by James Axler
Ryan turned the assault blaster’s select fire switch to full-auto and cut loose a short, aimed burst. Hit by several heavy caliber bullets in rapid succession, one of the creature’s rear legs broke free at the second joint from the body. As the limb fell to the floor, the spidie jumped in surprise, hitting the ceiling with its back. Then it moved down the hallway, away from them. Yellow blood gushed from the wound as the stump wobbled around. Even though the mutie had been hit, it didn’t seem in any hurry.
“Drive it off!” Ryan said, waving the others into the intersection. Then he opened fire again.
The spidie retreated farther. It looked as if they had the mutie on the run.
Then things changed.
The spidie suddenly reversed direction and charged right at them.
Ryan got off another short burst, then flattened his back against the wall. If the spidie wanted out, it was free to leave. When he turned his head, he saw Jak and Lima standing in the middle of the hall, right in the onrushing mutie’s path. The whitecoat seemed paralyzed by the sight of it, and the rope around his neck tethered Jak to an immoveable object.
Before Ryan could cry out, the jutting points and sharp hairs on the spidie’s legs scraped past his chest. Jak let go of the rope and dived for the foot of the wall. For a second the tag end of the rope tangled in the spidie’s clawed feet; it jerked Lima to the floor and dragged him along behind it a good twenty feet before stopping and turning to address the problem. As the mutie squatted to bite him, Lima scooted out from under it. Trailing the rope from his neck, he high-kicked down the intersecting hallway.
It did Ryan’s heart good to see the seven-legged spidie scamper after him.
“It seems like we lost our guide again,” J.B. said.
“If he wasn’t lying to us about the directions,” Ryan said, “all we have to do is find the down staircase and the mat-trans will be somewhere on the level below.”
“Should we check the side passages for the stairway entrance?” Ricky asked.
“All the other entrances were accessed from the main halls,” Mildred said. “Why would this one be any different?”
“Excellent point, my dear,” Doc replied. “And to extrapolate further from experience, I suggest the most likely spot for the entrances would be near the elevators.”
With weapons raised all around, and clear firing lanes in front of them, the companions advanced down the level’s main hall. Checking inside every room as they passed added some time to the transit, but the last thing they needed was a surprise attack from the rear. They worked steadily, taking turns looking into the rooms, and pressing forward until the end of the hallway appeared in the distance.
On the left wall, almost at the end, Ryan saw the closed elevator doors. He opened his mouth to speak, but never got the chance. Two black suits burst out of the doorway opposite the elevator. They were three steps into the hall when Ryan and the companions started shooting. The kill zone was narrow and the blasterfire tightly focused. The enforcers took dozens of hits and dropped before they completed their fourth step. The automatic door behind them swung closed.
Jak and Ryan moved forward quickly, covering the doorway with their blasters.
The companions swept in behind them.
“Ryan, have a look at this,” J.B. said. “Ricky and Doc have got the door.”
When he turned back, Mildred and J.B. were standing over the corpses. The Armorer had rolled one of the bodies belly-up.
Mildred pointed at the dead man’s face. There were bloody circles on his cheeks where the skin had been ripped off by suckered fingers. And similar wounds were on the palms of his hands—defensive wounds.
“Poor bastards were just trying to get away,” Krysty said.
“We gave them a cleaner death than the stickies were offering,” Doc pointed. “I dare say I would take a firing squad over that any day.”
Jak threw open the stairway door and they pushed onto the landing. Blasterfire and shrieks filled the stairwell, coming from directly beneath them.
“Mutie yells,” Jak said with conviction.
“I think the lad is right,” Doc replied. “No human throat ever gave voice to a teakettle scream like that.”
“We’ve found the stickies for sure,” J.B. agreed as autofire rattled from the level below in a 30-round, magazine-emptying, single burst. “And the stickies have found the black suits. Mebbe we should wait a minute or two. We wouldn’t want to interrupt a special moment.”
They waited until the shooting finally stopped, then climbed down the stairs to the next landing. Nothing moved below them so they continued down the next flight, to the landing door. This one was intact, but there were circular marks in the paint, and the edge was smeared with milky adhesive.
“The mat-trans unit could be anywhere on this level,” Ryan said. “We never saw it. We were hooded, remember?”
“I won’t soon forget that experience,” Mildred said, hiking up the shoulder sling of her MP-5.
Ryan saw no signs beside the nearby doors to indicate what was on the other side of them. Farther down the hallway, the overhead bulbs were out for a long stretch, then the lights were back on again. “Unless we get lucky,” he told the others, “finding the mat-trans is going to take another room-by-room sweep. Mildred, it’s mighty dark up ahead. We’re going to need our flashlights.”
When they neared the edge of the last pool of illumination, they turned on their flashlights. White, paired objects reflected back from the floor in front of them—white bare feet with suckers on their soles. And golden spots of metal. Spent casings were strewed like confetti over the corpses of the dead muties; some of them had been gutshot so many times that they wore their intestines like greasy scarves around their necks.
“Now it’s starting to look familiar,” J.B. said with a laugh.
