Chapter Five

 

 

Ryan led the way toward the left, though experience in many other redoubts made him guess what he might find. Almost universally the passage to the left of the entrance to the mat-trans unit ended in a blank wall, as though the original, long-dead builders had deliberately made the gateway in the deepest, most secure part of the complex, as far away from the surface and potential danger as possible.

 

Above the sec door was a notice that he'd seen before in a variety of forms Entry To This High-Security Section Of The Redoubt Is Absolutely Forbidden To All Personnel Below The Security Clearing Of B12.

 

The corridor wound gently, ending after about a hundred yards in a blank, unfinished wall of raw rock. The stone crystals glittered brightly in the stark overhead lighting.

 

"Like gold," Jak said.

 

"More like the gold of fools, son," Doc stated. "Iron pyrites, unless I miss my guess."

 

"No point standing looking at it," Ryan said. "About-face and let's move on out."

 

 

 

IT WAS A BIG REDOUBT, nothing like some of the smaller, concealed buildings that they'd come across in their travels. This one was seriously substantial. You could sense it, even if you didn't have any special mutie powers.

 

"Feels like being buried at the bottom of the deepest mine shaft in the world," J.B. commented, his voice falling flatly into the endless space of the wide corridor.

 

"We must be careful not to risk a mine-shaft gap, mein President," Mildred said, laughing. She looked at the others, grinning at their puzzled faces. "I haven't gone crazy. Sort of a quote from a movie. Doctor Strangelove . Had a long subtitle. 'How I stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb.' Think that was it. Never thought about that until now. Amazingly prophetic movie. Kind of a black comedy."

 

"Never heard of it," Ryan said, shaking his head. "Didn't survive skydark."

 

The woman nodded. "I somehow think that the director might have liked that irony."

 

They moved toward the right, the corridor winding in a big circle, rising slightly as it went upward.

 

"Like being inside the shell of a huge snail," Krysty commented. "Going to get dizzy if this goes on much farther."

 

They passed a number of side passages, but all were blocked off by immovable sec doors. Each had a digital panel at the side, but the letter and number codes had vanished in the nuke haze of a century earlier.

 

Each time they came to one of the green painted doors, Jak wandered over and punched the keys at random, shaking his mane of stark white hair in disappointment.

 

Doc laughed. "I would hazard a guess that the odds against your stumbling on the right combination to open any of the doors is something in the order of Let me see." He closed his pale blue eyes as he did the calculation. "Six to one. No, that cannot be correct. Of course. I had forgotten that the decimal point should" He tapped the twin barrels of the massive Le Mat on the side of his head. "One hundred and eight million, six hundred and forty thousand to one. Very roughly. To the nearest ten thousand or so. Somewhere in that vicinity. Approximately. More or less. A rough estimate, of course. Rather a"

 

Ryan held up the SIG-Sauer to silence him. "Yeah, we got the picture, Doc."

 

 

 

"LOOKS CLEAR THAT THERE'S a single access down to the gateway part of the redoubt," the Armorer said after they'd been walking and climbing for close to half an hour. "Covered between two and three miles already."

 

Ryan nodded. He'd lost count of the side turns that had been locked and barred from them. There were discolored rectangular patches on the concrete walls where signs had been ripped down. They would probably have given them clues as to what the other sections of the complex had been.

 

Though, since access was impossible, it didn't make a whole lot of difference.

 

The worry was that they would eventually reach an end to the wide passage, an end that was staked off like a fox's den, giving them no choice but to return all the way to the gateway and try a jump out again.

 

"Is it my imagination, or is the air a tad fresher?" Ryan stopped and sniffed again.

 

After a few minutes of walking they'd dropped right down from triple-red to orange, which meant you could holster your blaster if you wanted, but you still kept well alert. It also meant that they'd stopped walking the extended skirmish line with Ryan at point and J.B. as rearguard.

 

"Could mean we're nearing the top. Close to the exit," J.B. guessed.

 

Ryan nodded. "Might be that. If the nuke power is drawing in any clean air from outside, it would be most obvious up here."

 

Doc leaned a hand against the wall, picking at the crusted blood around his nose and mouth. "I had rather hoped that there might be ablution facilities somewhere close by. A wash and brushup would be most welcome."

