Chapter Twenty-Three

 

 

The chamber was immense, nearly the size of the storage area above them, but built in an unusual cylindrical design. It was shaped like a hollow cone, with the apex funneling up overhead.

 

The chamber was tri-level, with two floors above their position. Banks of consoles ran the length of each. Brilliant overhead lights gleamed on the alloyed handrails, the glass-covered panels and meters. Chairs were attached to slideways so the console operators could be ferried from panel to panel. A quick count told Ryan that each level contained a dozen chairs. But none of the chairs was occupied.

 

Beetles flitted over the consoles, extensor cables manipulating dials, buttons and switches. Ryan quickly handed Mildred the ID badge he had taken from Doug, but none of the gadgets paid any notice to them.

 

Six chrome-capped glass tubes, each one ten feet long and three feet around, were positioned at equidistant points on the top level of the cone-shaped chamber. The tubes were filled with a churning, bubbling green liquid, flexible metal conduits extending from their tops and bottoms. The conduits extended from the bases of the tubes and disappeared into sleeve sockets on the deck.

 

It was very cold in the room, well below freezing. The frigid wind roared up from beneath, where the chamber's diameter was at its widest. Gingerly Mildred and Ryan peered over a handrail. Far below, perhaps a hundred feet, was a dark metal framework, surrounding six gargantuan fan units. Four of them were spinning, two were not, and Ryan estimated that the three fan blades of each unit were close to twenty feet long and ten wide.

 

Surveying the upper levels, they saw twelve open shaftways like the one they had used to reach the chamber.

 

Shivering and hugging himself, Ryan asked, "What the hell is this place?" The roar of the wind was so loud, be had to practically shout his question into Mildred's ear.

 

"I'm not sure," she shouted back. "An air circulation station, but it can't be the only one in an installation this size."

 

Eyeing the hovering beetles, Ryan said, "They haven't noticed us."

 

"They're probably not supposed to. More than likely their sole program is to maintain the operations."

 

"Why are those things doing it, since this place was designed for humans?"

 

"Lack of manpower to spare, easier to automate, I can't say."

 

Taking another look at the fan units below, Ryan said, "A couple of grens might knock those out, start warming this place up."

 

Mildred shook her head and gestured to the tubes of bubbling liquid. "That wind is almost gale force. Unless you find something to weigh down the grens, they'll probably be blown right back up here. Besides, those containers of coolant must be pumped into a conversion chamber below the fans. If we want to start a thaw, we need to prevent the flow of coolant."

 

Ryan lifted his blaster, but Mildred tugged at his arm. Her face was troubled. "This isn't right, Ryan. Our plan was to try and strike a deal with the Commander, remember?"

 

"Yeah, but his rats might gnaw us to death before we reach him. If this is only one of their stations, shooting out one or two of these coolant containers shouldn't putrefy the whole place, only show them what we can do if they screw around with us."

 

Mildred hesitated, biting her lower lip, then nodded. "Do it. We can't stay here much longer or we'll freeze."

 

Bringing the center of the nearest tube into target acquisition, Ryan squeezed the trigger of the SIG-Sauer. The report of the shot was completely swallowed up by the rush of the wintry wind, but the glass casing acquired a grayish smear. It didn't break or even crack. It was armaglass, or something very close to it. He cursed and fired again, aiming at the same spot. He expended three more rounds before he saw a small network of cracks appear, and he fired twice more before a trickle of green fluid began sliding down the tube's exterior and crawling down the conduit.

 

Immediately an overhead light went from white to red, and the beetles' smooth, hovering motions became hurried and frantic.

 

"Their instruments have registered a drop in the coolant level," Mildred shouted. "Time to go."

 

They chose a shaft at random and were grateful for the lessening of the cold and the thunder of the fans. Squeezing through the passage, the darkness grew almost absolute. The lateral shaft terminated in another elbow joint, and Mildred wasn't happy that it crooked downward rather than up.

 

"Makes sense, doesn't it?" Ryan asked, squatting at the lip of the upside down L and reloading the SIG-Sauer.

 

"Yeah, I guess so. The air has to be circulated to all levels of the Anthill. I'm just not crazy about climbing down into God knows what."

 

Putting his feet on the ladder rungs, Ryan replied, "Can't figure that it's much different than climbing up into God knows what."

