The Last Oracle

Boris, a thirteen-year-old with eyes so blue they appeared frosted, seemed almost to be studying her. His talent was an eidetic memory coupled with a retention that frightened. He even remembered his own birth.



“Why were we not allowed to go with the others?” he asked.



More heads nodded.



Savina swallowed before answering. “There is another path for all of you. Do you have your bags packed?”



They just stared. No answer was necessary. Of course their bags were packed. The question displayed the level of her own nervousness. Before her lay the power that would fuel the Motherland into a new era. And deep down, Savina knew such a power remained beyond her full comprehension.



“We will be leaving in an hour,” Savina said.



Those ten pairs of blue eyes stared back at her.



Footsteps sounded behind her. She turned as one of the technicians joined her.



“General-Major,” he said, “we’re having some glitch with the blast doors on the other side of the tunnel. If you could advise us how to proceed.”



She nodded, glad to focus her mind upon a problem.



She followed the technician back to the staircase. Still, she felt those ten pairs of eyes tracking her, cold and dispassionate, icy in their regard. To escape their judgment, she hurried down the stairs.



“Open the doors!” Monk called to Konstantin.



From inside the control station, the boy nodded. Electric motors sounded, and large steel gears began rolling the blast doors out of the way, splitting down the middle.



Konstantin came running over to him, out of breath. “Five minutes,” the boy warned.



Monk understood. Konstantin had sent the tunnel’s digital camera system into a diagnostic shutdown and reboot. The clever kid had engineered a five-minute blackout. They had that long to evacuate the children from the train before the cameras were back online.



There was little else he could do. The master control station lay at the other end of the tunnel. Once the subterfuge was detected, the other station would kill the power to Konstantin’s shack.



They had only this one shot.



As the doors parted, Monk squeezed through, followed by Konstantin. Marta also loped after them. The old chimpanzee wheezed with exhaustion, but she didn’t slow, even passing Monk.



The old girl knew they had to hurry.



A hundred yards away, the train rested on the tracks.



Monk ran toward it, hopping a bit on his wounded leg. Konstantin called out in Russian, yelling at them to get off the train and out the blast door. The boy waved both his arms.



“Just clear the train,” Monk said. “I must get moving as quickly as possible.”



Monk jangled alongside the train as he ran. He carried two assault rifles over his shoulders, each with sixty-round magazines. Konstantin had already given him a lesson on the manual drive mechanism for the train. It wasn’t much.



Get in the front cab, shove the lever up.



Reaching the train, Monk trotted along one side, Konstantin along the other. “Everyone off the train!” Monk shouted. “Out the doors!”



Konstantin echoed his orders in Russian.



Still, chaos ruled for a full half minute. Children yelled or cried. Hands grabbed at him, milling and jostling. But the kids were also well trained to follow orders. Slowly the tide shifted, and the children began to drift down the tunnel toward the doors.



No longer crowded underfoot, Monk reached the last car, a covered cab. He leaped through the open door and went to the front end. A small driver’s seat was flanked by a green and red stick. Green for go. Red for the brakes. A small dashboard displayed gauges and voltage readings.



Monk did not have time for finesse. He leaned out the window. “Konstantin!”



The boy’s voice echoed to him. “Clear! Go!”



Good enough.



Monk shoved the green lever forward. Electricity popped, casting a few sparks into the darkness ahead. The train lurched forward, then began to roll off down the tunnel.



Four minutes.



He had to get this train to the other end of the tunnel before the camera system rebooted. It was up to Konstantin to herd the children out of the tunnel and close the blast doors. Monk had instructed the boy how to jam the gears so that the doors would remain closed.



Konstantin also had one other task.



Monk had confiscated a pair of the miners’ radios. Once Monk reached the far doors, he would signal Konstantin to open them. If all went according to plan, Monk would have the advantage of surprise—and two fully loaded assault rifles. While likely a suicide mission, what choice did he have? The children were safe for the moment, but if Operation Saturn succeeded, how many millions more would die? Monk had no choice but to storm the master control station, guns blazing.



Initially, he had considered sabotaging the mine site, but Konstantin had paled at that suggestion. The charges—fifty of them—were primed with radio detonators. Even if he could scale the half kilometer of shaft in four minutes to reach them, any mishandling of the explosives risked setting them off.



