Shadow Fortress

by James Axler

  “Still warm,” Mildred said, turning the machine around and checking the ports. The CD drawer was empty, but a red diskette was sticking out of a slot, the writing on the label faded with age.

  “Pity,” the woman said, returning the disk. “When we blew the power to the lab, we killed the computer. This might have told us where the gateway is.”

  “No fix?” Jak asked, inspecting one of the bronze coins. It was a token of some sort. Odd.

  “Not without a power source.”

  “How about this?” Dean asked, walking in with the nuke battery from a droid in his hands.

  “That should have enough voltage,” Mildred said. With help from J.B., she wired the battery to the surge protector, and when she hit the switch, the screen began to glow and the device loudly beeped.

  “We’re in,” Mildred said, watching numbers and weird lines of coded text scroll by as the old comp sluggishly booted.

  “How can this thing work?” Dean demanded curiously.

  “Building must be shielded against an EMP blast,” his father said as the laptop gave a flourish of trumpets and a picture of a busty girl in a very skimpy bikini appeared on the screen. “Same way the re-doubts are.”

  “Called a Farraday Cage,” J.B. explained. “Sort of an electric fence against mag fields.”

  Jak blinked. “That work?”

  “Better believe it. But a Farraday uses a shitload of power. Megavolts to protect even a small house.”

  “Think the location of the gateway might be in a file?” Krysty asked pointedly, watching over their shoulders.

  “No,” Ryan replied sourly, turning the device around for them to see better. There were no icons on the wallpaper of the pretty blond girl at the beach. “The files have been erased.”

  Sliding into the chair, Mildred took the laptop. “Erased or deleted,” she said, bringing up the waste-basket and checking the contents.

  “Success,” she announced, restoring the files. “Nothing marked redoubt, gateway or anything like that yet. Ah, a word processor program. Let’s see if any text files are still listed.”

  Using the mouse, the physician shifted the cursor and double-clicked on the icon of a book only to have a pop-up screen appear demanding a password. Typing clumsily, the physician tried several of the most common passwords getting no results.

  “Fuck this,” Ryan said, standing erect. “There’s a million passwords he could have used. This is a waste of time.”

  “Just a minute,” Mildred said, lifting the mouse pad to check underneath. There were several alphanumeric sequences on a yellow sticky note, and she tried the longest. As the woman hit Enter, the password screen went away and the word processing program began to expand.

  “We’re in,” Mildred reported, typing steadily.

  Rubbing his cheek with the edge of a hand, Ryan grunted in reply. “The idiot wrote down the password?”

  “Lots of folks used to do that,” she admitted sheepishly, having done the same thing herself at the hospital. “Corporate security always keeps changing the passwords, and so folks write them down somewhere convenient to not forget.”

  Reviewing the text files, there was still nothing marked redoubt or gateway, so she shifted to the disk and brought up a large file marked “important.”

  “Okay, the man who worked in this office had the National Guard haul the supplies from the armory to this building,” Mildred said, compressing the broken sentences and random words. “Then had his technicians carry it to the redoubt.”

  “Where is it?” Ryan demanded.

  Mildred shook her head. “He doesn’t say yet. This is very badly typed with no spelling whatsoever. I wonder if he was dying, it’s so muddled. Ah, here’s something. He also shipped all of the live ‘pilots,’ he calls them, to Maturo Island. It has nothing of military importance, so his children should be safe there. God-damn son of a bitch actually calls the poor muties his children!”

  “The whitecoat is aced,” Krysty said gently. “His crimes have been paid for.”

  “Not enough for me,” Mildred argued.

  “Why gateway redoubt here?” Jak asked frowning. “Broken?”

  “Cave in,” the physician reported hesitantly, as if unsure of the event. “Apparently six technicians died trying to dig through the rubble before the scientists decided to leave and assemble the gateway as far away from this island as possible.”

  “Strange to go when they were so close,” Dean said, standing at the doorway to keep watch on the laboratory.

