S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Northern Passage s-2 Read online

  S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Northern Passage

  ( S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - 2 )

  Balázs Pataki

  Life goes on in the Exclusion Zone around ill-fated Chernobyl — adventurers calling themselves Stalkers hunt for valuable artifacts, mutants hunt for Stalkers and the Zone still decides over the fate of souls living within its wild frontiers. Behind the scenes, the Ukrainian Secret Service is forcing a fallen hero to betray a friend.

  In the New Zone, the Exclusion Zone’s vast twin phenomenon and apparently created after nuclear warheads devastated Afghanistan in 2011, renegade US Marines calling themselves the Tribe patrol the mountain ranges, Stalkers try to establish themselves in ruins of Bagram Air Base and mutated predators migrate to the anomaly-infested plains. All these dangers can not dissuade those hardy souls who brave the New Zone. But whatever their motives, however great their courage, a new power is arising and its vicious plan threatens to destroy them all.

  Major Tarasov, a Spetsnaz commander turned renegade, knows the New Zone’s darkest secrets. While in a land far away, he receives alarming messages from the Exclusion Zone. Is an old friend in danger? Does someone else know the secrets he discovered? Or could it be a trap set by his former masters to lure him back?

  The sequel to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Southern Comfort, the first English novelization from the acclaimed game series by GSC Game World.

  Balázs Pataki

  S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

  Northern Passage

  Honor (hon•or [on-er])

  noun

  1. honesty, fairness, or integrity in one’s beliefs and actions

  2. a source of credit or distinction

  3. high respect, as for worth, merit, or rank

  4. such respect manifested

  5. high public esteem; fame; glory.

  Prologue

  May 2012

  Dark Valley—Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine

  Seen from an airliner flying at the safe altitude of ten thousand meters, the Exclusion Zone doesn’t differ much from the lush fields and forests of the vast Ukrainian plains. Only a closer look out of the windows reveals the signs of abnormal features on the ground: forest roads leading nowhere, clearings where none should be, brown patches in the green fields.

  Patrolling over the Zone at a much lower altitude, the pilots of the Mi-24 attack helicopters can make out small buildings at the end of the paths. Weirdly gnarled, leafless trees in the clearings. Clusters of vehicle wrecks.

  Soldiers in the gunships know that the small buildings are abandoned villages and factories, the weird trees the only natural objects remaining amidst fields of physical anomalies, the wrecked vehicles helicopters, trucks and armored personnel carriers massed together to contain the radioactivity their rusty shells emit, even though they were contaminated back in 1986.

  All avoid the center of the Zone: commercial airplanes, helicopters and military patrols alike. It is not to enshrine the memory of the thousands to have lost their lives in the wake of the Chernobyl accident, neither to leave the ghosts of the Dead City of Pripyat in peace, but for the fear of being hit by another emission of destructive energy that has turned the Exclusion Zone into a lethal wasteland of decay.

  The Dark Valley has been named in a way reflecting the creepy nature of the Exclusion Zone. The irradiated marsh to its southern reaches would make good for its name alone and the sinister industrial buildings in the north even more so. Nothing reveals the true heart of darkness hidden beneath the abandoned factory on its eastern edge. Not even the crane standing in its courtyard covered with moss and vines that hang down like curtains from its rusty structure, slowly moving in the chilly wind, making it appear like ghosts in the mist. The dark factory hall holding ominous containers is nothing particular in the Zone. Neither are the bodies strewn around on the floor beyond, or the eerie glow of the emergency light over the staircase leading down to the factory vaults. Although still seeping from the gunshot wounds of one more body in the passageway where stairs lead, blood on debris-littered concrete floor is also a sight as common in the Zone as are mutants and anomalies.

