Outlanders 15 - Doom Dynasty

by James Axler

  Domi did not seem particularly relieved to hear it, but she said nothing. Kane returned the notebook to the shelf and looked around. He saw an open doorway on the opposite end of the chamber. To Domi he said, "Stay here."

  He crossed the huge room, sidling between the comp terminals. The square doorway opened up on an expanse of featureless corridor. The overhead light strips shed a pale illumination on the dusty linoleum floor. The hall was only twenty feet long and dead­ened against the sealed doors of an elevator shaft. Apparently, the elevator was the only way to and from the control room.

  Kane weighed his options for a moment, then re­turned to Domi. "You're going back."

  Her eyes flashed and her back stiffened. "Why?"

  "To fetch Grant and Baptiste. The objective was to secure the immediate area, and we've done that."

  "Why me?" she demanded. "Why not you?"

  "Because you agreed to follow my orders on this op. If you're reneging, then just jump your ass back to Cerberus and don't bother to come back with the others."

  Domi's jaw muscles bunched, but she only nodded tersely.

  They went back to the mat-trans unit, and Domi stepped into the chamber, pulling the door closed to initiate the jump sequence. Solenoids clicked with a solid, satisfying chock.

  Stepping back, Kane waited for the subsonic hum to begin, for the hexagonal disks to exude their fa­miliar glow. He waited. And waited. And nothing happened.

  Domi opened the armaglass door, her brow fur­rowed in puzzlement. She pulled it firmly shut again. Nothing happened—no whine, no glow, no spark-shot mist.

  Kane opened the door, carefully inspecting the cir­cuitry actuator on the lock, making certain full contact was achieved. He slammed it closed and stood si­lently in baffled anger. After a few seconds, Domi opened the door from the inside. "What's going on?"

  Kane's reply was grimly to the point. "We were expected. It's a one-way conduit."

  Fear shone in the girl's eyes. "How were we ex­pected?"

  Kane did not tell her about Grant and the conse­quences his streak of mercy may have wrought.

  "We're trapped?" Her voice hit a shrill note.

  Kane nodded. "That's the general concept I was trying to convey."

  Chapter 22

  Hearts trip-hammering within their chests, Kane and Domi went back through the control room and into the corridor. He fought off the creeping fingers of panic that clutched at his mind, refusing to conjecture on how the mat-trans unit had been reprogrammed.

  When they reached the elevator, he unsheathed his combat knife and jammed the heavy blade between the doors, prying at it, working it back and forth.

  "Where are we going?" Domi demanded in a fierce whisper.

  "Anywhere but here," he grunted, applying more pressure to the knife's handle. "I don't want to be penned up in there."

  He heaved back on the knife, and there was a grat­ing sound as the panels separated a bit. Domi worked her small hand into the crack to help with the lever­age. Something snapped loudly on the other side of the doors, and they rolled open smoothly and without resistance, rocking Kane back on his heels.

  The car was large, with polished chrome handrails. There was only one button on the exterior wall, im­printed with an arrow pointing upward. Kane used the point of his knife to depress it, but the doors did not slide shut, nor did the car ascend. Domi pointed to the square hatch on the ceiling, so Kane boosted her up. She pushed it open and crawled through. She whispered down, "Ladder here."

  Kane jumped up and grabbed the edge of the open hatch, and chinned himself through it. Because of his armor, the fit was tight, but after a moment of muscle-straining effort and a couple of breathless curses, he wriggled onto the roof of the elevator car. The illu­mination was weak, but Domi's sensitive eyes were sharp even in semidarkness, and Kane's image en­hancer and visor made the most of all available light to provide him with limited night vision.

  The square shaft rose above them. Paralleling the cables and extending up one wall were the metal rungs of a ladder. About fifty feet above shone a faint rectangle of light.

  Domi stepped onto the ladder and began to climb. Kane followed, hand over hand, until they came to an opening. Elevator doors were partially ajar and led to another expanse of featureless corridor, the walls made of mortared, unpainted concrete blocks. They passed several closed, electronic-lock-equipped doors, each one bearing the circular yellow-and-black radi­ation warning symbol. Beneath the symbols were plastic signs emblazoned with red block lettering: Ra­diation Hazard Beyond This Point! Entry Forbidden To Personnel Not Wearing Anticontaminate Clothing!

