by James Axler
Brigid was the first to sit up, blinking at the arma-glass walls enclosing the jump chamber. The beautiful shade of clear, cerulean blue told her they had completed the transit to Redoubt Papa. The six-sided chambers in the Cerberus mat-trans network were color coded so authorized jumpers could tell at a glance which redoubt they had materialized into.
It seemed an inefficient method of differentiating one installation from another, but Lakesh had once explained that before the nukecaust, only personnel holding color-coded security clearances were allowed to make use of the system. Inasmuch as their use was restricted to a select few of the units, it was fairly easy for them to memorize which color designated what redoubt.
Lakesh hiked himself up on his elbows, turned a wince into a squint and declared, "Transition achieved, I take it."
Climbing carefully to his feet, Kane made a swift visual inspection of his armor, making sure all the sections and joints were sealed. He bent down and picked up his helmet, slipping it over his head and activating the image enhancer. It worked perfectly, for which he was grateful. A few weeks before, the light-amplification microchannel feed to the visor had been damaged. It had taken the Cerberus techs days to repair it, and he had been warned that rough treatment might yet cause it to malfunction.
Extending a black-gauntleted hand to Lakesh, he said, "How are you feeling, old man?"
Rather than taking his hand, Lakesh passed him up the compact tool kit, replying, "Invigorated."
He and Brigid stood up. She consulted the small rad counter clipped to the belt girding her bodysuit. The needle wavered in the low-end-yellow range.
"Tepid readings," she said. "I guess the radiation shielding has held out to some extent. It's tolerable as long as we don't overstay."
Lifting his left wrist, Kane turned toward the door. Strapped around it was a small device made of molded black plastic and stamped metal. A liquid crystal display window exuded a faint glow. The motion detector showed no movement within the radius of its invisible sensor beams.
"It appears we're alone," he said. "Let's get to it."
Gripping the handle, he heaved up on it. With a click, the door of dense, semitranslucent material swung outward on counterbalanced hinges. Manufactured in the last decade of the twentieth century, arma-glass was a special compound combining the properties of steel and glass. It was used as walls in the jump chambers to confine quantum-energy overspills.
Kane cautiously shouldered the door aside, fairly certain in advance of what he would see. All of the Totality Concept-connected installations followed standardized specsthe jump chambers led to small anterooms, which in turn led to the control rooms.
When the door swung wide, he wasn't surprised by what he saw, but he was more than a little dismayed by its condition. The anteroom was a shambles of bro-ken plaster and heaps of masonry dust that had fallen from the ruptured ceiling. The surface of a long table bore a thick film of gray white powder. Feeble light spilled from the control center, where a third of the overhead light strips offered no illumination whatsoever.
Brigid and Lakesh moved to either side of him. She murmured, "This place was hit very hard."
"Washington was ground zero," Lakesh reminded her, his reedy voice strangely hushed. "Frankly I'm amazed the gateway still functions."
They stepped carefully and quietly toward the control room, Kane taking the point as always, toeing aside ceiling tiles and slabs of dry wall. He studied the floor as he walked, noting signs of recent disturbance in the patina of dirt and dust.
"Somebody has been here," he commented. "Not too long ago, either."
The control room showed extensive damage, but it appeared to be primarily cosmetic. Long black cracks spread out in jagged patterns from the corners, and a considerable amount of the ceiling had fallen in. Looking up through the ruptures, he saw vanadium-alloy sheathing gleam dully.
Still the consoles flickered with power, lights on panels and boards blinking and shining. Kane saw places where dust had been brushed away from readout screens. Wadded up on the floor glinted several small aluminum bags.
"Self-heat rations," he said. "Whoever visited here had a picnic."
Lakesh grunted in disinterest, picking his way swiftly through the rubble to the main console. Puffing out his cheeks, he blew a cloud of dust away from the keyboard.
"Here is the memory matrix for the imaging scanner," he announced. "Tools, please."
Kane handed him the kit. Undoing the latches, Lakesh raised the lid and removed first a flashlight, then an array of small, shiny metal instruments. Kane watched him for a moment, then asked, "You need any help?"
