Skylock

by Paul Kozerski

  The jet navigated a path indifferent to the dead metropolitan centers far below. From its height, evident only as discordant flashes of dim and distant glass, were the cities: St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha—all alike. Forlorn and abstract swatches sliding quietly beneath the autotinting windows of this climate controlled, private viewing studio.

  Trennt looked on and wondered, How many innocent "displaced" families had found their end amid that distant silence?

  * * *

  The emergency National Census of 2042 was a desperate plan hatched by the withering federal government: a last organizational edict before decentralization finally knocked the blocks out from under Washington, D.C.

  After several years of trying to devise a regenerative balance for its depleted urban areas, an injection of new bodies was hit on as the simplest approach. A special census, beyond the scope of any basic head count, ordered entire families to their father's birth city. This, it was believed, would redistribute needed skills and talents of the population and infuse fresh human resources into epidemic-withered areas after the devastating North American Flu.

  * * *

  Trennt and his family had traveled light. A two-bag limit was mandated for all refugee families, so few troublesome effects needed to be worried over. They were directed to the local post office to await transport on that early spring morning with little more than the clothes they wore. Of their entire rural township, they were the lone family to be sent so far away.

  A few friends stayed with them during their wait that day, when hugs and assurances of a brief absence were exchanged. Trennt then led his family to one-way seats aboard a bus in a flotilla of commandeered vehicles and they took their place in an exodus not seen since biblical times.

  After a week's living on wilted box lunches, they finally entered the hulking city by the lake. Trennt's wife and kids were asleep as their bus joined the angled rows of sooty Greyhounds and Trailways already parked at the Randolph Street terminal and Cee-Dee reception station.

  Trennt woke Dena and helped bundle Jennifer and Andy against the late-night air. The family then spent three solid hours standing in a cold drizzle, awaiting their turn at processing into their new home.

  Shortly after, four-year-old Andy became the first family member to develop the ominous Cee-Dee sniffles.

  * * *

  Kosinski's voice startled Trennt.

  "We're about twenty minutes out."

  Trennt offered a map folded to their landing zone.

  "Can you hang just beyond range of the station while we give it a peep?"

  The pilot reached for a swingout keypad.

  "I'll ask permission."

  "If things look sour you can set down in this secondary clearing about a half mile south."

  Back in the cabin, it was Trennt's turn to do the waking.

  "Baker."

  The shooter came up in his seat same as always; instant on. No hint of normal human drowsiness. "How far out are we?"

  "Few minutes. Get your goods around. We'll take a couple wide swings before deciding where to land."

  "Grips, Pard."

  Dismissing further courtesy, Trennt called back to the other rider.

  "Hey, who're you?"

  The man straightened to the gruffness.

  "Doctor Thomas Ashton."

  "You got something to invest in this, Doctor?"

  "I'm to check over the station people."

  "Whatever. If you're getting off, get ready. Otherwise, stay out of the way."

  Changed to a transitional flight attitude, the jet swung a lazy wide orbit about the research station. From their height, a weave of hardwood trees and camouflage netting did obscure much of its surface. Yet all five research and storage buildings seemed intact—though uninhabited.

  "No smoke or movement," declared Baker.

  "Not good," Trennt concurred. He called to the pilot. "Drue, hit the alternate."

  CHAPTER 8

  The plane set down snugly in the designated clearing. Gear was quickly unloaded and readied. Trennt and Baker each took an S-12 shotgun, stuffing the magazines with explosive 10-gauge rounds. Pistols were likewise charged and holstered.

  Lightweight speed packs followed, filled with Kevlar "sapper suits" for maneuvering through barrier vines, rappelling line, and assorted pyrotechnics. To allow freer movement, Baker discarded the awkward protective case housing their nuclear detonator and wedged the thin primer tube between the open straps of his pack.

  After a couple of minutes orienting their map and verifying reference points, the pair was ready. The aerial light show had dimmed appreciably to the risen sun. But a somber gray void was beginning to fill the northeasterly distance. The air now also had the bitter-fresh nip of gathering ozone.

