Chapter 10

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Again there was a hatch, stamped, clearly factory-made. At the same time, the metal disk with rivets bore the stamp of handwork and polishing. Some engraving, gears again, a code of long rows of ones and zeros... Fortunately, at least it opened easily, almost noiselessly, without the usual creak and effort. And then a new corridor appeared.

She turned to look at the engine room, which now seemed a hundred times more comfortable and homelike. How long had she been here? A couple of hours at most, probably less? And yet here the girl had found some rest. And at least some explanation of what was happening even found an interlocutor who spoke in human language. Well, how "spoke"... communicated, at least.

"Good luck, Machine," she whispered.

It would seem that what could threaten a computer behind armored doors in a deserted station? Especially with some "automatic protection". But... for some reason, it seemed like it was going to end sadly here. Okay. When it is glitchy, you should be baptized. And in general, "if you leave, then leave. She recollected the howl from the depths of the station. Yes, she should hurry before all these "states" began to change. And to understand what the computer meant when it spoke of "borderline". And she should also get past the asstropati.

She closed the hatch. Something clicked and turned in the steel disk, clanking its teeth. Olga checked it just in case - yes, it was locked from the inside. Now there is no way back, even if she really, really wants to. The girl slammed into the inside pocket of her jacket, where she slipped carefully rolled up printouts of the Machine. As it was, "find Fidus Kryptman, save Fidus Kryptman..." She more or less understood the scheme, but still counted more on the Guide.

Well, then she has to go and save the day.

The skull hovered to the side and behind, habitually moving its vertebrae. After a moment's hesitation, Olga reached out and touched the yellowish surface with her fingertips. The skull flicked its lenses but did not resist. The wanderer stroked it. The deadhead was slightly warm and vibrated faintly as if a motor was turning inside.

"Baldhead, give me a pie?" Olga smiled faintly.

The skull didn't answer and swayed in a wave of faint draught as if nodding.

"Yeah, you're right, it's time. Let's go."

Behind the back was a blocked technical exit hatch. Ahead stretched a corridor. Again a new shape. Not the old Soviet bureaucracy, not a brick vintage, and not even a fantastic tube. Now the designer was inspired by dieselpunk. Olga was to walk along the pipe, which resembled a very elongated oval in the cut. The "floor" also curved in a smooth half-circle, and how it was walked on - remained incomprehensible. Maybe people didn't walk here, but, say, flew? Or they rode monocycles.

Olga looked hopefully at the skull, but it was silent. She wonders, by the way, because surely nothing prevents the Machine from printing cards further? Then why is it silent?

"Hey," the wayfarer called with faint hope. In vain.

Olga thought that somehow too often she encouraged herself to move on without any action, and simply stepped forward. It was uncomfortable to walk. She had to put her soles in a single line, like a mannerist fool on a catwalk. White squares of light glowed at regular intervals under the ceiling. Thin pipes stretched along the walls, and incomprehensible twisted cables were held by iron hooks and loops. It was as if it was supposed to be navigated here in a violent rocking motion by holding on to the ropes. The corridor went far away. Olga sighed heavily, resigning herself to the pain in her ankles from her unnatural steps.

She wanted to take out the mirror and look in it. To look into the beautiful cornflower eyes, to regain her confidence and courage. But then the corridor ended abruptly. Out of the half-darkness ahead floated something that looked like a large iris. The strange door itself opened with a quiet rustling of petals, and a real blast of light fell upon Olga. Her eyes were used to the twilight, the artificial "economic" lighting. Now the diaphragm opened into the realm of the brightest whiteness, which - so it seemed at first glance - burned out Olga's retinas.

"Ahhhh... Fuck!" The girl twisted in place, covering her face with her wet sleeve. Tears spurted out again, and she saw colorful sparks under her closed eyelids. When the tears subsided, the girl squinted cautiously out from behind her sleeve. The light was not so bright. It was more of a contrast effect. After blinking, Olga decided that she could go on, especially since the skull flew forward, spinning around its axis as if checking to see if the companion was following.

Olga crossed the high threshold hurriedly, not without trembling. The diaphragm petals looked too massive, almost entirely embedded in the grooves in the walls. And too quickly, too easily, they came off. What if someone turned on the lock the second she was in the opening?

Nothing happened. Behind the oval tunnel opened another round tunnel, but with a normal floor and transparent walls. Behind which, in turn, was...