But it wasn’t just muties on the floor. And not just enforcers, either. There were civilians, too. Of all coverall colors. Of all ages. The smallest of them, the youngest of them, were reduced to shreds and pulp, recognizable as once human only by the tiny shoes and socks that lay nearby. The larger victims had been deconstructed into piles of red bones and mounds of discarded entrails and clothing.
Not pretty. Not sweet-smelling.
Krysty hardly looked down as she walked around the carnage. J.B. trod on severed parts with indifference. Even Mildred, who had once sworn an oath to do no harm, seemed unmoved by the spectacle.
The Antarcticans had in their arrogance and ignorance tempted fate. Fate had responded to the challenge, as it so often did, by ramming them headfirst through a meat grinder.
Halfway down the dark stretch of the hallway, Ryan shone his light at the ceiling. There was no isolated power failure, he realized. Every bulb was broken in its socket, shot out in the wild melee.
Who killed who, or what killed who, or who killed what was impossible to determine. There were too many dead, their corpses choking the corridor, and their destruction was intertwined. The only thing certain was that the clockwork of the universe continued to tick on without them.
As the companions moved into the light, seventy feet away a pair of black suits popped around a doorway on the right, wildly spraying bullets at them.
The answer back came tenfold. Autofire rained on the doorway, gnawing at the wall and door frame. One of the men fell backward into the hall, hit in the head and chest; the other made it back into the room.
“We have at least one survivor,” J.B. said. He, like everyone else, held a tight bead on the door through which the black suit had escaped. “What do you want to do, Ryan?”
“Got to clear the room. Give me a couple of concussion grens.”
“Why not frags?” Ricky asked. “Kill the bastards.”
“We don’t know what’s in that room,” Ryan said. “They could be protect
ing something.”
“You mean the mat-trans?” Mildred queried, digging the grens out of her backpack.
“Makes sense,” Ryan replied. “We haven’t come across it yet. Cover me. I’m going to shake things up.” He passed Jak the assault blaster because he knew it would only slow him.
The companions lined up along the left-hand wall, weapons aimed, as Ryan slipped down the other side. He wasn’t worried about taking fire from the doorway. Anyone stupe enough to stick his or her head out was going to lose big chunks of it. Using the concussion grens was a concern, though, if the door did in fact lead to the mat-trans control room. There was a possibility that the blast could damage the comps that ran the system or cut the power supply. He had to take the risk; it was either that or charge into the room not knowing how many blasters were on the other side.
When he got within a yard of the door frame, he pulled the pins on both grens. Then he stepped away from the wall just far enough to see that the door was standing half-opened, angled into the room. He couldn’t tell if anyone was behind it, but that didn’t matter. The partly open door offered him a bank shot. Letting the safeties of both grens pop off, he counted to two, then dived past the doorway. As he cleared it, he tossed the grens against the face of the door. They bounced off and rolled into room.
By the count of four, he was on the far side, face against the wall, hands over his ears.
The grens detonated on five with a blinding flash and a double jolt that rocked the hallway.
Ryan pushed up from the floor. Dust and smoke poured out the doorway, but the lights inside the room were still on. J.B. and Doc went through the door first. Ryan grabbed his longblaster from Jak and followed them. There were five black suits in the room, all were down. Two were dead from the explosions, which from the ravaged state of their faces had to have gone off under their noses. The ones who weren’t dead were unconscious. They were barely breathing and their pulses were irregular.
The control room appeared undamaged, except for a dusting of burned explosive. The black suits had absorbed most of the blasts with their bodies.
Krysty walked over to the companions’ piled clothing, which lay where they’d left them, then walked to the mat-trans, opened the door and stuck her head inside. “Our blasters are still encased in ice,” she said. “Frozen to the floor plates.”
“Let’s get out of these damned coveralls,” Mildred suggested.
Without hesitation they all stripped down to the skin and put on their own clothes and boots.
“All right, let’s haul ass into the mat-trans and head home,” Ryan said.
“With no unplanned stops between,” Mildred stated.
“Home sounds mighty good,” Doc said.
“Home and food,” Ricky added.
“If we’re still in transit when they come back to this room, they could commandeer our jump and bring us back here,” Krysty pointed out. “Like they did before.”
“They could do but they won’t,” Ryan assured her. “Ricky, help me drag the two dead black suits into the chamber.”
“What do we need them for?” the youth asked.
“You’ll see. Don’t argue, just help me.”
They hauled the corpses by the arms and feet through the mat-trans door and dumped them onto the frozen floor panels.
“What about the live ones?” Ricky asked. “Shouldn’t we put them inside the chamber, too?”
“No use for them,” Ryan told him. “Gather up some of the redoubt’s weapons and Mildred’s backpack and stow them in the chamber.”
“What about Lima?” Krysty said. “That bastard needs to pay for what he’s done.”
“Oh he will,” Dix told her.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m betting on that spidie. With so much extra food stuck to the ceiling, it’ll take weeks for it to get around to Lima. Meanwhile, he’ll be just hanging around up there, waiting to be digested.”
“He’s right,” Ryan said to Krysty. “Lima isn’t going anywhere. None of these people are. This is the end of the road for them all.”
