by James Axler
Suddenly conscious that he'd been weeping, the old man dabbed at his eyes. "Good of you to say so, my friend. But ask not for whom the teller bowls? He bowls for me. I believe that my memory has played some scurvy trick with me. That sounds to be a little awry. No matter. I should go and join my sweet bird with her youth. Good night, sweet friends. May choirs of angels sing you to your rests."
Doc made an unsteady bow and tottered off toward the room he was sharing with Lori, the other three watching him go.
It was Krysty who broke the long, thoughtful silence.
"Bastards who trawled him from his family set up a damned big debt. I just hope they died slow, cold and alone."
J.B. stood up. "Odds are they died hot and fast, Krysty."
"And alone?"
He nodded. "We all do."
With a nod of the head he left Ryan and Krysty, closing the door quietly behind him. The music had ended, and there was only the faint, muted hiss from the speakers.
"You and me, lover," she said.
"Best there is," he replied, leaning back and sighing.
"Handful of jack for your thoughts?"
"Been a great evening. One of the best. That peach drink. Good food. Doc's classic music. Just the six of us. Times we've seen. Places we've been."
"Getting old, lover. A sure sign when you start getting... What's the word I want? Nostalgic. That's it. You can't look back at yesterday, Ryan. Tomorrow's the one really counts."
"Guess you're right. How d'you feel about going to bed?"
* * *
Krysty found some packets of deconstituted egg and cooked them in powdered milk, adding some shreds of freeze-dried bacon for something that approached an old-fashioned breakfast. They could wash it down with reheated coffee.
"Stove's blinking on and off," she said. "Looks like some of the auxiliary power sources are giving up. Mebbe even the main power. Be bad news for the gateway if it's that."
Ryan brushed his fingers through his hair. "Yeah. Could be real bad. After we've eaten we'll get everyone together and talk about it. Most times we've ended up in a redoubt we take a look outside. Could be for once we should think about making another jump out of this place."
Krysty sighed. "Another jump? Need it like a rad shot in the head. Come to think of it, lover, that's just what another jump would feel like."
Jak and J.B. appeared ten minutes later, followed by Doc. He apologized for Lori's lateness, explaining with blushing cheeks that it was her time of the month and she had stomach cramps.
The discussion didn't take very long. Everyone was interested in going to find the freezing section of the redoubt. There was a general agreement that it was only fairly minor bits of electrical equipment that were failing, most of them coming off unimportant sections of the main power grid for the huge fortress complex.
While the others were eating, finally joined by a pale-faced Lori, Ryan decided that he'd go and freshen himself with another shower.
The immaculate white tiles and the mirrored chrome taps and controls heightened his anticipation of the steaming water.
Fortunately Ryan turned on the taps before he stripped and stood under the needle-jets.
There was a distant, sinister gurgling, amplified by the metal pipes. Ryan quickly stepped back, hand dropping to the blaster on his hip. The noise became louder, an obscene bubbling sound, surging toward the shower room.
"Fireblast!" Ryan moved away, hissing between his teeth at the appalling stench.
It was a black liquid, streaked with vivid green, like rotting molasses. Oozing from the gleaming metal nozzles, it crept down the walls, staining them with its glossy filth. It flowed over the main control taps before Ryan could get anywhere near them, making it impossible for him to stop the outpouring.
He heard the door open, and Jak called out to him. "You here, Ryan? We... what fuck's stink? You okay, Ryan?"
"Stay where you are, Jak. Yeah. Looks like it's end of the line time for hot showers. Power unit just pulled the plug on us."
Despite the new evidence of the redoubt beginning to run down, everyone agreed that they should at least take a look at the cryo section.
Following the light blue pattern on the fortress map, they headed north, through areas of the huge redoubt that had been more carefully evacuated and cleansed. Only once did they find any region that proved interesting.
"Map said there was a small arms and plas-ex module out this way," J.B. said. "Be good to find it and see if mebbe there's anything left that we could use."
