Callsign Cerberus

by Mark Ellis

  Kane put on his helmet. “Understood.”

  Lakesh handed Brigid a small metal device, an instrument Kane recognized as a Mnemosyne. “The connecting doors to the levels are electronically locked. You’ll need this to override them.”

  Brigid tossed the Syne uneasily from hand to hand. “Can you give us any idea of what we’ll run into there?”

  Lakesh sighed, shook his head. “I haven’t visited there since my resurrection. As I understand it, the place was pressed back into service in the last thirty years. So, my ideas of what you might encounter inside the Mesa are based only on my recollections from two centuries ago. In my opinion, the four of you will face the truth of humanity’s ultimate destiny. And if you face it and can live with it, perhaps you will decide that destiny is not an absolute, but only a variable.”

  The old man wet his lips nervously. “Are you ready?”

  Domi, Kane, Grant and Brigid exchanged long, silent glances and then they walked through the control centre. They paused briefly at the door leading to the anteroom to look back. Lakesh called after them, “Don’t dawdle.”

  Domi smiled at him, and Lakesh smiled back, very widely. The four people went through the anteroom and entered the portal chamber. Kane closed the door behind them. They all took deep, calming breaths. Even though they had experienced it before, the concept of having their bodies, their minds, everything that they were, converted to digital information, transmitted to a distant receiver and reassembled, was still a fearsome one.

  The now-familiar vibrating hum arose, climbing to a high-pitched whine. The metal disks below exuded a shimmering aurora that slowly intensified. The fine mist gathered and climbed from the floor and wafted down from the ceiling. Tiny crackling static discharges flared in the vapor.

  Kane closed his eyes and rushed headlong into the abyss of infinity, filled with spheres of brilliant light and swarms of stars.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THE FIRST THING Kane saw when he opened his eyes was a square wall made of thick, mortared concrete blocks, not the translucent transparisteel. The door was a rectangle of steel set in the wall facing him, a wheel projecting from the rivet studded mass.

  From overhead, a thread of light shone from a single fixture. By its feeble illumination, he saw Brigid, Domi and Grant groan, stir and sit up.

  Brigid brushed back a loose strand of hair from her face. “Everybody feel all right?”

  They did, none of them suffering from the nausea, dizziness and headaches that had afflicted them after their first jump. Grant climbed to his feet. Due to the low ceiling, he couldn’t stand at his full height.

  “They must’ve tested this thing on dwarves,” he muttered.

  Kane stood up and went to the door. He had to stoop slightly, too. He put his hands on the wheel-lock, giving it a clockwise twist. It didn’t budge. Taking and holding a deep breath, he threw all of his weight against it.

  Slowly, resistantly the wheel turned. With Grant’s help, he was able to get a hand-over-hand spin going. The solenoids creaked aside, and Grant pushed against the steel door with a shoulder. Flexible rubber seals made a sucking noise as the thick slab swung open on squealing hinges. He stepped out first, Sin Eater in hand. Kane, Domi and Brigid followed, watchful and cautious.

  They entered a medium-size room with a dozen desks, most of them covered with computer terminals and keyboards. A control console ran the length of one wall, consisting primarily of liquid-crystal displays and gauges, though a few indicator lights blinked and flashed purposefully. On the other side of the wall, behind the console, the electronic whine slowly wound down and faded altogether. As the sound disappeared, the lights on the console went out, plunging the room into darkness.

  Grant handed Domi a flashlight, and she swept the beam around. Brigid murmured, “This is where Lakesh devoted thirty years of his life. So much stolen from him. Sad.”

  “What’s sad about it?” asked Grant gruffly. “That devotion bought him survival when most of the world’s ‘useless eaters’ were vaporized. His life wasn’t stolen—it was bought and paid for.”

  “I like him, though,” Domi interjected blandly.

  “Quiet,” Kane whispered.

  The door at the far end of the room bore a knob rather than a lever or a sec-code keypad affixed to the frame. Kane walked to the door and slowly turned the knob. Domi, Brigid and Grant fanned out behind him, taking cover behind desks and drawing their weapons.