 

After a few minutes of hand-over-hand descent, the shaft terminated in another elbow, joining with a passageway branching off to the left. They were able to walk side by side along this one. As they did they passed several smaller openings. Judging by the icy drafts that blew out from them, there were a number of other subsidiary shafts connected to more circulating stations.

 

Presently they detected a faint radiance ahead, and as they went farther down the shaft, the light grew brighter and they heard a series of noises. Ryan was able to distinguish the humming of generators and the murmur of voices. A metal-meshed grille stood in front of them. They approached it in a crouch and peered through the screen.

 

They looked down on a miniature city. They saw buildings with foundations of brick and concrete, narrow paths twisting and turning between the squat structures. None of the buildings looked like they could comfortably fit a child, much less a full-grown adult. It looked like a model of a predark city, shrunk in volume and reduced in scale. In the center was an obelisk tower made of white stone, stretching upward about twenty-five feet.

 

Mildred caught her breath in surprise, but she said nothing. The city, if it could be called that, was empty and devoid of life, despite evidence to the contrary. Both of them had heard voices. Ryan pressed his face closer to the grille, looking from the left to the right. Almost directly below them was a metal pole, and topping the pole was a rectangular green sign with white lettering. He read it aloud "Pennsylvania Avenue."

 

Running a hand across her forehead, Mildred said, "Sweet Jesus. It's a scale model of Washington, D.C." She pointed to a white-domed building about thirty yards away. "That's supposed to be the Capitol Building, and that tower is the Washington Monument."

 

Ryan shook his head. "A bastard weird hobby. These freezies have way too much time on their hands."

 

"Crazy as shithouse rats," Mildred intoned.

 

After waiting a few minutes and hearing nothing, they decided to move. Feeling around on the inside of the hatch cover, Ryan found a slide lock and he pushed the bolt aside. The hinges were stiff, and he had to launch several kicks at the frame before it creaked open. They were about twenty feet above the floor, but only five from the arched roof of a strange building supported by Doric columns. There was the statue of a seated man inside it.

 

"A baby-sized Lincoln Memorial," Mildred said. "Appropriate in kind of a sick way."

 

Both of them jumped to the roof of the miniature memorial and clambered down to the floor. They walked carefully down Pennsylvania Avenue, looking for any movements or signs of life, straining their ears and eyes. The sound of their footsteps echoed unnaturally loud. Evidently the "city" wasn't equipped with the sound-absorbent shielding of the storage level.

 

"You know," Mildred whispered, "if I could have imagined a place that had become a refuge for survivors of the nukecaust, trying to evade death and retain some semblance of their former lives, this would be the place."

 

The ceiling was fairly high, perhaps fifty or more feet, tapering upward to armatures holding electric light fixtures. Very few of the buildings were more than six feet tall, and Ryan and Mildred felt uneasy striding among them like giants.

 

Ryan had only seen pictures of America's capital city, and walking through a toy version of it disturbed him for reasons he couldn't identify. Mildred, of course, had visited D.C. before sky dark and remembered it well.

 

" 'There were giants in the earth in those days,' " Mildred muttered, bending down to peer into the windows of a building.

 

"Don't you start. One of the reasons I accepted this job from Hellstrom was the prospect of getting away from Doc and his flashblasted quotes."

 

"Sorry," Mildred said. "It's only natural for the child of a preacher to quote scripture. Besides, if Doc was with us, he'd be talking some obscure shit about Gulliver and Lilliput."

 

The room containing the city was so long that its far end was indistinguishable in the shadows. There didn't seem to be any doors or any way out. Suddenly Ryan felt the fine hairs on his nape lift.

 

The cold, still air blazed with automatic gunfire. Bullets smacked into a building beside them, digging white pockmarks in the brickwork, shards scattering in every direction. Ryan and Mildred responded instantly, in lunging rushes for cover on opposite sides of the avenue.

 

Men in business suits, brandishing handblasters and autorifles, bounded toward them from all directions. Ducking behind a four-foot-high office building, Ryan fired the Walther MPL in a stuttering spray. He heard ricochets, screams and curses, and the snapping snarl of Mildred's MP-5.

 

A machine gun was unlimbered. The chatter of the weapon was amplified, and echoes of the rapid reports were sent booming back and forth. Out of the corner of his eye, Ryan glimpsed a shadowy shape and heard automatic fire. He flung his body to one side as a shower of rock chips swept against him.

