by James Axler
But few ville citizens knew the true nature of their rulers. The barons ruling the nine villes were more than the governing body of postnukecaust America— they were a living expression of the ancient god-king system. Their semidivine status derived from the means of their birth; they were hybrids of human and nonhuman, a blending of genetic material with the sole purpose of creating new humans to inherit the Earth. The barons served as a bridge between predark and postdark, the plenipotentiaries of the alien Archon Directorate itself.
According to what Kane, Brigid, Domi and Grant had been told by Lakesh upon their arrival at the Cerberus redoubt more than a year before, the entirety of human history was intertwined with the entities called Archons. Over the long track of time, the mysterious entities had been referred to by many names—de-mons, visitors, E.T.s and, finally and most simplisti-cally, the Grays.
Archons traditionally allied themselves with conquerors and tyrants, conspiring with willing human pawns to control humankind through political chaos, staged wars, famines, plagues and natural disasters. Their goal was always the unification of the world under their control, with all nonessential and nonproductive humans eliminated.
As time progressed, the world and humankind changed too much for them to rule through fallible human intermediaries with any degree of effectiveness. The Archons had no choice but to reveal themselves openly to the men in power.
After World War H, a pact was formed between elements in the United States government and the Archons, essentially an exchange for high-tech knowledge. Part of the trade agreement allowed the Archons use of underground military bases. The agreement was known in ultra-top-secret documents as the Ar-chon Directive. The power elite convinced themselves that the Archons were benevolent, with their primary interest in sharing technology that could make nuclear war obsolete. Much of this technology, based on Ar-chon templates, was the foundation of the Totality Concept researches.
Following the nuclear holocaust of January 20, 2001, the Archon Directive became the Archon Directorate. During the first century after the holocaust, humanity was too scarce and widespread for effective control. The Archon's solution was a long-range hybridization program, combining the genetic material of humankind with their own race to construct a biological bridge.
Eventually, the Archon Directorate interceded directly in the development of the most powerful baronies, and instituted the Program of Unification to bring humanity back under its control. Through their intermediaries, the Archons prevented the rebuilding of a society analogous to the predark model. Aspects of the Program of Unification were designed to prevent a repetition of the inefficient preholocaust societal structure and also to hide the existence of the Archon Directorate and the Totality Concept from all but a minority of humanity.
But over the past few months, Brigid, Kane, Domi and Grant had learned that the elaborate backstory contained only bits of truth mixed in with outrageous fiction. The Archon Directorate did not exist except as a vast cover story, created in the twentieth century and grown larger with each succeeding generation. The only so-called Archon on Earth was Balam, the last of an extinct race that had once shared the planet with humankind. Even more shocking was Balam's assertion that he and his ancient folk were of human stock, not alien but alienated.
Balam claimed that the Archon Directorate was an appellation and a myth created by the predark government agencies as a control mechanism. Lakesh referred to it as the "Oz effect," wherein a single vul-nerable entity created the illusion of being the representative of an all-powerful body.
Balam himself may have even coined the term Ar-chon to describe his people. In ancient Gnostic texts, archon was applied to a parahuman world-governing force that imprisoned the divine spark in human souls. Kane had often wondered over the past few months if Balam had indeed created that appellation as a cryptic code to warn future generations.
The Cerberus exiles still didn't know how much to believe. But if nothing else, none of them subscribed any longer to the fatalistic belief that the human race had its day and only extinction lay ahead. Balam had indicated that was not true, only another control mechanism.
It was undeniable, however, that the barons, the half-human hybrids spawned from Balam's DNA, still ruled. Each of the fortress-cities with its individual, allegedly immortal god-king was supposed to be interdependent with the others, but the baronies operated on insular principles, and cooperation among them seemed to be grudging despite their shared goal of a unified world. They perceived humanity in general as either servants or as living storage vessels for transplant organs and fresh genetic material.
