Philip Hemplow: Sarcophagus

“Oh come on! It wasn’t his fault, he had nothing to do with it. It was Serhiy driving the car. Serhiy. You remember him? You met him last night. You talked to him. Maybe you tipped him over the edge!” Victoria was being deliberately provocative, but Swan just shrugged.

“That guy? Wow. I guess we can add ‘not putting psychos in positions of responsibility’ to the list of things your Doctor needs to learn, huh?”

Victoria banged her coffee mug back onto the table, resisting the urge to throw it over the American. That was as much of an allowance as she was willing to make, though. She wasn’t going to stand there and listen to him bad-mouth her friend. Leaving Swan alone in the dining shelter, she stormed out into the rain to find Osterberg.

An engineer scuttling between habitations pointed towards the Carapace when she asked him for the project director’s location. In decent weather it would have been an easy walk to get there, but, even though the rain had eased off, Victoria kept her head down and made a beeline for the hard-standing where the SUV fleet was parked.

The cars were UAZ Patriots. Black, with small Octra logos stamped on the fuel caps. They were left unlocked, with the keys in the ignition. There was not much fear of car thieves in the Zone of Alienation. Victoria shucked her coat and spent some time adjusting the seat and mirrors before summoning the engine to life.

Even with power steering, the car felt heavy as she turned it towards the overgrown road that led to Unit 4. She tried not to imagine that weight slamming into her body, throwing her to the ground and rolling over her. Her scalp prickled and she pursed her lips as the events of the previous night spooled past her mind’s eye. Realising that she was still driving at a crawl across the plaza, she jabbed angrily at the accelerator, spurring the car to 20mph and piloting it into a narrow channel between the leafless birch trees.

She leaned forwards in the seat, peering past the metronomic batting of the windscreen wipers and doing her best to follow the track carved out by a daily procession of Octra vehicles. After a couple of hundred metres it joined a road that ran past the tiny harbour, where rotting ships slumped in the water, then followed the shore of the gigantic, man-made lake once used to cool the power plant.

The only other vehicles she saw were the occasional skeletons of cars and buses, left rusting at the sides of the road, many of them looted of their engines and electrical components. In Prypiat, it was always 1986. It was impossible to forget where you were.

The ruined power plant was a couple of miles away. When the road eventually turned south it came into view through the haze of rain, like a picture emerging from static. Vast and dark; a seventy metre tall cathedral of the nuclear.

Robotic cranes sprouted from the roof. They were used to dismantle parts of the structure, preparing it for the arrival of the Carapace, like parasites consuming their host. They were conspicuously new, in sharp contrast to the decay that was spreading through the building beneath them. The concrete was stained. Railings, fire escapes, and scaffolding were soft with rust. The urgency behind the Carapace project was immediately apparent.

Just for a few moments, as she gazed at it, the crudely tiered architecture of the reactor building seemed to become the image of a gigantic step pyramid. Mesoamerican? Maybe Egyptian. Its flanks were overgrown with vines—or was that seaweed? No—a click of the mental kaleidoscope, and it was just the reactor building again.

Another of the giant BTR personnel carriers was parked across the road ahead, bolstering the old vehicle checkpoint with its armoured bulk. VV troops in waterproof plastic ponchos leaned against it, watching her approach. The reactor was to the left of the road, and the site where finishing touches were being applied to the Carapace was on the right. Victoria parked the Patriot before the checkpoint, where a selection of other Octra cars were already beached at the side of the road. As she approached on foot, she wondered whether the VV would let her through—but, apart from some almost-insultingly perfunctory ogling, they showed no interest in her at all.

Passing the APC, she turned her back on Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Unit 4, and stopped for a moment to appreciate the miracle of engineering that was the Carapace.

A perfect arch, one hundred metres high, it looked as though it belonged on the surface of Mars. Its tubular steel framework supported hundreds of gigantic composite panels, laminated with polycarbonate, giving the whole thing an almost featureless exterior on which human eyes struggled to focus. The inside was a different matter though.

Three powerful cranes hung suspended from beams that ran the full 150m length of the hangar. Nicknamed Athos, Porthos and Aramis, they had been custom built by Octra. Each was equipped with hydrocutters, plasma arcs, and diamond-tipped saws, with which to tear the Sarcophagus apart. Cameras, floodlights, HEPA vacuums, radiation counters, and myriad other instruments studded the walls and roof. The doors that would eventually close over the memory of Reactor 4 hung, concertinaed, on either side of the entrance.

The giant cavern echoed with the high pressure hiss of industrial sprayguns, used to apply flame-retardant chemicals to the wall at the far end, but in truth most of the workers were deployed elsewhere: either assembling the powerful winches that would be used to maneuvre the Carapace into position, or inside Unit 4 itself. Victoria looked around for Osterberg, but it wasn’t until she heard his voice booming somewhere overhead that she managed to pinpoint his location.

A brightly-lit metal cabin was mounted against the north wall of the hangar, 15 metres above the ground. According to the blueprints, it would store the servers and computer systems necessary to monitor and control the environment inside the completed Carapace. Osterberg’s voice was coming from within. Victoria jumped into the portable scissor lift parked below and rode it up to the cabin, hoping that the reinforced structure would be able to support her in addition to Osterberg’s considerable bulk.

The German poked his head out of the cabin at the sound of the lift. “Victoria! You are here. Where is your hard hat? This is still a construction site. Here, wear mine.” As the lift brought her within reach, he deposited a yellow helmet, stamped with the Octra logo, on her head. “There. You slept well?” he enquired, helping her off the platform, and ushering her into the control room.

“Well enough,” replied Victoria. “What are you up to?”

By way of reply, Osterberg reached behind a Blade cabinet and wheeled a man in a deskchair into sight, ignoring his protestations. “Victoria, this is Yosyp. He is supposed to be very good with computers, but today we are having problems. Is that not right, Yosyp?”

Yosyp looked annoyed. He was a skinny young man, mid-twenties perhaps, with a gaunt face that tapered to a sharp little chin. His eyes were dark and rather cruel, his hair cropped short and plastered with gel.

“They were fine yesterday!” he retorted in thickly-accented English . “Absolutely damned fine! Today they are full of crap!”

“What’s full of crap?” asked Victoria, crossing the cabin so she could see the six flatscreen monitors against the far wall. They were all displaying blue-screen error messages.

“The installs,” replied Yosyp, in pained tones. “Brand new arrays. Yesterday I load the operating systems onto them. Today I come to them and find nothing but bugs.”

“Last time they stopped working after a week,” explained Osterberg. “We thought maybe it was the cheap hardware that Octra was providing, so Yosyp bought some new things—top of the line, no expense spared. This, it seems, has failed even more quickly.”