  It is the fear in the face of the man sitting on the floor at the dead end of the passageway that tells all about the darkness ruling over the Valley, even though he is a fearful appearance himself in his fatigue — half hazmat suit, half body-armor, tailored in a way that resembles the pressure suits of fighter pilots. Close to the hood to be within easy reach, a gas mask is fastened to his shoulders. His martial appearance is reinforced by the Beretta pistol holstered on his right limb and the shotgun fastened to his belt pushed to the side. Fear and determination blend on his face as he carves a small notch into the stock of his SGI-5k assault rifle with his combat knife, adding one more to the fifteen notches already there.

  In the Exclusion Zone, anyone wearing such armor is called Stalker and a Stalker with fear on his face when approaching one of the Zone’s underground vaults would be called a sane man. Sane men do fear, but have the willpower to overcome their terror and turn it into a state of constant alertness.

  The dark eyes of this Stalker, set in a pale face under a receding headline and a sharp nose between them, reflect this kind of determination. Controlled fear is written all over his face as he finishes carving and reflects over the Bandits he has killed while penetrating their base in this abandoned factory. Of all his victims, now only remembered by a notch in his rifle stock, he knows only one by name: Borov.

  Peeking over to the door that is the source of all his fears, the Stalker takes a deep breath. Killing more than a dozen Bandits had been a roadside picnic compared to what is waiting for him beyond the steel door, the key of which he had taken a few minutes ago from Borov’s dead body.

  The door has a warning sign on it.

  “Oh well,” the Stalker says to himself. “High voltage is probably not the only thing that’s dangerous to life here.”

  Using the combination written on Borov’s key card, he opens the code-locked door.

  He peeks inside the vault, holding the assault rifle at aim and ready to shoot. He himself wouldn’t know what memory or instinct makes him move like a battle-hardened commando. Right now, his failing memory is no concern. All the Stalker cares about is that no imminent danger appears in the dark corridors behind the door.

  The damp vault smells like rotten earth. His Geiger counter crackles lowly.

  He checks out the corridor to his right. Barely visible in the dim, orange glow of an emergency light, a dead Stalker lies between two green metal lockers. The moldy corpse is still held together by an armored suit of the same variety he is wearing, but the face under the hood betrays that this man had been dead for months.

  This doesn’t bid well, he thinks.

  Turning back, he enters a chamber with a control board and a skeleton with its skull missing.

  See, old buddy? This happens to people coming to the vaults and losing their head.

  With a bitter smile on his face, he moves to the staircase leading below. As soon as he takes the first flight of steps, an echo bellows beneath like someone or something, hitting a huge metal object. A wave of ice runs down his spine. He freezes, and for a moment holds his weapon at aim, ready to shoot. Nothing moves. With cautious steps, he moves down the staircase.

  His anomaly detector emits a single beep. Then his Geiger counter starts crackling. It is not the radiation warning that makes him freeze once more, but the sight of two wooden crates in the hall opening from the staircase.

  Normally, no Stalker would be scared of two musty wooden boxes. But these are moving, as if lifted by an invisible hand.

  Suddenly, two crates come hurtling towards him. One box hits the door fra
me and scatters but the other one flies directly to his head. If it weren’t be for his quick reflexes causing him to bend over at the last second, his head would be in shambles now.

  Damned poltergeist playing its gravity tricks. I’ll give you such hell if I see you!

  But poltergeists are invisible and it is with extreme caution that he enters the room. To his right, he sees a toilet—probably this must have been a resting or changing room for the scientists who had once pursued their shadowy business here. He steps inside, guided more by the subconscious desire of hiding than the hope of finding anything useful there. Water is trickling down the walls covered with green ceramic plates into the rotting toilet caps built into the floor.

  How old is this place? Even in the USSR, people were using sitting toilet caps from the Nineties on.

  A mirror is still hanging over the broken sink, too opaque to reflect much else than the light of his headlamp.

  It’s left to my imagination to judge if I look cool in this armored suit… probably I do.