Lakesh shook his head impatiently, fitting the blade of a tiny screwdriver into the slot of an equally tiny screw on the underpart of the panel. "A one-tech task. This has to be done just so, in a certain order, or the microprocessors could be damaged."
"I think I'll do a little exploring." He glanced toward Brigid. "Care to join me in a little recce, Bap-tiste?"
She looked uncertainly at Lakesh. "You sure you don't need any help?"
"I'm sure. Just stay aware of the time. Ideally the removal shouldn't take more than fifteen minutes."
She reached out, removed his trans-comm from his belt and placed it near the toolkit. ' 'Keep your channel open."
He grunted in acknowledgment. Kane walked deeper into the control room. Before following him, Brigid unleathered the stub-barreled Mauser from her slide-draw holster at the small of her back and cycled a .32-caliber round into the chamber from its extended magazine.
The double sec doors that separated the mat-trans section from the rest of the redoubt were open. Kane pointed out tracks cutting through the detritus on the floor. Several sets of parallel grooves stretched this way and that.
"Something on wheels," he said. "Something fairly heavy, like a dolly. It was rolled out of here, then rolled back."
Brigid turned on the Nighthawk microlight strapped around her left wrist. She shone the brilliant amber beam ahead of them, then along the ceiling.
"The sec cameras are dead," she observed, playing the light on the small vid boxes clamped in the high corners of the room. "There won't be a record of who was here before us."
In the passageway just outside the arched doorway, Kane kneeled to study a scattering of prints. At first glance, he wasn't sure if they showed hands or feet. Brigid focused her light on them and murmured wordlessly in surprise.
"What do you make of this, Baptiste?"
She bent down, squinting, taking out and putting on her former badge of office, a pair of wire-framed, rec-tangular-lensed eyeglasses she wore when an archivist. "Like the hands of children...or the feet of monkeys."
Kane swung his head toward her. "Monkeys?" he echoed incredulously.
She gazed at the prints with critical eyes. "Too big for monkeys," she said at length. "Apes, maybe."
"Oh, come on," Kane said skeptically.
"See that shape like an opposable big toe?" Brigid replied briskly. "Still, it's too narrow to have been made by an ape."
Kane stood up. "That's good to know. I can't quite picture apes or monkeys teleporting themselves from wherever and digging into a self-heat-rations feast."
"Me, either," she replied. "Could be some unre-corded species of human or animal mutant that somehow got in here. Or" She broke off, brow furrowing.
Kane completed her sentence. "Or a hybrid."
She didn't respond, but she nodded grimly. More than one type of hybrid had been spawned since the unification program, although the genetic mixture of human and Archon, as typified by the barons, was by far the most numerous. England's self-proclaimed Lord Strongbow and his Imperial Dragoons were mutagenic alterations of human biology, and Colonel C. W. Thrush was a blend of human, machine and Archon.
For that matter, Lakesh had told them that even the mutie species that had once roamed the length and breadth of the Deathlands were less the accidental byproducts of radiation and environmental changes than the
deliberate practice of pantropic sciencea form of genetic engineering devoted to creating life-forms able to survive and thrive in the postnuke world.
Brigid and Kane moved farther down the corridor. The rad counter's needle slowly crept toward the end of the yellow field, closing in on the orange. "The farther we go, the warmer the count. Not dangerous yet."
The damage became more pronounced along the passage. The cracks and splits riven deep in the concrete walls and ceilings spilled piles of masonry and heaps of dirt. In some sections, buckled vanadium showed through the holes. Many of the light strips were completely dark.
Kane alternated making motion-detector sweeps and eyeing the disturbed dust on the floor. The echoes of their steady footfalls chased each other back and forth. Whoever the interlopers had been, he didn't blame them for vacating the installation. Redoubt Papa was as grimly depressing a place as he had ever been, haunted by the ghosts of a hopeless, despairing past age. The walls seemed to exude the terror, the utter despondency of souls trapped here when the first mushroom cloud erupted from Washington on that chill January noon.
