Гарт Никс - Dislocation Space

She eased forward, putting her head into the box, and at the same time, smoothly and easily dislocated both her shoulders. She continued to move, undulating like a snake, and within seconds was through the box and out the other side. Her arms moved back into position with only the faintest audible click, and she stood up, flexing her fingers. She poked out her tongue and picked up the tiny knife she’d held there, though neither Termin nor Shargei had seen her put it in her mouth.

“Well? Do I pass?”

“Yes, yes indeed,” said Termin. “Wonderful! Even better than…”

His voice trailed off.

Aleksandra cocked her head to one side. The tiny knife moved through her hand as if it had a life of its own, rolling over and around each finger, and back again.

“Better than who?”

“You’ll be told more as required,” said Shargei. “We must go. Your uniform is in the suitcase.”

He slid the suitcase towards her with a grunt.

“Other clothes. Everything you need.”

“I want a pistol,” said Aleksandra. “It goes with the uniform, no?”

“Don’t be stupid,” said Shargei. “Get dressed.”

She quickly dressed in the clean clothes from the suitcase. Her uniform tunic was pressed, laid down in tissue paper, and even had her Hero of the Soviet Union, Order of Lenin and campaign ribbons. But there was no chocolate brown leather holster for a Tokarev TT-33, as there should have been. “Where are we going, by the way? Somewhere warm, I hope?”

“A little warmer than here,” replied Termin. “Still Siberia. Some five thousand kilometres west. But we have an aeroplane.”

Shargei put the shackles on her himself, wrists and ankles. He didn’t bother to make them tight.

“I know you can get out of these,” he said, leaning close. “Don’t. Remember what you have to lose.”

“I remember,” said Aleksandra quietly. “I remember.”

She slept on the aircraft, a new type she had not seen before. It was called an Antonov AN-2 and they only had to land six times to refuel, every stop at strange little airfields in the middle of nowhere, staffed by skeleton crews of orange-tabbed soldiers manning basic facilities. The last two refuellings were at night, the aircraft guided in to land by lines of flares and truck headlights.

Somewhere along the way the flight crew changed as well. The only passengers were Aleksandra, Termin, Shargei and four silent soldiers, who sat at the back of the passenger cabin and paid Aleksandra no attention, only coming fully alive at each stop, where they paced out at the cardinal points of the compass and stood on guard. Looking outward, not in.

Soon after dawn, Aleksandra peered through the small, round window by her seat, watching the forest beneath. Pine, spruce and larch, as far as the eye could see. The taiga, which she knew well, though better in its more western reaches, towards Karelia. She had not been to Siberia before the camps.

But as the aircraft droned on, the forest suddenly disappeared. There was a demarcation line ahead, beyond it lay a wasteland of dead trees entirely stripped of their branches. From high above they looked like toothpicks stuck in pale ash. The destroyed area stretched for kilometres ahead and to either side, a vast swathe of desolation.

“What happened here?” asked Aleksandra. “The American bomb?”

She knew about the atomic bombings of Japan, though she had already been in her first camp at the time. Arrested, tried, and transported between June 10 and June 12, 1945, immediately after she had completed her last mission on Comrade Stalin’s personal orders, in Moscow. But prisoners arriving after her had talked about the end of the Japanese War, about the American A-bombs.

“No,” replied Termin, shaking his head. “The devastation is much older, from 1908. There are various theories. The most popular is that it was a very large meteorite.”

The aircraft shuddered and nosed forward.

“We are landing here?”

“Near the lake. Lake Cheko. You see the landing strip, and the camp?”

“Another camp,” said Aleksandra sourly. She could pick it out, a rectangle of huts, a perimeter fence, the beaten ground around it where the trees had been bulldozed away, caterpillar track scars still visible in sweeping curves. That was a good sign, for it meant no zeks were involved in the tree-clearing labour. There were no guard towers, either. This was not a prison camp. Or not one of the usual ones.

“You will be treated well here,” said Termin. “Your own hut, exclusively yours. There is a bathhouse, excellent food, the baker in particular is a genius. He was at the Hotel Metropol for years. We have vodka, wine from Abrau-Dyurso, even caviar at times!”

“All dependent on good behaviour,” added Shargei.

The aeroplane sank lower. Aleksandra continued to look through the window, examining the camp and the surrounding area, looking for landmarks, roads, other signs of habitation. Anything that might be useful when the time came to escape.

“What is that enormous construction at the far end of the camp?” she asked suddenly. “Like a very long rabbit hutch… many rabbit hutches joined in lines… a maze? Some folly, an amusement?”

“No,” said Termin. “It is not a folly. It is a model, of sorts. We call it the Replica. It is a representation of a network of narrow tunnels, made on a one-to-one scale, as best we can gauge.”

“Ah,” said Aleksandra. “It is extensive.”

“The main line is one thousand, four hundred and eleven metres long,” said Termin, enthusiastically. She had not seen him so energised. Whatever this was, he was deeply invested in it. “As you can see, not at all in a straight line. There are six branch lines, accounting for another nine hundred and eight metres, collectively. You cannot see all the twists and turns from up here, but there are many. Vertical and horizontal.”

“What is it a replica of, exactly?”

“You will be informed at the appropriate time,” interrupted Shargei.

“What is it made from? It is a strangely uniform colour.”

“Welded steel, painted grey,” said Termin. “The interior is lined with five millimetre cork. This attempts to mimic a small amount of flex in the Original.”

Aleksandra frowned. This “replica” was a very, very expensive construction. And what was this reference to an “Original”?

“What is the ‘Original’ and what is it made from?”

Termin began to answer, but stopped at a movement from Shargei, who spoke instead.

“We will be landing in a few minutes. I will take your shackles off.”

Aleksandra raised her hands and the shackles fell into her lap. She lifted her legs and her ankle chains fell to the floor. She’d slipped her hands out while Shargei and Termin were sleeping, picked the locks on the ankle manacles with the wire she kept in her hair and closed them again, unlocked.

Termin looked impressed.

“These small rebellions can be tolerated,” said Shargei, his voice even and conversational, his eyes as dead as ever. “But no more. You know what is at stake. Do not overplay your hand, or overestimate your usefulness.”

Close up, the Replica was even stranger than it had looked from the air. Aleksandra stood on a short stepladder to look into the entrance point of the cork-lined 31.15 cm square tunnel, which was raised up a metre from ground level. From there it ran straight for only two or three metres, then made a sharp left turn of some one hundred degrees or so, carried on for several metres more, then corkscrewed down three turns, always maintaining that basic dimension of a 31.15 cm cube.

She climbed down and followed the tunnel along the outside. After the corkscrew there was another straight horizontal section, longer this time, then more turns, to left and right and up and down, and then something different. A larger chamber, from which the “main” tunnel continued a little offset to the right, but there was also another branch going off sharply left.