  Trennt handed a walkie-talkie to the pilot as they stood in the heavy dank silence outside the parked plane.

  "These should reach the short distance to the station, providing the magnetics don't get too wild. Keep an ear open. Your call sign will be 'One-One.' Ours, 'One-Two.' Anything special breaks loose, we'll call you. If the radios fail, just watch for a flare. Green means come; red, bailout. If things go good, we should be in place in three-quarters of an hour."

  Baker extended a small-caliber pistol pulled from his waistband. "Can you use one o' these?"

  The pilot regarded it uncomfortably.

  "Hey, I'm no . . ."

  "Don't have to be," interrupted the gunman. "Just keep it handy. Any trouble comes along, 'bang bang,' okay?"

  Baker shifted his gear into a comfortable position. Pumping his clenched weapon, he rattled with boyish exuberance.

  "Just like the old days, huh, Jimbo?"

  Again checking the sky, Trennt didn't share in any nostalgia.

  "Let's get it done."

  * * *

  They went back a long way. To the Peru-Ecuador scrap of the early new century. Dozens of long-range recon missions into enemy territory. Fighting side by side in the trenches of the Cordillera del Condor Siege. On a spot of ground named Hill 27, but forever known to the common grunt simply as "The Gnat's Ass."

  All this time and it still rode fresh as ever in Trennt's mind while he hiked. Seventeen days in the spring of the year. Their firebase low on everything because of weather-fouled resupply lines. Food was a memory; hardly any ammo. Little cover and constant, driving rain. Nonstop downpours that brought on trenchfoot and those wonderful sucking leeches.

  But weather that also helped smother the accuracy of enemy mortar fire. And loosened the footing of three separate bayonet charges they fought off with entrenching tools and fire axes when the bullets finally gave out on both sides and taking that hill became a matter of honor for the bad guys. Like it or not, few blood ties could ever run deeper than the one Trennt shared with the lethal, slender man hiking beside him now.

  * * *

  Their pace was brisk. Heading off through a downhill mix of scrub and boulders, both the point of origin and their objective were soon lost from view. The terrain was brittle and oven dry. Left shriveled by years of drought, what life remained had even lost interest in catching fire. But it was easy to read. No signs of preceding travel took some of the edge off their pace and the agents made the butte well ahead of schedule.

  Their first challenge waited there. Growing freely about the steep ramp were coils of a familiar and lethal hybrid thornbush. Developed in the old army labs by the very man they were here to rescue, the hellish parasite thrived as a living razor-wire fence.

  A mesh of coal black, porcelain-hard barbs rose in flesh-shearing spirals taller than a man and fifty yards deep. Hooked like jagged crosscut saw teeth, the barrier waited to shred any creature foolish enough to dare enter. Blowing it away would have been time consuming—and noisy. The only alternative was to traverse it.

  From the hill's base, Baker scanned higher levels while Trennt verified the location of booby traps.

  "After we get through this stuff, there're a dozen tiger pits and dead
falls. Beyond are electric mines and the Intruder Alert System, with the summit another couple hundred feet past that. The guns are stocked with twenty thousand rounds apiece in a corridor that varies in width from sixteen feet to five feet. Just as bad is a four-foot-thick bed of masonry sand, topped with concrete slabs and meant to avalanche if crossed over. So stay close."

  The pair donned their Ninja-style Kevlar body suits. Acrylic face shields and mail hoods replaced their fatigue caps and they entered the deadly barrier. While the suits did protect their movements through the cruel growth, it couldn't prevent a drastic slowing of the pace. By the time they'd cleared the thorny, shearing tangle, twenty-five precious minutes had been lost. Above, an accelerating change in the weather was becoming obvious. The temperature was falling and an eerie green pigment began filling the sky.

  "Deck's stackin' against us," noted Baker.

  Trennt yanked off his sweated faceplate. "Let's make the most of it."

  The pair cinched themselves together on a fifteen-foot tether and entered the steep wooded hillside. Against their better judgment they hurried the pace, advancing under hasty cover-and-movement spurts, while negotiating the lethal mix of exposed roots and loose earth.

