Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series) (9 page)

Then he saw it, something winking
like sunlight on a diamond in the distance. He watched it for some time, then
decided to steer the airship a few more points to starboard to get closer. Yes,
there could be no doubt now. It was no random reflection where the sun might
have broken through a hole in the clouds to find water. Could it be deliberate?
Was someone was down there with a mirror or some other shiny metal, perhaps
even a lantern, trying to catch his eye? He called up to notify Captain Selikov
to see what he wanted to do.

“Good news,” said Selikov on the
phone. “Keep us close to that signal. We’ll hover here and see what we can find
out about it. That may be a local Evenik hunter who can put us on the map.”

The airship hovered and they soon
began the slow process of reeling in the sub-cloud car, until Orlov was hauled
up through the cloud deck and his pod was recovered. Then
Narva
achieved
a slight change in her gas bag pressure balance using the pumps to move helium
and inflate the ballonets to reduce buoyancy. It was just enough to allow the
ship to slowly descend through the thick, grey clouds until her vast bulk emerged
like a great alien spacecraft, slowly descending towards the forest below.

Now they could all see the glint
of something on the tundra beneath them, a bright object in a clearing that
occasionally caught the sunlight that was able to pierce the weather in thin
golden shafts. It was not a man after all, not a local hunter, and Captain
Selikov was disheartened.

“Well at least you got us to the
river again,” he said. “I had hoped we would find someone out here, but what
are the chances of that?”

“You mean to move on?” Orlov
seemed eager to explore the finding and see what they had discovered.

“Why not?”

“Look at this,” said the Chief,
with a wry grin. He handed Selikov his compass and the hands were making a wild
spin, much more erratic than they had seen before.

“Yes? So the compass is still
useless. What of it?”

“It was never this bad,” said
Orlov. “Whatever that thing is it may be the source of this interference. Why
don’t I go down with a few men to have a look.”

Selikov seemed restless, and
clearly uneasy with the proposition. He had heard too many stories of this
region, the stuff of horror tales and nightmares. Besides that, he felt an
unaccountable anxiety here, a chill along his spine that was not from the
Siberian cold. He had been watching the ship’s elevator panel to note the
airship’s pitch, and was surprised by the odd vibration he had noted in the
glass leveling tube. It was not the engines, he knew. Like Dobrynin with his
reactors, Selikov had come to know every sound and vibration of his airship
over the years, and his engines had been running smoothly.

No. It was something else, and it
gave him a feeling of profound unease. There was something wrong here. He could
see it in the glint of light from the clearing below, and feel it in the air
all about him. Yet he could not grasp what it was, like a sound just below the
threshold of hearing that nonetheless could be subtly perceived, a ghostly
cantata that for him was a dirge from hell itself.

“It looks metallic,” said Orlov,
his curiosity obvious as he studied the light source through a pair of
binoculars. “If this is the source of that magnetic interference, we ought to
have a look.”

It was only Orlov’s insistence as
the nominal mission leader that compelled the Captain to relent and hover in
place, descending into a clearing not far from the source of the light and
hovering the ship at 100 meters.

“Alright, Orlov,” he said
quickly. “We’re wasting time here. That’s probably nothing more than an
aircraft that got lost out here and crashed. If you must go see for yourself,
then be quick about it. We can lower you and a few men in the main cargo basket
aft.”

“Good enough,” said Orlov. “Hey
Troyak,” he shouted. “Bring your equipment!”

The Chief decided to go down with
Troyak and another Marine, a man named Chenko, and they would do a brief ground
reconnaissance to see what Orlov had discovered. Orlov did not believe in fairy
tales and ghost stories, though he had to admit that Selikov’s dark mood, and
the almost palpable edginess and fear displayed by many of the crew members,
was somewhat infectious. His curiosity drove him on that day, though he would
come to regret his little fishing expedition here in more ways than one.

