by James Axler
"Might be something good, might be nothing. But a set of keys always makes fine bait in a booby trap."
Resting against her BMW, Amanda watched their proceedings with a disinterested air. Her gaze, though, kept darting to the interior of Leviathan.
Krysty noticed her attraction and moved between the stranger and the dashboard console. Curiosity was natural, but she got an odd feeling about the blonde. The woman had clearly been badly beaten. Purplish bruises were slowly appearing all over her body, especially the thighs, and there was a prominent tooth missing. Krysty could guess exactly what kind of trouble Ryan and Dean had rescued her from. Yet the blonde wasn't angry or humiliated as any normal person should have been. She almost seemed amused. Even pleased.
"Achilles, don these, for the world knows your plight," Doc said, handing Dean a pair of leather boots.
The youngster tried them on, delightedly finding the footgear to be a near-perfect fit. "Bit large," he commented, standing and stamping his feet.
"You'll grow into them," Ryan said, his expression belying the stern tone.
"Wait a moment," Amanda said, going to her saddlebags. "I have something here that might work better than those."
A warning signal flared through every nerve, and Krysty drew the .38 Ruger but Doc and Jak were between her and the woman. Both of the blonde's hands were out of sight inside the bags doing something.
"Ryan!" Krysty yelled. "Something's wrong! Stop her!"
But before anybody could react, an intense hissing sound came from the motorcycle. Nothing was visible, but Doc and Dean toppled limply to the ground. Scowling, Ryan managed to pull his hand-blaster when he also folded.
"It's gas!" Mildred cried, drawing her .38 blaster. But the weapon fell from nerveless hands and she slumped as if dead.
Drawing a knife, Jak held his breath and backed iway, but be also folded. Over the loud hissing, Amanda laughed contemptuously as J.B. tried to fire the Uzi and failed, crumbling as if every bone in his body were dissolved. Even though she had a clear shot, Krysty dropped her pistol and tried to shut the door when blackness swallowed her whole.
Chapter Ten
Blackness. Total and complete. The dead silence was broken only by the echo of a drip striking water, then a creak of straining metal and a rumble of collapsing stonework. A brief flicker of greenish light shattered the dark, then a second flicker. There was the soft high-pitched whine of accumulators releasing stored power and servomotors revving to operational speeds.
In agonizing slowness, circuits grew warm, then solder cracked and wires parted. Fat sparks crawled like neon spiders over the shattered transistors, broken chips, smashed relays and cracked motherboard of the General Electric Ranger Mark IV before its auxiliary CDPs flared into microsecond life again.
The autorepair systems strained against the electronic and physical damage. Reserve power flowed from the nuke batteries past pulverized circuit boards and along the very alloy framework of the annihilated tank until finally reaching relays and incandescent bus bars. Most of the sensors were offline, some completely dead. The few still working indicated impossible things, so the diagnostic systems promptly disconnected the malfunctioning elements. But the remaining handful registered that water rich with decaying leaves and faint traces of human waste were flowing over the decimated vehicle. Memory chips struggled to identify the environment, and the answer came soon enough: a sewer. The Ranger was in a city sewer. High probability: driven through the street and into the underground pipes by the force from above. The circuits had no solid data on what was the generating factor of the crushing blow, but from the concrete dust, glass splinters, broken bricks and such, it postulated a falling building.
Then alarms sounded. Trace levels of gallium, arsenic and selenium were found in the muddy water. Subprocessors indicated very high probabilities that there were computers in the structure above the Ranger. If the repair droids could only reach those, the machine could get back online. Once more, the autorepair systems tried valiantly to function, and failed. They tried again, and failed again.
Searching for an answer to the repair problem, complex arrays of sophisticated Thinking Wires surged with stored bytes, and virtual-reality monitors flashed random data, blueprints and schematics. A hundred thousand miscellaneous files were opened and read as the diagnostic software searched for the correct command prefixes. Stored bits of conversation and recorded visuals had to be listened to endlessly as the search continued at the speed of light. One file was heard a thousand times before the loop could be severed and the work continued.