 

He saw the man running toward him between two buildings, an autoblaster spitting flame, lead and noise, held at waist level. The Walther loosed three rounds and the man flipped backward, his chest blown out.

 

Another stream of autofire chewed the air over his head. Ryan tried to press his body into the building as the slugs stitched a red-hot path against the opposite wall of his refuge. Cordite smoke and pulverized stone filled the air.

 

Suddenly the autoblaster fire stopped. Ryan didn't wait and wonder why. He sprang away from the office building, holding down the Walther's trigger.

 

Only one man was out in the open, about thirty feet away. He was holding a small skeletal weapon Ryan recognized as a SIG-AMT autocarbine. He seemed to be having difficulty with its breech system, which Ryan, from prior unpleasant experience with the gun, could have guessed. The man saw him and swung the eighteen-inch barrel in a semicircle, trying to catch up with Ryan's sidewise lunge. Three rounds from the Walther broke his head apart before he managed to get his blaster operational again.

 

Ryan didn't see him drop. He was too occupied with angling his body toward a collection of several buildings and avoiding more slugs that burned the air all around him. Reaching the cover, he drew the SIG-Sauer and put it next to him while he popped a fresh clip into the MPL.

 

He didn't see Mildred, so he thumbed the transmit stud on the transceiver in his pocket. "Mildred, where are you?"

 

"About forty feet to your right," came the crisp response. "You made a head count yet?"

 

"Not yet. You?"

 

"Rough estimate. I think there's about fifteen of the opposition, not counting any you've put down."

 

"As far as I know," Ryan said into the mouthpiece, "I've accounted for two."

 

A man jumped from cover a dozen yards to his left, slapping the stock of a rifle to his shoulder. He was dead on his feet, with a skull smashed into three pieces, before he could squeeze the trigger. A single shot from the SIG-Sauer had drilled him through the forehead and blown out the back of his cranium in a welter of brain matter and bone chips. He went down without an outcry.

 

"Three," Ryan said. "What's your score?"

 

"Two definites, two maybes." There was a pause, and Ryan heard the crack of the ZKR. Her voice filtered into his ear again, tense and worried. "Make that three definites. Listen, we're already pinned down, and pretty soon we'll be outflanked and outgunned. I think we should split up."

 

Ryan didn't answer for a long moment. Mildred's expertise was crucial to the successful completion of their mission. It was a tough call to make, but each of them had to take fundamentally the same chancesboth were important, and therefore both were almost equally unimportant, in terms of the risks to be faced by separating. It was the only way they really had a chance.

 

"Ryan?" Mildred's voice was urgent.

 

"Okay," he said. "We split up. We can stay in contact with the radios. I'll draw them away from you in a very flashy way."

 

"I'll give you covering fire if I can."

 

"No. Don't draw any more attention than necessary. Just wait for my next signal."

 

"Acknowledged," she replied tersely.

 

One thing Ryan knew better than anyone else was how to conduct a running gunfight. He leaped from cover, sparing one split second to survey his surroundings, then he raced through the miniature Washington, D.C., in a long-legged, yard-eating lope. He jumped over boulevards, pounded past the Capitol rotunda and sprang over the Potomac in a single bound. Voices yelled to his right. He spied four men, less than fifteen feet away, rising from cover, fumbling to bring their blasters to bear, faces registering astonishment.

 

Ryan swept them with a long burst from the Walther. One took several 9 mm hollowpoints in the face and throat, the others receiving theirs in the guts, their entrails shredding and splitting.

 

He didn't slow his pace, but he swerved back and forth, running in a broken-field fashion, trying to keep buildings at his back and sides at all times. Staccato pops filled the air, and bullets blasted chips of brick and masonry from the structures all around him. Flakes of stone and fragments of concrete stung the back of his neck and the left side of his face.

 

A dark-haired man ran to intercept him, a long-barreled revolver held in both hands. He assumed a two-handed combat stance, and with smooth, practiced motions drew a bead on Ryan.

 

The SIG-Sauer spit flame and noise, and three wads of lead centerpunched the man in the lower body. He staggered backward, dropping the blaster, arms windmilling as he tried to maintain his balance.

 

Another fusillade of shots chewed up the paint job of a building only a few feet in front of Ryan. Without aiming, he pointed the Walther MPL behind him and fired a strafing burst.