Chapter 8

It
was the sound that
undid them as they approached, a sound they could not hear. Acoustic trauma was
a well known phenomenon. Humans were accustomed to a range of acceptable sound
in the 20-20 scale, from 20 Hz to 20KHz. Even within that range, sound had long
been a means of warning, from the clatter of swords deliberately beating on
metal shields in a formation of ancient soldiers, to the harsh warning of a
siren, alarm, or claxon on the ship before a missile fired. Sound we could hear
might grate upon us, like fingernails scratching a blackboard, a dentist’s
drill grinding through the enamel of the tooth ever closer to the pulsing
infection of a swollen nerve in the abscess. The sound we could hear could be
used to soothe, or to torture, to give pleasure or pain, to lure like the siren
song, or give warning of imminent harm.

Beneath the threshold of human
hearing, however, sound seemed to take on other mysterious properties. Animals
with keener senses used it well enough. Pigeons could navigate by ultra low
level sound, it was thought that other migrating birds could hear the low infrasound
of air masses passing over distant mountains and move towards it as well.
Elephants could emit low sounds that could migrate through the earth itself and
range out as far as ten kilometers to coordinate with other herd members. And
the growl of a Siberian Tiger was said to exhibit vibrations in the range of
16Hz, below the threshold of human hearing, but nonetheless perceived as the
deep, threatening warning that it was.

There was something growling on
the taiga that day. They could not hear it, but they could feel it, a
discomfort in the chest, a thoracic sense of doom. It was a thrumming vibration
that seemed to invade their very being with the warning of injury, and the
closer the three men came to the clearing, the more uneasy they felt.

“Glubokiy zvuk,” said Troyak,
feeling the disturbance around them in a palpable way now. It was Russian for
“deep sound,” and the gritty Sergeant had undergone special training where he
was exposed to dangerously low infrasound in the range of
8-10 Hz, and challenged to perform normal routine
duties—assembling and disassembling his rifle, loading ammunition, calculating
target coordinates and keying the information for a presumed artillery fire.

Orlov
was not so well conditioned, and he immediately began to regret his impulsive
urge to come down and see what was shining at them from the clearing. They were
out of the cargo basket, once used in decades past for men to stand and throw bomblets
at ground targets in the older zeppelin models. Now it was an easy way to put
down a squad sized contingent from heights up to 200 meters.

A stand
of trees separated their clearing from low depression in the ground, a thicket
of larch and pine that seemed oddly twisted and stunted in places as they
passed through, with strange burls on the trunks of the trees that appeared to
be odd boils in the wood, some genetic malformation that had caused a cancerous
growth on the trunks. There, in that moment of suspended anticipation, Orlov
could feel his disquiet redouble with each step he took. Something was wrong
here, he knew, deep in his bones. Something was ugly, and bad, and vile here,
and he had to resist the urge to turn and simply retrace his steps, yearning
for the relative security of the metal cargo basket now, yearning for the cold
interior of the airship again, his curiosity quashed by this strange,
unfathomable fear.

Yes, it
was fear—a fear they could almost hear quavering in the air about them, as
though something was hidden in the marshy ground ahead, waiting to emerge like
a demon from hell and devour them. They would hear it, and then not hear it,
and the absence of the sound had an equally chilling effect on Orlov. Silence
could choke a man too. It enveloped him like a shroud, utter silence, a
soundless quiet that spoke of an uttermost void, where no life of any kind
could ever live. There would come a moment of absolute silence when they
stopped, all three men at once, where nothing could be heard. Nothing at all…

Then
Troyak stepped forward, the sound of his heavy boots on the duff of rotting
wood branches and pine needles in the thicket becoming a welcome balm… until
the sound came at them again—a sound they could not hear, but yet one that
assaulted them as they stepped to the edge of the tree line, intruding on every
sense, bone deep sound that penetrated into their minds like a throbbing
vibration of something old, something primal, something lost and forlorn.