Sluggishly, the main data processor of the Ranger came awake. A soft ethereal glow began to tint the dark as a series of small submonitors came to life. Each showed the view around the hull from a different direction, including directly behind and straight above. No details, only brown. Secret codes and complex commands started to scroll on the arced array of virtual screens, and the gloom wildly strobed with the combined pyrotechnic effect. Cybernetic relays slid into position, superconductor bus bars hummed alive and a torrent of fresh electricity from miniature nuke batteries flooded deactivated circuits with a massive infusion of power.
Instantly, a subcomputer ran a full diagnostic.
Blueprints and electronic diagrams scrolled across every monitor in furious study. The probability of success was 8.9 percent. Good enough. It was smashed to pieces, with most of its computers destroyed, and circuits dead, but the Ranger had gone into many battles with a lower probability and emerged victorious.
A primary circuit sparked and nothing happened. A secondary was tried and a solenoid thumped, but the tiny hatch it was connected to refused to open, the metal buckled into an impossible condition. When the computer realized the truth, it bypassed the escape hatch and sent a hundred crablike drones out through the cracks in the hull. Clambering through the bricks and wreckage, most of the drones stepped on a loose piece of masonry and were subsequently crushed under an avalanche of debris. The remaining handful climbed over their fallen units, continuing ever upward into the tangle of glass and carpeting and out of visual range.
Time passed slowly, then the drones radioed with important news. In the ruins above were smashed computers of superior technology than those on board the Ranger. Generations better. There were fax machines for wiring, TV remote controls for infrared relays, video games loaded with integrated chips and microwave beamers inside kitchen ovens. The inventory went on for hours: rare metals from office copiers, fiber optics from phone lines, Plexiglas windows, optical lenses from security cameras, titanium steel from the building itself, electric motors in escalators, hydraulic pumps from the elevators, endless coaxial cable from VCRs, cooling units from refrigerators and air conditioners, and low-power civilian lasers from countless CD stereos and office printers.
Snipping bits and pieces from this and that, the handful of drones first repaired the rest of the broken droids. Dozens, then hundreds of the little machines started to ferry ton after ton of processed materials to the smashed tank. Hours passed in frantic activity as the sewer walls were shored up to prevent any further collapse onto the tank. Then primary power was restored, and miniature lasers began to weld the hull solid as hydraulic pumps forced warped sections closed.
Scurrying drones covered the tank, banging on treads and rewiring command boards. The world was at war, with millions of American lives depending upon the operational efficiency of the robotic guardian. Soon, the Ranger would be online and combat ready, with its invisibility shield and polycycic laser fully restored. Then the machine would hunt down the unauthorized intruders who stole valuable military supplies from redoubt 549.
The carrier wave of their badly shielded radio gave off an easily traceable signature.
But the Ranger wouldn't try to capture the thieves again. They had illegally resisted with lethal force and the Mark IV was programmed to learn from mistakes. This time, it would simply kill them on sight.
Chapter Eleven
Dri
p, drip, drip. The noise was maddening, neither slowing nor increasing in tempo. It was as regular as clockwork.
The laughing woman, Amanda, filled Ryan's vision and he put a bullet through her face. A neat hole punching in her forehead, the blood flowing out to drip-drip-drip to the ground. But the woman neither stopped laughing nor fell. Ryan shot again with his massive revolver. Pieces of her clothing were blown away, her seminude body punctured in a dozen places, but the great volume of welling blood still only dripped in that single maddening beat.
"Fire!" he shouted, and Leviathan's main cannon boomed, blowing her into a dozen pieces. The steaming chunks hit the ground and oozed, in perfect unison, a chorus of blood.
Ryan stared at her with both eyes, shaking his fists in silent rage as he began to feel the world dissolve. The sound of the drip continued unabated, but the images left his vision and he awakened ma large dark room, his hands manacled to the cold stone wall above him.
