Time Nomads

by James Axler

  But any demolition was a shifting equation with any number of variables.

  In this case they didn't have unlimited power at their disposal. And if they used too much, then it could likely have wrecked the delicate machinery of the gateway—as well as bringing down the rest of the roof on top of them. It was like trying to use a sledgehammer with all of the delicacy of a watchmaker.

  J.B. worked fast and carefully, setting the charge halfway up one side of the door where it should do most damage. He glanced at Ryan once the work was done. "Ready?"

  "Yeah."

  The small red button was depressed, and a tiny light began to flash once every second. Three hundred flashes to detonation, give or take a few clicks. The little chron-detonators were notoriously unreliable, and it was always better to give yourself a margin of safety.

  "Move," J.B. said.

  The others had got farther away, out of sight in the maze of passages. J.B. was counting out loud as he and Ryan sprinted away from the explosives. They passed under a section of roof that had already partly fallen, and Ryan had a moment to wonder if the shock would bring it all down.

  "Two hundred and sixty and one and two and three… This'll do."

  Both men dropped, keeping to the center of the corridor where the impact was likely to be less. Walls set up pockets of violent turbulence. Ryan closed his eye and tried to relax. Hands pressed tightly over his ears, mouth slightly open, he continued counting under his breath.

  He felt himself lifted momentarily by the blast. Dust swirled all around him and brought back a fragment of memory of the chem-storm at the ghost ranch by Abbyqu. He strained to hear if there had been any major falls, but the cascading echoes bouncing off the ceiling and walls distorted sounds.

  The moment the shock wave had passed, he stood and brushed dust off his clothes. The force had been greater than he'd expected, probably because of the confined space. J.B. also stood, wiping away a thin worm of blood from below his nose.

  "Quite a bang," he said.

  "Yeah. Let's go see if it did the trick. The others'll follow us."

  Some rocks and concrete had fallen from the weak part of the roof. Ryan looked up at it before moving underneath. He could see twisted bars of rusted iron and some raw, reddish-orange rock. Dust was still dropping and the two men didn't linger.

  "Rad-blast it!" J.B. rarely showed his emotions, but he couldn't conceal his anger and frustration as they confronted the sec-door into the gateway.

  The air carried the bitter flavor of plas-ex, and a haze of smoke drifted aimlessly in the corridor—not enough to hide the fact that the attempt to blow the entrance had failed.

  Part of the wall had caved in, and the door now hung crookedly. Where it had slipped at the top, was a narrow gap, perhaps four inches at its widest, showing the light from the interior control room. But the arma-door was now more firmly jammed then it had been before, one corner dropping into a metal trough beneath it. Even if they could have blown the lock, opening it was now an impossibility.

  "Around?" Ryan asked, hearing the sound of feet behind them as the other four arrived through the swirling smoke.

  "The wall, you mean? Take a lot more explosives, and it would do some serious damage in the room behind the door. No." J.B. shook his head.

  Krysty, hand over her mouth against the fumes, was the first to join them, taking in the situation in a quick, raking glance. "Didn't work," she said. "Nearly, but not nearly enough."

  Jak was second. He slapped his hand against the inflexible steel. "Fucking door!"

  Mildred arrived third. She stood for some moments, trying to weigh up what had happened, and saw the glimmer of light at the top angle. "Can't we…" she began. But she read the look on Ryan's face. "No. No, I guess it looks like we can't."

  Doc joined the others, his lion-headed cane rapping smartly on the stone floor. "Upon my soul, but the stench is extraordinarily noxious. Far worse than dynamite and black powder used to be. Do I assume from the gloomy expressions on your faces that our little experiment has not been a success? Yes. I believe that I do. Ah, well, back to the drawing board."

  The noise from the explosion and the various sections of falling masonry was finally dying down. The flat stillness of the abandoned redoubt came creeping slowly back around them.

  "Least it doesn't look like we set off any mega-death alarms," Ryan said.