"God," said the shocked wanderer, looking around and covering her eyes with her palm.

Olga didn't know what "ballistic" meant, so the Machine's description told her nothing - a station it's a station. They come in all kinds. And now realization came crashing down on her with a heavy sledgehammer - "Station XVI" is not stationary, not hidden under the ground, and not even floating somewhere amid the waves. The giant hologram in the atrium is not an image, but a real window into the world around her. To the universe.

To the open space.

Forty thousand years? Is that really how it is?

"Oh, my God," the girl said, in shock, forgetting all the other words, including the very appropriate swear words.

It was beautiful, insanely beautiful. Stunning, unimaginable, fabulous. And terrifying, if only because now the space began not behind the vast well of the dark atrium, but directly behind the thin and transparent glass. Incredible colors, the sparkle of diamond and emerald dust, the edge of a yellow star that barely showed, but already exuded the glow of molten gold multiplied by a thousand times. And an impenetrable background of darkness so thick and inky that it seemed velvet in itself, trapping the splendor of total "nothingness".

It had never occurred to Olga to engage in what academic people call "reflection". But now, for the first time in her not-so-long life, she felt like a grain of sand, something vanishingly small in the infinite universe.

It was also very quiet. There was no noise of machinery, no ventilation, no humming of communications. There was an almost grave silence and peace. Only a breeze blew through the tunnel, rustling as in a deep mine.

The girl put her palm to the transparent concave wall. Olga thought the glass would be cold, but it was as if the pipe had no temperature at all. The traveler looked around more carefully, trying to distance herself from the grandiose panorama.

The transition tube was about a quarter of the way down into the shell of the station. It led almost straight ahead, to something tower-like and at the same time jagged, like a wooden massage roller. Behind her, however, rose a huge, stepped pyramid-like structure. Olga could not determine its size even approximately. Because here the reference to the coordinates was completely lost. "Huge" was all that could be said

On the right hand, there was a similarly transparent tunnel, apparently a backup. On the left, she could see some trusses that looked like a monorail or a ropeway Something transporting as well. The exterior relief of the Station itself was complex and resembled space ships from a science fiction movie, but ... Something scratched the eye, and what it was, the girl could not say. Maybe the continuing space architecture's "otherness" or inappropriate hypertrophy. Or the very appearance of the stepped tower, which looked more like a temple, especially the broad bands of gold that curved at strict angles not a single rounding across the dark surface. It folded into incomprehensible symbols.

She quietly recited a children's rhyme.

And go.

It was much easier to walk here. The floor was overlapping panels with frequent slits. Multicolored bundles of cables could be seen underneath. It was light, smooth, and generally not stressful. Unless you count light bouts of sudden agoraphobia. The transition from a low-lighted cramped space to a huge space was too sudden.

The skull accompanied her properly. He occasionally flew a little forward and turned around, levitating with the back of his head forward for a while, as if checking to see if the person he was leading was in place. But mostly he kept to the left and slightly behind. Something inside his bald skull clicked and buzzed rhythmically, like a revolving flywheel. Olga imagined for a moment that there really could be some kind of counter that marks the meters covered by the rotation of the gears. She also wondered how everything was lined up under the yellow skull cap. Engine, printer, card stock, something optical. And it also buzzes with mechanical parts... Wonders of miniaturization and at the same time deliberately crude solutions.

As if in accompaniment to her thoughts, the skull started to worry. Clicking its jaws, it circled Olga several times, quickly changing lenses. The "tail" of vertebrae twitched, curling into a hook.

"What do you want?" The girl asked grudgingly.

The skull shook and, as if convinced of the companion's impenetrable stupidity, struck the transparent wall of the tunnel twice. Olga finally looked where she should have looked. Something was moving in the parallel tunnel. Olga leaned her forehead against the glass. She folded her palms like "binoculars" to keep the glare out of her way. Definitely, some kind of mechanism was rolling pretty fast, catching up. Something quite similar to a zombie tractor, only without the skulls on the tentacle-ropes. Taller, bigger, with disproportionately large "hands. She was not even sure they were hands at all, just some kind of tube-like thing.

Olga shrugged. Well, it's going and it's going...Although she has to walk faster, who knows where the exit will be. Although we have to walk faster, who knows where the exit will be. Wouldn't want to run into a robot at the next gate. The skull went berserk; it looked like it was going to start grabbing the jacket with its teeth, pulling me further up.