So the matter was settled.



With a rattle of wheels, the train sailed down the dark tunnel, lit by occasional bare bulbs. The front cab also had a single headlamp, which cast a glow ahead of him. As the train trundled faster and faster, Monk noted kilometer markers on the wall. According to Konstantin, the tunnel ran four kilometers long.



Monk found himself holding his breath, counting off a full minute in his head. Along the right side, he saw the number 2 stenciled into the wall.



Halfway there.



At best, he would have less than thirty seconds to spare.



Not great, but not bad.



Then the lights went out, as if the hand of God had clapped.



Under Monk, the train sighed, as if echoing his despair. Without electricity, the train rolled to a stop in the pitch darkness.



Behind him, from the back of the train, a child screamed in raw terror. Monk’s body clenched. He knew that voice.



Pyotr.



Savina stared at the bank of darkened monitors in the control station. She shook her head. Minutes before, one of the technicians had summoned her down here, worried about a glitch in the system, something to do with the blast doors at the far end of the tunnel. By the time she’d got down here, the cameras were off-line, running a diagnostic subroutine.



No one had ordered it.



Suspicions hardened her veins. Something was wrong. Rather than sit idle, she took a preemptive move and cut all power to the tunnel.



“M.C. three thirty-seven,” Savina said. “There’s a substation over at the mining complex.”



One of the technicians, an electrical engineer, nodded to her.



“And as I recall, there’s a camera built into the control shack over there. To allow you to communicate with technicians on the other side.”



The man nodded again—then his eyes widened. “It’s on a system independent from the tunnel.”



It was a precaution engineered in case of breakdowns like now, leaving the two stations still able to communicate.



“Bring up that camera.” She tapped one of the monitors.



The engineer typed rapidly at his computer. A few moments later, the screen snapped to life in grainy black-and-white. The camera was small and utilitarian, angled above the control board of the shack to give a good view of the operator on that side.



Savina leaned closer. Out the shack’s open door, the camera caught a milling of children in the cavern beyond. Many children. The ones who had boarded the train.



Savina struggled to comprehend, when a taller boy stepped into view of the camera. He was tall, dark-haired, with a long, angular face. Her fingers tightened. She knew that boy.



Konstantin.



What was going on?



With all that had happened this morning, she’d had no time to follow up on Lieutenant Borsakov’s hunt for the American and the three children. She watched Konstantin wave an arm and call silently to the crowd of children. Borsakov had obviously failed.



But what were they doing over there?



She searched the crowd, looking for the American and the other two children. She sought one child in particular, the one she wanted back.



Pyotr screamed as the blackness smothered him. His eyelids stretched wide searching for any light, Marta held him in her strong arms. The two had used the confusion at the other end of the tunnel to sneak aboard the last car and hide.



Pyotr knew he had to stay with the man.



But the darkness…



Pyotr gasped, drowning in the black sea. He rocked and rocked while Marta tried to hold him. It was his nightmare come true. He’d had the same dream often: where his shadow rose up and consumed him, smothered him until there was only darkness. The only way to defend against it was to set himself on fire, to burn like a torch against that darkness—then he would wake screaming.



Other children said they saw him on fire in their own dreams. At first he thought they were making fun of him, but after the first few times, they all started looking strangely at him, seldom talked to him, rarely played with him. Teachers grew angry, too. They scolded, didn’t let him have sweetcakes with honey, said he upset the other children to the point that no one did well on their tests for days afterward. They blamed him for scaring everyone.



And it scared him, too, down to the bones—and that was only a dream. This darkness now was no dream.



Panicked, he strained to escape it, but it was everywhere. He sought light where there was none. Even that path terrified him, but it was better than the smothering inkiness.



Out of the darkness, pinpricks of light appeared like fiery needles punched through black cloth, willed into being by his terror. Just a few, then more and more. He stared upward as the starry landscape spread and pushed back the darkness.



But he knew the truth. These were no stars.



As Pyotr strained, his heart fluttered like a trapped bird. He stared upward as the stars grew brighter, swelling larger as they fell closer. He knew he should turn away. But his eyes opened wider…as did the darkness inside him. It also sought the light, howling out of the dark pit, needing to be fed.



Stars began to fall faster and faster, a few at first, then others followed. From all directions, they swept down upon him, crashing toward him.