"Blasphemy! You dare to speak so of the ancient wise ones, who built the great cities and travelled in magical machines? You are nothing! Even the monsters dare not set foot here. While others fight wars and destroy each other, we alone will survive, for none dare attack us."
"Monsters from the Death Zone?"
The bald woman gestured in the general direction of the desert. "Yes, the monsters from out there. Fearsome creatures that our warriors have seen in the desert; that have attacked the people who dared to leave the sacred city. They paid the price for their deceit. None may leave this haven created for us by the ancient ones. It's forbidden, and they make sure the law is upheld. We see the creatures pass by, going to ravage the lands of those who don't have our protection."
Sabre considered the startling revelation that had led to this awful situation. There was no radiation inside the Death Zone, but apparently the creatures that came from there could detect it, and had enough brains to avoid it. Those that did not soon perished. The Death Zone spread its evil far and wide, and what came out of it affected every tribe he had encountered in some way. In addition, it was spreading, breeding more and more foulness to pour out and ravage the land. As long as monsters prowled outside the radioactive lands, these people would not change their ways, fearing an influx of Death Zone creatures and attack by unknown enemies. If the monsters stopped coming, they might leave this terrible place and find somewhere better to live.
It was pointless to try to change the priestess' beliefs, however. She had clearly been brought up steeped in the paranoia of the people who had survived the war and crawled out of the bomb shelters to try to rebuild their lives. They must have been convinced they would be attacked again, and had passed this terrible legacy on to their children. Now they worshipped radiation, an invisible god-like force that killed all but them, and the sense of invulnerability it imparted made up for the mutations. The people who had survived the bombs had apparently not known the holocaust had all but wiped out the rest of civilisation, and built a religion around the radioactive protection. Perhaps they would have ventured out, if not for the monsters that had appeared from the desert and effectively trapped them here. He was wasting words on her, but he had to try.
"There are few people left in the world, and those dwell in peace," he told her. "The weapons of the past no longer exist, so you have nothing to fear. At least move the radiation further from the city, so the mutations will stop. It will still repel the monsters, and the people outside won't attack you. Why should they?"
Her mouth twisted. "You lie. Ours is a flourishing society. Our forebears saved domestic animals, and we grow good crops from the seeds they stored. Many would want what we have, and the monsters will cross the radiation if it's not enough to kill them."
"I don't think they would. They're obviously wary of it. Have any come through?"
"No." She hesitated. "But that's because the curse would kill them. If they could cross the line without dying from it, they would."
They could, though, Sabre knew. If he could find his way through with Tassin and avoid the hot spots, so could the monsters. Just the presence of radiation was enough to deter them. "I don't think so. Only hapless wanderers who can't see the radiation will die from it. I came through safely with a girl who's vulnerable to it, because I can see it, like the monsters. No one will invade if you thin it and move it away. The people outside have all the things you have, and no one would want to have crippled children."
The priestess' eyes narrowed. "Not all of us are affected, some are born perfect." She clapped her hands, and a cowled man appeared from the shadows. "Bring Leat!"
The man vanished into the gloom, and the priestess paced around the altar, a slight limp making her gait clumsy. Sabre wondered how many people had suffered radiation sickness needlessly over the years. The survivors had gradually become immune, and bore immune, deformed children. After living for five hundred years in this radiation level, it no longer sickened them, but the mutations would never stop.
The priest returned, leading a beautiful, empty-eyed girl clad in a scanty gold satin top and a short skirt studded with sequins and fake jewels. Sabre wondered how often she was trotted out before the masses to prove that perfect people still existed in this sick city. Jassine stroked the girl's long yellow hair, her strange eyes glowing with pride.
"You see? There's nothing wrong with her."
Sabre studied the girl. "What happens when she goes out in the sun?"
"We don't allow her to mar her perfection by exposing her to such things."
"I'll bet. She's an albino. She lacks melanin, which makes the skin brown and protects against the sun. How clever is she?"
