by James Axler
Carefully, all of them got to their feet. Grant said hoarsely, "This unit has clear walls."
"It's not a redoubt, not exactly," Brigid told him.
Lakesh had once said that many of the armaglass walls were color-coded to differentiate all the Totality Concept-related redoubts. Inasmuch as use of the gateways was restricted to a select few personnel, it was fairly easy for them to memorize which color designated what redoubt.
They peered through the wall of the jump chamber. The only light was provided by the red and green blinking telltales on the console. The control room was covered by a carpet of dust. They saw faint imprints of feet in the dust of broken plaster that had fallen from the cracked ceiling. Splits high in the walls showed where the vanadium-alloy shielding had buckled.
"A little less tidy than I remember," Brigid murmured.
Kane chuckled uneasily. He still had difficulty sorting out what had happened when they attempted the temporal dilation on the final day of the twentieth century. They had successfully traversed the time stream, true enough, but they arrived in an alternate past, a probability branch almost but not quite identical to their own.
He experienced a momentary disorientation as he tried to reconcile the fact that this was, yet was not, the same subterranean installation they had visited before.
Extending his left hand, Grant made a sweep with the motion detector. The faintly glowing LCD on its face registered no movement within the radius of its sensor beams.
Taking the point as always, Kane lifted up the door handle and stepped out carefully and quietly into the control room. His companions followed, Domi doublefisting her Combat Master. Brigid swiftly moved toward the master console. Removing the tool kit from her pocket, she spread it open and selected a tiny, almost delicate screwdriver.
"You're sure you know how to do this?" Kane asked.
"I went over it step by step with Lakesh after the last time," she retorted a bit peevishly. "Even if I make a mistake, what's the worst that could happen?"
"You could short out the mat-trans," Grant responded gruffly. "And strand us here."
She shook her head in annoyance. "This is a dedicated system. It has nothing to do with the jump cycles. Domi, come over here and give me some light."
Obligingly the albino girl stepped over beside her, turning on her small Nighthawk. Grant and Kane moved to the six-foot-tall open doorway to peer into the dark passageway beyond. They activated the image enhancers on their helmets. Even through their night-vision visors, they saw nothing but shadows and dust.
They waited quietly while Brigid kneeled beneath the console, removing the protective plate and making all the necessary disconnections. After ten minutes, she held an ovular disk in her hand, about a quarter of an inch thick.
"Done," she announced, slipping it into her pocket.
"Let's get the rest of this mission over," Grant said in a tense whisper. "Triple red."
They entered the corridor, the amber-colored beams from Brigid's and Domi's microlights illuminating their path. The hallway stretched for a hundred feet then reached a junction, where four passages radiated off like the spokes of a wheel, just as Kane and Brigid remembered. It was a very unsettling sensation, to retrace steps through a place they knew they had never actually visited.
At the mouth of each side-branching corridor, red numbers, one through four, were just visible through the patina of dust. The set of tracks drifted off to the opening on their left. Kane led them to the one to their far right. The passage was short and opened into a reception room furnished with armchairs, a couch, a low table and a coffee machine. A television set supported by a metal framework was positioned in a corner just below the ceiling. All of the items showed their age, speckled with rust and covered with a film of dust.
Kane pointed to a double set of doors. "The elevator. Think it still works?"
Brigid stepped forward. "Only one way to find out."
The elevator doors were opened by a proximity sensor, but it didn't respond when she waved her hand in front of the grit-encrusted control plate. She cleaned it of its accumulation of dust and tried again. The doors slid apart with a grinding creak. The car was large, with verdegris-coated brass handrails, and easily accommodated all four of them.
"Whoever arrived before us may still be wandering around down here," Grant observed. "They didn't find the lift."
As soon as the doors slid shut, the car ascended with ominous groans and shudders. The noise didn't decrease as they rose higher, but the ascent lasted only a handful of seconds. When they squealed to a lurching stop, the doors opened on a large square room. The floor was thickly layered with concrete dust. The walls were black-speckled marble and showed ugly crisscrossing cracks.
