Dmitry Glukhovsky: Metro 2034

And all this would not have been so bad, if only the lines of communication were functioning. But something had happened to the telephone line that led to the Circle. Contact had been broken off on Monday, and the team sent out to search for the break had drawn a blank.

The lamp with the broad green shade hung down low over the round table, illuminating yellowed pieces of paper with graphs and diagrams drawn in pencil. The little bulb was weak, only forty watts, not because of any need to save electric power, but because the occupant of the office was not fond of bright light. The ashtray, overflowing with stubs from the atrocious local hand-rolled cigarettes, exuded an acrid, bluish smoke that gathered in viscous clouds, stirring lazily under the ceiling.

The station commandant rubbed his forehead, then jerked his hand away and glanced at the dial of the clock with his only eye, for the fifth time in the last half-hour. He cracked his finger joints and rose ponderously to his feet.

‘We have to decide. No point in putting it off any longer.’

The robust-looking old man sitting opposite him in a military camouflage jacket and threadbare sky-blue beret, opened his mouth to speak, but instantly started coughing. He drove away the smoke with a sharp flap of his hand, frowned in annoyance and replied:

‘Then let me tell you again, Vladimir Ivanovich: we can’t take anyone off the south side. The guard posts are already struggling to hold out under this kind of pressure. In the last week alone they’ve had three men wounded, one critically – and that’s despite the reinforcements. I won’t let you weaken the south side. And apart from that, they need two teams of three scouts to patrol the shafts and connecting tunnels. And as for the north, apart from the soldiers from the reception team, we don’t have any men to spare, I’m sorry. You’ll have to find them somewhere else.’

‘You’re the commanding officer of the perimeter, you find them,’ snapped the station commandant. ‘And I’ll handle my own business. But the team has to set out in one hour. What you need to grasp is that we’re thinking in different categories here. We have to look beyond solving the immediate problems! What if it’s something really serious out there?’

‘I think you’re getting ahead of yourself, Vladimir Ivanovich. We’ve got two unopened crates of 5.45 calibre in the arsenal, that’s enough for a week and a half, for certain. And I’ve got more lying around under my pillow at home.’ The old man laughed, baring his strong, yellow teeth. ‘I can scrape together a crate, for sure. The problem’s not the ammunition, it’s the men.’

‘I’ll tell you what the problem is. We’ve got two weeks to get our supplies in order before we have to close the hermetic doors in the southern tunnels, because we won’t be able to hold them without ammunition. That means we won’t be able to inspect and repair two-thirds of our mills. A week after that they’ll start breaking down. Nobody will be happy about disruptions in the power supply to Hansa. If we’re lucky, they’ll just start looking for other suppliers. And if we’re not… But the power’s not the worst of it! The tunnels have been totally deserted for almost five days now – nobody, not a single man! What if there’s been a cave-in? What if we’ve been cut off?’

‘Ah, come on! The power cables are in good order. The little numbers are spinning on the meters, the current’s flowing, Hansa’s consuming it. If there was a cave-in, you’d know straight away. Even supposing it was sabotage, they’d have cut our cables, not the phone. And as for the tunnels – who’s going to come down them now? Even in good times no one’s ever strolled down here just to be sociable. Nakhimov Prospect is bad enough, without throwing all the rest in. No one can get through it on his own, the merchants from other stations don’t stick their noses in here any longer. And the bandits obviously know about us. We did the right thing, letting one go alive every time. I’m telling you, don’t panic.’

‘It’s easy for you to talk,’ growled Vladimir Ivanovich, lifting the bandage off his empty eye socket and wiping away the sweat that had sprung out on his forehead.

‘I’ll give you a team of three men. Honestly, I simply can’t give you any more yet,’ the old man said, speaking more calmly now. ‘And stop smoking, will you! You know I can’t breathe that stuff, and you’re poisoning yourself! Why don’t you just get us some tea?’

‘That’s something we can always manage,’ said the commandant, rubbing his hands together. ‘Istomin here,’ he growled into the telephone receiver. ‘Tea for me and the colonel.’

‘And summon the duty officer,’ said the perimeter commander, taking the beret off his head. ‘I’ll give the instructions about those three men.’

Istomin’s tea was always the same, from the Economic Achievements Station – a special, select variety. Not many could afford that sort of thing – delivered from the far side of the Metro and charged duty three times along the way by Hansa’s customs posts, the commandant’s beloved beverage was getting to be so expensive, even he would have stopped indulging his weakness, if not for his old contacts at Dobrynin Station. He once fought side by side with someone there, and ever since then, every month, without fail, the commander of the convoy returning from Hansa had brought a bright-coloured bundle, which Istomin came to collect in person.

A year ago, however, supplies of the tea had become unreliable. Alarming rumours reached Sebastopol Station of a terrible new danger menacing the Economic Achievements Station, perhaps even the entire Orange Line: new mutants of a type never seen before had come down from the surface, and supposedly they could read people’s thoughts, were almost invisible and, even worse, virtually impossible to kill. Some said the station had fallen and Hansa, fearing an incursion, had blown up the tunnel beyond Peace Prospect Station. The prices for tea soared, and then it disappeared completely, and Istomin had been seriously alarmed. But a few weeks later the frenzy subsided, and the convoys returning to Sebastopol Station with ammunition and electric light bulbs started delivering the aromatic beverage again – and what could possibly be more important than that?

As he poured the perimeter commander’s tea into a china cup with a chipped gold border, Istomin squeezed his eyes shut for an instant, breathing in the fragrant steam. Then he strained some tea out for himself, sat down heavily on his chair and stirred in a tablet of saccharin, tinkling his little silver spoon.

Neither of them spoke, and for thirty seconds or so this melancholy tinkling was the only sound to be heard in the dark office, wreathed in tobacco smoke. But suddenly the tinkling was drowned out by a different sound, in almost exactly the same rhythm, that came hurtling out of the tunnel – the jangling of the alarm bell.

‘The alarm!’

The perimeter commander leapt up off his chair with incredible agility for a man of his age and darted out of the room. Somewhere in the distance there was the crack of a single rifle shot, immediately overtaken by the chatter of machine-guns – one, two, three of them. Metal-tipped soldiers’ boots clattered along the platform and from somewhere far away came the bass rumble of the colonel’s voice barking out orders.

Istomin also reached for the gleaming militia machine-gun that was hanging by the cupboard, but then he gasped and clutched at his waist, flapped his hand helplessly, went back to the table and took a sip of tea. The perimeter commander’s abandoned cup was standing there, cooling, on the table in front of him, with the light-blue beret lying beside it, forgotten in the colonel’s haste. The station commandant grinned sourly at the beret and started arguing in a low voice with the commander who had bolted, coming back again and again to the same old topics with new arguments that he hadn’t thought of while they were wrangling face to face.