Dmitry woke up not from an alarm, but from the silence. IIn Kyiv, even on the fortieth floor of a skyscraper overlooking the Dnipro, behind triple-glazed windows, silence was never absolute. There was always a background: the vibration of the metro, the hum of the city, the noise of ventilation. Here, the silence was cottony. Dead.

  He opened his eyes. The watch on his wrist showed 10:15. He had slept for almost twelve hours. His body was stiff. His back responded with a familiar, dry crunch—titanium vertebrae hated lying down for too long. But it was a healthy fatigue. The psychosis of last night had retreated, driven into a far corner of his consciousness by a full stomach and sound sleep.

  Dmitry sat up, lowering his feet onto the warm teak floor.

  “Good morning, Robinson,” he said hoarsely. “It’s not Friday yet, but at least there’s coffee.”

  The morning ritual was sacred. It didn't matter where you were—in a penthouse or a swamp. If you stopped shaving and drinking normal coffee, you stopped being human. While the Miele machine purred, grinding beans, Dmitry walked to the window. The armored shutters were down.

  “Ark, raise shutters.”

  A quiet hum of servos. Metal plates slid upward, letting in the light.

  Dmitry expected to see the same thing he saw yesterday in the flashlight beam, but daylight made the picture even more depressing. The sky was low, the color of dirty sheepskin. Clouds hung so low they seemed to snag the tops of dead trees. The swamp itself looked not black by day, but gray-green, like a festering wound. The water was covered with a film of duckweed. And silence. No birds, no gnats. As if life had left this place a thousand years ago.

  Dmitry took his coffee cup and sat in the pilot's chair. He needed to get out. The GPS maps showed a gray grid of coordinates: "No Data." Driving blindly in a 26-ton vehicle was a sure way to sink for good. He needed reconnaissance. High-altitude reconnaissance.

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  He took a case from the closet. DJI Matrice 30T. An industrial drone. His "flying eye." Dmitry got dressed—fleece, pants, boots (trying not to look at the scrubbed floor). Opened the top evacuation hatch. Damp, icy air burst into the cabin. Dmitry placed the drone on the roof, right on the solar panels.

  “Takeoff.”

  The quadcopter howled with its props and rocketed straight up into the gray sky. Dmitry ducked back into the warmth and sat before the monitor.

  The camera image was clear but joyless. The drone rose. 100 meters. 300 meters. 500 meters. Software limit. The horizon expanded.

  Dmitry slowly rotated the camera. East—endless gray gloom fading into fog. South—the same. North—the same. Dmitry felt a chill run down his spine. Was he in the center of an ocean of mud?

  But the West... To the west, about ten kilometers from his point, the character of the terrain changed. The gray ripple of the swamp met a dark strip. The shore. Solid ground.

  “Contact,” Dmitry exhaled. “Ten kilometers to land.”

  He peered further, beyond the edge of the swamp. A plain stretched out there. Dreary, empty, brown. But on the very horizon, another thirty kilometers from the swamp's edge, a hill rose from the plain. The only elevation in this flat world.

  Dmitry cranked the zoom to maximum. Digital stabilization smoothed the shaking. On the top of the hill, a silhouette was visible. Angular. Geometrically regular. Nature doesn't create right angles. Those were walls. Towers. One ruined, the other—tall, powerful.

  “A castle?” Dmitry squinted. “Or ruins?”

  The thermal imager was useless at this distance—40 kilometers of humid air worked like a wall. He couldn't tell if people lived there, if fires burned there. It could be an abandoned fortress full of ghosts. Or a bandit den. But it was a structure. And it stood on solid ground.

  “Landmark accepted,” Dmitry said. “Course—strictly West. To that pile of rocks.”

  He retrieved the drone, catching it by hand through the hatch. The situation had clarified, but it didn't make things easier. Ten kilometers of bog lay between him and solid ground. For a hiker, a day of hard trekking, if you didn't drown. For the Ark, weighing 26 tons, it was an obstacle course. Every meter could be the last. If he beached the belly far from trees, there would be nothing to anchor the winch to.

  “Alright,” Dmitry rubbed his hands. “We know where to go. Now to figure out how to get this beast out of the pit.”

  He looked out the window. The wheels had sunk deep into the mud. The vehicle was resting on its axles. To just hit the gas meant burying it even deeper. He would have to work. Get out pneumatic jacks, saw these damn twisted trees, build a corduroy road under the wheels. Stoker, lumberjack, and now a road builder.

  “Career growth, indeed,” he chuckled, finishing his cold coffee.

  ?? SYSTEM ALERT: SUPPLY DROP

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