For
Orlov it was pure fear that he felt at that indefinable boundary’s edge. It
brought a choking or gagging sensation to his throat that made him want to
wretch, yet froze his larynx to the point where he could not speak. Beyond the
edge of those trees lay the clearing, and there was something there that seemed
to take him by the throat with the intent to choke the life from him. Strange
visions emerged in his mind, the purple face of Commissar Molla, his eyes
bulging, as Orlov choked him to death. Now the memory of an old story his
grandmother had told him as a child emerged in this thoughts—the devil’s bone
yard—the story he never believed, until that moment…
“A bright star fell in
the far away land, and tall grey phantoms were seen to haunt the woodlands in
the days after, hunting the living and dragging their souls through the fens
and moors of the taiga, to the gateway of Hell…”

For
Chenko
it was a deep feeling of sadness that came over him, like the melancholy of
Russian
Toska
, the feeling that could not be truly described to anyone
who was not Russian. There was no escaping it, for it became one’s entire thought
process when it arose. Yet here it seemed to come from without, emanating from
the center of that clearing and forcibly entering his mind, as if it had
crawled out of the ground and entered his soul through the bones of his leg.
His hands tingled and the air seemed to thicken as he struggled to breathe, as
though he were drowning.

Troyak could clearly feel the
same effects he had endured in his training. It was a resonance of doom, a
sonic violence that some believed could rupture the organs of the body itself
at very low frequencies around 7Hz, a frequency of the brain’s own theta wave
rhythm associated with fear and anger. He could not hear the sound, yet he
knew, on some inner level, that he was under attack. It prompted him to
instinctively prime his automatic rifle, leveling it at the open clearing as
though it were filled with some unseen enemy. It was “Glubokiy zvuk,” deep
sound, body sound that entered not through the ears, but the body itself.

Chenko saw this and immediately
raised his own weapon, and the three men stood there, a few feet into the
clearing, in the pulsing dissonance of annihilating silence alternating with
that dreadful vibrato, the devil’s whisper, the sound of death itself.

There, ahead of them, something
lay gleaming in the wan sunlight, but none of them ventured to take one further
step. The ground all about the clearing was littered with the dead, bleached
skeletons of fallen animals—the devil’s bone yard if ever there was one. The unheard
sound came again, and Orlov was the first man to break, turning and running
back into the comforting closeness of the trees, yet tripping over a fallen
branch and going down with a hard thump. There, right before his eyes he saw
another shiny thing, what looked to be a small chunk of metal, which he
impulsively grasped in the palm of his hand. He would not go back into that
clearing to see what was there—to hell with that—but he would at least have
this much to show for their foray into the Siberian wilds of Tunguska.

Chenko was soon at his side,
eager to help him if only to get himself farther away from that god forsaken
clearing. Only Troyak stood his ground, his eyes puckered as he scanned the
distant tree line on the far side of the clearing, mindless so his mind could
not unnerve him, his every movement no more than a well honed military reflex.
A man who was afraid could not fight well, and Troyak was fearless. He knelt,
shifting the pack on his back to off shoulder the equipment he had brought
along. His shielded military field radio set had a mode that could detect
electromagnetic interference and store the measurement level in memory. He also
had a Geiger counter set that could see if there was any unseen radiation in
the area. Both readings convinced him that this was no place to linger. He
completed his survey, took a soil sample and sealed it off in a special
container, and then turned to join the others.

He found them back in the main
clearing, hastening towards the safety of the zeppelin basket.

“Orlov!” he called. “Don’t you
want to have a look at that damn thing back there?” The Sergeant thumbed over
his shoulder.

“Leave it!” Orlov was no longer
curious. He had a chunk of something shiny enough in his pocket, and now all he
wanted to do was to get back up to the zeppelin and get something hot to drink,
followed by something much stronger.

Troyak looked back over his
shoulder and stared at the object protruding from the matted duff of the
tundra. He had heard so many tales of these hidden dens from his youth, and he
knew what this must be. Kheldyu, he said to himself, a word from the Yakut
Siberian dialect that meant “Iron House.” There was a vale nearby, between two
rivers, that was known as Kheliugur, the “Place of the Iron People.” Others
simply called them “Cauldrons” due to their concave, circular shape.