  Successfully rounding the tiger pits and deadfalls, Trennt led their way toward the primary bank of laser-activated intruder alert grids. He low-crawled in a wide circuitous route around the control box of the first camouflaged grenade dispenser. Clipping jumper wires to its power terminals, Trennt snipped the leads. With a finger slash across his windpipe, he sat tight as Baker sidearmed a root ball into the beam path. Nothing happened.

  Four more positions were located, probed, and tediously neutralized in the same painstaking manner. Clearing the final station, the rescuers were just yards from cresting the summit itself, when Baker lost his footing and stumbled onto the plane of a hidden shear plate.

  The reactive earthwork broke loose even under his bantam weight. In a blink all the dirt for sixty feet around was cascading downhill, carrying the shooter away in an engineered landslide and chewing greedily after his partner.

  Trennt dove safely outside the broken shear plane himself, but he was still tied fast to Baker, and felt the slack umbilical between them rapidly paying out.

  The low fork of an anemic sapling was his nearest hope. He thrust the S-12 between its tines, twisting the barrel and stock in opposite directions. Jamming and locking his arms through the web sling, Trennt braced himself and prayed it would hold.

  Behind, Baker spun about as the last of his tether line went taut. He left the ground like a hooked marlin breaking water, then slammed back to earth, speed pack first. It cushioned the blow as he jammed hard against a tree stump, held stiff as a ship's prow to parting waves of cascading gravel and sand.

  The avalanche roared on and away, crashing off far below. Trennt was left gasping and wrenched in its choking, dusty wake. He painstakingly freed a numb hand from his gun sling brace and grabbed at the tether line. All he found was slack. Somewhere hundreds of yards below he imagined Baker, torn free, crushed, and mangled.

  Still clutching the locked weapon, Trennt pivoted slowly for a look behind. A heavy tan curtain of gently twirling dust greeted him. But his movement also dislodged a jammed rock. The snarled tether shot free and sprang back to tension. Trennt choked up a mouthful of muddy slime, hopefully testing his voice.

  "Baker?"

  Through the heavy swirling veil a muffled cough answered.

  "Yo, Pard."

  "You okay?"

  "Think so. Speed pack took most of it, I reckon. Nuthin' feels broke. But I'd guess we lost any element of surprise."

  Trennt slowly reeled the man up. Sharing a nod at their good fortune, they started the final yards to the summit, and the research station just beyond.

  * * *

  They could see the compound's five prefab buildings. Living quarters, greenhouse, lab, and storage boasted all the latest high-tech support system gizmos. Solar-steam electrical generators and chemical fuel cells sat in protective sheds, routed by thick overhead umbilicals, to a vast array of computers, air conditioning, and refrigeration units.

  But aside from a growing rustle of static in the treetops, all was silent. No smells, no sound, no movement. The steadily thickening sky allowed no more time for caution. Shotguns tucked tight and hip-high, the pair split up and entered the camp fringes.

  Now among its buildings, they found the first obvious signs of trouble. The compound's power plant was rent and buckled from an explosion. Its window vents were blown free, aluminum wall panels bulged and, in spots, were peeled back and flattened in the jagged flowerlike petals of lethal shrapnel blooms.

  Still, they saw no people. Taking cover beside the power station, Trennt leveled his weapon, finally calling aloud.

  "Anyone in there, come on out! We're here to help you!"

  Long seconds passed with no response.

  "Do you hear me?" he repeated. "Come on out!"

  Still nothing.

  He was preparing to move forward when the barracks door burst open. Out flew a frazzled young woman. Wide-eyed and strung miles beyond hysteria, she glared in hateful silence for a moment, then charged Trennt, unafraid.

  "Where have you been?" she demanded. "I've been waiting a whole day! What took you so long to get here?"

  Trennt snapped his S-12 to port arms. He blocked her flailing advance and levered her off balance. But even knocked down, the woman regrouped and came at him again.

  "Why did you take so long?" she growled, swinging wildly at his face with hands drawn into claws. "Where were you?"

  Grabbing her wrists, Trennt forced her arms down.