"Yeah yeah, I'm going," the girl soothed the deadhead.

The golden star rolled out from behind the edge of the station, slowly eating away the contrasting charcoal shadows. Olga estimated that she had to hurry. Judging by the brightness, when the light covers everything around her, she'd have to make some sort of blindfold. For lack of sunglasses. She was immensely annoyed by the lack of a clock and the impossibility of getting any kind of timeline. How long had she been here? Two days? Three?

Skull became "nervous," he flew behind her and started hitting Olga from behind.

"What do you want?" The wayfarer asked in a disgruntled voice. "Well, we're overtaking him."

She checked her statement with a glance at the parallel tractor. Yes, it was indeed lagging behind. At that moment a red beam slid across the glass as if the tractor was trying to illuminate Olga with a laser pointer.

"Fucking pointer," muttered the girl, starting to get seriously worried. The crawler hadn't come here by accident and was taking a personal interest in her. It could hardly be an intruder, sent on by the Machine. She mechanically staggered forward, feeling the ache in her strained muscles. She wanted to get to the tower ahead, with more time to spare. To be sure of avoiding another zombie chariot. It kept moving, tossing out a spoke of red beam every few seconds.

The tower was indeed getting closer. It was about halfway, or even less than halfway. Already she could clearly distinguish the faceted spikes on the entire surface of the "massage roller". And some antenna-like "whiskers" that looked like the bristles of a flea under a microscope. Olga had seen these in a single volume of the Soviet encyclopedia Fauna, which somehow ended up in the school library.

The tractor threw another beam. This time it was green for a difference. And then it began to do something strange. From the outside and through the double barrier - albeit transparent - it looked as if the tractor had lit orange parking lights on its manipulators. And began spraying whitish foam on the tunnel glass. Almost immediately, with literally seconds of hesitation, Olga heard a fractional clattering sound. It was as if someone was quickly throwing pebbles at the plastic sheeting. The sounds were well transmitted through the thickness of the metal and could be heard quite clearly, though muffled, aloof, as if through absorbent cotton.

The foam was getting more and more, the lights kept flashing in a clear rhythm that matched the pounding. Olga froze, trying to think what all this could mean. The green beam bounced intermittently around her figure. The girl mechanically covered her eyes, remembering that the green laser is the most "biting". Even balloons can be popped with it, so if it stung in the eye it would hurt. The humped figure of the tractor disappeared behind the white foam, and then a section of the next tunnel exploded silently.

A moment later, the surface beneath her feet shook. A thud swept through the glass tube. The air pressure scattered shards of the ruptured part of the tunnel upward and outward, but mostly upward, toward the stars. It looked like a burst of steam mixed with shards of sparkling ice. With a loud shriek, Olga crouched down, covering her head. Several pieces of debris struck her tube, but the material resisted. The steam dissipated into the void in a few moments, leaving only pieces of glass, glittering in the reflected light of the yellow star

The tractor, against expectations, did not fly into space. Although the depressurization blew out everything, including bundles of wires and several floor sections. From this distance, it was unclear whether the machine was magnetized or hooked by some kind of hook. But the machine stopped and again outlined the outline of Olga's figure with a green pointer. A light flashed on one of the "arms," and the transparent material cracked against the wanderer's head, spreading out in a web of frequent cracks. It was the way ice bent and cracked, hard but still thin enough when you hit it with a blunt crowbar. The orange lamp blinked again, and a new whitish "cobweb" the size of a saucer appeared. And another, and then almost immediately a fourth.

Her legs were already carrying Olga further, toward the tower of salvation. While her brain realized that the fucking tractor was simply firing at her, ignoring the obstacle. She mistook muzzle flashes for parking lights and cracks in the glass for foam. Apparently, that was what the automatic defenses the Machine had warned her about looked like. A robot with guns, like in Terminator.

Olga ran as she had never run before, to the point of her heart tearing out of her throat and the pain in her chest. She ran very, very fast. But the tractor was scorching faster. The hits on the tunnel followed with relentless frequency as if fired from a slow automatic firearm or a very fast single shot. The crawler terminator was firing at preemptive range. So, without turning around, Olga could see out of the corner of her eye - the strong material was holding. But the cracks are running, like on the same ice, joining into one continuous mesh.