  Kane took the warnings seriously and decided not to investigate. When they came to a T-branching in-tersection, he saw a door without the symbol or the warnings, although it was locked electronically, with a small keypad instead of a knob. The face of the door held a small plaque that read Purity Control Ori­entation. He paused, recalling what Lakesh had said regarding the basis of ville class distinctions.

  They were based primarily on eugenics, and this was determined by the Directorate, or rather Balam. He had access to the findings of the Human Genome Project, so everyone granted full ville citizenship and the privilege to reproduce had to meet a strict criteria. The actual reason, though concealed, was simple: the purer the quality of individual genetic characteristics, the purer the quality of the hybrid. The practice was called Purity Control.

  Kane turned to Domi, holding out his hand. "Give me the Syne."

  She dipped her hand into her kit bag and produced a small metal device shaped like an elongated cir­cle. The Mnemosyne—or Syne, as it was casually called—was an electronic lock decrypter. Kane placed the Mnemosyne against the keypad, thumbed a stud on its surface and initialized the decryption mechanism. It emitted a faint, very high-pitched whine. The tight-band, high-power microwave fre­quency overrode the lock's microprocessors, and with a snap of metal, the locking bolts clicked aside.

  Carefully, he toed the door open and, leading with his blaster, stepped inside. After a moment of groping, he found a wall switch and flicked it up. They stepped into a medium-sized office suite, with six partition-enclosed desks, all of them equipped with computer terminals. Two steel-gray filing cabinets stood in a corner.

  Tacked on the wall, faded and yellowed with age, were large full-color illustrations arranged in a se­quence that ran nearly the entire length of the wall. The pictures displayed images of a naked human male and female, superimposed over twisting DNA mole­cules.

  The next illustration showed the strands of the helix separated, then moved back together in a new chain configuration. Another image showed egg cells being opened by microscalpels so their dark nuclei could be replaced with new ones.

  The final picture showed the male and female hold­ing the hands of a baby standing between them. The baby possessed a very high forehead and domed cra­nium, beneath pronounced brow arches overhanging big, slanting staring, eyes.

  "What's that supposed to be about?" Domi mur­mured.

  "Hybridization 101," Kane replied in the same muted tone. "How to make monstrosities in three easy lessons."

  On the right-hand wall a slab of steel was set tightly in the concrete blocks, a wheel lock jutting from the rivet-studded, cross-beamed mass. To their left, a hallway stretched into the distance.

  Kane went to the door. He put his hands on the wheel lock and gave it a counterclockwise twist. It did not budge. Taking and holding a deep breath, he threw all of his weight and upper-body strength against the lock.

  With a tortured screech of solenoids, the wheel turned, slowly and resistantly at first, then Kane was able to get a hand-over-hand spin going.

  He threw his shoulder against the steel door, and there was the sticky sucking sound of rubber seals separating. The door opened inward. He stepped for­ward, Sin Eater filling his hand. Domi followed him, alert and watchful, Combat Master at the ready. Both of them stopped and stared. A light strip flickered overhead
with a yellow glare.

  They were in a large, low-ceilinged room with a dozen desks, most of them covered with computer terminals and keyboards. A control console ran the length of the right-hand wall, consisting primarily of plastic-encased readouts and gauges. The left wall was composed of panes of glass, beaded with con­densation. The smell of disinfectant and chemicals cut into their nostrils. Kane's eyes took in at a glance the heavy tables loaded down with a complicated network of glass tubes, beakers and retorts.

  On a long, black-topped lab table were glass cases and fluid-filled jars. Floating inside them were human internal organs—livers, hearts, loops of intestines. Domi made a gagging sound. Kane stepped to the left wall, peering through one of the sheets of glass.

  Beyond it, in a cubicle, he saw the naked body of a man. His complexion was ruddy, his hair straight and dark. He was attached to a metal framework, his arms and legs spread-eagled, secured to steel struts by gleaming, heavy-gauge wire. His genitals had been removed and his eyes were missing. Only dark, red-rimmed hollows stared back at Kane.

