by Ryder Stacy
“You’re right, pal,” Rock said, wiping his brow. He almost felt feverish. “It’s the pressure of this damn mission—it’s almost too much. In a way it makes all the other expeditions we’ve gone on seem pretty small potatoes.”
“Just think of it as another mission,” Chen said as he sat back and looked firmly at Rock. “You’re doing your best—somehow good things will come of it. That’s why we follow you through this hell.”
“Amen to that,” Detroit said as he tossed the map back to Rock. “You’ve led us through too much to start getting doubts.”
“It’s not doubts,” Rockson said irritably. “It’s—how the hell can we just charge down there into that mess? We don’t even know where the entrances to the bunker that still function—if any—are. I’m going down there—alone.”
Before the two could say a word he had stripped off his outer gear and equipment from around his shoulders and started toward the edge.
“Careful, Rock, careful,” Chen said into the darkness. “Do you want someone with you?”
“No, be better alone,” Rock whispered back over a sudden song of crickets on wind. Then he was gone, as Detroit took out some grenades and Chen some star-knives. And they sat silently watching him disappear down the slope and into the shadows, praying that he would make it back.
Seventeen
Rockson could hear the grunts, the snores, the occasional scream here and there as he approached the outskirts of the ramshackle “city” with utmost caution. He stopped just a few hundred feet from the warlord’s outermost shack—made of car fenders and doors all set together with mud. Rock smeared some dirt over his face. Being too clean in a camp like this would be a beacon. Then he took out his knife and sliced his sweatshirt and pants so they were a little more tattered. He made sure his shotpistol was well hidden and rose to a lurching kind of walk. It wouldn’t be good to come in on all fours; that would attract attention. No, he had to fake it all the way from now on. He was one of them, one of the slave peons, one of the ragtag, filthy plunderer soldiers of Warlord Garr.
The first thing he noticed when actually entering the city was how it smelled. For once inside the shantytown border the smell of rotted meat, of death, of gangrened human flesh was almost overpowering. He took shallow breaths trying to keep the smell out as it made him gag. The second thing he noticed, as he passed a bunch of the inhabitants sleeping around a campfire huddled together by the dozens, was how repugnantly filthy and unkempt they actually were. He wasn’t nearly dirty enough he saw immediately.
Uh-oh. Too late now.
About ninety-nine percent of the camp was asleep, the rest tending to various chores or guard duty. The place was pretty broken-down, but Garr clearly kept his finger on all of it. For even as he walked along Rockson saw groups of gun-carrying guards in twos and threes patrolling the place, and others up in wooden guard towers. He slid behind a row of shacks that looked like they could hardly withstand a good wind and made his way down one of the side alleys.
The trio of radar dishes, the highest part of the encampment, was where he kept heading, because according to the chart that spot was adjacent to one of the entrances to the underground rocket complex.
This close, he was even more sure they were in the right place. There was metal junk buried in the ground poking through all over the place. He rubbed off some rust from one piece of scrap and read the words “North American Command Dynasoar Project.” Bulls-eye.
Even in the midst of the danger something in him celebrated infinitesimally. At least they were in the right place. That always helped. He made his way in an around about way, avoiding guards as he sure as hell didn’t want to get looked at too closely. Some of the ragtag soldiers wore emblems he didn’t recognize.
The shacks these pitiful souls had built were without windows or doors or much of anything for that matter. Many people slept outside in the dirt streets or on the sagging roofs of the rows of dilapidated single-story structures. The snores, coughs, groans, and sounds of gagging were omnipresent. Men, all men.
He had just turned a corner when he walked right into a hairy unshaven dude squatting down and crapping right in the roadway, his pants at his ankles.
Why don’t we do it in the road?
“Wha?” the toothless man muttered as he looked up. And from the sudden dilating of his eyes, Rock knew he was not being accepted as one of the gang. The guy took in a deep breath of air to yell but Rockson’s boot came up and caught him right beneath the chin sending the man flying backwards into the side of a hovel. There were small snorts of complaint in the darkness but no one came to the window opening.
