the arcade at the top of the stairs, they passed the corpses of two men.

"Yes, Hender," she said, stifling her nausea as they rushed past the bodies.

They hurried down one of the grand staircases to the foyer. Hender saw the limousine parked at the bottom with two open doors. The smell of death was overpowering. There were more corpses below.

"How die?" Hender asked.

"They were trying to kill Geoffrey."

"Geoffrey killed other humans?"

"Yes."

They passed through the palace, past more bodies, to the curving steps that cascaded over the courtyard outside.