  "Put out a lot of the lights, though." J.B. pointed along the passage. Three-quarters of the ceiling lamps had gone out, and others were flickering.

  "That light inside the control room's started to flicker as well," Krysty observed, "pulsing in a rhythm."

  Everyone looked up at the ribbon of gold. With a tremor of unease Ryan saw that Krysty was right. And the light was also tinged with red. He turned to Jak.

  "Here." Ryan cupped his hands and stood against the door. "Climb up and see what you can see."

  The boy stepped up, balancing himself with the ease of a born acrobat. He hung on to the top of the door and heaved himself up, feet scrabbling on the smooth metal for a grip.

  "Some kind red flashing light," he reported.

  Ryan was hesitant to abandon the gateway. Not every redoubt had a mat-trans facility. If they managed to claw their way out of this fortress, it could be months before they managed to get themselves back into the network of gateways—maybe never.

  "Got to be some way in," he said. "I hate the idea of just walking away from it."

  Jak vaulted lightly down. "Don't like red light. Angry."

  J.B. looked worriedly at Ryan. "Jak's right. I don't like it."

  "Should be an audible warning though," Ryan commented.

  "We broke big red wire in ceiling."

  "What? What's that, Jak?"

  "Broke wire. Looks like speakers wire."

  "More lights going out," Krysty cautioned.

  J.B. and Ryan looked at each other. If the teenager was correct, then the broken wire could lead to a system of loudspeakers for their section of the redoubt.

  "Jak, can you join the ends?"

  "Sure. Help up. Easy."

  Ryan held him, and they all waited in silence. Suddenly there was a piercing screech of crackling feedback. Jak jumped and nearly fell.

  A booming woman's voice erupted all around them.

  "One hundred and fourteen minutes to destruct. Proceed immediately to evacuate. Without override, the complex will destruct in one hundred and fourteen minutes."

  Chapter Forty

  THERE WASN'T a moment's hesitation from any of them.

  "I am the bringer of death," Doc panted, hobbling along with surprising speed, his knee joints cracking like a fusillade of flintlock muskets.

  "Save your breath," Ryan snarled. "J.B.! You and Jak go fast as you can and start digging. We'll get there as quick as we can."

  With less than two hours before the fortress disintegrated, there was no point in the fastest waiting for the slowest.

  Parts of the fortress's speaker system had decayed over the past hundred years, but other parts still functioned. So the run through the redoubt was a dash at the edge of panic, sprinting through corridors of silence, then encountering the recorded voice once more.

  "One hundred and four minutes remain to termination. Move quickly without panic to the nearest exit point. One hundred and three minutes."

  Under pressure, Ryan was only too aware of the danger of someone taking a wrong turn and vanishing into the maze of corridors, so he kept his speed down to that of Doc Tanner's, trying to hustle the old man along without actually driving him beyond his limits.

  "I am doing my best, my dear friend. Why do you and the ladies not press on at your own speed and leave me to make my best time?"

  "Disengage your mouth, Doc, and keep the feet moving. We get out together."

  "Or we vanish into the ether, together," Doc replied, but he moved along a little faster.

  "Ninety-one minutes. Self-destruct procedure is progressing without override. Use approve
d comp-code to check termination sequence. Ninety minutes. Ninety minutes remain… main… main… main…"

  "Shit," Mildred gasped. "Just what we need. A malfunctioning computer."

  JAK WAS OUT of sight, but J.B. was lying on top of the earth fall, reaching into the gap near the ceiling, dragging back the stone and dirt that the boy was excavating. He hardly glanced around as the rest of the companions arrived, throwing the news over his shoulder.

  "Doesn't look so good. Block of concrete fallen directly ahead. Jak says he can feel air, and thinks he can make out light."

  The albino boy found seeing difficult in bright daylight, but in the gloom his eyes were at least as good as Krysty's.

  "Can he shift it?" Ryan asked, leaning over and battling to steady his breathing, trying to ignore the reproachful voice warning them that only eighty-three minutes remained.

  "No way. But he's trying to tunnel under it to the right. Says there's a gap."

