by Greg Cox
Morrison would have to wait, while she took the time to laboriously carve an exit-size hole out of the dense steel door. “Stay back!” she warned the hostages, hoping they could hear her through the newly created airholes; if nothing else, she was counting on the glow of disintegrating metal to alert the bunker’s unwilling inhabitants to back away from her impromptu demolition project. “I’ll have you out in a minute or two!”
The invisible beam cut through the six-inch metal like Lorena Bobbit’s cutlery sliced through her husband’s, er, servo. Wonder what the hot tabloid story is now? Roberta thought, looking forward to a little mindless TV-watching after several months of compulsory media deprivation. Within minutes, she finished the makeshift exit. “Watch out below!” she hollered as a roughly six foot by ten foot rectangle of iron toppled over onto the floor of the bunker.
Thankfully, no one appeared to have been squashed, although it was hard to tell as a panicky stream of escaping militia members came flooding out of the breached shelter. Roberta wisely jumped to one side to avoid the pell-mell exodus, although she was relieved to see that the woman with the baby was among those making the disorderly flight to safety. She wondered briefly how many, if any, true believers would feel obliged to stay behind in the bunker, awaiting further crazed instructions from their general.
They’ll be waiting a long time, if I have anything to say about it, Roberta vowed. With the AEV’s mass “suicide” put on hold permanently, dealing with Morrison was next on her agenda. As his nearly fatal stunt in the bunker proved, the superhuman militia leader was far too dangerous to remain at large. Now that his private army was in disarray, Roberta fully intended to take the general into custody until she and Seven could arrange to turn him over to the proper authorities. With luck, some of his disillusioned followers could be persuaded to testify against him. Stockpiling weapons is one thing, she thought, ticking off the charges that could be brought against Morrison. Trying to suffocate dozens of people is something else indeed.
Not to mention whatever evidence Seven might be able to amass regarding all that nerve gas unpleasantness . . .!
Doberpits barked and howled indignantly as scores of former militia members abandoned Fort Cochise. Roberta heard the roar of multiple automotive engines as every truck, Jeep, bus, and recreational vehicle in the camp’s motor pool gunned into life and headed for the front gate, unmanned and unguarded for the first time since Roberta’s arrival back at the middle of August. She glanced up at the looming watchtowers and saw they were unoccupied as well, their searchlights dark, their gun placements deserted. She guessed that the once-bustling compound would be a ghost town again before dawn.
Spurred on by their close brush with asphyxiation, none of the fleeing refugees accosted or even noticed Roberta as she determinedly made her way toward the old adobe post office that served as Morrison’s headquarters. Was he still sitting behind his desk, she wondered, and what was he thinking now that his lunatic ambition to re-create Masada had gone down the tubes? He had to know that his plans had gone awry somehow; there was no way he could escape the chaotic sounds of his army defecting en masse. Even now, Roberta could hear raised voices arguing as people fought over the last few provisions and vehicles, making her gladder than ever that Seven had turned all of Fort Cochise into a gunpowder-free zone. Things are just a little too intense right now, she observed, noting that many of the vamoosing militia types were still hanging onto their various pistols and rifles anyway. An enforced cease-fire and cooling-off period was definitely a good idea.
Making a mental note to report Morrison’s key lieutenants to the FBI later on, Roberta climbed the steps to the closed front door of the old post office, past an antique hitching post. No light escaped around the edges of the oak door, making her question whether the general was still at home. She worried that Morrison might have already fled the compound, or, worse, disappeared into the maze of mining shafts underneath the ghost town. No way could she find him down there.
“Here’s hoping he stayed put,” she whispered. The door was locked, but her servo hummed it open easily. Not quite as soft-footed as Isis had always been, she tiptoed down an empty hallway toward Morrison’s private office at the rear of the building She used the servo as a penlight, letting a narrow beam of white light guide her way through the darkened post office. A sturdy metal door had replaced the wooden timbers Morrison had smashed through after Roberta locked him out during her previous stint of breaking and entering. She placed her ear against the door, but heard only silence beyond; it was looking more and more as if the hawk-eyed general had already flown the coop.