  "Where are the others?"

  The woman didn't answer, struggling on and babbling, until he jarred her senses with a rattling shake.

  "The others!"

  She whiplashed in his grip. Then, suddenly frightful, she melted back to her exhausted senses.

  "Inside," she whispered, wretched and spent. "All inside."

  Trennt let her go, offering no apologies for his rough handling.

  Doctor Keener was just beyond the radio room door. Piled under insulating blankets, he glistened in a bloodless white cast, doused in sweat and wheezing shallow, ravaged breaths. Beyond sat a row of blanket covered corpses.

  "What happened here?"

  The woman motioned vacantly about.

  "I don't know. The powerhouse, it exploded. Blue smoke went everywhere."

  She looked out a window, toward a tubular scaffold supporting weather monitoring gear and a small radio dish.

  "Martin told me to climb, as fast as I could, while he woke up the others. The smoke was spreading all over by then. They were trying to cover their faces while they climbed. But they couldn't hang on. Martin couldn't pull them up either and fell back partway in it himself."

  The woman broke into ragged sobs and sank to a dejected heap at Trennt's feet. He studied her for a moment, then checked the deepening cast of eastern sky.

  "Baker. Call our bird over and help me take a quick look around. Let's find the goods and shut this place down."

  "Grips, Pard."

  But the gunman's radio was impossibly clogged with static. As agreed, Baker uncorked a signal rocket from his pack. A quick twist and smack of its primer cap sent the green starcluster streaking high into the ominous heavens.

  Trennt, meanwhile, spared a few minutes to inspect the ruined powerhouse. Scattered hunks of spun metal littered the courtyard in silent testament of the blast's force. Inside the prefab walls he found the burst remnants of refrigeration and power units. Chalklike splatters of an odd yellow-green chemical precipitate were plastered about in dry, powdery streaks. And even now a faint bleachlike after-smell lingered.

  Trennt was familiar enough with the bank of ruptured cylinders to recognize them as portable electrical fuel cells. Here, though, a double row of a dozen such bottles had been linked into a much more permanent and powerful arrangement. Thick braids
of feed and return pipes were plumbed below to charging media and beyond to the pressurized chlorine separators and recyclers in an adjacent cubicle. Also sharing the space were refrigeration and air-conditioning containment systems.

  Only token walls of a honeycomb insulating material separated one power medium from another. And a moment's study of the symmetric blast holes made Trennt aware of a peculiar and common orientation among the cubicles. He stepped back toward the doorway, realizing also that the power station was set slightly elevated to the entire camp—something military engineering strictly forbade out of normal environmental safety concerns.

  Silently arrived, Baker gauged Trennt's scrutiny.

  "Wha'cha see, Pard?"

  Trennt shrugged, returning to the doorway.

  "Maybe nothing."

  By then the jet had settled in and its engines finished coasting down.

  "I'll check the lab," Trennt said. "You salvage whatever might be of value in the barracks. And keep that bird ready for a quick start-up."

  "Grips!"

  Following Baker out, a final item caught Trennt's eye, something so obvious, he hadn't noticed it on entering. Mounted to the outside shed wall was an emergency panel box. Prominent yellow-and-black instructions were blazed across it:

  for emergency systems shutdown,

  push and twist right.

  It was a typical total-suppression unit, simply meant to govern all the power mediums housed within. Even now its safety pin and tamper label remained undisturbed, but left of the broad striped handle, a small stainless steel turnkey and beaded chain dangled from a tiny unmarked side lock. Trennt gently touched his fingers to the chain, then continued on, for the labs.

  A different type of devastation awaited him there. A premeditated, man-made kind. But the manner in which growth chambers and related seedlings had been destroyed seemed no random act of madness, for DNA synthesizing gear, electron microscopes, and genetic particle guns hadn't been touched at all.

  Further on, Trennt swung open the main storage vault. Lifting a flashlight from his grommet belt, he thrust it inside the darkened chamber and keyed its beam. A cruel halogen brilliance exploded before him. Playing about the blackness, it chased off the stark and irregular shadows of more ruin.