A long, horseshoe-shaped console occupied the facing wall, but it was half-buried by fallen stone and metal conduits. An ornate, gilt-faced clock lay on the floor, its glass face shattered, the hands frozen at 12:32. On the right side of the room, a hallway stretched away, lined on both sides with wooden doors. On their left they saw a glass-and-chrome door that led to a murky semidarkness. Though the heavy glass bore cracks, it was still intact.
Kane crept out of the lift, followed by Grant, who swept the motion detector back and forth. Domi and Brigid followed them cautiously. The dust was much thicker here, and they moved slowly to avoid stirring it up any more than necessary. Kane paced over to the door and peered out into what was once an underground parking garage. Now it was a graveyard for scores of rusting vehicles, almost all of them squashed beneath tons of tumbled rubble. Huge chunks of brick and massive slabs of concrete, bristling with shorn-off reinforcing rods, filled the area within and beyond his range of vision. A cold and bleak daylight filtered in from an opening somewhere.
Putting his shoulder against the door, Kane gave it a shove. The electronically controlled solenoids had long ago been burned out and it opened, though not easily. The bottom of the metal frame dragged loudly against small particles of rock.
Stagnant water lay in algae-scummed pools on the floor, and the cool, dank air tickled their nostrils. Kane started walking toward the source of the light. He saw no sign of habitation, recent or otherwise, and Grant's periodic motion detector sweeps caught nothing, either.
The four people picked a path over the heaps of debris on their way to the light, speaking little. The longer they walked, the more repulsive became the odors; an effluvia of urine, rotting meat and mildew hung over the garage like a shroud. The piles of rubbish rustled when small animals darted into them at their approach.
As they strode beneath a roof overhang, a faint click of stone against stone reached their ears. Domi whirled in the direction they had come, leading with her blaster. Her delicate nostrils flared.
All of them stopped, turning to look where she had her Combat Master pointed. They were more unnerved by her stance, like that of a snow leopardess preparing to pounce.
"Just a loose rock," Grant said quietly.
Domi whispered fiercely, "Not just sound — smell."
She had reverted to the terse, broken mode of speech of the outlander, as she always did when under stress.
Kane and Brigid sniffed the air experimentally. Grant didn't bother, inasmuch as his sense of smell was seriously impaired due to having his nose broken three times in the past.
At first, neither Brigid nor Kane smelled anything more noisome than the blended varieties of stench they had already detected. Then a faint miasma inserted itself into Kane's nostrils, and he realized it was an odor he had encountered twice before in his life.
The first time had been a number of years before, when he and Grant stumbled on a snake pit in a hellzone. The second time was far more recent, when the mutagenically altered Lord Strongbow broke a sweat. The musty reek was the same — the cold, repulsive taint of reptiles.
At the same time the memory registered, the scalie dropped from the ceiling.
16
Out of the four of them, only Domi had ever
seen a scalie before. Most of the obviously mutated human breeds had been on the road to extinction for a long time. Some, like the swampies, managed to survive, due in part to their isolation. Others, like the once fearsome stickies, had been the target of a concerted campaign of genocide on the part of the villes. Since they tended to congregate in clans and form settlements, they weren't hard to find and exterminate. Scalies, on the other hand, reportedly haunted the shadows, often in the shunned ruins of predark cities, more legend than reality.
As his Sin Eater sprang into his hand, Kane caught only a brief impression of a small yet very broad and squat figure dressed in a collection of rags. The hairless, blunt-featured head was coated in thick, overlapping scales, as were the talon-tipped hands it swept toward Domi. They gripped a foot-long sharpened shard of metal.
She squeezed the trigger of the Combat Master before the scalie had fully regained its balance. The.45-caliber round caught the creature dead center, smashing through the sternum and bursting both lungs. The scalie flailed backward, blood spewing in a liquid banner from its chest, clawlike toenails scrabbling loudly on the concrete floor.
It fell with a wet, slapping sound. The scalie's pendulous lips writhed back over yellow pointed teeth, and a geyser of blood fountained up over them. Its dark-rimmed eyes glittered with hate before it gasped and died.