  Pushing the door open, Kane moved out into a wide, wood-panelled corridor. It stretched to his left and his right. Even with his image intensifier at full output, the hallway was shadowed and dim.

  Brigid moved up beside him and said, “To the left here.”

  He started down it, moving rapidly and silently on the nap of the carpet.

  They passed two doors, which were unlocked. Nothing lay in the rooms beyond them but empty spaces and a few pieces of dusty furniture. They came to an intersecting corridor and peered around the corner. To the right, a few yards away, a sign hung above a varnished wooden door. The faded lettering read Not An Exit. No Unauthorized Personnel. A red triangle bisected by three black vertical lines was stamped at the bottom of the sign.

  Gripping their blasters tightly, they eased around the corner, careful to keep their bodies to one side. The door had a keypad instead of a knob. Brigid placed the Syne against it and initialized the decryption mechanism. They crouched on either side of the door, Grant covering the way they came, tensely waiting for the Syne to do its work. A few moments later, the computer-controlled lock slid aside.

  Kane gingerly pushed the door open, and then moved in, the other two sliding in after him, to his left and right. It was an empty, bare-walled landing. On the wall was a red down-pointing arrow, and the words To Levels Five And Six. The four people soft-footed down the wide concrete steps, careful not to touch the metal banisters.

  They reached another landing, another door, another inverted arrow on the wall, but they kept going downward. At the next landing, the door was a heavy metal bulkhead framed within a recessed niche in a double-baffled wall. The door bore the emblazoned warning Only Overproject Excalibur Personnel Beyond This Point! Must Have MAJIC-A Clearance To Proceed! Deadly Force Is Authorized! And imprinted below that, was the ubiquitous red triangle with black vertical lines.

  “Sick of seeing that,” murmured Domi.

  Brigid put the Syne over the keypad and initialized it. The device overrode the lock’s microprocessors, and with a squeak of rust and a hiss of pneumatics, the bulkhead slid into its slots between the double frame.

  Semidarkness met their eyes, though there wasn’t much to see. They faced a narrow, uncarpeted passageway, long and low ceilinged. A dim glow filtered from its far end. Cool air fanned their faces, and they heard a rhythmic drone of turbines and generators. A faint chemical odour hung in the air.

  They moved on toward the light. Brigid turned out her flashlight. Kane’s and Grant’s combat senses were on full alert. Domi put her hand on the knife sheathed at the small of her back. The mechanical throb grew louder. A turnstile device blocked the end of the passageway. Obviously meant as a checkpoint nearly two centuries ago, the metal prongs were rusted into position, so the four of them were forced to clamber over the time-frozen barrier.

  The passageway took on a downward slope. It was lighted by dim red bulbs strung from a cable on the low ceiling. The floor changed from bare concrete to metal plates ridged and flaking with rust.

  The passage ended abruptly at a glass door. It bore a sign stating, Biohazard Beyond This Point! Entry Forbidden To Personnel Not Wearing Anticontaminant Clothing!

  Beyond the door they saw a small, glass-walled booth. From hooks on the wall hung a dozen one-piece coveralls. Hoods with transparent Plexiglas faceplates were attached to them. Kane pushed open the door, and the generator throb grew considerably louder.

&n
bsp; Grant touched one of the coveralls with the barrel of his SA-80. “Should we put ‘em on?”

  Kane shook his head. “We’d have to take off the armour. Besides, if we can’t get back to the portal in the next hour and thirty-two minutes, it doesn’t much matter what kind of bugs we catch. And if we do get back, more than likely Lakesh can shoot us up with boosters and germ chasers.”

  “That’s one way of approaching the problem,” Domi said sceptically.

  Brigid said, “You can put one on if you’d like.”

  “Thanks, anyway. I’ll share the risk with my partners.”

  Kane wasn’t sure if the girl was being sarcastic, and he didn’t request elaboration. He crossed the booth, pushed open the opposite door and stepped out onto a steel-railed balcony. Thirty feet below spread a broad mezzanine, illuminated by crackling red lights that played along the lines and ceramic pylons of a voltage-converter system.

