He stepped away from the platform, not entirely sure what he might be stepping into, only that he could feel it. It thrummed around him like there was something wrong with the atoms in the air. He could feel minute pulsations of force crawling up and down his spine. His light beam danced about, picking out tool cribs, compressors, hoses and electrical lines, hoists, the gigantic drill itself which dangled high above like a cruise missile ready to fall. He kept going, moving around the great iron tripod of the drill. His light glanced off the housings of pumps and circulator tanks. Shadows flowed and leaped.

“Shit!” he suddenly cried out, casting his light in every which direction with a badly shaking hand. As he moved, the air crackled around him with tiny bursts of blue light. It looked like two static-charged blankets violently pulled apart.

On the other side of the tanks, he met a wall of utter blackness. But at its edges, there was a faint bluish glow. He moved towards it. The wall itself was only a section of fiberglass shielding from the drill apparatus used to contain ice chips and slush that cycled about when the hot water drill began melting through the glacier. His nerves feeling electrified, Orr maneuvered around the shielding and then the glow was right in front of him…and what it came from.

He let out a small, economical cry.

He froze up, a wild and gibbering terror rushing through him. He saw several cadaverous figures drifting in his direction, all of them limned in that blue, unreal electricity.

42
PRENATAL

Far, far below in the black, nightmare depths of the city, the living god was breathing. It was taking form and shape and substance. Although it was incorporeal by nature and only a fragment of it was visible in the third dimension, it was alive and organic, throbbing and pulsing, cells dividing and tissues expanding, an embryonic horror that was coming to term.

Ready to be born in the dark womb of the city.

43
PRELUDE

They were dead.

They were all dead.

About fifteen feet away from Orr were six bodies…and they were all floating about ten feet off the floor. There was no menace in them as he’d first thought. They were simply dead. The techs. No wires or ropes held them. They floated of their own accord.

Like ghosts, he thought.

And they did look that way.