As his eye became accustomed to the dim light, Ryan saw the rest of his people were chained to the wall to his right In surging waves of recollection, he remembered the fight on the highway, the bikers, then Amanda gassing his crew, their bodies dropping to the ground as if dead. But it was worse than that; now they were her prisoners. A glance at his clothes said he had been thoroughly searched, everything, not just his weapons, gone except for the clothes themselves. Even the spent shell casings.
The rest of the companions were shackled alongside him. Everybody seemed alive, chests rising and falling, so Ryan turned his attention to the chains. They were inordinately thick, like a tow chain for a boat anchor. The links were clean and oily with not a sign of rust or corrosion. The bolt they looped through was in equally good condition, and not sunk into the mortar between the stone blocks, but directly into the granite.
He noticed a door on the far side of the room, squat and massive, banded with iron. It was a tough barrier, but the lock appeared to be an old-fashioned turnkey. J.B. could probably pick that in a minute.
Once they were off the wall.
To the left were four grilled openings, only blackness visible beyond. But the bars were spotless, the handles gleaming not from constant use, but from being highly polished, with faint traces of wax still in the seam where the brass handle joined to the steel door frame. Damn, but the place was clean.
A collection of chains and ropes hung above a grated drain in the center of the windowless room. That boded ill, evoking images of tortured souls bleeding into the sewer. The drain was very large, nearly a foot across, but still too small for even
Dean to crawl through. A trickle of water flowed into the grating, and Ryan backtracked it to a neatly coiled garden hose hanging from a shining brass wall mount, the nozzle steadily dripping water. The source of his torment.
The one-eyed man licked dry lips, then turned his head away. Staring and wishing would only make his thirst worse. Concentrate on the problem at hand. Recon, then escape. Revenge, if possible.
"Bitch," he muttered aloud, the tendons of his arms standing out as he pulled against the chains with all of his strength. They didn't give.
"I have to agree," Krysty murmured, rattling her chains. "So, she got all of us, eh?"
"And all of our stuff. We've been searched by pros.
Krysty gazed at her misbuttoned shirt. "I know."
Doc came awake with a sour expression.
"Bloody hell" he rumbled. "Captives of the lady ward, I surmise."
"Everybody okay?" Krysty asked, her hair coiling tightly. "I have a terrible sense of suffering."
"Yeah, fine."
"Not bleeding," Jak said, his tumbling hair almost completely masking his face.
"I am undamaged," Doc said. "Merely acrimomous.
Dean looked upward. "If that means pissed off, count me in."
"Whatever that gas was, it moved like lighting," Ryan said. "Must be predark military stuff."
"I don't know of any knockout gas that can strike with that kind of speed. Nerve gas, yes, but nothing that merely incapacitates," Mildred said. She smacked her lips and looked longingly at the dripping water, then sighed.
Suddenly, Ryan understood what it was there for, and chalked up another point against the blond bitch.
"No wonder she wanted her bike so badly," Dean said. "I thought it was so she could escape from us."
"If only," J.B. grunted, probing the inside of his mouth. "Damn, they got my lockpick." Then he wiggled his body around. "Not a thing in my pockets. Bet she took the lint."
No sign of your hat, either," Mildred added.
"Tell me about it."
"Call if guards approach," Doc said, and bracing his long legs against the wall, he tried to force his thin wrists out of the manacles. Sweat broke out on his brow, and tendons stood out on his arms. A line of blood flowed down his wrists and into his sleeve.
For a moment, Ryan thought it was going to work, then with an explosion of breath, Doc stopped his exertions.
"Negative," he growled. "They have been adjusted for my size."
"Get close?" Jak asked.
Dean lifted his boots off the floor and jerked downward with his full weight. The chains shook from the effort, but the boy's hands stayed inside the cuffs. Placing his feet back on the floor, this time, he bent his knees and jumped into the air, to cry out as his fall was arrested by the shackles.
"That was stupe," Krysty commented. "You could have busted a bone."
"I was trying to," Dean told her. "Break a few fingers, and the cuff will slide right off."
"Good try," Ryan said, his gaze moving back and forth across the room. "But save it till we know more. Something is odd here."