"Always use a few spare rounds for the G-12," Ryan agreed.
A torn poster on a side wall proclaimed that Volvos Are Best — Forget the Rest.
"This way." Jak pointed to a side passage. A neat yellow sign warned all B8 or lower cleared personnel not to proceed farther without signed sec permit. The armored door was half-open. Spray-painted on it were the two words Raiders Rule.
"Gridiron team," Doc explained as they stooped beneath it.
Lights shone brightly ahead of them. Most illumination units in redoubts operated on proximity-trembler systems. Sensors picked up the vibrations of anyone moving along the corridors and would switch on the lights for a couple of sections ahead. So, no matter how quick you were, you could never catch a functioning length of corridor in the dark. To try was as futile as a man spinning around in front of a mirror, hoping to snatch a glimpse of the back of his own head.
The corridor opened without warning into a massive room, at least as large as an aircraft hangar, divided by partitions and pallets like some vast warehouse.
"Black dust!" J.B. exclaimed. The use of this rare saying told his companions how truly amazed J.B. was.
Most of the shelves were full of cartons, tins and boxes of all manner of ammunition and explosives. Spilling out over the floor, the munitions gave every evidence of something near to panic, of people scrabbling to survive despite the odds.
"Let's go, guys," the Armorer said, his sallow face alight with eagerness, eyes sparkling behind the lenses of his glasses. None of the others, except for Ryan, had ever seen him so animated. Ryan had once seen J.B. more excited, but it had been in another time and at another place.
"Could be boobies?" Jak suggested, stopping J.B. cold in his tracks.
"Could be, kid. Sorry. Didn't mean to call you that. Could be, Jak. Good point. But we've never seen nothing in any other redoubt. No, I figure we're safe. Just take a little care, is all."
Mostly they ran into booby traps out in mutie country. Then a lot of care had to be taken about what was picked up or moved. Four of the young blaster team from War Wag Three had gone to buy the farm together, around five years ago, Ryan figured. They'd stumbled into an encampment of stickies, out toward the Darks. One of them had seen a tiny crippled baby, bawling its eyes out and had stooped to pick it up and comfort it. He'd snagged a thin fish line linked to a simple detonator and a pound of plas-ex. It'd taken over an hour to collect the shredded flesh and bone of the four adults and the infant out of the surrounding trees and bushes.
Krysty had plenty of ammo for her own 9 mm Heckler & Koch P7A-13. She wandered around the huge storeroom, hands in her pockets, feeling the cold smoothness of the jet-black stone Apache tear. She watched as Ryan, Jak and J.B. darted around like children in a candy store. Not that Krysty had ever seen a candy store, except in old vids and mags.
Ryan was delighted to find an unopened wooden box of rounds for his caseless rifle. Ammo was becoming increasingly scarce throughout the Deathlands, particularly for rare guns like the G-12. It was a fifty-shot automatic, able to fire on single shot, triple or continuous burst. The rounds had no metal jacket, being molded into the case of the actual propellant. They were 4.7 mm by 21 mm. He eagerly loaded one of the pockets of his coat with the unusual rounds. The SIG-Sauer pistol fired standard 9 mill ammo, which was still being made, in unreliable bastardized forms, in any ville with a decent machining plant.
Krysty strolled up and down the aisles, carefu
lly avoiding stumbling over the hundreds upon hundreds of loose rounds scattered everywhere. There were neatly typed cards thumbtacked to the shelves, telling her what was in the cartons. And what had once been there.
Lists of death-dealing names, some of which she recognized and some she didn't, the endless fugue of the long-gone megacull.
Lori took a handful of .22 rounds for her pearl-handled PPK, and Jak stuffed another couple of dozen .357 slugs for his Magnum cannon into his pockets.
Not surprisingly, there was nothing there that Doc could use in his nineteenth-century Le Mat handgun, with its central .63 caliber scattergun barrel and the nine-chamber revolver barrel, firing straight .36s. So the blaster remained in the hand-tooled Mexican holster rig.