“Sorry to interrupt your crap,” Rock whispered in the darkness as he moved quickly forward. “But I got an important engagement.” As he came out of the “street” and slipped his head around the corner shack, he saw the radar units just twenty yards away. And from close up it was clear that his observations from the plateau above were one hundred percent correct. They had been turned into a sacrificial alter.
Bones were all around the bases of the things, a lot of bones. No one lived within a few hundred feet of the place, which probably meant it had all kinds of religious and power connotations for them. And the trail of blood that ran down the metal beams of the twenty-foot-high dishes, was fresh, some of it red. They had made sacrifices on these vestiges of technology on this very night. A primitive group, but well armed and organized.
Rock lowered his eyes and saw that there was a steel box about as tall as a telephone booth that sat right below the radar complex. Two Neanderthal-types who were supposedly guarding the box had fallen asleep themselves and lay on each side of it, their heads leaning against it like a metal pillow.
So much for Garr’s elite guards, Rockson smirked. That was one thing about armies of dirt-encrusted amoeba brains—they didn’t stick to the regs. But their mistake was Rock’s—and America’s—break.
He walked forward, not too fast, as no one walked fast around here, but stumbled ahead in the shadows lit by thickly smoking oil lamps here and there. The lights were from burning animal fat, their thick meaty scents mixed with the foul odors of unscrubbed humanity. Low tech drek.
Just as Rock reached the steel shed he tripped over a buried handle in the dirt and it clanked hard against another piece of metal. Both guards woke up snorting and rubbing their faces.
“Sorry,” Rock muttered as he took out first one, then the other, with quick and hard chops to the throats. He didn’t know if he’d killed them or not but set them back against the shed as if asleep. They wouldn’t be noticed at least until morning—and by then . . .
He tried the door handle but it was stuck solid. Even with all his strength it wouldn’t budge. He spotted an unlit oil lamp on the ground and picked it up. The contents were some kind of thick fatty animal oil. He took out his knife and as he poured some of the gunk all around the handle he carved out the dust and rust over the surface so the grease slid down into the steel handle below. He suspected it was rust-frozen, not locked.
It took nearly five minutes of twisting and pushing the oil in enough, but at last on his fiftieth or so try, the handle turned and there was a most satisfying click.
Rock pulled the door open fast and slid inside closing it right behind him. Inside there was a ladder going down. Rock loosened his shotpistol and started down. He descended about a hundred feet, he estimated, when he came to a landing. It was gray but seeable. Very dim fluorescent bulbs still burned along the curved corridor.
The place clearly ran on its own power, and though the bulbs hardly seemed to work, they were still chugging out a few lumens. He moved cautiously but more and more had the feeling that in fact they didn’t come down here from above. That’s why the dishes were used as sacrificial alters—they were the symbol of the high tech gods who waited below. And why the guards were posted at the door—this was taboo land down here. Ju-ju to the peons, at least.
He came to a junction of four different corridors an
d had to dust off a metal sign that stood on one wall with arrows and words below each pointing in all four directions.
“There,” Rock said with satisfaction after rubbing like a maniac for a minute. ROCKET LAUNCH TUBE—it pointed to the right. He headed down that way fast. The place smelled dank after all these years, like it had been recycling all its own air for a century. It tasted like a pair of old socks, but it was breathable. He just prayed he wasn’t breathing in any germ-warfare spores that had been lying dormant and for which no one had antibodies anymore. That would be all he needed, Rockson laughed in the grayness, to come down with a super cold from the 1980s and croak.
As he walked down the corridor, getting excited in spite of himself, wondering if the damned thing would really be there, he saw the first bodies, skeletons really. These were clearly from long ago. Their bones were so fragile that as he poked at one with his boot it crumbled into dust before his eyes.