Although the nine barons were not immortal, they were as close as flesh-and-blood creatures could come to it. Due to their hybrid metabolisms, their longevities far exceeded those of humans. Barring accidents, illnesses—or assassinations—the barons' life spans could conceivably be measured by centuries.
But the price paid by the barons for their extended life spans was not cheap. They were physically fragile, prone to lethargy and their metabolisms easy prey for infections, which was one reason they tended to sequester themselves from the ville-bred humans they ruled. Once a year, all the barons traveled to the Dulce facility to have their blood filtered and their autoimmune systems boosted. In severe cases, even damaged organs were replaced from the storage banks of organic material stockpiled at the Dulce installation.
Built in the midtwentieth century to house several divisions of the Totality Concept, the vast genetic engineering facility beneath the Archuleta Mesa in Dulce was later turned over almost entirely to Over-project Excalibur, the governing body overseeing bio-research programs.
Over the past thirty-odd years, the subterranean installation had become a combination of gestation facility, birthing ward and medical-treatment center. The hybrids, the self-proclaimed new humans, reproduced by a form of cloning and gene-splicing. Since the installation at Dulce had been rendered useless by the Cerberus personnel, extinction for the barons was less than a generation away if they did not have access to a secondary installation. Or so the Cerberus exiles fervently hoped.
As Kane led his companions on their journey, they twice crossed shallow ribbons of water that Brigid identified as tributaries of the Stanislaus River.
"If we follow it," she said, "we'd probably come to the ruins of a predark town or two."
"So?" Domi asked darkly.
"So, we might find some items of historical interest."
Kane gave her bleak half grin. "This isn't a field trip, Baptiste. Besides, the trail moves away from the river, not along it."
When they emerged from the grove of trees, they found themselves on a two-lane blacktop road The asphalt had a peculiar ripple pattern to it, and weeds sprouted from splits in the surface. Kane and Grant had seen the rippling effect before, out in the hell-zones. It was a characteristic result of earthquakes triggered by nuclear-bomb shock waves.
In a relieved voice, Brigid announced, "State Road 49. We're right on course."
During the prejump briefing, Brigid mentioned that the entire area around the Sierra Nevada foothills was the center of the California gold rush, three hundred or so years ago. Fueled by dreams of riches, prospectors crossed America's mountains, plains and deserts to pan for the precious nuggets. In response to the influx of fortune seekers, hundreds of mining towns sprang up around the mountain range. Within two decades, with the gold fields played out, most of the towns died.
None of her companions had any reason to doubt
Brigid's brief history of the region. Not only was she a former archivist, but she was also gifted with an eidetic, or "photographic," memory. She instantly recalled in detail everything she had ever seen or read. Due to her years as a historian, her mental stockpile of predark knowledge was profound.
They walked along the highway for only a mile before it was bisected by an earth slip, the rupture as clean as if made by an unimaginably
huge knife blade. Beyond lay a great plain of parched desert terrain, dotted only with sagebrush, cacti and ocotilla shrubs.
All of them knew that the most far-ranging destruction during the holocaust took place on the West Coast. Soviet "earthshaker" bombs had been seeded by submarines along the unstable fault lines in the Pacific. When they were detonated, vast areas of land between the Cascades and the Sierra Nevadas bucked, heaved and burst apart as if the earth itself were giving birth.
The four people were able to climb down the face of the fall with little difficulty, reaching the bottom in a series of jumps. Stooping, Kane examined the ground, noting marks of booted feet that had been poorly swept over with sand.
On one knee, Grant poked at a half-obscured pattern. "Boot treads," he observed. "They look familiar to you?"
Kane lifted his right foot, tapping the sole. "Stan-dard Mag-issue footwear. How old do you figure they are?"
Domi stepped forward, eyed the tracks and announced, "Not more than six hours." She looked toward the sky. "Be full dark afore we catch up with 'em."