  In the centre of the mezzanine, thick power cables sprouted from sockets in the concrete floor and snaked toward a strangely shaped generator. At least twelve feet tall, it looked like a pair of solid black cubes, the smaller balanced atop the larger. The top cube rotated slowly, producing a rhythmic drone of sound. An odd smell, like ozone blended with antiseptic, pervaded the air.

  “That doesn’t look like a nuclear generator to me,” said Brigid.

  “How many have you seen?” Kane asked.

  “Dozens—schematics, at least. There’s no hint of that monstrosity in Lakesh’s floor plan.”

  Surveying the structures below, Grant commented, “Nobody around. Their security is for shit.”

  “I’d rather not have blastermen to contend with,” Kane remarked. “Not if I can help it.”

  Suddenly, he held up his hand in warning. Far below, two figures emerged from behind the base of the generator. Both of them carried toolboxes. Despite the shapeless coveralls they wore, there was no mistaking their hairless, malformed skulls and long-tentacled fingers.

  Kane drew in a sharp breath and took a backward step, then stood and watched motionless as the pair of figures walked out of the mezzanine. Turning toward Brigid, he said incredulously, “Those were Squidoos!”

  Brigid stared after them. “Lakesh said the first generations of mutants was created here in the mesa...it shouldn’t come as a surprise there may be some left in the place to perform the scut work.”

  Kane strode along the catwalk, trying to keep his eyes on the two Squidoos below, following them at a distance of fifty feet. The noise from the generator smothered the sound of his footfalls.

  The catwalk abruptly became a stairway, and by the time he, with the others trailing him, reached the bottom step, the figures were nowhere in sight.

  The vast, dim room was strangely bare. Scars and gouges in the grey concrete floor indicated heavy objects had been dragged and moved about some time in the not-too-remote past.

  Kane looked toward Brigid. “Now where?”

  “The floor plan wasn’t like this. There have been a lot of changes.” She looked around, turning her head very slowly, trying to reconcile their surroundings with the layout she had memorized.

  Stepping forward, Brigid put out her right hand as though feeling her way along an invisible wall, reaching out for a vanished doorway. Kane and Grant followed her. She turned left after so many steps and again moved in a straight line. Finally, she halted in a broad area surrounded only by shadows. Round holes in the floor showed that some large piece of heavy equipment had once been bolted there.

  Craning her neck, she looked straight up. Her companions followed her gaze. Attached to a length of frayed cable, a photoelectric-eye device dangled overhead. Extending an arm, Brigid passed her hand in front of her in a right-to-left arc.

  Inches from her feet, a square section of flooring began to turn over with a grating of stone and creak of metal pivots. It rolled up and stopped on edge, revealing a dim passageway leading below. The air wafting up from it was dank and laden with the acrid odour of chemicals.

  Brigid said, “A disguised entrance, so the uninitiated of Overproject Excalibur wouldn’t stumble over the real fruits of their labours.”

  Domi eased to one knee, studying the yawning opening. “What do you mean?”

  Brigid’s lips moved in a half smile, and she gestured theatrically to the square hole in the floor. “Welcome to Nightmare Alley.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  A SHORT FLIGHT of stairs brought them down into a low-ceilinged anteroom. Another photoelectric sensor registered their presence, fed the signal to the portal and the square of concrete overhead rolled back into place with a crunch. Kane tensed, waiting for the brief wave of claustrophobia to pass.

  “You okay?” Grant’s voice was an anxious whisper.

  “I’m grand,” Kane responded in the same low tone.

  “Wish I could say that,” Domi put in apprehensively.

  Brigid shushed them into silence. She eyed the door at the far end of the room. It was of simple, innocuous wood. A push button was screwed into the frame with a small plastic sign above it.

  “Ring For Attendant,” she read aloud. “Should we?”

  “I hope you’re joking,” Grant snapped.

  “I am. I don’t think the people—or whatever—who took over this place still observe the preNuke security procedures.”

