Pony Soldiers

by James Axler

"I wish we could control the jump, dear Ryan, but it's out of our hands. We could, in effect, be bounced back here, or to any other gateway we've been to," Doc explained.

  "Are we going to make another jump?" the Ar­morer asked. "Right now?"

  Ryan didn't answer immediately. He knew what J.B. was getting at. The mat-trans journeys were more than tiring.

  "We could stay a while."

  "No," Lori said, her face pale, as she turned her blue eyes imploringly to Doc. "Please, not stay. Too many thinking from yesterdays. Please, can't we go now? Please, go?"

  Bearing in mind what the girl's life must have been like before they rescued her, Ryan had to admit she had a point. The Alaska redoubt didn't exactly hold happy memories for her.

  "Doc?" he asked. "You get hit worst on the jumps. How d'you feel about going straight off on another? Be tough."

  The place was freezing. His memory of it was of a steady sixty degrees, controlled by the comp-center of the complex. If they'd broken down, then there could have been a lot of other changes around the place. It seemed like most of the redoubts were set down in what had become double-solid mutie country. Maybe it would be better, and safer, to move on as fast as they could. While they could.

  Doc cuddled Lori to him, her head resting com­fortingly on his shoulder. Though he looked tired and drawn, he didn't hesitate, and his voice was strong as it ever was.

  "Without doubt it would be hazardous to remain here, Ryan. My vote, for what little it might be worth, is for us to quit the establishment as soon as we pos­sibly can."

  Everyone else nodded as Ryan caught their eyes. "Sure. Come on, then. Mebbe next place'll be a touch warmer."

  RYAN'S MOUTH WAS FILLED with sour, yellow bile, as bitter as wormwood. He coughed, feeling cool metal against the stubble on his cheek. His head pounded like it did after a night in a frontier gaudy bar. He whistled softly to himself.

  "Must be getting old," he said, voice cracking.

  "You and me both, lover." Krysty lay at his side, knees drawn up under her chin, face sallow and streaked with sweat. She tried for a smile, but it came out looking like a grimace of pain. "Hope we don't need to do this for a while."

  "Depends where we've gotten to. Feels warmer than last time."

  It was positively hot. Ryan glanced at the rad counter, seeing that it was well through the orange, only a few units off the beginning of the red section on the tiny dial. Krysty caught the glance.

  "Hot spot?"

  "Might be. It's tolerable at this level. Could be a leaking power source in the redoubt."

  Doc was the third one of the group to come lurch­ing back into consciousness, holding his head in his hands and wiping away a thread of bright blood from his nostrils.

  "I fear I caught myself a knock as I slipped away from the realm corporal into the realm ethereal," he said. "Not that this looks particularly ethereal. What a bilious color to the walls."

  The glass was too bright for yellow, too light for gold.

  Jak announced his own return to consciousness by throwing up copiously and noisily, barely managing to avoid covering himself in vomit. He coughed and spluttered, shaking his head like a dog coming out of a lake.

  "Not again for bit," he said. "Feel like got sec man's boot in balls."

  J.B. sat up suddenly, eyes open. He carefully re­moved his spectacles from his top pocket where he'd placed them for safety during the jump.

  "Ugly colors," he said. "Looks like I feel. Rad count's high."

  "Hot spot?" Ryan asked.

  "Can't tell. Get outside and find where we are. Feels warm."

  Lori was the last of the six to recover. She took so much longer that Ryan was beginning to worry. The tall blonde had an amazingly tough constitution, but she was breathing fast and shallow, her pulse racing. More like someone with a tearing fever. When she fi­nally stirred in Doc's arms, she looked dreadful. Her eyes were blank, like old glass.

  "You okay?" Krysty asked.

  "No. Feel sick. Dreamed bad. Lost and Keeper after me. I run and run, but my foots don't work and Keeper run fastest. Feel bad, Krysty. Time month starts on jump."

  Doc looked worriedly up at Krysty, who smiled re­assuringly. "Don't worry, Doc. Woman's problem. I got something. When we're out of there. It'll only take us a second. She'll be fine."

  "Did the jump make her menses begin, do you suppose?" he asked.