  “Hurry it up, Millie,” J.B. warned, holding the power cord attached to the battery. “These wires are red-hot, and are gonna burn out any sec.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Mildred said, turning off the comp without any preamble. “That was the lot. The rest of the disk was blank.”

  “If they had the supplies relayed here by the military,” Ryan said, thoughtfully rubbing his chin, “then a bunch of whitecoats moved it to the redoubt—it has to be very close. A couple of blocks at the very most.”

  “And underground,” Krysty added. “I’d say the basement here is the logical place to start looking.”

  “Just a second,” J.B. said and left the room. He returned in a few moments with a handful of metallic disks.

  “Subway tokens,” the man said, spreading the items on the desk. “The secretary’s desk was full of them.”

  “And here, too,” Doc said, lifting a similar disk from the black chair.

  Going to the window, Ryan yanked away the curtains and looked at the city. An ivy-covered helicopter was parked on a rooftop, cars filled the streets, stores and restaurants abounded and only a block away was a subway station.

  “Less than a hundred feet away,” Ryan stated resolutely. “Let’s go.”

  As they departed, Krysty noticed a nasty smell in the air of the lab, but paid it no attention. The companions were already in the lobby and heading for the exit when the smashed equipment in the medical lab burst into flames, the electrical fire following the overheating wires into the walls like fuses on a bomb.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Do it,” Colonel Mitchum commanded, and placed the folded piece of leather into his mouth. He was sitting on a park bench, his pants cut off above the knee, and the wound in his leg was now only a shiny smear of cauterized flesh. The sec chief was breathing hard, trying not to think about what was coming.

  Nodding assent, the sec man lifted the orange-hot poker from the crackling campfire and touched it briefly to the bullet wound in the man’s shoulder. Flesh sizzled at the contact, and Mitchum went stiff, his eyes distending as he throated a scream muffled by the thick leather filling his mouth. His big hands grasped the predark bench, tendons swelling in his arms and neck as he rode out the wave of pain.

  As the branding iron was removed, a mix of shine and water was splashed on the glassy scar, and Mitch-um only grunted at the minor stinging it created. Sweat was trickling off the sec chief as he pulled the leather from his mouth and gulped in fresh air.

  “That did it, sir,” a corporal stated, tossing away the red-hot metal rod. “No more bleeding. That wound is healed.”

  Grabbing the jug of shine and water, Mitchum drank a healthy draft and poured the rest over his face and body, then wildly shook his head like a dog in the rain to remove the excess. Anything could be endured, if it brought Ryan under his blasters.

  The climb up the side of the mesa had been pure torture to the sec chief with his bad arm and leg. But the bodies of the shot Hunters left by the outlanders had left a clear trail to the top. The first sec man crawled to the top with a rope around his waist. Once he was secure, the man dragged up the rope with a tow cable attached to the end. The cable from the winch at the front of the Hummer had been just barely long enough to wrap around an outcropping, but then the stripped wag winched itself to the top of the mesa. After that it was easy, and the rest of the wags soon followed.

  From the cliff, Mitchum had been able to see the beach fronting the
valley. Out in the ocean, a score of PT boats darted about, launching Firebirds and torps at the fifty enemy windjammers. Huge clouds of black smoke from the thundering pirate cannons blew across the water, blocking the view of the raging battle. Then for a moment, the air was cleared and the legions of wounded men splashing in the red water could be seen. Many seemed to be attacking the ocean with their blasters and knives, and Mitchum could only guess that the sharks had arrived, attracted by the battle. More than one man gushed blood from his mouth as he was crushed by something below the surface. Often, a friend or shipmate would then fire a blaster into the dying man to stop the hideous screaming. At any moment now, he had expected a Deeper to arrive, and then all of the fools would die unless they joined forces to repel the sea mutie. No way that was going to happen.