They climbed four sets of wide stairs, Kane noting the tracks that came and went on the risers and landings. The fourth stairway led to an open area with several corridors branching off, all but one of them blocked by sec doors. The overhead lights shone dimly, and they saw tracks extending straight ahead into the gloom, toward the single unobstructed doorway.
As they approached it, Kane saw a small form slumped in the shadows near the square frame. He slowed his pace, stiffening his wrist tendons. With a faint whir of a tiny electric motor and a click of the actuator, the Sin Eater snapped from his forearm into his waiting palm.
Brigid saw the shape, too, and at first she took it to be nothing more than a heap of discarded clothing. Still, she approached it cautiously, right hand tightening on the butt of her Mauser.
Outlined by Brigid's microlight, and enhanced by Kane's night-vision visor, the shape formed into that of a man, but in no way resembling any human either one of them had seen before, mutated, hybridized or otherwise.
The corpse floated in a pool of half-congealed blood that had flowed from a bullet-holed torso. He was no more than four feet in height, but he reminded Kane of a stunted giant, not a dwarf. The gnarly arms were disproportionately long in comparison to the legs. The splayed, square-tipped fingers had curved, bevel-edged nails.
The body was thick and powerful, the low, sloping brow topped by a tangle of lank white blond hair. His complexion was very dark, though the features were not negroid. The blunt features held an expression of dull ferocity, fleshy lips peeled back over stumpy, discolored teeth, black glassy eyes wide and staring. He wore a one-piece coverall garment, a drab olive green in color where it was not black with blood.
Brigid shifted her light down to his feet. They were bare, small, callused an inch thick on the soles with nine long, under-curving toes on each one. The tenth toe was exceptionally long, nearly the length of the foot itself, projecting out at a forty-five-degree angle near the heel. It looked like a double-jointed thumb, topped by a yellow horny nail, caked with dirt to the cuticle.
Kane moved first, tentatively dropping to one knee beside the body, avoiding the blood. He gave the body a swift visual inspection. "Shot to death," he said, unconsciously lowering his voice. "Nine millimeter, two rounds. One in the upper right thorax, the other straight through the pump."
He dipped the tip of one gloved finger into the pool of dark scarlet. "Still wet. He didn't die all that long ago."
Picking up the corpse's right arm by the sleeve, he waggled it, testing the elbow joint. It moved, though stiffly. "Rigor is just now setting in."
Brigid inhaled a breath through her nostrils, then wished she hadn't. The coppery tang of blood and the sulfur-ammonia stink of evacuated bowels and bladder made her stomach lurch.
"What do you estimate his time of death?" she asked, imitating Kane's low tone. "Twelve, fourteen hours ago?"
He dropped the arm, and it landed in the blood with a splat. "A little more, maybe sixteen."
Standing up, he performed a motion-detector circuit of the area beyond the doorway. No readings registered, so he stepped out in the corridor. Brigid followed him, fanning her microlight around. Small brass objects on the floor reflected the amber beam. Kane plucked one up, revolving it between thumb and forefinger.
"Shell casings," he said with a note of grim surprise in his voice. "They're 248 grain. Standard Magistrate Division issue."
Brigid frowned. "Are you saying Magistrates chilled that... troll?"
Kane smiled crookedly. "Troll?"
She returned his smile, though wanly. "That's what he reminds me of."
Tilting his head back, Kane examined the upper walls and ceilings. He pointed to several small, flattened dark blobs, adhering to the vanadium alloy. "See the slugs? If Mags were the blastermen, their firing pattern was pretty damn wild."
He silently counted the bullets impressed into the walls and ceiling. "At least two blasters, maybe three."
Brigid stepped back, directing the beam of her light along and around the door frame, seeing the scars of ricochets. "Mags aren't known for firing wild, are they?"
"Generally speaking," admitted Kane, "no."
"Perhaps it wasn't Mags."
"Think of how those Roamers were armed, with one-shot muzzle loaders. That kind of primitive fire-power is about the best anybody without a pipeline into a ville armory can manage. No, whoever hosed these bullets around used top-of-the line autoblasters."