  Krysty nodded. "Funnily enough, I came on dur­ing a jump. It's a shame there's no more scientists. Could bear investigation, couldn't it, Doc?"

  For the second time recently the old man failed to hide a blush.

  As always, there was a small, bare room immedi­ately beyond the mat-trans chamber. Roughly fifteen feet by ten feet it was furnished only with a folding, canvas-backed chair and a table with a broken leg. Marks on the wall showed where there'd been a row of narrow shelves. There was a fine layer of red-orange dust all over the floor.

  "Sure is warm," Ryan commented.

  The main control area was the largest that Ryan had ever seen. The ceiling was high, crossed with strips of lights. Unusually, every single one was working per­fectly. At a guess, he put the room at two hundred feet by ninety.

  "This is nice!" Doc exclaimed. "My goodness, but this is very nice!"

  "How come it looks so good, Doc?" J.B. asked, running his finger over the film of dust that shrouded a chattering console of dancing lights and jittering dials.

  "The air feels very dry, John. Ah, my apologies. I had forgot you prefer to be called J.B. I was saying that the air seems dry. From what my poor, ailing memory can dredge up, I seem to recall that most of the redoubts that we've visited have been damnably damp and cold. Alaska, the Darks, the swamps and so on."

  "Where are we?" Lori asked. She was recovering slowly, still hanging on to Doc's arm, though it seemed to Ryan that the girl was maybe not quite as bad as she pretended.

  "Where, indeed? Where, my charming little entrancer? Near or far? I fear that your old dodderer is very far away from where he should be. Oh, so many miles. So many mornings behind. I'll bring you only boots of Spanish leather, my dear child."

  He shook his head, eyes puzzled. The only conso­lation, thought Ryan, was that Doc didn't have as many of the wandering spells as when they first met up with him.

  "Rad count's still up some," J.B. said, changing the subject. "High, but still not too high."

  As they moved through the control room, Ryan asked the Armorer if he had any thoughts about where they might have ended up.

  "Doc's right about dryness. Never quite got the jumps figured. At times it seems like there's a change in the season. That could just be distance. Don't know. No refs for it. If it's summer could be a lot of places. You know that, Ryan."

  "Yeah. Hot and dry. Sounds like the Southwest to me. Near Mexland. River Grande. Don't know that part well. Do you?"

  Never a man to waste a word, J.B. simply shook his head.

  "Trader said that the coast went under during the nukings. Lower California vanished. He said the Pa­cific laps against the foothills of the Sierras now. At least we didn't hit a gateway under the sea."

  Again Doc nodded his agreement with Ryan's words. The six of them reached the door to the rest of the complex and stopped.

  The green lever that they'd seen before was in the down mode, showing that the entrance was still locked and sealed. Krysty stopped Ryan from lifting the han­dle. "Wait."

  "What is it?"

  "If it's this hot in the middle of the redoubt, chances are it'll be a whole lot warmer once we get out. Mebbe we should leave our coats here. Get 'em on the way back."

  "Sure. Hang on to the packs." He took off his own long fur-trimmed coat and folded it neatly, laying it on a straw-colored plastic bench. He kept the weighted silk scarf. The others took off their warm clothing, except for Doc, who insisted on keeping the faded frock coat.

  "Need something to hold a touch of heat in these cold old bones," he explained.

  The lever work
ed easily, with the familiar feeling of some massive hydraulic pressure behind the walls. Gears engaged and the twin doors slid slowly open.

  The corridor swept past them; it was wider than most, with a circular roof. Immediately Ryan felt the increase in heat. Glancing down at the rad count he noticed that it had darted into the red. J.B. spotted it at the same time.

  "Shouldn't linger here," he stated.

  The tiny measuring devices were slightly direc­tional, and Ryan undipped his from his shirt lapel, glad he'd transferred it from the long coat. He held it on the palm of his right hand, turning and pointing it both ways along the passage.

  "Fair bit warmer that way." He pointed.

  "Hot spots be interesting," Jak said. "Find good things near 'em."

  It was true. Hot spots showed heavy nuking. That meant they were often important places from the past.

  "We'll go left a ways. If it gets too hot we'll come back."