 

"Yeah. I stink of puke," Jak said sourly.

 

"Wash'd do us all good after that horrific jump." Mildred sniffed cautiously at herself. "Yeah. Can't say my armpits are charmpits."

 

They moved on.

 

 

 

THE EARTH WAS BARRED.

 

They stood in a huddle, dejected and downcast, looking at the single sec door that filled the end of the passage from side to side. It fitted flush all the way around the flanks, coming down to settle on the concrete floor without enough of a gap for an ant to crawl through.

 

"That's it," Krysty said. "Gaia! I really don't want to face another jump just yet."

 

"Nothing else to do." Ryan bit his lip, feeling a surge of anger. "Fireblast! Even if we could have gotten through to find somewhere to clean up, with drinking water and mebbe beds for a night, then I'd have felt ready to jump again. But this" He glared at the blank wall of vanadium steel.

 

"I'll just punch in code and open door," Jak said, walking across with the lithe grace of the trained acrobat, light on the balls of his feet.

 

"Sure, and we'll just sit here and wait for three thousand years while you try all the possible combinations," Mildred said wearily.

 

The albino stood very close to the wall, peering short-sightedly from his pink eyes.

 

"What in the name of perdition is the young Ganymede doing?" Doc asked. "Does he seek the Holy Grail? The key to Rebecca? The Rosetta stone? The riddle of the Sphinx? The mystery of Kaspar Hauser?"

 

Ryan laughed, the sound startling and loud in the muffled stillness of the passage. "No. I know what it is he's looking for."

 

"Found it," Jak called. "Need some way blackening it." He smeared his hand over the film of dust on the sole of his combat boot, spitting in it and rubbing it into a gray paste. Carefully he wiped it on the wall beneath the code pad.

 

"You saw that they'd done this on other doors, didn't you?" Ryan called.

 

"Yeah. But scratched out. Guessed might leave main-door code. People always forget it. Seen that in other redoubts." He stared at the tiny incised markings, standing out dark against the cream concrete of the wall.

 

The others gathered around.

 

"Looks like a six, then two and nine," Ryan said, "followed by two letters. An N and a W , then another two and an eight to finish."

 

"Nine," Krysty said. "The last number is a nine not an eight, Ryan."

 

"Sure?"

 

"Sure."

 

The others agreed.

 

Krysty rattled it off. "Six, two, nine, N, W , two, nine. Well done, Jak."

 

"Enter it in, Jak," Ryan said. "Everyone back onto triple-red. Keep alert."

 

"I can't feel anyone near, lover."

 

He grinned at her. "Probably right, Krysty. Trader used to say that a man who rests his life on a probably doesn't get to be much older."

 

They stood off in a circle while the teenager took up his position by the control panel.

 

There didn't seem to be any manual override on the sec door, so it wasn't going to be possible to stop it after a few inches. It was all-or-nothing.

 

The buttons clicked in smoothly, and after a couple of seconds' hesitation, the green door began to rise ponderously into the air, leaving a film of fine dust hanging below it, finally settling silently into the recessed ceiling.

 

"Nothing," Ryan said.

 

There was a similar corridor beyond the door, but it was slightly less wide, and one or two of the ceiling lights had malfunctioned.

 

"Air's better," Mildred said, holstering her revolver.

 

"Reckon we could be close to ground level," Ryan guessed. "Passage is level."

 

"Plan over there that they haven't taken down," J.B. said, slinging the Uzi over his shoulder and balancing the scattergun on his other shoulder.

 

"Only shows this level." Krysty was trying to make sense out of the pattern of colored rectangles and circles on the schematic map, looking at the fluorescent yellow arrow with the words You Are Here.

 

"There appears to be some residential accommodation with washing-and-sleeping facilities," Doc said. "If they didn't strip it during the evacuation of the place."

 

"Sometimes they leave one small section for the final platoon or whatever was working here on the last cleansing." Ryan looked around. "That's up to the left."

 

"What was this?" The Armorer was stooped over the key, trying to read a small rectangle of white paper that had been stuck over one of the adjacent sections. "Says 'ART.' What does that stand for? Anyone come across it before?"

 

"Armament Retraining?" Krysty offered.