"Yes, it's the damnedest thing," Mildred muttered, sniffing the air. "But if this was a torture chamber, it's cleaner than most hospitals."
Massaging his wrists, Doc agreed. "A condition that logically makes no sense. Having this grotesque locale disgusting with rotting corpses and such is a good way to soften up a victim's resolve. It would make it much easier to get the information the person wanted."
Ryan frowned. "Or mebbe she wants her victims comfortable, so they last longer. Lots of folks get their jollies slicing and dicing for no other reason than to hear the red music."
"Yes, an intriguing puzzle."
"Not like puzzles," Jak stated. Hawking loudly, he spit on his manacles and tried to wiggle his own hands free, to no success.
"The ward won't tolerate no dirt," a gruff voice said from the darkness. "No, sir. Utter is a slap. Rust gets ya whipped, and so on."
Ryan went cold inside, frantically searching for the telltale feeling of cold fingers stroking his brain. He had just been wondering why everything was so bastard clean down here. But fly as he might, there was no sensation of a mutie reading his thoughts.
"Everybody says the same thing first time down here, eh?" Ryan stated.
"Yep. Don't recognize your voices. What block ya from? Nine? Ten? Or is ya farmers from Detail?"
"Outlanders from beyond the desert," Krysty replied, staring directly at the cell as if she could see into the lightless interior.
There came a guttural laugh. "Ha! Good story. Nothing out there but the Beast, and folks who like to eat folks. Or so I hear."
"Also some vines and bugs that eat damn near anything," Ryan commented. "But on the most part you're correct"
"Eh?" asked the voice. "You really from outside?"
"What happened? Got caught trying to steal food from the guards?"
"We rescued a woman who called herself Amanda, and got this as a reward." Ryan shook his chains.
"Blond woman, big chest, green eyes?"
"You know her, then."
"Yes. I do."
He paused. "This the truth?"
"As sure as death," Ryan stated.
"Who are you anyway?" Krysty asked. "Another traveler?"
"Prisoner 224474," the voice stated. "But my friends call me Shard."
Ryan looked at Krysty, and she nodded
. The other was a prisoner, and not a guard or sec man trying to fool them. With her okay, the companions introduced themselves.
"So, is that blond bitch actually in charge here?" J.B. asked, "or just some gaudy slut hired to tease in the customers?"
Chains rattled, and a disheveled face appeared at the bars. The hair was long and tied back with rag strips, the beard was full, but squared off. His clothes were old and patched a thousand times, but painfully clean. "Never say that to her face, or you'll get the twisters, right on the spot."
"Twisters?" Jak repeated.
Shard shuddered.
Probably thumbscrews, Ryan realized, or something similarly medieval. Maybe electric drills. "Sounds bad," he said. "Ville run by real coldhearts, eh?"
"They got names?" J.B. asked.
"Our lord and leader is the Ward Coultier,"
Shard seemed to be reciting by route. "But his children speak for him-Lady Ward Amanda and Deputy Ward Richard. Heirs to the Citadel. Ain't personally heard the old ward talk for years. Some say he's dead, some say worse."
"And the kids?"
"Bad ones. Hurt for no reason but the liking of it."
"And this is their torture chamber."
"They call it Times Square."
"Just like in prison," Ryan said. Then he looked around. "Shard, have you ever been outside?"
"Sure, I was out last spring for good behavior. No, it was the spring before that. Mostly I work in the mills and coal mine."
"Coal mine?" J.B. asked.
Shard stomped the floor. "We're on top of it. Goes down deep. Straight to hell, some say. I don't know about such things, but I can swing a pick with the best of them."
"I can tell you're a powerful man," Krysty said, offering a sweet smile. it was clear that Ryan wanted some information from the wreck, and flattery was the only way to bribe Shard at present
"Shard," Ryan said slowly and distinctly, "you want to escape?"
"Don't!" Shard thrust a hand out between the bars of his cell as if trying to reach Ryan and close his mouth by force. "Don't never say that word again! They give you to the fat man and his dogs!"