  They followed Ryan's lead without question. They'd only been walking along the featureless corridor for a couple of minutes when they came across the first of the bodies.

  Chapter Six

  "MUST HAVE BEEN MEN here when the nukes actually hit the redoubt." J.B. cocked his head to one side as he considered the evidence in front of him.

  "First time I've seen that," Ryan said. "All the other places were stripped and mostly cleared."

  "There wasn't a whole lot of warning. Not when it came down to it."

  Ryan had also read and heard about the last bitter days before the skies darkened. "Government knew at the end… They knew."

  "Too late, my brothers. Oh, too late by too many years." Doc looked along the corridor, to the begin­nings of destruction. To the first of the scattered corpses in front of them.

  Lori drew her pistol, but Doc shook his head. "No danger, dearest. They've been chilled for the better part of a century… of a hundred years. They can do us no possible harm."

  There were five. Tangled together, limbs entwined in the embrace of a violent passing. They all wore the faded, crumbling rags of uniform, but the colors had bleached out long ago. One had three golden stripes lying on the rotted cloth of an arm.

  Jak went and stooped over them, touching the toe of a boot to the nearest. It quivered, dried bones rat­tling at the movement. One of the skulls rolled a lit­tle, empty sockets glaring at the intruders. Teeth gleamed like ivory, between lips like brown parch­ment.

  "All leather," the albino boy called, straightening up. "Look like blown against wall. Big boom."

  "The biggest, son," Doc said quietly.

  The bones of the hands were like frail sticks, and strands of wispy hair clung to the skulls. As far as could be seen, none of the bodies showed any marks of bullets.

  "No blasters," Krysty observed.

  "Non-combs."

  "How's that, J.B.?" she asked.

  "Cleaners, cooks, clerks. Not fighting soldiers. Don't have pistols. There'll be shelters someplace in the redoubt. Looks like they were on their way there when the missiles hit. Shock wave. The blast threw 'em there."

  "Don't look like they have bones breaked," Lori observed.

  "Not like that. Shock wave. Ruptures all your in­ternal… your guts," Ryan said. "Could also have sucked out the air and choked you. It depends. Guess we'll never know."

  "They won't tell us. That's for sure," Krysty said.

  The rad count was intermittent, but it was generally edging upward. Ryan had made the decision that they'd keep going for another fifteen minutes or so.

  Experience showed that exposure of that length didn't generally bring rad sickness.

  They moved past two more groups of dead sol­diers, only one of them with a blaster. A Browning Hi-Power pistol, still holstered.

  Then they found the woman.

  Jak was on point, and they had reached a section of the long passage with other narrower corridors wind­ing off. And rooms on either side. If it hadn't been for the rad heat, Ryan would have stopped and explored.

  All his life he'd wondered what the madness had been that had made civilized people destroy one an­other, like crazies tearing out their own eyes. He felt that one day he might find a clue to what had lain at the back of it.

  The letters on the half-glazed door had peeled and become almost illegible. Ryan traced them with his finger. "C PTA N S R H GUY."

  "Captain Sarah Guy," Doc said.

  The door stood half-open, and they could see a fig­ure slumped over a desk. The orange dust was thicker now, laid over everything like a shroud of the finest silk.

  "Time we should be moving out, Ryan," J.B. urged. "Counter's well into red."

  "Five more, J.B.," Ryan replied. "Just five min­utes more."

  He pushed the door open and walked into the of­fice. On the one wall was a calendar for the year 2001, with a beautiful laser pic on it of the Tetons under snow.

  The days had been neatly crossed through with a purple felt marker, all the way up to January 20.

  On the wall opposite was a poster that read, If You Aren't Sure, Then You Aren't Right!

  There was a long, fine hair dangling from the shrunken skull of the woman, which, under the veil of dust, looked as if it might once have been blond. Her head rested on her arms. The sharp edges of the shoulder bones had pushed through the frayed mate­rial of the uniform. The finger bones were pinched around a pen, and on the desk was an unfinished let­ter.

  "Look," J.B., said, pointing to a small brown bot­tle that stood uncapped and empty on the corner of the desk.

  "She must have had some warning," Krysty sug­gested. "Could be she survived a first strike, knew she was rad dead anyway and chose the easy way out for herself. Looks that way."