  Thankfully, some of the peteys had unloaded Hummers before the pirates arrived, or else Mitchum would have been stranded. He’d been down to his last wag and less than a pound of black powder when the relief ships arrived with fresh wags, weapons, Fire-birds and, hopefully, a way home. The ville of the pirates was beaten, but the street fighting went on. Damn pirates never knew when to quit. He might have admired the trait in a sec man, but in a pirate it was damn annoying.

  “Sir!” a sailor cried, charging around a corner. “Look there! A skyscraper is on fire!”

  Standing awkwardly, Mitchum squinted toward the downtown area. True enough. From the middle of a glass skyscraper, black smoke was pouring from the broken windows of the fifth floor. Flashes of light appeared within the flames as something exploded. A lance of flame extended from a window, seeming to push out something metallic with lots of legs that promptly dropped from sight.

  “Found you,” Mitchum growled, brandishing a fist smeared with his own blood. “Time to get aced, traitor.”

  Turning, he limped toward the Hummers, checking the revolver in his new shoulder holster. The branding iron had cauterized the wounds closed, but the pain still slowed him like chains on a slave.

  “Everybody in the wags!” he shouted, stiffly getting behind the wheel of the lead Hummer. “The outlanders die today!”

  Grimly, the sec men and sailors grabbed their blasters and climbed into the armored machines, preparing for battle.

  LEAVING THE Protoculte building, the companions stayed alert as they headed across the plaza for their bikes. Halfway there, Ryan cursed and swung up the flamethrower, but withheld fire.

  “Droid!” he shouted as the machine appeared from behind the towering DNA sculpture. But Ryan eased his hand off the trigger. He couldn’t use the M-1 A; that’d only burn their transport.

  Its long legs stepping high, the droid strode through the parked bikes as its laser pulsed. Firing the SIG-Sauer, Ryan felt a rush of heat past his face on the blind side as the rest of the companions separated and attacked. The M-16 rapidfires chattering steadily, the noise punctuated by the telltale booms of the Weatherby and Colt and Webley, the friends kept on the move, never giving the machine a stationary target.

  Incoming lead peppered the machine, and the laser started to pulse once more when the crystal lens was shattered by a 7.62 mm tumbler. As the energy weapon winked out, the companions charged to finish the job at close range. Bullets tearing it apart, the damaged machine tried to run, to dodge, then climbed into the complex rigging of the DNA sculpture for protection. But once the droid was clear of the bikes, Ryan hosed the artwork with a chem storm of flames.

  Dripping fire, circuits sparking, the droids still tried to escape, but as its onboard systems overheated and shut off, the machine fell from the sculpture and landed on the parked bikes. The crash sounded louder than doomsday, pieces of fender and windshields flying into the air.

  “Good thing the machines are old and slow,” Krysty said, reloading her revolver as she looked around the plaza. “We wouldn’t stand a mutie’s chance in a rad pit against a fully functional droid.”

  “Mebbe.” Shuffling among the wreckage, J.B. lifted a fuel-drenched seat from the jumble of steel and rubber only to toss it away. “Son of a bitch did this deliberately,” he growled.

  Exchanging clips, Mildred agreed. “It’s probably in its programming to destroy the transport of the enemy as a last action.”

  “Two still okay,” Jak said, righting a Harley. He pressed the ignition and the engine purred to life.

  “This one is okay, too,” Mildred added, starting her bike. The rpm were low, and the engine had a slight ping now, but it still operated.

  “Okay, scav what you can, pile it on the two,” Ryan directed, black smoke from the burning sculpture rising high into the stormy sky. “The rest of us walk from here.”

  “Only a couple of blocks,” Krysty said. “But we better stay sharp.”

  “Razor,” Jak agreed, climbing onto the motorcycle.

  After gathering what intact supplies they could and retrieving their backpacks, the companions started down the ancient boulevard, watching the alleyways and rooftops.

  Suddenly, Krysty turned and fired, a small lizard sitting on a garbage can blew apart, the bloody gob-bets smacking against a stone wall. A block later, Dean triggered the Weatherby, the corner window on a second floor shattering on both sides from the arrival of the big grain .460-caliber round. From somewhere inside the building came the chest-thumping roar of a gorilla.