There were more he discovered as he walked on. A whole bunch in fact. And a ruptured pipe along one wall which no longer had anything to leak. Gas, or fuel? Something had come out and taken out a whole bunch of them right here in the corridor. It spooked him in a way to see them where they had fallen, for nothing but bacteria had disturbed their slumber down here sealed within chromium and stainless steel. He walked on, carefully stepping through the piles of bones, until he came to a steel door after another hundred yards or so.
ROCKET TUBE, CAUTION, it said in large red letters. Rockson pressed a button on one side of the wall and the door flew open as if it had closed just seconds before. Whoever built this whole place had done some pretty damn good engineering work.
He stepped inside and for a few seconds couldn’t really comprehend what lay before him, lit up by the same dim half flickering yellowish bulbs which ringed the entire chamber. The rocket, the Dynasoar. It was so big that Rockson at first didn’t really realize that it was in fact the X-7. It looked more like a cylindrical tower that they had forgotten to pull all the way up. It wasn’t all that wide, perhaps twenty feet—but it stretched off for a good two hundred feet on its side, so the pointed nose jutted along a long tube with tracks which disappeared into the dimness ahead, curving slowly upward. And not rusty!
Rockson whistled as he walked around one of the many platforms that had been built up around it, to do final finishing work apparently. Tools still lay strewn around amidst more skeletons. The suckers had sure as hell taken their work seriously. He kept trying to imagine the last few desperate minutes here as the war broke out. They would have tried to launch it . . . And then something happened. A neutron bomb? Gas, maybe? Rock would never know. But the glistening ship sure as hell looked like it was ready to fly up into space. It was flawless as far as he could see, and awe-inspiring. Especially in a world where a working automobile was a cause for wonder. Technology had—to say the least—gone down the drain, and now there was no drain. But this, the sheer sleek mechanical beauty of it, the evidence of what man could have done with all his knowledge and power so many years before, made Rock’s Adam’s apple catch in his throat.
The ship had windows tinted blue but he could see through them enough to see that within the rocket everything was lit up, rows of computers and complex control boards sat there as if just waiting for someone to push a button and get the damned thing going. Such a marvel of mechanical engineering—and it had never gotten to move even an inch. It could do everything—except turn itself on. Who said the gods didn’t have a sense of irony? Maybe now it would fly. God help them all, it had better—or they would die trying.
Rockson didn’t attempt to get in. It appeared flyable, that’s what he had to know. Only the whiz kids and the surviving techs would be able to tell for sure. Rock had done his part, he had found the thing. He checked all around the ship looking for any obvious damage. And saw none.
Checking his watch he made a sudden decision. They would take it tonight. Before another day had passed. There was no reason to wait. Which meant he had to move. He debated taking the way he had come to get back out, but decided that he had to check the entire launch tube as well. It would be meaningless to get the ship fired up and then run right into fallen rocks where the tunnel had collapsed in years before.
He started along the tracks at a medium run. The entire ship was built on top of a railcar-type contraption that rested on the tracks. They’d gone over it enough with him on the blueprints back at C.C. But out here seeing it—was something else again. It seemed impossible that such a monolith of steel power could just subway it along down here. But other than a few rocks which the wheels would have passed over, Rockson saw nothing that would impair the movement of the rocket train. The walls of the launch tube were smooth as glass, shining chromium which looked bright even under the nearly extinct neons every fifty feet or so.
He moved fast now, jumping over the concrete-set wooden ties below his feet—and gauged it was about a half-mile before he felt the tube start to increase its curve. It rose at a steep angle for another quarter-mile or so, and then he reached a wide circular steel door which sat at the very end of the tracks. That would be another problem—opening these damn things. He’d worry about that later. Rockson searched around and found another small steel door and turned its handle. This one opened easily and he stepped out.