Brigid took another backward step. "Still"
Something squashed under her left foot, as if she had stepped in mud. Blurting wordlessly, she skipped forward, pulling her boot free with a slight sucking sound. Pointing her microlight down, she saw a viscous, two-inch layer of what appeared to be semiliquid obsidian. "What the hell is this?"
At the startled timbre of her voice, Kane took two long steps and gazed with mystified eyes at the gelatinous mass extending eight feet across the floor toward a bend in the wall. Lumps of the substance clung to the walls.
With a repellently moist, slithery sound, the black matter slowly re-formed around the impression Brigid's boot had made.
"What is this shit?" Kane demanded, thrusting his head forward and sniffing the air. "Looks almost like tar, but it doesn't smell."
Brigid studied the protoplasm and felt the hair at the nape of her neck stir. With a detached sense of horror, she recognized rough human contours, elongated and very nearly liquefied.
Stretching out her arm full-length, she splashed the amber beam down the corridor and her breath caught in her throat. A body lay slumped on the floor, directly beneath a thick smear of the black substance. She whispered, "Look."
Kane looked, stiffened, muttered something beneath his breath and strode quickly to the body. She joined him as he turned it onto its back. The red badge affixed to the molded polycarbonate pectoral caught the light.
"A Magistrate," he said, his voice sounding hollow. "But where's his head?"
Brigid didn't try to repress the shudder that shook her frame when she saw the red-rimmed cavity between the corpse's shoulders. What little flesh was visible had a translucent, rubbery look to it, as of meat boiled far too long.
Mouth filling with sour saliva, she cast her eyes away. They rested on the tarlike lump splattered against the wall. In a dispassionate tone, she declared, "There."
"There what?" asked Kane, continuing to examine the decapitated body.
"His head. There it is."
He looked up, stared and recoiled, sensing the unknown and the unnatural and cringing from it. He stood up, glaring from the headless body encased in armor to the black ooze smeared over the wall. Brigid's mind functioned in a matrix of mounting fear and keen analysis.
"Some force, some kind of weapon, broke down their molecular integrity," she heard herself saying. "Whatever it was, everything holding their bodies to-,gether became unstable."
"I never heard of a weapon like that. It can't exist," Kane said, but he didn't sound as if he believed it. "What would be its operating principles?"
"Electromagnetic, particle-beam acceleration, who knows? There were a lot of experimental energy-based weapons in development before the nuke."
Kane's lips compressed in a straight line of tension. "We may not know what did this to the Mags or what that troll really is, but we know somebody who probably has a pretty good idea. Let's get his ass up here."
He activated his helmet's comm-link. "Lakesh, status report."
After a moment, Lakesh's voice filtered into his ear. He sounded distracted. "I'm just about done here. Another minute, and I'll have the memory pulled and we'll be on our way to reasoning out this conundrum."
"Good," replied Kane. "Add a couple more to the laundry list while you're at it."
Lakesh's response was a laconic "I don't know what you mean."
"You will when you see them. Or maybe not. I'm sending Baptiste back down to fetch you. Try to be done by the time she gets there."
Chapter 10
While waiting for Brigid to return with Lakesh, Kane checked the passageway around the bend. It stretched out for about twenty yards, ending against a massive sec door. The film of dust on the floor showed scrape and scuff marks, as of fast-running feet.
He tried to keep from conjecturing about what had happened in the redoubt, to the Mags or upon the identity of the troll. At the door, he reached for the green control lever, took a deep breath, held it and lifted it to the midpoint position.
The huge portal shuddered, then slowly rose upward, raised by the buried systems of gears and hydraulics. Dropping to one knee, Kane peered out into late-afternoon sunlight, slanting down from a partially overcast sky. He saw outcroppings of dark, flintlike rock sloping downward to a sere and sterile plain. The black bulk of a mountain rose on the near horizon, its summit lost to view amidst a cloud of vapor. A faint, rotten-eggs odor irritated his nostrils. The air tasted foul and acidic, making him want to spit.