From her knapsack, Brigid took a compact set of microbinoculars. She peered through the eyepieces, adjusting the focus to accommodate her own slightly astigmatic vision. At first she saw nothing but a dry vista of sand, stone and clay. Then she distinguished a dark line, a deeper brown against the beige of the sand.
"The edge of the desert isn't far," she said.
"Define 'isn't far,'" Kane suggested.
"An hour. Two at the outside."
Kane straightened. "Let's double-time it, then."
They strode swiftly across the arid ground, though clusters of cacti sprouting steely thorns made double-timing anything difficult and painful. The wind-drifted sand glimmered in long ripples, as if a sea had been suddenly frozen and turned to powder. It reflected the sunlight so brightly that all of them put on dark glasses. The ground was not smooth, although it looked deceptively so. All of them stumbled at least once on the sharp creases of rock hidden beneath sift-ings of sand.
Inside of a mile, the air was heavy with radiating waves of sheer, hellish heat. The desert hardpan seemed to soak it up and reflect it back. There was no shelter in sight from the rising inferno.
Domi, with her fair skin and sensitive eyes, suffered the worst, but she kept her complaints to herself. Kane and Grant quickly soaked their Kevlar under-sheathings through with perspiration, making both feel as if they were wearing swamps. Despite Brigid's estimate of how far away the edge of the desert was, the afternoon drifted by in a haze of heat shimmers and sweat.
They slogged on through the sand. Cacti of twisted, distorted shapes grew nearby, but no trees, not even a decent sized bush. Kane was concerned that Brigid would tire quickly, but her swift, almost mannish stride never faltered.
With agonizing slowness, the sun dropped enough that its glare wasn't as intense. The terrain gradually became rockier, firmer underfoot, inclining downward into dusty arroyos, dry washes that petered out after short distances. The ground was still soft enough to show bootprints, and the four people followed them.
One shallow ravine led into a deep gorge, where sheer walls rose on every side, exposing layers of sediment stained with streaks of red and ocher. Rocks both large and small reared in their path, as well as scatterings of dense shrub brush. Gravel crunched beneath their tramping feet. An island of solid granite stood in front of them. It had once forced a river to divide itself into a pair of channels, one right and one left. Both of them meandered out of sight. During the nuke-triggered quakes, rivers and streams had been diverted, sometimes running together until they made a vast, raging torrent.
Kane came to a halt, carefully examining the stony ground. He saw no sign of bootprints, not even the faintest of scuff marks. He looked to the left and to the right, and said in a voice full of frustration, "We've lost the trail."
Grant looked at the ground with an offended expression on his face, almost as if he blamed it for not holding tracks. "Fucking fireblast. To have come this far—"
"We've still got two choices," Brigid said.
"Yeah," Kane agreed gloomily, "and one of them is wrong. It could take us miles away from the bastards."
They stood in silence for a long moment, all of them loath to choose a path and take the responsibility if it was the wrong one. Finally, with a sigh of resignation, Kane started walking toward the mouth of the right-hand channel.
Not surprisingly, Domi heard the distant sound first. All of her senses were honed to razor keenness due to her upbringing in the Outlands of Hells Canyon, Idaho. She hissed, gesturing sharply for everyone to halt. They obeyed her without question, standing stock-still, listening hard, nerves tingling. They heard nothing but the soughing of the wind.
"What?" Kane asked impatiently.
Domi opened her mouth to speak, closed it, then shook her white-haired head, dark and damp now with sweat "Thought I heard things. Voices, footsteps, stuff clanking."
Kane strained his hearing, still heard nothing and started to relax. Then he heard the faint noises—a distant murmur of voices at the far limit of audibility, coming from somewhere ahead of them. Within a moment, all of them heard faint, mixed sounds, cries of pain, curses of anger, metallic clinks and jingles. Kane quickly slipped out of his backpack and Grant did the same, dropping their Copperheads atop them.
Extending a hand toward Brigid, Kane demanded curtly, "The binoculars."