  "Yeah." Ryan picked up the sheet of paper and blew off the layer of fine dirt. The letter wasn't very long.

  There was no preamble. No date.

  So Dad was right all those years we kidded him about his doomy fears. Now it's happened. Don't know if you'll get this letter. Don't know if you're still alive. The EMP wiped out everything around here. They nuked the north end the redoubt. Lot of dead. Lot of good friends. Maybe they died fast and lucky. I know that Ginny and Donna (the one Dad said had nice tits when we came home last fall) went in that strike. I was in the shelter. Rads are way off the top of any scale we got, so I'm not waiting for the blood and ulcers and all that. I guess Gramps wouldn't approve. He always said it was a coward's way out and that you'd end up in hell. He was wrong, Mom. This is hell.

  The writing was beginning to deteriorate as the drugs started to take her away.

  Don't feel too… dark in here. The backup lights work throughout, so it's not this. They got nuke power, and they'll be light for another thousand years. Funny that is… Wish I could have seen you all more time. Bruce said not trust leaders, and he was really right. Too late now. It's working than I quickly… Wanted to… Just hope Gramps was right about us all meeting someplace. Guess it's shame write any more. If you see…

  And that was where the letter ended.

  Ryan put the piece of paper on the desk, and they all left the room in silence. Lori was last out, and she closed the door gently behind them.

  Two sets of armored titanium sec doors opened up a hundred paces along the passage, revealing what the long-dead Captain Sarah Guy had mentioned. Mis­siles had hit the complex and hit hard. There was massive nuke damage: walls scored and seared, gran­ite turned liquid in a microsecond, then back to rippled stone; jagged streaks of charred paint, the wooden frames of doors converted instantly to char­coal. There were no more corpses.

  They did discover piles of scattered, tumbled bones that bore no resemblance to anything human, to any­thing that might once have been human.

  And eventually, only a little farther on, they reached the end of the line. The missiles had brought down the walls and ceiling, caving in the earth above, filling the corridor with spilled rocks and dirt, bright orange-red dirt.

  "Gaia!" Krysty said. "Let's get out o
f here. It's just a big tomb."

  "Stay much longer and we'll fry along with them," J.B. said tersely, his voice betraying rare emotion. "Count's up and off the red."

  Ryan led them back to the main entrance to the gateway, then continued along the corridor in the op­posite direction.

  At every main junction there was a wall map of the whole complex, which was color-coded level by level. The gateway was simply shown as MT Chamber. It was immediately obvious that the nuking had wiped out nine-tenths of the base, leaving only a residual section. Fortunately it included the main entrance.

  "At least we know the name of the place," Doc said, pointing to the top of the clear-plas-covered guide. Printed in comp-capitals were the words Shay Canyon Redoubt.

  "You know it, Doc?"

  "What's that, Ryan, my dear fellow? I fear that I was allowing my mind to wander a little. What were you saying?"

  "You heard of this place? Shay Canyon? Know where it is?"

  The old man looked bewildered, and Ryan expected one of his gibberish responses. But he was wrong. "I'm not sure, but…the name reminds me… Back in October… No, it must have been September. Or was… September. It was definitely September. 1896 was the year."

  He stopped, and everyone waited for him to con­tinue. Finally Lori jogged him by tugging at the sleeve of his coat.

  "What? Oh, yes, I was just recalling that it was most definitely 1896. Poor dear Harriet Beecher Stowe had passed on to join the choir invisible at the begin­ning of July that year. And only two months later I was plucked from my home and hearth by the bas­tards of Project Cerberus."

  "Doc," Ryan growled, growing impatient, "does this have some point?"

  "Of course it does. I came to the Southwest for a working vacation. I lived with the Mescalero Apaches. Local Indians. Met the Navaho and Hopi peoples and lived for some time near one of their holy places. Now—" he glowered at Ryan from beneath his bee­tling brows "—that was called Canyon de Chelly." He spelled the name out. "And it was pronounced Shay like that name there. I just wonder…"

  BEFORE THEY HEADED for the main entrance of the redoubt, J.B. insisted they first visit the armory that was shown on the plan.