  From a shallow console at the bottom of the win­dow frame protruded a black knob. Kane touched it, turning it to the right. The metal framework slowly revolved, turning the man's back to the glass. His rectum had been cored out in a surgically precise manner. There was no sign of blood.

  Domi moved to his side, stared and whirled away, covering her mouth with one hand. Kane felt bile ris­ing in his own throat, but he didn't recoil. He knew that genetic engineering, DNA manipulation and splicing formed only part of hybridization process. There were also surgeries, transplants of tissues and organs. Domi's own people had been rounded up and butchered like cattle, and their eviscerated corpses left to rot.

  He forced himself to step to the next pane of glass. When he saw what lay beyond it, he instinctively re­coiled, his finger tensing over the trigger stud of his Sin Eater. Beyond the glass was a transparent sac filled with a semiliquid amber gel, attached to a ceil­ing rack. A small figure, curled in a fetal position, floated within its gelid contents. The misshapen, in­humanly large cranium was a pinkish-gray in color, spotted here and there with wispy strands of hair. The nose was merely a pair of tiny nares. Its upslanting eyes were dull and fathomless. The limbs were dis­proportionate, far too long for the torso.

  Kane had seen similar hybrid fetuses in Dulce, but the sight still made him feel ill, his belly turning cold flip-flops, his mouth filling with sour saliva. He found a door leading to the glassed-in chamber and went through it, Domi following close behind. He scruti­nized the creature within the artificial womb, filled with synthetic amniotic fluid, and knew he was look­ing at a corpse, as dead as the mutilated human.

  He poked the tiny body with the barrel of his Sin Eater and set it to swaying gently. "It's dead."

  Domi nodded in satisfaction. "Good."

  Kane could not share her glee. Whatever methods had been used to create the hybrids at the Archuleta Mesa complex obviously could not be duplicated here. And he knew the barons would not just give up, resigning themselves to the long night of extinction.

  He left the chamber and went back to the door. "Let's move on."

  Domi did not respond, but he heard her fumbling with her kit bag.

  Impatiently, he said, "Let's go, Domi."

  "I heard you the first time," she snapped. "By the way, I think we'd better duck."

  He cast a quizzical glance over his shoulder as she stepped away from the long control console. A small metal-shelled oval rested there, as did two others in other parts of the room. Recognition flooded through him like a rash of icy water. Even as he stared at the incend grens, Domi grabbed him by the arm and hauled him down behind a lab table. In a shaved sliver of an instant, Kane saw the console disintegrate in a roaring white flash.

  The glassware atop the lab table shattered as if a giant fist had smashed into it. The entire room shud­dered brutally. Domi's mouth was open in a shout of elation, but Kane's concussed eardrums could not hear it.

  Shards of glass rained on them, and preservative fluids slopped over onto the floor. Despite the barrier of the heavy table, they felt the scorching heat of the thermite charge.

  The secondary incendiaries went off in a deadly chain reaction all over the room. Rolling balls of flame overlapped, instantly building to a roaring in­ferno. The thundering shock waves felt like a storm-driven surf.

  Kane made a lunge for the doorway, one hand gripped tightly around the collar of Domi's vest. A hurricane of superheated air struck him from all sides, slapping his breath back into his nostrils. A white nova forced him to squeeze his eyes shut, as it over­loaded his image enhancer. Dimly, he heard the squealing rasp of rupturing metal and the splintering of glass.

  Kane thrust himself out onto the floor of the office suite, yanking Domi forward in a forced somersault. Groping behind him, his hand closed around the wheel lock of the door. Pulling shut the heavy slab of metal was not difficult. Another explosive charge detonated, and the concussion slammed it closed, though tongues of flame spurted around the edges, melting the rubber seals.

  "That ought to start something!" she exclaimed happily, her tone full of glee, her eyes alight.

  Infuriated, Kane was just barely able to keep him­self from striking the girl. "You stupid, silly little bitch! Why did you—?"

  Domi sprang to her feet, her white face twisted into something demonic. "It's war!" she shrilled. "You're the stupid one, all of you—Lakesh, Grant, Brigid—stupid!"

  He rose, struggling to regain his composure. "Now they'll know—"

  She cut off his words with a savage gesture. "They know already we're here. Now they know that if they try to trap us, it'll cost 'em. Cost 'em big time. They'll end up praying we leave!"