The booming echoes of the blaster's report rolled throughout the garage. Domi's face twisted into a porcelain mask of revulsion, but she stepped closer to the scalie, drawing a bead on its head.
Grant slapped down the barrel of her blaster, saying, "I think you got him."
Domi swung her head up and around, ruby eyes bright with rage, but she didn't aim at the mutie again. "Reminds me of Guana," she muttered in a guttural voice.
Grant remembered the faint greenish tint of Guana Teague's skin and its odd, faintly scaled pattern. A lot of people had suspected that Guana had a scalie in the family woodpile — hence his nickname. The loathing Domi felt for her former master still ran deep, even after all this time, and Grant didn't blame her for it.
Brigid moved closer to the scalie, inspecting it visually, noting its deep-set eyes and the brachycephalic contours of its skull. She didn't bother suppressing a shiver of repulsion or speculate on what bizarre combination of warped DNA could have created such a mixture of reptile and human.
"Let's keep moving," Kane said. "If we have to face more of those things, I'd rather do it in the open."
Taking the point again, he led them to wide concrete steps stretching upward. Painted on the wall beside them, faded almost to illegibility, were the words Exit To Street Level. The feeble shafts of sunlight angled down the throat of the stairwell.
He easily recalled the last time he climbed these stairs, how he, Brigid and Salvo emerged into a courtyard between the Twin Towers and stared in stunned silence at the majesty of prenuke New York City.
He climbed out into the same courtyard and once more stood dumbfounded. Not, however, at the vista of the thriving metropolis, but rather at its ruins, the hecatomb of a vanished civilization. The fields of devastation stretched almost out of sight. The few structures still recognizable as buildings rose at the skyline, then collapsed with ragged abruptness.
The courtyard itself was buried beneath tons of rubble that had fallen from the ramparts of the two skyscrapers. Tilting his head back, Kane saw that both buildings looked as if they had been broken by titanic blows combining shock and fire. The sky was a canopy of pewter-colored clouds, and what little sunlight pierced them had an unearthly, diffused quality to it.
All four people stood for a moment, silently appraising the panorama of desolation. Consulting her rad counter, Brigid said in a hushed voice, "Green. Whatever kind of explosives caused this destruction had an exceptionally low rad yield. Maybe missiles with short-term 'squeeze' yields."
"Which way?" Kane asked.
She pointed eastward. "That way."
Clambering over massive chunks of concrete, scattered shards of glass and twisted girders of steel, they reached the Avenue of the Americas and began walking. Brigid cryptically warned them to stay away from the black maws of subway-tunnel entrances and open manholes. No one questioned her, assuming she drew on information about Manhattan gleaned from the Wyeth Codex.
As they passed through the shadows cast by the shattered monoliths, they heard, far in the distance, a rhythmic thumping, as of a metal drum being pounded repeatedly by a mallet. The sound was too regular to be the product of the wind.
Kane's pointman senses rang an alert, and he cast a grim glance toward Grant. The man's lips tightened beneath his mustache. "I think we've been formally announced."
Gaping rents in the crumbling masonry and the dark windows leered down at them, like monstrously distorted, mocking faces. They strode down the broad avenue, turning onto Columbus. On some of the city blocks, the breadth of rubble was so widespread, they could see no discernible difference between the street and the ruins. The roadbed itself had a ripple pattern to it, a characteristic result of earthquakes triggered by explosive shock waves.
As they reached a corner obscured by a great pile of debris and broken stone, they heard a raucous chorus of high-pitched shrieks and squawks. A swarm of small black shapes held aloft by furiously beating wings darted over a pair of bodies sprawled on the ground. They dived and dipped and banked at such a blurring speed, Kane couldn't get a good look at them.
"Scream-wings," Domi declared quietly.
All of them had heard of scream-wings, but like scalies, the bat-winged predators had been relegated to the status of legend. Barely six inches long with a two-foot wingspan, the creatures were equipped with serrated razor teeth, curving claws and whiplike tails. Rare even in the wild old days before the Program of Unification, scream-wings traveled in flocks.