  “Let’s go, then,” said Kane, the Sin Eater filling his hand.

  The door opened easily at the turn of the knob. They gazed down a tile-floored corridor, lined on either side by machines shrouded in plastic dust covers. Some were very large and bulky. As they walked between them, Brigid was able to identify much of the equipment—fluoroscopes, an oscilloscope, centrifuge, evaporator, distillation tanks, a chromatograph.

  “Old medical machines,” she said softly. “Must have been moved down here when the facility was reactivated. Guess there wasn’t much use for them anymore.”

  At the word “reactivate,” Kane mechanically consulted his chron. “We’ve got one hour and seven minutes left.”

  “I’ll track the time,” Grant offered, “or we’ll get stuck here.”

  With his thumb and forefinger, Kane gave him an okay sign, and then grimaced. The tart scent of chemicals was very strong, almost cloying, but they smelled and could almost taste a worse odour, the taint of death.

  A set of sheet-metal double doors divided the corridor. Kane toed aside the one on the right, and Grant pushed open the left. Another corridor lay beyond, very long and nearly twenty feet wide. The ceiling was still low, lit by an arrangement of red bulbs, though the wattage seemed higher. The walls were composed of sheets of glass, all canted inward at forty-five-degree angles. The chromium frames glinted dully in the muted illumination.

  “What’s with this red light?” Grant snapped. “You could go blind in here.”

  Kane didn’t offer a reply, though one part of his mind pounced on the most likely answer. The eyes of Balam were huge and black, and therefore extremely sensitive to light levels above a certain brightness and spectrum. If this level of the Dulce complex housed Balam’s brethren or his spawn, then it would have been converted for their comfort.

  Brigid stepped forward. Kane reached for her, but she was too quick. She walked only a dozen feet before halting suddenly in front of a glass wall. Kane nearly trod on her heels.

  Angrily he demanded, “What are you doing?”

  His words caught in his throat. On the other side of the glass barrier, spread-eagled on a metal framework, lay a flayed corpse.

  It was a mass of yellow-white adipose tissue, ropy blood vessels and red-blue entrails. The body was all muscle, tendon and ligament—but the soft organs pulsed wetly. They were covered, held together, by a clinging sac of transparent plastic-like material.

  Brigid lurched away, making a strangling, gasping sound. He was only dimly awa
re of Domi and Grant stepping up beside him. Both of them stared in horrid fascination at the face, at the stripped head covered with a pattern of black-blue veins. Then an eye opened and stared back at them. It was a brown eye, and it held no particular expression.

  Domi stumbled back a few paces, her knife coming up reflexively. “It’s still alive! Kill it!”

  “No!” Brigid whirled, securing a grip on her forearm. “Keep to the plan!”

  Domi struggled for a second, and then the tension went out of her. “Let go.”

  Brigid released her. The look she cast Kane was so filled with soul-wrenching horror and disgust, he could say nothing but “Keep moving.”

  They walked along, and the sights they saw inside the glass-fronted cubicles didn’t become any less nauseating but they didn’t get worse, either. Perhaps the clinical atmosphere and the red lights contributed to a sense of unreality, so even though they were on the edge of it, they didn’t panic.

  Kane’s mind distanced itself from the externals, as though his eyes were vid cameras transmitting the images to the real him at some distant, safely removed location. He glanced past the glass walls, each one of them holding an artefact of horror, each one of them threatening his tenuous grip on sanity.

  They passed glass cases and fluid-filled jars with floating human internal organs.

  In one cubicle, they saw the naked body of a man. His complexion was ruddy, and his hair hung down his back in three thick strands. Parts of him were missing, but there was enough left of the face that they could see the snake tattoo imprinted across it.

  Grant muttered, “Milt. At least he’s dead.”

  “Now we know what happened to the bodies in the Cliff Palace,” Kane said matter-of-factly, and continued on his way.

  He clawed frantically for a grip on the real world, but the world around him was real. Everything outside of Dulce, this nightmare spot, seemed like a dim, half-remembered fragment of a dream.