"She is... normal."
Sabre knew the priestess was lying even without the faint red light that flashed deep in his brain as the cyber analysed her breathing and pulse and deduced her duplicity. He stepped in front of the girl. "What's your name, girl?"
Her eyes focussed on him, and she smiled vacantly.
"She's retarded," Sabre said.
"She's a little simple," Jassine retorted.
"She has fewer brains than those donkeys outside, and she's also deaf and half blind. You call that perfect?"
The priestess made an angry gesture, and the priest led the girl away. "Physically, she's perfect. She'll breed perfect babies."
"No she won't. Her children will be as deformed as anyone else's. You should leave this place and breed with normal people, then perhaps one day your people will have normal children."
"Enough of this. Tell me how you came to be immune to the curse, but your woman is not?"
Sabre sighed, folding his arms. It was a long story, and there was nowhere to sit.
Chapter Three
Tassin waited on the cart, growing as impatient as the stamping, fidgeting donkeys. What was happening inside? She chewed on a cooked root she had peeled, to kill time. The five men stood at the corner of the building beside her in a muttering group. None of them glanced in her direction, and she wished Sabre would hurry up. She wanted to leave this dreadful city as soon as possible. The sight of the mutants made her ill with pity and horror.
A furtive movement at the corner of a building further down the street caught her eye. A child peeped around the edge, and, when Tassin looked in her direction, beckoned. Tassin glanced at the men, who still lounged against the wall, oblivious. Easing herself off the cart, she wandered in the child's direction, trying to look nonchalant.
The girl, glancing past her at the guards, signalled her to be quick, and Tassin slipped around the corner. The child took her wrist and pulled her to a nearby hovel, ducking inside. Tassin had to bend double to follow, stumbling over the rubbish on the floor. The girl towed Tassin through the dwelling into a narrow passage, then through another shack whose residents watched them pass incuriously. Tassin stopped, forcing the child to halt.
"Wait! Where are you taking me?" she asked.
"To safety! Hurry!"
"But -" Tassin gasped as the girl yanked her forward again with surprising strength. The child appeared to be about twelve, with a hunched back, short, patchy brown hair, and a twisted leg. Tassin followed her through a warren of shacks, nodding embarrassedly to the people who watched them pass, until at last the girl stopped and turned to her.
"Now we're safe," she stated.
"Safe from whom?"
"The priestess. She'll want to kill you."
Tassin's mouth fell open. "Why?"
The girl shrugged, settling on a pile of sacks. She wore a dirty knee-length dress made from the same coarse home-spun material as everyone else. "Because you're outsiders; they don't tolerate them."
"They?"
"The priests." The imp sighed theatrically, folding her arms. "All those who make it through the curse are killed at the altar."
Tassin leant against the wall, weak-kneed. The low roof forced her to stoop. "Why did you rescue me?"
The urchin's face twisted with a mi
xture envy and admiration. "You're pretty. I never saw someone so pretty before. I wish I looked like you do."
"You poor thing. Where's your mother?"
"Dead."
"Who takes care of you?"
The girl smiled. "No one. I look after myself."
Tassin eased herself onto the floor, rubbing her neck to relieve the crick that had developed in it. "What's your name?"
"Dena."
"I'm Tassin."
Dena leant forward. "Where are you from?"
Tassin related an abbreviated tale of her journey, and what had started it all. When she finished, Dena was rapt.
"I'm glad I rescued you. Will you take me with you when you go back to your land? It sounds so nice."
Tassin smiled. "Of course we will."
A black look came over the girl's face. "Will people stare and laugh at me?"
"No. You're not that different, and there are people who are crippled in my land too."
Dena beamed, and Tassin hoped she was right. The girl's brown eyes were too large, but that made her quite pretty when combined with her pointed chin and gamin features.
A thought struck the Queen. "Will they try to kill Sabre?"
