Chapter Eight

 

 

 

"Good condition," J.B. stated.

 

"Go check the outer door, will you? Make sure the green lever's pointing"

 

"Down," the Armorer completed. "I can remember that much, Ryan."

 

There was no trace of any fault or flaw in the main control area to the gateway chamber. Nor was there any sign of any human activity. It was as though it had been built and manned by robotic androids who had completed their set tasks and then quietly and tidily made their exits.

 

"Not even some fossilized chewing gum under any of the desks," Mildred said, stooping beneath the nearest row of consoles to check it out.

 

Binomial eyes clicked. A light film of the thinnest oil eased tumblers. On the control panels, dazzling arrays of changing colorsa rainbow of reaction. Wheels danced and numbers flashed.

 

The small black loudspeakers set in the corners of the control room suddenly hissed, one of them crackling. The voice that came from them had an oddly dead, automated quality to it as though everything human had been drained away.

 

"Midnight on fifth tone after message." A pause. "No message from central. All quiet." Another pause, then came five spaced tones, thin and metallic. "Midnight. Ends."

 

Abe laughed. "That thing been talking to nobody for a hundred years?"

 

Doc had sat at one of the comp keyboards, looking at the endless flow of data that was scrolling up the screen, like a reversed river of gibberish. "Once programmed, those 'things' as you call them, will loyally carry out their preset duties until time ends."

 

"I've never heard one in any of the other redoubts." Ryan looked at it. "Wonder why they left it on?"

 

"Better question is why they bothered to turn it off in the other places." Krysty looked around. "Nothing here for us. Let's go out and recce a little, lover. Might even find some beds for the night."

 

Trader had thrown his Armalite onto one of the desks. "Sounds good. You said that some of these places had plenty of blasters, and some had food and shit like that."

 

Jak had been leaning against the wall. "Some do, some don't," he said.

 

"Might as well go and take a look. J.B., you know the drill for opening the big sec steel doors. Rest of you get on watch. Still triple red."

 

Trader grinned across at Abe. "Triple-red warning must be in case one of these 'nominated screens gets off its ass and attacks us."

 

Ryan ignored him.

 

J.B. put his hand on the large green lever at the side of the massive door. It was down in the locked position. The Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 scattergun was propped against the wall next to him, the Uzi slung over his shoulders.

 

Everyone else had their weapons out and ready as they crouched in a semicircle around the entrance to the control room.

 

"Ready, Ryan?"

 

"Do it."

 

"Few inches for starters?"

 

"Yeah."

 

The Armorer started to tug the lever upward. Some of them, in other locations, had been stiff and resistant, but this one moved like a hot knife through ice cream. They could all just hear the distant, muffled sound of the gears engaging, slowly powering open the incalculable weight of the door.

 

A tiny slit of light appeared beneath the bottom of the sec steel, widening to eight or nine inches.

 

"Stop," Ryan ordered.

 

He dropped flat on his belly, the SIG-Sauer probing ahead of him, sliding to peer under the door. He could see the wall of the passage opposite, brightly lighted. By squinting he could make out the curve of the corridor, both ways. There was no sign of any sort of life.

 

For a moment Ryan thought that he might have caught a very faint scratching sound, but when he strained for it, the noise was gone.

 

"Watch out for the attack of the killer lemmings," Trader whispered.

 

Ryan found it interesting, and increasingly irritating, the way that his old war chief was reacting. If Trader had been in charge of the group in an alien environment where a danger could threaten them from anywhere, be would have been the first to insist on triple care being taken by everyone.

 

Now, conscious that Ryan was the man, he couldn't resist getting in the little sarcastic digs.

 

Ryan ignored the comment and stood. "Right, J.B., take her all the way up."

 

They all waited, taut and silent, until the vanadium-steel door had opened to the top. There was no movement from outside in the corridor.

 

Edging slowly around the corner, Ryan glanced quickly both ways. "Nothing," he said. "Let's go. Drop the lever once everyone's out, J.B., and we'll take a look."

 

One of the most common factors in all the redoubts that they'd visited through the mat-trans systems was that the passage beyond the control room almost always ran a short way to the left and then ended in a blank wall of bare stone, as though the gateways were always at one of the burrow ends of the complexes.

