Ice and Fire

Chapter Two

"Safe," she said.

As was usual in the gateways, the main mat-trans chamber opened into a small anteroom, which was only about twelve feet square and contained no furniture. A row of shelves lined one wall, and a dark green plastic beaker stood alone on the middle shelf. Generally the redoubts that Ryan had seen throughout the wastes of the Deathlands had been surprisingly clean. They were all run by efficient nuke plants and comp-controlled to regulate light, heat, humidity and antistat dust maintenance.

This small room was no exception. Very faintly, far off, felt rather than heard, came the whispering vibration of the main power plant — self-maintaining, ticking away dutifully for a hundred years, still doing the job that its long-dead creators had programmed it to perform.

J.B. followed Krysty, with Ryan eventually bringing up the rear. With six of them in the room it was a little crowded. Jak picked up the beaker and looked inside it. He shook his head and replaced the container on the shelf. "Dry as neutron bones."

From several previous experiences, Ryan knew that beyond the closed door would be the main control room for the gateway. Its condition would probably give them a valuable clue as to the state of the rest of the redoubt. Some had been totally evacuated during the megadeath panic in the last weeks of the year 2000. Some had shown signs of having been left in a tearing hurry in the second week of January, 2001.

"Ready?" Krysty asked.

The heavy door was vanadium steel, with a hydraulic power switch. There was the hissing sound of the motor operating, and the door slid open. The six had traveled together long enough to know how they should operate in a potentially dangerous situation. Krysty and J.B. slithered out quickly, flattening themselves against the walls on either side of the entrance. Jak and Doc, with Lori dragging at their heels, darted toward the nearest cover, which was a line of workbenches. Ryan stayed behind for a moment in the anteroom, ready to provide supporting fire if it proved necessary.

But the room was empty.

The huge double doors that would link it to the remainder of the fortress were solidly closed. Ryan stepped out, easing the door shut behind him. He took his finger off the trigger of the G-12 and let the rifle dangle from its shoulder strap. Everyone else relaxed.

"Lori!"

"What, Ryan?"

The tall, broad-shouldered man strode across to where the girl had draped herself across a padded chair. She glanced up, seeing the flare of anger in his eye, and winced as if Ryan had already struck her across the face.

"Get up, girl," he ordered.

Krysty moved a half step forward to try to intercede.

"Keep out of it, lover," Ryan said, quiet, not even turning.

Lori, eyes glued to his face, rose slowly to her feet. In her heels she came close to his six foot and two inches height. Nervously she lifted a hand to flick away an errant curl from her forehead.

"Don't ever do that again, Lori," Ryan warned.

"Do what?"

"Come out of an unknown door like you were strolling into a high-fash clothes store in a fancy ville."

"I don't know what..." she began, ducking and recoiling as he actually lifted a clenched fist toward her.

Like a wolf checking its leap in midair, Ryan succeeded in holding back the intended blow.

"Fireblast, you triple-stupe bitch! You think this is some kind of game? Bang and you're dead and then we all sit around and share a self-heat? Any team's as good as its weakest member."

"And that's you, Lori," Krysty pointed out.

"Just kept your fucking mouth shutting, Krysty," the younger girl snapped.

"We all have to pull together, my dear," Doc said, trying to placate his teenage mistress.

"You pull yourself, you old..."

Ryan reached out and grabbed Lori by the collar, hefting her so that her toes barely scraped the floor of the control room. "Keep buttoned, girl! You screw up and we all get screwed up. Stay alert when you're supposed to."

"What if I don't?" she sneered, recovering her nerve now she saw he wasn't actually going to hit her.

"If you don't stop playing around with all of our lives? Easy, Lori. We dump you. Just walk away and leave you behind. I figure you might live a couple of days on your own."

"You'd chill me?" She looked around at the faces of the other four, seeking some sign that they disputed what Ryan was saying.

Krysty met her gaze, nodding slightly. J.B. simply stared straight back at the blond teenager. Jak turned his fingers into a gun and pointed at her, drilling her between the eyes. Doc shuffled his feet and looked down at the floor.

Ryan answered her question. "You carry your share, Lori, and nobody chills you. You let us down and then you get treated like anyone outside the group. If that means chilling, then..." The sentence trailed away into the stillness of the room.

The tension stretched, against the background of flickering lights, dancing dials and chattering comp-consoles. This was the nerve center of the whole redoubt, where every aspect of the building was controlled. Once, it had all been set running for the convenience of the human occupants. Now they were gone, but it still kept steadily to its ordained tasks.

"Looks like they left in a hurry," Krysty said, easing the moment.