She gave them to him, and he slung them around his neck by the strap. He and Grant picked a path through a jumble of upthrast rocks and reached the deeply fissured gorge wall. They began scaling it quickly and easily. It wasn't long before the easy ascent gave way to a serious climb. Footholds were hard to come by, and some of the handholds were mere cracks in the smooth stone face, but they wedged their fingers in and pulled themselves along. Their fingers gripped cracks in the stone, and rivulets of gravel streamed beneath their boots, rattling and clicking.
Grant huffed and puffed and swore as he clambered up the gorge wall, wishing Domi had volunteered to take his place. Nimble and strong, she could climb like a scalded monkey.
Finally, they reached a shelf of rock jutting below the top of the gorge wall, and panting heavily, the two men pulled themselves on top of it. Moving on hands and knees, they crawled to a heap of loose stones on the far edge. Kane raised the microbinocu-lars, blew grit from the ruby-coated lenses and peered through the eyepieces. Except for the shimmering heat waves rising from the baked ground and an occasional birdcall, the air was still.
He caught a flicker of movement and swiftly he tightened the focus to bring distant details to crystal clarity. Two columns of obsidian-armored Magistrates approached the gorge from the far side. He estimated they were about six hundred yards away, ten Mags to a column. Two armored men bringing up the rear haphazardly used brooms improvised from intertwined mesquite and sage branches to sweep their trail.
Between the black, marching lines staggered six men and three women. Raggedly dressed, they were tethered to one another by yokes of thick leather and wood with a length chain. They cringed from a pair of Mags who urged them along with curses and strokes from the barrels of their Copperheads.
"I guess they got what they came for," Kane murmured.
Grant squinted, barely able to pick out the distant black figures. "Anybody we know?"
Kane swept the binoculars back and forth, then fixed on a burly, stocky man in the lead. As he watched, the man removed his helmet and palmed away a film of sweat from his pale moon face and bulldog jowls. His small eyes were nearly buried within fleshy, puffy bags.
"Well, well, well," Kane drawled, handing the binoculars to Grant. "Look who's walking point."
Grant peered through the eyepieces and grunted softly in mingled surprise and disgust. "Baron Cobalt must be slag-assed desperate to assign Pollard to lead this detail."
Kane smiled mirthlessly. "Good old Polly. Haven't seen him in a while."
"Mebbe? You're not sure?"
The broad yoke of Grant's shoulders lifted in a negligent shrug. "It wasn't for lack of trying. If you're interested, you can always ask him."
Kane nodded. "I figure to do that very thing. Just as soon as they make camp."
Chapter 4
The channels the long-gone river had cut into the gorge formed a natural maze with ancillary branches and side passages that offered easy concealment Grant, Kane, Domi and Brigid withdrew into a deep fissure in the canyon wall, on the opposite side of the rock island that the Magistrates approached. They crouched silently as, hidden by the formation, the columns passed them by.
As the sound of the grim procession faded, Brigid commented quietly, "They'll have to stop for the night soon."
Kane glanced at the sky, at the sun sliding down amid a flurry of feathery clouds tinted a light purple. "In an hour or so," he agreed. "We'll be able to find them with no problem."
He eased himself into a sitting position, his back against a rock wall. "We can wait here for a bit before moving out"
In relative silence, they ate from me MRE ration packs. The Cerberus redoubt had thousands of the concentrated foodstuffs in storage, enough to feed all of the installation's permanent residents for a lifetime—if they ever got hungry enough.
The self-heat rations offered a wide variety of meals, but most of them tasted like damp cardboard. The few that didn't have the flavor of wet paper and glue tasted, according to Domi—who had the most indiscriminate of taste buds—like stickie shit. Still, the MREs contained all the vitamins and nutrients to keep people alive and healthy, just not happy.
"If I were Pollard—'' Grant began.
"You'd chill yourself?" Kane broke in.
Grant regarded him with mild irritation. "Besides that. I'd wait until a few hours after dark before crossing the waste. When the moon is high."