Trying the knob, she found the office door unlocked. Holding her breath, she shoved it open and peered inside. No moonlight penetrated the windowless chamber, forcing Roberta to rely on the light from her servo. The incandescent beam found an empty chair behind Morrison’s neatly ordered desk, then slid down to reveal that his Navajo rug had been shoved aside, exposing the open trapdoor beneath. “Damn,” Roberta muttered.
Just for a moment, she wished that she hadn’t wasted precious time freeing the fruitcakes trapped in the bunker. But what else was she supposed to do? Leave all those terrified people (and their children!) locked underground indefinitely? She had done the right thing, she knew, even if it meant that she and Seven would have to track down Morrison all over again.
Maybe the lonely office held some clue as to the general’s future whereabouts? Holding the servo before her, she stepped warily into the unlit room, with an eye toward raiding Morrison’s files and hard drive. Assuming he hasn’t shredded or trashed them all, she thought.
A karate chop slashed down against her arm, shattering her wrist and sending her servo flying out of her fingers. A shadowy figure darted out from where it had been hiding, up against the wall to the left of the doorway, and grabbed onto the collar of Roberta’s windbreaker, yanking her roughly to one side.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t hear you sneaking up on me?” Morrison snarled into her ear. His hot breath carried the spearminty scent of his chewing gum. “My ears are almost as good as my eyes, which means they hear a helluva lot better than any average grunt’s.”
Wincing in pain, clutching her fractured wrist, Roberta could not put up a fight as Morrison dragged her farther into the room, then shoved her brutally into the wooden chair in front of his desk. Her eyes desperately sought out her servo, rolling across the floor a couple of yards away, but Morrison snatched it up before she could even think of retrieving it. “I’ll hang on to this little doohickey,” he told her sneeringly. “You stay right where you are.”
I don’t have much in the way of options, she thought, biting down on her lip to keep from whimpering. Unarmed and injured, with stomachchurning waves of agony coursing up her arm, she doubted she could outrun a genetically engineered superman with enhanced night vision. Shock and nausea battered against her ability to concentrate, making it hard even to keep an eye on Morrison as he sat down behind his desk, clasping his hands atop the desktop like a high school principal preparing to lecture a misbehaving student.
Although keeping the overhead lights dark, he clicked on a bendable halogen reading lamp atop his desk. His mirrored sunglasses were tucked neatly into the breast pocket of his short-sleeved khaki shirt, so that he gazed at Roberta with the enlarged red eyes of a bird of prey.
“Freewoman Landers,” he addressed her, “if that’s your real name. So you’re our resident snake-in-the-grass. I wish I’d caught on earlier, before you had a chance to sabotage all of our noble plans and aspirations.” He leaned toward her, like a raptor stalking fresh game. “Who are you working for? Who sent you here? The FBI? FEMA? The Illuminati?”
Don’t be ridiculous, Roberta thought. She tried to grin feistily, but ended up grimacing instead. Seven and I shut down the Illuminati years ago.
Morrison held up her captured servo to the glow from the lamp. Its silver casing shimmered in the light. “Impressive ordnance,” he remarked
, rolling the slender instrument between his meaty fingers, while his jaws masticated an unseen wad of gum. Stubble peppered his jowls, making him a good deal more disheveled than usual. “My security cameras caught you using it before.”
He tapped the keyboard of his computer, rousing it from powersave mode. The monitor lit up, and he rotated it around so that Roberta could glimpse the screen, where she saw a videotaped image of herself utilizing the servo to slice through the bunker door like an acetylene torch. Roberta thought she looked faintly ridiculous in her nylon jacket and khaki pajamas.
“At one time I would have loved to know who your supplier is,” Morrison said, winking at her with his nictitating membranes. “But that was before you spoiled everything, casting this nation’s last hope for freedom into the abyss.”
“That’s one way of looking at it, I guess,” Roberta said, spitting out the words between razor-sharp pulses of pain. She was hurting too much to try to talk sense to this lunatic. “A crazy, what-planet-are you on kind of way.”