He was on the side of a mountain slope, looking down at the city about five hundred feet below. The outside of the steel door he could see was camouflaged, appearing as granite. Warlord Garr and his people probably didn’t even know the opening was here. Rock lodged a small stone in the door so it couldn’t shut completely, and then moved like a goat down the steep slope. He had to go through the encampment to get back to Chen and Detroit, otherwise it was almost two miles around. He kept having to force himself to slow down as he knew that no one would move fast in a place like this at three o’clock in the morning.
He was about halfway through the shantytown when he heard screams; terrible sounds like someone was being torn limb from limb. In spite of himself, Rockson made a slight detour and slipped through the darkness to the largest shack of the whole encampment, the only one with more than one story. He dropped to the ground as he could hear guards around the front side, and seeing a crack of light, he peered through a few slabs of metal that had been welded together.
If the spaceship had brought up a certain sense of beauty in his chest, what he saw within the shacks brought up the opposite. A scarred, hideously ugly man with bald head and boils all over the top of his skull was torturing a bearded young man. He was using a heated poker—and what he was doing to him was unspeakable.
The man was huge, with shoulders as wide as Archer’s though he wasn’t as tall. He wore a thick nargaskin vest over his bulging muscles and bloodstained leather pants below. The description fit Garr. And he was clearly having a good time, a smile pasted on his cracked lips.
Rockson bit his lip in the darkness. He wanted more than anything to go in there and take out the slime. But he couldn’t. If he was caught and the whole camp alerted—he would be dead, the mission destroyed. Cursing himself and vowing as he turned his head away that somehow he would get Garr even if he had to come back from the grave to do it, Rockson turned and headed off into the scream-shattered darkness.
Eighteen
The scraping purple fingernails of dawn were just beginning to rip a hole into the blackness of night on the eastern horizon as the force of Freefighters and ’brids made their way up over the top of a granite ledge and gazed down at the camp of Warlord Garr below.
“Shit, we’re behind schedule,” Rockson muttered as he noted the lightening sky. He had wanted to have them all inside the underground space complex before daybreak. Maybe there was still time. He told them to stay back from the side of the slope that led down to the warlord’s camp so they wouldn’t be seen. Most likely every son-of-a-bitch down there was out like a light—but Rock always assumed the worst. And he was usually not disappointed.
Rock pulled his ’
brid close to the sheer mountain face rising above them, nearly scraping along it. He made his way about one hundred yards along the ledge to the virtually hidden exit and the steel doors of the rocket launch tube. It was amazing how well camouflaged it all was. If he hadn’t known exactly where to look, there was no way even he could have found it.
The door was still ajar, held open by the stone he had lodged between it and the frame. He opened it slowly and looked inside. Nothing—they were still undetected. He didn’t know why he kept feeling such a presence of danger. His heart had been beating wildly for hours now. It was the mission, the incredible importance of it—and the utmost likelihood that they would still fail.
“Unload your ’brids,” Rock ordered them in the purple dawn darkness. They’d have to take all the supplies down the rail tunnel by hand. The ’brids had done their work, they couldn’t fit through the narrow exit door anyway. They had the gear down in minutes. Rock led them inside and pointed down the wide cylindrical firing tube. Chen took the lead, rushing about twenty yards ahead, star-knives ready in each hand just in case. Within ten minutes of their reaching the mouth of the tube, every man was in except for Rock, Detroit, and two combat men with heavy machine guns who he had set up to guard their flank.
“Come on, Detroit,” Rock whispered, “let’s get these animals headed in the right direction.” They gathered the tethers of the hybrid horses that were left and took them back over the rise three hundred feet back.
The ’brids were all trained to head back to Century City where they knew food and warmth were waiting. Besides they were extremely intelligent animals in their own right. It seemed to be instinctive—they possessed an uncanny sense of direction and location.
The two Freefighters took off all the gear—saddles, reins—from the steeds as it wasn’t fair to send them out riderless with junk hanging all over them. A bridle or saddle caught in a branch could mean death. When they were all stripped, Detroit and Rock smacked them hard on their flanks and sent them down the back of the slope. The ’brids tore off at full gallop with Snorter, Rock’s mount, in the lead.