 

He felt a shock of impact in the muscle of his right shoulder, and he spun completely off his feet. His head reversed position with his boots and his back thudded heavily onto the floor with such force he couldn't see or breathe for agonizingly long seconds.

 

He choked back the burning bile sliding up his throat, and he bit his tongue against the pain. Rolling over onto his left side, gulping the cold air, he looked behind him, in the direction from which the shot had come.

 

The man who had shot him confidently exposed himself to check the quality of his marksmanship. The blaster looked like a Ruger rifle. Ryan planted two slugs from the SIG-Sauer in the man's dingy white shirtfront. He went down with a great yelp of pain and astonishment. Someone pulled him back behind the corner of a flat-roofed building.

 

Getting to his knees through sheer force of will, Ryan kept low and crawled behind the base of the Washington Monument. The whole right side of his shirt was dark with blood. White-hot pain and nausea washed over him in a wave, but it passed. Gingerly he flexed his fingers, and though the movement tore a protest from his shoulder, the muscles, tendons and nerves still worked. He wasn't so much worried about the blood loss, but about crippling injury, temporary or not.

 

He seated the earpiece of the headset more securely and called Mildred. There was no reply, only the hiss of static. He repeated her name, and received the same responsestatic.

 

Refusing to speculate on the reasons why he couldn't contact her, Ryan opened his coat and checked the severity of the exit wound. The bullet had passed completely through his shoulder from the back. Under the circumstances, the raw, bleeding crater just beneath his collarbone was more unsightly than critical; the bullet hadn't taken much meat and muscle with it, and it had fortunately missed bone.

 

Still, the wound hurt like bottled hell, and it throbbed in cadence with his heartbeat. Sensations became rubbery, wavering. His eye remained open, but the miniature city blurred and receded in his vision. Footfalls and voices forced him to focus. He could hear men moving quickly toward his position.

 

"He's over there, behind the monument. Frank nailed him."

 

"And he nailed Frank. Let's be exceptionally careful, gentlemen."

 

The mechanical sound of firing bolts being pulled back was audible.

 

"Fuck this," Ryan mumbled beneath his breath.

 

He pulled one of the incendiary grens from his combat harness, jammed it firmly against the base of the obelisk and pinched away the pin. He got to his feet and trotted away in a fast backpedal, making sure to keep the replica of the monument between him and the freezies stalking him.

 

A quartet of blaster-wielding men crept around the monument, two to a side. One pair sighted Ryan and raised their weapons. The second pair sighted the metal egg at the base of the tower. They uttered cries of alarm and fear, and tried to scuttle away as fast as they could.

 

The base of the monument erupted in a blaze of flame, smoke and debris. Ryan felt the cold slap of the concussion. The obelisk shivered, swayed, and with a groan and grate of stone, the entire length toppled majestically down across metropolitan Washington, crashing into and crushing several buildings. Planes of smoke and dust rose in the air. Men screamed in pain and outrage, cursed in a homicidal fury.

 

Ryan turned and ran as fast as he could down another lane, sprinting low to keep his head down behind the buildings. Once, he was forced to squeeze into a very narrow alley and squat there as a column of dark-suited pursuers flashed past along the street. He didn't shoot at their retreating backs, reasoning that if he hadn't done enough to draw the heat from Mildred by now, there was no point in engaging in another blaster battle.

 

He noticed blood dripping from his left hand, slicking the butt of the SIG-Sauer and splattering on the artificial lawn. Fleur's knife cut on his shoulder blade had reopened, though Mildred's stitches and bandages seemed to be keeping the bleeding to a minimum.

 

He tried raising Mildred a third time on the comm unit, and when he couldn't, he removed the headset and stowed it in an inner coat pocket. Biting his lip to repress a grunt of pain, Ryan rose and moved through the drifting sheets of dust and smoke, wending his way between the buildings until he came to a barrier. Two very ornate, very tall double doors, bound with thick braces of brass, towered over him.

 

Emblazoned in the very center of the doors were two bordered disk-shaped symbols that depicted, in gold and black paint, an eagle with outstretched wings. One clawed talon gripped a sheaf of arrows, and the other held what looked like sharp pointed missiles. He recognized the images as altered versions of the great seal of the United States. There was an inscription printed inside the borders of the disks, and Ryan had trouble reading it, sounding out the words.

 

" Novus Ordo Secolorum ," he muttered. "What the fireblasted hell is that supposed to mean?"