 

"Arizona Rangers' Tercentenary?" J.B. suggested.

 

"American Research and Technology?" Doc guessed.

 

"Must be something military." Ryan considered the acronym. "And it looks like it's something that they only came up with at the last moment. Stuck it on. Some kind of evacuation section." He shook his head. "No. Can't even guess."

 

"We can go look." Jak had holstered his blaster. "Can't we?"

 

"Sure. But that part with bathing facilities sounds like a number-one target for us. To the left and up a couple of levels. Hope there's no more locked sec doors."

 

 

 

RYAN FOUND HIS HOPE was fulfilled.

 

It was as if the big sec barrier had been a last resort, sealing off the lower part of the redoubt from above, locking it away for all time.

 

Before they moved on, J.B. took a stub of pencil from one of his capacious pockets and scrawled the code number of the door onto the wall by the control panel, ready if they needed it when they left the region.

 

Now there were more signs of human life, evidence of a hasty departure.

 

In a controlled and unchanging environment, the detritus of the evacuation had remained untouched. Soda cans lay crumpled in corners with gum wrappers. Wads of tissues were stained black with what could have been clotted blood, or might have been teriyaki sauce. After a hundred years there wasn't much way of knowing.

 

Clothes were piled everywhere, pants and shirts in olive green, some with badges of rank still shining dully on them.

 

"Looks like the end came fast." Ryan stirred a mound of scarlet berets that lay in a corner of one of the corridors.

 

"Wonder if they left any weapons." J.B. muttered to himself.

 

But Mildred heard him. "Damned if you don't have a one-track mind, John. How about finding some worthwhile relics of the past? Books or movies or records. Pile of personal letters. Newspapers. Better than blasters."

 

"Depends on what you want them for. Book isn't much use against a gang of screaming stickies."

 

Doc coughed. "I once believed that the pen was mightier than the sword. Until I attempted to fight a duel with a feathery quill pen against a sturdy piratical cutlass. I must here admit that I was most damnably fortunate to escape with my life from that incident."

 

Everyone laughed, lightening the heavy, melancholy atmosphere of the redoubt.

 

"Let's head for the rest-and-washing section of the redoubt," Ryan said.

 

Now the corridors were more narrow, and a lot of the lights had gone out. A network of fine cracks ran along some of the walls and the ceiling, with deeper crevices here and there, looking like quake damage or possibly ancient nuke tremors.

 

Someone had painted a crude hammer and sickle on one of the locked doors to the right, with the warning Reds Out! You Want The Gain, Then Take The Pain.

 

"There was talk of invasion well before the actual time of skydark," Mildred said. "Rumors of millions of Russians and Chinese pouring across the Bering Strait into Alaska, marching down through San Francisco."

 

J.B. stopped a moment to adjust his weaponry, easing the straps. "Surprises me that we don't come across more boobies in these places. Way the world had war terror and total paranoia about the Russians beating us When they left the redoubts, they must have had a genuine fear that the russkies would come strutting in and take them over." He pushed back his fedora. "Be easy enough to set some triggers."

 

"Guess they were frightened that any sort of booby trap might take out their own men once they came back after the war," Mildred commented.

 

"After the war," Doc said wonderingly. "Apres la guerre. Where are the snows of yesteryear? Gone to graveyards every one. After the war, madam? Yes, verily I believe that was once what decent people hoped for. It would have been a brave land fit for heroes. Fit for muties and the rad sick. After the brief war was over, there was precious little left. Spoils to the victor. A spoiled world to the victor."

 

He had moved ahead as he spoke, his knees creaking softly, down a side corridor that the map had showed would soon lead them to the sleeping-and-washing quarters of the complex. A whole row of lights had gone down, and a stretch of forty or fifty paces was in total darkness.

 

Ryan was staring at the ceiling as the old man vanished into the blackness. "Funny," he said quietly.

 

"Back there the ceiling lights had simply gone out. Here they've been broken. The glass covers smashed. Deliberately broken. Now, why would anyone have done that?"

 

The answer came to him like a bolt of lightning from a clear summer sky.

 

"Doc!" He started after the vanished figure. "Don't move! Don't"

 

But the cry of shock and pain told him that his warning had come too late.