  "A gap for him and a gap for me aren't necessarily the same thing," Doc panted, his face drawn and tired.

  "Gaia! I wish we could find some way of turning off that woman's endless voice," Krysty complained.

  "It'll turn itself off in around eighty minutes from now," Ryan said.

  "SIXTY MINUTES. The time is now one hour and still counting. This is not a drill. This is not a practice evacuation. The self-destruct clock is running, and now shows fifty-nine minutes."

  The gentle feminine voice could easily have been giving out a recipe for making a blueberry sponge cake, not conveying the slightest hint that a cataclysmic explosion that would totally destroy the redoubt was now less than an hour away.

  Exhausted, fingers bleeding, Jak Lauren had reluctantly agreed to be relieved at the rock face and allowed Ryan to take his place. The others took turns clawing back the piles of loose stones and red dirt that were being pushed from the gap above the fall.

  It was desperate work.

  Ryan tried to lock his mind onto the compressed earth ahead of him, forcing away the knowledge that there could be anything up to a mile of solid rock poised above his head. He half expected a slide, a tiny, tiny movement that would smear him into instant eternity. Doc had waved him into the cramped tunnel with the encouraging words that if anything happened he probably wouldn't feel any pain.

  The long panga was useful to jab out gobbets of dirt, but there was little space to use it effectively. Every handful had to be pushed behind so that someone else could drag it, in turn, into the open tunnel.

  The working area was about eighteen inches high, and about four feet across at its widest. The long block of crumbling concrete that J.B. had mentioned was almost a finite obstacle to their escape route. But Jak had been right. It could just be circumvented. Twice Ryan was certain that he felt it move against his legs and winced, anticipating its forty-ton weight coming across his knees.

  But it held.

  "Fifty-one minutes until termination. Make sure that you have switched off all electrical equipment and removed all classified material. If you are not sure where to go, check with your manual, page two hundred sixty-eight, paragraph two. Please make your way to the appropriate departure point. You have precisely fifty minutes."

  "Fuck off!" Jak yelled, shaking his fist at the nearest speaker. He stooped to pick up a chunk of concrete as big as a baseball, winding up ready to throw it.

  "No," Krysty said, pausing from shoveling dirt with her hands.

  "Want shut fuck up!" he shouted.

  "Better to let it run. Keep track of the time without having to keep stopping to check a chron. Leave it be, Jak."

  Reluctantly the boy dropped the hunk of jagged stone.

  Ryan crawled out and made way for J.B. It was oppressively cramped, and everyone was touching the far edge of exhaustion.

  "Thirty-six minutes. Evacuation is proceeding smoothly, and most of the personnel have been removed to places of safety. Will anyone still remaining in any part of the complex go immediately, and I repeat that word, immediately, to the nearest exit. Thirty-six minutes remain to autodestruct."

  Ryan was back in the hole, digging away with the blunted point of his panga. The air seemed fresher. He rested a moment, then jabbed once more at the packed earth. Some slid loose and he blinked. The tunnel was dark and he could now see…

  "Light. I can see light!"

  Time was becoming desperately short.

  At thirty minutes a siren began its banshee howl. It started as a whining, low note, then rose up the scale to a crescendo of noise, sometimes drowning out the monotone of the woman's recorded voice.

  The pinprick of light had become the size of a hand, then the size of a child's skull. But there was bedrock on either side, and it was becoming impossibly tight to work.

  Ryan was close to giving up. The gap wasn't big enough for any of them, even Jak, to wriggle through. The redoubt would be vapourized in less than half an hour and they would die, trapped in its entrails. The consolation that death would be swift was very small. Even if they got out, the sand was running through the hourglass with such speed that they wouldn't have time to get a safe distance away.

  "Let me take over, Ryan," J.B. called close behind him.

  "No. If I can just break this angle of…" His voice vanished into a grunt of strained effort. He pushed his feet against the sides of the escape passage, bracing himself and putting his hands flat against the corner of the chipped rock. Slowly, using every fiber of his fading strength, Ryan straightened his arms. Nothing happened and then… a tremor of movement. Another tremor.