Dena frowned. "Who?"
"The man I came with."
"Of course. They'll make him touch the black glass, and he'll die."
"No, he won't."
Dena looked perplexed. "He's like us?"
"Sort of. He comes from the stars; the curse won't harm him."
"From the stars? Like the others!" Dena's eyes brightened.
Tassin cocked her head. "Others?"
"Yes! My mother told me; it happened long before I was born. A man came. He was beautiful, perfect, like you. He said he was from the stars, and he was taken to the temple, but he never came out; not even his body. The curse wouldn't kill him, so the priests did it instead. Then, months later, another man came; he had a light on his head. He wasn't afraid of the glass, and he also vanished."
Tassin frowned. Another cyber? How had they been able to kill him? Cold fear crept through her. If they had already killed a cyber, they might be able to kill Sabre too. She looked at Dena, who watched her.
"Will you help us? I must free Sabre."
The child shrugged. "What can I do? He's already in the temple, and I can't go in there."
Tassin pondered. Somehow, she had to get into the temple and warn him without being caught. "You're sure they'll kill him?"
"Oh yes. It's the law. No outsiders may leave the city, or they'll give away its location to our enemies. They're also not allowed to live amongst us and flaunt their perfection. Only Leat is perfect, and she's one of us. So they must die."
The Queen chewed her lip. Maybe Sabre would become suspicious and escape without her help. Perhaps she need only wait, and not risk falling into the priests' hands. He would be furious if she got into trouble again. Perhaps this time she should heed his advice. Surely he would smell a trap?
Sabre smelt incense. One of the hooded priests came in and threw it on the brazier while he was talking to the priestess. It had a pleasant aroma, relaxing. He had finished his tale, and now answered Jassine's numerous questions, some of which seemed pointless, but she was far friendlier. Tassin would probably be annoyed at being made to wait for so long, he mused, but soon the priestess would run out of questions and then they could leave. His long monologue had dried his throat, and when a priest came in with two glasses of red wine, he accepted one.
A red warning light flashed deep in his mind, drawing his attention inwards to a scrolling column of data. It informed him that the wine contained an unknown substance, possibly a poison. That the cyber was unable to identify it was strange, but it was not the first time he had encountered an unknown substance on this planet. This one, however, was not the same as what the Oroka had used to subdue him. He raised the glass to his lips, but did not drink the wine.
Jassine sipped hers, smiling. They still stood near the altar, and he wondered if she thought he was lying about his immunity to it, for she seemed to like hanging around the radioactive glass. She asked a few more questions, and he found that he was strangely relaxed, considering the situation. Glancing down at his glass, he discovered it was half empty and cursed his inattention. Something was making him unwary, and he wondered if the incense was also a narcotic.
This would probably be a good time to head for the door, he reflected, yet he could not summon the energy to act on the thought. What was even stranger than his lack of motivation was his inability to perceive any danger in the situation. It all seemed quite acceptable, despite the alarm bells ringing in his mind along with the cyber's flashing lights. It had succeeded in partially analysing the substance, which appeared to be a mild sedative. He answered another question, and noticed that his speech was slurred. Surely he could not be drunk after one glass of wine? It must be potent stuff, maybe five hundred years old, from the pre-war civilisation. A cold spurt of logic intruded, reminding him of the sedative, yet still he could not formulate a reaction to it. He caught his wandering thoughts and concentrated on what the priestess was saying.
"...Old machines and weapons from before the war, stored in a room downstairs, would you like to see it?"
Sabre shrugged. "Sure."
Replacing the glass on the tray, he followed Jassine into the shadows whence the priests had periodically emerged, parting musty curtains to enter an oil lamp-lighted corridor. Priests flitted past like cowled ghosts, their heads bowed and faces shadowed. Once again, he wondered why he did not find the situation alarming. The priestess led him around two corners and down a flight of steps, then opened a steel door and entered a room carrying an oil lamp she had filched from the wall outside. Placing the lamp on a table, she turned and smiled at him.