  A massive rectangular column is standing in the middle of the room. Judging by the brown sliding doors on one side, it must hold an elevator shaft inside. The Stalker peeks out from behind its corner and can barely pull his head back to cover when he sees another box rising from the floor. It is smashed against the elevator shaft. He glances around. The floor is empty, save for a few fragments of concrete that have loosened themselves from the wall.

  On the wall opposite to the elevator’s doors he finds a steel door with a combination lock. It is tightly shut, with no chance to open it unless with the correct code—if it is still working after decades of decay.

  He perks his ears as he hears a thumping noise coming from a far corner of the dark maze of corridors and laboratory rooms. It sounds as if an extremely heavy creature is walking in circles, and faintly but recognizable, the noise of intense fire burning. After a second, the sound of fire recedes. He is about to give a relieved sigh when his ears detect the flames again.

  Oh no—Burner anomalies. I didn’t expect a bed of roses here but Burners blocking my way is just not damn fair.

  His only comfort is that where there’s an alive pseudogiant, and the thumping noise must come from the heaviest mutant in the Zone, there are usually no humans around. Mutants are another thing. Some attack each other, mostly those who still have a trace of the original animal instincts inside their distorted brains — blind dogs hunting fleshes, boars smashing blind dogs. The more sinister abominations are a different matter. Only a chimera would mercilessly kill any other mutant, but chimeras are as silent as they are deadly.

  No. This must be a lonely pseudogiant.

  He mentally curses the trader at the 100 Rads, the Stalker bar where he received this mission, for not having a better close-range weapon in his stock than a TOZ-66 with barrels sawn off and the stock removed. Slinging his assault rifle on his shoulder, he takes the shotgun. It is a woefully inaccurate weapon and reloading it takes time, but in the confined spaces of the undergrounds it is an adequate weapon against mutants.

  Let’s hope I don’t run into a squad of Spetsnaz like I did in the Agroprom tunnels… I’d do more damage by looking angrily at them than shooting with this crap.

  The Stalker knows that on the body of a dead scientist, hidden somewhere in an obscure corner where he hid from whatever had put an end to the experiments, there is the card with the code needed to open the metal door. Looking up the corridors opening from the elevator room, he chooses the one which has at least an orange emergency light still on.

  Cautiously, he peeks ahead. His headlight is too weak to reveal any danger that might lie in the dark space.

  Taking one more cautious step, he enters the room ahead. To his right, a container holds something that looks like a green, boiling liquid. He puts on the gas mask hanging on his shoulder. The green liquid emits a weird glow and thick bubbles are rising from its surface. His anomaly detector remains quiet. He scans the walls, here also covered by green tiles and long, rusty pipes running along them. Reaching the light sphere of the next emergency light, he finds a few cylindrical containers with the hazmat sign painted on them. His Geiger counter starts crackling more intensely. Stepping back, he looks around but sees nothing of interest apart from an anomalous apparition in front of the containers. It looks like heat emanated by an unseen, flameless source, blurring the dark corner behind.

  Okay… Nothing here.

  Once back to the elevator room, he decides to try the next room to his right. The blue painting is crumbling from the walls and the brown floor tiles are covered with debris. On the ceiling, another emergency light casts its dim light behind a grill.

  At least no snork will jump at me through those grills.

  A sign on the wall reads, Sanitary area ahead. Entry forbidden. The small room ahead seems to hold nothing of interest, save for another half-dozen pipes behind an opening in the wall behind chicken wire. The Stalker is about to leave the room when he sees another corridor appear.

  From an opening to the right, the strong light of intense fire falls on the faded blue wall. Further down the corridor, another column of flameless heat blurs whatever lies beyond in the darkness. It is no stranger than the fire to the right. Fire casts light, normally, but this light on the wall is moving — as if the fire casting the light is moving in circles.

  The anomaly detector starts beeping. Opening the display, the Stalker sees a green circle about a few meters ahead. A dot signals an artifact right at his foot, next to a wooden crate. Without the detector, he would have stepped on it. Eagerly, he bends down, looks closer and carefully picks up the artifact that glows with fiery red light as soon as he touches it.