Overlooked on a back shelf, behind some tumbled boxes of Mark Seven ball, J.B. discovered a dark green metal container, stamped in an endless string of white letters and numerals. He hauled it down, letting it crash to the floor, then levered the spring clips open along one side.
"Hey! Come look! Anyone want a real good new blaster? With lotsa rounds?"
Everyone gathered by the crouched figure of the Armorer, peering over his shoulder. He was pulling sheets of brown waxed and oiled paper off a dull black gun.
"Heckler & Koch full— and semi-auto," Ryan said. "Don't know the model. Never saw one like that. Integral silencer."
"And laser-optic sight," J.B. said with a note of reverential awe in his voice. "It's one of the MP-7 SD-8s. Only made a few, according to what I've seen. Supposed to be a good gun for anything up to thirty yards."
"Going to change that old Uzi of yours, J.B.?" Ryan asked, not really expecting Dix to agree with the suggestion.
"Why not?"
"Hey, I was only..."
J.B. picked up the blaster and cradled it, feeling for the button to activate the laser sight, aiming it across the room. Everyone watched the tiny ruby dot of light. "Yeah. Like the feel."
"You fire it from the shoulder?" Krysty was puzzled by the strange double sight on top of the short muzzle.
"No. Not at all. Close quarters you press the trigger and spray. Aimed shots you can use the laser spot. Then hold it braced against the hip and let go. No need to aim from the shoulder. Not with a baby like this."
Without a sign of regret the Armorer laid down the battered mini-Uzi that he'd carried for so long over so many miles, walked away and began to rummage through the box that contained equaloy 9 mm ammo, emptying his pockets of the old bullets.
Jak picked up one of the guns and hefted it, shrugging and putting it back again. "No. Slow down close fights. No."
"Saw some grens racked up over that side," Ryan said.
"Yeah. And some plas-ex. Be right there with you, I when I got enough ammunition."
Jak and Krysty followed Ryan across to the far side of the weapons wing of the redoubt, with Doc and Lori trailing behind them.
"Here. Look colors!" the albino teenager exclaimed, standing, jaw gaping, at the serried rows of different kinds of hand grenades.
They were much smaller than the type used in the conventional wars of the twentieth century, only half the size of a baseball, but relatively heavy. Some had two-step button firing pins and some had flip-top detonator releases. All were silver or black, with bright strips of different paints. Labels told what each one was.
"Scarlet and blue is imploder. Met one of those before," Jak said, remembering a close call on the Mohawk River. "How they work?"
"Like an explosion, only it works on a kind of antimatter principle. Sucks things in as it goes off," Ryan explained.
Krysty ran a long finger down the row of printed labels. "Stunners. Burners. Frags. Lights. High-alts. Shrap. Nerve. Smokers. Grounders. Low-ex. Delays, various. Remotes."
"Take an implode, stun, burn and frag each. Others are too specialized for us. Basically we'll just want to stop or chill. Nothing else."
They all stashed away four grens. Ryan pocketed a couple of extra implodes for good measure. Lori complained that they were too heavy for her.
"What's the pointing for?" she asked. "Got blasters and they do any job."
Doc shook his head. "I fear that when in Rome... I mean, when in Deathlands, one must look first for survival. Anything above and beyond that is somewhat of a bonus, my dear child."
Lori pouted and swung away, the bells on her spurs tinkling with their usual thin, bright sound. As she stalked off she tripped over some loose ammo, cursed and nearly fell.
"She'll break her rad-blasted ankle with those heels one of these days," J.B. stated.
Ryan nodded. "Could be." He looked around. "We all got what we want? Enough to chill a mutie army, I guess."
"After the chill, we can go and look at the freezing," Doc said, smiling broadly. "Get it? That was a joke, was it not?"
"Very nearly, Doc." Krysty sighed. "Very nearly."
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.