The tower was only a short distance away. Olga felt as if her heart was about to jump into her mouth. The cool air was tearing into her lungs with sharp needles. The heavy bag was pounding her back in time with her jumps, and there was no time to throw it off. The clicking and crunching of hits faded into the background. A loud, ominous crackle burst into the foreground. The shelling had compromised the integrity of the glass, and the internal pressure was beginning to destroy the tunnel itself.

Olga had no idea about the physics of airless space and did not know exactly what would happen to her when everything went to shit. But she was sure that nothing good would happen, so she ran even faster. Even though it seemed impossible.

The thought pounded in the rhythm of her steps: Bitch, you mechanical motherfucker, when are you going to run out of bullets?! However, judging by the growing crackle, the bullets were no longer needed. The transparent material was remarkably durable and most likely reinforced in layers, like automobile glass. However, it could not take direct fire, and the integrity of the tunnel lived out its last seconds.

The end of the path appeared suddenly, but the passage was closed by a second diaphragm, seemingly as solid as the previous one. Olga had no time to be upset or properly frightened that she would remain here when the skull overtook her and rushed forward as if it were about to ram the barrier.

The crackling became deafening as if an asphalt roller were driving over broken glass. The crunch was joined by a piercing whistle and, almost immediately, by a hum that sounded something like the roar of a vacuum cleaner. The skull flicked forward a "tail" of vertebrae and, without slowing down, slammed it into the thick rump surrounding the diaphragm. The vertebrae must have been more than just a decoration, but some kind of local USB. The petals trembled and parted, opening swiftly and silently against the rumble of the breaking passage.

Olga rushed forward with one last desperate spurt. Enhanced by the pure energy of terror and fear of imminent death, because her muscles were failing.

And she did it.

The girl stumbled and fell, but on the other side. The glass finally succumbed to external damage and pressure from within. The impact, like the snap of a whip, whipped at her ears. Olga felt as if a giant's palm picked her up and yanked her back, outward, at the same instant the diaphragm closed, and she crashed into the steel barrier. The impact on the metal was violent, hard, to the point of crunching her bones. The girl fell, painfully smashed her face to the floor. Olga did not lose consciousness, but the spirit was blown out thoroughly, to the darkness in her eyes and spasm in her diaphragm, as from a blow to the solar plexus. So she lay there, spreading her arms and legs like a starfish, feeling the jacket on her back getting wet. It was either from the wound or the water bottle that had broken.

Her head hurt, her jaw hurt, everything hurt, and yet she was alive. God, if she was a second too late, it would be the end. Is this what forty percent of death looks like?

It was close.

Only the skull was left outside and was now probably flying somewhere in space. Olga felt sad about the thing. She had managed to get attached to it. Maybe somehow it would find its way back to the Machine? Yes, it was a pity for the bald head, but the girl felt even more sorry for herself. She drew in a breath, lay back with a groan, tucked her legs against her stomach, wrapped her arms around herself. Habitually, like in the old days, expecting a beating. Her breathing calmed, her heart ached as if it had been poked by needles. But it seemed to be ticking. There were no fractures to be found.

And she did come to ... The girl realized that she had forgotten the name. Oh, no, she remembered. Navigation and some kind of communication. Radars, compasses, big round steering wheels with handles, a bearded captain looking into a bullshit mirror, and command everyone to go up.

It hurts... But it's bearable. She can keep going. Compasses probably aren't dangerous. But, what the fuck isn't dangerous here, though?

She stood up with a muffled groan. She jerked her shoulders. Dropping her backpack. She felt her back, making sure she was soaked with water. Yeah, the bottle was broken. At least she got drunk before her quest. And the knife was still on her belt. Olga stroked her lower back and looked at the wide staircase that widened out ahead. Ordinary stairs, like stone, something like marble. To the right was an elevator that looked like a wheelchair, only three times bigger and with what looked like cages being loaded onto the platform. Just above the stairs was a banner that said, in blue letters on a white background:

Monitum!

Astropaths!

Periculum mortale!

Caute!

Morte!

Wow, they know exclamation points...

Olga reasoned that the letters are not red, therefore, the danger is not reported. And even if they did, she had no choice. She wanted to sit down and rest, but she remembered about the terminator. What if he drove on and was already on his way?

"Compasses aren't scary," the girl muttered, lugging her backpack around. "And the asstropati can fuck itself."

And with slightly slurred steps she moved toward the marble-like white stone stairs.

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