 

This one was no exception.

 

Less than thirty yards from the open door of the control area, the curved walls came to an abrupt stop.

 

"Other way," Ryan said.

 

"What's the sign say over the sec door?" Trader asked, pointing with the barrel of the Armalite.

 

Dean read it out. "It says 'Entry Forbidden To All But B12 Cleared Personnel And Above. Mat-Trans Unit. Project Cerberus. Overproject Whisper.' Did I get that last bit right? Real stupe long words."

 

"You did well," Krysty said.

 

Almost immediately they reached a side tunnel. But it was less than fifteen yards in length, with a lower ceiling, ending in yet another blank wall of concrete.

 

"Bullet holes," Abe said. "Look, took great scars out of the stone. Around four feet from the floor."

 

J.B. took a few steps into the side turning, stooping to pick something up that was laid against the bottom of the wall. He held it out to the others.

 

"A 9mm bullet," Jak said. "Got different look. Not like most."

 

"Equaloy," Trader observed, bringing it closer to his eyes to examine, angling it for the best illumination from the overhead strip lights.

 

The Armorer nodded. "Right. Hardly ever come across them. Think they must still have been sort of experimental when the big fires started burning."

 

Mildred took the unfired round from Trader. "What's so special about it, John? The coating's like plastic or"

 

"Nylon. Self-lubricating."

 

"Feels too light." Mildred handed it on to Dean. "Whys that?"

 

"Aluminum. From what I know about them, the idea was that the bullet was high velocity, but when it strikes a target it checks momentum very quickly, so all of the kinetic energy goes flowing onward."

 

"Devastating," Ryan said. "Could do with a few hundred rounds of that. Must have had a massive effect on anyone who got in the way of it."

 

Mildred moved to the wall and ran her finger over the chipped holes. "You're right, Abe. They're bullet holes, all right."

 

Doc wasn't at all interested in the rare example of predark ammo. He had joined the doctor, staring down at their feet. "I suspect that if you were to analyze that black substance that stains the floor, my dear Doctor, you might well find that it is almost certainly human blood."

 

She stopped and rubbed her finger over it. "Old, old, blood, Doc. But you won't find me arguing with you over it." She straightened and looked again at the wall. "Firing squad."

 

"I fear that it was."

 

Everyone gathered around. Ryan was surprised. The evidence of some quasi official executions wasn't something that they'd come across before. It spoke of a violently traumatic episode in the last days, or hours, as the sky grew dark with the foreign missiles, of a mutiny or a rebellion.

 

"We'll never know," Krysty said.

 

They moved on.

 

 

 

THEY PASSED AN ENTRANCE or stairwell on the right, seventy paces farther along. But it had been sealed with shutters of sec steel. Without any plas-ex or some grens, they had no way of opening them.

 

"Getting bored," Trader said. "Thought these redoubts were treasure houses."

 

"Nobody told you that," J.B. protested. "This one looks like they did a good number on evacuating it. Odds are we won't find anything."

 

"Then we might as well make another jump and get out to someplace more interesting."

 

"Patience, Trader," Ryan said. "You used to say that a man who walks sees a whole lot more than a man who runs."

 

"I did?"

 

"You did."

 

"Anyway," Mildred said, "I'd like to check outside. Find out where the jumps taken us."

 

"I'd like some sleep," Dean said, yawning to prove his point. "Triple whacked."

 

"Yeah, me, too," Abe agreed. "Looks like there's another passage just ahead."

 

"Vid cameras following us." Jak pointed at the tiny boxes with the gleaming lenses that were suspended from the angle between wall and arched ceiling. They roamed ceaselessly, back and forth, sending their pictures to some distant, unmanned sec center at the heart of the redoubt.

 

Ryan held up his hand as they reached the junction with the side corridor on their left. It was more constricted and appeared to climb upward.

 

"Hold it here. I'll go check with J.B., just a little farther along. Rest of you wait here on orange alert. Be back within fifteen minutes."

 

"I'll take charge here," Trader said.

 

"No. Nobody takes charge here. Jak and Krysty been around with J.B. and me for long enough to know how things go down. Let it lie, Trader."