In his blood-blurred anger at Lori's casual stupidity, Ryan had barely noticed what the control room looked like. Now he took a few moments to glance around.

If he hadn't known better, he might have guessed that the workers had only rushed out of the big room minutes ago, rather than nearly a hundred years back. There were a number of Styrofoam cups, and plastic containers that had once held sandwiches, long rotted and gone. Pens and pads lay scattered on the benches, scraps of crumpled paper on the floor. On an impulse Ryan stopped and picked one up from the tiles near his feet, unfolding it carefully.

"Like the Dead Sea Scrolls," Doc said. "Open with caution."

The paper was part of a comp-print, covered on one side with an incomprehensible mass of jumbled figures. He turned it over. There, on the other side, was faded handwriting — a question from one person, with a reply in different colored ink.

My room after last food?

Piss in a hot spot!

Ryan grinned. "Nothing changes, does it?" He crumpled the note to brittle shards and let them filter through his fingers like grains of sand.

They spent a quarter of an hour wandering around the control center. Ryan joined Doc by the main display panels that ran all of the gateway's mat-trans functions. The old man was shaking his head at the coded numbers and letters on the liquid-crystal console.

"Make any sense of it, Doc?"

"No. The men who worked on these were a small and highly specialized team, some of the best brains on all of the Totality Concept. I had heard the odd whisper, of course, around the canteens and bars. But nothing that... If only we could learn how to drive these darned buggies! Least we could get where we wanted and not where they shoot us. All along the disassembly line and back again."

"Place like this — abandoned in a hurry — could there be a manual or something?"

Doc sucked at his peculiarly perfect teeth. "Doubt it, my dear fellow. Software and all instructs would go first of all. Instant self-destruct. Press the button on the can, and it's incinerated and pulverized in fifteen seconds. It's the hardware you can't get rid of so easily."

"Must have been someplace they held copies of all the vital documents and stuff?"

The old man patted him on the arm. "Course there was, Mr. Cawdor. Course. Nearly all missile complexes, military bases, fortresses... all of them. But there was one small problem. As soon..."

Ryan interrupted him. "I get it, Doc. Primary, triple-red targets for the nuking? Missile complexes, military bases and... Yeah, I get it. Mebbe one day we'll find something, tucked away at the back of a file, forgotten. Mebbe."

Doc Tanner shook his head. "We had a saying, Ryan. It'll happen when pigs fly. I haven't seen any airborne bacon for a very, very long time."

There was a printed card tacked to the wall by the exit door from the control room. The letters had peeled, and one or two had fallen off completely. But it was still legible: Warning. On Egress No B12 Sec-Cleared Documentation to Be Removed Under Pain of Instant Court-Martial. This Means YOU.

Doc nodded. "Brings it back. A sign like that surely brings it back. Once they saw I was a kind of threat to them, they watched me closer than a hawk watches a rabbit. By then all international security had become so compromised and infiltrated that I guess us and the Russkies knew all along what we were all doing and what they were doing. Secrets!" He gave a short, cynical laugh. "Not anymore, there weren't."

Jak coughed. "Sorry interrupt. Hungry. Gotta be food around redoubt left in big hurry. Let's go."

"Sure," Ryan agreed. "Everyone ready? Lori? You ready?"

Her bad mood had blown away like a summer squall, and she favored him with her broadest smile. "Yeah, Ryan."

From their previous visits to the concealed fortresses, they all knew that they now faced one of the moments of maximum danger. The entrance that linked the control room and the gateway to the rest of the redoubt was sufficiently strong to withstand almost any power used against it. It wasn't uncommon for local muties to have broken into other sections of the redoubts, but they lacked the weaponry to force the double doors.

"Three-five-two code?" J.B. said.

"Guess so."

It bore out Doc's comments about how ridiculous a lot of the sec regs had become. In every redoubt they'd entered, the "code" to get in and out of the control section had been numerical. Three-five-two to open it and two-five-three to close it.

Ryan wondered why they didn't just have a pair of buttons marked Open and Close.

The Armorer punched out the triple numerals, standing to one side, his Uzi at the ready, braced against his hip. The other five companions were ranged behind him, ready to pour full-metal jacketed death into anything waiting for them. Nothing happened at all.

"Dark night!" J.B. exclaimed in a voice of the mildest annoyance.

"Try it again," Krysty suggested.

"Could try reversing it," Ryan said.

"If they've played tricks, it'll take a long time to go through all the combinations of three numbers," Doc said, sighing. "The number of possible permutations is... about... approximately... Well, it's a lot."

J.B. pressed the same three numerals again. "Two's a mite sticky. Ah, that's got it."

