Ice and Fire

Chapter Six

"This is it."

The six had walked briskly through the sweeping corridors of the redoubt. One of the surprises had been that they still hadn't the least idea where in all of Deathlands they were.

The light blue locator strips had brought them to the northern limits of the fortress, which was one of the largest that Ryan had ever encountered. They saw no further signs of life and no more evidence of any seismic damage to the structure.

The nearer they came to the auxiliary exits at the northern flank, the less they saw of any hasty withdrawal. There were few rooms opening off, and all of them had been stripped bare and left utterly deserted.

"Anything else you can tell us about these cryo places, Doc?" Ryan asked, walking alongside the old scientist.

"When I was first trawled, none of us would have dreamed it would become possible to put a human being into a sort of suspended state of animation and then hope to revitalize them. It would have been like the books of Jules Verne."

Ryan had actually heard the name before. "But what about when you were around Project Cerberus in the late nineties?"

"No." A vigorous shake of the head. "You must be aware, my friend, that science had become ever more specialized. I saw and heard... perhaps more than they wished."

"How'd they do it?" J.B. asked, joining them at the front of the party.

"The freezing?"

"Yeah. Ice or what?"

Doc sniffed. "Not ice. Some gas, I believe. Let us see how well my memory can recall..." For a hundred paces or more he didn't speak, forehead furrowed with the effort of trying to remember. "Yes," he said finally. "It depends on the temperature at which the gas liquifies. Carbon dioxide was discarded because it doesn't liquify, just freezes solid at minus seventy-eight Celsius. No good. Nitrous oxide, a scant ten degrees more chill, not cold enough. Then I think liquid nitrogen."

"Colder?" Ryan asked.

"Much. My memory toys with a figure of minus one hundred and ninety-six degrees."

The Armorer whistled. "Dark night, Doc! That's some kind of cold."

"Indeed it is. I have seen experiments. A flower becomes as solid, and as fragile, as spun crystal. Place an apple into liquid nitrogen for a few moments and then take it out and strike it with a hammer. It will shatter into a thousand splinters. But I cannot imagine what human flesh becomes."

They walked on in silence for several minutes, each of them locked into imagining that situation. If an apple became like stone, then how would flesh react to being frozen?

Krysty tugged at Ryan's sleeve, breaking into his thoughts. "Figure we'll find us some freezies, lover?"

"Not likely. Not impossible. If they evacuated the redoubt in a hurry, they might not have been able to take any with 'em. But from what Doc says about it, there might not have been any in the first place. It was all kind of experimental."

"Soon know," she said, pointing to the sign on the wall ahead: Cryo. Medical Clearance 10 or B Equivalent Only Permitted.

"TVs watching us." Jak pointed up at the diminutive cameras that ranged ceaselessly backward and forward.

"Nobody watching them," Ryan said, pushing at the control lever for the single sec door that blocked off the passageway.

"Hear something," Krysty warned, stopping and putting her head to one side, listening intently.

"What?"

"Quiet, lover."

Ryan strained his hearing, thinking he might have caught the faint sound — or imagined that he'd heard — or... "Can't hear anything unusual, Krysty."

"Hissing. Like steam. Far off." Her body relaxed, the tension easing. "Yeah. Thought at first it could have been an armored door opening. That kind of a sound. But it's not. Too steady. Constant pitch to it."

A little farther, around a wide bend, they came across a different kind of a door.

"Airlock," Doc observed. "Guess that makes sense if it's some sort of medical base."

The notice beside the armaglass-topped door ran to about fifty lines, covering all manner of rules and regulations about who could go through and when and with whose permission, as well as details about what kind of protective clothing had to be worn.

"You sure this isn't full of some kind of germy gas or nervers, Doc?" J.B. asked, looking strangely reluctant to proceed any farther.

"No. I imagine it will be quite the reverse, my dear Mr. Dix. Free of all manner of germs or infection. The clothing will be to stop us bringing sickness in, not to prevent us catching it from anyone or anything in there."

Ryan laid his hand on the door and began to push it open. The voice was deafening, making everyone jump.

"Cryogenics command. Unauthorized personnel withdraw immediately! Security will take finality action!"

J.B. unslung his new blaster and leveled it at a bank of linked speakers set in the center of the arched ceiling.

"Unauthorized personnel withdraw immed..."

The integral silencer reduced the noise of the gun's explosion to a polite cough, like a nervous curate clearing his throat in front of his maiden aunt.

"That's telling big-mouth ratboy," Jak sniggered.

"Move it out," Ryan ordered.

Some years earlier, in wind-washed Wisconsin, Ryan had led a hunting party through the ruins of a deserted ville, and they'd come across the tumbled stones of what had once been a large hospital. One wing had been freakishly protected from the worst of the nuke blasting. He still remembered the cold wind blowing along the corridors and the look and feel of the place.

Now, on the fringes of the deep redoubt, there was a similar feeling.

Ryan almost felt that he could even catch the long-gone scent of disinfectant lingering in the dull, reprocessed air.

"Looks like they cleared up rather carefully here," Doc observed. "Look in here. Everything copybook neat and trim. Like they were hoping one day to come back and pick up where they left off."

It was true. Word processors stood at the ready, under plastic covers; phones waited for the next call; filing cabinets were closed and orderly; an operating room waited for a new patient, rustless scalpels and probes lying in glittering ranks with other nameless tools of the surgeon.

"Gives me creepies." Lori shuddered. "Reminds me of the redoubt I came from. Cold and... and watching us."

Ryan knew what the girl meant. It was oddly sinister the way that everything in this section was so perfect. It was almost as if they'd slipped through into a time warp. At any moment a sec man or a doctor or a nurse would walk along the antiseptic corridor and challenge them.

They reached another air-locked door.

Krysty was in the lead, but she faltered and stopped, putting her hand to her forehead.

"What is it?" Ryan asked, moving quickly to her side.

"Don't know, lover, but... Gaia! Something strange is... living and partly living. Dead and yet... not dead."

"Freezies," Doc said. "They must be what Krysty can 'see' in there."

"Could it?.."

She shook her head, the mass of crimson hair dancing across her shoulders like filaments spun from fire. "How the?.. I don't know, lover. I just tell you that there's something up ahead of us that's not like anything I ever sensed before."

"Could go back," J.B. suggested, the tone of his voice making it obvious that he wanted to keep going on.

"No. Krysty says that what's through there isn't alive, so it can't hurt us."

"But said not dead, as well," Jak pointed out, lips peeling back off his sharp teeth in a feral grin of anticipation.

"So, let's move on," Ryan said.

There were two air locks close together, each with its own set of instructions about making sure no clothing was trapped in closing doors and not attempting to leave until pressure equalizer had fully returned to zero.

Beyond the second set was an ordinary pair of double swing-doors. Now the humming and hissing sounds that they'd heard from way back had become much louder, as though they were closing in on the heart of a sleeping giant.

Ryan took the lead, pushing the doors open and stepping cautiously through, into a huge control room, much like the one that ran the gateway.

"This is it."

The other five filed in after him, stopping to gaze around at the amazing complex of comp-panels with lights, buttons and switches. The humming was louder.

"Look." Krysty pointed across at the long side wall of clear glass. Behind it, angled on a raised platform, were about twenty silvered capsules, looking like sci-fi coffins.

"Freezies," Doc breathed. "So, the stories were true. They exist, and there they are. By the three Kennedys, they're freezies!"