Apostolic Journey

[Karim al’Shaidis]

By the time Ascendancy had been asleep for several hours, Karim had discovered that everyone seemed to have quietly agreed the Dominions belonged to him until further notice. No announcement had been made. No formal authority had changed hands. Requests simply began finding their way to Karim, followed by questions about who was available, who needed rest and how quickly their team could be moved from one district to another.

He’d taken a quick trip down into the Facility to swap out his Dominion’s jacket for one not smeared in filth following an unfortunate accident with a broken sewer pipe. The Facility had always impressed him more as an engineering problem than as a symbol of government power. Twenty-two subterranean levels descended through reinforced construction, older bunker infrastructure and passages built for purposes that had outlived the governments that commissioned them. Somewhere beyond the most secure portions, emergency routes connected outward through older systems beneath the city.

Karim’s pace suddenly slowed. For two days they had been forcing new geography through snow. Above them, Moscow had effectively disappeared beneath fifteen or twenty meters of accumulation. They had answered by cutting streets through it again, rebuilding the surface grid as tunnels because that was the obvious solution. Standing twenty-two floors beneath the Kremlin, Karim realized they had been thinking in only one direction.

Moscow already had another city underneath it. Not simply the Metro. Service passages. Bunkers. abandoned utility corridors. Drainage systems. Older tunnels buried beneath newer ones. The vast unofficial Underground that had accumulated beneath Moscow through centuries of construction, abandonment and reuse. It was said that some of it was dangerous. Much of it was poorly mapped. But it existed.

Karim stopped in the corridor and pulled up the rescue network on his tablet. The new snow tunnels glowed across the map in branching lines extending outward from the Kremlin.

He overlaid what subterranean infrastructure records his clearance could access, it wasn’t much, but the two systems touched in several places already. Karim stared at them for a long moment, and he knew there were more.

They did not need to dig all the way across Moscow. They needed to connect what already existed. By the time he returned to emergency command, the idea had become a proposal.

The official coordinating the next operational block listened without interrupting as Karim placed both maps side by side. He was a deputy minister Karim had encountered several times over the previous two days, an efficient man whose patience had deteriorated in direct proportion to the number of districts requesting resources.

“If the Undercity is passable, we can use existing corridors for distance and the Dominions only have to open connections into and out of it.”

The deputy studied the overlay for several seconds, then began opening additional map layers. Most were familiar municipal records, emergency routes and partial infrastructure surveys. But one returned a permissions error.

The deputy tried again, this time through a different menu, and a much larger network appeared for less than a second before the system locked it behind restricted access.

Both men went still, and Karim leaned closer. What little had flashed across the display was enough. The visible emergency maps showed fragments. That hidden layer had shown continuity. It was a whole system they didn’t know existed.

“Open that again.”

“I've never seen that map before. I don’t know where it came from.”

He pulled up the permissions data and read silently for several seconds. His expression changed.

“It's restricted explicitly to the Ascendancy.” They exchanged looks.

Someone had mapped the Undercity far beyond the fragmentary records available to emergency command, thoroughly enough that the hidden layer appeared to connect corridors the public system treated as isolated. Karim had no idea who had done it, when it had been done or why Ascendancy alone had access.

For the moment, none of that mattered as much as the fact that the information existed.

“Can you request access?”

“Not without Ascendancy to approve it.”

Karim's attention shifted briefly toward the clock and rubbed his chin.

Ascendancy had been asleep only a few hours.

“Then we wait until he wakes.”

The deputy shook his head. “The western hospital needed fuel access an hour ago. It could take ten hours to get there through the snow. Underground could cut that time significantly.”

Karim enlarged the nearest entrance they could actually verify. “When was this last inspected?” It was a retired system.

For once, the deputy sounded as unhappy with the answer as Karim was. Karim traced the known corridor beyond the entrance. It ran west for less than a kilometer before disappearing from the layer he could access. Somewhere behind the locked map existed the rest.

They had no idea what lay beyond it. If it was flooded or closed or anything. Karim exhaled slowly. “You're asking me to cut into a system we know has been mapped without the map.”

“You can't see it until Ascendancy wakes.”

“Then we have to wait.”

“Karim, we don't have that luxury.”

Karim folded his arms. “Neither do the people I'm sending underground.”

The deputy stepped closer. “We know this entrance exists. We know the corridor behind it exists. We open it, send in a survey team, and adjust from there.”

“Or we cut into the wrong branch, lose an hour, and discover afterward that the route we needed was fifty meters away on a map we weren't allowed to open.”

“And while we wait for certainty, the hospital burns fuel it doesn't have.” The deputy's voice lowered. “When Ascendancy wakes, I'll tell him you had a viable entrance and chose not to use it.”

Karim rubbed his eyes. Give him a chart to analyze or a group to encourage. But choosing between the better of two tragedies was a gamble that made his stomach flip. Perhaps Ascendancy would think he had been too cautious. Perhaps he would have looked at the same incomplete information and acted immediately. After a long moment, Karim touched the entrance on the map.

Karim glanced at the Dominions’ rotation schedule. Dominik needed rest soon. Two others had already exceeded the schedule Karim had set that morning. Another was maintaining a ventilation route that could not simply be abandoned midway through.

He was tired too.

“Fine. We open this one. But I'll go in first when we get there.”