"What do you think?"
Sabre looked around at what must have once been a computer room. Dusty consoles lined the walls and terminals cluttered the tables, keyboards before them. He wandered over to a bank of old-fashioned radar screens next to what looked like a firing console. This had been the city's nerve centre, he surmised, the control room that housed all the tactical defence equipment. He turned to the priestess, and found himself alone. The oil lamp still flickered on the table, but the door through which they had entered was closed.
Sabre stared at it, puzzled, then went over to it and discovered that the inside handle had been removed. The door was flush with the wall, and the hairline cracks around its perimeter were far too narrow to insert anything into to pry it open. For a minute he pondered it, the sedative fogging his mind, making it impossible to think straight. He nodded.
They were trying to kill him. The thought burst upon him like a gas bubble in a quagmire, leaving an equally bad stench. The altar stone killed all who made it through the cursed lands, but he was immune, so she had locked him in here to starve. He recalled that the open door had been at least ten centimetres thick, designed to survive a nuclear attack. Sabre shook his head to try to clear the numbness that clouded his thinking. He still had the laser, but that was useless against a ten-centimetre-thick steel door.
Even with the two extra power packs, it would probably only melt through about five centimetres of steel in a circle big enough for him to climb through. Turning away, he studied the room. A command centre had to have ventilation, for people spent days or even weeks in here during an attack, controlling the defences.
His eyes came to rest on an air vent in the opposite wall, but it was only about ten centimetres in diameter. So, air vents were out, but there had to be at least one emergency escape route, in case the enemy breached the control centre. He consulted the cyber's information. The room's structural analysis showed six air vents that led to the surface, filled with numerous filters and scrubbers. There were three extractor fans and three blowers, all non-functional. That meant he would not die of starvation, but asphyxiation. He studied the analysis again, and found an escape hatch situated in the far corner, behind a cabinet.
Going over to it, he noticed that the cabinet had already been moved aside, and stopped in shock when he stepped around it. Two skeletons grinned up at him. One was a cyber. The barrinium-plated bones gleamed dull gold in the flickering light, and the dead brow band was black. He contemplated his identical twin's bones. The tough harness and trousers still clung to them, and the wrist laser and cannon hung around a skeletal wrist. The explosives attached to the harness were no use in this room; he would only succeed in injuring himself. Had the cyber released its host before he died? Had he known a brief moment of freedom, or had he lost consciousness before the control unit had failed, and never been able to as much as cry out in despair?
Wrenching his mind from the morbid thoughts, he studied the second skeleton's expensive silver shirt and shiny grey trousers, the sort rich young fops favoured, a useless laser holstered in its belt. Some young fool bent on adventure and exploration, no doubt, ignorant of the fact that primitive people could be dangerous, especially post-holocaust people. Clearly the cyber had been sent to search for him, and had fallen into the same trap. A cyber, however, would not have drunk the drugged wine. They only consumed water, and he would have detected the sedative too.
Cybers were not stupid, so how had the priestess lured him in here? Certainly not with the same ruse she had used on Sabre, for cybers had no curiosity. She must have told him that the man he sought was here. The cyber would have asked about him and described him, and would have wanted to leave as soon as he was told that his quarry was not there. So, she must have told him the truth, brought him here and told him to search the room, then locked him in. The bones were approximately twenty years old, according to the scanners, and Jassine appeared to be about fifty, so she could be responsible.
The dead cyber had possessed the same structural information Sabre did, yet he had failed to escape. Stepping closer, Sabre examined the circular emergency escape hatch set into the floor. The handle that activated the high-tensile steel bars that slotted into the concrete on either side of it was sheared off. Cold fear crept through him. There was no way out. In a few hours the air would grow stale, and his barrinium-plated bones would join the pile.
The Cyber Chronicles 03: The Core Page 4