Several of them circled overhead, clutching bloody chunks of flesh in their talons, chewing on them as their leathery wings beat the air.
Domi looked around, then approached the edge of the debris and pulled a rusty length of reinforcing steel from beneath a heap of bricks. As the others watched, mystified, she slowly approached the bodies, swishing the metal rod through the air over her head, producing a deep hum.
Almost at once, the scream-wings stopped screeching and in a black, flapping cloud, flew up and away from the bodies. Although they didn't go far, the flock maintained a safe distance overhead, circling clockwise.
Still whipping the rod around and around, Domi explained, "They're deaf, but they feel vibrations in the air. They think a big bird is down here."
Keeping uneasy eyes on the fluttering, banking scream-wings, Brigid, Grant and Kane strode to the bodies. Though it was partially eaten, they recognized one of the corpses as a scalie. A bullet had punched a small hole in its forehead and a much larger one through the back of its head. A slop of blood and brain matter oozed across the street.
The other body was human enough, the face still unmutilated. A thick metal spike protruded from his chest. His clothing consisted of a short dark jacket, baggy, coarsely woven trousers and boots of animal hide. A heavy iron cudgel, shaped like an oversize, old-fashioned door key hung from a thong about his waist.
Despite the black soot smeared over his round face, Brigid noted the epicanthic fold of the glazed eyes. "An Asian. Maybe a Mongol," she said.
Domi, still wielding the length of steel in a circle over her head, said impatiently, "Let's go. My arm is getting tired."
They moved on down the street. After a few yards, Domi dropped the rod to the ground. Almost immediately, the clot of scream-wings swarmed down and covered the corpses again.
"They managed to find another way out of the installation," Grant commented. "We'll be contending with one blaster at least. Fairly small caliber, I'd judge."
"For some reason," replied Kane, "that doesn't make me feel a whole lot better."
They passed between silent shells of buildings and then into an expanse of tangled overgrowth. High g
rass and rank weeds sprouted between paving stones that had once been sidewalks. From all sides, foliage crept in, making a snarl of thorns and vines.
"This used to be Central Park," Brigid panted, disengaging her coat from a briar bush.
They struggled through the dense thicket until they reached a deeply furrowed avenue. On the other side was a series of huge pillars, thrusting their jagged, sheared-off pinnacles into the sky. The sprawling complex of buildings was overgrown with vines and creepers, masking the facade and the windows. The edifice was staggering in size, and one whole wing had tumbled into a featureless mass of moss-covered stone.
Mammoth blocks of granite lay in the overgrowth. The statue of a man on horseback, his features obliterated by the passage of centuries and acid rain, rose up from a skein of thorny brush.
Carved on a pediment above a huge arched entranceway, the inscription Knowledge was barely visible. It was bracketed by two other words, but the letters had long ago been erased by the hand of time. Behind a wavering line of crumbling walls, they saw a vast, stained dome.
Brigid pointed to it. "The Hayden Planetarium."
Kane crossed the avenue, moving toward a wide expanse of cracked, grass-grown stone slabs leading up to the archway, flanked by crooked columns. He paused at the dark door, waiting for the others to join him. Grant made a motion-sensor sweep, which registered nothing, and they stepped in.
The foyer led directly into a long, broad hall that ran away until its nether end grew indistinct in the distance. Skylights were set in the lofty, vaulted ceiling, allowing weak sunlight to flow through the broken glass and wire mesh. Dead leaves covered the tiled floor in an ankle-deep layer. Here and there, the marble walls showed blackened soot streaks from ancient cooking fires. Moldering rubbish was heaped in the corners.
Grant and Kane had seen wrack and ruin before in their missions as Magistrates, but nothing like the chaos within the walls of the museum. As they strode down the hall, they beheld the fantastic at every turn. On one side was the heaped clutter of a pharaoh's treasure. On another, through shattered glass, they glimpsed the stuffed remains of animals not seen since before the nukecaust.