  Stone Blood. There must be a Whirligig nearby. Shit. Why do the most dangerous anomalies create worthless artifacts?

  Studying the ugly object made out of pressed together and curiously bent polymerized remnants of plants, soil, and bones, he shakes his head. The artifact is as much beneficial as harmful, speeding up his metabolism but also making his body more susceptible to any wound. It is not even precious, and all the trouble of carrying and selling it at the value of a few boxes of ammunition doesn’t appear worth the effort.

  Besides, my artifact containers are full—I already have two Stone Flowers and a Slime, together with a Fireball to neutralize the radiation they emit.

  He puts the artifact back on the ground and is about to peer inside the room with the fire when a growl comes from the far end of the corridor. It could have been emitted from a human imitating a mutant but from a mutant that was once human as well. Behind the blurry column, a creature appears. It is walking, or rather leaping, on all fours with the remains of a gas mask dangling from its head.

  Snorks! This shotgun better not jam!

  Not perceiving imminent danger from the fire room, the Stalker decides to turn the presence of an anomaly ahead to his advantage. He reaches into a container on his belt and fishes out a bolt.

  “Hey! Snorky!” he taunts the mutants. “Dinner time!”

  The Zone might have given snorks the ability to perform incredible leaps, and sharp teeth that could tear any human opponent into pieces once they manage to kick him off his feet with their strong legs, but left them with barely any intellect. Following only the instinct to hunt the lonely human down, they move to leap over the crates blocking their way.

  The Stalker quickly throws it ahead. The column of heat immediately bursts into a jet of fire, burning the first mutant to death. The second one is luckier, though. The Stalker quickly fires both barrels of his shotgun but the mutant has already torn its claws into his armor. Sharp pain bites into his limbs. He recoils, frantically reloading the shotgun. After receiving two more buckshot shells fired from point-blank range, the snork still jolts for a second, then dies with a last growl.

  The Stalker is panting now, his heart beating in his ears, and knows that with each heartbeat, more poison from the snork’s infested claws might get into his bloodst
ream. He reaches for the first aid kit on his belt, tears it open and applies antiseptics on his wound from where blood is trickling.

  Shit! Bandage, bandage—

  Moaning with pain, he quickly presses a bandage over his wound. The pain starts receding as the antiseptics’ effect kicks in and in a minute, the bandage has at least stabilized the wound.

  Nothing moves in the corridor, only the fire burning in the room nearby. Peering cautiously inside from the door frame that still holds with a gutted circuit board, he sees a pile of wooden crates in the middle and an apparition that looks like a fire column moving around the room in circles. If it is a sort of mutant, it doesn’t seem too interested in attacking him. It lights up a dark corner as it moves around, illuminating the body of a dead Stalker among the debris.

  That moving fire, or whatever it is, looks like trouble—it’s moving in a predictable way, though, and I could reach that body if I wanted to. On second thought, it doesn’t look worth the risk.

  He throws another bolt in the direction where a small space appears between the next anomaly and the wall. Immediately, a column of fire goes up an arm’s length away. He recoils with a jump. Finally, throwing three more bolts, he finds a zigzagging path through the three anomalies, even if it means to jump over the crates blocking the way. No matter how foreboding the next room is, he sighs with relief once he leaves the corridor behind.

  More Burners loom ahead. Repeating the tedious bolt throwing to find his path through, he reaches a chamber where his search proves fruitful: a dead man lies there, wearing the orange hazmat suit of scientists. He is glad that the opaque plexiglass on the helmet spares him the sight of a head that had been decaying for many years. Quickly going through the containers on the protective suit, he finds a note, barely readable and half-eaten by mildew.

  “Excellent, colleague! I’m glad that you’ve received second-level access. At last you will find out what goes on in our laboratory. Your access code is 1243. Chief of Laboratory X-18, Piotr Ilyich Kalugin.”