Morrison glowered at her, unhappy at having his delusions punctured. “Crazy?” he asked fiercely, an edge of genuine madness in his voice. Standing up suddenly behind his desk, knocking his chair onto its back, he reached for the Glock holstered at his hip and, with preternatural speed, drew his weapon faster than any legendary gunfighter who ever rode the West. “I’ll show you crazy!”
He aimed the gun at Roberta and pulled the trigger repeatedly. Nothing happened, of course, Seven’s transporter having emptied all of Morrison’s firearms of gunpowder, too. “You see!” the general exclaimed, hurling the useless Glock away in disgust. “Who else but the Beast could have devised such a diabolical means to strip free men of the constitutional right to bear arms?
His irate query put Roberta at something of a loss; explaining the extraterrestrial origins of the transporter was not likely to calm Morrison down. Best just to keep my mouth shut, she reasoned, especially since I’m in no shape for a debate.
Turned out it was a rhetorical question anyway. “I’ll tell you what kind of planet I’m on, Ms. Landers. It’s a planet that, thanks to you, will soon fall under the absolute dominion of a soulless, all-powerful, world government controlled by the likes of Khan Noonien Singh.” Avian eyes the size of silver dollars regarded Roberta mercilessly. “I don’t know about you, little lady, but that’s not something that I’m looking forward to.”
For once, Roberta was forced to agree.
Morrison fiddled with the servo, finding the adjustable collar ring. “So how do you fire this gizmo?” he asked, applying his augmented intellect to the task of mastering the alien instrument’s controls. He fired experimentally at the screen of his computer, switching settings randomly until an invisible beam burned right through the monitor, causing a gout of white-hot sparks to gush from the screen. “Whoa there!” the general laughed joylessly. “Now I’m getting the hang of it.”
I always knew that thing was too darn user-friendly, Roberta thought, cradling her splintered arm. She figured Morrison would be using her for target practice next.
He looked like he was thinking about it, but then he looked upward with a start. “Wait!” he exclaimed, his hawk’s eyes searching the stuccoed ceiling. “Do you hear that?”
Roberta didn’t hear anything, not even the howl of a coyote. “Hear what?” she asked.
“Don’t lie to me! There it is again!” He craned his head back, staring at the ceiling fearfully. His jaw dropped open, revealing a mass of green chewing gum stuck to the inside of his cheek. “It’s the copters!” he declared with paranoid certainty. “The black helicopters! They’re coming for me at last!”
“There are no helicopters,” Roberta whispered, chilled to the bone by the sight of pure, naked insanity. A teardrop welled at the corner of her eye, and it struck her, with heartbreaking force, that twenty years ago little Randy Morrison had been one of the precocious superkids she’d rescued from Chrysalis. “There’s nothing there.”
Morrison was beyond hearing her. “Hear that? They’re getting closer.” His head rotated back and forth, from right to left to right again, like an agitated bird. “But I won’t be captured, not by them! There’ll be no show trial, no kangaroo court, no goddamn propaganda victory for the New World Order!”
He turned the tip of the servo toward his own head.
“No!” Roberta blurted. “Wait! Don’t do it!”
Hawklike eyes stared past her, gazing into limbo. “Tell the world I never surrendered.”
The servo hummed, and one more ghost joined the phantoms haunting the deserted mining camp. Roberta looked away, feeling sick to her stomach. He was such a bright kid, I’ll bet, she thought forlornly, remembering an underground day-care center full of budding supergeniuses.
How in the world did we end up here?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
PALACE OF THE GREAT KHAN
CHANDIGARH
MARCH 17, 1995
KHAN STOOD UPON THE RAMPARTS OF HIS FORTRESS, LOOKING OUT ON the city below. He did not like what he saw. Designed by a Swiss architect merely forty years ago, Chandigarh enjoyed a deserved reputation as India’s most modern and well-organized city. Wide, leafy boulevards met at tidy right angles, according to a sensible grid pattern that neatly divided the city into discrete zones and sectors. Open lawns and parks provided welcome oases of green amidst steel-and-concrete buildings of modernist design. In contrast to, say, the sprawling disorder of Old Delhi, Chandigarh conveyed an impression of cleanliness and control, which was one of the reasons Khan had chosen the city as his capital.