“I don’t understand. They can still make jumps. Lima can make a jump. Their whole damned army of enforcers can jump right into our laps. For all we know the whitecoat’s still alive.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
As the mist of the mat-trans chamber surrounded him, Ryan dropped into unconsciousness not knowing if he would ever wake. In that sense, this was no different than any other jump. The coating of ice was different, though. The cold against his back kept him awake a few seconds longer than usual, long enough to see his companions sitting around him, their faces already going slack as consciousness slipped away. After he, too, passed out, the nightmares that chased him were violent and bloody; no difference there, either. Jump dreams were invariably nasty affairs. But the details in this case were unique.
There were ghosts in the machine with him.
The spirits of the dead black suits. Their angry, murdered souls had been sucked into the mat-trans ether, and they sought revenge against the man who had killed them.
True enough, it was dreamed vengeance, but the dreams felt very real to Ryan.
They hurt.
He couldn’t move fast enough to avoid the edges of the black suits’ broadswords. With precision and pleasure, they chopped him apart, separating hands from wrists, feet from ankles, forearms from elbows, on and on, until they had turned him into a headless doorstop. The whole time he screamed in vain for mercy, and then in vain for a merciful death.
And still the angry spirits were not satisfied.
They put him back together like a child’s puzzle, and when he was whole again, they repeated the process, hands from wrists, feet from ankles.
The loop of pain and helplessness continued until he jerked awake to the sharp smell of ozone, and promptly threw up—or tried to. There was nothing in his stomach but caustic bile, which surged into his nose and mouth.
One by one the companions woke up; some of them tried to vomit and like Ryan, they failed miserably. It had been a long time since they had eaten. From the expressions on their faces, they were all relieved to be out of the bitter cold, and glad to see their weapons were no longer stuck to the floor.
When they could stand, Ryan urged them to gather their gear and get out of the chamber as quickly as possible. They all helped one another through the door and into the brightly lit anteroom.
“J.B., Ricky,” Ryan said, holding out Mildred’s backpack, “we need to rig a charge to blow when the door is opened. Everything you need for the job is in here.”
J.B. dumped the contents on the floor and the two of them quickly set to work.
“We got this,” he said.
They clapped the individual slabs of the C-4 together, the full ten pounds of it, armed the massive block of high explosive with a detonator, blasting cap and timer, then used some string J.B. had in his pocket to rig a trip line to the inside of the door, which opened out. When the line was drawn taut by the swinging door, a locking pin would be pulled and the timer initiated. With Ryan’s and Doc’s help they carefully positioned one of the bodies on top of the charge to hold it in place.
When everything was ready, Ryan and his friends exited the mat-trans. He needed to check to make sure the faces of the corpses could not be seen through the porthole. “What will the colonists think when they see the black suits?” Krysty asked.
“That it’s two of us and not two of them,” Ryan said. “That Doc and Mildred didn’t make it out of the unit. The colonists won’t hesitate when they see the bodies. They’ll jump in the chamber to secure their prisoners and check for pulses.”
“I set the detonation timer for just under a minute,” J.B. said. “It should be long enough for them to open the door and get in, but not get back out. If
no one shows up, at least the mat-trans will be damaged.”
“Time to press the LD button,” Ryan said as he moved toward the door to the mat-trans. Suddenly they heard the comps in the control room whir into life. Someone was trying to initiate a jump from another redoubt. Ryan hastily closed the mat-trans door.
“Looks like the whitecoats hit the LD button first,” J.B. stated. “Mebbe even Lima himself. Black dust, they’re in for a surprise!”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The mat-trans unit hummed, indicator lights flashing red, green, yellow across the control panel. And then came the familiar deep throb of the power cycle as it built to jump threshold. Lima rubbed his neck where the rope had cut into his skin. If it hadn’t been for the general’s staff and their excellent marksmanship, the spidie would have had him for lunch.
“How much longer?” General India queried. “They could be getting away.”
“Only a moment or two,” Lima told him.
The general and his seconds-in-command, Mike Romeo and Quebec Sierra, were in full, orange-suit battle gear. Helmets. Protective goggles. Combat harnesses. Sidearms. Submachine guns. The anteroom was crowded with orange suits, black suits and whitecoats. Everyone wanted a piece of the Deathlanders.
Security teams were still hunting down the muties that had been released, with attacks reported in widely separated sections of the redoubt. Lima knew, they all knew, if the muties were allowed to breed they would never be rid of them.
The carefully laid plans for a mass relocation to Argentina had suffered a serious, if not fatal, setback with the destruction of the evacuation fleet. On the way to the mat-trans unit, Lima had overheard the general’s staff quietly speculating on whether there was a contingency plan for the base command’s solo escape to South America. To take one of the remaining hovertrucks and a few select, orange-suited personnel and leave everyone else behind.
The mat-trans recall had been General India’s bright idea. Lima wanted revenge, too, for how the bastards had mistreated and maligned him, but as a scientist he had been trained to look objectively at all sides of a problem. Based on his analysis, the risks of what they were about to do could not be calculated.