  The rock broke away, leaving a wider gap. It was no more than a foot high, and barely two feet wide, but it was enough.

  It had to be.

  "Through!" he panted. "Come on."

  Behind him he could hear the muffled voice of the self-destruct announcement.

  "Twenty-one minutes remain. Without comp-code override the complex will be subject to controlled termination in twenty minutes." The screech of the siren drowned it out.

  Ryan wriggled forward.

  Chapter Forty-One

  THE FRESH AIR was almost like a triple shot of top-grade jolt. It surged into the lungs and raced through the body, rushing into the brain.

  When Ryan tried to stand up he became dizzy, overwhelmed by the air and by the brightness of the golden sun.

  He was vaguely aware of a crimson land, stretching below, but his entire preoccupation was with helping the others to escape from the towering sarcophagus of the doomed redoubt.

  Doc was out first, panting and wheezing, dragging his cane behind him, the bulky Le Mat pistol snagging on the raw rock on the left. As soon as he was clear the glasses of J.B. glinted in the opening. He pushed through Ryan's Heckler & Koch G-12, followed by his own MP-7-SD-8 automatic rifle. He took Ryan's forearm and slipped easily out into the fresh air.

  Then Mildred was through, her face beaded in sweat and covered in gray and orange dust. She collapsed on hands and knees, fighting for breath.

  There was a brief delay, then Krysty's flaming hair appeared in the darkness. She wriggled her way out, snakelike, cursing as her ankle got trapped against some loose rock.

  "Jak's right behind me."

  "How long?" Ryan asked.

  "Eighteen," she replied.

  Like some mythical cave dweller, Jak came through last, his face whiter than ever, his ruby eyes glowing like coals in the sockets of scoured bone.

  Ryan's mind was racing.

  In eighteen minutes, on level ground, a fit man could probably run something like two and a half miles. Maybe manage three. In eighteen minutes.

  There had been a moment to look around at where they'd emerged from the naked rock. Just to one side was the obvious remains of an emergency exit from the redoubt, but the door had been twisted out of shape by some massive earth movement, probably at the time of the mega-nuking. And the corridor leading to it had been distorted, leaving only the slender gap that they'd managed to find and exploit.

&nb
sp; Now they stood on a narrow ledge, less than six feet in width. Ryan had already checked the drop, which was nearly seven hundred feet, onto spires of crumbled sandstone. The cliff above them rose two hundred feet, nearly vertical. In any case, since the redoubt was going to explode in a big way, it seemed a bit pointless to think about climbing up. It would be like sitting on the nose of a missile and striking it with a large hammer.

  Despite their tiredness there wasn't a second to waste.

  "Come on," Ryan said, leading the way along the ledge, moving to the right, where he'd seen a goat path that zigzagged across the face of the mountain.

  J.B. was keeping an eye on his chron. "Sixteen minutes, Ryan," he said quietly.

  "Keep the count."

  In his heart, Ryan knew that their chances weren't that good. There was no way they were going to be able to get far enough away from the redoubt in the short time left to them.

  The Trader had used to say that it didn't matter if the odds against survival were a million to one. You still tried for that one chance.

  Frequently glancing over his shoulder to check that the others were keeping up with him, Ryan led the companions on a breath-stopping descent. Slipping, sliding and tumbling, they ignored the cuts and bruises and the dust that stung their eyes. They kept moving.

  "Seven minutes," J.B. announced.

  Very soon Ryan knew they'd have to stop and try to find some cover, however minimal. If the redoubt self-destructed while they were out on the exposed hillside, then they'd all be pulped.

  Several hundred yards below them were the ruins of some buildings. But it was obvious that they'd been destroyed long years ago. They were useless for shelter and safety.

  "What's that?" Krysty called, pausing a moment and pointing to something just beyond the farthest building. It looked like a huge saucer of white metal, streaked with orange rust.