Now, however, parts of Chandigarh, namely the sector dominated by Khan’s fortress, were beginning to resemble an armed camp. Roadblocks and checkpoints, manned by Khan’s own soldiers, obstructed the spacious avenues leading to the palace. As a precaution against car bombs, the nearest streets had been closed to unauthorized auto traffic. Snipers prowled the parapets atop the fortress’ high sandstone walls, alert to the possibility of attack. Thirty meters below, in the once-public plaza outside the main gate, a team of army engineers were digging a trench along the base of the fortress, then rigging the moat with mines and motion detectors.
This is not the brave new world I envisioned, Khan brooded morosely. The ugly fortifications threw a melancholy pall over his soul, darkening his spirit despite the crisp blue sky overhead. He had hoped to create an orderly utopia in which even the lowliest of his subjects could walk the streets in safety at any hour of the day or night; instead, he found himself barricaded inside his own palace grounds, increasingly cut off from the humanity he had desired to rule.
“Your Excellency,” Joaquin entreated, uncomfortable in such an exposed setting, “you should come down from here. It is not safe.”
Khan leaned out over the battlements, resting his palms against the sculpted ocher crenellations. Summer was still a month away, and the stonework felt cool beneath his touch. In the distance, he saw a handful of families touring the city’s famed Rock Gardens; he envied their simple, carefree lives. “Is that what it has come to, my old friend? I am no longer safe upon the walls of my own citadel?”
The stalwart bodyguard could not lie to him. “There have been death threats, Your Excellency. And plots against your life, both from here and abroad.” He divided his uneasy surveillance between the city streets and the skies, as if anticipating an assassin’s bullet or an aerial assault, respectively.
The worst part was, Khan knew Joaquin’s fears were not unfounded. The more Khan attempted to ensure the security of his domain, by showing zero tolerance for any subversive elements at work, be they religious fanatics, malcontented students, or disgruntled academics, the more bitter the opposition to his reign seemed to become. Fools! he railed against them in the sacrosanct privacy of his mind. Ungrateful troglodytes! Did his unappreciative subjects not realize that their seditious rumblings, their irksome demonstrations and work stoppages, but played into the hands of his enemies? He did not relish playing the
heavy-handed tyrant, but in these perilous times he could ill afford to show any sign of weakness.
“Please, Your Excellency,” Joaquin pleaded, stepping hopefully toward the watchtower wherein the nearest convenient stairwell was located. Fully recovered from the injuries he had sustained at Ajorra, the bodyguard no longer showed any evidence of a limp. “Let us return to the safety of your private apartments. Or one of the enclosed gardens, if you prefer.”
Khan shook his head. He was not yet ready to abandon the relative freedom of the open ramparts. He spent too much of his life locked away these days, strategizing against his enemies, obsessively devising ruthless moves and countermoves to protect his embattled regime from a world that seemed increasingly arrayed against him. Hunyadi was dead, along with Morrison and Amin, but he still had Gary Seven to contend with, not to mention the increasingly restive attentions of the planet’s so-called “legitimate” superpowers. There is too much stubborn opposition in the world, he lamented sourly, crossing me at every turn.
“Lord Khan!” an unhappy voice accosted him. Khan turned away from his view of the city to behold, to his surprise and dismay, the Lady Ament striding toward him across the rampart. A glossy sable cloak, drawn shut against the chill March air, concealed her exquisite figure, but nothing hid the marked displeasure upon her refined and elegant features. “I must speak with you at once.”
Keen to the hostile tone in her voice, Joaquin instinctively stepped between Khan and the approaching female. Khan appreciated the impulse, but he was not a man to shy away from a confrontation, no matter with whom. Whatever had incurred the superwoman’s ire, he was inclined to deal with the matter without delay.