Behind the immensely thick walls, huge gears began their ponderous engagement, moving for the first time in all the long, still years. Grudgingly edging the double doors apart, the powerful hydraulics hissed at the weight.

Once the gap was wide enough, J.B. slipped through, eyes searching in both directions down the brightly lit corridor beyond. The rest waited, nerves stretched tightly.

"Clear," the Armorer called. "It's a sealed section. Ends in a blank wall one way, no doors. Other way it curves a little to the right. Then there's a big sec door, a ceiling-to-floor job. No side entrances."

Jak led the others out. The entrance to the control section was now wide open. This was always a difficult moment, particularly as the controls weren't functioning perfectly. If they left the doors open, then there was a serious risk of other trespassers finding their way in and destroying the gateway, stranding them wherever they were. But to close them meant a similar danger — they might permanently malfunction and keep them locked out for good.

"You got two bad options then pick the least bad," had been the advice of the Trader.

Ryan punched in two and five and three. Unhesitatingly the double doors closed tightly shut.

It was a typical redoubt corridor, around twenty feet wide, with a slightly arched roof nearly fifteen feet high at its crown. Strip lighting was set at the line where wall and ceiling merged. Ryan spotted the tiny sec cameras dotted along the roof, their probing lenses turning in an eternal quest. No doubt they were already carrying the pictures of the first intruders for a century to some far-off security center. And nobody would be there to take notice of the invasion of the redoubt.

"Least there's no problem which way to go," J.B. said, pushing his glasses farther up his narrow nose.

The steel shutters had been carefully dropped and locked during the evacuation of the redoubt. The main control was a simple, counterweighted green lever, which had to be lifted to raise the doors above their heads.

It was an unusual setup. The gateway section of the redoubt seemed to be stuck out on an isolated wing of its own, with no other passages opening off the main corridor.

They passed under a half dozen of the metal doors before they began to notice some changes.

"Seismic damage," Doc observed, pointing with his cane at several narrow stress fractures in the ceiling.

Everyone stopped and gazed up, seeing rippled furrows in the stressed concrete. The floor under their feet was no longer perfectly regular. There were chunks of loose grit and larger pieces of stone, some as big as a child's thumb. They also noticed that not all of the lights were functioning. About one sol-strip in five was darkened.

"Nukes?" Jak asked.

"I would hazard a guess that we are still too deep for any primary effects of missiles," Doc replied. "But there is no doubt that the effects of heavy nuclear activity can affect the earth for many miles, exposing frailties in its crust and causing shock waves to run far and deep."

Beyond the next barrier the roof was much worse and parts of the walls had split and fallen. The floor was corrugated in tiny waves. Now three in five of the lights were out.

"Don't much care for the way this is looking, lover," Krysty warned. "I've got a feeling that there's something in this place, 'part from us."

"Something? Or somebody?"

She shook her head, closing her eyes and trying to focus the mutie "sensing" powers she'd inherited from her mother.

"No. Weird... not humanoid, and not mutie, either. Some sort of animal." She shook her head. "No. Not really animal. Just... something."

They reached another of the barriers. Jak was leading and he glanced at Ryan, hand resting on the green control lever. Ryan nodded to the albino boy, keeping his own finger on the trigger of his G-12. If Krysty could feel something wrong, then it likely meant something waswrong.

"Mechanism rough," Jak said. "Sticking bad." He didn't need to tell the others. They could all hear the grating sound from behind the crumbling walls of the passage.

When it reached about two and a half feet in the air, the door stopped moving, with a final, inexorable metallic jolt.

For a moment, in the stillness, Ryan thought that he could hear something moving on the far side, a faint rustling noise, like a breeze moving crumpled pieces of dry paper.

"A ghastly smell," Doc observed, "like old vinegar. It's most unpleasant."

Jak stooped and peeked under the rim of the jammed door. "Can't see much. Nearly all lights gone. Think there's a fork in passage ahead."

Though bright lights affected the white-haired boy's sight, he saw better in semidarkness than any of the others.

"Must be where this spur joins on the main redoubt," J.B. guessed.

"We might as well go take a look," Ryan said. "I'm getting to feel as hungry as Jak. The living and sleeping quarters are where we'll find any eats that are still around."

"Careful," Krysty whispered, licking her lips nervously. "There's... Just take care through that door."

"Go first?" Jak asked.

"Sure. We're right behind you. Watch what you're doing."

The boy flashed a fearless grin and ducked under and out of sight, closely followed by the rest of the group. Jak was the first to find the cockroaches — or rather the cockroaches found him.