Rising high above her on a weedy nest of kelp, flowing luminescent mosses, and morbid, slithering marine growths, was the progenitor she had once called Regina, but was in truth a massive, squirming bathypelagic horror, a pulsating gelatinous monstrosity that looked down upon her with eyes of green quartz. Her spiny fins quivered, fleshy suckers pulsing, gills vibrating, and fungous-white tentacles undulating. She brooded upon a mountain of throbbing, gelid eggs as Javy herself would one blessed day.

(NOW THAT YOU HAVE BECOME THE LIVING GOD AWAITS YOU)

Yes, oh yes, oh yes…

(AND WE SHALL DWELL IN HIS HOUSE FOREVERMORE)

(PREPARE TO MAKE PRAISE)

(OFFER THY SPREAD LOINS BEFORE HIM)

Javy could feel his nearness.

She could feel the very life of the city. It was thrumming with vitality now that the living god had come through the gateway. It beat like a great heart as it woke up, its blood flowing, cells dividing, and neurons firing, a mammoth biomechanical organism which would now rise to the surface and release the living, hungry god.

41
ALONE

The cable car climbed and climbed through the borehole cut from the ancient glacial ice and the minutes dragged by like eternities.

Finally, Orr saw the drill tower above and he pressed his face to the window of the car and watched the light at the end of the tunnel. It occurred to him, as he watched it getting closer and closer, that it was all like some perverse mockery of the birth experience—moving down the womb towards the light.

But he didn’t even want to speculate what birth was going to reveal this time around.

You’re going back to the world, you idiot. The real world. You have a purpose. One last purpose.

Then the cable car was pulled clear of the borehole and the winch swung it automatically over to the wooden staging platform some distance away. No one came running up to greet him. The entire drill tower structure was entirely black and silent.

Where the hell is the crew?

The lights he had seen from below were only the security lights that surrounded the borehole itself. The main generator was out. There was no doubt of that. Everything at Kharkov and the drill tower was automated, computer-controlled. If the main generator failed, the back-ups would kick in as they apparently had. Even the cable car winch was automated so you could operate it from the LSB in an emergency, as Orr had. The back-up generators could theoretically run by themselves all winter, even the fuel-fired boilers were self-governing, siphoning diesel from the main tanks as needed.

Yes, things would keep running…but what about the crew?

Where were they?

There was a crew of six techs that monitored the borehole, the drilling apparatus, and the LSB far below. Three more people operated the station itself. So where in the hell were they?