  Kane stared at her, feeling cold nausea leapfrog in his belly, chill fingers tapping out a ditty of dread up and down the buttons of his spine. What little self-restraint Domi had practiced in the past was now completely discarded. Without Grant as the mitigating influence, the authority figure, she was unleashing all of her bottled-up passions, turning them from love to violence.

  Her ruby eyes glared at him, silently daring him to either command her to give up her weapons or take them from her by force. Kane saw no wisdom in at­tempting either. He turned sharply on his heel, saying, "Come on."

  As they strode down the corridor, Kane admitted to himself he was, at that moment, more afraid of Domi than whatever awaited them along or at the end of the passageway. He was just as disturbed by the lack of fire alarms or any commotion at all caused by the explosions. Possibly an automated extinguisher system had kicked in and doused the flames, but that did not explain the lack of personnel.

  The corridor ran straight for a hundred yards, dog-legged to the right, then ended, but not against a bar­rier. Kane let out an involuntary grunt of astonish­ment.

  They looked upon a multileveled man-made cav­ern, so vast Kane could not guess at its true dimen­sions. The nether end ran away into the dimness. The ceiling was at least three hundred feet above their heads, and dotted with bright stadium lights. It was far larger than the deep-storage chamber beneath Mount Rushmore where they found the Aurora air­craft.

  Large containers were arranged in orderly fifty-foot-tall aisles, stretching as far as they could see. Gently sloping ramps led from level to level, linked by passages wide enough for lift trucks and dollies to carry their loads. The ramps appeared to be the only method of getting from level to level. A floor-mounted, electric monorail ran the entire length of the enormous chamber, disappearing between a pair of double doors.

  An elevated superstructure was placed between the ground floor and the second level, like an observation post. A short flight of metal stairs led up to its un­derside. At regularly spaced intervals were wide, square apertures, leading out of the warehouse.

  Moving with a silence that would put cats to shame, Domi and Kane eased their way into the mon­strous warehouse, using the large containers as cover while they
explored the aisles. Once they were be­tween them, the gloom was deep and almost impen­etrable.

  Most of the containers were of similar size, and all were made of a kind of lightweight, corrugated metal with hinged lids. With his combat knife, Kane pried open the catch of one and pawed through the contents. Nestled within strawlike excelsior and foam padding were broken-down pieces of scientific equipment. He examined the parts of a microscope and other odds and ends he could not identify.

  Lowering the lid, he and Domi moved on. They saw and heard no one. Kane felt like an ant trapped in a child's toy box, wending his way around building blocks. Suddenly, a discordant beep emanated from the motion detector.

  They slowed their pace at once. Flattened against the crates, they slithered to the floor level and behind the protective shelter of the stacks. On the LCD face of the detector, three, then four, five and six pulsating dots appeared They moved very swiftly, vectoring in on their position.

  Kane and Domi saw them at the same time, creep­ing from the valley of shadows between two aisles, dark figures, eerie and unnatural, like living shadows themselves. They moved fast and with an unnatural silence.

  All of the figures were slim of build, the tallest not much more than five and a half feet in height. Above the narrow shoulders rose smooth, domed craniums, apparently jet-black in color. The hairless skulls ta­pered to sharp chins, so the impression of the heads was of inverted teardrops.

  The bulging eyes were completely round like an insect's. Dark and glassy, they were surrounded by protuberant ridges. Between them, extended in a V, was a pair of insectlike antennae. {Cane realized the figures wore night-vision goggles attached to skull­caps, and the antennae were infrared projectors. He had seen a hybrid with a set once before.

  All six of them wore tight bodysuits of a dark gray metallic weave, as well as plastic tube-shaped holsters strapped to their thighs. Kane knew that snugged within the tubes were infrasound wands, devices that converted electricity to sonic waves.

  They could be deadly weapons, but none of the six figures wielded them. Instead they carried wicked lit­tle subguns, Calicos by the looks of them, with 100-round cylindrical magazines and mounted laser sights. Their pale hands were long, slender, with very deli-cate fingers. The middle ones looked to be the length of Kane's entire hand.