 

The older man nodded, stifling a yawn. "Make it quick. I could do with some sleep as well as the boy here." He patted Dean on his shoulder.

 

"Fifteen minutes at the outside."

 

 

 

IT DIDN'T TAKE ANYWHERE near that long. They passed another sealed exit in the first hundred yards, then the passage narrowed and climbed much more steeply, with several flights of short, broad steps, a ramp at the side for wheeled vehicles.

 

The place was still spotlessly maintained, though the air quality seemed less good.

 

Neither man spoke. When you were on a recce patrol like that, you never spoke unless you had something to say.

 

Their search ended at the top of another, longer flight of stairs.

 

"That's it," J.R said, moving forward to investigate the blank wall of pale cream sec steel that blocked off the corridor from floor to ceiling.

 

Ryan looked at the control panel at the side. "Been sealed off."

 

The coded letters and number buttons had been hidden behind a sheet of clear sec plas that would resist anything except some serious explosives.

 

"Not taking any chances of anyone getting into there, were they?"

 

"Right." Ryan tapped a finger on the cold steel of the huge door. "No point in wasting any time here. Let's get back to the others and try that side passage."

 

 

 

A SIGN OVER THE NEXT DOOR read Leaving Section 4 Entering Section 5.

 

It was a manual lock, a small silver button, arrowed for up and down.

 

"Can I, Dad?"

 

"Sure."

 

The boy pressed it. A red light glowed under the "up" panel, then went out. For a few moments nothing happened at all. Dean tried it again.

 

The red light stayed off, but the heavy door began to move upward, faltering three times before finally reaching the top and halting.

 

"First sign of malfunction," J.B. said.

 

"So it is human after all." Doc grinned.

 

It was almost the first sign of a normal response that he'd shown since coming out of the gateway chamber. He'd asked nothing about Sukie's absence, seeming to accept her last-second change of mind and disappearance.

 

Ryan had picked up the heel of a woman's boot that had been lying inside the chamber, slipping it in his pocket. His belief was that it had come off one of Sukie's boots, and he decided it would be better if Doc didn't see itparticularly as it seemed to have been sliced cleanly off, halfway up, by some unimaginable force.

 

Dean was going to run ahead into the section in front of them, but his father called him back.

 

"Wait. Keep together."

 

Krysty touched Ryan on the arm. "There's some sort of feeling in here, lover."

 

"What?"

 

She shook her head, her bright green eyes showing doubt. "Not sure. Just a sort of background I don't know like a backgroundhum of menace. It's both close and far away at the same time. Best be careful."

 

"Should we go back?"

 

"No. Just take care."

 

 

 

IT WAS WHAT THEY'D HOPED fora self-contained area of the sprawling military complex, with a forty-bed dormitory, kitchen and ablution facilities.

 

The sleeping arrangements were single bunk beds, with plastic spring supports and shrink-wrapped mattresses.

 

The kitchen area was totally, hygienically clean, with nothing on any of the shelves or in any of the capacious range of polished steel cupboards.

 

Water ran from the taps there, as well as in the shower and toilet sections. It was flat, recirculated water that Mildred pronounced probably safe to drink, though she commented on how poor the air quality was.

 

J.B. and Jak quickly toured section five, reporting back to Ryan and the others that this part of the redoubt was also totally sealed off.

 

"Sec doors are locked at every exit. The only door open in the place seems to be the one between here and the gateway section," J.B. stated. "There's the vent grilles in the bathhouse, but nothing larger than a rat could get through there. And it's too clean for rats."

 

Trader didn't try to hide his disappointment. "No blasters or ammo?"

 

"Some you lose" Abe said.

 

"I know that, you stupe, Lol!"

 

"I'm Abe, Trader."

 

The flash of temper evaporated as quickly as it had flared up. "Yeah, 'course you are. 'Course you are."

 

"Can we go to bed, Dad?"

 

"Sure. Place is locked up tight, so there's no need to post a watch."

 

He turned to Krysty. "How about your feeling?"

 

"Still there. Insistent. Not human. But I never felt anything quite like it. Definitely a sort of threat."

 

Ryan nodded. "Since we can't get anywhere else we'll use the beds. Then jump out of here in the morning. That way nothing much can go wrong."