  “Hot pipe, missed him,” the boy stated, fumbling in his pockets for more ammo.

  But the search became more intense, and soon the boy realized he had lost count and was out of rounds for the longblaster. Scowling, he draped the weapon over a shoulder and pulled out his Browning Hi-Power, racking the slide to chamber a cartridge.

  Cradling the softly hissing flamethrower, Ryan made no comment as they approached the subway station, his every sense strained to the limit. Obviously a converted train station, the white brick building stood two stories tall, with an impressive face for the tourists. A row of slit windows skirted along the overhang of the red tile roof.

  “That would make a good fort,” J.B. observed, adjusting his glasses. Then the man stopped dead in his tracks to start firing the Uzi in controlled bursts.

  “Twelve o’clock high!” he shouted over the stuttering roar of the deadly rapidfire.

  Heads swiveled, and there was the mutie spider crawling over the building. The beast paused on the top of the roof to spread its mandibles wide and hiss loudly.

  “Run for the door!” Ryan ordered as he triggered a long arching spray into the sky, aiming a lot higher than the oncoming mutie.

  As the companions raced for the entrance to the station, the stream of burning fuel shot across the plaza and descended in a fiery rain upon the creature, its stubbly hair instantly igniting. Keening in pain, the creature danced madly about, snapping at the fire on its back.

  Charging after the others, Ryan rejoined his friends at the entrance to the station, J.B. already busy at the lock. Jak and Mildred had parked the bikes nose to nose and were stripping off the saddlebags; Dean and Krysty were taking everything they could with them, while Doc stood guard.

  Putting his spine to the wall, Ryan started sweeping the flamethrower back and forth, establishing a growing half circle of flames on the plaza before them. Before he was done, the spider arrived and tried to cross the field of flames, but the heat forced it temporarily back. The mutie keened again and tried another section only to be repulsed once more.

  “Open the bastard door!” Ryan commanded, sending another lance of flame at the beast. The gauges were nearly empty, the pressure flickering at registering zero. One or two more sprays and the M-1 A would be empty. He’d have to make each burst count.

  “Can’t. Locked from the inside,” J.B. answered, pressing on the door. It opened a crack, exposing the thick steel chains wrapped around the handles on the other side.

  “Blow it!” Mildred commanded, emptying a clip into the giant insect. As the rapidfire cycled dry, she dropped the heavy blaster and drew her ZKR. That had been her last clip for the M-16. />
  “Prep the LAW,” Krysty shouted, carefully placing the shots of her Smith & Wesson for maximum damage.

  “No room,” Ryan said, sending another spray across the ground to maintain the fire wall. “We’re too close! The back-blast would blow us apart.”

  Stepping close to the fire, Doc braced for a recoil and fired the M-203. The short weapon thumped, sending a 40 mm shell straight into the shoulder of the beast, the blast splattering out gobbets of flesh, and a limb fell off. Staring at the ghastly wound pumping blood, the mutie screamed, backing away from the norms. Ryan sent off the final arc of flame, coating its head for as long as he could until the spray sputtered and cut off.

  Hitting the buckle on his chest, Ryan shrugged and the spent weapon dropped to the ground. Then he grabbed the harness and heaved it into the flames.

  “Cover!” he yelled, going to the ground.

  A heartbeat later the pressurized tank blew, sending out a death shroud of shrapnel. Hot steel zinged off the ground, slammed into the closed door, knocked over both bikes and ripped a long gash across the bulbous back of the spider, blood gushing in an emerald torrent.

  Unexpectedly, there came the sound of heavy-caliber rapidfires, squirts of blood spitting from the side of the howling mutie. Squinting against the dying flames, Ryan could see Hummers full of sec men rolling down a wide flight of stairs on the plaza, the .50 cals throwing death at the creature. Then a line of rounds stitched the front of the train station, shattering the pretty white bricks.